PEACE PROBE [ss], Roy L. Prosterman

In certain situations it's necessary to speak strongly - and carry a big stick.

He screamed.

He was a little man, rather dark, going gray at the temples. He sat in the big chair with his elbows tucked in against his sides, his eyes closed tight. He screamed again.

"He's fighting it," Ed said.

I was frightened (not for the first time in this job). Frightened at the incongruity with the everyday general-issue plastics of the government office. Frightened when I looked into the six accusing eyes (wife and two daughters?) of the little framed holographs on the wall. Frightened that even the bright sunshine of a spring afternoon pouring through the window, even the placid Buenos Aires crowds borne along on the slide-ways far below, could not make a difference to the mysterious struggle going on in the little man. (Had there been bright sunshine too, that spring day in New York?)

"I know." I stared at the little man. "Lord knows how. This stuff is supposed to be tamper proof. Frap, we've been using it for only six months. He's the first one. I haven't seen a red flash on anyone fighting it before." I looked at Ed inquiringly.

He shook his head. The little Argentine screamed again.

"They'll hear him all over Buenos Aires." I looked at the locked door. "The programmers in that office will think we're some kind of sadistic nuts. Why the hell is he fighting it?" I sighed and looked at my watch. It was ten minutes since we had started. "I guess I'll take him down and start over again. Get me some lollipop." "Lollipop" was our nickname for the most common of the counteragents we used when necessary.

Ed busied himself in the black bag, happy enough not to look at the little Argentine, who now had a bit of foam coming out between his tightly clenched teeth. He looked completely rigid, his chin tilted about two inches into the air.

He relaxed.

I went over to look at him. I looked again.

"Ed." Ed looked up at me. He had the half-full hypodermic balanced in one hand. "You can forget it, Ed. He's dead."

"Oh, crap!" He dropped the hypodermic back in the bag and snapped the bag shut. In two steps he was stationed by the door, holding his laser gun. Ed still moved with the speed of an All-Hemisphere from Massachusetts Intertech. (Ten years ago. Was it that long? When football was just getting started again.)

I switched on my pocket communicator and called in the day code. "Team nineteen," I said. "Colonel Herrera just died on us. He was frozen tight. No responses. Time of death approximately fifteen minutes from administration. Slight foaming at the mouth. Cause of death unknown."

There was a pause at the other end. By that time there were probably seven tons of brass patched, into regional HQ.

"Johnson?" There were. That was General Arlo's voice.

"Yes, sir?"

"That's the second Argentine in two days. We hadn't gotten out a red flash yet."

I could see Ed shaking his head and muttering "damn" or some equivalent under his breath. I felt the same way. (And all this for only fourteen thousand new dollars a year. Sometimes I wished I had a nice quiet practice in clinical psychology.)

"What do you want us to do, General?" I knew what was coming.

"You're the senior man in sector, Johnson. Keep your communicator open for continuous monitoring of your safety." He paused. By that time, I imagined they probably had Secretary Handley patched into the network, if not the President himself. Time dragged. "Johnson?"

"Yes, General Arlo?"

"We are declaring a full sector emergency. Thirty teams are en route, with ETA's from one to three hours at Buenos Aires. Any interference will result in immediate nuking of Buenos Aires. Ready for the drill?"

"Yes, sir."

(Shudder.) They are right when they talk about your stomach being a cold, tight ball. This was only the eighth sector emergency since the Unilateral Declaration. (Eight times in eighteen years.) It was my second. I didn't like it. I wished there were someone more senior in the country, even though, as of now, sector HQ would be making all the big decisions.

There would be three twelve-unit flights of two-phase five-megaton missiles on their way to Argentina now. Ten minutes in ballistic trajectory, then circling in air-supported flight responding to sector's orders. Destroy Buenos Aires. Don't destroy Buenos Aires. They were the first step in the drill.

"Mr. Johnson?" It was a new voice. The President.

"Yes, sir?"

