“We have been challenged twice by dangerous entities from an unknown origin,” says a new president, a younger president, in front of a cheering crowd at Rice University. “And so long as that origin remains unknown we must look for it on every frontier science can open to us. We choose to orbit a permanent military observatory around the earth in this decade, not because it is easy but because it is hard, because it is as much a test of character as an act of necessary self-defense!”
“The skybase race,” the competition to launch permanent anti-monster observation posts into earth orbit, dominates the aerospace rivalry between east and west. Plans to go to the moon are shelved. Everyone makes mistakes in their haste to shove bigger payloads up the gravity well. Flaming rocket parts rain on Florida, Texas, and Kazakhstan.
Messenger re-emerges after five years, now 150 meters long, sporting a gleaming black carapace capable of shrugging off atomic fire as if it were sarcasm. The Second Mid-Pacific Entity War is an even bigger mess than the first. Exclusion zones are a thing of the past. Messenger sinks ships and smashes infrastructure from Yokohama to Singapore, from Adelaide to Auckland, from Rarotonga to Vancouver, moving through the depths at twice the speed of steam and steel. Atomic weapons are hurled in strings across the open sea, chasing Messenger’s wake, signifying nothing except a great many dead fish. Rachel Carson’s 1964 book
The United States, having trouble keeping its logistical chain out of the mouth of a giant radioactive sea monster, withdraws its “advisory forces” from South Vietnam in 1965. President Johnson declares victory, announcing: “Vietnam is ready to take a proud place in the vanguard of the free nations of the world, and stand against communism on its own feet.” About a month later, that week’s president of that month’s junta proudly abandons South Vietnam, ready to take a stand against sobriety somewhere on the French Riviera. Red flags rise over Saigon. President Johnson grapples with a private certainty that he won’t be re-elected in ’68. Somewhere, Richard Nixon has a spring in his step.
Prominent American science fiction writers pen an open letter to the White House, condemning what they call an “epochal failure to attempt meaningful communication with the Mid-Pacific Entities” and “the reckless overuse of nuclear weapons.” An equivalent number of their peers sign a counter-screed, insisting that “soft-headed, idealistic flinching from confrontation is precisely what the Communist Bloc and these hostile entities both desire of us.” At the next World Science Fiction Convention (in Cleveland), Harlan Ellison is arrested for punching Robert Heinlein, who is arrested in turn for knocking Harlan unconscious with a large bag of jelly beans. Nobody pays any attention. That night, Messenger knocks the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay.
MR. CRONKITE: What is your reaction to those Americans now claiming that the maintenance of an active civil rights movement is an unaffordable or irresponsible distraction is this time of struggle against the Mid-Pacific Entity?
MR. BALDWIN: It is not lost on any Black American that the activities of his oppression have not ceased, have not ceased, despite the so-called urgency of the situation. Only the activities of his liberation must be abandoned; the routine of his oppression and all the resources thus wasted—that goes on as though no entity had ever appeared. We are told our cooperation is desired, but the situation was not so urgent that Congress felt moved to pass the 1968 additions to the Civil Rights Act. The situation was not so urgent that the man who murdered Martin felt compelled to set aside his gun and do something constructive instead. The entity has brought us no new situation. This is the oldest situation in America.
MR. CRONKITE: You contend that you derive, or perhaps the Negro more generally derives, no benefit from the government expenditures on this crisis?