7. The Chairman

Block jumped, his mind startled out of contemplation by the loud beep.

His eyes focused on the warning light.

It changed from a warning amber to a bright yellow, the harshness of it blotting out the soft yellow of Lanette's eyes from his mind.

He cycled his mind into the present, calling up the security clearance code he obtained prior to leaving Pierce, as Danette had chosen to call the rock containing Lansdowne's new laboratory, truly a laboratory of the mind, a mind Lansdowne couldn't take with him as he'd taken his own upon fleeing Perce after the onslaught of Karen's Kids.

"He doesn't have to pierce the veil of nature to understand the physical operation of the universe," Danette said, upon christening it with its new name. "He'll just have to pierce the shroud empirical science has buried understanding in."

Punching in the security code turned the light green.

He was in the hundred mile security net.

Normally, the hundred-mile radius would've produced the amber light, the first warning, but because of the war with Bourgesie, and Block suspected, Karen's attempt on the Chairman's life, security was a lot tighter.

Block reconciled himself to the new system, five hundred mile amber net, one hundred yellow.

Things rarely returned to what they were even long after the need for change vanished.

He slowed the craft to under fifty kilometers per hour, watching the approach of Cabo de San Vicente slow in front of him.

The end of the world! This eastern most point of Europe had indeed been the end of the world to the ancient Romans and from the looks of the security, with the whole of the Ponta de Sagres cordoned off at its narrowest point, it was secure in its position.

With people like Karen Carenson supporting the efforts of a butcher like Bourgesie to sabotage the emerging Representative World Government, Block could see the reasoning.

He'd really lost it when Karen claimed she'd never mounted a man with her mouth, a claim her ineptness at the effort fully supported, but a lack of experience in this area didn't imbue her with the cloak of innocence he'd conjured up to justify making love to her.

And yet, that's what he'd wanted to do ever since Lanette started goading him about the million tongues.

The Earth may be a fertile place for plants, but the flowers the mind could grow out of barely a seed were truly remarkable.

But then, in the balance between the mind and the body where both were capable of producing images, recreate a reality from which acts could find a basis for becoming reality, the actual acts that occurred depended on the extent the physical and mental colored the mind to produce the acts.

If the mind was in control, forming a clear picture of external reality, sex would be impossible with the mind forming a clear picture of reality, the reality of the animal, the sweat, the blemishes, the smells, all the realities that recoil a mind searching for order and beauty in external reality.

But let the artist of the body start to subtly change the hues in the picture the mind is forming and the same animal qualities, the sweat, the blemishes, the smells, either dissolve into images of beauty coloring the picture of external reality or become things of beauty themselves, to contemplate, idealize, kiss, fondle, worship.

If blue was the color of the mind, the cold contemplation of the reasoning function, and red the body, the hot physical response to the call of the flesh, the hue of the mind would take on the tint of the source of the color, whether from the blue or the red side.

Every individual controlled the switch to the extent control was a product of heredity, the clarity of the mind and the sharpness of the physical responses that came with the genes and environment, the ambience within which the inevitable conflicts between the two were moderated as their development occurred.

A person with a weak red inheritance could allow their lifetime to be blue. A person with a strong red inheritance might never see the blue sky for grunting around on all fours looking to spread the red as far as possible.

But most people moderated the two, enjoying the one under circumstances where the results of the red wouldn't color the blue once the red burnt its brightness.

For acts were always a product of the pictures of reality the mind reconstructed, and acts taken when the pictures were tinted red would exist in reality after the red had long since disappeared and the reconstructions were tinted with the blue of reality.

Had Block a second chance, he wouldn't have touched Karen, not because she lost her mind in the process, giving new meaning to the term screwing one's brains out, but because she was, quite simply, odious.

The thought of being in her didn't conjure up the thought of a million little tongues but rather a million little worms, all crawling squishily over each other in an attempt to return her flesh to the Earth.

He'd called the Captain down as soon as he realized Karen was gone, her mind destroyed by her own actions.

He'd taken his good time to get down to the suite. Karen was up to the eight-times-eight tables before he knocked sharply on the door.

When he walked in, he looked around, saw Karen on the floor, eyes sightless, mindlessly reciting the math tables and looked at Block for an explanation.

"Is there anyone else between you and . . ." He flipped his hand in Karen's direction.

"Gako"

"Gako? She said she opposed Gako. Who's Gako?"

"Her second in command. No one has seen him since she got back from her trip. We assumed he was dead, or at least well on his way."

"Where would he be?"

The Captain gestured at the massive door with its intricate locking system.

"If he's not shark food, he's probably in there, or at least what's left of him."

"How do you know what's in there?"

"We've had to dispose of some that died before she was finished with them, which means while there was still something left to dispose of."

"Do you know the combination?"

"No."

"Can you get it open?"

"We can take it off its hinges easy enough."

Block told him to make the necessary arrangements, pouring himself some scotch over ice while he was waiting.

When the Captain said there'd be people coming up in a few minutes, Block continued his informal interrogation.

"You realize you're embargoed."

"Yes sir."

"I can depend on you, then, for any cooperation I need."

"Absolutely."

"Is there a doctor on board who can look after this?" Block thumbed Karen with a flick of his wrist.

"We don't have any medicals on board."

"What can you do with her?"

"I can put her in a cabin with no internal door handles. She won't be able to go anywhere. Doesn't look like she has the will to, anyway. No chance she's faking, is there?"

"None at all. Have your locksmiths take her with them after they finish. Where are you headed?"

"The Acores."

"Where in the Acores?"

"De'Corvo."

"So you know about the dock on the rock about a mile from De'Corvo??"

"Sure. The Mistress built an artificial dock on her private island. She has her own bridge on the Queen. She blocks my controls so I can't get the coordinates. We dock and she has us helicoptered blind from The Queen to De'Corvo."

"We'll follow the same procedure, then. Ah."

Two crewmen entered after a brisk knock.

The Captain pointed at the door and told them to get to work. The two pried the hinges off the sheet metal of the bulkhead with a crowbar. When the door still remained in place, they cut the pins the wheel lock had inserted into mounts in the door frame.

The door fell away with a crash. Before it even hit the deck, both the crewmen were bent over, gagging.

Jeez," Block moaned, remembering the smell at the fort on Gaspé. "I don't need any more of this."

But he had to take more. The two crewmen fled without Karen. The Captain stood stony-faced.

Block put a handkerchief over his mouth and nose and walked into the vault. He saw what looked like half man, half scab hanging on a meat hook. He put his watch crystal underneath its nostrils and saw the crystal momentarily fog up.

He went out to the sitting room.

"You got any gas masks?" he asked, taking the bottle of scotch in one hand and pointing at Karen's shoulder with the other, moving over to take a shoulder himself.

Together, they picked her up and lifted her slight frame off the floor, dragging her out of the room between them.

"Yes," the Captain replied when they were out of the suite of rooms, the outer door shut against the smell. "I'll have two of the crew get him out of there if he's alive. But I don't know what we can do for him even if he's alive."

"He's all scabbed over so his systems are still functioning. It's important to me he live long enough to answer some questions. I'm going to try to get a doctor to come out here."

The Captain pulled up in front of a door.

"This it?" Block asked.

"Yes."

He opened the door. They deposited Karen on a bunk. She'd started the tables over and was back up to the sevens, although Block didn't know whether it was the second, third, or even the fourth time.

The Captain shut the door, looking at Block.

"The bridge."

Block followed the Captain onto the catwalks spanning the walls of the ship's hollow interior. He recognized the helicopters on their individual pads as the ones used in the attack on the Crystal Palace in Bermuda.

"Where's the Stratodart she used when she left Gaspé?" he asked.

"At the bottom of the ocean. She missed the deck. We had to fish her out of the drink. She wasn't herself. She kept mumbling something about continuity.

"We never questioned what she did or said in any way and weren't about to start, so I really can't tell you anything about what was going on. She met with Gako and that's the last time we saw him. She didn't even want to know about our course, but we were heading for De'Corvo anyway and she knew that."

They reached the bridge, and Block staked out a position on the chart desk.

