Chapter 12

June 24

That Indian was right. Kerns was sure of it. He resolved to send a deli platter over to the observatory in thanks. Kerns had been up late into the night considering options and plotting stratagems. He had never plotted a stratagem before in his life for fear his wife would disapprove, but now he found he rather enjoyed it. For once, Kerns decided, he would stand up to his problems, and stand up for himself. Specifically, he would agree with everyone regardless of what they said. The more he thought about it, the more Kerns suspected that he could do this without even resorting to lies, which seemed an unscrupulous and cowardly way out. Kerns would find something in whatever was said to agree with, and simply ignore the rest.
The next time some one came to him and said that what the school really needed a 100-foot high statue of some long-dead Socialist revolutionary he'd never heard of, he wouldn't say "What the hell are you talking about? Get out of my office," as he'd so often been inclined to, or even "I'll have to think about it," as he actually had been saying. He'd say "I think it's a wonderful idea for the school to have a sense of history," and then try to change the subject. If pressed, he'd insist that the idea be brought before a board or group that would never agree. Since no board or group on campus ever agreed on anything, this did not figure to be a major challenge. When extreme measures were called for, Kerns would require the approval of the Special Intra-Campus Steering Committee, a group that was certain not to approve any plans, mostly on account of the fact that it didn't exist.
Only it did exist, Kerns reminded himself. A campus group exists once the paperwork has been filed and approved by a college officer. Kerns had submitted and approved the paperwork himself that very morning. Then he'd posted a note on the door to the group's designated meeting room stating that this month's meeting was cancelled, as were all future monthly meetings, until such time as a resolution to the contrary was raised during one of the Committee's meetings according to accepted rules of order. "Those with complaints," Kerns had added with a flourish, "are free to take them up with the group's president, who would be duly elected at the first meeting." As the Indian had suggested, Kerns could now pass the buck to someone who didn't exist. Kerns was, quite justly, proud. With these few simple precautions in place, he could be on record in agreement with anything and everything, with a virtual guarantee that nothing would come of it.
But then planning was the simple part. The bit would be dealing with his adversaries--the students and faculty of the college--in person. Such encounters would require tact, guile, and savvy, three skill sets Kerns had had little need to muck around with up to this point in his life. As daunting as all this was, Kerns knew it was best to get started right away. It already was well into June, and he needed to be ready when the full-fledged assault of students landed in September. Kerns asked the office secretary, a large woman named Janet with a fondness for days off, to schedule meetings with four of the student groups he'd been ducking. "Schedule them for this afternoon," he'd said. For the first time since his promotion, Kerns didn't dread going to a student group meeting. Out of habit, however, he did throw up.
It all started rather well. That afternoon Dean Kerns agreed with a group of three students who felt they were being badly exploited, a group of two who were sure that humanity was sewing the seeds of its own destruction, and a lone student who thought he deserved a better grade in Chemistry 212, mostly because he was being badly exploited and had been distracted the previous term by those who were sewing the seeds of his destruction. The meetings had gone swimmingly. Kerns had sat behind his desk, nodding gravely, and muttering "Yes, yes, I couldn't agree more," when given even the slightest opening. With everyone taking the same side of the debates, things had remained quite civil. And as an added benefit, the meetings had ended in record time. When each of the first two student groups filed out, Kerns implored them to keep up their important work. He referred the Chemistry student to the Academic Performance Sub-Committee of the Special Intra-Campus Steering Committee, and assured him that he'd throw the full weight of his office behind this vital effort.
