2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [94]
“And yet,” Max told her, “people are reading this all over the world.”
“Do you think it will change anything?”
“Not until these words come from someone hugely important.”
“Like who?”
“The President. The Speaker of the House. A Nobel Prize–winning scientist. Someone like that.”
“How’s that going to happen?”
“Well, baby, that’s exactly what I’m working on.”
* * *
Older people were spooked by the rambling letter. AARP got almost two hundred thousand contacts from their members, who were, not surprisingly, petrified. There was obviously enough truth in the man’s note that plenty of seniors thought it might awaken a sleeping giant.
Robert Golden requested an urgent meeting with the White House. He was invited to have breakfast the next morning with John Van Dyke, a measure of how important a political force AARP was.
Golden was furious. “The President needs to weigh in on this. He has said nothing. This could spiral out of control.”
“The President knows this is serious, Bob, but we have to be cautious about speaking out too strongly at this juncture,” Van Dyke said.
“They’re shooting up buses, our building was bombed, and now twenty people just died and a note was left that our membership is shitting in their pants over.”
“Don’t they shit in their pants normally?”
“That’s not funny, John. There’s nothing humorous here. We need to hear from the top.”
“Bob, we know from experience that as soon as presidential attention is given to something like this, then the kooks and the nuts get energized. We are working on this at the highest level. The FBI is all over it, but if the President comes out with a speech to the nation, he raises it to a national emergency and we can’t do that.”
“But it is an emergency.”
“No, it isn’t. Los Angeles is an emergency. This is not the same.”
“We’re scared, John. I’m scared. I go to work every day and worry whether I’m going to get shot.”
“You won’t get shot. You have protection. Do you need more?”
“No. I need the President to say this has got to stop.”
“At this point that can do more harm than good. You’ll have to trust me.”
“You wouldn’t say that if they bombed the White House.”
“No, I wouldn’t. But they didn’t. I hear you, and I will convey everything to the President. But I will tell you that a speech to the nation is not going to happen at this juncture.”
* * *
The President lay awake at night. Normally, he was blessed with the ability to sleep, and he had a doctor on staff with every sleeping medication known to man if he needed it.
Sleeping medications had taken great leaps in the 2020s. The only side effects associated with the new sleeping drugs were that once you got a good night’s sleep using them, it was hard to ever go back. They put you to sleep, you didn’t wake up in the middle of the night and eat or drive or make calls you were embarrassed about, and you didn’t feel groggy in the morning. It was like an anesthetic in a pill, and once people tried them, they wanted them forever.
President Bernstein prided himself on his nonaddictive drug behavior. He used the medicine as often as needed but forced himself to sleep without it, just to strengthen his character. Betsy had taken them nightly for four years and had no interest in strengthening anything. She took them according to how many hours of sleep she desired. The pills were so specific that they came in six-, eight-, ten-, and twelve-hour doses, and they were amazingly accurate. In early tests, three thousand people who took the eight-hour dose slept within fifteen minutes of that time, most waking up on the later side. The time-release element in the medicine was brand new, a patent of a German pharmaceutical company. Their commercial had an animated alarm clock that looked at the pill to get the right time.
The President used to