A voice spoke to us through a small speaker inside the boat: “Remain seated, please. Permanecer sentados por favor.”
“Is this part of the ride?” I whispered to Alan.
“A malfunction, more likely,” he said.
A full minute passed with nothing happening. Finally, another humanoid robot appeared. It was a man in a dark suit, wearing sunglasses—a Secret Service agent, no doubt. He walked onto the stage with a heavy limp. His feet were fixed to brackets below the floor that we weren’t suppose to see. He leaned foreword and back with each step, like a drunken stage hand.
The agent approached the presidents, his finger pressed to one ear. “Mister Presidents,” he said, “our country is under attack!” Then he turned and walked off as clumsily as he had entered.
The robotic presidents didn’t move a solenoid or a relay, as if all their circuitry had burned out.
Suddenly, Nixon’s eyes blinked. His head turned to look at the others on stage. “We just gonna stand here?” he said.
“Hell, no!” said Roosevelt, now in motion.
Our boat slowly backed away from the stage. All the presidential heads turn toward us.
Lincoln reached down, picked up his stovepipe hat, and placed it back on his head. “Well, what are we waiting for?”
Then each robot grabbed his legs below the knee and yanked straight up. Bolts and fasteners that had secured them to the stage popped out. They hurried toward our boat and hopped into the empty seats behind us.
This was getting weird. Animatronic characters in theme park rides, that move and speak is one thing, but when they start following you around, it’s time to freak out a little.
“Man, it sure feels good to stretch your legs,” said Roosevelt.
“You trying to be cute?” I asked the robot. “You know the real Roosevelt was confined to a wheelchair during most of his presidency, don’t you?”
Lincoln reached over and slapped the back of Roosevelt’s head. “What’s the matter with you, Frank?” he said. Then Lincoln turned to me. “Sorry about that, ma’am. He’s always been that way. He was originally built to play Jefferson, but he was too much of a practical joker.”
“That’s not true!” argued Roosevelt. “Just ‘cause I put that mouse under your hat that one time . . .”
“Calm down, you guys!” said Nixon. “You’re gonna overheat.” Then he whispered in my ear, “It’s all true, of course. I’ve got it on audio tape.”
Alan kept quiet throughout this whole exchange. I think he was growing tired of all the silliness. I, on the other hand, found it stimulating.
Downstream, we passed through an opening in a stone wall, and emerged onto open waters. Suddenly, our forward motion stopped. Our propulsion was gone. Any underwater tracks we might have been anchored to gave us no direction. The little boat rocked as we drifted aimlessly.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” said Lincoln, “We’ve been known to rust in less humid conditions than this.”
“You’re not afraid, are you, Mr. Lincoln?” I asked.
Roosevelt stood up and clasped the lapels of his coat. “The only thing we have to fear, is fear—”
“Is fear itself,” interrupted Nixon. “We know!”
“Remain seated, please,” advised our invisible boat captain.
As Roosevelt sat down, Lincoln placed his hand on my shoulder. “No, ma’am, I’m not afraid. But I know what real fear is—like the sound of a cannon ball explosion at Gettysburg.”
“Or buzz-bombers flying over London,” added Roosevelt.
“Or a napalm drop in Viet Nam,” said Nixon.
Alan finally broke his silence and turned back to the presidents. “You think you know fear?” he said. “How about this: You’re going about your day—driving to work, walking the kids to school, shopping for dinner. You hear a sound overhead, and terror rattles your whole body. Death rains down from the sky, and there’s nowhere to escape from it. I’m talking about the innocent civilians, gentlemen, and the fear of being a casualty of a war that you had nothing to do with.”
Suddenly, a strong wind blew through my hair, and the little boat picked up speed. We were headed straight for a cave opening on a rocky shoreline.
After some hooting and howling, and locking elbows, we entered an enormous cavern. It was dark and dank, like an abandoned mine. Water droplets fell from the ceiling, one dabbing me on the nose. It was pretty spooky in there, but at least the water was calm.
