Bollinger turned away from the window that opened onto Lexington Avenue.
He hurried out of the Opway Electronics suite and down the hall toward
the office from which he had shot at Harris a few minutes ago.
'Chaos, Dwight.
'Chaos-I'
'There are too damned many of- these subhumans lor the supermen to take
control of things in ordinary times. Only in the midst of Armageddon
will men like us ascend 'You mean ... after a nuclear war?'
'That's one way it could happen. Only men like us wouldbave the courage
and imagination to lead civilization out of the ruins. But wouldn't it
be ridiculous to wait until they've destroyed everything we should
inherit?'
'Ridiculous.
'So it's occurred to me that we could generate the chaos we need, bring
about Armageddon in a less destructive form.
'How?'
'Well... does the name Albert DeSalvo mean anything to you?'
'No.
'He was the Boston Strangler.
'Oh, yeah. He murdered a lot of women.
'We should study DeSalvo's case. He wasn't one of us, of course.
He was an inlezior and a psychotic to boot. But I taink we should use
him as a model. Singlehandedly, he created so much fear that he almost
threw the city of Boston into a state of panic. Fear would be our basic
tool. Fear can be stoked into panic. A handful of panic-stricken
people can transmit their hysteria to the entire population of a city or
country.
'
'But DeSalvo didn't come close to creating the kind of fear the degree
of-chaos that would lead to the collapse of society.
'Because that wasn't his goal.
Even if it had been-'
'Dwight, suppose an Albert DeSalvo ...
better yet, suppose a Jack the Ripper were loose in Manhattan. Suppose
he murdered not just ten women, not twenty, but a hundred two hundred.
In a particularly brutile fashion. With clear evidence of aberrant sex
in every case. So there was no doubt that they all died by the same
hand And what if he did all of this in a few months?' ,There would be
fear. But-'
'it would be the biggest news story in the city, in the state, and
probably in the country. Then suppose that after we murdered the first
hundred women, we -began to spend half of our time killing men. Each
time, we'd cut off the man's sex organ and leave behind a message
attributing the murder to a fictitious militant feminist group.
'What?'
'We'd make the public think the men were being murdered in retaliation
for the murders of the hundred women.'
'Except women don't typically commit crimes like that.'
'Doesn't matter. We're not trying to create a typica] situation.'
