Business as Usual, During Altercations

by Joseph H. Delaney

Illustration by Darryl Elliott

John Sumpter carefully scraped the last fleck of lather from his face, turned on the tap and rinsed his razor. When it sparkled he risked a glance into the mirror and studied the face he saw there, wondering if someday in the far future it might appear on a stamp or a coin.

He had been president for four whole days now. Not one instant of the time had been peaceful and nothing had happened in that interval to make him think that would ever change. Never an optimist where politics was concerned he had not expected the job to be a bed of roses, but in his wildest dreams he had never imagined things would get this bad.

The day before yesterday the stock market had crashed, plunging a thousand points in a single day. Most of that was recovered in the next session, thanks mostly to intervention by foreign investors looking for bargains, but the part that scared Sumpter was that the dip produced greater losses than the entire equity market had been worth in 1929.

The conditions which had caused this were still operating, of course, and were almost certain to generate more fluctuations. Something had to be done about this right away. That was why the first item on today’s agenda was a breakfast meeting with the secretary of the treasury and the chairman of federal reserve board. He wasn’t looking forward to that.

Sumpter took a towel and carefully wiped his face, splashed on stinging after-shave lotion, and walked into the bedroom where his wife still slumbered. There he donned the shirt and tie she had selected for him the night before, slid into his jacket and tiptoed out of the room.

When he entered the dining room all conversation abruptly ceased. Coffee cups clinked down into waiting saucers as the others greeted him. He took his seat at the head of the table and an ancient steward whose name he had not yet learned poured a cup of coffee for him.

For a minute or two, while dishes were passed to him and he made his selection there was relative silence, but then, with these chores out of the way, and the waiters having melted back into the woodwork, the working part of the meeting began.

“We’ll get a breather on the market situation, Mr. President,” Sam Baribeau was saying. The secretary of the treasury was a career man, held over from the last administration because his ideas, while not popular with Sumpter’s predecessor, were practical and orthodox. “We’re getting good support from the European central banks, and there’s a lot of cash moving in from the oil producing countries. These people have to support the dollar to protect what they already have invested. But,” he added grimly, “things won’t get any better until we do something about the drug deficit.”

All the faces at the table dropped at that suggestion. This was the factor that had swept Sumpter’s splinter party into power in the first place. The public had finally realized that the dollar drain across the southern border made the trade deficit with Japan look puny, and was, in fact, the major reason why every American company with the ability to do so was going multinational.

There were so many expatriate dollars floating around outside the national borders that if they were to suddenly reenter the domestic economy they would create untold havoc. The dollar was stretched to its limits worldwide. It had been forced to cover the economies of countries like Peru and Bolivia, where it had driven the local currencies off the street.

The dollar was being used to do things against the national interests of the United States. Outsiders were gaining control over it, manipulating it. That was a critical part of the problem Baribeau had just broached.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Walter Holloway’s message was just as grim. He lowered his coffee cup and added, “We can’t keep interest rates artificially low forever, Mr. President. If they start going up it’ll pull a lot of that cash in. Inflation will rise again. The process will feed on itself and pretty soon there won’t be anything we can do to stop it. We have to act now.”

“What I’d really appreciate from you guys,” Sumpter replied glumly, “is some good news. Surely we can do something?”

Baribeau and Holloway looked at one another, then as if by silent agreement, Baribeau became the spokesman. “Basically, we have two alternatives, Mr. President. Both of them are bad. The first one is to repudiate the expatriate dollars outright. The primary effect of that would be the immediate collapse of most of the economies of South and Central America, including Mexico’s. There will be substantial ripple effects in other economies, mainly those of the Pacific Rim, because you never can only do one thing. In the worst scenario there might be worldwide depression.

“It’s way too late to avoid any of this completely. The best we can do is stretch these effects out some so they’ll just produce misery instead of catastrophe. The way we do that is to quietly redesign and reissue the currency. Then we can start an exchange program and we’ll be better able to control what comes back in.”

“I like that a little better than your first suggestion. How long would this take?”

“We could be ready in a month, Mr. President,” Baribeau replied. “We’ve had the design changes in the works for some time anyhow. For treasury it just means moving up the schedule. Walt would be in a better position to comment than me.”

Holloway obliged. “Domestic exchange will be no problem, Mr. President. We can go as soon as we’re stocked. There’ll be a little more paperwork for the banks, of course, and they’ll grumble, but the IRS should have a real picnic.”

“It’ll be a nasty surprise for the bad guys,” Sumpter chuckled.

“Only the small timers, Mr. President. Within hours after you order it every important crook on Earth will know the details of the switch, and that’s a conservative estimate.”

Sumpter’s jaw went slack. The other two gazed at him in frank disbelief at his naivete. He made it worse by asking, “How?”

It was a moment or two before embarrassment forced Baribeau to attempt an answer. Even then, his effort to do it diplomatically was almost ruined. “When it comes to understanding how government works, Mr. President, you’re at a disadvantage. Most of our presidents have been lawyers. Those that weren’t lawyers were career politicians, or at least experienced in the cut-throat world of big business, big military, or some other well organized discipline. You’re the first scientist that ever made it, and scientists don’t do very well as herd animals.

“In science, it’s the cream that rises to the top. In politics it’s the scum. To be a successful politician you have to be good at four things: lying, cheating, stealing, and conniving. Scientists have too much faith in the rules to make really good liars, too much fear of exposure to make good cheaters, too little opportunity to steal to get good at it, and they’re too individualistic to be successful at conniving.

“Of the four, conniving with the bureaucrats is the most important, because it’s the bureaucrats, not the politicians, who really run things. Nobody elects them, nobody can outlast them, and getting one fired is like pulling the back teeth out of an elephant.

“You asked how they’ll know about the switch. They’ll know because some bureaucrat will tell them. The bad guys own more crooked bureaucrats than they do crooked politicians, Mr. President. Bureaucrats are a better investment because they’re around longer, have more power and don’t have to account to anybody.” At this point, Baribeau took pity on Sumpter and let up a little. “But we’ll still hurt the big boys some, Mr. President.”

“Good,” Sumpter replied, “because I think we ought to go ahead and issue the new money. If we get the right kind of cooperation from our allies maybe we can at least cripple the drug interests for a while.”

