James Blish - To Pay the Piper

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To Pay the Piper

THE MAN in the white jacket stopped at the door marked

Re-Education ProjectCol. H. H. Mudgett, Commanding

Officer and waited while the scanner looked him over. He

had been through that door a thousand times, but the scanner

made as elaborate a job of it as if it had never seen him

before.

It always did, for there was always in fact a chance that it

had never seen him before, whatever the fallible human beings

to whom it reported might think. It went over him from gray,

crew-cut poll to reagent-proof shoes, checking his small wiry

body and lean profile against its stored silhouettes, tasting and

smelling him as dubiously as if he were an orange held in

storage two days too long.

"Name?" it said at last.

"Carson, Samuel, 32-454-0698."

"Business?"

"Medical director, Re-Ed One."

While Carson waited, a distant, heavy concussion came

rolling down upon him through the mile of solid granite above

his head. At the same moment, the letters on the doorand

everything else inside his cone of visionblurred distressingly,

and a stab of pure pain went lancing through his head. It was

the supersonic component of the explosion, and it was harm-

lessexcept that it always both hurt and scared him.

The light on the door-scanner, which had been glowing

yellow up to now, flicked back to red again and the machine

began the whole routine all over; the sound bomb had reset it.

Carson patiently endured its inspection, gave his name, serial

number, and mission once more, and this time got the green.

He went in, unfolding as he walked the flimsy square of cheap

paper he had been carrying all along.

Mudgett looked up from his desk and said at once: "What

now?"

The physician tossed the square of paper down under

Mudgett's eyes. "Summary of the press reaction to Hamelin's

speech last night," he said. "The total effect is going against

us, Colonel. Unless we can change Hamelin's mind, this outcry

to re-educate civilians ahead of soldiers is going to lose the

war for us. The urge to live on the surface again has been

mounting for ten years; now it's got a target to focus on.

Us."

Mudgett chewed on a pencil while he read the summary;

a blocky, bulky man, as short as Carson and with hair as

gray and close-cropped. A year ago, Carson would have told

him that nobody in Re-Ed could afford to put stray objects

in his mouth even once, let alone as a habit; now Carson just

waited. There wasn't a manor a woman or a childof

America's surviving thirty-five million "sane" people who

didn't have some such tic. Not now, not after twenty-five years

of underground life.

"He knows it's impossible, doesn't he?" Mudgett demanded

abruptly.

"Of course he doesn't," Carson said impatiently. "He

doesnt know any more about the real nature of the project

than the people do. He thinks the 'educating' we do is in

some sort of survival technique. . . . That's what the papers

think, too, as you can plainly see by the way they loaded that

editorial."

"Urn. If we'd taken direct control of the papers in the

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first place . . ."

Carson said nothing. Military control of every facet of

civilian life was a fact, and Mudgett knew it. He also knew

that an appearance of freedom to think is a necessity for the

human mindand that the appearance could not be main-

tained without a few shreds of the actuality.

"Suppose we do this," Mudgett said at last. "Hamelin's

position in the State Department makes it impossible for us

to muzzle him. But it ought to be possible to explain to him

that no unprotected human being can live on the surface,

no matter how many Merit Badges he had for woodcraft and

first aid. Maybe we could even take him on a little trip top-

side; I'll wager he's never seen it."

"And what if he dies up there?" Carson said stonily. "We

lose three-fifths of every topside party as it isand Hamelin's

an inexperienced"

"Might be the best thing, mightn't it?"

"No," Carson said. "It would look like we'd planned it

that way. The papers would have the populace boiling by the

next morning."

Mudgett groaned and nibbled another double row of inden-

tations around the barrel of the pencil. "There must be some-

thing," he said.

"There is."

"Well?"

"Bring the man here and show him just what we are doing.

Re-educate him, if necessary. Once we told the newspapers

that he'd taken the course. . . well, who knows, they just

might resent it. Abusing his clearance privileges and so on."

"We'd be violating our basic policy," Mudgett said slowly.

" 'Give the Earth back to the men who fight for it.' Still, the

idea has some merits. . . ."

"Hamelin is out in the antechamber right now," Carson

said. "Shall I bring him in?"

The radioactivity never did rise much beyond a mildly

hazardous level, and that was only transient, during the second

week of the warthe week called the Death of Cities. The

small shards of sanity retained by the high commands on

both sides dictated avoiding weapons with a built-in backfire;

no cobalt bombs were dropped, no territories permanently

poisoned. Generals still remembered that unoccupied territory,

no matter how devastated, is still unconquered territory.

But no such considerations stood in the way of biological

warfare. It was controllable: you never released against the

enemy any disease you didn't yourself know how to control.

There would be some slips, of course, but the margin for

error ...

There were some slips. But for the most part, biological

warfare worked fine. The great fevers washed like tides around

and around the globe, one after another. In such cities as had

escaped the bombings, the rumble of truck convoys carrying

the puffed heaped corpses to the mass graves became the only

sound except for sporadic small-arms fire; and then that too

ceased, and the trucks stood rusting in rows.

