'Andy." Banion said, sitting in his chair going over his notes. "Relax. It's going to be fine."
"Fine? The fucking lawyers say we could fucking get indicted for inciting violence."
"Try that sentence again, bu
t this time leave out the word f
ucking. You'll get twice as much said, in half the time. I'm not going to tell them to attack the government with pitchforks and torches. I'm calling for a march. If you can't march on your capital, then what's the point in having one? There are precedents. So relax. Think about all the money you're going to make when they drive to Washington in their lubricated cars."
"I gotta go sit down. I don't feel good."
"Why don't you watch from the Little Green Room?" Banion said. "Thirty seconds," the technician called out. Roz, lovely in a green mini, came forward and brushed his mop back with her hand.
"Give 'em hell." She winked.
"Five seconds . . . three . . . two . . . one."
The music was cued. Banion introduced himself. He decided that, given the importance of what was about to follow, he would dispense with the usual "But first, this word from Gooey-Lube." Instead he said, "But first, this message."
The commercial ended, and he began his carefully prepared text for the day, a brilliant precis of the government's more than fifty years of denials and dissemblings about UFO's. He recounted his own attempts to get Senator Gracklesen's committee to open hearings, including accosting him outside the Senate Cloakroom. (He graciously left out the senator's crude valedictory.)
As he was talking about the great protest marches of the past, he realized that something was amiss. The director's face had taken on a look of grave concern bordering on panic. He had sneaked off to a far corner of the studio and was talking excitedly into his microphone. The two cameramen, normally the most stolid inhabitants of a TV studio, were exchanging nervous glances and wheeling their cameras to and fro, as if the sedentary Banion had suddenly become the lead car in the Indianapolis 500 race and they were at pains to keep up with him.
What on earth? It didn't make his job any easier. Banion did not speak from prepared texts and disdained TelePrompTers. It was all he could do to keep from losing the thread of his talk, but he managed to press on: a show of force, massive crowds, that was the thing. Only if they - the people - demanded action would the government act. Nothing less would do than a Millennium Man March on Washington! Who was a "Millennium Man"? Everyone who had seen a UFO, who had been abducted, probed, terrorized, or otherwise affected by alien beings. The time was - now.
'And so," he concluded, "until we meet two weeks from now on democracy's front lawn, the Mall in
Washington, D.C., this is John O
. Banion."
The theme music started up. He sat back in his chair while the credits rolled, eager to Find out what the problem was, impatient to Find out what the problem was. From the back of the studio he heard raised voices and the phrase "chest pains" in connection with Andy Crocanelli. The director approached at a pace suggesting that he was not eager to bear this news.
The headline glowered up at him from the front page of the Sunday paper. Variations on it adorned every paper spread out before him.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE KINKY KIND
VIEWERS OF BANION UFO SHOW
EXPRESS OUTRAGE OVER AIRING
OF ADULT MOVIE ON MORNING UFO SHOW
Banion forced himself to read the article one last time.
The Federal Communications Commission is investigating complaints fro
m thousands of viewers of John O
.
Banion's popular new TV show about UFO's, after yesterday's live show transmitted graphic clips from an adult movie called
Space Bimbos
from Planet Lust.
Banion and his producers strenuously denied that it was deliberate. At the time of the broadcast, the movie was being shown on the Yearning Channel, a twenty-four-hour pornographic movie channel. Producers of
Saturday
were at a loss to explain how sections of the movie, featuring naked astronauts having sex in weightless environments, ended up on their program.
"We are pursuing our own investigation into this," Banion said, "but at this point the indications are that this was an act of sabotage aimed at stopping me from forcing the government to reveal what it knows about the continuing abduction of American citizens by aliens."
He wondered if the quote made him sound like a paranoid loon. Its only advantage was that it was true. It had to be sabotage. If it wasn't, then it was clear evidence that God hated him. This was not a possibility that Banion, a practicing Episcopalian, was prepared to admit, at least for the time being.
Yesterday should have been a triumph. Instead, it had been hell. He spent most of it fielding furious calls from various UFO groups. Andy Crocanelli was still in the hospital, having had some kind of cardiac "event." as the doctors called it. His hysterical wife was shrieking that they had tried to kill him in order to get rid of him as a sponsor. If he died, she said she was going to quote "sue" Banion's "nuts off." Bimmerman, the producer, was trying to find out how the Yearning Channel's broadcast of unspeakable goings-on aboard a space shuttle had found itself on
Saturday.
Their satellite distributor didn't know. No one knew. The FCC was playing it bureaucratically straight-faced, focusing on the complaints rather than the cause.
Once more, Banion found himself besieged by reporters, who were swarming anew like reenergized locusts. Once again he was the stuff of hooting headlines. Crews from disreputable tabloid shows were camped out on the sidewalk in front of the house. Tomorrow, Monday, the first tabloids would hit the stands. There he would be, on the covers, no doubt, sharing scandal space with overweight and over-the-hill actors, unhappy royals, and plastic-surgery accidents. He could hardly wait. He wished now that he hadn't left the studio with his head slunk down like a mafia don entering the courthouse to be sentenced for shooting his former mentor outside a restaurant.
John O
. Banion had a headache.
Roz called. She was at the office, spinning the media as hard as she could, telling them that this only strengthened the resolve of Americans Against Alien Abductions. But to Banion she admitted that it was tough going. Jokes were going around, and once you were the butt of those . . .
