Alumni

There was a university somewhere in the Midwest, Jack had once heard on the radio, which had an instrument package designed to go inside a tornado. Each spring, graduate students and a professor or two staked out a likely swath of land, and on spotting a tornado, tried to set the instrument package, called "Toto"-what else?-directly in the path of the onrushing storm. So far they had been unsuccessful. Perhaps they'd just picked the wrong place, Ryan thought, looking out the window to the leafless trees in Lafayette Park. The office of the President's National Security Advisor was surely cyclonic enough for anyone's taste, and, unfortunately, much easier for people to enter.
"You know," Ryan said, leaning back in his chair, "it was supposed to be a lot simpler than this." And I thought it would be, he didn't add.
"The world had rules before," Scott Adler pointed out. "Now it doesn't."
"How's the President been doing, Scott?"
"You really want the truth?" Adler asked, meaning, We are in the White House, remember? and wondering if there really were tape machines cover- ing this room. "We screwed up the Korean situation, but we lucked out. Thank God we didn't screw up Yugoslavia that badly, because there just isn't any luck to be had in that place. We haven't been handling Russia very well. The whole continent of Africa's a dog's breakfast. About the only thing we've done right lately was the trade treaty-"
"And that doesn't include Japan and China," Ryan finished for him. "Hey, you and I fixed the Middle East, remember? That's working out fairly nicely."