The first real trouble came during the fourth and final meeting of the day, the administration's monthly conference with the Student Coalition Against Racism, who this month, as it happened, had some complaints they wished to air about racism. The Student Coalition Against Racism was a particularly powerful campus organization, and they had not taken kindly to Kerns' ducking their May meeting. Kerns had known they wouldn't like it of course, but he had concluded, perhaps correctly, that not showing up was better than showing up and saying the wrong thing, since this way at least they'd have to find him before they could hurt him. Smith had taken Kerns' place at the May meeting and now took a seat by his side for the June meeting. Smith's presence at past meetings, conferences, and informal chats only had added to Kerns' tension. But things had gone so well all afternoon that the Dean was anxious to show off his newfound administrative chops to someone who would understand their value. Smith might have been a weasel, Kerns thought, but the man had enviable political skills. Kerns suspected that Smith had never been on the wrong side of an argument in his life. Kerns further suspected that Smith had ever been on either side of an argument in his life. If a point was in debate, Smith was firmly on the side of abstention.
The Dean sat and listened through the meeting's early minutes, muttering "Yes, yes, you're right of course," and jotting down notes when it seemed like someone believed they had said something too important to be lost to the mists of time. Smith was shifting around uncomfortably in his chair. Kerns could tell he sensed the change in his boss. The Dean was beating Smith to the agree. Kerns was becoming confident. But unfamiliar as he was with confidence, he failed to note that even the smallest trace of confidence has a way of growing into a robust overconfidence. Eventually this overconfidence cost him. Kerns saw what on the surface appeared to be an ideal opportunity for agreement and fell right into a trap.
"By all means, I agree completely that the color of a person's skin doesn't have anything to do with intelligence or job performance," Kerns said triumphantly, and quite honestly. He had held off offering his own opinions all day, instead just agreeing with others. And in retrospect, perhaps he simply should have continued nodding his head and kept his mouth shut. But now everyone was looking at him, waiting for him to continue. So Kerns pressed on. "I mean, just look at Indian-Americans. Despite India's economic, social and political problems, within one generation of coming to the U.S. the average Indian family has a standard of living that's actually above that of the typical American family."
A hush fell over the room.
Then Smith's beeper sounded. "You're on your own," he whispered to Kerns, using the beeper as an excuse to bolt from the meeting.
"I have to find out how he gets his beeper to sound on command like that," Kerns thought. He'd seen Smith use the trick too often to believe it a coincidence. Kerns could see from the apoplectic expressions around the table that he'd done something wrong again. And indeed, for the next two hours he sat quietly, pretending to take notes as the meeting's participants questioned his data, mostly by shouting obscenities at him. But Kerns was learning.
This afternoon's mistake had taught him a very valuable lesson. Kerns almost smiled when he realized how far he'd come as an administrator in such a short time. Today's moral: don't try to offer facts or opinions. Only open your mouth to agree, and leave it at that. In the future, Kerns would compliment every person, group, and team he met on their remarkable achievements, even if they hadn't any. His only opinion would be complete support. After the meeting broke up, Kerns flipped his daily planner open to a page he had been using to record the pearls of wisdom that he had picked up in the past six weeks.
"1. Nothing is anyone's fault, unless it happens to be your fault" it read. "2. Anything referred to a student committee will result in inaction. Arrange for additional student committees. 3. If anyone ever asks you to give up a comfortable position for a powerful position, say no. If it really was a powerful position, they wouldn't be offering it to you. 4. Everyone's out to get you, except maybe the dog, who seems to be wavering." To this he added his latest observation. "5. Just agree with everything."
After a moment's thought, he added one more: "6. Get more advice from those who have helped in the past."

June 25

It had been two million years, give or take a few hundred millennia. Two million years since the piece of land that would eventually become Dana's home first poked its head above sea level. It must have been a very proud day for this lump of volcanic rock, considering how long it had taken to climb all the way up from the ocean floor. And it must have been something of a let down when the tide rose a few hours later and sent the nascent island back underwater. But then when you're a rock, you can afford to be patient.
The volcanic activity far below had just enough juice left to push three hundred feet higher before petering out, leaving behind a truly magnificent mountain thousands of feet in height as a testament to its immense power. Unfortunately, as only the very tip of this mountain was visible above the Pacific, and a marginally larger piece of rock existed just a short distance away, this monument of nature was destined to get saddled with the somewhat degrading handle "Lesser Morrell Island." Perhaps this name gave the island an inferiority complex. Perhaps some stone mounds just don't have greatness in them. Whatever the reason, this slab of stone had managed to escape the sort of attention and activity that had so marked the history of so many other, better known, locations.
True, the island did have two claims to fame, but neither was substantial enough to afford it any more notoriety than that earned by your average medical oddity or town named after a game show. The first of these marginally notable characteristics concerned the island's wildlife. The Lesser Morrell Island Uncommonly Clever Monkey generally was regarded as an extraordinarily intelligent species--perhaps the smartest monkey yet devised. The only ones to question these chimps' intellect were Lesser Morrell Island's human inhabitants, who liked to point out that they often had success trapping and eating the monkeys, whereas the monkeys only occasionally had success trapping and eating them. Such dissenting opinions aside, it's a well-known fact among medical researchers that if you have a group of monkeys from various monkey-producing countries assembled for a hazardous and painful medical-research assignment, most of the Lesser Morrell Island monkeys will figure out a way to get themselves assigned to the so-called "control group" where all they have to do is loll around downing placebos. Those that don't end up in the control group somehow wind up assigned to the research team.
The second of Lesser Morrell Island's second-rate claims to fame was cartographical. Or perhaps it was chronological. It all depended on how you looked at it, assuming you bothered to look at it at all, which most people, quite rightly, didn't. Owing to an oversight at the International Meridian Conference of 1884, Lesser Morrell Island was the only piece of land north of Antarctica bisected by the international dateline. This error could have been corrected, of course, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble, as the Lesser Morrell Islanders had never considered the dateline much of a bother. In fact, despite repeated attempts, they had never even been able to find the darn thing. The islanders eventually concluded that this so-called 'dateline' separating today from tomorrow was just a myth subscribed to by off-islanders. But the Lesser Morrell Islanders understood that people cling jealously to their myths, so they never argued. When an outsider mentioned the dateline, they would agree that it was treasured feature of their island, although difficult to see with the untrained eye. Then the Lesser Morrell Islanders would exchange a conspiratorial wink and offer to take the off-islander out scouting for this elusive prey, for a very reasonable fee.
The dateline anomaly was an interesting bit of trivia. But that and the cunning monkey thing still made for an embarrassingly brief listing in the annual Who's Who of Land Masses. In fairness, a four-square-mile patch of lava rock placed neatly in the middle of a rather sizable ocean never really had much of a chance to become a second Athens--or even a second Athens, Georgia. But one could not help but notice that Lesser Morrell Island had escaped even the fleeting glory afforded many of its fellow distant specs of earth. Tahiti and Bora Bora, for example, were known around the globe, and they were not so very much larger than Lesser Morrell Island. Easter Island had found a niche in the world of sculpture. Howland, Pitcairn, Bikini, Midway, they all had their pages in history. A cynic might conclude that Lesser Morrell Island had simply arrived on the scene two million years ago and then stopped trying.

The human history of Lesser Morrell Island, such as it was, began perhaps 4,000 years ago, when a boat full of natives from Greater Morrell Island lost its way in a storm. By chance, or perhaps by destiny if one believes in such things, these first Lesser Morrell Islanders stumbled upon the one small cove that allowed entry to the island from its otherwise prohibitively rocky coastline. These Lesser Morrell Islanders were amazed by what they found, but mostly this was because they were the sort to be easily amazed. In truth it was an island exactly like Greater Morrell Island, only populated by largish birds content to stroll about on land, blissfully unaware that other birds have shown a bit of initiative and taken to the skies. Within a few short years--the blink of an eye in historical terms--these new Lesser Morrell Islanders realized that such walking birds were easier to catch than the ones on Greater Morrell Island that insisted on flapping off at the slightest provocation. The natives decided to stay.
Of course the problem with flightless birds is that you never can eat just one. Within a generation, all the flightless birds were gone, and all the recipes for flightless bird casseroles were rendered useless. Unable to build any new flightless birds, the natives returned to fishing, which they had never particularly liked, on account of the fact they had a history of losing their way in storms, which is the sort of thing that sticks with you.