"Let's bring this thing to the surface. Don't drain the water off the decks. I want as much reflection as possible so we can be located and tracked without any difficulty. Where's the radio?"

The Captain hooked him up and went about the task of surfacing the ship.

Block tried to get a doctor dispatched, but with war mobilization, there were none available. No problem, he'd pull rank.

And he had, he thought, as he broke the shoreline over Cabo de San Vicente and proceeded the several miles inland to Sagres. Armored carriers and attack choppers were bunched in what appeared to be haphazard array, an array Block knew effective positioning to take advantage of any incursions.

He didn't have to look out to sea, away from the Ponta de Sagres and the crisp clean beach, to see the carriers floating in their individual majesty.

He circled around over Fortaleza, out over the beach and then back the small distance until he was over the Pousada do Infante.

He let the helicopter freefall three hundred feet before he caught it and settled it peacefully on the lawn between the Pousada and the beach.

He searched his memory. The Infante of the name was Afonso Henrique, Prince Henry, the Navigator, and Fortaleza in Sagres was where he'd established his observatory and school of navigation.

Block let the blades run down. He looked at his watch. He still had plenty of time before his appointment with The Chairman.

He felt the blast of heat as he opened the door. He jumped out of the helicopter and made his way up the lawn in front of the Pousada. The heat disappeared in the coolness of the stone structure as he entered its darkened lounge.

A bottle of scotch awaited him on the bar.

"Glass of ice," Block said, looking around the empty lounge winding its way in a curve over to the restaurant on the other side of the room.

He shut his eyes and imagined the three hundred foot freefall again.

It'd been pleasant. He'd take the helicopter out over the Atlantic when he finished with The Chairman and drop it to his heart's content.

»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»«««««««««««««««

The Chairman buckled his belt, still winded from the last two hours.

Without Janette, who was nowhere to be found, he had to take his sex the old fashioned way, and even with his new find, a startlingly lithe woman who could perform the act in all sorts of positions while he remained totally motionless on the bed, the serial ejaculations she was able to coax out of him every five to ten minutes left him breathless after awhile.

He got himself back in shape and turned to his partner.

"Now listen, I know you've a ton of things to do, but I want you to stay in the room here for the next couple of hours. And whatever you do, I don't want you to even think about talking to Ronald Block. If you see him coming, I want you to make the hex sign with your fingers and run like crazy."

He finished tucking in his shirt.

"After a couple of hours, I'll be back and we can pick up where we left off."

He shut the door behind him and went over to the bar. He checked over the wine stock and picked Bonnado Das Moscas, filling his glass, smelling the aroma to see how it related to what came out of the backend of a fly, and then walked over to the window overlooking the ocean.

The sleek silver body of a helicopter, added since he last looked, announced Block's arrival.

The first item on his list was Janette, right above cynosure.

When Block first met Mary Renon, The Chairman was looking forward to many months of enjoyment with her. When Block was finished with her, attempting to satisfy her alone was impossible. She'd changed from a pleasure giver to an insatiable seeker, too much for The Chairman.

The last morning he'd spent with her almost killed him.

And then Janette came along, Janette with the fathomless eyes, those orbs that seemed to pull his body into their golden glow and drain it of all its juices in effortless ecstasy.

And then Block comes along, sees her for all of thirty seconds, and she disappears from the face of the Earth.

Not that he'd been looking for her, at least not before yesterday when victory was declared and he had time to take a break, kick his legs up a little.

Janette had come in with disquieting news about Rudolph Lang's son being kidnapped. While they were going down to pick up their transportation, another aid brought information from the Council of Representative World Governments that there was intelligence to the effect Prime Minister Bourgesie was planning to make a move on his neighbor in retaliation for some manufactured wrong.

CORWOG demanded his immediate attention. He'd detailed Janette, foolishly, as it turned out, to the Lang problem and headed north on his own.

He'd been telling himself for years he was going to have to start settling down, but it never seemed to happen.

It wasn't that he, or anybody else for that matter, was indispensable in the grand scheme of things. The formation of The Representative World Government was a historical process quite beyond the dictates of any individual or group of individuals, but two things kept bringing him back to centerstage.

The first was his mastery of the probability software he'd both designed and now supervised.

Each member country of The Representative World Government had to meet certain conditions to qualify for membership.

The vast majority of those qualifications dealt with items requiring agreement simply because an orderly market between and among the member countries required standardization.

The Chairman analogized the process to the early days of railroading, where each railroad was built with a different gage track. As a result, the cars carrying the commerce had to be unloaded and then reloaded as one railroad's tracks switched over to another's.

The lack of standardization added a prohibitive labor cost to the movement of goods so by the time they got to market, they could be priced out of the market depending on the number of different railroads they were transported over.

The countries making up the European Common Market were the real trailblazers in this area. They had to come up with standards for everything from road signs to the electronic method of transporting ATM transactions over their many borders, not to mention an electronic security clearance system.

The standardization of commerce couldn't be effected, however, without the standardization of the commodity of commerce, the unit of exchange in which commerce was conducted.

The European Common Market had gone a long way towards this standardization, the development of the Euro. And, of course, the consolidation required central banks in the member countries as well as a central bank for the Euro.

Transaction processing, the processing of individual financial transactions either as a result of the issuance of a check, largely discouraged, or the use of an ATM or a credit or debit card, had been centralized in the United States in the central banking system, each Federal Reserve District undertaking the societal function for its particular region.

The result was the collection of market-based figures that became invaluable for the smooth operation of the economy as a whole.

CORWOG adopted both principles from the United States and the European Common Market, requiring, as a precondition for admission of all countries, a central bank that would process the transactions of the citizens of those countries.

Because those transactions invariably included credit transactions, information collateral to the transactions themselves collected in the cells of the system, information as to age, familial status, work history, education, travel and hobbies to name a few.

It wasn't by design, and in fact, directly manipulating the information was strictly prohibited.

However, peculiarities, unusual patterns developed from the totality of the information could prove to be very important to the smooth operations of the marketplace by providing an early warning sign something untoward might be happening in time to correct it.

If one manufacturer of micro-hexagonal logic nuts were to go under, that fact would be of interest to the company and its creditors, but no one else.

If two went out of business in a particular period of time, that might not be of too much importance.

But if three went out of business, the program The Chairman developed would call this to the attention of the program's operators for a probability assessment.

The Chairman wouldn't, of course, be notified in instances where the norms of statistical probability were exceeded unless there was something extraordinary about the coincidences involved. But The Chairman, perhaps because he devised the program, had a knack for seeing trends in an otherwise insipid collation of facts. He not only examined those brought directly to his attention, but could be found examining, in his off-moments, all sorts of combinations of statistics, looking for trends, if emergent, that might effect the normal emergence of The Representative World Government.

As important as this initiative on the part of The Chairman had become to CORWOG, The Chairman's actual function within the Council was much more important.

While governments contracted with each other through the Council and jointly with non-member countries, CORWOG itself didn't operate a central banking system, nor did it issue currency like the European Common Market did.

It had to operate on current contributions from its members and those contributions in turn were dependent on the danger the absence of The Representative World Government would pose to a particular government's market share in the world economy.

If a nation had nothing to contribute, the likelihood it'd contribute to an emerging world government was minimal and, in fact, the possibility it might allocate its resources to destroy it, either directly or indirectly by destroying the marketplace that gave it viability, was great.

And in all events, there was the question of what the value of a particular nation's contribution to the marketplace was.

Nations were caught between the needs of their citizens and the fact these same citizens couldn't understand the intricacies involved and therefore couldn't see the need for any contribution or the necessity of participation in order to benefit themselves. Even though they enjoyed the fruits of participation, they many times objected supporting it.

Obtaining funding for any particular endeavor, then, wasn't a simple matter and involved not only the support of the representative governments, but also the support of the citizens who made up the representative governments.

If a particular nation didn't like, or was otherwise unable to support, a Council initiative because it couldn't get its citizen's approval, the other members of the Council had to make up the difference.

This wasn't unusual because it was rare when an initiative benefited all members directly and not unusual for a particular initiative to be directly opposed to some member's direct economic interest.

