Before the predicted period ended, though, Bodger insisted he felt improved, and wished to return to his job. Permission was granted provisionally: Just one sign of radiation sickness and Bodger was to be replaced as Vice President, and to submit himself to medical care in a sanitarium for the time left to him. Bodger agreed to this, and was released. In six months' time, with the fall election just over the horizon, he was again reexamined, and a startling fact came to light: The incision from the two previous operations had healed without a scar, and Bodger was found to be in a better state of health than most of his doctors. Whatever property in the ferric emanations was able to cause the death of body tissue was not doing it; instead, it was destroying only those chemical compounds which inhibit, retard, or prevent proper cellular functioning. In effect, Bodger's body--not unlike vacuum-wrapped radiated foodstuffs--was incorruptible. He would never grow older. * * * * * On learning this news, Bodger made a request of the President. He wanted Wiley Connors to put him in charge of the still-incomplete city-building project, postulating that an incorruptible man was the likely one to see the project completed. While agreeing to some extent, Connors counter-stipulated that Bodger be second-in-command, and that he be forbidden, by law, to ever take higher office, lest he become overcome by the magnitude of his power in the city. Bodger readily agreed, stating that he'd just as soon be under the head of the city, since "no one ever tries assassinating a vice president". By September of that year, then, Bodger was fully in charge of the city, which the workers had humorously dubbed "The Hive", because of its proposed final shape, multitude of inner cells, and the vast population-to-be. That fall, Wiley Connors was elected by an overwhelming majority, and put his medical-care plan into immediate effect. The years between then and the year 2000, the time-of-completion year for the Hive, were uneventful in import, but unsettling in degree. The weather was now the primal topic of conversation everywhere. During the intervening five Presidential terms (Wiley Connors had successfully campaigned for a second term on the strength of the popularity of his free medical-care program), the government was forced to clamp down on newscasts of storm disasters, lest a national panic be started. This was feasible only if the damage were to minor rural areas; news stories of items like the destruction of Kansas City by lightning, in 1987, were impossible to suppress. As a direct result of this appalling disaster, a successful international nuclear-test ban was agreed upon, the first real progress in that area since the late nineteen-forties. Whether this major co-operative decision had come too late remained to be seen.