“We expect others to resign,” John added, “from Congress and the bureaucracy, the Old Media—and maybe even leave the country.”

  “That’s why I’m suspending all the Drug War and IRS regulations,” Alex told him, “limiting how much money an individual can take out of the country—to encourage them to go. Look, Kitch, this isn’t any more dangerous than what we’re doing with cold fusion—“

  “Cold fusion? That crackpot scam—“

  Alex shook his head. “Not at all. It’s the most thoroughly and viciously suppressed technology in human history, one that will change everything, very much for the better. The physics and chemistry make perfect sense; I’ve known that since Pons and Fleischmann did their thing back in the 80s, But in terms of 21st century American institutions, it gores every ox there is.”

  “Balderdash!” Kitch exclaimed. Alex’s respect for him increased in that moment because he’d had the courage to say it.

  Alex laughed. “Imagine a footlocker-sized device in your basement that lights your lights, warms and cools your home, heats your water, cooks your food. Another like it in your car takes you anywhere, at any speed, without refueling or recharging, silently and almost for free. No power lines overhead or underground, no oil or gas pipelines. Who wouldn’t like it? Oil and gas companies, power generators and electric grids, car manufacturers ... “

  “I’ve heard it all before,” Kitch replied. “200 mile per gallon carburators, cars that run on water, perpetual motion, Nikola Tesla’s long lost radium kidney belt ... “

  “Kitch, you’re wrong. This is like iron pipe and cotton fabric, which—because they allowed people to wash themselves and their clothing—doubled human life expectancy in the 18th century. It’s like the Industrial Revolution, or the advent of cybernetics. And there are old, established interests out to stop it at all costs.”

  “Surely you don’t want the government to develop it?”

  “No—and don’t call me Shirley. I’ll appoint a commission of courageous scientists, engineers, lawyers, and historians to look very publicly into the suppression.”

  “I see.”

  “But my point is that ending the War on Drugs is less risky than that. Even if it weren’t, I’d still ask you you to be my Drug unCzar, or my unDrug Czar, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “You what?” It was several moments before Kitch stopped laughing. “I get it: like putting Yamamoto in charge of the Pearl Harbor attack. Mr. President, I’m flattered. But I know nothing about administering a program like that. Absolutely nothing!”

  Alex laughed. “You’re not administering, Sgt. Schultz, you’re shutting it down. We’ll find bureaucrats to help. What I can’t find so easily is principled, intelligent, incorruptible people like you.”

  Kitch raised his eyebrows. “Can I put that on my resume?”

  “Carve it on Mount Rushmore, as long as you make sure the War on Drugs is shut down everywhere, domestically, internationally, at every level of government.”

  Something went ping!. Kitch jumped as if it were a gunshot.

  “They’re talking about you, Daddy.” Faith-Anne turned her laptop so that the others in the room could see the screen. At the moment it showed a rather contrivedly windblown female news “personality” in a trenchcoat, outside what appeared to be a rural courthouse.

  Dana retrieved her own laptop from the floor beside the sofa and found the same website, a recent competitor to NetPlanetNews.com.

  “ ... threatening to convert the White House into an ‘executive clemency factory’ again, with pardon forms stacked to the ceiling, ready for his signature, Hope has begin emptying America’s jails and prisons of more than three-quarters of their populations—“

  They cut to an interview Alex had given some time ago in the White House briefing room. “ ... these are decent, productive people,” he watched himself saying into the camera, “who never harmed anyone, and whose only crime was an—often unknowing—violation of laws and regulations that were grotesquely unconstitutional to begin with.”

  Alex had been speaking to the media that day—back when he was still on crutches, he noticed—of pardons he’d just granted various farmers and developers convicted under draconian EPA wetlands edicts of filling in ditches and muddy sinkholes on their own property. He’d asked several of them to Washington to join him at the podium. He was returning their land and in some instances ordering the prosecution of the runaway bureaucrats and field agents responsible.

