'Simplistics?' offered Jennings quietly.
'Today's world is as complicated and tumultuous as the act of creation itself, however it came about,' replied Payton. 'Wrong moves by only a few and we're back where we started, a lifeless ball of fire racing through the galaxy. There are no easy answers any longer, Mr. President… You asked for candour.'
'I sure as hell got it.' Jennings laughed softly as he uncrossed his legs and sat forward, his elbows on his knees. 'But let me tell you something, Doctor. You try expounding on those complicated, tumultuous problems during an election campaign, you'll never be in a position to look for the complex solutions. You end up bellyaching from the stands, but you're not part of the team—you're not even in the game.'
'I'd like to believe otherwise, sir.'
'So would I but I can't. I've seen too many brilliant erudite men go down because they described the world as they knew it to be to electorates who didn't want to hear it.'
'I would suggest they were the wrong men, Mr. President. Erudition and political appeal aren't mutually exclusive. Some day a new breed of politician will face a different electorate, one that will accept the realities, those harsh descriptions you mentioned.'
'Bravo,' said Jennings quietly as he leaned back on the couch. 'You've just described the reason for my being who I am—why I do what I do, what I've done… All governing, Dr Payton, since the first tribal councils worked out languages over fires in their caves, has been a process of transition, even the Marxists agree with that. There's no Utopia; in the back of his mind Thomas More knew that, because nothing is as it was—last week, last year, last century. It's why he used the word Utopia—a place that doesn't exist… I'm right for my time, my moment in the change of things, and I hope to Christ it's the change you envisage. If I'm the bridge that brings us alive to that crossing, I'll go to my grave a damned happy man and my critics can go to hell.'
Silence.
The once and former Professor Mitchell Jarvis Payton observed the most powerful man in the world, his eyes betraying mild astonishment. 'That's an extremely scholarly statement,' he said.
'Don't let the word get out, my mandate would disappear and I need those critics… Forget it. You pass, MJ, I'm voting for you.'
'MJ?'
'I told you, I had to do some fast gathering and faster reading.'
'Why do I “pass”, Mr. President? It's a personal as well as a professional question, if I may ask it.'
'Because you didn't flinch.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'You haven't been talking to Lang Jennings, a farmer from Iowa whose family made a few bucks because his daddy happened to buy forty-eight thousand acres in the mountains that developers sold their souls for. You've been talking to the head boy of the Western world, the man who could take this planet right back to that ball of fire. If I were you, I'd be frightened confronting that fellow. Frightened and cautious.'
'I'm trying not to be both, and I didn't even know about the forty-eight thousand acres.'
'You think a relatively poor man could ever be president?'
'Probably not.'
'Probably never. Power is to the rich, or the damn-near broke who haven't a thing to lose and a lot of clout and exposure to gain. All the same, Dr Payton, you come here through a back door making an outrageous request, asking me to sanction the covert domestic activities of an agency prohibited by law from operating domestically. Further, and in the process, you want me to permit you to suppress extraordinary information involving a national tragedy, a terrorist massacre meant to kill a man the country owes a great deal to. In essence, you're asking me to violate any number of rules vital and intrinsic to my oath of office. Am I right so far?'
'I've given you my reasons, Mr. President. There's a web of circumstances that spreads from Oman to California, and it's so clear that it has to be more than coincidence. These fanatics, these terrorists, kill for one purpose that overrides all other motivation. They want to focus attention on themselves, they demand headlines to the point of suicide. Our only hope of catching them and the people here behind them is to withhold those
