A Matter for Men watc-1 Read online

  High above it all, flashing bursts of fireworks threw themselves against the night, sparkling in the sky, popping and exploding in a never-ending shower of light. The stars were dimmed behind the glare.

  By comparison, the rest of the city seemed dark and deserted. It was as if there were nothing else in Denver but this colossal spire, blazing with defiant life-a celebration for the sheer joy of celebration.

  A gasp of awe went up from some of the revelers. I heard one lady exclaim, "It's beautiful! But what are they celebrating?"

  "Nothing," laughed her companion. "Everything. Just being alive!"

  "They do it every night?"

  "Yep."

  The bus rolled down a ramp, through a tunnel and up into the building itself, finally stopping on an interior terrace overlooking a frosty garden.

  It was like stepping into a fairy tale. The inside of this gaudy diamond was a courtyard thirty stories tall, bathed in light, divided by improbable fountains and exuberant forests, spotted with unexpected plateaus and overhung with wide terraces and balconies. There were banners hanging everywhere. I got off the bus and just stared-until Ted grabbed my arm and pulled,me along.

  To one side was a lobby containing the hotel's registration desk and elevators, on the other was a ramp leading down into the heart of the courtyard. A Marine Corps band in shining silver uniforms occupied one of the nearby balconies and strains of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty March filled the air. (It used to be a waltz, until the Marines got ahold of it.) Everywhere I looked, I saw uniforms-from every branch of the service, and quite a few foreign ones as well. Had the military taken over the hotel?

  There was a young lieutenant-good grief! When had they started commissioning them that young?-at the head of the ramp. He was seated behind a porta-console, checking off each person against the list in the computer. Although we didn't see him prevent anyone from going down the ramp, his authority to do so was obvious. I wondered how Ted was going to get us past.

  It turned out to be no problem at all. Ted had attached himself to the buffoon with the sixteen-year-old girl, showing interest only in the buffoon and none at all in the girl. He looked like a hustler in his gaudy flash-pants; now he was acting like one. We approached the console in a group; Ted hooked one arm through the buffoon's, the other through mine. "Now, come on, Jimmy-boy," he said. "Don't be a party-poop." The looey looked up at all four of us, tried unsuccessfully to conceal his reaction and nodded us past without comment.

  Turned out the buffoon was one of the better known buffoons in Denver. As well as his predilections for-well, never mind. The girl was not his daughter. But she was hungry.

  I shook off Ted's arm and pulled angrily away. I stopped on the ramp and let them keep going without me. Ted just nattered along, barely noticing my departure.

  I stood there watching them, Ted gushing on one arm of the buffoon, the girl on the other, and hated all three of them. This wasn't what I'd come to Denver for. I felt hot and embarrassed, a damn fool.

  Screw them. I went looking for a phone. Found one, inserted my card and dialed home.

  Got a recorded message. "Not here now, back tomorrow." Beep.

  Sigh. "Mom, this is Jim-"

  Click. "Jim, I'm sorry I missed you. I'm not in Santa Cruz anymore. I've moved down the coast to a place called Family. It's on the New Peninsula. We take care of orphans. I've met a wonderful man here-I want you to meet him. We're thinking of getting married. His name is Alan Plaskow; I know you'll like him. Maggie does. Maggie and Annie send their love-and we all want to know when we'll be seeing you again. Your Uncle Ernie will be in town next month, something to do with the Reclamation Hearings. Please let me know where I can get in touch with you, okay?" Beep.

  "Hi, Mom. I got your message okay. I don't know when I'll be able to get away, but as soon as I can I'll come home for a few days. I hope you're well. I hope everyone else is okay too. I'm in Denver right now at the National Science Center and-"

  A metallic voice interrupted: "It is required by law to inform you that this conversation is being monitored for possible censorship under the National Security Act."

  "Terrific. Anyway, Mom, I'll be in touch with you as soon as I can. Don't try to call me here; I don't think you'll have much luck. Give my love to everyone." I hung up. I tried calling Maggie, but the lines to Seattle were out, or busy, or something. I left a delayed message, pocketed my card and walked away.

