Ernst Reinholt, from Hamburg, had headed a party which had striven to unify Germany once more; the deal would be that as a military and economic power she would be neutral between East and West. It had taken ten more years, but in the fracas of 1992 he had obtained from the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. what he wanted: a united, free Germany, called by its present name, and just chuck full of vim and Macht.
And, under Reinholt, Neues Einige Deutschland had played dirty pool from the start. But no one was really surprised; East and West were busy erecting tents where major popcens—population centers such as Chicago and Moscow—had existed, and hoping to god that the Sino-Cuban wing of the C.P. did not, taking advantage of the situation, move in and entrench. . . .
It had been the secret protocol of Reinholt and his N.W.G. that it would not be neutral after all. On the contrary.
New Whole Germany would take out China.
So this was the unsavory basis on which the Reich had re-obtained unity. Its Waffen technicians had devised, as instructed, weapons which had, in 1997, dealt a terminal punch to People’s China. Matson, examining the folio, very rapidly scanned this part, because the Reich had come up with some show-stoppers, and even the abominable U.S. nerve gas had seemed like a field of daisies in comparison—he did not wish to see any mention of what Krupp u. Sohnen had devised as an answer to China’s thousands of millions who were spilling as far west as the Volga, and toward the U.S., were crossing from Siberia—taken in 1993—into Alaska. In any case the compact had been agreed on, and even Faust would have blanched at it; now the world had no People’s China but a New Whole Germany to contend with.
And what a quid pro quo that had proved to be. Because, correctly and legally, Neues Einige Deutschland had obtained control of the sole planet-wide and hence Sol system-wide governing structure, the UN. They held it now. And the former member of the Reinholt Jugend, Horst Bertold, was its Secretary General. And had faced squarely, as he had promised when campaigning for election—it had become, by 1995, an elective office—that he would deal with the colonization problem; he would find a Final Solution to the tormented condition that (one) Terra was as overpopulated throughout as Japan had been in 1970 and (two) both the alternate planets of the Sol system and the moonies and the domes et al. had failed wretchedly.
Horst had found, via Dr. von Einem’s Telpor teleportation construct, a habitable planet in a star system too far from Sol to be reached by the quondam drayage enterprise of Maury Applebaum. Whale’s Mouth, and the Telpor mechanisms at Trails of Hoffman’s retail outlets, were the answer.
To all appearances it was duck soup, feathers, scut included. But—
“See?” Matson said to Freya. “Here’s the written transcript of Horst Bertold’s speech before he was elected and before von Einem showed up with the Telpor gadget. The promise was made before teleportation to the Fomalhaut system was technologically possible—in fact, before the existence of Fomalhaut was even known to unmanned elderly relay-monitors.”
“So?”
Matson said grimly, “So our UN Secretary General had a mandate before he had a solution. And to the German mind that means one thing and one thing only. The cat and rat farm solution.” Or, as he now suspected, the dog-food factory solution.
It had been suggested, ironically, in imitation of Swift, by a fiction writer of the 1950s, that the “Negro Question” in the U.S. be solved by the building of giant factories which made Negroes into canned dog food. Satire, of course, like Swift’s A Modest Proposal, that the problem of starvation among the Irish be solved by the eating of the children . . . Swift himself lamenting, as a final irony, that he had no children of his own to offer to the market for consumption. Grisly. But—
This all pointed to the seriousness—not merely of the problem of overpopulation and insufficient food production—but to the insane, schizoid solutions seriously being considered. The brief World War Three—never officially called that; called instead, a Pacifying Action, just as the Korean War had been a “Police Action”—had taken care of a few millions of people, but—not quite enough. As a solution it had worked to a partial extent; and was, in many influential quarters, viewed exactly as that: as a partial solution. Not as a catastrophe but as a half-answer.
And Horst Bertold had promised the balance of the answer.
Whale’s Mouth was it.
