“Miss Tagbord?” A young man knocked on the green room door and opened it. “Five minutes.”
Dragnie nodded. She was ready.
“Good evening, my fellow American citizens.”
Banden watched Mr. Jenkins glumly from the implacable clutches of the beanbag chair as Angel sat nearby. Unable to cope with reality, she smoked a Mary Jean cigarette and damaged her consciousness in the manner promoted by her generation of lazy hedonists who expected something for nothing.
“As you know, we have been in the midst of a national emergency,” Mr. Jenkins continued. He summarized the embargo issued by the People’s States of the People, the Strike as called for by John Glatt, and the subsequent Declaration of War by the People’s States. “I’m sure you agree with me that it all seems so… hostile,” Mr. Jenkins went on. “Everybody is suffering—our people, people all over the world, and the people in governments in every country on Earth. That is why I am pleased, now, to introduce Miss Dragnie Tagbord, who as a member of the Board of Directors of the United States and an original participant in the Great Takeover, is known to you all. She has some words about the war, and the Strike, that I know you will all want to hear. Miss Tagbord…?”
As Banden stared in a miasma of guilt, despair, and impotent self-loathing, the image of Dragnie appeared on the screen. She wore a gray jumpsuit suggestive of some sort of official captivity, and the effects of a week’s detention were evident in her drawn, haggard face. “Thank you, Mr. Jenkins,” she began. “Ladies and gentlemen: As you may know, the text of the speech I am supposed to deliver appears on a small screen just under the lens of the camera that is beaming my image to your television sets. I am to read the speech, while appearing to be looking into the camera, at you, the American people. The speech is one in which I call on all of you to end the Strike that John Glatt initiated in his now-famous Broadcast From the Moon. I am, supposedly, to call on you to restore America’s reputation as a place of economic opportunity, religious tolerance, and racial understanding, and to cease and desist from pursuing our Strike goals of promoting poverty, bigotry, and racist hatred. But I am not going to do that.”
Suddenly alert to an ominous tone of defiance in Dragnie’s voice, Banden sat up with an abrupt jerk, or tried to, but failed, and flopped backwards into the yielding, entrapping sack of pebbles.
“I am not going to do that, because to do that would be to compromise our highest value—that the poor be just as free in theory to become rich as the rich are free in reality to become richer. It would compromise our most cherished principle—that individuals collected into groups known as governments and unions represent mediocrity and are an unmitigated evil, while individuals collected into groups known as corporations represent the pinnacle of civilization. It would compromise our noblest foundational axioms of truth, which hold that existence exists whether it wants to or not, that everything is itself and so everything is everything, and that only tautologies offer the basis for an unchallengeable philosophy, because only tautologies are always true, because they have to be, which means that they are.”
“Nathan, are you okay?” Angel was looking at him in concern. But it was the concern of the silly nitwit for the wellbeing of the superior man, and as such was of no consequence. “You have like this weird expression on your face.”
“Just please,” he replied, eyes fixed firmly on the television screen. “Please, I beg you, do whatever you can to shut up. She’s… she’s wonderful.”
“You whose company manufactured those spontaneously-combusting legal pads, whose products are no longer bought in the other nations of the world; you whose job consisted in packing and shipping fourteen-ounce jars of marinated okra, whose off-gassing vapors have proven toxic to all mammals, including Man; you who have spent your days delivering shipments of potassium-fiber bathing suits which explode upon contact with water: what’ll you do now, you ask? Now that your companies have gone bankrupt and left you without income? We say: so long as you are conscious, you are alive. And we want you to live. We want you to remain conscious.”
In the control room of the television studio, Mr. Jenkins cried to the technicians, “This isn’t the speech she’s supposed to give! Cut her off!”
The engineer, whose life, unlike that of the bureaucrat, was dedicated to the clean, pure pursuit of the utmost exactitude, said, “Not so fast, Mr. Jenkins. I want to hear what she has to say—and I have a hunch other people do, too!”
“It doesn’t matter what she has to say, damn you!” he yelled. “Get her off the air!”
“This is my studio,” the engineer said, gesturing with clean, economical gestures toward the clean, efficient instruments and technology. “And as long as you’re broadcasting from my studio, you’ll play by my rules.”
“And now,” Dragnie said into the camera, “I have an announcement to make. My announcement is that Mr. Jenkins and his bureaucrat thugs have taken me, John Glatt, and several of our colleagues as their prisoner. My announcement is that we are being held in an undisclosed location until you, the American people, end this Strike. But you must not end the Strike. Rather, if John Glatt and Sanfrancisco De Soto and Hunk Rawbone and I are not released within forty-eight hours from now, the consequences around the world will be dire. You, in the meantime, must continue to display openly your natural or learned enmity toward people of other races, creeds, and religions; you must continue to reject what had once been known as the American Dream, and its promise of upward mobility, and persevere in embracing a frightened acceptance of the American Nightmare, with its threat of total financial desolation; and you must continue to transform America from the hope of the world’s peoples to the shame of all of Planet Earth. You must do this until our enemies capitulate, end this cruel embargo, and resume buying our admittedly occasionally hazardous barbecue sauces and radioactive typewriters. You must do this for the reason all true American patriots do whatever their leaders tell them to do: in the name of Freedom. As John Glatt himself once said while asking me to pass him the sour cream—“
But Dragnie was unable to continue. Mr. Jenkins strode out onto the studio and, live and on camera, pulled her out of her chair. “That’s it!” he barked at the lens. “Show’s over.” He forced her off the set, away from the cameras and microphones. “I should have known better than to trust you,” he hissed. “Well, you’ve dug your own grave. You and Glatt have had it. We’re going to bury you in a military detention center and throw away the key.”
“We’ll see about that,” Dragnie said with a mysterious smile.
“What are you doing, Nathan?” Angel said after the special announcement had ended and normal broadcasting had resumed. The girl’s attention, to the extent that it was not focused on trivial fancies and her own childish vanity, was caught by the sight of Nathan A. Banden suddenly squirming and lurching around within the grasp of the bright pink mass of plastic furniture, amorphous as a giant blob of bubble gum, in which he had lain, trapped.