We finally came to rest at a passenger loading dock, adjacent to a spacious area that had been chiseled out of solid rock. It looked like the inside of NORAD, the U.S. underground command center, from where missiles can be launched if we’re ever attacked by a hostile nation.
“All ashore!” said a monotone voice from our boat’s speaker. We all climbed out, the robot presidents clinking and clanking as they disembarked.
Dozens of control consoles faced a “Big Board” that covered an entire wall. It displayed video feeds of surveillance cameras from all of the major cities in the world: Paris, London, Baghdad, you name it. The chattering of teletype machines could be heard above the humming of electronic equipment. If this was a set from a movie, it was a cross between War Games and Dr. Strangelove.
Then I heard the faint sound of an explosion. Flickering lights lit up the cave wall behind the Big Board. I walked around the back and found a computer gaming console, running a video game named Retaliation.
I called to Alan, “This isn’t a missile defense bunker. It’s an arcade!”
The gamer would sit in front of a large, curved screen that showed video from the night-vision camera of a military drone in flight. The high-resolution images showed people scrambling for cover, while the player tried to nail them with computer-guided missiles. The effects were amazing! I had never seen simulated humans in a video game that looked so real.
I was so taken with the imagery that I hadn’t noticed that someone was seated at the controls. I expected to find a young gamer with eyes locked onto the brilliant screen, but it was Chester Fields, holding a joystick and grinning!
Chester launched another missile. The screen indicated that he had made a direct hit. I could feel the ground shake under my feet from the impact.
“Gotcha, you bastard!” yelled Chester.
The robot presidents were standing behind me, watching the display with awe. Roosevelt’s jaw nearly came unhinged again. “Man, if we only had one of those in Okinawa,” he said.
“It’s only a game,” said Nixon.
But game or not, what bothered me was that the objectives were not military targets, they were civilian areas: schools, city parks, shopping centers—not surprising, given the extreme violence in today’s video games.
“What’s the object of this thing, anyway?” I asked Chester.
“Terrorists!” he said. “They’re everywhere. See that school? There’s one holding the children hostage. That man in front of the movie theater, he’s got a bomb. Who knows where else those cowards might be hiding?” He launched another missile.
Boom!
People on the screen scattered as a parked car was blown up. “Oo! Just missed him,” grumbled Chester.
Alan showed absolutely no interest in the game, being more fascinated with the Big Board. “Come over here, Amy,” he said.
I stood in front of the giant, live video display.
Alan pointed up at it. “Look!”
I heard Chester launch another missile. But at the same time I heard it explode, a cloud of smoke rose from a building on one of the Big Board monitors.
“Omigod!” I said. “It’s not a game. It’s real!”
Alan and I dashed over to the gaming console. Insert coin to continue flashed on its screen.
“This is no game, is it?” Alan asked Chester.
“Who said it was?” Chester replied, walking over to a change machine. He inserted a dollar bill, and a single game token spilled into the change tray. The coin pulsed with a b
right, red light.
“Those are real people down there, aren’t they?” said Alan.
“I can’t help it if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Chester reached to insert the glowing coin to resume the game. Alan grabbed Chester’s wrist. “No more!” he demanded.
“Stand aside, hippie!” said Chester. “Our freedom is at stake.”
Alan wrestled Chester to the floor. “Our nation’s under attack, you idiot!” yelled Chester. “We have to retaliate!”
“Not at the cost of innocent lives,” said Alan.
“We can’t just do nothing!”
“We can negotiate.”
“Thousands will be killed before that happens!”
Suddenly, the game went dark. There behind the video screen, stood Mr. Lincoln with the power plug in his hand, the other robots standing behind him.
“Gentlemen,” said Lincoln. “After careful deliberation, we, the Wartime Presidents, have decided that neither of you are qualified to be Commander-in-Chief.”