  I found myself in front of a news stand, studying headlines. It was the same old stuff. The President was calling for unity and cooperation. Again. Congress was in a wrangle over the economy. Again. The value of the casey had jumped another klick. Bad news for the working man. Again.

  On an impulse, I picked up a pack of Highmasters, opening them as I headed back.

  I stopped to light up at the top of a ramp. "Who's that?" said someone behind me. "Who's who?" someone answered.

  "The preacher."

  "Oh, that's Fromkin. Ego-tripping again. He loves to play teacher. Whenever he comes to these things, he holds court."

  "Looks like a full house."

  "Oh, he's a good speaker, never dull-but I've heard him before, and it's always the same sermon: `Let's be unreasonable.' Let's go somewhere else."

  "Okay."

  They wandered off. I studied the man they were talking about for a moment, then headed down the ramp for a closer listen. He did look like a preacher. The effect was accomplished by a ruffled silk shirt and a black frock coat-he looked like he'd just stepped out of the nineteenth century. He was lean and spare and had a halo of frosty-white hair that floated around his pink skull like a cloud.

  His eyes sparkled as he spoke; he was very much enjoying himself. I edged into the crowd and found a place to stand. One of the women at his feet was saying, "But I don't see how it's possible to inflate a labor economy, Professor. . . . I mean, I thought that everything was fixed. "

  "It's really quite simple," Fromkin said. "Just devalue your counters."

  "But that's what I mean. I thought the point of the whole thing was to create an economy that couldn't be devalued."

  "Sure. But-oh, hell, it requires too much explanation. Wait a minute, let me see if I can boil it down. Look, the theory of money is that it's a tool to allow a social organism to manipulate its energy-that is, money units are the corpuscles of the cultural bloodstream; it has to flow for the system to be able to feed itself. You like that, huh? What we think of as money is really only counters, a way of keeping score which organ in the social body-that means you-is presently using or controlling this piece of energy. It's when we start thinking that the counter is valuable that we confuse ourselves. It's not-it's only the symbol."

  "I could use a few of those symbols," one wag remarked.

  Fromkin looked at him with withering gentleness. "So create some," he said. Suddenly, I knew who he reminded me of-Whitlaw!

  "I'd love to. How?" said the wag.

  "Easy. Create value-for others. The truth is that you can only measure your wealth by the amount of difference you make in the world. That is, how much do you contribute to the people around you? And to how many people do you contribute?"

  "Huh?" The wag had stopped being funny. Now he was honestly curious.

  "All right, stick with me. The physical universe uses heat to keep score. Actually, it's motion, but on the molecular level we experience it as heat. Just know that it's the only way one object ever affects another, so it's the only way to measure how big a difference an object really makes. We measure heat in BTUs. British Thermal Units. Calories. We want our money to be an accurate measure, so we use the same system as the physical universe: ergo, we have the KC standard, the kilocalorie."

  A chubby woman in a bright-flowered dress giggled nervously. "I used to think we were spending pieces of fat. I thought I'd be rich." Fromkin acknowledged her attempt at humor with a noncommittal smile, and she gushed happily.

  The man next to her asked, "How much is a pound of flesh these days
?"

  "Um, let's see-a pound is two-point-two kilograms. . . ."

  "It'd be three caseys," I said. "A pound of flesh is three thousand calories." I looked back to Fromkin.

  He was ignoring the interruption. He took a final sip from his drink and put it down. Someone immediately moved to refill it, a thin, bony-looking woman with basset-hound eyes.

