They were sitting around the conference table in the Tank. Markus had not used the term "inquest" to describe this meeting, but that was clearly what it was. Or as close as they would ever get, in any case, to a formal determination of what had happened yesterday. It had gotten off to a reasonably brisk start with a summary from Markus, then gone off the rails as Julia had insisted on telling her story "from the beginning"—which turned out to mean from the moment she had woken up in the White House next to her late husband and gone down to breakfast with her late daughter, straight through to the end of the world, and her hastily arranged launch into orbit, some thirty-six hours later. Along the way had been a sequence of mishaps and coincidences just shaggy enough to be somewhat plausible. No liar could fabricate such a story. The narration had lasted for the better part of an hour despite Markus’s increasingly frequent and obvious glances at his Swiss watch, and left all the others in a strange combination of spellbound, bored, horrified, and bemused.