ANGELS FROM RIKENNY

I just completed the third draft of a sci-fi novella entitled Angels from Rikenny. I first outlined this story in 1968 when I was a second year medical student at Harvard. The story was the product of two diverse forces, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone and the adoption of Medicare and it is a bit depressing to see that the novella is as timely today as it was then.

The basic story involves aliens who come to Earth with the cure for heart disease and cancer. The result is not a utopia, but a complete collapse of society as people live long but not well. That’s just the beginning, but I don’t want to spoil the story for people who want to read it by giving away too many details.    

Three episodes of The Twilight Zone made a special impression on me and led me to write my novella. In “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” typical small town Americans are exposed as fearful paranoids who turn on each other as various technological failures occur. In the end, we learn that their paranoia is justified. Aliens have landed in the distance, and by getting us to turn on ourselves, they have facilitated their conquest. The main lesson - in The Twilight Zone there is always a lesson - is that paranoia destroys and that disaster does not require physical weapons of mass destruction.

In the episode “To Serve Man,” apparently friendly aliens come to Earth, solve some our basic problems, and choose some fortunate Earthers to visit their home planet. Only at the end do we translate their language and find that their book, “To Serve Man,” is a cookbook. Oops! As Rod Serling says at the end, man has devolved from ruler of a planet to "an ingredient in someone's soup." Clearly aliens can be dangerous even when they seem benign.

To counter these tales, Serling produced a third episode entitled “The Gift.” In this episode, an alien is pursued and killed despite offering a gift to mankind. In the process, the vial he has brought with him is destroyed and its label is read. “Greetings to the people of Earth: We come...in peace. We bring you this gift. The following chemical formula is...a vaccine against all forms of cancer.”

When I first saw “The Gift,” I thought that the episode offered a balance to Serling’s two xenophobic efforts. Then, in 1968, I decided that the aliens in “The Gift” might have been the most dangerous aliens of all.

In 1965 the United States passed Medicare, a just system designed to prevent the elderly from going broke while dealing with the illnesses that they had collected over the course of a lifetime. I asked myself, “What could be better than seeing to it that elderly people did not lose their life savings spending money on their end of life illnesses?” I did not consider the question to be rhetorical. Imagine that one had to create a health care system from scratch and define priorities. How would we rank order the following?

1. Let’s guarantee that every child is able to grow up and reach his or her potential without being affected by illnesses that are treatable and curable.

2. Let’s guarantee that every working adult gets the care he or she needs to remain functional and provide for their family and that they are not compromised by treatable and curable disorders.

3. Let’s guarantee that every wanted pregnancy can be carried to term without disease compromising either the mother or the child.

4. Let’s devote money to research to increase the number of conditions that are treatable and curable.

5. Let’s protect the life savings of the elderly by providing them unlimited hospital care.

Considering that the death rate is, was, and always will be one hundred percent, option 5 is not at the top of my list. Sadly, it was the only aspect of health insurance on which we could agree at the time, since, as was pointed out, everyone either has a parent or grandparent or hopes to become one.

It was clear from the inception of Medicare that more and more health care resources were going to be devoted to individuals who couldn’t enjoy anything that would be considered health. Forty-eight years later, our health care system, more correctly our disease care and health insurance system, is little improved. While we don’t face the social disaster described in Angels from Rikenny, we don’t need aliens to destroy us when we are in the process of bankrupting ourselves. The only way in which the situation has changed, sadly, is that we have replaced benign neglect of the problem with partisan stagnation.

The original version of the tale was a story told by an American sniper in exile in Antarctica after having failed to follow orders to shoot the aliens. He heard the aliens’ description of their gift upon their arrival and he decided that we were on the brink of utopia. Not quite.

Richard Dinsmore, the staff at BHC-DEL, the American Party, TGB, The Dana Twins, Noraa, and the other Rikennians are new additions to the story. So is the idea of saving the world by making a movie. Obviously, the fact that Richard Dinsmore caused the Cubs to lose the critical game in the 2003 playoffs was not part of the original tale written in 1968. Having been at that game, and feeling that it is ridiculous to blame Steve Bartman, the fan who touched the fly ball, when it is Alex Gonzalez’s error that sank the Cubs, I wanted to blame someone else. I have not been back to Wrigley Field since and probably never will, unless I go to see an alien landing.

I once promised myself that I would never write a time travel story because the paradoxes gave me a headache.  For that reason, I concluded the story in such a manner that I did. Without giving too much away, anyone wishing to read a time travel story can simply stop before Warren Tanner yells ‘CUT’ for the last time, and leave the joke on Noraa.

