The candidates gave their opening statements.
Jibber went first. As he had been so carefully trained to do, he clomped out from behind his podium in his little cowboy boots, pushed his little cowboy hat back on his head, stood bowlegged for a few minutes, hands on his hips, squinting at the crowd with his jaw thrust forward, and then gibbered for a few minutes. As he turned and clomped back behind his podium, the Republican half of the audience jumped up from its seats and applauded and shrieked and squealed and stamped its feet. They were joined by the panel of reporters who were there to ask questions of the candidates.
After the crowd and the panel had settled down, it was Tom Moore’s turn. He smiled slightly and said, “There you go again.”
The Democratic side laughed and cheered.
The moderator spoke angrily into his microphone. “People, we can’t have this! You’re just taking time from the candidate you support. Please hold your applause till the end of the debate. Unless you’re so overcome with patriotism that you can’t help applauding our wonderful President. That would be understandable. But don’t applaud the other guy. Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Tom Moore said ironically. “I assume that long interruption won’t be counted against my time, and the clock starts now?”
The moderator made a face at him and muttered, “Wise guy.”
Moore shifted his attention to the crowd. He seemed straighter, bigger, stronger than four years earlier. He ignored the pitiful little simian and the panelists and spoke directly to the audience in the auditorium and those watching the debate on television.
“Four years ago, unemployment stood at under four per cent. According to the most recent figures, it’s now at 99.6 per cent. A budget surplus of 250 billion dollars has been converted to a deficit of five trillion dollars. From the most powerful, wealthiest, and admired nation in the world, we’ve gone to being poor, weak, despised, and on the verge of civil war.”
That was as far as he was allowed to get. The Republican part of the crowd and all of the panel were on their feet screaming insults and shooting rubber bands at him.
Moore stood his ground quietly and stared down the rowdies. When the noise had subsided enough for him to be heard, he said, “Now, I’d like to ask a question of...” He paused for a few seconds and then, with a faint, ironic smile, continued, “... the President.”
The two Secret Service men guarding Moore moved close in and raised their hands threateningly, quite close to his head.
Moore turned his head toward Jibber and started to say something.
His head fell off.
The audience watched in silent horror as Moore’s head, his expression one of surprise and disapproval, thumped to the floor of the stage. Blood shot in powerful spurts from his cleanly sliced neck. His torso collapsed and twitched for a while and then stopped.
The Secret Service men who had been on the stage leapt off it to avoid the spreading pool of blood.
The audience and the panelists exploded into motion. They ran screaming for the exits.
Hiding behind his podium, Jibber also screamed. As was his wont when he was terrified, which he was so much of the time, he expelled violently all the feces and urine in him. He vomited, to boot. Fortunately for his political career, the podium hid him, and the one television camera whose operator hadn’t fled was trained unwaveringly on the two separated pieces of Tom Moore.
Which meant that the camera caught the return of the two Secret Service men who had been standing on either side of Moore. They mounted the stage, treading very carefully. They looked at the body with distaste, looked around to make sure the place was empty, and then, very gingerly, picked up something from the stage floor that the camera and its operator couldn’t make out. They put whatever it was in a box, turned to leave, and noticed the camera and its red light and the man standing behind it.
The poor man should have fled with the crowd. As it was, so unhinged was he by the extra few minutes of watching Moore’s ghastly body, that he destroyed his camera and the tape it contained and then went to the nearest men’s room and drowned himself in a toilet.
That evening, the horrible end of the debate was the only topic on television. Over and over, grim-faced news anchors told America how President Jibber Longlegs had taken charge immediately, calming the crowd, comforting Moore’s widow, and assuring everyone within hearing that he would not rest until he had brought to justice the vile evildoers who had in so cowardly a manner struck down the former Vice President and brainiac loser. Jibber’s virile anger and manly sorrow were much remarked upon.
Later reports indicated that the villains were a gang of ancient Nazis who had been hiding out in Argentina since the end of World War Two, striving to perfect a death ray. Apparently they had managed to infiltrate the United States, bringing a working version of their hideous device with them. Their intended target, of course, had been the noble Jibber, not the debased Democrat, but they were, understandably, very old Nazis indeed, and their eyesight was terrible.
Jibber’s administration issued a stern warning to Argentina, telling the South American nation that if it didn’t hand over the Nazis and their frightful machine in twenty-four hours, along with detailed proof that no more such machines or Nazis were present in the country, then the United States would have to take unspecified action and could not be held responsible for the consequences.
Americans went to bed shocked at the loss of the man most of them had intended to vote for in the coming election but heartened and comforted and with renewed confidence in the strong, protective hand of their eloquent President.
Not reported was a diplomatic dispatch received in Washington later that night from Brussels explaining that the Argentine government had begun negotiations with the EU concerning a mutual defense treaty, and in light of that, Brussels strongly advised Washington not to issue any warnings or ultimatums to Buenos Aires. Or to anyone else south of the Rio Grande. Or, for that matter, anywhere else.
