The Media Candidate (34 page)

Sherwood performed the ritual of selecting the
appropriate tobacco for this occasion, cleaning his pipe bowl to
preserve the purity of the blend, and filling the bowl and tamping
it with his pipe-cleaning tool. He sat back against the bench and
drew lightly on the pipe to insure that it was prepared. Elliott
remained motionless as Sherwood applied fire to the tobacco and
began producing clouds of some aromatic smoke of great complexity.
The slightest of breezes carried the dispersing clouds past
Elliott.

“You are playing a foolish and dangerous game,
Townsend. Burns says you are just a harmless old man. We have
encountered cases like you before. We usually dispatch them much
more efficiently. There is never any real threat, but COPE does not
like loose ends. Not good business.” Settling back into a position
of arrogant disdain, Sherwood continued, “Tell me, Townsend, what
did you expect to gain with your incursion into politics?”

Elliott turned his head enough to look at
Sherwood and to attract his attention. “What’s going to happen to
Guinda now?”

The question startled Sherwood, causing him to
divert his eyes from the clouds attempting to flee his presence. He
looked at Elliott somewhat confused by this role reversal.

“What’s going to happen to Guinda now?” Elliott
repeated.

“Well, G … ah, Burns has a great deal of
potential, and we plan to use her assets in upcoming—”

“You mean her body,” Elliott interrupted now
looking squarely at Sherwood, causing him to shift his eyes away
nervously.

“Burns has many assets besides the obvious
physical ones,” Sherwood continued.

“Name some others,” Elliott demanded, still
looking directly at the nervous Sherwood and moving his face closer
to him.

“Well … her … ah … hair is very … ah … beautiful
and … she won some medals in the Olympics and—”

“In what event?”

“Well, let’s see, … it was tennis, that’s it,
tennis.”

“Swimming, you cretin, it was swimming. She won
the gold in the 100 meter freestyle and the silver in the 200 meter
butterfly, and she anchored the team that took the gold in the 400
meter relay.” Elliott returned his gaze to the earth just beyond
his folded hands. “How about her Master’s degree in political
science? How about her enthusiasm and dedication to the Party? How
about her intelligence? How about her aggressiveness at uncovering
the truth?” Silence now filled all the voids among the clouds of
smoke.

During Elliott’s short testimonial, Sherwood had
risen to his feet and withdrawn a couple paces upwind. He tapped
his pipe bowl sharply on a steel railing, disgorging the old ashes,
still burning furiously, which had failed him. He fumbled in his
pocket for a new pouch of tobacco.

With a new charge of tobacco, Sherwood walked
back to the bench and stood with his shadow directly intersecting
Elliott’s folded hands. “I am here to convince you that it is in
your interest, Townsend, and in the interest of whatever romantic
and pedantic ideals you harbor about some nonexistent America, to
desist in this nonsensical game you are playing.”

“Why are you so interested in preserving my
life?” Elliott asked, turning to face Sherwood.

“Do you know who Jean D’Alembert was?” Sherwood
asked.

Elliott maintained a fixed stare on
Sherwood.

“The great Dr. Townsend, having studied
theoretical physics, of course knows the name. But do you
understand the significance of D’Alembert’s Principle?”

“What are you getting at, Sherwood? D’Alembert’s
Principle is at the very core of our concept of classical
mechanics. Without it, we could not have developed the Hamiltonian
model of the physics of particles.”

“Which links,” Sherwood gestured with his pipe,
“the physics of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first
centuries. The point, Dr. Townsend, is simply this. When pure
science is pursued for the sake of the science, with no concern for
what technology might ever derive from it, we never can know what
incredible connections may be drawn from it in the future—until
that future arrives.”

“What’s the point, Sherwood?”

“Neutrino Wave-Function Exchange may be such a
principle.”

