"Give it to me," said the President. She walked across the room and handed it to him. Quickly he read it and pushed it across the desk to Porter.

"It makes no sense," he complained. "A big black box, it says, sitting on a bridge. A meteorite wouldn't be a black box, would it?"

"Hardly," said Porter. "A meteorite would come in with a hell of a rush. It would dig a monstrous crater."

"So would anything else," said the President. "Anything that fell out of the sky. A decaying satellite

"That is my understanding," said Porter. "They'd come in fast and dig a crater. If they were big, that is."

"This one sounds like it is big."

The two men faced one another across the desk, staring at one another.

"Do you suppose." the President started to say, then stopped in mid-sentence.

The intercom on the President's desk purred and he flipped up the toggle. "What is it, Grace?" he asked.

"It's General Whiteside, sir."

"O.K.," he said. "Put him on."

He lifted the phone and said, out of the side of his mouth, to Porter, "He's heard about the Minnesota business." He spoke into the phone and then sat listening. From where he sat, Porter could catch the buzz and hum of the torrent of words the man at the other end of the line was pouring into the phone.

Finally, the President said, "All right, then. Let's keep our shirts on. Let me know when you have anything more.

He hung up and turned to Porter. "He's buying it," he said. "Someone in the National Guard phoned him from Minnesota. Says the thing came down and landed, that it didn't crash, that it is still there, that it is the size of a good-sized building, all black, like a big box."

"Strange," said Porter. "Everyone is calling it a big box."

"Dave," asked the President, "what do we do if it should turn out to be a visitor out of space?"