Every now and again throughout the succeeding millennia a group of men from outside the island would come by in a boat. Generally, such floating foreigners be intent on putting Lesser Morrell Island to use for their own purposes, perhaps as a home, a port, or just a nice vacation spot where one could wage war and rape any women or remaining flightless birds that might happen by. But thankfully, such occasions were rare. The island's challenging coastline helped the Lesser Morrell Islanders hold off their foes, most of whom would quickly give up and head off to Greater Morrell Island instead, where there was more to pillage, and the women were…well, let's just say if you had a few beads or a couple of nice, shiny shells there was hardly any need for rape.
But while life for the Lesser Morrell Islanders had stood virtually still, change was swirling all around them on the other islands of the Pacific. Technically speaking, every piece of land within thousands of miles had fallen under the control of the Portuguese in 1525, when a party of Portuguese ships in search of the Spice Islands wound up in completely the wrong place. Making the best of a bad situation, the Portuguese declared all the islands in the vicinity to be possessions of Portugal. This was their legal right since they had found them first, something they did their best to explain to the islands' inhabitants.
Historians will note that in declaring these new lands to be theirs these Portuguese were representative of a new, enlightened Europe. Earlier seafaring tradition had held that upon discovery of a piece of land you couldn't recognize, you simply declared it to be the place you'd been looking for in the first place. But the Portuguese were clever in the ways of the world, and within months realized that these couldn't be the Spice Islands, since they had no spices, just assorted fruits and lizards.
Eventually the Portuguese sailed on, never having set foot on the portion of their new territory now known as Lesser Morrell Island. As it happened, they never found the Spice Islands, either, as those islands had taken the sensible precaution of changing their name to Indonesia and telling any dangerous looking foreigners who happened by in search of spices that they should sail two weeks south, three weeks east, then stop and ask for directions. The Portuguese expedition fell for the ruse, as did the search party sent after them. This marked the beginning of the end of Portuguese sea power. For the next 500 years, the nation would be content to sit around growing overly sweet wine grapes and flaunting their power over the Azores.
Before long the Spanish took over the region from the Portuguese, their claim to the region resting on the long-established legal principle of just-try-and-stop-us. No one did try to stop them, since the rest of Europe was busy claiming other portions of the globe that had a bit more land to them. For their part, the local populations of the Pacific Islands didn't even realize the Spanish weren't Portuguese. To this day the people of the Pacific are said to consider the Spanish language to be poorly spoken Portuguese, whereas the rest of the world knows that it's actually Portuguese that's poorly spoken Spanish. But like the Portuguese, the Spanish never set foot on tiny Lesser Morrell Island, since there were so many other islands in the area that seemed more likely to contain huge piles of gold or, baring that, a nice fountain of youth.
From 1899 through 1914 the Germans were in control, but they never bothered to stop by and didn't keep up the payments, so between 1914 and 1945 things were run by the Japanese. The Japanese did have a more dramatic effect on the Pacific Islands than did their predecessors, what with thousands upon thousands of them moving in and driving up real estate values and golf-club membership costs. But since Lesser Morrell Island was much too mountainous for even a decent nine-hole course, the Lesser Morrell Islanders remained blissfully unaware that anyone but them considered the island theirs. After that unpleasantness in the 1940s cleared out the Japanese, the United Nations put the United States in charge of the area, as the UN itself was tied up with more important matters, such as deciding which day should be International United Nations Day.
Finally, in the late 1970s, the islands of the Pacific began teaming up to form nations themselves. These young nations didn't really get much attention on the world stage, since you can't have a good border dispute when you live on islands, and the press never really got itself very worked up over the short-lived macadamia-nut cartel. Still, on many of the islands in Lesser Morrell's neighborhood, this was a time of exciting progress. The people of the Island of Truk now saw that they wouldn't draw vacationers with a name like Truk--not when they were up against places with exciting names like Maui and Atlantic City. So they changed their name to Chuuk. Meanwhile on Nui they installed a phone. Eight years later, they installed another. Within months, the two were connected, and use skyrocketed. Wrong numbers were not a problem.
