“Speaking of getting something accomplished,” Whitmore grinned, showing her the front page of the Orange County Register, “I’ve been named one of the ten sexiest men in America! Finally, we’re getting somewhere on the real issues.” That broke the mood and both of them enjoyed a laugh as they began reading through the article.
They were interrupted by a young man who poked his head in the doorway. “Excuse me, Mr. President?”
“Alex, good morning,” he said to the staffer. “What is it?”
“Phone call, sir. It’s the secretary of defense with an emergency situation,” he reported nervously as Whitmore made his way to the breakfast room phone.
“What’s going on?” Whitmore asked. For the next two minutes, he listened, walking over to the window and peering outside. Whatever it was, Connie already knew from the expression on the chief’s face that it was serious. Serious enough to change the day’s whole schedule.
*
One of the amazing things about humanity is how often and how effortlessly we ignore miracles. The strangest, craziest, most sublime things happen around us all the time without anyone taking much notice.
One such miracle used to take place at Cliffside Park in New Jersey. For a few glorious moments every summer morning, as the sun began rising out of the Atlantic, great slabs of light sliced between the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan, mixing with the mist coming off the Hudson. It was a scene made famous on postcards and television commercials, but the men who gathered in the park every morning before dawn almost never gave the sight so much as a quick glance. They were mostly older gentlemen who had come to play chess on the long rows of stone tables near Cliffside Drive. For every man playing a game, there were three others standing about watching. In hushed murmuring voices, they exchanged gossip and news, announced the births of grandchildren and the deaths of longtime friends. Except for their sneakers and sweatshirts, they could have been the ancient Greeks conferring in the agora.
The largest group of these men were gathered loosely around two expert chess players, David and Julius. They seemed to be unlikely opponents. David was tall, gaunt, and intense, with a mop of curly black hair. Although he was in his late thirties, he played with the concentration of a child building a house of cards. His fingers smooshed his face into strange expressions and his long limbs coiled around one another at odd, uncomfortable looking angles. Completely focused on the game, he was totally unaware of looking like a human pretzel. He knew he needed to concentrate if he hoped to beat a wily opponent like Julius.
Julius, on the other hand, had only one way of sitting. At sixty-eight years old, he often said, his ass was too fat to squiggle around like David’s. Once he had plopped himself down, that’s how he stayed. His legs, stuck straight out, were barely long enough to rest his heels on the ground. His meticulously ironed slacks were jacked halfway up his calves, exposing the white socks he didn’t think anyone could see. Under his windbreaker, he wore one of the two dozen white shirts he got from his brother-in-law when he retired from the garment business five years ago: Hey, why not? They fit perfect! To complete his look, the old guy was working a half-smoked cigar around the side of his mouth.
These opponents had faced one another many times, usually drawing a sizable crowd. This morning’s match had begun with a flurry of standard moves until the older man, a speed player, began a blitzkrieg with his bishops. Since then, David had had to think about every move very carefully. Julius, always a showman, went to work on David psychologically, loud enough for everyone to hear. “How long are you gonna take? My social security will expire and you’ll still be sitting here.”
David pulled his fingers slowly across his face. Without looking up, he said, “I’m thinking.”
“So think already!”
Still thinking, David lifted his queen’s knight and moved it tentatively forward. The moment his fingers lifted off the piece, Julius responded like lightning, pushing a pawn forward to challenge. David glanced up for a moment, genuinely puzzled, before looking down to study his options.
“Again he’s thinking,” Julius announced, reaching into a carefully folded paper bag to retrieve a Styrofoam cup full of coffee.
David shot him a disappointed look. “Hey, where’s the travel mug I bought you?”
“In the sink, dirty from yesterday.”
“Do you have any idea how long those things take to decompose?” David reached across the table to take the cup, but Julius drew back, protecting his caffeinated treasure.
“Listen, Mr. Ecosystem, if you don’t move soon, I’ll start to decompose. Play the game.”
Disgruntled, David countered the challenging pawn with one of his own. Then Julius really gave him something to think about. Without hesitation, he slid his queen into the middle of the battle. “So,” the old man leaned in over the board, “if I am not mistaken, a certain someone left a message on your answering machine yesterday.” Julius sat back and took a sip of his coffee. David merely grunted. “Furthermore, I understand that this person is single after an unfortunate divorce, that she has no children, that she has an interesting career, that she’s educated and attractive. All good things.”
“You’re doing it again,” his opponent complained with a growl. At some point, Julius would invariably bring up something uncomfortable, some emotionally-charged issue that made it difficult to continue with the match. David was pretty sure there was no malicious intent, that the old guy was just worried about him, wanted to see him happy. Then again, maybe he was just trying to win at chess. He protected his bishop by advancing his king’s knight.
“So did you call her back I’m wondering,” Julius said, casually advancing another pawn.
“Look, I’m sure she’s a beautiful and sophisticated woman, but she invited me to go country line dancing. I can’t really see myself doing that, and besides, I’m convinced those tight cowboy jeans can do permanent damage to one’s reproductive organs.”
