David's Sling (7 page)

Daniel gave her a satisfied clap of his hands. "Yes! And we have some great ways of helping them. We have inside information on just about every dark corner of society—politicians, in particular. Our selected reporters wifi receive leaks to help them build their careers. And, of course, the magazines and cable channels that depend on Wilcox-Morris for advertising support will be particularly eager to ran their pieces."

These thoughts were obviously new to Kira; her eyes looked beyond him at the broad ramifications. She had an open look, her face filled with an emotion he dimly recalled from his childhood. It was the emotion that came with a sense of wonder. "Of course. You have leverage all over the country." Her wonder turned into a moment's revelation, as she realized how much easier her job would be, working with the tobacco industry.

Daniel shrugged. "Well, for what it's worth, we have all the power that money can buy. There are limitations, of course, on the power that money can buy, but there aren't many things that can buy more power than money."

"So, would you like a list of candidate reporters?" Excitement filled her voice. She clearly relished the idea of using the media as much as Daniel did himself.

"Excellent." He stood up, concluding the meeting. "I think we can do lots of business together."

Kira also stood up. "I agree. I'm quite confident that both of our companies will profit from this link-up. " She paused at the door, and turned to him. "I still can't believe you think the Zetetic Institute is worth
bothering
with."

Daniel's voice grew stem. "I've made my career out of seeing where trouble will appear before anyone else could see it. There're other sources of trouble for our business, too—plenty of them. But this is one we have to nip in the bud. Believe me." He watched her depart, then snuffed out the remains of his second cigarette with methodical care. The ventilation sucked away the odor of tobacco with equally methodical efficiency—at least, it sucked away enough of the odor so that a smoker could no longer detect its presence.

Daniel stepped up to the great wall of glass, to look outside and luxuriate in the gentle springtime. For a moment, his mind flashed over the years of his life—from his childhood on a tiny farm, to his first deals in the commodities market, to his successes in stocks, and finally, his takeover of one of the biggest companies in the world. At each step, he had been involved with the tobacco industry— first, because he had been bom there; then, because tobacco was such a volatile commodity; and finally, because the companies that controlled the world s cigarette industry were such cash cows.

At each step he had lived the harrowing life of a man whose survival depends on his interpretation of tiny indicators of the future. He had lived that life brilliantly. Consequently, it did not surprise him that Kira failed to see inevitable dangers. Not even the corporate directors of the huge conglomerates had seen thee future as clearly as he. Had they been able to, they would have prevented his conquest of their companies.

And now his alarms pounded with every new bit of information he received on the Zetetic Institute. Politicians, he could control. Crowds of voters, he could manipulate. News media, he could redirect. But an organization dedicated to enhancing human rationality might be beyond his influence.

He was playing with lightning here in other ways as well. Kira might hold divided loyalties if she had friends in the Institute. Even more frightening was the danger that his attack on the Institute could backfire. The Zetetic Institute was, as Kira had noted, a tiny thing today. By bringing media attention to bear on it, he could be fueling its growth, even if all the attention were directed at its oddities. A certain percentage of the people who enjoyed going against the conventional wisdom would seek the Institute out because of such notoriety. He frowned, wondering about Kira's failure to comment on this danger.

But he knew that inaction led down a short path to disaster. And whatever the truth or falsehood behind the allegations that cigarettes killed, Daniel knew a more important truth.

He remembered his mother, on her broken-down farm in West Virginia, discing the soil with her broken-down tractor. That tractor had already taken two of her fingers in payment during half-successful attempts at repair. He remembered the hardness of living poor. He remembered how old she had looked at the age of 35—older than Kira Evans would look when she was 50.

Cigarettes were a minor part of the dangers of life. Poverty was the real horror. Poverty killed. Looking down upon the world from his steel-and-glass fortress, Daniel swore that never again would one he loved suffer from that land of poverty.

The Zetetic Institute would fall before him, as the others had fallen in the past. As for the uncertainties of Kira, he felt little concern. He had already set in motion some of the types of plans they had discussed. His reporters were already on the job.