None of this change had much of an effect on Lesser Morrell Island, mostly because no one had bothered to tell them about it. The island's lack of a port suitable for large vessels, together with its uneven terrain disadvantageous to aircraft runways, had successfully curtailed interest by foreigners of all flavors. The Lesser Morrell Islanders had won the war against colonization without even knowing that it had been fought.
Only during World War II did any outside power show even the mildest of interest in Lesser Morrell Island, and that was just a token, half-hearted interest, something akin to the obligatory attention Rock Hudson paid his leading ladies. Specifically, the Japanese had stationed a single soldier on the island in 1941, not so much for any real strategic purpose, but rather out of a sense of punctiliousness for which the Japanese long have been known. The soldier, a raw recruit of 18, was ordered to defend this land with his life and to remain at his post even if it seemed obvious that the war had been over for decades and everyone had just forgotten to let him know, which, predictably enough, was how things turned out.
When the U.S. Marine Corps reclaimed the Pacific in a series of bloody battles in 1944, Lesser Morrell Island was overlooked by a careless admiral's aide who assumed it to be nothing more than a crumb from the tuna sandwich he was eating as he reviewed the map. Thus the island was spared from bloodshed, although it was left with a Japanese soldier who insisted on raiding the natives' food supplies every few weeks. The locals finally put a stop to this behavior in the 1960s by inviting the soldier to dinner. The man accepted, if only because it had been a long 20 years eating alone in the woods and he was interested to find out the news from the war and maybe some baseball scores. The Lesser Morrell Islanders, who didn't want to disappoint the soldier, and anyway knew a good opportunity for a practical joke when they saw one, told him the war was going well, but it figured to rage on for another decade or two.
Contented, the man returned to the woods, coming down only for dinner and later to publicize a book about his 40 years on Lesser Morrell Island. Tragically, the book didn't sell well, as it hit the market just months after four other books written by Japanese soldiers who was still fighting World War II on other islands, and a fifth by a soldier who was still fighting the Meiji Restoration of 1868. But this mattered little as Lesser Morrell Island's soldier died only weeks after his book's release, leaving all proceeds from his volume to the war effort.
Despite the poor book sales, the soldier came to be seen as a hero in Japan, one of the last of a great generation willing to do whatever they were told in the name of country and honor without a second thought, or for that matter, without much evidence of a first. The man's family was said to be extremely proud.
The people of Lesser Morrell Island hardly had stopped talking about the death of their soldier when fresh groups of outsiders began dropping by ten or twelve years later. First came missionaries. They were nice enough sorts, although the islanders did find them a bit preachy. And then came a new type of outsider that claimed not to be soldiers or missionaries. They were social activists, they explained, people of science and humanity who wished only to study the Lesser Morrell Islanders and their homeland. The Lesser Morrell Islanders suggested that if these people wanted to see something really interesting, they ought to go to Greater Morrell Island, where they had all kinds of neat stuff like electric lights and video poker. The outsiders said that wasn't the kind of thing that interested them. Lesser Morrell Island was more their speed, they insisted, since it hadn't been spoiled by foreigners. And after talking it over amongst themselves, the Lesser Morrell Islanders said, fine, come to our island and study us, but stay away from our sisters.

Dana had been on Lesser Morrell Island for three days, and the experience had been the greatest of her life, except maybe when it was too hot. Which, thus far, had been always. And the dateline expedition she'd agreed to had been a bit of a bust. But Dana had come into this with her eyes open: social activism was like art films or tofu. You didn't expect to enjoy it, you just did it to prove that you're one of those people who enjoy such things.
There had been something of an altruistic rush to the island in the past year or two, as a wide range of social crusaders had swept down on one of the few remaining places on the globe still untouched by outsiders. Environmentalists and social crusaders, like antiques dealers and classic car collectors, like things in unaltered condition. It's a tenet of the social activist belief system that separates them rather markedly from, say, industrialists and property developers, who tend to argue that improvements are, well, improvements. Each side can site precedent to defend its position. On the one hand, advances in technology, medicine, and agriculture have helped improve the lives of billions. On the other, without traditional, unspoiled peoples and places, there's a good chance the world would have lost the simple joys of beetle eating and animism.
