Collected Short Fiction, page 175
He tried for NBC but found himself back at C-SPAN. The President was still at the podium, with no words coming out of his mouth, while the look on his face was that of a man about to be arrested. A big bruiser wearing an earpiece was passing a piece of paper to him.
“I don’t get it,” the Congressman said.
Three of the Secret Service agents stepped in front of the screen, blocking the Secretary’s view. “What’s going on?” he asked.
The agent tapped his earpiece. “You’re not going to believe this, Mr. Secretary,” he began.
The Secret Service officer had performed some odd actions in the course of his duties. He had ridden in the freight elevators of hotels where the President was staying, the only elevators that could be truly secured, with himself and his fellow agents packed as tightly around their charge as passengers on a low-fare flight. He had rerouted traffic during rush hours to allow for the Presidential motorcade, closely observed annoyed chefs in restaurant kitchens, had forced the cancellation of long-held reservations at resorts where Air Force One was headed, and generally made an unholy nuisance of himself in the course of protecting the Commander in Chief. But looking out for the big guy during the State of the Union address was, generally speaking, a piece of cake, because security was so tight throughout the Capitol and in DC at that time.
But now, looking around at the assembled dignitaries in the House chamber, he could see that pretty much all of them suspected that something was up. One of his fellow agents had discreetly passed a note to the President just before he was to begin his opening remarks, and so far the President was doing a decent job of huddling with the Vice President and the Speaker as if he just had a few last-minute items to iron out, but the Supreme Court justices were definitely looking restless, while the Joint Chiefs of Staff looked like they had bigger than usual ramrods up their asses. Camera crews from the networks were still going about their business, and he wondered what the TV audience, that small percentage that even bothered to watch the State of the Union, was seeing.
“C-SPAN’s just about to cut off its cameras,” a voice said in his earpiece, answering his question, “and all the networks have gone to their anchors for special reports. We’ve got the Capitol and the White House surrounded, so nothing’s going to get through.” There was a pause. “Okay, guys, time to tell you just exactly what’s going on, but brace yourselves.”
Terrorists, the officer thought. They’d finally done it, struck at a time when the whole country, or at least that segment of it that wasn’t in the middle of watching ESPN, HBO, or rented DVDs, would be transfixed with terror, glued to their screens the way they’d been during those dark days in September at the turn of the century. All of the Secret Service agents inside the chamber—those by the doorways, at the end of the aisles, in the balcony with the First Lady and honored guests, and standing near the President—stood at attention while continuing to scan the room, heads turning from side to side.
“It’s like this,” the voice in his ear continued. “The Capitol, like, suddenly got real small, and so did the White House. What happened was this weird rippling-in-the air kind of deal, and then suddenly stuff shrank. I’m talking about the White House, the Capitol, the House and Senate Office Buildings, and pretty much everything on either side of Pennsylvania Avenue. Basically, the White House is now about the size of Malibu Barbie’s beach house, and the Capitol dome isn’t much bigger than a goddamn teacup.”
The Secret Service officer pondered this statement. If the Capitol was so tiny, how could all of them still be inside it? The answer came to him just before the voice provided further illumination.
“And it looks like all of you . . . us . . . shrank right along with everything else.”
Pennsylvania Avenue was still the same size, despite the shrunken size of the bordering real estate. Rows of troops, along with police called in from surrounding counties of Maryland and Virginia, had been stationed around the Capitol and were lined up on Constitution and Independence avenues, ready to protect the Lilliputians trapped inside the Capitol Building from any Brobdingnagian constituents seeking redress for real or imagined grievances. There was a rumor that some residents of Anacostia were preparing to converge on the Capitol.
They could stamp us all flat, the First Lady thought. She stared at her hands, which seemed the same size they had always been; but if everything here had shrunk proportionately, then everything should still look the same. If she went outside, she would notice the difference. Any eagle soaring overhead would probably look like an Airbus.
She sat in an office just outside the House chamber, along with the President, the Vice President, the Vice President’s wife, the National Security Advisor, the Domestic Policy Advisor, and several Secret Service agents, her jaws aching from the smile she had struggled to keep in place even after she had been led out of the chamber and ushered to this temporary sanctuary. Her husband, as usual when things got really heavy, had a bewildered expression on his face, as if hoping that, real soon now, somebody would tell him exactly what to do.
“So what the hell happens now?” the Vice President asked, looking even more morose than usual. “Can’t park our asses here forever.”
“True enough,” the Domestic Policy Advisor muttered as he rubbed his bald pate, “but we’re safer staying here for the moment. Easier to protect us.”
The First Lady shuddered, then thought of all the time she had spent refurbishing the White House, rescuing it from the tacky excesses of her predecessor and restoring the residence to its former glory, only to have it all taken from her, reduced to the size of a dollhouse. But perhaps all of her efforts weren’t necessarily wasted.
“Couldn’t we all just go back to the White House?” she asked. Her husband gazed at her as if clutching a life preserver; the Vice President glowered at her as though wanting to push her overboard. “I mean, it’s teeny now, but so are we, apparently, and I’m sure we could be just as well protected there.” The staff had to be as tiny as they were, at least those who were still there attending to their nighttime duties, so life could go on, even if on a somewhat smaller scale.