The Chairman, through his long experience and extraordinary abilities, was responsible for funding the Council's activities. Just like the inability to form a united thought could prevent effective action, the inability to fund initiatives could cause those initiatives to remain creatures of hope rather than realities.

When the probability program began to produce evidence that Prime Minister Bourgesie's actions were more than just talk, that he might actually have the will to use force on a neighboring country in order to improve his market position in opposition to the interests of virtually every other member nation, and most of the non-member nations, many of the member nation's welcomed the intervention.

There'd been an internal argument for many years that there should be a clear line drawn for the benefit of renegade operations whether they be nations, groups that gained control of nations, or even groups that operated independently, using a nation or a group of nation's infrastructure for support and protection.

The recent suitcase affair in which a renegade operation, using support from sources yet to be determined, had come close to destroying the U.S. Capitol, strengthened the call for such a line to be drawn. A clamor arose to clearly specify that any operation, and the persons, groups and nations supporting it, having the purpose of disrupting the international marketplace, could expect not only the absence of mercy, but total destruction, or as close to destruction as weaponry permitted.

Countries such as Bourgesie's, whose citizens allowed their leaders to engage in activities endangering the safety of the world marketplace and thus the entire planet, would be deprived of their infrastructure and thus their ability to participate in the marketplace they were attempting to destroy.

Before the suitcase affair, the first instance of the successful delivery of a nuclear weapon by a small group of individuals against a major market player, the call for such definitive action was weak because it was difficult to obtain support for such actions in the court of world opinion and thus financing for the action.

It was as easy to recoil from the organized violence of war as it was from the unorganized violence randomly plaguing an otherwise orderly world, and such an action, to the extent it was deemed unnecessary, couldn't find either monetary or popular support.

But when the suitcase bomb almost resulted in the destruction of some ten million people on the east coast of the United States, and in fact would've resulted in their destruction but for the quick thinking of one individual, Ronald Block, the millions outweighed the thousands who might succumb to the purposeful punishment of aggression by the elimination of the aggressor's infrastructure, and the cry gained strength.

The Chairman had never been absolutely convinced, however, the cry was strong enough to support such an operation.

The question was whether the world would allow things to reach a point where millions, perhaps tens of millions of its citizens, would be unnecessarily destroyed so it might wake up to the fact some sort of definitive action had to be taken, or would CORWOG draw a clear line and spell out the consequences for crossing that line.

There was no question in The Chairman's mind.

So when he parted company with Janette, leaving her to unravel the situation with Rudolph Lang, he was planning to meet with the Council determined to proceed against Bourgesie with all possible dispatch, but deeply concerned how to finance the operation, and more to be point, how to do so without affecting the normal operation of the world's financial markets.

Redirecting the equivalence of seventy-five to a hundred and fifty billion U.S. dollars in world currencies from the international marketplace wasn't an easy undertaking.

He was even more concerned after the meeting, where it was decided action would be taken against Bourgesie.

The Council voted unanimously to deploy, through their voting power in the United Nations, troops and material of the necessary strength to force the withdrawal of Bourgesie from his neighbor's soil.

Regardless of the words used, the real point of the vote was to demonstrate the ability of the United Nations to deploy technology on a real time basis to any part of the planet, delivering it with sufficient force to stop disruptive wars.

In the future, there'd be no perch too high, or rock too small for the assassins and terrorists to hide behind.

The only problem with the vote was, it called for affected nations to support the deployment without specifying who was affected and how much support there'd be.

The war fought, the lessons taught, he'd put in a call for Janette, only to find Block had run off with her.

He eyes refocused and the silver body of Block's helicopter swum back into view.

He went over to the bar, poured himself another glass of wine, and picked up the thick red folder stamped CE, the "for The Chairman's eyes" only classification.

When Bourgesie failed to provide his troops with the explicit terms of withdrawal and they turned tail and attempted to head home en masse, the resulting massacre brought the conflict to an abrupt halt.

With no troops to withdraw and no equipment left to withdraw, there was no war left and The Chairman was free to return to the standard emergencies constantly demanding his attention.

He was pleased to discover the oil disappearances had abruptly ceased. He discovered devices had been installed in all the world's oil tankers within a week of the time he'd sent Block to discover the cause of the oil's disappearance. The devices were fabricated from materials readily available on board the tankers and their installation only required plans and instructions.

No tanker suffered a disappearance of oil after the device had been installed and put in operation.

His pleasure in Block's accomplishment was offset, at least at first, by his seizure of the assets of a church. He trusted Block to take correct action, but the proximity of the seizure with the start of the war against Bourgesie provided ammunition for those against the war.

All reservations about timing the action disappeared, however, when he read the CE report that included a transcript of the drug-induced interrogation of a monster named Gako who seemed to be the heart of the conspiracy against not only Rudolph Lang's project, but the entire prospect of an emerging Representative World Government. The transcript was peppered with accusations against himself, the Council, and any member government or anyone associated with a member government. He and they were all murderers who performed grave criminal acts to mutilate the life-giving founts of men and women and the extermination of innocent beings in the maternal womb, repeated references, he assumed, to free voluntary sterilization and the morning-after pill respectively.

Opposition to these birth control methods was widespread and to be expected as an international cultural emerged out of individual cultures. However, it was amazing to hear it from someone who supposedly dealt with a wide consortium of world leaders. It didn't take long for The Chairman to realize Gako's primary goal was the overproduction of individuals for the express purpose of taking pleasure both in the impoverishment, starvation, disease, rape and murder that resulted as a normal course of overpopulation and in the purposeful infliction of as much pain as possible on the individual members of the resulting populations.

The details weren't beyond The Chairman's ken. He'd encountered them before, and indeed, they weren't much different than the pain leaders had been inflicting on their populations and anyone else they could get their hands on throughout recorded history. But the purposefulness of Gako's actions was chilling.

Block, in going after the cause of the oil disappearances, stumbled on a maggoting cancer and was more than correct in surgically incising it as soon as its dimensions became apparent.

He finished his wine and walked back to the bedroom door.

"Not one word to Block," The Chairman yelled through the door, refraining from using her name for fear of slipping it out to Block. "Don't even answer the phone."

He left his suite and walked the short distance to the lounge, picking up the glass of wine awaiting him on the bar.

Block had pulled up several chairs in a conversational array and was sipping his drink, looking thoughtfully out at the blue sky, the blue-green sea, and the two very large aircraft carriers that dominated the horizon.

He stood as The Chairman walked over. "How goes the war?" he asked.

"It's over," The Chairman replied.

"Was there ever any question?"

"Definitely." The Chairman took a seat as Block sat down. "We had the weapons, we had the funding, but it was an open question right up to the end whether we had the will."

"The will?"

"The will to fight. If any member nation had publicly questioned the U.N. or if a substantial countermovement had gotten off the ground in a substantial member country, it would've been all over."

"That's hard to believe, especially after the hardware demonstration you put on, not to mention the supporting software."

"Bourgesie didn't have a chance, but he had some very unpleasant options."

"Which were?"

"He could've used his ABC arsenal."

"I thought the combined forces had eliminated all his atomic, bacteriological, and chemical capabilities."

"No. That was militarily impossible. We reached a sort of impasse with him in the early part of the war. You, unfortunately, acted to confiscate the assets of The Save Our Children Foundation.

"Bourgesie must've had intimate knowledge of what you were doing, although we had trouble finding out anything about the foundation at all, let alone its connections. He immediately translated the confiscation into an act against this established Art of the Lord church and therefore an act against all churches, an act against all established religion.

"We had tremendous public support for our actions prior to the outbreak of hostilities, but the outbreak soldered the opposition into a solid front and that front was beginning to chant the two sides to the war were God, as evidenced by Bourgesie, and the devil, as evidenced by the Council.

"In other words, they were trying to turn the prosecution of the war into a private act by member nations of CORWOG rather than a United Nations enforcement operation."

"Not a hard thing to do seeing how the United Nations is dependent for it financial support on the same nations belonging to the Council," Block pointed out.

"Maybe, but in the event, during the early hours of the war, the Bourgesie block made a very cogent argument and it was making direct hits on public opinion in a number of principal countries providing troops for the operation.

"My financing was hanging by a thread to start with and any shrinkage in public support could've ended any further support."

