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“In short, Dr. Swain, my husband discovered a way to talk to dead people on The Turkey Farm. He never taught the technique to me or my son, or to anybody. But the Chinese, who apparently have spies everywhere, somehow found out about it. They came to study his journals and to see what was left of his apparatus.

“After they had figured it out, they were nice enough to explain to my son and me how we might do the gruesome trick, if we wished to. They themselves were disappointed with the discovery. It was new to them, they said, but could be ‘interesting only to participants in what is left of Western Civilization,’ whatever that means.

“I am entrusting this letter to a friend who hopes to join a large settlement of his artificial relatives, the Berylliums, in Maryland, which is very near you.

“I address you as ‘Dr. Swain’ rather than ‘Mr. President,’ because this letter has nothing to do with the national interest. It is a highly personal letter, informing you that we have spoken to your dead sister Eliza many times on my husband’s apparatus. She says that it is of the utmost importance that you come here in order that she may converse directly with you.

“We eagerly await your visit. Please do not be insulted by the behavior of my son and your brother, David Daffodil-11 von Peterswald, who cannot prevent himself from speaking obscenities and making insulting gestures at even the most inappropriate moments. He is a victim of Tourette’s Disease.

“Your faithful servant,

“Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald.”

Hi ho.

41

I WAS DEEPLY MOVED, despite tri-benzo-Deportamil.

I stared out at the frontiersman’s sweaty horse, which was grazing in the high grass of the White House lawn. And then I turned to the messenger himself. “How came you by this message?” I said.

He told me that he had accidentally shot a man, apparently Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald’s friend, the Beryllium, on the border between Tennessee and West Virginia. He had mistaken him for an hereditary enemy.

“I thought he was Newton McCoy,” he said.

He tried to nurse his innocent victim back to health, but he died of gangrene. But, before he died, the Beryllium made him promise as a Christian to deliver a letter he had himself sworn to hand over to the President of the United States.

• • •

I asked him his name.

“Byron Hatfield,” he said.

“What is your Government-issue middle name?” I said.

“We never paid no mind to that,” he replied.

It turned out that he belonged to one of the few genuine extended families of blood relatives in the country, which had been at perpetual war with another such family since 1882.

“We never was big for them new-fangled middle names,” he said.

• • •

The frontiersman and I were seated on spindly golden ballroom chairs which had supposedly been bought for the White House by Jacqueline Kennedy so long ago. The pilot was similarly supported, alertly awaiting his turn to speak. I glanced at the name-plate over the breast pocket of the pilot. It said this:

CAPT. BERNARD O’HARE

• • •

“Captain,” I said, “you’re another one who doesn’t seem to go in for the new-fangled middle names.” I noticed, too, that he was much too old to be only a captain, even if there had still been such a thing. He was in fact almost sixty.

I concluded that he was a lunatic who had found the costume somewhere. I supposed that he had become so elated and addled by his new appearance, that nothing would do but that he show himself off to his President.

The truth was, though, that he was perfectly sane. He had been stationed for the past eleven years in the bottom of a secret, underground silo in Rock Creek Park. I had never heard of the silo before.

But there was a Presidential helicopter concealed in it, along with thousands of gallons of absolutely priceless gasoline.

• • •

He had come out at last, in violation of his orders, he said, to find out “what on Earth was going on.”

I had to laugh.

• • •

“Is the helicopter still