“That’s all well and good for you,” the Vice President’s wife murmured, “but where are we supposed to live? If we set foot inside our house, it’s a toss-up which of our cats gobbles us up first.” The Vice Presidential residence had apparently escaped shrinkage, along with most of Washington, but that was small consolation to the First Lady. The Rayburn, Longworth, and Cannon House Office Buildings, along with the Russell, Dirksen, and Hart Senate Office Buildings, were the size of a set of children’s blocks, while the Supreme Court Building could now rest easily on scales held by any good-sized statue of Justice. She should be grateful that the FBI Building hadn’t shrunk during the daytime, when many more people there would have been in their offices, and that the Pentagon and the CIA remained untouched, even though nobody there had been able to prevent what seemed a massive breach of national security.
“I have an idea,” the Foreign Policy Advisor said. “Couldn’t we just, well, like, go about our usual business?” She cast a wide-eyed glance around the room. “I mean, apparently the broadcast wasn’t affected, at least not until the cameramen were told to shut it down, so wouldn’t we still look the same on TV?”
“That won’t do us any good the next time we hold a summit,” the Vice President growled.
“Or a state dinner, for that matter,” the First Lady said.
The Vice President frowned even more. “Some superpower we’d look like.”
A door opened, and a man wearing the dark suit and earpiece of a Secret Service agent lunged into the room and slammed the door behind him. “Got some news,” he said.
“Hope it’s good news,” the President said, looking a little less lost.
The Vice President scowled. “In this context, about the only thing that might count as good news is getting low bids from Mattel and Toys “R” Us for future government services.”
“Better news than that,” the agent replied.
The House Sergeant at Arms made the discovery. He was standing in a doorway at the East Front of the Capitol because, after all the strangeness of the evening, he needed a smoke but also some fresh air, which would be unattainable in the smog of the Speakers’ Lobby, already crowded with stressed-out smokers. Luckily, his cigarettes had shrunk along with him, while the few inches of snow that had been predicted for that evening had failed to materialize; he would not have wanted to confront a glacial mass in order to get some air.
He stood above the stairway, puffing away, until someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to find that the Mayor of Washington, DC, had also stepped out for a smoke. The two men smoked together in silence, gazing out at the mountainous dark forms of tanks and forests of trousered legs that surrounded the Capitol. Finally the Sergeant at Arms said, “Think I’ll take a walk.”
“Man, maybe that ain’t such a good idea,” the Mayor said, “you bein’ sized so small as you are.”
“I advise against it,” a member of the Honor Guard said behind them. “You wouldn’t want to get gooshed.” Another serviceman nodded his head.
“Nobody’s going to goosh me with all those tanks around, and my doc keeps telling me I need more exercise, what with my cholesterol and all,” the Sergeant at Arms said.
“If you’re worried about your cholesterol,” another young military man muttered, “then you ought to quit smoking.”
“Watch out for pigeons,” the Mayor added.
The Sergeant at Arms descended the steps, breathing in the cold night air between drags, and wondered how that was possible; maybe the molecules of air around him had shrunk along with the Capitol. He dropped his butt, ground it out with his foot, and tried to recall what one of his high school science teachers had said about a square cube law or whatever it was. If people were the size of grasshoppers, they’d be able to hop around like grasshoppers.
He was envisioning tiny members of Congress leaping high in the air from the Capitol steps, flapping their arms to ward off flies that would be nearly half their size, when the air seemed to ripple around him. For a moment, as his body vibrated, he felt a not-unpleasant electrical sensation as the ground shifted under his feet.
Three uniformed policeman ran toward him, followed by a man in a long tweed coat, and then the Sergeant at Arms saw that the tanks, although still imposing, were now their normal size. The men coming toward him were of normal size, too; in fact, two of them were considerably shorter than he was.
“What the hell did you just do?” the man in the tweed coat asked.
“Came outside for a smoke and took a walk,” the Sergeant at Arms replied.
“What you did,” one of the cops said, “was just pop up out of nowhere. Maybe we better take you in for questioning.” The policeman gestured toward the barricades and at the tiny Capitol dome inside them, which glowed under its small floodlights, its tiny flags on its east and west sides still proudly flying.
“I’m the House Sergeant at Arms; I can show you my ID.” He was about to reach inside his jacket pocket before realizing that this might not be such a good idea with armed cops standing around.
“Wait a minute.” The tweed-coated man scratched his head. “Maybe we’d better try an experiment.” The man clapped a hand on the Sergeant at Arms’s shoulder and shoved him toward the miniature Capitol. He felt the vibrations and then the prickly electrical sensations again as the Capitol abruptly loomed up before him in all of its majesty.
“So that’s how it works,” the man in tweed said softly.
The two tiny men turned around in unison to face six legs as big as sequoias. Far above them, a voice as loud as God’s exclaimed: “Jesus H. Christ!”
