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  Yes, our technological leadership has been overtaken by others. But we still lead the world in the production of food. And as long as the world’s population keeps growing, there will be markets for America’s grains and livestock. World prices may fall temporarily, but in the long run they will rise again. We must weather the bad times and prepare for the good.

  Yes, unemployment is severe. But we have beaten recessions in the past and we will beat the one that faces us today. (But she did not remind the audience that more Americans were unemployed now than ever before in history.)

  “There are those,” the President concluded, “who look longingly to the past, seeking faded glories and a way of life that we have outgrown. There are those who look to the future with despair and fear.”

  She hesitated, took a breath. Not a sound from the audience. The beast was holding its breath, waiting for its mistress to tell it what to do.

  “I look to the future with hope. With an optimism born of the strength of the American people. I have a vision of a new America-free, secure from the terrors of war and the burdens of overseas entanglements, threatening no one and being threatened by none, growing more prosperous with every year as we learn to live within the natural boundaries that God has given us, using the abundant resources that reside in our own lands and in our own hands and hearts and minds.

  “We will move forward and rebuild our nation. We will purify its air and waters as we purify our own souls with the dedication that every generation of Americans has within them. God is with us. Our strength is boundless. We are moving toward a new era of peace and prosperity for all. We have taken the hardest and most difficult steps of all-the first ones. We will persevere. We will triumph. Thank you.”

  They came to their feet applauding, pounding their hands together, smiling, cheering, calling to her, shouting their approval and encouragement. The big auditorium was swept by a tossing, heaving sea of applauding people.

  The President stood at the podium, gripping its sides in her two hands, smiling back at them, just the hint of a tear of gratitude glistening in her eyes.

  Two hours later, after the heavily guarded reception and precisely orchestrated press conference, after her staff and even most of the reporters told her what a wonderfully inspiring speech she had made, after the long, quiet drive in the dark shadows of the limousine out across the dilapidated highway, with the governor of Louisiana apologizing to her for every pothole and then renewing his plea for federal funds to rebuild “my infrastructure,” Jane wondered if Dan would show up.

  She had made no move at all to contact him. She had ignored his attempts to contact her. She had maintained a tighter-than-usual security guard for this trip, surrounding herself with grim-faced young men and women who just might shoot Dan Randolph dead if he tried to get past them.

  But he would be at the plantation, she knew. Dan will be there. There was no doubt at all in her mind. Years ago, when life had been so much easier for them all, she and Morgan and Dan and whichever girl he had picked up for the occasion would drive all the way from Houston to Knottaway Plantation and spend a quiet weekend sipping mint juleps and watching the Mississippi go by. It was the perfect place to relax, as far removed from the real world as Tara or Camelot or Xanadu.

  Now, as she bade the governor good night in the gracious foyer of the old plantation house, and followed her trio of personal security guards up the stairs to the old master bedroom suite, she wondered how far Dan would get.

  It was no surprise to her when she saw him sitting calmly on the silk damask-covered sofa at the head of the second-floor landing.

  Her guards-two men, one woman-instantly pulled out their snub-nosed machine pistols. Dan sat unmoving on the sofa, his eyes on Jane.

  She smiled. “It’s all right. I was expecting him.”

  The guards relaxed and put their guns away. Slowly, though. Grudgingly. They did not like the idea of a stranger suddenly appearing, someone they had not been told about in advance.

  One of the young men opened the door to the bedroom suite. Two more guards were inside. They stepped out as the President invited Dan into the suite with a wordless gesture.

  She closed the door behind her. “We’re alone now. There are security agents on the roof and patrolling the grounds, but nobody else in here.”

  Dan grinned at her. “Aren’t you afraid of being compromised?”

  Jane did not smile. She was a tall, stately woman, with coppery red hair and skin as smooth and white as ivory. Dan saw that the years since he had last been this close to her had taken their toll on Jane. She was still beautiful, with the sculptured flawless face of a Norse goddess and those cool green eyes that he had known so well. But she was President of the United States now; her eyes were warier, they probed more deeply; her mouth was set in a distrustful, almost suspicious frown. She was dressed in an off-white suit that was tailored severely enough to look businesslike, yet took advantage of her tall, full figure and long legs. Scant jewelry: merely a choker of pearls with matching pearl earrings, and the diamond-studded gold wedding band that Morgan had given her so long ago.

  Beautiful enough to be a screen star, Jane had earned her law degree in her native Seattle, where she met a lanky, bashful Texan named Morgan Scanwell. He was an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Jane went into corporate law, and when she helped Morgan to get a new assignment in Houston, she went to Texas with him. They married, he left the FBI and went into politics, with Jane guiding his every move and helping to overcome his natural shyness. They met Dan Randolph in Houston: an eager, impetuous, blithely reckless former astronaut driving hard toward his first millions. Dan raised money for Morgan’s campaigns. They became close friends. So close that Jane and Dan flirted in and out of an affair that started and stopped time and again, only to start once more. If Morgan knew, he gave no indication. And Jane pretended not to notice her husband’s occasional dalliances.