  “With fully intended irony,” the woman went on, “usually reliable sources close to the President tell us he has selected Nuremburg, Pennsylvania for a series of legal actions that will accuse—and possibly convict—thousands of officials of ‘crimes against the Constitution’. The Hope Administration plans to emphasize the point, first made in Nuremburg, Germany, at the Nazi War Crimes tribunals following World War Two, that ‘just following orders’ is no excuse.”

  “Nuremburg!” Alex shook his head. “I wish I’d thought of that!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: SENATOR PETERS

  Henry David Thoreau used to speak of leaving every individual free to “step to a different drummer”. Today, more and more Americans find themselves marching in lockstep to a single drummer, one who is deaf to any cries for decency or sanity, let alone individual liberty.—Alexander Hope, Looking Forward

  The limestone cave in the Arkansas hills was secret, such a good secret that not even the US Geological Survey knew of its existence, and a lot of blood and money had been spent to keep it that way. There had originally been signs that it had once been used as a hiding place, a century and a half ago, by runaway slaves, and then a hideout for bootleggers during Prohibition that had never been discovered by the Revenuers. Before that, paleo-Indians had lived here. Its present owner wore a Clovis-style arrow point he’d found here, on a gold chain around his neck.

  But the feature that made this cave most valuable was that it was dry. It sat up in the middle of a small mountain, high above the local water table, and the floor and the walls and the air inside betrayed no trace of dampness, even when it was raining heavily.

  Jorge “Pencils” Aguilar had no idea what kind of geological upheaval could carve out a big cave like this and then toss it up, out of reach of the water that had carved it, and he didn’t care. He was no scientist; in fact he was much more an accountant than a gangster. All he knew was that it was perfect for his purpose, which was the storage for later distribution of illegal drugs.

  He enjoyed looking at the great white bales of cocaine that lined the walls on one side and marched up to the ceiling, where the stalactites had been knocked out because they took up too much room. Stalagmites were gone from the floor, as well. On the other side, greenish-brown bales of marijuana took up more space than the cocaine, but was a perfectly salable product all the same. It was possible, he thought, that there was a billion dollars worth of drugs in this chamber, which was about 100 yards in diameter and probably 60 feet high in the middle. A billion dollars, and it was his.

  His and his partners’. It had arrived here from further south, where it came in by small aircraft from South and Central America, and occasionally from Asia. It had arrived here by truck. From here it would go to cities and small towns across America. This cave and its secrets had survived many changes of administration and policies, both local and national. It would support him in his old age.

  “Boss! Boss!” Slider, one of Aguilar’s flunkies, careened into the cave from a tunnel that wound along for two miles, 50 feet below the surface, and came out in a clearing near the Interstate. “Lookit this! Lookit this!”

  In his hand he held a tiny combination television set and 8mm video tape player. Lately, it was his favorite toy. Aguilar took the unit, but had to put his glasses on to see what was happening on the screen.

  Alexander Hope was speaking at some kind of luncheon. “As soon as we stop enforcing drug laws,” he was telling his audience, “the value of those drugs will plummet. Drugs that presently sell for 100 dollars a baggie, will fall to 50 cents or a quarter, and all of the people who cultivate, process, transport, and sell those drugs will have to find a different profession.”

  “What?” Aguilar looked around him. If that man had his way, the billion dollars worth of drugs in this cave would be worth less than the plastic bags they were stored in. Hope was a menace, and he had to be—

  “That’s why,” the President said, “I’m issuing an Executive Order within the hour to cease all drug law enforcement for the foreseeable future. I have appointed my friend and colleague, Dr. Thornton Sinclair, to supervise this process. There was no drug problem in America before there were drug laws—look it up, you’ll find I’m right. Without drug laws to drive the price up, there won’t be any drug problem ever again.”

  Panic sluiced like icewater through Aguilar’ body. What could he do? He was stuck with a cave full of perfectly legal drugs! Was there any time left to move this stuff?

