AH, THOSE FAMOUS WORDS, that classic introduction: “The name is Bond—James Bond.” We’ve heard that so often, and isn’t it just brilliant? Thank you, 007; you’ve just saved the bad guys a lot of investigative work. Have you forgotten you’re supposed to be a secret agent? Really, would it be so very difficult to say, “My name’s Fred Jackson,” and smile charmingly?
“We” represent a confidential board of review composed of retired operatives and experts in various fields, appointed by Parliament in hopes of improving the Government’s performance in certain areas, including clandestine operations. We have been charged with going over the history of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, determining what has worked well in the past and what has not, and offering suggestions for improvement.
M has asked us to review your case files, 007, and point out some of your critical mistakes—oh, not the simple, one-time mistakes, the errors in judgment, the instances where you trusted the wrong woman or shot the wrong man, but the recurring themes, the problems that crop up again and again throughout your career. The theory is that making you aware of your flaws will help you lessen them, thereby improving your chances of survival on future missions.
Given that you’ve already survived this long, and that thanks to you we haven’t all fallen victim to some madman’s scheme for nuclear blackmail or world domination, one could argue that you haven’t made any critical mistakes, and there’s a great deal to be said for that position, but my colleagues and I believe we have identified a few things that might prove critical in the future, and that are certainly areas of concern, with obvious room for improvement.
Your ongoing resistance to actually staying undercover is one of them. Announcing your true identity to anyone you happen to meet at a bar or across a gaming table is really not in accord with policy.
Practice these phrases, 007: “My name isn’t Bond.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “I was just passing through.” “The British Consulate will hear about this!” Try to imagine yourself actually saying them in the field. Oh, we know most of the bad guys won’t believe you when you deny your identity, but if you could just learn to act a little you might at least put a bit of doubt into them. Telling everyone who you are may be good for the ego, but it is not good for the mission.
Please, stop giving your real name.
There might have been a time when you could justify this little quirk by saying that the name James Bond shouldn’t mean anything to your typical world-conquering megalomaniac, it’s just a boring, ordinary name, but really, 007, that dog won’t hunt anymore. Even if the public at large hasn’t seen your name in the newspapers, word gets around. International terrorist organizations, ex-Communist mercenaries, crazed multimillionaires, and the like don’t live in a vacuum; they compare notes, 007. Surely you realize that. Why build one’s world-spanning conspiracy from scratch, reinventing the wheel as it were, when you can learn so much from those who have gone before? Modern megalomaniacs do their best to stay informed and learn from the errors of their predecessors. And guess whose name always comes up?
Yes, word of your identity does get out, despite the devastation you leave in your wake. When you blow up the secret island lair, or the villain disposes of his own men once they’re no longer needed, you don’t really think all the underlings die, do you? Remember just how huge some of those lairs were, and how many hundreds of technicians, scientists, thugs, concubines, advisors, assassins, engineers, torturers, bodyguards, drivers, and assorted other minions it took to run them. Some of those people always survive, if only by sheer dumb luck—the fellow who was out getting coffee and donuts when the balloon went up, the chaps in the blast-proof underground vault, the ones who crawled out of the wreckage miraculously unhurt. No, Felix Leiter and his CIA pals don’t always put all of them behind bars.
And it’s not as if you do much to help with rounding up the underlings. We know it’s not your job, you’re there for the big picture, stop the mastermind’s evil scheme and you’ve earned your pay, but somebody has to do it. You might want to make some effort to say a few words about that: point the fellows in the right direction, mention where the secret tunnels are. It would make things ever so much easier for the cleanup crew.
So a few underlings survive and slip away before we can incarcerate them. Now, if you’re a minion who’s escaped from the catastrophic failure of a world-conquering scheme, what sort of job do you find next? What can you put on your resume? You’ll hire on with the next megalomaniac who comes along, because that’s the only sort of person who’ll hire you, and you’ll tell him all about that dreadful Mr. James Bond who blew up your last boss, in hopes that maybe this time the scheme will work, the world will stay conquered, and you’ll get your little piece of the action.
So please, 007—do try to maintain your cover just a little longer, rather than announcing yourself. We know it’s hard on your ego, pretending to be someone else when you’re so very obviously wonderful as yourself, but try.
