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  Little Green Men

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  Tags: Satire

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  SUMMARY:

  In 1994, Christopher Buckley published one of the most acclaimed and successful comic novels of the decade, Thank You for Smoking. Now Buckley returns to the strange land of Washington, D.C., inLittle Green Men, a millennial comedy of manners about aliens and pundits . . . and how much they have in common. The reluctant hero of this hilarious novel is John Oliver Banion, a stuffy Washington talk-show host, whose privileged life is thrown into upheaval when aliens abduct him from his exclusive country-club golf course. But were his gray-skinned captors aliens . . . or something far more sinister? After Banion is abducted again--this time in Palm Springs--he believes he has been chosen by the extraterrestrials to champion the most important cause of the millennium, and he embarks on a crusade, appearing before a convention of UFO believers and demanding that Congress and the White House seriously investigate UFOs. His friends and family suspect that Banion is having some kind of manic-depressive midlife crisis and urge him to seek therapy before his credibility as a pillar of the punditocracy is ruined. So John Oliver Banion must choose: keep his establishment status or become the leader of millions of impassioned and somewhat scruffy new friends who want to expose the government's secret alien agenda. Little Green Menproves once and for all that the truth is out there. Way out there. And it reaffirms Christopher Buckley's status as the funniest humanoid writer in the universe. Coming soon from Christopher Buckley: One of Our Whales Is Missing

  Little Green Men

  Christopher Buckley

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2001 by Allison & Busby Limited Suite 111. Bon Marche Centre 241-251 FerndaleRoad London SW9 8BJ

  www.alIisonandbusby.ltd.uk

  Reprinted 2001

  First published in the USA in 1999 by Random House, Inc Copyright © 1999 by Christopher Buckley

  The right of Christopher Buckley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 0 7490 0505 X

  Printed and bound in Spain by Liberduplex, s.l. Barcelona.

  For Caitlin

  The exercise took place in the early 1960s . . . and involved launching fictional UFO sighting reports from many different areas. The project was headed by Desmond Fitzgerald of the CIA's Special Affairs Staff (who made a name for himself by inventing hare-brained schemes for assassinating Fidel Castro). The UFO exercise was "just to keep the Chinese off-balance and make them think we were doing things we weren't. . . The project got the desired results, as I remember, except that it somehow got picked up by a lot of religious nuts in Iowa and Nebraska or somewhere who took it seriously enough to add an extra chapter to their version of the New Testament."

  - Former CIA officer Miles Copeland, quoted in Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up

  [President Clinton] said, "Hubb, there are two things I want you to find out for me: One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?"

  I actually did go to NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) when I was in Colorado Springs and asked them about UFOs. Of course, they denied it.

  - Former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell,

  in USA Today

  PART ONE

  ONE

  "Ten seconds."

  John O. Banion scared unblinkingly into the TV camera's cyclops eye, keeping his famous cool under the baking glare of the Videssence lights. It pleased him that he was more at ease than the person seated opposite him, who as it happened was the most powerful man in the world.

  "Five seconds." The technician counted down with an outstretched hand. With his huge headset, he could have been a crewman on an aircraft carrier signaling for the launch of an F-14.

  "Three, two . .

  The theme music was cued, a variation on a Handel trumpet voluntary with echoes of Aaron Copland. The TV critic for The Washington Pose had called it "Fanfare for the Self-important Man." Still, nothing like a few bars of brass to get the Establishment's hemoglobin pumping on Sunday mornings as it sipped its third cup of coffee and scanned the newspapers for mentions of itself.

  "Sunday..."

  A satisfying opener, implying, as it did ownership of the entire day, and the Sabbath at that. The announcer's voice was familiar. It had taken four meetings between Banion, his producers, and the sponsor. Ample Ampere, to settle on it. Ample Ampere had wanted James Earl Jones, but Banion said that he couldn't hear the voice of James Ear! Jones without thinking of Darth Vader, hardly an appropriate tone setter for such a high-level show as his. Ampere countered with Walter Cronkite. No, no, said Banion, Cronkite, the beloved former TV anchorman, was too avuncular, too upbeat. The voice must have such gravity as to suggest that if you missed the program, you were not a serious person. Only one would do - George C. Scott, the voice of General Patton.

  "... an exploration of tomorrow's issues, with today's leaders. And now ..." - Banion had dictated the slight pause in the manner of Edward R. Murrow's wartime "This ... is London" broadcasts - 'your host. . . John Oliver Banion." The Post critic had written: "Drumroll, enter praetorians, household cavalry, concubines, elephants, rhinos, captured slaves, eunuchs, and other assorted worshipers."

  Banion looked owlishly into the lens through his collegiate tortoiseshell eyeglasses. He seemed perpetually on the verge of smiling, without ever giving in to the impulse. He was in his late forties, but could have been any age. He had looked this way since his second year at Princeton. He had a round face that was handsome in a bookish sort of way. His graying blond hair was unstylishly cut, on purpose. He disdained salon haircuts as marks of unseriousness.

