She said, "You may go in now, General Spicer."
I placed the facsimile sheet on her desk and waited while she activated the circuit, which would release the catch on her side of the door.
Who had it been? There had been four of us. Volunteers. We had been selected, briefed and trained separately. We had been housed separately during the mental and physical tortures of the surgical and the psych labs. The ship which had brought us to Earth had released us at separate points above the Earth capital. Only our ultimate goal was the same. But now there was one less of us to accomplish that goal! And we had lost the element of surprise.
The door clicked twice and swung open. I stepped through, just in time to see the rotund shape of Senator Chambers go out a private exit on the far side of the room. Both doors closed at almost the same moment and I stood alone before the Secretary of Defense for the planet Earth.
The secretary sat behind a desk on the far side of the room. He was a powerful man, in keeping with the importance of the job he filled. But the huge memory bank which he relied upon and which filled the entire wall behind his desk seemed to dwarf him.
Without looking up immediately, Secretary Bartlett carefully rewound a tape he had been referring to and fed it back into the open mouth of the memory unit.
He said, "Spicer, we've been talking about you. Do you have anything new on this alien incident? Chambers said an impulse cleared the Master Machine last night, indicating there may have been some sort of ship overhead."
"No, sir," I lied. "My people are working on it, but we don't have much more to go on than appeared in the latest fac-report."
"If there was a ship overhead, it was protected by a new type of anti-identification device. The Master Machine probed for more than six minutes and registered only a void. Chambers, of course, is always—"