And speaking of ego, it’s not just the name. Would it kill you to drink a martini that had been stirred? Don’t you ever feel overdressed, wearing a tuxedo so much of the time? Have you ever considered driving a Toyota rather than a Ferrari, and perhaps obeying the speed limit rather than making every little jaunt look like Le Mans? Must you draw attention to yourself at every opportunity? Blending into the crowd really can be useful sometimes. The sheer gall you display, your open arrogance, is really rather disconcerting. If we were using you as the diversion while our real master spy slipped into the villain’s headquarters unnoticed, that would be one thing, but 007, you are the master spy, not the diversion. Making yourself so bloody obvious rather wastes any element of surprise you might have had.
Yes, yes, we know, you’re trying to lure the evil mastermind out of hiding by making yourself a target, but one of these days you’re going to run into an evil mastermind bright enough to realize it, and he’ll either ignore you or kill you in some simple, fairly foolproof way, such as dynamiting your hotel (or better, your girlfriend’s hotel), rather than inviting you to dinner, setting up an elaborate deathtrap, or sending exotic assassins after you with rare poisons and razor-edged derby hats.
There are other ways of getting inside the fortress besides being taken in under heavy guard as the mastermind’s soon-to-be-murdered guest, you know.
Well, yes, you do know, because often enough you’ve swum in through a submarine pen or crawled in through an air vent, and in those cases your displays of ego are relatively harmless. They merely ensure that when you’re captured, the villain won’t need to ask who you are—he’ll already know.
Saving the evil mastermind a few minutes of interrogative effort is not really something we want to encourage, 007.
Have you ever considered hiring on as a low-level minion? I mean really hiring on, rather than whacking some poor bastard on the head and stealing his uniform half an hour before doomsday. You could infiltrate the evil organization weeks or months in advance, get a look at exactly what it’s doing, report back to headquarters on who’s been supplying these arch-villains with their hardware, where they’re hiring their technicians, all manner of useful little tidbits like that, and then take down the megalomaniac and blow up his lair. Maybe then we and the other good guys could make it a little more difficult for the next world-conquering crackpot to equip his troops and build his secret headquarters.
Or, just possibly, you might consider not blowing up the villain’s lair; has it ever occurred to you that some of that stuff might be useful? Not just the information about where the bad guys get all those expensive high-tech toys that you blithely obliterate when you destroy the computer systems, but the toys themselves. That’s got to be a few billion pounds of hardware and real estate you’ve destroyed; it could have been turned over to Her Majesty’s government for its own use, or for resale to trusted allies. You know, the British government has no serious qualms about owning orbital death rays, or maintaining secret outposts on uncharted islands; in fact, this sort of thing could be quite handy sometimes. Getting the funding through Parliament could be difficult, and building it ourselves might have the Americans looking askance, but if it just falls into our lap, no, we are not morally obligated to blow it up.
A good island lair or undersea base or hideout under the polar icecap has many possible uses; it isn’t just for world domination. A forward listening post here, a covert refueling station there—Britain could use these, 007.
Really, destroying them all seems terribly wasteful. Yes, we want them out of the villains’ hands, but can’t you ever find a way to manage that short of wholesale annihilation?
And of course, you always escape the conflagration at the last minute. The last minute. Might you ever consider setting the timer for a few minutes more, so you can make sure the arch-villain and his major henchmen are really dead, and won’t be back for a sequel?
It’s just sloppy, 007. For someone so fastidious about food, drink, and clothing, you can be astonishingly sloppy about your work. Blown covers, ruined equipment, escaped bad guys, demolished lairs—it’s dreadfully untidy.
And then of course, there’s that other area where you are noted for being something less than fastidious. Really, 007, must you bed every attractive woman you encounter?
Yes, we understand that you have been successful several times in acquiring vital information from your playmates, and sometimes in convincing your foe’s female associates to betray their employer and come over to our side, but a little more selectivity might be a good idea. Seducing your CIA counterparts may save on hotel bills, but it does nothing to hasten the successful completion of your assignments, and the benefits in international goodwill are at best trivial and more often nonexistent. Furthermore, involving random strangers in your work simply because they happen to be absurdly attractive is not in keeping with the policies of Her Majesty’s government concerning sensitive operations.