Both Baribeau and Holloway nodded in assent. Neither had expected him to turn it down. It was the only reasonable course, and talking it out as they had was only a formality.

“OK,” Sumpter continued. “Then go to it.”

Two weeks passed. Sumpter, though he knew he would never be comfortable in the role, had nevertheless superficially adapted to the trappings of the presidency. With no substantial formal representation in congress, his administration was more dependent on diplomacy than any that went before it.

He had started out with pretty good relations, although pundits told him that was normal, the so-called “Presidential Honeymoon.” It took a while for political factions to size each other up and make adjustments before they began slitting each other’s throats.

Subsequent events soon convinced Sumpter his honeymoon would be a short one. He knew his plans to alter the currency were responsible. Congress had been neither consulted nor notified of this. Its consent wasn’t required. Still, just as he had been warned they would, rumors of what he planned to do began circulating the very day he made the decision and had since proliferated.

He had another breakfast meeting with Baribeau and Holloway to talk about this, and got an explanation that disturbed him.

Sam was a comfortable guy to talk to, very philosophical, very knowledgeable. He was one of those rare people who enjoyed observing cause and effect and who were inordinately good at it. His kind usually gravitated toward scientific pursuits, and this too Sumpter found reassuring.

“You have to understand how things work in the legislature, Mr. President,” Baribeau told him. “These guys need big money just to get elected. Some of them spend a hundred times more than their official salaries and allowances will ever gain them. They get this money anyplace they can, any way they can, and society pays the price.

“Greed drives the machine, not ego, like they want people to think. It’s a whole lot easier and a lot less risky to get rich in politics than in business. Being in congress, or any public office, for that matter, is like having a license to steal. Everybody does it so they don’t dare tell on each other, and because they control the system getting caught rarely means getting punished.

“That, Mr. President, is why your popularity is slipping up on the Hill. The situation down in the border states has been a regular money pump for a whole generation of crooked politicians, especially in Texas, which has the longest stretch of border. They know you’re about to try choking that off and they don’t like it.”

“I don’t care whether they like it, can they do anything to stop us from switching?”

“If they could they would have done it before now. No, Mr. President, you’re an independent branch of the government, protected by the separation of powers clause in the constitution just like they are. The regulation of the currency is an executive function. They can’t interfere.” He paused contemplatively.

“But,” Baribeau continued, “life will be miserable from now on. Since they can’t make you do what they want they’ll spend the rest of your term trying to make you wish you had. Your legislative agenda is now just so much scrap paper. Any bill you send them will need absolutely overwhelming public support just to get on the agenda.”

There was a moment of silence, then Sumpter asked, “Tell me, Sam, do you think we’re doing the right thing?” His tone was grave.

“If I didn’t I wouldn’t be aboard, Mr. President. Right now this country’s on the same road to ruin that Rome took. Getting off is going to be a chore, but in the end our people will benefit more from this than from anything any other president in this century has done. You’re our first real populist president, the first one in a long time who has a chance to be a really great one. That’s the reason I stayed on with you. Stick to your guns.”

Sumpter did, but a week later he found out the country was at war.

The declaration came in by e-mail, unsigned, untraceable, through the Internet. In any other administration the White House staff would have tossed it into the circular file and forgotten it. Sumpter’s people didn’t. Moments after receipt the chief of staff plunked a copy down on his desk.

Sumpter picked it up and read the short message aloud: “Stop the switch, Egghead, or else!”

“I brought it to you because it sounds like a threat, Mr. President. What’s it mean—the switch?”

“Leave it, Mary, I’ll handle it myself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep this quiet, Mary. Take personal charge of anything else like this that comes in. Notify me right away.”

She nodded, turned, and left.

Sumpter called Baribeau right away. He could have turned the matter over to the Secret Service agent in charge of White House Security but he didn’t want anything getting lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. He would keep things on the cabinet level.

Sam already knew. “I was just about to call you, I got one, too,” he explained. “Mine has some strange numbers on it, and a time—Greenwich Mean Time—solar time in Greenwich, England, which is where Earth’s day officially starts. It says to watch the sky.”

“What are the numbers?”

“Thirty-eight-forty N., seventy-seven W.”

“Map coordinates, the latitude and longitude of Washington.”

“Of course! And the time works out to—let me see—10:35 p.m. Eastern Standard.”

“What do you think it means?”

“It’s obviously some kind of threat. It could be a crank, looking for excitement, stirring up what he can, or it could be serious. We can’t afford to ignore it. I’m going to have to tighten up your security, Mr. President.”

There came a knock on Sumpter’s office door. An instant later his secretary appeared, waving a piece of paper. Sumpter motioned her to come in, took the note, read it, then dismissed her. “Something else is up, Sam. My press secretary is waiting outside. The note says he needs to see me right away. Stay on the line while I talk to him, OK?”

Sumpter switched to the intercom. “Send Frank Marsh in.” He punched another button, and put the phone on speaker.

A moment later the door opened and the press secretary waddled in. He, too, had papers in his hand.

“These came out of my fax just a minute ago, Mr. President.”

Sumpter took them, recognized both, then handed them back to Marsh. “Who’d you get these from?”

“Kirby, over at the Post. He called me, too, but I didn’t take it. I wanted to report first. What’s it all about, Mr. President?”

“It appears that we are, as one of my predecessors put it, ‘in deep doo-doo,’ Frank. Sit down. Baribeau s on the line. Did you get all that, Sam?”

“Every word.”

“Obviously, whoever’s behind this threat is trying to start a panic. What do you suggest we do about it?”

“For the meantime, I think we ought to play dumb. If we go public about the switch we create a media event—just what they want.”

“We don’t really know anything, anyhow,” Marsh added.

Baribeau quickly agreed. “He’s right, Mr. President. This is what we should tell the press, that we’re taking it seriously but we don’t have enough information to make a judgment, and we’d appreciate their forbearance while we try to find out what all this means.”

“All right. Frank,” he pointed at the door, “Go!”

Marsh was off in a flash, but Baribeau, who could not see this, was confused.

“What was that, Mr. President?”

