Chapter Seven: Stop the Invasion!

“Gentlemen, we have a new campaign priority, so listen carefully,” Dubois said, back at his desk in the Red Room. “Alien. Go. Home.” He punctuated each word by slicing the air with his index finger. From where Toby sat, the picture on the wall of Wayne Wallace, first world president, was just over Dubois’s head, his own hand held up in greeting.

“Shouldn’t we consult with some military and other experts,” Toby asked, “to get their judgment on just what we’re up against?” Once again Dubois had ordered the “lowbody” aides out, and locked the door so even cabinet members couldn’t enter. Only his most central political staff were present: Toby, Lara, Vice President Rajan, and Phil Farley, Dubois’s chief of staff.

Dubois smiled and shook his head. “You’re thinking like a bureaucrat. What happened to the ‘get things done’ Toby I used to admire so much? The one who wanted ambitious policies that voters would notice?”

“We’re not setting grain policies here,” Toby said, fiddling with his scarf. “We’re not arguing about meat-eating in Australia, or gun violence, or cutting taxes. This is first contact. We can’t slam our doors on the galaxy because some alien was rude to you.”

“Why can’t I?” Dubois exclaimed. “Are the aliens in the rest of the galaxy going to go away? They’ll be there when we’re ready to meet them, but we’re not doing it now, not with this alien, this grog creature—”

“Grod,” the vice president said.

“Just plug it, Rajan.” Dubois glared at his vice president, then at each of the others in the room.

“Where’s General Duffy?” Toby asked.

“He’s on his way,” Farley said.

Toby knew the trigger-happy chairman of the armed forces would back whatever Dubois wanted, especially if it gave him a chance to blow up something. Toby hoped the alien ship had very strong shielding.

The hated fly was buzzing again. “Excuse me for a moment,” Toby said. Again brandishing the rolled-up The Regreening of America report, he advanced on the window. The fly took off across the room. Toby gave pursuit, but lost it somewhere over by the portrait of Jim Abrams, the world’s second president. Sighing, he returned to his chair, still holding the rolled-up paper.

“Are you going to talk softly while you carry that big stick?” Lara asked with a grin.

Dubois fixed his stare on Toby. “You always complained that there was no point in having such a large military, since we’re all under one government. What do you think now?”

“I think that we just shot up the first alien visitor to Earth, and didn’t even scratch her. And somehow, I don’t think a bunch of floating tanks or high-energy lasers will help much against a ship that can move like that, especially if it’s shielded like the alien. We have no idea what type of weapons it has.”

“It’s a direct threat to us,” Dubois said. “It’s my job to protect Earth from threats, and by God, that’s what I’m going to do. We’ll show that we can stand up to these aliens.”

“Alien,” Toby said. “You said we have to show we can stand up to aliens, plural, when there’s only one.”

“How do you know?” Dubois asked. “That ship could be crawling with aliens with ray guns, ready to come out at night and, well, do whatever aliens do when they invade. Haven’t you heard of the Trojan Horse?”

“Ray guns?” Toby asked with a slight grin. “It could also be the start of a new era where the galaxy becomes the new frontier.”

“You could get credit for that,” Farley said. He gave Dubois a silly grin. Dubois and Farley had been close friends for many years, Toby knew, even rooming together during college. Neither had ever married, leading to rumors they’d had to put down during the 2095 campaign. Homophobia, real or imagined, was alive and well in parts of the world.

“Why don’t we—” Persson began.

“Rajan, why don’t you—” Dubois began.

The vice president slammed his fist on his chair’s cushioned armrest, making a light thumping sound. The vice president couldn’t even find a good place to slam his fist, Toby thought, as Persson rose to his feet.

“No, you plug your mouth!” Persson said. “This is too important. I ran for office with you because it was politically convenient and it put me next in line.”

“Rajan—”

Persson raised his hand, palm outward at the president, and for once, Dubois shut up.

“I’ll be running for president next time,” Persson continued, “and I’ll be stuck with whatever policies you come up with. I’ve shut up for five years, but not now. Not this. Not when you’re setting the most important policy ever, based on a snub!”

It was more words than the vice president had spoken in a meeting as long as Toby could remember. Toby had put together the Dubois and Persson partnership when he’d calculated Dubois needed a boost in Europe, which resented France’s domination, and India, where the Swede had grown up. It had been politically successful. Persson was a checklist conservative’s conservative, and he brought in European and Indian votes. However, his aloof temperament turned many voters away, and so he had run a distant second in the Conservative primaries in 2095. He’d agreed to drop out and run on the Dubois ticket in the expectation that he’d be next in line in 2105.

