The Business, As Usual

audiobook

The Business, As Usual

by Jack Sharkey

EN·~16 minutes·1 chapter

Chapters

1 total

Part 1

16:16

Description

A clandestine meeting in the Oval Office sets the stage for a darkly comic look at Cold‑War politics. When the U.S. Air Force unveils a radar‑invisible aircraft, the nation’s top officials scramble to find a purpose for the unprecedented weapon—one that lets them flaunt power without sparking open conflict. Their back‑and‑forth, peppered with bureaucratic jargon and weary sarcasm, reveals a government more concerned with optics than strategy.

The solution they settle on is as absurd as it is unsettling: deploying a single, specially trained operative to showcase the plane’s capabilities while sowing confusion among rival powers. As the plan unfolds, the story balances razor‑sharp wit with a chilling glimpse into the machinery that turns espionage into theater, inviting listeners to question the fine line between deterrence and provocation.

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Details

Language

en

Duration

~16 minutes (15K characters)

Publisher of text edition

Project Gutenberg

Credits

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Release date

2016-03-13

Rights

Public domain in the USA.

About the author

Jack Sharkey

Jack Sharkey

1931–1992

A wildly prolific American writer, he moved easily between stage farce and science fiction, building a career that included more than eighty plays as well as dozens of speculative short stories and novels. His work has a lively, idea-driven energy that helped him stand out in both theater and genre fiction.

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