For a moment Max simply stood there on the porch, too stunned to know what to think or feel. As a self-employed machinist, he’d always had trouble paying his taxes and worried constantly about a lien being filed against his income, or this house he and his wife had built with their own two hands.

  Suddenly, a happy thought occurred to him. He turned, opened the screen door, and stepped back into the house. “Marilyn!” he shouted, “forget that picnic lunch! We’ll go fishing tomorrow! Today we’re going to buy a boat!”

  ***

  The bar was dark and smoky, just the way its habitues preferred it. It was hard to see who else was here and, maybe more importantly, who they were with.

  Darkly complected, with slicked-back oily hair, the Democratic leader of the United States Senate sat at one end of a high-sided horseshoe-shaped booth, upholstered in red leather, sipping a martini and smoking a cigar.

  In the same booth, the short, fat, deceptively harmless-looking, Democratic leader of the House of Representatives scowled into the seedy depths of his third strawberry daiquiri. From time to time, he conspicuously wrinkled up his nose at the Senator’s acrid cigar smoke, but he said nothing about it, and the Senator returned the favor by ignoring him.

  Between the two men, drinking a whiskey sour and a screwdriver, respectively, sat their most closely-trusted political lieutenants, a harsh-featured female Senator from California, and a droopy-jowled, plump and matronly Congresswoman from Colorado. The California Senator was chain-smoking cigarettes to the resentful glares of the Colorado Congresswoman.

  Between the women, the Hollywood producer of movie spectaculars that usually grossed a billion dollars or more was drinking a Shirley Temple.

  The female Senator spoke. “Well, boys’n’girls, here’s our chance! Those butt-stupid conservatives are gearing up to impeach Hope for us, and all we have to do is sit tight and keep our mouths shut!” She was the kind of liberal who got a lot of mileage from her Jewish surname, even though it had been acquired by marriage and meant nothing more to her than that. She was also famous for advocating stringent victim disarmament for everybody else while she carried a short-barrelled .357 magnum revolver in her handbag and hired bodyguards with machineguns.

  The slick-haired Senator shook his head. “It isn’t that simple, Diane. I’ve seen the articles of impeachment. They make a lot of all the executive orders Hope’s issued. But you know what it’s really all about?”

  The Democratic House leader accepted his fourth strawberry daquiri from a waiter who had arrived. He spoke with a lisp and turned his Rs into Ws. “Didn’t Bwue and Commack and Petewth pay him a vithit thith mowning?”

  “You’ve go that right, Bee” replied the female Senator. “And if it was Senator Robin Peters, you can bet there’s only one thing they talked about!”

  “Abortion,” everyone at the table said simultaneously.

  “Doeth anyone heaw happen to wemembew,” the House leader lisped, glancing around at his comrades, “what Hope’th pothition on abortion ith?”

  The female Senator lit another cigarette with a flourish intended for the Congresswoman and sneered, “Bee, dear, just what makes you think that anyone pays any attention to what libertarians think about anything?”

  The Congresswoman who’d come here with her leader spoke at last. She was the ultimate collectivist, proud of the fact that she had never had an original thought in her life, and frankly incapable of making a decision without first consulting somebody—anybody—else. Her voice was pitched half an octave higher than it should have been and was affectedly girlish. “Well, with one of them occupying the White House, now, Diane, dear, maybe it’s time that we started. As I recall, the position they take in their platform is some kind of a compromise.”

  “That’s right, Diana,” said the female Senator. Both of the women secretly hated the fact that their first names were similar. “Abortion is perfectly peachy with them as long as it isn’t paid for with tax money. Isn’t that just like them? And they’re worse than Republicans because they can’t be made ashamed of it! How are poor and minority women going to—“

  “Save it for the media, Diane!” The Senate leader snarled and shook his head in disgust. “This is serious! If we go along with this impeachment, it’s going to get out that we helped the right-wingers get rid of him over abortion! How’ll that look on regular TV, let alone what the internet trash will make of it? They’ll chop us up like chicken liver!”