Elliott held his breath as Sherwood projected a
gray cloud into the air above him. “You won a Nobel Prize for
discovering the Higgs Particle, a rather plebeian, yet
time-consuming, effort by your own admonition. But your theory of
Neutrino Wave-Function Exchange has been generally ignored by a
physics community largely focused on funding issues. Your principle
is quite subtle but may hold the key to understanding whence ninety
percent of the universe derives its origin. Neutrino exchange may
thrust physics into the twenty-second century.”

“You think my life should be preserved because
of some arcane principle I derived?”

“The Principle of Neutrino Wave-Function
Exchange exists quite independent of your life, Dr. Townsend. Where
you separated yourself from the slugs surrounding us was your
vision, your conscious decision to forsake all to pursue your
science.”

Elliott studied Sherwood’s shoes for a moment
and then snapped to his eyes. “You know nothing about my vision or
my conscious decisions.”

Sherwood stood up and withdrew a couple paces
where he pondered a cat sleeping in the shade of the Pampas grass
with several wrens astride bobbing fronds just overhead. Then he
looked back at Elliott and finally studied the flowers, behind
which he knew a set of perfectly aligned sensors monitored his
every movement.

Standing over Elliott, he said, “Let us not
become engulfed in bygone ghosts. We have some important business
to attend to—business which may have a great impact on your
future.

“I will give you a simple option, Townsend, a
second chance from an organization not accustomed to giving second
chances. Your meddling in the affairs of COPE has nearly cost your
life. I advise you to quit while you can. You Don Quixotes all have
one major flaw in common, maybe stemming from a mutation somewhere
in a chromosome. The bottom line is that you all think that someone
cares, that if you can alert the masses, something will change.

“No one cares, Townsend. No … one … cares. No
one other than the few foolish remaining Minutemen. Burns was
mostly right. You are a harmless old fool.”

Sherwood retook his position seated beside
Elliott. “You probably think people cared in the last century and
that you and your Minuteman brethren can turn the clock back. Let
me tell you how people cared in your century.

“Do you know what it means when your liabilities
exceed you assets, Townsend, and the only way you can live is by
borrowing more and more money every day? That is called bankruptcy.
Do you know that by 1970, your favorite government was hopelessly
bankrupt? By the 90s, the Government had created giveaway programs
to pay out about forty trillion dollars that they knew would never
exist. Do you know who cared? No one, Townsend. And do people care
more today? You were a fool in the twentieth century. Imagine what
a super fool you are in the twenty-first century.”

Elliott visualized Martha in the TV room with
her friends. He saw bouncing nipples and peckers and game show
contestants barking and smiling their way to Washington and
millions of players at home cheering them on. He made no defense.
“Get to the point. I don’t need a history lesson.”

“In 1935, the Social Security Act was passed by
Congress. The politicians sold it to the masses in those depression
days as a way to care for people who could not care for themselves.
So you say your twentieth-century Congress cares after all? Take a
look at Government revenues afterward. Your Government stole those
‘contributions’—nearly a trillion dollars by the end of the
century. Social Security added over ten percent to Government
revenue for a dozen years after it’s enactment. Any politician with
a third grade education could have foreseen that. And you know they
did.

“Whose problem did Social Security solve? Your
caring Congress solved the only problem any politician ever
has—revenue for his personal empire. From that empire comes votes,
power, favors, status. The point is that no politician cares, or
ever cared, or ever will care, about anything but where the dollars
come from. The voters just want some strong, charismatic leader to
whom they can transfer the burden of their conscience, which
otherwise might nag them for not caring. And then Minuteman
Townsend arrives to tell them that they should care about some
ancient principles of freedom. You are the fool, Townsend, and
those people at home, cheering for the candidates, real or
otherwise, are the living reality.

“Your obtuse concept of freedom nearly caused
the total collapse of the Government. We were dangerously close to
a revolution because the Government could no longer borrow to pay
its bills, and millions of people depended on that for their daily
survival.

“Then some resourceful businesses teamed up with
big labor and formed a coalition with a major TV network, and some
Hollywood syndicates that put up unbeatable candidates with
unbeatable campaigns. They called themselves The CBS
Republicans.