Sumpter turned off the speaker and answered. “I thought it best that Marsh got back to the Post before they went public.”

“Good idea. Meanwhile, since the note seems to imply there’ll be an aerial display of some kind I’d suggest we include the secretary of defense in any briefing. It’s not impossible that some nut’s gotten hold of a missile or something.”

Those words were chilling. Sumpter hadn’t been scared before. Now he was. The thought of a warhead slamming into the White House curdled his blood. Even in the quietest times more than a hundred people worked inside. Some of them were certain to be hurt, maybe killed. “I want the secret service to clear out as many non-essential people as it can.”

“We’ll take care of that, Mr. President. Everything will be fine. If they mean what they say we’ve got almost twelve hours to get ready.”

“That’s assuming,” Sumpter answered, “that whatever they’re planning happens tonight. It might not. Their note’s not dated.”

“Somehow, I think it’s going to be tonight, Mr. President. The fact that it involves the switch means an early deadline. I think you ought to watch on TV, though, from the bunker.”

“I’ll think about it. Now, you’d better get to work. Keep in touch, Sam.”

“Yes, sir.”

The White House bunker was comparatively roomy and quite comfortable. Built during the Cold War to serve as an emergency command post, it was designed to survive anything short of a direct hit by a thermonuclear warhead. It had been kept in a ready condition even after that generation-long crisis had ended, and its communication gear was state-of-the-art. Down here, Sumpter actually had a better view of the sky than he would have had from the rooftop. The best toys the military owned were in operation, including some that easily penetrated the light overcast.

Sumpter actually found himself becoming more relaxed as the appointed time approached. The scientist in him had had most of the day to adjust, to ponder the obstacles an assailant would have in mounting such an attack. He was half convinced that this was a hoax.

But he became even more puzzled when, as the onscreen countdown reached zero, a tiny pip of light flared only briefly. In proportion, it looked like a photographer’s flashbulb going off. It was far less impressive than the average meteor. It would have gone unnoticed had they not been watching for it.

But a murmur arose from the military people who stood behind him at their instruments, and he knew that he was merely misinterpreting what he had seen.

“What was that?” He asked the nearest of them.

“A chemical explosion, probably TNT, judging by the spectra,” the man answered.

“Where?”

“In Low Earth Orbit, directly overhead.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, sir. Not yet. But it implies access to far greater technical assets than a simple assassin would have. As a matter of fact, it implies complicity of a major spatial power. The motion of the debris cloud suggests that whatever this was it was, in a polar orbit. That alone takes it out of the amateur class.”

“I agree.” Sumpter was now far more impressed with his unknown enemy. He was a physicist, not a rocket expert, still, he could now rule out most of countries that had only marginal spatial capability. China, Japan, France, Russia, and possibly India could have done this easily, but none of those countries had a good reason to block the switch, and in fact, should all benefit from the switch.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Sumpter looked away from the screen and turned toward the voice. It was Colonel Carl Brinker, his Pentagon liaison.

“Sir, there’s been another message. You might want to look at it in your office.”

Sumpter rose, and followed Colonel Brinker. Inside his office a sergeant waited with a fax in his hand.

Sumpter took it, read it, and gasped. “What you have just seen was the explosion of 200 kilograms of TNT. This was only a part of the payload our satellite carried. Unless you immediately cancel all plans to alter the US currency another charge will be detonated. It will be larger. It will scatter hundreds of thousands of steel fragments into near space. These will spread out in a globular configuration to surround the Earth. Collisions would destroy all existing orbiting facilities within a few days, and all near-Earth space will become permanently unusable unless you meet our terms.

“Our satellite is equipped with defensive devices. If you attack it or attempt to approach it these will activate automatically. You will be given additional instructions in a few days.”

The message was unsigned.

“Your orders, Mr. President?”

“Stand by. I’ll get back to you. Meanwhile, find out as much as you can about this—but do it safely. Whoever is behind this is right. If we lose the use of near-Earth space we are back in the Stone Age. Tell the guys to be careful, Colonel.”

“Yes, sir.”

It had not been a good night for sleeping. Knowing that he might be needed awake and alert on a moment’s notice, Sumpter declined the White House physician’s offer of a sedative. Consequently, when he finally rose after hours of tossing and turning, Sumpter had slept almost none of this time.

His first act after rising was to contact the duty officer and arrange a briefing. His call was routed to Colonel Brinker.

“Yes, sir. We’ve made a little progress, although it lengthened our list of suspects. Cheyenne Mountain has located the launch data, of course. It was an ordinary commercial launch, nothing suspicious about it at all, so there was no background check on the customer. NORAD just issued it a pre-launch catalog number as requested, watched it go up and logged it onto the tracking system. That was three days ago.”

“Who?”

“Francospatiale, from the Chad facility.”

“The French! Wouldn’t you know!”

Colonel Brinker didn’t comment.

“Have you told State?”

“Yes, sir. They’re on the horn with the French foreign minister now. He’s promised they’ll try to find out who’s behind it.”

“They’re going to try?!”

“Sir, it seems French law is a little vague about stuff like this, and Francospatiale is a private enterprise.”

“There’s a treaty covering killer satellites, Colonel. Even I know about that. France is a signatory.”

“We’ve reminded them, sir.”

“Good. What else do you know about this thing?”

“It’s big enough so it could be carrying a large warhead, sir, but I’m afraid we haven’t found out much else. We’re monitoring it for R/F emissions but so far there haven’t been any. Chances are that even if we can intercept transmissions they won’t help us identify the people who put it up. Our best chance for that is diplomatic pressure on France. I’m sure they know more than they’re telling us.”

“Keep on it, Colonel. Report directly to me if you learn anything more.”

“Yes, sir.” The colonel left, followed by his sergeant.

Sumpter almost wished he had stayed in the bunker with Colonel Brinker, whose unit would remain there for the duration of the emergency. Topside, he had to face the real world, and the real world had become exceedingly ugly.

“It’s a nightmare, Mr. President,” Marsh grumbled. “The reporters are all over us, demanding interviews. If you turn on your TV that explosion will be on every channel. They show it over and over again. Some of them have enhanced it. Others have added graphics. Every channel’s got its ‘expert,’ shooting his mouth off about how serious this could be. It’s a feeding frenzy, welfare for impoverished professors. I’ll bet you know at least half of them.”

