First Contact (18 page)

T
HE
P
RESIDENT COULD SAY
whatever he wanted to his staff about the Ambassador’s contact with the leaders of hostile nations and about his questionable decision to spike the punch, but the fact remained the President didn’t like the Ambassador for two much more basic reasons: One, the President didn’t like the French and didn’t like that the Ambassador liked the French. Two, and this was really the nub of it, the President didn’t like that the Ambassador rejected his god. One could sugarcoat it if so inclined, and say it was really about the Ambassador’s lack of respect for the President’s beliefs rather than about his actual beliefs, but the plain truth was the President thought the Ambassador was a heathen.

So the real question here is why did the President believe so absolutely that God exists and reject all those who did not? It was true, as the President told the Ambassador, he believed life was too complex and wonderful to be explained by mere chance. There were simply too many coincidences to believe things happened randomly.

But one coincidence, above all others, made the President believe in the existence of God. As with everything with people, it went back to his childhood. As you know, the President’s father was not an especially talkative man. He did not possess any of the interests, such as fishing and hunting and golfing, which fathers sometimes share with their sons. Aside from the occasional chat after church, father and son hardly spoke at all. So far as the boy could tell, his father’s only interest was reading biographies. He appeared to particularly admire Dwight Eisenhower and had read several accounts of Eisenhower’s time as a general and later as president. So, as a young boy, the President prayed he would one day grow up to become president himself. He did, of course, and did not see how this could be attributed to anything other than the existence of a just and attentive God.

H
ARRY
T
RUMAN BELIEVED IN
God too, though not with quite the same fervor. During his courtship of Bessie Wallace, he confessed that one Sunday “he made a start for church, but landed at the Shubert.” Still, on the Sunday before he ordered the release of the bomb, he
attended church twice: a Protestant service in the morning and a Catholic mass in the afternoon. A Baptist by birth, Truman nevertheless thought it important to cover all the bases.

“I guess I should stand in good with the Almighty for the coming week,” Truman wrote Bess from Germany, “and my, how I’ll need it.”

T
HE CURRENT PRESIDENT, ON
the other hand, experienced no such moral quandary. He went about his business as usual, meeting with various constituencies, and dining in the evening on macaroni and cheese, straight from the box, delivered to him, as always, by Lucian Trundle, his faithful butler and occasional confidante.

“I ordered a nuclear strike today on those aliens,” the President said.

“Very good, sir,” said Lucian Trundle. “Their table manners were deplorable.”

A
FTER THE
F
ENDLE
-F
RINKLE CONTROVERSY
fizzled out, life for Maude Anat-Denarian got much better. Most important, Maude felt better about her son’s direction. Todd would complete the year at Rigel Prep, but they had begun looking into art schools where he might finish his education. Ned was on his way home from the mission to Earth and had accepted the position in the follow-up division of the first-contact bureau. This would have him away from home much less. Really the only problem was the lawsuit stemming from the car accident.

Now Maude was the kind of person who needed a project, and with the rest of her life in decent order she had almost no choice but to obsess about the accident. The more she thought about it, the more it bothered her. Perhaps she had been distracted by the discussion of broccoli on the radio, but it could not have been for more
than a second, and she was such a cautious driver there was just no way she could have missed a car stopped in the middle of the road.

So she sat down one morning to do some research on the Intergalacticnet. The connection was slow because Ned refused to pay extra for warp-speed satellite access. It could be maddening waiting two seconds for a screen to upload, and twice it bumped Maude off while she was in the middle of a search, but it was okay—Maude had time.

She first did some searches on Nelson Munt-Zoldarian and found nothing particularly interesting. He once had a job in the waste management industry, but had stopped working many years ago after suffering an injury on the job. He regularly attended Mason meetings and was an avid birder, serious enough to have published two articles in
Interstellar Ornithology
.

Then, on a whim, Maude tried another tack. She searched for news articles about people being rear-ended in car accidents. From this she discovered something odd. A man named Nelson Mint-Zoldarian had been struck from behind on the Transorion Freeway. A man named Abner Munt-Zoldareen had been struck from behind in the HOV lane of the Andromeda Motorway. A man named Niles Mant-Soldareen had been struck from behind on the famous speed-limitless Spaceshipbahn in the Runnymede Solar System, built by the guilt-ridden Runnymedians as peculiar penance for their ancestors’ war crimes.

Maude found seventeen examples of a person with a name similar to Munt-Zoldarian being struck in the rear end of his car. Each occurred on a highway under similar circumstances: in the late afternoon on a high-speed motorway, and in each case the driver of the offending car never saw the car in front of him. Maude could only conclude it was the same person, and realized for the first time she might have been the victim of a fraud. Then she did what anyone would do under these circumstances: she called a lawyer.

S
PECIFICALLY
, M
AUDE CALLED
A
RNOLD
Nene-Zinkelreen, who had quite impressed her at the PTA debate, before he and everyone else petered out at the end of the meeting. She expected to get a secretary or a voice mail, but Nene-Zinkelreen answered the phone himself. Maude explained that she had thought well of the attorney at the meeting. She explained further what had happened to her,
her suspicions about Munt-Zoldarian, and asked whether Nene-Zinkelreen might be able to refer her to an attorney who could handle the matter.

“I’ll handle it myself,” he said.

“That would be fine with me,” Maude said, “but if you don’t mind my saying so, it seems to me you have all of the makings of a young Lionel Hut-Zanderian. I had the impression you were excited by much larger issues than a car accident.”

“I was,” the attorney explained. “But I got over that.”

“The PTA meeting was only a few days ago.”

“I had something of an epiphany,” he said.

“Is that right?”

“It is,” he said quietly, and added, “You seem like a nice woman.”

“Thank you,” said Maude.

“And what this man did doesn’t seem very nice.”

“That’s true.”

“Well, I could get excited about something like that.”

W
HEN YOU ARE A
lawyer, you look for just about any hook on which to hang your hat. My students ask me all the time whether I ever defended a person whom I knew to be guilty. I did, and tell them so, and they always ask how it felt. The truth is it felt fine. When I defended a criminal, I could get emotionally invested in the gross disparity of power between government prosecutors and defendants. The prosecutors’ targets were, by and large, indigent and impotent, and got railroaded through the system on a regular basis.

Defending even a guilty person against the government machine seems like a moral crusade when compared to the civil cases that make up the bread and butter of an attorney’s work diet. I spent the last two years of my career as an attorney representing a man worth $1.2 billion in a lawsuit brought by a man worth $400 million over who was entitled to $40 million earned by a business they once had together. They each spent approximately a decade and $5 million litigating this question.

That
was tough to get excited about.

S
O
A
RNOLD
N
ENE
-Z
INKELREEN TOOK
the case. In a matter of hours he moved to dismiss Munt-Zoldarian’s lawsuit against Maude, brought a retaliatory lawsuit against Munt-Zoldarian on Maude’s behalf, and
notified the attorneys for all of the other victims of Munt-Zoldarian’s frauds. By the end of the day, Joseph Caratzo-Gambarian, the attorney for Munt-Zoldarian, had been served with five lawsuits and received phone calls from eleven other attorneys regarding Munt-Zoldarian. Late in the day, he called his client on the phone.

“What is it?” Nelson asked.

“They’re on to you. The heat is being turned up pretty good.”

“What gave?”

“I think it was that last woman. I think she figured it out.”

“How much time do I have?”

“A few hours. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

Nelson was disappointed, but not surprised. He had always known this day would come.

“I know what to do,” he said

“Okay then,” his attorney said.

“Okay then,” Nelson repeated. “Have a good life.”

T
HE CONTINGENCY PLAN THAT
had been prepared in the case of this precise eventuality was for Nelson to disappear. If the victims couldn’t find Nelson, they would be unable to get so much as a thin ditron out of him. That was the law. Caratzo-Gambarian had deposited some money in an account on Tchwitts, a planet with secure tax-free accounts, a history of neutrality in interplanetary wars, and an outstanding reputation for the manufacture of fine chocolate, cheese, and clocks. Nelson had enough money set aside to live out the remainder of his years in a remote quadrant of the universe and indulge without restraint in his three favorite hobbies: lying on the beach, watching birds (not necessarily on the beach), and having sex with prostitutes.

Nelson’s friends did not believe Nelson could be happy retired. They thought he would get bored. But Nelson kept his different sets of friends separate, and none of his friends knew all of his interests. For example, Nelson did not tell his friends from his days in organized crime about his interest in ornithology, largely out of fear they would kill him if they found out. Specifically, Nelson’s friends from his days in organized crime knew only of his interest in prostitutes. Nelson’s friends from the birding community knew only about his interest in birding. His friends at the Mason lodge knew only that he planned to retire to a beach. Moreover, no one knew the entire
story—his birding and Mason friends believed Nelson was a mortgage broker. Nevertheless, all of his friends shared the common belief that Nelson was too active to spend the remainder of his days lolling around, on the beach or wherever.

Nelson, on the other hand, believed he would be perfectly content in retirement. He expressed this sentiment differently to his different groups of friends. For example, when his friends in the intergalactic Mafia, who regarded his rear-ending scheme as high-risk, asked what he would do if he had to take it on the lam, Nelson would say sarcastically, “Like I’m really going to get tired of banging broads.” When his birding friends raised the same question, he would ask rhetorically, without sarcasm, “Could one ever possibly tire of watching dollowarries scavenge for nuts?” To his friends in the Mason lodge, he would say, “Is it conceivable I could get tired of watching the sunset?” Indeed, as he packed his things to flee the jurisdiction, Nelson had beach, birds, and prostitutes on his mind.

