Runaway World

President Calhoun

     "Mum doesn't have two years," said James miserably. "They might come for her any day."

     "Don't worry about me," Susan repeated. "I'll just close my eyes and pretend it's your father. They can only touch my body. Nothing they do to me will affect my love for you."

     She reached out to touch David's arm to include him in her words and the four of them held each other close while Jasmine continued to sleep beside them, oblivious to the emotional turmoil being suffered by the rest of her family.

     The hour was almost up and Andrew was bracing himself to be ripped from his wife and children again when the Captain appeared in the doorway. "Mister Birch," he said warily, keeping a safe distance as if afraid the New Londoner might attack him. Andrew found himself amused despite their dire situation. Word must have spread of his punching General Wayne on the jaw. "Please come with me. I have to take you back up to Washington."

     "I told them everything I knew last time," Andrew protested. "There's no point in them asking me more questions. I've got nothing more to tell."

     "They're going to ask you the same questions again and see if your answers are the same as last time," said James sympathetically. "It's a standard interrogation technique."

     Andrew thought he was probably right but there was no point in trying to argue himself out of it. The Generals owned them. They could do whatever they wanted with them. "Fine," he said therefore. "Let's just get this over with."

     He kissed his wife and hugged James and David, hating the fact that it would be a full day before he saw them again. Until then each of them would be alone and afraid among strangers who saw them only as assets to be exploited. He made the hug last as long as it could, therefore, so that the memory of it would last, then reluctantly allowed the Captain to take him away, out of the hospital and back to the central elevator shafts.

     He expected to be taken back to General Wayne's mansion and was bracing himself for a tense reunion as they both remembered their tussle of the day before. Stepping out into Washington, though, the Captain led him away in a different direction, along another of the long caverns that led away from the central chamber. Like the other cavern, this one was filled with neatly tended lawns and gardens and had the facades of mansions along the cavern walls, but the Captain led them past all of them towards the largest and grandest mansion of all at the cavern's end.

     Andrew paused in surprise and stared at it. "You're taking me to see the President?" he said. The mansion they were approaching was a replica of the south face of the central residence of the White House, taking up the entire width of the cavern's end wall. Andrew was willing to bet that there was a perfect reproduction of the oval office behind the outward bulging portico, where the diplomatic reception room had been in the real White House, unless there were east and west wings hollowed out of the rock on either side. There was nothing but a wide, grassy lawn in front of it. Nothing to block the view of the building all the way from the elevator shafts where the six long caverns converged.

     "All I know is that I was told to bring you here," the Captain replied. "That does seem to be the logical deduction, though."

     Andrew's heart surged with hope. He could think of only one reason why the city's ruler would want to see him. Could they all soon be returning to New London after all? He forced the thought out of his head. If he allowed himself to believe it and it turned out to be wrong, he thought it might plunge him into such a depth of despair that he would never emerge from it.

     There was a grand entrance on the left of the portico, guarded by a pair of soldiers in dress uniform, but the Captain took him to a smaller and rather less impressive doorway on the right. It was also guarded, but by regular soldiers holding machine guns and they stopped the Captain while they assured themselves that he was who he claimed to be. "The President is expecting me," Captain Douglas told them. "He won't want to be kept waiting." The soldiers scowled at him, but then stood aside to let them through.