24. CAMP DAVID
15 JANUARY 2008
OUTSIDE, THE WIND HOWLED THROUGH NAKED BRANCHES, rattling the eaves of the log cabin and sweeping the needles of the barberry bushes across the windowpanes like fingernails on a blackboard. The snow was already piling up against the front door, and the storm was just beginning. Inside, the fire in the hearth blazed as hot as the August afternoon sun against the cheeks of the two men who sat staring into the flames, their feet propped on a big Moroccan leather ottoman, their liver-spotted hands clutching tall glasses as a shipwrecked man clutches a piece of driftwood.
“Frankly, William, I’m more than a little worried,” said President Horatio Francis Turnbull.
The bearded William S. Grayle made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Trust me, Mr. President. I haven’t let you down yet.”
“That’s part of the trouble: I don’t know whether you
have let me down or not. Things are coming to a head, and I sometimes fear, despite your assurances, that the head will roll, and it will be mine.”
“God’s will be done,” said the other sententiously. “Over some events man has no control, nor can he see them coming. But to the degree that forethought, money, organization, imagination, and infinite pains can influence the course of U.S. political history, you have nothing to fear.”
President Turnbull shook his head. “I wish I could share your optimism. This cancer business, for instance, is–”
“Your type of cancer,” Grayle chuckled, “no matter what the Washington Post medical columnist would say if he got wind of it, is curable. Mark my words, two years from now, when you’re well into your second term, you’ll thank me for bundling you off to the Naval Medical Center.”
“Sure I will, if I’m still around.”
“You will be. William S. Grayle says you will, and his mother made him promise never to tell a lie.”
President Turnbull heaved himself out of the chair and paid a visit to the decanter on the big oak sideboard. He wished he could share Grayle’s optimism, but the formidable bipartisan following his secretary of water resources, David D. Castle, had built up during the past three years made it impossible. Of all the threats to Turnbull’s reelection, David D. Castle was the most dangerous.
And Grayle had told him not to worry!
Ironically, Castle had proved a tower of strength largely owing to the counsel of William S. Grayle, who had continued to provide the secretary of water resources with advice, contacts, press handouts, ghosted articles, convention addresses, technical information, and revised organizational charts for his new department. He even vetted the applicants for all positions down to the assistant deputy to the deputy assistant secretary level, warning him away from job-hopping bureaucratic deadwood and cast-offs from other Washington agencies and suggesting men and women who could and would actually do a day’s work.
No question about it, David D. Castle had surprised everybody with his success as secretary of water resources. William S. Grayle had, to be sure, mapped out for him the path to power, but it was a path that Castle himself had followed with energy and determination.
The first step, of course, was Iceberg International, Inc. For David D. Castle it was a no-lose situation: If Forte brought in the iceberg, its waters would irrigate the Midwest, and Castle would collect the political credit– and the Midwest’s votes. If Forte failed, the Salvation and Alamo fiascoes would be scientific evidence that iceberg transport was not feasible.
Jennifer Red Cloud, who was along for the ride with the Alamo in hopes of learning how it could be made to succeed–and then sabotaging it–would have no further hope of recouping the fortune she had lost with the Salvation. She would, therefore, be even more eager to hitch her wagon to Castle’s rising star and become First Lady of the land. Then a dummy company responsive to her remote control would be established. Her knowledge, an amalgam of years of leadership of Raynes and her firsthand observation of Forte’s handling of the Alamo, would make the company easily America’s most expert in iceberg transport. It would be a simple and straightforward matter for Castle, as President, to see that the new company obtained a monopoly on supplying Antarctic water to a thirsty America. And by the time he left the presidency in 2016, he and his lovely wife would be in control of what would certainly be the world’s most profitable enterprise.
