Authors: Robert Buettner
I buckled up, and my mother blew the paint off that sucker.
FORTY-THREE
One year to the day after my mother flew my father, Kit and myself off Yavet, Kit and I “walked together on a lawn,” which was another way of describing what golf was when unspoilt. The lawn was at a place located outside the Trueborn American puzzle factory called Washington, D.C. The place was called Walter Reed Military Convalescent Center.
Walter Reed was a Trueborn American army surgeon who noticed in 1896 that GIs who marched around in swamps caught yellow fever, while their officers, who sat on their asses back in camp, didn’t. Reed theorized that this was because swamp mosquitoes carried the disease. Reed’s insight eventually saved millions of GIs, and even more millions of civilians, from death by yellow fever. So, ever since, there has always been a military medical facility in the Washington area named after Walter Reed. If Dr. Reed had also invented a way to prevent officers from sitting on their asses, GIs would’ve named Washington after him, too.
As Kit and I walked on the soft grass, me in civvies, Kit still in convalescent whites, I gently squeezed the fingers of her new hand.
She smiled and squeezed back.
I said, “Stronger today.”
She smiled again. “Stronger every day the therapy gorilla lets you sleep over.”
The therapy gorilla said Kit’s new arm would eventually be indistinguishable from the one she lost. But it would be awhile before she would squeeze a trigger again. If I had my way, it would be forever.
The sleepovers were less about what Mort called coitus, though that was coming back nicely, and more about giving her an anchor when the dreams woke her, and about helping her through the other pathologies of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which the gorilla said in Kit’s case were “exacerbated.” Although from what I had learned by hanging out at Big Walt, unexacerbated PTSD was the kind that happened to somebody else.
The strip of lawn that Kit and I were crossing separated the rear of the hospital’s eight-story main building from its parking lot. In front of the acres of spaces filled by the Chyotas of the people who did Big Walt’s actual work were three VIP spaces, each occupied by a spook-black limo.
As we walked, the main building’s rear glass doors hushed open and a squad-sized gaggle of briefcase-toting, gray-suited men and women bustled in front of us like ducks crossing a highway. The frowning ducks mounted their blacked-out limos, then sped away.
Kit raised her eyebrows. “Howard’s legal eagles are flying the coop early today.”
I nodded. “Then let’s go upstairs and say hello.”
Various legal eagles spoiled most of Howard’s days lately, because while Kit, my parents and I were returning from Yavet, an anonymous source leaked to the Trueborn American media a report about how the Pseudocephalopod War had really ended. This report provoked outrage and widespread panic across the American Trueborn population.
It also provoked an alleged heart attack in the alleged anonymous source, who had since that time holed his allegedly lying ass up on Walter Reed’s top floor like a reclusive billionaire. The best argument that the source was
not
Howard Hibble was that the report told the truth, a commodity unfamiliar to him.
Actually, what provoked the outrage and widespread panic wasn’t so much the truth, but the Trueborn American media, which was as unfamiliar with the truth as Howard was. Outrage and widespread panic were the media’s stock in trade, in the way that carrots and bananas are a grocer’s stock in trade.
However, for Trueborn Americans, for whom the future always works out, outrage and widespread panic have the shelf life of grocery-store produce. After a couple of news cycles, the bananas turned brown. The outcome of a war that ended decades before, in a vacuum at the end of the universe, got replaced on media shelves by fresh and fragrant crises.
Not a few pundits reflected that the revealed truth reflected better on mankind as a species than the long-told lie did.
One suspects that the anonymous source knew all of that when he reportedly leaked his unconfirmed report.
More importantly, he also realized that the immediate relatives of the sixty million war dead, who would at the War’s end have been rightly and egregiously offended for innocents and heroes unavenged, were now largely dead themselves, and so didn’t care.
The dead themselves, who had the most skin in the game, had been dead a long time, would stay dead even longer, and so didn’t care.
