Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction

105

Dubnium

(262)

George "Dubna" Bush

Dubna is a small town situated where the Moscow Canal meets the Volga, a

two-hour train ride north of Moscow. Lushly pastoral in summer and

bleakly beautiful in winter, it is world famous as the home of the Joint

Institute for Nuclear Research. The citizens of Dubna are a warm and

welcoming lot. Their interests include music and folk dancing, the arts,

ice fishing, and wild mushroom hunting. Several new elements have been

created there, including dubnium, which is named after the town.

It is also the birthplace of George W. Bush, the forty-third president of

the United States.

Not many people know this story, but it's true. George H. W. Bush, a Navy

pilot in WWII and later the forty-first president, was recruited into the

OSS (the precursor organization to the CIA, of which he was later to

become director) while still in the service and then, when that

organization was canceled, handed off to an ad hoc intelligence group

headed by one of William Donovan's proteges. As a covert operative, Bush

was sent to Dubna, then a handful of dachas and an enormous construction

site, to negotiate with Stalin's representatives over matters that remain

classified to this day. With George went his young?and very

pregnant?wife, Barbara.

Why would anybody send a pregnant woman into the chaos of postwar Russia?

It helps to remember that Donovan's people had the reputation of being

"cowboys," more interested in playing spy than in serious analysis.

Apparently it was felt that Barbara Bush's presence would help disguise

the nature of the operation. But while in Dubna, Barbara went into labor

prematurely and, assisted only by a hastily summoned midwife, who spoke

not one word of English, gave birth to her first son. Anxious to secure

for his child all the benefits of his birthright as an American,

including the possibility of someday becoming president, George H. W.

Bush hushed up the incident. Later, as director of the CIA, he had his

people forge unimpeachable documentation that George W. had been born in

Connecticut.

Which makes George W. Bush the only president ever born behind the Iron

Curtain. So what if the Constitution says the president has to be

American-born? It's just a piece of paper! A technicality! Anyway, he's

president now, and there's nothing you can do about it.

You say you don't like it? What are you?some kind of Communist?

The End