STRANGE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OMNIBUS

by Benson Grayson

  The legislature of the state of Arizona, furious about the administration’s policy on immigration and border control, took the lead. It passed a resolution calling for the holding of a national convention to propose new amendments to the Constitution of the United States. Other states rushed to follow suit, and the required two-thirds total was quickly surpassed. The National Convention met in Chicago and seriously considered only one new amendment. As passed, this stated that “In addition to any native born citizen of the United States, an individual who has served two consecutive four-year terms as an elected president of a country holding a permanent seat on the United Nations Security council shall be eligible to be elected and to serve as President of the United States.”

  After its passage by the National Assembly, the proposed amendment went to the states for ratification. State legislatures vied with each other to have the honor of being the first to ratify. Maine, New York, Mississippi California and Hawaii all ratified it on the same day, with California and Hawaii alleging that they were unfairly treated because they were in Western time zones. Within a few months the required three-fourths of the states had ratified the new Twenty-Eighth Amendment, and it became a fundamental part of the American Constitution. The so-called “Putin Amendment,” was the first new amendment to be added since the Twenty-Seventh in 1992, which prevented Congress from increasing its own pay until after a new session begins..

  Unfortunately, ratification was completed before the Iowa Caucuses and the deadline for entering the New Hampshire primaries had passed. In Iowa, a plurality of delegates selected at the caucuses were individuals who pledged that if Putin ran, they would give him their support. In Iowa, Putin won both the Republic and Democratic Presidential primaries because of a landslide of write-in votes. His victories in every succeeding state primary led the Republican National Convention in August and the Democratic National Convention in September to each nominate Putin for President of the United States by acclamation. For his running mate, Putin surprised the public by announcing that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev would join him on the ticket. To a few timid objections that Medvedev was barred from the ticket because of his Russian birth, Putin answered that whatever technical problems that might exist were very minor in nature and would be handled by him administratively.

  With Putin running against himself as the candidate of both the Republican and Democratic Parties, the result was a foregone conclusion. The final electoral vote was almost evenly split, with Putin winning a slightly larger number of votes in the Electoral College as the Republican candidate than he did as the Democratic Candidate. As the date for Putin’s inauguration as the forty-fifth President of the United States, his support among all sectors of the public is the highest any new American President has ever enjoyed. The Defense Industry views him as a President who will, favor powerful and well-equipped armed forces and will support greatly increased American spending on defense. All elements of the business community are confident he will favor healthy profits by firms as long as they support his governmental policies and contribute to any projects he regards as important. The general public knows that under President Putin, opposition in Washington to proposals urged by the administration will unfailingly pass both houses of Congress. In short, America is looking forward to a period of peace and harmony in both the domestic and foreign arenas unknown in our history.

  ERSKINE’S LAW

  You may search where you will in any reference book and any library in the world for some mention of John Erskine or of Erskine’s Law. You will be unsuccessful. That is because John FitzJames Erskine and Erskine’s Law have been deliberately excised from human history. In effect, he now has never existed. He is buried in an unmarked grave. His birth certificate, death certificate, all government records relating to him have been destroyed or permanently misplaced.

  Erskine’s early life was perfectly normal. Born in a small Ohio city the only child of two parents who were school teachers, he received good grades in high school. Recognizing his potential, his parents managed to scrape together enough money to permit him to attend the local state university. There, he did so well majoring in economics that his professors arranged for him to receive a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago, and then regarded as one of the leading centers for advanced economic research.

  Receiving his doctoral degree, Erskine taught as an instructor at Michigan State for two years, then took a high-paying job at the prestigious Brooking Institution in Washington, D.C. It is there that he began the research that was to lead to his discovery of Erskine’s Law. When he found he missed teaching classes and the personal contact with students, he moved on to Harvard University, where he was named to a titled professorship.

  It was at Harvard that he completed his research and published his law in a small scholarly journal. A shy man, he was not seeking publicity, but rather hoped to arouse comment and criticism of his law from other economics professors. In his heart, he was appalled by the possible implications of his law had hoped that one of his contemporaries would be able to find flaws in it.

  In simple English, the law states that wealth is neither created nor destroyed. It thus might be considered a corollary of the law that matter cannot either be created or destroyed and no more likely to cause significant discord and controversy than the latter. For several months, Erskine’s article passed unnoticed. Then a professor at Stanford University published a critique of Erskine’s Law.

  . The criticism asserted that both the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the computer ushered in periods of rapid economic growth in which tremendous wealth was created. Given the opportunity to reply, Professor Erskine answered that, in fact, the apparent increase in wealth linked to those events actually represented a borrowing of wealth potential that had been untapped for centuries and was now being spent. The cost of this wealth represented a transfer of wealth to the generations benefitting from it from the future generations which would no longer have it available.