And mankind cared, and should care, more about preventing the likes of once and future yellow fevers than about dissipating its limited capacity for good by fearing and containing boogeymen who had long since left the closet.
So even though it turned out that mankind hadn’t killed the Slugs after all, Trueborn America, and so the universe that followed its lead, went on about its business.
Well, almost all of it did.
When Kit and I disembarked the elevator on Walter Reed’s top floor, a female nurse behind a desk that blocked access to the floor glanced up from her handheld. The printed sign on her desk read:
MATERIAL WITNESS SEQUESTRATION FACILITY
ACCESS LIMITED TO WITNESS’ COUNSEL, JUDGE ADVOCATE GENERAL
AND COMMITTEE STAFF, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT COUNSEL,
AND AUTHORIZED GUESTS.
As a frequent authorized guest, I said to the nurse, “How’s the material witness doing today?”
She shrugged. “Dying as usual.” She pointed a stylus down the hall. “Go see for yourself.”
Howard Hibble, the floor’s sole patient, sat propped up in his bed, wearing a hospital gown. Tubes and wires sprouted from his shriveled body like those little rootlets that erupt on past-date carrots.
“Jazen! Kit!” Howard looked up from his handheld and smiled, looking surprisingly chipper for a man who had been dying regularly for the best part of a year.
I asked, “Did the lawyers leave because you’re finally well enough to testify about the cover-up and the leak?”
Although the media’s business was outrage and panic, and the general populace’s business was business, Washington’s business was, first, to be shocked—shocked!—about things that it had no ability to remedy, and, second, to find somebody besides itself to blame for them.
Therefore, for the best part of a year, Congress, the Justice Department, the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the Sierra Club, Amnesty Interplanetary, and, probably, the Chancellor of the Exchequer if America had one, wanted a piece of Howard Hibble. Of course, all those entities had wanted a piece of Howard for decades, and so far none of them had gotten one.
Howard coughed like the smoker he had once been, maybe one cough more than necessary to be convincing. “Regrettably, I’m not going to be able to testify yet. Actually, my cardiologists are talking replacement heart.”
I rolled my eyes. The legal eagles had finally caught Howard Hibble in a lie. “That implies you had one in the first place, Howard.”
Kit asked, “Do you buy your cardiologists the same place Bart Cutler buys his anonymity and his pardons?”
Actually, although Cutler had gone to ground as a fugitive somewhere among five hundred twelve planets, his anonymity was about to spoil like warm rutabagas.
Now that Mort had honed his ability to locate a single human being in the vastness of the cosmos by chasing me, he was spending his mental spare time hunting for the man who killed his mother. Cutler had been convicted and sentenced
in absentia
of treason. Cutler probably would still find a politician corrupt enough to sell him a pardon, as long as it became effective after Cutler was hanged.
But money could still buy anonymity for some.
Three months after Kit, my parents and I returned to Earth, news accounts of a Sotheby’s auction reported that “the sole surviving authenticated original from the series of sixteen oils by C.M. Coolidge, circa 1903 A.D., frequently reproduced in schlock pop culture and collectively known as ‘dogs playing poker,’ sold for a record price to a well qualified buyer.”
The accounts noted that “well qualified” meant an anonymous buyer with net worth in excess of ten billion. I’m no gambler, but I’d bet I knew the buyer, and knew how he became well qualified.
The same accounts also reported that at the same auction “a one-hundred-six-carat perfect blue-white Weichselan diamond, the largest such piece ever offered for sale, fetched a record price for undisclosed sellers.”
By happy coincidence, my parents shortly thereafter purchased a retirement home on Florida’s platinum coast, where my father is recuperating well from a procedure medically similar to Kit’s.
My parents’ little shack is just a yacht’s throw down the beach from Edwin Trentin-Born’s compound. I don’t know whether Edwin’s the kind of guy who loves his neighbors, but he seems to accept his neighbors’ son better since my parents moved in. Or maybe I just accept being their son better now.
