"Come in," said Bennington, accepting the smoke. "But--er--" "M'Lady is sawing wood. This may be important enough for fast action, Phil. Come on in and for--" Bennington opened the envelope with a thumb and spread out the pages. He looked and then found a magnifying glass and went to work on the micro-typewritten pages. "Phil," he said slowly, "forget about this until three days from now. Then see to it that Chadwick Haedaecker is summoned here for a--" Bennington went on to peruse a calendar and then a clock, "--an official session!" The following day Phillip Vanderveer reported that Haedaecker was out on some tour of the Galactic Network and was not expected back for some time. That was too bad, but not a bar to the future actions of President Bennington. He spent the next two days closeted with his aides writing a flowery speech of fancy phrases that would do the trick. He decided finally to make his speech from America's White House, and went with the First Lady to Terra to that shrine where Free Men were first welded into a Strong State, because there in America the seeming incompatibility between Freedom and Empire had been favorably resolved. Bennington prowled the mansion, looked at the shrined artifacts, and was he, himself, impressed once again. Somewhere in the middle of the road there was the right path between the extremes of anarchy and tyranny. To be really Free, every man must be released from any governing, which would make him a unit weak enough to be assailed by any grouped force. To _rule_ men meant they had too little to say about their own lives. Bennington slept in a bed once slept in by Andrew Jackson. It was midnight of the third day. The shrined White House was a blaze of lights. Newsmen and radio technicians trod the revered halls and strung their wires. The connection to Z-wave Central had been made, first. The other lines to the rest of the world were ready. The lines to Z-wave Central were ready to bring the message to the planets of Sol--and all that remained was the final connection that would bring President Bennington's address to the worlds of Neosol. Bennington sat at his desk with a fountain pen altering the long speech. He was not entirely satisfied with it. It contained flowing passages calculated to jog the emotions, words carefully selected because of their syllables to cause a ringing cadence which would cause an emotional reaction. It was flowery and forceful. It was long; starting on a slow measure and rising to a proper climax, completely a mathematico-musico-psychologico compilation intended to sway emotions and minds in the right direction. He stood up from time to time and delivered portions of it. Playbacks returned both his voice and his appearance to him, and Bennington worked on slight faults of either until his delivery was perfect. Outside of his room, bustling technicians checked their circuits and Washington itself was alive with the tenseness of waiting.