“Sorry,” he half-muttered, and Arnold sighed.

“No, Jase,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “I shouldn’t have bitten your head off. I guess I’m even more irritated than I thought I was.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you were,” Jason said, and produced an off-center smile. “Seems like every time we turn around someone’s giving one of us a fresh reason to be pissed off, doesn’t it?”

“Sometimes,” Arnold agreed. He tipped back his chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose. It would have been nice if he could have squeezed the overwhelming sense of fatigue out of himself, but that wasn’t going to happen.

Jason watched him for several seconds. Arnold had always been the leader. Partly that was because he was over ten T-years older than Jason was, but Jason was honest enough to admit that even if their ages had been reversed, Arnold would still have been the leader. He was smarter than Jason, for one thing, and Jason knew it. But more importantly, he possessed something that had been left out of Jason’s personality. Jason wasn’t entirely certain what that “something” was, but he knew it gave Arnold a spark, a presence. Whatever it was, it lay at the heart of the almost frighteningly powerful magnetism Arnold could exert upon those around him when he chose.

Well, upon almost all of those around him. Eloise Pritchart and Thomas Theisman appeared remarkably resistant to what several of their congressional allies referred to as the “Giancola Effect.” Which unhappy reflection brought Jason back to the purpose of his visit.

“What do we do now?” he repeated, and Arnold lowered his hand to look up at him.

“I’m not sure,” the Secretary of State admitted after a moment. “I hate to admit it, but Pritchart and Theisman completely surprised me with that news conference. I guess they were more alert to where I was headed than I thought they were.”

“Are you sure? I mean, it could have been a genuine coincidence.”

“Sure it could,” Arnold said acidly. “But if you think it was, I’ve got some bottomland I’d like to sell you. Just don’t ask me what it’s on the bottom of!”

“I didn’t say I thought it was a coincidence,” Jason said with some dignity. “I only said that it could have been, and it could have.”

“In the theoretical sense that anything could be a coincidence, you probably have a point, Jase,” Arnold replied a bit more patiently. Not a lot, but a bit. “In this particular case, though, it had to be deliberate. They knew we’d been talking to people, and they must have suspected that we were just about ready to announce the existence of the new ships ourselves. So Pritchart had Theisman made the announcement instead as a way to take the wind out of our sails.”

“McGwire asked me about her speech,” Jason told him, and Arnold grunted. The mysterious speech all of the news services planned to carry live from Eloise Pritchart’s presidential office the next evening was another source of his current unhappiness.