Howard grunted at his handheld as he got a report of something new from somewhere. He was still King of the Spooks, running his show from his hospital bed, despite dodging Washington flak. I suspect he kept his job, as he always had, because his hunches had so often wound up saving mankind’s produce from the disposal.
Howard said, “We just got product back from Utility 5. Ulys Gill was elected to the Central Committee. Now that’s a change that stabilizes the balance point.”
I rolled my eyes again. “Change? Really? The Yavi still have nukes. So do we. The people in charge on Yavet are still repressive, genocidal environmental rapists. We’re still over-privileged hedonists who waste our time and our money betting on bloodsports. While our politicians waste their time and our money arguing about nothing. Howard, do you really believe we’re gonna make it?”
Howard looked from Kit to me, then he stared up at the ceiling, as though he could see through it all the way to the stars. “Make it? I believe mankind will always make it. We may make it by the skin of our teeth, but we will always make it. And that’s the truth.”
Then he lay back and closed his eyes.
AFTERWORD
Cliff’s Notes for
Balance Point:
My wife and I once sat my daughter down with us at our kitchen table to resolve some now-unremembered error that probably involved Kool-Aid and a Dustbuster. The Accused clutched her mother’s forearm, wept, and pleaded, “I won’t do it again! Just don’t have Dad
explain
it to me!”
Like my daughter, fiction readers hate it when authors
explain
it to them. Fiction readers want to laugh a lot, cry a little, and learn something about life, and about the world, that they didn’t know. But readers don’t want a novel that turns into The Fourth Grader’s Big Book of Story Problems.
Fiction editors know this. So, when fiction writers forget this, editors decorate our manuscripts with red marginal notations like “Cut! Readers will
get
this (or don’t need to know it) anyway!” Or, in Hollywood screenplay-ese, “Cut!!! Too on-the-nose!!!”
What we authors cut, whether by editorial fiat or by self-inflicted wound, usually involves parallels from our life experience or from history that inspired some or all of our story.
This afterword adds back for curious readers a brief and “on-the-nose” guide to some of those anecdotes and historical parallels that would have slowed
Balance Point
as a story, or would have been “too on-the-nose.”
I’m a child of the Cold War. So, therefore, is
Balance Point
. I hope it conveys, from the comfortable distance that conversational science fiction imparts, the mood of a time when every day that mankind didn’t blow itself up was a gift, and much of the world presumed every foreigner was a spy.
But I know that generations who already see 9-11 as mere touchpad digits may already irretrievably see the Cold War only as a black-and-white non-war that was contested by dead people. But not
zombie
dead people, so who, like,
cares
?
Balance Point
doesn’t bid to retell the Cold War like a quasi-historic thriller. Maybe you got that from the three-eyed King Kong on the cover. Rather,
Balance Point
is more a memory quilt appliqued with interesting, telling and occasionally true anecdotes. Or at least the author hopes readers find them so.
So, in no particular order:
Starship technology is like the A-bomb, and the last half of the twentieth century would undoubtedly have been vastly different if the West had somehow kept the Soviet Union from getting the A-bomb.
The Trueborns are, overtly and on-the-nose, us Americans. With all our faults and contradictions, I challenge anyone to name a dominant power on the world stage over the course of recorded history that has been a greater net force for good.
The Trueborn’s annihilation of the Slugs is like America’s use of that A-bomb.
Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki horrifically and directly killed, immediately or eventually, between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand people. But the A-bombings abruptly ended the thirty-one-year cycle of organized violence known as World Wars I and II, which killed over
one hundred million
people.
The so-called
Pax Americanum
that replaced that cycle of violence is blamed for less than
half
as many deaths from all wars and similar conflicts during more than
double
the time. That’s still a numbing statistic, but
Pax Americanum
marks the first meaningful interval during human history during which war mortality as a percentage of world population meaningfully
de
creased, rather than sharply increased.
Yet as a people, America’s strength is that we remain vigorously but peaceably of two minds whether that decision to use the bomb on Japan, and the ongoing World Police role it thrust upon us, was motivated by, or was for, the good.