G
IVEN THE CONSTRAINTS OF
time, it was only possible for Nelson to pack a few things. It is an instructive exercise to list the things you would bring if you were being sent, say, to a desert island. If I were confined to three things, I would bring the memory of my first kiss (Huey Lewis’s “Power of Love” playing in the background), the memory of my father jumping up and down like a kid when a horse we bet on came in at 45 to 1, and a giant thing of sunscreen. If I were restricted to tangible items, I would take my stuffed bunny rabbit, a sharp knife, and a giant thing of sunscreen. The speaker at my college graduation really impressed upon me the importance of sunscreen. It now strikes me as invaluable.

Like many thought experiments, however, the answers one offers are not especially meaningful. For example, I ask students all the time whether a person has a moral obligation to save a young child drowning in a lake, even if saving the child involves no risk to the rescuer. Everyone always says yes. When I probe they all say further that they would unhesitatingly jump in the water if they were confronted with the situation in real life. But the fact of the matter is I see very few people jumping into lakes to save children.

This is the problem with all hypotheticals. What really matters is not what people say they would do, but what they really do, or,
in the case of What Three Things Would You Bring with You to a Desert Island, not what the people say they would take, but what they actually do take. To his own exile, Nelson Munt-Zoldarian brought: a copy of
The History of Masonry in the Known Universe
(Unabridged), a pair of field glasses, and an industrial-sized box of condoms. This says all you need to know about him.

A
S IT TURNED OUT
,
though, the beach and birds did not keep Nelson occupied for long, not even for a day. He puttered around his beach house a bit and took a swim. But what he found himself thinking about more than the sand and the women and the dollowarries was that he would never be in another car accident. Rather than make him happy, this made him quite sad. In fact, he began to wistfully yearn for his halcyon days on the highways of the universe. The thought had never occurred to him before but, he realized while watching the sunset, more than birds or beautiful women, what he truly, genuinely enjoyed best of all was his work.

I
T MUST SOUND DECIDEDLY
strange that Nelson’s epiphany occurred without the aid of any cake or fruit punch. It must sound stranger still that his moment of lucidity led him to conclude that stopping short in front of cars was not just his vocation but also his avocation. The fact is, though, many people have unusual avocations. I have one friend who collects the trucks Hess stations sell each Christmas. Another has a complete collection of the covers of
Cosmopolitan
, each autographed by the cover model. A third has a rather peculiar collection of eggshells. Every time he eats an egg, he saves the shell, which he then rinses, shellacs, and displays in a wooden case in his living room. He finds the distinctiveness of the cracks interesting and beautiful.

I personally have several utterly pointless hobbies. I like to play cards, which is a mostly useless endeavor, and golf, which is the epitome of a useless endeavor.

None of these activities are particularly harmful, though, so the analogy to Nelson’s car crashing may not be apt. Still, there are people who hunt animals for sport and others who drive motorcycles and Hummers even though they contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. I daresay these people find their pursuits satisfying if not important.

At a certain level of abstraction, it is very difficult to draw a distinction between the class of pursuits that might be deemed worthwhile and those that would not. If someone’s pastime were, say, feeding soup to the homeless, this would certainly strike me at first blush as more important than contriving interstellar car accidents. But if one looks at things with the kind of angst-ridden, metaphysically paralyzed what-does-any-of-it-mean sensibility that underlies this book, then nothing really matters. I mean, we’re all going to die anyway, perhaps as soon as eighteen months if Fendle-Frinkle is right, and many homeless people don’t even like soup. From this perspective, none of these choices make one bean of a difference.

Besides, it isn’t true that the first category of pursuits is harmless. The eggshell guy actively injures no one, but causes harm by omission. He could just as easily devote his time to working on a cold-fusion generator or something else to benefit mankind. The friend who collects Hess trucks could be out curing cancer. I don’t ordinarily hurt anyone playing golf, though I could certainly use the greens fees to help feed the poor or buy up some rain forest.

Either we take the leap that altruism is morally required of people or we can draw no distinction among people’s many diversions. If this is the case, whatever makes a person happy is valid, and, much as we might dislike it, Nelson Munt-Zoldarian has to be cut some slack.

A
NYWAY
, N
ELSON MADE A
dramatic change in his life plans. He abandoned retirement on the beach, twenty years in the planning, and decided instead to continue his career. He would have to do it on a smaller scale, of course, on a pre-lightspeed planet, one out of the intergalactic loop. And he would have to start from scratch since such a planet would be unlikely to accept wire transfers from Tchwitts. But the pioneer spirit in him found all of this exciting. He did some searching and finally settled on a quaint little spot in a remote corner of the Milky Way, a little planet called Earth, which, by all accounts, had lots of highways and many speeding drivers.