It wasn't quite that bad. There were anywhere from fifty to a hundred people going in and out of that room. Hardly any of them paid any attention to me. But it was no more than twenty minutes, and I'd only had my feet stepped on twice as people in a hurry crowded past, when the sergeant came back. "This way, Major," she said. "Lieutenant Kauffmann is ready for you now."
Lieutenant Kauffmann was not only ready for me, he said, first thing out of his mouth, "Where the hell have you been, Major? You're supposed to be over at the White House right now."
"The White—" I began, but he cut me off.
"Right, and you're supposed to be in civilian clothes too. It says here"—he speared a folder out of the stack on his desk—"that you closely resemble a U.S. senator on the other side-"
"Resemble him, hell. I am him."
He shrugged. "Anyway, you're going to assume his identity. After the first wave has secured the White House-"
It was my turn to cut him off. "We're invading the White House?"
"Where've you been?" He groaned again, this time with a different intonation. "They haven't responded to our messages; now we try force. You'll go in civilian clothes, as I said, and take two guards in their uniforms with you. You'll get orders from the portal master, but it looks like they want you to find the President, take her prisoner, and bring her back here."
"Holy shit," I said, and then, "Wait a minute. What if the real Senator DeSota is there?"
"He's not," he said positively. "Didn't you capture him yourself?"
"But he got—I mean, I thought he'd returned to his own time."
Shrug. Translation: Not my department. "So," he went on, "get your B-four bag and change into civvies, and we'll get you transportation to—"
"I didn't bring any baggage," I said. "I don't have any civilian clothes with me."
Thunderstruck stare. "You what? Christ, Major! How the hell am I supposed to get you fitted out with civvies? Where would I get them? Why the hell—" And then he turned to the sergeant. He had remembered how to get difficult tasks done. "Sergeant! Get this man fitted out with civvies!"
And so it came to pass that twenty minutes later the sergeant and I were getting out of a commandeered Cadillac limousine the size of a house trailer, in front of a store whose neon sign said: FORMAL CLOTHES RENTAL FOR ALL OCCASIONS. The neon was turned off, but the owner had opened up for us. And forty minutes after that we were on our way to the White House, and behind us the proprietor was grumpily closing his store again. "Good work, Sergeant," I said, stretching out in the back seat, which was roughly the size of a football field. I admired the gleam on the rented patent-leather shoes, smoothed down the rented satin cummerbund, adjusted the rented black bow tie. I was, I believed, the very picture of a U.S. senator coming from some formal dinner party for a late-night call on his President. "I guess the tux is the best idea," I observed, "because who knows what the current styles for men are in their time? And formal clothes don't change, do they?"
She said shortly, "We hope." Then we were at the VIP gate, and she was showing documents to the very thorough and skeptical MP, with two other MP's right behind him, looking over his shoulder. They were all armed, but they didn't have to be. Beyond them, square in the middle of the narrow drive, was a personnel carrier with a heavy machine gun mounted in the rear, and it was pointed right at us.
It took me a moment to realize that the White House had changed considerably. The strobes! They weren't there—evidently the Russian satellite had passed and they were no longer needed. That wasn't the only thing.
Even Washington Friday-night people go to bed sometime, and the traffic had been dwindling all along. Not here, though. The traffic jam was all around us, parked on the grass, crushing the roses. The lawn of our White House would be five years recovering from the tanks and half-tracks and personnel carriers that had chewed it up—"rehearsing for the parade," of course.
I could see why they were not letting ordinary civilians in.
I was no ordinary civilian, though. We were waved through at last. The weapons carrier started up and pulled off onto the grass to let us through—another hundred dollars worth of turf down the tube—and our driver took us to a small portico I had never seen before. "Good luck," said the sergeant, hesitated, then leaned forward and gave me a kiss to show she meant it.
That was the last time for quite a while that anybody showed any affection for me.
The only other time I had been in the White House was in Stevenson's second term, and it was nothing like this. Now there weren't any uniformed pages to show me around, nor velvet ropes to keep the barbarians out of the sacred chambers. There weren't any sacred chambers. There were troops in half the rooms, and machinery or weapons in most of the others. A corporal took me swiftly down a service hall and up a broad staircase, not encouraging pauses to gawk. I wound up in a green-draped room with portraits of Presidents Madison and Taft on the wall. It was a strikingly handsome room, not counting the urn of coffee with paper cups that stood on a card table near the door. The upholstered chairs were sparsely occupied—four or five civilians, one of them a woman who looked familiar, as did two of the men, especially the black one I recognized as a former heavyweight prizefighter—and eight or nine soldiers in the dress uniform of the other side, with side arms that looked as though they meant it.
Two of the soldiers got up and came toward me, hulking, huge paratroop types, both with corporal's stripes. "Here's Major DeSota, sir," said my own corporal, saluted, and left.
It is a measure of how fast things were happening that it did not occur to me that corporals did not salute corporals. I said to the bigger of the two, "The first thing I'd like is some of that coffee, Corporal."
He raised an eyebrow as thick as a chevron, then grinned.
"Let's get the man some coffee, Captain Bagget," he said. And while corporal number two went over to pour me a cup, corporal number one said, "I'm Colonel Frankenhurst, Major. Do you know your mission?"
It took me a minute to reorient. "Sorry, sir," I apologized. "Uh—only in general terms. I mean, I understand I'm supposed to find this President Reagan, and when I do you two are supposed to take her prisoner and bring her back."
"Shit," he said dispassionately. "Well, it doesn't matter. The captain and I have been rehearsing this for the past forty-eight hours. If we're stopped, I'll do the talking; all you have to do is look like a senator. Can you handle that?" Then he grinned, to show that he had the situation well in hand. "Don't worry about it, Major. First place, we may never go through. They're having trouble with the peepers; these people on the other side move around so fast they can't keep track of them. Last I heard, they weren't going to open a portal before oh-three-hundred anyway."
"That's dumb," observed the captain-corporal, returning with my coffee. "They ought to wait till morning, that way we won't look so conspicuous." The colonel only shrugged. "Of course," said the captain with a sigh, looking me up and down, "a tuxedo won't look exactly normal at eight o'clock in the morning, either."
"Six of one, half a dozen of the other," said the colonel. "Well, DeSota, would you like to meet the other doubles? This is Nancy Davis—of course you've seen her on the TV." Of course I had; she was the star of the I Remember Mama remake, and how they'd got her away from her studios and her well-advertised activities raising funds for everything from Animal Welfare to the Right to Life I couldn't guess. "She's the President." Colonel Frankenhurst grinned. "John here is a Washington police captain on special White House duty—in the real world he's an airline pilot from Ohio. And the champ is a senator like you." He watched me shake hands. "Pretty good work getting you all together," he said complacently. "We missed a few, of course. We found the President's personal maid, but she was eight months pregnant—they didn't think anybody would be fooled. And we lucked onto General Porteco, her personal military aide. Unfortunately our guy was just coming out of the DT's and they couldn't trust him to remember his lines."