"We'd be sitting on Bourgesie's doorstep with our hands out. Not a pleasant prospect."

"Certainly not if, in the name of God, he dosed our troops with radiation, spiked them with bacteria, or burned their lungs out with chemicals.

"And he had them in abundance."

"So what was your solution?" Block asked.

"During the early hours of the war, we convinced Bourgesie decisively that no matter what happened, he'd lost the war. This was a part of our strategy. We wanted to use the initial military display to banish for all time the possibility any local group, be it a group of terrorists or a nation of terrorists, could escape The Representative World Government because not only did it have the hardware, software, and money to back up its troops, it had the will to put an end to the terrorist acts.

"That left Bourgesie with two choices. Either he could die going down in history as a dead violator of the international laws of decency or he could just go down in history as dead. Given his radical use of the deity to justify his actions, the chances were, he'd go down as the dead violator.

"I wanted to give him another option."

"You met with him?" Block was incredulous.

"I had to. We couldn't take a chance this would turn out bad. We knew how it would turn out, but it was important to leave the impression it'd be conducted again, immediately, given a similar situation.

"We had to impress upon the world the marketplace was a consortium benefiting all participants and all were invited to participate. There would be no more attempts to annihilate the caravan for private gain on the part of non-participants, and especially non-contributors."

"So what could you possibly offer Bourgesie?" Block asked.

"I found out right off I'd been right about which path Bourgesie would take. He claimed, and probably with a good deal of truth, the propaganda used against him had already destroyed him to the point people would believe he'd used dirty weapons whether he had or not. So he figured he might as well go ahead and use them.

"When I offered him a postwar existence dependent only on whether he could keep his own people from knocking him off, he thought it was a trick."

"Being a dead man to start with, what could the trick possibly be?" Block asked.

"That finally dawned on him and we got an agreement of sorts out of him not to use the weapons. And he didn't either."

Block was surprised.

"You mean you're not going to go in and hang Bourgesie on a flag poll?"

He took a savage drink out of his glass.

The Chairman smiled. "Your passion becomes you, but it's misplaced. Save it for victims like Rudolph Lang's son."

"What about Lang's son?"

"We found him in a hospital left behind by Bourgesie's troops after their hasty withdrawal."

"What in the world was he doing there?"

"Some kind of holding operation for Bourgesie. Most of the kids were being transshipped from President Denjens."

"Transshipped?"

"It seems Denjens cripples them and President Bourgesie purchases what's left. Didn't you see a copy of the Gako transcript?"

"I got it, but I couldn't bring myself to read it."

"Well, first, you know what Carenson did to Gako, don't you?"

"Tortured him so he finally died," Block replied.

"Yet he was still concerned about her well-being."

"How so?" Block asked.

"When he found out she'd be spending the rest of her life in an asylum, he said it wouldn't be long before someone found out about her special gift and then everyone, from fellow inmates to staff to their friends and their friends' friends would be lined up around the clock to have a go at her. Can you believe it? Here she'd destroyed his body and hung what was left up on a hook, and he was inconsolable, not that he believed she'd spend the rest of her life being raped, but that she wouldn't be able to get pleasure out of it. Do you know anything about this special gift he's talking about?"

Block just shrugged and shook his head.

"Carenson had quite a business going. She sold children."

"She did what?"

"She sold children under cover of The Art of the Lord church you shut down. The church's so called monasteries were operated as a children's foundation of some sort. But basically, she took children wherever she could find them, worked up a catalog on them, and sold them to the highest bidder."

"For what. Housekeepers, gardeners, assembly-line workers?"

"The people she was selling to had already turned their countries into slave labor camps. No. For sexual pleasure, if sex is what you want to call it."

"For heaven's sake, you actually dealt with someone like that? Couldn't you just take him out?"

"If I did, who'd replace him? When Stanley, of Livingston fame, was asked who would replace him if he were injured on one of his expeditions, he replied he didn't know who would replace him, but one in twenty could replace him.

"There's a finite number of leaders, the number is almost invariable for any particular group, and it applies to rats as well as humans. If you take a bunch of rats and observe their behavior, classify it according to which rats have the dominant personalities and which rats end up cowering in the face of the dominant rat's activities, you'll find one in twenty are leaders and the rest followers."

"So, that means there are plenty of people who can take over from Bourgesie," Block noted.

"But where do they come from? They come from the ranks of the people forming the circles of authority rippling out from the central authority of the leader in power.

"If the group had lived in colonial America, the leader's behavior, his actions, would be constrained by the bonds between the members of the community that held the life of each member of the community was important to the survival of the entire community.

"And it was.

"Before the members of the community delegated authority to a leader, they got together and set up the standards of conduct expected from each member of the community. As the leader was a member of the community, he was expected to take those standards of conduct into office with him.

"Leaders led by example and future leaders of the community learned to lead with constraint by having observed leaders observing standards.

"But what happens in a country ruled by a Bourgesie?

"The country starts off the same way as the American colonies started off, with strong religious and civil constraints imposed on both the leaders and the members of the community.

"But the same religious and civil constraints keeping the leaders in check were imposed every time leaders attempted to take actions to prevent the creation of more people than the territory or the richness of the earth could support.

"This has always been fairly common where the available fecundity outstripped the people available to harvest it. If the death rate of children is high to boot, the primary constraint on the community was to produce children so the community could survive."

"Go forth and multiply, no, grow exponentially rather than arithmetically," Block commented.

"Right. If such a directive is encoded into the basic constraints, constraints that invariably become a part of a moral code, they're like time bombs in the body politic, ready to explode when the bounty of the land dries up or is outdistanced, or the survival rate of the children in the community increases due to improved technology.

"The Art of the Lord had such a covenant according to the Captain of Carenson's ship The Queen," Block said.

"What young religion wouldn't have? You increase followers by the number of children you can produce.

"Its not an insane thing to do. The problem is, it outgrows its purpose, and when it does, it becomes insane, and like all insanity, endangers the life around it.

"When people multiply beyond the resources available to sustain them, the resources available to each member of the community become less than what they need to sustain themselves. At that point, the inequitable distribution of resources begins to take place.

"A person who had his full measure of resources before the number of people surpassed the amount available will want to have his full measure of the resources afterwards."

"The resources begin to pass through the one in twenty's hands and the one in twenty take their full measure before resources are passed on to the rest of the group," Block observed. "But isn't that the same group that's putting more into producing the resources than the other members of the group?"

"I've no problem with that, obviously. In fact, it's necessary for the one in twenty, the leaders, to have their full measure of the resources because it leaves them free to pursue the purpose of leadership, furthering the goals of the other members of the group, the members they lead.

"But what happens as the population continues to increase?"

"Resources per member continues to decrease."

"Progress comes from the use of the mind in extending the resources available and the useful time the mature and educated mind has to accomplish this.

"One of the most important requirements for the maturation of a mind capable of improving the world is the requirement of nutrition.

"Without proper nutrition, the mind will wither and die before it can become aware of its surroundings.

"As the population increases and outstrips the resources available to nourish it, the level of nutrition in the general population decreases.

"As the level of nutrition decreases, mental ability decreases, and the whole purpose of perpetuation becomes endangered.

"Obtaining a full share of the resources that are continually decreasing with respect to the increasing numbers of people in pursuit of them moves societies into the realm of power. If one member of the group has more power than another, he can take other member's resources to bring his up to full measure.

"Before population outstrips resources, there's a pact between the productive members of the group and the non-productive members that allows productive members to get their full share of decreasing resources if they're able to increase the total resources available. When the population reaches a certain point in its persistent march to outstrip available resources, it's not the ability to contribute that earns the full measure but rather the ability to forcefully take the full measure from other members of the group."

"And leaders by force soon replace leaders by example," Block observed.

"When you have a full stomach, you can contemplate how your stomach works. When you have an empty stomach, you can only contemplate how you're going to fill it.

"If you take fifty thousand soldiers and put them in a stockade with limited food and water, the resulting barbarism is predictable and certain. That's the legacy of the gulag. Take decent human beings, beat them, strip them of their dignity, put them in a cage and starve them, and patterns of indecency always appear. What's more, once they appear, they become accepted because there's no other choice.

