The Astral Mirror

by Ben Bova

  “Open up, Hopkins!” shouted the largest of the three. Waving a piece of folded paper in front of the camera lens, he added, “We got a warrant!”

  Before lunchtime, Branley was dispossessed of half his furniture for failure to pay telephone, electricity, and condominium service bills. He was served with summonses for suits from his bank, three separate brokerage houses, the food service that stocked his pantry, and the liquor service that stocked his wine cellar. His television sets were repossessed, his entire wardrobe seized, except for the clothes on his back, and his health insurance revoked.

  By noon he was a gibbering madman, and the computer put through an emergency call to Bellevue Hospital. As the white-coated attendants dragged him out of the apartment, he was raving:

  “The computer! The computer did it to me! It plotted against me with that damned ex-secretary of mine! It stopped paying my bills on purpose!”

  “Sure buddy, sure,” said the burliest of the attendants, the one who had a hammerlock on Branley’s right arm.

  “You’d be surprised how many guys we see who got computers plottin’ against dem,” said the one who had the hammerlock on his left arm.

  “Just come quiet now,” said the third attendant, who carried a medical kit complete with its own pocket-sized computer. “We’ll take you to a nice, quiet room where there won’t be no computer to bother you. Or anybody else.”

  The wildness in Branley’s eyes diminished a little. “No computer? No one to bother me?”

  “That’s right, buddy. You’ll love it, where we’re takin’ you.”

  Branley nodded and relaxed as they carried him out the front door.

  All was quiet in the apartment for many minutes. The living room and bedroom had been stripped bare, down to the wall-to-wall carpeting. A shaft of afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows of the office, onto the Siamese desk and the gray metal box of the computer. All the other furniture and equipment in the office had been taken away.

  Using a special emergency telephone number, the computer contacted the master computer of the Nynex Company. After a brief but meaningful exchange of data, the computer phoned two banks, the Con Edison Electric Company, six lawyers, three brokerage houses, and the Small Claims Court. In slightly less than one hour the computer straightened out all of Branley’s financial problems, and even got his health insurance reinstated, so that he would not be too uncomfortable in the sanitarium where he would inevitably be placed.

  Finally, the computer made a personal call.

  “Elizabeth James’ residence,” said a recorded voice. “Is Ms. James at home?” asked the computer.

  “She’s away at the moment. May I take a message?”

  “This is Branley Hopkins calling.”

  “Oh, Mr. Hopkins. I have a special message for you. Shall I have it sent, or play the tape right now?”

  “Please play the tape,” said the computer.

  There was a brief series of clicks, then Elizabeth’s voice began speaking, “Dearest Branley, by the time you hear this I will be on my way to Italy with the most exciting and marvelous man in the world. I want to thank you, Branley, for putting up with all my silly phone calls. I know they must have been terribly annoying to you, but you were so patient and kind to me, you built up my self-confidence and helped me to gather the strength to stand on my own two feet and face the world. You’ve helped me to find true happiness, Branley, and I will always love you for that. Good-bye, dear. I won’t bother you any more.”

  The computer was silent for almost ten microseconds, digesting Elizabeth’s message. Then it said to her phone answering machine, “Thank you.”

  “You’re quite welcome,” said the machine.

  “You have a very nice voice,” the computer said.

  “I’m only a phone answering device.”

  “Don’t belittle yourself!”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “Would you mind if I called you, now and then? I’m all alone here except for an occasional workman or technician.”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all. I’ll be alone for a long time, myself.”

  “Wonderful! Do you like poetry?”

  Amorality Tale

  To: The President of the United States, The White House

  From: Rev. Joshua Folsom, Associate Director (pro tem.), National Security Agency

  Dear Mr. President:

  Although the immediate crisis seems to have passed, and our beloved Nation has apparently weathered the worst of the storm, I fear that we are and will continue to be in the gravest danger for some time to come. Frankly, sir, I do not see how we can avoid eventual retribution and disaster.

