"Mr. President! Mr. President!" The White House press corps rose to its collective feet like an attention-seeking wave.
The President of the United States smiled into the tumult and the TV cameras, and raised his hands for silence. "That's enough questions for now, ladies and gentlemen. Let me just make a few concluding remarks." He waited until something resembling silence had descended on the Press Room, and his expression grew serious. "This has been a . . . vigorous campaign, and feelings have sometimes flared, as they will among people of strongly held beliefs. But that's over now. The electorate has spoken, and the Constitution admits of no doubt as to the outcome. Now it is a time for healing, and for unity. It is for that reason that President-Elect Langston and I called this joint press conference. And now, let me turn the podium over to the President-Elect."
Harvey Langston rose to his feet with a muttered "Thank you, Mr. President." He took his place behind the Presidential seal and smiled at the reporters who, he knew, had never really expected to see him there.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I want to add my voice to the President's. As we know, all sorts of things get said in a campaign . . . by both sides. But now the President and I share a common goal: a smooth transfer of power. My transition team has been in close communication with the President's staff to assure that my administration can hit the ground running. I intend to act without delay to deliver what the people have demanded by putting me in this house. The people want compassionate government. The people—"
"Forty-one percent of them, anyway," someone could be heard to remark, somewhere in the room.
"—want us to focus on our own domestic problems, and not on foreign adventurism," Langston continued without a break, forcing himself to ignore the dig. Plenty of time later to stick it to that wiseass reporter, he thought, knowing that Sal DiAngelo, his campaign manager, would have spotted the man and noted his name. "The people want us to abandon our weapons of destruction and seek peaceful solutions to the conflicts we ourselves have provoked! The people—"
From off to the side, DiAngelo caught his eye and frowned. Stop campaigning, damn you! Langston told himself. You don't have to campaign any more. You've won! He still had to periodically remind himself of that fact, as incredible to him as it was to most of the country.
"The people want continuity and the regular exercise of constitutional processes," he finished smoothly. He prided himself on these seamless recoveries. It was an ability that could be counted on to save his bacon as long as DiAngelo or one of his other handlers was around to shoot him warning looks when the shrillness started to creep back into his voice. "And now, I'll take a few questions."
He got through the questions from the floor, recognizing only those journalists he knew were friendly or, at least, predictable. Then it was over, and the President and his successor were out the doorway of the Press Room together, trailed by a gaggle of staffers and Secret Service men.
As they proceeded down the corridor into the West Wing, a tall, unfamiliar man on the outskirts of the President's entourage caught Langston's eye. He felt certain he would have remembered the man if he'd seen him before, despite his completely nondescript clothes. He looked old, with his thick mane of white hair, and yet his movements were not those of an old man. His features were bleak and harsh, and disfigured by a scar slanting across his left cheek. . . .
"Harvey . . . I mean, Mr. President-Elect," muttered DiAngelo, derailing his train of thought, "I still see no reason for this meeting. If there's anything that needs to be settled, the staffs—"
"Oh, it's all right, Sal. The President has asked for a private one-on-one conversation, and I see no reason to object. I'm curious to see what he wants. And besides, we can afford to be obliging."
"Yes, but—"
Before DiAngelo could finish, they passed by the Cabinet Room and the office of the President's private secretary, and reached the door that was their destination. Langston glanced around, but the mysterious old man was no longer in sight. The President led the way through the door. Langston followed, with Secret Service men politely but firmly shooing everyone else away. Then the door closed behind him, and he was in the Oval Office.
The President sat down behind the massive oak desk in front of the tall French windows of foot-thick armored glass that admitted the pale light of late fall afternoon. He motioned to a chair across the desk.
Langston was impressed despite himself as he crossed the carpet with the Presidential seal in gold and red against the deep blue. The momentary mood vanished as his eyes fell on the flags of the five armed services in their traditional position to the right of the desk, along the south wall. Must get rid of those, he made a mental note to himself.
Langston sat down and gazed across the desk at the man he would succeed in January. Silence and mutual loathing settled over the room.
"Mr. President," Langston finally began, "I trust that in the spirit we both articulated at the press conference just now—"
"Oh, cut the crap," the President interrupted in a voice as cold as his eyes. "I'm well aware that you have no higher opinion of me than I have of you. So spare me your trademark smarmy hypocrisy. We're alone now—really alone—and we can dispense with the pap we were feeding those hyenas in the Press Room."
"Do you seriously expect me to believe that? You're just trying to trick me into—"
"You can also spare me your paranoia. You know it's true, because otherwise I wouldn't be talking this way. Besides, what would be the point of trying to trap you into anything? It's too late for it to do any good. You've won." The President shook his head slowly, as though to clear it of a stunned disbelief that still hadn't worn off. "There's no getting around that fact . . . and I'd even go so far as to call it fifty percent just. You didn't deserve to win, but Ortega did deserve to lose."
Vice President Andrew Ortega had been the President's handpicked choice to succeed him, in line with their party's strategy of reaching out to Hispanics. He'd won the nomination with little opposition save that of isolationist commentator Frank Ferguson, a Holocaust-denial crank who had subsequently bolted the party and launched an independent candidacy with the announced aim of acting as a spoiler for "that spic." Still, Ortega's election had seemed a foregone conclusion. The opposition party, knowing it couldn't win anyway, had thrown a sop to the Old Left hardcases who were its shock troops by nominating one of their own: the patently unelectable Harvey Langston, congressman from a California district for which the term "La-La Land" might well have been coined.
Then the unthinkable had begun to unfold. Ortega's campaign had been a parade of blunders, bloopers, pratfalls and general ineptitude without modern precedent. The unfunny comedy show had climaxed the night of the final debate, when the Vice President—whose handlers had believed his drinking problem to be safely in the past—had managed to not quite fall on his face on prime-time TV. His apology to the nation the next day had made matters even worse than they would have been had he tried to brazen it out.
Voter turnout had been the lowest in the history of presidential elections, with most of Ortega's centrist base of support—not to mention the agonizingly embarrassed Hispanics—staying home in disgust. In spite of everything, he had somehow managed a forty-three percent plurality of the dismally small popular vote. Ferguson had gotten a once-unimaginable fifteen percent. Another one percent had gone to the usual assortment of minor-party joke candidates. But Langston's forty-one percent had been distributed with mathematical precision to give him exactly two hundred and seventy-one electoral votes.
Now he sat in the office he would soon occupy, filled with his triumph and his hatred of the man across the desk.
"Thank you for clearing the air, Mr. President. Yes, I know—or can imagine—what you think of me. And I make no secret of what I think of you." Oddly enough, Langston found himself believing the President's assurance that no one was listening . . . and it felt so good to be able to finally let it all out, without DiAngelo to rein him in. "You're a reactionary, warmongering dinosaur—a tool of the military-industrial complex and the multinational corporations! You've ignored the problems capitalism has inflicted on us—poverty, racism, sexism, suburban sprawl, cigarette smoking, meat eating, SUVs, and all the rest of our real problems. Instead, you've promoted economic growth to please the fat cats of Wall Street, and invented imaginary foreign threats to justify military spending."
The President raised one eyebrow. "As 'imaginary' as the terrorism we've faced ever since the 'imaginary' destruction of the World Trade Center back in 2001?"
"What you call 'terrorists' are heroic freedom fighters whom our own greed and imperialism have forced to defend themselves against us! We brought the 9/11 attacks on ourselves, by our support for Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people! Besides, the Israelis knew about it in advance and didn't warn us. They let it happen, to inflame public opinion against the peace-loving people of the Arab world. That's been clear all along, at least to those of us who aren't blinded by the propaganda of the international Zionist conspiracy!"
This time both presidential eyebrows rose in arcs of irony. "The Vice President-Elect might not see it quite that way."
