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.