The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  The traffic was so bad that it had actually started to snow, softly, by the time I reached Memo’s office. He was pacing across the thinly carpeted floor, his shoes squeaking unnervingly in the spacious room. Copies of The Washington Post, The New York Times and Aviation Week were spread across his usually immaculate desk, but his attention was focused on his window, where we could see fluffy snowflakes gently drifting down.

  “Traffic’s going to get worse as the day goes on,” Memo muttered.

  “They’re saying it’ll only be an inch or so,” I told him.

  “That’s enough to paralyze this town.”

  Yeah, especially when everybody jumps in their cars and starts fleeing the town as if a terrorist nuke is about to go off, I replied silently.

  Aloud, I asked, “What about this sterilization business? Is there any substance to the story?”

  Memo glanced sharply at me. “They don’t need substance as long as they can start a panic.”

  Dr. Pencilbeam sat at one of the unmatched conference chairs, all bony limbs and elbows and knees.

  “Relax, Roger,” Pencilbeam said calmly. “Congress isn’t going to halt the SSZ program. It means too many jobs, too much international prestige. And besides, the President has staked her credibility on it.”

  “That’s what worries me,” Memo muttered.

  “What?”

  But Memo’s eye was caught by movement outside his window. He waddled past his desk and looked down into the street below.

  “Oh, my God . . . “

  “What’s going on?” Pencilbeam unfolded like a pocket ruler into a six-foot-long human and hurried to the window. Outside, in the thin mushy snow, a line of somber men and women were filing along the street past the TURD building, bearing signs that screamed:

  STOP THE SSZ!

  DSON’T STERILIZE THE HUMAN RACE

  SSZ MURDERS UNBORN CHILDREN

  ZEPPELINS GO HOME!

  “Isn’t that one with the sign about unborn children a priest?” Pencilbeam asked.

  Memo shrugged. “Your eyes are better than mine.”

  “Ah-hah! And look at this!”

  Pencilbeam pointed a long, bony finger farther down the street. Another swarm of people were advancing on the building. They also carried placards:

  SSZ FOR ZPG

  ZEPPELINS SI! BABIES NO!

  ZEPPELINS FOR POPULATION CONTROL

  UP THE SSZ

  Memo sagged against the window. “This . . . this is awful.”

  The Zero Population Growth group marched through the thin snowfall straight at the environmentalists and anti-birth-control pickets. Instantly the silence was shattered by shouts and taunts. Shrill female voices battled against rumbling baritones and bassos. Placards wavered. Bodies pushed. Someone screamed. One sign struck a skull and then bloody war broke out.

  Memo, Pencilbeam and I watched aghast until the helmeted TAC squad police doused the whole tangled mess of them with riot gas, impartially clubbed men and woman alike and carted everyone off, including three bystanders and a homeless panhandler.

  The Senate hearings were such a circus that Driver summoned me back to Phoenix for a strategy session with Anson’s top management. I was glad to get outside the Beltway, and especially glad to see Lisa again. She even agreed to have dinner with me.

  “You’re doing a wonderful job there in Washington,” she said, smiling with gleaming teeth and flashing eyes.

  My knees went weak, but I found the courage to ask, “Would you consider transferring to the Washington office? I could use a sharp executive assistant—”

  She didn’t even let me finish. “I’d love to!”

  I wanted to do handsprings. I wanted to grab her and kiss her hard enough to bruise our lips. I wanted to, but Driver came out of his office just at that moment, looking his jaw-jutting grimmest.

  “Come on, kid. Time to meet the top brass.”

  The top brass was a mixture of bankers and former engineers. To my disgust, instead of trying to put together a strategy to defeat the environmentalists, they were already thinking about how many men and women they’d have to lay off when Washington pulled the plug on the SSZ program.

  “But that’s crazy!” I protested. “The program is solid. The President herself is behind it.”

  Driver fixed me with his steely stare. “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”

  I left the meeting feeling very depressed, until I saw Lisa again. Her smile could light up the world.

