THIRTY-FOUR
They unloaded from the smooth quiet of Air Force One at Houston: the president, four cabinet secretaries, Senate president pro tem Louie Grosberg, House speaker Ken Lynch, and six Secret Service men. They were met by Brigadier General Harvest Ballister and his aide, and transferred to an army helicopter, a Sikorsky S-70 outfitted for VIP shuttle duty. For this mission it would be known as Army One.
The people from Washington had been briefed before they'd left the capital. They had the general picture, of which a key part was Ballister. Large, black, young for a general, he was in charge of the internment camps that held people arrested under martial law for rioting and associated violence. Or those still being held. The biggest single element were blacks, though there were plenty of "anglos" and Hispanics.
The chopper lifted and swung away northward, crossing the city's eastern suburbs, then flew out over a pattern of forest, housing developments, and farmland where morning sunlight glinted on occasional ponds. On their line of flight, scattered housing developments continued for miles from the city, the traffic from them funneling conveniently down country roads to the divided concrete strips of US 59 and thence to Houston.
After about fifty miles—twenty minutes—the last developments had been left behind. Ahead stretched national forest, broken here and there by logged-off patches and by their destination, the square, fenced enclosure of an internment center. The initial tent camp had been replaced by a war-time style military hutment built partly by its inmates, its shacks more suitable for winter than the tents would have been.
Except for three uniformed greeters, no one seemed to be there as the S-70 settled to the helipad. The sound of rotors and engines stilled, and the passengers got out, squinting in the sun, zipping jackets against a thin chill breeze.
"This, gentlemen," Ballister said, "is the San Jacinto Internment Center, one of sixteen still occupied. Except for the "D" camp in Nevada, this one's the farthest west; they're scattered from here to South Carolina."
He turned to the reception party. "This is Captain Roberg, the camp commander, and this is his project officer, Mr. Castro." After Roberg had introduced his master sergeant, Ballister continued. "Captain, the president and these other gentlemen have seen a brief written summary of the internment camp system. Why don't you show us around and give us the specifics of your particular operation?"
Roberg did. First they looked into one of the huts, covered with green asphalt siding. Inside at each end was a small, wood-burning, sheet-metal stove and a dozen single-deck bunks, everything orderly, everything clean. The messhall was of similar construction, but much larger. The latrine-laundry-shower house was scrubbed and odor-free, the big, stainless steel washers and dryers wiped clean, the porcelain washbowls and commodes shiny white.
Outside again, Roberg pointed. "And that," he said, "is the classroom building. Unless you insist, I won't take you inside now; it would disturb the classes. What I'd prefer to do next is show you some of the project work the men have done."
They got back on the S-70, and guided by the brawny-looking Castro, a Forest Service superintendent on loan, viewed several hundred acres of new loblolly pine plantations planted by the internees. Then they flew over hundreds of acres more of older plantations from which the competing scrub had recently been chopped, the stubs painted blue with biocide to discourage regrowth. Roberg had the helicopter land at one where crews were currently working.
Castro gave them a quick rundown on the projects while curious internees cast glances toward them. "The Sam Houston National Forest," he said, "had about three year's worth of projects backlogged, because of federal budget problems. This internment operation's gotten us caught up on a lot of it. We'd have done the work by machine, if we'd had the money, but the internees have been using handtools, which has the advantage of being more exact, and easier on the ground, than using heavy equipment.
"There are still 187 men here, alternating ten-hour work days with six-hour school days. We work half of them one day and the other half the next, and they've been doing better work than we'd ever imagined they would. The first week we had a lot of trouble with them, but that grew out of the hard cases—the Type D troublemakers. Then those got segregated out and shipped to Nevada, and the rest of these guys settled down pretty quickly."
Category D, the president thought. Category D was out west now, in desert mountains, working and living under heavy guard, doing things like improving primitive access roads with hand drills, sledge hammers, picks and shovels—the techniques and tools of seventy and eighty years earlier.
Castro was still talking about his San Jacinto crews. "They're pretty good-natured, as good as you'd expect any crews to be. They get paid by crew production points, with individual bonuses, and both crews and individuals get deductions for poor work. They really put out. The crews make a contest out of it, and the crew members lean on anyone who goofs off or does sloppy work. But that hasn't happened much since the first couple weeks."
