The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  But I went a step farther. In my capacity as a junior (and rising) executive, I used expense-account money to plant a snoop in the organization of the nation’s leading ecology freak, Mark Sequoia. It turned out that, unknown to Sequoia, Anson Aerospace was actually his biggest financial contributor. Politics make strange bedfellows, doesn’t it?

  You see, Sequoia had fallen on relatively hard times. Once a flaming crusader for ecological salvation and environmental protection, Sequoia had made the mistake of letting the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hire him as the state’s Director of Environmental Protection. He had spent nearly five years earnestly trying to clean up Pennsylvania, a job that had driven four generations of the original Penn family into early Quaker graves. The deeper Sequoia buried himself in the solid waste politics of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chester, Erie and other hopelessly corrupted cities, the fewer dedicated followers and news media headlines he attracted. After a very credible Mafia threat on his life, he quite sensibly resigned his post and returned to private life, scarred but wiser. And alive.

  When the word about the SSZ program reached him, Sequoia was hiking along a woodland trail in Fairmont Park, Philadelphia, leading a scraggly handful of sullen high school students through the park’s soot-ravaged woodlands on a steaming August afternoon. They were dispiritedly picking up empty beer cans and gummy prophylactics—and keeping a wary eye out for muggers. Even full daylight was no protection against assault. And the school kids wouldn’t help him, Sequoia knew. Half of them would jump in and join the fun.

  Sequoia was broad-shouldered, almost burly. His rugged face was seamed by weather and news conferences. He looked strong and fit, but lately his back had been giving him trouble and his old trick knee . . .

  He heard someone pounding up the trail behind him.

  “Mark! Mark!”

  Sequoia turned to see Larry Helper, his oldest and therefore most trusted aide, running along the gravel path toward him, waving a copy of the Daily News over his head. Newspaper pages were slipping from his sweaty grasp and fluttering off into the bushes.

  “Littering,” Sequoia muttered in a tone sometimes used by archbishops when facing a case of heresy.

  “Some of you kids,” said Sequoia in his most authoritative voice, “pick up those newspaper pages.”

  A couple of the students lackadaisically ambled after the fluttering sheets.

  “Mark, look here!” Helper skidded to a gritty stop on the gravel and breathlessly waved the front page of the newspaper. “Look!”

  Sequoia grabbed his aide’s wrist and took what was left of the newspaper from him. He frowned at Helper, who cringed and stepped back.

  “I . . . I thought you’d want to see . . . “

  Satisfied that he had established his dominance, Sequoia turned his attention to the front page’s blaring headline.

  “Supersonic zeppelin?”

  Two nights later, Sequoia was meeting with a half-dozen men and women in the basement of a prosperous downtown church that specialized in worthy causes capable of filling the pews upstairs.

  Once Sequoia called his meeting I was informed by the mole I had planted in his pitiful little group of do-gooders. As a newcomer to the scene, I had no trouble joining Sequoia’s Friends of the Planet organization, especially when I FedEx’d them a personal check for a thousand dollars—for which Anson Aerospace reimbursed me, of course.

  So I was sitting on the floor like a good environmental activist while Sequoia paced across the little room. There was no table, just a few folding chairs scattered around, and a locked bookcase stuffed with tomes about sex and marriage. I could tell just from looking at Sequoia that the old activist flames were burning inside him again. He felt alive, strong, the center of attention.

  “We can’t just drive down to Washington and call a news conference,” he exclaimed, pounding a fist into his open palm. “We’ve got to do something dramatic!”

  “Automobiles pollute, anyway,” said one of the women, a comely redhead whose dazzling green eyes never left Sequoia’s broad, sturdy-looking figure.

  “We could take the train; it’s electric.”

  “Power stations pollute.”

  “Airplanes pollute, too.”

  “What about riding down to Washington on horseback! Like Paul Revere!”

  “Horses pollute.”

  “They do?”

  “Ever been around a stable?”

  “Oh.”