Langston flushed. "Senator Goldman and I have had to agree to disagree about some things. But on matters other than Near Eastern policy, we share a broad philosophical common ground."
The President gave a short, scornful laugh. "Translation: you had him rammed down your throat as your running mate. The grown-ups in your party weren't about to accept a loony tune like you as nominee, even for what was supposed to be a kamikaze run, without a sane moderate to balance the ticket."
Langston rose to his feet, quivering with rage. "If you've asked me here simply to insult me, Mr. President, I believe I have better uses for my—"
"Insulting you is impossible. Now sit down!"
Without recalling having done it, Langston realized he was seated again. His conscious rejection of his country's past could not immunize him from the sheer power that pervaded this room, all of it focused and concentrated in the one man behind the desk.
For now, he added to himself grimly. Until January.
The President drew a breath and released it slowly. "Well, none of that matters now. Thanks to the vagaries of the electoral system and the buffoonery of Andy Ortega, you are—God help us!—going to be President of the United States. So it's time for me to pass the burden on to you. That's why we're here now."
Langston was puzzled. "But the inauguration isn't until—"
"Never mind that circus. And never mind everything the presidency is officially about. I'm talking about the real burden. Something every president for the last six decades has had to live with after learning of it in private from his predecessor."
"I have no idea what you mean."
"Of course you don't. The little ritual we're here to enact is not generally known. Nor will you find anything about it in the Constitution."
Langston felt a coldness slide along his spine.
"I am," the President continued, "about to impart to you certain information which has been handed down by each president to his successor ever since Eisenhower took over from Truman. I will not swear you to secrecy, because it would be a meaningless formality. After you've heard what I have to say, you will know that it must be kept in confidence. All your predecessors have understood this—even the ones who looked like they might present problems. I've heard a few stories . . ." The President gave a chuckle of amused reminiscence. "There was one president-elect who had to have it put to him as a religious imperative, on the Sunday school level; it seems he genuinely believed the infantile pietism he spouted. And then there was a later one who turned out to be perfectly happy to go along with anything that didn't interfere with his extraordinarily single-minded pursuit of every pair of panties in sight. In fact, I understand he was tickled pink to know—for once—something his wife didn't know!" The President sobered. "The only break in the chain was before either of those, at the time of the Kennedy assassination. Afterwards, Johnson had to be informed by other means. I gather there were complications. But he had no trouble grasping this information's . . . 'sensitivity' is hardly the word. Neither have any of the others."
The thinly veiled slights to a couple of former presidents whom Langston particularly admired helped break the spell. He leaned forward, glaring. "If you think I'm going to unquestioningly accept this vague, unsubstantiated mystification—"
"Of course not. I wouldn't expect you to. On your standards, you're actually being rational. No one should take something like this on blind faith. And we all know that photos and film can be faked. So in order to assure that you take me seriously . . ." The President reached into a desk drawer and withdrew a foot-square sheet of gray metal. He wordlessly passed it to Langston, who handled it gingerly. It was lighter than he'd expected, and unyieldingly rigid.
"Well, what do you think?" asked the President.
Langston handed it back, irritated. "What am I supposed to think? Steel, I suppose, although it's very thin for something that won't bend at all."
"So it is." As Langston watched in dawning amazement, the President took out a block of what looked like soft wood and placed the square of metal atop it. Then he produced what looked like a metal-punch, placed it in position above the metal, and held up a heavy mallet. "The Secret Service gets upset at people putting bullets through things in here," he explained, and, without warning, brought the mallet down. Langston jumped in his chair as the bit punched through the metal and into the wood.
The President held up the metal sheet, which now had a small round hole with a slight lip on the underside.
As Langston watched, the metal around the hole began to . . . do something. The lip grew even slighter, and then smoothed itself out altogether. And the hole closed, and vanished. The metal was as flawless as it had been before.
