---------------------------------------- Note 9 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 6/10/79 9:48 pm graper / udperuse / unidel Dear Friends: Mrs. McGillicudy was shopping. Her basket. . .what? look, her name is Mrs. McGillicudy because . . .I know it's a stupid name, but she's not going to get too much coverage anyway. Yeah, she has to be simple to walk into the stupid situation I'm going to put her in. Mrs. McGillicudy was shopping. Her basket was full of canned fruit, even though she didn't have a can-opener at her house. Why? Precisely because when you drop cans of fruit, they roll around very impressively, especially in city streets. She was in a city, by the way. New York City. It is 1979, June 3. I am playing a cameo role in this short story. I am the shopkeeper. "Well, what is it today, Mrs. McGillicudy?" "Just these cans of fruit." "Excellent." Oh, incidentally, the sun is shining outside. It's ---------------------------------------- Response 1 of 6 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 6/10/79 9:56 pm graper / udperuse / unidel daytime. "Well, we'll put it on your bill. Toodle ooh, Mrs. McGillicudy!" "Toodle ooh!" she said, the little bell on the door tinkling as she left. She wore tiny wire glasses. She was old. She would only age about twenty more seconds because, all of a sudden, out of the sky, a huge piece of the steel sheathing that was used in the fifth baffle plate of a falling weather satellite came down on her, cutting a triangular piece of her off. She was in two parts, a head and an arm part and the rest. It was a sharp baffle plate. Blang blang blang roolllll went all the cans of canned fruit on the sidewalk. I'll have to admit that I was inside giggling. I'm sorry. "Hey, lady, are you alright?" a man asked Mrs. McGillicudy's head and arm part. There was no answer. Far away, in a beautiful green room in Washington D.C., the capitol of the United States, two important men sat in comfy chairs watching television. One was the ---------------------------------------- Response 2 of 6 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 6/10/79 10:04 pm graper / udperuse / unidel head of the committee on financing the resultant ex- penditures of forestry research projects. The other was a lieutenant-aide in the United States Army. They were watching a cartoon show called "Snotty Drawers and the Boogaloos." A phone rang in the room, the lieutenant aide got it, acted real official and hurried out of the room. His friend continued watching the cartoon show. The lieutenant had just found out that, in ten minutes, over one hundred nuclear surface-to-surface missiles were to strike that very exact spot with their super accurate computer guided noses and quite probably blow a lot of stuff up. His job right then was to gather all the information per- taining to the MTY project in the adjoining room, burn it and then to report to the bomb shelter. MTY stood for some sort of project that would make high explosives out of fir trees. As you can see, things were in bad shape. But don't worry. Pomeroy Osborn, a 12 year old black child living in ---------------------------------------- Response 3 of 6 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 6/10/79 10:16 pm graper / udperuse / unidel Washington D.C., was waiting for something interesting to happen that day. He looked up in the sky and saw whole bunches of streaming white lines, like hundreds of sky writers. It was exciting. The first few passed slightly over his district, the method of area saturation being that the tip of the city would be struck by the first missiles, and the rest of the city would be systematically hit by the ensuing ones. Pomeroy was not killed by radiation. He was killed by a garden hose nozzle display, which had been showing at the Washington Ramada Inn Hose Convention some five miles away. It was being pointed at by a pointer stick by a salesman when suddenly it found itself accelerated to a speed of 400 miles per hour by the missile blast. It went through no less than twenty five buildings before reaching Pomeroy's street, and was all mashed up by the time it got to Pomeroy. In less than a minute, everything was all smashed up in Washington. People were all gathered around Mrs. McGillicudy's ---------------------------------------- Response 4 of 6 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 6/10/79 10:30 pm graper / udperuse / unidel white sheet covered body, all trying to get a peek. When the ambulance arrived, a man came yelling out of the television repair shop that Washington had been blown up by nuclear missiles. Oh Christ, I did remember to tell you where this is, didn't I? It's New York City. . .I already said that? Ok. Everybody got really excited right then, thinking that New York City was going to be next and how the world was coming to an end and that they were to run for their lives and, for some reason I will never understand, people started killing each other. Mostly by running each other over in their cars, if you're wondering. They had nothing to fear, though. The United States had had an idea that this was going to happen, and was prepared for an almost instantaneous counterstrike in the event that the intelligence information they had ob- tained would come true. Since it had, every single piece of American nuclear hardware took off slightly before the first enemy missiles struck Washington. This was on ---------------------------------------- Response 5 of 6 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 6/10/79 10:38 pm graper / udperuse / unidel the order of a trillion zillion megatons of stuff, each aimed at its own little target by the system of airborne computers and so on and so forth and all of a sudden, due to the incredibly high quality standards of the American nuclear missile industry there was nothing living on the other side of the earth and it would be impossible for any- thing to live there for about five hundred years. It had been a short war. "Order! There must be order!" A police car's PA horn shouted over the throngs of humans being run over and running over other humans in their big cars. New York was one lively town. Far away in other states of the United States, other folks were finding out about Washington being destroyed by the radios and televisions, both of which had been taken over by the Army and which were spouting messages to the effect that everything was alright, quiet down now, nothing's going to happen, we've got it under control. Things weren't quite as bad other places as they were in New York. ---------------------------------------- Response 6 of 6 *** A Story by Dr. Graper *** 6/10/79 10:55 pm graper / udperuse / unidel And things quieted down. And then it was election year and the presidential candidates were bickering on the television about this point and that and the people got all bored again and couldn't care less and then a man rose up in the Republican party who proposed that, since there wasn't anything else to do that we use the Soviet Union as a place to dump our nuclear wastes and, sure, what the hell Mr. and Mrs. Joe America all thought and he got elected. Then, one day, as he was signing a bill to recognize the birthday of Elvis Presley as a national holiday, the rear beam-driver of a tele- communications satellite came crashing through his office in the new, Lincoln Nebraska White House and skewered him in his recliner chair. He had just signed half his name when it came in through the roof, and there was a lot of argument as to whether the bill was "signed" or not, and one of the great divisive forces of the country became the recognition or lack of recognition of this national holiday.