Killing Time by Caleb Carr Page A

when she'd so expertly manned
the ship's big rail gun during the battle with our pursuers? "It was
fairly depressing," I said carefully.
    "And the sea around us
now," Tressalian went on. "Does anything appear to be missing?"
    "Just the fish," I joked;
but the tableful of straight faces that looked back at me indicated how
terribly serious my words had actually been. "Jesus," I fumbled.
"Have things really gotten that bad?"
    "The sights speak for
themselves, Doctor," Colonel Slayton said gravely, running a finger along
the scar on the side of his face. "The Atlantic seaboard is almost
literally a hog sty, and the last of the important fish species, thanks to
government lies about enforcing fishing regulations around the world, have
been chased into the furthest recesses of the ocean, where they'll be found
and, soon enough, slaughtered." He kept gently rubbing that scar,
reminding me of how much "government lies" had contributed to his own
disastrous experiences during the Taiwan campaign.
    "Yes," Tressalian
agreed gloomily. "I only wish I could say that such developments were
outside the norm of modern human behavior. And yet, according to a generation
of rhetoric, our own age should have separated itself from that norm, shouldn't
it, Doctor?"
    "How do you mean?"
    "Well, after all, the dawn
of this century did present humanity with an enormous opportunity to
improve both its own lot and the condition of the planet. The necessary tools
were all at hand." His voice became distinctly ironic. "The age of
information had been born."
    I was puzzled by his tone.
"Yes—thanks in large part to your father."
    Tressalian's irony quickly took
on a hard edge. "True. Thanks in large part to my father ..."
    I pushed my plate aside and
leaned forward. "You referred to his work earlier as a 'sin'—why?"
    "Come now, Doctor,"
Tressalian answered, toying with a slender silver knife. "I think you know
exactly why. And what's more, I suspect that you agree with the
assessment."
    "I may share some of your
opinions," I said, weighing the statement. "But I also may have
arrived at them through entirely different reasoning."
    He smiled again. "Oh, I
doubt that. But let's investigate, shall we?" He struggled to his feet,
having eaten only half his food, and began to slowly circle the table.
"Yes, Doctor, my father and his colleagues made certain that most of the
world was given access to the modern Internet. To what was marketed—quite
seductively and, of course, successfully—as 'unrestricted information.' And in
an era when capitalism and global free trade had triumphed and were running
rampant, such men had little trouble further promoting the belief that by
logging on to that Internet, one was tapping in to a vast system of freedom,
truth—and power. The mass of mankind withdrew to its terminals and clicked
away, and those afflicted with philosophical scruples allowed themselves to be
cajoled into believing that they were promoting the democratic cause of a free
exchange not only of goods and information but of ideas as well. Convinced, in
other words, that they were changing the world, and for the better."
    His face turned toward the ocean
again, and his manner softened once more. "Yet in the meantime, inexplicably
but undeniably, the water and the air grew dirtier than they had ever been. New
pandemics appeared, with no medicines to treat them. Poverty, anarchy, and
conflict ravaged more and more parts of the world." He sighed once, his
brow arching. "And the fish—disappeared ..." When he turned to me
again, his face radiated a paradoxical and disquieting calm. "How did it
happen, Dr. Wolfe? How, in an age when the free flow of information and trade
was supposedly creating a benevolent global order, did all this happen?"
    Just then the shipwide address
system issued another gently throbbing alarm, at which Colonel Slayton
announced that there was to be another "system transfer" in two
minutes. "We're heading into the stratosphere for a few