  Sequoia pounded his fist again. “I’ve got it! It’s perfect!”

  “What?”

  “A balloon! We’ll ride down to Washington in a non-polluting balloon filled with helium. That’s the dramatic way to emphasize our opposition to this SSZ monster.”

  “Fantastic!”

  “Marvelous!”

  The redhead was panting with excitement. “Oh, Mark, you’re so clever. So dedicated.” There were tears in her eyes.

  Helper asked softly, “Uh . . . does anybody know where we can get a balloon? And how much they cost?”

  “Money is no object,” Sequoia snapped, pounding his fist again. Then he wrung his hand; he had pounded too hard.

  When the meeting finally broke up, Helper had been given the task of finding a suitable balloon, preferably one donated by its owner. I had volunteered to assist him. Sequoia would spearhead the effort to raise money for a knockdown fight against the SSZ. The redhead volunteered to assist him. They left the meeting arm in arm.

  I was learning the Washington lobbying business from the bottom up, but rising fast. Two weeks later I was in the White House, no less, jammed in among news reporters and West Wing staffers waiting for a presidential news conference to begin. TV lights were glaring at the empty podium. The reporters and camera crews shuffled their feet, coughed, talked to one another. Then:

  “Ladies and gentlemen: the President of the United States.”

  We all stood up and applauded as she entered. I had been thrilled to be invited to the news conference. Well, actually it was Keene who’d been invited and he brought me with him, since I was the Washington rep for the SSZ project. The President strode to the podium and smiled at us in what some cynics had dubbed her rattlesnake mode. I thought she was being gracious.

  “Before anything else, I have a statement to make about the tragic misfortune that has overtaken one of our finest public figures, Mark Sequoia. According to the latest report I have received from the Coast Guard—no more than ten minutes ago—there is still no trace of his party. Apparently the balloon they were riding in was blown out to sea two days ago, and nothing has been heard from them since.

  “Now let me make this perfectly clear. Mr. Sequoia was frequently on the other side of the political fence from my administration. He was often a critic of my policies and actions, policies and actions that I believe in completely. He was on his way to Washington to protest our new supersonic zeppelin program when this unfortunate accident occurred.

  “Mr. Sequoia opposed the SSZ program despite the fact that this project will employ thousands of aerospace engineers who are otherwise unemployed and untrainable. Despite the fact that the SSZ program will save the American dollar on the international market and salvage American prestige in the technological battleground of the world.

  “And we should keep in mind that France and Russia have announced that they are studying the possibility of jointly starting their own SSZ effort, a clear technological challenge to America.”

  Gripping the edges of the podium tighter, the President went on, ““Rumors that his balloon was blown off course by a flight of Air Force jets are completely unfounded, the Secretary of Defense assures me. I have dispatched every available military, Coast Guard, and Civil Air Patrol plane to search the entire coastline from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras. We will find Mark Sequoia and his brave though misguided band of ecofr . . . er, activists—or their remains.”

  I knew perfectly well that Sequoia’s balloon had not been blown out to sea by Air Force jets. They were private p
lanes: executive jets, actually.

  “Are there any questions?” the President asked.

  The Associated Press reporter, a hickory-tough old man with thick glasses and a snow-white goatee, got to his feet and asked, “Is that a Versace dress you’re wearing? It’s quite becoming.”

  The President beamed. “Why, thank you. Yes, it is . . . “

  Keene pulled me by the arm. “Let’s go. We’ve got nothing to worry about here.”

  I was rising fast, in part because I was willing to do the legwork (and dirty work, like Sequoia) that Keene was too lazy or too squeamish to do. He was still head of our Washington office, in name. I was running the SSZ program, which was just about the only program Anson had going for itself, which meant that I was running the Washington office in reality.

  Back in Phoenix, Bob Wisdom and the other guys had become the nucleus of the team that was designing the SSZ prototype. The program would take years, we all knew, years in which we had assured jobs. If the SSZ actually worked the way we designed it, we could spend the rest of our careers basking in its glory.

