Stand on Zanzibar (63 page)
Authors: John Brunner
“Get him to Jogajong’s camp. We run a submarine courier service up the Shongao Strait—that’s the way we got Jogajong himself in and out. Aquabandit activity is maximal at the moment, but it’ll drop back in a few days.
“We’re relying on you. There’ll be medals in it if you fancy them. Good luck—and by the way! If you can handle a mucker, the experts say, you can handle
anything
.”
The thin whisper died away. Donald sat in the darkness staring at nothing, thinking about Sugaiguntung and maybe having to kidnap him and getting him across the Strait to the jungle cove where Jogajong was lying low under the very noses of those who most dearly wanted to put him to death, then escaping by submarine with Chinese hunter-killers in pursuit …
I want out. I want out. I want OUT!
A hand touched him on the shoulder. He jumped and whirled and it was only Bronwen come to see what had become of him. She moved so silently he had not heard her approach.
“It was my head office,” Donald said. “Pleased with what I’ve done.”
The words tasted filthy on his tongue.
Transcript—SECRET—for secure file
Dr. Corning (at State) | We have Scramble A on, don’t we? Good, yes, we do. Dick, sorry to bother you. |
Mr. Richard Ruze (Engrelay) | No trouble, Raphael. What can we do for you that we aren’t doing already? |
Dr. Corning | Yes, we are asking a lot of you just now, aren’t we? I have to ask something else, though, I’m afraid. You’re carrying this tremendous story filed by the man you sent to Gongilung, Donald Hogan— |
Mr. Ruze | Yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? We’re extremely grateful to you for giving him to us—we didn’t expect to get anything out of him, let alone a sensaysh like this. |
Dr. Corning | I’m sorry, I didn’t quite follow that. It unscrambled as something about giving him to you and I think it must— |
Mr. Ruze | You mean you don’t know about that? |
Dr. Corning | (inaudible) |
Mr. Ruze | He’s one of your own people. We’re giving him his cover for the trip—hired him as a special correspondent. That was what I thought you had in mind when you said we were doing a lot for you at— |
Dr. Corning | No, Dick, I was thinking of something else entirely. A matter I guess is uppermost in my mind. Well, look, this means you’re going to feel I’m applying leverage, but— |
Mr. Ruze | Lever away, Raphael. We show a sheeting great profit on the Hogan scene so far and we can afford to be generous. |
Dr. Corning | I’ll go straight to the point, then. You know we run trend-studies on all the big media. Our computers say you’re liable to involve Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere in the Yatakangi scene soon. ( |
Mr. Ruze | You want it not. Tell me why? |
Dr. Corning | Yatakang means one thing to the audience right now, and we’re taking that subject straight and slow. |
Mr. Ruze | I have Shalmaneser time booked for SCANALYZER as usual in an hour or so. I put in a Yatakangi programme for evaluation. |
Dr. Corning | Think he’ll tell me the details? I’d like a sight of that, if you don’t mind, to see if it agrees our own study. |
Mr. Ruze | Which said … |
Dr. Corning | Gave them a sixty-forty chance of bringing it off when we first checked. We programmed in some new material about Yatakangi human resources and dragged it down to fifty-fifty. Since then we’ve been re-evaluating every forty-eight hours and currently it’s seventy-three to twenty seven against. ( |
Mr. Ruze | I see. You think it might raise false hopes. |
Dr. Corning | The impact of Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere would give the claim sort of automatic cachet. It would save you possible later embarrassment and us a lot of definite problems if you— |
Mr. Ruze | I read you. Guess we can send them back to MAMP … By the way, Raphael, when you asked us to lay that on heavy you hinted there was a big breakthrough due shortly. It’s a long time and no roughage. |
Dr. Corning | On that, we have eighty-two to eighteen in favour. When it breaks ninety the whole story will bust loose. |
Mr. Ruze | It’d better be worth the wait. |
Dr. Corning | I so testify. Well, thanks very much, Dick—glad you saw what I set course for. |
Mr. Ruze | Don’t I always? I’ll call you the results from Shal when I have them. ’Bye. |
Dr. Corning | ’Bye. |
At the head of his cabinet table, in the rather mean and ill-maintained Parliament building, President Obomi struggled to focus his surviving eye on those who had joined him. There was a small patch where vision blurred into meaningless dots and swirls; the doctors said something about a retinal trauma and talked of optic nerve regrafting and regretted that it would take a month to heal if they did operate. There might, now, be a month to spare. He hoped so.
Immediately to his left were Ram Ibusa and Leon Elai; beyond them, Kitty Gbe sat next to Gideon Horsfall. Facing the president from the foot of the table was Elihu Masters. And on the other side were the representatives from GT led by Norman House.
“Well?” said the president at length.
Norman licked his lips and pushed across the shiny top of the table a thick pile of green printouts from Shalmaneser.
“It’ll work,” he said, and wondered what he would have done if he had not been able to utter that simple phrase.
“Have you any reservations, Norman?” Elihu inquired.
“I—no. None. I don’t believe anyone else has.”
Terence, Worthy, Consuela, all shook their heads. Their faces had a uniformly dazed expression, as though they found it impossible to accept the evidence of their own judgment.
“So we think it will work,” the president said. “Ought it to be done? Leon?”
Dr. Leon Elai also clutched a thick file of Shalmaneser printouts. He said, “Zad, I’ve never had material like this to work with before. I’ve barely had time to read it, there’s so much! But I’ve extracted a kind of digest, and…”
“Let me hear it, please.”