“Of course, the campaigns were all the same lies
that the masses had come to accept, but now the politicians started
making some changes. Since we owned the politicians, they worked
for us; and we started making some progress toward fiscal reforms.
Then another network coalition, that called itself The NBC
Democratic Party, started doing the same thing.

“After a few elections, Washington began to be
occupied by the stars of the infotainment industry. Under their
tutelage, the fiscal situation slowly turned around, and most
people benefited. The Supreme Court supported this benign
revolution with decisions that were no more unconstitutional than
those of the previous century.

“The game shows were a stroke of genius. All
that hype and nonsense is exactly what the voters wanted to further
isolate them from the real business of government while giving them
the sense that they were participants in the great American
tradition of democracy.”

Elliott appeared to be displaced in time and
space as he sat stoically with the words of the oracle tearing at
his soul. He began to mumble audibly, “They all know deep down that
it’s bullshit.”

Sherwood continued, “A media republic has risen
from the ashes of the popular republic. And it works. But nothing
lasts forever, right, Townsend? Ultimately, power will corrupt the
leadership of the media republic just as it corrupted the masses
who could not handle the power they possessed in the popular
republic. But the masses are still gorging themselves on their
newfound freedom from choice.

“Only one thing is certain. Whatever form our
Government takes today or took in the past, it is intrinsically
what the masses want. Our Government mirrors the will of the
electorate. Government can have no deficiencies because it is the
id of the masses. Their complaining and hand-wringing is all part
of their mantra, their badge of participation.”

Sherwood rose, puffing heavily on his pipe. The
bowl nearly glowed in response. A smile came over his face as he
cherished the experience. “I believe this pipe will be just fine.
It needed to be burned in, to excise that which was inadequate, to
temper its fiber, to transfigure its soul.” He held the pipe up and
examined it briefly. Then he turned his attention back to
Elliott.

“There is one additional thing to bear in mind,
Townsend.” Sherwood paused, during which the cloud of smoke cleared
between them. “COPE has more spiders than you have lives.” With
this, he blew a great cloud of smoke to envelope Elliott once
more.

Elliott sat motionless, searching the ground
beneath him for some form of truth to repudiate what was crushing
his senses, but no truth rescued him. As another plume of smoke
enveloped him, he fantasized that it was some poison gas that would
make everything so simple. He embraced it and drew it into his
lungs, awaiting relief. No, it was just smoke.

Sherwood interrupted the séance. “I suggest you
go home, Townsend, and throw away any copies of the files you stole
and go back to thinking about physics. It will be much more
rewarding and will keep you out of trouble. That is my best offer,
and a generous one.”

“This is all just an espionage game to you,
isn’t it?” Elliott stood up, one leg nearly collapsing in
complaint. “You’re just moving pawns and rooks around as you sit in
your twenty-first century castle surrounded by your eight-legged
centurions. But there’s more than just pride at stake here. There’s
a whole way of life changing. And the people don’t even know about
the fraud you petty monarchs are imposing on them. But you must be
plenty scared of anarchists like me based on all the attention I’ve
gotten in the last few days. You must realize there are thousands
or millions of people out there just waiting for a wakeup call, and
all it takes is one trouble maker with real ammunition to set
things going against you and your phony candidates and your robot
assassins. You are outside the law, not me. And you’re terrified
that the free media will latch onto this Nobel-Prize-winning
scientist with proof of a government conspiracy against the
Constitution.”

“That is very exciting oratory, Townsend. But
what about your lover? What do you suppose will happen to her
career in the Party when they discover she is the one who hacked
her way into the COPE files for your so-called proof?”

“She’ll have an even more exciting career in the
revolution. She has talent you autocrats would never appreciate
anyway.”

“Indeed. What clever rhetoric. And what is the
probability of such a revolution even being recognized, much less
successful? Apply your mathematical skills to that question.”