I skipped past the guest editorial, a topical poem written by Global Data Manager Gene McCarthy himself. Where he found the time to churn out all these poems while shepherding the daily affairs of billions of people around the planet, I had no idea. Everyone else, myself included, bright and ambitious as one might be, looked like a lazy underachiever next to our GDM.
Beyond the editorial, the first article was a seventy-fifth anniversary retrospective on President Hearst’s first term of office, 1901–1905. Even though the material was mostly familiar, it made for a lively, almost unbelievable story: the story of a personal transformation so intense that it had completely remade, first, one man’s life, and then the collective life of the whole world.
Few people recalled that William Randolph Hearst had been a money-grubbing, war-mongering, unscrupulous newspaper publisher in the year 1898. A less likely person to become a pacifist politician and reformer would be hard to imagine. But there was a key in the rusty heart of the man, a key that would soon be turned.
And that key was Hearst’s son.
In 1879, at age twenty-six, Hearst had been vacationing in England. There, through mutual friends, he met a poor but beautiful woman named Edith Nesbit, aged twenty-one. The American and the Englishwoman fell in love and married. The couple returned to America. The next year saw the birth of their son, George Randolph Hearst.
In 1898, spurred on by his father’s jingoist rhetoric, the teenaged boy enlisted in the Army and went off to Cuba to fight in the very conflict his father was so ardently promoting, the Spanish-American War.
And there young George Randolph Hearst died, most miserably, on the point of a bayonet and subsequent peritonitis.
The death of their son first shattered, then galvanized William and Edith. Recanting all his past beliefs, Hearst vowed on his son’s grave to use all his skills and resources to bring an end to armed conflict on the planet. A titanic task. But he would be aided immensely by Edith. Her hitherto undisclosed writing talents and keen political sensibilities were brought to their joint cause.
In early 1899, Hearst and Edith formed the US branch of the Fabian Society, based on the parent UK organization that Edith had ties to. Backed by his media empire, Hearst ran a feverish, spendthrift campaign for the Presidency of the United States under that banner, and indeed defeated both McKinley and Bryan.
And that’s when Hearst started changing the world—
My robot annunciator interrupted my downtime reading then. “Chum Moritz, you have a client in the reception room.”
I swung my feet off my desk, and checked my appearance in a mirror hanging on the back of the door to reception.
My blue T-shirt bearing the image of Krazy Kat and Ignatz with the legend “Hairy, man!” was relatively clean. A small cluster of pinback buttons on my chest displayed the logos or faces of Green Lantern, Frank Buck, Lil Abner, Les Paul, Freeman Dyson, Dash Hammett, Bunny Yeager, Jean Harlow (still gorgeous at age 64), and the Zulu Nation. The pockets of my khaki cargo shorts were stuffed with the tools of my trade. My high-top tennis shoes were fresh kicks.
There was nothing I could do about my perpetually unruly cowlick or thin hairy shanks, so out I went.
A pretty woman under thirty—roughly my own age, stood up as I entered. Her thick auburn hair crested at her shoulders and curled inward and upward, and her wide mouth was limned in that year’s hot colour, Sheena’s Tiger Blood. She wore a green short-sleeved cashmere top that echoed her green eyes, and a felted poodle skirt that featured a snarling Krypto. Black tights, ballet slippers. She looked like a page of Good Girl Art by Bergey come to life.
She extended her hand forthrightly, a sombre expression on her sweet face. “My name’s Polly Jean Hornbine, and I’m here because the police don’t believe someone murdered my father.”
Her grip was strong and honest. I got a good feeling from her, despite her unlikely introductory claim. “Let’s go into my office, Ms. Hornbine.”
“Call me PJ, please. That’s—that’s what Dad—”
And then she began to weep.
Putting my arm around her slim shoulders, I conducted her into my office, got her some tissues and a spaceman’s bulb of diet Moxie (I took a Nehi for myself out of the Stirling-engine fridge), and had her sit. After a minute or so, she had composed herself enough to tell me her story.
