Protein bars had replaced cigarettes in the White House cabinet briefing room. Cartons were placed throughout the room. The President took a thick sausage. Molly salivated. Fenway looked at her with disgust.

Molly looked around the room. The Vice President's chair was empty. She stared in surprise. He should have been there. Nigel shook his head. Obviously Cheney didn't make it either. She cleared her throat. "Mr. President. Cabinet secretaries. I'm Dr. Molly Caffrey and this is Dr. Nigel Fenway. We are here give you a situation briefing on the current situation."

She tried to make eye contact with the President. Instead her eyes kept locking onto that sausage he was eating. Down her eyes would go to it. She'd feel herself licking her lips. Then she would jerk her head and eyes up. "We will speak from known and proceed to unknown. Dr. Fenway will first review the spread of the infection."

She stood aside. Secretary Chertoff from Homeland Security had a chocolate protein bar. She could barely stand it. He handed her a tall protein shake. She stayed to the side and drank it as Fenway began his report.

Fenway ignored the great quantity of meat being chewed. Instead he focused his mind on Secretary of State Rice and the cup of coffee she was slowly sipping. "Mr. President, members of the Cabinet. I will speak to you all as if nobody in this room has been infected. As Dr. Caffrey said, we will proceed from known to unknown. We know that yesterday the alien signal was broadcast through the television and satellite radio networks. Most of the people in the country were exposed then. However, the demographic that was exposed the most was the athletic young adult white male. The overnight Nielsen ratings for the Superbowl overlap very well with that of that of the U.S. Armed forces. We estimate that most of the military was infected at that point. However by the time we went to try to sample the infection at three military bases the commanding officer had already ordered everyone to watch a recording of the alien signal. As a net result, we must conclude that our armed forces are almost completely infected."

"We tried estimating how many police have been infected. However I have not been able to get samples from the D.C. Police. For some reason they suddenly seem to be less inclined to cooperate with Threshold."

"We have reports of twenty million dead in the United States. Anybody past the age of puberty could die. Statistically, it seems that people at the lower end of the economic spectrum were more likely to die. The worse the physical condition, the more likely they were to die. Having had exposure to certain viruses dramatically increased the chances of dying. We have identified hepatitis C and HIV as apparently being a death sentence."

"In simple terms, we lost about six percent of our population. The preliminary numbers are that Canada lost a little less. That's not surprising. They have socialized medicine and their population is generally more healthy than ours." Fenway enjoyed watching Bush squirm at his dig but pretended not to notice. "The situation varied greatly from country to country in Latin America. Mexico's death rate apparently was apparently less of ours. Half of the adults in Haiti died. Brazil lost about one adult in six."

"The infection was spread into Europe over a number of broadcasts including major soccer games. Judging by store purchases, perhaps one person in three is infected although we expect this number to rise rapidly. The death rates per infected person are similar to those here, with the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland and Portugal seeming to have a higher death rate and the Scandinavian countries having a lower death rate. The Scandinavian countries always have had a high protein food consumption rate so we may be over-estimating their infection rate. Russia and many members of the former Soviet block had a very high death rate."

"The worst hit continent was Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa was decimated. According to reports from South Africa, Mali, Egypt, Somalia and Madagascar, almost all of the adults in several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa such as Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Malawi have died. Whole villages are completely wiped out. Cities are like ghost towns. South Africa has also been hit hard."

"Unfortunately for White House policy, Iran claims to have less than one person in a hundred die. You'll have to get the CIA spooks to verify that of course, but I was able to go to and see all the Iranian TV channels broadcasting perfectly normally when most of the channels in Thailand and the Russian Federation were down and the ones that were on seemed to be sending emergency news."

"It is difficult to precisely estimate the world wide death toll. This is certainly the single biggest disaster that has happened to humanity with a death toll far higher numerically than the black plague and in many areas higher percentage wise. We estimate half a billion to a billion people either have died or will die over the next few weeks."

That was Molly's queue. She stood in front of the group. Fortunately the protein shake prevented her from involuntarily snatching the jerky the President was gnawing. "Mr. President, we know that many countries have been massively devastated. We know that the surviving countries will have much higher food needs. This closely resembles the scenario 'Doorway.' In Doorway, global warming caused crop failures. We expected mass warfare, with many countries suddenly and opportunistically attacking their neighbors so they could take the farm land. We predicted that the worst hit countries would be attacked first. According to their own TV broadcasts, South Africa has begun occupying its neighbors. Argentina is mobilizing its military forces, possibly against Brazil. We strongly suspect that there will soon be a free for all grab by many countries against Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, with Viet Nam expected to take the largest piece."

