The Media Candidate Read online

  “Yes, that’s right. There was an article in the Campus Daily about conspiracy. You even went to see Dean Tresbien about it, didn’t you?”

  Elliott nodded. “Stonewall Stewart.”

  “It was one of the few times you ever poked your nose out of your lab, at least since you stuck it into Susie’s science career.”

  Elliott paused for a moment and watched coffee being urged into Martha’s cup. “Halvorsen was murdered last night.”

  “Oh my goodness, Ted! That’s terrible!”

  “FBI says it was organized crime. Says she was involved in some kind of espionage.”

  Their eyes met and spoke.

  “Elliott, you just get that Don Quixote look out of your eyes. I haven’t seen that look for a long, long time, but I know it means trouble. This sounds a lot more serious that just making the dean mad. You aren’t a detective. Don’t get the idea just because you don’t know what to do with yourself now, you can start playing FBI. The University gave you your old office and full privileges for a year. I hope you spend time there instead of getting into trouble … like you used to before you married the Lab.”

  Elliott kept silent for a long time, adrift in the back yard. “Why do they ask such stupid questions on those game shows? And then pretend it’s all so meaningful? It’s all bullshit, you know! Where are the debates? Where are the real candidates that deal with real issues, or at least lie about them? They don’t even do that any more. You remember that, Martha? Remember when the politicians used to lie about everything? They don’t now. You watch those shows. They just talk about bullshit, right? Who needs to lie about that?”

  “That seems a lot better than it used to be,” Martha said. “Isn’t bullshit better than lies?”

  “I don’t think that’s very funny.”

  “I remember when we were young, and we were both active in politics,” continued Martha. “I used to volunteer for the Democrats, and you were on some third party committee. We both used to get so upset about the politicians just saying whatever lies their supporters paid them to say. And we weren’t the only ones. But now people don’t get upset anymore. It’s a much happier way to live. I know you understand that because you escaped, too. But you chose your lab to hide in. With all those equations and high voltages and fancy words. The rest of the world escaped to the TV and being entertained. You see, it’s all the same thing. You had your game, and we had ours. The difference is that you don’t have your game anymore.” She straightened out her paper with a snap. “But I still have mine.”

  Elliott frowned and looked out the window at Grunt, the little lawn maintenance robot. Grunt was just finishing trimming around the flower bed before following its standard routine of going next door to take care of the Mason’s lawn.

  “It’s going to be tough for you until you can adjust to the world you’re in now,” she continued. “You’ve been away a long time. Just don’t go criticizing the world I’ve grown into while you were off playing your silly games at work. Either join my world or leave me alone, but don’t throw rocks and screw it up for me.”

  Elliott followed Grunt’s progress, inwardly glad that Grunt was a tracked robot rather than an eight-legged one.

  “And don’t go stirring up trouble over this Halvorsen thing.” She turned back to her newspaper. “You could get hurt.”

  “I could get hurt? What does that mean?”

  “You know, you’ve had your head in the sand for a long time. Things have changed since you jumped into your little playground a lifetime ago and locked the door. I’ve heard stories that there’s some group or something, I don’t even know what, that takes care of people that stir up mud—people like you. Maybe it’s COPE.”

  “What are you talking about? COPE just sponsors candidates.”

  “See? You’re just a stupid old man. You don’t have any idea, do you?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Detective Townsend

  “My name is Professor Townsend from HPHC.” Elliott paused and extended his hand to the middle-aged lady seated in her office next to the receptionist.

  She slowly raised her head. Her hand followed reluctantly. “I am the Political Science Administrator.”

  “Dean Tresbien wanted me to come over to see if we could help sort out Professor Halvorsen’s things,” Elliott said.

  The administrator squinted up at Elliott form her desk without moving her head. “I see, but we weren’t expecting you, and I can’t imagine what Professor Halvorsen would be doing with anyone from the HyperCollider. This is the Political Science Department, as I’m sure you are aware.”

  “Yes, it’s a little strange, but we’d been collaborating on a data-analysis problem, something she was doing about candidates and funding. Anyway, it turned out that looking for correlations in her data was very similar to looking for certain high-energy-physics events in a chaotic background, so I was helping her apply our computer programs to her problem. Dean Tresbien thought I might be able to help sort out some computer files or something. I think there were several papers that were almost ready to publish, and we agreed it would be fitting for her name and the Political Science Department’s to appear in the journals as a tribute to her great work.”

  “Yes,” she drew out as she touched a button labeled Dean Tresbien. After listening for a half minute, she said, “Dean Tresbien is out of town today.”

  “It would only take me a few minutes to find the files we worked on together. I could put them together and leave them with you. It would be a snap, then, for the department to get them published.”

  “I wouldn’t want to put you to such a trouble, Professor Townsend. I’m sure we can—”

  “Oh, I’d be happy to do it. Terra was such a wonderful person, and she had such insight into political affairs. I want to do something to memorialize her name. I promise I won’t disturb anything, and I’ll be gone in a jiffy.” Elliott walked down the hall to a room marked Halvorsen, and entered.

