The President's Brain Is Missing by John Scalzi

Author:John Scalzi [Scalzi, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Humour
ISBN: 9781429926928
Google: xsgLsmsBSokC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 10365532
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

There was a knock on Alex’s door. It was Stein.

“I can’t believe it,” Alex said, and rubbed his eyes. “You knocked.”

“Sun’s up,” Stein said. “You were here all night?”

Alex motioned to the thick stacks of paper on his desk. “You see what I had to go through last night. And this is just the dead guys. I hate to think what would have happened if Dave got General White to give him the files on the live guys, too. How about you? Up all night?”

“Of course not,” Stein said. “I’m keeping my regular schedule, remember.”

“That’s right,” Alex said. “Another reason to put you on the list of people I hate.”

“It might interest you to know that the President is back in action today,” Stein said. “By the end of the night last night he said he was feeling good as he ever has, and this morning he was back in the pool by six am. So it’s his full schedule and then off to Ohio for that stupid town hall speech of his.”

“Come on, Brad,” Alex said. “Town hall meetings are participatory democracy at its finest.”

“When it’s thirty people talking sewage issues in New Hampshire, maybe,” Stein said. “When the President is trying to explain why the country needs to temporarily raise the marginal tax rate on millionaires in front of screaming yahoos who think all taxes are treason, well. Let’s just say I get nervous.”

“That’s what the Secret Service is for,” Alex said. “Yahoo management is their specialty.”

“Let’s hope you’re right,” Stein said, and nodded at the piles. “You find anything interesting?”

“Yeah,” Alex said, rubbing his eyes again. “Yeah, I did. Not in the files, really, but around 3:00 A.M. I got a little loopy and decided to fire up the IRS database and look up some of these guys’ family members.”

“Why would you do that?” Stein said.

“Oh, you know,” Alex said. “See if any family members suddenly started paying taxes on millions of dollars of income, signifying ill-gotten gains.”

“Ill-gotten gains are not the sort of thing people usually pay taxes on,” Stein said. “Pretty much by definition.”

“Point,” Alex said. “Which is probably why I didn’t find anything. But then I found the opposite: The wife and adult child of one dead scientist stopped paying taxes entirely the year after he died. Here, look.” Alex plopped over a folder to give to Stein. “Louis Reynolds dies of a heart attack two years ago, right?” Alex then added some additional printouts to the pile. “The next year, his wife Lisa and kid Martha don’t pay any taxes at all. No reported income when both of them had jobs the year before. Lisa was an administrative assistant and Martha was a nurse practitioner. And no taxes filed this year, either.”

“And they’re not dead,” Stein said.

“Not that I can tell,” Alex said. “I didn’t call or anything, seeing as it was three in the morning.”

“If this Reynolds had life insurance and they were both beneficiaries, they could have lived off that money for a year or two and not had to pay taxes on any of that,” Stein said.

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