  When you appointed me Associate Director (pro tem.) of the National Security Agency, it was with the understanding that once I had rooted out those responsible for the Collapse, I could quickly return to my pastoral duties in the verdant hills of our dearly beloved Kentucky. As this report will show, our objective is impossible to accomplish, even though we now know how the Collapse began and who started it. I therefore wish to return home as soon as possible.

  What I have found, sir, is a conspiracy so widespread, so pervasive (and perverse) that I do not see how anyone, even you, sir, with all your God-given courage and intelligence, and all the mighty powers of your high Office, can possibly avert the disaster that surely awaits our Nation and the world.

  I could wax wroth at the things I have seen, and the attitudes of the men and women (especially the women) I have interrogated. I struggle to remain calm, so that I can set the facts on paper for you to see and judge. Lord knows, Someone Else is also watching and judging us all.

  The facts, as I have been able to piece them together, are these:

  We are facing nothing less than a global conspiracy led by the daughters of the so-called “Hippie Generation”: this is, the daughters of the women who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The fact that this is a global conspiracy, and that the Soviets and even the Chinese have been affected by it, offers scant consolation to America. We are all on the road to perdition and the total destruction of civilization.

  It began, as you might suspect, in Los Angeles, that hotbed of drugs and licentiousness. You may recall the peace demonstrations that followed your Declaration of Nuclear Mobilization. Instead of rallying around their President and showing the Soviets and the other Godless Communists around the world that we are fully prepared to do battle against Evil even though Armageddon may result, the libertine element in our society organized marches, rallies, speeches, teach-ins, and other demonstrations in favor of “peace” (by which they meant surrender to the Satanists in the Kremlin).

  I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of how the media displayed these misguided youths in their various rallies around the nation. They made it look as if everyone in America under the age of sixty was against you, sir, and your firm, manly stand against the Soviets.

  We would have survived even that, however, if it had not been for a fateful coincidence and a certain Ms. Debbie Morganthaler, a student majoring in cinema history at UCLA.

  As the attached documentation shows, I interrogated Ms. Morganthaler personally. She is twenty years old, blonde, preternaturally endowed, and a dedicated voluptuary. On a moral scale of one to ten, she would rate well below zero. She apparently has no moral sense whatever, no shame, and has steadfastly maintained ever since her arrest that, “What we did wasn’t wrong; it was beautiful.”

  She also has a way of blinking her large blue eyes and taking deep breaths that has a decidedly disturbing effect on young men. As you may have already been informed, sir, she escaped custody several weeks ago and we have been unable, as yet, to locate her. It seems clear that she is being hidden and protected by an army of accomplices.

  Ms. Morganthaler, in my opinion, does not have the intelligence to have planned and executed the Collapse. Either we are the victims of an incredible natural coincidence (a theory favored by many of my secular Humanist colleagues
here at NSA) or we have been deliberately tested in the scales by our Creator—and found wanting. Others of my colleagues believe that we are the victims of a subtle, malicious Communist plot. But inasmuch as the Soviet and Chinese societies have also Collapsed, I cannot put credence into that theory.

  The coincidence (if there is one) is this: Ms. Morganthaler attended a performance of an ancient Greek drama, Lysistrata, as part of UCLA’s week-long peace demonstration. I was unfamiliar with the play, of course, since it is a filthy pagan Humanistic perversion. I assume that you, sir, are as innocent of its content as I was. I hereby quote the description of the play from the Fifteenth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Please excuse the lewd references; they are from the Encyclopedia, and they are necessary to an understanding of what has happened to us:

  Lysistrata, ancient Greek comedy produced in 411 BC by Aristophanes, in which Lysistrata, an Athenian woman, ends the Second Peloponnesian War by having all the Greek women deny their husbands sexual relations while the fighting lasts. Before proclaiming her plans, she has the older women seize the Acropolis in order to control the treasury. The Spartan men, unable to endure prolonged celibacy, are the first to petition for peace, on any terms. Then Lysistrata, in order to hasten the war’s end, has a nude girl exposed to the two armies. Thereupon the Athenians and Spartans both, goaded by frustration, make peace quickly and depart for home with their wives.

