Arnold Grainer had been the General commanding Moon-base during the confrontation with the Eastern bloc and his initiative in contacting the Eastern commander, General Lobachevsky, and the subsequent joint evacuation of both bases probably rescued the world from a panic-inspired holocaust and certainly saved the garrisons of the bases from slow death. As I had been one of the Special Strike Force in Western Moonbase I owed Grainer a personal debt. So did Lobachevsky. For after both Generals had been hailed as heroes Lobachevsky was on his way to the wall. Grainer saved him by letting the Eastern leaders know that if Lobachevsky was disgraced he Would make it his personal business to see that every field commander in the Eastern forces got both coded originals and decoded copies of the signals exchanged between Eastern Moonbase and the Kremlin during those hectic days—convincing evidence that many of them, with their staffs and armies, had been slated for sacrifice in the initial nuclear exchange. Knowledge that would make them uneasy about obeying future orders from their Supreme Command.
Grainer only escaped court-martial himself because of bis transient popularity. He had used intercepted signals to save an enemy commander when the State Department had planned to use those same signals to blackmail the Kremlin. He was retired as soon as the Administration judged it was safe to retire him. Years later, when Lubachevsky came to power after the convulsions which always accompanied an Eastern change in leadership, Grainer’s action gave him an unique relationship with the Eastern bloc.
The Affluence was an age in which the only heroes the media permitted to survive were those it had created itself. Editors, columnists, and commentators were not comfortable with the genuine article and started to cut Arnold Grainer down to size once he was no longer needed to save their necks. He was a man whom it was easy to dislike, and he infuriated them further by ignoring their criticism and advice. On becoming a civilian he joined Wrenshall in turning veralloy from a laboratory curiosity into the material which threatened the future of every metal-consuming industry. In ’09 planned obsolescence was economic dogma and the concept of a cheap, easily worked, wear-resistant alloy was anathema.
Grainer believed that veralloy and other products of high technology could be the basis of a genuine and general affluence. He set out to prove it, and in the process both he and Wrenshall became multimillionaires. Wrenshall continued to mix metals happily. Grainer concentrated on changing the Affluence into the Millennium by converting industrial production into industrial productivity.
Opposed by multinational corporations, international unions, and timid governments of every political hue and economic faith, he saw that logic was useless. Only by political action could he break the strangleholds. To beat the politicians he had to join them. He joined the least rigid of the three parties and put himself forward as a candidate for its presidential nomination. To the astonishment of everybody except his delegates he got it. At that point the Service realized that somebody would probably try to kill him and that many would be delighted if somebody did. A pack of Secret Service men and women surrounded him throughout his campaign. And in 2020 the American people, with that gut instinct which had saved the Republic in the past, elected as their President a man too strong for their tastes and too tough for their stomachs.
By the end of his third year in office Arnold Grainer was so hated by his party’s leaders that they were happy to believe the pollsters who were forecasting that he would be the first elected President in over a century to seek renomination and not get it. They prepared to make Vice-President Randolph the people’s choice. And during the early months of 2024 most people were saying loudly that they’d never vote for that bastard Grainer again.
When Grainer let his name stand in the primaries but made no effort to campaign, the Party thought he was finished. When he went sailing with Helga and Gloria (both murdered within the year) and with myself on the eve of the New York primary, they were sure of it. They only realized that they were likely to be manipulated and harried by him for another four years when the party members who had cursed him publicly voted for him privately, suggesting that in November the electorate would do the same.
The electorate never had the chance. President Arnold Grainer was assassinated on the twenty-fourth of October 2024, while waiting at Dulles Airport to greet the new President of the Soviet Union.
That was one of his few public appearances when I was not near enough to throw him to the ground. McLean, in charge of overall security, had sent me with a section to investigate a report that there was an intruder on the observation deck of the Airport Terminal. We found nobody but, glancing across the reception area, I saw a curtain move behind the window of a room which should have been cleared.
I called a warning on my communicator and got no answer. The Soviet airliner was turning off the runway and taxiing toward the red carpet where the President was waiting. The rest of my section had already spread out to search the roof. I was alone. I raced along the observation deck, swung down to the ledge by the window where I had seen the curtain move, and was drawing my gun when the man behind the window fired.
His shot shattered the glass. Mine hit him before he could fire a second. I threw myself through the broken window and heard him gasp, “That bitch! She tricked me!” before his voice was drowned by the blood gushing from his mouth. By the time other agents burst into the room he was dead.
I didn’t know the President was also dead. A marksman cannot shoot accurately through plate glass and his first round had been designed to smash the window and give him a clear target for his second. For the moment, my attention was fixed on a young man standing on the steps below with a forbidden video camera pointing toward the group around the President. I dropped from the window ledge onto him, fearing that he was the “second gun” in a planned assassination. I had snatched his camera and snapped out the cassette before I even looked toward the apron and saw that the first shot had hit somebody.
The confusion was such that it was minutes before I learned it was the President, and several hours before I found he was dead. He had been whisked away immediately, and I never saw Arnold Grainer again. Later I found he had been killed by an armor-piercing round which had punched through the veralloy vest only the Service knew he was wearing.
Our whole communication system went out of operation; all our careful contingency plans collapsed into chaos. The Service, which had seemed the one efficient organization in the Federal bureaucracy, suddenly showed how far it had deteriorated since becoming the creature of the Attorney General.
When the Secret Service had been transferred from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Justice its responsibilities had been enlarged and the quality of its recruits had changed. The new agents were men and women who had never known the confusion of combat or the uncertainty of clandestine operations; trained killers rather than experienced fighters. They held political views in a Service sworn to neutrality, and those views would not have been mine had I held any. But until that day I had thought they knew their job; by nightfall I realized they did not.