By five o’clock on Friday afternoon, the official estimate of plague dead was seventeen million. Every Atlantic beach was closed from Key West, Florida, to Portland, Maine. The most explosive story of the day, though, was where the plague-infected sewage had originated. It was being suggested by NBC and CBS, and strenuously denied by the New York Department of Sanitation, that the sewage was polluting the Eastern seaboard from an area twelve miles off the Long Island shore.
According to official sources, sanitation barges had left Pier 70 every day for longer than anyone could remember, and dumped untreated sewage into the Atlantic. It was supposed to sink to the ocean floor, and slide, in the form of black viscous ooze, down the shelving incline that would take it out towards the mid-Atlantic.
The New York Department of Sanitation, in a joint statement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, agreed that the sludge was highly infectious, but that it could not have been a breeding-ground for the plague that had ravaged the southern states.
‘Ordinary plague, Pasteurella pestis, is one thing,’ said a spokesman for the department. ‘But there is no scientific way in which ordinary plague could have mutated under the ocean into this particularly virulent and fast-growing form of super-plague.’
The department also denied that the raw sewage on the beaches of Florida and Georgia was anything to do with them. Yes – there had been eccentric winds and tides. But it stretched the credulity to suggest that tides had borne the sewage as far south as Miami.
A CBS reporter asked if it were possible for a message in a bottle, dropped off Long Island at the sewage-dumping spot, to float south as far as Miami. An oceanographer said that, with climatic conditions as they had been, yes. The CBS reporter then asked why, in that case, a lump of human faeces couldn’t do the same.
The spokesman for the Department of Sanitation gave an answer that became the morbidly popular catchphrase of the day. ‘What you’re suggesting,’ he snapped, ‘is crap.’
*
Herbert Gaines walked into the conference room at the Summit Hotel with his hands raised like a successful candidate for the New York presidential primary. Flashguns blinked in the crowded entrance, and he had more pictures taken for the press in the space of twenty seconds than he had in the last twenty years. He was wearing orangey panstick make-up to make himself look healthier on color TV, and his white hair was combed into a flowing mane.
‘Welcome back, Herbert,’ said a fat reporter in a creased blue suit. ‘It’s nice to have a hero around for a change.’
Beside Herbert Gaines, sticking close, was Jack Gross – all glossy suit and carnivorous teeth. He piloted his figurehead through the throng of pressmen and television cameras, and up towards a red-white-and-blue platform. More flashguns flickered, and Herbert tried hard to keep smiling.
Jack Gross waved his hands for silence.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jack Gross and I’m the agent for what we call the FTT. Now, does anyone here know what FTT stands for?’
It was meant to be a rhetorical question, but a New York Post reporter said, ‘Fart Tunefully Tonight?’ There was a general guffaw of laughter.
Jack Gross, his smile a little strained, waved his hands for silence again.
‘FTT,’ he said, quickly, ‘stands for Face The Truth. And Face The Truth is what we call our particular group of dedicated Republican senators and congressmen, all of whom are totally committed to the revival of honest, no-nonsense, straight-down-the-middle politics.’
‘Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?’ asked the lady from Time, sardonically.
‘It has been up until now,’ said Jack Gross. ‘But let’s think why American politics has gotten such a bad name. It’s gotten a bad name because it’s been the province of men who won’t Face The Truth. That’s what our group is all about. We’ve decided that no matter how unpalatable or unpleasant the true facts are, we’re going to have to face up to them, and speak our minds no matter how unpopular our voice might be.’
He lowered his voice, and spoke with intense sincerity.
‘Maybe, in the past, refusing to Face The Truth didn’t matter so much. But today – right this very evening – America faces a disaster of hideous and unprecedented proportions. The plague has already laid waste our southern states, and the last we heard it was infecting parts of Jersey. We are right up against the wall, ladies and gentlemen, and we can’t keep our eyes blinkered any longer.
‘The crisis is so serious that an American hero has returned to speak the truth about it. A man whose voice once spoke out on the movie screen for honesty and purity and the preservation of the American way, and who has now emerged from honorable retirement to take up our cause. Ladies and gentlemen – Captain Dashfoot, better known as Herbert Gaines.’
There was a light smattering of applause. Herbert’s movies were still doing the rounds of art houses and late-night TV channels, and most of the pressmen there had seen at least one of them.
Herbert Gaines stood up. With the TV lights on him, he hardly seemed to have aged. He could have dismounted from his Civil War horse just a few moments ago, flushed with success from his famous ride in Incident at Vicksburg. He raised his hand for silence.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, in his rich, deep timbre. ‘I never thought the time would come when I would feel it my bounden duty to ride once again in defense of the American people.’
There was clapping, and someone said, ‘Dashfoot to the rescue!’
Herbert Gaines smiled ruefully. ‘I wish Captain Dashfoot could come to the rescue, but we’re shooting from a different script today. Our nation is being scythed to the ground by
