Someone, perhaps the ET’s, had morphed Benita’s face and hair on the tape, making her a blonde, twenty pounds heavier, with a different nose and mouth. Benita, while being glad she wasn’t recognizable, didn’t appreciate the disguise. When the tape came to the after-dinner speeches, the sound came on so everyone could hear the speeches: the FL, the SOS, the general, and then the envoys. The tape stopped moments before the visitors disappeared.
The president went on in his serious voice. “Since the dinner last Wednesday evening, we have had one further message from our visitors. Tomorrow night at ten o’clock, Washington time, seven Pacific time, the envoys will address the nation on television, explaining their intentions. Prior to that occurrence, I will be meeting with various congressional committees. I know many of you have questions. Foremost among them will no doubt be the question of whether our visitors were responsible for the recent events in Israel and Afghanistan. The intermediary tells us they say they are responsible, though they have not told her how it was done. They assure her Jerusalem was not destroyed but remains whole, elsewhere. They assure her the so called ugly-plague in Afghanistan is reversible.
“I would ask you to keep in mind that no one has died in either Israel or Afghanistan as a result of these happenings. At this point, I am as much in the dark as you are, and I cannot answer any questions. We should all be patient. We have detected no malicious intent in our visitors. We believe they are what they represent themselves to be. All questions will eventually be answered, and it would be helpful if speculation were kept to a minimum.”
He started to leave, to a babble of “Mr. President, Mr. President,” stopping when one reporter shouted: “Tell us about Jane Doe, Mr. President, you can tell us that!”
He turned back to the lectern. “Jane Doe is an American housewife. She is married and has children. I cannot tell you why the extraterrestrials picked her, and she doesn’t know. Both the envoys and Jane Doe herself have asked that she remain anonymous. She is not a celebrity, she has not chosen to be a public figure. As the envoys made clear, they chose someone who would have no personal agenda concerning their actions or ours, rather than some head of state or government employee or political figure who might have an ax to grind. She knows no more than we do. Think of her as a kind of telephone line between them and us. She’s not responsible for what comes and goes over the line, so let us set aside our prurient, window-peeping greed for the private details of others’ lives and leave her alone.”
This time he departed, refusing any other questions.
“Fat chance they’ll leave me alone,” Benita remarked to Sasquatch. “The Sunday papers will be full of speculation, ninety-nine percent of it useless! Some politicos will say it’s all fake.”
The bookstore didn’t open until noon on Sunday. Early in the morning, however, theWashington Post an d theNew York Times w ere delivered through a chute from the side street into the stockroom, along with half a dozen other papers from around the country. Around eight o’clock, she went down to get herself copies of several, bringing them back upstairs to read. The outcry was predictable. Her least favorite columnist’s prissy face sneered above his usual malicious column, and a good many others decried the president’s “unwillingness” to answer questions, raised the possibility that Jane Doe might be either the president’s mistress or a foreign agent, or offered the idea that the whole thing had been done by special effects and that the president no doubt knew more than he admitted to knowing.
Various other pedants offered opinions ranging from the necessity for an immediate declaration of war against any one or several of five foreign countries to the novel idea, expressed by one fat talk show host, that the envoys were simply Democrats in ET suits, trying to distract the nation from more pressing matters such as cutting taxes. Photo excerpts from the dinner tape were used and reused on page after page of the newspapers. The many-eyed monsters, however, who should have seemed ogreish, actually appeared to be rather loveable, like a cross between a sharpei puppy and a jumping spider done by Disney animation artists.