Statistical asterisk to the two foregoing paragraphs: The “facts” cited about war dead vary among creditable sources over a range of more than forty million human souls. That’s roughly twice the population of the continent of Australia, give or take the Holocaust. Some of those varied sources are neutral. Some have skin in the game, like Robert McNamara and Zbigniew Brezinski.
My middle name is “Douglas,” after General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur was an American general who became the effective military governor of Japan after the A-bombs. He introduced Japan to surrender, representative democracy and baseball. He later would have introduced Red China and North Korea to the A-bomb, if America hadn’t restrained him.
My father served under MacArthur, as a tanker scheduled to invade mainland Japan, which never happened because of the A-bombings. The invasion would likely have killed my dad, along with perhaps a million other GIs and five to ten million Japanese. In which case you would not be reading this. So I admit to that skin in this game. Choose your own facts and conclusions if you disagree.
The monolithic, gray, repressive, paranoid, insular and nuke-rich Yavi stand in for, well, you pick ’em. The Soviet Union, Red China, and for a host of wannabes (North Korea, East Germany) come to mind.
Ulys Gill reminds me of Oleg Penkovsky, the Soviet Union GRU Colonel who in 1962 supposedly (In espionage every “fact” should be prefaced with “supposedly.” I’ve said “supposedly” this time. Imply “supposedly” hereafter) feared that his countrymen, who were sneaking nukes targeted on America into Cuba, were crazy enough to use them.
Nuking America would have gotten Penkovsky’s Mother Russia blown up far worse than America, to say nothing of ending the world as we know it. So Penkovsky revealed the nukes to America.
By that single sane, but treasonous, act Penkovsky gifted mankind with one get-out-of-blowing-ourselves-up-free card that we have to date used wisely.
But if Penkovsky was a sane traitor, he wasn’t a profligate traitor. Like Gill, he refused to rat out other Soviet spies he knew about to his adversary. Unlike Gill, Penkovsky’s sanity earned him a Soviet bullet in the back of his head.
In
Balance Point,
Max Polian, who was crazy enough to blow up his world, got the bullet to the back of the head. Because if reality were just, we wouldn’t need fiction to teach us what justice should be.
Historical allusions to dead-rat dead drops, eavesdropping from purpose-built garbage mountains, bugging the car phones of hypochondriac Politburo octogenarians, and most of the tradecraft portrayed in
Balance Point
, sound too nutty to be made up. They are in fact presented as accurately as a short-term Cold War era spy knows how.
Another area where
Balance Point
’s fiction is more-or-less true is that although it may be hard and dangerous to smuggle spies and secrets across borders, it’s much less hard to smuggle drugs, booze, bulldozers, luxury sedans and people willing to work for less than minimum wage.
Any and all references suggesting familiarity with alcohol, sex for hire, drugs and gambling are in no way autobiographical. And I’m stickin’ to it.
All that said, the lives of children of the Cold War have been about other balance points, too. And the book touches on those, too. Like the balance point between risk-taking, and risk-averse, people in love; and the balance point between the green but prosperous planet that Earth, by the skin of her teeth, still is. Compared to the gray, dirty Yavet we might make her into. And maybe the balance point between who children want their parents to be, and who the world lets them be.
Finally, if you know classic science fiction, not well but too well, you recognize that Howard Hibble’s last optimistic words about mankind “making it by the skin of our teeth” echo Robert Heinlein’s words in a nationally broadcast radio interview with Edward R. Morrow in 1952.
If you don’t even know that “nationally broadcast radio” was YouTube without skateboarding cats, Robert Heinlein was a quintessentially American bundle of the conservative, liberal, and libertarian contradictions that characterized the Cold War. In the century following Heinlein’s, he remains in any conversation about history’s greatest writer of classic science fiction.
But a little homage to science fiction classics goes a long way. Sometimes as long as eight books. So I’ll just say so long, and thanks for the fish.
—Robert Buettner