“More like two-thirds, Frank. Scientific controversy brings all kinds of people out of the woodwork.”

“This is exactly what we don’t need, Mr. President, the people are so used to getting their minds washed out by the box that they treat catastrophe like entertainment.”

“They may be in for a real shock, Frank. If the satellites go they’ll lose a big piece of that. You know, it seems to me that we ought to be taking some polls, getting a sample of public reaction.”

“There are some in the works, Mr. President, but no definitive results yet. The only place where an effect really jumps out at you is in the markets. Baribeau and Holloway are having kittens, and I don’t blame them. World investment in spatial facilities amounts to trillions of dollars. A threat to that menaces human civilization itself. This is as serious as a nuclear war.”

This brought a raised eyebrow from the president.

Marsh felt constrained to elaborate. “It started in the Far East and Europe, naturally, since their exchanges have been open longest. Telecommunications shares dropped dramatically as soon as the markets opened, but the extra business this crisis generated caused a rally and they’ve stabilized for the time being, although they are lower.

“From there it spread into commodities. Baribeau says these are highly sensitive to climatic conditions, and naturally, if anything happens to inhibit our ability to forecast weather, production will go down. The commodities markets feed on shortage, you see. Now it’s beginning to dawn on investors that they could get hurt badly in enterprises that space technology formerly made secure.”

“I was afraid of that. That’ll cause big problems for countries with marginal economies, and those are the same countries that have caused a lot of our problems with drugs.”

“Is there anything you especially want me to watch, Mr. President?”

“Yes, Frank, there is. I want you to watch congress. I know we’ve got a lot of enemies over there. I suspect some of them are in bed with the bunch who did this. I expect these will be the leaders of an appeasement movement and I don’t want defeatism to get a toehold on the public’s mind. That could be disastrous.”

“I understand. I’ll keep on top of it, Mr. President.” Marsh turned and walked out of the room.

That left Sumpter alone with his thoughts for a moment. He had learned to cherish such times since taking office. In this job, with all the bright people he had available to advise him, it would have been very easy to surrender to the temptation to let them make the decisions. He resolved that would never happen in his administration.

Sumpter saw the economic consequences as long-term problems. The acute effects would be very transitory if a way were found to eliminate the threat. More immediately vexing were the political implications. Uncle Sam had long been the world’s scapegoat, getting blamed for every adversity simply because he was the biggest kid on the block.

He knew it would happen in this case too, the superman syndrome would eventually infect the rest of the world. We’ll be blamed because they think we can fix it, he thought. They ’ll resent us if we don’t.

Sumpter gave a little shiver. As the nation’s leader he should not empathize, but as an individual he could hardly help himself. People envied superior ability or intellect but nobody genuinely loved a superman. The very existence of such superiority relegated all others to inferiority, and the human ego was not very good at handling things like that.

History was full of examples where societies had turned on such individuals for no other reason than that their intellects embarrassed their neighbors. Sumpter often wondered where the world would be today if Socrates had not been murdered, if da Vinci’s studies could have been shared instead of kept secret, if Galileo had been allowed to publish what he knew.

The rudeness of the intercom buzzer shattered this brief moment of tranquillity. Sumpter answered, learned the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was on the line. He pushed the button that was blinking.

Admiral Richard Vogel was a man of few words, and those he used he didn’t mince. “It’s happened,” he announced. “We’ve got our first revolution out of this and it’s right on our doorstep.”

“Mexico?!”

“Yes, sir. It’s pretty well coordinated too. Three different spots. Guerrero, between Taxco and Acapulco, Baja California Sur, and of course, in Chiapas. All the usual trouble spots, places we’ve been watching for quite a while. We think this is a mere preliminary, sir. None of these areas is what you could call strategic. They’re all a long way from anywhere so this could very well be just a diversion. Logically, the main effort should be a drive up the gulf coast by conventional forces.”

Sumpter knew what he meant by “conventional forces.” They were a legacy from the last administration, whose chickens were now coming home to roost. His predecessor’s saber rattling, intended to intimidate the Castro regime, had alarmed it instead, and it had had better sense than to stay bottled up on an island.

Its response to that increasingly bellicose behavior had been to abandon indefensible Cuba, where it had been relatively harmless, and flee to Southern Mexico, where there was a budding revolution to hijack.

The Cubans had had no difficulty whatsoever in subverting the Mexican military, which would cut its own throat for money, and looked the other way while huge quantities of arms were smuggled in. After that the Mexican government couldn’t stop them by itself, and the US military, chilled by its recollection of Viet Nam, opposed intervention.

Until now, maybe, Sumpter thought. Aloud, he asked, “what are the joint chiefs recommending?”

“Caution, Mr. President. We believe it would be a grave mistake to intervene, not only because the current government is sure to fall whatever we might do but because we might need our forces elsewhere, perhaps in the Middle East.

“But,” he hastened to add, “it would be extremely unwise not to close the border. We can do that with organized reserves and National Guard units. Also, we think it might be helpful to show the flag offshore, since there is a carrier task force stationed in the Gulf anyhow.”

“Then do it.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, may we have a written order?”

Cagey! Sumpter thought, but he’s right to cover himself. He’s one of the bright ones, and he knows he may be making history. He doesn’t want himself, or the country, to wind up on the unpopular side of the war. “It’ll come through your fax within the hour, Admiral.”

“Thank you, Mr. President. We’ll keep you advised.”

Sumpter then made a call himself, to the director of the CIA. He wanted a briefing on this revolution. If there was an obvious drug connection he wanted to know about it. If the timing had been mere coincidence he wanted to know that too.

Satellite launches were expensive, and even the drug cartel would have had to strain a little to finance one. Looting the national treasury was second nature to Latin leaders and Castro had left his native country flat broke, so there was a better than even chance he had collaborated and that he had contributed funds. It would be a cheap way to bloody the Yankee nose and punish the United States for frustrating his imperial ambitions.

But the CIA disappointed Sumpter. It didn’t agree. It didn’t share Sumpter’s hunch.

