Norman told Aurora a version of the truth that did not include Pepe or weapons of incredible ferocity. The police investigation of the murder/arson did not publicly acknowledge that the bodies had been burned beyond even molecular recognition. The station scuttlebutt was that Willy Joe had arranged the arson to make it look as if he had died, a cover for disappearing out of sight. That was consistent with Rabin's fantastic testimony and the absolute lack of organic residue: the "men" who were holding him hostage were just convincing dummy robots, loaded with something like thermite. It would have been an expensive masquerade, but well within Willy Joe's budget, or at least the budget of his bosses.
Rabin had one more clandestine meeting with Norm, where they discussed the unlikelihood of that explanation. Of course, Rabin had gone along with it during the investigation, because it turned the spotlight away from him: Willy Joe had only picked up a cop so he would have an unimpeachable witness to his dramatic "demise."
Norm and Rabin stropped Occam's razor and concluded it must have been some clandestine military device that had fallen into the hands of an enemy of Willy Joe's. Norm was still thinking privately about gamma-ray bursters, but he left well enough alone there.
(An aspect of it that no one else was privy to was that the chief of police had a cousin in Washington who was high up in U.S. Army weapons research. He said there was nothing in the arsenal, or even on the drawing boards, that would do what Rabin had described. So it must have been fake.)
1 December
Aurora
"This should be entertaining." Rory snapped off the screen.
Norman was in the supplicant's chair. "Well, I'mimpressed. The leader of the Western world up at nine." He sipped coffee.
"Oh, since eight at least, putting on makeup." Rory leafed through a thin stack of papers and slid them into a plastic portfolio. She reached for his cup. "May I?"
He pushed it an inch toward her. "No sugar."
"I stand in awe of your willpower." She took a sip. "Ugh. Delicious."
"Take it along."
"They'll have some there." She gave him a good-bye peck and took her jacket off the peg. "Wasn't it raining out?"
"Stopped before I left." She'd come to the office about four and saw lightning over the horizon. Crazy weather.
The elevator had a sharp scrubbed smell; first of the month. She put the scruffy jacket on over her businesslike meet-the-president dress, feeling bohemian. But who in Florida bothers with fancy cold-weather clothes?
The sky was gray with fast-moving clouds, the air damp and cool. It might rain again. She hurried along with the students hustling to their nine-o'clocks, some of them resolutely wearing shorts. Maybe they didn't haveanything else.
She got to the conference room early and was startled to see the president already there. "It's just a test holo," Deedee said from the other side of the room. "Coffee?"
"Half a cup, sure." The holo looked absolutely real. Its eyes seemed to follow you. "I wonder how much science the holo knows. We could just go ahead and get started."
"Ye of little faith." Deedee handed her a plastic cup as she sat down, and took her own place across the table. "Let's hope it's just a pro forma pep talk."
"Not a funding cut," Rory said. "That's the first thing that occurred to me."
"It's been a real windfall for you guys."
She blew on the coffee. "You know it. Half our salary load this semester's covered by the federal grant. Of course it's generated a lot of paperwork. People trying to justify their ongoing research in terms of the Coming."
"I didn't hear that." Chancellor Barrett walked into the room.
"I didn't say it, Mai." She smiled at him. "I was temporarily in the thrall of millennial demons."
"That was lastmonth." He poured some coffee and squeezed past Deedee to get to his assigned chair. "I hope we won't have to address the spiritual side of it this time."
"God willing," Deedee said.
"Amen." The meeting a month ago with Reverend Kale had been harrowing. You were either with him or against him, and he had come to the meeting knowing that it would be a confrontation with his strongest enemies.
He tried to turn it into a ground-shaking media event, but fortunately, the press was tired of dealing with him. So it was a lot of sound and fury and no airtime.
There was a soft gong and the president came to life, a few inches higher, her hair unchanged but her blouse lavender instead of teal. Governor Tierny and Grayson Pauling appeared at the same moment. The governor had a green suit with a red tie, Christmas coming. The science adviser always wore gray. This morning, his skin seemed a little gray.
"Good morning," the president said, as if she meant it. A smile that revealed just a trace of her perfect teeth. "Let's get right down to business." She reached outside of the holo field and someone handed her a leather folder.
Rory had expected the Oval Office, but this was some other room, oil paintings of the presidents looking down from windowless walls.
"This is top secret. You may not discuss it with the media. A few days ago, the secretary of defense asked me to convene a secret cabinet meeting."
"Oh, no," Rory said, at the edge of audibility. Pauling looked up at her, but the president didn't seem to notice.
" ... about our preparedness for what amounts to an alien invasion. Clearly, we are not prepared, he admitted, but just as clearly, we can be."
She looked around the room as if daring anyone to speak. "We reviewed your testimony on this, and the corroborating testimony f the National Science Foundation and the American Association for Science—"
"The Advancement of Science," Pauling corrected.
"Thank you, Grayson. Simply put, we felt that you were well meaning but wrong. This is actually a political issue, not a scientific one. I mean, we wouldn't know about the danger without you scientists, true. But it is a political problem with a political solution."
"Which is to say military," Deedee said. "Ms. President."
"Strategic. There's a time-honored distinction."
"Strategic, until you push the button," Pauling said. "Then it's military."
"And the reason for strategic preparedness is to prevent war."
"Ms. President," Rory said, "what are you going to use to scare these space aliens with? Nuclear weapons?"
"Better than that." She pulled a diagram from the folder. "Though it uses a nuclear weapon for fuel."
The diagram was just a polar view of the earth, with a dotted orbit surrounding it, about four thousand miles up. There were three equidistant Xson the orbit.
"Each of these three shuttles has a one-shot maser, microwave laser, generator. It turns the power of a hydrogen bomb into a single blast of energy powerful enough to vaporize anything. At any given time, two of the three will cover any approach to Earth."
"Boy, I hope they don't have four ships," Rory said.
"What?"
"Ms. President, if you were going to invade another planet, would you send just one ship?"
"Well ... I'm sure we can put any number of these things in orbit ... "