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hoping that President Wade was not acting in the haste of panic.
    “Al, you’re to organize a task force. You are ordered to find a way to destroy those lenses, all of them. I want it fast, and I want a one hundred percent certainty of success.”
    “Sir,” Tom asked, “is an attack on them wise? We’re in the region of the unknown here.”
    “The man with the medals suggests retreat,” the president said. “Okay, I hear you. Al, when you’re ready to attack these things, inform me at once. Directly.” He pointed to a telephone. “Directly,” he repeated.
    “Yes, Sir. We only have four bombs, Sir. We’ll need British and French support.”
    The president sighed. “Waldo, how many nuclear bombs do I have?”
    “Twenty-three, Sir. Four in the hands of the military, the rest underground at-“
    “Tom, Al, you understand that you had no need to know on this.”
    “Sir, I beg to differ,” Tom said. Al could see that his neck was red, his veins pulsing. “We had a need to know. Strategic planning, war games-of course we had a need to know!”
    “And I have a need not to find myself face to face with a quartet of outraged imperial ambassadors all demanding that I hand over my nukes. You leak, Tom. Nobody on your staff likes you, and that makes for security issues, doesn’t it?”
    Al fought his face. The least trace of the smile that his enjoyment of this was urging to his lips would get him fired before sunset.
    One of Waldo’s aides listened to his earpiece. He nodded to the intelligence chief.
    Waldo said, “Mr. President, we have a party present at this time who might be able to help us. There was an archaeologist inside the pyramid as the explosion developed. His working party was killed, but he got out. He’s here.”
    “Excellent work, Bo,” the president said. “Now, you listen and learn, Tom. Bo here wants to impress his president. This is what I like to see. You might take that under advisement.”
    Tom bristled, then plastered a rigid grin on his face. A dusty young man, handsome but looking profoundly exhausted, came wide-eyed into the room.
    MARTIN HAD BEEN GIVEN EGGS and a whole lot of coffee on the plane. It was quite incredible-Air Force private jets all the way from Cairo to Le Bourget, then here. He had been able to talk to Lindy and the kids via videophone from the plane. In normal times, incredibly fun. Now, not so fun. He was heartsick about what had happened, still trying to accept it as reality. The Great Pyramid, gone, replaced by that…thing. Lens, they called it-he’d called it that, in fact, for the BBC, which had interviewed him just before he left Cairo. In fact, he’d probably started the use of the word.
    Now here he was in the White House, in the West Wing, no less. He was a reeking mess, he supposed. Nobody had bothered him with such niceties as a change of clothes or a shower. He still had Giza dust in his hair, as a matter of fact.
    A man in a black suit took him to a book-lined study. He’d hoped to see the Oval Office, but this was apparently the inner sanctum of the Great American Fool, President Jimmy Wade. He’d gutted National Academy of Science budgets, he’d pulled grant money out of dozens of universities, Uriah included. He was a man willing to spend billions supporting American trade associations in their perpetual war with the larger imperial economic systems, but his education program was a sham, his entitlement system was a mess, and his interest in the sciences appeared to be, if anything, negative.
    Under Wade, even NASA’s exobiology and alien culture programs were languishing, and now that it was known that UFOs were intelligently guided, these two programs seemed to be doing some of the most important science in the world. Not to mention the Advanced Propulsion Physics Seminar.
    Still, he was the president, the leader of the American people and one of the more powerful world leaders, and seeing him here, all human and vulnerable, was an odd