  I was almost getting accustomed to being called over to the West Wing to deal with bureaucrats and politicians. Still, it was a genuine thrill when I was invited into the Oval Office itself.

  The President’s desk was cleared of papers. Nothing cluttered the broad expanse of rosewood except the telephone console, a black-framed photograph of her late husband (who had once also sat at that desk), and a gold-framed photograph of her daughter on her first day in the House of Representatives (D., Ark.).

  She sat in her high-backed leather chair and fired instructions at her staff.

  “I want the public to realize,” she instructed her media consultant, “that although we are now in a race with the Russians and the French, we are building the SSZ for sound economic and social reasons, not because of competition from overseas.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” said the media consultant.

  She turned to the woman in charge of Congressional liaison. “And you’d better make damned certain that the Senate appropriations committee okays the increased funding for the SSZ prototype. Tell them that if we don’t get the extra funding we’ll fall behind the Ivans and the Frogs.

  “And I want you,” she pointed a manicured finger at the research director of TURD, “to spend every nickel of your existing SSZ money as fast as you can. Otherwise we won’t be able to get the additional appropriation out of Congress.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” said Roger K. Memo, with one of his rare smiles.

  “But, Madam President,” the head of the Budget Office started to object.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” the President snapped at him. “I’m perfectly aware that money doesn’t grow on trees. But we’ve got to get the SSZ prototype off the ground, and do it before next November. Take money from education, from the space program, from the environmental superfund—I don’t care how you do it, just get it done. I want the SSZ prototype up and flying by next summer, when I’m scheduled to visit Paris and Moscow.”

  The whole staff gasped in sudden realization of the President’s masterful plan.

  “That right,” she said, smiling slyly at them. “I intend to be the first Chief of State to cross the Atlantic in a supersonic zeppelin.”

  Although none of us realized its importance at the time, the crucial incident, we know now, happened months before the President’s decision to fly the SSZ to Paris and Moscow. I’ve gone through every scrap of information we could beg, borrow or steal about that decisive day, reviewing it all time and again, trying to find some way to undo the damage.

  It happened at the VA hospital in Hagerstown, a few days after Mark Sequoia had been rescued. The hospital had never seen so many reporters. There were news media people thronging the lobby, lounging in the halls, bribing nurses, sneaking into elevators and even surgical theaters (where several of them fainted). The parking lot was a jumble of cars bearing media stickers and huge TV vans studded with antennas.

  Only two reporters were allowed to see Mark Sequoia on any given day, and they were required to share their interviews with all the others in the press corps. Today the two—picked by lot—were a crusty old veteran from Fox News and a perky young blonde from Women’s Wear Daily.

  “But I’ve told your colleagues what happened at least a dozen times,” mumbled Sequoia from behind a swathing of bandages.

  He was hanging by both arms and legs from four traction braces, his backside barely touching the crisply sheeted bed. Bandages covered eighty percent of his body and all of his face, except for tiny slits for his eyes, nostrils and mouth.

  The Fox News reporter held his palm-sized video camera in one hand while he scratched at his stubbled chin with the other. On the opposite side of the bed, the blonde held a similar videocorder close to Sequoia’s bandaged face.

  She looked misty-eyed. “Are . . . are you in much pain?”

  “Not really,” Sequoia answered bravely, with a slight tremor in his voice.

  “Why all the traction?” asked Fox News. “The medics said there weren’t any broken bones.”

  “Splinters,” Sequoia answered weakly.

  “Bone splinters!” gasped the blonde. “Oh, how awful!”

  “No,” Sequoia corrected. “Splinters. Wood splinters. When the balloon finally came down we landed in a clump of trees just outside Hagerstown. I got thousands of splinters. It took most of the surgical staff three days to pick them all out of me. The chief of surgery said he was going to save the wood and build a scale model of the Titanic with it.”

  “Oh, how painful!” The blonde insisted on gasping. She gasped very well, Sequoia noted, watching her blouse.

