Why Do Birds

CHAPTER 24

In a large, well-lit conference room in Washington, Conway Kettle said, "You people all know each other, so I'm just going to begin by introducing Ed Stone, the man the aliens talked to."

There were smiles, nods, a spattering of applause.

"Now, Ed, we're the ad hoc task force to generate plans for the Cube Project, and we've all got our names and specialties on our workspaces, so you can figure out who is who as we go along, okay?"

"Sure."

"All right, let's begin with siting. Sam?"

Sam Cooper cleared his throat. "Okay, the first consideration is passenger miles. If you want to put the whole human population in one place, it ought to be a central location in or near the largest concentration of people,just to shorten the supply lines. Well, that narrows you down to China and India. Next you want a seaport big enough or expandable to handle the traffic you project. All right, by all those criteria it's Shanghai. Large port, with room for expansion if necessary, good communications by air and rail with the rest of China."

"Sam," said Joan Feuerbach, "are you proposing to build the Cube there? Shanghai?"

"Sure, why not?"

"Because it's built on alluvial soil. I was there with a trade commission in the nineties, and that whole area is a floodplain. For any structure like this you're going to need bedrock. But wait, it isn't a disaster. There's Nanjing. That's about two hundred miles away, and it's in the foothills of the Purple and Gold Mountains. So my suggestion would be, use Shanghai as your staging point for deliveries by sea and air, then truck them up to Nanjing."

"Doesn't Nanjing have an airport?" asked Conway Kettle.

"Sure, but it's smaller. You could route some of the flights directly there, take some of the load off Shanghai."

"Okay, that's good," said Cooper. "Now the next question is, which areas do you evacuate first? My thought is, take the outlying ones first, then the ones a little closer, and so on. So you're shortening your transportation lines as you go, and as soon as we clean out an area, those planes and ships, and railway cars in some instances, are released for use elsewhere."

"What about Third World problems? If we start there, won't they think we're trying to get rid of brown and black folks?"

"Not if we do the right kind of PR, but I see your point. Maybe it would be a good idea to start in the U.S., just to set an example."

"Maybe start with sister cities?"

"Yeah, Steve, that would be great PR. Big celebrations, live global holo, fireworks, entertainers-"

"The mayors will want to make speeches."

"Okay, but we can keep them under control. Go to another camera if we have to."

"One consideration we haven't talked about, what classes of people do we take first? Now, obviously, transportation people have to be last, but who goes first?"

"I'd say your nonproductive people. Undernourished people, unemployed people. Get them out of the way, then you don't have to feed them."

"You'd include all the starving people in the Third World?"

"Sure. Might give them a square meal first." (Laughter.)

"Wait a minute, I'm thinking of what Paul said before, about the brown and black folks? This could be the same kind of thing. If we start shoveling all the undesirables in there first, they're going to think it's just another scheme to get rid of them."

They thought about that a minute. "I agree with Al," said Charles Bok. "We don't want to raise any suspicions that we want to get those people out of the way because they're in the way."

"Well, they are."

"Sure they are, and that's why we've got to pretend they aren't. How about this? We start off with famous people. Rock stars, ex-Presidents."

"In the sister cities."

"Right, and then we invite a lot of other big shots, just to drive the point home. Now here's the fun part. We make the underprivileged types suspect we're going to leave them behind, get it, and we generate a worldwide protest. Then a movement starts up, or if it doesn't, we start it, to give a fair shake to poor people. We could have a slogan, like 'Don't Let Them Leave You Behind!' And we waffle a little, then we bow to public pressure, and we set up a system where everybody gets the same chance, rich or poor, without regard to race, creed or color. Make it a lottery, and have drawings every Wednesday. We can rig the drawings a little, to make sure essential people get left till last, but otherwise more poor people will win because there are more poor people."

"Oh."

"We're doing them a favor, either way, but one way, it looks like a favor and they're suspicious. The other way, it's something they have to fight for."

"Perfect," said Kettle. "I have to hand it to you, Charlie, that's brilliant."

"Oh, well."

"Now about the essential people-"

"Transportation people. Doctors and nurses."

"Right, but the numbers of those people we need go down as the population gets smaller. The best thing would be to skew the lottery according to computer projections. Can we do that, Jim?"

"Sure, if we have the data."

"Okay, now about evacuating the U.S. first, I think we could start there, just to give a boost to the Third World, but then when we get the protests, then I think it would be smart to shift to South America, go ahead and clean that out, then southern Africa and so on, and the U.S. after that. And Canada, of course."

"Okay." Cooper looked at the halo map. "Then northern Africa, then Scandinavia and the British Isles, and so on down until we're cleaning out India and the Middle East."

"Should India be earlier? That's Third World. "

"You may have a point there. Actually there's no reason we have to go strictly by the longest passenger-mile numbers. Just so we don't give anybody the idea we really want to clean out the poor people first. Why don't we wait until we see if India makes a stink?"

"Right, and then give in. But we ought to have all this in the master plan beforehand, so we can coordinate transport."

"Don't call it the master plan, though. Call it Contingency Plan C. Or better yet, give it a letter farther down the alphabet-Plan M."

"All right. Jim, are you listening?"

"All ears."

"Jim is working up a computer model and putting all these factors into it. What other factors, Jim?"

"Well, declining numbers of necessary personnel, that Bart mentioned. Then what about government officials, right down to the local level? There's a point where we need them, so we can't take them all during the big-shot phase, but then later on there isn't much for them to do. Then farmers, food processors, wholesalers-we need them at first, but then at a certain point we've got enough food in storage and there isn't time enough to raise another crop anyway, so we don't need them."

"The computer will draw curves for all these people?"

"Exactly. And then we can skew the lottery to make it fit the curves. The beauty part is, is we can fine-tune it as we go along.''

"Beautiful."

"Okay, but I'm thinking about the transition period now, and I'm thinking about arson. You've got a country almost cleaned out, nothing but skeleton crews left. And you've got these mavericks out there. Some of them are nutsos, and either they've got weapons already or they can get them. They're starting fires, they're killing each other, and they may try to kill us.''

"What for?"

"Well, who knows what for? We don't want to wait till they do it and then hand them a questionnaire. What I'm saying is, when time starts running out, things may get really weird around here."

At the lunch break, Cooper, Kettle and Bok sat together. "Something that's been on my mind, that hasn't come up," said Bok, "is what kind of catastrophe are we looking at here?"

Kettle said, "I've thought about that too, and it seems to me there are three possibilities. One, a giant meteor strike, triggering volcanic activity. Two, a nuclear war. Three, the aliens are going to do it."

"Why would they?"

"Go figure. We can't rule it out."

"That's not very cheerful."

"We don't know what their motives are, we don't know their psychology, we don't know anything about them."

"Including what they're going to do with us after they get us in the box."

"Right. There we have four possibilities. One, they're really going to take us to another planet."

"You don't believe that?"

"Sure I do, but that's beside the point. Two, they just want to get us out of the way, maybe because our space effort of the eighties poses a threat to them."

"Why wouldn't they just bomb the planet, then?"

"I don't know. Three, they might have some use for us. Breeding stock, maybe. Maybe they want us for fertilizer."

"Come on."

"Four, maybe we're a collector's item. Maybe there are really big aliens out there, and we're going to wind up on a coffee table."

"Con, what have you been smoking?"

"Just a little cannabis."

"Suppose any of those four except the first one is a real possibility, then we'd be responsible for the death of the human race."

"Sure."

"But if number one is true, then we'd be guilty if we didn't go along with it."

"Right. And dead."