"They'll want to know," said Sandburg, "why they are coming back. Steve has to have some sort of answer. We can't send him out there naked. And, besides that, they will know, within a short time, that we are placing guns in front of the tunnels."

"It would scare hell out of everyone," said Williams, "if it was known why the guns were being placed. There would be a worldwide clamor for us to use the guns to shut down the tunnels."

"Why don't we just say," suggested the President, "that the people of the future are facing some great catastrophe and are fleeing for their lives. The guns? I suppose we'll have to say something about them. We can't be caught in a downright falsehood. You can say they are no more than routine precaution."

"But only if the question should be raised," said Sandburg.

"OK," said Wilson, "but that isn't all of it. There'll be other questions. Have we consulted with other nations? How about the UN? Will there be a formal statement later?"

"You could say, perhaps," said Williams, "that we have contacted other governments. We hate that advisory about the guns."

"Steve," said the President, "you'll have to try to hold them off. We've got to get our feet under us. Tell them you'll be back to them later."

14

By Molly Kimball

WASHINGTON (Global News) — The people who are coming from the tunnels are refugees from time.

This was confirmed late today by Maynard Gale, one of the refugees. He refused to say, however, why they were fleeing from a future which he says lies 500 years ahead of us. The circumstances of their flight, he insisted, could only be revealed to a constituted government. He said he was making efforts to get in contact with an appropriate authority. He explained that he held the position of ombudsman for the Washington community in his future time and had been delegated to communicate with the federal government upon his arrival here.

He did, however, give a startling picture of the kind of society in which he lives, or rather, did live — a world in which there are no longer any nations and from which the concept of war has disappeared.

It is a simple society, he said, forced to become simple by the ecological problems that we face today. It is no longer an industrial society. Its manufacturing amounts to no more, perhaps less, than one percent of today's figure. What it does manufacture is made to last. The philosophy of obsolescence was abandoned only a short distance into our future, he said, in the face of dwindling natural resources, a dwindling about which economists and ecologists have been warning us for years.

Because its coal and fossil fuels are almost gone, the future world, said Gale, relies entirely for its energy on fusion power. The development of that type of power, he said, is the only thing that holds the delicate economic fabric of his world together.

The world of 500 years from now is highly computerized, with the greater part of the population living in "high rise" cities. Half a dozen towers, some of them reaching as high as a mile, will constitute a city. Urban sprawl is gone, leaving vast surface areas free for agricultural purposes. The cities are built, in large part, from converted scrap metal which in our day would have been buried in landfills, and are computer-operated, almost entirely automatic.

There is, Gale said, none of the great spread of wealth that is found in our world. No one is rich and there is none of the abject poverty that today oppresses millions. Apparently there has been not only a change in life style, but a change as well in life values. Life is simpler and kinder and less competitive; there are few eager beavers in that world of 500 years ahead…

15

A crowd was gathering in Lafayette Park, quiet and orderly, as crowds had gathered through the years, to stand staring at the White House, not demanding anything, not expecting anything, simply gathering there in a dumb show of participation in a nation's crisis. Above the crowd, Andy Jackson still sat his rearing charger, with the patina of many years upon both horse and rider, friends to perching pigeons.

No one quite knew what this crisis meant or if it might even be a crisis. They had, as yet, no idea how it had come about or what it might mean to them, although there were a few among them who had done some rather specific, although distorted, thinking on the subject and were willing (at times, perhaps, insistent) on sharing with their neighbors what they had been thinking.

In the White House a flood of calls had started to come in and were stacking up — calls from members of the Congress, from party stalwarts ready with suggestions and advice, from businessmen and industrialists suddenly grown nervous, from crackpots who held immediate solutions.

A television camera crew drove up in their van and set up for business, taking footage of the Lafayette crowd and of the White House, gleaming in the summer sun, with a newsman doing a stand-up commentary against the background.

Straggling tourists trailed up and down the avenue, somewhat astonished at thus being caught up in the midst of history, and the White House squirrels came scampering down to the fence and through it out onto the sidewalk, sitting up daintily, with forepaws folded on their chests, begging for handouts.

16

Alice Gale stood in the window, gazing across Pennsylvania Avenue to the gathering crowd in the park beyond it. She hugged herself in shivering ecstasy, not daring to believe that she actually was there, that she could be back in twentieth century Washington, where history had been made, where legendary men had lived, and at this moment in the very room where crowned heads had slept.

Crowned heads, she thought. What an awful, almost medieval phrase. And yet it had a certain ring to it, a certain elegance that her world had never known.

She had caught a glimpse of the Washington Monument as she and her father had been driven into the White House grounds, and out there, just beyond it, a marble Lincoln sat in his marble chair, with his arms resting on its arms and his massive, whiskered face bearing that look of greatness, of sorrow and compassion that had quieted thousands into reverent silence as they came climbing up the stairs to stand face to face with him.

Just across the hallway her father was in the Lincoln bedroom, with its massive Victorian bed and the velvet-covered slipper chairs. Although, she recalled, Lincoln had never really slept there.

It was history back to life, she thought, history resurrected. And it was a precious thing. It would be something to remember always, no matter what might be ahead. It would be something to remember back in the Miocene. And what, she wondered with a little shiver, might the Miocene be like? If they ever got there, if the people of this time should decide to help them in getting there?

But whatever might happen, she had something she could say — "Once I slept in the Queen's Bedroom."

She turned from the window and looked in wonder once-again-renewed at the huge four-poster bed with its hangings and counterpane of rose and white, at the mahogany bookcase-secretary that stood between the windows, the soft white carpeting.

It was selfish of her, she knew, to be feeling this when so many others of her world at this very moment stood homeless and bewildered, unsure of their welcome, perhaps wondering if they would be fed and where they might lay their heads this night, but even as she tried, she could not rebuke herself.