"With one exception.

"In the community situation, the community is being replenished with young who have less and less food.

"In the stockade and the gulag, full mental development has been achieved before the degeneracy was imposed and it still doesn't prevent the descent into indecency.

"In society, because the gradual fall in the level of nutrition as a result of the disbalance between the population and the resources available to sustain it eliminates mental development, the downward spiral increases. Succeeding generations grow up not only with a decreasing mental development, but with a decreasing ability to reach full mental development.

"The decent into indecency is slower but more horrible than it'd be if a group, or an entire society, instantly suffered starvation."

"The murderers of children, the proponents of unbridled population creation, the opponents of population control, become the murderers, not just of the individuals within the population, but the entire society, and then the species itself," Block said bitterly

"Unfortunately, a person such as Rudolph Lang can be labeled a child-murderer and her life forfeit in the eyes of public opinion. After public opinion performs the execution, it crawls into bed and mindlessly produces more surplus children who will overpower available resources even more.

"Because humanity produces the same one in twenty, the same five percent of leaders a rat colony produces, the one in twenty enslaves the remaining nineteen in twenty. If power replaces example as the basis of leadership, prospective leaders will use power to obtain leadership position."

"They don't learn power by example," Block observed.

"Power never takes example to learn. Example requires the demonstration of qualities not common in the ninety-five percent of the population who aren't leaders. Example raises the level of community. Example is only achievable where resources are sufficient to eliminate unequal levels of power.

"Power will always appear when resources decrease in relation to population. Two farmers will live side by side in peace as long as they can feed their families. When a drought reduces their crops to the point where only one family can survive, only one family will survive.

"The leaders who develop then reflect the society developing them. If it's a society that allowed its population to outstrip the resources available to support it, self-interest rather than the community of interests that lead to a viable future will govern the leaders.

"So what would we get if we replaced Bourgesie, assuming I would be silly enough to go back on my word?"

"The same," Block answered.

"Or worse. And as bad as Bourgesie is, as disgusting as it appears his personal activities are, he doesn't even approach the systematic violence many others inflict on their populations.

"Take the Commander General, a person who the Gako transcript says was the mentor of the Carenson operation.

"Here's a man who systematically takes his citizens off the street for the sole purpose of finding out who they associate with.

"How does he find out? By the systematic, institutionalized destruction of their personalities. He feels there can be no opinion contrary to his own opinion, no freedom of thought, let alone thought. Disagreement? Forget it.

"He's got the art of rape, torture and murder down to a bureaucratic grind, ceaselessly feeding the bodies of his youngest and brightest into the grinder so broken spirits and spiritless personalities emerge at the other end.

"Do you think we could mobilize world opinion to take an army in and hang his butt out to dry?

"Not on your life. Show someone a picture of a starving girl and they'll pledge enough money every month to fatten her up so at puberty she can start dropping babies at the rate of one every nine months. They put out their money to destroy the world and feel great about themselves in the process.

"But try to tell them about the lost souls who're being beaten, starved, raped and tortured in the Commander General's dungeons, let alone show them pictures of the results, and they'll close their minds tighter than a drum to reality.

"Even if we could get public opinion behind the United Nations and give it some enforcement power to remove national leaders who abuse their populations, even if the Council could coerce a country into a more humane course by denying it economic credits in the community of nations, it wouldn't cure the underlying cause, the excess production of people.

"There's never been a law restricting the production of children because there's never been a need for it. If more people were produced than the land could support, armies were formed to use force to take more land. As an alternative, excess people were sent to the ends of the Earth to make do as best they could. In many instances, the unsanitary conditions resulting from overproduction gave birth to a germ that wiped out untold millions, restoring the balance"

"The black plague," Block noted.

"It's only been in the last century or so that technology produced the conditions both lengthening life and making the limitation of its conception possible.

"And while that same technology has resulted in a quantum leap in our ability to produce the resources needed to support the people who exist because their life spans have increased, it can't support the people who exist as a result of refusing to use available contraception technology.

"In developed countries, there's little need for a law limiting the number of children who can be produced because in a multi-choice economy, there'll be a direct correlation between the number of choices a participant can make and the number of children they have."

"The more children, the fewer their choices," Block said.

"Except for the very fortunate few who have been able to inherit their wealth, amass it though a glitch in the marketplace or simply win the lottery."

"So an affluent society in the most danger of being destroyed by unbridled population production is in the least danger because of its very affluence," he observed.

"Hopefully," The Chairman continued, "if it can keep the poor members of overpopulated societies from pouring through its boarders. The society that's already been destroyed by its unbridled population production can never hope to become affluent because it lacks the will to limit its population."

"It seems another one-way street. Just as the over-production of population leads to the loss of mental capability through declining nutrition, the process of creating excess people destroys the ability to produce the technology to limit the population."

"Actually, overpopulation creates conditions that prevent the technology from forming. Technology, the creation of the prosperity that produces choices, is the only natural way to limit the creation of excess population.

"Overpopulation creates more excess people. It seems to be tautological, but unfortunately, it's all too logical."

"Which means if a country wants to join the group of producing nations, it must convert itself into a technological society," Block observed.

"The technologically advanced world cannot export technology to overpopulated countries without those countries agreeing to take steps to limit their population because of the double edged nature of technology.

"Technology carries with it the promise of progress and also the promise of destruction.

"Freely giving technology to countries that haven't shown the ability to restrict their population to the number they can feed would be a form of suicide. Excess population sets a nation on a course toward destruction because the people who make up the nation are reduced to spending their time responding to physical needs.

"The technology will invariably be used to provide for the immediate satisfaction of those needs. It'll be used to fashion guns, not plows."

"Thus Lof Lang's oil for contraception program."

"Lof? Lof? You knew Rudolph Lang well enough to call her Lof? Is there any woman on the face of the Earth you don't know?"

Block got up to refill his glass, taken aback at the change of pace.

"Well, I knew her . . ."

"And what did you do with Janette?" The Chairman asked.

"I didn't do anything with Janette," Block replied.

"She left with you, didn't she? You've been carting her around all over the world and now the only fix I can get on her is in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere. What did you do, throw her off that Queen ship?"

"I was with Lanette, Janette's twin sister, but . . ."

"Lanette, Spanette, Janette doesn't have a twin sister, for crying out loud. She was orphaned at three and doesn't even know who her relatives are."

The Chairman got up and walked over to the bar, gesturing wildly. "When it comes to women, you're irresponsible."

"At least I don't pick them from my employees."

"You don't have any employees. And besides, why should you pick them from your own when you can pick them from mine. Janette was an interesting woman. You say she called herself Lanette? Did you get off by looking into her eyes? That was an experience, you know."

The Chairman refilled his wine glass and clicked it with the rim of Block's glass of scotch.

"So where's this Lanette? You drop her in the middle of the ocean, too?"

"If Lanette was Janette, both are now Danette, married to Georges Lansdowne living in a little rock off the shore of De'Corvo in Acores."

"Married? Danette, you say? What a way to solve the world's population problems."

The Chairman walked back to his chair and sat down.

Block followed with his drink. "How so?"

"She's three people in one. If everybody were like that, we'd have two-thirds less people to feed."

He sighed.

"But we don't."

"How's it going to come down?" Block asked.

"You mean how's the world going to fall out? What's it going to be like a hundred years from now?"

"Yes. It seems the growth of the population is a blockage. It could reach a point where it'll bring the movement of civilization, the march from a strictly reflexive society involved solely with the satisfaction of its physical wants to a reflective society capable of examining the future and working together to bring it about, to an abrupt halt.

"It could be a human defect that'll cause the species to be selected out as the life form developed to successfully create a consistent picture of physical reality, matter that evolved to understand its own existence."

"Well, I don't know about that metaphysical claptrap," The Chairman said, "but it could certainly put the bricks on civilization, bring it to an end.

"I take comfort in the fact there're more people alive today who're educated in the process of problem solving than at any other time in the history of the human race. We've been able to provide these people with a standard of living freeing them from the need to spend time attempting to satisfy their physical wants. They spend their time solving the problems that'll keep civilization on a course preserving its existence, allowing for its growth, not on a quantity basis, but on the basis of quality alone."

