course is the sort of slow, mutual suicide we’ve got now.”
Hamelin put the tips of his fingers together. “You gentlemen
lecture me about policy as if I had never heard the word
before. I’m familiar with your arguments for sending soldiers
first. You assume that you’re familiar with all of mine for
starting with civilians, but you’re wrong, because some of
them haven’t been brought up at all outside the Department.
I’m going to tell you some of them, and I think they’ll merit
your close attention.”
Carson shrugged. “I’d like nothing better than to be con-
vinced, Mr. Secretary. Go ahead.”
“You of all people should know, Dr. Carson, how close
our underground society is to a psychotic break. To take a
single instance, the number of juvenile gangs roaming these
corridors of ours has increased 400 per cent since the rumors
about the Re-Education Project began to spread. Or another:
the number of individual crimes without motivecrimes
committed just to distract the committer from the grinding
monotony of the life we all leadhas now passed the total
of all other crimes put together.
“And as for actual insanityof our thirty-five million
people still unhospitalized, there are four million cases of
which -we know, each one of which should be committed
right now for early paranoid schizophreniaexcept that were
we to commit them, our essential industries would suffer a
manpower loss more devastating than anything the enemy has
inflicted upon us. Every one of those four million persons is
a major hazard to his neighbors and to his job, but how can