John Barnes - Directive 51

“Yeah,” Roseann, his assistant, said. “Except, you know, they had electricity and phones for the Manhattan Project.”

Heather was so much bigger than Lenny that it had been easy for her to position an arm and a thigh to support his different, asymmetric body, and to sleep with his slight weight resting partly on her. When she woke to the soft chime of her phone, she moved Lenny to a more convenient position, careful not to bend anything that didn’t seem like it should bend. He mumbled, and she squeezed his shoulder affectionately.

She made sure the phone was definitely not on video, and whispered, “Yeah, Arnie?”

“Norcross is going on the air any second. Considering the impact he had last night, and the way the media have been running excerpts from that speech all night long, I thought you’d want to tune in.”

Lenny, beside her, was stretching and using his good hand to rub some of his back muscles. “I’m awake,” he said.

She said “Voice identify and open,” and an image of her computer desktop appeared on the room’s ceiling. “Find Norcross press conference today not yesterday soon not past,” she said.

“On forty-six channels.” Icons appeared on her ceiling.

“Select Spanfeed.”

“Hey, we’re both Spanfeed people. We’re even more compatible.” Lenny turned to put his head on her shoulder; she reached over him, her hands exploring his back, working muscles that were tight, and he sighed like Fuss did when she found the right places.

The image on the ceiling was almost life-size, as if they were looking through a glass wall into the meeting room at the Dubuque Radisson; Norcross appeared to emerge prone from a door about forty feet above Heather’s ceiling and walk down the wall to the podium. “At least he’s not walking in over the swimming pool.”

Heather snorted. “Laugh while you can. One more speech like the one last night, and Mr. Jesus is probably the President of the United States.”

Norcross announced his campaign would be aiming to win the presidency by the “shortest possible route,” because it was now his duty to win the election and put matters right, and so he had calculated a pathway of appearances that would take him through the set of states he judged himself most likely to win—all the traditionally solid Republican states plus Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, Maryland, and Colorado. He admitted how hard it might be, but he added, “We need a President. I am qualified and ready to be one. The other side is not offering that, and we have to have it.”

Simple as Norcross’s message was as a text, the subtext was even simpler: I am religious, not a nut; I would not have done anything so stupid, and stupidity must be punished; I realize that you don’t care for my policies, but I am your alternative, so I will be moderate domestically if you’ll let a grown-up take over national security.

“Phew. He’s the next president, all right,” Heather said, as the network logo popped up with a picture of the Dubuque Radisson and the caption Decision in Dubuque .

“Yeah. Can the Democrats even replace Pendano on the ticket?”

“The ballot slot technically belongs to the party, not the person, in all the states, ever since that Caroline Kennedy uproar. Theoretically, the DNC could just tell everyone ‘a vote for Pendano is really a vote for this other person.’ But who do they have who could possibly win?”

Lenny Plekhanov said, “President Norcross. We’ll have to get used to—”

Her phone beeped, and an ID appeared on the screen on the ceiling. “Confirm no video.”

“Confirmed.”

“Pick up phone.”

“On line.”

“Hey, Cameron,” she said.

“I’m glad you got a chance to sleep,” he said. “We’re having a meeting of everyone working on the Daybreak problem, with Secretary Ferein and several other bigwigs, at one o’clock this afternoon. The meeting before the meeting will be lunch at eleven, and here’s the address. Can you pass that on to Lenny Plekhanov? He’s invited to both meetings.”

“I’ll be there,” Lenny said.

Heather snorted. “You know, some people would object to your tracking our whereabouts? I mean just hypothetically and all. Thought I’d mention that.”

Cam said, “Sorry about the intrusion—”

“I was yanking your chain, Cam, I really shouldn’t do that.”

“You might as well, everyone else does.”

She grinned and rolled her eyes at Lenny; Cameron Nguyen-Peters had been known to everyone at the FBI Academy as “Eeyore.” “Unofficially, how is the real president this morning?” she asked.

“Sedated. Graham Weisbrod had to talk him into that, too. As for the Acting President, and by god that’s a good term, he’ll be at the one o’clock meeting—along with President-Damn-Near-Certain-To-Be-Elect Norcross.”

“Oh, you saw that speech too,” she said, smiling. “Okay, Cam, see you at eleven.”

“Well,” Lenny said, working through the complicated, awkward process to move from bed to wheelchair, “it sounds like you and Cameron have a history.”

Smiling, she came around and knelt beside him so he could use her as a stabilizing rail. With his fused hand braced on her shoulder, and his good hand on the armrest, he easily slipped back into the chair. She said, “Let me make a guess. Does your history happen to include being dumped a lot?”

“Can’t be dumped a lot if you aren’t picked up much,” he pointed out, sullenly.

“Yeah. True. Okay, well, if my love life was a bridge, it would have holes in the deck, towers leaning every which way, and no one in their right mind would venture onto it. Mixture of poor construction and too much traffic, you know? So… I was Cameron Nguyen-Peters’s one and only friend at the FBI Academy because, well, Christ, somebody had to be. A couple weeks before graduation, on the strength of its having been a while, my appreciation for his loyalty, and a few tons of plain old desperation, I went out with him. Once. He made the most gentlemanly and discreet pass I’ve ever seen in my life; the pass was an incomplete, because the receiver was by then not the least bit interested; he did not attempt a punt, end run, or field goal; and the game was called on account of he doesn’t have a damned clue about human beings, and I’ve known warmer snowmen.

“Ever since, whenever we’ve worked together, he has been cordial, friendly, and a good old friend, and he sometimes asks my opinion about things because for reasons not totally clear to me he values my judgment just as if I had any. Oh, and now and then, when he’s doing something really buttheaded, I tell him so.” Still kneeling, she was below Lenny’s eye level, and she leaned forward. “Now kiss me, dammit.”

He did, and seemed to relax. She decided it wouldn’t hurt to drive the point home. “Since that date, which I point out was around thirteen years ago, when he was merely a knee-jerk conservative, Cameron Nguyen-Peters has become a complete right-wing nut of the type that thinks this country is about the flag, God, and the Army, and so I wouldn’t be able to listen to him talk politics for three minutes without strangling him. He is a cold fish emotionally and admits, himself, that he needs massive coaching in order to express the feelings he probably doesn’t have. He is so irritating that every time he swims in the ocean, he causes pearls to grow in oysters a thousand miles away. He has several good qualities, such as being a pretty good sport about being teased, being an Angels fan, regular flossing, and the way he keeps his shoes shined. I’ve honestly dated worse, though not twice.”