  Recognizing that his explanation would not be accepted by many, Erskine included in his response details of the mathematical formulas he had devised to support it. News of the academic debate spread and stories about it began to appear in the popular media. Erskine’s formulas were carefully analyzed and subjected to the most detailed computer analysis. The conclusions were horrifying. Erskine was correct! All of the beliefs and the programs stemming from them over the ages were not just flawed but totally wrong and useless.

  Once the ramifications of Erskine’s Law were recognized, there was widespread panic in government circles and the board rooms of corporations. The procedures and policies that had served as a guideline for society would have to be abandoned. Aid to the less advantaged, according to Erskine’s calculations, would not benefit society as a whole, merely represent a shift in wealth from those who had to those who did not. While this simple fact should have been readily apparent, it was normally disguised from public view. Now it became totally clear. So, too, were other government programs, such as Social Security and Medicare.

  Similar recalculations occurred in the commercial sector. Wages increases obviously represented a shift in wealth from stockholders to investors, management salaries and stock options a shift in wealth from both labor and investors to management. The confusion, chaos and discord rose to such a high level that the civilization was itself in peril. There was only one logical solution. Erskine and his law must no longer exist.

  The timely death of Professor Erskine almost immediately followed. He had been traveling on a regularly-scheduled commercial jet from Boston to a speaking engagement at the University of Chicago. The brief report of the incident appeared on in the back pages of the few newspapers that carried it. The story reported that when the plane encountered strong turbulence, one of the cabin doors had been forced open. In the disturbance caused in the passenger compartment one unlucky passenger, Professor Erskine, had been yanked out of his seat and been
projected out the door, despite the frantic efforts by a cabinet attendant to save him.

  At about the same time Professor Anne Howard, Erskine’s fiancée and a brilliant economist in her own right, suffered a nervous breakdown in which she suffered the delusion that she had known, studied under and then become engaged to a fictional colleague named John Erskine. This delusion defied all psychiatric attempts to cure her, resulting in her permanent confinement in the luxurious psychiatric institution used only by the nations rich and famous. She was allowed to pursue her academic research and furnished whatever she wished, all at government expense.

  As Erskine’s parents were dead and he had no other living relatives to mourne him, his existence effectively perished from human ken. New issues of the economics journal which had published Erskine’s Law and the subsequent commentary on it were furnished all libraries that had copies of them in their collections, and the originals destroyed. The archives of Harvard University, the Brookings Institution, the University of Chicago and Ohio State were all similarly corrected to eliminate and mention of Erskine. Not even the yearbooks from his high school escaped the purging.

  Since Erskine and his law had never existed, it was an easy matter for government and industry revert to their traditional practices. Welfare, Social Security, Medicare, stock options and wage increases were no more disputed than before. If Professor Erskine had been a real person, a wise observer might have learned one thing from this event. When truth becomes too uncomfortable to accept, the wisest course is to simply ignore it.

  SNAFU

  As Joshua Oates scrutinized the data from the giant super computer, he realized there could be no possible doubt. Everything in the world that could go wrong was going wrong. The weather was worsening year after year at an accelerating rate. Colder winters combined with warmer summers; the polar icecaps were melting, seismic activity and volcanic eruptions, from supposedly long extinct volcanoes, were causing not only property damage, but more often also loss of life. The life expectancy rates in the advanced nations were climbing, at the same time as the birth rate in the less developed nations soared, producing growing populations that could not be fed. Unemployment rates climbed; wages fell. In the Mid-West, mutant giant man-eating ants had emerged from the corn fields and forced the evacuation of all the inhabitants of Des Moines and several smaller towns.

  Oates was a conscientious scientist and read and reread the computer readout repeatedly. Each time, it was the same. He instructed the technicians to take the computer apart, and examine every component for a failed part. Then they reassembled the computer, and Oates ran through the data readout. The result was the same. Oates knew it was his responsibility to alert his superiors of the awful news. This, however, was not a simple matter.

  The giant super computer furnishing the data was the keystone of a top secret project by the NSA to collect, collate, and analyze all of the data in the world. The purpose was to provide policy options to the American President. The project was so highly classified that its existence or findings could never be disclosed. This obviously was a serious obstacle in the way of Oates’ informing anyone of his disturbing findings. Finally, after considerable thought, he put them down in a memo that he gave the highest possible security classification. Only one copy was made, and this was delivered by an armed courier, personally into the hands of the President’s Adviser for National Security Affairs.