"I have been in direct touch with President Argeles of Argentina." He sounded tired. "You have full liaison authority. He assured us of his cooperation. He was probed just ninety days ago, and it is highly unlikely that he is involved. Remain open for monitoring, and be careful," he added unnecessarily. "This is your second time?" (The ball in my stomach was tighter. Like the last time, and like twenty years ago.)

"Yes, sir."

"Good luck."

"Thank you, Mr. President." (Tighter. The young medic picking his way through the rubble of a Boston suburb during Restoration, M-20 in his right hand and bag in his left.)

By the time we finished, Ed already had the palm-sized TV on. I flipped all the channels. They were the same. A mustachioed general was giving orders to the population. The government was cooperating. The drill was on. I tuned the radio wavelengths for comparison.

Same voice, same words. By now, I was out the door and watching the picture in the elevator leading up to the roof and our servocopter. Ed would lock the door behind me and stay with the body. We were very interested in knowing how he had fought us; we wanted that body. I stepped into the copter's cabin and asked sector to punch in the coordinates for wherever the general was speaking, still keeping one eye on the TV.

"A maximum international emergency has arisen," he was saying. "Certain madmen appear to be conspiring against world order. Their plans will be laid bare. In the meantime, absolute cooperation of the population is required. The following steps are proclaimed, effective immediately and throughout the country."

He was an impressive speaker. He consulted a card in his hand. His notes on the drill. The big servo-copter was whispering low over downtown Buenos Aires by now, doing an elbow around the mile-high Peron Building.

"First," he went on, "martial law is hereby proclaimed throughout Argentina. An unlimited curfew is declared. Authorized emergency officials and officials of the Unilateral Declaration Agency are the only persons permitted on streets, highways or in the air. Noncompliance is a capital offense. Remain in your homes or offices. Stay where you are now." He looked at the card again. "All private communication by telephone, radio or other means is forbidden. Emergency officials will patch into the UDA network by portable communicator. All telephone exchanges are now being occupied by the national police. Random monitoring for direct, push calls and for private radio transmissions is now underway. Again, this is a capital offense. The survival of the nation depends on the most scrupulous obedience to UDA policy directives. Even the slightest failure means death."

Fine so far, movement and communication.

"Moreover, since the plots of the wrongdoers in our midst may depend on the availability of power, all power will be suspended immediately following this broadcast. All electrical power plants are now under military control. Keep your television and radio sets turned on. If additional communications are made, power will be temporarily restored for that purpose. Emergency power arrangements for hospitals should be put into effect at once. Other auxiliary power arrangements are strictly prohibited."

Movement, communication, power. The UDA servo-copter with its white crosses against a red background was coming down on another roof. Half-a-dozen armed men were there to hustle me below. I kept the little TV in one hand.

"Finally, to assure that the plotters do not achieve their ends, all production and trade are hereby suspended. Any production lines not halted by the stoppage of power must cease immediately. Most particularly, all production lines involved in the production of drugs, chemicals, biological materials or lasers, or utilizing nuclear materials must halt immediately, and will be placed under military guard within two hours. All nuclear reactors of whatever kind, for experimental or other purposes, will be shut down immediately. All other production facilities will cease. Also, all trade and retail sales will cease, except for the supplying of food to persons already on the premises. Some persons may, without their knowledge, be inadvertently supplying the plotters with some category of goods or products which they require."

I stopped looking at the TV. Now I could look up and see the general himself, standing solidly against the brightness of the studio lights.

"Again," he was continuing, "failure is a capital offense."

No copters, slideways, or telephones. All power plants shut down. Add to that no producing and no selling, and you just about had the full drill. In five minutes, Argentina had moved back from the last decade of the Twentieth Century to a collection of medieval villages. And you could at least walk around in a medieval village. Try that here, and you'd be shot. If there were any plotters, they were going to have a hell of a time gathering their forces.

Now there would be a little sweetener.