Sumpter’s suspicions were aroused. He was keenly aware that spooks were strange creatures, who had strange notions about what was important and what wasn’t, and who not infrequently pursued goals of their own. If there was anyplace where treachery and intrigue could be expected it was with the clandestine services. Sumpter did not exclude the possibility that dirty money had turned some of the top people, as it had so many others in government. In the past, the agency was known to have collaborated with drug dealers in Southeast Asia as well as in South America.

The experience drove him to a decision to trust none of the civilian organizations. Sam’s sage admonition about bureaucrats and dirty money had been driven home.

The military intelligence people were much more regimented, and therefore more capable of controlling leaks. Nobody was allowed to know more than he had to so a great many more people would have to talk before anything useful to the enemy could get away from them.

Since he was commander-in-chief and the present crisis threatened national security he could eliminate most interference from congress. Admiral Vogel and the chiefs of staff seemed to be more conscious of their constitutional obligations than anybody Sumpter knew in the congress.

There would be accusations of censorship, of course, but the alternative, to let the enemy in on strategic plans, was unthinkable. He would not follow the course that had toppled Czarist Russia and made the twentieth century a time of continuous ideological warfare.

As it happened Sumpter was not the only one entertaining such notions. Later on that afternoon he got his first comprehensive report from the State Department. August Powers, his secretary of state, was a capable and conscientious man, but he was not a career diplomat and was somewhat less than thrilled with diplomatic practices.

“They’re giving me the runaround, Mr. President,” he announced. He sat on the very edge of his chair, pawing through his briefcase for his bundle of correspondence with the French foreign minister. “I’m convinced they know a lot more than they’re telling us.”

“And just what have they told us so far, Augie?”

Powers had finally extricated the documents he wanted. He glanced furtively through the pack, then replied. “The funds came through Switzerland. No big surprise there.” He handed the president a couple of the papers from his stack, then continued.

“Nothing remarkable about the satellite package either. It was supposed to be an ordinary communications rig, assembled by a Russian Company established by former employees of the Soviet space administration. All these people are experts and all are well respected. The French explanation for what was in the package is that while top company leadership was honest they had some employees on the take, and somebody substituted a different payload than the specs showed. They claim all that Francospatiale’s people did was mount it on the launch vehicle.

“The instrumentation was mostly Japanese. I’ve talked to their foreign minister. He confirms what the French say, that it was just business as usual; standard components ordered off the shelf from respectable companies. As far as they could tell there was nothing unusual about the order, not even any custom-made devices. The French think there were other former Soviet people involved in the fabrication of the detonating devices we saw demonstrated.”

“What you’re telling me is that they don’t know any more than we do?”

“No, Mr. President, I’m telling you they’re holding back. I don’t know why, but I do get the impression that this is highly embarrassing to them and they’d like to get out of it without our help.”

“I can understand that. What I don’t like to contemplate is unilateral action. This is a global problem. The solution should also be global.”

“All the other European governments are cooperating, Mr. President. So are the Chinese, for once.”

“I hope that lasts. I expect dissension when we get those instructions’ the terrorists promised us.”

“Me too. But we can’t back down, can we?”

“No chance. One alternative is as bad as the other—for everybody, not just us. If they set that thing off we go back to old fashioned technology, which means economic ruin. If we give in to blackmail then the US is no longer the superpower, they are. On the other hand we can’t let them destroy our economy either, and that’s the alternative. Our economy is civilization’s engine. Our money is the global standard. If it Ms, we fall, and mankind itself falls with us. No, Augie, there has to be another way.”

“I hope so, Mr. President. I’ll keep at it. So will the rest of your people, you know that?”

“It’s because I know that I still have hope. Keep me informed, Augie.”

“Yes, sir.”

Three days had passed since Sumpter’s discussion with the admiral. They had been action filled. Mexico had fragmented. Half a dozen regional revolutions had sprung up while its central government cowered in Mexico City awaiting an onslaught that hadn’t come and most thought never would, now that the old regime was doomed. The revolution had decapitated the snake. The body was their prize, so they simply ignored the helpless head, leaving it to rot away. A new capital was being set up in Monterey, long the country’s prime industrial and manufacturing center.

The US border was now garrisoned by troops from units drawn largely from the interior, and a strip of land fifty miles wide was under martial law. Military police units, not the corrupt Border Patrol, regulated traffic between the two countries. Civilian authorities, both federal and state, were now powerless.

The flow of drugs overland dwindled from a torrent to a trickle. In Occupied Texas, the Big Bend, through which 70 percent of everything America snorted, smoked, or shot up had once come in, political dissidents who had for years on end been second class citizens in their own country were turning over tons of information to the military. A few local politicians resigned. So did several US district judges and half a dozen federal prosecutors. But most just fled. It was like a horde of cockroaches running from the light.

Sumpter was beginning to feel very good about this part of it. The crisis had not only brought the country together on the issue, it had provided a legitimate excuse to take long overdue action. “If this is all I accomplish in my presidency,” he remarked to Baribeau, “I will have justified my own existence.”

Then the dam broke. The “instructions” arrived, again by an ordinary fax. Again, distribution had been wide, obviously so that terror would more easily spread. It demanded first, that all the new currency and all the plates for making it be publicly destroyed, and second, that the US Treasury redeem for gold, without question and upon demand, all expatriate money brought into the country.

President Sumpter took one look at the fax and said, “No.” He didn’t even bother to hold a press conference. Instead, Marsh issued a press release in which he quoted the president’s response—“Given the choice of death on our feet or life on our knees, this country will fight.”

The general public took it much better than the moneyed interests did. While the man on the street was aware that bad things would happen to him if the bomb went off he understood these same things would happen if it didn’t. Either way he lost, so he wanted the bad guys to lose right along with him.

The bankers and industrialists saw things quite differently. A howl went up from them, that congress joined in, and which was reinforced by similar groups in other countries. All the people who stood to lose big, and soon, were opting for appeasement.

Congress went into emergency session to consider impeaching Sumpter. But congress, designed as a deliberative body, deliberated. It could not agree with itself, thus the procedure began to drag out. Congressional leaders carefully leaked their not so subtle hints to the media, suggesting that but for their efforts to reach a “fair and just resolution of the differences,” the button would already have been pushed.

