The Presidential election of 1972 brought a landslide of votes for the Democratic candidate, Lester Murdock. The Republican candidate, Neal Ten Eyck, demanded a recount of the votes, as was by then the custom of the loser in an election. Ten Eyck's request was, however, not granted, due to a certain plank in Murdock's political platform. Murdock's prime contention was for a return to Real Democracy, a thing possible among such a widely scattered population because of the enormous advances in electronic communications. Murdock insisted that his vote-by-machine plank must have its chance to be put into effect, first, and then Ten Eyck could have his recount, one which could not be further gainsaid.
The country was strongly behind Murdock in his insistence on this point, all the thoughtful voters being oversated with what news agencies referred to as the "crybaby" attitude of political losers. In vain did Ten Eyck protest the plan.
"It will not be a recount," he deplored, in a nationwide television speech. "It will be a brand-new election, involving me, the candidate who has had no chance to perform, and Mr. Murdock, the candidate who will already have fulfilled a major campaign promise!" Ten Eyck's words went unheeded, as he had gloomily suspected they would, and all across the nation, automatic vote-machines were installed, to the amount of one machine per hundred citizens. When a disgruntled Ten Eyck refused outright to even have his name flashed on the ballot-screens, Murdock changed the initiation of the new machines to a simple Vote-of-Confidence Ballot, and received a ninety percent return, ten percent being either undecided or abstaining. Ten Eyck, shortly afterward, resigned from politics and retired to a ranch in the Pacific Northwest, to write his memoirs. A severe electrical storm in that area set fire to the house when he was just short of completing his manuscript, and every last page was destroyed. Ten Eyck himself was away at the time, and declared, in an interview with reporters just outside the blazing house to which he had returned on hearing of the disaster, that he was also retiring from the field of literature.
News of the storm and fire only became more support for a secondary plank in Murdock's platform, weather control. He was glad of the opportunity the fire had given him to move smoothly into this next facet of national development, and his intimates informed newsmen—not for publication—that Murdock was secretly glad to have his program "rise like a phoenix from Ten Eyck's fire."
This phase of his three-plank platform proved quite troublesome. The most learned scientists of the world informed him that weather could, indeed, be influenced by the detonation of nuclear weapons in strategic locales, but so far, the influence was all to the bad. The three new radiation belts developed since 1961 were doing unexpected things to the balance of the ionosphere, and this in turn was affecting the jet streams high in the atmosphere, with a consequent unpredictability as to prevailing movements of large air masses over the globe. In short, the weather had become prankish, balky, and not a little ferocious in parts, with longer, colder winters, manic-depressive summers, and a gradual disappearance of the spring and fall seasons altogether. Ordinary grounding devices, such as lightning rods in rural areas, were no longer sufficient conductors for the wild electrical potentials building up in air and soil, because of the increased activity of free electrons in the atmosphere. A mild storm did not exist, anymore. The norm had become intense blankets of snow, or torrents of rain, and a continued rise in wind velocities and destruction by lightning.
"The time has come," Murdock therefore addressed the nation in his State-of-the-Union speech, "to stop talking about the weather, and do something about it!" What he proposed doing, in view of the scientists' disclaimer to be able to control, even slightly, the crescendoing perils of wind and water, was to develop a form of housing that would be impervious to the weather. "When there are too many flies to swat," he said, in his famous concluding line, "you put up windowscreens!"