In the old days, when every network, newspaper, magazine, news service, or independent station picked out its own crises, things were always in a jumble. Sure, they would try to focus on one or two surefire headline-makers: a nuclear powerplant disaster or the fear of one, a new disease like AIDS or Chinese Rot, a war, terrorism, things like that.
The problem was, there were so many crises springing up all the time, so many threats and threats of threats, so much blood and fire and terror, that people stopped paying attention. The news scared the livers out of them. Sales of newspapers and magazines plunged toward zero. Audiences for news shows, even the revered network evening shows, likewise plummeted.
It was Jack Armstrong—a much younger, more handsome and vigorous All-American Boy—who came up with the idea of the Crisis Command Center. Like all great ideas, it was basically simple.
Pick one crisis each month and play it for all it’s worth. Everywhere. In all the media. Keep it scary enough to keep people listening, but not so terrifying that they’ll run away and hide.
And it worked! Worked to the point where the CCC (or Cee Cubed, as some of our analysts styled it) was truly the command center for all the media of North America. And thereby, of course, the whole world.
But on this particular Friday afternoon, we were stumped. And I had that terrifying note crumpled in my pocket. A handwritten note, on paper, no less. Not an electric communication, but a secret, private, dangerous seditious note, meant for me and me alone, surreptitiously slipped into my jacket pocket.
«Make big $$$,» it scrawled. «Tell all to Feds.»
I clasped my hands to keep them from trembling and wondered who, out of the fourteen men and women sitting around the table, had slipped that bomb to me.
Boss Jack had started the Delphi procedure by going down the table, asking each of us board members in turn for the latest news in her or his area of expertise.
He started with the man sitting at his immediate right, Matt Dillon. That wasn’t the name he had been born with, naturally; his original name had been Oliver Wolchinsky. But in our select little group, once you earn your spurs (no pun intended) you are entitled to a «power name,» a name that shows you are a person of rank and consequence. Most power names were chosen, of course, from famous media characters.
Matt Dillon didn’t look like the marshal of Dodge City. Or even the one-time teen screen idol. He was short, pudgy, bald, with bad skin and an irritable temper. He looked, actually, exactly as you would expect an Oliver Wolchinsky to look.
But when Jack Armstrong said, «We shall begin with you,» he added, «Matthew.»
Matt Dillon was the CCC expert on energy problems. He always got to his feet when he had something to say. This time he remained with his round rump resting resignedly on the caramel cushion of his chair.
«The outlook is bleak,» said Matt Dillon. «Sales of the new space-manufactured solar cells are still climbing. Individual homes, apartment buildings, condos, factories—everybody’s plastering their roofs with them and generating their own electricity. No pollution, no radiation, nothing for us to latch onto. They don’t even make noise!»
«Ah,» intoned our All-American Boy, «but they must be ruining business for electric utility companies. Why not a crisis there?» He gestured hypnotically, and put on an expression of Ratheresque somberness, intoning, «Tonight we will look at the plight of the electrical utilities, men and women who have been discarded in the stampede for cheap energy.»
«Trampled,» a voice from down the table suggested.
«Ah, yes. Instead of discarded. Thank you.» Boss Jack was never one to discourage creative criticism.
But Marshal Matt mewed, «The electric utility companies are doing just fine; they invested in the solar cell development back in ‘05. They saw the handwriting in the sky.»
A collective sigh of disappointment went around the table.
Not one to give up easily, our Mr. Armstrong suggested, «What about oil producers, then? The coal miners?»
«The last coal miner retired on full pension in ‘08,» replied Matt dolefully. «The mines were fully automated by then. Nobody cares if robots are out of work; they just get reprogrammed and moved into another industry. Most of the coal robots are picking fruit in Florida now.»
«But the Texas oil and gas …»
Matt headed him off at the pass. «Petroleum prices are steady. They sell the stuff to plastics manufacturers, mostly. Natural gas is the world’s major heating fuel. It’s clean, abundant and cheap.»
Gloom descended on our conference table.
It deepened as Boss Jack went from one of our experts to the next.
Terrorism had virtually vanished in the booming world economy.
Political scandals were depressingly rare: with computers replacing most bureaucrats there was less cheating going on in government, and far fewer leaks to the media.
The space program was so successful that no less than seven governments of spacefaring nations—including our own dear Uncle Sam—had declared dividends for their citizens and a tax amnesty for the year.
Population growth was nicely levelling off. Inflation was minimal. Unemployment was a thing of the past, with an increasingly roboticized workforce encouraging humans to invest in robots, accept early retirement, and live off the productivity of their machines.
The closest thing to a crisis in that area was a street brawl in St. Petersburg between two retired Russian factory workers—aged thirty and thirty-two—who both wanted the very same robot. Potatoes that were much too small for our purposes.
There hadn’t been a war since the International Peacekeeping Force had prevented Fiji from attacking Tonga, nearly twelve years ago.
Toxic wastes, in the few remote regions of the world where they still could be found, were being gobbled up by genetically-altered bugs (dubbed Rifkins, for some obscure reason) that happily died once they had finished their chore and dissolved into harmless water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia compounds. In some parts of the world the natives had started laundry and cleaning establishments on the sites of former toxic waste dumps.
I watched and listened in tightening terror as the fickle finger of fate made its way down the table toward me. I was low man on the board, the newest person there, sitting at the end of the table between pert Ms. Mary Richards (sex and family relations were her specialty) and dumpy old Alexis Carrington-Colby (nutrition and diets—it was she who had, three months earlier, come up with the blockbuster of the «mother’s milk» crisis).
I hoped desperately that either Ms. Richards or Ms. Carrington-Colby would offer some shred of hope for the rest of the board to nibble on, because I knew I had nothing. Nothing except that damning damaging note in my pocket. What if the Boss found out about it? Would he think I was a potential informer, a philandering fink to the feds?
With deepening despair I listened to flinty-eyed Alexis offer apologies instead of ideas. It was Mary Richards’ turn next, and my heart began fluttering unselfishly. I liked her, I was becoming quite enthusiastic about her, almost to the point of asking her romantic questions. I had never dated a sex specialist, or much of anyone, for that matter. Mary was special to me, and I wanted her to succeed.
She didn’t. There was not crisis in sex or family relations.
«Mr. James,» said the Boss, like a bell tolling for a funeral.
I wasn’t entitled to a power name, since I had only recently been appointed to the board. My predecessor, Marcus Welby, had keeled over right at this conference table the previous month when he realized that there was no medical crisis in sight. His heart broke, literally. It had been his fourth one, but this time the rescue team was just a shade too late to pull him through again.