  Morgan became governor of Texas. Then a senator. And then he ran for president as the ultimate confrontation of the Cold War took shape and the dark clouds of nuclear annihilation gathered on every horizon. One of the women on their public relations staff came up with the idea of having Jane run alongside her husband for the vice-presidency. Dan thought it was little more than a gimmick. But the gimmick won almost every woman’s vote in the country. When Morgan took the oath of office as president, his running mate became vice-president. When Morgan died in office, little more than a year later, the victim of Soviet pressures and the collapse of American will, Jane Scanwell became the first woman president in the history of the United States.

  And by that time, Dan Randolph had renounced his American citizenship and fled to Venezuela.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Jane asked him, “how did you get in here? Security was supposed to be airtight.”

  “Yes, I know. They checked out every member of the staff very carefully.”

  Her eyebrows lifted in a wordless question.

  “When I found out that you were going to give a speech in

  New Orleans, I bought this place. I’m the owner. Technically speaking, Madam President, you are my guest.” Dan made a sweeping, old-fashioned bow.

  Jane could not help laughing. “You rogue! So when the security people checked out the staff …”

  “They checked out the owner as well. All I had to do was show up and prove to your trigger-happy guards that I actually am Everett McKinley of Minneapolis, the owner of this noble and ancient house.”

  They were standing in the suite’s morning room, furnished in cushioned white wicker chairs. Decanters of wines and brandies stood on the serving table next to the door that led to the actual bedroom.

  Heading for the liquor, Dan asked, “Can I pour you something? That was quite a speech you gave; I watched you on television.”

  Jane sat on the settee next to the curtained window. “What did you think of it?”

  “You were incredible,” Dan said, pouring two snifters of b
randy. “The country’s flat on its back, so you told them they’ve got no place to go but up. Quite a performance.”

  Her green eyes went cold. “You’re being sarcastic.”

  Handing her one of the snifters, he replied, “Not really. I don’t think you could do anything else. They all know that things have gone to the dogs. They look to you for hope.”

  “That’s right, they do.”

  Dan lifted his glass and muttered. “Salud.”

  “You’re not in South America now.”

  He grinned sheepishly. “I forgot. I’m getting accustomed to the place.”

  They sipped at the brandy. Dan made a sour face. “Cheap crap! I’ll have to raise hell with the staff.”

  “It’s my favorite brand,” the President said. “Your staff checked with my people.”

  “Your favorite? This garbage?”

  “Yes. And it was Morgan’s favorite, too.”

  Dan felt his face tighten. “He never was much of a drinker.”

  “But you are. You’re a man of the world, aren’t you, Dan?”

  Better to let that one pass you by, he told himself. Yet as he pulled one of the smaller wicker chairs up close to the settee and sat in it, Dan said, “There wasn’t anything I could do to help. You know that.”

  “You could have stayed by him,” Jane answered in a low voice. There was anger in it, even after years. “He needed every friend he had. God knows there were few enough of them.”

  “I came to the funeral,” Dan said. “I wasn’t invited, but I snuck in anyway.”

  “A lot of good that did.”

  He took a long pull on the brandy, despite its acrid roughness, remembering how Morgan preferred raw bourbon to twenty-year-old Scotch, well-done steak to veal cordon bleu.

  “So you thought my speech gave the people hope,” Jane said. Her tone was determinedly brighter; she was trying to put the past behind them, Dan saw.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And?”

  He looked at her.

  “Come on, Dan. What else? What do you really think?”

  Shrugging, he replied, “You came into office to govern a nation that’s turned its back on its responsibilities. They’ve stuck their heads in the sand, Jane. They got tired of the tensions and the pains of being a world leader. They let their fears rule them-fears of nuclear energy, fears of weapons, fears of war, fears of inflation, fears of taxes …”

  “They had a right to be afraid of those things.”

  “Sure they did. They had a right to be afraid of the Russians, too. But their other fears overpowered that. Morgan’s predecessors gave our power away, piece by piece. We abandoned Israel. We got out of Latin America. We gave up on nuclear power. We froze our missiles. We let NATO break up.”

  “Morgan wanted to change that. The people elected him to bring us back to greatness.”

  “They elected him by the thinnest majority since Kennedy squeaked past Nixon. And the day of his inauguration the Russians announced their missile defense satellites were operational, and what was left of our strategic missile force was useless.”

  Jane said quietly, “Morgan had his first heart attack that night.”

  Dan felt a pang of surprise. “I didn’t know.”

  “No one did. Not even the Cabinet or most of the White House staff.” Her green eyes drifted into the past again. “He never really was president. I was, from that very first day. …”

  “And now you’re going to stand for election.”

  “I’ll win,” she said flatly. The mist in her eyes disappeared.

  “I heard a lot of citizens complaining, out there,” Dan said, jabbing a forefinger in the general direction of New Orleans.

  She almost smiled. “What else is new? It’s their right to complain.”

  “They claim there are Russians in the White House, telling you what to do.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “But the Soviets do have a pretty effective veto on anything you want to do, don’t they?”

