The Hades Connection

by Gabriel S. Timar

Chapter 21

part 2 of 2

While the participants were working on their reports to the home office, I relaxed and thought about them.

Yoshi Yamamoto did not look like a banker. His face always slightly contorted suggested that he was continuously being offended. With his iron-gray hair, a little moustache, circular steel-rimmed glasses, and ill-fitting suit, he looked like a World War II Japanese general before a war-crimes tribunal. He had several well-groomed, elegant, young people around him. The team was very quiet, almost ghostlike, but very efficient. They kept bowing to each other; I always expected them to butt heads, but they knew exactly how far to go. The heads came awfully close at times, but like airliners in the night, they missed each by by a hair’s breadth. Yoshi’s team sent off the message first.

Bobrov was athletic, well-built, looking like a professional wrestler. He was of the new breed of Russian politicians. His entourage did not look as efficient as the Japanese team. However, in a fight I would have preferred the Russians backing me.

Ben Gaylord was handsome, slim, tall and a little bit graying, just like the portraits of American Presidents on the newscasts next to the insert of the presidential seal. His team was typical American. They looked like a group of actors starring in a major motion picture.

His secretary, Janice, on the other hand, was a heavy, elephantine lady weighing at least three hundred pounds. I knew from experience this is what the efficient girl Friday looked like. The pretty, well-shaped, elegant secretaries are usually out to hook the boss or a young up-and-coming executive; their work is a distant second. Janice was the model of intelligent efficiency. I would have traded Ben for her any time.

Sheila Potts was not bad-looking, if you like the stringy type. The mere fact that she was a feminist gave me the shivers. The Canadian delegation was exactly what I expected it to be. “Team Sheila” had francophones, visible minorities, women, and one lone male WASP, incidentally a sorry specimen of hardy Canadian men. Nevertheless, the team functioned well; they were the second to return to the conference room, closely following the Japanese.

After all had returned, Prince Henry took matters in hand again: “We’ve already started the technical process,” he stated, “now we have to tackle the hard part: the money.”

This was Yoshi Yamamoto’s expertise. He slowly wiped his glasses, looked around, and declared: “The financial requirements to complete this project in each year of its life are equal to about twice the combined annual defense budget of all the nations in the world. It is quite impossible to finance it in the conventional manner without major social changes.”

The conference room was as quiet as King Tut’s grave.

“Could we borrow it?” Sheila asked.

“I’m sure we could,” Ben replied. “We can always borrow as much as we want.”

“Who is going to lend you that much money?” Yoshi asked with a grim look on his face. “There isn’t that much money on the market. If you just printed it, inflation would take off. In that case, you should print more money and pay higher interest. Conventional financing is out of the question.”

“Is there any other way we could finance the project?” the Prince queried.

“There are two ways,” Yamamoto said in the tone of a funeral director stating the price of a funeral. “One is to disarm the world and grab their military budget by force.”

“It would be difficult,” Ben remarked. “To implement it, we would have to set up and maintain an international army to police the whole world.”

“The combined armed forces of the U.S. and Russia could do the job and maintain peace throughout the world,” Yoshi remarked.

“It wouldn’t work, I’m afraid,” Bobrov asserted. “Most countries are either declared or covert dictatorships. Dissolving their armies would be a disaster. Disgruntled soldiers would take their guns to the bush, creating many resistance movements. It would cost a fortune to keep them at bay. No, that will not work; we must come up with a better way.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Yamamoto,” said Prince Henry, “when we start building the thrusters, we will generate employment. With everybody working, the consumers’ demand for goods and services should grow. To supply the goods, the economy should create more jobs and profit. We could tax those and use the money again.”

“Your Highness,” smiled Yoshi, “your confidence in human nature is remarkable. With the thruster construction comes a lot of new technology from the Captain’s people. Light industries will no doubt get hold of it. In the interest of making more money, they will use robots and automate all processes.

“Big business believes if they rationalize, reduce their work force, replacing people with machines, they can produce things more cheaply and make more money. Of course, this is true, but with each laid-off employee, a piece of the solvent market disappears, and the demand for goods and services decreases. If all manufacturers used old-fashioned technology, or we forced them to accept lower profits, yes, you could do it.”

“In other words,” said Gaylord, “you are telling me that the pure capitalist system cannot assure the survival of the human race.”

Yoshi nodded.

“Do we have to become communists to survive?” Sheila asked.

“Madame,” Bobrov said with a smile, “I lived in a communist environment for thirty-odd years of my life. Let me assure you the system could not cope with bare self-preservation, let alone an enormous project like this.”

“I understand,” rapped the Prince. “It means that we have to come up with a new ideology and a new social structure, something between capitalist democracy, communism and autocracy. We have to invent it, but we don’t have much time to do it.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Yoshi agreed.

“In essence we must keep the new technology under wraps,” said Henry. “This also means a few thousand security-related jobs.”

“Not bad, your Highness,” Yoshi said with something like a smile.

“To make sure that the security shall not be breached,” Henry continued unabated, “we must be brutal. I’d suggest introducing the death penalty for industrial espionage and use of stolen technology.”

“That is too harsh,” said Sheila. “The Canadian people would not stand for it.”

“Would they rather become extinct?” I asked.

“Let’s be practical about it,” Ben intervened. “It seems to me that we should freeze technology throughout the world except at the firms building the thrusters. Is there any way to enforce that?”

“Yes, there is,” said Prince Henry. “The great powers have the muscle to implement and enforce anything, although they must introduce certain unsavory things like collective responsibility for terrorist acts and a few other unthinkable concepts.”

“The idea certainly has merit,” Yoshi declared. “We should find a few experts to explore that further and prepare a quick feasibility study of these suggestions.”

“It is going to be very difficult,” Sheila got into the fray, “in essence we will interfere in the internal affairs of other countries of the world, which would be hard to stomach.”

“The question is simply this,” Bobrov remarked. “Do they want to survive? If they do, help us, and shut up. If they do not, we should use as much force as we can muster to eliminate all resistance. If we don’t do it, we will not survive. It’s simple as that. Do you agree?”

There was not a sound in the conference room. You could have heard a pin drop.

“That’s about the size of it,” Prince Henry remarked.

“I’m afraid we don’t have a choice,” added Ben Gaylord.

“I hate to agree with you,” Sheila said, “but unfortunately I have to.” She turned to Yoshi: “Now, tell us, how do we get around to financing this venture?”

I had heard enough. Humanity was uniting and trying to manage the crisis. One could have said that they took a great leap forward in the development of the social structure. It was a complex problem; they had begun to realize that the old-fashioned religious or agnostic philosophy and the traditional social structure had suddenly became obsolete. It was time to develop an efficient society and rule by understanding to assure the survival of humanity. I thought they were on the right track.

Sadly, it took extraterrestrial intervention and direct threat of extinction to pressure the terrestrials into sitting down and listening to each other. We should have done it on our own much earlier, thus preventing the environmental degradation, terrorism and many other problems stemming from lack of communication.

I interrupted the proceedings: “Ladies and gentlemen, from here on, you are on your own. I would like to meet your engineers as soon as you appoint them, since I have the plans and the details of the new technology you need to complete the project. I leave the social and financial matters in your capable hands. If you had no other engagements, I’d like to have you for cocktails in the Sedona room at seven p.m. tonight,” then I stood up and left.

* * *

While the negotiators were doing well, Mike Horn seemed to fail somewhere since none of the newscasts mentioned the NUTS conference. It did not bother me since I thought it was a political trick to enhance the re-election chances of Messrs. Kamarov, Holdsworth, and Park. All is fair in love and politics.

I was not interested in the work of the NUTS team for the time being. They were doing all right, I was sure of that.

To be continued...