“My father is—was—Doctor Harold Hornbine. He was head of pediatric surgery at David H. Keller Memorial. Until he was murdered! The authorities all claim he died of natural causes—heart failure—but I know that’s just not true!”
“What leads you to believe his death was murder, PJ?”
“Dad had just undergone his annual physical, and his T-ray charts revealed he had the physiology of a man much younger. He followed the Macfadden-Kellog Regimen religiously. All his organs were in tip-top shape. There was no way his heart would just stop like it did, without some kind of fatal intervention.”
“An autopsy—”
“—showed nothing!”
This woman’s case was starting to sound more and more delusional. I tried to reason with her gently. “Even with current diagnostic technology, some cardiac conditions still go undetected. For instance, I was just reading—”
“No! Listen to me! I might have agreed with you, except for one thing. Just days before Dad died he confided in me that he had discovered a scandal at the hospital. Something in his department that had much more widespread implications. He claimed that the wrongdoing at Keller would implicate people all the way up to the GDM himself!”
“I find that hard to believe, PJ. In nearly thirty years, Global Data Management hasn’t experienced any scandal worse than the use of some public monies to buy a few first editions for the private libraries of the occasional greedy sub-manager. And even that was resolved with simple tensegrity counselling. No, the GDM is just too perfect a governmental system to harbour any major glitch—especially not something that would involve murder!”
PJ stood up determinedly, a certain savagery burning in her expression. I was reminded immediately of Samantha Eggar playing Clarrissa MacDougall in 1959’s Children of the Lens. I found my initial attraction to her redoubling. I hadn’t felt like this since I fell in love with Diana Rigg (playing opposite Peter Cushing) when I first saw her onscreen in Phantom Lady Versus the Red Skull when I was fifteen.
PJ’s voice was quavering but stern. “I can see that you’re not the man for this job, Max. I’ll be going now—”
I reached out to stop her. I couldn’t let her leave.
“No, wait, I’ll take the case. If only to put your mind at ease—”
“It’s not me I’m concerned about. I want you to find the people who killed my father!”
“If that’s where the trail leads, I promise I’ll run them down.”
A thought suddenly occurred to me. “How’s your mother figure in all this? Mrs. Hornbine. What’s she got to say about your father’s death?”
PJ softened. “Mom isn’t with us anymore. She died five years ago, on the way home from Venus Equilateral.”
I whistled. “Your Mom was Jenny Milano?”
PJ nodded.
Now I could see where PJ got her spunk.
Jenny Milano had managed to nurse the leaky reactor of her crippled spaceship, the GDM Big Otaku, for thousands of miles until she finally achieved Earth orbit and spared the planet from a deadly accidental nuclear strike. Today her ship currently circled the planet as a radioactive memorial to her courage and skills.
According to PJ, Dr. Hornbine hadn’t been conducting any independent research prior to his demise. And he didn’t see any private patients outside the clinical environment. Therefore, whatever scandal he had uncovered had to originate at David H. Keller Memorial itself. At first, I assumed that to learn anything I’d have to go undercover at the hospital. But how? I certainly couldn’t masquerade as a doctor. Even if I managed to get some kind of lowly orderly job, I’d hardly be in any position to poke around in
odd corners, or solicit information from leet personnel.
So I abandoned that instinctive first approach and decided to go in for a little social engineering.
I’d try to infiltrate one of Dr. Hornbine’s karasses. Maybe amongst those who shared his sinookas, I’d learn something he had let slip, a clue to whatever secret nasty stuff was going on at the hospital.
Assuming the beautiful PJ Hornbine wasn’t as loony as Daffy Duck.
Hopping onto the a-net, I quickly learned what constituted the Doc’s passions.
He had been a member of the Barbershop Harmony Society.
No way I could join that, since I could carry a tune about as well as Garfield.
The Doc had also belonged to the Toonerville Folks, a society dedicated to riding every municipal trolley line in North, Central and South America, a life-quest which few members actually managed to achieve, given the huge number of such lines. (The old joke about the kid who parlayed a single five-cent transfer for a ride from Halifax to Tierra del Fuego, arriving an old man, came readily to mind.)