"All losses suffered because of this emergency, except for claimed losses of production and sales, will be compensated. The Unilateral Declaration Fund and the Government of Argentina will share equally in making good all claims. The UDA also authorizes me to declare that the customary award for information leading to the arrest of violators will, during the period of the emergency, be increased to twenty million dollars in gold. Persons wishing to communicate on this subject will push the special telephone code 999, and their information will be taken."

Perfect. The lights went out and the general stepped back. He had his handkerchief out, wiping away the perspiration.

"Senor Johnson?" He stared at my armband for a moment, but his grip was firm. He was grim. Not frantic, but dead worried. (Tighter. By now that salvo of five-megaton buzz bombs was circling overhead.)

One of my chief jobs as Johnny-on-the-spot was to get a direct visual impression of key personnel in the government. ("Frankenstein-on-the-spot," she had chuckled, when I used the phrase, and started crying in the middle of her chuckle.) No one had yet been able to build as much suspicion into an external monitor as there was in a UDA prober. General Uberto-Jackson, as minister of defense, was top man in this government. I would stop and probe if I had to, but I didn't want the mover-and-shaker disoriented for the next twelve hours if I didn't get at least a taste of suspicion.

After two minutes of conversation, I would have laid long odds that the general was O.K. and on our side all the way. Another five minutes and I had checked out details of the drill, such as use of army units picked at random to carry out the emergency duties, with the rest confined to barracks. Unless the plot was very large, that meant the chances were remote that the very guys who were moving around were the ones we didn't want to move around. Moreover, the generals got probed so often that the army was not usually where the rottenness lay. In the seven previous full alerts, the army (this one was in Albania) had been implicated only once.

"We have done everything you ask?"

"The drill was perfect, General. I'm sure we'll have this straightened out soon."

"I hope so, Mr. Johnson. I love my country. I do not want it destroyed."

There's not much you can answer to a line like that. I was happy when my communicator buzzed. It was Arlo.

"Johnson, get up to a firm called Rio Rhine Pharmaceutical. We've had a nine ninety-nine on it, and it could fit. The call was terminated before we received any details."

I looked at my watch. Just half an hour since the little man died. Half an hour until the first supplementary probe team arrived. I had a second probe bag in the copter. "How far is this pharmaceutical firm?"

Uberto-Jackson was conferring with a young lieutenant. "It is on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. About ten minutes by copter. My aide will fly escort and give you every assistance." (Tighter. The other time, Colonel what's-his-name had said, "We'll blow it up for you" every time we'd had a lead.)

Escort apparently involved about thirty heavily-armed troops, in two accompanying copters. We were the only air vehicles in sight. We skimmed low over deserted slide- ways, and then over old-style streets as we neared the northern outskirts of the city. Their emptiness was periodically broken by a roadblock or a rumbling tank. I took a broad spectrum antibacterial. Might as well cut down my risks as much as I could. Not that it would do anyone much good to zap me, but I wanted to enjoy my pension, not get a posthumous Medal of Honor. (Frank Abernathy, our sector leader, had explained to him patiently, every time, why he couldn't blow it up. On the SuSt back to Washington, "Dr. Frank" had his heart attack.)

When we arrived, it was apparent we didn't need the escort. There was about a division, looked, around the place, with twenty or thirty tanks aiming their laser tubes generally in the direction of the pharmaceutical plant.

The director of the plant was sitting in his big sunny office with a couple of rather shaky-looking laser guns pointed at his head. He was pretty near hysterical. That damned sunlight gave the whole thing a weird feeling. (Had it been sunny, in New York?)

I waved the soldiers away. I really didn't need to, in fact. They recoiled about three paces when they saw my red armband with its white cross. The director looked at my face, and then at the armband and just shuddered. He kept shaking his head from side to side.

"Can I see your organizational chart?" I wasn't getting through. He just mumbled that he didn't know anything. I opened my probe kit to get something that would pull him together. His eyes opened wide when he saw the hypodermic.