"Problem solving? Problem solving doesn't make cars. What about the people who put the cars together?" Block asked.

"For the first two hundred years or so of the industrial revolution, the creation of a production based society, the technological leap putting a sizeable portion of humanity in the position of producing options, problem solving produced industries employing hundreds of thousands of people.

"Those people, employed and being paid for their employment, turned around and used their pay to purchase what they produced.

"That's old Henry Ford's principle, produce enough cars to create the economies of scale that reduce the price of production, produce them by employees paid enough to buy them, and you create the never ending prescription for prosperity limited only by the ability to convert the resources of the Earth, its iron, its rubber and so forth into the shape of automobiles.

"In the early days of the industrial revolution, a little mental work went a long way toward prosperity. Economies of scale, efficiencies, increased productivity so rapidly, there was more than enough left over to create an entire class of service personnel to take care of the production people.

"But as time went by and the methods of production became more important than simple production, productivity increases were invariably made at the expense of production jobs. What emerged, or what's emerging, is well defined today. We have an economy where the mental dominates. Information and its manipulation are vastly more important as employers of people than physical production because physical production is being mechanized.

"As a result, a fabricating operation, be it smelting, stamping, assembly, whatever, can be conducted anywhere on the face of the planet.

"With that the case, those employing the little labor still necessary as a part of the physical production of goods can seek out the most amenable labor market on the planet to conduct the scutwork. Production can bid down labor and thus produce goods at the cheapest possible price."

"In a world where overpopulation is becoming commonplace, this bidding down process might become extreme," Block observed.

"You're right and it would be except for the fact production jobs are no longer routine. The training function in an information world becomes the most expensive ingredient in the production process. Once trained, employees have an intrinsic asset that'll serve as long as the overall production operation remains.

"Make no mistake, though, trainable labor will always define the marketplace for production workers. Production will go where they are and the cost of untrained but trainable labor will be bid down in the process. It's a normal result of overpopulation.

"And if production will go where there's cheap trainable labor, cheap trainable labor will go where the second class of jobs becoming available in the world are as it's emerging into an international marketplace, the service sector.

"The problem solvers, being independent of the production that's the end result of the system, will gather in enclaves where they can, first and foremost, exchange ideas, for this is their stock in trade, but also where they can raise their families with good schools, pleasant recreational facilities, and plenty of entertainment close at hand.

"These enclaves will normally be centered in university communities. The personal service workers who provide for them, whether as housekeepers, baby sitters, restaurant workers or health spa instructors, will have to live in the area. Where they live, however, doesn't provide a limit as to where they can come from.

"Again, because of overpopulation problems, there'll always be a source of educable and willing service workers to replenish the labor market."

"The salary outlook for both production workers and service workers doesn't look very promising," Block said.

"When Livingston was asked who could replace him, he answered one in twenty, or five percent. If the further question had been put to him, how many of that one in twenty were needed to ensure success in the operation, he'd have had to reply two in twenty.

"I estimate about fifteen percent of the feedable population of a country will constitute the class of problem solvers. This group of people will have the skills to look at a problem and reduce it to symbols. Once they think of the problem as a group of symbols, they'll be able to rearrange those symbols so the result can be duplicated in the real world to see if it solves the problem.

"Because the world won't be able to work without this fifteen percent of the population, the problem solvers will be able to participate in resources to a disproportionate extent."

"Which will cause them a great deal of guilt?" It was a half question on Block's lips.

"Guilt would be out of place for a well-adjusted problem solver. Of course, glitches in the system produce some problem solvers whose wealth gets totally out of proportion to their needs, but that's the exception, not the real world, and the world has a tendency to equalize wealth.

"No. Problem solvers will have no basis for feeling guilt because they'll have spent half their lives preparing for the task of problem solving. A production worker, or a service worker, can obtain skills relatively cheaply. Problem solving requires extensive education.

"And to be honest, any one nation doesn't produce educated, capable people to fill the ranks of the fifteen percent required."

"By feedable population, you mean the number of people estimated the Earth could feed without depleting itself?" Block asked.

"Right. The so-called countries of the north, the production based societies making up the core of The Representative World Government, continually produce more than they consume because their members limit the size of their families to increase their choices. The so-called third world countries, the countries of the south, can never produce as much as they consume because they live under religious and social rules or in the face of actual dangers requiring bodies to throw into battle. As a result, they're promiscuous producers of children.

"Whatever they produce, whatever the technological countries give them, it's never enough because the population increases exponentially for every pound of food they obtain from outside sources. A child who would otherwise starve and therefore add nothing to the population, if supported through the age of twenty-five, can add ten people to the population of her country.

"The more you attempt to help, the greater the damage you do. On the level of human suffering alone, overpopulation leads to starvation, disease and, because it pits people against each other in an attempt to secure inadequate resources, rape, torture and murder.

"The misery quotient, not to mention the overall danger, of overpopulation, is so staggering as to be incomprehensible.

"Any humane attempt to relieve the misery increases the misery tenfold.

"By following our human instincts, we commit the very murder we attempt to prevent, only we multiply it by a factor of ten and endanger our own lives and the lives of our children in the process.

"Using the fifteen percent rule, technologically advanced countries have to scour the world for the talent that exists in every society, technological or overpopulated.

"Overpopulated countries therefore have an opportunity to contribute not only production and service workers, but also problem solvers.

"Barriers to race, creed and color do not exist where there're jobs to be filled and no one to fill them.

"The society of problem solvers is dictated by considerations of mental ability, education, training, and the money that comes with it."

"This is creating a tremendous stratification within society. How many production workers are necessary? How many service workers?" Block asked.

"Theoretically, the number of production workers could be reduced to zero with the introduction of robots to perform the tasks of fabrication and assembly. Again, theoretically, there's no limit to the number of service workers as a percentage of the total feedable population.

"There's a limit, however, with respect to the feedable population.

"Only so many people can live on and off the Earth without disrupting the environmental equilibrium of the Earth.

"Given this limitation and recognizing there'll probably never be a situation where more than fifteen percent of the population can contribute as problem solvers, usually less, the remainder of the population will have to be either service workers, on pensions, students, or children."

"So the continuation of the human race depends on somehow limiting the number of people on the Earth to approximately the number of people the Earth can support," Block noted.

"And the number of people the Earth can support is finite even though technological possibilities are infinite.

"There's a point past which technology can't replace the productive capabilities of the Earth itself.

"There's an absolute limit to the number of people who can live on the Earth, and that number has apparently been passed. There are people moving like lemmings toward fertile areas, creating blockages in those areas, and the resulting inhumane conditions of starvation and disease that lead to the negation of all mankind has accomplished in its effort to perpetuate itself.

"They crowd into fertile areas and the fertile areas, because fertility's produced by weather, are the same areas the extremes in weather produce typhoons, tidal waves, and other natural catastrophes that wipe them out by the hundreds of thousands.

"As a result, aid pours into the fertile area, resulting in both the surviving population increasing exponentially and the area becoming a bigger magnet for the overpopulated non-fertile areas.

"Its a vicious cycle that can't be broken.

"Your human instincts tell you to rush in and help with all you have. But doing so results both in the perpetuation of the vicious cycle and its magnification.

"When you attempt to do what is generally agreed would be the humane thing to do, you end up creating or contributing to the creation of inconceivably inhuman horrors that make the Commander General's systematic torture chambers relatively minor in comparison.

"Under those circumstances, your idea that someone like Lano D'Lazo gets his just desserts as a result of his acts becomes somewhat clouded, doesn't it?"

"Lano D'Lazo. How so?" Block asked.

"As I'm beginning to understand it, your philosophy of Perceptionism comes up with the conclusion people's afterlives are affected by the acts they performs. If a D'Lazo does evil, the act reflects the state of his mind when he did the evil. The state is actually a physical reality. The mind constructs pictures of reality. If it's out of balance, the construction of physical reality will be out of balance."

"More or less," Block replied. "The starting premise is the mind's a product of nature and therefore must exist in harmony with nature. It has the ability to construct representations of nature that aren't in harmony with nature, and those representations cause the mind itself to become disbalanced.

