Pat Benson, the President’s national affairs adviser, shook his head glumly. “I wish I could believe that, Mr. President. I’ve been out in the hustings these past ten days, and never in thirty-eight years of taking the public’s pulse have I witnessed such honest-to-God hysteria.”
“Relax, Pat. You’ll think of something. You always do.”
The President tilted back in his tall leather chair and put his feet on the desk. He lit a nine-inch Emperador and silently commended his sagacity in repealing the embargo on Cuban tobacco. He was content. How many men could put their feet on a desk once owned by Abraham Lincoln, enjoy an unlimited supply of the world’s best hand-rolled cigars, and have the fate of the nation in the palm of their hand–not to mention the undivided attention of a man like Dr. Sidney Bussek, lately the eminent chancellor of the University of Southern California, silently awaiting an invitation to speak?
President Turnball turned to his scientific adviser and smiled. “How about it, Sid–don’t you think Pat is getting his bowels in an uproar over nothing?”
“On the contrary.” Sidney Bussek was a tall man clad in black who looked rather like a professional mourner. “Congressman Castle is scaring the public witless. He tells them that the population bomb is about to blow up our water supply and implies that this crime must be laid at the door of the last four or five Republican administrations. He trumpets the dangers to our rivers of raw
sewage and industrial toxins and thermal pollution. He piles statistic on statistic–how it takes fifteen thousand gallons of water to irrigate the land to grow a bushel of wheat, four thousand gallons to produce a brace of chicken eggs for breakfast, and so on and so forth. But before scientific commentators can put into perspective those scare headlines Castle produces day after day, he hits us with new ones. I agree with Ben: The man’s a menace. If we don’t do something soon, he could be real trouble.”
“What do you suggest?” said President Turnbull, adjusting his handsome features into an expression of concern.
Horatio Frances Turnbull looked the way a president should look. He was tall, substantially built, and ruddyfaced, with the silver mane of an antebellum southern senator. He had a pleasing baritone voice, the gift of sounding as if he were confiding a secret to a valued friend even when addressing an audience of thousands, and a patent sincerity of manner that won him friends and elections. He did not, it was true, adhere to any fixed principles but cast his vote with the majority, on the indisputably democratic premise that the majority is always right. Advice was a nuisance he endured: It made his associates happy, and Turnball liked to see happy faces around him. But when it came to political decisions, he relied on instinct, and it had never failed him yet. So he would listen to Dr. Sidney Bussek with attention, as he listened to all his advisers, and do precisely as his instincts had told him to do all along.
“That there is a water crisis,” said Dr. Bussek, “cannot be denied. But a variety of simple measures can alleviate it. Every American could start in his own home, for example, and reduce water consumption by 50 percent by such simple means as putting a couple of bricks in the toilet’s water closet. That would save 2.5 billion gallons a day. Installing the Clivus Multram composting toilet, a Swedish invention of thirty years ago which uses no water at all, would save 4.2 billion gallons.”
“Forget toilets,” said Pat Benson emphatically. “People don’t vote for toilets.”
“Tell you what you do, Sid,” broke in President Turnbull. “Write me up a memo and lay it all out. Give me
the problems, the solutions, their drawbacks and advantages, the time it will all take, what new agencies we’ll need to create, if any, the people we should recruit to handle it, what political interests we’ve got to avoid alienating in the process–that sort of thing. Give it to me in the usual form–one page. Tomorrow.”
He lowered his feet to the floor and rose. “I want to thank you for dropping in, Sid. I hope you’ll make it a habit, because I need somebody to lean on I can trust in this era of rapid technological progress. Ben here is good in getting out the vote, but he can’t tell a hawk from a handsaw.”
He saw the two men out the door, massaging Dr. Bussek’s arm as he went, considered a sure sign of personal regard by President watchers, and returned to his desk. He sat down in the big leather chair, folded his hands behind his head, and regarded the ceiling. He chuckled.
“Come on in, Mr. Grayle,” he said.
The door opposite that through which his aides had just departed opened, and William S. Grayle entered. He was a tall, spare man with abundant wavy gray hair, a luxuriant gray beard, and dark glasses that obscured the rest of his face. He walked slowly and carefully, his steps rationed by old age.
“Did you hear?” said President Turnbull, coming around the desk to hold the chair for his guest.
“I heard.”
“What do you think?”
“They suspect nothing.”
“Exactly,” said the President, nodding vigorously as he returned to his desk. “And if Pat suspects nothing, then nobody suspects nothing–anything. Well, Mr. Grayle, what now?”
Grayle stroked his beard with his gloved hand. “We let nature take its course. We’re right on schedule. During the next three sessions, the committee will deal with ways, mostly visionary, to augment the nation’s water supply. Castle will quite properly reject them all as too little, too late, or impractical. Only one possibility remains, he will intimate. And on that note he will adjourn the hearings to give a little time for public suspense to build up.
“When it peaks in about ten days, Castle will hold a
televised press conference. He will announce the solution to America’s water problem.”
“Beautiful,” said the President, his eyes alight with admiration for the astuteness of William S. Grayle, who had quietly emerged from retirement recently with a scheme to guarantee his, Horatio Francis Turnbull´s, reelection in 2008.
The plan was going to cost the Republican National Committee dear but would be worth every penny. Known only to Turnbull himself, Grayle’s plan guaranteed that during the next four years, Congressman David D. Castle would receive so much favorable news coverage and deal with the nation’s gravest crisis with such vigor and imagination that by convention time all other contenders for the Democratic nomination in 2008 would be steamrollered into obscurity. It was, as Turnbull admitted, a great plan. With David D. Castle as Democratic nominee, Turnbull could not possibly lose. Unless…
“But what if–” he began, a frown clouding his face.
“–Castle does succeed in bringing an iceberg into San Francisco Bay?” said Grayle. “If he does, he wins by a landslide, of course. But no, the drums will beat and the banners will wave until, just before convention time, it will become apparent that he has failed miserably. And you’ll sail into office for a second term.”
“Yes, yes,” said Turnbull. “But if he does succeed?”
“Impossible. The California Current will defeat him. Castle doesn’t have the chance of a snowball in Hades. Nobody does. Castle is living in a dream world.”
8. HAMBURGER
22 FEBRUARY 2005
OUTSIDE THE HALLS OF CONGRESS THE AIR WAS COLD and dry, but inside, in the House Interior and Insular Affairs committee room, the atmosphere was hot and
steamy, charged with the sweat and exhalations of some two hundred press and television reporters. Since 8 P.M. they had been jostling and shoving to get vantage points for Congressman Castle’s press conference, which would be heard and seen by an estimated 145 million Americans.
At two minutes before nine, Congressman David D. Castle made his entrance and mounted the podium. He was dressed in black, and his expression was grave. He was alone and without notes.
At exactly nine o’clock, the red on-the-air lights blinked on above the lenses of a dozen television cameras, and the sober countenance of the representative from California’s Sixth District appeared on 50 million screens.
“Fellow Americans,” he began in a warm conversational tone, “on the way home at night after work I often stopped for a hamburger. No more. Why not? Well, in the hearings I have conducted during the past two months I have learned many things. I learned, for instance, that in addition to the flour that makes the bun, it takes nearly a bushel of wheat to produce the meat that goes into the hamburger itself. Some fanner in the Midwest expended twenty-two minutes to harvest that wheat, along with 655 grams of fertilizer and 15,000 gallons of water from aquifers that will not be replenished for another 10 million years. In effect, I was consuming a bushel of wheat and 15,000 gallons of water to wash it down. It was too much. I lost my appetite for hamburger.