Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

The local boys, however, are headed for the crypt. Collapsing productivity, crippling trade imbalance, noncompetitiveness, voracious and untenable consumption. "And here, the figures for unemployment, infant mortality, and emigration." Each set of numbers elicits a groan of recognition from the captive and unmasked council.

"I don't need to spell out to you, gentlemen, that the general state of affairs is trending toward the iffy." The stranger possesses graphs for everything. He has pie charts for falling food yields, balloon inserts for inflation, bar graphs for increased alcohol intake and prison confinements, line graphs for bread handouts to the poor. In fact, between negative balance of payments, debt servicing, capital depreciation, investment failure, population increase, water poisoning, field exhaustion and erosion, diminishing revenue returns, graft, tax evasion, currency softening, brain drain, corporate flight, disease, defense burden, and mushrooming social service costs, the town is clearly racing toward a condition of Infinite Sink.

The lecture points out to the local brokers what they have long known in denying: each year, the town borrows increasingly more against principal to pay for the previous year's emergency borrowing. Consumption is biting into production and getting hungrier as the take gets leaner. Quite simply, the town is burning itself out, chasing its own decline. All the graphs converge on that one bankrupt point, a few years down the pike, when there will be no squanderable resources left, nothing at all.

"What we need here, gentlemen, is to implement a program of strict Structural Adjustment." The stranger flips to a sheet showing simply those two words, initial letters embroidered in luxurious vegetation, monastery-dense with devils and demiangels. This time, Joachim the Stone Dresser doesn't even bother asking for a definition.

"But we've tried everything," the Bürgermeister moans. "Believe me. Capital injections. Tax incentives. 'Buy Native' campaign. Urban development zones. Belt tightening." His face looks as though the last-mentioned measure is about to herniate him.

"What we need," the head of the exchequer interrupts excitedly, "is to hang in with the infant Hanseatic League."

"Will you shut up with the Hanseatic League already?" the Bürgermeister shouts. "The Hanseatic League hasn't don't shit for us lately."

The head of the exchequer whimpers, feelings deeply hurt. "The Hansa is going to be big someday."

"Thing's not going to amount to diddly."

"Polish Corridor!" shouts the head of the Archers' Guild.

"What we need is to substantially reduce the pressures from overpopulation," contributes the abbot's man.

"But population growth never comes down until well after the standard of living has started to rise." And the stranger has another graph to prove it.

This observation releases a flurry of competing theories and prescriptions in the room, all strident, each sickeningly familiar, and every one feckless and futile. Throughout the fray, the motley lecturer waits patiently, leaning on his improvised podium. At last, the room falls into an exhausted lull. The Bürgermeister asks the man, this unwashed illegal immigrant whom not one of them knows from Adam, "Tell us, then. We beg you. What's our problem?"

The stranger smiles, savoring the served-up moment. He flips another piece of parchment on the easel, and pronounces the flamboyantly displayed word. "Rats."

The council is too stunned at first to respond. Then they produce the obligatory, derisive laughter. "Rats?"

"Rats. Any of the diverse, murine species of rodent…"

The Bürgermeister snickers nervously. "How can rats be the problem? Paderborn has rats."

"And Goslar!" an indignant Joachim snaps, secretly pleased with following the syllogism.

"Yes," the stranger concedes. "But neither of them has rats quite like Hamelin."

Quickly, before he loses shock's initiative, he produces a slew of explanatory graphics. Vermin population's impact on food reserve depletion. On depreciation of real estate — sewers, cellars, road bed, new housing starts. Increase in disease; costs to health, education, and welfare. Loss to tourist income and investment from abroad. "None of the effects, taken separately, is disastrous. But taken together, they create a threshold effect, preventing the town from reaching economic takeoff."

The leading lights of Hamelin confer among themselves. In the absence of any more-likely explanation, they are inclined to except the causal mechanism. Besides, the stranger has all the figures at his disposal, and who at this late a date would dare to be so medieval as to dispute statistics?

Discussion wheels from cause to countermeasures. The commander of the Archers' Guild says to leave it to his troops. With a systematic program of superior firepower, smart targeting, and will, they can have the little brown problem licked by fall of '89.

"But do we have until fall of '89?" the Bürgermeister asks. The stranger only shrugs.

The head of the exchequer comes down for a massive importation of cats, picked up in bulk quantities on the spot market. Others object, pointing out: (A) The unlikelihood of being able to secure sufficient felines to turn the trick. (B) The unavailability of foreign exchange credits sufficient to foot such a venture. (C) The subsequent expense of securing a similar consignment of corrective and compensatory canines.

Local ingenuity is soon exhausted. The council has no other recourse but to turn again to the stranger and ask for his recommendation. "Genus Rattus " the stranger carefully explains, "is a perverse animal. It's no good reasoning with him. He will go on proliferating until the bottom drops out of the entire self-supporting system. He will extend his success until it buries all competition and pulls down his hosts on top of him. He possesses too much native smarts for most traps. Poison is too good for him. Nor is he sufficiently God-fearing to respond to religious urging. In fact, there is only one thing the rat will listen to."

He waits until begged. Then he discloses the word with the perfect timing of a free-marketeer. "Music."

One half of the council explodes with cries of fraud and nonsense. The other remains skeptically purse-lipped. The abbot's man alone corroborates: he once saw his aunt Agatha sing a trio of baby-gnawers into contrite squeaklessness for the length of three antiphonal treatments of the Kyrie.

The stranger withdraws from his satchel the strangest-looking flûte à bec ever to appear along the Weser. It is tiny, more of a narrow ocarina than a pipe, its cylinder a slight, silversmithed figure with finger holes running the length of its gown. "I'm afraid this is all I have by way of résumé. But I guarantee that I will rid you of all problems with it, or you will owe me nothing."

"And how much will we owe you if you succeed?" the shrewd Bürgermeister asks. The piper grins at him strangely and names a figure just slightly below the total hard-currency reserves of the entire Northern Marches. Said fee provokes all manner of sneaky sidelong council looks. They couldn't possibly pay anything near that amount; it is fiscally unrealizable, as the quarterly reports put it.

And yet, they will pay that much now, or they will pay a good deal more over the long haul. The council bows its collective head with the helplessness of a public official caught over a pork barrel. The Bürgermeister coughs casually. "Fine. No problem. Your terms. Plus a healthy bonus for finishing the job quickly."

Only the blundering Stone Dresser, thickheaded with integrity, holds out. "But we were saving our money. We need it to finish the basilica."

The Bürgermeister takes a deep breath and adopts his best patronizing campaign voice, saved for idiots, children, and the obstinately underprivileged. "We've been working on that church for the last two centuries, son. It'll keep for another couple lifetimes." In the casual tones of all weak-hand negotiators, the mayor reiterates that the piper will not get paid a single pfennig until the town has been demonstrated rat-free by an objective, third-party fact-finding commission. The piper agrees, again eerily amused.