Puss in D.C. and Other Stories

by Pamela Sargent

  His first trip down Pennsylvania Avenue, three days after everyone had been evacuated from all the shrunken buildings, had been a sobering experience. The reduction of the F.B.I. Building had been almost as disturbing to see as the tiny Capitol. There had been talk of bringing out essential records, which would have restored them all to their normal size once they were carried outside the Peewee Zone, the appellation that had unfortunately adhered to the region of shrinkage. The problem was figuring out what was essential, since just about everything was considered essential by somebody in authority, and then finding places to store the whole shebang. In the meantime, F.B.I. agents could no longer access their files and computers, Senators and Representatives were cut off from the tiny records in their offices, the Supreme Court Justices could no longer peruse their now minute law volumes, and documents in the National Archives and at the Federal Trade Commission were unreadable to anyone over three inches in height.

  At least the Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian Institution, and other national treasures had escaped; he would not have been able to bear seeing the Washington Monument reduced to the size of a pencil. It was also their good fortune that the offices of the Internal Revenue Service, not far from the Zone, had not been affected. But to have so many sites of power reduced to the size of scattered toys had been a heavy blow. The Chief of Staff thought of his recent conversation with the Canadian Ambassador, whose embassy on Pennsylvania Avenue was one of the shrunken structures. “So now you know how we feel sometimes, eh?” the Ambassador had said in his usually bland voice.

  The phone on the desk behind him beeped. He turned to pick up the receiver. “The First Lady’s Chief of Staff is here,” his receptionist’s voice said.

  “Send her in.” The door opened; a tall and emaciated woman in a red suit strode inside and sat down in the worn leather chair on the other side of his desk. “How are things going over at Blair House?” he asked. The First Family was now in residence at the guest house across the street from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

  “About as well as you’d expect,” the First Lady’s Chief of Staff replied. “In other words, they totally suck. Everybody’s bitching. The First Lady still thinks that she and the President should have moved into the Vice-President’s residence.”

  “You know how the Vice-President felt about that.” Actually, it had been the Vice-President’s wife who had pitched a fit at that suggestion, but the Veep hadn’t looked overjoyed at the idea of sharing their quarters with the First Family, either. “The set-up we’ve got now is about the best we can do in the interim.”

  The interim, he thought; he was still imagining that the tiny buildings would somehow balloon to normal size. He wished that they’d appointed a real science advisor to the President’s staff instead of that Bible college biologist who had been put in to appease the more rabid of their constituents. Maybe they should put out some feelers to some of those strange institutes of nanotechnology that were popping up around the country. He didn’t know much about nanotechnology except that it had something to do with very tiny things.

  “I suppose you’re right,” the First Lady’s Chief of Staff murmured, “but after all the work we put in fixing up the White House—” She paused. “That’s what I’m here about. The First Lady is getting very concerned about the condition of the furnishings there.”

  The Chief of Staff scowled at his colleague. “What can possibly happen to them now?”

  “Tiny bits of dust. Tiny spiders weaving their webs. Teeny little moths, teeny little bacteria in the kitchens, eensy-weensy dust bunnies in the Lincoln Bedroom and the Oval Office and everywhere else—you name it.” She sighed. “We want to send in a cleaning crew.”

  The Chief of Staff was suddenly wary. “We can’t,” he managed to say.

  “Come on, we already know that people can shrink going into the Zone and expand on their way out. Just shrink ’em in and grow ’em out.”

  He wondered how she had found that out. The Secret Service had sent some agents into the F.B.I. Building and both buildings of the National Gallery of Art under cover of night, making sure that they were unobserved by anyone except a few guards, and they had gone inside and emerged again with no apparent ill effects. “Who told you that?” he asked, vowing silently to punish the leaker. It occurred to him then that, if they could ever find a way to control the shrinking process, tiny little buildings might make for very effective and easily guarded prisons. That would also settle the hash of any whistle-blowers who crept in to expose abuses in the system.

  “Let’s just say I have my sources, and this place leaks like a sieve.” The First Lady’s factotum leaned forward. “So whaddya say?”

  “It’s too risky. Maybe the next time somebody’ll go in and stay tiny when they come out. Or maybe they’ll suddenly blow up when they’re inside and mess up the whole damned place.”

  “You don’t have any reason to think that’ll happen.”

  “I don’t have any reason to think that it won’t.” He was silent for a bit. “Wait until we’ve run a few more tests.”

  His counterpart leaned back. “Okay, okay.” She let out her breath. “But don’t take too long. You have no idea how messy things can get when you haven’t cleaned in a while.”

  She was worse than his mother.

  * * * *

  By cherry blossom time, it was clear that people could go into the shrunken artifacts and come out again, shrinking and then expanding, with no apparent problems. The Metro under the Zone was running again; as long as passengers boarded and exited the trains at stops outside the Zone, it didn’t much matter if they shrank in the interim, and nobody noticed much difference during the ride anyway. By Memorial Day weekend, tourists were returning to visit all of the famous sites, including the cute little Capitol and diminutive White House, although no visitors were allowed inside while skeleton staffs of agents, law clerks, and Congressional aides scanned and photographed the most essential of the small documents inside the Zone and emailed copies to the larger world outside; wireless Internet access was apparently unaffected by the differences in scale.