Sumpter and his allies had a different theory to explain this forbearance. “Threats are ineffective when the victim has nothing to lose. We haven’t. We can’t fall off the floor.”

The man on the street agreed. So, apparently, did the bombers. The situation languished in stalemate. Nobody blinked, but nobody moved either.

The trouble with stalemates was that none ever had or ever could last forever.

Within Sumpter’s cabinet the voice of caution struggled with the voice of action. “In the long run this posture is: dangerous in itself, Mr. President,” Sam admonished. “Uncertainty is debilitating to business. As long as that thing is up there nobody will invest in anything that loss of spatial capability might affect. The enemy can win a long war, and we can’t.”

He turned his gaze to the other cabinet members at the meeting, noted the nodding heads and added, “we’ve got to eliminate the threat once and for all, otherwise depression is inevitable and imminent. As Augie is here to tell you, Mr. President, there are plans underway to upstage us.” He turned to the secretary of state.

The secretary made his grim announcement. “Our military attache in Paris forwarded a note, delivered to him this morning. Officially, the purpose is to warn us of pending military action so that we can take steps to protect our interests. It refers to us as a friendly power, but I get the impression that they mean ‘friendly’ in the same sense that de Gaulle regarded us as friendly.”

He gestured toward the admiral, who had been invited to sit in even though he wasn’t a member of the cabinet. “I’ve already furnished a copy to the joint chiefs, who reached the same conclusion I did, namely, that the French are planning to try it alone, perhaps to save face. After all, they did put that thing up there. Admiral?”

“They’ll botch it, Mr. President.” Vogel’s tone was grave. “They’ve got the right idea but the job’s too big for them. They haven’t got a system good enough to close in on that thing and destroy it before somebody on the ground can press the button. It may be that nobody has. Certainly we haven’t been able to come up with anything foolproof.

“That’s without considering what its automatic defenses might do. We don’t know anything about these systems. We don’t know what they do, how sensitive they are, what ranges they’ve been set for or anything else about them. We can’t even be sure they exist. They might not. The terrorists could be bluffing.

“We can’t determine that without approaching it and risking setting it off. On the other hand my experts tell me that even if neither we nor the terrorists do anything, sooner or later some stray piece of space junk or a meteor will wander into range. There’s just no way to get near it without setting it off.”

Sumpter had been listening with only half an ear, groping through his memories for a way to do exactly that. He felt something, but so far it had managed to stay just beyond the edge of his perception. It was a rare moment these days when anything from his scientific past was able to dislodge the vicious realities of geopolitics.

Then, in a flash, he had it, snared in a net of logic. He reeled it in, then beamed, “There is a way, Admiral. It’s a way we already know will work because we did it once before, by accident.” He gazed out at all the puzzled faces. “I guess I’d better explain. You see, all of us were kids then, and some of us hadn’t even been bom yet, but there was this experiment, a nuclear weapons test, and it all went wrong. This is what happened…”

Donald Grimm, pilot of the shuttle Endeavor, and mission commander, was not an easy man to rattle, but he was realist enough to acknowledge that looking up through the hole in the donut could not be very healthy.

Just hours before Endeavor had launched, a French missile had come up from Chad. It waited in a parking orbit until they reached their position, then ground control began maneuvering it to catch up to the target, the so-called bucket of buckshot Francospatiale had unwittingly launched for the terrorists. It carried a nuclear warhead, to be exploded in the proximity of this target. Theoretically, the electromagnetic pulse would fry any unprotected electronic equipment.

What worried Grimm was what else it might fry. He knew that even with the Earth between the ship and the device at the time of detonation the residual radiation level would be very high and their next orbit would take them through the debris of the blast. He wasn’t very comfortable with the prospect.

True, the explosion would assume a different configuration and appearance up here, since the mushroom cloud was typical only of surface detonations, and the particles would disperse faster without an atmosphere to affect them, but the mission was dangerous nonetheless. Endeavor would be pretty hot when she landed.

As soon as he had reported in, the countdown on the ground had begun. Zero was the last word he expected to hear from the ground. When the device went off it would black out all electronic communication, both in orbit and on the surface.

That meant Grimm would have to fly the mission manually from then on, and that contact with Earth would be tenuous, slow and cumbersome through their single, shielded laser.

“Zero!”

In response, Grimm burned the main engine for what seemed an eternity, and Endeavor climbed steadily toward the bucket. Inside the shuttle four American crewmen and three French astronauts waited pensively for the target to appear over the horizon. They made the first pass through the debris cloud. It was not visible, of course. Their only indication that a thermonuclear explosion had occurred was a prickling sensation on the skin as they passed over the south pole. It felt weird.

“There’s the target,” Thomas Westwater announced. With radar unusable, Endeavor’s co-pilot/astrogator had been searching for the target with a binocular telescope. “I have it in the cross hairs. Our approach looks good but it’s a little slow. Why don’t you give it a couple of squirts?”

Grimm responded with a two second burn of the main engine and waited. This was when he first started to feel really scared. No matter how much confidence the people on the ground had in the theory, this was still the acid test and nobody knew for sure the theory could pass it.

Just about everything the US had put up here was designed to deal with EMP, and had automatically resetting circuit breaking devices. Russian equipment also had them, which meant that as the pulse weakened, what was dormant in the target now might revive and zap them.

Their safety depended on getting the job done before that happened, always presuming, of course, that the terrorists had bought the deluxe package. If they hadn’t, their circuitry would have been ruined by the immense current the pulse induced and put out of commission for good.

As Endeavor approached nearer and nearer without incident Grimm opened the cargo door. The EVA crew gathered at the airlock, ready to go out and attach the booster she carried in her cargo bay. Grimm didn’t know whether the shuttle could survive long enough to get away if the satellite exploded but he was sure suited men wouldn’t.

Westwater dismounted the big glasses and stood down. The target was now near enough to be tracked with the naked eye.

Grimm fired short bursts from the forward thrusters, settling onto station in a manner not much different from routine docking. When relative motion reached zero the Frenchmen went out the lock, while the arm was deployed by the other two Americans inside. From the arm a rocket dangled, its nozzle pointing at the ship, its four spiderlike arms now extended and protruding from its flat nose.