“What, so you can’t even call the poor girl back and spend five minutes on the phone? After she worked up the chutzpah to call you, you can’t just maybe be polite and call her back?”
“Dad, I’m not interested,” David said flatly. “Besides, I’m still a married man.” He held up the wedding ring on his finger to prove his point. He pulled one of his bishops back to safety.
Suddenly, Julius felt embarrassed by the presence of the crowd, the old-timers who were his friends and confidants. They knew the whole sad story of David’s broken marriage and his refusal, or inability, to let it go. He glanced around at them, hoping they’d take a hint and make themselves scarce. Not a chance. They were more interested in the conversation than in the game. As he usually did, Julius went ahead and said what was on his mind anyhow. “Son, I’m thankful you spend so much time with me. Family is important. But I’m only saying, it’s been what, four years? And you still haven’t signed the divorce papers?”
“Three years.”
“Three, four, ten, what difference? The point is, it’s time to move on with your life. I’m serious—this is not healthy what you’re doing.” As if to prove his point, Julius reached across the table and captured a knight with his queen.
“Healthy? Look who’s talking about healthy.” He pointed at the old man’s cigar and coffee. “We’re exposed to so many carcinogens in our environment and you make it worse by—” The frantic chirping of David’s pager interrupted him. He glanced down at the number display and saw that it was only Marty calling from the office for the third time that morning.
“Thai’s about six times they’ve called you. Are you trying to get yourself fired? Or maybe you’ve decided to get a real job.” David moved his bishop to take one of the pawns guarding Julius’s king.
“Checkmate,” he announced matter-of-factly. “See you tomorrow, Dad.” He untangled his limbs, hopped up, and planted a kiss on his father’s cheek, then grabbed his fifteen-speed racing bike.
“That’s not checkmate,” Julius roared,
“I can still take your… but then you can… oh.” He yelled across the park as David began to pedal away, “You could let an old man win once in a while, it wouldn’t kill you!” But secretly, Julius Levinson loved the fact that his son could swoop in whenever he felt like it and beat almost anyone in the park.
*
A rush hour jam session was underway. Grumbling across the George Washington Bridge, blaring bumper to bumper traffic mingled its noise with the honking and screeching of ten thousand hungry seagulls to produce an early morning orchestral cacophony over the Hudson, the whole mess pouring itself into Manhattan. David, on his bike, shot through the gridlock and hung a hard right onto Riverside Drive. Five minutes later, he turned onto a street full of old warehouses and coasted to a stop in front of an aging six-story brick building. Foot-high stainless steel letters anchored into the bricks spelled out the name of the site’s present occupant: COMPACT CABLE CORPORATION. Outside the front doors, a man with a picket sign was marching back and forth, protesting.
David dismounted and wheeled the bike over to the man. “Still planning to shut us down, huh?”
“You got that right, brother,” the man answered. King Solomon was a slight, hyperalert black man in his fifties. As usual, he was dressed up in a crisp suit and a bow tie. His sign read, “Unchain the Airways, Cable Companies have NO RIGHT to charge you.”
“Haven’t seen you for a couple of months. Everything all right?”
King looked both ways then leaned closer, conspiratorially, “Been at the library, doing research. I found a ton of good stuff for my show.” King had a half-hour slot on the public access channel where he went head-to-head with the giant communications conglomerates like AT&T. In addition, he’d been picketing around town for years, explaining his idiosyncratic theories, a mix of socialism and anarchy, to anyone who would listen. “Hey, Levinson, you got a minute?”
David pictured Marty stomping around the office in a ballistic frenzy over some minor technical glitch, pulling his hair out. “Sure, I got a minute.”
“Okay, the subject is phone calls, but it applies to the legalized extortion of the cable television companies as well, ’cause both move through satellites. Because you guys control these satellites, you can charge little guys like me outrageous prices to do things like watch a football game or make a call to my lady friend who lives in Amsterdam, right? Now the same thing was going on in England way back in the 1840s. The government was trying to regulate communication so they could make extra money. If somebody wanted to send a letter, they had to go to the post office and hand it to a clerk. The farther the letter was going, the more this clerk charged you. Long distance rates, see? The whole thing was so expensive and such a damn headache, nobody wrote letters. Then this one dude came along, I forget his name right now, who figured out all the work, all the labor, was done at the beginning and the end of the process, sorting out and then delivering the letters. All the costs along the way, the shipment, remained the same whether there was one letter or a hundred. So this guy goes to the king and says, ‘This is bullshit, baby. Let’s have one low price for all letters, wherever they’re going.’ The king said okay, and do you know what happened?”
“Everybody started writing letters?”
“Exactamundo, mon ami. All over Europe folks started expressing their feelings and communicating scientific ideas, and shazam! we had the Industrial Revolution. That’s why I’m out here every day. If y’all would quit monopolizing the satellites sent up there at taxpayers’ expense, I could be on the phone to my lady friend in Amsterdam and my show could be seen in China. The common people could have a renaissance, an information revolution. Whaddaya think?”
