Little Green Men (17 page)

Gracklesen! Give us Gracklesen! Grrrrrrrrrr! Rip him to shreds!

A half continent away, a young aide opened a door and said, "Senator, you might want to turn on C-SPAN."

"Mr. Stimple on the line," Renira announced.

Banion frowned. He was working away on the word processor, banging out a column on the latest photographs from
Loiterer One.
the U.S. space probe currently orbiting Neptune and sending back photographs. One of these showed a mountainous rock formation on the planet's surface that, from 270 miles up, vaguely resembled human faces. Dr. Falopian seized on it as evidence of alien life on the planet and pronounced it a Neptunian Mount Rushmore.

Bill Stimple did not ask Banion about the status of his golf handicap.

"The big guy is unhappy, Jack. Really, really unhappy."

"Oh? Why?" Banion continued typing:
Increasing numbers of abductees, when hypnotically "regressed" by Bart Hupkin about their experiences, reveal that their captors telepathically communicated to them that they are using Neptune as a staging area for their exploration of earth . . .

"The show you did from that UFO conference. Jesus, why didn't you tell me you were doing that?"

"Didn't know I was supposed to clear my programs with you, Bill."
These developments, together with the stunning Loiterer photos of the Neptunian "Mount Rushmore" suggest that alien colonization of our solar system may alr
eady be more advanced than prev
iously. . .

"Sunday
is supposed
id
be a public affairs program, not a
freak
show."

'And just what did you find freakish about it?"

"Everything! There wasn't one person on there wearing matched socks. Falopian, your so-called nuclear physicist? I wouldn't trust him with a toaster oven! And that chinless colonel who saw alien bodies from Roswell, in bottles? Jeesus. What planet is
he
from? And those Russians. Where the fuck did you find them? On the Internet, under
fraud.org

? Plasma Beam Device? Shooting down flying saucers? My daughter says she saw the fighter pilot on
Tales of the Weird
a couple of weeks ago. Jack, your show was like the bar scene in
Star Wars."

Informed sources within the UFO scientific community now say that NASA should concentrate
Loiterer's
cameras on the area 750 kilometers southwest of the humanoid rock
formation . . .

"Jack?"

"I'm listening." 'Am I getting through?" "You saw the Nielsens?" "Yes, I saw the Nielsens."

"Then no doubt you remarked that we were up five points. We had the highest rating since the Monsoone show."*

"Great," said Bill acidulously. "We're doing wonderfully in households with no teeth and combined household income of three thousand dollars.
Exactly
the sort of people Ample Ampere is trying to reach."

"That's a very outdated demographic model of the UFO community. We're mainstream now. Just look at me."

"Jack, the closest your new viewers will ever come to one of our refrigerators is using the packing box for an addition to their home."

*
Susan Monsoone, Hollywood actress who defected to Hanoi during the Vietnam War to protest U.S. policy. Married Ho Chi Minh. Returned to the United States after his death. Now married to a multibillionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, she is active in veterans' causes.

"Are you saying that Ample Ampere has no interest in being on the cutting edge of the biggest story in history?"

"The only cutting edge at Ample right now is the ax that Al Wiley, chairman of the board, is sharpening. He tested it on me this morning. He chopped off the tip of my dick with it."

"Have you packed the extremity with ice?"

"Jack, goddamnit, this is serious. The next call is going to be one you don't want to get."

"He's going to cancel my show?"

"Not the show.
You."

"Bill, not to sound like the Sun King, but I
am
the show."

"You're not the only warm body in Washington. If it came to that."

"You were thinking perhaps - Evan Thomas?"

"Not my department. But we're not there yet. Look, we're a two-hundred-and-eighty-billion-dollar company. The chairman of the board does not want to hear people sniggering behind his back when he's trying to sink a long putt at Pebble Beach. My advice, and I'm saying this as a friend, is - lay off the aliens."

"Lay off the biggest story in history?"

"Jack, I'm not going to get
into
this with you."

"Not going to get into the fact that aliens are abducting U.S. citizens -"

"I'm going to hang up the phone now, Jack. Good-bye. I'm hanging up."

Bill Stimple's call annoyed Banion. It was all he could do to concentrate on the Neptune rock formations. He didn't want to lose his TV show, but what was the point of having one if the bastards weren't going to let you use it to expose the really Big Story? Perhaps there was a middle way.

