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them, increasing the chances it would make it to the news. “This is my young friend Joe Quibler and his father Charlie, a member of my staff. Good job, you guys. You know, citizens like Joe are the ones we have to think about when we consider what sort of world we’re going to be handing along to them. That’s what government is, it’s making the world we want to give to our kids. People should think about that before they put down Washington, D.C., and our country’s government. Lincoln would not approve!”
    Indeed, Lincoln stared down at the scene with a knowing and disenchanted air. He looked concerned about the fate of the republic, just as Phil had implied.
    The reporter asked Phil a few more questions, and then Phil signaled that he had to go. The TV crew shut down, and the little crowd that had stayed to watch dissipated.
    Phil phoned his office to get a car sent, and while they waited he shook some hands. Charlie roamed the sanctum with Joe in his arms, looking for routes up to the great American’s lap. There were some disassembled scaffolds stacked on their sides against the back wall of the chamber, behind Lincoln and next to an inner pillar; it was just conceivable that Joe had monkeyed up those. Easier than doing a diretissima up Lincoln’s calf, but still. It was hard to figure.
    “God damn, Joe,” Charlie muttered. “How do you do this stuff?”
    Eventually he rejoined Phil, and they stood on the steps of the memorial, holding Joe by the hand between them and swinging him out toward the reflecting pools, causing Joe to laugh helplessly.
    Phil said, “You know, we’re swinging him right over the spot Martin Luther King stood on when he gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. He is really touching all the bases today.”
    Charlie, still a little bit shaky with relief, laughed and said, “Phil, you should run for president.”
    Phil grinned his beautiful grin. “You think so?”
    “Yes. Believe me, I don’t want to say it. It would mean endless hassle for me, and I haven’t got the time.”
    “You? What about me?” Phil was looking back up into the building.
    “Endless hassle for you too, sure. But you already live that way, right? It would just be more of the same.”
    “A lot more.”
    “But if you’re going to run for high office at all, you might as well make the biggest impact you can. Besides you’re one of the only people in the world who can beat the happy man.”
    “You think so?”
    “I do. You’re the World’s Senator, right? And the world needs you, Phil. I mean, when the hyperpower goes crazy what are the rest of us going to do? We need help. It’s more than just cleaning up the city here. More even than America. It’s the whole world needs help now.”
    “A godawful fate,” Phil murmured, looking up at the somber and unencouraging Lincoln. A bad idea, Lincoln seemed to be saying. Serious business. Copperheads striking at heel and head. You put your life on the line. “I’ll have to think about it.”

II
    ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE
    T
he ground is mud. There are a few sandstone rocks scattered here and there, and some river-rounded chunks of amber quartzite, but for the most part, mud. Hard enough to walk on, but dismal to sit or lie on.
    The canopy stands about a hundred feet overhead. In the summer it is a solid green ceiling, with only isolated shafts and patches of sunlight slanting all the way to the ground. The biggest trees have trunks that are three or four feet in diameter, and they shoot up without thinning, putting out their first major branches some forty or fifty feet overhead. There are no evergreens, or rather, no conifers. No needles on the ground, no pinecones. The annual drift of leaves disintegrates entirely, and that’s the mud: centuries of leaf mulch.
    The trees are either very big or very small, the small ones spindly and light-starved, doomed-looking. There are hardly any medium-sized trees; it is hard to understand the succession story. Only after