“Here’s where we come in,” Marrow said. “We’re on.” He faced the camera. “And now a third tanker of the Kennedy class is nearing completion. As she takes shape, out beyond the moon, we have with us the man who designed the original Kennedy, a man who has just returned from his third expedition to Jupiter. His friends call him Flash Gordon.”
“You’re not my friend,” Dom said. “To you it’s Admiral Gordon.”
“Cut,” Marrow said. “I’m sorry, admiral. Shall we try again?” He went through his introduction. “And now, Admiral Gordon, can you tell us the results of your latest trip to Jupiter?”
“We brought home the bacon, same as before,” Dom said.
“An apt phrase, admiral, for in a sense that’s exactly what you did, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I said.”
“For, indeed, the hold of the New Republic contains enough material to furnish food for millions of people.”
“To be specific,” Dom said, “the hold contains several hundred thousand tons of carbonigenous cloud from the three-thousand-atmosphere layer of the planet Jupiter.”
“Now, Admiral Gordon, let’s go back to the beginning, when you and J.J. Barnes were designing the original Kennedy.”
“J.J. had nothing to do with designing the ship,” Dom said. “He was project head. The design was done by me and my team, which included Larry and Doris Gomulka—”
“Cut,” Marrow said. “Let’s go back to ‘let’s go back to the beginning.’ Roll ’em. Let’s go back to the beginning, admiral, to the time when you and your team were designing the original Kennedy. I understand that you did not know the true function of the ship. Is that true?”
“We were told that there was an alien ship inside the atmosphere of Jupiter,” Dom said.
“Is it true that only one or two men knew the true purpose of the first expedition?”
“I don’t know how many,” Dom said. “J.J. Barnes knew.”
“But you, admiral, soon saw, once you were down in the atmosphere, that J.J. Barnes was a man of true vision, a man with brilliant insight and wisdom?”
“I thought he was crazy,” Dom said.
“You no longer feel that way, I’m sure.” Marrow laughed.
“I still think he’s a nut, but an inspired and very lucky nut. He took a gamble and it paid off. It was a brilliant gamble and we owe a lot to J.J.”
“Would you cast your vote for J.J. Barnes as President of the United States?”
“No,” Dom said.
“Cut,” Marrow said.
“What the fuck kind of a question is that?” Dom demanded.
“Don’t you know that J.J. filed for the Presidency in the next election?” Marrow asked.
“No.”
“Would you vote for him?”
“No.”
“We’ll leave that out,” Marrow said. “Roll ’em.”
He thought for a minute. “Are you a qualified voter, Admiral Gordon?”
“Not yet. I’ll probably have to have my wife coach me to pass the test.”
Marrow was forming another question when Dom interrupted. “Did J.J. line this up so that I would give him a testimonial as a candidate?”
“Let ’em roll,” Marrow said. “Well cut it out later.” He changed tactics. “As the man who designed the Kennedy and was her captain on her first voyage, could you, Admiral Gordon, give us your explanation of what some people call a miracle?”
“Well, it wasn’t really a miracle,” Dom said. “It came at the right time, and that made it seem miraculous. The materials were there. We merely had the hardware to go get them and put them to use. The most puzzling part of it, to most people, is actually the simplest. That part of the miracle is repeated over and over, every day, somewhere on Earth. When the air is overcharged with vapor, the vapor condenses and falls as precipitation. If you overcharge an atmosphere with the proper amounts and the proper compounds of carbon and hydrogen, then the predpation will be in the form of carbon-hydrogen compounds, or carbohydrates.”
“Or manna from heaven,” Marrow said.
“The ancient Jews called it that,” Dom said. “The Talmud said bread rained from heaven. In Icelandic legend, people ate the morning dew; Buddhists called it heavenly oil, perfume, and ointment. It came in a time of troubles, and was called a miracle, just as it comes to us in a time of trouble. The only difference is that instead of a god or goddess bringing it to us, we went out and got it.”
“Yes, thanks to the foresight of that great man, J.J. Barnes,” Marrow said, smiling directly into the camera.
“Thanks to Immanuel Velikovsky,” Dom said. “Who is long dead.”
“Ah, yes,” Marrow said.
“That’s why the third ship is to be named the Velikovsky.” Dom said.
Much later, Dom lay in a hammock watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. It was a lovely evening. He felt good. The warm softness of a summer evening caressed his skin. An empty drink glass was in his hand, and he was trying to work up enough energy to go inside and fill it when Doris came out.
“Hey, admiral,” she called. “Your interview is on.”
He ambled in. He saw himself standing beside John Marrow. He grunted and went to mix a drink, but he was human so he came back to see himself as others saw him. However, he couldn’t keep his eyes on his own face, because Doris was standing behind him, looking quite nice…
“You look good in living color,” he said.
“You look sleepy.”
“I was.”
“There are nuts and there are nuts,” Dom was saying. “Velikovsky was a nut who lived and wrote in the middle part of the twentieth century. Briefly, he evolved a theory, by bringing together information from hundreds of ancient writings—”
“Material which was highly suspect,” Marrow put in.
“Suspect only because of the limitations of early writing,” Dom said. “Take the Bible, for example. It was written in Hebrew. Hebrew is a primitive and very inexact language. In Hebrew, as in most ancient languages, one word can mean several things. Thus, depending on the translator, you can read just about anything you want to read into the Bible or any other writings from the early times. Shortly after Velikovsky’s time, for example, a German used the same sources to prove to a lot of people that Earth had been visited by spacers from another planet. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Velikovsky had a slight advantage with thinking people, because he proved to be right in a couple of predictions. He predicted the higher-than-estimated surface temperature on Venus.”
“Doesn’t that higher surface temperature on Venus play a vital part in Velikovsky’s theory?”
“Velikovsky said that Venus was thrown out of the planet Jupiter into an erratic orbit which brought her into near collision with both Mars and the Earth,” Dom said.
“At the time of the Exodus, and again in the time of Joshua, in the Bible,” Marrow said.
“But the Velikovsky theory didn’t account for all known phenomena,” Dom said, “so it was treated as a rather scary and very harebrained idea. It was largely forgotten.”
“But not by J.J. Barnes,” Marrow said.
“Yes,” Dom said, “Velikovsky’s theory was that the carbonigenous clouds torn out of Jupiter by the planet Venus made carbohydrates fall onto Earth during the moments of near collision. One nut remembered another nut and we went off to Jupiter and found it to be, truly, a land of milk and honey.”
“At this moment,” Marrow said, “a cargo of carbonigenous cloud from Jupiter is being pumped into a vast cloud chamber on the moon. There, the carbohydrates will precipitate out, be shaped into loaves, loaves which you and I will be eating in the near future.”