In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 87-105 revised

Now we’ll say you’re in charge of those who guard
the systems that deliver things up high.
Quite suddenly, your task has gotten hard.
This is the most important thing to fly.

You’re not expecting sabotage, of course;
your chief concern is theft of isotopes.
A lunatic would not know how to force
the failure of a job like this (one hopes).

So here you are: The launch is in a week.
Tomorrow the deuterium arrives.
A bunch of nuts comes swimming up the creek,
equipped with lineman’s pliers and pocket knives.

They’re brought before you, heretofore unhurt.
with hesitant defiance in each eye
Within each wetsuit is a printed shirt:
“The world will end real soon, and you may die”.

At first they try to claim they just got lost.
They meant to snorkel up another stream.
You have to have the truth at any cost.
Sometimes the answers might be what they seem.

Persuaded to reveal their true intent,
they say all humans merit being fried.
Beyond that, you have clues that they were sent
as cover for shenanigans inside.

So when an unnamed caller leaves a tip
that some employees plan a little raid,
you cancel reservations for their trip.
You find the damage, and repairs are made.

That would have happened had the plot gone well.
Your limited resources would be where
you found an intrigue and the schemers fell,
while something could be done that wasn’t there.

What really happens is you get two calls.
Two puzzle pieces weren’t where they belong.
Two groups of evil traitors take two falls.
The launch goes full ahead with nothing wrong.

If you were in the story in that role,
you’d never know what made these people spin
or how they harbored such a dreadful goal.
You’d only know they turned each other in.

You’d find out where they go and what they do.
Their lives would be your business from now on.
Their history and motives, though, to you
would be a mystery forever gone.

When you apprised your boss of what you’d heard,
you didn’t hear him as he fumed and stormed,
or know he was about to give you word
that he himself had just been so informed.

He couldn’t very well confirm the plot
because he didn’t know which one you knew.
He couldn’t tell you both because he thought
the one you didn’t know could still go through.

Your boss was to decide which team got nabbed.
Each unit had a fifty-fifty chance,
but both teams in the dorsal zone got stabbed
before your boss could kick one in the pants.

The fifty-fifty part they could accept
as long as the percentage stayed the same,
but once they thought the deal had not been kept,
they did not feel obliged to play the game.

So, whence the notion that the odds had changed?
Team A believed Team B was like Team A,
Team B believed the same, but rearranged,
and both extrapolated either way.

With perfect trust, the line would stay amid,
but nothing’s like that, and the slightest shift
will feed upon itself the way it did.
A gap in faith will widen to a rift.

The other guys are thinking much like us
while we are thinking, “Why not jump the gun?”
and we think that they’re thinking this way, thus
we do unto before we’re unto done.

Preemptively responding in reverse,
proactively reacting to the threat,
we’re all sure that the other guys are worse.
If we would do it, they would, you can bet.


©2010, 2016 Louis A. Merrimac