"Steamrollers are very undemocratic," Len added. "Never consult people on how they like to be flattened before flattening them. They just go rolling along."
"Just go rolling, they go on rolling along," Kujack said. "Like Old Man River."
"What's the upshot?" Len demanded. "People get upshot, shot up. In all countries, all of them without exception, they emerge from the war spiritually flattened, a little closer to the insects—like the hero in that Kafka story who wakes up one morning to find he's a bedbug, I mean beetle. All because they've been steamrolled. Nobody consulted them."
"Take the case of an amputee," Kujack said. "Before the land mine exploded, it didn't stop and say, 'Look, friend, I've got to go off; that's my job. Choose which part you'd prefer to have blown off—arm, leg, ear, nose, or what-have-you. Or is there somebody else around who would relish being clipped more than you would? If so, just send him along. I've got to do some clipping, you see, but it doesn't matter much which part of which guy I clip, so long as I make my quota.' Did the land mine say that? No! The victim wasn't consulted. Consequently he can feel victimized, full of self-pity. We just worked it out."
"The whole thing," Len said. "If the population had been polled according to democratic procedure, the paraplegia and other maimings could have been distributed to each according to his psychological need. See the point? Marx corrected by Freud, as Steve Lundy would say. Distribute the injuries to each according to his need—not his economic need, but his masochistic need. Those with a special taste for self-damage obviously should be allowed a lion's share of it. That way nobody could claim he'd been victimized by the steamroller or got anything he didn't ask for. It's all on a voluntary basis, you see. Democratic."
"Whole new concept of war," Kujack agreed. "Voluntary amputeeism, voluntary paraplegia, voluntary everything else that usually happens to people in a war. Just to get some human dignity back into the thing."
"Here's how it works," Len went on. "Country A and Country B reach the breaking point. It's all over but the shooting. All right. So they pool their best brains, mathematicians, actuaries, strategists, logistics geniuses, and all. What am I saying? They pool their best robot brains, their Emsiacs. In a matter of seconds they figure out, down to the last decimal point, just how many casualties each side can be expected to suffer in dead and wounded, and then they break down the figures. Of the wounded, they determine just how many will lose eyes, how many arms, how many legs, and so on down the line. Now—here's where it gets really neat—each country, having established its quotas in dead and wounded of all categories, can send out a call for volunteers."
"Less messy that way," Kujack said. "An efficiency expert's war. War on an actuarial basis."
"You get exactly the same results as in a shooting war," Len insisted. "Just as many dead, wounded and psychologically messed up. But you avoid the whole steamroller effect. A tidy war, war with dispatch, conceived in terms of ends rather than means. The end never did justify the means, you see; Steve Lundy says that was always the great dilemma of politics. So with one fool sweep—fell swoop—we get rid of means entirely."
"As things stand with me," Kujack said, "if anything stands with me, I might get to feeling sore about what happened to me. But nothing happens to the volunteer amputee. He steps up to the operating table and says, 'Just chop off one arm, Doc, the left one, please, up to the elbow if you don't mind, and in return put me down for one-and-two-thirds free meals daily at Longchamps and a plump blonde every Saturday.'"