STRANGE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY OMNIBUS (20 page)

After these most important features had been taken care of, work on the actual excavation began. Day after day, week after week and year after year the digging went on. After each twenty feet were dug, the announcement of this feat was made at a giant press conference in the media center. Frequently the President or the Vice President would take the occasion to deliver a televised speech. When the first ten-year period, financing for a second ten year period was passed with little struggle.

Everyone concerned was happy about the project. Senator Nettles easily won re-election and served an additional two terms before retiring to take a highly paid job as a lobbyist in Washington. Senator Cooper was similarly pleased by the renewed financial strength given by the bailout to the auto industry companies in his state, which kept them out of bankruptcy for at least another three years. Of the three principal Senatorial backers of the plan, only Senator Zeiss was somewhat disappointed by the results. Although the funds promised under the legislation for fellowships funding of scientific education and research were provided as promised, American scientific prowess did not stop or even slow its rapid decline. The funds provided were still insufficient to redress the balance between what students had to expend in on postsecondary school education with the difficulty to obtaining adequately paid jobs after graduation. In actuality, the great majority of the money actually went to providing for improved facilities for the faculty, particularly faculty dining rooms and tennis courts.

Scientific research and education were spent, American scientific prowess.

Eventually, this happy state was cruelly shattered when the excavation reached the center of the earth, with no signs of life discovered there. Alarm rose throughout the country that the project might be ended, with no further funding. All of the groups in society that had benefitted from the massive government spending provided by the project feared that the gravy train had ended. To deal with the problem, the President took the traditional presidential approach to dealing with such a problem. He named a blue ribbon commission to look into it and to recommend the proper policy to pursue.

As was the case followed in the creation of such commissions, all of the proposed members were carefully vetted before appointment to determine their views on the matter. It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion when the body submitted its final report and recommendations. The original purpose and implementation of the Vulcan Project had been worthy of commendation. The inability to uncover any life form in the center of the earth was simply due to an understandable error in the selection of the site for excavation. This time, two rather than one excavation project was the proper choice to ensure greater coverage of the core of the earth’s core.

Congress immediately approved the continuation of Vulcan Project to the tune of six trillion four hundred billion dollars over the next ten year period. In the interests of economy, the sponsors noted that the amount to be appropriated for a bailout of the auto industry plants and funding the scientific research and education area had been left unchanged, ignoring despite the high annual rate of inflation. Two new states were chosen as the sites for the project. Each one was a state which had benefitted from rapid population growth since the original project was established and which now benefitted from exercising much larger political power in the national elections and in the House of Representatives.

The renewal of Project Vulcan stimulated increased concern over how to dispose of the immense quantity of fill generated by the project. During the early decades, all of the possible fill disposal sites on land had reached and then surpassed acceptable limits. It then had become necessary of dispose of the fill as is done with most of the world’s refuse by dumping it into the Atlantic Ocean. The fill now generated from two excavations resulted in the Atlantic Ocean being completely filled in. The land bridge thus created connecting Africa with the United States. Most of the population of Africa trudged across it to seek political asylum in the U.S., a movement encouraged by the recent Congressional legislation requiring that refugee status be extended to anyone in the World injured by having a standard of living lower than the average prevailing in this country.

All was going well when fate intervened. The covering up, of the Atlantic Ocean, the massive amounts of fill now being dumped into the Pacific Ocean and the t funneling out of so much of the Earth’s interior caused the Earth to begin to wobble on its orbit around the sun. As the orbit became increasingly erratic, the Earth moved too far and collided with the planet Venus, causing both of them to shatter into fragments, the biggest pieces of which were attracted by gravitational pull of the largest plant, Jupiter, and now revolve around it as additional moons. The planet closest to the Sun, losing the gravitational pull formerly exercised by Earth and Venus, fell into the Sun and vanished in a brief solar flare-up.

The destruction of the Earth, Venus and Mercury were observed by astronomers on the planet Broma Three, the planet closest to the Solar system having an intelligent life form. Since because of the vast distance it had taken eons for the light of the catastrophe to reach observers on Broma Three, it was far too late for them to do anything about it, even if they had wished to do so. It is highly unlikely that any of the historians on Broma Three knew about the details of Vulcan Project to render an informed judgment concerning the wisdom of the endeavor. However, they might have benefitted from the conviction in the United States immediately before the destruction of the Earth than Project Vulcan was by far the most thoughtful and best executed program ever implemented by the federal government

Conditions in the United States and the rest of the developed world were deteriorating so rapidly that there could be no overlooking the problem. The President summoned an emergency session of the National Security Council and instructed them to come with a solution. For several days, they met and hotly debated the probable causes and how to remedy the situation. Realizing that the situation was so dire that they had to do something, they finally agreed to call in Dr. Kroutmier. The doctor was probably the most important unofficial adviser the government had ever had. A professor at the Cambridge School of Advanced Strategic Studies, he was widely regarded as a combination of Henry Kissinger and Bernard Baruch.

As usual, Dr. Kroutmier’s schedule was fully booked for several months ahead, but he graciously agreed to travel to Washington and meet with the National Security Council the next weekend. The president’s senior advisers gathered in their high-security conference room, eagerly awaiting the doctor’s council. He Stroud in so purposefully that it was apparent to all that his was the dominant personality in the room. He demanded a slide projector, ordered the room lights to be dimmed, and with an attitude much like that of a teacher instructing dull students, turned on the projector.