  “The never-to-be-sufficiently-damned internet,” said the Senator from California. She signalled to a passing waiter to bring her another whiskey sour and lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the previous one. “We were a little too late recognizing the threat it represented. If only we’d nipped it in the bud. Now if we do what we need to do, they’ll make it look like we’re against a woman’s right to choose—“

  The movie producer wore nylon running shoes, a sportscoat over a t-shirt, threadbare Levis, and a baseball cap crammed down over bushy gray hair that matched his bushy gray beard. He was well known for his huge personal collection of assault rifles and “black guns”. Whenever a guest asked him how he squared that with his energetic advocacy of victim disarmament laws, the producer always replied “The laws are for them!”

  Just now he replied to the California Senator, “If they do, it’ll be the end of any contributions you hope to keep receiving from our industry.”

  The Senate leader retorted, “We don’t need to hear this right now, Steve!”

  “Hey, Charlie, don’t kill the messenger—I’m just stating a plain fact.”

  “Don’t bwow a gathket, darling,” lisped the House leader. “One of thothe internet twash happenth to be the Prethident’h mithtreth—they won’t dawe—“

  “Wife,” said the Senate leader.

  “What?”

  “You heard what I said, Bee! Where have you been for the past week? The lovely and talented Dana Li is Al Hope’s wife, now, all neat and tidy, with a great big South African rock on the delicate third finger of her dainty little left hand, her doting parents’ smiling approval, and all the Ozzie and Harriet trimmings! If we try to make something questionable out of that, we’re likely to come off publicly as bitter, resentful, unromantic, and probably racists in the bargain!”

  “You’re right,” the Congresswoman said. “You have noticed that the President’s blushing bride is of Asiatic extraction, haven’t you, Bee?”

  The female Senator added, “They just celebrated the first White House wedding in two generations. The whole country loves them for it—especially all of the women’s magazines.”

  “Okay, you’we wight,” complained the House leader, whose personal indiscretions were an everyday topic of hilarious discussion on talk radio. “I could have paid clother attention. You know, they wewe weawy caweful. Wong pewiodth in the hothpitaw fow each of them. Chapewoned by the Thecret Thervice motht of the time afteward. As faw ath anybody knowth, they nevew even—“

  “Enough!” barked the Senate leader. “I hate this! That man is cheerfully dismantling everything we’ve ever worked for, as we sit by and watch it happen—“ The Senator had been a child prodigy and had entered the university in his mid-teens. He still thought of himself as an intellectual, and when he said “everything we’ve ever worked for,” he meant as far back as the 18th century French communitarian, Prudhoun.

  “I know what you mean,” the Colorado Congresswoman said. “Look at all these highly publicized presidential commissions he’s created. The latest one would demilitarize police departments nationwide—no more federal money, or federal control, for local cops—outlaw ‘dynamic entries’, and limit the police to weapons that are lawful for ordinary citizens. He plans somehow to jawbone local authorities into abject compliance.”

  This was an especially sore point for her. Her middle-aged jowls flopped up and down in agitation and her artificial little-girl voice squeaked with annoyance. Her goal—and the linchpin of her political career—was to make sure that no weapon was lawful for ordinary citizens.

  “He’s got another commission,” added the producer, to rate federal judges in terms of what he calls ‘adherence to the plain language of the Bill of Rights’. He’s recommending that pressure of every kind be brought against judges who presume to disagree with the intent of the Framers, or who’ve used their courtrooms to advance the Progressive cause.”

  The Senate leader winced at the euphemism. In private company like this, he preferred to be direct, and the word the producer should have used was “socialism”. It was a word with an honorable history 200 years long and it was past time that its advocates were free to use it openly.

  The Colorado Congresswoman nodded. “I’ve heard that the pensions of all federal judges found ‘guilty’—along with their houses, their cars, and so on—will be used to compensate their ‘victims’. Our party will resist, of course, and so will the Republicans, but all the polls say that the people want it. We may have to go along with it or be discredited!”