He decided to call his producer, Chip, and tell him
to
line up Secretary of State Slippersen for this coming Sunday's show. That should please Ample Asshole. They could talk about Russia and North Korea and whether to give Most Favored Nation to Iraq, now that Saddam Hussein had become a born-again Christian. And if the conversation should . . .
drift
into alien abductions, well, it couldn't be helped. To hell with it, he'd call Slippersen himself. They were close friends.

"It's John O
. Banion. I'm calling for Secretary Slippersen."

"Oh," said the secretary, with unsuccessfully disguised alarm. "Could you hold a moment?" She came back on. "I'm sorry, Mr. Banion, but the secretary is unavailable."

Unavailable?
When John O
. Banion called, minions rushed to pull their principals out of meetings with prime ministers.

"I see."

"Is it something I can help you with?"

The cheek! He never should have placed the call himself. "I'm calling to ask if he'll be our guest on the show this Sunday." "I'll certainly pass that along."

In gloom, Banion returned to his Neptune column. When it was finished, he gave it to Renira to copyedit, fact-check, and transmit to the syndicate in St. Louis.

A half hour later, Bob Newcombe, the head of the syndicate, was on the line.

"You son of a gun," he said in his hearty, broad-shouldered way. "You really had us going!" "How's that?"

"With this column about Neptune. Mount Rushmore! I almost fell out of my chair." "Yes?"

"We're gonna put it in
Clippings,
our in-house newspaper. Funniest thing I've ever read. You ought to do more of this. I never realized you had this side."

"Side?"

"Comic side."

"How do you mean, 'comic'?"

"To come up with something like this."

"Bob, that is my column. It is not 'comic' 'Comic' is not what I do."

After a longish pause, Newcombe said, "Jack, we can't run this." "Why not?"

"I haven't said anything up to now. You've done eight columns on alien-related topics in the last three weeks. That's a lot. Time to get back to meat and potatoes. Who's gonna be the next president, are we going to war with Russia. Inconsequential things like that. Enough aliens, please. I gotta run. We need the new column in an hour. Say hi to Bitsey."

Gotta run?
Bob Newcombe had something more important to do than continue a conversation with his leading syndicated columnist? Banion sat holding the uncradled phone, listening in amazement to the dial tone. Send
another
column?

When he had calmed down, he fired off that staple of newspaper columnists who have nothing else to write about that day - 700 words of diatribe about his latest commercial airline ride. He had to fudge a little, since he had been seated in first, but he did a reasonable job of pretending he'd been in the back, along with the rabble. He rationalized it by reflecting that even in first these days the food would gag a ferret and you sometimes had to drink your Scotch and soda out of a plastic cup, not that these were privations to bring tears to the eyes of people reading your column while riding to work on an overheated subway train, face to face with someone with a wracking wet cough.

Moreover, the phones they provide these days on planes seem programmed automatically to cut you off in the middle of an important point. . .

A couple of paragraphs into this jeremiad he hit delete and started over, with a blistering attack on the Federal Aviation Administration for not proceeding more swiftly with installing wind-shear detectors at regional airports. Probably wise, even if it was the dullest column he had filed in ten years.

Newcombe rang back fifteen minutes later on a cell phone. Banion refused to take the call. Renira passed on the message: "You at your best! Keep it up!"

Amazing. Here he had been over into the future, and all they wanted from him was white noise about wind shear. He groped for an analogy: Lewis and Clark, returning triumphant from the Pacific with marvelous tales of the newest world, only to be told, Never mind, tell us about the streetlights of St. Louis! Philistines!

'A Mr. Barnett on the line, from CNN."

Banion took the call. Barnett's piece on the UFO conference had been skeptical but not snide, which was about all he could hope for.

Barnett's question hit him pretty hard. But then this was the Washington way: even at the White House you were apt to find out that you had just been fired by hearing it on TV The League of Gay Voters had dropped him as moderator of the presidential debates.

"I'm sorry," Barnett said. "I hope you're not hearing this from me first."

"No, of course not."

"I'm really sorry. Would you like to comment?"

"Obviously, I'm disappointed. I was looking forward to moderating the presidential debates. However, 1 certainly respect their - oh, to hell with it. What did you hear?"

"They were worried you were going to spend the whole time grilling the candidates about aliens. It's their first time sponsoring a presidential debate. I guess they were counting on a more - maybe the word is
mainstream
- moderator."

"I
am
mainstream!"

"Would it be all right if 1 sent a crew over? It wouldn't take much time, I promise."