"Don't get uptight. I'm just going to give you something that will help you think straight. Not a probe drug."

In a couple of minutes we had the organization chart out. The chief of pharmaceutical production looked like the place to start. If anyone knew of unauthorized use of the facilities, he should. It was a logical setup, too. They produced and killed plague bacilli for vaccines, and cultured a lot of other bacterial material that might be unpleasant in the wrong hands. (More logical than the other time. An atomic bomb, for God's sake! The morons were trying to build an atomic bomb! "They were suicide-prone, not conspiracy-prone," Frank had said to me on the plane. A few minutes later, he had slumped over.)

Since there was no telephone and no power, the director walked me down the long corridor to the production chiefs office. With no exterior windows, it was gloomy. About ten soldiers crowded along behind. They held their guns tensely. One young soldier right in back of me was shaking so hard I could actually hear his teeth clicking together. If they were like me, they were trying hard not to think about those megatons circling over our heads. (One hundred and eighty megatons. Thirty tons of TNT-equivalent for every man woman and child in greater Buenos Aires.) As we trooped down the corridor, clerks and technicians stared at me from the doorways, looking like rabbits fascinated by a snake. A couple of the women crossed themselves when they saw my armband. One man just folded his hands, sank slowly down on his knees and whimpered.

There were a couple of soldiers in the production chief's office, but he wasn't there. "Tell them where to look for him." The director started giving instructions. I looked around the room. It was modest, white and clean. In fact, it looked almost empty. There was very little in the desk drawers. On a hunch, I spoke into my communicator. General Arlo was there.

"General, can we arrange a search pattern, for - " I gave him the production chief's name and the particulars the plant director could furnish me.

I looked at my watch again. Ten minutes to ETA for the first supplementary probe team. (Tighter. I had always liked Buenos Aires. If I did much more waiting around, it would be my own teeth clicking together.)

Efforts to find the production director inside the plant weren't having any success. I asked for his assistant. He was hurried into his chiefs office a moment later, a kid not much out of college. He looked scared out of his wits.

I worked quickly. First a sedative to calm him down. Then a buffered chloryl-sodium-pentathol compound. One with a new radical, that wasn't the greatest thing for the system. But it was the fastest-acting thing we had. (There were six million people living in Buenos Aires.)

His name was Castellano. "What do you know about diversion of pharmaceutical materials, Senor Castellano?"

"Nothing. Nothing."

"No diversion for illegal or warmaking purposes?"

"No." I thought I sensed a pause, a tentativeness, in his drugged answer.

"Then how about any material taken out of the plant? Other than for regular commercial sales," I added hastily. They could be pretty literal-minded under the drug.

"Only for Senor Alvarez' research for the company," he said. "Nothing illegal."

I looked at the director. Alvarez was the name of the production chief. The director stared at me and shook his head.

"What research?" I asked.

"On the new plague vaccine. He took a hundred cc's of the plague bacilli to develop the new vaccine. It was very secret. So the competitors wouldn't know." He looked at me earnestly, as though to confirm my understanding that it was important the competitors not know. I'll bet it was important.

"When did he take these bacilli?"

"Approximately two months ago."

"Who else knew?"

"I don't know."

"Did he work with anyone on this project?"

"I don't know."

"Did he ever mention his work with these bacilli again?"

"No. Not to me."

"Did you call 999 today?"

"No, sir. No."

I had everything Castellano could offer. "And you solemnly swear you did not know that Alvarez was engaged in any unauthorized or illegal activity, or in the production of any weapons of mass destruction, or of any other prohibited category?" I wanted to get that straight for the record. They would be taking it all down at sector, over my open communicator. In a couple of years, the past one hour in the life of Thomas Johnson would be available, breath by breath, on thirty-track stereo tape, for any earnest Ph.D. candidate who wanted to write his thesis on "The Argentine Crisis of '98" and get into the Probe Corps.

"No," said Castellano. "I knew of nothing like that."

