"I'm different," Minelli concurred. Then he began to weep. "Goddammit, just put us back out where the rocks are. Let us go in our truck. I'll sign anything. Really. Please."

Phan glanced at them all, then turned and left abruptly. The curtains hummed back into place. Edward's drawer opened and he removed a newspaper and the new packet of infodisks. Hungrily, he read yesterday morning's headline.

"Christ," he muttered. "They know about the President. Stella!" He punched her number on the intercom. "Stella, they know the President came out here!"

"I'm reading," she said.

"Do you think your mother got through?"

"I don't know, really."

"We can hope," Edward said.

Minelli was still weeping.

Chapter 20

20

Hicks lay back against a pillow in the Lincoln Bedroom, a foot-high stack of reports on the round draped night-stand beside him, a small glass-globed lamp glowing softly above the reports. The late Empire-period pendulum clock on the marble mantelpiece ticked softly, steadily. The large, high-ceilinged room looked haunted, in a cozy sort of way; haunted by history, by association. This had been Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet room originally; here he had signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

He shook his head. "I'm crazy," he said. "I'm not here. I'm imagining all of it." For a moment, he hoped desperately that was true; that he was dreaming in the hotel room at the Inter-Continental, and that he would soon be promoting his novel for six minutes or less on another radio show, before another young announcer . . .

On the other hand, what was so undesirable about being in the White House in Washington, D.C., personally chosen by the President of the United States to advise him on the biggest event in human history? "The man doesn't listen," he murmured.

Hicks picked up the topmost report on the stack, a thick sheaf of photocopied papers on the Death Valley site, the Guest, and all that was known about the Great Victoria Desert site.

The Guest's interim autopsy report was third in the stack. Using a talent acquired across years of research, he skimmed the first two papers quickly, stopping only for essential details. The reports, not unexpectedly, were "safe"—hedged through and through with ambiguous language, craftily defused theories, prompt second-guessing. Only the autopsy report showed promise of being substantive.

Colonel Tuan Anh Phan, a man Hicks would like to meet, was clear and to the point. The Guest's physiology was unlike that of any living thing on Earth. Phan could not conceive of an environment that would evolve such a physiology. There were structures that reminded him, again and again, of "engineering shortcuts," totally unlike the more intricate, randomly evolved structures terrestrial biology exhibited. His conclusion was not hedged in the least: