The General's President (56 page)

President Valenzuela could not see them off. He'd left the evening before on Air Force One, to meet in Vancouver with Prime Ministers Byrnes and Beliveau of Great Britain and Canada. Vice President Marianne Weisner and Jumper Cromwell were the Haugens' farewell committee.

The Air Force personnel were courteous and respectful, as always, and when the Haugens had boarded, Arne shook hands with all of them. Then, after the prefiight routine was completed, the small jet took off. The city passed beneath, both Arne and Lois watching as it gave way to a patchwork of developments, woods and fields. Shortly the landscape became dominated by long low mountain ridges extending southwest to northeast, covered mostly with winter-bare forest. Somewhere down in that general region, Arne knew, was Camp David; he and Lois never had gotten there.

He looked across at her. She seemed pensive too; obviously they had adjustments to make. He decided to start his as of right then, with a reading binge, and from his travel bag took a paperback novel:
Once More Into the Wishing Well
. The cover showed a banded, jovian planet, and a ship that had just launched a spherical probe. Undoubtedly manned. Liisa had brought the book with her when she'd arrived to help her mother organize their move.

Anderson. How long has the old master been writing? Forty-five years at a guess
, Haugen told himself as he settled back to read.
After all those years, all those books, his muse is still healthy, still keeps up its varied flow.

His last thought before immersing his attention in the novel was to wonder if he had a muse? He'd soon find out. Or perhaps the term didn't apply to reciting memoirs onto tape.

Muse or whatever, he wouldn't ask any long-term production of it.

FIFTY-FIVE

They stayed in Duluth only a week, then spent a couple of days in Grand Forks with Liisa and Ed, and two more in Canoga Park, California where their son had a computerized film animation lab. From there they flew to Maui, where a friend had made available his vacation place near the beach.

They were on Maui for ten weeks, with a break of several days in Honolulu where Lois had further immunotherapy. The treatments had not cured her cancer, but simply reduced it; the retreatment was to keep it controlled. She declined more heroic treatment.

Arne's problem was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The symptoms were more definite now; his fine movements were a little slower and less precise. It would be downhill from here on.

Even so, he exercised, walked, swam, and stretched, but somewhat more moderately than before his presidency. His recuperative powers were noticeably less. And he read some of the mail sent to him, including an occasional letter from friends in government—Valenzuela, Grosberg, Liederman, Cromwell, Dirksma.

His principal activity, and Lois's, was preparing his memoirs. Including the history of the scalar resonance transmitters—their early Soviet development, the evidence for ET visits, the history of Soviet-USA technical exchanges, weatherwar, seismic attack, and the strike against Pavlenko.

He'd already sold limited North American rights to Random House, Commonwealth rights (excepting Canadian) to Ploughshare Books, and all other international publication rights to Iwaki House in Japan. While he could hardly imagine that the Valenzuela government would slap an injunction on the book under the Official Secrets Act—for one thing, the media had already speculated convincingly that there'd been a weatherwar and a seismic war—he had a history of making sure of things. And it was time that the public got the information, now, in the warm sunlight of an expanding economy and national confidence.

The two of them worked on it four or five hours a day, outdoors in the ocean breeze, beneath a sunscreen. Arne taped; Lois sat at one computer and typed; he rewrote on the screen of another. Once a week a private courier flew to each publisher, carrying what they'd finished. It went fairly rapidly and without real effort. Every second week, disks and hard copy came back, edited and with questions, and twice his editor flew to Maui from the wilds of Manhattan.

Then, in mid-June, they flew first to Honolulu, then to Los Angeles and D.C. The two houses of Congress were seating a joint constitution committee to develop constitutional amendments for consideration by Congress and ratification by the state legislatures. The results could range from a rewrite—a new constitution—to no change at all.

And the leadership had invited Arne Haugen to make the keynote address.

***

The ex-president looked a little leaner and a little older than they remembered him, but walking to the lectern, he seemed as vigorous as before, and tanned from his weeks in Hawaii.

When he reached the lectern, he looked the audience over—the members of the Senate and House, the president, the Supreme Court, the cabinet, and as always, the media and selected guests. It occurred to him that if someone blew the place up now, or laid in a quick-freeze, Jumper Cromwell might end up head of government in spite of himself. But no; his eyes didn't find Marianne here. Perhaps that was a deliberate safeguard.

He turned and nodded to Ken Lynch, who'd introduced him. "Thank you, Mr. Speaker," he said, then faced his audience again. "I want to express my appreciation to the Congress for inviting me, because I do have things to say. And to the people of America, whose guts and resilience and adaptability have brought us so far in our national recovery that now the nation can really attend to its future.

"I'd like to stand up here and give you a short, warm, possibly sentimental address, or maybe a pep talk. But instead I'm going to say what needs to be said, because I don't intend to speak to the nation again.

"We're sometimes advised to live in the present. It's the only place we truly can live, because only in the present can we act. We are always in the present; it's a moving point that travels with us through time, and its track is the past.

"We create our future by what we do in the present. It can be a future of slavery and poverty, of poison and degradation, or one with a high degree of justice and freedom, opportunity and satisfaction. And it will depend to a considerable degree on the wisdom exercised in this year in this building, by the members of this congress and its constitution committee."

He paused to scan the chamber, his eyes stopping on Tim Brosnan, who would chair the committee. "History can be an important source of that wisdom. Recent work in the new universal field theory suggests that when we have learned to separate our intuitions from our prejudices, our inspirations from our aberrations, then our intuitions will be more reliable than data. And my own intuition is that this is correct, But that's still theoretical physics, it's not yet technology, and at least for now, government must pay attention to what the past has to teach us.

"Too often, human beings have learned the wrong lessons from the past. Repeatedly, history has been used as inspiration for hatred and vengeance. And you will find people who would have you poison this Constitution with the bitterness of yesterday. It would be unfortunate if something like that happened, but I'm confident it won't. There is too much wisdom in Congress for that.

"Somewhat more than two hundred years ago, a gathering similar to this one was seated in Philadelphia to do the same sort of thing this Congress will do—it decided on the ground rules for the United States of America. And they wrote a constitution that, with the Bill of Rights, allowed as much personal freedom as they thought was compatible with the overall welfare. A constitution that was basic enough, wise enough, with enough understanding of human nature, that given an occasional amendment, it functioned well for more than a century, and more or less adequately till quite recently."

Haugen paused to sip lemon water before going on.
 

"Some of you have read a 'Modern Constitution for the United States of America,' a document developed by the Holist Councils Panel for Constitution Reform. That proposed constitution is based on principles drastically different from those in the constitution we're familiar with. Basically, the Holist constitution assumes that the American people are too ignorant, unruly, and foolish to be allowed the ultimate power. Or any real power. It assumes that all decisions, including who holds office, must be in the hands of an assumed elite.

"But the people do have that power, regardless. If somehow the Holist constitution, or anything like it, was proclaimed for this nation, after the troubles we've recently experienced and the renewed hopes we've more recently tasted, there would be riots to make those of last fall seem like Sunday School picnics, and I doubt that the military would prevail against them even if it tried. Which I doubt. And the elitists would be lucky to get out of the country alive.

"That would be quite in keeping with the view expressed by the founding fathers of this nation. Writing their views for their editing and signatures in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson declared that when a government clearly intended to reduce a people under despotism—" he paused, looked around, then suddenly beat the air with a thick finger in rhythm with his swelling words—"then 'it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.' "

Again he paused, looking about, almost fierce, almost glaring, then relaxed and spoke more softly.

"I mention that only to make the point that the power resides in the people regardless of any constitution, and things will go much better if we keep that always in mind, operating on that principle. I feel utterly confident that this Congress will not consider such a constitution. I know this Congress well enough to have no fear of that.

"But I
am
concerned about the lobbies, the special interests, that will clamor in the corridors and wheedle and coax. That is and should and must be their right. But they are experts, usually highly paid experts, at influencing and confusing. And they are here for only one purpose: To gain advantages for their employers, their special interests, and most often those advantages will reduce liberty, add heads to the bureaucracy and complexity to government.

"So I beseech this Congress and their committee: Do not let those lobbyists dilute the liberties, the responsibilities, and the powers of the American people. Listen to them with a skeptical ear and a hard heart. Hear their points, which may be good,
promise nothing
, then turn your backs on them and walk away. After making sure your wallet is still in your pocket."

He stopped talking for a long moment then, to scan again the assembled congressmen, his eyes stopping here and there. "I see three members of the Holist Council's Panel for Constitutional Reform seated among your members: I even noticed the name of one of them on your joint constitution committee: Senator Morville.

"They have every right to be here. But I do want to point out a few facts to them, and to any who find that Holist constitution attractive. First, we have climbed out of depression partly by backing away from elitism and providing new power and responsibility to the people as individuals.

"There are some who say that we reversed our decline by calling in a dictator, and there is some truth in that. But it succeeded only because, in this case, IN THIS CASE, that dictator started at once to return responsibility and power to the people.

"Actually they'd never lost it. The people always had the power in America; they just hadn't been exercising it. Too many had been brainwashed into thinking it belonged to someone else. But when things got bad enough, they started exercising it again. They started in the streets. And if the army and the marines had begun to agree with them, and refused to fire on them, we might have plunged into a mobocracy, which could have turned into a brutish feudalism.

"So Americans, if you want to keep this land a land of justice and opportunity and freedom, see that your constitution provides workable democratic ground rules. Follow the lead of the Constitution we've had all along, and this time take responsibility for what happens afterward without waiting for things to go to hell."

He stood quiet for several seconds; the chamber was utterly still.

"Because the biggest trouble with the one we have is that we allowed it to be corrupted, partly by 'gimmeism,' which I've talked about before, partly by a legal system that put too much power in the hands of a legally knowledgeable elite, and partly by"—

Once more he paused. "I hate to say it, but partly by conspiracy. Last winter we uncovered a long-standing, deliberate conspiracy that we kept quiet about until the investigation could be completed."

Haugen stopped there and looked his audience over carefully. "Conspiracy. A loaded word. Let's unload it before I give the particulars. Usually conspiracy implies illegal acts, criminal acts. But drawing up the Declaration of Independence was a criminal act within the British Empire, and Paul Revere was a conspirator when he rode to warn the minutemen. So there are conspiracies we've admired.

"The conspiracy I refer to here, however, the conspiracy that helped corrupt our democracy, was
not
illegal. The men who conspired acted within their rights, though against ours. They called themselves the
Archons
. The term Archons was originally applied to the ruling aristocrats in Athens before the Athenian democracy. Later, in the early Christian church, the term 'archons' was applied to a theoretical kind of spiritual beings who were higher than the angels.

"So we see how our American archons viewed themselves. Originally there were six of them, and their names were from the who's who in American finance in the late eighteen hundreds. Their heirs were with us till this year. I'd like to read to you what they were up to, in the words of their founder, the man they acknowledged as their leader."

Haugen held up a looseleaf folder. "The original to this photocopy has been sent to the National Museum," he said, then opening it, began to read aloud. "The title page reads, 'Opening Address to the 1928 Meeting of the Archon Fellowship,' and it is signed John Simmons Massey.' " Haugen turned a page. "Copies will be available; I'll give you some excerpts. These are Massey's own words. They start out: