by Ginger Booth
The SAMS instructors had informed Emmett of that, which officers outside SAMS they were allowed to speak with in regard to the draft Calm Act. He was grateful for that now. Invoking need-to-know with the commandant would have been…awkward.
Emmett explained haltingly, in the most tea-service-friendly terms he could muster, how he and like-minded SAMS proposed to soften the Calm Act by inserting agents within the armed borders. That relatively few people, taking proactive steps, could mitigate the devastation within a boundary, if they knew what to do.
Emmett believed that Kansas City, and local migrant camps, provided conveniently located, advanced field conditions for study. But the group consensus was that nothing could be done for Kansas in any event. And they had too much to do, to waste time on field tests. The rest of the group focused on war games and simulations, and paper research.
But Emmett felt there was a meaningful shortage of precedent to be found in past experience. He backed it up with his own thesis studies over the summer on the Mexican border. Americans didn’t behave quite like Syrians or Bangladeshi or Nigerians. Each nation had its own signature strengths and social fault lines. To ignore those unique characteristics would be to miss the opportunities they so sorely needed.
Emmett hoped Cam had given up and left without him. Schwabacher was intensely interested, and brainstormed ideas with him for over an hour.
At last, the general sat back in his chair to think for a long minute. “Are you sure this isn’t just wishful thinking on your part, Major?” he probed gently.
Emmett considered that, and swallowed. Schwabacher had listened well and collaboratively, encouragingly, a consummate teacher and mentor. Emmett risked the truth. “I believe…if there were no wishful thinking, some would need to be invented, sir. There has to be hope. There is no basis for morale, without hope. Public, or military. Or my own.”
After a few more minutes of contemplation, Schwabacher nodded. “Very well put, Major MacLaren. And very well done. I believe this is our first break-through in the Calm Act project. I will so notify your instructors tomorrow. Please consider your current assignments canceled until revised. In the meantime, enjoy your house guest. Dismissed.”
-o-
“Well, hello! You two were gone a long time,” John prompted in concern. And not a little irritation. He’d given up a doubles tennis match and several hours of his Sunday to play host while his roommates got called on the carpet.
Though there were compensations. Dwayne and Zack were both superb cooks, and overjoyed by the low food prices at the PX. The remnants of a gorgeous Sunday brunch lay strewn across the dining table. John had prudently dictated that they eat without waiting for Emmett and Cam. Any ordinary ‘you’re in the dog-house’ interview would have deposited them home inside of 20 minutes. The commandant’s elegant brick mansion, with its imposing white colonnade, was just a couple blocks away.
“I had a lovely time,” replied Cam. He eagerly sat to load up on pretty edibles. “Schwabacher is very genteel. His wife gardens.” He frowned, pained. “I spent an hour with his wife, touring the gardens, waiting for Emmett…”
“Uh-huh,” said Emmett. He got rid of tie and jacket, and rolled up his sleeves before he sat to the feast. “I had a great time. He’s good to talk to, Schwabacher.”
“You look like a ton of bricks got off your back,” Zack observed. “You should talk to people more often.” He looked a little jealous.
Emmett favored him with a slow, wry smile. That signature smile of Emmett’s that Zack hadn’t realized, until now, that he’d been missing this whole trip. The one that made Emmett’s posture relax and his eyes dance. “Uh-huh. And guess what? My homework has been canceled for today. Play time until you leave tomorrow. I’m all yours.” Emmett didn’t think twice about pouring himself a half-glass from the gleaming glass pitcher of mimosas.
“Really,” said John, strangely intent.
“It was a good talk,” Emmett assured him, nodding slowly as his slow smile bloomed again.
“I may borrow you from Zack for a little while, then,” said John. “Later. I don’t suppose my assignments have been canceled?”
“Couldn’t say. Are those crawdads?”
“Crab legs,” replied Cam, passing the platter. “My extreme compliments to the chefs. Dwayne, you made some of this, right? That…that.”
“Yes, I made ‘that’,” Dwayne assured him. “It’s called a ‘quiche,’ honey.”
“I like the quiche,” Emmett assured him. “And everything else. You made…?” he prompted Zack.
Zack pointed around the table to his offerings, including the crab legs. He didn’t bother with the vocabulary. Emmett nodded and grinned in appreciation, but kept chewing. It was the first time he’d eaten with gusto since term began.
“What is there to do in Leavenworth?” Zack asked. “Now that you’re all mine.”
“Drive to Kansas City for the nightlife,” Emmett replied. “Been there. Done that.”
-o-
General Schwabacher delivered as promised on Monday. The year’s SAMS class—charged with vetting and war gaming the Calm Act in absolute secrecy—turned around from that point.
Aside from minor corrections, they couldn’t change the overall Calm Act itself. Martial law was to be declared country-wide to maintain public order. Freedom of speech drastically curtailed. The borders would go up, freedom of interstate travel denied. The stack of states from Oklahoma to North Dakota would be cordoned off first, including Kansas. The SAMS did have significant input on where and when to erect the remaining borders. There were also several parts of the Act they were never even allowed to read, such as the measures to insure continuity of government.
The real change in October was in their morale. The first months of the project, everyone dragged through their assignments under a pall. There was only the one suicide, but alcoholism and depression took their toll. After that slight adjustment—the resource coordinators, as they dubbed them, inside the borders—the group’s outlook changed. Because the results of their research and projections and war games now had a constructive outlet. They informed what the resource coordinators could do, to attain the best quality of life possible within the borders.
Schwabacher arranged to have the draft Calm Act amended, to authorize the resource coordinators—Rescos—and their resources. The SAMS class was roughly split between the war gamers and the Resco manual writers, in terms of how each spent their time. But both groups felt that what they were really doing, was writing the manual. How to get the best life for the most people, despite the draconian Calm Act.
Granted, that outlook wasn’t universal. Some took the war games awfully seriously. But there was enough to do that most classmates who didn’t get along, could easily and constructively avoid each other.
John Niedermeyer was one of only three senior officers from some of the other armed services—Coast Guard, Navy, and Air Force. They focused on the war games, to keep the Army players aware of the other services in play.
Emmett MacLaren didn’t get to continue his field studies on how to turn around a city once it devolved into food riots. Essentially, he was out-voted. He was the only one of the SAMS who’d actually worked a subsistence farm in his youth. So they felt it was better that he take the lead on that crucial section of the Resco manual—how to convert to sustainable local agriculture within the borders, the crash program. Because when others attempted to tackle the topic via academic paper research, Emmett had to constantly correct them on what was practical. So they took a vote, and dumped it on him. He had to admit, it made sense.
Emmett was frequently invited to a weekly tea with Schwabacher. Other SAMS cycled through less often. Emmett wasn’t the best or the worst student in the class, but he’d built a rapport with the commandant that day after Kansas City. Once Schwabacher was sure the SAMS knew what they were asking for, he sometimes supercharged their results by getting research assistants assigned to them from other federal agen
cies. Emmett directed a group remotely from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The aggies were flattered and delighted to work on a top-secret classified project, and worked hard for him.
Schwabacher had a private talk with John and Emmett about Cam, after John incidentally mentioned how awkward it was to hide their Calm Act work from him, after the three had already started on the migrant camp issue as a household project. The commandant and the lead instructor had a private meeting with Cam. He emerged almost as grey as John and Emmett had their first day of SAMS.
Cam never became a SAMS, exactly. He was officially still in the prerequisite ILE program, and didn’t attend SAMS class meetings. But half his ILE courses were quietly set aside as ‘passed by oral examination’, and he was encouraged to punt on the rest. There was a distance learning program for the core of the ILE. He could work through that later.
For now, Cam was a confidential assistant to John and Emmett. They had him work on topics they felt the SAMS consensus had set aside too glibly, but couldn’t pursue themselves. Cam took on two main issues, one for each of his roommates.
