Arslan

He drew a harsh breath through his open mouth, and nodded dogmatically. “Yes, sir. The natural is the inevitable.”

“Then what’s the use of what you’re doing?” I got in.

He nodded again. “Good. A good point. If man is set back to his beginnings, will he not build another civilization? If he can, yes; but he must have the raw materials, and his environment must not be too strong for him. Now, sir, do you understand?”

“No, I don’t. You say what’s natural is inevitable, and I say that at least what we’ve done before we can do again. Man has proved he can handle any environment in the world—and out of this world, too. If you’re talking about depletion of natural resources, a civilization just getting started doesn’t need the resources that we’ve depleted.”

“On the contrary, sir! It is exactly the resources it needs that are gone forever. Where now is the ore that can be mined and smelted without modern equipment—the equipment that I am destroying? Where is the coal that lay exposed on hillsides, the oil that oozed from the ground? There is wood, yes, I grant that, there is water, yes, there is air, and these will survive—if I succeed. If I succeed.” He stopped for another drink, a hasty one this time. “But consider the environment, sir, the environment as a whole. Drouth, flood, fire, vermin, disease, all the enemies that man boasts of controlling—he has armed them, trained them, fed them, laid himself down in their path. Man has unbalanced the world, unbalanced so literally, sir, that he creates earthquakes. Earth breaks beneath his tread and he falls, he drowns in his leaking oil. He burns the oxygen of the land, he smothers the oceans with his grease. These abuses must cease, sir—I tell you, these abuses must cease at once! You have complained'—his face twisted in a genuine sneer of contempt—'because your little pollution machines have been turned off—your clumsy little coal-burning power plant—” Something internal interrupted him; his eyes went blank and private, and he chuckled and muttered. He was drunk.

“So we cut down the trees instead,” I said.

He grunted and shrugged. “Reversible. Correctable. You understand? What you do to the trees is very little. Man is man; yes. But it is possible to eliminate the practices that cause irreversible damage. It is possible to reduce the population within tolerable limits. District by district.”

“I thought you’d already stopped everything, abuses included.”

“I have halted these abuses, sir. It is the first step—only the first step. No doubt the world can heal itself, but already it has been permanently scarred—disfigured—maimed. This is my hope, sir: that, once destroyed, civilization will not rise again, or at worst will rise only very slowly.”

I heard Hunt draw a long, weary-sounding breath. Arslan was tending to his bottle again, and I said bitterly, “If civilization’s going to destroy itself anyway, why do you have to step in and do it?”

He waved his hand impatiently. “Is this so hard to understand? I do it for two great reasons. The first, but the less important, is this, to save mankind from much suffering.”

“Save it!” I was on my feet and he was looking up at me. “You call this saving mankind from suffering?”

“Yes, sir,” he said coolly. “But in any case, my second reason is sufficient.”

“And what is that?”

“To save the world from mankind.”

I swung away from him and paced around the room, stopping at the foot of the bed to face him. “Plan Two,” I said. “What’s Plan Two?”

A new kind of smile spread across his face, thin and cold. “If civilization cannot be thoroughly eradicated, it remains necessary to exterminate the human species.”

“That’s what I thought. Damn you, that’s what I thought.” My own voice sounded small and thin in the silence before it and after it.

“This plan contains its own problems,” he was saying. “The Nazis eliminated with difficulty only a few million persons. And passing over all operational problems, the final problem remains: Who will exterminate the exterminators?” He dropped his head back on the pillow and smiled at me. “There are, however, other approaches. For example, a program of disease dissemination could be managed to end with the spread of contagion to my armies.”

I stared down at him. His smile deepened and faded, and his eyes flicked away, finished with me, to rest on the ceiling. I raised my hand, and let it drop again. I would no more have hit him than I would have hit a corpse.

“But there are unavoidable risks,” he went on after a moment. “Your liberals have prattled of the dangers of biological weapons, the danger of inadvertently destroying mankind. But in fact it is very difficult. No disease can be trusted to produce perfect mortality. There is always, always, the possibility of undiscovered pockets of survivors. Are you familiar with the screwworm fly, sir?” He turned his bland face back to me.

“Screwworms,” I said, when that non sequitur had gotten through to me. “I’m familiar with screwworms.”

“Then perhaps you know that they were exterminated in Florida by releasing sterilized males into the wild population for two consecutive years.”

I shook my head, partly to clear it, partly because that didn’t sound logical.

“Yes, sir.” He was warming to his subject again. “Naturally, the species was particularly vulnerable to such treatment. With the human species, one entire sex would have to be sterilized. There are certain advantages of sterilization over killing, as no doubt you can see. There are two possible disadvantages; death is irreversible, sir, and it is recognizable.” And again he gave me a small, horrible smile.

I turned slowly back to my chair and sat down. We were walking through a mine field; but there were ways out of it, if we could just feel our way into them. Who exterminates the exterminators?

It dawned on me presently that for a minute, or a few minutes, or maybe more, we had all three been silent, sunk and oblivious in our separate contemplations of the same horror. Well, contemplation didn’t win wars. I took a deep breath and cleared my throat.

“General,” I said, “I don’t know the details of how you came to power in your own country. We didn’t get too much news of it, and frankly I’ve forgotten most of what little we did hear. But I have an idea you started out as a patriot.”

“My country,” he mocked throatily. “My country.” He pressed himself back into the pillows, stretching his legs and lifting the bottle at arm’s length, then relaxed again. “This I have never understood,” he said mildly, “how people forget. By what mechanism do your minds shut out parts of themselves? I, I do not forget.”

Hunt laughed haggardly. Arslan looked at him, and slowly an intense, warm smile lit up his face. “I do not forget,” he said again. “You speak of my country, sir. Do you think Turkistan is a country? Ah, no. Turkistan is an invention, sir, of the British.”

It was interesting to hear bitterness in Arslan’s voice. It helped bring him down to size. Now he was drawing maps in the air with his hand. “Turkistan is a dying fish. In the time of Herodotus—not so very long ago— here” (he stabbed the air with his bottle) “was a great sea. What is it now? A salt pond —a puddle—fifty, sixty feet deep. And here the Caspian; a great sea still, but also dying. Once rivers flowed into these seas from the mountains here on the south. The mountains still stand. The rains fall, the snows melt, the rivers start out bravely into Turkistan. But only two are strong enough to live. And the others, that flow into nothing, that are blotted up by the desert and the sun, they are not rivers, sir. Can you call them rivers?” He drank, and added to his imaginary map. “Here, the Amu Darya, the famous Oxus. Northeast, the Syr Darya, the little brother of the Amu.” Hunt’s eyes, across the bed from me, glinted like wellwater. “These are the only streams that feed our salt puddle, which is called the Aral Sea. But the Aral Sea is a Russian lake. Do you begin to understand?” Another stroke at the air. “Between the Syr and the Amu live a people with Mongol eyes and little leather caps.”

“Not your people,” I said. Not if you could judge from his tone of voice.

“Not my people, but my mother’s people.” What kind of a mother could Arslan have had, I wondered. “They call themselves Uzbek, the people of Uzbek Khan, who led them across the Syr Darya a few hundred years ago—not so very long. But between the Syr and the Amu they found Bukhara—Bukhara the old city. Bukhara the Noble; the Dome of Islam; the city of the pure faith. Bukhara, my city; not my mother’s city. And beyond the Amu they could not go, because of the Turkmens.” He drank again. His voice had turned heavy with the liquor. He managed his words and his sentences all right, but you could hear him managing them. “Turkmens—Turkistan—Turkey—you understand? If my people had traveled a little farther west, as their cousins did, I would have been born a Turk. The