  “I don’t know about you, Boss,” Slider told him, bringing him back to here and now. “I’m gettin’ outa here! There’s no tellin’ what the local cops’ll do when their payoffs dry up! They’re gonna hate Hope, but they’ll take it out on us!”

  Aguilar shook his head to clear it. “You’re right, Slider. Let’s clear out of here. Just leave the stuff and clear out. Our uniformed friends will steal it out of sheer reflexive greed, and maybe leave us alone. By the time they figure out that it’s worthless, we’ll be somewhere else. I hear Calgary’s very nice this time of year.”

  “Y’gotta be kiddin’! I was thinkin’ maybe Costa Rica, Boss. I got a cousin with a seaplane, an’ a little money goes a long way down there. They got pretty senoritas, Boss.”

  “We’ve all got cousins with seaplanes, Slider, but pretty soon there isn’t going to be any gas money for them. I like pretty senoritas. Costa Rica it is, then—oh, wait, there’s something I want to do before we go.”

  He went to the wall, opened a hidden panel, turned a dial, and closed the panel again. “There,” he said. “Four minutes after the first person enters this cave, 10 pounds of C4 distributed throughout the walls will blow up, and Arkansas will suddenly be missing a lot of crooked cops.”

  “Pretty good, Boss—you’re a social benefactor!”

  “That’s me all over, Slider, that’s me all over.”

  ***

  “Your visitors are here, Mr. President.”

  Alex sighed inwardly. It was a cold and soggy April in DC. He missed his good old Austrian Mafia—Katie wouldn’t have called him ‘Mr. President’, she would have called him by his first name. He also missed Dana—she was off suffering through some kind of physical therapy and planned to do some First Lady work afterward. His only consolation was that Faith-Anne was here to help him deal with ‘visitors’ this morning.

  She still called him ‘Daddy’.

  He arose and walked around his desk. “Please send them in, will you, Louise?”

  There were three of them this morning, and even if he hadn’t been expecting them, their faces were extremely familiar. They were the assistant Republican leader of the United States Senate, the assistant Republican leader of the House of Representatives, and the Republican Senator to whom the topic of this morning’s discussion was the be-all and end-all of his political existence.

  “Good morning, gentlemen!” He strode forward and took each of their hands in turn, as warmly and sincerely as he could manage. “Congressman Blue, Senator Commack, Senator Peters, good to see you. You all know my daughter and good right hand, Faith-Anne? Excellent. Would you all care to join me over here, where it’s more comfortable, at the coffee table?”

  Blue was a tall man in his late 30s, with strong features, deeply sunken eyes, and prematurely white hair. Alex found himself thinking of the man as “young Boris Karloff”. Commack, Blue’s opposite number from the Senate, was fiftyish, short, plump, and florid, with a low, rasping voice.

  Peters—the individual who’d organized the meeting this morning—was of medium build, appeared to be in his early 60s, and had what Alex thought of as that “lean and hungry look”. Peters had founded a national anti-abortion lobby group and led it since his earliest days as a state legislator. He still published a weekly newsletter on the subject.

  Coffee had been poured, sugared, creamed, and the first sip taken. Cigars had been offered and refused. All of these social amenities having been taken care of, it was time, Alex thought, to get down to business.

  “Now what can I do for you gentlemen today? Perhaps I ought to inform you that CNN is already reporting that a delegation of ‘irate Republican leaders’ is visiting the White House to remonstrate with the President over what they refer to as his ‘lackadaisical’ position on abortion.”

  There was an embarrassed silence, which was exactly what Alex had intended. These three, of course, were the ones who had planted that story with CNN and he was letting them know that he knew it. It was interesting to him that straight talk, an extremely rare commodity in this city—in an apparent contradiction of the basic economic theory known as the Law of Marginal Utility—had no value at all to most of its inhabitants.

  The first of tehm to recover his aplomb was Senator Peters, who shook his head. Alex realized that Peters reminded him of the columnist Robert Novak, whose mortal enemies had called him the Republican “Prince of Darkness”.

