He watched the great clouds roll along the ocean rim, clouds that might have come from war-torn Europe, but more likely from the tropics, from seas that still carried a whiff of Joseph Conrad and H. Rider Haggard when he saw their names on a map: the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal. He would dream in such a fashion, and then he would eat his lunch: cold roast beef from the hotel kitchen and a thermos of sweet iced tea.

I was once as alive as that.

What fairy tales our lives are, William thought. How strange that that child could have conceived an ambition to rule the United States—could have pursued his ambition so relentlessly that he became something stony and patrician. It seemed to him now that he had fallen into a kind of trance, though he could not say exactly when. In law school? When he first ran for office? He had folded himself into the cloak of his career until it dimmed his urge to run away down some sunny summer beach. What a shame.

He drifted into sleep, sun-warmed on a park bench by the statue of Rochambeau… but the touch of the pistol barrel on his neck woke him instantly.

The steel barrel was pressed against a space two inches below his left ear, sliding minutely against a knot of muscle under the skin.

William turned his head cautiously away from the pressure and looked up.

He did not immediately recognize the man who was holding the pistol. He was a tall man with a neat brush of white hair. A strong man, but not a young man—on the shy side of sixty, the President guessed. He was wearing an immaculate three-piece suit with the jacket open. William saw all this in the blink of an eye.

The face was startlingly handsome. And not completely unfamiliar.

He probed his memory. “Ah,” he said at last. “Colonel Tyler.”

John Tyler kept his body tight against the weapon to disguise it from the few tourists strolling in the park. He slid the barrel across William’s collarbone and into his belly as he sat beside him on the bench.

John Tyler’s name had cropped up every so often in the National Intelligence Daily or the President’s FTPO briefings. Tyler had been a minor player in the planned coup d’etat, which had been derailed, of course, by Contact. He was one of those ex-military men who lead odd little careers in the defense lobby, the so-called Iron Triangle. Revolving-door connections with—who was it? Ford Aerospace? General Dynamics? In exchange for some ground-floor lobbying with the House Armed Services Committee or the Subcommittee on Procurement. A man with contacts at the Pentagon, and Langley, and at certain banks. Tyler was an educated man and a convincing public speaker, and his prospects might have been brighter if not for the hint of a scandal that had ended his military career—some sexual impropriety, as William recalled.

He knew one other thing about John Tyler. A small piece of intelligence from a loyalist Air Force general. The architects of the coup had had a particular role in mind for Colonel Tyler: If William had refused to retire peaceably to some country dacha, it was John Tyler who was to put a bullet in his brain.

“I watched you,” Tyler said. His voice was quiet but bitter. “I watched you leave the White House. My God, it’s startling to see a President in public without a Secret Service escort. Did you think it was all over? You didn’t need the bodyguards anymore?”

“It is over. The guards all went home, Colonel.” He looked at Tyler’s pistol. An ugly little machine. “Is this your revolution? I thought that was over, too.”

“Keep your hands down,” Tyler said. “I should kill you right now.”

“Is that what you mean to do?”

“Most likely.”

“What would be the point, Colonel Tyler?”

“The point, sir, would be that a dead President is better than a live traitor.”

“I see.”

In fact, William understood several things from this small speech:

He understood that the coup was a thing of the past; that Colonel Tyler had come here representing no one but himself.

He understood that Tyler had said no to the Travellers and was only beginning to grasp the significance of Contact.

And he understood that beneath his rigid calm, the Colonel was teetering on the brink of panic and madness. Would Tyler shoot him? He might or might not. It was an open question. It would be decided by impulse.

Choose your words carefully, William told himself.

“You had friends,” he said to Tyler, “but they all changed their minds. They woke up and saw that the world is a different place now. Not you, Colonel?”

“You can bank on that.”

“That was a week ago. Did you wait all this time to see me?” William nodded at the White House behind its spiked fence. “You could have walked in the front door, Colonel. No one would have stopped you.”

“I talked to your friend Charlie Boyle yesterday. He told me the same thing. I didn’t believe him.” Tyler shrugged. “But maybe it’s true. I mean, if you’re out taking a goddamn stroll.”

Charlie Boyle has only been my friend since he woke up immortal, William thought; but yes, Charlie had been telling the truth. The White House was open to the public. Like any other museum.

There was a twitch of impatience from Tyler, a slight pursing of the lips. William drew a slow breath.

“Colonel Tyler, surely you know what’s happening. Even if you don’t want any part of it. Even if you said no to it. This isn’t an alien invasion. The flying saucers haven’t landed. The Earth hasn’t been occupied by a hostile military force. Look around.”

Tyler’s frown deepened, and for a space of some seconds his finger tightened on the trigger. William felt the barrel of the gun pulse against his body with the beating of Tyler’s heart.

Death hovered over the park bench like a third presence.

That shouldn’t frighten me anymore, William thought. But it does. Yes, it still does.

“What I think,” Tyler said, “is that everybody has been infected with a hallucination. The hallucination is that we can live forever. That we can cohabit like the lamb and the lion in a Baptist psalm book. I think most people succumbed to this disease. But some of us didn’t. Some of us recovered from it. I think I’m a well man, Mr. President. And I think you’re very sick.”

“Not a traitor? Just sick?”

“Maybe both. You collaborated—for whatever reason. You’re not qualified to hold office any longer.”

“Am I sick? You’re the one with the pistol, Colonel Tyler.”

“A weapon in the right hands is hardly a sign of illness.”

How strange it was to be having this conversation on such a gentle day. He looked away from Colonel Tyler and saw a ten-year-old attempting to fly a kite from the foot of the statue of Andrew Jackson. The breeze was fitful. The kite flailed and sank. The boy’s skin was dark and gleaming in the sunlight. The kite was a beauty, William thought. A black-and-yellow bat wing.

For a moment the boy’s eyes caught his and there was a flash of communication—an acknowledgment in the Greater World of each other’s difficulties.

J may yet talk my way out of this, William thought.

“Colonel Tyler, suppose I admit I’m unqualified to hold the office of President of the United States.”

“I have a gun on you. You might admit any damn thing.”

“Nonetheless, I do admit it. I’m not qualified. I say it without reservation, and I’ll continue to say it when you put the gun away. I’ll sign a paper if you like. Colonel, would you care to help me nominate a successor?”

For the first time, Tyler seemed uncertain.

“I’m quite sincere,” William hurried on. “I want your advice. Whom did you have in mind? Charlie Boyle? But he’s not trustworthy anymore, is he? He’s ‘diseased.’ The Vice-President? The same, I’m afraid. The Speaker of the House?”