"You solemnly swear it?"

"Yes, sir." I gave him a downer.

General Arlo broke in on the communicator. "O.K., Johnson. Good work. If we can just find the s.o.b. The first two supplementary teams have arrived. Heath and Wellman are leading. I'll send them out there."

"Fine." We would probably have to probe everybody at Rio Rhine Pharmaceutical, from the busboys in the cafeteria on up, before the matter could be closed. If we found Alvarez. If we didn't, the question of probing Rio Rhine or anything else in Buenos Aires could well be academic. (One-hundred and eighty megatons, "UD overkill," my young army friend had called it, chuckling.)

"Johnson." It was General Arlo again. "They've got Alvarez holed up in his home. There's resistance, and I've told them not to storm it. Get over there and see if you can talk him out alive."

I was running as I left the plant door for the copter. I passed Heath and Wellman, on, their way into Rio Rhine with their probe kits. We just waved. They'd get their instructions from the communicator.

Up again, over the dead streets. Farther out toward open country. We set down on a green lawn (still that damn sunshine!) near a house that had a lot of bristling armor pointed at it. I was introduced to a Major Rafael. He looked at my armband, flicked his glance at my eyes, stared at the house. He licked his lips twice before he could get the words out. "Alvarez is in there, apparently alone: He has a rifle. He also says he has the means to kill us all if we attack. He says they are germs. If he uses them, will you ..." he didn't finish the question, just brought his eyes back to stare at me.

"The important thing is we've found Alvarez. And he looks like our boy. Don't worry." (Not as confident as I sounded. What if there were more Alvarezes? What if there were other germs?) "We've got to try to get him out alive. Are there any protective masks here?" Rafael said they were on the way. I had one, but I wouldn't use it, unless the soldiers had theirs. "Does Alvarez speak English, do you know?" Rafael looked over at another man, a civilian, who nodded.

I held my hand out for the bullhorn. "Alvarez." It was very quiet as I spoke. "My name is Thomas Johnson, and I am the senior sector officer of the Probe Corps. Do you hear me?"

Silence. The soldiers were all staring at me, no longer at the house. (Johnny-on-the-spot. Johnny-on-the-snot. Johnny-on-the-trot.)

"I am authorized to tell you that if you surrender and do not cause any more harm, you will be treated as a prisoner of war, as an officer under the Geneva Conventions. You will not be harmed." (You will be probed, but you will not be harmed.)

A high, broken voice came from the house: "I will not surrender. I will use these. I will kill you all."

I put on my most patient voice. "Dr. Alvarez, if you use those germs, you will accomplish nothing. A few of us may die, and a few of your neighbors may die (but not if some masks get here quickly enough), but you cannot escape. By resisting you endanger the whole city. You know that, Dr. Alvarez. You know there are nuclear missiles up there right now. Whatever it was you planned to do with those germs, it's too late. You can only hurt your own people."

Silence. "Major Rafael, does Alvarez have any children?" Rafael looked over again at the civilian, and I could read his lips making the word dos.

"Dr. Alvarez. Do you want your two children to go down in history as the children of a mass murderer? As the children whose father was responsible for the destruction of Buenos Aires? Come out and you will not be harmed."

Silence.

Then a shot came from the house. I ducked reflexively. (But we all know what a single shot means, from years of watching the holoflix.)

"Alvarez?" No answer. After another minute, Rafael and I started moving slowly toward the house. For all we knew, we were walking into a fine mist of plague bacilli, wafting into the sunlight. (Mutated? And all for fourteen thousand new dollars a year? Tightest.)

But the two flasks next to the body were still sealed. Alvarez dead, not prettily, told us nothing. Before we went down to the basement and found a nicely-equipped lab and a freezer full of flasks, I sat carefully down in a chair behind a solid old wooden desk. I could see dust motes, against the sunlight falling on the desk. The desk top was warm and smooth to the touch. I took three very deep breaths. Then I asked for some water and washed down two pink tranquilizers. Strong ones. We weren't out of the woods yet, and UDA teams would continue to pour into the country, to make sure there weren't any more Alvarezes. But it was looking a lot better.