  Fromkin returned his attention to the brunette who had asked the original question. "Still with me? Good. Okay, this is what the casey teaches us about the law of supply and demand. The purchase price of an object is determined by how much of your labor you're willing to trade for it. The difference between the purchase price and its actual value is called profit. Stop wrinkling your nose, my dear; profit is not a dirty word. Profit is a resource. It is a necessary part of the economic process; it's what we call the energy that the organism uses for reinvestment if it is to continue to thrive and produce. This apple, for instance, is the apple tree's profit-the meat of it is used to feed the seeds inside, and that's how an apple tree manufactures another apple tree. So you cannot charge less than an item costs in energy, but you can charge more; in fact, you must. "

  "So why does a kilo of Beluga cost more than a kilo of soya?" someone asked. "The soya has more protein."

  Fromkin smiled. "Isn't it obvious? As soon as you have one unit less than the number of willing buyers, you have an auction going. The price will rise until enough people drop out and you have only as many buyers as units to sell; it's called `whatever the market will bear.' "

  He stood up then and stepped to a nearby buffet table and started loading a plate. But he kept talking. The man was incredible. "Under the labor standard, a nation's wealth is determined by its ability to produce-its gross national product. Cut the population and you cut the wealth of a country. Automatically. But the amount of counters still in circulation remains high. And there's no easy way to cut back the coinage; it can't help but inflate-and even if you could cut back all the excess cash in circulation, it wouldn't be enough. The system is still pegged to its history. Bonds, for instance-a government sells bonds on the promise of paying interest on them. Interest can only be paid when the system is in a growth situation. If there's no growth, then interest is only a promise by the government to continue inflating the economy and further reduce the value of the counters-the money. That's why I oppose letting the government borrow money-under any circumstances. Because it sets a bad precedent. If it can't pay it back, then it has to borrow more, and the inflationary spiral is endless. Let the government go into debt and we're mortgaging our own future incomes. This country-the whole world, in fact-is in an extreme no-growth situation, yet the interest will still be paid on all outstanding bonds. It has to be; it's the law. So ... the more cash in circulation, the less each bill is worth. Thank God we still have the dollar-that's at least backed by paper, and it can't inflate as fast as the casey can under these circumstances-and it'll continue that way for a long time. It was a commodity; someday soon it'll be money again. We're at the beginning of a long recede-"

  "Beginning-?" said the brunette. "I thought-"

  "Nope." Fromkin was sitting again, eating. He paused to chew and swallow. "You're wrong. That was a population crash. When four and a half billion people die in two years, that's a crash. The U.N. definition of a recede specifies seven percent or more over an eight-month period-but when it's seventy percent, that's a crash. We're just coming out of the crash now; the curve is finally starting to level off. Now we're going into the recede. The real recede. It's the aftershock of the crash. But it's a lot more than that too. Believe it or not, the human race may have been knocked below the threshold of viability. There may not be enough of us left to survive."

  "Huh?" That was a newcomer to the group. His posture was military even though he was wearing a dress jacket. He was standing with a plate in one hand and a drink in the other. "Are you serious? Fromkin, I think you're ignoring the fact that the human race has survived a long time-and we've only been above one billion individuals for a little more than a century."

  Fromkin looked up. He recognized the man and grinned. "You'd better stick to your spaceships, Colonel Ferris. Someone make room for the colonel here, thank you. You're right about your figures, of course-I saw the same report-but the figures alone don't tell the whole story. You need to know the demographic cross section. Right now, we are not functioning from a stable population of family or tribal groups. The human network is mostly disjointed-we're all individual atoms, swirling in chaos.

  "We haven't reformed into molecules-although that process has begun-let alone crystals and lattices. We're still a very long way from the creation and operation of the necessary social organisms that a self-generating society needs to survive-and I'm still only talking about survival; I haven't even touched upon anything beyond that-like celebration."

  Ferris looked unhappy. Some of Fromkin's other listeners looked puzzled.

  "Okay, let me put that in English for you. We are not a population yet. We are just a mish-mash of people who've been lucky enough-or perhaps I should say unlucky enough-to survive." He looked at Ferris as he said it. "Each of us has his own horror story."