But this karass mainly encouraged solitary activity, save for its annual national conventions. No good to me.
Pop Hornbine also collected antique Meccano sets.
Again, that wasn’t going to put me into social situations where I could pump people for dirt.
But at last I hit gold, like Flash discovering Earth-Two.
Harold Hornbine was also known as Balkpraetore, common footpad and strangler.
The Centropolis sept of the Children of Cimmeria called itself the Pigeons from Hell. That was Balkpraetore’s crowd. Every weekend they had a melee with other regional groups. These were the tight friends with whom Hornbine would have shared thoughts on what had been troubling him, even if he hadn’t ventured into full disclosure.
This group I could infiltrate. No reason I had to assume warrior guise. I could go as a bard or mage or tavern-keeper.
Today was Thursday. That gave me plenty of time to prepare.
So that sunny Saturday morning found me riding the Roger Lapin trolley line out to the Frank Reade Playing Fields, several hundred acres in the heart of Centropolis devoted to cosplay, recreations, re-enactments, live RPG and other pursuits of that nature. I was dressed like a priest who might have been Thulsa Doom’s wimpy mouse-worshipping cousin. I figured nobody would want to waste a sword-stroke on me. I didn’t stick out particularly amongst my fellow passengers, as half of them were attired in similar outfits. And besides, most were busy reading books or zines or pictonovels, or watching movies and cartoons on their pocket-solido sets.
After I boarded at the Dunsany Towers stop, a little nervous at carrying out this imposture, I dug out that issue of Global Heritage that I had been reading when PJ first showed up.
Once in the Oval Office, President Hearst quickly assembled an official cabinet—and a semi-secret cabal of assistants and advisors—who could help him carry out his radical disarmament and re-education program. The list leaned heavily towards scientists and reformers and what passed for media people in those days, deliberately excluding the tired old politicians. Hearst hired Havelock Ellis and Thomas Edison. Mrs. Frank Leslie and Nikola Tesla. Edward Stratemeyer and Margaret Sanger. Frank Munsey and Percival Lowell. Lee de Forest and even old rival Joseph Pulitzer.
(Cabinets during Hearst’s subsequent six terms as President would include a new generation of younger luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller, Huck Gernsback, Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Robert Goddard, B. F. Skinner, Thomas Merton, Vannevar Bush, David Ogilvy, Marshall McLuhan, Claude Shannon, Dorothy Day and A. A. Wyn. Service in the Hearst administration became a badge of honour, and produced a catalogue of America’s greatest names.)
These men and women set about dismantling the cultural foundations of belligerence, both domestic and international, substituting a philosophy of intellectual passions, encouraged by education and new laws.
And one of their prime weapons in this initially subliminal war was the same yellow journalism that had once fomented violence.
Specifically, the Funnypaper Boys.
Hearst wanted to reach the largest percentage of the population with his message of reform. But there was no radio then, no spy-rays or ansible-net or ether-vision or movies. Mass media as we know it today, in 1975, was rudimentary, save for zines and newspapers.
And most importantly, the newspaper comics.
The funny pages. Already immensely popular, comprehensible even by the nation’s many semi-literate citizens, able to deliver concealed subtextual messages behind entertaining facades.
Thus were born the Funnypaper Boys, artists who were really secret agents for Hearst’s program.
Outcault, Herriman, Dirks, McManus, McCay, King, Opper, Schultze, Fisher, Swinnerton, Kahle, Briggs, and a dozen others. They were motivated by Hearst’s grandiose humanistic dreams to create a Golden Age of activist art, full of humourous fantastical conceits.
No one could deny the power and influence of such other eventual Hearst allies as pulpzines and Hollywood. But the Funnypaper Boys were first, the Founding Fathers of a republic soon informally dubbed Geektopia. (“Geek” became the in-term for the fanatics who followed the Funnypaper Boys due to Winsor McCay’s association with carnival culture, where the word had a rather different meaning.) Their utopian artwork swept the nation—and the globe. American comics proved to be potent exports, with or without translation, and were adopted wholeheartedly by other cultures, carrying their reformist messages intact and sparking similar native movements.
