What worries me are the people who are doing the investigating. The press could get to some of them."

"I warned Allen on that. He is using only men in his own department—not the people he recruited from outside. He swears that he can trust them. It is unlikely that anyone can get to them, let alone talk to them. We've got a security net around Lone Pine a snake couldn't wriggle through."

The President hoisted himself to his feet and started for the door, then came back and sat down again.

"There's another thing I don't like," he said. "It's that goddamned U.N. There is a push to declare that the visitors are an international, not an internal, matter. You are aware of it, of course.~~

Porter nodded. "I had some rather sharp questions on it at today's briefing. For a while, the boys had me skating on thin ice."

"The resolution is going to be voted," said the President. "Sure as hell it will. There's no way we can stop it. Only half a dozen governments will stand with us. We've twisted all sorts of arms, but there is little we can do. All our little sanctimonious underprivileged brothers that we're breaking our ass to help will vote against us."

"They can pass the resolution. They'll play hell enforcing it."

"Sure, I know that, but we'll get a bloody nose for all the world to see. We'll drop a lot of prestige."

"Maybe it is time to let the prestige go. This is our show. We are the ones who have the visitors on our backs."

"Dave, you may be right. But there are other considerations. State is frantic at the prospect."

"State is always frantic."

"I know. But it's not only State and the U.N. resolution. There are others who are giving us heat. The environmentalists are up in arms because we are doing nothing to protect our wilderness areas against the visitors. The lumber interests are howling to high heaven. The farmers, seeing visitors come down and roost in the middle of their fields, are getting restless. The entire business world is in an uproar. The stock markets are reacting like a yo-yo. At times, I catch myself thinking and I know it's wrong to think it, but I can't help it—why did it have to be us? Why couldn't it have been Europe or South America, or even at times, God help me, the Soviet Union?"

"I can understand how you might feel that way," said Porter. "There is so damn much.

"If only I could win once in a while," said the President. "If I didn't have to fight so hard for every inch of progress. Take the energy bill. It all makes sense, it is all possible within the state of the art. I could bring in hundreds of top notch engineers who would swear that the plan is practical. A solar energy farm in the deserts of the Southwest, a few more millions to nail down a cryogenic transmission and storage system. Another year is all it would take, the engineers tell me, a few more millions. Enough energy to power the entire country, a transmission system that could distribute or store the energy with virtually no loss of power. But does Congress see it that way? Hell, no, they don't see it that way. Half of them are in the clutches of the big energy corporations, the other half so stupid that it's a wonder they can find their way home when they leave the Capitol.

"Some day," said Porter. "Some day they'll come around to it. Soon or late, they'll have to see.

"Sure," said the President, "some day. I'll tell you when that some day will be. When gasoline costs five bucks a gallon and you have to wait in line for hours to get the three gallons your ration card allows you. When you go cold in the winter because you can't afford to use enough natural gas to keep warm. When you use 25-watt light bulbs to hold down the lighting bill.

36. IOWA

The sun had set and the early evening dusk was settling in when Jerry Conklin turned into the gas station.

"Fill the tank and check the oil," Jerry told the attendant.

While the attendant was busy at the pump, Jerry walked to the edge of the road. The station was on the outskirts of one of the many small villages through which he'd driven; a quiet little trading center for the farming country that surrounded it. The town, the same as all the others, was made up of rows of small, neat houses and a tidy business district. Lights were coming on in some of the houses and there was little traffic on the road. An evening hush had fallen over the community, broken now and then by the yapping of a dog.

Jerry stood at the side of the road, looking up and down it. Within himself the ache still persisted. He had been stupid, he told himself, driven by an illogical need that he could not define. He should have known, he told himself, that the trip would come to nothing. It had been silly to think that 101 would recognize him—although, in a way, it might have recognized him. But if it had been recognition, he could find no comfort in it.

He had driven to the farmhouse late in the afternoon after several failures to find the place and having to stop along the way for further directions.

The farmer had been in the farmyard, puttering around with a hammer and nails, repairing a pigpen fence.

"Yeah, it's still sitting there, guarding the field," he had said. "But it won't do you no good to go over there. You're welcome if you want to try, but I know what will happen. I'd go with you, but I got work to do. These hogs have been breaking out of here and I have to repair the fence so I can keep them in.

Jerry had walked to the field. Old 101 sat there, in a hayfield off to one side of the plowed strip of land. It made no move to chase him off. It just kept sitting there. He had walked out to it and walked around it, Staring up at it, trying to remember how it had looked when it had landed on the bridge. But while the memory of it straddling the river, with the bridge gone to kindling wood under its impact, still was sharp and clear, he found it difficult to equate it now with the way it had appeared the time he first had set eyes upon it. Somehow it seemed smaller now, although God knows, it was still big enough.

He had walked around it and moved up close against it, laying his hands upon it to feel the soft warmness of it. He had patted it gently and poked it with a playful fist. And it gave no sign.

"Tell me," he had said to it. "Tell me what I need to know."

It had told him nothing. It had paid no attention to him. But he was sure it knew that he was there. How he could be so sure of that, he did not know.

He had given it plenty of time. He talked to it. He laid his hands upon it and still it made no sign. So finally he had walked away, going slowly, turning back every now and then to look at it, but each time he turned to look, it still sat there as stolidly as it had been sitting all the time.

Although, he told himself, it had not chased him off. It had chased off everyone else who had approached it, but it had made no move against him. And that, in itself, he thought, might be a sign of recognition.

"Mister," said the station attendant, walking up to him and holding out the dipstick, "you need a quart of oil."

"All right, put it in," said Jerry. "This car always needs a quart of oil."

He paid the man and, getting into the car, drove out to the road and headed toward the town.

But when he reached the business district, he drove around a block and came out on the road again, heading back the way that he had come.

He was going back to that farm again and just why he was going back was not quite clear to him. An essential stubbornness, perhaps, he told himself, a desperate unwillingness to give up, a very stubborn faith in his silly conviction that there might be an answer he could get from 101. He didn't deliberately decide to go back, he didn't argue it out with himself, he didn't ponder it; he simply drove around the block and it was not until he was headed back down the road the way that he had come that he realized he was going back. Now that he had done it, he did not try to fight it.