Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“Because with all that input and theory, we still don’t have a good idea what we’re playing around with, which is why I trust my soldier’s instincts first, because they’re programmed to function, not to understand, which is also nature’s way of going about things. Nature creates blindly and without apparent purpose. It kills in the same fashion. The people who frustrate and obstruct nature aren’t soldiers — soldiers do nature’s work without any thought of kindness or cruelty or fairness or justice. Ulysses S. Grant and Stonewall Jackson did more for this country than Abe Lincoln and whoever the hell wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin . One Napoleon or Wellington is worth a whole passel of Pascals and Newmans.”

The general snapped a switch on the control panel and lighted the screen. Life at Summitt City flowed before the audience.

Taggart said, “I’m not convinced there’s time left for gradual adaptation. Mr. Correll hopes there is. As a good soldier, I’m doing my best to prove he’s right.”

The general nodded to the screen. “Initially at Summitt City we created situations which powerfully stimulated defensive mental responses, and then identified and synthesized the chemical shields secreted by our test subjects.

“Our experiments proved the brain is capable of producing chemicals to defend the host organism against damn near anything — the pain of injustice and discrimination, the shock of violent stimuli, hunger, torture and even death.

“To these natural opiates, we added a synthesis of the brain’s natural chemical, serotonin, which is located in the raphe nucleus, buried protectively within the brain system, between the nexus of the corpusbrain and the spinal cord.

“Serotonin neurons are the messengers that bring instructions and warnings to the areas of the brain that control vision and the affective emotions — pity; terror, anger and so forth. While we’re awake, as I stand here blowing smoke at you, and you sit out there looking up at me, those serotonin neurons — automatic sentries — send out chemical signals at the rate of twenty-four per second to tell us that this is happening, that we are not imagining it .

“Serotonin is a reality signal. It validates the evidence of sensory perceptions, certifies that we aren’t dreaming or imagining. If we witness a violent automobile accident, serotonin neurons authenticate the screams of the injured and the flames melting down steel and glass. Police sirens, the stench of smoke — serotonin permits us to react logically to experience. We may run like cowards, or drag the trapped people to safety, but we know goddamn well we are in a real-life situation and can respond accordingly.

“But the exact opposite occurs when we sleep. The flow of serotonin stops and the absence of that reality signal allows us to endure the experience of nightmares. We may be troubled and restless, flail at our bed partners, even have a succubus attend us if we’re lucky, but because the reality signal isn’t ringing, we can get back to sleep.

“Of course,” the general remarked, after blowing a stream of smoke over his audience, “if we thought for one second those nightmare monsters from our unconscious were really real ” — he smiled — “insomnia would then become our dearest luxury. Who could sleep if it meant encountering that kind of reality?

“But that consideration led us to the ultimate refinement of Ancilia Four, because what we needed was an element to make our waking horrors as bearable as the absence of serotonin renders the sleep-time monsters.

“In short, Ancilia Four deceives perception by turning off the reality signal when real life threatens to become unendurable.

“For how long?” The general shrugged. “That brings us back to how much time we’ve got left, doesn’t it? Which means it’s up to you people. Ancilia Four is a control mechanism that can keep people in line more effectively than cattle prods and guard dogs or prayer wheels and muezzins and church bells.

“This might be our best and our last chance to take the lunatic’s hand off the nuclear plunger, put a steel bell over Soweto and Lebanon and Belfast and Haifa and Harlem, and squirt it full of an element that will muffle the sounds of the reality signals — for a time.

“But right now,” the general said, his voice suddenly becoming quiet and cold, “as we anticipate a pleasant lunch and a briefing on further details of our program, half the world is starving to death. In India cows and rats are stuffed and fattened while infants die of hunger. In Uganda, life expectancy is under eleven years. On the banks of the Chari, for hundreds of miles, mothers, mere children themselves, live in slime and pollution without milk in their breasts for their dying babies. In South America and Cambodia, there is even a shortage of garbage for the starving. And yet millions of more disadvantaged and unwanted children are born every day. No scientist can solve that problem, nor can any priest or rabbi or shaman.

“All across black Africa, food production is decreasing at the same rate the population is growing. A half billion people in the sub-Sahara regions are facing starvation. The only hunger being satisfied is that for power — by the military and privileged.

“These problems don’t stem only from the Third World. Or from those people that in our good-humored way we call gooks and wogs and slopes and ragheads. No, the western alliance, with America in the van, has chosen to make greed not only a national policy but a national ethic. Every man, woman and child in the United States needs a support system of forty thousand pounds of minerals per year. One hundred thousand gallons of water is required to make one deliberately inefficient automobile. While we escalate the use of energy, the gulags are doing the same thing with human misery. And those forces are now creating a mix of crisis flashpoints all over the world.

“Ancilia Four will control those flashpoints and defuse them for a while. But unless we seize this opportunity to establish some order and sanity, then we’ll hand the job over to the soldiers by default. It’s the work they’re trained and suited for, and by God, they’re eager to get on with it.

“Give me — give any soldier — control of the headwaters of the Kiang, the Niger, the Congo and the Amazon, and with a few hundred thousand pounds of explosives, I’d turn half the world back to sand and gravel and reduce the number of people on earth to decent proportions. That’s one way to do it. Pave Africa, maybe that’s another, from the Med right on down to the Cape.

“Elephants and lions and brilliant spotted snakes would be gone forever, of course, with all those unwanted humans. But we have pictures of lions and cages full of monkeys.

“The solution to a disastrous oversufficiency is one of textbook clarity to the military. Destroy the surplus. That’s the orderly and soldierly way to handle it. Sounds terrible, but the scientists don’t offer us a thing better. Here’s what Andrei Sakharov had to say. After a first military strike by either side and the inevitable response spasm, Comrade Sakharov predicts at the very least the complete destruction of major cities throughout the world. I’ll give you a little chapter and verse in his own words.”

The general removed a sheet of paper from an inside pocket, thrust it before him at arm’s length and began reading: “—an end to all systems of education and industry, a poisoning of fields, water and air everywhere by radioactivity, poverty, barbarism, a return to savagery and a genetic degeneracy of survivors under the impact of radiation, a destruction of the ultimate basics of civilization—”

The general tossed the paper onto the desk of the control panel. “That’s the genius who created the Russians’ thermonuclear weapons system, telling us in horrified tones what we can expect from the megabombs. Didn’t he know what he was doing in his laboratory? Can we believe he was stricken with terror at the results of his work? What the hell did that clever man think would happen when he flipped those switches and loosed the equivalent of lightning bolts inside his test tubes?