The target floated menacingly near, no more than 50 meters away. Grimm could see there was already a booster mounted behind the payload. They hadn’t known about that, since there had been no close reconnaissance. He wondered how the EVA team would handle that. Watching the activity out the port made Grimm very nervous. He knew the pulse had done its job. What scared him was that the effect could vanish any time and the target’s breakers, if it had any, might reset.

The EVA team wasted no time. Two orange-suited bodies drifted off toward the target, each dragging a nylon rope whose other end was attached to the booster. This would be an old-fashioned operation, nothing fancy, just hectic.

Arm over arm they hauled the booster into position, having been joined by the third man as soon as his duties at the arm permitted him to leave it. A slight tumbling began when the two masses touched but nothing vigorous enough to interfere with the task of fastening them together.

The French team went about its work with practiced precision. Though they lacked actual experience in free-fall before this mission, they seemed to be doing very well. After much tugging the ponderous masses were joined, and the new booster’s four arms gripped the warhead firmly. The EVA team then pondered the removal of the target’s original booster.

After the first few minutes of this Grimm began to sweat nervously. He had good reason. Nobody knew how long the pulse would continue to immobilize the target’s sensors. For all they knew it could fail anytime and the thing would go off in spite of all their efforts.

Finally, he fired a steering jet for a millisecond just to get the EVA crew’s attention, then motioned for them to come aboard.

This was acknowledged by a prearranged gesture. The men outside had evidently concluded the extra booster could not be easily removed. They used the booster’s attitude jets to manually align the mass, then set the timer and boarded.

Grimm decided against moving Endeavor. Though the risk of collision was minimal he hesitated to take it. He thought it was better to stay put while the satellite’s booster fired.

The rest of the operation was flawless. The bucket’s new engine burned for a full two minutes, killing its forward motion rapidly, driving it lower and lower. The side benefits of Grimm’s decision not to move became apparent. By staying put they were in position to see the show. Grimm watched with great satisfaction while the bomb turned cherry red from friction with the atmosphere. A spectacular but silent explosion followed when the remaining propellant and the bucket’s charge detonated in unison.

Grimm donned his helmet against the possibility that collision with stray slugs would decompress Endeavor. He didn’t know whether any of these would reach their orbit, which was fairly high, but he could see others enter the atmosphere, rise to incandescence, and finally traverse thousands of kilometers while they burned to dust.

Grimm was not the only spectator.

In the darkened capital it was 0600 hours, Greenwich Mean Time. Sumpter stood alone on the roof of the White House, gazing up at the sky, watching the most extravagant fireworks display human eyes had ever seen. Although mission control supposedly had contact with the shut-tie they had not been able to tell him very much about what Endeavor was doing. This visual feast was Sumpter’s first confirmation his solution had worked.

There had been a price. Briefly, nothing electromagnetic worked. Powerplants shut down. Radio and telephone communication ceased. Even automobile engines could not be started, the flux was that intense. That would pass, but immense masses of electromagnetically stored data would have been obliterated.

On Earth’s surface most of these effects were very brief, except for the communication interruption. In space, fortunately, it had lasted longer. In hours the Earth’s own magnetic field would disperse the pulse, just as it had the first time man had done this some forty years before.

Back then it had been a catastrophe, sobering to the extent that both the US and the Soviet Union had spent billions trying to find out how to shield from it. Neither had been willing to risk a communications blackout while the other side’s nuclear bombers might be sneaking up.

It was ironic, Sumpter thought, that what once threatened to obliterate civilization had now saved it. He knew that it was time to get on with his own mission.

All the gloom was gone. The immediate crisis was over. Casualties had been very light. Less than a thousand people had been unlucky enough to be in situations where the blackout was lethal. Most of those had brought disaster on themselves by ignoring warnings issued before the blast.

For Sumpter and most of the world, all this morning’s news was good, and the breakfast conference at the White House was as much a celebration of what had been accomplished as it was a working meeting.

“The Swiss were stubborn, at first,” Powers said with a chuckle, “but with them business is business and the thought of some doper screwing it all up for good scared the pants off them. Their ambassador admitted to me that while the system was down they lost hundreds of millions of francs just in unearned interest. That clinched it. After that they coughed up their records. Then we knew who the terrorists were, where they were and how to nail them. Now, to the dopers, we’re the terrorists!” The chuckle became a roar.

It infected Sumpter, who grinned from ear to ear. He had known all along that none of what happened in the international drug trade occurred without the complicity of the corrupt regimes in the producing countries, Baribeau had explained how all that worked. Now, with the rest of the world fully appreciative of the consequences of letting this go on, something had finally been done about it. These regimes would quickly be toppled by concerted and determined international pressure, after which teams of experienced and determined reformers would move in to reconstruct their ruined economies.

With the kind of incentive the world now had to do it nationalistic interests would be forced to yield to collective action. The public would demand it. Ordinary people everywhere had suddenly realized that organized international crime had taken the place of world war, that it was a worldwide menace, and that the greatest crime of all was political corruption. People who had formerly been apathetic about it now clearly saw how intimately this touched their lives.

“Yes, sir, it’s a brand new world out there,” Baribeau remarked, “a turning point in human civilization.”

Sumpter did not truly appreciate how literally true that statement was until the meeting broke up and he and Baribeau settled in to a private conversation in Sumpter’s office. Of late he had discovered that this guy was more than just a member of his cabinet, he had become a friend, a mentor, a confidant.

“We’ve got the people behind us now, Sam,” he said with a new confidence.

“Yes, we have, Mr. President. That’s true, maybe for the first time since Washington’s day. But that could be a bad thing as well as a good one. It’s also the reason why you might want to consider quitting after one term.”

“What?! How can I do that, with all the work that’s left to do? Why would I want to?”

“Because maybe it’d be good for public morale, and maybe it would help preserve your place in history.”

Sumpter was now staring in disbelief at Baribeau.

“You can’t top what you just did, Mr. President. From now on your stock can go only one way, down. Nothing else I can think of would be worse for this country—or the world, for that matter. You’re a crisis leader, Mr. President, you’re a fixer. The trouble is that except when society faces mortal peril competent people like you are pariahs nobody wants to have around.” He paused, watching the words penetrate, like so many daggers, into a man who called him “friend.”