  Before heading back to Washington to fight Sequoia’s sterilization propaganda, I looked up my old APT buddies. They were in the factory section where the SSZ was being fabricated.

  The huge factory assembly bay was filled with the aluminum skeleton of the giant dirigible. Great gleaming metal ribs stretched from its titanium nosecap to the more intricate cagework of the tail fins. Tiny figures with flashing laser welders crawled along the ribbing like maggots cleaning the bones of some noble whale.

  Even the jet engines sitting on their carrying pallets dwarfed human scale. Some of the welders held clandestine poker games inside their intake cowlings, Bob Wisdom told me. The cleaning crews kept quiet about the spills, crumbs and other detritus they found in them night after night. I stood with Bob, Ray Kurtz, Tommy Rohr and Richard Grand beside one of those huge engine pods, craning our necks to watch the construction work going on high overhead. The assembly bay rang to the shouts of working men and women, throbbed with the hum of machinery, clanged with the clatter of metal against metal.

  “It’s going to be some Christmas party of Congress cancels this project,” Kurtz muttered gloomily.

  “Oh, they wouldn’t dare cancel it now that the Women’s Movement is behind it,” said Grand, with a sardonic little smile.

  Kurtz glared at him from behind his beard. “You wish. Half those idiots in Congress will vote against us just to prove they’re pro-environment.”

  “Actually, the scientific evidence is completely on our side,” Grand said. “And in the long run, the weight of evidence prevails.”

  He always acts as if he knows more than anybody else, I thought. But he’s dead wrong here. He hasn’t the foggiest notion of how Washington works. But he sounds so damned sure of himself! It must be that phony accent of his.

  “Well, just listen to me, pal,” said Wisdom, jabbing a forefinger at Grand. “I’ve been working on that secretary of mine since the last Christmas party, and if this project falls through and the party is a bust that palpitating hunk of femininity is going to run home and cry instead of coming to the party!”

  Grand blinked at him several times, obviously trying to think of the right thing to say. Finally he enunciated, “Pity.”

  But I was thinking about Lisa. If the SSZ is cancelled, Driver won’t let her transfer to the Washington office. There’d be no need to hire more staff for me. There’d be no need for me!

  I went back to Washington determined to save the SSZ from this stupid sterilization nonsense. But it was like trying to stop a tsunami with a floor mop. The women’s movement, the environmental movement, the labor unions, even Leno and Letterman got into the act. The Senate hearings turned into a shambles; Pencilbeam and the other scientists were ignored while movie stars testified that they would never fly in an SSZ because of the dangers of radiation.

  The final blow came when the President announced that was not going to Paris and Moscow, after all. Urgent problems elsewhere. Instead, she flew to Hawaii for an economic summit of the Pacific nations. In her subsonic Air Force One.

  The banner proclaiming HAPPY HOLIDAYS! drooped sadly across one wall of the company cafeteria. Outside in the late afternoon darkness, lights glimmered, cars were moving and a bright full moon shone down on a rapidly-emptying parking lot.

  Inside the Anson Aerospace cafeteria was nothing but gloom. The Christmas party had been a dismal flop, primarily because half the company’s work force had received layoff notices that morning. The tables had been pushed to one side
of the cafeteria to make room for a dance floor. Syrupy holiday music oozed out of the speakers built into the acoustic tile of the ceiling. But no one was dancing.

  Bob Wisdom sat at one of the tables, propping his aching head in his hands. Ray Kurtz and Tommy Rohr sat with him, equally dejected.

  “Why the hell did they have to cancel the project two days before Christmas?” Rohr asked rhetorically.

  “Makes for more pathos,” Kurtz growled.

  “It’s pathetic, all right,” Wisdom said. “I’ve never seen so many women crying at once. Or men, for that matter.”

  “Even Driver was crying, and he hasn’t even been laid off,” Rohr said.

  “Well,” Kurtz said, staring at the half-finished drink in front of him, “Seqouia did it. He’s a big media hero again.”

  “And we’re on the bread line,” said Rohr.

  “You got laid off?” I asked.