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter if the joke is on Richard Dinsmore or on Noraa. With respect to the disorganization of our disease care system, and our failure to recognize that as we spend dollars on health care without considering the true costs and consequences, including opportunity costs, the joke, quite sadly, is on us.

The first ten sci-fi fans who find this blog post and request a copy of Angels from Rikenny will be sent an electronic version of the unpublished manuscript for their reading enjoyment.

Just e-mail me at richard.stein.050446@gmail.com or at richard.stein@vanderbilt.edu and I will get back to you.

TEXAS AND GEOGRAPHY

When I was a child, I had a puzzle map of the United States in which the states were scaled to size. Rhode Island was so small that it came attached to Connecticut and Massachusetts, Delaware was similarly attached to Maryland and perhaps also to Virginia.

Texas was the largest state, something that I have had reinforced in recent years when I have looked at an electoral map and seen all those electoral votes going Republican.

I suspect they don’t make puzzle maps like that any more. The words "DANGER : CHOKING HAZARD" come to mind. Keeping a few children from choking to death is worth a nation of geographically challenged individuals, which is the polite way of saying people who have no idea where the states are.

As I was writing this, I mentioned what I was doing to someone quite intelligent who told me that they had once claimed (incorrectly) that it was impossible to go from Texas through Oklahoma to Kansas because Missouri was there. Having mastered putting the states in the right place at a young age, I knew that right down the middle of the USA, from north to south, are North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Of course, instead of giving myself an ovation for this trivial piece of knowledge, I should point out my own answer to the question “In what direction does one travel to get from Vanderbilt (in Nashville, Tennessee) to Los Angeles?” My answer was “Southeast.” I then explained that one went Southeast to the Nashville airport and got on a plane, and what heck difference did it make where anything was.

I thought that my smug reply was useful until I was talking about my snarky approach to geography with a friend who told me about some relatives who came from Israel to visit them in California. They wanted to see the Grand Canyon and also the Grand Tetons. So they flew to Arizona and back. Then they flew to Utah and back. Thank goodness they didn’t want to see Miami and New York City.

Now, while I realized that Texas was big, I had no concept of how big it was until my wife and I and our two dogs drove cross country from Nashville to San Diego (December 2012) and back (March 2013). Because we had the dogs and had to stay at pet friendly hotels we only managed 350 miles a day. Our itineraries were as follows:

Nashville to Little Rock

Little Rock to Fort Worth

Fort Worth to Midland, Texas

Midland to Las Cruces, N.M. (just across the state line from El Paso)

Las Cruces to Casa Grande, Arizona

Casa Grande to San Diego (actually Del Mar)

That means two and a half days to cross Texas.

I suppose I should have had some sense of this in advance. Obviously, I knew where we were stopping each day, but it wasn’t until I was driving that the vastness of Texas became real. For those of you who have never driven across Texas let me share some observations.

When writers talk about the wind roaring across the Texas plains, they are not kidding. There were times when we were crossing Texas that I thought we were in a thunderstorm but without any rain.

Coming back east, we left El Paso, Texas, and saw a sign that read “Beaumont 784 miles” (at least that’s as best as I remember the sign) and Beaumont is still in Texas. Heck, it’s 450 miles from where I grew up in the Chicago suburbs to where I live in Nashville and that takes me through parts of four states : Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. Google maps says the short route from El Paso to Beaumont is 828 miles so if I’m wrong about the sign, I’m not wrong by much.

On the sad side, it was March, three weeks before spring, when we drove back east through Texas and we were more than 400 miles into Texas until we saw the first green, a very small field that looked smaller than the two acre lot on which our house stands. We were taking the southern route, but the drought has been terrible. It’s one thing to read about it but another thing to see it. When we turned northeast to head to Dallas/Fort Worth it was clearly spring.

By the way, both going west and coming back east we stayed in Midland Texas. I never thought that I would say this, but I now feel sorry for George W. Bush. He may have started a war with Iraq for no reason, and he may have claimed to be a "uniter not a divider" before starting us on the road to partisan stagnation, but he paid for it in advance by being born in Midland. How a town of 100,000 people can have absolutely nothing except for one new Japanese restaurant is beyond me. I thought that Kenton, Tennessee, the home of the major characters in “No Cause for Shame” was the middle of nowhere, but I was wrong.

Then again, my characters needed to be from a small obscure town, and Midland is neither small nor obscure.