As he watched, the snarl of traffic on the parkway broke free, and started to flow as easily as the gentle Potomac River that paralleled its course. The bright wall of cherry blossoms was all that divided the flow of belching metal from the flow of quiet water.

Major Vorontsov
. The title sounded good when it preceded his name. It was quite a victory.
Major Ivan Vorontsov
.

Ivan wondered why his victory tasted like the bitter steel of a Kalashnikov; why his mood matched the gunmetal gray of the weather outside his window, rather than the bright sunshine that the weather bureau—
his
weather bureau—had predicted for this day a week ago.

He had just received the promotion to major, making him one of the youngest majors in the army. He had also received an assignment—one that might well end his career.

They had ordered him to re-evaluate the predictions of global consequences of a nuclear war. The purpose of the re-evaluation was to ''perform an analysis that allows the Soviet Union to maintain an advantage in confrontations with the United States."

Ivan was a good Russian. He was also pure Russian, born in Kursk as the only child of wholly Russian parents. As often happened with single children, he had learned early how to talk with adults, though he had never quite learned how to play with other children his own age. Also like many single children, he believed his parents' beliefs even more fiercely than his parents did. He loved his homeland. He disliked Americans. And he hated Germans.

So when his time had come to serve in the army, to protect the children of Russia and of the whole Soviet Union from her enemies, he had accepted the duty proudly.

He stepped out of his office, quickly marched down the hallway of the Military Meteorology building, and pushed through the massive door into the streets of Novosibirsk. Bitter wind swept around him. He clenched his teeth against the cold and headed for the officers' quarters.

The gunmetal sky showed no hint of sun. Would the climatic effects of a nuclear war even be noticed here? He could imagine that the sunbathers along the Black Sea would be most affected, though he knew better.

Certainly, radioactive fallout from a war would affect all the people he cared about. That included his childhood friend Anna, and her three children, living so close to the strategic targets in Sevastopol.

He remembered the day his parents had brought Anna to stay. Her mother, Ivan knew, was always drunk, and her father was . . . different. He remembered how helpless Anna had been, yet how hopeful, despite her helplessness. Ivan's parents loved her as they loved all children—almost as much as they loved Ivan himself. And though Ivan never did learn how to be friends with his peers, he had learned from his parents the love of children.

How wasted their efforts would prove if Ivan let some damn fool—either American or Russian—initiate a nuclear exchange. Though Ivan loved his country's children, he worried that Russia's leaders might not share that feeling.

He thought again of the sunny skies predicted for today. How could men be so foolish as to think they could know the impact of a nuclear war on the fragile atmosphere! The work of climatology contained too much magic and too little science for categorical assertions.

Within that guaranteed uncertainty lurked the great danger. Ivan knew he could
make
the outcome of his re-analysis match any result they wanted him to report.

With too-crisp clarity, he saw why they had chosen him for this job. He was bright, ambitious, patriotic, and impressionable. And he had a knack for technology—a knack that compensated for his loner's attitude. He had the credentials, and presumably, the malleability to give them what they wanted.

He felt like a scientist in the days before the telescope, instructed by the Church to prove that the Sun circled the Earth. The truth could not be changed. But without instruments, truth could be distorted whenever convenient for the leaders—or when necessary for the followers.

Still, none of these games of distortion could change the truth. And in the nuclear age, distorting the truth about nuclear war endangered all the children, including the adult children playing the game.

Ivan squeezed his eyes closed. Another gust of wind slapped his face. His nostrils flared as he inhaled; the deep breath of sharp, chilled air helped him make his decision.

He would gather the best scientists he could find. They would study the consequences of nuclear war again. If the earlier analysis had been
provably
hysterical, wonderful. But the new Major Vorontsov would introduce no bias to force the decision.

Ivan tramped onward against the last gusts of Siberian winter, unswerving in his purpose.