  "Good morning," Banion said to the camera. "Our guest today is the president of the United States. Thank you for being with us this morning,"

  "My pleasure," lied the president. He had loathed John O. Banion ever since Banion had corrected him on a point of history at a White House dinner, in front of the French president. He would much - much - rather have stayed at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountain Park outside Washington, on this Sunday morning. He chafed at being told by his press secretary that Banion insisted on a live interview in the studio. What was the point of being the most powerful man on earth if you had to grovel before these assholes, just because they had their own TV -

  "Sir, it's the top-rated weekend show. And it looks like he's going to be moderating the debates this fall."

  'All right, but you tell him, no commercials. I won't sit there twiddling my thumbs while they break for commercials every five minutes. It's unpresidential."

  "Mr. President," Banion said, "I want to ask you why, in light of your administration's below-par performance in a number of areas, you haven't fired at least two-thirds of your cabinet, but first..."

  It was a trademark Banion opener: establish the guest's inadequacy, then move along to the even more pressing issue. The president maintained glacial equanimity. For this he had gotten up early on Sunday and helicoptered all the way back to Washington. The press secretary would suffer.

  ". . . let me ask you about something else. We have a report that NASA, the space agency, is planning to advance the launch date of the final stage of the space station Celeste to right before the presiden
tial election this fall. Would you call that a triumph of American aerospace engineering, or of politics? You can take credit for both, if you'd like."

  The president smiled, suppressing his desire to pick up the water pitcher and smash it against the forehead of this supercilious twerp. But inside his brain alarms were sounding like those on a depth-charged submarine. How did Banion know about the launch date? They'd gone to pains to put in so many buffers between the White House and NASA on this exquisitely delicate matter that no one would be able to trace the decision to the Oval Office.

  "John," he began, in his slow, overly patient tone of voice that suggested he wasn't sure English was your first language, "the credit for Celeste's dazzling success has to go, first and foremost, to hundreds and thousands of men and women who have worked their hearts out on this project from the very beginning ..."

  Banion looked over his glasses in the manner of a disappointed schoolteacher and jotted notes on his clipboard. He did this not because any of the drivel exgurgitating like foam from the presidential mouth warranted recording but because it made his interviewees nervous.

  ". . . to make sure that America will not only be number one here on earth but number one out... there."

  "Before we return to whether the timing of the launch was politically manipulated." said Banion, "let's talk for a moment about the wisdom of spending so many billions of dollars on a space station. So far all it seems to have accomplished is to provide a platform for studying the effects of weightlessness on copulating fruit flies."

  "That's -"

  "Three and a half years ago, only days after a disastrous and, if I may, ill-advised military operation in North Korea, you gave a speech at an aerospace plant in the Mojave Desert in California in which you called for completing an orbital space station. You called this 'an urgent national priority.' Some cynical voices at the time suggested that, like President Kennedy, who announced the man-on-the-moon initiative right after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, you were trying to get people's minds off the Korean debacle. But leave that aside for a moment -"

  "Let me -"

  "If I may? And leave aside the fact thai Celeste's biggest contractors are in California and Texas, two states you almost lost four years ago and which you desperately need to win this time. Let me ask you, after four years of cost overruns that would have made the emperor Caligula blush crimson, what does the nation have to show for this celestial boondoggle, aside from three-point-four-million-dollar zero-gravity coffeemakers and one-point-eight-million-dollar toilets?"

  "With all due respect, I'm sure there were some people in the court of King Ferdinand and Isabella who objected to the cost of the facilities on Columbus's boats."

  "I don't recall that there were facilities on the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria."

  "My point is that you can't really put a price on the future."

  "With all due respect, whenever a politician says you can't put a price on something, you can be sure it's going to be a whopper. The fact is that you can put a price on anything. In this case, it's twenty-one billion dollars and counting, as they say at Cape Canaveral. This is a huge sum of money. What's more, it's being said that your re-election committee should report this as a campaign donation by the American people."

  "Fine," said the president, "but let me tell you what I hear when I travel around this country in support of Celeste. I hear people saying, 'This is excellent. This is something we can all be proud of.'"

  "Fine. So what are the American people getting for their billions?"

  The president pressed play and, straining against the weariness of reciting it all for the two hundredth time, began to tick off the bountiful spin-offs that Celeste would bring to earth: glorious advances in - you name it - machinery lubricants, long-distance telephone networks, sewage treatment, robotic wheelchairs, insulin pumps, pacemakers, research on cures for osteoporosis, diabetes, uh, radiation-blocking sunglasses, energy-conserving air-conditioning ... too numerous to mention, really.

  Banion listened to this life-enhancing litany with the chin-quivering air of a man at pains to stifle a yawn. Sensing that he had better come up with something more millennial than Celeste's contribution to the field of ultrasound scanning, the president gave a gripping description of what the AOR - atmospheric ozone replenishment - module, part of the launch package, would accomplish once it became operational, namely squirting ozone back into the atmosphere to cover the O-Hole, which now stretched from the Falklands to Madagascar, wreaking havoc on plankton and emperor penguins alike.