And that was how it kept on looking, although there were loose ends. We never discovered who gave us the nine ninety-nine. And Mrs. Alvarez has never been found. Apparently she had left the country a couple of weeks before, with the two Alvarez children. We lost the trail in Rome, and even though we've put a ten million dollar reward on information and probed every friend and relative in sight, we haven't found her. It just shows, we're not perfect. We only hope she's not sitting around some city with a batch of plague bacilli.

We're just about sure she isn't though, from the pattern of events that we pieced together.

Buenos Aires survived, of course. The Argentine Crisis of '98 is considered fully resolved, despite the missing Mrs. Alvarez. Alvarez himself was a member of an ultra-nationalist group that thought of their country as a world power. If a dozen men with plague bacilli could be placed in major U.S. cities, they thought, then maybe they could deal with us as "equals." Maybe they could even blackmail us into giving them their atomic bombs back. Maybe they could even have what they called at their meetings a "foreign policy," meaning taking over some chunks of Chile they had disputed for a century-plus.

By midnight of that same day, I had enough of the pieces to authorize a preliminary clean bill of health. The thirty-six missiles were pointed east and nosed into the Atlantic. Headquarters bumped the alert status down from bright orange to medium yellow. I took two more tranquilizers. The Argentines got their electric power back, but we didn't give them their streets and slideways till next morning, and their phones till the morning after.

Very few high officials had been involved. The little colonel who had died (the sunlight flecking the foam) was the conspirators' highest-ranking military liaison. Unfortunately for him, he got picked out in our random quarterly probe of the Argentine intelligence service. Even more unfortunately, his death followed the death of a minor laboratory-supply official. They had worked out a pretty good technique for beating our most commonly used drug. Good, except it turned out in practice - we extrapolated from chimpanzees - to give a 60-40 chance of heart failure. Now we always take a blood sample in advance, for the presence of possible interference chemicals. This is nice, because it means that a female lab technician, generally nubile, is attached to each of the two-man probe teams. Two hundred openings for nice female Ph.D.'s.

If it hadn't been for the conspirators' bad luck, they might have gotten through the first part of the plan. They were such small fish, they almost fell out of the net. Not the second part of the plan, of course. Plague or no plague. We'd have flattened Argentina before we would have given them back their A-bombs. People don't forget that fast.

We mean business.

The aftermath was pleasant. Two mornings, a couple of hundred probes and two suicides later, Ed and I climbed on a SuSt, exhausted but happy. (No heart attack for me.)\General Arlo had a lot of brass and TV cameras gathered at the VI lounge in the Washington airport The network news gave us a bi play, heroic saviors of world peace, and so forth. I suppose a few hundred more kids decided they were going to get their Q-clearances and try to go for Ph.D.'s Sin Psycho-Security Affairs.

My nephew Phil and his wife invited me out to their country place in old Philadelphia, and I sat staring at the grass and at the new saplings donated by the JNF, and drank gin-tonics until I was pleasantly plowed. After dinner their youngest son, who was about five, came up shyly. He was looking at my armband with fascination. I motioned him up beside me and let him twist it around. Phil was beaming with amusement across the room. "Sir, please" - still twisting the red armband with its white cross - "what is this for?"

I met my nephew's eyes across the way. "Well, son, it's the badge of the organization I belong to. The badge of the Probe Corps. You see, way back in the middle of the century, before you or your daddy were even born, a lot of scientists were trying to make new ways to kill people." I looked to see if he understood. "New ways to hurt people, to do bad things. A man named Edward Teller invented the biggest way of all, and they called, it the H-bomb: Now, of course, we call it after the man who invented it, and nice little boys don't use that word. But back when it was invented, everyone wanted to make them. By the late 1970's, eight countries had them, and there was enough explosive power in them to ..." I looked across at my nephew "... to do very bad things.

