SEC. TREAS.: You’re looking vigorous and hale today, sir.
GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.
PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V–C O.N.A.N.: May I ask, Señor, why my distinguished co-Vice Chair of O.N.A.N. is not with us in attendance today.
GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.
MR. RODNEY TINE, CHIEF, U.S. OFFICE OF UNSPECIFIED SERVICES: The president’s taking a little pure oxygen today, boys, and has authorized me as his oral proxy on this may I say historically opportune day. The Canadian P.M.’s in a bit of a snit. He prefers to whinge in the media surrounded by Mounted Reserves and is off somewhere far from Quebec in a Kevlar vest doing whatever the Canadian word is for pouting, doubtless poring over opinion polls prepared by chinless guys in Canadian hornrims.
MEX. AND SOME OTHER SECS.: [Various puzzled apprehensive noises.]
TiNE: I’m sure you’ve all been briefed on the unprecedented but not unop-portune crisis that obtains north of the almost perfectly horizontal line between Buffalo and Northeast Mass.
TINE arranges photos on seal-crested easels: a New Hampshire runoff-ditch running off stuff a color nobody’s quite ever seen before; a wide-angle horizon-stretching vista of skull-embossed drums, with short-haired guys in white body-suits walking around adjusting knobs and reading dials on shiny hand-held devices; a very weird chemical sunrise, close in hue to the Cabinet members’ lipstick, over some forests in southern Maine that look way taller and generally lusher than January forests ought properly to be; a couple indoor-lit snapshots of a multi-eyed infant crawling backwards, its ear to the carpet, dragging its shapeless head like a sack of spuds. The last display’s a real heartstring-plucker.
ALL SECS.: [Various concerned and sympathetic noises.]
GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.
TlNE: Gentlemen, let the president just say that no one’s prepared to say they’re quite sure what’s happened, or just which quote unquote loyal part of the Union or Organization might reasonably be said to be culpable, but it’s not the administration’s immediate concern to point the levelling finger of blame or aspersion just yet or right now. Our concern is to act, to respond, and act and respond decisively. Swiftly. And decisively.
SEC. INT.: We’ve come up with some extremely preliminary projections on the costs of detoxifying and/or deradiating the better part of four U.S. states, sir, and I have to tell you gentlemen that even with the atmosphere of uncertainty at this point in time of not yet having a definitive handle on just what kinds and combinations of compounds were — umm — found there and how wide your — not ‘your’ personally, sir, J.G., ‘your’ just being a shorthand way for — to say something like I suppose simply ‘the’ — how wide the dispersal- and toxicity-parameters are shaping up to look — umm — I have to relate that the figures we’re looking at are almost staggeringly multi-zeroed, sir, gentlemen.
TINE: Tighten in and expand on staggering if you will, Blaine.
SEC. INT.: We’re talking at bare minimum a staggering amount of Prívate-Sector-caliber guys in white suits and helmets, not unlike your own helmet, sir, with a commensurately massive tab for the suits and helmets, plus gloves and throwaway booties, and a lot of really shiny equipment with a great many knobs and dials. Sir.
GENTLE: Hhhaaahh Hhhuuuhh.
TINE: Gentlemen, let’s pay the president the due tribute of proceeding right to the bone of the matter. I think the president’s position is rendered patently clear by the pure oxygen he’s been forced to take here with us today. No way we can possibly permit territory publicly exposed as this befouled and waste-impacted to continue to besmirch the already tight and tidier territory of a new era’s U.S. of A. The president shudders at the mere thought. Just the mere thought of it forces him to resort to oxygen.
PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V–C O.N.A.N.: I do not anticipate what options your federal and our continental government might consider options to this permitting, señors.
OTHER SECS.: [Tentative puzzled nods and slightly off-key agreement-noises.]
TlNE: Having been elected and conferred with a mandate on the clear and public anti-waste platform of the C.U.S.P., the president is inexorably driven to see the only viable option being to give it away.
SEC. STATE: Give it away?
TINE: Expressly.
SEC. STATE: You mean simply tell the truth? That Johnny’s C.U.S.P. platform necessitates — given the unfeasibility of shooting national wastes into space, since NASA hasn’t put a successful launch on in over a decade and the rockets simply fall over and blow up and become more waste — that — given the amount of additional waste annular fusion’s start-up is going to start putting in circulation the minute start-up commences — that his platform all but necessitates the second-tier option of transforming certain vast stretches of U.S. territory into uninhabitable and probably barbed-wired landfills and fly-shrouded dumps and saprogenic magenta-fogged toxic-disposal sites? Concede publicly that those EPA Softball games weren’t casual or pick-up in the least? That you allowed Rod the God here to convince you[156] to authorize Unspecified Services to undertake massive toxic dumping and skull-softening against local statute for basically the same hard-choice, Greater-Good-of-the-Union reasons that prompted Lincoln to suspend the Constitution and jail Confederate activists without charge for the duration of the last great U.S. territorial crisis? And/or not least that these particular territories were chosen essentially because New Hampshire and Maine didn’t let C.U.S.P. on their Independent ballots and the Mayor of Syracuse had the misfortune to sneeze on the president during a campaign swing? Give away the entire strategy the two of you have apparently huddled in some sterilized corner and mapped out? Can this be what you mean by Give it away, Rod?
TINE: Bôf. Don’t be a maroon, Billingsley. The it in the president’s Give it away signifies the territory.
GENTLE: Hhhaaaahhh.
TlNE: We’re going to give away the whole benighted smirch of ground.
SEC. INT.: Export it, one might venture to sally.
TINE: It’s a novel and pro-active resource no prior statesman’s had the vision or environmental cojones to envision. If there’s one natural resource we’ve still got in spades, it’s territory.
PRES. MEX./SEC. MEX./V–C O.N.A.N. AND SEVERAL OTHER SECS.: [Attempt to bring eyebrows back down below hairlines,]
TINE: President Gentle’s decided we’re going to reinvent not just government but history. Torch the past. Manifest a new destiny. Boys, we’re going to institute some serious intra-O.N.A.N. interdependence.
GENTLE: Hhhaaahh hhhuuuhh.
TiNE: Gentlemen, we’re going to make an unprecedented intercontinental gift of certain newly expendable northeast American territories, in return for the faute-de-mieux continuation of U.S. waste-displacement access to those territories. Allow me to illustrate what Lur— just what the president means.