Washington’s response, also not reported publicly, was couched in the usual diplomatic circumlocutions. It could be accurately translated into conversational American English as, “Oh. Okay.”
The vertebrae the Democrats had recently bought and installed crumbled. Perhaps they had been obtained from an unreliable supplier.
The party passed over Moore’s running mate and chose for its new Presidential candidate an obscure governor who, it came to light during what was left of the campaign, had belonged to Students for a Democratic Society while in college and whose grandfather, in a nice piece of family generational balance, had been a bigshot in the Ku Klux Klan. His running mate was Moore’s original running mate — that same black, female, Jewish homosexual who had once been a homeless street person, had once burned the American flag, and favored abortion on demand. During the campaign, it was disclosed that she had also once been a man, but that seemed anticlimactic.
The election results resembled the outcome of a football game starring the Piketon Ponies on one side and any competent team on the other.
* * * * *
The following spring, only seven months after Jibber’s record-setting landslide reelection victory, and only four months after he had been inaugurated for his second term as President and Fancy had been inaugurated for her first term as Vice President, the Longlegs family went sailing together off the New England coast.
Daddy had always loved sailing. It made him feel manly and competent and not like a wimp at all. Grammy hated sailing, but she often went out with Daddy in order, so to speak, not to rock the boat. The three little brothers feared any body of water that was more than a foot across, but they hadn’t realized where they were being led until it was too late. Bip and Bop had been carried aboard in an alcoholic haze and handcuffed to their beds below deck, and they still had no idea that they were at sea. Newspapers had been spread in a thick layer over the floor of their cabin in preparation for their awakening.
Mr. Umbral was not aboard, e
ven though he had suggested the sailing trip. “A victory celebration,” he had told Daddy. “And it will promote family togetherness. You can get the three boys back into line. They’ve been acting somewhat too independent lately, don’t you think?”
Daddy did indeed think so. He nodded vigorously. “Water,” he said. “Fear. Threats. Keep those terrible twins in line, too. If they don’t, over they go. Maybe a good idea, anyway. Hate those girls.”
But now, far out upon the heaving blue-green breast of the mighty ocean, Daddy was concerned with something else.
Staring down at the wooden planks that formed the deck, Daddy frowned. “What the heck is that?” he said. “Doesn’t look right. Tiny, moving things. Eating the deck. Jibber, stop squeezing my hand so hard!”
But then Daddy realized what he was looking at and he understood the sudden yawning chasm at his feet. “Shit!” he shouted. “Mr. U.!”
The President of the United States shrieked in sudden fear, let go of his daddy’s hand, leaped away, and scampered to the top of the main mast, spewing feces and urine all the way up.
A giant meteorite crashed into the ocean, vaporizing zillions of gallons of seawater and the sailboat and the entire Longlegs family.
Or so the official account said.
Not a trace of the boat or the bodies of those onboard was ever found. It was as though they had been reduced to their individual molecules and then eaten, as one television newsreader put it imaginatively just before he too disappeared. The caskets at the state funeral were therefore only symbolic, even Jibber’s tiny one with the cowboy hat, boots, and toy pistols laid touchingly upon it. A horse was bought from a glue factory, humanely killed, and buried next to Jibber’s empty casket in Arlington National Cemetery to symbolize the deep-rooted essential cowboyness of the late President.
Fancy ascended to the presidency immediately.
Together, Zip Muchley and Shirley Weng paid a visit to Malcolm.
Malcolm gibbered like a terrified little simian, but in the end they persuaded him to take on his new assignment.
* * * * *
CHAPTER NINETEEN
O poor, gullible, forever earthbound reader! You ask me — me! a star-dwelling, high-income Merskeenian executive with much better things to do! — if it is true that we make our own reality and that we can be anything that we want to be if only we follow the appropriate set of rules and procedures, such as those outlined in the best-selling business self-help book by Malcolm Erskine. Oh, don’t be a twit. Of course not. Reality is reality. It’s real, it’s there, and if you’re smart, you’ll do your best to understand exactly what it is and then you’ll accept it. However, this much is true: Other people are gullible, and if you can dupe them into believing in the right silly, made-up version of reality, then you can end up being filthy rich and never having to work again. Just like my unscrupulous channeler, Malcolm Erskine.
— Lukas of Aldebaran, coming clean
Fifteen years later, on the day after Fancy’s state funeral, Malcolm began writing his autobiography.
No one had expected Fancy to last that long. Certainly no one had believed she would stay in power for that long.
China killed her, finally. Not the country, but dinnerware that arrived with a pattern different from the one she had ordered. She was infuriated. She was explaining to the portrait of Calvin Coolidge how justified her fury was when something burst in her head and she smiled pleasantly at Calvin and became forever as silent as he was reputed to have been.
She was buried in Washington, along with her husband. The memorial tomb had never been finished, and the foreign power in whose steadily expanding territory it was now located had no reason to spend any money on it, although it did briefly consider completing the thing so that it could serve as an offbeat tourist attraction.
Malcolm was now anticipating, without any great pleasure at the prospect, his sixtieth birthday.