Banion was rehearsing his sound bite: magnanimous, yet cutting:
I'm only disappointed because UFO abductees and the gay community have so much in common, the struggle
for acceptance amidst bigotry and prejudice
- when Renira walked in with a face like a funeral parlor.

"Yes?" Banion said cautiously.

"Mr. Mint on the phone."

"Hello. Sid."

"Jack!" Good old Sid - he was never one to let bad news deprive him of an exclamation mark. "Howyadoin'?" "Never better," Banion lied. "Sorry about the presidential debates." "I'll survive."

"Oh yeah. It's just, it would have been so great for the bookings. You hate to lose that kind of TV exposure. But no sweat, I'm with you all the way."

"I appreciate that, Sid."

"So, the ITT date."

"Good."

"Not so good. They just canceled. They feel - what am I going to do, lie to you? It's this UFO stuff. It scares some people, like large insurance companies. Banks. Wall Street firms. Forbes Five Hundred corporations."

"Your biggest clients, in other words."

"Yeah, basically. But now listen, I got one for you, and you don't even have to travel far. It's in Pennsylvania. King of Prussia." "Yes?"

"It's supposed to be the big annual conference on crop circles. I'm not - are you clear on what these things are?"

"We don't know exactly, but they appear to be alien semiotics. Large-scale alien hieroglyphics mown into agricultural fields. Very precise and elaborate. Wheat, corn, soy." Banion sighed. "Sorghum."

"They really, really want you to speak."

"How much?"

"I'm trying to get them up. Their opening offer was totally unacceptable."

"How unacceptable?"

"I'm not even going to tell you. I'll get 'em higher. Don
't worry. But I gotta wonder." “
About what?"

"You know more about this than I do. But if there's intelligent life out there, what's it doing making graffiti in wheat fields in Nebraska? Don't they have anything
better
to do?"

Banion did not have the heart to go into what he knew about this admittedly recondite extraterrestrial manifestation.

An hour later, Secretary of State Slippersen's press officer called to say, in a decidedly unapologetic tone, that the secretary had a "previous commitment" on Sunday morning. For a moment Banion wanted to ask what it was, but he decided not to, for fear he would be bluntly told: a secretarial bowel movement.

It was only four o'clock, yet Banion found himself craving a martini the size of a swimming pool.

Burt Galilee called.

"What is the difference," he said in his deep voice, "between a woman and a computer? A woman will not
accept
a three-and-a-half-inch floppy." Booming laughter.

Burt, who had better antennae than AT&T, had heard from an Ample Ampere lobbyist that Big Guy Al Wiley was "quote going ape" over the UFO show and was threatening to pull the plug on
Sunday.

Banion told him about his conversation with Bill Stimple. Galilee told him not to worry about Stimple, he was just Al Wiley's "butt boy." Good old Burt. Always so upbeat. Burt said he and Wiley would be playing golf next week, and he would put in a soothing word. Everything would be fine. Not to worry.

"Why don't you come to dinner Saturday?" said Banion, feeling relaxed already. "We'll round up the usual suspects."

"Isn't that the night of Erhardt's dinner for Prince Blandar?"

Erhardt Williger was former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, former head of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, former secretary of defense, former everything except shadow of his former self. He was now a "strategic planner," the phrase preferred over "influence peddler," used by former government officials who negotiated advantageous trade deals. He was a figure of some controversy outside Washington - his thick Hungarian accent made for easy parody - but within the town he was esteemed for having managed to rise above a government career that featured a disastrous war, somehow earning him a reputation as the wisest of the Wise Men. He was certainly the most expensive of Wise Men. But he did not always charge for advice. Since he had perpetuated catastrophe when he was in charge of U.S. foreign policy, presidents now turned to him to advise them on how to perpetuate catastrophes of their own. His very presence in such situations was deemed by the press to be encouraging.

All this he had accomplished by untiring and dexterous stroking of the most susceptible egos in the culture, that is, the ones belonging to the people who owned and ran its newspapers and television networks. (He did not slum to flatter mere radio broadcasters.) In social Washington, he ruled supreme, thanks to an impeccable and, by common consent, superb trophy wife. He was ruthless in the continual revising of his A-list. Banion and Bitsey had long been members in good standing. Now it dawned on Banion with a chilly presentiment of social ruin that he had, evidently, been dropped from it. He could practically hear the thud. He'd better get home quickly and keep Bitsey from drinking furniture polish.