"Then, about twenty years ago, one of the countries didn't like another country, and it used some of these weapons. And the other country didn't have bombs, but it had germs, and it sent some germs back against the first country. Pretty soon, everybody was using all the things the scientists had invented. For a long time, it was very, very bad." The little boy stared up at me, trying to understand. I knew he could not. It was beyond his experience, beyond even the furthest reaches of his imagination. But I would finish the story.

"Then, when all the bad things were over, America was the strongest country left. We were terribly weak, but we were stronger than anyone else. And we were determined that it would not happen again. The President was a very good and a very wise man, and he issued the Unilateral Declaration, so it would never happen again. And he set up the Unilateral Declaration Agency, which everybody calls the Probe Corps, so it would never happen again. And I joined it, and got this armband, so it would never happen again." I got up abruptly and walked up the stairs to my bedroom, Phil and his little son staring after me.

That night I had my nightmare again. This time, my nephew was having the heart attack, and the plane was flying over Buenos Aires, and then there was nothing there except a giant rumbling tank moving over the rubble, like a huge beetle. When I woke, my own heart was thumping wildly.

But the next day was warm sunshine, and my nephew's littlest boy came clattering down to breakfast wearing a makeshift "UDA armband." (Later, they wrote me that they couldn't even get him to take it off for bed.)

Around noon, I went back to Washington, where the hero's welcome was resumed. The President gave me a Peace Medal (and a raise!), and they had a banquet at the New Mayflower, where General Arlo presented me with a solid gold, inscribed copy of the Unilateral Declaration. I swear I got tears in my eyes when he handed it over. I lost most of my family in New York in '78, all except Phil, and I keep it on the wall, next to the little framed holographs of my dead sisters:

The United States of America, on December 31st of the anno Domini, 1979, as the most powerful nation surviving World War III, and determined forever to rid the world of the scourge of war, which in the past two years has taken more than one billion lives upon this planet,

DOES HEREBY SOLEMNLY AND UNILATERALLY DECLARE

FIRST, that the possession, by any nation, entity or person other than the United States, of all weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, thermonuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and of such other weapons, armies and armaments as the President of the United States shall from time to time designate, IS ABSOLUTELY PROHIBITED.

SECOND, that all nations, entities or persons possessing such weapons and armaments MUST INSTANTLY SURRENDER THEM.

THIRD, that all making of war by one country against another IS HEREBY PROHIBITED.

FOURTH, there is hereby created AN AGENCY FOR THE ENFORCEMENT OF THIS UNILATERAL DECLARATION.

FIFTH, all citizens of all nations SHALL SUBMIT TO SUCH PSYCHOPROBING AS MAY BE DIRECTED BY THE OFFICIALS OF SUCH AGENCY, CONCERNING VIOLATIONS, OR PLANNED VIOLATIONS, of the provisions of this Unilateral Declaration. Enforcement activities conducted within the United States shall be pursuant to legislative standards and safeguards established by the Congress. Enforcement activities conducted outside the United States shall include probing as to plans for creation or use of prohibited weapons, possession of such weapons, or plans for war, and may be carried out by hypnotic, drug or other techniques not causing avoidable injury to the subject. The probing shall involve such officials or citizens of that country, without limitation as to persons, times or places, as may be designated by the Agency hereby created. Use of such information shall be restricted to the subjects and purposes of this Unilateral Declaration, and shall not include use in any criminal or civil action under local laws.

SIXTH, ANY INTERFERENCE WITH THE WORK OF THE AGENCY IS PROHIBITED, including failure to supply persons designated by psychoprobing, death or disappearance of such persons, and threats or actions against the persons designated by the Agency to perform the psychoprobing.

SEVENTH, any violation of the prohibitions here set forth, and any interference with the work of the Agency, WILL BE MET WITH THE TOTAL AND TERRIBLE MIGHT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

We've never had to use that might. Not yet.