Red Dot: Contact. Will the gravest threat come from closer to home than we expect? by Eugene Linn

aide. “The North has made very little headway.”
    Douthart didn’t respond, but continued to look expectantly at Peoples, who soon guessed what information the President wanted.
    “We’ve lost nineteen, sir, with eighty-one total casualties.”
    US and South Korean leaders faced the tricky challenge of defeating the North quickly, to minimize their own losses, while decisively destroying the DPRK’s ability to strike again, but leaving the North’s leadership strong enough to retain control of their country. Neither China nor South Korea wanted millions of destitute North Korean refugees pouring into their country.
    Three days later, the DPRK halted its attack. And the long, frustrating process of trying to negotiate a peace plan started.

    Although President Douthart made one difficult decision after another, nothing relieved the frightening, simmering discontent connected to his leadership. Criticism of his policies was inevitable, but in addition, old rumors surfaced that Douthart didn’t really want the massive responsibility of being President. What was more, talk emerged, even from unnamed government sources, that he was overwhelmed by the space crisis and sometimes paralyzed into inaction.
    Douthart had never seemed to give himself completely to politics. At the University of Virginia, he dabbled in Young Republican activities, and recoiled at what he saw as Democrats’ penchant to solve every problem with a new government program. But he spurned the Ayn Rand books that inspired many of his conservative classmates with tales of heroic, supremely successful, and self-sufficient entrepreneurs. Instead, he directed his passion toward 19 th -century Russian literature, especially Dostoevsky’s novels, with their characters’ intense inner struggles.
    Douthart abandoned his first presidential campaign when his wife became seriously ill. After she died a few months later, some of his close friends and advisors feared he might be too emotionally fragile to finish his Senate term.
    Grief therapists made points that seemed reasonable to him, and he agreed with their message, at least on the surface. Douthart firmly believed in God, and found some comfort in reassurances by counselors at his Lutheran church that his wife’s soul lived in heaven. However, somewhere deep inside, the pain from his wife’s death endured, untouched by reason or faith. But he persevered, because that was what people expected, and what
he
expected.
    During the next presidential campaign, he seriously and very publicly considered running again, but in the end, decided not to. However with no credible centrist candidate emerging halfway through the contentious Republican primaries, Douthart entered the race, apparently answering the call of Party leaders. After he won the nomination, pundits were divided: Was Douthart’s initial reluctance a political masterstroke, or did it show he just really didn’t want to be President that badly?
    More and more, world leaders and public opinion leaned to the conclusion that Douthart was not capable of leading the monumental task of coping with the arrival of extraterrestrial life. If that opinion grew strong enough, any coordinated global response would fall apart.

M AKING P ROGRESS
    W hen Claire arrived at Denver One after her disturbing detour with Scott, she tried to put her heightened fears of chaos behind her.
The best thing I can do is help find out as much about the aliens as soon as we can
, she thought. At present, the main thing was to figure out what D9 was trying to say to Earth.
    The first person to meet Claire at Denver One was Blake. “You’ve got an appointment at the White House for the National Security Council meeting at 1:00,” he told her.
    Claire took a deep breath. She’d briefed the President and some other high officials separately and mostly on the phone, but the prospect of being called on in person at the highest-level government policy-making group was