  Which was all very well, the Senator from Montana thought, but having to put up with a shithole of an office in the Ford House Office Building instead of her nicely appointed and roomy space inside the Hart Building was really getting on her nerves. That all of the Congresspeople were even more crowded in the offices over at the O’Neill House Office Building, since they had conceded one of their two remaining unshrunken buildings to the Senate, did nothing to assuage her annoyance.

  One of her aides sat in a corner, pecking away at a laptop; another aide was pouring himself a cup of instant coffee at the counter near the microwave. “Pour me a cup of joe, too,” the Senator said. The young man poured, stirred, and set the cup on her desk with a flourish.

  The Senator looked around resentfully at her crowded domain. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” she added. “Got a good mind to announce I’m not running again and that I’m resigning from public service and hauling ass back to Butte.”

  “I thought you hated Butte,” the young woman with the laptop said.

  The Senator had made her remark about Butte only for rhetorical purposes, because it sounded better than saying that she was thinking of resigning and then getting into the lobbying racket. Fortunately, K Street lay well outside the Peewee Zone. “At least I’ll have enough space to turn around in back home,” the Senator replied. Using “home” as a synonym for “Montana” was another rhetorical flourish; she had been living quite contentedly in her house in Virginia’s much tamer horse country for over a decade. “Look, the fact of the matter is that the rest of my staff inside Hart has a lot more room right now than we do.”

  “They should be done with copying and emailing everything we need pretty soon, Senator,” the male aide said.

  That was the problem, the Senator t
hought, gazing at the pillars of printouts still standing on her desk for lack of enough filing cabinets. They would finish retrieving everything she really had to have within a week or so, and then she would have the impossible task of finding space for those staffers here. “Somebody should do something,” she muttered.

  The female aide looked up from her laptop. “Why don’t you introduce a resolution?” she asked.

  “A resolution about what?”

  “Resolved, that the Senate will return to its offices and chambers by Election Day in order to more effectively continue to serve the American people. I mean, if everybody’s staff can go in and out and get bigger and smaller as needed, there’s, like, no reason why the whole Senate can’t do the same. And if you introduce a resolution, somebody in the House will probably introduce one, and then maybe everything can finally get back to normal.”

  There was some logic to that, but something inside her resisted the suggestion. “It’s absurd,” the Senator said. “We can’t have little tiny Senators and Congresspeople debating and passing laws inside the Zone and having them signed by an itsy bitsy President. Who the hell would take us seriously?”

  “What difference would it make?” the male aide asked. “There’s nothing in the Constitution or the rules of the Senate that says you have to be a certain size to hold hearings and pass laws. Besides, everything would still look the same on TV.”

  Her aides had a point. The Senator finished her coffee, then said, “Maybe you could start drafting that resolution, but let’s change the date. We’ll be back to business as usual by the Fourth of July.”

  * * * *

  Shrinkage had done nothing to improve the slovenly ambiance of the White House Press Room. The same crappy chairs were still there, the White House Correspondent noticed as he filed in behind some other newsfolk, the same outdated equipment, the same wires all over the floor, even the same coffee and food stains on the tabletops, but the shabby familiarity of it all was oddly reassuring. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, even though postponed to a later date than usual, had been a reassuring affair this year as well, drawing nearly the same number of Hollywood celebrities as in the past. It had helped that the comedian providing the entertainment had been warned not to make any jokes about size or smallness unless he wanted everybody in the press corps and all of their famous friends to boycott his show permanently and also bring some pressure to bear on his bosses. The guy had been relying far too much on such humor for his program anyway.

  The Correspondent, whose name everyone tended to forget more and more often since his network’s ratings had tanked, had not been a happy camper when the head of the news department had told him in no uncertain terms that if getting tiny was what was needed to cover the President, then tiny was what he would get unless he preferred to lose his job. It wasn’t as if he would have to stay tiny, except when he was inside the White House or doing standups outside of it; the network had nixed any footage that showed any of their newspeople towering over either the official residence or the Capitol. And there was no danger that anybody going into the Zone wouldn’t be able to get big again outside of it. The President had been living inside the White House for over a month now, and he was still able to resume his six feet of height for trips to Camp David.

  There were also the Correspondent’s home in Georgetown, his Manhattan digs, his son’s tuition at William and Mary, and the financial arrangements with his first and second ex-wives to consider. Anyway, he told himself, everything was pretty much photo ops these days. As long as everything looked a certain way, people in front of their TVs would come away with the impression that nothing essential had changed. Eventually most of them might forget that any shrinkage at all had occurred.

  He sat down in his usual seat in the front row as the camera crews finished setting up and his colleagues settled in around him. What mattered was acting as though everything was still the same, and now that he was here, it was easier to feel that way, especially since there were no windows in the Press Room to reveal the size of everything outside these tiny walls. They were all in this together, he and the President and everybody else in Washington who mattered; he had to look at it that way.

