I’m not fit, he thought, to hold this office.

“Listen, Leon,” he said, “I’m going to give it to that Briskin anyhow and then step down. It’ll be my last official act.” Once more he picked up the red phone. “I’m going to order them to wipe out Briskin and then someone else can be President. Anyone the people want. Even Pat Noble or you; I don’t care.” He jiggled the phone. “Hey, C. of C.,” he said loudly. “Come on, answer.” To his cousin he said, “Leave me some of that shake; it’s actually half mine.”

“Sure, Max,” Leon said loyally.

“Isn’t no one there?” Max said into the phone. He waited. The phone remained dead. “Something’s gone wrong,” he said to Leon. “Communications have busted down. It must be those aliens again.”

And then he saw the TV screen. It was blank.

“What’s happening?” Max said. “What are they doing to me? Who’s doing it?” He looked around, frightened. “I don’t get it.”

Leon stoically drank the milkshake, shrugging to show that he had no answer. But his beefy face had paled.

“It’s too late,” Max said. “For some reason it’s just too late.” Slowly, he hung up the phone. “I’ve got enemies, Leon, more powerful than you or me. And I don’t even know who they are.” He sat in silence, before the dark, soundless TV screen. Waiting.

The speaker of the TV set said abruptly, “Psuedo-autonomic news bulletin. Stand by, please.” Then again there was silence.

Jim Briskin, glancing at Ed Fineberg and Peggy, waited.

“Comrade citizens of the United States,” the flat, unmodulated voice from the TV speaker said, all at once. “The interregnum is over, the situation has returned to normal.” As it spoke, words appeared on the monitor screen, a ribbon of printed tape passing slowly across, before the TV cameras in Washington, D.C. Unicephalon 40-D had spliced itself into the co-ax in its usual fashion; it had pre-empted the program in progress: that was its traditional right.

The voice was the synthetic verbalizing-organ of the homeostatic structure itself.

“The election campaign is nullified,” Unicephalon 40-D said. “That is item one. The stand-by President Maximilian Fischer is cancelled out; that is item two. Item three: we are at war with the aliens who have invaded our system. Item four. James Briskin, who has been speaking to you—”

This is it, Jim Briskin realized.

In his earphones the impersonal, plateau-like voice continued, “Item four. James Briskin, who has been speaking to you on these facilities, is hereby ordered to cease and desist, and a writ of mandamus is issued forthwith requiring him to show just cause why he should be free to pursue any further political activity. In the public interest we instruct him to become politically silent.”

Grinning starkly at Peggy and Ed Fineberg, Briskin said, “That’s it. It’s over. I’m to politically shut up.”

“You can fight it in the courts,” Peggy said at once. “You can take it all the way up to the Supreme Court; they’ve set aside decisions of Unicephalon in the past.” She put her hand on his shoulder, but he moved away. “Or do you want to fight it?”

“At least I’m not cancelled out,” Briskin said. He felt tired. “I’m glad to see that machine back in operation,” he said, to reassure Peggy. “It means a return to stability. That we can use.”

“What’ll you do, Jim-Jam?” Ed asked. “Go back to Reinlander Beer and Calbest Electronics and try to get your old job back?”

“No,” Briskin murmured. Certainly not that. But—he could not really become politically silent; he could not do what the problem-solver said. It simply was not biologically possible for him; sooner or later he would begin to talk again, for better or worse. And, he thought, I’ll bet Max can’t do what it says either… neither of us can.

Maybe, he thought, I’ll answer the writ of mandamus; maybe I’ll contest it. A counter suit… I’ll sue Unicephalon 40-D in a court of law. Jim-Jam Briskin the plaintiff, Unicephalon 40-D the defendant. He smiled. I’ll need a good lawyer for that. Someone quite a bit better than Max Fischer’s top legal mind, cousin Leon Lait.

Going to the closet of the small studio in which they had been broadcasting, he got his coat and began to put it on. A long trip lay ahead of them back to Earth from this remote spot, and he wanted to get started.

Peggy, following after him, said, “You’re not going back on the air at all? Not even to finish the program?”

“No,” he said.

“But Unicephalon will be cutting back out again, and what’ll that leave? Just dead air. That’s not right, is it, Jim? Just to walk out like this… I can’t believe you’d do it, it’s not like you.”

He halted at the door of the studio. “You heard what it said. The instructions it handed out to me.”

“Nobody leaves dead air going,” Peggy said. “It’s a vacuum, Jim, the thing nature abhors. And if you don’t fill it, someone else will. Look, Unicephalon is going back off right now.” She pointed at the TV monitor. The ribbon of words had ceased; once more the screen was dark, empty of motion and light. “It’s your responsibility,” Peggy said, “and you know it.”

“Are we back on the air?” he asked Ed.

“Yes. It’s definitely out of the circuit, at least for a while.” Ed gestured toward the vacant stage on which the TV cameras and lights focussed. He said nothing more; he did not have to.

With his coat still on, Jim Briskin walked that way. Hands in his pockets he stepped back into the range of the cameras, smiled and said, “I think, beloved comrades, the interruption is over. For the time being, anyhow. So… let’s continue.”

The noise of canned applause—manipulated by Ed Fineberg—swelled up, and Jim Briskin raised his hands and signalled the nonexistent studio audience for silence.

“Does any of you know a good lawyer?” Jim-Jam asked caustically. “And if you do, phone us and tell us right away—before the FBI finally manages to reach us out here.”

In his bedroom at the White House, as Unicephalon’s message ended, Maximilian Fischer turned to his cousin Leon and said, “Well, I’m out of office.”

“Yeah, Max,” Leon said heavily. “I guess you are.”

“And you, too,” Max pointed out. “It’s going to be a clean sweep; you can count on that. Cancelled.” He gritted his teeth. “That’s sort of insulting. It could have said retired.”

“I guess that’s just its way of expressing itself,” Leon said. “Don’t get upset, Max; remember your heart trouble. You still got the job of stand-by, and that’s the top stand-by position there is, Stand-by President of the United States, I want to remind you. And now you’ve got all this worry and effort off your back; you’re lucky.”

“I wonder if I’m allowed to finish this meal,” Max said, picking at the food in the tray before him. His appetite, now that he was retired, began almost at once to improve; he selected a chicken salad sandwich and took a big bite from it. “It’s still mine,” he decided, his mouth full. “I still get to live here and eat regularly—right?”

“Right,” Leon agreed, his legal mind active. “That’s in the contract the union signed with Congress; remember back to that? We didn’t go out on strike for nothing.”

“Those were the days,” Max said. He finished the chicken salad sandwich and returned to the eggnog. It felt good not to have to make big decisions; he let out a long, heartfelt sigh and settled back into the pile of pillows propping him up.

But then he thought, In some respects I sort of enjoyed making decisions. I mean, it was—He searched for the thought. It was different from being a stand-by or drawing unemployment. It had—

Satisfaction, he thought. That’s what it gave me. Like I was accomplishing something. He missed that already; he felt suddenly hollow, as if things had all at once become purposeless.