  Now I knew him. Jarles "Free Fall" Ferris. The Lunar Colony. One of the seventeen who made it back. We never heard how they chose who stayed and who returned. I wondered if we'd ever find out.

  Fromkin was saying, "The fact is, we're still getting aftereffects of the plagues. We'll be getting them for another year or three-but we're nowhere better equipped to handle them for a small, spread-out, disorganized population than we were able to handle them for a large, dense, organized one. If anything, an individual's chances are worse now for survival. There are still ripples of those plagues circulating. Slowly, but surely, we're going to lose another half-billion people-that's the guess of the RandTanks. Then, of the survivors, we're going to lose ten percent who will have lost the will to live. Anomie. Shock. The walking wounded-and just because you don't see them wandering around in herds anymore doesn't mean they're not there. Then we'll lose the very old and the very young who won't be able to take care of themselves. And the very ill too. Anyone on any kind of maintenance is in danger, even if it's something as easily controllable as diabetes. There simply won't be either the medical care or the supplies. We lost nearly eighty percent of the world's supply of doctors, nurses and support technicians. We'll lose a lot of children because there won't be anyone around to parent them.

  "Some will die, some will go feral. The birth rate will be down for a long time. We're going to lose all the babies who won't be born because those who could have been parents are no longer capable or willing. We'll lose even more babies who are born to parents who can't or won't maintain them. Should I go on? No? Okay-but we're real close to the edge. It'll look like positive feedback on the cultural level: psychoses creating more psychoses, distrust and suspicion leading to more distrust and suspicion. And if enough people start to perceive that there isn't enough of anything to go around-food, fuel, whatever-they'll start fighting over what's left. And by then we'll be into serious problems with population density; the survivors-a rag-taggle conglomeration of misfits by any definition-may be too spread out to meet and mate. Those few left who are capable and willing to be responsible parents may not be able to find each other. I expect the recede to take us right down to the level where it will be questionable if we can come back. Which means, by the way, that the casey was a noble experiment, but I'm afraid it's going to be overinflated and worthless for a long time to come. I wish I were wrong, but I've already converted most of my holdings to property or dollars. I'd advise the rest of you to do the same. With a shrinking tax base, the government is going to have to take drastic steps soon, and you're going to have to protect your wealth, or you might find yourself turned into a pauper overnight by a paper revaluation. That's happened a couple times in the past two decades, but this next one ought to be a wowzer."

  He paused to take another bite of food a
nd wash it down with a drink.

  Maybe it was my high-school reflexes-I had to say something. He was talking about the fact that the dying hadn't ended yet, that we were going to lose one-third, maybe even one-half, of the remaining human beings left on the planet. He wasn't talking about how to save them; he was talking dispassionately about how to avoid economic discomfort. No-he was talking about how to profit from it. I couldn't help myself. "Sir-"

  He looked up. His eyes were shaded. "Yes?"

  "What about the people?"

  "Say again?"

  "The people. Aren't we going to try to save them?"

  "Save whom? From what?"

  "You said at least another half-billion people are going to die. Can't we do something about that?"

  "What would you have us do?"

  "Well-save them!"

  "How?"

  "Um, well-"

  "Excuse me-I should have asked, `With what?' Most of us are spending most of our energies just staying alive. Most governments are having too much trouble just maintaining internal order to mount a rescue effort even for their own populations, let alone others. And how do you rescue people from the crisscrossing wave fronts of five different plagues, each wave front more than a thousand kilometers wide? We may have identified the plagues, but we haven't finished identifying the mutations. By the way, are you vaccinated?"

  "Sure, isn't everybody?"

  He snorted. "You're vaccinated because you're in the army, or the Civil Service, or something like that-someone considers you valuable enough to justify keeping you alive; but that vaccine costs time, money-and, most valuable of all, human effort. And there isn't enough of the latter to go around. Not everybody is vaccinated-only the ones that the government needs to survive. We don't have the technicians to program even the automated laboratories. We don't even have the personnel to teach new technicians. We don't have the people to maintain the equipment. We don't have-"