"That's the letter you want me to deliver?"
"Get back. For your own good. Get back. I control forces you know nothing about, forces beyond your understanding."
"That's the letter you wanted me to deliver. What are you doing to it?" Barry went over to the small table the rubber arms worked over. There was a jar of something on the table. The swab was wet with something. Barry leaned over the little jar. He sniffed. It smelled strangely like a root cellar he once had made love in. He had gone to a client's house to help her with a divorce. Her husband had accused her of adultery. He was very suspicious, she had said. Life was hell, she had said. Perhaps they had better talk about it in the root cellar, she had said. It was the first time Barry Glidden had ever accepted an alternate form of legal fee.
So Barry Glidden basked in the fond memories of this odor.
"Get back," said Rubin.
"What's wrong here? What are you doing, Rubin?"
"It's too intricate for you to understand."
"What if I were to take this jar and bring it to the police, Rubin? What would happen then?"
"You'd only hurt yourself," said Rubin. "Don't touch it, please."
"I'm not so sure," said Glidden.
"It's dangerous. What do you think I am doing on the other side of the glass shield with my hands in rubber gloves?"
"You tell me," said Glidden. He did not move. He liked the aroma of the liquid in the jar.
Beside the steel jar was a steel cap. If he could protect his own hands with his own jacket, Barry reasoned, he could cap the jar, put it in his briefcase, and drive it to some chemist to get it analyzed. It could be good evidence in the government case against the Dolomos, good enough to cut six months off the projected time when all this land would be sold.
Glidden removed his suit jacket, taking out the wallet and the keys and stuffing them in his pants. Then, very carefully, he used it like a giant potholder to move the steel jar top over the container of the pleasant-smelling liquid. One of the rubber gloves tried to push him away. It held the letter. Barry ignored it. Then the letter touched the back of his hand.
He looked down at his suit jacket. For some reason it was bunched up in his hand. Inside it was a jar top. He was holding a jar top with his suit jacket. He put the lid on the table and began to brush out his suit. As he did so, he knocked over the jar. A sense of panic seized him as the dark stain spread over his shirt and jacket and pants. Someone was going to tell his mommy.
Barry Glidden began to cry and he only stopped crying when the nice man brought him into a room with toys and other children, nice little boys and little girls. But they were not really that nice. They kept all the toys to themselves and would not share with Barry. Nobody would share with Barry. He cried even harder. Then a nice lady gave him the yellow boat, and he stopped crying. Barry Glidden, after twenty tough competitive years before the California bar, was happy at last.
Rubin Dolomo left Glidden in the first playroom and began his assault on the President of the United States. He was not sure whether he should cast legions in a wild charge such as in Invaders from Dromoid, or send in a single lone deliverer. Like in Defenders of Larkin.
Beatrice had a simpler plan.
"Do both and do it now. If we wait around for you to get things right, we'll die of old age," she said. She now blamed him for failing to turn the witness.
The problem had been that they couldn't get through. A man of such negativity as to be totally unreasonable had been responsible for keeping the love note from the President.
In his own way, Rubin Dolomo had more than a little shrewdness, and Beatrice, despite her haranguing, appreciated that. She knew that though he often failed once, he rarely failed twice, if one kept after him. So when he said he had a new and better plan to reach the President of the United States, she did not question him.
"I am only asking for one thing. Get the SOB. Get the President of the United States. Is that too much to ask?"
"No, dear," said Rubin. For this assault he was going to have to use Powies who didn't know him, or who couldn't trace him. This was not altogether impossible, because his photograph in the back of all Poweressence books was one taken of him in his twenties and then touched up by a comic-book artist, so that a powerful, benign, eternally young presence radiated from the picture. It wouldn't even pass muster now for his passport.
He created for this sacred mission the Servants of Zor, and then from franchises around the country he bought the names of seven Powies who had reached Level Seven. By Level Seven everyone had paid in at least eight thousand dollars. Anyone who had paid that much for Poweressence courses could be counted on for almost anything.
But Rubin Dolomo did not ask for just anything. From his hiding place in a darkened room lit only with candies, from behind a screen emblazoned with the sign of the eternal warmth of this galaxy, the sun, he addressed his band of housewives, executives, aspiring actresses, and a real-estate salesman from Poughkeepsie.
"You are a select group. You are the ones who have been given much-therefore, you must give much in return. You will save this country from religious persecution, from religious intolerance. You will guide the leadership of this land into the ways of righteousness. And future generations will call you blessed."
Thus spake Rubin from behind the magnificent partition that was his shield in case his plan did not work, which seemed unlikely anyhow.
The real-estate salesman from Poughkeepsie felt a chill go up his spine. The housewife gasped-suddenly she was important in the world, important beyond her wildest expectations. The aspiring actress had a vision-a religious experience in which her name was up in lights, just like Kathy Bowen's. Kathy Bowen was a Powie. If she had gotten where she was by doing this stuff, so would she. And then she would do anything she pleased, from Shakespearean drama to Johnny Carson.
So when the man the actress could not see began talking about enlightening the President of the United States, about touching him with goodness, she had few questions. Fewer still when the speaker assured her that if there was any trouble, any fear, anyone questioning her, all she had to do was break a small glass vial and she would be invulnerable to the evil forces of the world.
But there was a warning:
"You must only break this glass vial when you are in trouble. Otherwise trouble will come to you," said Rubin from behind the screen.
"Isn't this wonderful?" said the housewife. "It's just like Defenders of Alarkin. "
"Is that a book or what?"
"It's a book."
"Sounds like junk," said the actress.
"Whoever said that will be the first to save America," said Rubin Dolomo.
For the Secret Service, entrusted with protecting the President of the United States, the nightmare began somewhat harmlessly in the main mailroom of the White House. It was nothing great, but anything out of the ordinary had to be investigated. Several clerks now had failed to show up for work.
"As you know," said the supervisor, "we have five routings for mail. All of it is opened here after being checked for cookies, bombs, anything like that. Personal gifts go to the Courtesy Center, where thank-you notes are composed. If the gifts are worth more than a certain amount, our Courtesy Hostesses send them to the Smithsonian for display. Letters criticizing the President or the First Lady are routed to the Beige Room, where benign responses are written. Threats are sent to you for investigation. Letters that have to be answered by the President's staff of secretaries are sent to another department, and personal letters, ones that seem as though they actually come from people who know him, are handled by another. It was in this last category that we had the problem."
"You mean the clerks who open the President's personal correspondence?"
"Oh, no. Machines open his letters. It was the clerks who handled them. They'd be working a regular shift and then they would just stare out into space. Just stare, gape, gawk, like they were in a void."
"So you had no way to differentiate them from any other worker," said the Secret Service man. "Just a joke."
"We earn our money here," said the supervisor, looking wounded.
"Sorry. Go on."
"Well, they would entertain themselves for a while-play with stamps, trade lunches, that sort of thing, but then they would wander off. And when we phoned them at home, a few of them were gone."
"What do you mean, gone?"
"They never returned home that day. Or any day thereafter."
"Give me the names of those who didn't wander off," said the Secret Service man.
There were two of them. Both of them seemed unaccountably listless. And they were incapable of answering any questions about their jobs or why they left-in fact, they hardly remembered ever working there at all.
Then came the real problems. The President would be making a Midwestern road trip to speak to farmers. As usual, the Secret Service had to sanitize the route, making sure that no bombs were set in roads. All hiding places and potential sniper sites had Secret Service men stationed at them, and all the roads that could be used as avenues of escape along the motorcade route were barricaded.