"If the disbalanced view of nature is never converted into action, it can evanesce, disappear from the mind as the mind regains its balance. Thoughts don't leave permanent tracks in reality.

"However, if a person acts in physical reality as a result of the disbalance, and those acts aren't in harmony with nature, the traces of those acts will continue to exist in reality after the mind birthing the acts regains its balance.

"Murder is an act not in harmony with nature. If a disbalanced mind produces acts that result in murder in physical reality, the murder exists. The image of the murder can no longer fade after the mind regains its balance. When an act of the mind results from a disbalance, it exists and won't allow the mind to regain its balance. It's always there.

"To the extent the mind is forced to accommodate the act as a part of its own operation reconstructing external reality, it'll be disbalanced. It can never regain its true balance.

"We can never escape our acts because they're forever a part of the external reality we reconstruct.

"Our acts can therefore destroy our mind," Block concluded, "and if our mind outlives our body, our acts can destroy something in one lifetime that might have taken more than a single lifetime to create."

The Chairman smiled and sipped his wine.

"You used the word murder. Why not killing. Doesn't murder depend on the definition of murder? And don't we give murder its definition? We engage in capital punishment, which but for the definition, would be considered murder."

"Taking life would appear to be the absolute. However, you have to remember we're an evolving species and death is obviously a part of that evolution. If matter is evolving into the mind, something more permanent than the subsystems of the living organisms, the evolving mind can determine what's acceptable to its existence.

"A society that condones murder to the extent murder eliminates it couldn't exist and wouldn't provide a basis for the development of a mind that could last longer than the physical organisms that came together to make up the society.

"The development of a mind that outlasted the physical organism giving rise to its existence would require that society last long enough to give rise to its existence."

"Then," The Chairman observed, "it'd seem murder could be defined objectively as acts against the continued existence of a society rather than acts promoting the continued existence of society."

"That would be the requirement if a mind more durable than the body were to evolve."

"Your idea, then, is someone like the Commander General or this Karen Carenson ceases to exist at death, their minds were disbalanced to the extent they somehow ceased to be."

"I felt it with Lano D'Lazo. I think I witnessed it with Carenson," Block said.

"Witnessed it? That must've been a unique experience. Acts that don't reflect reality disbalance the creator of those acts, selecting out the mind or the creator of the acts from further evolution, right?"

"I think there's a universal principle dealing with treating others the way we wish to be treated that provides a guideline, as long as we don't require others to treat each other the way we'd wish to be treated. Violating this rather obvious guideline would most certainly result in acts creating a mental disbalance that would destroy any mind that evolved to perceive reality.

"Minds that evolved to perceive reality would certainly be selected out of the evolutionary process if they engaged in acts promoting the destruction of the species rather than its development."

"So," The Chairman observed, "it's fair to say any mind evolved to survive the physical span of the organism it evolved in is subject to annihilation if it permits the organism to engage in acts opposed to the continued existence of both the organism and the species."

Block took a sip of his drink before he replied.

"For purposes of this argument, I'll accept that. I'm not sure there has to be an awareness the act is or isn't in balance with nature. I think the mind is so in tune with nature, with the universe in which it's developing, it simply can't exist disbalanced.

"It's like creating life in a test tube by running electrical charges through some imagined primordial soup. The test tube retains the artifacts of life, but no life.

"It boils down to pure Originism. Myriad different life forms appeared at a point in the fossil record, not the heritage of the invisible history of non-fossilized ancestors, but simply the creation of conditions as the Earth cooled. As the Earth cooled, new species replaced species evolved in warmer environments. The mind that allows us to construct pictures of external reality had to have its origin with the first forms of ambulatory life because without the ability to reconstruct reality, there would be no way for an organism to move within reality.

"It wasn't until the mind reached the stage where it could act within the environment, rather than merely react to the environment, that it reached the point it could cause itself to be selected out by choosing acts not in balance with reality."

"Just for the sake of argument," The Chairman said, chuckling, "is it possible to get a simple yes or no from you?"

"Yes," Block replied, and then amended it, "I mean, no. I just want to make clear that it's not necessary for the mind to be aware of the consequences of its act to be selected out. The Commander General can be just as convinced he's doing right and what he's doing is the only way to preserve mankind, but he's still going to have whatever perverted structure remains to define his personality selected out.

"That he's unaware he's engaging in activities that'll result in his mind, his essence, being selected out of the evolutionary process, may keep him alive a little longer than otherwise, but he's going to blow his opportunity to participate in the universe reaching a point where it can perceive itself."

"So you agree the mind can cease to exist if it engages in acts inimical to the continued existence of itself or the species of which it's a part," The Chairman said. "Just say yes or no."

"I agree, that . . ."

"I'll take that as a yes. Now, what is the part of this mind in procreation?"

"Well, to the extent it has to form a picture of itself engaged in an act, it couldn't procreate unless it could reconstruct a picture of itself engaged in the act of procreation. Of course, a women could be forced, but I doubt, well, I take that back, I guess a man could be forced. But that would be engaging in nonconsensual activity, a violation of doing unto others."

"I'm not talking about using sex as an instrument of power or terror. Under your theory, either would result in acts that would disbalance the mind and lead to its destruction.

"I'm not even talking about its use as a source of consensual physical pleasure, which of course does nothing but balance the mind.

"I'm talking about its use for purposes of procreation. Surely the act of sex for procreation isn't going to disbalance the mind giving rise to the act. If an act violating a moral imperative dealing with the continuation of the species can disbalance the mind, how can an act promoting the continuation of the species constitute a violation that translates into a disbalance in the mind giving rise to the act?

"I'm not going to disagree with you one iota on all you say about the ability of acts taken in opposition to some objective standard of balance in nature to destroy the essence of the entity taking the acts," The Chairman said. "I'm just saying procreation can't be one of them.

"Running his torture chambers may very well bring the Commander General down, select whatever makes up his essence out of the evolutionary process, but he can screw as many women as he wants and produce as many children as he can. It won't be the production of children that'll damn him, it'll be his acts against his fellow creatures that'll cause him to be selected out.

"And yet, his contribution to overpopulation could result in an infinitely greater measure of agony and misery for the human race than his methodical cruelty. The very act bringing about the destruction of the human race is invisible to the process you claim evolved to preserve it.

"Overpopulation creates a blockage in the further progress of the human race. Once overpopulation takes hold, acts human beings are forced to engage in become debased in a direct ratio to the increase in population. Thus, not only does an act invisible to your system of evolutionary progress cause a blockage to the physical advance of the species along the evolutionary trail, if you're right about the effect of acts on the mind, it guarantees the destruction of all of the minds developed over the course of the evolutionary process."

The Chairman stopped, drained his glass and refilled it. Block looked out over the lawn to the blue-green sea and the carriers bobbing on its surface. He had no answer to the paradox The Chairman had disclosed in his reasoning.

"Are you going to take Lansdowne's devices off the tankers now that Carenson and her operation have been disbanded?" he finally asked.

"Have you proven it was Carenson's operation causing the oil to disappear?"

"No. Just the fact she penetrated Lansdowne's laboratory, his mind if you will, with her poor little uneducated orphan ploy."

"What do you think, then?" The Chairman asked.

"How do you know shooting a low level current through thousands of tons of oil keeps it from disappearing?"

"None has disappeared from a tanker with Lansdowne's electrodes installed," The Chairman replied.

"So, I imagine oil tankers will be fitted with, what did you call them, Lansdowne's electrodes, for as long as there are oil tankers."

"I suppose so." The Chairman sipped his wine, staring intently at Block. "I'm sure you've heard the theory that procedures, once put in place, remain long after the reason for their creation ceases to exist. They remain in force unquestioned by subsequent generations. As the generations pass, the weight of useless procedures gradually brings civilization to a halt and it crashes down on itself.

"On the other hand, what if Lansdowne's electrodes actually did prevent the disappearance of oil by somehow stabilizing it? What if the conditions under which it was stabilizing the oil changed and the oil no longer needed stabilizing? What if instead of preventing the oil from disappearing, they all of a sudden started causing oil to appear, to regenerate itself?"

"You'd have a tanker full of oil getting fuller," Block said.

