GENESIS
A NEW PRESIDENT
Davey burst into the Oval Office in a panic, and then let out a long sigh. He picked at the frostbite patches on his face, the mark carried by most children who returned from Antarctica. The girl Benes was sitting in the high-backed presidential chair leisurely clipping her nails. When she saw Davey enter, she rolled her eyes and said, “Mr. Herman Davey, you’ve been impeached and have no authority to return to this office. And in fact, you don’t have any authority to be in the White House at all.”
Davey rubbed his temples and said, “I want to leave, but that pack of thugs out there want to kill me!”
“You deserve it. You screwed everything up. You’ve done a worse job than any president in US history.”
“You… you have no right to say that to me! Why are you sitting in the presidential chair? You think you can just ignore etiquette when I’m away?”
Benes looked up at the ceiling. “You’re the one who needs to pay attention to etiquette.”
Davey was about to explode when Vaughn came in and said, “What you probably don’t know is that Frances Benes was elected the second president of the United States of the Supernova Era.”
“What?” Davey exclaimed, staring at the blond-haired girl clipping her nails in that hallowed seat. He looked back at Vaughn, and then burst out laughing. “Don’t joke around. That idiot doesn’t even know how to count!” He chuckled.
Benes furiously smacked the table, but then held her hand to her mouth to soothe the pain. Then she pointed a finger at Davey and said sharply, “Shut your mouth or you’ll be charged with defaming the president!”
“You’ve got to be responsible to the republic!” Davey said, pointing at Vaughn.
“She’s the choice of all American children. The new president was selected in a fair election.”
Davey spat in Benes’s direction. “When we were off facing death in Antarctica, you were back here flirting with the media!”
“Slandering the president!” Benes shouted at Davey, opening her eyes wide, but then her face dissolved into a pleased smile. “Do you know why they voted for me? I look like Shirley Temple. That’s where I’ve got you beat. You may be handsome, but you don’t look like any movie star.”
“If those old black-and-white movies hadn’t been playing on TV all day, who would even remember Shirley Temple?”
“That was our campaign strategy!” Benes said with another sweet smile.
“The Democrats are blind.”
Vaughn said, “It’s actually fairly easy to understand. After the war games, the people needed someone more moderate to represent their will.”
Davey frowned in distaste. “And this Barbie doll can represent the will of America? Right now the whole country is consumed by the Antarctic failure. The country is going to slide back into violent games. The crisis facing the republic right now is far more frightening than the Antarctic war, since we could collapse at any moment. At this critical juncture, to put the American children in the hands of this—”
“Mr. Vaughn will find a solution for us,” Benes said with a nod in his direction.
Davey was stunned for a moment, but then nodded thoughtfully. “I get it. Mr. Vaughn is using us as tools to realize his ideas. The country and the world are his stage, and any individual is a puppet whose strings he can pull at will. Yes, that’s what he thinks….” Then he jumped to his feet in exasperation and pulled an object from his pocket: a full-lug snub-nosed revolver, which he leveled at Vaughn. He said, “You’re far too sinister and frightening. I should blast your brains open. I’ve been fed up with that head of yours for a long time.”
Benes yelped and reached for the alarm, but Vaughn stopped her with a gentle wave. “You’re not going to pull the trigger. If you do, you’re not walking out of this old house alive. You’re an exemplary American. In whatever you do, you act according to one iron law: Outputs always need to exceed inputs. That’s your fundamental weakness!”
Davey put away the gun. “Of course outputs should exceed inputs!”
“But that’s not the way to make history.”
“I’m not making history anymore. I’m tired of it!” Davey said, and bounded to the door, where he took one last look around the Oval Office, where so many of his dreams remained. Then he ran out alone.
Carrying a motorcycle helmet, Davey exited the White House by the back door. He found the Lincoln Town Car he had parked there and got inside. He put on the helmet, and then found a pair of sunglasses in the car and put those on. Then he started the engine and headed off. Just outside the White House a hundred children were gathered, looking to settle their score with him, but his car didn’t attract their attention and they let him pass.
He glanced out at the crowd as he did so and saw they had hung a banner:
Davey drove aimlessly around the capital. Very little of D.C.’s population was left, since the majority of children had moved in search of work to larger cities with denser concentrations of industry, so apart from the government it was practically a ghost town. It was past nine in the morning, but the city showed no signs of waking up. His surroundings were as silent as the dead of night, which only heightened the impression he had of the city: It was a tomb. He thought fondly of bustling New York. That’s where he came from, and that’s where he’d return.
The Lincoln was too flashy, he thought, and such a high-end thing no longer suited him. He parked it in a secluded spot by the Potomac River and from the trunk retrieved the FN Minimi light machine gun that Vaughn had given him. He checked the translucent plastic magazine; it was almost half full. He hefted the gun level and aimed it at the Lincoln a few meters away, and then ratatatat let fly a burst. The muzzle spurted flame three times, and the recoil dropped him back on his ass. He sat there staring at the car for a moment, and when nothing else happened, pulled himself up by the barrel, adjusted the gas valve to the fastest rate of fire, and again leveled the swaying gun. Again he fired at the car, the rapid reports echoing across the river, and again he fell back onto the ground. There was no reaction from the car. He stood up again, two round dirt stains on the butt of his jeans, and sprayed the car again, emptying the magazine. With a boom the Lincoln burst into flames and started smoking, and Davey crowed “Woohoo!” and bounded away, carrying the gun with him.
Benes finished clipping her nails and turned to plucking her eyebrows, using tweezers and a small mirror. Vaughn pointed to two buttons on the presidential desk, and said, “Lots of people are very curious about those buttons. The media has even speculated that they are tied to the fate of the nation, and if the president presses one, it will immediately contact all NATO countries. Press the other, and a nationwide war alert is issued, scrambling bombers and dispatching nuclear bombs from their silos… things like that.”
But in fact, one button called for coffee, and the other alerted housekeeping to clean the room. During the time she had spent with Vaughn, Benes had discovered that he was sometimes quite eager to talk to her. He proved a good conversationalist, although he held forth only on insignificant and nonessential topics, and deflected serious matters with practiced evasion.
She said to him, “I know my own strengths, and I don’t share the outside world’s misapprehensions about those two buttons. I’m not too clever, I know that, but I’m better than Davey’s reverse cleverness, at least.”
Vaughn nodded. “You’re certainly clever about that.”
“I’m riding on this horse of history but I’m not holding the reins. It can trot wherever it pleases. Not like Davey, clutching the reins and forcing it to the edge of a precipice.”