  “Certainly not!” she snapped. “This nation is free, and we’ll remain free. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool or a malicious liar!”

  He smiled at her. “Good. That’s the answer I was hoping for.”

  “What are you driving at, Dan?”

  “A way out of the mess we’re in. A way to help bring this country back to greatness.”

  She gave him a quizzical, almost unbelieving look. The United States was not prostrate, they both knew. It was merely impotent. The people’s fear of Armageddon had faded. In its place was America the second-rate power; America the debtor nation; America the coal-burner, who could not afford to buy oil, whose major export was food, who had to import high-technology products such as computers and jet airplanes and electric automobiles; America disarmed, its obsolete nuclear missiles dismantled under the watchful eyes of international inspectors (Russian, Eastern European, and-most humiliating of all-Cuban), its troops mustered out of service, its vast panoply of weapons sold to other nations or left to slowly rust away in the southwestern deserts.

  And it was America the unbrilliant, as well. Six years had passed since the last American had won a Nobel Prize. The Brain Drain worked in reverse: bright American scientists and engineers went overseas to find career opportunities. Dan himself had been part of the earliest wave in that flow, seeking work as an astronaut in Japan’s space program when it became clear to him that the United States was abandoning space.

  “It’s a little late for your kind of help,” Jane said.

  “But-”

  “I know what you’re after. You’re going to send a mission out to an asteroid, to prove they can be sources of raw materials for your factories in space.”

  He sagged back in his chair, a shock of alarm racing through him.

  Jane broke into a smile. “We’re not without our sources of intelligence, Dan.”

  He recovered and grinned weakly back at her. “So I see. Congratulations. But if you know …”

  “Do the Russians? No, I don’t believe so. There are people who are friendly to us and not to the Russians. You know how the top dog is hated. Now that we’re not top dog anymore, we have lots more friends than we used to.”

  Dan kept the smile on his face, but his stomach felt as queasy as the first few minutes in free fall. If she knows, the Russians must know, he thought. Our security isn’t as tight as I thought it was.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Jane was asking. “How can your space mission help the United States?”

  “We can leapfrog the Russians,” he heard himself reply. It was almost as if someone else were speaking and Dan was an eavesdropper, listening to the stranger’s speech while his own mind was running through the implications of the breach in his company’s security.

  “Leapfrog?”

  “They have a monopoly on cislunar space. Everything from the Earth’s surface to the Moon’s orbit is theirs.”

  “By UN agreement, they operate-”

  “The Treaty of New York,” Dan said. “They shoved it up our ass and gave it a full turn.”

  If the President was shocked, she gave no indication of it. She merely picked up her brandy snifter and sipped from it, her eyes never leaving Dan’s face.

  “We have the technology to go to the asteroids for raw materials. This mission I’m sending out will prove that. It’ll open up a source of natural resources bigger than Africa and Asia and the Pacific put together. It’ll be the biggest bonanza in human history.”

  “And what has that got to do with the United States? We have no space operations at all.”

  “But you could have,” Dan answered. “You could establish trading relations with Venezuela, with Japan and China and all the Third World countries. Europe would come in on it, if the States showed enough guts to do it.”

  “And what would the Russians do?”

  “If they were faced with an alliance that included the States, Japan, China and most of the Third World? Wha
t could they do? Not a damned thing.”

  The President shook her head sadly. “Dan, perhaps you’re right and they couldn’t do anything once such an alliance was formed. But do you have any idea of what they can do to prevent us from even starting to make such agreements?”

  “They could threaten to cut off the last of the oil, I suppose,” he muttered. “Cut food prices again.”

  “They could also stop all our electronic communications which are relayed through their satellites,” the President said. “They could seize our overseas assets …”

  “What’s left of them.”

  “They would get Venezuela to close down Astro Manufacturing.”

  “Not if you granted Astro a license to operate out of Hawaii,” Dan said.

  “They’d send troops to seize your launch centers, wherever they are. They’d occupy your factories in orbit.”

  “Not if we defended those facilities!”

  “Defended them?” Jane’s face showed horror. “Do you mean with soldiers?”

  “Yes. What else, Girl Scouts?”

  “A military confrontation? Then what’s to stop the Soviets from wiping out Washington with a missile? Or Caracas, for that matter?”

  Dan suddenly found that he was out of answers. “It always comes down to that, doesn’t it? They still have their hydrogen bombs and missiles; we don’t. They don’t have to invade us, or bomb us. Just the threat is enough to make us dance to their tune.”

  “It won’t work, Dan,” the President said, her voice softening. “It just won’t work.”

  “It won’t work because none of you has the guts to make it work.”

  Her eyes flashed. “You want me to risk a nuclear holocaust so that you can make another billion or two?”

  “This has nothing to do with money, for Chrissake!”

  “Everything you do has money behind it!” Jane snapped. “You left Morgan alone, left your best friend to die, so that you could run off to Venezuela and make more money!”

  “That’s not-”

  “And now you want me to put the cities of the United States at risk of a nuclear attack. You’re crazy, Dan! Insane! Money mad!”