While the 1,600 men of Machado’s army were occupied in the environs of Kiev, a Texas army of 800, in civilian garb, had invaded Washington, D.C., where dusk had just fallen. Their task was easier: they needed only a dozen men to deploy the Spirochaetum encaustum at key points around the city-near the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and other repositories of the nation’s millions of tons of paper. Two-man teams, in tanker trucks equipped with spray nozzles, ringed the city with SE-slay, by saturating the ten-lane pavement the entire length of the Beltway girdling Washington. The rest of the men were armed with spray tanks and the cover story that they were neutralizing a possibly toxic spill. They laid down wide bands of SE-slay around the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Archives, the National Institutes of Health, the public libraries, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, Georgetown and George Washington universities, and various other centers of useful knowledge. Law libraries were studiously excepted. It took less than an hour before they completed their work, climbed in cars, and drove to outlying airports where chartered planes were waiting to convey them-having aroused little suspicion, and no opposition at all-back to Texas.
In both Kiev and Washington, the moment the Spirochaetum encaustum came into contact with a printed page, bacterial action began-on the ink. The bacterium was an ink-ravenous beast, and consumed the stuff with the zest of King Henry VIII attacking a leg of mutton. As it gorged, it proliferated, doubling its population by a factor of fifteen every hour. The exponential increase of the Spirochaetum encaustum quickly and simultaneously blanketed the two cities, except for those enclaves spared by the application of SE-slay around them. Newspapers turned white before their readers’ eyes as the bacteria did their work. Billboards went blank. The labels on ketchup bottles disappeared. Maps vanished, collectors’ valued first editions in private libraries became so much waste paper, love letters faded even as they were being read by eager young maidens. Washington suddenly became an illiterate’s paradise.
And at the hundreds of government agencies, the bacterium was busy drinking oceans of ink on mountains of law books, speeches, memoranda, reports, scrolls, pamphlets, drafts, transcripts, text and reference books, tax and police records, weapons specifications, and court decisions that stretched back beyond the Revolutionary War. And of course, money… There was so much printed matter that it took the night of 1 December and most of the next day for the fulminating bacteria to complete their work. But in the end, save in the protected zones, not a single letter, printed or written by hand, remained in Washington-and none at all in Kiev.
The two world capitals had become white cities. Government abruptly ceased, for how can central governments exist without papers to shuffle? Willy-nilly, local control of the people’s destinies, without regard or recourse to Big Brother in Washington or Kiev, had become a sudden reality. For the first time in three hundred years in the United States-and a thousand years in Russia-men were free to pursue their own bent without interference from ideologues, demagogues, and tyrants intent upon shackling the masses for their own enrichment, prestige, and comfort. The profession of politician became suddenly obsolete: the fat cats would now have to scratch out their living like everybody else.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For 30 years Daniel da Cruz has lived and worked- as a diplomat, teacher, businessman, and journalist-in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
He spent six World War II years as a U.S. Marine volunteer, serving ashore, afloat (in 1941 aboard the Texas), and aloft in the three war theaters. A magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, da Cruz has been variously a census enumerator, magazine editor and editorial consultant, judo master-he holds a second degree Black Belt of the Kodokan Judo Institute, Tokyo-taxi driver, farmer, public relations officer for an oil company, salesman, foreign correspondent, publishers’ representative, vice-president of a New York advertising agency, slaughterhouse skinner, captain of a Texas security organization, American Embassy press attache in Baghdad, copper miner and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Miami University.
Da Cruz has published many books, among them an American history text, a monograph on Amerindian linguistics, and three suspense novels for Ballantine Books, the most recent of which, The Captive City, was awarded a special “Edgar.” He has written five other science-fiction novels, The Grotto of the Formigans (Del Rey, 1980), The Ayes of Texas (Del Rey, 1982), Texas on the Rocks (Del Rey, 1986), F-Cubed (Del Rey, 1987), and Mixed Doubles (Del Rey, 1989).