And then there’s the whole question of being lured into traps by women who were not as thoroughly seduced as you thought. Don’t try to tell us it hasn’t happened; we’ve read the files. Admittedly, you’ve always managed to survive and turn the tables, but it is an added risk.
That does not even mention the little detail that the mortality rate among your bed partners is appalling. Getting beautiful women killed is not part of your job, nor do we consider it advisable. It’s not as if the world has a huge surplus of them; those of us less favored by Nature than you do not appreciate this reduction in the supply. Yes, it does establish that your opponents are absolute rotters, but honestly, we don’t really need that much proof; generally, the construction of a death ray or an attempt at nuclear blackmail is enough to convince us. Leaving a woman dead in your bed and making it personal is unnecessary.
We would never advise you to attempt celibacy; even if we thought you would pay any attention, we don’t think it’s possible. You wouldn’t be you, 007, if you didn’t have an eye for the ladies. We merely suggest you try to cut back a little and choose your targets more carefully.
Really, 007, that’s all we ask—a bit of restraint. Don’t be quite so obvious about who you are. Don’t be quite so quick to blast everything to smithereens. Don’t be quite so eager to tumble into bed. Is that so very difficult?
We can guess how you’ll respond, 007. You’ll point to your unbroken streak of more than forty years of successfully defeating megalomaniacs and evil international conspiracies, and ask why we want to fix something that isn’t broken. We concede you have a point; really, how critical can these flaws be when they haven’t resulted in a single failure in so long?
But admit it, 007—you’ve been lucky. You know it, we know it, everyone knows it. Your enemies have had dozens of opportunities to simply put a bullet in your brain, and as yet they’ve never actually done it. Their compulsion to make speeches and play elaborate games has always saved you.
Sooner or later, though, your luck will run out. You’ll find yourself up against a mastermind who puts more faith in a 9mm slug than in an elaborate laser deathtrap, who considers a knife in the belly more efficient than an exotic Oriental assassin’s projectiles and poisons, and who really isn’t interested in games or speeches. When that happens, the mistakes we have pointed out here really may be critical. They may well be what get you killed. Your forty-year streak of luck may not last forever.
Which brings us to something we’ve wondered about. You know, 007, most operatives don’t last forty years in the field. Even those who survive every assignment generally retire before reaching that particular milestone. Usually there’s some incident—a call a little too close, a rescue a bit too narrow—that prompts them to say, “That’s it, then; time to pack it in.” Sometimes it’s just the obvious encroachment of age: the need for reading glasses to make out the hidden message, perhaps, or having to turn down a job because it conflicts with scheduled gall bladder surgery. You, it seems, don’t have those little warnings. You don’t appear to be susceptible to the normal ravages of time.
And that may be your most critical mistake of all. Your repeated rejuvenations and refusal to age beyond a certain point are quite amazing, and we really don’t understand how you manage it, but in the end this may be your undoing. It’s just odds. If you keep doing this forever, sooner or later your luck will run out.
If you were to age like a normal human being, then you’d be forced to retire, to live out your days in peace and honor, instead of continuing to risk your neck for Queen and country. We wouldn’t keep sending you out there to face man-eating sharks, orbital death rays, steel-toothed killers, and the like.
For that matter, with your record you could retire right now if you chose, ageless or not, and no one would think the less of you. That you choose not to demonstrates either remarkable patriotism, adrenaline addiction, or a death wish—or perhaps all three.
Perhaps you prefer to die in harness. If so, then just keep on as you are, letting everyone know who you are, blasting everything in sight, falling into bed with every attractive female you see, accepting every assignment. Even if you continue to somehow stave off old age indefinitely, sooner or later the odds will catch up with you.
It may be fun, 007, but it can’t last forever.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS is the author of some three dozen novels and over a hundred short stories, mostly in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. He won the Hugo Award for Short Story in 1988 for “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” served as president of the Horror Writers Association from 1994 to 1996 and treasurer of SFWA from 2003 to 2004, and lives in Maryland. He has one kid in college and one teaching English in China, and shares his home with Chanel, the obligatory writer’s cat.