  “What really worries me,” whispered the female Senator, “is this commission that Hope’s organized to investigate all these crackpot claims that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified by the state legislatures, and that the federal income tax—and the IRS along with it—are illegal! The rabble will love that one, too! We could lose control over the population that we’ve worked nearly a century to gain!”

  The Senate leader regained control. “I appreciate your concerns, ladies and gentlemen,” he told them, “and believe me, I share them. But I’m afraid that we’re going to have to stop this particular impeachment. Bee, Diane, that means you two have to find out who it is on our side of the aisle in either chamber that Peters is counting on, and make them see the light. I mean it.” He gritted his teeth at them. “Make. Them. See. The. Light.”

  The House leader slurped up the rest of his daiquiri. “Count on me, Chawie.”

  “I will, Bee, I will. Maybe we can impeach this SOB ourselves, later on.”

  ***

  Ernie Hanover scratched his head and said, “How about ... ‘the graverobber tax’?”

  “You know, I think I like ‘the ghoul tax’ better,” replied Katie Harris.

  “What, precisely, is a ghoul?” Rick Thomas wanted to know. He was a stickler for correctness.

  Mick Douglas grinned and said, “What’s a nice ghoul like you doing in a place like this?”

  “Shut up, Mick,” Katie pretended to be annoyed. “You’d clown at your own funeral. I think it’s creature—a demon or a goblin, or a human being with extremely low standards, I don’t know—that eats dead bodies.”

  “Then how about ‘the eaters of the dead tax’?” Rick suggested. The four of them looked around at one another, then at their host, the President.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t fall very trippingly off the tongue, does it?”

  Katie shuddered. “Given the context, Alex, I think that may be a plus!”

  Everybody laughed. They were using the same small, comfortable sitting room in the residential section of the White House that was supposed to be reserved for the First Lady. The First Lady herself was up in Alaska at the moment—“the Delta Quadrant”, Mick had called it—cutting the ribbon on a brand new oil refinery. She wouldn’t be back in Washington, to Alex’s dismay, for several days. Sometimes it felt like he’d seen her more often before they were married, when she’d worked for NetPlanetNews.com.

  He’d missed her the moment she left. School was out, so he’d asked the Austrian Mafia here to the White House to help him with a problem, then delightedly flown out to Colorado himself to pick them up. They were obligated, he’d told them as they’d boarded his private jet at the Jefferson County airport, after all, they’d gotten him into this mess.

  John, who’d flown out to Colorado with the President and acted as Fred “Launchpad McQuack” Gorski’s co-pilot, had wanted to know what kinds of weapons the Austrian Mafia were carrying, gave one of them a hard time for not having brought a gun at all—John never told Alex which one it was, but simply provided the culprit with “a loaner”—and another of them for toting what he termed “one of those puny little nines”.

  At the White House he’d escorted them through all the security barriers, not allowing the Executive Protection Service to search them. They’d spent an hour this morning down in the new shooting range.

  “What kind of civilization,” Alex asked them now, “punishes its productive classes by taxing the wealth they work so hard to create three, four, five times—and then robs them of the chance to pass it on to their own children—gives it instead to those who are neither willing nor capable of earning it? They pay property taxes, corporate taxes, personal income taxes, capital gains taxes, a hundred kinds of excise taxes, and finally this inheritance tax—this death tax—that can wind up taking more than half of what’s left. Cannibalism, that’s what it is. Maybe ‘eaters of the dead’ is the thing to call it, after all.”

  Suddenly serious Katie asked, “Alex, why are we talking about the inheritance tax? Aren’t you concerned that the Republicans are trying to impeach you?”

  Alex smiled. “You know, in some ways it would be a relief. Despite my best efforts, I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since I got here. I’d certainly see a lot more of Dana, and she wouldn’t have to quit her job to avoid a conflict of interests. Where’s the losing outcome, here? But think, Katie, if they’re going to do it, it’ll take a few weeks. Which is all the more reason to work hard and fast on issues like this one.”

