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and short dark hair. Ball was a small, dapper man with a head that seemed too large in proportion to the rest of him. He was currently professor of international relations at the Kennedy School, prior to which he had been chair of the UN commission on viral pandemics and global avoidance. Further back he had served six years as an assistant director of national security.
     
    John Eales joined the group as well. Benton gave a short introduction, stressing that no one outside this group, and an equally small number of people in the Gartner White House, knew what they were about to discuss. Then he asked Eales to give a briefing. Eales had spent a half day with Art Riedl getting full coverage of the negotiations with the Chinese, and another half day with Dr. Richards. He summed up concisely.
     
    “What I want to do tonight,” said Benton when Eales had finished, “is get the thinking going on this. I’m not looking for decisions yet, obviously. Let’s get some first thoughts on what you see as the implications, any ideas for how we take this forward, and then we can all go away and think about it a little more. Let’s start with your initial reactions. First of all, from each of your perspectives, then we can loop back to the bigger picture.”
     
    Alan and Jackie looked at each other.
     
    “Go ahead,” said Ball.
     
    “Gee, thanks, Alan.”
     
    There were smiles for a moment. Then a serious frown came over Jackie’s face.
     
    “Speaking off the top of my head . . . The first thing that occurs to me is, I’m not sure where we go with our domestic programs if we have to absorb a hit like this. We’ve agreed all along that we ought to expect a deficit at least half as big again as the deficit the administration projected in the campaign, but this is a whole nother issue. If we’re really looking at thirty or forty trillion more over the next ten years, that’s almost...we’re talking about numbers that are getting up towards half our total budget. Proportionately, that’s probably more than we’ve ever spent even in a war situation.” Rubin paused. “I’ll check that. Maybe we’re going to need to think of ourselves as kind of a war economy. There’s going to be a massive transfer of productivity from consumption to capital investment just to replace infrastructure.”
     
    “We already anticipated that,” said Eales.
     
    “But not on this scale. Without seeing the figures, I’m guessing this is so big you can’t expect to manage it within the economy as usual and there’s going to have to be a significant restructuring of the allocation of resources. In other words some kind of central involvement in the allocation.”
     
    “In the allocation only, or in the investment?” Benton asked.
     
    “I’m guessing both.” Rubin frowned. “I have to think about this. And I need to get the numbers and have some work done on them.”
     
    Benton nodded. “Anything else?”
     
    “I’m worried about what this does to our programs in the short term. Health and education in particular. If we’re looking at something on this scale, are we going to be able to do better than just pick people up and move them and put them in a trailer somewhere like Gartner was proposing?”
     
    “We have to do better than that,” said Benton.
     
    Jackie nodded. The frown on her face deepened.
     
    Benton turned to Ball. “Alan?”
     
    “If you’re asking from my perspective as potentially a national security advisor, I guess my first thoughts are, Gartner went bilateral to try to deal with this with China, and that’s not our style. I don’t think anyone here is going to say we shouldn’t be putting this into the Kyoto process like you said we’d be doing all through the campaign.”
     
    Benton gazed at him. “Go on.”
     
    “Even if we had any doubts, what Gartner’s told us just demonstrates why that approach won’t work.”
     
    “Because the Chinese didn’t cut a