"Was that stuff about Kwanzaa being a sixties thing true?"
"Search me. I never heard of Kwanzaa before the First Lady started talking it up two years back."
"Me, neither." The President frowned with all of his puffy face, producing an effect like a cinnamon roll baking. "Get me a federal directory. There must be some agency we can turn to in a situation like this."
"Are you sure we want to? The BioBubble is an orphaned private boondoggle. Nobody even knows the identity of the philanthropist who's backing it now."
"How many people died?"
"Maybe thirty."
"And no one knows how or why?"
"That's so far. But there's talk about a lightning strike."
The President snapped his fingers suddenly. His baggy eyes lit up. "Get me the National Weather Service. Try for that hurricane expert who's always on TV. He looks like he knows this stuff."
Twenty minutes later, Dr. Frank Nails of the National Weather Service was patiently explaining to the Chief Executive that a lighting bolt powerful enough to melt fifty tons of glass and steel and everything it housed would be, in his words, "a thunderbolt you'd have felt in the Oval Office."
"You're saying it can't be lightning."
"Not unless the BioBubble was filled with propane and natural gas before the hit."
"It's all natural. No additives. No artificial colors. Or whatever."
"And no lightning bolt."
"People say they heard thunder."
"They heard an explosion, is my guess. Or an atmospheric pressure wave they mistook for thunder."
"You've been very helpful," said the President, hanging up and looking serious.
Calling the CIA again, the President got the director.
"I was just about to pick up the phone," the CIA director said. "Our intelligence source suggests natural causes."
"What does that mean?"
"An accident. Propane leak or something."
"The BioBubble uses no harmful chemicals, any more than the rain forest does."
"They also claim they don't eat pizza. But there's a lot of loose talk about catering trucks and midnight snacks coming out of Dodona."
"Who's your source?"
"Confidential. But we've used this person before with acceptable results."
"What's acceptable?"
"This was the source of our report on the Korean famine, Mr. President."
"I had that warning weeks before CIA gave it to me. Korea was in the middle of a crop failure when the flooding started. Anyone could have predicted famine," the Chief Executive pointed out.
"CIA makes no predictive claims. We confirmed the intelligence."
"Find other sources."
"Yes, sir."
"I don't think these people know what they're doing," the President said after hanging up.
"You're not the first Commander in Chief to come to that conclusion," the chief of staff said ruefully.
The President sat down at his desk, his unhappy head hovering between the brazen busts of Lincoln and Kennedy on the shelf behind him. Outside the imperfect window glass, more than a century old, Andrew Jackson's hickory tree groaned under its burden of pristine snow.
"Let's see what the media says."
Picking up a remote, the chief of staff clicked on the Oval Office TV set, nestled in a mahogany cabinet. "At least this should knock the Kwanzaa story out of the lead," he sighed.
"If not off the newscasts entirely," the President said with ill-disguised relief, forgetting there were four more days to go.
The President frowned as a face and voice familiar to many Americans resolved on the screen that showed the CNN bug on the lower right-hand corner.
"With me is renowned astronomer Dr. Cosmo Pagan of the University of Arizona's Center for Exobiological Research."
The President of the U.S. looked to his chief of staff. "Exo-?"
"I think it means life outside the planet."
"Oh."
The reporter shoved his CNN mike into Dr. Pagan's studious face and asked, "Dr. Pagan, what does the BioBubble disaster mean for the space program?"
"It may mean that someone up there doesn't want us up there," said Dr. Cosmo Pagan in his chipper, singsongy voice.
And the President groaned like a wounded reindeer.
"Are you suggesting an attack from space?"
Dr. Pagan smiled as if the idea of an attack from space would be a wonderful thing and a boon to his career.
"No one can say what kind of life-forms exist in the vast vastness of interstellar spaces. But think of it-billions and billions of stars each, in all probability, orbited by planets-trillions upon trillions of worlds very much like ours. If there is life up there, and they have chosen to make their presence known in this dramatic fashion, it will once and for all answer that age-old question. Is there intelligent life in the cosmos?" Dr. Cosmo Pagan smiled so broadly his onyx eyes twinkled like black holes. "I, for one, find this development very life affirming. And can only hope they'll strike again."
The President sputtered, "Is he nuts?"
"We've got to put a stop to this kind of scare talk," the chief of staff said worriedly. "Remember Orson Welles's 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast?"
The President looked thoughtfully confused. "You mean H. G. Wells's movie, don't you?"
"It was a book, then a radio program, then a movie. The radio program pretended that the Martians had landed and were frying ass all over New Jersey."
"We've got to find out if any of this is real," decided the President, leaping to his feet.
"Sir?"
"If Martians are out to fry the space program, we've got to take countermeasures."
"What kind of countermeasures could-?"
But the question hung unfinished and unanswered in the empty air. The President of the U.S. had abruptly left the Oval Office, his destination unknown.
UPSTAIRS in the Lincoln Bedroom, the President plopped down on the rosewood bed in the rose red bedroom and removed a cherry red telephone from the cherry-wood nightstand.
It was a standard AT el, its face as smooth as its red plastic molding. There was no dial or keypad. Just the shiny red receiver attached by a gleaming red coil of insulated wire.
Placing the fiery telephone on his lap, the President picked up the receiver and lifted it to his concerned face. His eyes were grim. He turned on the nightstand radio and tuned it to an oldies station.
The phone began ringing at the opposite end, and instantly a parched, lemony voice said, "Yes, Mr. President?"
"The BioBubble disaster. I want you to look into it."
"Do you have reason to believe its destruction is a national-security issue?" "All I know is that a major scientific project is dead, and the FBI won't touch it, the CIA is citing unnamed sources and the National Weather Service says it can't be lightning."
"The lightning explanation is preposterous, I admit," said the lemony voice of the man the President knew only as Dr. Smith.
"So you'll take the assignment?"
"No, I will look into it. What is the source of the CIA assessment?"
"I just talked to the director a few minutes ago. He called it natural causes-whatever that means."
"One moment."
The silence of the line was perfect. No buzzes, clicks or humming. That was because it was a dedicated line. A buried cable ran from the White House to some unknown point where the director of CURE held forth in secret. The President had no idea where. Sometimes he imagined a basement off in a forgotten Cold War fallout shelter. Other times he envisioned the shadowy thirteenth floor of some massive skyscraper that wasn't supposed to have a thirteenth floor.
The lemony voice came back and it sounded peeved. "The preponderance of telephone-message traffic in and out of Langley is to various commercial hot lines."
"Hot lines?"
"The Prophet's Hot Line. Psychic Buddies Network."