Then Dr. Ballard told me about the job. He explained how I was the only kid in the whole USA that passed the tests. He said that the President and I have something called “empathic resonance,” which means that the President likes me a lot. He told me all the things I would have to do, but he also told me I had to volunteer, No one could make me take the job. Not him, not Mama, not even the President! He told me that if I took the job I could quit when the President quit his job. I’d get lots of money and the Government would pay for my school when I grew up.
He said another kid would take over my job someday, but I would always be the most important, because I would be the first. I would be in the history book just like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and kids in school would have to know my name on tests! He told me I should think about it before saying yes or no.
I was just a dumb little kid back then. I didn’t know about symbols and how people pay more attention to them than to things that are real. But even if I’d known, I’d have still said yes in the end. I like the President.
Being a little kid is scary. You don’t know the rules of the game that grown-ups play. Sometimes they act like they don’t want you to know. Even if you did know they wouldn’t pay any attention to you anyhow. But I know about The Bomb. All kids know about it.
The first time I heard about The Bomb I got scared and had bad dreams. Then I found out that grownups were scared of it too and how they don’t always understand the rules either. That scared me a lot, but when I talked to Dr. Ballard about it he said sometimes grownups aren’t as smart as you think. He said sometimes they get stuck and kids have to help them.
So, I made up my own mind. Not Mama, not Dr. Ballard, and not the President—no matter what the newspapers say. I did it because I owe it to all the little kids in the world, not because I would be famous and get in the history books. Dr. Ballard says I’m a living symbol that says, “I want to grow up.” If I do well at my job, then all the other countries will have kids just like me. That’s why I’ve written all of these essays for Dr. Ballard. Because it’s history. Writing is ok but I wish I could go outside and play.
I’ve had my job two years now. That means I get to retire soon. The scar from where they opened me up to put in the codes doesn’t hurt anymore, but it’s still there. Sometimes the reporters ask me if I can feel the metal thing inside me near my heart. I tell them no, but sometimes I can feel it. Or I think I can. I talked with Dr. Ballard about it and he thinks it’s in my head. I told him no, it’s in my chest. That made him laugh. I almost never see him laugh for real anymore.
I wonder how it will feel when they take the briefcase off my wrist. It doesn’t really bother me. It isn’t heavy at all and the handcuff doesn’t bug me anymore, like it did at first. It did take Mama a long time to get used to carrying it around everywhere I went, but now I don’t really notice it. I don’t think about what’s inside it.
I only got to see the knife the day Dr. Ballard put it inside the briefcase and locked it and gave the key to the President.
A lot of things are happening now. The President keeps going to meetings with the generals from the Pentagon. I have to sit on a chair near the President where they can see me. I spend most of the time coloring or working in my workbook. I don’t understand what the generals say most of the time and it’s boring. Mainly I don’t like the way they look at me. Dr. Ballard says they just don’t want me hanging around. Maybe they think I am a spy or something. That is so dumb! The way they look at me makes me feel real funny, though. When I look back at them, they pretend they weren’t staring at me and they get embarrassed. Sometimes they look at me with this real mean look. Like Marjorie, only worse.
I like the President. I always have. He’s a nice man.
He’s got a granddaughter the same age as me. We even get to play together in the Rose Garden when she comes to visit him. When his dog Tinkerbell has puppies, he said I can have one! He wants me to grow up, he says. I wish his eyes weren’t so sad, but maybe Mama will let me keep it.
Sacred Fire
George Zebrowski
“When the beast stays its hand from killing, it is as one dead, “
—Old Saying
At the age of sixteen, as I prepared to attend my first peace festival, I knew that my father feared my going. I could have gone to the annual displays earlier, but he never went and discouraged me from going alone. We stayed in the family shelter when our area was targeted.
“I didn’t want you contaminated with their ideas,” he said to me on the day before I was to leave, “—until you could think for yourself.” His voice trembled as he shifted in his chair. “But the law says you have to go now.” He reached over and turned on the standing light. Its brightness seemed to terrify him for a moment.
He squinted and looked away from me as I sat down on the floor. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Maybe I’ll learn something.”
He scowled and leaned back; there was sweat on his face. “You’ll learn what they want you to, and nothing more.”
“Don’t you trust me?” I asked anxiously, afraid that he thought me a failure, unable to think for myself.
He smiled, but it seemed to me that knives were at his heart as he wiped his forehead. “Try not to believe any of it, even it you’re having a good time.” I knew that he always missed my mother, but I’d never seen him afraid. “They’ve got it wrong, son, their way of peace.”
I said, “But it’s been over seventy years. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
He seemed to be struggling with himself. “Anyone has to be able to kill anyone,” he said slowly, “—and that’s how it should be, always, as an extreme of behavior, not to be tampered with. The peacekeepers are just another genetics cult that wants to do away with our capacity for violence. The trouble with trying to improve us is that we don’t know what we are, where we are, what we want to become and where that’ll take us. Shut up/in their mountain enclaves, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a human being.”
I’d heard some of this before from him, but never so bitterly. “I’ve come to suspect,” he continued, pushing the words out with painful conviction, “that all these decades of the peace festival have been a preparation for a great change to some new human model. There’ll be no going back after that.” He leaned forward in his chair. “They’ll let things get out of hand, have what looks like a small war and blame it on ordinary human nature showing itself, then push their salvation on us. One or two bombs is all it’ll take for the keepers to close their grip on us.” He shifted in the chair and gazed into the far corner of the room, as if someone were hiding there, listening to him.
“I can’t believe they’d kill people,” I said.
He looked exasperated. “What you want to believe has nothing to do with it. They’d do anything to get their way, because they’re certain it’s right.”
I didn’t know what to say, except to remind him that he still had me, that he wasn’t alone. I looked into his eyes, but he turned away before I could speak.
He couldn’t have come with me to the festival. Our area had been targeted, and one person in each household had to stay behind. But I knew that he wouldn’t have gone even if he could.