With John, he worked on prioritizing key technologies to preserve after an economic collapse—and how—such as the Internet and the manufacturing base to maintain it. He had industry experts from Silicon Valley to help with that one. They irritated Cam no end with their presumed superiority to any mere military idiot. He returned the sentiment.
With Emmett, Cam kept tabs on the losing battle to impose order on Kansas City. Younger captains and lieutenants, Army and National Guard, led the protracted fighting retreat as it inexorably fell back toward Fort Leavenworth. Emmett and Cam advised them as a means of field-testing the Resco manual chapters on militia tactics for migrant control. The beleaguered junior officers didn’t know about the Resco manual. They were simply grateful for the help.
The SAMS in charge of those militia tactics chapters weren’t as appreciative of Emmett’s interference. But Emmett didn’t tell Cam that. Instead he vented to John, who arranged for the militia writing committee’s attitude problem to evaporate within a week. John got remarkably good at solving interpersonal squabbles like that among the SAMS.
Occasionally Emmett asked him how he did it. The answers made his head hurt.
Chapter 5
Interesting fact: Though the Calm Act was unprecedented in stripping U.S. citizens of their basic Constitutional freedoms, it was surprisingly well-received in most areas of the country. In particular, its Internet censorship managed to kill off spam and trolling on the social networks. The sharing of cat videos continued undisturbed.
For Thanksgiving, Emmett spent a couple days back home in the boredom of the Ozarks with Emma and his step-dad. Otherwise he got a lot of work done home alone in Leavenworth.
Cam and Dwayne formally presented each other to their families, in Mansfield Connecticut and Hoboken New Jersey respectively. The couple was warmly received on both ends.
John—unbeknownst to his wife Pam—made week-long reservations for the family to fly to Tahiti. In addition to a few nights in a thatched bungalow on pilings over a blue lagoon—because he and Pam had always wanted to try that—he borrowed a generously appointed yacht for the week from one of his wealthier sailing cronies.
When Pam realized at the airport just where they were flying ‘as a surprise’, she shrieked and started bludgeoning John with her purse. “Have you lost your salt-sucking mind?! Did you put this on a credit card? You balding, absentee imbecile! What, is this some kind of middle-age crisis?”
Pam’s shrieks ascended yet another octave, to heights never before imagined, when she learned their plane tickets were in first class. To French Polynesia, in the middle of the Pacific. About the most expensive place you could possibly fly to, even in coach. “Is this guilt? Did you have an affair?!”
John couldn’t explain that maxing out his credit card didn’t really matter. Money would be worth nothing in a year or so. So why not knock Tahiti off his bucket list while he still had the chance? So he didn’t have much choice but to smile vacantly and endure her abuse. He’d explain the joke next year.
Across the jet aisle, Bets and John Jr. hunkered down in their earphones and pretended not to know them.
-o-
Before Christmas, all civilian flights were canceled. The UN crisis conference on climate change had been sitting since July. They’d convened in response to warnings that the entire Arctic ice sheet would melt that summer—as it did. Talks bogged down in recriminations between developed and developing nations, over whose fault all the carbon in the atmosphere was. Banning civilian air travel was their first unanimous directive, lopping perhaps 5% off of greenhouse emissions.
Military flights were omitted from the international agreement.
The U.S. began to withdraw its forces from all international entanglements, in unilateral retreat. Simply walking away was fairly quick. The American excuse was that the troops were needed to handle domestic crises. The spreading crises were self-evident. But U.S. allies were understandably irate.
-o-
“Ah! Always do Christmas to the max,” John advised, imparting wisdom to his junior roommates. They were putting the finishing touches on their Christmas fireplace. Emmett’s store of household goods, shoved into the back of the linen closet, included one tantalizing box labeled ‘Christmas.’ This proved to contain thick pine-green garland, red velvet bows, low-power fairy lights, a box of push pins, and an unmatched dark red sock. No tree or ornaments.
Emmett claimed a roommate had walked off with his tree stuff. Cam and John had their doubts. As their scant sticks of furniture could attest, artfully clumped to leave wide open sock-skating expanses of bare hardwood floor, Emmett was a furnishing minimalist.