"The next question is why all of this happened in the first place. We know an alien probe contacted the Bighorn. We have evidence of other contacts. That is definite. What I will tell you next is also definite."

She put up on the screen an ugly misshapen mass in outer space. "That is a picture of the star Eta Carinae taken from the Hubble space telescope. The bright area towards the center is the star itself. Those exploding mushroom shapes are signs of it exploding.

It is 100 times more massive than the Sun and 5 million times as luminous. The monster, as astronomers have described it, had a dramatic outburst in 1841, shining for a time as the second brightest star in Earth's night sky despite being about 7,500 light-years away, or roughly 1,000 times farther away than Sirius, the brightest star in the sky."

"Observation by Dr. Stefan Immler at NASA's Goddard space flight center and at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile last week shows Eta Carinae is on the verge of instability." She caught President Bush's eyes. He had clearly glazed over. It didn't take much to confuse him, unfortunately.

She continued on, more for the sake of Secretary Chertoff than anyone else. Some members of the cabinet obviously understood every word. But would she be able to convince the President? She smiled and kept talking. "The ESO's observations detail a 'wind' of charged particles plowing out from the star that is estimated to be the equivalent of 500 Earth masses every year. They found that Eta Carinae's stellar wind is dramatically elongated in the polar direction. They believe that this is because atoms at the surface of the star are bombarded with so many photons that star is unstable and is constantly blowing itself away. This also means that when it does blow it will release a massive gamma ray and neutron burst out both sides on the direction of its rotation axis. That picture doesn't make it look like it is pointed at us but the star is rotating."

She looked around the room. Secretary of State's eyes were getting wide, obviously concerned. "How do you know this," Rice asked.

"It came from a study published on the Internet last week by Roy van Boekel of the ESO and the University of Amsterdam. You can double check it with NASA. This data is absolutely verifiable. It's so easily verifiable that a Junior High School student would have come up with the same information if they had googled it."

The President gave her a wry look. "Googled a famous internet search engine, Sir. A very famous one. As I was saying, anybody could find out this information. They could have found out that the coordinates of Eta Carinae are ten hours right ascension, 59 degrees south declination. I found out about Eta Carinae because Captain Manning from the Bighorn, one of the original people infected, gave me those coordinates and told me to investigate them."

"What did he want to know?"

Molly shook her head. "What he wanted us to know, Sir. I heard the same story in Mercy, Arizona from a police officer that had been infected. Eta Carinae blew 7,500 years ago and became a gamma radiation and neutron radiation particle fountain aimed right at Earth."

The President scowled. "Well if he says it blew up 7,000 years ago then he must be lying because you said it's still there."

She managed to not bust up laughing. She could see Nigel bite his lip to maintain composure although a smirky grin did flash across his face. "Sir," she said. "Let me explain. The light we see from Eta Carinae is 7,500 years old. It's 7,500 light years away and it takes 7,500 years to get here. If the star had blown up 7,506 years ago, we would not see the light from the explosion for another six years. Nor would the radiation that also travels at the speed of light reach us for another six years."

The President's eyes clouded over.

Secretary of State Rice leaned over. "Let me explain, Mr. President. If you were a sailor on an island and the only way you get news or mail is by boat and it always takes exactly a year to get there, your news is a year old. You could be following the Presidential elections in the newspapers. The Presidential election could be over and you still wouldn't even know who the party's nominee was."

Bush nodded, kind of. "No absentee ballots, I suppose."

"They'd take a year to get there and a year to get back. It would be the mid-term congressional election until the sailor's Presidential election ballot made it back to get counted. This works the same way."

Secretary of Defense Gates chimed in. "Sir, if you prefer it's like when a rifle fires a bullet. The bullet doesn't hit the target instantly. If you're just standing there and a bullet is coming for you, it doesn't matter that you haven't heard the shot yet. That bullet is still whizzing towards you and there's nothing you can do about it."

Bush nodded. Those terms he understood. Molly smiled. "Thank you very much, Secretary Gates."

The details about Eta Carinae come right out of Wikipedia. Is it too much technical detail to be interesting?

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