Little Green Men (34 page)

"Mr. President. . ." The chief of staff only called him that when he was about to not do what he was being asked. "Poor Ike," Harry Truman said before handing over the reins to Eisenhower. "He'll sit there and say, 'Do this,' and nothing will happen."

"Damnit. Bill, don't you give me that 'Mr. President' -" "This is the figment of a deranged mind." "Then let's find out for sure."

The chief of staff was silent a moment. He said gravely, "Let's for the sake of argument say that there
is
something odd going on here. Now let's pose the critical question: Do you
want
to find out?"

"Damn straight. It's my job."

"Your job, if I may quote the oath of office, is to preserve and protect and defend the Constitution of the United States -" "I
know
that."

"- not to light a match to it."

"I haven't heard one word of sense from anyone today."

"Suppose we ascertain that, starting in nineteen forty-seven, the U.S. government has been behind every UFO in the sky. For God knows what reason - spooking the Russians, for starters. For fifty years, every blinking light in the sky. every scorch mark in the desert, every - my God - abduction . . . why don't we just call it kidnapping? . . . has been brought to you courtesy of Uncle Sam. Your tax dollars at work. How is this going to play on the evening news? It would make everyone's worst Kennedy assassination theory read like Mother Goose. No one would trust the government ever again. And who would they blame? The handiest person around - you. I can't wait to get to work on your TV address from the Oval Office. 'Guess what. I just found out that for the last half century we've been making funny lights in the sky and kidnapping your womenfolk, plowing crop circles. Did I mention the cattle mutilations?' Never mind reelection. Let's skip directly to impeachment proceedings."

"Hold on.
I'm
the one blowing the damn whistle. I'd be a hero." "No one," the chief of staff said somberly, "remotely associated with the United States government
would be in the running for the
title of hero. Do you have any concept of the chaos such a revelation would create? At a time, let me point out. when we face the prospect of war with a country that still has sixty-eight hundred nuclear warheads, under the control of a man who, CIA tells us, brushes his teeth in the morning with vodka and instructs his mistresses to address his penis as Peter the Great. Is this really a good time to bring the government crashing down?"

"We're getting ahead of ourselves here," the president said after a reflective pause. "Banion probably is haywire. It's probably nothing."

"Exactly. Then why go poking into it?"

"It's ugly, coyote ugly. Makes me want to chew my arm off."

'All I'm saying is that if it is true - which it isn't - there's no way you can reveal that it is. And if it isn't - which it can't be - then there's no need to do anything. When you come right down to it. it's a no-brainer."

The president frowned. "We still have a Banion problem. He's going to piss on my parade if we don't do anything."

"What's Banion going to do? Announce that the aliens are going to attack. What'll that do to his credibility? The moment he announces that, no one has to take him seriously anymore."

"What about his three million followers marching down to Canaveral to crap all over my moment?
My
moment."

"Bring them on. You emerge as the strong leader who stood up to the forces of cuckoodom. The more I think about this, the more 1 like it. This may be the best thing that could have happened to us. This could be our margin of victory."

"It's going to be a goddamn mess."

"It'll be a triumph. Unless . . . ," the chief of staff said darkly. "What?"

"The aliens attack."

For a brief, unusual moment, the Oval Office filled with laughter.

UFO BIG IN KINK STINK BANION LIKED TO DRESS UP AS ALIEN AND HAVE PROSTITUTES "PROBE" HIM

"It's only the
Blare,
" Scrubbs said from the sofa.

Banion sat at his desk staring down at the headline in the nation's largest-circulation supermarket tabloid. The escort service girl with whom he had purportedly "holed up" in the Hay-Adams Hotel, right across from the White House, for several weekends of "sextraterrestrial" whoopee was attractive enough, in an over-rouged sort of way. What branch of the government was
she
employed by, he wondered. Inside were four full pages of color photos. The one that would probably go out to the wire services and be reprinted in
Time, Newsweek,
and other glossies showed Banion wearing nothing but Martian antennae. It was a good job of Scitexing. In the digital age, photos lied all the time, through their teeth. You could put Mother Teresa in a bordello, Hitler in a synagogue. Should he even bother issuing an outraged denial? In the outer office, he could hear Renira's phones clamoring. Outside, TV trucks disgorged camera crews like soldiers deploying from a troop carrier.

Renira walked in to say that
The New York Times
was on the line demanding comment. Banion said to Scrubbs, "You were saying how the mainstream media wouldn't pay any attention to this?"

Scrubbs shrugged. "I was only trying to cheer you up."

"You failed." Banion told Renira to tell the
Times
he'd call back and returned to his tabloid. In a lurid sort of way, he was fascinated by this fictional fantasy they'd concocted for him.

"What an idiot," he muttered. "To think that I could walk into the Oval Office and start issuing demands." He shook his head. "But I didn't expect them to hit back this way. I thought, well, I thought he was above this sort of thing." He read aloud, '"While we were doing it, Jack liked me to make these noises like a spaceship. Like this: Wee-ooo-wee-ooo - you know, just like they did at that march last weekend?'

"The government's got no class anymore," Banion said.

"There's plenty of reporters outside. Tell them the White House is trying to make you look like an asshole because they're scared of you."

Banion looked at Scrubbs sourly. "I'm not sure you're cut out to be a spin doctor."*

"It's true, isn't it? Unless it was MJ-Twelve again."

"This is no time for earnest denials, especially honest ones. It's time to take the fight to them. But when you strike at a king, you must kill him."

"What?"

"Emerson. In a way, this might work to our advantage." "You being an alien sex freak?"