Lesser Morrell Island's phalanx of activists included Jeff Tabac, tall and thin, forever forced to duck through the island's low doors and under tree branches. Jeff had spent much of the past year under tent roofs, and now stood with a permanent hunch even when in the relatively roomy outdoors. With the financial backing of a well-known international organization, Jeff had started Lesser Morrell Island's first environmental program. When he feared that he wasn't doing enough, he had started three others.
Jeff's closest friend was Tommy Binder. Tommy was an ordinary man, unspectacular in appearance and uninspired in intellect. He was, simply put, extra-ordinary--or he would have been, if that term hadn't already been employed to describe quite the opposite. Tommy might well have been the most ordinary man who had ever lived, and he hoped that this might count as something exceptional, although deep down in his ordinary soul he knew it didn't. Tommy was the island's most recent arrival, Dana aside, a fact that had left him a bit over-eager to fit in, which, of course, further reduced his chances of actually doing so. Tommy had been sent to the island to start a literacy program. He also had started an island anti-litter campaign, mostly because Jeff had misread his sign-up sheet for literacy volunteers and Tommy hadn't wanted to disappoint him.
It had been a productive partnership. Together, Jeff and Tommy had reduced the litter problem on Lesser Morrell Island by nearly 100%. Jeff had noted that the main source of litter on the island was all the printed reading materials that Tommy passed out as part of his literacy campaign. In a bold pre-emptive strike on litter, Jeff had Tommy stop handing out reading materials.
Then there was Laura Pressinger, an energetic, driven woman who would have been perfectly described by the term "perky," except that she preferred terms like "energetic" and "driven," made it a point to be involved with every vital cause on the island. She was regional president of, and received funding from, no fewer than 10 different social activism organizations. And although she was rumored to be the sole member of at least eight of the local chapters of those ten groups, the others admired her skills in juggling so many leadership responsibilities and the boundless commitment it reflected.
Brent Gonner was a hydroelectric engineer on the island to construct a dam for a group known as Power to the People. The other activists thought Brent might be a bit conceited, perhaps because his hydrological engineering degree meant that he could be making big money somewhere else. In truth, Brent wasn't a very good hydrological engineer, and probably could not have been. But he saw no reason for the others to know this, and went right on acting a bit conceited, peering questioningly over the top of his wire rim glasses whenever someone said something with which he might or might not agree.
No one was quite sure what organization had funded Sarah Skeller's stay on Lesser Morrell Island. But everyone knew her focus. Sarah had created--and named herself the head of--three groups, each of which strove to foment political revolution among the island's natives. It isn't an easy thing to foment political revolution in a place that contained no politics, so Sarah's task was not an easy one.
First Sarah had tried to form a local cell of the Communist party. For a week, she had marched around the small native village with a Chinese flag and Mao jacket. When she stopped marching, she told the local people that they must give her everything they had and let her decide who deserved what. To Sarah’s dismay, this plan had drawn little support from the proletariat. So Sarah turned to Socialism, and told the Lesser Morrell Islanders they should at least turn over half of what they had. As socialists, they wouldn't even be required to march around the village, except maybe once a year on May Day. But still Sarah sensed reluctance. In desperation she had started a local chapter of the Democratic party and begged the villagers to give her at least some of their possessions, in exchange for which she would make promises she couldn't possibly keep but otherwise would stay more-or-less out of their way. Taking pity, or perhaps just anxious to shut Sarah up, the natives had agreed, and given her four pieces of fruit and a carved bowl. In return, Sarah promised that she would take care of the old, the sick, and the needy. She then went home and ate the fruit. It was a small victory, but an important one in that it set a precedent. In four years, Sarah would be able to return and demand even more fruit and carved bowls.