They moved toward the policemen. This time, the Sergeant at Arms felt himself suddenly shooting up like Jack’s beanstalk, or maybe Alice in Wonderland after eating that weird cookie in that Disney flick that was a favorite of his daughter’s. He was again looking down at two cops who were shorter than he was.
“What now?” the Sergeant at Arms asked.
“Evacuate the Capitol,” the man in the tweed coat said.
It had taken a couple of weeks, but everything was almost back to normal, or at least as normal as anything could be under the circumstances. The President’s Chief of Staff stood at his office window, gazing below at the cordon of tanks and soldiers around the tiny White House. He’d had to move himself and the rest of the staff over to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which had caused a fair amount of hard feeling. Those who had lost their cherished offices in the West Wing were not happy about their relocation to the EEOB, while those who had earlier been exiled to that Siberia resented having to move their operations to the New Executive Office Building, the State Department, and the campus of George Washington University, where some basement offices had been turned over to them.
His first trip down Pennsylvania Avenue, three days after everyone had been evacuated from all the shrunken buildings, had been a sobering experience. The reduction of the FBI Building had been almost as disturbing to see as the tiny Capitol. There had been talk of bringing out essential records, which would have restored them all to their normal size once they were carried outside the Peewee Zone, the appellation that had unfortunately adhered to the region of shrinkage. The problem was figuring out what was essential, since just about everything was considered essential by somebody in authority, and then finding places to store the whole shebang. In the meantime, FBI agents could no longer access their files and computers, Senators and Representatives were cut off from the tiny records in their offices, the Supreme Court justices could no longer peruse their now-minute law volumes, and documents in the National Archives and at the Federal Trade Commission were unreadable to anyone over three inches in height.
At least the Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian Institution, and other national treasures had escaped; he would not have been able to bear seeing the Washington Monument reduced to the size of a pencil. It was also their good fortune that the offices of the Internal Revenue Service, not far from the Zone, had not been affected. But to have so many sites of power reduced to the size of scattered toys had been a heavy blow. The Chief of Staff thought of his recent conversation with the Canadian Ambassador, whose embassy on Pennsylvania Avenue was one of the shrunken structures. “So now you know how we feel sometimes, eh?” the Ambassador had said in his bland voice.
The phone on the desk behind him beeped. He turned to pick up the receiver. “The First Lady’s Chief of Staff is here,” his receptionist’s voice said.
“Send her in.” The door opened; a tall and emaciated woman in a red suit strode inside and sat down in the worn leather chair on the other side of his desk. “How are things going over at Blair House?” he asked. The First Family was now in residence at the guest house across the street from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“About as well as you’d expect,” the First Lady’s Chief of Staff replied. “In other words, they totally suck. Everybody’s bitching. The First Lady still thinks that she and the President should have moved into the Vice President’s residence.”
“You know how the Vice President felt about that.” Actually, it had been the Vice President’s wife who had pitched a fit at that suggestion, but the Veep hadn’t looked overjoyed at the idea of sharing their quarters with the First Family, either. “The setup we’ve got now is about the best we can do in the interim.”
The interim, he thought; he was still imagining that the tiny buildings would somehow balloon to normal size. He wished that they’d appointed a real science advisor to the President’s staff instead of that Bible college biologist who had been put in to appease the more rabid of their constituents. Maybe they should put out some feelers to some of those strange institutes of nanotechnology that were popping up around the country. He didn’t know much about nanotechnology except that it had something to do with very tiny things.
“I suppose you’re right,” the First Lady’s Chief of Staff murmured, “but after all the work we put in fixing up the White House—” She paused. “That’s what I’m here about. The First Lady is getting very concerned about the condition of the furnishings there.”
The Chief of Staff scowled at his colleague. “What can possibly happen to them now?”
“Tiny bits of dust. Tiny spiders weaving their webs. Teeny little moths, teeny little bacteria in the kitchens, eensy-weensy dust bunnies in the Lincoln Bedroom and the Oval Office and everywhere else—you name it.” She sighed. “We want to send in a cleaning crew.”
The Chief of Staff was suddenly wary. “We can’t,” he managed to say.
“Come on; we already know that people can shrink going into the Zone and expand on their way out. Just shrink ’em in and grow ’em out.”
He wondered how she had found that out. The Secret Service had sent some agents into the FBI Building and both buildings of the National Gallery of Art under cover of night, making sure that they were unobserved by anyone except a few guards, and they had gone inside and emerged again with no apparent ill effects. “Who told you that?” he asked, vowing silently to punish the leaker. It occurred to him then that if they could ever find a way to control the shrinking process, tiny little buildings might make for very effective and easily guarded prisons. That would also settle the hash of any whistle-blowers who crept in to expose abuses in the system.
“Let’s just say I have my sources, and this place leaks like a sieve.” The First Lady’s factotum leaned forward. “So whaddya say?”
“It’s too risky. Maybe the next time somebody’ll go in and stay tiny when they come out. Or maybe they’ll suddenly blow up when they’re inside and mess up the whole damned place.”
