"I think so, Ma'am."
"You're an engineer."
"I am an obsolete engineer, Ma'am."
"I don't expect you to do the job yourself. You know what I did about fusion power plants."
"You sent for the one man with a perfect record. I've seen the power ship moored off Point Sur. Brilliant. Solved an engineering and a public relations problem simultaneously."
"Not quite what I mean. I consulted the Admiral, yes. But the job was done by his first deputy, the officer he has groomed to replace him. And by some other Navy people. Now we're working on ways to make the key fission - power people - safety control especially - all former Navy nuclear submariners. But we have to do it without stripping the Navy of their Blue and Gold crews. On things I know nothing about - most things, for this job! I consult someone who does - and that leads me to the person who can do it. Since I know very little about how to be President, I look for advice on almost everything."
"Ma'am, it seems to me - and a lot of other people - that you were born for the job."
"Hardly. Oh, politics isn't strange to me; my father held office when I was still a girl at home. But I did my first television commercial at fourteen and I was hooked. If I hadn't been 'resting' between contracts, I would not have had accepted the Governor's appointment - I was just his 'exhibit coon' but the Commission's work did interest me. Then I was still an 'exhibit coon' when he saw to it that I was on his favorite - son slate. Then, when the three leading candidates deadlocked, my late predecessor broke the deadlock in his favor by naming me as the other half of his ticket. I went along with it with a wry grin inside, figuring, first, that the ploy wouldn't work, and second, that, if he did get nominated, he would find some way to wiggle out - ask me to withdraw in favor of his leading rival or some such."
She shrugged. "But he didn't - or couldn't. I don't know which; he rarely talked to me. Real talk, I mean. Not just, 'Good morning,' and, 'Did you have a comfortable flight' and not wait for an answer.
"I didn't care. I relished every minute of the campaign. An actress sometimes plays a queen... but for four months I got to be one. Never dreaming that our ticket would win. I knew what a - No, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and we must get back to work. What would you do about pollution of streams?"
"Eh? But that one has already been solved. By one of the Scandinavian countries, I believe. You simply require every user to place his intake immediately downstream from his discharge of effluent into the stream. In self - protection the user cleans up his discharge. It's self - enforcing. No need to test the water until someone downstream complains. Seldom. Because it has negative feedback. Ma'am, complying with a law should be more rewarding than breaking it - or you get positive feedback."
She made a note. "We could clean up the Mississippi that way. But I'm fretted about streams inside states, too. For example, the Missouri, where it is largest, is entirely inside the State of Missouri."
"Ma'am, I think you'll find that you have jurisdiction overall navigable streams."
I do?
"Ma'am, you have powers you may never have dreamed existed. A 'navigable stream' is one only three feet deep, I think. You may right now have the power to order this under law already on the books. If there is a paragraph or even a clause on placement of inlets and outlets, you almost certainly can issue an executive order right away. Today. The boss of the U.S. Engineers would know. General Somebody. A French name."
She touched a switch. "Get me the head of the U.S. Engineers. How would you dispose of nuclear power plant wastes? Rocket them onto the Moon as someone
urged last week? Why wouldn't the Sun be better? We may want to go back to the Moon someday."
"Oh, my, no! Neither one, Ma'am."
"Why not? Some of those byproducts are poisonous for hundreds of years, so I've heard. No?"
"You heard correctly. But the really rough ones have short half - lives. The ones with long half - lives - hundreds, even thousands of years, or longer - are simple to handle. But don't throw away any of it, Ma'am. Not where you can't recover it easily."
"Why not? We're speaking of wastes. I assume that we have extracted anything we can use."
"Yes, Ma'am, anything we can use. But our great grandchildren are going to hate you. Do you know the only use the ancient Romans had for petroleum? Medicine, that's all. I don't know how those isotopic wastes will be used next century .. . any more than those old Romans could guess how very important oil would become. But I certainly wouldn't throw those so - called wastes into the Sun! Besides, rockets do fail - . . and who wants to scatter radioactives over a couple of states? And there's the matter of the fuel and steel and a dozen other expensive things for the rockets. You could easily wind up spending more money to get rid of the ashes than you ever got from selling the power.
"Then what do you do? They say we mustn't sink it into the ocean. Or put it on the Antarctic ice cap. Salt mines?"
"Madam President, honest so help me, this is one of those nonproblems that the antitechnology nuts delight in. Radioactive wastes aren't any harder to handle than garbage. Or hot ashes. Or anything else you don't want to pick up in your bare hands. The quantity isn't much, not at all like garbage, or coal ashes. There are at least a half dozen easy ways. One of the easiest is to mix them with sand and gravel and cement into concrete bricks, then stack them in any unused piece of desert.
"Or glass bricks. Or let the stuff dry and store it in steel barrels such as oil drums and use those old salt mines you mentioned - the bricks you could leave in the open. All by remote manipulation, of course; that's the way a radioactives engineer does everything. Waldoes. That's old stuff. No trouble."
"I thought you said you were obsolete."
He grinned sheepishly. "Ma'am, it's easy to talk. As long as I know that young fellows will have to do the tedious drudgery that goes into making anything new work. But the solutions I've offered are practical. No new discoveries needed.
"How about air pollution?"
"What sorts, Ma'am? The two main sources are internal combustion engines - trucks and autos - and industrial smokes. Quite different problems."
"Pick one."
"Transportation pollution is going to solve itself soon. Either the hard way or the easy way. Oil, whether it's our own or from the OPEC, is too valuable to be burned in cars and trucks; it's the backbone of the chemical engineering industry - fertilizers, plastics, pesticides, lubricants, and so forth. So, quite aside from the energy problem, we need to stop burning it. We can either wait until it's forced on us catastrophically . . - or we can turn to other transportation power voluntarily, and thereby become self - sufficient in oil for peace or for war. Either way, transportation pollution is ended."
"But what other transportation power, Doctor?"
"Oh. Half a dozen ways, at least. Get rid of the I.C. engine completely, both Otto cycle and Diesel cycle, and go back to the external combustion engine and steam. The I.C. engine never did make sense; starting and stopping combustion every split second is a guarantee of incomplete combustion, wasted fuel, and smog. Air pollution. External combustion has no such built - in stupidity; no matter what fuel, it burns continuously and can be adjusted for complete combustion. The Stanley Steamer used kerosene. But that's petroleum again. I would use wood alcohol as a starter - it hurts me every time I pass a sawmill and see them burning chips and slash.
"But wood alcohol has its drawbacks. We may burn hydrogen someday. Or learn to store electricity in less weight and less space. Or store energy in a flywheel. But all of those, even hydrogen, are simply ways to store energy. It still leaves an energy problem."