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He wondered for the thousandth tiled so hard and so long for the damned thankless job anyway The price had been painfully his His political trail was littered with the bones of lost friends and a broken e And, he'd no sooner taken the oath of office when he had found his infant adered by a Treasury Department scandal, a war in South Aress that had come to mistrust whoever resided in the White House He threw in an extra curse for Congress Its members had overridden his last two vetoes and the news didn't sit

ith him

Thank God, be would escape the bullshit of another election How he'd ed to o terms still mystified him He had broken all the political taboos ever laid down for a successful candidate Not only was he a divorced ars in public, and sported a largehis opponents and by hitting the voters solidly between the eyes with tough talk And they had loved it Opportunely, he had cooody-goody candidates who s andsentences that the press couldn't twist or find hidden s to invent between the nouns

Eighteen more months and his second terht that kept hient at the University of California Eisenhower had withdrawn to his far, and Johnson to his ranch in Texas The President smiled to himself None of that elder-statesman on-the-sidelines crap for him His plans called for self-exile to the South Pacific on a forty-foot ketch There he would ignore every da ruirls andered within view He closed his eyes and almost had the vision in focus when his aide eased open the door and cleared his throat

"Excuse "

The President swiveled back to his desk and ran his hands through a patch of thick silver-tinted hair "Okay, send them in"

He brightened visibly Gene Seagram and Mel Donner enjoyed iht They were the chief evaluators for the Meta Section, a group of scientists orked in total secrecy, researching projects that were as yet unheard of-projects that attey by twenty to thirty years

Meta Section was the President's own brainchild He had conceived it during his first year in office, connived and , and personally recruited the sroup of brilliant and dedicated reat unadvertised pride in it Even the CIA and the National Security Agency knew nothing of its existence It had always been his dream to back a team of men who could devote their skills and talents to impossible schemes, fantasy schemes with one chance in a million for success The fact that Meta Section was still batting zero five years after its inception bothered his conscience not at all

There was no hand shaking, only cordial hello's Then Seagram unlatched a battered leather briefcase and withdrew a folder stuffed with aerial photographs He laid the pictures on the President's desk and pointed at several circled areas that were marked on transparent overlays

"The ion on the upper island of Novaya Zemlya, north of the Russian mainland All indications from our satellite sensors pinpoint this area as a slim possibility"

"Damn?" the Presidentlike this, it has to sit in the Soviet Union or in soraphs and then turned his eyes to Donner "The earth is a big place Surely thereareas?"

Donner shook his head "I' for byzanium ever since Alexander Beesley discovered its existence in 1902 To our knowledge, none has ever been found in quantity"

"It's radioactivity is so extre vanished fro more than very athered on this eleleaned from small, artificially prepared particles"

"Can't you build a supply through artificial means?" the President asked

"No, sir," Seagraed to produce with a high-energy accelerator decayed in less thao minutes"