“So in my opinion,” Matson murmured, to himself mostly, “I’ve always been suspicious of Whale’s Mouth. If I hadn’t read Swift and C. Wright Mills and the Herman Kahn Report for Rand Corporation . . .” He glanced at Freya. “There have,” he said, “always been people who would solve the problem that way.” And I think, he thought, as he listened to the aud tape of the crowd noises, a tape which pretended to consist of a transcript from the launching, at Whale’s Mouth, of the ritualistic, celebration-inspired time capsule back through hyper-space—or in some such ultra high velocity fashion—to Terra, that we have those people and that solution with us again.
We have, in other words, UN Secretary General Horst Bertold and Trails of Hoffman Limited and its economic multi-pseudopodia empire. And dear Dr. Sepp von Einem and his many Telpor outlets, his curiously one-way teleporting machine.
“That land,” Matson murmured, vaguely quoting, lord knew who, what sage of the past, “which all of us must visit one day . . . that land beyond the grave. But no one had returned to report on’t. And until they do—”
Freya said perceptively, “Until they do, you’re going to stay suspicious. Of the whole Newcolonizedland settlement. Aud and vid signals are not good enough to convince you—because you know how easily they can be faked.” She gestured at the deck running the tape at this very moment.
“A client,” Matson corrected her. “Who on a nonverbal level, what our Reich friends call thinking with the blood, suspects that if he takes his one remaining inter-stellar worthy flagship, the—” What was it called? “The Navel,” he said. “The Omphalos; that’s what that lofty Greek word means, by the way. Takes the Navel direct to Fomalhaut, that after eighteen years of weary deep-sleep which is not quite sleep, more a hyponagogic, restless tossing and turning at low temp, slowed-down metabolism, he will arrive at Whale’s Mouth, and oddly it will not be beer and skittles. It will not be happy conapt dwellers, smiling children in autonomic schools, tame, exotic, native life forms. But—”
But just what would he find?
If, as he suspected, the aud and vid tracks passing from Whale’s Mouth to Terra via von Einem’s Telpor mechanisms were covers—what really lay beneath?
He simply could not guess, not when forty million people were involved. The dog-food factory? Are, god forbid, those forty million men, women and children dead? Is it a boneyard, with no one there, no one even to extract the gold from their teeth—because now we use stainless steel?
He did not know, but—someone knew. Perhaps entire New Whole Germany, which, having cornered the lion’s share of power in the UN, hence ruled throughout the nine planets of the Sol system; perhaps as a totality it, on a subrational, instinctive level, knew. As, in the 1940s, it had intuited the existence of the gas chambers beyond the cages of twittering birds and those high walls that kept out all sight and sound . . . and except for that oddly acrid smoke from chimneys all day long—
“They know,” Matson said aloud. Horst Bertold knew, and so did Theodoric Ferry, the owner of THL, and so did doddering but still crafty old Dr. von Einem. And the one hundred and thirty-five million inhabitants of Neues Einige Deutschland, to some degree; not verbally—you couldn’t put an expert psych rep of Lies Incorporated in a small room with a Munich cobbler, run a few routine drug-injections, make the standard quasi-Psionic transcripts, EEGs of his para-psychological reactions, and learn, know, the literal, exact truth.
The whole matter was, damn it, still obscured. And this time it was not cages of twittering birds or shower baths but something else—something, however, equally effective. Trails of Hoffman published 3-D, multicolor, brilliantly artistic, exciting brochures displaying the ecstatic life beyond the Telpor nexus; the TV ran ceaseless, drive-you-mad ads all day and night, of the underpopulated veldt landscape of Whale’s Mouth, the balmy climate (via olfactory track), the warm the-answer-is-yes two-moon-filled nights . . . it was a land of romance, freedom, experimentation, kibbutzim without the desert: cooperative living where oranges grew naturally, and as large as grapefruits, which themselves resembled melons or the breasts of the women there. But.
Matson decided carefully, “I am sending a veteran field rep across, via normal Telpor, posing as an unmarried businessman who hopes to open a watch repair retail shop at Whale’s Mouth. He will have grafted sub-derm a high-gain transmitter; it will—”