The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [149]
Since what his wife said was true, Ranjit made no attempt to argue. “It’s like Robert keeps telling us,” he said. “We should ’oo unto others as we would have others ’oo unto us. I personally would not like any others to be shooting me.”
Myra grinned and then was caught by what was now going on on the screen. Some of the alien bits and pieces of machinery had detached themselves from their spacecraft, had crawled to a dune, and had begun chewing at it. “They’re digging a tunnel,” Myra marveled. “What do you think, maybe a kind of bomb shelter in case anyone attacks them?”
Ranjit didn’t answer that. The idea that the aliens might be expecting armed attack was all too plausible, but he didn’t want to say as much….
And didn’t need to, because all the news screens that still belonged to the human race at once went dark. They were quickly replaced by a flustered newscaster, hurriedly informing the audience that the president of the United States had requested immediate air time to make an announcement of “world importance.” “Those were the president’s words,” the newscaster on the Subramanian screen nervously informed her audience. “We know nothing beyond that here, except that this is almost unprecedented in—What?”
She was asking the question of someone invisible, but the answer was obvious. All she had time to say was, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the—”
And then the screen went briefly to black. When it lighted up again, it was showing a group of important-looking (but also worried-looking) men and women clustered around a table that bore a forest of microphones. Ranjit looked with some puzzlement at the scene; it was not the usual Rose Garden setting, or the Oval Office, or any of the other backgrounds the president usually preferred. There was, it was true, the giant American flag behind the standing group, as the president almost always required. But what Ranjit could see of the chamber they were in was unfamiliar to him—windowless, harshly lit with floodlights, with a corporal’s guard of armed United States Marines standing at attention, their fingers on the triggers of their weapons.
“Oh my God,” Myra whispered. “They’re in their nuke shelter.”
But Ranjit hardly heard her. He had made a discovery of his own. “Look who’s standing between the president and the Egyptian ambassador. Isn’t that Orion Bledsoe?”
It was. They had no time to discuss his presence, though, because the president had begun to speak. “My friends,” he said, “it is with a heavy heart that I come before you to say that the invasion—yes, invasion; I can find no other word to describe what has happened—of our planet by these beings from space has passed the point at which it can be tolerated. The government of the Arab Republic of Egypt has explicitly demanded that those who have committed this act of aggression stop their preparations for war at once and begin to withdraw from Egyptian territory. The aggressors not only have failed to comply with this demand, which is according to international law, they haven’t even had the courtesy to acknowledge receiving it.
“Accordingly the government of our ally, the Arab Republic of Egypt, is preparing an armored column to cross the desert and drive the invaders off their soil. Furthermore, the president of the Arab Republic of Egypt has called upon the United States to comply with existing treaties by aiding in the military effort to drive them out.
“You will understand that I have no option but to comply with this demand. Accordingly, I have ordered the sixth, twelfth, fourteenth, and eighteenth air forces to destroy the alien encampment.” He permitted himself a slight smile. “Under most circumstances that would be a highly classified decision, but I feel that showing the actual forces that have been brought to bear on the aggressors will help convince these alien invaders that they must immediately cease