Nixon stepped forward. “You, Mr. Fields. Your bloodthirsty disregard for human life is beyond reproach. And you, Mr. Freeberg, refuse to engage the enemy at the risk of civilian losses, even while your own countrymen are being obliterated.”
“Wartime decisions,” said Roosevelt, “must be made by a leader with both courage and compassion.”
“All of you had to make those decisions,” remarked Chester.
“Yes, we did,” said Lincoln, “but at enormous, personal cost.”
“100,000 civilians died when we firebombed Tokyo,” said Roosevelt. “Their blood can never be washed away.”
“Innocent Vietnamese died needlessly from war crimes,” said Nixon, “Their faces continue to haunt me.”
“Thousands of innocents died on my watch in the Civil War,” said Lincoln. “I grieve for them still. Could you live with that burden?”
Just then, a huge explosion sent shock waves through the cave, but this time it wasn’t from the video game. The sound of jets and helicopters roared over our heads. Rocks started falling from the cave ceiling. I dove under a control console. Alan crouched over me to deflect the falling debris.
“What’s happening?” I cried.
“The hunters have become the hunted,” said Alan.
“Shoe’s on the other foot now, isn’t it, Mr. Lincoln?” said Chester, hunkered under a metal office desk.
But the Lincoln robot did not answer. He made no attempt to escape the falling rock, neither did any of the other robots. Boulders fell squarely upon them. Their heads cracked open like eggshells, revealing their mechanical workings. Soon they were nothing more than a heap of twisted metal and wires.
A missile crashed through the ceiling and blasted our boat into slivers.
Then the face of Little George filled the entire Big Board. “How about that riddle?” he said.
“Can’t you see what’s happening?” yelled Alan. “I can’t think about that now.”
“Here’s your last clue:
The answer to the riddle will end war forever.”
But as Little George was about to sign off, the enormous screen exploded into a million pieces.
We were plunged into darkness, as the sounds of the attack raged on. “Stay down!” hollered Alan, still sheltering me with his body.
I covered my mouth with my hand as I coughed from all the dust in the air. But when I lowered my hand to the ground, I felt something that wasn’t there before. A dim light pierced the darkness, and I could just make out what I was feeling under me: orange shag carpeting! Alan and I were back on our bus.
The air became breathable, and the sounds of explosions faded completely away. Alan and I stood up and looked out the window to see a tornado heading away from us.
In a matter of moments, the bright sun and the blue sky had returned.
“That tornado must have just missed us,” I said.
“You might say we dodged a bullet today,” said Alan.
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Had we survived a missile attack at a theme park, or a natural phenomenon in Tornado Alley? Like everything else on this crazy trip, we couldn’t be absolutely sure what was real and what was bogus.
We quietly took our seats as Alan started the engine.
“I just figured it out!” blurted out Alan.
“Figured what out?”
“The answer to the riddle—a green vegetable that we all want for Christmas: Peas on Earth!”
“I think that’s supposed to be Peace.”
As Alan started to put the bus into gear, he hesitated, then reached for the ignition switch and turned off the engine. He stared down the road, deep in thought.
“Peace,” he said. “In my day we heard that word constantly—in song titles, in slogans, in everyday conversation. The Peace Symbol was on everything from hillsides to school book covers.”
Alan’s hippieness was showing, and I felt it was my duty to remind him that we weren’t in the 60s anymore, but I was moved by his sincerity. Maybe his generation had the right idea, just the wrong approach. From the first day I volunteered for this assignment, I had seen people taunted, mistreated, and abused. Of all the mean things we do to each other, I guess waging war is the meanest of them all.
I reached over to Alan and squeezed his hand. “Make peace, not war, Mr. President,” I said.
Alan looked at me with a melancholy grin, then started the engine again.
Chapter 11
The Date
The chauffeur held open the door to the shiny stretch-limo. Music from my favorite blues artist, Stevie Ray Vaughan, poured out from the back seat. “Ticker’s running,” said a voice from inside. As I leaned down to take a look, Peter handed me a bouquet of fragrant, yellow roses.