Kira stepped from the elevator into the antiseptic beauty of the Oeschlager Art Museum. She forced herself to slow down as her high heels clicked across the slippery marble floor. She turned, to step into the quiet elegance of the displays. Soon she was surrounded by works that cost thousands of hours of loving labor to construct. She needed these moments, in this museum, to remember why she had come to Wilcox-Morris. She needed these moments to fuel her anger.

Her whole body itched from the taint of the Wilcox-Morris Corporation. She wanted to run home to the shower, to cleanse herself of it; yet she knew that that would not help. Only her anger enabled her to continue.

The Oeschlager Museum sprawled over the first two floors of the Wilcox Building. All costs of maintaining it, and for collecting new works, came out of the advertising budget of Wilcox-Morris. Thousands of people had died of lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease to support this museum.

Kira stopped before a sculpture in silver and gold. In the curves of the reflection she saw her mother's face—her own face. Older people sometimes called her by her mother's name, so strong was the resemblance. And despite her fierce defense of herself as a separate person, Kira could not deny the similarity. They shared the same cheekbones when seen in profile, the same pout when angry, the same quick smile that puzzled people who missed the subtler points of human comedy.

They had not shared the dark anger seething behind Kira's eyes as she watched her reflection snake across the surface of the silvery sculpture. Perhaps that was a difference in age more than anything else. Her mother had not blamed the tobacco companies for her own death. In keeping with her other views of human responsibility, Jan had blamed herself for taking chances that might lead to suicide. Kira had a different point of view.

Uncle Nathan had the most complex view of blame, though in some sense, it was also the simplest. Blame, Uncle Nathan contended, was a concept without value in either Industrial Age or Information Age societies. The key question was not whom to blame, but rather, whose behavior to modify so that the problem did not arise again.

All that analysis had led him to Jan's answer to smoking, however; they agreed that the best solution lay in educating people to the danger and in teaching them how to quit. Uncle Nathan further contended that this was the
only
solution a free society could tolerate. Kira still felt uncertain about whether he was right. Certainly, it would not hurt to investigate other possibilities.
Know your enemy; he probably does not know himself
, the Zetetic commentary went. People did not usually pursue evil purposes with thoughtful intent, though they might pursue evil purposes while fiercely avoiding thoughts about intentions. The key lay in cultural engineering. Non-Zetetic cultures were always designed to give men rationalizations for not thinking about the inconsistencies of that culture. Given the right cultural environment, you could shape the adaptable human being to profoundly unsane purposes.

Like other creators of evil, Daniel Wilcox was not an evil man. The tobacco culture had engineered him; now, he was himself the chief engineer for the tobacco culture. Still, he was not evil, though he was undoubtedly quite ruthless. He was not evil, though his hands were covered with blood.

Kira looked about the room at the works of inspired genius, at the painfully detailed craftsmanship, that were also now covered with blood.

And she looked back at her own reflection. She too was now covered with blood. She had used her own mind in the creation of advertising that would attract children to their deaths. She had done it in order to get close to the source of power that drove the tobacco companies, so that she might find some way of destroying them. She had done it for a good cause.

And she could rationalize that, had she not created those ads, someone else would have, and they probably would have done just as good a job. But rationalization was not her purpose. She accepted her share of responsibility for the deaths that might result from her action, as surely as she accepted responsibility for the lives that might be saved, if she found a way to destroy the cigarette empire. That was her purpose in coming to Wileox-Morris—to find some weakness, or set of weaknesses, with which she could destroy the industry.

Based on her first meeting with Daniel Wilcox, she questioned her ability to destroy him. He was too insightful; surely he recognized her revulsion at cigarette smoking, and her shock at the idea of attacking the Institute. She had recovered fairly well at the end. She could even get excited about using the news media, after having watched them take periodic shots at her mother and her uncle for years. She would certainly have no trouble composing a list of potentially useful reporters—she could get them from the Institute data base. She allowed herself a small smile, thinking about how easily she could mold them with the subtle power Wilcox afforded her.