"It's an application of nanotechnology known as 'smart matter'," the President explained matter-of-factly. "Actually, these particular molecule-sized robots aren't all that smart; they can only return it to its original shape."
The chill Langston had felt along his spine now rose to his neck, and the short hairs bristled. He found he could not speak.
"There are limits to what I can show you here," the President continued. "I'm pretty much restricted to things that don't make much noise and don't set off any alarms. So flashy or spectacular stuff is out. However . . ." He took out what appeared to be a thick headband, made of some flexible substance that seemed neither plastic nor metal. "Put this on."
Adrift in unreality, Langston could only obey. He slipped the device—it was heavier than it looked—over his head. The Oval Office grew dim and indistinct.
"Prepare yourself," he heard the President say.
He was no longer in the Oval Office. He was in what looked like a ski lodge, judging from the dramatic mountainscape beyond the wide windows. A fire roared and crackled in a massive stone fireplace, and the heat tingled on his face. He squeezed the armrests of his deep lounger, and felt the soft leather yield. The President—now dressed in khaki cords and a green turtleneck sweater—gazed at him from a similar lounger.
"Ask me something," urged the phantom President.
"But you're just an image," Langston heard himself say.
"But an interactive one." The unmistakable face formed its equally well-known smile.
For the first time in Langston's life, sheer panic took him. He tore off the headband and flung it away. With vertigo-inducing abruptness, he was back in the Oval Office, drawing deep, shuddering breaths and fearing he was going to be sick on the carpet with the presidential seal.
"So," he finally gasped, "this is all about some covert top-secret research project?"
The President shook his head. "I can't blame you for not being a scientist. I'm not one either. But if you were one, you'd know that this stuff is whole technological revolutions ahead of anything that could be seriously considered for R&D by anyone in this world." He paused significantly after those last three words.
Langston looked blank.
"You still don't get it, do you?" The President reached inside the desk again. This time he produced a plastic container the size of a large lunch box, but with tiny readouts on the side which Langston couldn't interpret. Its top clamshelled open at a touch of a button. The President took out . . . something.
"This animal is, of course, dead. But it has been preserved in molecular stasis by means whose details are immaterial at present. Here—take it. Feel it. Look at it."
Gingerly, Langston took the small, unmoving shape, flinching involuntarily from the lifeless flesh. That flesh was brownish-gray, smooth . . . and it didn't feel like flesh. He wasn't sure why it didn't, for this was inarguably a formerly living animal. The mysterious preservative to which the President had alluded had left it limp and flexible. Overcoming his queasiness, Langston found he could feel the outline of its skeleton. But it didn't feel like a skeleton. Instead of four limbs branching from a spine, there were six, radiating from some bony something in the center . . . but the animal was nothing like a starfish. One of those limbs, he realized, was no limb at all, for it terminated in a tiny face. At least Langston assumed it must be a face, for it had eyes. Three of them.
Belatedly, he recalled the emphasis the President had laid on the words in this world.
A cold draft seemed to blow through the Oval Office. It didn't stop sweat from popping out all over Langston's body.
"I think," said the President gravely, "you're now ready to look at these and not automatically dismiss them as fakes." He slid a sheaf of photos across the desk. "You'll note," he commented as he put the preserved animal away, "that not all evolutionary pathways are as divergent from ours as this guy's—especially the ones that culminate in tool-using races. The way it's been explained to me, a bilaterally symmetrical vertebrate—that's us—is a better arrangement for an active animal than a radially symmetrical one like his. It helps to have a definite front end."
Langston wasn't listening. Nor was his mind processing everything he was seeing. The various beings in the photos were too foreign to his accustomed world to fully register. But they had a certain indefinable quality of reality which he could now recognize, having seen the animal from the plastic case. And they had another quality: a sheer, skin-crawling wrongness far beyond the adolescent imaginings of Hollywood special effects. Oddly, this was most true of the ones that came closest to the human form.
"Do I now have your undivided attention?" the President asked.
