Chapter Three

T HE PRESIDENT'S HANDS were shaking. It wasn't exactly the most presidential of reactions, but the more of the letter he read, the more his tremors grew, until finally, he had to take a break. He set the letter down, wiped the sweat from his brow, and looked across his desk at the little man with the salt and pepper beard across from him. The man gave a slight smile, and then looked down at his phone.

The president picked up the letter again and finished reading it.

"Gerald Ford," he said out loud.

Joseph nodded. "If you get curious and want a deeper history, I believe there are more letters behind that one."

The president stared at the little man for a moment. Then he reached into the desk, and pulled out envelope after envelope, each one older and more yellowed than the last.

"Is this real?" the president asked, spreading all the letters in front of him. "How can this be real?"

"There's more in heaven and Earth—" Joseph began.

"Shakespeare? You're answering me with goddamn Shakespeare?"

"Mr. President," Joseph said, moving forward in his chair, "if we come out of the other side of this, I'll be happy to sit and debate the true make up of the multi-verse over a beer. But for the moment, we are in a bad state."

"How bad?"

"How bad can you imagine?"

"I was alive during the Cold War—"

"Several shades worse than anything which transpired during our youths."

Joseph took a deep breath, trying to think about the first time he'd encountered the Bureau of External Affairs. How he'd been forced to reckon with cosmological concepts, and spent a long time not sleeping.

"It's beyond a nightmare, Mr. President," Joseph continued. "Not just the end of America, not just the end of humanity, but perhaps even the end of reality as we know it."

"No," the president replied, "that's not how things work."

"Mr. President, my organization can trace itself back to the beginning of the federal government, working with Washington before there even was a United States. Always in the background, always in secret. There's no way we'd be around, still, if there wasn't a reason to keep paying our bills."

"But what's the danger? Nuclear? Dirty bomb—"

"It's not man-made. Not exactly. That's not what we guard against. There are these, I hesitate to use the term entities, but I don't know what else to call them. They exist in parallel dimensions, or alternate dimensions, or another universe, just a step away. We don't exactly know."

"Why? If this is all so dangerous, why don't I know about—"

"I realize I'm not able to paint this picture as clear as you'd like it—"

"You think I wouldn't understand? You think I'm some sort of idiot or—"

"It's not that at all, sir. I can't take the risk that you wouldn't understand."

The vein in the president's forehead suddenly got prominent, and he half stood behind his desk. He slammed his hands down and leaned over. "What the hell does that mean?"

Joseph held up his hands. "Easy, Mr. President. I honestly meant zero disrespect to you or your intelligence. As far as our research has indicated, there seems to be a finite limit to the human mind in terms of how it can parse the world around it. Push that mind too far with knowledge about the, well, Truth with a capital T, and that mind will break. The Bureau has seen extensive evidence of this, and frankly, sir, you are too important to risk your brain turning to mush if we let you read the wrong book on the subject or see some of the specimens we have collected. There was a single president who disregarded this. Or, shall I say that there was a BEA director who didn't follow the appropriate protocol, and we paid the price—"

"Who?"

"William Henry Harrison."

"He died of pneumonia."

"You think we could have let the nation know what really happened?"

The president sat back in his chair, face pale, sweat pouring down his brow. This was not how he thought he'd be kicking off his day.

"The Bureau of External Affairs is down to our last four agents in the field, and there is a group out there dangerously close to bringing an entity through to our world which would, in no uncertain terms, destroy everything . It would extinguish not only our way of life but our lives themselves, and possibly our entire world."

The president took a deep breath.

"What can I do?" he asked.