"Mr. President, the First Lady did indeed speak to me," Hicks said.

"She's not speaking to me, you know," Crockerman said levelly. "Or not often, at any rate. She doesn't share our convictions."

"Yes," Hicks said. "Or rather, no . . . Mr. President, my colleagues—" He cast a pleading look at Arthur.

"We assume you're still planning to tell the public about the Death Valley bogey," Arthur said, "and about the Guest."

"The story will break soon one way or the other," Crockerman said. "It must be kept quiet past the election and the inauguration, but after that . . ."He lifted three fingers from their grip on the edge of the desk and shrugged slightly.

"We're not at all sure about your emphasis, sir . . ." Arthur paused. "Surrender will not sit well with the country."

Crockerman hardly blinked. "Surrender. Accommodation. Nasty words, aren't they? But what choice have we against superhuman forces?"

"We do not know they are superhuman, sir," Harry said.

"It would take us thousands, perhaps millions of years to rival their technology—if indeed we can even call it technology. Think of the power to destroy an entire moon, and push its fragments into collisions with other worlds ..."

"We don't know that these events are connected," Arthur said. "But I think we could equal them with a couple of hundred years of progress."

"What does it matter, two centuries or two millennia? They can still destroy our world."

"We don't know that," Schwartz said.

"We don't even know of whom we speak when we say 'they,' " Hicks said.

"Angels, powers, aliens. Whatever they might be."

"Mr. President," Hicks said, "we are not facing God's wrath."

"It seems we face something equivalent in force, whatever the ultimate source," Crockerman said. "Can something so catastrophic happen to the Earth without God's approval? We are His children. His punishments are not random, not when they're on such a huge scale."

Hicks noted that the President's pronoun for God had assumed traditional gender now. Was that Ormandy's doing?

"We have no evidence the Earth can be destroyed," Harry said. "What we need ... we need a smoking gun, something that proves that the power they claim to have does indeed belong to them. We don't have a smoking gun."

"They reveal their intentions clearly enough," Crockerman said. "The self-destruction of the Australian robots shows them to be bringers of false testimony. When their lies are discovered, and pointed out to them, they vanish. Their message of hope is a deception. I believe I knew that, sensed it, before the news from Australia arrived. Ormandy certainly did."

"None of us puts any faith in Mr. Ormandy," Schwartz said.