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By Root 1631 0

stooge, an assassin. Look at the evidence. He works for the state—a socialist state at that. He went to university and worked with those traitors Philby and Burgess, that MacLean fellow—communist spies to a man. He didn’t resign his commission when the British government went socialist, like a decent fellow; instead he took assignments to go after entrepreneurs who were a threat to the interests of this socialist government, and he rubbed them out like a Mafia button man. There was no due process of law there, no respect for property rights, no courts, no lawyers—just a ‘License to Kill’ enemies of the state, loosely defined, who mostly happened to be businessmen working on start-up projects that coincidentally threatened state monopolies. He’s a damned commissar. Do you know why Moscow hated him? It’s because he’d beaten them at their own racket.”

Blofeld was clearly depressed by this recollection, so I tried to change the subject by asking him about his personal management philosophy.

“Well, you know, I tend to use whatever works in day-today situations. I’m a pragmatist, really. But I’ve got a soft spot for modern philosophers, Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand: the rights of the individual. And I’ve always wanted to remake the world as a better place, which is probably why the establishment dislikes me: I’m a threat to vested interests. Well, they’re all descended from men who were threats to vested interests, too, back in the day, only I threaten them with new technologies, while their ancestors mostly did their threatening with a bloody sword and the gallows. I don’t believe in initiating force.” He laughed self-deprecatingly. “I suppose you could call me naïve.”

Trade Goods

When I played back my tape of our discussion, it took me some time to notice that Ernst had carefully steered the conversation away from certain key points I had intended to quiz him about.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Bond milieu is the prevalence of technologies that are strangely out of place. Belt-buckle grappling hooks with wire spools that can support a man’s weight? Laser rifles? These aren’t simple extrapolations of existing technology—they go far beyond anything that’s achievable with today’s engineering tools or materials science. But forget Bond’s toys, the products of Q division. From Blofeld’s solar-powered orbital laser in Diamonds Are Forever to Carver’s stealth cruiser in Tomorrow Never Dies, we are surrounded by signs that the adversary has got tricks up his sleeve that far outweigh anything Bond’s backers can provide. These menacing intrusions of alien superscience—where could they possibly have gotten them from?

The answer can be discerned with little difficulty if one cares to scrutinize the writings of the sage of Providence, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. This scholar—whose path, regrettably, never crossed that of the young Ian Fleming—asserted that our tenancy of this planet is but a recent aberration. Earth has in the past been home for a number of alien species of vast antiquity and incomprehensibly advanced knowledge, and indeed some of them may still linger alongside us—on the high Antarctic plateau, in the frigid oceanic depths, even in strange half-breed colonies off the New England coastline.

If this strikes you as nonsensical, first contemplate your nearest city: How recognizable would it be in a hundred years’ time if our entire species silently vanished tomorrow? How recognizable would it be in a thousand years? Would any relics still bear witness to the once-proud towers of New York or Tokyo, a million years hence? Our future—and the future of any once-proud races that bestrode our planet—is that of an oily stain in the shale deposits of deep history. Earth’s biosphere and the active tectonic system it dances upon cleans house remorselessly, erasing any structure that is not alive or maintained by the living.

Consider also the extent to which we really occupy the planet we live on. We think of ourselves as the dominant species on Earth—but 75 percent of the Earth’s entire biomass consists of bacteria and