Toby knew that Dubois was more likely to endorse a randomly chosen zoo animal—or an invading alien—than the vice president who, as a presidential candidate, had once criticized Dubois in an early debate about France’s domination of Europe. He’d publicly called Dubois an American cowboy, something others had only done in private, and the nickname stuck. Secretly, Toby thought that Dubois liked the characterization. Dubois liked to say in private, “Stand in partnership on the shoulders of those who criticize you, and then kick ’em in the face.” Persson’s shoulders were very high, and he had a very large face. And he was high on Dubois’s enemies list.

“Everyone, let’s cool down,” Lara said. She pulled a large bottle of Coke from the refrigerator by the wall. She poured it into five glasses, which she distributed. “Ronald Reagan once said the eleventh commandment was ‘Thou Shalt Not Attack a Fellow Conservative.’ Those words are engraved right here on the Coke bottle.” She held the bottle up for all to see, but Toby already knew the words. He knew Reagan had actually said this about fellow Republicans, the political party that had fallen apart after the third and most disastrous Bush administration. Its members later regrouped and became the worldwide Conservative Party.

Toby knew his Reagan quotes. “Reagan also said, ‘I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.’ It looks like your patron saint was wrong.”

“He’s your patron saint too, Dad.” Lara grinned. “You’re running a campaign for conservatives, remember?” Toby grimaced. How had that happened? Thank God Vinny wasn’t around to see him now…what would his old mentor think?

“I never planned on running such a conservative campaign,” Toby pointed out, ignoring a glare from Persson. “You know I pushed moderate issues from the start—”

“And they worked, five years ago,” Dubois interrupted. “But that was during a campaign. You can’t do anything if you don’t get elected, and that was the way to get elected. You should have known that once elected, I’d govern as a conservative. That’s the party I come from, the people I represent, and the ones who vote for and contribute to my campaign. And in this campaign, you yourself admitted that if we went moderate, the liberals would paint us as hypocrites. Plus, what would our sponsors think if we went all moderate on them?”

They wouldn’t be sponsors anymore, Toby admitted to himself. He wondered what he’d think if Dubois were a more thoughtful leader. He’d truly respected some of the more thoughtful conservatives whose campaigns he’d run in the past, even if he didn’t always agree with them. But the most thoughtful ones rarely won. At the highest levels of politics thoughtfulness was a dreaded handicap.

“To thirty more years of Coke sponsorship!” Lara said, raising her glass. She took a big gulp of her Coke, as did Dubois. Persson, who had sat down again, left his untouched. Toby took a sip of his, then examined his drink. It always amazed him how two companies that sold a product that was basically water, sugar, and some chemicals, had come to dominate the political landscape. Personally, he preferred the sweeter Hancola, but Hanna sponsored the Liberal Party, so it was Coke only for him.

“Okay, we’ve had our drinks,” Persson said. “Can we reconsider this Alien go home! policy? We should be negotiating trade agreements, not blocking them. We’re the party of business and economic growth, remember?”

“No,” Dubois said. “The policy’s a done issue, so get on board. How does Stop the Invasion! sound as a slogan?”

“Perfect!” Lara said. “What do you think, Dad?”

Toby felt a bit dizzy. He blinked his eyes a few times, and his head began to clear. He glanced over at the window where the fly buzzed about, and it didn’t bother him anymore. Then realization hit him. “You put Eth in my Coke, didn’t you?”

“Sure did, Dad. We need clear thinking here, and you always did your best thinking with it. So drink up! What do you think of the new policy now?”

“You learned a lot from your old man,” Toby said, grinning. He’d been trying to get Lara off Eth for several years, but somehow that didn’t seem important now.

“I learned from the best.”

“I certainly am!” Toby knew that he’d be angry at her when the effects wore off. While on Eth, it was hard to be angry at someone else for being unethical.

Ironically, he’d championed the anti-Eth movement that led to it getting banned, and so knew a lot about how it affected the moral judgment center in the brain, in the prefrontal cortex in the frontal lobes, the Brodmann Area 10, just above the eye sockets. He could imagine the drug swirling about in there.

Some people thought a person on Eth could be excused for their actions. That wasn’t true—they chose to use the non-addictive drug. Unless, of course, your daughter spiked your drink with it.

He knew the underground saying—it’s a lot easier to choose to be unethical than to act unethical—and Eth allowed one to make the choice to be unethical without actually acting so until you were under the drug’s effects, and no longer blocked by your conscience. It was a godsend to many politicians and business people, until they got caught. Toby still felt guilty about some of the things he’d done while under its effects before he’d quit—but he had chosen to take the drug when he had tough choices to make, and so was responsible for those choices.

“If this lovefest can be postponed,” Dubois interrupted, “can we go back to deciding the fate of the world?” He took another gulp of Coke. “I’m glad to have you back on board, Toby. So what’s the plan? How will this play out?”

