Almost too relaxed. He did not sweat the details on most topics. He was a delegating senator, a hands-off senator. As many of the best of them were. Some senators tried to learn everything, and burned out; others knew almost nothing, and were in effect living campaign posters. Phil was somewhere in the middle. He used his staff well as an exterior memory bank, if nothing else, but often for much more for advice, for policy, even occasionally for their accumulated wisdom.

His longevity in office, and the strict code of succession that both parties obeyed, had now landed him the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a seat on Environment and Public Works. These were A-list committees, and the stakes were high. The Democrats had come out of the recent election with a one-vote advantage in the Senate, a two-vote disadvantage in the House, and the President was still a Republican. This was in the ongoing American tradition of electing as close to a perfect gridlock of power in Washington as possible, presumably in the hope that nothing further would happen and history would freeze for good. An impossible quest, like building a card house in a gale, but it made for tight politics and good theater. Inside the Beltway it was considered to be an invigorating thing.

In any case, Phil was now very busy with important matters, and heading toward re-election time himself. His old chief of staff Wade Norton was on the road now, and though Phil valued Wade’s advice and kept him on staff as a telecommuting general advisor, Andrea had taken over the executive staff duties, and Charlie the environmental research, though he too was a part-timer, and telecommuting much of the time.

When he did make it in, he found operations in the office fully professional, but with a chaotic edge that he had long ago concluded was mostly engendered by Phil himself. Phil would seize the minutes he had between appointments and wander from room to room, looking to needle people. At first this appeared to be wasting time, but Charlie had come to believe it was a kind of quick polling method, Phil squeezing in impressions and reactions in the little time he had that was not scheduled. “We’re surfing the big picture today!” he would exclaim as he wandered the offices, or stood by the refrigerator drinking another ginger ale. Those were the moments when he would start arguments for the hell of it. His staff loved it. Congressional staffers were by definition policy wonks; many had joined their high school debate clubs of their own free will. Talking shop with Phil was right up their alley. And his enthusiasm was infectious, his grin like a double shot of espresso. He had one of those smiles that invariably looked as if he was genuinely delighted. If it was directed at you, you felt a glow inside. In fact Charlie was convinced that it was Phil’s smile that had gotten him elected the first time, and maybe every time since. What made it so beautiful was that it wasn’t faked. He didn’t smile if he didn’t feel like it. But he often felt like it. That was very revealing, and so Phil had his effect.

With Wade gone, Charlie was now his chief advisor on global climate issues. Actually Charlie and Wade functioned as a sort of tag-team telecommuting advisor, both of them part-time, Charlie calling in every day, dropping by every week; Wade calling in every week, and dropping by every month. It worked because Phil didn’t always need them for help when environmental issues came up. “You guys have educated me,” he would tell them. “I can take this on my own. Naturally I’ll be doing what you told me to do anyway. So don’t worry, stay at the South Pole, stay in Bethesda. I’ll let you know how it went.”

That would have been fine with Charlie, if only Phil had in fact always done what Charlie and Wade advised. But Phil had other advisors as well, and pressures from many directions; and he had his own opinions. So there were divergences.

He would grin his infectious grin whenever he crossed Charlie. It seemed to give him special pleasure. “There are more things in heaven and earth,” he would murmur, only half-listening to Charlie’s remonstrances. Like most congresspeople, he thought he knew better than his staff how best to get things done; and because he got to vote and his staff didn’t, in effect he was right.

On the following Thursday at ten A.M., when the Khembalis had their twenty minutes head-to-head with Phil, Charlie was very interested to see how it would go, but that morning he had to attend a Washington Press Club appearance by a scientist from the Heritage Foundation who was claiming rapidly rising temperatures would be good for agriculture. Marking such people and assisting in the immediate destruction of their pseudoarguments was important work, which Charlie undertook with a fierce indignation; at some point the manipulation of facts became a kind of vast lie, and this was what Charlie felt when he had to confront people like Strengloft: he was combating liars, people who lied about science for money, thus obscuring the clear signs of the destruction of their present world. So that they would end up passing on to all the children a degraded planet, devoid of animals and forests and coral reefs and all the other aspects of a biological support system and home. Liars, cheating their own children, and the many generations to come: this is what Charlie wanted to shout at them, as vehemently as any street-corner nutcase preacher. So that when he went at them, with his tightly polite questions and pointed remarks, there was a certain edge to him. Opponents tried to deflect it by labeling it as self-righteousness or affluent hypocrisy or whatnot; but the edge could still cut if he hit the right spots.

In any case it was perhaps best that Charlie not be there at Phil’s meeting with the Khembalis, so that Phil would not be distracted, or feel that Charlie was somehow coaching the visitors. Phil could form his own impressions, and Sridar would be there to do any shepherding necessary. By now Charlie had seen enough of the Khembalis to trust that Rudra Cakrin and his gang would be up to the task of representing themselves. Phil would experience their weird persuasiveness, and he knew enough of the world not to discount them just because they were not Beltway operators dressed in suit and tie.

So Charlie hustled back from the predictably irritating hearing, and arrived right at 10:20. He hurried up the stairs to Phil’s offices on the third floor. These offices had a great view down the Mall the best any senator had, obtained in a typical Phil coup. The Senate, excessively cramped in the old Russell, Dirksen, and Hart buildings, had finally bitten the bullet and taken by eminent domain the headquarters of the United Brothers of Carpenters and Joiners of America, who had owned a fine building in a spectacular location on the Mall, between the National Gallery and the Capitol itself. The carpenters’ union had howled at the takeover, of course only a Republican House and Senate would have dared to do it, happy as they were to smack a union whenever possible but it had left a political stink such that very few senators were actually willing to brave the negative PR of moving into the new acquisition once all the legal wrangling was over and the building was theirs. Phil, however, had been quite happy to move in, claiming he would represent the carpenters’ and all the other unions so faithfully that it would be as if they had never left the building. “Where better to defend the working people of America?” he had asked, smiling his famous smile. “I’ll keep a hammer on the windowsill to remind myself who I’m representing.”

At 10:23 A.M., Phil ushered the Khembalis out of his corner office, chatting with them cheerfully. “Yes, thanks, of course, I’d love to talk to Evelyn about setting up a time.”

The Khembalis looked pleased. Sridar looked impassive but faintly amused, as he often did.