The intersection erupted in a sheet of flame. The explosion blew out the western end of the lumberyard, leveled the Tastee-Freez, knocked out all of Wesley’s windows, and demolished his garage. Wesley suffered two broken arms and a mass of cuts and burns, but he survived.
One of the few pieces of Randy’s vehicle that came through more or less intact was a vanity plate that read UFO.
Traffic was so heavy that Max decided to do something about it. In the morning he contacted Bill Davis at Blue Jay Air Transport outside Grand Forks and scheduled a helicopter pickup service. They established an operating schedule among Fort Moxie, Cavalier, Devil’s Lake, and Johnson’s Ridge.
Matthew R. Taylor had come to the White House by a circuitous route. His father had run a candy store in Baltimore, which had provided a meager existence for Matt and his six siblings. But the old man had provided his kids with one priceless gift: He’d encouraged them to read, and he didn’t bother too much about the content, subscribing to the theory that good books ultimately speak for themselves.
By the time he was nineteen, Taylor had devoured the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and a wide array of modern historians. He was also a decent outfielder in high school and at Western Maryland University. In 1965 he went to Vietnam. During his second patrol he took a bullet in the hip. Doctors told him he would not walk again, but he had stayed with a six-year-long program of therapy and now needed only a cane to get around the White House. Eventually, of course, the cane would become a symbol of the man and his courage.
He married his nurse and invested his money in a car wash, which failed, and in a fast-food outlet, which also failed.
Taylor was never very good at business, but he was scrupulously honest, and he was always willing to help people in the community who got in trouble. During the mid-seventies, when he was working as a clothing clerk at Sears Roebuck, he allowed himself to be persuaded to run for the county highway commission by people who thought they could control him.
He proved to be a surprisingly shrewd steward of the public money. Before he was done, several county officials and a couple of contractors were in jail, costs were down, and the road system had improved dramatically.
Taylor was elected to the House in 1986 and to the Senate eight years later. He chaired the ethics committee and introduced a series of reforms that brought him national prominence and the vice presidency. But within sixty days after his accession to office, a stroke incapacitated the chief executive, and Taylor became acting president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. He was subsequently elected in his own right.
The country loved Matt Taylor as they had no other president since FDR. He was perceived by many as a new Harry Truman. He possessed several of Truman’s finest characteristics: an unbending will when he believed he was right, uncompromising integrity, and a willingness to say what he meant in plain English. This latter tendency sometimes got him in trouble, as when he offhandedly remarked within the hearing of journalists that it might be prudent, during the visit of a certain Middle Eastern potentate, to hide the White House silver.
Taylor explained his solid ratings by saying that the American people understood that he did what he thought was right, and to hell with the polls. “They like that,” he would say. “And when they reach a point where they don’t trust my judgment anymore, why, they’ll turn me out. And good riddance to the old son of a bitch.”
The president’s political alarms over the North Dakota business had been sounding all winter. His advisors had told him not to worry. It was just a crop circle flap, the sort of thing to stay away from, to deflect at press conferences. A chief executive who starts talking about flying saucers is dead. No matter what happens, he is dead. That was what they said. So he had kept away from it, and now it was blowing up. The stock market today had dropped 380 points.
“They’re already calling it Black Wednesday,” said Jim Samson, his treasury secretary. Samson was now trying to pretend he’d been warning the President all along to take action.
It was a turbulent time. There were six wars of strategic interest to the United States being fought with varying degrees of energy, and another fifteen or so hotspots. Famine was gaining, population growth everywhere was shifting into overdrive, and the UN had all but given up the dream of a new world order. The American transition from an industrialized economy to an information economy was still creating major dislocations. Corruption in high places remained a constant problem, and the splintering of the body politic into fringe groups that would not talk to each other continued. On the credit side, however, the balance of trade looked good; the long battle to reduce runaway deficits was finally showing positive results; racism, sexism, and their attendant evils seemed to be losing ground; drug use was way down; and medical advances were providing people with longer and healthier lives. Perhaps most important for a politician, the media were friendly.
The truth was that Matt Taylor could not take credit for the latter trends any more than he could be blamed for the former. But he knew that whatever else happened, he had to have a strong economy. If he lost that, the dislocations accompanying the evolution through which the western world was now passing were going to get a lot worse. He could not allow that. He was not going to stand by and watch hordes of homeless and unemployed reappear on the American scene. No matter what it took.
“A blip,” Tony Peters said. “These things happen.”
Peters was chairman of the president’s Fiscal Policy Council. He was also an old ally, with good political instincts. Of the people who had come up with him from Baltimore to the White House, no one enjoyed a greater degree of Taylor’s confidence.
“Tony,” the president said, “it’s only a blip if there’s nothing to it. What happens if they really have a metal up there that won’t break down or wear out?”
“I agree,” said Samson. “We need to find out what the facts are here.”
Peters frowned. “As I understand it, Mr. President, it’s not a metal.”
“Whatever.” Taylor pushed back in his chair and folded his arms. “They can make sails out of it. And they can make buildings. The issue is, what happens to the manufacturing industries if they suddenly get materials to work with that don’t break down periodically?” He shook his head. “Suppose people buy only one or two cars over a lifetime. What does that mean to GM?” He took off his glasses and flung them on the desk. “My God,” he said, “I don’t believe I’m saying this. All these years we’ve been looking for a way to beat the Japanese at this game. Now we have it, and it would be a catastrophe.”
Taylor was short and stocky. He wore nondescript ties and well-pressed suits that were inevitably last year’s fashion.
“Mr. President,” said Peters, “it’s all tabloid stuff. No one is going to be able to mass-produce supermaterials.”
“How do you know? Have we looked into it?”
“Yes. Everybody I’ve talked to says it can’t happen.”
“But we have samples.”
“We saw a lot of lightning before we learned how to put it into a wall switch. What we need to do is get everybody’s mind off this thing. Pick one of the wars, or the Pakistani revolution, and start sounding alarms.”
There was this about Tony Peters: He was the only person Taylor had ever known who seemed to understand what drove economies, and who could make that insight clear to others. He also knew the Congress, the power brokers, and the deal makers. He was an invaluable aide to an activist president. But Taylor knew his chairman’s limits. To Peters, experience was everything. One learned from it and applied its lessons succinctly, and one could never go far wrong. But what happened when you ran into a problem that transcended anything you’d seen before? What good was experience then?