Toby stood and paced back and forth. He felt free for the first time in years. He knew taking Eth was a scandal in the making. Yet, what better way to hide it than in the privacy of the Red Room?

“It’ll play out the way we want it to play out,” Toby said. “We play the fear card. Once we do that, there’s no turning back, and there’s no stopping it. The Liberals will look weak if they don’t join us, and most won’t. They’ll get the support of intellectuals and their liberal base, but we’ll take the rest. The liberals who go along with us will split their party’s base.”

He stopped pacing and gazed at the others in the room. “This is the wedge issue we’ve been looking for. When the issues are economic and social, the liberals get the masses. But if we make security the issue, they look soft.”

He examined the world holomap, next to the North America map. There were eleven continental groups, with varying electoral votes for the countries in each, and rarely could you find an issue where all agreed. The countries were shaded by their current electoral preference, with red for conservatives, blue for liberals, and various shades of purple in most regions where the real political wars would be fought.

“Fear,” he continued, “is the strongest unifying force in the world. We’ll have Stop the Invasion! and Alien Go Home! stickers everywhere. It’s going to be the main issue from here on, at least until people tire of it, and then we’ll think of something else.” He walked over to the president’s desk and slammed his fist on it, knowing it was over the top, but enjoying the contrast of his slammed fist on the desk with Persson’s earlier thump on the chair’s armrest. “Anyone who disagrees, well, either they are with us…” He stopped and looked each of the others in the eye. “…or they are against us.”

Dubois slowly clapped his hands. “Wow. Now I remember why I hired you.”

“Do you think you can convince people of an alien conspiracy?” Lara asked.

“Easily,” Toby said. “The masses have believed in conspiracies ever since the truth of the Kennedy and Brown assassinations came out. People look for conspiracies everywhere, especially if we tell them to.”

Persson leaped to his feet. “You’re all a bunch of drug-addled pygmies! If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my office with a real drink, planning out the rejection of your policies when I’m president in five years, starting with a return to the principles set forth by Reagan and Steif, which you have all ablomerated.”

Dubois rose to his feet, eyes blazing, and seemed to tower over his two-foot taller vice president, who visibly wilted, his shoulders slumping.

“Rajan, why don’t you go back to your summit?” Dubois said. “I’d love to see you talk like that to the Mountain Monster, and see what Feodora does to you.”

She’d probably punch out his kneecaps, Toby thought of the tiny Russian general, Feodora Zubkov. That was someone you didn’t want to cross. He liked people like her, ones who decided what needed to be done, and just did it, without worrying too much about nuance and formalities. Persson chaired the endless Korean International Sovereignty Summit—KISS—which mostly pitted Feodora and the Russians against Japan and China. Inevitably nothing happened, but it was fun reading the latest Feodora quips.

“Fine,” Persson said. “I’ll go back to my summit, and I’ll ‘plug it’ until the next election. You do what you want.” Persson left, slamming the door on the way out.

“He never really was with us, was he?” Dubois said. “He’ll be back. There’s nowhere else for him to go.”

“We only need him another few months,” Toby said. “Then he either joins us, or you shut him out of anything worthwhile.”

“He’s politically dead anyway, when I’m through with him,” Dubois said. “Hell, I might support the Liberal candidate over him.” He grinned. “Don’t quote me on that! Now, we’ve got Alien go home!, and Stop the Invasion! Any more?”

“How about Earth First!, or Get off our planet!” Toby said.

“We could try a more statesmanship-sounding approach,” Farley said. “How about, ‘Treat the alien with dignity and respect, and show him the door off our planet.’”

Toby stared at him as if he had turned into the alien. “No, that’s clunky. It’s gotta be short and snappy, so it hits you right in the pit of the stomach, the center of fear in the human body. The shorter the sound bite the better, and the better it looks on a bumper sticker. We’re gonna scare the heck out of people, turn this Twenty-two into a monster, and the voters into sheep bleating for help. Our help.”

“Excuse me,” Farley said. “I just got a message from General Duffy. He said the alien took off and flew to Washington D.C. The general’s diverted his floater there, says he’s going after her.”

“I gave him…special orders regarding the alien,” Dubois said. “How soon will the alien be in D.C.?” Toby noticed that the alien was no longer “Ms. Ambassador” to Dubois.

“According to Duffy, it took it about two minutes to fly there,” Farley said.

“That’s not possible!” Lara said. “That’s two hundred miles in two minutes. A hundred miles a minute…that would be like six thousand miles an hour!”

“Breaking News!” Toby’s TC startled him from his line of thinking. He looked about; already Dubois and the others had that dazed look as they watched a broadcast. How come his was always a few seconds behind?

“TC on,” he whispered, expecting the worst.