Elizabeth was usually amused by his vulgarities, especially in bed, but she was not amused now. "His exercising executive privilege will damage him," she said. "The papers and TV will crucify him."

"OK, we can do that," Sal said. "But how about if just you and me go to see Oddblood Gray and try to pin him down?

We can't make him talk but maybe he will. He's an idealist at heart, and maybe psychologically he's horrified at the way Klee botched the atom bomb incident. Maybe he even knows something concrete."

It was unfortunate that they picked Oddblood Gray to question. Gray was reluctant to see them, but Elizabeth's friendship with Vice President Helen Du Pray was the deciding factor in their favor. Gray had a tremendous respect for Du Pray.

Sal Troyca opened the discussion by asking, "Isn't it odd that the Attorney General, Christian Klee, had those two young men in custody before the explosion and never got any information out of them?"

"They stood on their Constitutional rights," Gray said cautiously.

Troyca said dryly, "Klee has the reputation of being a rather forceful and resourceful man. Could two kids like Gresse and Tibbot stand up against him?"

Gray shrugged. "You never know about Klee," he said.

It was Elizabeth Stone who put the question directly. "Mr. Gray," she said, "do you have any knowledge or even have any reason to believe that the

Attorney General secretly interrogated those two young men?"

Gray felt a sudden rush of anger at this question. But wait, why the hell should he protect Klee? he thought. After all, most of the people killed in New York had been black. "This is off the record," he said, "and I will deny it under oath. Klee did conduct a secret interrogation with all the listening devices turned off. There is no record. It is possible to believe the worst. But if you do, you must believe the President had no part in it."

ON THIS EARLY MAY MORNING before meeting with the President, Helen Du Pray went on a five-mile run to clear her head. She knew that not only the administration but she herself was at a very dangerous crossroad.

It was pleasant to know that at this point in time she was a hero to Kennedy and the senior staff because she had refused to sign the petition to remove Kennedy-even though that feeling sprang from a concept of male honor that she held in contempt.

There were many dangerous problems. What had Klee really done? Was it possible he could have prevented the atom bomb explosion? And had he let it explode because he knew it would save the President? She could believe that of Klee but not of Francis Kennedy. And surely that could only have been done with Kennedy's consent?

And yet. And yet. There was in the persona of Kennedy now an aura of danger. It was clear that he would try to get a subservient

Congress to do his will. And what would he make that Congress do? It was clear that Kennedy was going to press for RICO indictments against all the important members of the Socrates Club. That was an extremely dangerous use of power. Would he discard all democratic and ethical principles to further his vision of a better America? Kennedy was trying to protect Klee, and Oddblood Gray was rebelling against this. Helen Du Pray feared this dissension. A President's staff existed to serve the President. The Vice President must follow the President. Must. Unless she resigned. And what a terrible blow that would be to Kennedy. And the end of her political career. She would be the ultimate betrayer. And poor Francis, what would he do about Yabril?

For she recognized that Kennedy could become as ruthless as his opponents: the Congress, the Socrates Club, Yabril. Oh, Francis could destroy them all-the tragedies of his life had warped his brain irreversibly.

She felt the sweat on her back, her thigh muscles ached, she dreamed of running forever and ever and never going back to the White House.

Dr. Zed Annaccone dreaded his meeting with President Kennedy and his staff. It made him slightly ill to talk science and mix it in with political and sociological targets. He would never have accepted being the President's medical science adviser if it hadn't been for the fact that it was the only way to ensure the proper funding of his beloved National Brain Research Institute.

It wasn't so bad when he dealt with Francis Kennedy directly. The man was brilliant and had a flair for science, though the newspaper stories that claimed the President would have made a great scientist were simply absurd. But Kennedy certainly understood the subtle value of research and how even the most farfetched of scientific theories could have almost miraculous results.

Kennedy was not the problem. It was the staff and the Congress and all the bureaucratic dragons. Plus the CIA and the FBI, who kept looking over his shoulder.

Until he began serving in Washington, Dr. Annaccone had not truly realized the awful gap between science and society in general. It was scandalous that while the human brain had made such a great leap forward in the sciences, the political and sociological disciplines had remained almost stationary.

He found it incredible that mankind still waged war, at enormous cost and to no advantage. That individual men and women still killed each other, when there were treatments that could dissipate the murderous tendencies in human beings. He found it contemptible that the science of genetic splicing was attacked by politicians and the news media as if tampering with biology were a corruption of some holy spirit. Especially when it was obvious that the human race as now genetically constituted was doomed.

Dr. Annaccone had been briefed on what the meeting would be about. There was still some doubt as to whether the exploding of the atom bomb had been part of the terrorist plot to destabilize American influence in the world-that is, whether there was a link between the two young physics professors, Gresse and Tibbot, and the terrorist leader Yabril. He would be asked whether they should use the PET brain scan to question the prisoners and determine the truth.

Which made Dr. Annaccone irritable. Why hadn't they asked him to run the PET before the atom bomb exploded? Christian Klee claimed that he had been tied up in the hijacking crisis and that the bomb threat had not seemed that serious.

Typical asshole reasoning. And President Kennedy had refused Klee's request for the PET brain scan for humanitarian reasons. Yes, if the two young men were innocent and damage was done to their brains during the scan it would be an inhuman act. But Annaccone knew that this was a politician covering his ass. He had briefed Kennedy thoroughly on the procedure, and Kennedy understood that the PET scan was almost completely safe, and would make the subject answer truthfully. They could have located the bomb and disarmed it.

There would have been time.

It was regrettable, to say the least, that so many people had been killed or injured. But Annaccone felt a sneaking admiration for the two young scientists. He wished he had their balls, for they had made a real point, a lunatic one, true, but a point. That as man in general became more knowledgeable, the probability that individuals would cause an atomic disaster increased. It was also true that the greed of the individual entrepreneur or the megalomania of a political leader could do the same.

But these two kids were obviously thinking of sociological controls, not scientific ones. They were thinking of repressing science, halting its march forward. The real answer, of course, was to change the genetic structure of man so that violence would become an impossible act. To put brakes in the genes and in the brain as you ~on a locomotive. It was that simple.

While waiting in the Cabinet Room of the White House for the President to arrive, Annaccone dissociated himself from the rest of the people there by reading his stack of memoranda and articles. He always felt himself resistant to the President's staff. Christian Klee kept track of the National Brain Research Institute and sometimes slapped a secrecy order on his research. Annaccone didn't like that and used diversionary tactics when he could. He was often surprised that Klee could outwit him in such matters. The other staff members, Eugene Dazzy, Oddblood Gray and Arthur Wix, were primitives with no understanding of science who immersed themselves in the comparatively unimportant matters of sociology and statecraft.