Nor were human beings the sole victims. Cattle fevers were

sent out. Wheat rusts, rice molds, corn blights, hog choleras,

poultry enteritises, fountained into the indifferent air from

the hidden laboratories, or were loosed far aloft, in the jet-

stream, by rocketing fleets. Gelatin capsules pullulating with

gill-rots fell like hail into the great fishing grounds of New-

foundland, Oregon, Japan, Sweden, Portugal. Hundreds of

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species of animals were drafted as secondary hosts for human

diseases, were injected and released to carry the blessings of

the laboratories to their mates and litters. It was discovered

that minute amounts of the tetracycline series of antibiotics,

which had long been used as feed supplements to bring farm

animals to full market weight early, could also be used to

raise the most whopping Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes

anybody ever saw, capable of flying long distances against the

wind and of carrying a peculiarly interesting new strain of the

malarial parasite and the yellow fever virus. . . .

By the time it had ended, everyone who remained alive was

a mile under ground.

For good.

"I still fail to understand why," Hamelin said, "if, as you

claim, you have methods of re-educating soldiers for surface

life, you can't do so for civilians as well. Or instead."

The Under Secretary, a tall, spare man, bald on top, and

with a heavily creased forehead, spoke with the odd neutral

accentuntinged by regionalismof the trained diplomat,

despite the fact that there had been no such thing as a foreign

service for nearly half a century.

"We're going to try to explain that to you," Carson said.

"But we thought that, first of all, we'd try to explain once

more why we think it would be bad policyas well as

physically out of the question.

"Sure, everybody wants to go topside as soon as it's possible.

Even people who are reconciled to these endless caverns and

corridors hope for something better for their childrena

glimpse of sunlight, a little rain, the fall of a leaf. That's

more important now to all of us than the war, which we

don't believe in any longer. That doesn't even make any

military sense, since we haven't the numerical strength to

occupy the enemy's territory any more, and they haven't the

strength to occupy ours. We understand all that. But we also

know that the enemy is intent on prosecuting the war to the

end. Extermination is what they say they want, on their

propaganda broadcasts, and your own Department reports

that they seem to mean what they say. So we can't give up

fighting them; that would be simple suicide. Are you still with

me?"

"Yes, but I don't see"

"Give me a moment more. If we have to continue to fight,

we know this much: that the first of the two sides to get men

on the surface againso as to be able to attack important

targets, not just keep them isolated in seas of plagueswill be

the side that will bring this war to an end. They know that,

too. We have good reason to believe that they have a re-

education project, and that it's about as far advanced as ours

is."

"Look at it this way," Colonel Mudgett burst in un-

expectedly. "What we have now is a stalemate. A saboteur

occasionally locates one of the underground cities and lets the

pestilences into it. Sometimes on our side, sometimes on

theirs. But that only happens sporadically, and it's just more

of this mutual extermination businessto which we're com-

mitted, willy-nilly, for as long as they are. If we can get troops

onto the surface first, we'll be able to scout out their im-

portant installations in short order, and issue them a surrender

ultimatum with teeth in it. They'll take it. The only other

course is the sort of slow, mutual suicide we've got now."

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Hamelin put the tips of his fingers together. "You gentlemen

lecture me about policy as if I had never heard the word

before. I'm familiar with your arguments for sending soldiers

first. You assume that you're familiar with all of mine for

starting with civilians, but you're wrong, because some of

them haven't been brought up at all outside the Department.

I'm going to tell you some of them, and I think they'll merit

your close attention."

Carson shrugged. "I'd like nothing better than to be con-

vinced, Mr. Secretary. Go ahead."

"You of all people should know, Dr. Carson, how close

our underground society is to a psychotic break. To take a

single instance, the number of juvenile gangs roaming these

corridors of ours has increased 400 per cent since the rumors

about the Re-Education Project began to spread. Or another:

the number of individual crimes without motivecrimes

committed just to distract the committer from the grinding

monotony of the life we all leadhas now passed the total

of all other crimes put together.

"And as for actual insanityof our thirty-five million

people still unhospitalized, there are four million cases of

which -we know, each one of which should be committed

right now for early paranoid schizophreniaexcept that were

we to commit them, our essential industries would suffer a

manpower loss more devastating than anything the enemy has

inflicted upon us. Every one of those four million persons is

a major hazard to his neighbors and to his job, but how can

we do without them? And what can we do about the un-

recognized, subclinical cases, which probably total twice as

many? How long can we continue operating without a collapse

under such conditions?"

Carson mopped his brow. "I didn't suspect that it had gone

that far."

"It has gone that far," Hamelin said icily, "and it is

accelerating. Your own project has helped to accelerate it.

Colonel Mudgett here mentioned the opening of isolated cities

to the pestilences. Shall I tell you how Louisville fell?"

"A spy again, I suppose," Mudgett said.

"No, Colonel. Not a spy. A band ofof vigilantes, of

mutineers. I'm familiar with your slogan. The Earth to those

who fight for it.' Do you know the counterslogan that's

circulating among the people?"

They waited. Hamelin smiled and said: " 'Let's die on the

surface.' "

"They overwhelmed the military detachment there, put the

city administration to death, and blew open the shaft to the

surface. About a thousand people actually made it to the top.

Within twenty-four hours the city was deadas the ring-

leaders had been warned would be the outcome. The warning

didn't deter them. Nor did it protect the prudent citizens who

had no part in the affair."

Hamelin leaned forward suddenly. "People won't wait to

be told when it's their turn to be re-educated. They'll be

tired of waiting, tired to the point of insanity of living at the

bottom of a hole. They'll just go.

"And that, gentlemen, will leave the world to the enemy . . .

or, more likely, the rats. They alone are immune to every-

thing by now."

There was a long silence. At last Carson said mildly: "Why

aren't we immune to everything by now?"

"Eh? Whythe new generations. They've never been

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James Blish - To Pay the Piper

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