The Second Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Robert Silverberg
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“What of it?”
“This of it. You were a blind, selfish stupid ass to tolerate economic and social conditions which penalized childbearing by the prudent and foresighted. You made us what we are today, and I want you to know that we are far from satisfied. Damn-fool rockets! Damn-fool automobiles! Damn-fool cities with overhead ramps!”
“As far as I can see,” said Barlow, “you’re running down the best features of your time. Are you crazy?”
“The rockets aren’t rockets. They’re turbojets—good turbojets, but the fancy shell around them makes for a bad drag. The automobiles have a top speed of one hundred kilometers per hour—a kilometer is, if I recall my paleolinguistics, three-fifths of a mile—and the speedometers are all rigged accordingly so the drivers will think they’re going two hundred and fifty. The cities are ridiculous, expensive, unsanitary, wasteful conglomerations of people who’d be better off and more productive if they were spread over the countryside.
“We need the rockets and trick speedometers and cities because, while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and shortsightedly having children—breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!”
“Wait a minute,” objected Barlow. “There were lots of people in our crowd who had two or three children.”
“The attrition of accidents, illness, wars and such took care of that. Your intelligence was bred out. It is gone. Children that should have been born never were. The just-average, they’ll-get-along majority took over the population. The average IQ now is 45.”
“But that’s far in the future—”
“So are you,” grunted the hawk-faced man sourly.
“But who are you people?”
“Just people—real people. Some generations ago, the geneticists realized at last that nobody was going to pay any attention to what they said, so they abandoned words for deeds. Specifically, they formed and recruited for a closed corporation intended to maintain and improve the breed. We are their descendants, about three million of us. There are five billion of the others, so we are their slaves.
“During the past couple of years I’ve designed a skyscraper, kept Billings Memorial Hospital here in Chicago running, headed off war with Mexico and directed traffic at LaGuardia Field in New York.”
“I don’t understand! Why don’t you let them go to hell in their own way?”
The man grimaced. “We tried it once for three months. We holed up at the South Pole and waited. They didn’t notice it. Some drafting room people were missing, some chief nurses didn’t show up, minor government people on the nonpolicy level couldn’t be located. It didn’t seem to matter. In a week there was hunger. In two weeks there were famine and plague, in three weeks war and anarchy. We called off the experiment; it took us most of the next generation to get things squared away again.”
“But why didn’t you let them kill each other off?”
“Five billion corpses mean about five hundred million tons of rotting flesh.”
Barlow had another idea. “Why don’t you sterilize them?”
“Two and one-half billion operations is a lot of operations. Because they breed continuously, the job would never be done.”
“I see. Like the marching Chinese!”
“Who the devil are they?”
“It was a—uh—paradox of my time. Somebody figured out that if all the Chinese in the world were to line up four abreast, I think it was, and start marching past a given point, they’d never stop because of the babies that would be born and grow up before they passed the point.”
“That’s right. Only instead of ‘a given point,’ make it ‘the largest conceivable number of operating rooms that we could build and staff.’ There could never be enough.”
“Say!” said Barlow. “Those movies about babies—was that your propaganda?”
“It was. It doesn’t seem to mean a thing to them. We have abandoned the idea of attempting propaganda contrary to a biological drive.”
“So if you work with a biological drive—?”
“I know of none which is consistent with inhibition of fertility.”
Barlow’s face went poker blank, the result of years of careful discipline. “You don’t, huh? You’re the great brains and you can’t think of any?”
“Why, no,” said the psychist innocently. “Can you?”
“That depends. I sold ten thousand acres of Siberian tundra—through a dummy firm, of course—after the partition of Russia. The buyers thought they were getting improved building lots on the outskirts of Kiev. I’d say that was a lot tougher than this job.”
“How so?” asked the hawk-faced man.
“Those were normal, suspicious customers and these are morons, born suckers. You just figure out a con they’ll fall for; they won’t know enough to do any smart checking.”
The psychist and the hawk-faced man had also had training; they kept themselves from looking with sudden hope at each other. “You seem to have something in mind,” said the psychist.
Barlow’s poker face went blanker still. “Maybe I have. I haven’t heard any offer yet.”
“There’s the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve prevented Earth’s resources from being so plundered,” the hawk-faced man pointed out, “that the race will soon become extinct.”
“I don’t know that,” Barlow said bluntly. “All I have is your word.”
“If you really have a method, I don’t think any price would be too great,” the psychist offered.
“Money,” said Barlow.
“All you want.”
“More than you want,” the hawk-faced man corrected.
“Prestige,” added Barlow. “Plenty of publicity. My picture and my name in the papers and over TV every day, statues to me, parks and cities and streets and other things named after me. A whole chapter in the history books.”
The psychist made a facial sign to the hawk-faced man that meant, “Oh, brother!”
The hawk-faced man signaled back, “Steady, boy!”
“It’s not too much to ask,” the psychist agreed. Barlow, sensing a seller’s market, said, “Power!”
“Power?” the hawk-faced man repeated puzzledly. “Your own hydro station or nuclear pile?”
“I mean a world dictatorship with me as dictator!”
“Well, now—” said the psychist, but the hawk-faced man interrupted, “It would take a special emergency act of Congress but the situation warrants it. I think that can be guaranteed.”
“Could you give us some indication of your plan?” the psychist asked.
“Ever hear of lemmings?”
“No.”
“They are—were, I guess, since you haven’t heard of them—little animals in Norway, and every few years they’d swarm to the coast and swim out to sea until they drowned. I figure on putting some lemming urge into the population.”
“How?”
“I’ll save that till I get the right signatures on the deal.”
The hawk-faced man said, “I’d like to work with you on it, Barlow. My name’s Ryan-Ngana.”
He put out his hand. Barlow looked