  The administrator said, “Wait just a minute!” but was too late. She punched the button labeled COPE.

  Elliott was busy on Halvorsen’s computer when he was interrupted by a scratching sound behind him. He looked up to the flick of a lighter. Two eyes studied the glow of tobacco as smoke billowed around them. Two lips parted just enough to liberate sweet smoke where it convolved into fractals. Elliott met his gaze through the cloud just as another cloud was born. They played a waiting game in non-committed silence. Finally, Elliott rose and stared into the steel face of Sherwood.

  “I’m Professor Townsend. And you are?”

  “I understand you were advised not to interfere with any of the Halvorsen things. We take quite a dim view of burglary.”

  “And who is we?” Elliott asked.

  “I recommend that you leave behind anything you might have found here. This is all Government property, and you are liable for prosecution.”

  “I see,” said Elliott. “And by what authority do you claim this as so-called Government Property?”

  “You have precisely two options, Townsend. You may leave immediately with nothing more than what you arrived with, or …” He drew a long breath through the glowing tobacco and directed the rest of his sentence to the bowl of his pipe, punctuating it with aromatic bursts. “… you may leave immediately with some form of stolen property.” He then raised his eyes toward Elliott. The image of Sherwood was disfigured by a gray cloud, which slowly began to clear. “In the later event, we will surely have the pleasure of another meeting. Unless, of course, I am otherwise occupied, in which case I will apologize in advance for having to send one of my …” He removed the pipe from his mouth and exhaled the final word, “… associates.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  COPE

  Elliott sat before the computer in his own office at the University and logged onto the X-Web. Let’s see, he thought. “COPE” and “Background.” A myriad of images assaulted his eyes and ears. He ignored everything and looked at the “In the Beginning�
� button. His display roared back at him.

  The Committee for Political Equality is an agency of the Executive Branch whose mission is to preserve free competition among political parties. It was created by President Prince, the first president from the CBS Party. It’s the only government agency not wholly funded by the taxpayer. Instead, half of its budget is derived from the Federal Government with the other half being contributed by the political parties that it monitors—”a self-funding agency” as President Prince dubbed it, “a joint venture between the private and the public sectors to protect our precious freedoms for future generations.”

  COPE has evolved over the years to the very essence of what the public and private sectors can accomplish when they team their resources for the benefit of all Americans. It is our most trusted watchdog. It has three basic functions: monitor the spending of parties and candidates, investigate the truth of candidates’ claims, and assure the quality of candidates.

  He clicked the “Spending” button, and Jack from Election Beat burst into the room followed by a half dozen young, athletic, and naked assistants, each weighed down with a stack of reports that Jack explained represented the spending and budget accounts of the political candidates in just one state for just the spring election season.

  “This proves that COPE goes all the way for America,” Jack said. “COPE is so effective at uncovering scandals and breeches of the public trust, that it has expanded its activities. And as it matures, more levels of improprieties and waste are uncovered. COPE’s goal: zero tolerance. That’s the least Americans deserve.”

  Elliott clicked the “Truth” button. A giant truthometer shaped like a thermometer zoomed out at him with the cold days before COPE hovering at the 20 percent level and then climbing after COPE to over 80 percent at the present.

  Jack appeared again with his assistants dragging a firehose behind them. “Imagine that each lie that COPE has saved Americans is a drop of water. Now let’s take a look at that saving in just the last election season.”

  The firehose came to life as Elliott clicked the “Quality” button. A very portly and bald cigar-smoker with a phone in one hand and a drink in the other, grew to fill the screen “If you wouldn’t buy a car from him,” Jack said, “why would you let him represent you in Washington?”

  The scene morphed into a tanned jock just as he snapped a blinding serve past his opponent. One of Jack’s assistants rushed onto the court yelling, “Senator Longbone from Colorado!” Then a bare-breasted beauty screamed out a hit song to a convulsing audience. Another assistant jumped onto the stage shouting, “Representative Shakem from—”

  Elliott clicked “Stop” and sank back in his chair with the last image frozen before him. Finally he reviewed “What others say about COPE.” There were over a hundred links to other sites, and he perused many of them before deciding that they were merely projections of the same party line he had witnessed from the COPE site. He ended up staring at a picture of COPE’s main entrance lobby with the inscription in granite above the door: “The freedom of political choice is so fundamental to America that we must not abandon it to the whims of unaccountable politicians. Let us insure a level playing field for our political process. In the long look of history, COPE will be seen as the lever on which balances our fragile Republic.”

  He sat back wondering about those words and suddenly said out loud, “Paper, that’s the answer—good old fashioned paper.” As he logged off, he continued, “If it weren’t for me, the Lab wouldn’t even have a library anymore. I’ll bet in a year it’ll be turned into a multi-media center or a holographic interface port. But right now, it’s still a library.”