"When you're hot, you're hot. It's not like I'm going to have a hard time getting on prime-time TV tonight, is it?"

"Our guest tonight, John O
. Banion. welcome back on
Larry King Live."
"Thank you, Larry."

"This story in the
Blare,
the tabloid, about you and this woman. Want to comment?"

"I could deny it, Larry, and say that powerful forces are out to discredit me, but why bother? I'm sure the young woman in question is a patriotic-minded person just following orders, the way all those Germans did in World War Two. Maybe she even thinks she was doing the right thing. I hope so. But I didn't come on your show tonight to talk about the government's latest clumsy attempt to force me to look

*
One who lies for a living, usually for a politician.

like someone who's overdosed on Viagra.*
1
have something much more important to talk about." "What's that?"

"I have received a communique from the alien high command."

Larry King arched his eyebrows and nodded. "No kidding."

"It's a very serious situation, I regret to say. I hope people listening tonight will pay very close attention, because this affects every man, woman, and child in this country."

"They're listening. Believe me."

"Well, Larry, the aliens are going to attack the United States with everything they've got if the president insists on launching the final stage of Project
Celeste
this week."

"That
does
sound serious. What's their problem?"

"Their intelligence apparatus here - as you know, Larry, the aliens have an extensive intelligence operation here - well, they have to, don't they? Anyway, their information is that the payload aboard this shuttle, bound for
Celeste,
is a first-strike weapon. A Plasma Beam Device. This is potentially devastating to the, uh, alien fleet. A dagger, if you will, Larry, aimed at their heart."

"Who did you speak to about this?"

"Their leaders. I only deal with the top echelon."

'And you've told this to our leaders?"

"I revealed this to the president, in the Oval Office at the White House, just a few days ago."

"Oh,
G
oddamnit,"
the president said. He and the First Lady were watching in bed.

"What was his reaction?"

*
Erection pills. Introduced in 1998. until protests from exhausted women pressured Congress to get the Food and Drug Administration to ban them. Now sold at higher prices on the black market.

"I'm sorry to report, Larry, that his attitude was one of complete denial. As you know, his poll numbers are way down, he might lose, the election is right around the corner. He needs all the publicity he can get. He seems to think that a photo opportunity at Cape Canaveral is more important than total annihilation at the hands of superior alien firepower. A sad situation, Larry."

"Right."

"You read in the papers this morning that he's going to be the one to personally push the launch button?"

"Yeah, I saw that. Let me ask you, doesn't this all sound kind of-to be honest - nuts?"

"It won't sound 'nuts,' Larry, to the majority of the American people. Let me remind you that eighty percent of the American people believe that the government has been lying to them about UFO's for over half a century."

"Yeah, but -"

"So why would they start believing the government now - when the stakes are so high? That's why I'm here tonight, to announce that unless the president agrees to halt the
Celeste
launch and agrees to inspection of all future space payloads by certified UFO organization inspectors, then the Millennial Man Militia will have no choice but to halt that launch."

"Millennial Man
Militia!"

"Yes, Larry. The military arm of the Millennium Men." "Get me the attorney general," the president barked into his bedside phone.

EIGHTEEN

CANAVERAL AUTHORITIES BRACE AS 500,000
"MILLENNIUM MILITIAM
EN" ARRIVE AT CAPE TO HALT LAUNCH OF CELESTE'S FINAL STAGE

PRESIDENT IS REPORTED "DEFIANT"

ATTORNEY GENERAL VOWS MASS ARRESTS IN EVENT PROTEST TURNS VIOLENT

With the
Celeste
launch less than forty-eight hours away, the media had all but abandoned the presidential election, only one week away. Beside the surreal tableau unfolding at Cape Canaveral, the campaign paled. Banion's call to arms, Dr. Falopian's perfervid networking, and Colonel Murfletit's deft logistics had produced a crowd of a half million, and growing. Traffic on Interstate 95 was backed up two hundred miles, to the Georgia border. Only the 1969 launch
of
Apollo 11,
which had carried the first Americans to their rendezvous with the surface of the moon, had drawn such numbers, but those viewers had come in peace. Local and state authorities were overwhelmed. The government called up the National Guard and then mobilized regular airborne units to parachute in, if it came to that.

The mood inside Banion's flying saucer command trailer (trucked down from Washington) was as defiant as that in the White House. Banion paced in front of a large map of the area, a pointer tucked under his arm like a swagger stick. Dr. Falopian had just informed him that a self-styled guerrilla UFO group had arrived. Its specialty was staging incursions into Area 51 in Nevada, where the government was supposedly reverse-engineering the captured alien spacecraft. The complicating factor was that members of Group 51, as they called themselves, were dedicated gun enthusiasts, and they had been observed toting large, bulgy duffel bags.

Banion summoned Colonel
Murfletit
and instructed him to convey to Group 51 that there was to be no plinking at
Celeste
on the launchpad. He had been doing his best to sound Gandhiesque. harping incessantly on the nobility of civil disobedience, millennial
satyagraha.
(The trick was not sounding like a weenie.) The emphasis was to be on tactics such as lying limply across the roads, preventing ingress to or egress from the Space Center; a little harmless chaining of limbs to fences, gates, that sort of thing. So far, the National Guard had carted off more than 5,000 superbly limp militiamen. Having filled all the local jails within fifty miles, the authorities were now having to bus them to a federal detention center in a swampy, godforsaken part of the state where several thousand extremely undesirable Cuban illegals were still being held. What the long-incarcerated Cubanos would make of their new fellow inmates remained to be seen. Lunch, probably.