The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch Read Free Book Online

test, such as it is. As far as we’re concerned, you’ve shown your mettle. If you only knew how many people walk right on up….” She sighed. “My name’s Alice Nemerov, R.N. Call me Alice.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “The letters mean I’m a nurse, you know. If you get sick, I can tell you the name of what you’ve got. Even help a little, sometimes.”
    “My name’s Jeremiah Orville, M.S. Call me Orville. My letters mean I’m a mining engineer. If you have any mines, I’ll be happy to look at them.”
    “And you, my dear?”
    “Jackie Janice Whythe. No letters. I’m an actress, for the love of God! I have thin hands, so I used to do a lot of soap commercials. But I can shoot, and I don’t have any scruples that I know of.”
    “Splendid! Now come along and meet the other wolves. There are enough of us to make a tidy pack. Johnny! Ned! Christie! All of you!” Shards of shadows disengaged themselves from the static darkness and came forward.
    Jackie hugged Orville about the waist delightedly. She pulled at his ear, and he bent down for her to whisper in it. “We’re going to survive after all! Isn’t that wonderful?”
    It was more than they had expected.
    All his life he had hoped, had Jeremiah Orville, for better things. He had hoped when he started college to become a research scientist. Instead he had drifted into a comfortable job with more security (it had seemed) than San Quentin. He had hoped to leave his job and Duluth as soon as he had saved $10,000, but before the fabled sum, or even half of it, was put together, he was married and the owner of a nice suburban home ($3,000 down, ten years to pay the balance). He had hoped for a happy marriage, but by then (he married late, at age 30) he had learned not to hope too hard. By 1972, when the Plants came, he was at the point of transferring all these choice hopes to the slender shoulders of his four-year-old son. But little Nolan proved unable to support even the burden of his own existence during the first famine that hit the cities, and Therese lasted only a month or two longer. He heard of her death by chance the following year: shortly before she had died he had deserted her.
    Like everyone else, Orville pretended to hate the invasion (in the cities it was never considered anything but that), but secretly he relished it, he gloried in it, he wanted nothing else. Before the invasion, Orville had been standing on the threshold of a gray, paunchy middle age, and suddenly a new life—life itself!—had been thrust upon him. He (and anyone else who survived) learned to be as unscrupulous as the heroes in the pulp adventure magazines he’d read as a boy—sometimes, as unscrupulous as the villains.
    The world might die about him. No matter: he was alive again.
    There had been the intoxication, while it lasted, of power. Not the cool, gloved power of wealth that had ruled before, but a newer (or an older) kind of power that came from having the strength to perpetuate extreme inequity. Put more bluntly, he had worked for the Government. First, as a foreman over pressed-labor gangs; later (within only a few months, for the pace of events was speeding up), as the director of the city’s entire labor operation. At times he wondered what difference there was between himself and, say, an Eichmann, but he didn’t let his speculations interfere with his work.
    In fact it was this, the strength of his imagination, that let him see the untenability of the Government’s position and make suitable preparations for its collapse. The farmers could not be driven much further. They had the habit of independence and resented the parasitism of the cities. They would revolt and keep their little food to themselves. Without rations, the slaves in the city (for, of course, that’s what they were—slaves) would either revolt or die. In any case, they would die. So (after suitable bureaucratic fictions and a few bribes had had the building condemned), Orville