And they were human.
'The President will be re-elected by an overwhelming majority two years from this November,' said the white-haired man with an aquiline, aristocratic face at the head of the conference table. 'We hardly needed our projections to determine this. He has the country in the palm of his hand and, short of catastrophic errors, which his more reasonable advisers will prevent, there's nothing anyone can do about it, ourselves included. Therefore we must prepare for the inevitable and have our man in place.'
'A strange term, “our man”,' commented a slender, balding man in his seventies with sunken cheeks and wide, gentle eyes, nodding his head. 'We'll have to move quickly. And yet again things could change. The President is such a charming person, so attractive, so wanting to be liked—loved, I imagine.'
'So shallow,' broke in a broad-shouldered, middle-aged black, quietly, with no animosity in his voice, his impeccably tailored clothes signifying taste and wealth. 'I have no ill feeling towards him personally, for his instincts are decent; he's a decent, perhaps a good man. That's what the people see and they're probably right. No, it's not him. It's those mongrels behind him—so far behind it's likely he doesn't know they exist except as campaign contributors.'
'He doesn't,' said the fourth member at the table, a rotund, middle-aged man with a cherubic face and the impatient eyes of a scholar below a rumpled thatch of red hair; his elbow-patched tweed jacket labelled him an academic. 'And I'll bet ten of my patents that some profound miscalculation will take place before his first term is over.'
'You'd lose,' said the fifth member at the table, an elderly woman with silver hair and dressed elegantly in a black silk dress with a minimum of jewelry. Her cultured voice was laced with those traces of inflection and cadence often described as mid-Atlantic. 'Not because you underestimate him, which you do, but because he and those behind him will consolidate their growing consensus until he's politically invincible. The rhetoric will be slanted, but there won't be any profound decisions until his opposition is rendered damn near voiceless. In other words, they're saving their big guns for the second term.'
'Then you agree with Jacob that we have to move quickly,' said the white-haired Samuel Winters, nodding at the gaunt-faced Jacob Mandel on his right.
'Of course I do, Sam,' replied Margaret Lowell, casually smoothing her hair, then suddenly leaning forward, her elbows firmly on the table, her hands clasped. It was an abruptly masculine movement in a very feminine woman, but none at the table noticed. Her mind was the focal point. 'Realistically, I'm not sure we can move quickly enough,' she said rapidly, quietly. 'We may have to consider a more abrupt approach.'
'No, Peg,' broke in Eric Sundstrom, the red-haired scholar on Lowell's left. 'Everything must be perfectly normal, befitting an upbeat administration that turns liabilities into assets. This must be our approach. Any deviation from the principle of natural evolution—nature being unpredictable—would send out intolerable alarms. That ill-informed consensus you mentioned would rally round the cause, inflamed by Gid's mongrels. We'd have a police state.'
Gideon Logan nodded his large black head in agreement, a smile creasing his lips. 'Oh, they'd stomp around the camp-fires, pulling in all the good-thinking people, and burn the asses off the body politic.' He paused, looking at the woman across the table. 'There are no shortcuts, Margaret. Eric's right about that.'
'I wasn't talking melodrama,' insisted Lowell. 'No rifle shots in Dallas or deranged kids with hang-ups. I only meant time. Have we the time?'
'If we use it correctly, we do,' said Jacob Mandel. 'The key factor is the candidate.'
'Then let's get to him,' interrupted the white-haired Samuel Winters. 'As you all know, our colleague Mr. Varak has completed his search and is convinced he's come up with our man. I won't bore you with his many eliminations except to say that if there's not complete unanimity among us, we'll examine them—every one. He's studied our guidelines—the assets we seek and the liabilities we wish to avoid; in essence, the talents we're convinced must be there. In my judgment he's unearthed a brilliant, if totally unexpected, prospect. I won't talk for our friend—he does that very well for himself—but I'd be remiss if I did not state that in our numerous conferences he's shown the same dedication to us that his uncle, Anton Varak, was said to have given to our predecessors fifteen years ago.'
Winters paused, his penetrating grey eyes levelled in turn at each person around the table. 'Perhaps it takes a European deprived of his liberties to understand us, understand the reasons for our being. We are the inheritors of Inver Brass, resurrected in death by those who came before us. We ourselves were to be selected by those men should their attorneys determine that our lives continued in the way they envisaged. When the sealed envelopes were given to
