The Brave New World - 129 Five Minutes To Midnigh

“It’s going to be a disaster,” moaned Weinberger. “It’s going to be a total catastrophe! I’ll get lynched.”

His eyes were close to popping out of their sockets with fear. He was sweating heavily even though the room was quite cool, as rooms tended to be these days. His mouth was working, and its lower lip was slick with spittle.

Olaf Kroll took all of this in, shook his head, then put a hand on Weinberger’s shoulder.

“Kasper,” he said. “Calm down. There will be no disasters, no catastrophes, and no one is going to lynch you. Yes, a lot of people will be miserable for a while, but that’s nothing new.”

Weinberger’s mouth opened and closed without making a sound. Kroll shook his head again.

“You were fine about everything just a few hours ago,” he said. “Why are you panicking like that? Has something happened?”

What had happened was that the beneficial effect of Dr. Knox’s morning confidence booster had disappeared. The doctor had calculated the mix so that the drugs wore out around or slightly before bedtime. It was pretty hard to fall asleep while the magic drug cocktail was still working.

“We don’t even have five percent of the liquid cash we need!” cried Weinberger. “And in just a few hours’ time, people will start lining up for their guaranteed income payouts!”

“They’ll be temporarily paid with scrips.”

“And trade! What about trade? How is everyone going to trade when no one has any money?”

“They can barter. They can also issue letters of credit valid for up to a year.”

“Chaos,” said Weinberger. “Complete, utter chaos.”

“Yes,” agreed Kroll. “But everything will sort itself out. It always does.”

Weinberger stared at Kroll. He said:

“I admire your confidence.”

“Yes, people keep telling me that,” Kroll said smugly. “It’s my Viking blood. Now come on, let’s go join everyone else in the banquet room. It’s already after ten.”

“I can’t go, I won’t go!” wailed Weinberger.

“You will. Do you have any alcohol? Here, in this room?”

“I, I have some brandy. It’s in the top drawer of my dresser. But alcohol doesn’t work for me. It won’t help.”

“Yes it will. In here?”

“Yes. I already tried, and it didn’t work. But if you insist… The glasses are over there. Over there, I said. Olaf! What are you doing?”

Olaf Kroll grasped Weinberger’s jaw in an iron grip with one hand, and pushed the open, upended bottle of brandy into Weinberger’s mouth with the other. Weinberger’s eyes practically came out of their sockets and he made noises as if he was drowning: he had to swallow fast to save his life. The bottle was more than half empty before Kroll relented, and released Weinberger who whooped and wheezed and coughed for the next minute.

He glared at Kroll with bloodshot, angry eyes. Then unexpectedly, he grinned.

“The secret is in the dosage,” Olaf Kroll said. “Now come on, let’s go and join the others. We’re late already.”

That night, there were nearly half a thousand people assembled in the grand banquet room of the United Nations building. There were over a hundred former heads of state, now national territory governors and members of the world parliament, and each of them had brought at least one aide. The entire Colonial Council was present, and so were all the experts invited to provide guidance in the shaping of the new world order on poor, old, chaotic Earth. Most importantly, there were also over a hundred waiters and other serving staff in attendance, busily rushing around to provide drinks and snacks.

The start of mankind’s greatest-ever colonization venture had been fixed at eight in the morning in each time zone. Thus, even though it was still February in New York, colonies were already being launched from many of the Pacific islands, from Kamchatka, from New Zealand; the first reports had already been telexed in.

Jean Caron, head of the Colonial Council, was beaming, partly because he’d already consumed several glasses of wine. However, the news that had reached him were undeniably good.

“Such enthusiasm, such immense enthusiasm!” he was saying to the people gathered around him. “I just had word from Auckland. The lineups in front of each Colonial Office there stretch for blocks! The people waiting are dancing and singing! It’s one gigantic celebration the world over.”

This rosy view wasn’t shared by Nelson Odongo.

“No meaningful violence so far, but everyone is pretty angry,” he was saying, in response to Carlton Brock’s earlier question. “People are shocked they’re getting just ten dollars a month, and that just a handful of cents is paid out in coin. If it wasn’t for the free food we’re handing out with each payment, there’d have been riots everywhere, I’m sure of it.”