Meanwhile, Castle launched a frontal assault on the water problem by cracking down on industrial pollution, enforcing compliance with laws already on the books to eliminate poisonous industrial discharges into rivers and streams, and successfully lobbying for laws that gave tax credits to factories that installed antipollution and water-recycling equipment. Then he announced nationwide competitions for designers of truly water-efficient household equipment, and federal legislation was passed offering manufacturers of such devices a five-year tax holiday. Estimated household water saving was 65 gallons per day, more than 4.5 billion gallons a day nationwide, or a whopping 1.7 trillion gallons a year, enough to fill 420 million backyard swimming pools.
But water economies were only a partial and interim solution. Castle also encouraged progressive adoption of efficient household water-recycling systems by offering similar tax breaks to producers of equipment and those who used it.
Working closely with the now-autonomous Department of Health, Castle launched a drive to replace heavily sugared carbonated drinks with sparkling pure water, both bottled and canned. With the slogan “Satisfy your thirst, not your dentist” looking down from every billboard, he declared war on the Coke and Pepsi generations. Government-sponsored television ads made the consumption of sugar in soft drinks a matter of national defense by claiming–with just a whiff of hyperbole–that each Coke or Pepsi consumed cost enough Cuban sugar to buy a communist bullet to kill an American soldier.
And still, that was only the beginning, since household water accounted for only 5 percent of the total used by Americans. Industrial water used amounted to more than six times that figure. Water-intensive processes such as automobile manufacture, costing 100,000 gallons per car, and coal-powered electricity production, using 900 gallons of water for every kilowatt-hour produced, were heavily taxed, resulting in both decreased consumption and increased efficiences.
Neither the household nor the industrial water revolution Secretary David D. Castle was spearheading, however, had quite the impact of his most important offensive: persuading farmers to abandon flood irrigation for drip irrigation. This measure alone could reduce by 90 percent farmers’ water requirements, which used up 83 percent of the nation’s entire supply.
Secretary Castle pushed solutions and pushed them hard. Their cumulative effect was a startling drop in national water consumption and in water costs and a corresponding rise in farm production and David D. Castle’s popularity in the politically powerful Midwest. Concrete accomplishments in the wheat belt, furthermore, gave hope to city dwellers that his reforms would ease their lot as well, and they too climbed aboard the Castle bandwagon.
“And you tell me not to worry!” said the President to his guest.
“That’s right, Mr. President. Every contingency has been foreseen.”
The President snorted. “That’s what you said about the iceberg project. And yet, it begins to look as if Ripley Forte is going to bring it home, after all.”
“Yes,” Grayle granted. “I didn’t overestimate the difficulties, but I certainly did underestimate Ripley Forte. From what my spies tell me, he has a very good chance indeed to bring the Alamo into Matagorda Bay.”
“There you are!” said President Turnbull triumphantly. “You have admitted that the great William S. Grayle is fallible, after all.”
“I have been known to make mistakes. It’s a practice, however, that I’ve never allowed to become a habit.”
“Still, if you can be wrong about Forte, how can you be so certain you aren’t wrong about Castle, too?”
“I’m not,” said Grayle imperturbably. “I’ve taken out insurance, as you know.”
“But if he is nominated?” Turnbull persisted.
“Then I shall see that he is not elected. You have my word.”
25. THE MAGNUS EFFECT
16 JANUARY 2008
FROM THE CARGO COPTERS THAT SHUTTLED FROM SUPport ship to iceberg, the Alamo looked like a big piece of angel food cake as warm with ants on a picnic table, for in this most critical phase of the entire operation, Forte had mustered every available man from his fleet of support ships, and he was keeping them on the run.
According to wind and current data radioed to Houston and cranked into the Brown-Ash Mark IX computer in
SD-1, the Alamo’s closest approach to the Benguela Current would come in seventy-one hours, at 39°51′ South and 10°06′ East. Here the Alamo would effect its first man-made maneuver: a northward diversion from the West Wind Drift and insertion into the Benguela Current sweeping up the west coast of Africa. If it missed the Benguela, it was doomed to continue circling the Antarctic continent until it melted away. Triple Eye would be triple X’d before it got started.