Chapter 32

As 1999 dissolved into 2000, two things happened: one of significance, one to become a joke. It would have been three things, but Putin’s heart gave out during a wilderness trip he set up to prove what a rugged outdoorsman he was.

The joke was the great hoohaw of the Millennium Meltdown. The world knew that all computers would be worthless hunks of metal at the stroke of Midnight, 1 January 2000. It absolutely KNEW. People were hoarding food and toilet paper. They were taking cash out of the banks. How could the world function? Oh! The end of the world is nigh.

Maybe we should have taken flight with the Hale-Boppers. In 1995, Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, a pair of amateur astronomers, separately and almost simultaneously discovered a comet that was out in the Jupiter-Saturn range. Its perihelion was, coincidentally, April 1, 1997 – April Fool’s Day, fitting – and it passed Earth at a distance of 1.3 Astronomical Units. 1.0 AU is exactly the distance to the sun, approximately 8 light minutes.

We humans measure virtually everything by comparing it to something else. Aircraft carriers are so many football fields in size. The power generated by a fusion reaction is so many Hoover Dam equivalents. Don’t get me started on where a ‘foot’ came from. China had four different ‘feet’ of various lengths. In Germany, each principality had its own ‘foot’ until the ‘metric foot’ was agreed upon, with the adoption of the metric system in the 1870s.

[It was once defined thus: “Stand at the door of a church on a Sunday and bid 16 men to stop, tall ones and small ones, as they happen to pass out when the service is finished; then make them put their left feet one behind the other, and the length thus obtained shall be a right and lawful rood to measure and survey the land with, and the 16th part of it shall be the right and lawful foot.” That was somebody chosen to define a bunch of things, by Charlemagne, it seems. So, I guess it would depend on who showed up for church, on measuring day. Humans can be so silly, sometimes.]

Sorry, Red. I got side-tracked and you, naturally, carried it to the extreme.

[You are welcome, Lexi.]

I am stupefied at the lengths to which you will go to express your sarcasm.

To get back to my point, the ‘Hale-Boppers’ said there was a spaceship which would beam us all out, hiding behind the comet. The Millennium Meltdowners should have left with the Hale-Boppers.

That was the non-significant event. The significant event was the US Presidential election.

Al Gore, Clinton’s Vice President, was selected to run against George W. Bush, then the Governor of Texas. Bush and my old pal Dick Cheney, his running mate, were in trouble going into the summer. You see, Bush and Cheney were both in tight with the oil industry. And the oil industry was a hurtin’ dude. So Bush/Cheney were hurtin’ dudes. They had under $10 million in their war chest on the Fourth of July.

I hadn’t helped Dick Cheney much since the minor attempt on my life, financed by his law firm. A few campaign contributions of the illegal variety (about $10,000) to Dick’s campaigns and to the Arizona Republicans, but nothing major.

On the fifth of July, I placed a call to Malcolm Rush, Cheney’s money man. Naturally, I got a flunky.

“Yes, Ms White Owl. I’m sure that Mr. Rush will appreciate your contribution. I’ll tell him you called. I see from our records that you have been a significant contributor in the past. Shall I put you down for fifteen hundred this year?”

“Listen, Freddy,” I said, calmly. I’d looked into his mind briefly when he picked up the phone. “You ’be sure’ to tell Mal that we’ve both come up in the world since we talked the last time. I’m the owner of Exxon, now. The OWNER. If he wants to talk seriously, he should come out to have breakfast with me some time. I generally have breakfast at 0800 hours at ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in Denton. If I don’t hear from him in the next two days, I’ll make other plans. You got that?

“Cowboys and Indians restaurant, Denton, Texas. 0800 hours. Two days,” I repeated for him. And then I disconnected.

He’d be interested, I was sure. They had $9.7 million in the bank and their burn rate was nearly a million a day – at least that’s what they budgeted to spend.

[Lexi, are you sure this is the right time? Gore would be a better choice for our long-term goal. He’s an environmentalist. We certainly have the cash, but... ]

Red, back when we financed Cheney the first time, did you read the future tea leaves and we both decided to run this through the Republicans?

[Yes, but... ]

We are at our peak. I don’t think we can sit on this any longer. Unless you want to try and get somebody into China and Russia, too.

[That might have been a preferable scenario, but that would mean abandoning this experiment. I won’t do that. I’ve had too much fun with you and your family these past 25 years.]

And everything is set up, right? We have a whole bunch of private domestic corporations sitting on a whole bunch of money, right?

I was still keeping tabs on Tommy Sussex. And sending x-rated dreams to him almost every night. Tommy was operating in a doped-up haze, but still managing to paint the underground parking lots of some of the major buildings in Washington. He’d add some ‘extra’ whiteners to the paint, using a special formula I sent him. And, no you perverts out there, it wasn’t a personal ejaculate mixture fueled by the x-rated images I sent, it was a real special formula. Red, naturally, supplied the special formula. It was all stuff you could buy at a drug store or a hardware store. He followed directions perfectly – except the one time in 1998 when he tried to drink the stuff, ‘cause his normal drugs were not available, due to a turf war between gangs. He had to go to the hospital for that, but they just pumped his stomach; the ER docs just shook their heads.

If only my kids were as easy to deal with as some oil sheiks. Jim was a real hard-ass motorcycle guy and could fix anything that had a motor. I found out, after the fact, that he did a ‘Vulcan Mind Meld’ – that’s what he called our talent – on the driver’s license clerk and got a license at 14. I grounded him for a month. Like that did a lot of good. I had to go take the spark plugs from his cycle.

Alex turned into a stunner, now in her late teens, and had already been accepted at the Wyoming College for Veterinary Medicine. She was on the first year of a six-year program to get her DVM, and was working with Toni Sky Lark, who was turning out Wokitas like crazy. She had trained all our Wokitas.