Somewhere in the middle of King’s speech, David’s pager had buzzed again. This was absurd, even for the eternally panicked Marty. He began to think something serious might be happening. “As usual, King, you’re convincing. Have you ever played on the World Wide Web, the Internet?”
He hadn’t. Didn’t own a computer. David told him where to find a public terminal and suggested that he check it out. It was the closest thing he knew to unrestricted communication. Then it was time to go into work and face Marty.
*
Inside the revolving doors was a completely different world. Compact Cable’s front lobby was a graceful, marble and mahogany environment with a ceiling three stories tall. A swank, low-slung reception desk stood in the middle of the room guarding the entrance. With his bike hoisted onto one shoulder, David strolled past the receptionist and into the main office space, a beehive of partitioned work areas with a huge bank of television monitors mounted to the southern wall. The minute he walked in, he knew something big was up. The room was much louder than usual, the activity more frantic. Before he could put down his bike, he was confronted by a one-man electrical storm. Marty Gilbert, a heavyset man with a lascivious goatee, blasted out of his office, waving his arms and shouting.
“What the hell is the point of having a beeper if you never turn the damn thing on?” Steaming mad, Marty stopped in the middle of the room waiting for an answer. He was armed with his two favorite weapons: a can of diet soda in one hand, a cordless phone in the other.
“It was turned on,” David explained matter-of-factly. “I was ignoring you.”
“You mean to tell me,” Marty screamed, “you got every one of those pages and you didn’t call in? Did it occur to you that maybe, just maybe, something critical was going on?”
David was used to Marty’s apoplectic, foot-stomping shit fits. He had one every couple of days and they usually lasted about ten minutes. The man lived in a perpetual state of high anxiety. He was constitutionally high-strung and had compounded his problem by taking on the incredibly stressful job of operations manager for one of the largest cable providers in the nation. His job was, in his words, “to be in charge of every little thing.” In a complex operation like Compact Cable there were a thousand little things that could go wrong, and enough of them did every day to keep Marty hopping from one crisis to another.
This morning’s run-in was a perfect example of why he hated David’s guts and loved him like a brother at the same time. Marty knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that David was the best chief engineer in the country. He was so overqualified for the job, so good at handling all the hypertechnical stuff, that Marty knew he’d never be able to replace him in a million years. David was his secret weapon, the ace-in-the-hole that kept him in front of the competition. Now that he had finally shown up, Marty knew it was only a matter of time before he could phone corporate headquarters with the good news that they were the first ones to restore service to their customers. But it drove him bonkers how flamboyantly casual David was about everything. If he didn’t return phone calls or answer his pager, Marty could huff and puff all he wanted, but there wasn’t much else he could do about it. The quirky technical wizard made his own hours and operated independently of Marty’s control.
“So what’s the big emergency?”
“Nobody can figure it out.” Marty calmed himself with a long gulp of soda. “Started this morning around four A.M. Every channel is making like it’s 1950. Picture’s all messed up. We’re getting static and this weird vertical roll problem. We’ve been down in the feed room all morning trying everything.”
David stashed his bike next to the vending machines in the employee kitchen and was about to head off for the feed room when Marty, expressing his frustration, slammed his empty soda can into the trash.
“Damn it, Marty, there’s a reason we have bins labeled ‘Recycle,’” David said loudly, turning back. The company’s recycling program had been instituted largely due to David’s insistence. He was a one man posse for the eco-police. More disturbing still, when he bent down to fish the can out, he found six more identical cans at the bottom of the bin. Appalled, he asked, “Who’s been throwing their aluminum cans in the garbage?”
“So sue me,” Marty hissed back. Then, before David could launch off into one of his save
the earth speeches, his boss took him by the arm and forcibly helped him down a short hallway and through a door marked TRANSMISSION FEED.
Inside were the mechanical guts of Compact Cable. Hundreds of flat steel boxes, signal modulators, were stacked in tall steel racks along the back wall. A long console with mixing and switching panels stretched the length of the room below several television monitors. Taped to the walls were technical charts showing satellite positions, vertical and horizontal transponder polarizations, the different commercial licenses within the megahertz bandwidth and an ancient poster of four hippies in San Francisco with the words “Better Living Through Chemicals” above their heads. And cable. Miles of coaxial cable, the backbone of the industry, snaked off the overhead shelves and ran everywhere underfoot. Like a thousand black asps writhing around an Egyptian tomb, the flexible cord connected every piece of machinery to all the others.
“Okay you guys, make room,” Marty squawked as they came in. “The Amazing Dr. Levinson has agreed to grace us with a demonstration of his skills.” Paying no attention, David walked over to the mixing board where a technician was fiddling with some knobs. The monitor above his head showed a transmission of the Today Show. Like Marty said, the picture was disintegrating into rolling vertical bars every few seconds.
“Looks like somebody’s scrambling our satellite feed,” David mumbled, thinking for a moment of King Solomon marching around outside.
“Definitely,” one of the two technicians told him. “We’re pretty sure it’s a satellite problem.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 3