The crowd inside the tent looked ugly indeed on the monitors, but he banged on their passage lock door and finally was let in, into a crush of angry young men and women. He walked through the inner lock door and breathed hot stale air. So many people were shouting he could make nothing out, but the ones in front recognized him and were clearly surprised to see him there. A couple of them cheered.
“All right! I’m here!” he shouted. “Who speaks for you?”
They had no spokesperson. He swore viciously. “What kind of fools are you? You’d better learn to operate the system, or you’ll be in bags like this one forever. Bags like this or else bodybags.”
Several people shouted things at him, but most wanted to hear what he would say. And still no sign of a spokes-person, so Chalmers shouted, “All right, I’ll talk to all of you! Sit down so I can see who’s speaking!”
They would not sit, but they did stand without moving, in a group around him, there on the tattered astroturf of the tent’s main square. Chalmers balanced himself on an upturned box in the middle of them. It was late afternoon and they cast shadows far down the slope to the east, into the tents below. He asked what had happened, and various voices described the midnight attack, the skirmish in the station.
“You were provoked,” he said when they were done. “They wanted you to make some fool move and you did, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. They’ve gotten you to kill some third parties that had nothing to do with the attack on you, and now you’re the murderers the police have caught! You were stupid!”
The crowd murmured and swore at him angrily, but some were taken aback. “Those so-called police were in on it too!” one of them said loudly.
“Maybe so,” Chalmers said, “but it was corporate troops that attacked you, not some random Japanese on a rampage. You should have been able to tell the difference, you should have bothered to find out! As it is you played into their hands, and the UNOMA police were happy to go along, they’re on the other side right now, at least some of them. But the national armies are shifting over to your side! So you’ve got to learn to cooperate with them, you’ve got to figure out who your allies are, and act accordingly! I don’t know why there are so few people on this planet capable of doing that. It’s like the passage from Earth scrambles the brain or something.”
Some laughed a startled laugh. Frank asked them about conditions in the tents. They had the same complaints as the others had, and again he could anticipate, and say it for them. Then he described the result of his trip to Clarke. “I got a moratorium on emigration, and that means more than just time to build more towns. It means the start of a new phase between the U.S. and the U.N. They finally figured it out in Washington that the U.N. is working for the transnationals, and so they need to enforce the treaty themselves. It’s in Washington’s best interest, and they’re the only ones that’ll do it. The treaty is part of the battle now, the battle between people and the transnationals. You’re in that battle and you’ve been attacked, and you have to figure out who to attack back, and how to connect up with your allies!”
They were looking grim at this, which showed sense, and Frank said, “Eventually we’re going to win, you know. There’s more of us than them.”
So much for the carrot, such as it was. As for the stick, that was always easy with people as powerless as these. “Look, if the national governments can’t calm things down quick, if there’s more unrest here and things start coming apart, they’ll say the hell with it— let the transnats solve their labor problems themselves, they’ll be more efficient at it. And you know what that means for you.”
“We’re sick of this!” one man shouted.
“Of course you are,” he said. He pointed a finger. “So do you have a plan to bring it to an end, or not?”
It took a while to rachet them into agreement. Disarm, cooperate, organize, petition the American government for help, for justice. Put themselves in his hands, in effect. Of course it took a while. And along the way he had to promise to address every complaint, to solve every injustice, to right every wrong. It was ridiculous, obscene; but he pursed his lips and did it. He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.