“What do you weigh now?” Arthur asked. The car moved out into watery sunlight. Snow threatened.
“I’m back to fighting trim. I weigh what I weighed in high school. Graduation day.”
“What’s the prognosis?”
Harry crossed his arms. “Still fighting.”
Arthur glanced at him, did a frank double take, and asked, “Is that a wig?”
“You guessed it,” Harry said. “Enough of that shit. Tell me about Ormandy.”
The wide double doors to the Oval Office opened and three men stepped out. Schwartz nodded at them. Arthur recognized the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Secretary of the Treasury.
“An emergency meeting,” Schwartz murmured after they had passed. Hicks raised his eyebrow in query. “They’re thinking of implementing Section 4 of the Emergency Banking Act, and Section 19a of the Securities and Exchange Act.”
“What are those?” he asked.
“Temporarily close the banks and the stock exchanges,” Schwartz said. “If the President makes his speech.”
The President’s secretary, Nancy Congdon, came to the doors and smiled at the four of them. “Just a few minutes, Irwin,” she said, silently easing them shut.
“Do you need a chair?” Schwartz asked Harry. Harry shook his head calmly. He was already used to people being solicitous. He takes it with something beyond dignity — with aplomb.
The secretary opened the doors and invited them in.
Mrs. Hampton had redecorated the President’s office, hanging the three windows behind the President’s large, ornately decorated desk with white curtains and ordering a new oval green rug with the presidential seal. The room seemed filled with light, verdant and springlike despite the gray winter skies outside. Through the windows, Arthur caught a glimpse of the snow-patched Rose Garden. He had last been in the Oval Office a year and a half before.
Crockerman sat behind the Victorian-era desk, looking over a stack of briefs tucked into brown folders. Some of the folders, Arthur noticed, were marked DIRNSA — Director, National Security Agency. Others were from the offices of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. He’s not going off half cocked. He’s preparing, and he deeply believes in what he’s doing. He hasn’t stopped being presidential.
“Hello, Irwin, Arthur…” Crockerman stood and reached across the desk to shake their hands. “Trevor, Harry.” He pointed to the four leather-bottomed, cane-backed chairs arranged before the desk. Addressing Hicks in particular, he said, “Sarah mentioned I might be meeting with you.”
“I think we’ve all joined forces, Mr. President,” Schwartz said.
“Are you feeling up to this, Harry?” Crockerman asked, politely solicitous.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Harry replied smoothly. “I’m not needed back with the mice and monkeys until the day after tomorrow.”
“We need you here, Harry,” the President said earnestly. “We can’t afford to lose you now.”
“That’s not what I’ve been hearing, Mr. President,” Harry said. Crockerman showed some puzzlement. “You haven’t been listening to anybody I trust around here, much less myself.”
“Gentlemen,” Crockerman said, raising his eyebrows. “Time to speak openly. And I apologize for being inaccessible recently. Time has been precious.”
Schwartz leaned forward on his chair, clasping his hands. As he spoke, he raised his eyes slowly from his feet to Crockerman’s face. “Mr. President, we’re not here to mince words. I’ve told Harry, and Trevor, and Arthur, that it’s going to take some powerful persuasion to move you back onto a rational course. They’ve come loaded for bear.”
Crockerman nodded and rested his hands lightly on the edge of the desk, as if he might push away at any moment. His expression remained pleasant, alert.
“Mr. President, the First Lady did indeed speak to me,” Hicks said.
“She’s not speaking to me, you know,” Crockerman said levelly. “Or not often, at any rate. She doesn’t share our convictions.”
“Yes,” Hicks said. “Or rather, no…Mr. President, my colleagues — “ He cast a pleading look at Arthur.
“We assume you’re still planning to tell the public about the Death Valley bogey,” Arthur said, “and about the Guest.”
“The story will break soon one way or the other,” Crockerman said. “It must be kept quiet past the election and the inauguration, but after that…” He lifted three fingers from their grip on the edge of the desk and shrugged slightly.
“We’re not at all sure about your emphasis, sir…” Arthur paused. “Surrender will not sit well with the country.”
Crockerman hardly blinked. “Surrender. Accommodation. Nasty words, aren’t they? But what choice have we against superhuman forces?”
“We do not know they are superhuman, sir,” Harry said.
“It would take us thousands, perhaps millions of years to rival their technology — if indeed we can even call it technology. Think of the power to destroy an entire moon, and push its fragments into collisions with other worlds…”
“We don’t know that these events are connected,” Arthur said. “But I think we could equal them with a couple of hundred years of progress.”
“What does it matter, two centuries or two millennia? They can still destroy our world.”
“We don’t know that,” Schwartz said.
“We don’t even know of whom we speak when we say ‘they,’” Hicks said.
“Angels, powers, aliens. Whatever they might be.”
“Mr. President,” Hicks said, “we are not facing God’s wrath.”
“It seems we face something equivalent in force, whatever the ultimate source,” Crockerman said. “Can something so catastrophic happen to the Earth without God’s approval? We are His children. His punishments are not random, not when they’re on such a huge scale.”
Hicks noted that the President’s pronoun for God had assumed traditional gender now. Was that Ormandy’s doing?
“We have no evidence the Earth can be destroyed,” Harry said. “What we need . .’. we need a smoking gun, something that proves that the power they claim to have does indeed belong to them. We don’t have a smoking gun.”
“They reveal their intentions clearly enough,” Crockerman said. “The self-destruction of the Australian robots shows them to be bringers of false testimony. When their lies are discovered, and pointed out to them, they vanish. Their message of hope is a deception. I believe I knew that, sensed it, before the news from Australia arrived. Ormandy certainly did.”
“None of us puts any faith in Mr. Ormandy,” Schwartz said.
Crockerman was obviously irritated by this, but kept his calm. “Ormandy does not expect the accolade of scientists. He — and I — believe affairs have passed out of the control of our particular witch doctors. Not to show disrespect for your hard work and expertise. He and I realized there was a job to do here, and that we are the only ones capable of doing it.”
“What exactly will your job be, Mr. President?” Arthur asked.
“Not an easy one, I assure you. Our country doesn’t believe in giving up without a fight. I acknowledge that much. But we cannot fight this. Nor can we go to our fate ignorant of what is happening. We have to face the music courageously. That’s my job — to help my country face the end bravely.”
Crockerman’s face was pale and his hands, still pushing on the edge of the desk, trembled slightly. He might have been close to tears.
Nothing was said for several long seconds. Arthur felt a blanket of shock closing around him. Microcosm of what the country will feel. The world. Not a message we want to hear.