Warn all the other nations including those behind the Curtain, ask for their help—but don’t be fussy about international law, for this was a fight for racial survival against an outside invader. For the moment it did not matter where they came from—Mars, Venus, the Jovian satellites, or outside the system entirely. Repel the invasion.
The Old Man had cracked the case, analyzed it, and come up with the right answer in a little more than twenty-four hours. His unique gift was the ability to reason logically with unfamiliar, hard-to-believe facts as easily as with the commonplace. Not much, eh? I have never met anyone else who could do it wholeheartedly. Most minds stall dead when faced with facts which conflict with basic beliefs; “I-just-can’t-believe-it” is all one word to highbrows and dimwits alike.
But not to the Old Man—and he had the ear of the President.
The Secret Service guards gave us the works, politely. An X-ray went beep! and I surrendered my heater. Mary turned out to be a walking arsenal; the machine gave four beeps and a hiccough, although you would have sworn she couldn’t hide a tax receipt under what she was wearing. The Old Man surrendered his cane without waiting to be asked; I got the notion he did not want it to be X-rayed.
Our audio capsules gave them trouble. They showed up both by X-ray and by metal detector, but the guards weren’t equipped for surgical operations. There was a hurried conference with a presidential secretary and the head guard ruled that anything embedded in the flesh need not be classed as a potential weapon.
They printed us, photographed our retinas, and ushered us into a waiting room. The Old Man was whisked out and in to see the President alone.
“I wonder why we were brought along?” I asked Mary. “The Old Man knows everything we know.”
She did not answer, so I spent the time reviewing in my mind the loopholes in the security methods used to guard the President. They do such things much better behind the Curtain; an assassin with any talent could have beaten our safeguards with ease. I got to feeling indignant about it.
After a while we were ushered in. I found I had stage fright so badly I was stumbling over my feet. The Old Man introduced us and I stammered. Mary just bowed.
The President said he was glad to see us and turned on that smile, the way you see it in the stereocasts—and he made us feel that he was glad to see us. I felt all warm inside and no longer embarrassed.
And no longer worried. The President, with the Old Man’s help, would take action and the dirty horror we had seen would be cleaned up.
The Old Man directed me to report all that I had done and seen and heard on this assignment. I made it brief but complete. I tried to catch his eye when it came to the part about killing Barnes, but he wasn’t having any—so I left out the Old Man’s order to shoot and made it clear that I had shot to protect another agent—Mary—when I saw Barnes reach for his gun. The Old Man interrupted me. “Make your report complete.”
So I filled in the Old Man’s order to shoot. The President threw the Old Man a glance at the correction, the only expression he showed. I went on about the parasite thing, went on, in fact, up to that present moment, as nobody told me to stop.
Then it was Mary’s turn. She fumbled in trying to explain to the President why she expected to get some sort of response out of normal men—and had not gotten it out of the McLain boys, the state sergeant, and Barnes. The President helped her . . . by smiling warmly, managing to bow without getting up, and saying, “My dear young lady, I quite believe it.”
Mary blushed, then went on. The President listened gravely while she finished. He asked a couple of questions, then sat still for several minutes.
Presently he looked up and spoke to the Old Man. “Andrew,” he said, “your section has been invaluable. On at least two occasions your reports have tipped the balance in crucial occasions in history.”