"What debate?" asked the new President.

"What the hell difference does it make? I don't know. The one where I made the stupid mistake and you spent all your time not answering questions. Anyway it doesn't matter. I asked to meet with you now to give you some of that inside information that only the President knows. Some of the duties of the job that you won't find out about listening to Congress or the New York Times, the bastards."

The new President sank back into the soft chair. He nodded. "Yes sir, I'm listening."

"Do you remember that convention that had all those people killed in Pennsylvania?" The former President waited for a nod. "Well, there was never any question about what killed them. They were poisoned."

"Poisoned? By whom?" asked the new President.

"I'll get to that. They weren't the first cases-either, but they were the most serious ones. Before that, for months, we were picking up reports of big groups of people getting sick. A party here. A wedding reception there. A church outing. Well, we put the medical boys on it right away, and they nailed it down quickly. It was poison. But the problem was that they didn't know what kind of poison or how it was administered."

"Why was nothing ever said about this?" asked the new President. "I don't remember ever reading…"

"Because you can't run the government of 220 million people out on Page One. Not unless you're willing to risk wild panic that you can't control. What do you do? Tell millions of people that someone out there's trying to poison all of you but we don't know who or how or why, now go to sleep and don't worry about it? You can't do that. Not and try to find any answers to those questions. Just listen, will you please? So there were all those poisonings but nobody died and it didn't seem like the end of the world when our guys couldn't find out the cause of the poison. And then came that business in Philly and all those people dead. And that made it something else. More serious."