  “It doesn’t make you angry, what they’re trying to do to you?” Ernie asked.

  “No,” Alex shook his head. “I guess it might if I thought they had any more intelligence than a common laboratory flatworm, but they’re Republicans, after all, no brains, no backbone. I do something they don’t like, they try to get rid of me in one of the only two ways they can, even though I’ve never committed so much as a single high crime or misdemeanor.

  “The other way is ... ?” Ernie formed a pistol from his fingers and dropped the “hammer”—his thumb—while pointing it at the President.

  “That’s where the ‘no backbone’ part comes in, silly,” Katie told him.

  There was a knock at the door. One of the Marine guards entered, strode to a television set, and turned it on. “Ms Louise said you’d want to watch this, sir.”

  “Thank you, sergeant.” It was C-SPAN, showing the floor of the United States Senate. The overlay, tallying the votes, was labelled “Impeachment, Yea, Nay”.

  “So much for a few weeks,” Rick observed.

  The vote was 51 for impeachment, 52 against. Apparently one state had asked to be passed over while some last-minute negotiation was being done. But now the president of the Senate—the Vice President of the United States, Forrey Nadalindov—hammered his gavel into the bench, demanding that the last state vote. He was highly motivated. If the vote went “for”, Nadalindov would be the next occupant of the White House.

  “How say you Alaska?”

  Alex’s personal laptop made tweeting noises. Only three people had the e-mail address that could make it do that. Alex went to the 18th century desk where he’d left it on its induction charger and opened it up.

  “Alex!” It was Dana, exactly as he’d expected, probably calling to congratulate him on his likely non-impeachment. The coincidence of where she was calling from hadn’t struck him yet, perhaps because he’d been a trifle more anxious over what had just happened in the Senate than he’d let on to Katie and her friends. What he hadn’t expected was to see was Congresswoman Linda Alvarez, the only libertarian in the House of Representatives, smiling into the video pickup beside his beautiful wife.

  “Greetings, from Juneau, Alaska!” the Congresswoman told him. “And congratulations, I assume. We’re standing here in the public park at the Alaskan capitol. You’re probably still President of the United States, and you have this lovely creature shivering here beside me to thank for it!”

  “What?”

  “Please don’t be mad at me, Alex,” Dana pleaded with a worried look. “Linda’s right, I meddled. I heard a rumor from of my former coworkers at NetPlanetNews.com. Linda had flown up here to check it out, too, and I joined her. It was almost—but not quite—true, so we went to work making it happen. Linda actually deserves most of the credit, She—“

  “What rumor?”

  “I’m getting to that, darling. We talked and argued and twisted arms and made promises all night and most of the day—we hocked your immortal soul, Mr. President—and as a result .. do you want to tell him, Linda?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “No, dear, you should tell him.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Tell me what?” The two of them were enjoying this. He wondered what it would be like if they ever teamed up in their mischief with Faith-Anne.

  “Okay,” Linda said, “I’ll tell him. The Governor of Alaska, the Lieutenant Governor, the Secretary of State, the State Treasurer, about half of the state legislature, and the entire Congressional delegation, including both Senators, have joined the Free Libertarian Party of America!”

  Behind him, Rick, Katie, Mick, and Ernie had begun whooping and yelling.

  “Quiet!” He hated to shout at them, but he couldn’t hear Dana and Linda.

  “ ... so I’m not the only libertarian in Congress anymore!” the latter was saying.

  Dana added, “So the Alaskan Senators will vote with the Democrats, against the Republicans!”

  On TV, the answer finally came. “The state of Alaska votes ... nay!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: PHIL OCHS

  It has been truthfully said that it’s the military’s job to kill people and break things. Fair enough. It’s the job of the militia to keep them from being killed or broken.—Alexander Hope, Looking Forward