  The President’s Press Secretary entered the room, smiling as he approached the podium, then resumed his usual bland expression. “I have a few announcements to make,” he began, “and then you can ask your questions.”

  The Correspondent already knew what those announcements would include. His sources had told him that, in addition to the usual bromides about staying the newest course in the Middle East, the growing strength of the economy as indicated by the latest statistics, and more insistence that the investigation of the shrinkage incident was continuing to go forward, the President’s staff had decided to have the British Prime Minister visit the President at his summer home instead of at the White House. Apparently even a close ally would not shrink in order to schmooze.

  He settled back in his rickety chair; his spirits lifted just a bit. In spite of everything, the useless ritual of the White House daily briefing was comforting.

  * * * *

  A small Congressional investigative committee, both in numbers and size, met to inquire into what had happened.

  “Any ideas about who did this to us?” the Chairman asked. The eyes of his four fellow Senators and their five House colleagues remained devoid of inspirational sparks.

  Moments passed. “A terrorist,” the Senator from Maryland said at last. “Some joker of a tech-terrorist.” He slapped the table with one meaty hand.

  “Right,” muttered the Congresswoman from Florida. “He’s, like, riding around in some, uh, conveyance, picking on national symbols to shrink—er, diminish.”

  “Sure, like Captain Nemo sinking warships with his submarine.” The Chairman snorted. “If you ask me, maybe we’d better bring in some of those nano-whatever-they-are scientists. They might be able to tell us something.”

  “Or else they might be behind all of this,” the Senator from Maryland muttered. “There’s some mighty suspicious characters among scientists. A lot of them aren’t even Americans.”

  “In terms of environmental impact,” the Senator from Kentucky intoned, “we might leave a far less large footprint on the Earth if we remained at a smaller level. Perhaps we should be asking the EPA to address the environmental effects of shrinkage.”

  “We’re here to figure out how to find the guys that did this,” the Senator from Maryland said, “not to ride your hobbyhorse.”

  “We couldn’t get shrunk any smaller, could we?” the Chairman asked. “I mean, we’re already so small.” He sighed. “We have to get to the bottom of this.” He did not say that he suspected what the others were already thinking, that this might be only the beginning. There were a whole lot of places that the joker, or jokers, might be planning to reduce.

  * * * *

  Hector wasn’t on his usual bench, and neither were the Homeless Lobbyist and the Homeless Philosopher. The benches where they usually sat were now behind a protective cordon of soldiers, and there were rumors that more of the park would be declared out-of-bounds. At this rate, he and the Lobbyist and the Philosopher would soon be living in the middle of H Street.

  But Hector understood. The Secret Service had to think about security, and there had been stories going around about people who were angry enough over various issues to want to rush the place and stomp on everything, the White House and the Capitol. In a way, he couldn’t really blame them for feeling that way, but if they had talked to the Homeless Philosopher, they would have realized that such hopes were futile.

  “See, it’s this way,” the Philosopher had explained to him during a recent seminar and consultation over a pint of rye. “You got this here Zone where everything shrinks, so even if people got past them soldiers and the cops and the Secret Service and everybody else, they’d get small as soon as they got
inside the Zone. So how the hell could they stomp anything? They’d just be milling around on the lawn until they got arrested. Jeez, they couldn’t even lob a few big rocks at the place, ’cause the rocks’d shrink on their way in.”

  “So why are they beefing up security so much?” Hector had asked. “If there’s anything to your goddamn premise, they could just station a few guys here and there and save some bucks. It’s not like the deficit’s gonna shrink.”

  “Oh, there’s probably good reasons for all the protection,” the Philosopher had replied. “You still gotta worry about terrorists. Teeny tiny terrorists could still do a hell of a lot of damage, ’specially if they’re aiming at tiny targets. But if you ask me, I think they beefed up security out of habit. It’s what they do, whatever the reason—anything happens, get more security, it doesn’t matter what. More of the same. Problem solved. Makes ’em feel important.” That had seemed like fallacious reasoning to Hector, but he had been too far in the bag by then to offer a convincing refutation.

  The Homeless Philosopher suddenly stood up. Even in the evening light, Hector could see that the Homeless Lobbyist was trying to restrain the other man. The Philosopher knocked the Lobbyist’s arms away, staggered toward the line of soldiers, then drew himself up. “Little bastards!” he yelled. “Little pricks! You’re bigger than they are! Shit, I’m bigger than they are! So why don’t you act like it?”

  The soldiers were taking aim. Shut your piehole, Hector wanted to shout, but fear constricted his throat.

  “Little bastards!” The Philosopher was not about to quit. “You were always small, goddamn it! You were always little guys. You didn’t shrink, you diminished yourselves! You fucking did it to yourselves!”

  Several soldiers were moving rapidly toward the Philosopher, but at least they had lowered their rifles. “You diminished yourselves!” the Philosopher cried as the soldiers dragged him away. In their boots and gear, they seemed so much bigger than his friend.