He was overly aware of the body parts that no longer worked as well as they once had. He dwelt on this far too much. Lukas! he would often cry in his mind. Lukas of Aldebaran! Old buddy! Bring me the secret of immortality and eternal youth from your magical pharmacopoeia among the stars! Since Lukas was a fictive invention and telepathy was a dream, Malcolm was not surprised that he never received an answer, but in his secret heart he always hoped that some day he would.
“And not a second bestseller in all this time,” he grumbled. “Maybe because I never did finish Business Dangers from the Stars. Or maybe because in Sex, Sins, and Software, only the first chapter had any spice, because there’s no sex in software and I couldn’t dream up enough sins. You know, I thought at least all the computer programmers in the world would buy that one, which would at least have meant pretty good sales, but it turned out that all of them prefer to read science fiction, and I can’t seem to write that stuff any more. And then I thought my book of critical essays on popular novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Inferior Fiction, would be a hit, but I couldn’t even get it published.”
“Well, now,” his next-door neighbor and dearest male friend in all the world said in mild reproof, “some might say that having one smash hit bestseller and being Vice President of the United States and changing history were enough accomplishments for any one man’s lifetime.”
“Yeah, there is all of that,” Malcolm said, smiling a bit smugly. “Although the bestseller was cynical hack work, I was only V.P. for six months, and the change in history was not exactly for the better.”
“There were some good things about it,” Carol said, and now it was his turn to be smug.
Shortly after Fancy became President, the Rapture occurred. Actually, it was a rather small-scale version of the Rapture, limited to one man and experienced by no one else. That one man was Reverend Gregory. He was enraptured to some other plane of existence, and Carol was nominated by his dear friend Jimmy Earl as a fine replacement. You could say, as Carol once told Malcolm, that both Gregory and he were kicked upstairs, although in very different ways. As a result, Carol was the White House’s favorite preacher during the long years of Fancy’s ascendancy, thanks to his toadying television sermons from the pulpit of the National Cathedral about God’s approval of the administration.
The long years of that ascendancy had ingrained a lot of habits in everyone. Even though he knew that Fancy was definitely dead and gone, Carol looked over his shoulder and scanned the distance for observers before he said, “I’m sure that in your memoirs you’ll blow the lid off everything that happened. That’ll give you another bestseller.”
“I’m certainly not going to write my political memoirs,” Malcolm told him. “That’s an occupational disease of ex-government officials which just wastes a lot of paper. Besides, as I said, I was veep for only six months, and it was a long time ago. No interest in that. Maybe I’ll write a literary memoir instead. Tell the truth about my writing career.”
They broke off to make obligatory kitchey-coo sounds over Carol’s three-week-old grandchild. Carol’s daughter and son-in-law had just come over to proudly show the neighbor what they had produced.
When the smelly little creature was finally removed to have its diaper changed, Malcolm and Carol resumed their conversation.
“I’m more than fifteen years older than you,” Carol said, “and I’m too old for this grandfather shit. Anyway, I don’t know if you’re wise to expect people to rush out and buy a book telling them how you made fools of them. You might earn more resentment than sales.”
“This isn’t exactly your field of expertise, is it?” Malcolm said with open annoyance.
“What? Fooling people and taking their money and yet having them still love me for it? Are you kidding? Anyway, I bet you have a lot of good anecdotes about your political career that you could make a book out of instead.”
Malcolm smiled at some memories. “Yeah. A few.” Now he looked over his shoulder quickly before continuing, then he said in a low voice, “But I wouldn’t want to write ’em down. Too ma
ny of the people involved are still alive. Listen to this, Carol. First cabinet meeting after the big reshuffling and restructuring of the government. There I was, sitting at an immense conference table in the White House, wondering what the hell I was doing there...”
* * * * *
Hear, O star-dupe, O one of the uncountably many suckers of the galaxy, one of whom is born every minute on each world that bears self-styled intelligent life, hear what Malcolm Ur-Cynic told his dear friend, Carol Pabulum-Preacher.
There he was, sitting at an immense conference table in the White House, wondering what the hell he was doing there, when Fancy called the meeting to order. Responsibilities of all those present had been radically redefined by the new president by means of presidential decree. The Speaker of the House had informed her that she couldn’t do that without congressional approval, and some of her changes might possibly need a constitutional amendment, although he wasn’t sure about that and would have to consult with his staff, so she had him taken outside by the Secret Service and shot, after which she specified who was to be the next Speaker, and there was no more trouble. Certainly Malcolm had been frightened enough for all of Washington.
“Secretary of Defense!” Fancy called out. “What’s the latest on the Wishful Thinking Missile Defense System?”
“Please, Madam President,” the secretary said in a pained voice, “it’s the Prayer Shield. We changed the name, remember? Well, we’re not doing too badly. We’re running into some problems with the new software you mandated, the stuff that will provide real-time horoscopes for all of our officers as part of the fire-no-fire decisionmaking process, so we’re gonna need a few billion more dollars and maybe another ten years.”
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