  Still Banion looked faint from boredom. The president dragged out the LAWSI module, the ultimate - if slippery - argument for Celeste's relevance. If in doubt, refer to the large asteroid warning system indicator, which theoretically could detect whether some astral death star this way was heading. The top people at NASA and the Pentagon had been cautioning him from becoming too evangelical on this particular aspect of Celeste. It was tricky business, getting the citizenry in a lather over the prospect of death-by-gigantic-meteor, especially this close to the millennium, when every fruitcake in the pantry was screaming Apocalypse.

  "But what," Banion said, "are we supposed to do if we find out that there is an asteroid coming our way?"

  "Well, in the unlikely event. .. we'd want some sort of warning."

  "I wouldn't. If the world's about to end, I don't want any warning."

  "No one is saying the world is going to end," said the president, trying to smile. "This is about beginnings, not endings."

  When he began to extol the racial and cultural diversity of the astronauts being launched, Banion interrupted him.

  "We'll be right back with the president, after this."

  The studio filled with the sound of Ample Ampere's theme music. The commercial showed a basset hound sitting staring hopefully through the glass door of an oven, inside which a juicy roast was baking. The president gestured to his press secretary to approach with his miserable, inadequate excuse as to why he, Leader of the New Millennium, was being made to endure a homey commercial message about the joys of electricity.

  A makeup woman, modern-day medic of the TV battlefield, sprang forward to touch up glistening foreheads.

  Banion, overhearing a snatch of perturbed presidential conversation, leaned forward and said, "I asked them myself if we could bank the commercials at the beginning and end, but" - he smiled dryly - "it seems 1 am as helpless as you, sir, in the face of the exigencies of Mammon."

  Banion's wife, Bitsey, reached him in the car on his way to brunch at Val Dalhousie's in Georgetown. The interview had made her nervous. After all, the president was coming for dinner, next week.

  "He's going to cancel now."

  "No he won't."

  "They'll make it sound like.a last-minute thing. I've spent the whole week with the Secret Service."

  "Bitsey, he's only a president." She would understand. She was fourth-generation Washington, a cave dweller.

  Banion hummed along Rock Creek Drive, fairly throbbing with contentment over the entrance he would make at Val's. The car, made in England, had a burled walnut dashboard that shone like an expensive humidor. He could actually make out his reflection in it, and he liked that. He'd paid for the car with two speeches - one of them on how to revitalize the U.S. auto industry - and he hadn't even had to leave town for them. More and more, he hated to leave town. Everything he needed was here.

  It was a bright, clear June day. He felt devil-may-care. He had just stuck it to the president of the United States in front of all the people who would be at Val Dalhousie's brunch: senators, Supreme Court justices, editorial-page pontiffs, bureau chiefs, an ambassador or two for seasoning, perhaps the papal nuncio, or at least a tony bishop. They added such nice color in their robes. It gave him a little thrum of pleasure that Bitsey was anxious. Dear thing - didn't she understand that presidents came and went?

  TWO

  "You were great," the press secretary said to the president as soon as they were in
side the vibrating cocoon of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, en route from the Sunday studio to Burning Bush Country Club in suburban Maryland for eighteen holes with Prince Blandar. The chief of staff pretended to be preoccupied with his PRESIDENTIAL ACTION folder. "Your line," the press secretary tried again, "about how this is about beginnings, not endings. A home run."

  The president, changing into his golf togs, tossed his suit jacket at his Filipino steward.

  "I go to his studio on a Sunday morning, because John Oliver Banion does not do remote interviews, and I get half an hour of abuse interrupted by three commercials showing toasters that talk to you and people smiling - smiling - as they're being fed into MRI machines. I've had an MRI, and you do not smile while you are having it, let me tell you. It's like being stuffed into a torpedo tube while waiting to hear whether you have cancer. You're not smiling. You're pissing down your legs. Why don't Ample Ampere's commercials show people being electrocuted in their new electric chair? That's it. No more Sunday with John O. Banion." He flung his pants at the steward. "I don't care what his ratings are. 'Exigencies of Mammon.' Prick!"

  The chief of staff's rule was never to interfere while the president was shredding the self-esteem of another member of the staff, but it was his job to save the president from himself. He looked up from the secretary of transportation's urgent memo about a bridge over the Mississippi that was about to collapse, halting all commerce on the river.

  "Is Banion moderating the debates?"

  The press secretary gratefully picked up the cue. "I talked to Jed Holcomb at the League of Gay Voters, and he says it's a done deal. This is their first time hosting the debates, and they're going out of their way to have as straight a moderator as there is. Banion's nothing if not straight."

  "How did the League of Gay Voters get to sponsor the debates?" the president asked. "For Christ's sake. Where does it end?" "It was their turn." "We have no say in the moderator?"

  "Theoretically. But if we veto him, it'll get out and we'll have elevated him into the Man the President Is Afraid Of."