The President allowed his gratitude to shine through his worry. "Let me know soonest."
Hanging up, he turned to his chief of staff. "At least somebody out there is on the ball."
The chief of staff made a face. "I wouldn't believe that bullcrap about a cosmic department. They're so eager over at CIA to justify their post-Cold War existence they'll tell you they have a Kwanzaa department if you wanted it investigated."
"Was that stuff about Kwanzaa being a sixties thing true?"
"Search me. I never heard of Kwanzaa before the First Lady started talking it up two years back."
"Me, neither." The President frowned with all of his puffy face, producing an effect like a cinnamon roll baking. "Get me a federal directory. There must be some agency we can turn to in a situation like this."
"Are you sure we want to? The BioBubble is an orphaned private boondoggle. Nobody even knows the identity of the philanthropist who's backing it now."
"How many people died?"
"Maybe thirty."
"And no one knows how or why?"
"That's so far. But there's talk about a lightning strike."
The President snapped his fingers suddenly. His baggy eyes lit up. "Get me the National Weather Service. Try for that hurricane expert who's always on TV. He looks like he knows this stuff."
Twenty minutes later, Dr. Frank Nails of the National Weather Service was patiently explaining to the Chief Executive that a lighting bolt powerful enough to melt fifty tons of glass and steel and everything it housed would be, in his words, "a thunderbolt you'd have felt in the Oval Office."
"You're saying it can't be lightning."
"Not unless the BioBubble was filled with propane and natural gas before the hit."
"It's all natural. No additives. No artificial colors. Or whatever."
"And no lightning bolt."
"People say they heard thunder."
"They heard an explosion, is my guess. Or an atmospheric pressure wave they mistook for thunder."
"You've been very helpful," said the President, hanging up and looking serious.
Calling the CIA again, the President got the director.
"I was just about to pick up the phone," the CIA director said. "Our intelligence source suggests natural causes."
"What does that mean?"
"An accident. Propane leak or something."
"The BioBubble uses no harmful chemicals, any more than the rain forest does."
"They also claim they don't eat pizza. But there's a lot of loose talk about catering trucks and midnight snacks coming out of Dodona."
"Who's your source?"
"Confidential. But we've used this person before with acceptable results."
"What's acceptable?"
"This was the source of our report on the Korean famine, Mr. President."
"I had that warning weeks before CIA gave it to me. Korea was in the middle of a crop failure when the flooding started. Anyone could have predicted famine," the Chief Executive pointed out.
"CIA makes no predictive claims. We confirmed the intelligence."
"Find other sources."
"Yes, sir."
"I don't think these people know what they're doing," the President said after hanging up.
"You're not the first Commander in Chief to come to that conclusion," the chief of staff said ruefully.
The President sat down at his desk, his unhappy head hovering between the brazen busts of Lincoln and Kennedy on the shelf behind him. Outside the imperfect window glass, more than a century old, Andrew Jackson's hickory tree groaned under its burden of pristine snow.
"Let's see what the media says."
Picking up a remote, the chief of staff clicked on the Oval Office TV set, nestled in a mahogany cabinet. "At least this should knock the Kwanzaa story out of the lead," he sighed.
"If not off the newscasts entirely," the President said with ill-disguised relief, forgetting there were four more days to go.
The President frowned as a face and voice familiar to many Americans resolved on the screen that showed the CNN bug on the lower right-hand corner.
"With me is renowned astronomer Dr. Cosmo Pagan of the University of Arizona's Center for Exobiological Research."
The President of the U.S. looked to his chief of staff. "Exo-?"
"I think it means life outside the planet."
"Oh."
The reporter shoved his CNN mike into Dr. Pagan's studious face and asked, "Dr. Pagan, what does the BioBubble disaster mean for the space program?"
"It may mean that someone up there doesn't want us up there," said Dr. Cosmo Pagan in his chipper, singsongy voice.
And the President groaned like a wounded reindeer.
"Are you suggesting an attack from space?"