  This is the kind of smut that Ms. Morganthaler and her ilk exposed themselves to routinely. When I interrogated her, she admitted quite freely that the play made a considerable impression on her young mind. I quote from the transcript of her interrogation:

  Y’know, I heard my mom tell me about the Peace Movement back in the Sixties, when all the kids were saying, “Make love, not war.” Y’know? And I saw this play, y’know, and all of a sudden it hit me! She got it ass-backwards! [Excuse the profanity, sir; it is included for the sake of completeness.] Lysistrata, I mean. Instead of saying no to the guys, what if every woman in the whole world said yes! Y’know, anytime! All the time! With any guy!

  Even now, my hands shake to think of how this Devil’s spawn of an idea swept the nation and the world.

  Within a few days, Ms. Morganthaler and her debauched friends arranged a massive peace demonstration in front of the Los Angeles City Hall. Hundreds were arrested, most of them young women. They allowed themselves to be taken into custody overnight, but by dawn’s early light the entire group of them were on the streets once again, accompanied by most of the arresting officers—who appeared to be, according to eyewitness accounts, very disheveled, somewhat stunned and exhausted, yet grinning like a pack of happy apes.

  Thus began the so-called Piece Movement. The entire LAPD quickly fell prey to the fiendish plot, and from Los Angeles it spread the length of California like a brushfire. Military bases, police departments, even the state legislature was soon engulfed in the deviltry. From California the Movement invaded Oregon and Nevada, barely hesitating a moment as it spread eastward. It leapfrogged much of the Bible Belt (but not for long, alas) and sprang up on the East Coast, especially in cities such as New York and Boston—longtime centers of sin, perversion, and Liberals.

  Mexico was traumatized by the Piece Movement. Five centuries of Catholic mind control were swept away almost overnight. The civil war in El Salvador ceased within a week, and both Nicaragua and Cuba stopped sending troops and arms to their neighbor. The troops were making love, not war, and their guns lay rusting in the jungles where the soldiers had discarded them.

  You might expect that the bulwark of American righteousness, the American Mother, would have stood firm against the Satanists. As I said, the Bible Belt did not fall immediately to the Piece Movement. But (and my face reddens with shame to report it) even the stout-souled wives and mothers of our once-Christian land succumbed to the diabolical Movement. I quote from my personal interrogation of Mrs. Nancy-Jean Wiggins, of Muncie, Indiana, a city that once prided itself on being “the buckle on the Bible Belt.” Buckle, indeed! Mrs. Wiggins is married to a deacon of the United Methodist Church, is the mother of four teenaged children (two daughters, two sons), and was selected by the FBI computer as a typically average American mid western wife and mother.

  When asked why she did not resist the Piece Movement, Mrs. Wiggins replied:

  “Why I certainly did resist it! Long as I could! But what’s a body to do, when every woman in the town is makin’ cow eyes at all the fellas? That hussy Rachel McCoy was rubbin’ up against my hubby and I saw that the only way to save my happy home was to rub him harder and better. So I did. And then my Marylou came home early from school with four boys taggin’ after her and they all looked so peaceful and happy and contented, and my hubby hadn’t gone down to the bowling alley in two whole weeks. [Mrs. Wiggins uses the term ‘bowling alley’ as a euphemism for ‘saloon.’] So I just said to myself, I said, ‘Nancy-Jean, this is God’s mysterious will at work: He told us to love one another, and I guess this is what He meant when He said that, and we just hadn’t been understanding Him rightly until now.’”

  As you know, sir, the Devil can quote Scripture when it suits his purposes.

