Scene 1
(Henderson Mayor Clem Seifert is seated in the cockpit of a spaceship. His feet are propped up on the dashboard as he speaks into the computer, making his last log entry before going into suspended animation.)
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Seifert: Somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than the weak mayor system of municipal government. (He takes out his gavel, fondles it lovingly, and stows it in a pocket of his spacesuit.) If Dave Stallings’ theories of good government are correct, then there’s a new City Council in Henderson. I wonder, is it better, or just different? Have council members themselves changed as a breed? (He roles up his sleeve and give himself a shot. He roles down his sleeve, flips some switches, and lies down on his cold-sleep couch.) Somewhere. Maybe on Planet Oxford. (His eyes flutter closed as he falls asleep.) Scene 2 (Seifert’s spaceship, the H.S.S. Search Committee, crash lands in a large saline lake. Seifert and his companion astronauts, former council members John Wester and Michael Rainey awake groggily and sit up in their bunks.) Wester: Where are we? Rainey: When are we? |
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Seifert: (Seifert checks the display screen). It’s 2,000 years in the future! Harriette, did you hear that? Harriette, are you ok? (He listens for a response.) Harriette? (Seifert slowly rises and looks in former council member Harriette Butler’s bunk.) Oh, my God! She’s dead! (He turns away.) There was an air leak. She died in her sleep. Rainey: Amazing. She doesn’t look any different. Wester: We’re in the water! Somebody radio Earth Tech and tell them to get Mike Hicks to take care of this! (Bolts begin to pop as water leaks into the cabin of the spaceship.) Seifert: Abandon ship! (The astronauts scramble from the spaceship into a rubber raft.) Rainey: Going… Going… Gone. Damn. And I just put recaps on her. Seifert: Well, boys, it looks like we’re here to stay. (The astronauts row to shore. There is nothing but garbage strewn around a desert wasteland as far as the eye can see. Wester plants a small flag of Henderson near the lake, propping it up with hubcaps, assorted broken masonry, and old bicycle parts.) Seifert: This has got to be the ETJ. Let’s get out of here before we get hurt. Scene 3 (Seifert, Wester, and Rainey have been wandering through the ETJ for three days in search of civilization.) Rainey: Mayor! Come here! (The astronauts come running to see part of a city ordinance half-buried in the sand.) Where there’s one, there’s another, and another, and another. Seifert: Let’s go find them. Scene 4 (The astronauts come across a gigantic City Hall oasis. Parched, they strip off their clothes and dive into the waterfall and lake created by the leaky faucet in the men’s room. While they swim, shadowy figures steal their uniforms and supplies discarded on the shore and tear them to bits. Wester spots them, but he is too late.) Wester: Mayor! Mayor! Look! (They give chase to the shadowy figures who run, tossing mangled bits of their equipment as they go. Seifert picks up the broken pieces of his gavel and looks at them fondly before casting them aside. Seifert, Wester, and Rainey follow the trail of ruined clothing and equipment to a gigantic outdoor open council chamber where council-people, town fathers, aldermen, and the like, with their suits in rags and name placards hanging around their necks, forage for documents. The astronauts tie the rags of their ruined clothing around themselves.) Seifert: If this is the best they’ve got, you two’ll be voted back into office in no time. (All the foraging activity of the council-people suddenly stops. A few seconds later, the whirring sound of a ballot card optical scanner is heard from the tree line. The council-people cut and run and Seifert, Wester, and Rainey follow, darting in different directions as they realize they are flanked on each side. The hunt begins. From Seifert’s point-of-view, we see that the hunters are city employees on horseback, armed with pens, ledgers, stamps, laptop computers, zip drives, floppy disks, and fully loaded filing cabinets. Each item has “City of” written on it, but Seifert can’t see the last word. During the hunt, Rainey takes a stapler to the back of the neck and is killed. Wester is caught in a net made of accounting ledgers and is captured when he becomes entangled. Seifert almost gets away, but is hit in the neck with a fountain pen. As he passes out, the scene fades to black. ) To be continued… What will happen to Clem and his intrepid gang of politicos? Find out next week in Planet of the Bureaucrats, Part II! |
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