"A tanker in the middle of the ocean all of a sudden starts to create oil. The Captain and the crew aren't even aware of the existence of Lansdowne's electrodes, so when the first hatch bursts open and they slide around trying to secure the situation, they're not even asking where the oil's coming from, they're just thinking it's spilling and they need to stop the spilling.

"Unfortunately, before they can stop the spill, the spill overtakes them, engulfing them in a gush of oil, drowning the Captain and the crew in the sticky black mess. There's nothing left but the tanker, sitting in the middle of the ocean, spewing forth gallon after gallon of crude oil. By the time the spill is discovered, a thousand other ships are in the same situation.

"Before we know it, the entire surface of the ocean is covered with oil, creating a blockage preventing the sunlight from releasing the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen so they can move toward the poles to provide life-giving rain. Before the inhabitants of the Earth know what's happened, they're dying of starvation."

"What a scenario," Block said, laughing.

"Totally improbable, but it illustrates my point. By obeying the biblical injunction against casting our seed on the ground, we're going to be overcome with physical organisms that choke off mankind's ability to survive on the planet and develop minds that outlive the organisms themselves.

"We have a set of principles encouraging the creation of life adopted at a time when life was perilous, a period when the chances of an individual surviving to the age where procreation was possible were less than fifty-fifty.

"The principles favoring procreation were actually principles stabilizing the population, ensuring the survival of the species.

"The mind you claim is designed to outlive the body comes alone and develops technology that extends life, creating more people than the planet can support. The principles, however, remain in place, ignoring the technology that can limit the number of people, producing instead a glut of people, a blockage that will destroy civilization, return us to the dark ages

"The glut of people fighting over limited resources leads to gross violations of the rules of reality. Instead of people advancing, they are, as a result of actions resulting from overpopulation, selected out.

"We're not dealing with a process that simply selects out a particular mind, a D'Lazo or a Carenson. It's a defect in the process that'll end up selecting out the entire human race.

"What I'm asking is, is it possible we've uncovered an inherent defect in the process, that there's no future for the human race?"

Block shook his head.

"That was my original question. I don't know the answer. If we consider the first particle came into existence merely to define non-existence, and after it defined non-existence, found itself with no purpose, it's easy to see the purpose for any matter to come into existence is to arrange itself into a structure permitting it to perceive itself.

"After the first particle came into existence and found that existence wasn't sufficient to accomplish the broader purpose of developing a structure that could perceive its own existence, there must've been a process of trial and error where the particles that came into existence to define nonexistence came into existence with certain properties.

"Because time doesn't exist until there are two particles that move with respect to one another, there's no end to the number of failed combinations of properties that occurred before the right mix popped up. After a timeless period of trial and error in nothingness, a particle came into existence with the right mix of the two opposing properties of speed and attraction to produce the universe we exist in and the minds we posses that can perceive that universe.

"The property of attraction could overcome the particle's speed to produce matter. With the property of motion, the ability to move at the speed of light, boxed up, matter has an extraordinary potential for energy because each particle is straining to be released to regain its normal motion.

"Can our minds, created with the specific mixture of opposing properties, survive, or is it a another failure, another dead end? Will we survive as the species that evolved on this planet? Can any species evolved on any planet in a universe with the same mixture of properties, survive?

'My answer is, I don't know. But if we ask the question, where do the particles that make up the matter of the universe come from in the first place, then I might be able to come up with some sort of coherent answer.

"The hardest thing to do is think about where the end of the universe is."

"I know what you mean," The Chairman said. "Once you think of an end, you ask, what's outside that?"

"Well, the answer is really quite simple. Our minds are constructed to compare reality with recall and the recall we put in our minds is either recall of reality, physical objects, or recall we've made up, why objects fall. However, the universe is made up of matter in nothing, and nothing is just that, nothing."

"So when we try to recall nothing, there's nothing to recall."

"Right. Nothing simply doesn't exist, so there can be no end to something that doesn't exist. We're asking an inappropriate question about what we think is something when that something is actually nothing."

"How does that relate to the purpose of the mind in perceiving reality?" The Chairman asked.

"If the purpose of the matter in the universe is to perceive itself, once it does so, it'll eventually perceive that it exists in nothingness. It'll then attempt to fill that nothingness with matter. I think the operation of the mind actually produces matter, particles. Perceiving the universe brings more particles that can form to perceive the universe into existence.

"When the mind is being used in ways that are constructive to the continuance of reality and all it contains, which includes the minds that produce the particles that add matter to the universe, then particles are created to fill nothingness and the structure of the mind is preserved. When the mind is used in a manner that opposes the continuance of reality, it's selected out, its particles unitize into nuclei that are drawn into the center of the inferno producing the gravity that holds us to the Earth.

"The entire purpose of the mind is to allow the species to develop a technology that reflects reality and will therefore allow the species to extend its existence into the universe, survive after the planet grows cold and dies. The goal is to fill nothingness with matter, and because nothingness is just that, nothingness, the process can continue forever," Block concluded.

"Interesting," The Chairman observed.

"Of course," Block continued, "we could be the proof that there's actually a defect in the basic mix of properties in the particle. Perhaps the mix gets us this far and fails. I guess continued failure would lead to the creation of another particle with a different mix, one perhaps that wouldn't lead to self-destruction. However, I think our condition results from being in proximity to the moon. Our original civilization was destroyed when the waters of the cooling moon, its cooling lessening its gravity, were lifted off its surface by the stronger gravity of the still hot Earth and inundated the Earth with the water recorded by the flood stories told in every culture on the planet.

"In the end, I don't believe the entire universe is in the toilet simply because a couple on this unfortunate planet, whose continuity of civilization was destroyed, its resources diminished by the water covering the land and cooling the environment, can lie down somewhere and say to each other, if this produces a child, it must be God's will.

"One thing the development of the mind gives us is the ability to make choices between alternate realities so we can ensure our own survival. Only an extremely ignorant, or extremely malicious individual or group of individuals, would make the choice of death the misery of overpopulation brings when the choice of life population planning promises is apparent."

The Ponta de Sagres swam back into Block's view as he relaxed the tension of his discourse, sitting back in his chair, looking at the blue sky through the amber liquid in his glass.

"There's a purpose in the evolutionary process," he said, "and our ability to make decisions concerning its course underlies that purpose."

"Well, I truly wish your views were universal," The Chairman said. "Unfortunately, I don't think there's much chance your views will get widespread currency. You'll never reach the couple lying down producing child after child on the axiom God will provide, and you'll never reach the couple who can form little more than an abstract relationship between what they're doing and the birth of a child.

"And, of course, beliefs are invisible and therefore chains that don't hinder by their weight. People can have all of the beliefs they want so long as they don't carry out acts in furtherance of beliefs that endanger other members of the community."

"And an act that endangers the community is any act that leads to the production of excess population," Block noted.

"Inherently unenforceable. Nothing is going to stop populations living in abject misery as a result of overpopulation from continuing to overpopulate, and on an escalating basis."

"Then we have a moral obligation at a minimum," Block said forcefully, "of withholding any aid from those populations that would increase their ability to overpopulate. We may not be able to stop people from acting in a criminal manner with respect to procreation, but we can refuse to become complicit in the criminal nature of their activities."

"And what is the criminal act?" The Chairman asked.

"Any act that lead to overpopulation or any conspiracy to engage in acts that might lead to overpopulation."

"Any conspiracy?"

"Certainly. Any acts taken in furtherance of a belief system that encourages people to procreate in a criminal manner, or counsels people to forgo taking actions which would prevent them from procreating in a criminal manner."

"And what is criminal procreation?"

"First, you have to be able to provide for the child you produce up to and through an appropriate education."

"And . . ."

"And you're only one person, it takes two to tango, so participating in the production of a third child becomes criminal procreation."

"And how would you classify this new crime?" The Chairman asked.

"By participating in excess procreation, you're taking lives."

"You mean you'd classify it as murder?"

"Mass murder."

"You mean individuals participating in the creation of excess population, either directly by producing more children than they can support, or indirectly by supporting institutions promoting overpopulation by discouraging taking appropriate precautions against excess procreation, are engaged in genocide?"

"Aren't they?"