First Contact (21 page)

“I’m in,” said Sinclair Lewis of Balta.

“I’m in,” said Hanukapi Puli of Nauru.

“I’m in,” said Tex McBain of Narragansett, Rhode Island.

And finally, Armando Tanzarian of Ocala, Florida, said, “I’m in,” and concluded the pact.

Thus the crew of the
Earth’s Hope
came together and displayed the determined best of humanity in the face of a certain crisis and in the name of an uncertain cause. Upon achieving orbit around Rigel-Rigel, the men took their positions. On Tanzarian’s command, Lewis and Puli pulled the handles of the makeshift release mechanism and were thereafter sucked into the vacuum of space. McBain and Tanzarian released the clamps, rode the missile out of the launching bay, and died in a manner similar to Major
T. J. “King” Kong in Stanley Kubrick’s classic
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
. A huge fan of Kubrick, Major McBain recognized the similarity to
Strangelove
and attempted to scream “woo-hoo” in the same manner as Slim Pickens, but could not because of the absence of air. Commander Tanzarian did not attempt to scream. He had never seen
Dr. Strangelove
, was not especially jingoistic, and did not understand the point of his own death.

P
ROBABLY FOR THE BEST
,
the crew of
Earth’s Hope
did not survive to see what became of its efforts. It was not much, really. What happened was the nuclear warhead struck the Rigel-Rigel orbital defenses, which were like a giant plastic shell around the planet. It created a pathetic, sickening thud, not unlike the sound made by striking a spoon against a Tupperware bowl. The defensive shell disarmed the warhead and deflected it into space where it drifted feebly until a gizmo that looked like a giant ball-peen hammer smashed it into flotsam and a second gizmo, which resembled a giant broom, swept it up, and a third gizmo, which looked a bit like a Greenpeace volunteer, separated out the recyclables and deposited the debris in the appropriate bins. The unmanned spacecraft met a similar fate.

All that survived was the flight recorder, contained inside a miniature ship resembling a homing pigeon. After the destruction of the ship, the tiny craft made its way back to Earth with news of the demise of
Earth’s Hope
and its crew. The trip from the wormhole to Earth took approximately nine minutes less than the outbound journey.

The recorder contained most of the pertinent information about the doomed journey, but excluded the unfortunate misplacement of the Chocodiles and their ultimate consumption by the engorged, irradiated raccoon who, together with Armando Tanzarian, Tex McBain, Hanukapi Puli, and Sinclair Lewis, died in service of his planet.

These facts were, sadly, lost to history.

War is hell.

S
IX WEEKS TO THE
day after
Earth’s Hope
set off as the last, best hope of mankind, the interstellar homing pigeon returned with news of the journey, all of it bad. The crew was dead, the sole nuclear weapon aboard the ship failed to penetrate the Tupperware shield of Rigel-Rigel, and the toilet had overflowed.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced this in the Roosevelt Room at a morning meeting of the President’s senior staff. Each person present recalled what the Ambassador had said at the White House dinner regarding the Rigelian policy on use of force.

Len Carlson spoke for everyone gathered when he said, “Uh-oh.”

I
N LIGHT OF THE
possibility of a counterattack against Earth, the Secret Service in consultation with the Joint Chiefs decided to err
on the side of caution. They determined to transfer the President and his staff to a nuclear shelter. Just to be safe, they decided to evacuate the cabinet and all of Congress too.

T
HE MILITARY DOES NOT
refer to nuclear shelters as “nuclear shelters.” It refers to them as government relocation centers. Most of these were built in the 1960s at the height of fears that the Cold War would become hot. The crown jewel of the system was “Greek Island,” a mammoth shelter in the beautiful mountains of West Virginia, built at the suggestion of President Dwight D. Eisenhower during the period before he became a dinner plate.

Greek Island took two and a half years to build and cost approximately $86 million. It was located sixty-four feet underground, with five-foot-thick concrete walls and twenty-five-ton doors. It had a power plant, water purification system, and television studio. Department of Defense plans called for the President, the cabinet, and certain key civilians—one thousand people in all—to be evacuated to the facility in the event of nuclear attack. Once there, they would remove their clothing, take a high-pressure shower, and then be issued uniforms, underwear, canvas shoes, and a toiletry kit.

The Defense Department plan contained several substantial flaws. The shelter had a fresh air supply that would last only seventy-two hours, after which time airborne radiation would seep into the bunker. The food supply was more substantial, but still good for merely sixty days. By contrast, the half-life of uranium 235, the nuclear fuel used for
Little Boy
, is approximately 704 million years.

The television studio was also wrongheaded. A study by a sociologist at Yale concluded that in the event of nuclear war very few people would watch television. The notable exceptions were a core of middle-aged women in unaffected areas, mostly in the Midwest, who would keep up with their soaps.