“Why’s that?” inquired Cam dubiously, regarding the wisdom of Christmas decorating.
“Most people hold deep emotional scars related to Christmas,” John elaborated. “Worthiness. Deserving-ness. Food. Disappointment. Humiliation. Betrayal.”
“Uh-huh,” said Emmett. “How to win friends and manipulate people. Again.”
Cam nodded. “Machiavelli’s guide to the holidays.” They laughed.
“You laugh now, grasshopper,” John said, holding up an admonishing finger. “But give people what their hurt-filled hearts lack at Christmas. They’ll love you for it.”
John’s pose as their wise elder was hampered by his ugly Christmas sweater. Rudolph’s red nose blinked desultorily on battery power upon his chest. Emmett and Cam wore their dark red berets over Emmett’s button-down jewel-tone shirts, in deep green and red respectively, over jeans. The borrowed red shirt was a bit short on Cam. Coast Guard hats not being particularly festive, John wore Dwayne’s left-behind Mickey Mouse ears on his bald head.
“Uh-huh,” replied Emmett. He stood back to regard their handiwork. “Fancy fireplace. Should we light the log?” They’d picked up the log for a dollar at the PX, weeks ago. It proudly and presciently advertised itself as 100% post-consumer waste.
They contemplated the cold wind keening outside on the parched prairie, dust sanding the brick exterior of the aged infantry barracks. Opening the fireplace flue would blow a cloud of dust into their living room.
“Let’s not,” Cam concluded. Sweeping the living room floor was his job.
“Right!” declared John. “Moving on to presents!”
Emmett felt hard cider was in order first, but no need to argue about it. He poured and handed goblets around. He tapped the gift from Dwayne in Cam’s hands. “Might want to open that alone, Cam.”
“No, I’ll just peek…”
John and Emmett watched him unwrap. They watched him turn red. They watched him close the package. They watched him slide down the long hallway to hide the thing in his bedroom.
“Point,” John awarded Emmett. “The one from your Mom is heavy.”
Emmett sighed. “Momma sent a shopping list for the PX to go with it.” He unwrapped a crockpot. With a recipe for the groceri
es she’d ordered him to buy. ‘Men can do this’ exhorted the note. “Is Hungarian goulash any good?” he asked.
“It’s great,” Cam assured him, flush from his running slide back from the bedroom. “That thing will make goulash for us?”
“We cut up all this…stuff,” explained Emmett. “And put it in. And turn it on. Then 10 hours later we eat it. Sounds complicated.”
“We can do it,” John claimed. At Emmett’s raised eyebrow, he prudently amended, “It’s your mother’s gift. I wouldn’t deprive you.”
“Uh-huh. What’s from Pam?”
“That’s in the bedroom,” John replied, with an arch look at Cam—I’m no amateur. “I’ve got a present from my kids, though.”
The Niedermeyer teens might have blown 10% of their joint weekly allowance on the gift. A necktie, adorned with swervy piano keys. He looped it onto his neck. They doubted he’d ever wear it again. Serving officers didn’t have much occasion to wear civilian suit and tie.
“It’s the lack of thought that counts,” John explained. “Helps me to keep tabs on their mental development.”
“Or lack thereof,” Cam said, grinning. “My turn again?”
A knock on the door interrupted their holiday gift joy. Emmett sock-skated to the door to answer it. “General Schwabacher, sir! Merry Christmas! Come in! Would you care for some hard cider?”
The school commandant entered, shook hands, and wished a merry-merry all around. Like most of them these days, he wore combat goggles to thwart the dust, but was otherwise nattily dressed for the holiday.
“Good to see you’ve decorated!” Schwabacher said heartily. “Hard cider, eh? That doesn’t sound too damaging. Yes, I think I will, thank you. And there will be no more ‘sirs’ today, Emmett.”
“From your lips to God’s ears, si—Charles,” Emmett agreed, and poured him a glass. John and Cam relieved the general of his outerwear and waved him to a seat.
