wryly.

The voice of the President, slightly amused, came to them. "I'm all right now," he said. "I think I ate too much ice cream last night. Nine dishes."

There were gasps. Hoshawk held back his sarcasm, but he could not refrain from a triumphant glance at the ancient Minister of State, who avoided his eyes.

Iraola was volatile. "Sabotage!" he said.

President Wadsworth licked his lips with the tip of his tongue. "No, the new pineapple-avocado. Very good, gentlemen. I recommend it."

The neuro-analyst whipped a graph from his machine. Hoshawk barely looked at the graph. "Speed of reaction down to zero, point, nine zeros, three, four—three times normal speed. Let's get on with the war."

The President's eyes had been fixed hopefully on Hoshawk's grizzled face, and at Hoshawk's words he relaxed. His muscles rippled an instant, and then he was standing.

It was always a little shock to Hoshawk to see him move. It wasn't right that any man, even a Superior Mutant, should be able to move faster than light-speed. You didn't dare to trust a man like that.

Forty august heads—all but Hoshawk's—inclined as the President stood there, but the President just smiled at them and yawned and stretched luxuriously.

Hoshawk was annoyed, but there was nothing he could do about it. The Hemispheric Congress had set up the Mutant College two hundred years ago, and every child with I.Q. above 200 and physique to match, became a member, for the sole purpose of selecting a President whose primary duty would be to fight a war, if it should come in his term, on one of the giant keyboards. This had been a concession to left-wing agitation that, if there was to be another war, it should be fought by the leaders and not by the ranks.

The Mutant College had been established when the Hunyas had overrun Europe and Asia, and now for two centuries there had been no war, but only preparation for war, East against West, through systems of selection and training closely parallel, but with a difference that was forever in Hoshawk's mind—if he was a capable man, the Hunyas kept him for twenty-one years. And obviously you could depend a lot more on a man of thirty-five than you could on a boy of sixteen.

Forgacs, president of the Hunyas, was thirty-three—an old man for a mutant, and smart and clever as only a mutant 

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