children, and kissed his wife.

John Smith was profoundly disturbed. During the years of the Big
Silence, a feeling of uneasy security had evolved. The Federation had
been in isolation too long, and the East had become a mysterious
unknown. The Presidency had oscillated between suspicious unease and
smug confidence, depending perhaps upon the personality of the
particular president more than anything else. The mysteriousness of the
foe had been used politically to good advantage by every president
selected to office, and the Sixteenth Smith had intended to so use it.
But now he vaguely regretted it.

* * * * *

The tenure of office was still four years, and he could not help feeling
that if he had maintained the intercontinental silence, he would not
have had to worry about the spy-matter. If the hemisphere had been
infiltrated, the subversive work had not begun yesterday. It had
probably been going on for years, during several administrations, and
the plans of the East, if any, would perhaps not come to a climax for
several more years. He felt himself in the position of a man who
suffered no pain as yet, but learned that he had an incurable disease.
Why did he have to find out?

But now that the danger was apparent, he had to go ahead and fight it
instead of allowing it to pass on to the next John Smith.

He made a stirring speech to Congress when it convened. The cowled
figures of the people's representatives sat like gloomy gray shadows in
the tiers of seats around the great amphitheatre under the night sky;
the symbolic torches threw fluttering black shadows among their ranks.
The sight always made him shiver. Their cowls and robes had been
affected during the last great peace-effort, at which time they had been
impregnated with lead to protect against bomb-radiation, but the garb of
office had endured for ceremonial reasons.

There was still a Senate and a House, the former acting chiefly as an
investigating body, the latter serving a legislative function in
accordance with the rabble-code, which no longer applied to the
Executive, being chiefly concerned with matters of rabble morals and
police-functions. Its duties could mostly be handled by mail and
televiewphone voting, so that it seldom convened in the physical sense.

President John quoted freely from the Declaration of Independence, the
Gettysburg Address, the MacArthur Speech to Congress, and the immortal
words of the