Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“A dozen years ago my associates and I decided to try to stop this mindless genocide and urbicide. Our problem was where to begin. We choose the United States, specifically Summitt City, rejecting France, Japan, Sweden, Brazil and certain smaller nations.

“In America, or rather in the peculiarities of the American character — stubbornness, a prickly independence, deep-down patriotism — here we decided would be the fairest test of our program. If we could chemically curb and modify these characteristics, we believed it would reflect a more significant success than a similar one in a starving or already subjugated population sample in — say — Asia or Latin America. If that is chauvinism, so be it.”

Correll pressed the keyboard and pictures flowed across the screen. Workers entering a plant. Ball games, fishermen and golfers, children laughing under lawn sprinklers. People chatting on the steps of a church. Men and women strolling through nighttime streets and parks.

“The irony, of course,” Correll observed, “is how little surface difference there is between Summitt City and communities regulated by other artificial stimulants. Religion, socialism, art and patriotism — yes, and television — tend to grind out citizens as uniform as sausage links.”

Correll paused to study the scenes on the screen. “The difference here,” he continued then, “is simple but profound. This is a social group that cannot be aroused to endanger its neighbors or itself. The emotional climate at Summitt City is permanently programmed and controlled.

“As you know from your indoctrination” — again Correll froze the frame — “we are prepared to produce and license the use of Ancilia Four, franchise is a more exact term since we will retain both the formula and the manufacturing rights. We will function as suppliers to those client-states who agree to all our conditions and, more importantly, who can afford them.

“The emphasis in the contracts is on money . You may wonder why I talk of mutual survival, and those sonnets and cathedrals in one breath and money in the next. That is because money is the quickest and most effective way to convince you that we are serious. Money is the only medium of exchange I know of which will ensure without question your respect and cooperation in the use of Ancilia Four.

“A word now from General Taggart. The general and I are not in philosophical agreement in certain areas. Perhaps I can illustrate that by the phenomenon among insects known as ‘stigmergy.’ A Greek coinage, it means roughly, incitement to work.

“It has been observed that three or four termites in a group are harmless. In a human reference, they are ‘peaceful.’ In small numbers, they know nothing and more importantly, they do nothing. But when you increase the termite population, competitive urges and instinctive compulsions cause them to build furiously. Prodded by genetic anxiety, these formerly peaceful insects become agitated and industrious. They collect one another’s fecal pellets and stack them in perfect heaps, construct towering structures to support and enclose their termitarium . They do this though they are, by nature, blind. A mass of termites becomes a single entity, a flawless architect, cunning, driven, tireless. But the result of their robotic labor is always chaos. In their fearful zeal they destroy everything. Columns and arches collapse, they are crushed and smother, their world ends.

“To me there is an analogy between those termites and the human race on this crowded earth. The Russians and Americans are building nuclear weapons in a mindless compulsion. Statistics have become meaningless. Each can destroy the other ten times over, fifty times, a hundred. The same instinctual fears have driven other nations to join the frenzied competition. To create ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy, Iraq, for example, used a French reactor, Italian processing equipment and Portuguese uranium. I believe they could as easily have gone to South Korea, Cuba, Pakistan or various countries in South America.

“The formula exists. Nuclear arms are now as uncontrollable as unregistered handguns. The growth is as mindless as that in a termite castle. The result will be identical. Our house will crumble and collapse about us, our world will end.

“I come to the heart of my difference with General Taggart. He has infinite faith in the capacity of the universe to repopulate itself. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, is convinced that a nuclear war can be won. If fifty Americans and only five Russians survived, they would both consider that a strategic victory.

“I, on the other hand, believe that man’s fate, his continuing existence, can be protected. Even from himself.

“After an intermission, and a briefing by General Taggart, we will show the film which demonstrates exactly what we have accomplished here at Summitt City.”

At Camp Saliaris’s communication center, a captain processed George Thomson’s call to Dom Lorso in an office humming with air-conditioning units. At various stations, sergeants monitored switchboards and radar screens. Windows gave on the parade ground and playing fields.

Thomson looked out at the exercise fields. Soldiers, men and women in shorts and tank tops, were playing volleyball. Joggers trotted by the obstacle course, weaving around the quilted stocks of a bayonet range.

The captain said, “We’ve got to tape this, Mr. Thomson. I’m required to tell you, sir.”

“I understand that, soldier. But let’s get with it.”

“Should be about five minutes, sir. We’re sweeping the Pennsylvania terminals for electronic surveillance. That’s SOP during alerts, sir.”

Everything looked so normal outside, the joggers, the young people playing volleyball, but circling the perimeters of the camp were chain-link fences with sound sensors, heat and pressure alarms. And jeeps with armed soldiers and guard dogs.

The legs of the women players were slim and white, fragile compared to the men’s, and when they leaped for the ball their longer hair swirled and tumbled about their faces and shoulders. Like a college campus, Thomson thought, except for the radar screens and monitoring helicopters and the orders that had sealed off the air space above Saliaris for the last twenty-four hours to all civilian and military overflights, except one.

Thomson drew a deep breath to relieve a cold ache in his stomach. That pain had been with him since he had got Dom Lorso’s message, telling him that Earl was missing. Gone, without a word to anyone...

Thomson’s nerves were stretched tight, and he found himself envying the stolid composure of the soldiers around him. Strong impassive faces, steady hands, army regulars with stomachs and bowels in fine working order, no need of drink or pills to put them to sleep nights. They were people Thomson knew well, the “three hots and a cot” types who had served under him in Korea, as easy to control as well-trained dogs.

That had certainly been Taggart’s view of them in those days, the “Chief” as he had been called then, because of his intense preoccupation with Rome and Spartacus’s gladiators and those old legends.

The general had the ideal soldierly characteristics, complacently adjusted to male bonding; he had been relieved, Thomson felt, when his wife died and he had been able to settle again into the spartan luxuries of post life — squash rackets and polo, card games and bachelor dinners and solitary officer’s quarters.

Taggart had a son, Thomson remembered, who had been at Rockland with Earl and was now a captain or a major somewhere in Germany. His name was Derek but for some reason he’d been called Ace by his classmates.