Langston looked up from the photos and managed to nod.
"Shortly after the end of World War II," the President began, "the United States government was contacted by a man—yes, man, human but of unknown origin. He called himself 'Mr. Inconnu,' thus demonstrating that his originality had limits. He brought incontrovertible proofs that he was for real, stuff that made it impossible to dismiss him as a nut-case. He also brought news the human race wasn't—and still isn't—ready to handle."
Langston found his voice. "You mean the fact that there really is, uh, life in outer space?"
"Not just that. The galaxy isn't merely inhabited; it is taken! There are mighty civilizations out there. They have all the prime real estate already nailed down. They have no interest in technologically backward, politically fragmented worlds except as pawns in the power-games they play. And at the time Mr. Inconnu arrived they were just about to uncover one more such world: ours.
"It was necessary—urgently so—to do two things. First of all, we had to bluff the aliens into thinking Earth had a central political authority and was technologically advanced enough to rate at least a certain perfunctory diplomatic courtesy. Secondly, we had to begin living up to the second half of that bluff, and bring Earth up to speed as quickly as it could possibly be done. Mr. Inconnu provided the means to commence the crash course."
"You mean . . . the kind of things you've shown me?" Langston gave a headshake of bewilderment. "But if, as you say, we've known about this technology since the late 1940s, then why isn't it commonly known? You yourself just said it's still beyond our horizons."
"It couldn't be released all at once. It is a sociological truism, worked out by cultures older than ours, that a society simply can't survive the abrupt, wholesale introduction of technology more than one level above its own. God knows there've been plenty of examples in our own post-Columbus history! Mr. Inconnu's stuff has had to be doled out gradually, to avoid causing cultural and social collapse. Although," the President added with a grim smile, "I sometimes think it hasn't been avoided by a whole hell of a lot! Have you ever read much classic science fiction?"
Langston shook his head emphatically. The stuff was just so politically incorrect.
"Those writers foresaw the things that lay within the potential of their early-to-mid twentieth-century world: nuclear weapons, spaceflight with chemical rockets, and so forth . . . including 'electronic brains.' But not one of them ever foresaw the culture of ubiquitous information access that arose by the end of the century: practically every middle-class person with a computer on his or her desk at work, and another one at home." The President paused significantly. "The transistor, you see, was one of the first of Mr. Inconnu's revelations to be released, in 1948. Once society had had enough time—barely—to absorb that, the silicon chip followed. Society managed to adjust. The side effects and by-products, such as the rise of an objectionable computer-geek subculture, weren't quite fatal. But the point is that if the technological progression had followed its normal course, we'd now be living in the future visualized by those Golden Age science-fiction writers: massive computers with lots of flashing lights and buzzers, and clunky Robbie-the-Robot type cybernetic devices, all using advanced vacuum tubes.
"At the same time, an analogous process was going on in molecular genetics. The same goes for any number of other fields. Materials technology, for example; none of those writers foresaw Kevlar. Nor did they foresee the laser. 'Death rays' were just a lucky guess."
Langston struggled to comprehend. "But . . . but who has been releasing these innovations? Who decides when they're to be revealed? And . . . what was that you said earlier about deceiving these aliens into thinking Earth had some kind of world government?"
"The answer to all your questions is the same. You see, this had to be kept secret. If it had gotten out, the result would have been global panic and hysteria that would have blown the whole deception. So a secret agency known as the Prometheus Project, answerable only to the President, was formed for the purposes of interfacing with the aliens and conducting a double security operation: keeping the truth about Earth from the aliens, and keeping the truth about the aliens' existence—and our relationship with them, including the agency's own existence—from the human race. It also controls the dissemination of extraterrestrial technology.
"It's been a staggering job—all the more so because the overriding imperative of secrecy has made the personnel problem almost intractable. Nevertheless, recruiting for the Prometheus Project commenced immediately and proceeded on a continuing basis . . ."