For Your Eye Only
Dr. Malenkov didn't keep us waiting long:
NO PEOPLE ON LONDON EYE AT MIDNITE
OK TO TURN BUT EMTY, NO PEOPLE ON IT
With all four nukes finally accounted for, the mood quickly turned festive. There were cheers and hugs and high-fives and hearty handshakes all around. They congratulated each other as if they had actually accomplished something, although as far as I could tell it was Yuri and Dr. Malenkov who had done all the work.
After only a few minutes of celebrating, Sheldon barked a reminder that they still had work to do, and they all got busy on their phones and laptops. Although the conversations still had a sense of urgency, the general mood was noticeably more relaxed than it had been earlier in the day. Expressions were determined, but not grim. Voices were insistent, but not raised. After all, this wasn't the first time they had called a foreign capital to urge the government to cancel their millennium celebration. And to make it even easier, this time everyone on the other end of the line spoke English.
(The London Eye, by the way, is the 450-foot Ferris wheel on the bank of the Thames that was scheduled to take its inaugural spin at midnight on New Year's Eve. I later read that 250 people had been invited to be the ride's first passengers. Some of them had won a British Airways contest and had been flown to London just to participate in the once-in-a-millennium ride. But at the last minute, the big wheel's operators, citing "safety concerns," disappointed the ticket holders and canceled the event.[7])
My visitors started collecting their belongings even before they stopped talking on their phones – in fact, some of them were still engaged in multiple conversations as they walked through my front door and out of my life. A few of them stopped to shake my hand and to say goodbye. My old buddy Sheldon barely had time for a few perfunctory parting words as he stuffed papers into his briefcase and juggled two cell phones. A pair of minivans screeched up my driveway (they must have been parked nearby, although I hadn't seen them in the neighborhood), the agents scrambled in, the vans backed out and zoomed away.
And just like that, it was over. The new millennium wasn't even going to start for another six hours, but Sheldon and I had already saved the world.
And all I had to show for it was a cigarette burn in my carpet and a bowl full of chicken cacciatore in my freezer.
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©2007 Henry Charles Mishkoff