And so many people looked at him, Clark noted. More surprisingly, people made way for him, especially women, and children positively shrank from his presence as though Godzilla had returned to crush their city. So it was true. He'd heard the stories but never quite believed them. Hairy barbarian. Gaijin. I never thought of myself that way, John told himself, walking into a McDonald's. It was crowded at lunch hour, and after turning his head he had to take a seat with another man. Mary Pat was right, he thought. Nomuri was pretty good.
"So what's the story?" Clark asked amid the din of the fast-food place.
"Well, I've ID'd her and I've got the building she lives in."
"That's fast work."
"Not very hard. Our friend's security detail doesn't know shit about counter-surveillance."
Besides, Clark didn't say, you look like you belong, right down to the harried and tense look of a salaryman bolting down his lunch so that he can race back to his desk. Well, that never came hard to a field spook, did it? It wasn't hard to be tense on a field assignment. The difficult part, which they emphasized at the Farm, was to appear at ease.
"Okay, then all I have to do is get permission for the pickup." Among other things. Nomuri wasn't authorized to know about his work with THISTLE. John wondered if that would change.
"Sayonara." And Nomuri made his exit while Clark attacked his rice ball. Not bad. The kid's all business, he thought. His next thought was, Rice ball at McDonald's?
The briefing documents on his desk had nothing at all to do with his being the President, but everything to do with his remaining in the office, and for that reason they were always at the top of the pile. The upward move in the approval ratings was…very edifying, Durling thought. Of likely voters—and they were the ones who really counted—fully 10 percent more approved of his policies than had done so last week, a numerical improvement that covered both his foreign and domestic performance. All in all, it was about what a fourth-grader might feel on bringing home a particularly good report card to doubtful parents. And that 10 percent was only the beginning, his chief pollster thought, since the implications of the policy changes were taking a little time to sink in. Already the Big Three were speculating publicly about hiring back some of the seven hundred thousand workers laid off in the previous decades, and that was just the assembly workers. Then you had to consider the people in independent parts companies, the tire companies, the glass companies, the battery companies…That could start to revitalize the Rust Belt, and the Rust Belt accounted for a lot of electoral votes. What was obvious, or should have been, was that it wouldn't stop with cars. It couldn't. The United Auto Workers (cars and related parts) looked forward to the restoration of thousands of paying members. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (TVs, even VCRs?) could not be far behind, and there were additional unions that had just begun to consider how large a piece of the pie they might receive. Though simple in concept, the Trade Reform Act represented, like many simple concepts, a wide-ranging alteration in how the United States of America did business. President Durling had thought he'd understood that concept, but soon the phone on his desk would ring. Looking at it, he already knew the voices that he would hear, and it wasn't too great a stretch to imagine what words they would speak, what arguments they would put forth, and what promises they would make. And he would be amenable to accepting the promises.
He'd never really planned to be President of the United States, not as Bob Fowler had planned his entire life toward that goal, not even allowing the death of his first wife to turn him from that path. Durling's last goal had been the governorship of California, and when he'd been offered the chance for the second place on the Fowler ticket he'd taken it more out of patriotism than anything else. That was not something he'd say even to his closest advisers, because patriotism was passe in the modern political world, but Roger Durling had felt it even so, had remembered that the average citizen had a name and a face, remembered having some of them die under his command in Vietnam, and, in remembering, thought that he had to do his best for them.
But what was the best? he asked himself again, as he had done on uncounted occasions. The Oval Office was a lonely place. It was often filled with all manner of visitors, from a foreign chief of state to a schoolchild who'd won an essay contest, but in due course they all left, and the President was alone again with his duty. The oath he'd taken was so simple as to be devoid of meaning. "Faithfully execute the office of…to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend…" Fine words, but what did they mean? Perhaps Madison and the others had figured that he'd know. Perhaps in 1789 everyone had—it was just understood—but that was more than two hundred years in the past, and somehow they'd neglected to write it down for the guidance of future generations.
Worse still, there were plenty of people ever ready to tell you what they thought the words meant, and when you added up all the advice, 2 plus 2 ended up as 7. Labor and management, consumer and producer, taxpayer and transfer recipient. They all had their needs. They all had their agendas. They all had arguments, and fine lobbyists to make them, and the scary part was that each one made sense in one way or another, enough that many believed that 2 plus 2 really did equal 7. Until you announced the sum, that is, and then everybody said it was too much, that the country couldn't afford the other groups' special interests.
On top of all of that, if you wanted to accomplish anything at all, you had to get here, and having gotten here, to stay here, and that meant making promises you had to keep. At least some of them. And somewhere in the process, the country just got lost, and the Constitution with it, and at the end of the day you were preserving, protecting, and defending—what?
No wonder I never really wanted this job, Durling told himself, sitting alone, looking down at yet another position paper. It was all an accident, really. Bob had needed to carry California, and Durling had been the key, a young, popular governor of the right party affiliation. But now he was the President of the United States, and the fear was that the job was simply beyond him. The sad truth was that no single man had the intellectual capacity even to understand all the affairs the President was expected to manage. Economics, for example, perhaps his most important contemporary duty now that the Soviet Union was gone, was a field where its own practitioners couldn't agree on a set of rules that a reasonably intelligent man could comprehend.
Well, at least he understood jobs. It was better for people to have them than not to have them. It was, generally speaking, better for a country to manufacture most of its own goods than to let its money go overseas to pay the workers in another country to make them. That was a principle that he could understand, and better yet, a principle that he could explain to others, and since the people to whom he spoke would be Americans themselves, they would probably agree. It would make organized labor happy. It would also make management happy—and wasn't a policy that made both of them happy necessarily a good policy? It had to be, didn't it? Wouldn't it make the economists happy? Moreover, he was convinced that the American worker was as good as any in the world, more than ready to enter into a fair contest with any other, and that was all his policy was really aimed at doing…wasn't it?
Durling turned in his expensive swivel chair and peered out the thick windows toward the Washington Monument. It must have been a lot easier for George. Okay, so, yeah, he was the first, and he did have to deal with the Whiskey Rebellion, which in the history books didn't look to have been all that grave, and he had to set the pattern for follow-on presidents. The only taxes collected back then were of the tariff and excise sort—nasty and regressive by current standards, but aimed only at discouraging imports and punishing people for drinking too much. Durling was not really trying to stop foreign trade, just to make it fair. All the way back to Nixon, the U.S. government had caved in to those people, first because we'd needed their bases (as though Japan would really have struck an alliance with their ancient enemies!), later because…why? Because it had become expedient? Did anyone really know? Well, it would change now, and everyone would know why.