“Well, first there are the problems with our neighbours.” Dr. Elai extracted a handwritten white sheet from among the stack of green. “The probabilities are high that for about two years there will be accusations against us for submitting to neo-colonialism. By that time the economic pressure to cooperate in the subsidiary aspects of the project such as placing contracts for manufactures which will by then show signs of being cheaper here than anywhere else on the continent will tend to reduce their violence. Also there will be a chance for them to buy cheap power from us. Within a decade at most, it says, they will become reconciled to the idea.
“Chinese and Egyptian interference is likely to be worse and go on longer. However, we can count on South African support, Kenyan, Tanzanian—shall I read the list?”
“Tell us how it comes out on balance.”
“There appears to be no chance of outside intervention halting the project unless some country is prepared to launch a major missile attack on us. And the probability of United Nations retaliation for such a crime is ninety-one per cent.” A trace of awe coloured Elai’s voice, as though he had never expected to be talking of the foreign affairs interests of his country in such terms.
“Very well. We may expect to be safe from other people’s jealousy, then.” Obomi’s eye switched to Ram Ibusa. “Ram, I have worried about the impact of so much money on our precarious economy. Are we going to suffer from inflation, unjust distribution of income, a top-heavy tax-structure?”
Ibusa gave an emphatic headshake. “Until I saw what this computer Shalmaneser can tell us, I was afraid of that too. But I do now believe we can cope with all those problems, provided we can continue to rely on General Technics’ assistance in processing the information. What it comes down to is that we have here the first-ever chance in history to control a country’s economy directly. There will not
be
any taxes in the traditional sense!”
He leafed through his own set of Shalmaneser printouts.
“There will first be the loan in which the American government will take its fifty-one per cent share. From it we will make a series of loans of our own, some of which will be into investment funds the interest on which will pay for the following: a subsistence ration of food, an issue of clothing to all working people and children of school age, and medical care of an improved standard. There will also be a building allowance to heads of families which will by law have to be spent on domestic improvements such as house-repairs.
“But the cost of the project will
at once
be of the order of three times our present GNP. Simply by controlling what the computer says we shall be controlling directly a higher proportion of the money circulating in the country than is possible anywhere in the world.
“At the worst possible reading of the factors concerned, the gain to Beninia will consist in the removal of starvation and the improvement of personal and public health. That is, if returns from the markets we intend going into do no more than pay for the guaranteed interest on the original loan.
“Much more likely, we shall also enjoy a very high standard of literacy and technical skill, the fruits of better housing, transport, harbour facilities, housing, school buildings, everything. Especially we shall have power in every house for the first time ever.”
His voice dropped away to a whisper and his eyes went out of focus as though he were staring at a dream.
“When you say there will be no taxes, Ram!” Obomi said sharply. “You mean there will be fixed prices and deductions of income at source? There will have to be a great deal of enforcement, and I have always hated enforcing regulations on my people!”
“Ah—it should not be necessary,” Ibusa muttered.
“Why not?”
“Suppose inflation actually runs at the probable level of five per cent in the first year,” Ibusa said. “We shall withhold the amount of purchasing power corresponding to what would cause a ten per cent increase. There will be a real rise in the standard of living anyway because of the free issues and the loans; the pinch will not be felt. We shall then have surplus purchasing power to release in the year following, when people are growing accustomed to their new prosperity. But in the meantime we shall have loaned out the money we withheld and it will have grown, giving us the power to withhold a further portion, and so on. At the end of twenty years, when the groundwork of the project is complete and everything is in operation, that fund of reserved purchasing power will be used to buy back for the country whatever item still mortgaged is judged most essential to our independent development. It might be the new harbour facilities, it might be the power-system, it might be anything, but there will be enough to let us make the right choice.”
He suddenly gave a broad grin.
“Kitty?” Obomi said.
The plump minister of education hesitated. She said after the pause, “I made the best guess I could of what we might need to turn our people into the sort of skilled labour force our American friends are talking about and asked them to have their computer look at it. The machine says we can have everything I asked for three times over, and I can’t quite see how!”
“As I recall,” Norman said, “you suggested trebling the number of teachers, increasing school accommodation to the best modern standards, and expanding the business college here into a national university with a student body of ten thousand, the rest of the training to be left to trade instructors on an on-the-job basis. Well, according to what I gather from Shalmaneser’s report, you don’t know yourself what you have to play with. You have a feedback element you left out completely. If the average runs no higher than one in ten, then in any class of forty children you have four who are capable of additional training so that they can relieve part of the teacher’s duty in respect of the class next below but one. Your thirteen-year-olds can spare an hour a day to supplement the instruction the ten- or eleven-year-olds are getting. The other day I met a boy called Simon Bethakazi at a hamlet on the Lalendi road. I met him at random—remember him, Gideon?”
“The one who gave me that nasty question about the Chinese in California,” Gideon nodded.
“Right. If he gets the chance, that boy will be teaching his own class of forty sub-teenagers in three years’ time
and
because he’s not teaching them anything he hasn’t already learned backwards he’s going to be able to study—perhaps more slowly than in Europe or America, but it’ll only add one year to a standard three-year course—he’ll be able to study a subject at college level.
“Additionally, we envisage bringing in foreign advisors and teachers at generous rates of pay who will cost your taxpayers nothing—they’ll be GT staffers—who will combine a job for the project with a compulsory course-leadership assignment. Some of them won’t like the idea, and we’ll weed them out fast. Others will take to it because their skills are the kind which are being automated away from them at home and they’ll react favourably to the chance of handing on their knowledge to human successors. Shalmaneser’s been fed the results of surveys we’ve done in Europe and estimates we can hope for a minimum of twenty-five hundred of suitable calibre.