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"I think he can"

"I'd like to kno"

Pitt stood and stretched "I' to take a little walk"

"You didn't answer my question" Gunn was anxious now, impatient

Pitt swayed and balanced his body with the rock of the ship and looked down at Gunn with a half grin "If I were hi about a man he kneell, "I'd make the ship disappear a second time"

Gunn's ave him an "I told you so" look

But before he could probe further, Pitt had exited the dining room

Pitt made his way aft and dropped down a ladder to the moon pool He walked around the Deep Rover and stopped in front of the large roll of plastic sheeting they had pulled up from the bottom It stood on end nearly as tall as Pitt and was secured by ropes against a stanchion

He stared at it for nearly five minutes before he rose and patted it with one hand Intuition, an intuition that grew into a certainty, put a look that could be best described as pure Machiavellian in his eyes

He spoke a single word, uttered under his breath so softly that an engineer standing only a few meters away at a workbench didn't hear him

"Gotcha!"

A flood of inforh crisis poured through teletype and coon's Military Command Center, the State Department's seventh floor Operations Center, and the War Ga

froy tanks, the data were asse speed Then the condensed version, fused with recommendations, was rushed to the Situation Room located in the White House basement for final assessment

The President, dressed casually in slacks and a woolen turtleneck, ent

ered the roo updated on the situation, he would ask for options froh final decisions were his alone, he was heavily reinforced by crisis-ement veterans who labored in search of a policy consensus and stood ready to carry it out once he gave it his sta opinions