Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

Bohdanovich laughed. "Oh, you're better than vodka. You're better than an American movie. The world doesn't work that way."

"No," said Cole, "the world works exactly that way, if only somebody had the vision to see past their fears and take bold, surprising action."

"Go to Estonia, then, and sell this idea to them."

"No," said Cole. "I can't."

"Because your president won't let you be a crazy man," said Bohdanovich.

"Because you're going to do it."

"My government won't—"

"Not your government," said Cole. "You."

"Me? I'm just a colonel."

"Your reputation is known. You're going to talk to your counterpart in Estonia, and you're going to tell him the same story I just told you. Only you won't tell him you got it from me. It's your idea. And then you'll tell him to take the idea to his own government. Again, not your idea, his. No American fingerprints on it. No Ukrainian fingerprints on it. Estonia's own plan for dealing with the Russian minority. They do it, it keeps the Russians from taking action, things get worse and worse in Russia, and there's finally a coup that gets rid of the fearless leader."

"Or else he invades Ukraine."

"And you win. You and your very well-supplied army with special forces disrupting their supplies win in an extended campaign against their impoverished, badly trained, underequipped, depressed, and vodka-swilling army."

"Does your president know the nonsense you tell people in other countries?"

Cole laughed. "Oh, I'd never tell him an idea as crazy as this."

"There you are," said Bohdanovich triumphantly.

Cole leaned in close to him and whispered, "But he might just tell it to me."

Cole put down enough money to pay for lunch—and a few more drinks if Bohdanovich decided to stay and think about it. Then he got up and walked out of the coffee shop.

It's hard for governments to spend resources on projects that won't have any immediate return. For instance, it is a scientific fact that someday a large object from space will collide with Earth. If the object is large enough, it could destroy all life on our planet. If it is smaller, it might simply destroy human civilization.

A meteor large enough to cause us terrible damage might still be so small that with existing technology, we would not detect it until only a few weeks before impact. Wouldn't it be nice if, when such an object appears, a technological civilization from Earth had had the foresight to set up distant observation stations to detect such an object years before any possible collision?

Wouldn't it be nice if that technological civilization had even installed an automatic system that would obliterate or turn away most such objects without any conscious human intervention? And what if this system were built with such high tolerances that it could last for a hundred thousand years without any further maintenance? That way it could go on protecting the human race even if we stupidly allow ourselves to lose our high technology.

There has been only one civilization, one nation in the history of the human race that could realistically aspire to achieve such early-warning and protection systems to benefit the whole world. And that is the United States of America.

But we're a democracy. That means that it is extremely hard for our government to take expensive actions whose benefits do not come before the next election.

And since we can't predict when we will actually need this system to warn us of or deflect a dangerous meteor, how can the American government justify taxing our people now to pay for a system that may not save the world for a hundred years? Or a thousand?

Yet if we, with our present level of prosperity and technology, do not create such a system, then when an Earth-wrecking object approaches and there is nothing that can be done in time, they will spend the last days of their lives cursing our names, remembering what we could have done, and chose not to.

I will certainly not be president long enough to see such a project to its conclusion. But neither was John F. Kennedy still president, or even alive, when his moon-landing project came to fruition. Yet if he had not begun it, it would not have been achieved. And it was that achievement that laid the groundwork for what we in turn must do.

Oh, and yes—spending money on developing this system will certainly stimulate our present sagging economy, and the benefits of the new technologies will once again spread through the world.

Already, all the people who are smarter than me are readying their criticisms. They will say, "Don't we have enough problems right here on Earth, right now, that we shouldn't waste money on space?"

All I can do is ask those of you who are as dumb as me to remember that this is a project that will someday save the human race. Our children may well bless our names because we just weren't smart enough to know we couldn't or shouldn't do the job.

Cecily Malich stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing the mixing bowl and watching through the window as her firstborn son, Mark, mowed the back lawn. His man-height was beginning to come on him—at age thirteen, it was right on time, or maybe a little early. He was wearing shorts, not because the spring weather in northern Virginia was really warm enough yet, but because all his long pants were too short.

She'd take Mark shopping later in the afternoon. She hated to do it, because there were only another couple of months of school, but she couldn't send him to school any longer in pants that showed so much ankle. Not to mention the fact that the crotch was too hig