Finally, there was Doctor Mudgett. He ran only one organization, the hospital, and that wasn't really an activist group so much as it was, well, a hospital. The doctor thus received little respect from the other more active members of the local political community. Still, Mudgett was allowed to join the others in their get togethers, partly out of sense of inclusiveness, but mostly because his tent was the only one large enough to fit the whole group. Every now and then Sarah made noises about liberating the tent from Mudgett's possession. It would have been for the common good, most agreed, but such a move would have risked alienating the doctor and thereby cutting off the region's supply of recreational pharmaceuticals.
Besides, Mudgett was a big bear of a man with a mean-looking beard who the others were not very anxious to cross. The doctor had such an ursine presence that Jeff, who had once spent three months protecting the grizzlies in the Canadian north, until he had been quite badly mauled, felt a subconscious need to defend Mudgett…as well as a very conscience fear that the doctor one day would rip him to shreds. Adding to Jeff's fear was the unavoidable fact that Mudgett had been on Lesser Morrell Island longer than anyone apart from the Morrell Islanders; the long-term island confinement, it seemed, had begun to drain away the physician's finite supply of sanity.
Dana wondered how she could fit in. Her trip to the middle of the Pacific had been arranged so quickly that no one had bothered to worry about what she might do whilst there. Dana's original mandate, to help distribute food to the impoverished people of Spanish Guyana, did not apply as well here on Lesser Morrell Island. These natives were by all appearances extremely well fed. And, as it happened, Dana had no food to distribute. In fact, she could only hope that the natives could spare some of their food for her.
This was not her first problem, however. Before Dana could worry about her mandate or the possibility that she might starve, she had to establish herself among the island's activists. The others were not be anxious to accept another outsider into their territory, particularly when that outsider represented One Planet, an organization so large and successful at fund raising that it was roundly despised by smaller, lesser known groups that were trying to save the world in exactly the same ways. Fortunately, Dana had a trump card. She recently had been held in a South American prison. Or, at very least, in a South American airport conference room, which under the circumstances would have to do. For an activist, there are few better coups than a good stretch of South American imprisonment. There were social activists who took their vacations in South America then loitered and jay-walked with abandon just to have some South American jail time on their resumes. The only thing more impressive was to be killed for a cause, but that was a bit drastic as career moves go.
"Great, just what this island needs, another foreigner," the first fellow activist Dana came across on Lesser Morrell Island had said. Dana would later learn that he was Tommy, an insecure man who had arrived only a week earlier. "I suppose you're an expert on Lesser Morrell Island?"
"I'm afraid not," Dana responded, ready to try out her trump card. "I've been a bit out of the loop--I was only released from a South American prison a few days ago."
The man simply dropped his head and wandered off, defeated, wishing he, too, could have been imprisoned by a repressive government.
This conversation was repeated along more-or-less the same lines with each new activist and environmentalist Dana happened across. One or two mentioned that they, too, had been unjustly imprisoned, for chaining themselves to gates in Arizona or creating a nuisance in Washington or unpaid parking tickets in New Jersey. But their stories fell short and they knew it. Left no other option, Dana's peers accepted her into their community. Dana was allotted a cot in one of the four army-surplus canvas pup tents that the activists had raised on bamboo platforms a few hundred yards up the coast from the natives' village, informed that Tuesday would be her day to prepare the meals, and warned not to bother with any Gilligan's Island jokes, since that's what everyone else had done when they first arrived and now they were all pretty much sick of them, especially the natives, who had never found the show very compelling in the first place.
With the introductions out of the way, all Dana had to do was determine how best to improve this corner of the world. At least she had choices. The six activists who had preceded her already had started at least 20 social, environmental, and political organizations and initiatives. It spoke to the drive and commitment of these activists that they had launched more than three organizations apiece in such short order. The natives themselves had started no organizations in the many millennia that they had been here, Dana noted, purely for the sake of comparison, not because she thought it reflected negatively on them. It was simply their way, and it was not Dana's place to criticize. Fortunately, the activists were now there to make things right.