T
HE TOILETRY KIT INCLUDED
a tiny toothbrush, a small tube of baking-soda toothpaste, one ounce of mouthwash, a comb, four aspirin, a fingernail clipper, two Maalox-brand antacid tablets, six Q-tips, two alcohol-based sterilizing cleaning pads, an after-dinner mint, eye shades, and a pair of foam earplugs.

Retail cost at CVS: $17.98.

DoD contracted price: $2,111.37.

W
HILE THE ABSENCE OF
adequate food and air were shortcomings of the program, the location of the shelter was inspired. The defense department built Greek Island under the lavish Greenbrier resort. This meant that after the war ended, and the radiation cleared five or six hundred years later, Congress could emerge for a quick round of golf.

When the residents of White Sulphur Springs became suspicious as to the nature of the construction, the DoD devised a sly cover: Greenbrier was constructing a hospital, one of those underground clinics with thick concrete walls that so many of the top country clubs maintain.

G
REENBRIER WAS NOT JUST
any golf course; it was the home of professional golfer extraordinaire “Slammin’ Sam” Snead, winner of seven professional majors, including three Masters. Snead was famously flexible, and through his late eighties could lift his legs above his head. Legend has it that while playing in the 1972 club championship, on the par-five twelfth hole Snead hit an errant tee ball, which descended into one of the ventilation shafts of the relocation center. When, after considerable searching, Snead and his opponent finally found the ball, it immediately became clear Snead faced a difficult shot. His golf ball had fallen sixty-four feet below ground onto the floor of the putative medical clinic, which appeared to be in fact a fallout shelter. Snead would need to hit the ball virtually straight up into the air, with enough spin so it would not fall back into the ventilation shaft, all with a restricted swing. Snead’s opponent graciously offered to give Snead a free drop, on the basis that the fallout shelter constituted ground under repair. Snead refused.

“Play it as it lies,” Snead said. “That’s golf.” On the first two attempts he failed but on the third try hit a spectacular shot that cleared the duct and, thanks to a favorable ricochet off an African gray parrot, landed on the green and rolled into the hole for a miraculous birdie.

T
HE PASSING PARROT HAD
no earthly business either in West Virginia or at the Greenbrier Club Championship.

Happily, the parrot was not injured. He was merely stunned and soon returned to his business.

I
N
1992,
THE
W
ASHINGTON
Post Magazine
ran a story about Greek Island and the shortcomings of its design. Notable among these, the shelter was too small to accommodate families. Congressmen would need to leave their spouses and children behind. It was thus unlikely any government official would ever actually go to the shelter. To make matters worse, it cost a fortune to build and was expensive to maintain. These ongoing expenses included the salaries of several government agents who worked undercover at the resort as caddies.

After public pressure mounted, the Pentagon deactivated the bunker and turned it into a tourist attraction. It did not do particularly well in this capacity. More people played golf at Greenbrier in a day than visited the shelter in a decade.

Greek Island may have been discredited, but the government still needed shelters. When time came to build a new one, the Department of Defense came up with a creative idea: build the new shelter directly under Greek Island. It was the perfect cover. Greek Island I, as the original shelter came to be known, had been such a financial and conceptual disaster, no one would ever expect another shelter to be built in the exact same spot. As the Secretary of Defense explained, people do not expect the government to repeat mistakes of such magnitude.

Greek Island II shared many of the same features as Greek Island I. It also had five-foot-thick concrete walls and twenty-five-ton doors. The main differences were Greek Island II was 128 feet underground instead of 64, had better ventilation and more food, and was large enough to accommodate the members of Congress and their families. The new kitchen also had a cappuccino maker. Other than these subtle distinctions, one could not tell the two shelters apart.

As one of the DoD contractors put it, “One Greek island looks pretty much like another.” He was referring to his travels with his wife in the Mediterranean, but the comment just as readily applied to the nuclear shelters.

Protocols at Greek Island II were much the same as at Greek Island I. Upon threat of nuclear war, all of Congress, the executive branch, key civilians and their respective families would be evacuated to the facility. Upon their arrival at the shelter, prospective inhabitants would remove their clothing, take a high-pressure shower, and then be issued uniforms, underwear, canvas shoes, and a $2,000 toiletry kit.

M
UCH ATTENTION WAS DEVOTED
to the toothpaste to be included in the new, revised toiletry kit. This was strange in a way since one toothpaste is pretty much like another. In fact when
Consumer Reports
reviewed toothpastes in 1998, it rated 30 of the 38 toothpastes tested as “excellent.”

For business reasons, the executives of Gleaming toothpaste pushed hard to get their brand adopted at the new nuclear shelter, the location of which was a closely guarded state secret. The toothpaste executives argued that the granulated baking soda–based toothpaste used at Greek Island I had been grossly inadequate. They made this argument despite the fact no one had ever used the toothpaste at Greek Island I, and the fact that one toothpaste is pretty much like another.

It was nevertheless decided, finally, by the relevant government procurement officer after a long dinner at Morton’s, pleasant conversation with several representatives of the Young Executive Program in the Champagne Room of the Capital City Playhouse Club, and the coincidental loss and recovery of a BMW convertible, that Gleaming would be the toothpaste of choice, thus positioning it desirably, in the view of the company executives, as the dentifrice of choice in postapocalypse America.

By the by, Gleaming was one of the eight toothpastes not rated “excellent” by
Consumer Reports.
In fact it was the only one rated “bad.” The testers said it had a faint odor of foot rot.

B
ACK TO OUR HEROES
.
Some people might have been daunted by a flight to an underground bunker in the face of a nuclear holocaust, but the President did not appear to be fazed. In fact he appeared to regard the whole matter as a great adventure. He sat aboard Air Force One and dabbled at a Sudoku puzzle. At one point, he turned to Ralph and said, “I understand in the event of nuclear attack they give you a toiletry kit and clean underwear at this shelter. Could you make sure they have the right kind?”

Ralph said, “Yes, Mr. President.”

“I wouldn’t want to have to deal with a bunching problem while we’re down there.”

“No, Mr. President.”

“What about a treadmill? Do you think they’ll have a treadmill?”

“I don’t know, Mr. President.”

“This could be a great opportunity for me to really get in shape.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Make sure they have a treadmill, Ralph.”

“I shall, Mr. President.”

T
HE
P
RESIDENT WAS THINKING
about Sudoku and treadmills, but Ralph had only Jessica on his mind. In the weeks since they had met at Blimpway, Ralph and Jessica’s relationship had blossomed into deep, abiding love. Their physical attraction had grown even more intense. More important, though, Ralph had the complete conviction that Jessica was the best person he had ever met. After she left school, she never looked back. Not once did she express even a whit of regret. Rather she tried to encourage Ralph to devote his energy to his own passion, whatever that might be. More and more, he found this to be Jessica herself, without whom he could not imagine living.

Jessica, for her part, loved Ralph intensely, but she continued to feel powerfully drawn to Tibet and continued to make the elaborate plans required to move there. In the meantime, while she waited for her visa, she went to work for a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Virginia, that placed pets in the homes of teenage children. Where the child’s home could not accommodate a living pet, he or she would be given a high-quality stuffed animal. In every case, the student was trained to care for the animal, which would be periodically examined, and was asked to make reports on its development and exploits.

What the organization found was that the students who participated in this program did better in school, were far less likely to get into trouble, and that, remarkably, these benefits accrued whether the student had been given a living animal or stuffed. The process helped the students learn empathy and responsibility. For her part, Jessica realized she loved working with children and all kinds of animals and didn’t miss law school one bit. She also discovered she loved Ralph more than she had ever imagined she could love someone.

R
ALPH MANAGED, WITH CONSIDERABLE
difficulty, to secure Jessica a space in Greek Island II. Since the slots at the shelter were reserved
for the members of Congress and the cabinet and their immediate families, this required Ralph to claim, untruthfully, that he and Jessica were engaged to be married. It also required him to convince Jessica she should set aside her substantial objections to the President and live with him in an underground shelter for an unspecified, and likely substantial, period of time. Jessica insisted she would rather live in a nuclear wasteland than a bunker with the President and Congress, which she described colorfully as a “gaggle of fat, old, bald men, who pay lip service to serving God but care only about eating pot pies and padding their pockets with cash.”

“Why pot pies?” Ralph had asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, snarling, “I just think old fat men like pot pies.”

“The President isn’t fat,” Ralph said.

“Well, he should be,” Jessica said. “And I bet he likes pot pies.”

This was in fact true.

“Think about our children if we don’t go,” Ralph said. “They’ll have three eyes.”

“I don’t care,” Jessica said. “I’m sure they will be beautiful three-eyed children.”

“Please,” Ralph said. “I love you and I want you to be safe.”

Jessica had no witty response to this. She agreed to leave work immediately if Ralph called to say an evacuation order had been issued and drive to Greenbrier, West Virginia. So when he did in fact call, she did not protest and said she would leave straightaway.

“Be safe,” Ralph said, “but get there quick.”

“I shall fly on the wings of love,” said Jessica.

Ralph blew her a kiss through the phone. “Thank you,” he said.

A
S
A
IR
F
ORCE
O
NE
took off from Andrews Air Force Base, on its way to the Greenbrier airstrip, each of its passengers worried about something. The passengers were in this respect no different from every other sentient creature in the universe. Sentient creatures worry. This is arguably the defining characteristic of sentience.