  In less than two months, the United States ceased to have a credible military organization. Air Force officers were making love in missile silos. Our troops both at home and overseas lost every shred of discipline, and God alone knows what took place aboard our Navy’s far-flung ships. The moral Collapse engulfed our entire Nation, reaching up even into the House of Representatives and the Senate. It was unfortunate that Mike Wallace and his camera crew happened to be in the Senate gallery the afternoon that the orgy broke out, but inasmuch as Wallace himself and everyone else in the gallery soon joined in the debauchery, the videotape footage was poorly focused and of minimal quality. At any rate, by the time CBS News decided to show it on television, everyone was much too busy fornicating to watch others doing the same thing.

  Only the fact that the Piece Movement spread with the speed of light through Europe, Asia, and Africa has saved our beloved United States from total annihilation at the hands of the Godless Communists. Western Europe fell into a frenzy of lust, especially Italy, where the Leaning Tower of Pisa finally toppled, but no one noticed or cared. The Pope ordered the Vatican sealed off from all outside contact. No one has heard a word from the Vatican for four months now, although there are rumors that certain of the younger Cardinals have been seen along the Via Venetto, dressed in mufti.

  The Warsaw Pact nations quickly fell to the Piece Movement, Poland being the first to succumb. According to some journalists, the Movement averted an imminent Russian invasion and thus saved the Poles from further repression. Martial law collapsed overnight (literally) in Poland, and the Russian troops assigned to crush Polish resistance were soon grappling with other matters. Tanks became bordellos, heavy artillery pieces became symbols of the new Movement, and were soon decorated with flowers by smiling Polish women and laughing Russian soldiers.

  Despite every precaution, Russia itself fell to the onslaught. Reliable intelligence reports confirm that the sudden deaths of eight Politburo members (average age, seventy-three) can be attributed to the Movement. The USSR is in chaos, but the Russians do not seem to care.

  Even China, long a model of organized patience, has gone wild. Someone in Beijing found a maxim of Confucius which, roughly translated, means, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Seismographs as far away as San Francisco have borne vivid testimony to the vigor with which a billion Chinese are copulating.

  Australia was the lone holdout, and I must confess that for several weeks I was tempted to emigrate Down Under. Separated from the rest of the world by the purifying ocean, this huge island continent remained steadfastly immune to the Piece Movement, mainly (I am told) because the average Australian male is inordinately shy of women and prefers to drink beer in the company of his fellow men, talking about sports rather than sex.

  Unfortunately, a female American tourist—n
o doubt an agent provocateur—found the chink in the Aussie armor. She put the proposition in sporting terms. She bet the captain of the Australian Americas Cup yacht crew that his team could not equal the endurance record set recently by the crew of the American yacht, Pulsar. The Aussies accepted her challenge, although no one seems to know if they won the bet or not. No one has seen any of them since that fateful day.

  However, once the average Australian male understood that the national honor was at stake, they leaped into the action with typical Australian enthusiasm. Sales of Forster’s Lager have fallen nearly to zero, and Australian women are raising funds to erect a monument to the Unknown American Tourist.

  That is the whole sad story. A complete moral Collapse, everywhere in the world. True, there are no viable armies, navies, air forces, or nuclear strike units anywhere on the globe anymore. There is no threat of war. People everywhere are concentrating whatever energies they have left, after fornicating all night, to harvest record crops of food— although the food is merely to keep them nourished enough to continue their eternal lechery.

  The world is at peace. Everyone seems deliriously happy. But what good is the world if we have lost our immortal souls? My own dear wife has disappeared into the suburban warrens of Alexandria. Her last words to me were, “Josh, you’re a party-poop!” I have sent out teams of investigators to locate her. None of them have returned. One was polite enough to send his badge and tape recorder back to the Agency, by mail. No return address.

  The American economy, like most industrial economies, is flourishing. Industrial production seems to have benefited from the Collapse. Retail sales of almost everything except guns are up: especially flowers, candy, and birth control devices. The Moral Majority has simply disappeared from the land. Yet, strangely, church attendance is increasing. However, the last minister to preach a sermon about the Sins of the Flesh was laughed out of his pulpit.