  The Adviser took one look at the memo and was appalled. He realized that if word of the contents were ever linked to anyone, it would be clear that all of the administration’s policies, past, present, and future, were totally useless. He immediately burned the memo, and flushed the ashes down the toilet. As a precaution, he then destroyed his computer hard drive and issued instructions in the President’s name for Oates to be immediately escorted out of his office by armed guards, prevented from speaking to anyone, or taking anything with him, and was to be flown in a sealed plane to a distant island off Guam. There, in almost complete isolation, he was, to take up his new post as supervisor of the computer project dealing with Pacific fish movements. Needless to say, all of Oates’ files were destroyed without being read.

  Because the National Security Adviser neglected to order that the project be terminated, it continued, with one of Oates’ subordinates taking charge. He had just seated himself at the console of the giant super computer when the readout abruptly changed. Instead of producing data, the readout kept repeating over and over again the phrase “situation hopeless; a further compilation of data futile.” As the man at the console stared in awe, and the technicians assisting him dumbly watched, the computer gave itself the command to self-destruct. It began emitting clouds of acrid black smoke and then exploded, showering the room with debris and severely injuring many of those in the room.

  The destruction of the super computer was followed swiftly by the collapse of human civilization around the world. Power systems failed; transportation networks crumbled. Produce lay rotting in the fields while urban populations starved. The earth’s population was literally decimated, and then decimated again. One of the last survivors was Oates, who lived on comfortably for some time on his remote Pacific isle, subsisting on the fish specimens that had been collected as part of his project.

  With the demise of the human race, other species vied viciously to become the dominant life form on the planet. The competition was finally won by the genus rattus, known commonly as the rat. Key factors in the rat’s victory were its high level of intelligence, small size, which enabled it to subsist on a minimum of food and its ability to eat a wide variety of food stuffs. Those few humans who exist today, do so as house pets in rat households, where they are usually well treated. There are occasionally unconfirmed reports about isolated humans surviving in the wild, most often in the jungles of New Guinea.

  THE CAT’S MEOW

  Hope Treason had reached the age of forty-three still a spinster, despite the many amorous escapades she had engaged in as a young woman. Unfortunately, none of the men she had met had satisfied the high levels she had in her mind. They all lacked the necessary level of intelligence, sense of humor, pleasant personality and solid financial footing. As a result, she was now living alone in her little town house in the prestigious northwest part of our nation’s capital known as Georgetown, with her pet cat Rasputin as her only live-in companion. She had no close friends other than several of her ex-beaux, whose occasional companionship she continued to enjoy, even as they dated or married women with lower standards than Hopes’.

  Hope held a senior, rather well paid position in the administrative side of the State Department. This was not related at all to her extensive knowledge of international affairs or to her having earned a Ph.D. degree in Russian history from one of the Ivy League universities. Both her parents held professorial posts in international relations, and from early childhood she had wanted to follow in their footsteps.

  Her graduation from the university had unfortunately coincided with one of the temporary economic slumps that afflict the American economy, so that university teaching positions that year were difficult to obtain. As the weeks of unemployment turned into months, she began applying for virtually any job that seemed appropriate. When she went for a personal interview which was part of the State Department procedures for job applicants, she had absolutely no expectation of being hired. Her appearance at the interview was solely aimed at honing her performance for potential future interviews.

  Much to her surprise, Hope had been hired for the post. She now headed a unit of the Department providing technical support to one of the Department’s Bureaus. Her unit comprised some twenty-two employees of various grades, organized into four sections.

  Hope found the work both extremely boring and frustrating. She had little interest in the technical matters which she now had to supervise. Even worse, all of her staff was of very low competence, with no interest in improving their performance. They had been hired as a result of pressure on thei
r behalf from influential members of Congress or from powerful political donors and regarded their jobs as sinecures

  The low level of their performance was not in itself particularly important. Very little of the work demanded of her unit actually was necessary, mostly consisting of periodic reports on inventory levels that were never read by their recipients. Hope, however, was acutely aware of her employees’ failure to perform the requests laid down and so did them all herself, usually after one or more of her staff had turned in unacceptable responses.

  One Tuesday morning, after some three and a half frustrating years on the job, Hope was seated at her desk laboring away when she realized she had left at home a report she had been drafting there the previous evening. As it was almost lunch time, she got up, left her office and went down to her car in the State Department garage. She was senior enough to enjoy a reserved parking space, so she envisioned no problem in driving to her nearby house in Georgetown, retrieving the draft report, and returning to her office within the sixty minutes officially allotted for lunch. Hope did not take this step lightly. The State Department Executive Dining Room, to which Hope was granted access because of her rank, usually served stewed apples on Tuesdays, and it was a dish she especially enjoyed.

  The traffic that day was unusually heavy, and she was then obliged to park several blocks away from her house because the parking spaces along her street were occupied. By the time she reached her home, she was feeling sorry she had started on the trip. Climbing the front steps, Hope unlocked the door and stepped in. To her amazement she heard someone speaking. It was obviously coming from the second floor, from the smaller of the two bedrooms which she had turned into an office.