  “Not yet—but it’s coming. This place will be closing its doors before the fiscal year ends.”

  “It’s not that bad,” said Wisdom. “We still have the Air Force work. As long as they’re shooting off cruise missiles, we’ll be in business.”

  Rohr grimaced. “You know what gets me? The way the whole project was scrapped, without giving us a chance to complete the big bird and show how it’d work. Without a goddamned chance.”

  Kurtz said, “Congressmen are scared of people getting sterilized.”

  “Not really,” I said. “They’re scared of not being on the right bandwagon.”

  All three of them turned toward me.

  Rohr said, “Next time you dream up a project, pal, make it underground. Something in a lead mine. Or deeper still, a gold mine. Then Congress won’t have to worry about cosmic rays.”

  Wisdom tried to laugh, but it wouldn’t come.

  “You know,” I said slowly, “you just might have something there.”

  “What?”

  “Where?”

  “A supersonic transport—in a tunnel.”

  “Oh for Chri—”

  But Wisdom sat up straighter in his chair. “You could make an air-cushion vehicle go supersonic. If you put it in a tunnel you get away from the sonic boom and the air pollution.”

  “The safety aspects would be better, too,” Kurtz admitted. Then, more excitedly, “And pump the air out of the tunnel, like a pneumatic tube!”

  Rohr shook his head. “You guys are crazy. Who the hell’s going to build tunnels all over the country?”

  “There’s a lot of tunnels already built,” I countered. We could adapt them for the SSST.”

  “SSST?”

  “Sure,” I answered, grinning for the first time in weeks. “Supersonic subway train.”

  They stared at me. Rohr pulled out his PDA and started tapping on it. Wisdom got that faraway look in his eyes. Kurtz shrugged and said, “Why the hell not?”

  I got up and headed for the door. Supersonic subway train. That’s my ticket. I’m going back to Washington, I knew. And this time I’ll bring Lisa with me.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF HENRY K.

  This is a pure romp, not to be taken seriously. Obviously, any relation between the characters in this story and real ex-Secretaries of State, movie stars, heiresses, et al. is purely . . . well, would you believe it’s an alternate universe, maybe?

  This late at night, even the busiest corridors of the Pentagon were deserted. Dr. Young’s footsteps echoed hollowly as he followed the mountainous, tight-lipped, grim-faced man. Another equally large and steely-eyed man followed behind him, in lockstep with the first.

  They were agents, Dr. Young knew that without being told. Their clothing bulged with muscles trained in murderous Oriental arts, other bulges in unlikely places along their anatomy were various pieces of equipment: guns, two-way radios, stilettos, Bowie knives. . . Young decided his imagination wasn’t rich enough to picture all the equipment these men might be carrying.

  After what seemed like an hour’s walk down a constantly curving corridor, the agent in front stopped abruptly before an inconspicuous, unmarked door.

  “In here,” he said, barely moving his lips.

  The door opened by itself, and Dr. Young stepped into what seemed to be an ordinary receptionist’s office. It was no bigger than a cubicle, and even in the dim lighting— from a single desk lamp, the overhead lights were off— Young could see that the walls were the same sallow depressing color as most Pentagon offices.

  “The phone will ring,” the agent said, glancing at a watch that looked absolutely dainty on his massive hairy wrist, “in exactly one minute and fifteen seconds. Sit at the desk. Answer when it rings.”

  With that, he shut the door firmly, leaving Dr. Young alone and bewildered in the tiny anteroom.

  There was only one desk, cleared of papers. It was a standard government-issue battered metal desk. IN and OUT boxes stood empty atop it. Nothing else on it but a single black telephone. There were two creaky-looking straight-backed metal chairs in front of the desk, and a typist’s swivel chair behind it. The only other things in the room were a pair of file cabinets, side by side, with huge padlocks and red SECURE signs on them, and a bulletin board that had been miraculously cleared of everything except the little faded fire-emergency instruction card.

