The process by which. Miles was whirled away after that to the university hospital, where they left Marie sleeping, to the airport, by jet to Washington, by blue civilian sedan there to a large building which he dimly recognized as the Pentagon, and within the Pentagon to a suite of rooms more resembling a hotel suite than anything else - all this passed like the successive shapes of some bad dream.  And after all the rushing was over, after he had at last been settled in the suite of rooms, he discovered that he had nothing to do but wait.

The two men who had picked him up in Minneapolis and brought him here stayed with him through the dinner hour.  After the dinner cart with its load of clinking empty plates and dirty silverware had been wheeled out again, the two men watched television, with its endless parade of announcers, throughout the evening - the sound turned low at Miles' request.  Miles himself, after prowling restlessly around the room and asking a number of questions to which his guardians gave noncommittal answers, finally settled down with a pencil and some notepaper to while away his time making sketches of the other two.

He had become lost in this, to the point where he no longer noticed the murmur of the television or the passage of time, when there was a knock at his door and one of the guards got up to answer.  A moment later Miles was conscious that the man had returned and was standing over him, waiting for him to look up from his sketching.  Miles looked up.

"The President's here," said the guard.

Miles stared, then got hastily to his feet, putting his sketches aside.  Beyond the guard, he saw the door to his suite standing open and a moment later heard the approach of feet down the polished surface of the corridor outside.  These came closer and closer.  A second later the man Miles had been watching on television earlier that day walked into the room.

In person, the Chief Executive was not as tall as he often appeared in pictures - no taller than Miles himself.  Close up, however, he looked more youthful than he appeared in news photos and on television.  He shook hands with Miles with a great deal of warmth, but it was something of the warmth of a tired and worried man who can only snatch a few moments from his day in which to be human and personal.

He put a hand on Miles' shoulder and walked him over to a window that looked out on a narrow atrip of grass in what appeared to he a small artificial courtyard under some kind of skylight.  The two men who had been with Miles and the others who had come with the Chief Executive quietly slipped out the door of the suite and left them alone.

"It's an honor..." said the President.  He still stood with his hand on Miles' shoulder, and his voice was deep with the throatiness of age.  "It's an honor to have an American be the one who was chosen.  I wanted to tell you that myself."

"Thank you... Mr. President," Miles answered, stumbling a little over the unfamiliar words of the title.  He burst out then in spite of the urgings of courtesy.  "But I don't know why they'd want to pick me!  Why me?"

The older man's hand patted his shoulder a little awkwardly, even a little bewilderedly.

"I don't know either," murmured the President.  "None of us knows."

"But -" Miles hesitated, then plunged ahead.  "We've only got their word for everything.  How do we know it's true, what they say?"

Again the Presidential hand patted him sympathetically on the shoulder.

"We don't know," the older man said, looking out at the grass of the artificial courtyard.  "That's the truth of the matter.  We don't know.  But that ship of theirs is something-incredible.  It backs up their story.  And after all, they only want -"

He broke off, looked at Miles, and smiled a little apologetically.

Miles felt a sudden coldness inside him.