Baribeau was agonized by this, nevertheless he knew he could not stop now. “I can see you don’t understand,” he added. “Let me explain. I realized there was something extraordinary about you when we met. I knew instantly that you were one of history’s rare and exceptional people who pop up when they’re most needed. Like Winston Churchill was, for instance. Nobody else but him could have pulled Britain through the early days of World War II, yet as soon as the voters knew it had been won they turned him out of office. He was such a monumental personage that even this could not detract from his greatness.

“The truth was apparent to his people even if Churchill couldn’t see it. He was a war leader. He would have screwed up the peace, he would have become an obstacle to true progress. He had to go.”

Baribeau’s tone softened. It was clear he felt great sympathy as he uttered his next remark. “You’ve got to quit before that happens to you. You saved humanity’s frontier when it was menaced, saved the Earth from stagnation and slow death. The race needed you for that, but it needs something different now. There are great changes in the works, Mr. President. There’s talk now of a constitutional amendment to change the function of congress, to give it an executive mission in place of the legislative responsibility it has now and isn’t meeting. If it happens there might not even be a president before very long.”

“That’s impossible, Sam!” The incredulity in Sumpter’s voice was stark.

But it wasn’t.

Baribeau was a man of imagination. He was not easily impressed by most things but he very definitely was with this, the sight of the immense roofed canyon which men had made into a cavern larger that many terrestrial cities.

The lesser tug of Martian gravity added to the effect by giving an energy far beyond the expectation of his years, and so when the flivver had passed through the airlock and stopped at the operations shack he fairly leapt out to greet his old friend Sumpter, who waited for him there.

“It’s been a long time, Sam,” Sumpter grinned, gripping Baribeau’s hand firmly. “Come on. Let’s talk in my office. It’s warmer.”

Baribeau nodded, then followed Sumpter. He had not noticed the chill through his insulated garments.

Sumpter’s office was not fancy, but it was homey, with stacks of papers and shelves of books and more complicated looking electronic equipment than Baribeau could ever remember seeing in one place before.

Sumpter hustled Baribeau into a chair, then, from some obscure nook he pulled a strangely shaped bottle and some glasses. “You’ll like this stuff,” he said. “The techs make it from fruit they filch from the experimental garden. I warn you, though, take it slow.”

Baribeau did, but its ferocious kick caught him by surprise just the same. He had expected wine. This was brandy.

“Vacuum distilled, Sam. But I did warn you.” He sipped his own. “You know,” he added, “I never did really thank you for what you did. And if you’d left me to follow my own inclinations none of this would be here.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Baribeau protested.

“Don’t I? You were absolutely right, Sam. I kept busy with scientific work, sure, but every chance I got I watched the show you guys put on too. It didn’t take me very long to realize that mine was the easy part. I just started the fight. You finished it.”

“I see it just the opposite,” Baribeau replied. “I see the breakout as the critical phase, absolutely necessary if we were to complete the circle. We had to get the monkey off our back and you were the guy who made that possible. Inside the government you would have been just another politician. Outside, with no personal interest beyond that of an ordinary citizen, the people could trust you. They did, and they followed your advice.

“Without the confidence you displayed in the reform movement even the United States would have reverted, and without reform there the rest of the world would never have followed.

“The world government we have today has been possible since the communication and computer breakthroughs in the early 1980s but we kept on using our old system out of apathy. We just couldn’t picture a government that functioned without the professional liars around to tell us what to do.

“Look how much better off we are because of your example. Science flourishes now as never before, because market forces are demanding access to the new frontier. The fusion engine on the ship that brought me here could have been built in 1990, and would have been if the right people had been in charge, but no, the vested interests and the bureaucrats had to keep monkeying around with chemical rockets.”

Baribeau paused and took another sip, this time with far more caution. I could get used to this stuff, he thought. His tongue started to feel fuzzy.

Sumpter noticed. “You don’t want to get bombed, Sam, not today. We’ve got the Centauri Project appropriation to vote on today.” He paused to glance at his watch. “Actually,” he continued, “most everybody else already has. We could be the swing vote and I think it might be fairly close. We wouldn’t want you to flunk the sobriety test and lose it for us.”

“Never fear,” Baribeau answered. Yet the stark reality hit him—there had been many issues which had won or lost by one vote margins, and one of them had been the decision to establish the Martian Colony.

He began to wonder what would happen if—no—when the day came that an extra-solar colony was founded. How would the new democracy handle a time lag of light-years? Would the old representative system have to be revived?

He hoped not. Size and dispersal had been the great curse, the price mankind paid for “civilization.” His first solution had been the monarchy, because one man could operate with greater efficiency and dispatch than the old tribal democracy could. Man endured the evils this produced for most of his civilized existence. Republics were a compromise, but inevitably these public servants perverted the system and too often they became the people’s masters.

Now, thanks to scientific progress the people had the whip again. There was no president of the new government. There was no congress either. There were only the people, who used the modern communications system that space technology made possible to propose and vote on legislation. Immensely powerful computers kept track of things, sophisticated programs prevented cheating, and the race at last was on its way to the next frontier.

Baribeau took another quick sip of the brandy, then remarked, “Maybe you’d better log on and let me vote. Then I’ll be able to finish this drink. Maybe I’ll even have a refill. Uh, there’s another piece of legislation up for a vote today. I proposed it. The vote was timed to coincide with my arrival here.” Sam was grinning wolfishly as he plunked the bright new coin down in front of Sumpter.

“What a rotten thing to do,” Sumpter fairly screamed. “But, I am flattered.”

“You deserved it, you know you do. Ordinarily, you have to be dead but I figured the people would waive it this once. Uh, what’s the matter?”

“On the one cent coin? Why not on the one credit piece?”

“Because you’re humble, John, that’s why. Now go ahead and vote. You think the Centauri issue will be close, try this one…”

Sumpter entered his password and voted “yes.” The circle, he realized, had closed again and the species was again at peace with itself. He wondered how long it would last this time.

Content

Business as Usual, During Altercations
by Joseph H. Delaney