(America’s oldest and staunchest ally, Britain, was the first to fully join the Hearst movement. The Fabians, Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Wells, Stapledon, Haldane, the many brilliant Huxleys, publisher Alfred Harmsworth, Edward Linley Sambourne and his fellow cartoonists at Punch— They soon had complete control of the reins of governmental power.)
Reprint books of newspaper strips began to appear in America. And then the original pictonovel was born. That’s when the tipping point was reached—
And my trolley had reached its destination as well, as the conductor announced over clanging bell.
I left my GH magazine behind on the seat and climbed down the stairs to join the costumed crowds surging into the Frank Reade Playing Fields.
Past fragrant food carts and knickknack booths and bookstalls, costume-repair tents and armouries, taverns and daycare corrals, I strolled, heading toward the fields assigned to the Children of Cimmeria. (My Mom’s business had a hand in running all this, of course.)
I decided to take a shortcut down a dusty path that angled across the vast acreage, and there I encountered a startling sight.
In a tiny lot mostly concealed by a tall untrimmed privet hedge, a few people were playing what I think was a game once called “football.” They wore shabby looking leather helmets and padding, obviously homemade. The object of their contention was a lopsided, ill-stuffed pigskin.
I chanced upon the game when it was temporarily suspended, and I spoke to one of the players.
“Are you guys seriously into this antique ‘sports’ stuff?”
The player made a typically Geekish noise indicative of derisive exasperation. “Of course not! This is a simulation of sports, not real sports! Frank Merriwell stuff. We’re just trying to recreate a vanished era like everyone else. But it gets harder and harder to find re-enactors. This sports stuff never really made much sense to begin with, even when it wasn’t dead media.”
I left the football players behind and soon arrived at the dusty turf allotted to the Conan recreators. I registered with the gamemasters and quickly inserted myself into the action.
For the next several hours I ministered in my priestly role to the dead and dying on the mock battlefield, liberally bestowing prayers and invocations I had learned off the a-net on their hauberked torsos and helmeted heads. For a big he-man guy, Conan’s creator Thomas Wolfe sure had a way with the frilly, jaw-wrenching poetry.
It was hot and sweaty work
, and I was grateful at last to hit the nearby grog tent for some shade and mead. While listening to a gal in a chainmail bikini sing some geeksongs about the joint adventures of Birdalone and the Grey Mouser, I spotted the Pigeons from Hell crowd, recognizable from their a-net profiles. One of them was Ted Harmon, an anesthesiologist compatriot of Hornbine. As he wasn’t engaged in conversation, I went up to him.
“Hey, Ted—I mean, Volacante. Neat ruckus. I saw you get in some wicked sword thrusts.”
Ted looked at me for a moment as if to say, Do I know you? But his weariness and the mead and my compliments and the congenial setting disarmed any suspicions.
“Thanks. Been practicing a lot.”
“I just wish old Balkpraetore could’ve been here to see your display of talent. Shame about his death.”
We clinked flagons in honour of Dr. Hornbine. Then Ted said, “Yeah, a damn shame. You know, when I first heard about him kicking it, I thought—”
“Thought what?”
“Oh, nothing…”
“C’mon, now you got me curious.”
Ted leaned in closer. “Well, he was just so nervous the last time I saw him. Something was obviously bothering him. It was almost as if he expected something bad to happen to him.”
“Oh, he was always like that.”
“Are you serious? You never saw Balkpraetore without a grin and a joke. It was only after he had that visit at the hospital—”
“Visit?”
“Yeah, from a drug rep. Guy named, uh, Greenstock. From MetamorPharma. I remember the rep’s name because it reminded me of the Green Man. The Green Man’s always been a minor passion of mine. You see, it all started with a Henry Treece novel when I was twelve—”
I cut Ted off in a practiced Geek manner. I couldn’t indulge him in a passion-rant now. “Queue it up. Back to Greenstock. What do you think he proposed? Something shady?”
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