  Dr. Young found that his hands were trembling. He wished that he hadn’t given up cigarettes: after all, oral eroticism isn’t all that bad. He glanced at the closed hallway door and knew that both the burly agents were standing outside, probably with their arms folded across their chest in unconscious imitation of the eunuchs who guarded sultans’ harems.

  He took a deep breath and went around the desk and sat on the typist’s chair.

  The phone rang as soon as his butt touched the chair. He jumped, but grabbed the phone and settled himself before it could ring again.

  “Dr. Carlton Young speaking.” His voice sounded an octave too high, and quavery, even to himself.

  “Dr. Young, I thank you for accompanying the agents who brought you there without questioning their purpose. They were instructed to tell you who sent them and nothing else.”

  He recognized the voice at once. “You—you’re welcome, Mr. President.”

  “Please! No names! This is a matter of utmost security.”

  “Ye—yessir.”

  “Dr. Young, you have been recommended very highly for the special task I must ask of you. I know that, as a loyal, patriotic American, you will do your best to accomplish this task. And as the most competent man in your highly demanding and complex field, your efforts will be crowned with success. That’s the American way, now isn’t it?”

  “Yessir. May I ask, just what is the task?”

  “I’m glad you asked that. I have a personnel problem that you are uniquely qualified to solve. One of my closest and most valued aides—a man I depend on very heavily— has gone into a tailspin. I won’t explain why or how. I must ask you merely to accept the bald statement. This aide is a man of great drive and talent, high moral purpose, and enormous energy. But at the moment, he’s useless to himself, to this Administration, and to the Nation. I need you to help him find himself.”

  “Me? But all I do is—”

  “You run the best computer dating service in the nation, I know. Your service has been checked out thoroughly by the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Defense Intelligence Agency—”

  “Not the CIA?”

  “I don’t know, they won’t tell me.”

  “Oh.”

  “This aide of mine—a very sincere and highly motivated man—needs a girl. Not just any girl. The psychiatrists at Walter Reed tell me that he must find the woman who’s perfect for him, his exact match, the one mate that can make him happy enough to get back to the important work he should be doing. As you know, I have a plan for stopping inflation, bridging the generation gap, and settling the Cold War. But to make everything perfectly clear, Dr. Young, none of these plans can be crowned with success unless this certain aide can do his p
art of the job, carry his share of the burden, pull his share of the load.”

  Dr. Young nodded in the darkness. “I understand, sir. He needs a woman to make him happy. So many people do.” A fleeting thought of the bins upon bins of floppy disks that made up his files passed through Dr. Young’s mind. “Even you, sir, even you need a woman.”

  “Dr. Young! I’m a married man!”

  “I know—that’s what I meant. You couldn’t be doing the terrific job you’re doing without your lovely wife, your lifetime mate, to support and inspire you.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, of course. Well, Dr. Young, my aide is in the office there with you, in the inner office. I want you to talk with him, help him, find him the woman he truly needs. Then we can end the war in Indochina, stop inflation, bridge—well, you know.”

  “Yes sir. I’ll do my best.”

  “That will be adequate for the task, I’m sure. Good night, and God bless America!”

  Dr. Young found that he was on his feet, standing at ramrod attention, a position he hadn’t assumed since his last Boy Scout jamboree.

  Carefully he replaced the phone in its cradle, then turned to face the door that led to the inner office. Who could be in there? The Vice President? No, Young told himself with a shake of his head; that didn’t fit the description the President had given him.

  Squaring his shoulders once again, Dr. Young took the three steps that carried him to the door and knocked on it sharply.

  “Come in,” said an equally sharp voice.

  The office was kept as dark and shadowy as the anteroom, but Dr. Young recognized the man sitting rather tensely behind the desk.

  “Dr. Kiss—!”

  “No names! Please! Absolute security, Dr. Young.”

  “I under—no, come to think of it, I don’t understand. Why keep the fact that you’re using a computer-dating service so secret? What do the Russians and Chinese care—” The man behind the desk cut him short with a gesture. “It’s not the Russians or Chinese. It’s the Democrats. If they find out—” He waggled both hands in the air—a Semitic gesture of impending doom.