I took a chair as he threaded the ancient Movie, which had been copied onto modern celluloid, into the projecting machine. Midnight had come and gone, and Calyxa would be expecting me home, but I sensed that Julian needed my company just now; and I was afraid that if I left him he might fall into a deeper funk, or declare yet another war. “What’s it about?”

The projector, driven by the Palace’s unsleeping electrical generators, hummed and clattered to life. “Boats and things. You’ll see.” He dimmed the lights.

I confess that I didn’t understand most of what played out on the screen before me. It was riddled with gaps and lacunae. Many of the scenes were terribly faded, almost ghostly. Our inability to reproduce recorded sound interfered with the intelligibility of the film, since much of it consisted of people talking to one another. But there were many striking and unusual things in it.

There was an Underwater Boat, for instance, which Julian said was called a Submarine Boat. The interior of it looked like the engine room of a modern steamer, but more complex, decorated with countless clocks, levers, pipes, buttons, blinking lights, etc.; and the ship’s crew wore uniforms that were perpetually clean and starched.

But only a few of the scenes were nautical. Some took place in a city of the Secular Ancients. There were automobiles in the streets, at least in the earlier portion of the film, though not as many as I might have expected, and then none at all. The people of the city behaved in ways that suggested great wealth but even greater eccentricity.

There was also, as the title suggested, a beach scene, in which men and women socialized in clothing so abbreviated as to approach blatant nudity. A glimpse of this, I thought to myself, would have confirmed Deacon Hollingshead in all his prejudices about our ancestors.

Inexplicable events happened. There was an automobile race, with casualties. The city was evacuated, and a newspaper blew down an empty street.^* Julian paid close attention to the fragmentary film, though he had watched it many times before; but it seemed very sad and elegiac to me, and I wondered if Julian’s repeated viewing of it had not further depressed his mood.

It ended abruptly. Julian shook his head like a man recovering from a trance, and stopped the projector and turned up the lights. “Well?”

“I don’t know what to say, Julian. I wish there had been more scenes of that underwater boat in operation. I suppose it’s a good movie. I’m surprised the people in it seemed so unhappy, though, since they lived in a world full of automobiles and submarine boats.”

“It’s a drama—people in dramas are seldom happy.”

“It didn’t end with a wedding, or any uplifting thing such as that.”

“Well, it’s incomplete. We don’t know what the whole of it was like.”

“Certainly it’s a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don’t seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect.”

“I don’t deny that they were imperfect,” Julian said in a distant voice. “I’m not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them.”

“What sin is that?”

“They evolved into us,” he said.

Clearly it was past time for me to go home. The sun would be up before very many more hours passed. I told Julian he ought to try to sleep, and see if the Presidency wasn’t more tolerable to a rested mind.

“I will,” he said, unconvincingly. “But before you go, Adam, I want to ask a favor of you.”

“Anything, if I’m able to grant it.”

“My mother has been making plans for all of us to leave the country. I’ve told her repeatedly we won’t be forced into such a drastic retreat. But I may be wrong. It’s true that I’ve made enemies. I’ve gambled with History, and I can’t guarantee the result. Adam, do you see those three film canisters on the table by the door?”

“Hard to miss them. What are they, some fresh discovery from the Archives?”

“No. That’s The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin. All three acts, a master print of it, plus the performance script. Perhaps it’s childish, but I don’t like to think of it being permanently destroyed. If the political situation gets worse, or if anything unpleasant happens to me, I want you to take Darwin out of the country with you.”

“Of course I will!—I give you my word—but you’ll come to Mediterranean France along with us, if the necessity arises, and you can bring the canisters yourself.”

“Yes, Adam; but it would please me to know I’m not the only one thinking of it. I put all the best part of myself into that film. It deserves to be seen.”

“All Manhattan will see it. The debut is only a few weeks away.”

“Of course. But you promise to do as I ask?”

It was an easy guarantee to make. I gave him my hand on it. Then I left the room, without bowing.

As I walked off, I heard the projector start up again.

The enclosed grounds of the Palace make up a rectangle two and a half miles long by half a mile wide, carved out of Manhattan by a man named Olmsted in ancient times. Pleasant and rustic by day, in the small hours of the night it was a lonely place. It hosted a large permanent population of bureaucrats, servants, and Republican Guards; but the majority of them had been asleep since midnight. Now even the revelries of the Wrap Party had ceased. Little evidence remained of what had taken place earlier in the evening, apart from a pair of Aesthetes snoring in wicker chairs along the Palace’s great piazza.

Not every member of the Republican Guard was allowed to sleep, however. They kept the watch in shifts, like sailors. They manned the four great Gates at all times, and patrolled the high walls for intruders. Lymon Pugh was one of them, and he met me as I was leaving the Palace. “On duty still?” I asked him.

“Just coming off it. Felt like walking a little before going to bed, the night air being so warm.”

The moon was up. A mist rose from the nearby Pond and put its pale fingers into the ailanthus groves edging the lawn. “This weather seems strange to me,” I said. “In Athabaska we often had snow by Thanksgiving. And in Labrador, too, of course. Not here, though … not this year.”

“Let me walk a little way with you, Adam. I have no other business, and I doubt I could sleep, to be honest.”

“Sleep is an elusive quarry some nights,” I agreed. “Do you enjoy doing this work for Julian?”

“I guess I don’t mind it. It was kind of him to select me, and there’s no heavy lifting involved. I don’t expect it to last, though. No offense to Julian Commongold—Comstock, I mean—but I’m not sure he’s altogether suited to the Presidency.”

“Why do you say so?”

“From what I’ve seen, it’s one of those jobs like being a line overseer at a packing factory—it rewards ruthlessness, and it kills whatever goodness a man might have in him. I knew a Seattle man who was hired up to be a line overseer at the factory where I worked. A generous man, saintly to his children, well-liked all around; but they made him a line boss, and after a week in that job I heard him threaten to cut a man’s throat for slowness. He meant it, too. Began to carry a razor in his hip pocket. Flaunted it from time to time.”

“That’s how you see Julian?”

“It’s not that he’s bad by nature. He isn’t. That’s just the problem. A truly bad man would have an easier time as President, and probably make a greater success of it.”

“Must a President be bad, then?”

“It seems so to me. But I don’t know much history—maybe it hasn’t always been that way.” We walked a little farther, listening to the soft sound our shoes made on the gravel path. “My point, though,” Lymon Pugh said, “is that Julian’s not succeeding in the Presidency, whatever the reason for it. I know you and your family are planning your get-away—”