At his villa on his Brocard ellipse satellite Matson was safe. And, as a precaution, he conducted as much business as possible from this spot; below, in New York City, at Lies Incorporated's offices, he always felt naked. Felt, in fact, the nearby presence of the UN and Horst Bertold's legions of "Peace Workers," those armed, gray-faced men and women who, in the name of Pax Terrae, roamed the world, even into the pathetic moonies, the sad, failure-but-still-extant early "colony" satellites which had come before von Einem's breakthrough and the discovery by George Hoffman of Fomalhaut IX, now called Whale's Mouth and now the colony.
Too bad, Matson thought archly, that George Hoffman didn't discover more planets in more star systems habitable by us, the frail needs of living, sentient, mentating biochemical upright bipeds which we humans are.
Hundreds and hundreds of planets, but —
Instead, temperature which melted thermo-fuses. No air. No soil. No water.
One could hardly say of such worlds — Venus had proved a typical example — that the "living was easy." The living, in fact, on such worlds was confined to homeostatic domes with their own at, wa, and self-regu temp.
Housing, per dome, perhaps three hundred somatic souls. Rather a small number, considering that as of this year Terra's population stood at seven billion.
"Here," Freya said, sliding down to seat herself, legs tucked under her, on the deep-pile wool carpet near Matson. "The file on H.B." She opened it at random; Lies Incorporated field reps had done a thorough job: many data existed here that, via the UN's carefully watchdogged info media, never had reached the public, even the so-called "critical" analysts and columnists. They could, by law, criticize to their hearts' content, the character, habits, abilities and shaving customs of Herr Bertold... except, however, the basic facts were denied them.
Not so, however, to Lies Incorporated — an ironic sobriquet, in view of the absolutely verified nature of the data now before its owner.
It was harsh reading. Even for him.
The year of Horst Bertold's birth: 1964. Slightly before the Space Age had begun; like Matson Glazer-Holliday, Horst was a remnant of the old world when all that had been glimpsed in the sky were "flying saucers," a misnomer for a U.S. Air Force antimissile weapon which had, in the brief confrontation of 1992, proved ineffectual. Horst had been born to middle-class Berlin — West Berlin, it had then been called, because, and this was difficult to remember, Germany had in those days been divided — parents: his father had owned a meat market... rather fitting, Matson reflected, in that Horst's father had been an S.S. officer and former member of an Einsatzgruppe which had murdered thousands of innocent persons of Slavic and Jewish ancestry... although this had not interfered with Johann Bertold's meat market business in the 1960s and '70s. And then, in 1982, at the age of eighteen, young Horst himself had entered the spotlight (needless to say, the statute of limitations had run out on his father, who had never been prosecuted by the West German legal apparatus for his crimes of the '40s, and had, in addition, evaded the commando squads from Israel who, by 1980, had closed up shop, given up the task of tracking down the former mass murderers). Horst, in 1982, had been a leader in the Reinholt Jugend.
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.