“I haven’t been able to get a thing through Congress except the moon project. They’re stiffing me on everything else: my economics package, my defense build-up, civil rights, welfare—everything except the moon program has been stopped dead in Congress. If I give up on the moon I might as well resign the presidency.”
“You are not happy in your work,” said Jazzbow.
“No, I’m not,” Kennedy admitted, in a low voice. “I never wanted to go into politics. It was my father’s idea. Especially after my older brother got killed in the war.”
A dismal, gloomy silence descended on us.
“It’s all been a sham,” the President muttered. “My marriage is a mess, my presidency is a farce, I’m in love with a woman who’s married to another man—I wish I could just disappear from the face of the earth.”
Which, of course, is exactly what we arranged for him.
It was tricky, believe me. We had to get his blonde inamorata to disappear, which wasn’t easy, since she was in the public eye just about as much as the President. Then we had to fake his own assassination, so we could get him safely out of the way. At first he was pretty reluctant about it all, but then the Berlin Wall went up and the media blamed him for it and he agreed that he wanted out—permanently. We were all set to pull it off but the Cuban Missile Crisis hit the fan and we had to put everything on hold for more than a month. By the time we had calmed that mess down he was more than ready to leave this earth. So we arranged the thing for Dallas.
We didn’t dare tell Lyndon Johnson about the Martians, of course. He would’ve wanted to go to Mars and annex the whole damned planet. To Texas, most likely. And we didn’t have to tell Nixon; he was happy to kill the Apollo program—after taking as much credit for the first lunar landing as the media would give him.
The toughest part was hoodwinking the astronomers and planetary scientists and the engineers who built spacecraft probes of the planets. It took all of Schmidt’s ingenuity and the Martians’ technical skills to get the various Mariner and Pioneer probes jiggered so that they would show a barren dry Venus devastated by a runaway greenhouse effect instead of the lush Mesozoic jungle that really exists beneath those clouds. I had to pull every string I knew, behind the scenes, to get the geniuses at JPL to send their two Viking landers to the Martian equivalents of Death Valley and the Atacama Desert in Chile. They missed the cities and the canals completely.
Schmidt used his international connections too. I didn’t much like working with Commies, but I’ve got to admit the two Russians scientists I met were okay guys.
And it worked. Sightings of the canals on Mars went down to zero once our faked Mariner 6 pictures were published. Astronomy students looking at Mars for the first time through a telescope thought they were victims of eyestrain! They knew there were no canals there, so they didn’t dare claim they saw any.
So that’s how we got to the moon and then stopped going. We set up the Apollo program so that a small number of Americans could plant the flag and their footprints on the moon and then forget about it. The Martians studiously avoided the whole area during the four years that we were sending missions up there. It all worked out very well, if I say so myself.
I worked harder than I ever had before in my life to get the media to downplay the space program, make it a dull, no-news affair. The man in the street, the average xenophobic Joe Six-Pack forgot about the glories of space exploration soon enough. It tore at my guts to do it, but that’s what had to be done.
So now we’re using the resources of the planet Venus to replenish Mars. Schmidt has a tiny group of astronomers who’ve been hiding the facts of the solar system from the rest of the profession since the late Forties. With the Martians’ help they’re continuing to fake the pictures and data sent from NASA’s space probes.
The rest of the world thinks that Mars is a barren lifeless desert and Venus is a bone-dry hothouse beneath its perpetual cloud cover and space in general is pretty much of a bore. Meanwhile, with the help of Jazzbow and a few other Martians, we’ve started an environmental movement on earth. Maybe if we can get human beings to see their own planet as a living entity, to think of the other animals and plants on our own planet as fellow residents of this spaceship earth rather than resources to be killed or exploited—maybe then we can start to reduce the basic xenophobia in the human psyche.
I won’t live long enough to see the human race embrace the Martians as brothers. It will take generations, centuries, before we grow to their level of morality. But maybe we’re on the right track now. I hope so.
I keep thinking of what Jack Kennedy said when he finally agreed to rig project Apollo the way we did, and to arrange his own and his girlfriend’s demises.
“It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done,” he quoted.
Thinking of him and Marilyn shacked up in a honeymoon suite on Mars, I realized that the remainder of the quote would have been totally inappropriate: “it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”
But what the hell, who am I to talk? I’ve fallen in love for the first time. Yeah, I know. I’ve been married several times but this time it’s real and I’m going to spend the rest of my life on a tropical island with her, just the two of us alone, far from the madding crowd.
Well, maybe not the whole rest of my life. The Martians know a lot more about medicine than we do. Maybe we’ll leave this Pacific island where the Martians found her and go off to Mars and live a couple of centuries or so. I think Amelia would like that.
BUILD ME A MOUNTAIN
Here’s Chet Kinsman again, about twenty years downstream from “The Lieutenant and the Folksinger,” and a few years before his appearance at the beginning of my novel about him, Millennium.
As soon as he stepped through the acoustical screen at the apartment doorway, the noise hit him like a physical force. Chet Kinsman stood there a moment and watched them. My battlefield, he thought.
The room was jammed with guests making cocktail-party chatter. It was an old room, big, with a high, ornately paneled ceiling.
He recognized maybe one-tenth of the people. Over at the far end of the room, tall drink in his hand, head slightly bent to catch what some wrinkled matron was saying, stood the target for tonight: Congressman Neal McGrath, swing vote on the House Appropriations Committee.
“Chet, you did come after all!”
He turned to see Mary-Ellen McGrath approaching him, her hand extended in greeting.
“I hardly recognized you without your uniform,” she said.
He smiled back at her. “I thought Air Force blue would be a little conspicuous around here.”
“Nonsense. And I wanted to see your new oak leaves. A major now.”
A captain on the Moon and a major in the Pentagon. Hazardous duty pay.
“Come on, Chet. I’ll show you where the bar is.” She took his arm and towed him through the jabbering crowd.
