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general election. This maneuver consisted almost entirely in emphasizing his blanket opposition to abortion, including for victims of rape and incest. The press did not explore the arguable tension between these positions. The strategy worked, which was all that mattered.
    Carlson would have been heralded by the press as a genius, if it knew that he existed, which it did not. Carlson was obsessively reclusive. This allowed him to take on clients of differing persuasions without his engagement creating difficulties for the candidates. Included among these were the President’s immediate predecessor, a lifelong Republican who at Carlson’s urging won nomination through the Democratic primaries, and the President’s predecessor’s predecessor, a liberal Democrat who ran on a bring-back-prayer-in-school platform.
    The joke among the dozen or so people inside the Beltway who knew of Len Carlson’s existence was that with $100 million for television advertising, Carlson could get Nixon reelected president, despite the impeachment and being dead.
    With $200 million, the joke went, he could get him elected as a Democrat.
     
    T HE SPECTER OF C ARLSON’S presence cast a pall over the political team as it waited for the President to get off the phone with his mother, who was giving her son substantial grief about her birthday gift, a magnificent Jean-Paul Gaultier evening gown, unfortunately purchased in a size eight instead of a size ten, the size the First Mother had worn for her entire adult life. The First Mother tearfully concluded the President was sending her a message about her weight. In truth, an assistant had reminded the President of his mother’s birthday, searched for the gift, and arranged for its delivery. His participation consisted entirely of saying okay to these arrangements. Of course, the President could say none of this to his mother. He spent several minutes trying to calm her.
    In the Roosevelt Room they did not know the details of what detained the President. They just waited.
    “I wonder why they came to Earth now,” David Prince said softly, thinking aloud. “What’s significant about this particular moment in our history?” This was a natural question for Prince, who had been a college history professor, with a tenure track job, when he decided to volunteer some time for the President’s first senate campaign. His interest in the campaign was academic; he wanted to see how politics worked. Before David knew it, he was in charge of research on the campaign, then the legislative director in the Senate, and soon after that a key member of the White House staff. Ralph wasn’t entirely sure David shared the President’s politics.
    “Maybe they were just in the neighborhood,” Martha Jones said with a smile.
    “In Star Trek ,” David said, “the Federation makes first contact when a planet develops faster-than-light-speed travel.”
    “That’s quite a bit beyond us technologically,” Martha said. Neither Martha nor Joe Quimble seemed very interested in exploring this issue, but Ralph found David’s question intriguing.
    “In the movie Contact ,” Ralph said to David, “it was the transmission of television programming that triggered the alien response.”
    “They’re a bit slow on the draw if that’s the case,” said David.
    “They were in Contact too. In fact, part of the message they sent back was footage of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. That was the first image ever transmitted by television. It took the Contact aliens more than fifty years to get a message back to Earth.”
    “Remember in Galaxy Quest ,” said David, “how the aliens had seen all the episodes of a Star Trek –like show but thought it was real, and decided Tim Allen, who played a character like Captain Kirk, should lead them through a crisis?”
    “Galaxy Quest wasn’t bad,” Ralph said.
    “Well,” Joe Quimble said, “I hope they didn’t see a bunch of Sanford and Son reruns. They