Such a lot of it was by rote, repeated from
The Green Ripper memory in a sentence structure alien to her usual patterns. “How do we do it, Sister?”
“We make the oppressors visible to the people by giving them reason to show how cruel and tough they can be. We force them to react. Like Chicago and Kent State, but much much more.”
“By going out and kiUing people?”
‘`That isn’t the purpose, Brother. To kill people. Our civilization has gotten too complicated. It’s full of machines and plastics. Brother Persival says it is very sick, and like a sick person, it can’t survive if a lot of other things happen to it.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, we won’t go after things that are really protected, like army places and shipyards and nuclear power plants and government buildings. That’s dumb. You can bring everything tumbling down by going after things that would take years to fix. Big gas pipelines and oil pipelines. Bridges and tunnels and big computer places. Refineries and chemical plants and control towers. TV stations and newspaper pressrooms. Blow ’em up and burn ’em down. Targets of opportunity. Anyway, it’s all being worked out. And then we’ll know what our part of it is. I hope I don’t get stuff to do that’s too hard. I mean I want to be able to get it done. Then if I get away, okay, and if I don’t, okay. But Ed hate to mess up. I hope I don’t get a tunnel. I get really itchy going through tunnels. I think of all that water coming down on me.”
“How do you do a tunnel?”
“Two people and two vehicles, right? Lee one is an old truck. You’ve got a good big load of explosives, labeled something else. It takes a big blast. The lead car stops and you stop the truck and yank the wire that starts the three-minute timer. Then you run and get in the lead car and get out of there. It’s the same for some kinds of bridges. I really don’t want to do a tunnel. They make me so nervous 111 do something wrong.”
She had turned onto her side, worked her head onto my shoulder. Her arm lay across my chest, her knees against the side of my thigh. She sighed and said, Y didn’t have any interest in sex at all until I was in training overseas. Then it started to all come back. It’s like that with most of the women who join. I mean the Church becomes the most important love life you have, and it wipes out every~bing else for a while. Then it’s never as important again as it once was to you.” She kissed the side of my throat and said, ‘enough of all this talking already? You want to make * now?” She snugged the length of her body against me. This was a frightening little engine of destruction, all trained, primed, touthoned, waiting only for someone to aim it at a target. Her breath had a faint scent of the deerburger onions. Her hair smelled clean, and her body had a slight coppery odor of perspiration. I remembered noticing at the table that her fingernails were chewed down to the quick.
The Green Ripper
Poor lithe assassin. She had gone out into the world with an empty head, and somebody had crammed a single frightful idea into it, dressed up with a lot of important-sounding rhetoric. She couldn’t know the frightfulness of the idea because she had nothing by which to measure it. Fifteen to forty groups of from eight to fifteen? From a hundred and twenty to six hundred of them. So take the smallest number, cut it in half, and think about sixty people like this one, armed, mobilized, superbly equipped, and aimed at the pressure points of our culture.
I remembered one of Meyer’s concepts about cultural resiliency. In the third world, the village of one thousand can provide itself with what it needs for survival. Smash the cities and half the villages, and the other half keep going. In our worbl, the vii” lage of one thousand has to import water, fuel, food, clothing, medicine, electric power, and entertainment. Smash the cities and an the viBages die. And the city itself is frail. It has little nerve-center nodules. Water plant, power transmission lines, telephone switching facilities.