  “No, Mr. President, that’s not why we’re here. I’d never call any of your policies ‘lackadaisical’, I’m sure they’re all extremely well thought out and energetically pursued. We’re here because the nation has arrived at an important crossroads in history. You see, we Republicans—along with a small handful of conservative Democrats in each chamber—we Republicans believe that we finally have garnered enough votes to outlaw abortion altogether ... “

  “And?” Alex asked.

  “Not ‘and’,” said Senator Commack. “But. But certain conditions have been imposed on us by our potential supporters both Republican and Democratic. Among the conditions, many of those supporters don’t want to risk exposing themselves publicly on this issue, only to have you veto the effort. Which means that we can’t get this work done without your endorsement.”

  “I see.” They didn’t have enough votes to override his veto.

  As Commack looked on, Congressman Blue handed out a single Xeroxed sheet to each of them. Faith-Anne glanced over the sheet Blue had given her with a carefully neutral expression, and stuck it in her notebook.

  Alex read the proposed bill before he commented. “Well, if nothing else, gentlemen, its brevity is commendable. It simply bans abortion anywhere within the United States, their territories, on US military bases overseas, or on American ships at sea. So where’s the rest of it?”

  Senator Peters looked confused. “The rest of it, Mr. President?

  “That’s right, Senator, the rest of it. When I was a schoolboy, before the Roe vs. Wade decision, something like 50,000 women a year were dying from botched abortions of one kind or another, either self-inflicted, or at the hands of some back-alley butcher. What that tells us, is that, whatever the law may decree, women will still take huge risks to control their own destinies.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. President, I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

  Alex nodded. “Well for example, you don’t want American women skulking off to Canada or Mexico to get their abortions, do you? So where’s your provision for physical examinations at the borders to detect pregnancies leaving the country, or terminated pregnancies coming back in?”

  The man reddened. “I ... we never thought of that, Mr. President.”

  Alex nodded. “I wondered whether you gentlemen had thought this matter through completely. Here’s another thing: if you seek to outlaw abortions, you’re going to have to add an enforcement clause to this legislation, aren’t you? And you may even have to create a whole new federal bureaucracy to do the enforcing. I certainly can’t imagine any existing law enforcement agency that I’d care to see doing it, can you?”

  Alex was morally certain that they had thought of those two points, hoping the president would overlook them. The looks on their faces tended to support his suspicions. Whoever had said the devil was in the details had been right. Heaven knew what details these three had in mind.

  “And then,” he added, “there’ll have to be agency regulations that go along with the law and sustain it. To begin with, I suppose you gentlemen realize that you’ll have to insist on mandatory monthly pregnancy testing for every female in the country, from puberty to menopause.”

  “M-mandatory—“ Peters sputtered to a stop.

  “I don’t know what it’ll cost, gentlemen, but it’s going to be horrendously expensive—and extremely unpopular,” Alex mused. “Maybe you’ll want to require women to show up once a month down at the local offices of the ... well let’s call it the ‘Pregnancy Enforcement Administration’, shall we? Or maybe you can just issue them a home pregnancy test kit every month and they can use it and send in the results—although can you trust them to be that honest? You’ll also have to accept the fact that you’ll be creating a whole new underground market for false test results.”

  “Mr. President, I—“

  Alex interrupted. “All pregancies, of course, will have to be registered immediately with the PEA, and every pregnant woman in the country will be required to undergo frequent psychological evaluation to determine whether she’s become an abortion risk during the past couple of weeks. And of course she’ll have to report for regular compulsory physical examinations to make sure she and the baby remain healthy. Here I thought you three gentlemen were against socialized medicine.”

  Commack tried to say, “Well, that’s not so—“

  “Naturally,” Alex went on, “the mother-to-be will be criminally prosecuted if she drinks or smokes while pregnant, or exposes herself or her baby to secondhand smoke or to any other politically incorrect influence—perhaps even if she eats too little or too much of the currently right or wrong thing. It will probably be called ‘unborn child abuse’.”