Battle Station by Ben Bova

Author:Ben Bova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Primary

We have not yet begun to feel the true impact of computers in government and politics.

I can’t really say more about this story without giving away some of its surprises. So, since, as Polonius once said, brevity is the soul of wit, I will be brief. (And, by implication, witty.)

Think about who—and what—you are voting for the next time you enter your polling booth.

So they bring us into the Oval Office and he sits himself down behind the big desk. It even has Harry Truman’s old “The Buck Stops Here” sign on it.

He grins at that. He’s good-looking, of course. Young, almost boyish, with that big flop of hair over his forehead that’s become almost mandatory for any man who wants to be president of the United States. His smile is dazzling. Knocks women dead at forty paces. But his eyes are hard as diamond. He’s no fool. He hasn’t gotten into this office on that smile alone.

I want him to succeed. God knows we need a president who can succeed, who can pull this country together again and make us feel good about ourselves. But more than that, I want my program to succeed. Let him be the star of the press conferences. Let the women chase him. It’s my program that’s really at stake here, those intricate, invisible electronic swirls and bubbles that I’m carrying in my valise. That’s what’s truly important.

We’re going to have a busy day.

There are four other people in the office with us, his closest aides and advisors: three men and one woman who have worked for him, bled for him, sweated for him since the days when he was a grassy-green, brand-new junior senator from Vermont. The men are his Secretaries of Defense, Commerce, and the Treasury. The lone woman is his Vice President, of course. There hasn’t been a male veep since the eighties, a cause for complaint among some feminists who see themselves being stereotyped as perpetual Number Twos.

And me. I’m in the Oval Office, too, with my valise full of computer programs. But they hardly notice me. I’m just one of the lackeys, part of the background, like the portraits of former presidents on the walls or the model of the Mars Exploration Base that he insisted they set up on the table behind his desk, between the blue-and-gold-curtained windows.

My job is to load my program disks into the White House mainframe computer, buried somewhere deep beneath the West Wing. He thinks of it as his program, his plans and techniques for running the country. But it’s mine, my clever blend of hardware and software that will be the heart and brains and guts of this Oval Office.

I sit off in the corner, so surrounded by display screens and keyboards that they can barely see the top of my balding head. That’s okay. I like it here, barricaded behind the machines, sitting off alone like a church organist up in his secret niche. I can see them, all of them, on my display screens.

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