On the screen appeared a chart with two curves, one in green and one in red. The green line began very high on the vertical axis of the chart and plunged downward to the horizontal axes. The red line behaved in the reverse fashion, starting off low and climbing sharply. The red curve, the doctor, explained represented the rise in the problems of the United States. The green curve represented the calorie intake of the average American. There is not the slightest doubt; Kupatsky declared, that the decline of the U.S. position in the world was due to the popular movement in this country to adopt a more healthy diet.

His listeners sat astounded. Many thought he had suddenly lost his wits. Others concluded that they had misunderstood him because of his strong German accent. The Secretary of Defense went so far as to utter a crude epithet and get up in disgust. Fortunately, a junior staff aide who had been ordered to the meeting to act as recorder suggested that they might submit the doctor’s theory to the secret government giant computer. It was a convenient face-saving exercise. The National Security Council voted unanimously to take this action and hastily left the conference room.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the giant computer confirmed Dr. Kroutmier’s analysis. The National Security Council convened again and unanimously concluded that the computer had somehow malfunctioned. The doctor’s theory was just too absurd to be possible. Confident that another computer would dispel the nonsense, they sent the readout of the giant computer to a still bigger computer used by the National Weather Bureau to forecast the daily weather for the next century.

The National Weather Service was reluctant to permit their computer to be diverted to mundane issues but agreed when the President personally ordered them to do so. Once again, Kupatsky’s theory was confirmed. There could be no doubt. The proximate cause for the decline of the U.S. and its allies was the fall in average caloric consumption.

There was no time to lose. In the interests of speed, the President used his executive powers to order an immediate tripling of the caloric composition of the school lunch program. Fruits, vegetables and salads were all removed, to be replaced with candy, fried potatoes and soda, to which extra sugar had been added. Senior officials from the broadcast media were summoned to Camp David. There, they were informed by the President, in the company of the majority and minority party leaders of both branches of Congress, that their broadcast licenses would be voided if they did not eliminate all slender actors from their shows and replace them with obese ones. Restaurants, particularly fast food chains received subtle but nonetheless clear cut warning from the government that they would far more difficulties in their operations if they did not eliminate all healthy choices from their menus and increase the high-carb, fatty selections. Food production companies followed suite and at each stage of the manufacturing process, greatly increased amounts of salt and sugar were added.

Not surprisingly, the alarming decline in the average American’s daily caloric intake stopped falling and began to rise sharply. Considering the scope of the national change in diet, a surprisingly large number of individuals remained ignorant of what was happening. The government encouraged this reaction, as did business groups. Clothing sizes were adjusted, so that the same size forty suits for men Was now the equivalent of what a size forty-four would have been previously. Both old and new customers at diet clubs found the caloric goals and weight guides set for them were not only not lower that what they had been but in fact considerably elevated. Where exercise clubs found it impossible to discourage customers from using their machines to lose weight, they were furnished and encouraged to consume so-called “health drinks” which were laced with calories and stimulants designed to increase their appetites.

In the face of such a massive campaign, which, in fact, could not be differentiated from the braining washing techniques developed by the former Communist security services of Eastern Europe, it is not surprising that it proved extremely effective. At the end of three years, the government officials administering the program submitted the data to the secret giant computer for analysis. The computer readout confirmed what had seemed obvious; problems in the United States and the rest of the developed world were on a sharply declining path with the trajectory of the rate of caloric consumption rising by the same multiple. Regrettably, a similar analysis could not be performed at the end of five years because the greatly increased girth of the technicians manning the computer now too great for them to get close enough to operate it.

All told, Professor Kroutmier’s analysis of the problem, the solution he provided, and the government implementation of it may be deemed the most effective ever to come from the American government. There was only one small problem. As mankind not more and more obese, it became more and more difficult for anyone to actually work. At the same time as people demanded ever high intakes of food, farmers stopped going into the fields to produce it. Remedies might have been sought, but the fact that most people now telecommuted from their homes rather than actually producing any real work masked the problem. Mankind gradually became extinct, paralleling the fate of the carrier pigeon, the dodo and the dinosaur. When rats took over as the dominant life form on earth, they profited from what had happened to man. Search where you will, in every social stratum, and no where will you find an obese rate.

Captain Winston Carpenter was flying his Army Air Corps plane over New Guinea in April 1944 when it developed engine failure and crashed. Because of bad flying weather, the search for survivors had to be postponed for twenty-four hours. When it was conducted, no trace of any wreckage could be spotted because of the dense foliage in many parts of New Guinea. After an appropriate period of time, Carpenter’s family was formally notified that he was missing in action and had to be presumed dead.

More than fifty years passed. Then Carpenter’s son, Winston Carpenter Jr., pressed the Pentagon for further information concerning his father’s fate. The request would have received a routine reply except for the fact that the son was not only a member of Congress, but more importantly the second ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. As head of one of the committee’s subcommittees, he could very easily reduce or even eliminate financing for some of the proposed new weapons systems most desired by the Pentagon.

As a result of these special circumstances, the Defense Department decided to would only be fair to reopen the investigation into Captain Carpenter’s fate. New reconnaissance missions were flown using the more sophisticated sensors developed since 1944. The result was the same. The dense foliage in the area prevented any thorough search airplane debris that might have been left on the ground by a crash. Given the high priority Attached to keeping Congressman Carpenter’s good will, it was decided that further efforts were warranted.

One of the service secretaries recalled that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had just terminated a project involved the use of seers, individuals believed to have telepathic powers to locate objects in areas in which aerial observation was not possible. Use of the seers to satisfy Congressman Carpenter’s request was approved at the highest Pentagon level, and three of the most highly regarded seers were summoned back to Washington to participate. They were briefed on all the known details concerning the disappearance and probable crash of Captain Carpenter’s aircraft and then placed in a room in the bowels of the Pentagon.