Flying back to camp, the president's thoughts went back to the Type Ds. Each one was a person. And presumably, somewhere beneath the hatreds, fears, violences—the general insanity and ignorance—somewhere beneath all that, presumably there was some decent nucleus, something that could be clean and creative.
Or were some people born evil? Irreversibly and innately hateful and destructive? He acknowledged to himself that it might be, but the concept didn't seem necessary to explain the phenomena, not considering what some people went through, some children.
But we don't know how to clean the shit off to let that nucleus show. Not with anything like reliability, we don't. It seemed to him that if someone could do that, could come up with a practical, efficient system to salvage Type Ds, it would be as important in the long run as the GPC, transistors, and the budding field of gene splicing. Because as they were, Type Ds produced nothing but trouble, destruction, whether they operated in the streets, with physical violence, or slyly, in board rooms or government, using lies and collusion. They were the instigators, if not the leaders, of trouble, the generators of scorn for whatever was good, whatever was being done to better things. And they were probably a major source of other people's mental problems.
What had Godfrey called Blackburn? A mind-fucker. That was one kind. Blackburn had been a Type D with a tie, gray flannel slacks, and blue blazer.
Haugen sheered away from the subject then. It seemed to him a morass which, in an absence of data, he was not prepared to deal with. He wondered if anyone was researching the subject, making any progress. He'd talk to Wing about that.
The presidential party arrived at the messhall after the internees had begun eating, and following Haugen's lead, the visiting party stood in line to get their food. Then they sat on benches at an oil-cloth covered plank table, to eat from sectioned trays that had probably been waiting in some army warehouse since at least the Viet Nam War. The food was plain but nourishing, the cooking decent, and there were seconds—not bad for these times, the president thought.
After an initial half-minute or so of gawking, most of the internees gave their full attention to eating again.
The Secret Service men were edgy and watchful as they ate, concerned with possible danger to the president. These internees were clean and quiet just now, but a few months earlier they'd been torching buildings, cars and buses, stoning firemen, some of them shooting at police and troops. Special agent in charge Rogers had intended to post his men near the door, to watch the room for any possible threat, but the president had told them to eat with the rest of the government party. They'd done as he'd ordered, most of them resentfully, although they hid it. They had a duty, the responsibility of protecting the president, and didn't appreciate having obstacles put in their way.
After the meal, the internees on their study day had till two o'clock to loaf and nap. The teaching supervisor, Warrant Officer Willard Light, took the presidential party through the classroom building, a building considerably longer than the messhall but with the same asphalt siding. There was a large room for assemblies and for showing films, plus a library-reading room and several smaller rooms. There was a large globe in every room; ancient army typewriters from god knew where, perhaps thirty in all; books and chalkboards; abacuses to learn the principles behind arithmetic; modeling clay; stacks of cheap paper; several ancient personal computers....
General Ballister had just previously been in charge of army technical training. And more relevant, before that he'd been in charge of remedial education in the army, a post he'd held with exceptional success. He'd overhauled the system, innovating freely and brilliantly; it was that which had gotten him the command of internment centers. The teaching supervisors were products of his training system, as were the teachers themselves.
Mister Light stated that the average reading skill of his students had already increased by two grade levels, that mathematical skills had increased even more, and that average IQ had risen a dozen points, which said something about IQ tests and human potentials. And most important, the attitude toward classroom learning had improved radically.
The president wondered what the results would have been if the Type Ds had still been there; poor, he suspected.
After touring the classroom building, the presidential party had gotten back aboard the S-70 and taken off for Houston. Then, in the air on Air Force One, they'd had a meeting and made their decisions. In part they'd already been more or less determined: The Type Ds would be formally charged with the appropriate felonies and tried, and their status changed from internee to convict or free person. Martial law would then be cancelled. The remaining internees could be returned home, or they could stay where they were, as Conservation Corps employees instead of internees. The fences and watchtowers would come down.
Grosberg and Lynch were more than a little pleased. The Congress had wanted to cancel martial law, but most had felt constrained to retain it as the basis for keeping the internees interned. And this seemed a major symbolic step toward normal government.