WASHINGTON, D.C.

There was nothing unusual about the man slouched in the back seat of a nondescript Ford sedan driving slowly through the streets of Washington. To the pedestrians who scurried in front of the car at stop lighted intersections, he might have been a paper salesman being driven to work by his nephew. No one paid the slightest notice to the White House tag on the license plates.

Alan Mercier was a plump, balding character with a genial Falstaff face that masked a shrewd analytical mind. No clotheshorse, he was addicted to ever-rumpled, bargain-priced suits with white linen handkerchiefs stuffed sloppily in the breast pocket. They were trademarks that political cartoonists exaggerated with keen enthusiasm.

Mercier was no paper salesman. Recently appointed national security adviser to the country's new president, he was still unrecognized in the public eye. Widely respected in the academic community, he had built a reputation as a canny forecaster of international events. At the time he came under the eye of the President, he was director of the World Crisis Projection Commission.

Perching a pair of Ben Franklin specs on a bubble nose, he laid a briefcase across his lap and opened it. The underside of the lid held a visual display screen, and a keyboard console, bordered by two rows of colored lights, lay across the bottom. He typed out a combination of numbers and waited a brief moment while the signal was bounced by satellite to his corner office at the White House. There a computer, programmed by his aides, whirred into life and began relaying his workload for the day.

The incoming data arrived in code and was electronically deciphered in milliseconds by the battery-operated microprocessor on his lap, the final text reading out in green lowercase letters across the screen.

First came the correspondence, followed by a series of memos from his security council staff. Next came the daily reports from various governmental agencies, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of Central Intelligence. He quickly digested them to memory before erasing their contents from the microprocessor's storage unit. All except two.

He was still lingering over them when his car swung through the west gate of the White House. His eyes mirrored a curious perplexity. Then he sighed, pressed the off button and closed the case.

As soon as he arrived in his office and settled behind his desk, he dialed a private number at the Department of Energy. A man's voice answered in the middle of the first ring. "Dr. Klein's office."

"This is Alan Mercier. Is Ron available?"

There was a slight pause, and then the voice of Dr. Ronald Klein, the secretary of energy, came on the line. "Morning, Alan. What can I do for you?"

"I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes today."

"My schedule is pretty tight."

"This is important, Ron. You name the time."

Klein wasn't used to being pushed, but the cement tone of Mercier's voice implied the security adviser was not about to be put off. He held his palm over the phone's mouthpiece while he checked with his administrative assistant. Then he came back on the line.

"How does between two thirty and three sound?"

"No problem," replied Mercier. "I have a lunch meeting at the Pentagon, so I'll swing by your office on the way back."

"You did say it was important."

"Let's put it another way," Mercier said, pausing for effect. "After I ruin the President's day, I'm going to screw up yours."

In the oval office of the White House, the President sat back from his desk and closed his eyes. He allowed his mind to wander from the pressures of the day for a minute or two. For a man who had been inaugurated to the nation's highest office only a few weeks before, he looked overly worn and tired. The election campaign had been long and exhausting, and he had yet to fully recover from it.

He was small in stature, with brown hair streaked with white and thinning; his features, once cheerful and crinkling, were set and solemn. He reopened his eyes as a sudden winter sleet rapped the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him. Outside on Pennsylvania Avenue, the traffic crawled at a sloth like pace as the pavement turned to ice. He longed for the warmer climate of his native New Mexico. He wished he could escape on a camping trip to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe.

This man had never set out to become President. Never driven by blind ambition, he had served in the Senate during twenty years of conscientious effort and a solid record of accomplishments that did little toward making him a household name.

Nominated as a dark horse by his party's convention, he was elected by a wide popular margin when an investigative reporter dug up a series of shady financial dealings in is opponent's past. "Mr. President?" He looked up from his reverie at the sound of his aide's voice. "Yes?"

"Mr. Mercier is here for your security briefing."

"All right, send him in." Mercier entered the room and seated himself across the desk. He passed over a heavy folder.

"How goes the world today?" the President asked with a thin smile.

"Pretty grim, as always," replied Mercier. "My staff has completed the projections on the nation's energy reserves. The bottom line isn't exactly encouraging."

"You're not telling me anything I didn't know. What's the latest outlook?"

"The CIA gives the Middle East another two years before their fields scrape bottom. That will leave the world's known oil supply at less than fifty percent of demand. The Russians are hoarding their depleted reserves, and the Mexican offshore bonanza fell short of expectations. And as for our own oil deposits…..."

"I've seen the figures," replied the President. "The hectic exploration several years ago brought in a few small fields at best."

Mercier surveyed the interior of a folder. "Solar radiation, windmills, electric autos, they're partial solutions of a sort. Unfortunately, their technology is at about the same state as television during the nineteen forties."

"A pity the synthetic fuel programs got off to such a slow start.

"The earliest target date before the oil-shale refineries can take up the slack is four years away. In the meantime, American transportation is up the polluted creek without locomotion."

The President cracked a faint smile at Mercier's rare display of dry humor. "Surely there is some hope on the horizon."

"There's James Bay."

"The Canadian power project?"

Mercier nodded and reeled off the statistics. "Eighteen dams, twelve powerhouses, a work force of nearly ninety thousand people, and the re channeling of two rivers the size of the Colorado. And, as the Canadian government literature states, the largest and most expensive hydroelectric project in the history of man."

"Who operates it?"

"Quebec Hydro, the provincial power authority. They began work on the project in nineteen seventy-four. The price tag has been pretty hefty. Twenty-six billion dollars, the major share coming from New York money houses."

"What's the output?"

"Over a hundred million kilowatts, with double that coming in the next twenty years."

"How much flows across our borders?"

"Enough to light fifteen states."

The President's face tensed. "I don't like being so heavily dependent on Quebec for electricity. I'd feel more secure if our nation's power came from our own nuclear plants."

Mercier shook his head. "The sad fact is our nuclear facilities provide less than a third of our requirements."