“Thanks to you,” said Brock. “That was a smart idea.”

Odongo shrugged.

“I just recycled something that worked when we were distributing food in the refugee camps,” he said. “Give everyone their bag of rice or flour or whatever and you have sulks, angry muttering, threats. Give them the same bag with something extra – something stupid like a tiny bag of peanuts, or a roll of candy – and they’re all smiles.”

“It’s the unexpected bonus thing,” Brock said, hazily remembering information from his student days. “You give someone a bonus they didn’t expect and they’re happy even though they’re being as badly fucked as ever.”

“They didn’t teach me that at Oxford,” said Odongo.

“I learned this at the age of ten, running a lemonade stand.”

“I never ran a lemonade stand.”

“You’ve missed out on an important experience… Hey, what’s this?”

A wild-eyed, elegantly clothed young man was pushing his way through toward the beaming Caron, and Brock found himself hoping it was bad news. Caron was getting on his nerves. He was getting almost all of the attention that evening. That frog-leg eater, that snail aficionado was getting more attention that Carlton Brock!

“It’s one of the people from the communications center,” said Odongo. “This doesn’t look good.”

He was wrong. The wild-eyed messenger reached Caron, and said what appeared to be a very short sentence. Caron appeared to go out of his mind. He raised his arms high up in the air, splattering a couple of people nearby with wine from his glass, and screamed:

“Oui! Oui! Oui!”

“He needs to hit the can,” said Brock. But Caron was shouting:

“Listen everyone! Everyone listen to me! We’ve found timon! We’ve found pure timon in Samoa!”

The messenger bent towards Caron’s ear, and whispered something. Caron’s face fell along with his arms. He dismissed the messenger with a flick of his fingers and became aware that everyone was staring at him, waiting for more news.

“We’ve found timon,” he said loudly. “But it seems that part of the New World is inhabited by dinosaurs.”

Brock had to fight not to burst out laughing. He was furious when Caron announced the discovery of timon. This was because there was Samoa, and then there was American Samoa. Located next door to the independent Samoa, it nevertheless belonged to a different timezone. It would be over twenty hours before colonization was launched in American Samoa. And the governor there obviously wasn’t pulling his weight. It seemed he hadn’t even established a settlement in the New World. Had he done so, he would have been sure to discover timon first.

“Excuse me, Nelson,” he said to Odongo. “I have to check on something.”

“So do I,” said Odongo. He had been looking at the red-faced and exuberant Weinberger, who had just entered the banquet room accompanied by Troll discreetly holding his elbow to help Weinberger walk in a straight line. Odongo sighed, and went to talk to Caron.

Brock wasn’t interested in talking to Caron; he wanted to find Lea Panatella. He found her at the buffet table, eating cheese-flavored nachos. The buffet tables were covered with trays and bowls of various packaged snacks: peanuts, potato chips, and others. It was the only kind of food still plentiful in the United Nations building’s pantry.

“Lea,” Brock said. “Did you hear what Caron just said?”

“Not really,” said Lea Panatella. “Those things are pretty noisy to eat. What did he say?”

“He said they’ve discovered timon in Samoa.”

“Yes?”

“I want to know why we haven’t discovered timon in American Samoa.”

“Sir,” said Panatella, hurriedly swallowing her last mouthful of nachos, “We don’t have a governor appointed yet in Samoa.”

“What?!”

“It was in the weekly briefing I gave you. I can’t remember his name, but anyway the gist is, the governor there went insane. He insisted on being the first to enter the New World and something really bad happened to him over there. When they woke him up he didn’t make sense. He was screaming and babbling about monsters and they had to put him in a straitjacket.”

“He wasn’t replaced?”

“The lieutenant-governor refused the job, and resigned. But he did set up a Colonial Office. Unfortunately, it seems no one is interested in launching a colony from there.”

“So we don’t have any presence in the New World over there?”

“That’s right.”

“Who’s responsible for that whole region of the Pacific?”

“American Samoa is an autonomous area. You are directly responsible for it, sir.”

“Oh fuck,” said Carlton Brock.

NOTICE

This work is available to read online exclusively at Webnovel.com.

https:///book/15767933905886705

If you are reading it at a different site, it has been copied and reproduced without the author’s consent. The owner of that site is a thief.