  He turned on the light as he entered the library. The librarian had been retained until about fifteen years ago when they discontinued the last paper periodical subscriptions. The library contained books dating back well into the twentieth century, many of them predating even the beginning of electronic library references in 1985. Elliott had used these paper references often during his career to the dismay of most of his colleagues. But today he rummaged through some non-technical books that had probably never been off the shelf. After paging through the indices of several, he found one with a major heading of “COPE” and a dozen subheadings under it. Elliott began reading.

  COPE established its headquarters in an impressive white building in the hills above Hollywood. Its director maintained that it needed to be physically detached from the political influences of Washington if it was to “steadfastly serve the interests of the people whom it is sworn to safeguard, rather than bow to the winds of partisan politics.” It chose to be close to this world media capital with which it has a symbiotic relationship. It also wished to be close to the technology of Silicon Valley.

  Elliott paged to another section of the book.

  After the end of the cold war and the legalization of drugs, the FBI fell into disfavor and experienced serious budget declines. The FBI director sold the idea of a new agency to the president and became the director of COPE using J. Edgar Hoover as a role model. The FBI continued as the senior agency but with a much smaller budget than COPE.

  Then COPE was instrumental in getting the law repealed that had legalized drugs, even though the law had successfully reduced drug-related crime by over 90%. Soon the drug wars were once more in full bloom, and business was booming again at the FBI.

  A rider to an act of Congress shortly after COPE was founded established Federal funding of all “serious” political parties seeking national office. Unserious candidates were defined as those not supported by a major party. The two well-funded parties, in turn, funded the private-sector half of COPE.

  Elliott studied a table showing the projected COPE budget ramping up rapidly with most of it going into its newest mission: assuring the quality of candidates. Elliott leaned back against the bookshelf where he sat on the floor and thought, So that’s what they mean by a self-funding agency. Then he continued reading:

  The formal mission of COPE was to monitor the activities of the political parties to insure that they all play by the same rules. With the appropriate political and media support, Americans embraced it fervently. Once created, however, its mission and its budget broadened.

  “Hm,” he said to the book as it grayed out in his lap. “I wonder how they enforce their rules. And what kind of technology are they developing to do the enforcing?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Baseball and Politics

  The next morning, Elliott sat motionless on the side of the bed as he’d done every morning of his career. This was his “collecting time” as he explained to Martha. “This is where I collect my thoughts and figure out where I’m going that day.” He’d tried to get Martha to try it herself because “it helps to focus your day.”

  Martha always responded, “I can’t even focus my eyes without a cup of coffee. How can I focus my day before I get up and have my coffee and read the paper?”

  Elliott fervently believed in the ritual; and this morning it had special meaning to him, even though it would not be followed by his other longstanding ritual of going to work.

  This morning’s collecting time, however, took a much longer look than just this one day. His meditation carried him beyond his home and his life. As he relaxed his mind this morning, a giant spider the size of a cat emerged and stalked him. The spider transformed into a holographic TV. There was Martha and “her TV family” exploring a wonderland of Hollywood animation, intertwining advertising, politics, adventure, and emotions until they were a monolith, a seamless package.

  Then he caught a thermal and rose toward a mountain. There was Ms. Dobbs at its peak holding a white ribbon with gold lettering that read Best of Fair. Around her sat her subjects: Martha, Susie, and even Luke. He couldn’t soar over this mountain, so he flew away from it.

  Water below him swirled and grumbled into a collage of grotesque icons, like the ice cubes in a vodka ad. But the icons jelled into faces. Lizzie smiled, waved, seduced. Jun
kie invited the cameras to explore, to grope. Baseball jocks, movie stars, and news anchors all spun about this sea, celebrating its fertility, exploiting its abundance. They flowed with the torrent, always laughing, always on top.

  Millions of bodies clung to their TVs, voting and applauding, even as the whirlpools sucked them beneath the surface. Suddenly Elliott plummeted in the still air. What would his choice be now that he could no longer soar? He opened his eyes and saw just swirling vines and swaying flowers of an Oriental carpet at his feet. His collecting time had never before strayed so far. But he had never before been faced with such a dilemma.

  Elliott had dedicated forty years of his life to the Laboratory, years looking for answers to questions that might not have answers, searching for fundamental particles with his high-energy cyclotron. These particles could help man understand the basic building blocks of the universe, forces that shaped the universe in that blinding instant of creation billions of years ago.

  But the technology he’d developed was not like superconductors or lasers or transistors that could be harnessed to make life better for others. The knowledge gained in his laboratory was the most basic kind, but it couldn’t relate to anything on earth or even on the sun or the brightest stars in the sky. The kinds of events he’d studied occurred in only two places, in his laboratory and at the instant of the creation of the universe. It was an expression of art with a price rivaling the Big Bang it simulated. Elliott could not suppress the feeling that the billions spent on this laboratory might have solved earthly problems.