She said placidly, "I didn't hear you mention that little fox from Puget."
" 'Specially her! I mean them. Look how far away they come!"
"Not so far they haven't been eating us out of house and home two weeks, over there to Blair House. I notice you spend a lot of time negotiating with her."
"You think you know a lot, but you don't know nearly as much as you think," the President said cuttingly, but he was pleased with the interruption when his Chief Science Advisor came in the door, shaking himself, dripping mud as he got out of his oilskin slicker. "Well, Harry?" the President demanded. "What did they say?"
The Vice President moved the good pillows to one side so Harry could sit down on the couch. "It's terrible out there," he complained. "Anybody got a dry cigarette?" The President threw him a sack of makings, and Harry dried his fingers on his shirt front before he started to roll one. "Well," he said, licking the paper, "I went to every boat captain I could find. They all said the same. Ships they talked to, places they'd been. All the same. Tides are higher than they've ever been, all up and down the coast. They don't think they're rising much anymore, but they're way high already."
He looked around for a match. The President's wife handed him a gold cigarette lighter with the Great Seal of the United States on it, which, after some effort, he managed to ignite. "It don't look really good to me, Jim. Right now it's low tide, and that's all right, but it's coming in. Even if the tides don't come up higher, there's going to be storms. Not just rains like this, I mean, but you got to figure on a tropical depression coming up from the Bahamas now and then, these next few months."
"We're not in the tropics," the Secretary of State said suspiciously.
"It doesn't mean that," said the Science Advisor, who had once given the weather reports over the local Top Forty FM radio station, back when there were FM stations and charts to be in the Top Forty of. "It means storms. Maybe hurricanes, coming up the coast from the Bahamas. Maybe the ice has stopped melting, who knows about that? But even if the water doesn't come up any higher, it sure isn't going to go down any lower, and any little piss-ant storm could have us swimming."
The President drummed his fingers on the coffee table, which was glass-topped, covering photographs of F.D.R., Ronnie Reagan, Harry Truman, and about six other ex-Presidents surrounding his own image. It often soothed him, but not this time. Suddenly he shouted: "I don't want to move my capital!"
No one answered. His temper outbursts were famous. The Vice President became absorbed in counting stitches, the Secretary of State picked up his cards and began to shuffle, the Science Advisor got up to retrieve his slicker and hang it carefully on the back of a door.
The President said, "You got to figure it this way. If we move out, then all those local yokels that claimed to be a President are going to look just that much better on their own turf, and the eventual reunification of our nation is going to be just that much more delayed." He moved his lips for a moment, and then burst out, "I don't ask nothing for myself! I never have. I only want to play the part I have to play in what's good for all of us, and that means keeping up my position as the real President, according to the U.S. Constitution as amended. And that means I got to stay right here in the real White House, no matter what."
His wife said hesitantly, "Honey, how about this? The other Presidents had like a Summer White House, and Camp David, and like that. Nobody fussed about it. Why couldn't you do the same as they did? We could pick out one of those old farm houses by Fairfax and fix it up real pretty."
The President looked at her with surprise. "Now, that's good thinking," he declared. "Only we can't move permanently, and we have to keep this place garrisoned so nobody will take it away from us, and we have to make sure of title."
"Oh, there's good titles to those places I have," the Secretary of State assured him hastily.
"I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to Harry. We have to come back here once in a while to show we own it, so is there going to be any problem there?"
The Science Advisor said thoughtfully, "We could rent some boats, I guess, if we couldn't get the horses in."
"No 'guess'! No 'if'!" the President yelled, looking at his Chief Science Advisor with irritation. "That's a national priority. We have to do it that way to keep those bastards in the rest of the country paying attention to the real President."
"Well, Jimbo, honey," said the Vice President after a moment, emboldened by recent praise, "you have to admit they don't pay a lot of attention to us right now. When was the last time they paid their taxes?"
The President looked foxily at her over his glasses. "Talking about that," he said, "I might have a little surprise for them anyway. What you might call a secret weapon."
"I hope it does better than we did in the last war," said his wife, "because if you remember, when we started to put down that uprising in Frederick, Maryland, we got the pee kicked out of us."
The President stood up, indicating the Cabinet meeting was over.
"Never mind," he said sunnily. "You go on out again, Harry, and see if you can find any good maps in the Library of Congress where they got the fires put out. Find us a nice high place within, um, twenty miles if you can—if it happens to belong to somebody we know, we'll get an appropriation for it. Otherwise we'll get the Army to condemn us a Summer White House, like Mae says, and maybe I can sleep in a bed that isn't moldy for a change."
Alerted by his tone, his wife looked suddenly worried. "Jimbo, what are you going to do?"
He chuckled. "I'm just going to check out my secret weapon."
He shooed them out of his study and, when they were gone, went to the little kitchen and got himself a bottle of Fresca from the sixpack in the open refrigerator. It was warm, of course. The Marine guard company was still trying to get the gas generators in operation, but they were having very little success. The President didn't mind. They were his personal Praetorians. If they lacked a little as appliance repairmen, they had proved their worth when the chips were down. The President was always aware that during the Troubles after the bolt from Alpha Centauri he had been no more than any other Congressman—appointed to fill a vacancy, at that— and his rapid rise to whip, majority leader, Speaker of the House and heir apparent, finally to the presidency itself, was due not only to his political skills and merits, but also to the fact that he was the only remotely legitimate heir to the presidency who also happened to be the brother-in-law of the commander of Washington's Marine garrison.
The President was, in fact, quite satisfied with the way the world was going. If he envied Presidents of the past (missiles, fleets of nuclear bombers, billions of dollars to play with), he certainly saw nothing in the present, when he looked at the world around him, that surpassed his own stature in the world he lived in. Oh, there were places where improvements could be made—the Science Advisor was a loser, and his brother-in-law had been better as a Marine major than he was as a Secretary of Defense. But he had plans for making improvements.
He finished his soda, opened his study door a crack, and peered out.
No one was nearby. He slipped out and down the back stairs.
In what had once been the public parts of the White House, you could see the extent of the damage more clearly. After the riots and the trashings and the burnings and the coups, the will to repair and replace had gradually dwindled away. The President didn't mind. He didn't even notice the charred walls and the fallen plaster. He was listening to the sound of a distant gasoline pump chugging away, and smiling to himself as he approached the underground level where his secret weapon was locked up.