It was 7:30 in the evening, and the red lights on the bus video cameras were all out. Alan and Chester were in the hotel’s grand ballroom, going head-to-head in a ridiculous cooking segment for the show. The live event wouldn’t be over till 11:00, leaving me ample time to sneak out for a little fun with Peter.
I thought it best to keep my meetings with him a secret. Alan might misinterpret my feelings for Peter as an act of treason. I was fully aware that Alan was contractually responsible for my actions, but young love needs time to flourish, and I didn’t want to miss my chance for a meaningful relationship.
As I thanked the limo driver for holding the door, I tried getting a look at his face, but it was hidden under his driver’s cap. He grabbed the brim and tipped it as I climbed into the luxury vehicle.
“Your driver’s kind of shy, isn’t he?” I said to Peter.
“They’re paid for drivin’, not for high-fivin’,” he replied.
I stretched out my legs. “Lots of room in here. This must be costing you a bundle.”
“It’s my dad’s corporate limo. He told me I could use it in case of emergencies.”
“You call taking me on a date an emergency?”
“I had to rush you off to some fun before you collapsed from boredom.”
“So, what kind of fun do you have planned?”
“The old-fashioned kind. You like old movies and retro ‘50s stuff, right?”
“Yeah, so? You taking me to a malt shop or something?”
“Close. Miniature golf! An old-fashioned date for an old-fashioned girl.”
I leaned forward and looked through the glass that isolated us from the front seat. “Did you hear that, Mr. Driver? He thinks it’s 1955.” I couldn’t see the chauffeur’s reaction, the tinted glass being too dark.
7:45
Mini Golf Palace read the sign to the indoor golf course. I had always pictured these places as hangouts for nerds, but to my surprise, this one was hipper than I imagined it. Dazzling, disco lights whirled, while a deejay spun tunes from his perch in the center of the amusement complex.
Peter paid up while I signed in. We grabbed a pair of putters, and headed for the front nine.
Th
e first hole was a par-4: get your ball in the cup in four strokes, or face ridicule from your opponent. The obstacle was a 6-foot-tall windmill. All you had to do was knock your ball past the slowly spinning blades to the cup inside.
I gripped the handle of my putter firmly and swung. Being an excellent pool player, I banked the ball off a side wall. The ball traveled at just the right velocity, coming to rest, dead center to the cup.
Peter was a little dumbstruck at my accuracy. “We can still do the malt shop thing if you want,” he said.
“Nothing doing,” I said. “Your turn.”
Peter didn’t do quite as well as I did, but made it to the cup in four strokes. I made it in two! He thought he knew all about me, but no one told him that I had a competitive streak a mile long.
Next hole.
The challenge this time was to roll your ball up a long, red tongue, and into the mouth of a giant Devil face. Again, I dominated the sport. Not only did I knock my ball down the Devil’s throat in one stroke, I putted out on my next swing.
“Looks like luck is on your side, tonight,” said Peter, as he scored my two strokes to his five.
I rested my putter on my shoulder, and strutted passed him, like an arrogant baseball hero stepping up to the plate. “Luck has nothing to do with it,” I said.
It was only the second hole with sixteen more to go, but I could already see Peter’s poor showing starting to wear on him. I could easily have let him win to boost his male ego, but defeat wasn’t written into my DNA. Then it occurred to me that maybe he was letting me win to coax a little sympathy out of me. We would soon see.
8:20
The medieval castle featured a motorized drawbridge that went up and down—rising and falling over a water-filled moat.
Peter studied the path to the castle like a highway surveyor, bobbing and weaving, as if the slightest miscalculation would mean certain disaster. The fun of the evening was dwindling fast, so I decided to put a little playfulness back into it.
I raised my putter up into the air like a magic sword. “I charge thee, Sir Peter, to beat me in thy quest for yon castle.”
The Thumper Amendment Page 9