Footfall

“Hello, Colonel Hartley? General Ed Gillespie here. Captain Crichton said you’d be expecting my call … Yeah. Yeah, she’s always had a level head. Yeah. Yeah, I believe her too. Okay, so what do we do about it?” This is crazy, Linda thought. Absolutely crazy. My kid sister discovers flying saucers. I don’t believe it. I will not believe it. Only … Only Jenny never pulled a practical joke in her life. She doesn’t drink, she doesn’t take drugs, and … Aliens? An alien ship approaching Earth?

She saw that Edmund had put the phone down. “So now what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Hard to think. Have to let people know. Have to let the President know. I’m not sure how to do that.”

“Wes Dawson could do it,” Linda said.

“By God!” He looked at his watch. “After six in Washington . Wes might be up. I’ll wake him up. You got his home number handy?”

David Coffey had always thought of himself as a night person, but that wasn’t possible now. The President of the United States couldn’t sleep late. It just wasn’t done.

He couldn’t even insist on being left alone for breakfast, although he tried. As he sat down on the terrace to enjoy the lovely spring day in Washington , the Chief of Staff said, “Wes Dawson. California—”

“I know who he is.”

“Insists on joining you for breakfast.”

“Insists?”

“He didn’t put it that way, but yes. Said he was calling in any favors he had coming. Vital, he said.”

David Coffey sighed. He felt the pressure of his belt. There was a cabinet meeting at eleven, and he’d hoped to get in a half hour swim before then. Tighten up the gut a bit. “Tell Congressman Dawson I’m flattered,” he said, “And ask the housekeeper please to set another place at the table.”

Flying saucers. Spaceships. Silly, the President thought. The sort of stuff the midwestern papers ran when there wasn’t any other news. Fakery. Or insanity. Except that Wes Dawson wasn’t crazy, had never been crazy, and even though he was acting manic, he wasn’t crazy now.

“Let me get this straight, Wes,” Coffey said. “The astronomers have seen a spaceship approaching Earth. It will be here next month. You want to go meet it.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Wes, do you know — scratch that. Of course you know how goofy this sounds. All right, assume it’s all true. Why you?”

“Somebody has to,” Dawson said. “And the fact that I used up all my favors to be the first to tell you about it ought to show I’m interested.”

“Yeah, I give, you that.”

“I’m on both Space and Foreign Relations. You ought to have somebody from the Congress when we go out to meet them.”

“Why go out to meet them at all?”

“Because … it’s more fitting, sir,” Dawson said. “Think about it. Mr. President, they came from a long way off. From another star—”

“Sure about that?” the Chief of Staff asked. “Why not from another planet?”

“Because we’ve seen all the likely planets close up, and there’s no place for a civilization,” Dawson said patiently. “Anyway. Mr. President, they came from a long way off. Even so, they’ll, recognize that the first step is the hard one. We want to meet them in orbit, not wait for them to come here.

“Let me try to put it in perspective,” he said. “Would the history of the Pacific Islands have been different if the first time the Europeans encountered Hawaiians, the Polynesians had been well out at sea in oceangoing boats? Mightn’t they have been treated with more respect?”

“I see,” the President said. “You know, Wes, you just may be right. That’s assuming there’s anything to this.”

“If there is, do I get to go?” Dawson asked.

David Coffey laughed. “We’ll see about that,” he said. He turned to the Chief of Staff. “Jim, get hold of General Gillespie. Get him on a plane for Washington . And the Army captain who discovered this thing.” He sighed. “And get it on the agenda for the cabinet meeting today. Let’s see what the Secretary of State has to say about welcoming the Men from Mars.”

Wes Dawson walked back from the White House to his offices in the Rayburn Building . He didn’t really have time to do that, but it was a fine morning, and the walk would do him good, and he was too excited to work anyway.

The President hadn’t said no!

Wes strolled quickly through the Federal Triangle and along Independence Avenue . He’d done that often, but he still tended to gawk at the great public buildings along the way. It was all there. Government granite, magnificent buildings in the old classic style, built to last back when America had craftsmen able to compete with the great builders of old Greece and Rome. And more than that, The Archives, with the original Constitution and Declaration of Independence to make you misty-eyed and silent and remind you that we’d done things even the Romans couldn’t, we’d invented a stable government of free citizens. Beyond that was the Smithsonian, old castle and new extension.