'I will go one step further, John,' said the General. 'I submit that if the cut were made at a sufficiently low intersection, it would be possible for the head to retain the power of speech.'
'You see, we disagree there as well: Where would the wind come from, Marcus?' argued Sir John Chandros, the owner of Ravenscar. 'Even with the neck in all its unfettered glory, there's no bellows to move the air through the vocal cords. Come on, man! What expertise can you offer us, Doctor? From a purely medical perspective?'
'I'm afraid I've never given the matter much thought,' said Doyle.
'But it is a most provocative subject, don't you agree?' asked Chandros, who apparently felt no further introductions necessary.
'A heady matter indeed,' said Doyle.
Chandros laughed genuinely. 'Yes. Heady. Very good. Heady: Do you like that, Marcus?'
Drummond snorted, Doyle assumed disapprovingly.
'Marcus has been in violent need of a good, solid belly laugh for the last thirty years,' said Chandros. 'And he needs it still.'
Drummond snorted again, seeming to confirm the opinion.
'For an accredited cynic and somewhat notorious man of the world, my friend the General manages to retain a remarkable naivete.' Chandros took Doyle's arm in his before he could respond and directed him down the corridor. 'However, Doctor, apropos our prior discussion, regardless of its particular unlikelihood, I strongly believe that as a race of people we are on the verge of such a vast sea change of scientific discovery that it will transform forever life as we have known it.'
Another snort from Drummond: There were apparently shadings and nuances to the man's use of the exclamation that would require months to interpret.
'Drummond will warn you that I am an inveterate disciple of the future. Guilty as charged. I happen to believe that if man is in need of hope, he need look no further for it than tomorrow. Yes, I've been to America, spent many years there: New York, Boston, Chicago, there's a city for you, powerful, tough, raw as the wind. Done a lot of business with them— they understand business, the Americans, second nature to them—and perhaps they've infected me with their optimism, but I still say if a man with the right idea meets a man with the right money, together they can change the world. Change it, hell: transform it. God gave man dominion over the earth; it's high time we took the bit between our teeth and pulled the plow with which the Lord provided us. Tried politics. Not for me. Too damn dependent on consensus to get anything done. Committees didn't build the Great Pyramids; Pharaoh did. My point is: The business of living is a business. Let me give you an example.'
As they passed a banister looking down on the entrance hall, Doyle saw the long table was set for dinner. Well-attired guests mingled before the fire. With the baleful shadow of General Drummond trailing them, Chandros took Doyle past the overlook and through a door, out onto a high balcony. A vast panorama to the west, where the sun balanced perfectly on the lip of the horizon.
'What's man's greatest obstacle in life?' asked Chandros, puffing away on his cigar. 'Himself. That's the rub. His own damn animal nature. Perpetually at war with the higher power inside. Can't surrender. There's a genius living cheek by jowl in the same bag of bones with this lower man, and let me tell you, sir, that lower man is nothing but a troglodyte, a half-wit chucklehead without the common sense to live. Worse still, this dumb clot thinks he's the long-lost son of a god; it's only a matter of time before the world puts him back on the throne where he belongs. In the meantime, he works like a dull ox and he drinks and he gambles and he whores and he pisses his life away and he dies crying out for this god that deserted him to save his pathetic, penny-ante soul. Let me ask you this: What everloving deity in its right mind would waste a moment's precious thought on a worthless wretch like that?'
'I'm sure I don't know,' said Doyle, recoiling at the man's frigid assurance.
'I will tell you: no deity worth a tinker's dam.' He folded his arms, leaned against the wall, and looked out over the land. 'Now the Christians have had a good run. No question about it. One dead Jew with some neat tricks up his sleeve, promoted like hair tonic by a few fanatical followers, and one converted emperor later they've got themselves a Holy Empire to shame any in history. Going on two thousand years. How did they manage it? The secret of their success was simplicity: Concentrate your power. Wrap it in mystery. Hide it inside the biggest building in town. Lay down a few commandments to keep the peasants in line, get a regulatory grip on birth, death, and marriage, throw in the fear of damnation, some smoke, a little music—there's your first commandment: Put on a good show—and customers will come crawling on their knees for the stale crumbs of that Feast of Saints. Now that ... that was a business.'
Drummond snorted again. Doyle wasn't certain if it was meant as affirmation or rebuttal.
Chandros puffed and chomped his cigar. His dazzling blue eyes sparkled with inspirational zeal. 'So: How do you change man from a dim-witted, randy farm animal to a domesticated, productive tool ready to roll up his sleeves and pitch in for the greater good? There's the puzzle anybody that aspires to rule has to crack, be it religion, government, busi-
ness, what have you. And here was the plain genius of the Christians' solution: Convince your constituents of one big lie. We hold the key to the gates of heaven. You want to make the trip, brother, you'll have to do it through our aus-pices. Sure, advertising how dodgy the Other Place is helped
close the deal: Fear puts those poor ignorant sods down on t.heir knees lighting candles like there's no tomorrow. And let's be straight, Old Nick's always been their real matinee idol—the man you love to hate, he'll scare you so bad you piss in your union suit, but you still can't take your eyes off him. He's the one puts the ladies in a lather, not that simpering, doe-eyed Messiah. Throw the Devil in to spice up the soup, and you've got yourself a flawless formula for religion hegemony. Worked like a Swiss watch. Nothing came close.
'But the march of progress—and you know it moves independently of our measly concerns; there's mystery for you— the march of progress demands that those in power change right along with the times. We're at the big table now, boys, playing with a whole new deck of cards: heavy industry, mass production, international economies, weaponry like you never dreamed of. Pious homilies and weak cheese pulpit-pleading to the customer's spiritual virtue just don't cut the mustard anymore. The Christians, as they are fond of saying in Kentucky, are just about shit out of luck. Excuse my French.'
As the sun sank below the horizon, its dying rays lit Chandros and the sandstone wall behind him with a fiery orange luster.
''Look down there, Doctor,' said Chandros, pointing toward an enclosure near the outer walls. 'What do you see?'
A number of men in identical gray-striped pants and jackets of rough, nubbed material were filing into the compound through a gate leading toward the biscuit factory. The hair on their heads was cropped close to the skull. Armed guards supervised their movement, barking instructions, as the men fell into formation, their voices responding with cadenced chants that faintly reached the balcony.
'Workers. Factory workers,' said Doyle.
Chandros shook his head, leaned in, and tapped Doyle on the chest for emphasis. 'The answer,' he said. 'The men you are looking at were until recently the lowest, most degraded form of human filth imaginable. Convicts: mean, vicious, blockheaded incorrigibles. Recruited for those very qualities, the worst of the lot from the lowest prisons and penal colonies of the nation and the world. Brought here—and believe me the prisons are only too glad to be rid of them—-to take part in a program that will prove our deliverance from blind enslavement to man's essential nature. Look at them.'
The group's movements in the yard were well drilled, disciplined but unenthusiastic, if not sluggish, although none seemed to be performing under any sort of duress.
'Not so long ago those men could barely share common living space with other human beings for an hour without committing senseless acts of violence. The problem of crime. The problem of intolerance. The problem of brutality. Do you see? They all spring from the same fountainhead. Here and now, for the first time, they are completely rehabilitated, well provided for, and willing to give an honest day's work.'
And so Bodger Nuggins was released from Newgate, thought Doyle. The intention seemed admirable enough—not all that different in conception, if not in scale, from what Jack Sparks tried to accomplish with men in the London underworld. But what was their method?
'How?' asked Doyle. 'How is it done?'
'Direct intervention,' said Chandros.
'What does that mean?'