"I'm
sorry,"
she said. "This should have been such a triumph for you. Do you want me to come over, bring you some chicken soup or something?"
He did. But he didn't want a photo of his attractive executive director entering his house to appear on the cover of some tabloid with some screaming headline like
banion's real-life babe
. But he wanted nothing more than for Roz to come over. Maybe she'd even sleep with him, just to make him feel better.
"Better not." He sighed.
Nathan Scrubbs was learning about hanging drywall. So far, he had learned that he did not want to hang drywall in his next career. However, it did provide an atmosphere free of people trying to kill him.
Bradley, the man who had rescued him, lived near the river in Anacostia, a part of Washington that white people by and large tended to avoid, and where, paradoxically, Scrubbs now felt safe. Bradley was divorced and lived alone. Scrubbs had use of a mattress on the floor of a spare room. It wasn't the Ritz, but it was shelter in this strange storm.
True to his promise, Bradley woke him out of a sound sleep at five o'clock the next morning and put him to work with the rest of his crew, installing Sheetrock in a town house in a part of town hovering on a thin wedge of gentrification.
Scrubbs had been taken aback when Bradley introduced him to the other members of his work crew as a fugitive.
Stunned, Scrubbs accepted high fives and hearty congratulatory hellos from his new colleagues.
When opportunity presented itself, he took Bradley aside. "Why did you tell them that?"
"You the only white man on the crew, aren't you?"
"So?"
"Don't you
want
to be accepted?" "What if they turn me in? Jesus."
Bradley chuckled. "I don't think any of
them
is going to be calling the police. And leave the Lord out of it. A man on the run makes a sad blasphemer. Now get back to work. I'll
tell
you when the coffee break is."
At the end of the first day, when they got back home, Bradley handed him a ten-dollar bill.
"Ten bucks? For busting my hump all day? That won't cover the aspirin I need for my back."
"I deducted your expenses."
"What expenses?"
"The hole in my fishing boat from your friends' bullets. The hooks I ruined pullin' them out of you. Rent on the room. And your donut and coffee this morning."
"God bless the cheerful giver," Scrubbs grumbled.
'"Rejoice in the Lord, O
ye righteous: For it becometh well the just to be thankful.'"
"Whatever. Thought they abolished slavery."
"Not so's
I
noticed. But if you can do better at McDonald's, be my guest, and while you're
at
it, you can bring me back a couple of Quarter Pounders. With fries and a large Coke."
"Someone who says he has important information about the satellite business," Renira said. "He won't say who he is."
There had been a lot of these calls the last two days. The angry calls had almost stopped entirely. The ones coming in now were almost all sympathetic.
Dr. Falopian and Colonel Murfletit were in his office with some former military type who did satellite security, going over preparations for ensuring the electronic integrity of next Saturday's broadcast, assuming there was one. Andy Crocanelli had pulled through his cardiac event, but his wife was adamant that he could not have stress and was threatening to pull Gooey-Lube's sponsorship if Banion went ahead with his call for a march on Washington. Banion's lawyer, Barrett Prettyman, Jr., was threatening Mrs. Crocanelli with head-spinning breach of contract. The once happy
Saturday
family now resembled most other families: dysfunctional, miserable.
Banion decided to take the call.
"
I
cannot discuss how I know what I am about to tell you," said the caller, an intelligent-sounding male in his forties or so. But then most nuts, including presidential assassins, are fortyish, intelligent-sounding males. "If you have caller ID you will already have determined that I am calling from a pay telephone in Los Angeles. That narrows your search to three and a half million people. That is all you will find out about me, so just listen to what I have to say."
"Fine," Banion said, doodling the word
roz
on a notepad.
"I am an admirer, Mr. Banion. You are doing important work. That is why 1 have compromised a Yankee White security clearance to p
lace this call. So much for my
B
ona Fides
. Now as to the purpose of my call. Last Saturday, a jamming signal was directed at the Geostar satellite carrying your television show. It came from another satellite designated
Thruster Six.
It uses an EHF - that is, extremely high frequency
relay system called Polar Adjunct. But never mind all that. The point is that
Thruster Six
blocked the signal of your show and substituted the signal of the sex movie. Not a bad movie, I must say, as those go
-
no reflection on your own show."
Banion was paying full attention. 'And who operates
Thruster Six!"
The voice laughed softly. "Who do you think has the capability to operate such a satellite?"
"The government?"
"Don't ask me for further details. I'm not in a position to provide them. They are trying to silence you, Mr. Banion. They are afraid of you. Fight them. You have friends in many places. We are with you. Good-bye, sir. Good luck!"
Hours of heated debate in Banion's office followed the call. Dr. Falopian and Colonel Murfletit were of divided opinion. Falopian thought the man was a fraud. In his view, the satellite signals could only have been tampered with by one source - the aliens. They had motive - to stop Banion's call for the march. They had know-how - for them, it was a local telephone call. And they had, as he put it with a flourish of his bushy eyebrows, the wit. Time and again, the aliens had shown themselves to be adept manipulators of public opinion.
Colonel Murfletit was less sure. He was intrigued by the man's mention of his Yankee White security clearance, one of the very highest in the military - the same one given to pilots entrusted with flying the president of the United States. Could it be, he wondered, that the man piloted the black helicopters that the military used to enforce control of the civilian population?
Of course, there was no way of establishing, much less confirming, that the satellite jamming had been the work of a black gang from NSA.* And what folly it would be to charge them publicly. They had means of retaliation at their disposal.