  “And what about your hair?” Fox News asked.

  Sequoia felt himself blush underneath the bandages. “I . . . uh . . . I must have been very frightened. After all, we were aloft in that stupid balloon for six days, without food, without anything to drink except a six pack of Perrier. We went through a dozen different thunderstorms . . . “

  “With lightning?” the blonde asked.

  Nodding painfully, Sequioa replied, “We all thought we were going to die.”

  Fox News frowned. “So your hair turned white from fright. There was some talk that cosmic rays did it.”

  “Cosmic rays? We never got that high. Cosmic rays don’t have any effect on you until you get really up there, isn’t that right?”

  “How high did you go?”

  “I don’t know,” Sequoia answered. “Some of those updrafts in the thunderstorms pushed us pretty high. The air got kind of thin.”

  “But not high enough to cause cosmic ray damage.”

  “Well, I don’t know . . . maybe . . . “

  “It’d make a better story than just being scared,” said Fox News. “Hair turned white by cosmic rays. Maybe even sterilized.”

  “Sterilized?” Sequoia yelped.

  “Cosmic rays do that, too,” Fox News said. “I checked.”

  “Well, we weren’t that high.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah . . . well, I don’t think we were that high. We didn’t have an altimeter with us . . . “

  “But you could have been.”

  Shrugging was sheer torture, Sequoia found.

  “Okay, but those thunderstorms could’ve lifted you pretty damned high.”

  Before Sequoia could think of what to answer, the door to his private room opened and a horse-faced nurse said firmly, “That’s all. Time’s up. Mr. Sequoia must rest now. After his enema.”

  “Okay, I think I’ve got something to hang a story on,” Fox News said with a satisfied grin. “Now to find a specialist in cosmic rays.”

  The blonde looked thoroughly shocked and terribly upset. “You . . . you don’t think you were really sterilized, do you?”

  Sequoia tried to make himself sound worried and brave at the same time. “I don’t know. I just . . . don’t know.”

  Late that night the blon
de snuck back into his room, masquerading as a nurse. If she knew the difference between sterilization and impotence she didn’t tell Sequoia about it. For his part, he forgot about his still-tender skin and the traction braces. The morning nurse found him unconscious, one shoulder dislocated, most of his bandages rubbed off, his skin terribly inflamed, and a goofy grin on his face.

  I knew that the way up the corporate ladder was to somehow acquire a staff that reported to me. And, in truth, the SSZ project was getting so big that I truly needed more people to handle it. I mean, all the engineers had to do was build the damned thing and make it fly. I had to make certain that the money kept flowing, and that wasn’t easy. An increasingly large part of my responsibilities as the de facto head of the Washington office consisted of putting out fires.

  “Will you look at this!”

  Senator Goodyear waved the morning Post at me. I had already read the electronic edition before I’d left my apartment that morning. Now, as I sat at Tracy Keene’s former desk, the senator’s red face filled my phone screen.

  “That Sequoia!” he grumbled. “He’ll stop at nothing to destroy me. Just because the Ohio River melted his houseboat, all those years ago.”

  “It’s just a scare headline,” I said, trying to calm him down. “People won’t be sterilized by flying in the supersonic zeppelin any more than they were by flying in the old Concorde.”

  “I know it’s bullshit! And you know it’s bullshit! But the goddamned news media are making a major story out of it! Sequoia’s on every network talk show. I’m under pressure to call for hearings on the sterilization problem!”

  “Good idea,” I told him. “Have a Senate investigation. The scientists will prove that there’s nothing to it.”

  That was my first mistake. I didn’t get a chance to make another.

  I hightailed it that morning to Memo’s office. I wanted to see Pencilbeam and start building a defense against this sterilization story. The sky was gray and threatening. An inch or two of snow was forecast, and people were already leaving their offices for home, at ten o’clock in the morning. Dedicated government bureaucrats and corporate employees, taking the slightest excuse to knock off work.