They look at menus. “Have the People’s Choice triple-decker sandwich,” Rove says. “Guy in prison recommends it.”

“Your new best friend?” Bush says.

“Actually yes. It wasn’t so kind and gentle in there. This guy took care of me. Jewish accountant, but he knew martial arts.”

“Where were you, again, Karl?”

“Uh, you know, in Merced County.”

“That wasn’t what I heard,” Bush says. “I heard another name, right Karl?”

“Okay, it was called Atwater. Get over it.”

Bush cackles. “Talk about being hosted by your own retard!”

“Hey, those bastards framed me,” Rove says. “I was innocent, boys. You know that.”Cheney says, “Okay, Karl, do you want to fill us in on this operation?”

“Gentlemen,” Rove says, “you know that feeling when somebody has you beat fair and square, but you want to win anyway? That is what we’re going to do — and the best thing is, nobody is going to be the wiser.”

“The Man with the Plan rides again,” Bush says.”

That’s right. That is me. And the best way to explain this plan is to tell you how we came up with it. When you’re in stir, you get to talking about strange things. One day my accountant friend told me about a big-time atomic scientist, name of Dr. Lieserl. Used to be at ucla, then branched out.”

“Did he branch Davidian?” Bush says.

“No, George, that would be you. Anyway, this doctor has come up with something a little different. It isn’t time travel. It’s how to change the past.

“No one says anything for a beat. Then Bush cracks up. “Okay, guys, I get it. Surprise party. My birthday is today!”

“Oh . . . right, July 6th,” Cheney says. “No, that’s not it.”

There’s an awkward silence.

“But we do have a very good present for you, George,” Rove says. “Look, I don’t have the theory down perfectly, but here goes. You know how word processing works. You don’t have to retype the document like in the old days when my mom typed. You just go in and change it, then you print it and it’s right. Well, Dr. Lieserl came up with word precessing. He said the whole ‘change the past’ thing was too big to tackle. They had to find a piece of it, a manageable piece. Otherwise known as a document.”

“What document are we talking about?” Bush says. “I’m not with you here.”

“I’ll get to that,” Rove says. “What they came up with — and this happens to be the biggest thing since relativity, my friends — is what if we just go back and change one document, and everything else has to adjust to that?”

“This recessing,” Bush says. “Has it ever been tried? “”No, George, it’s word precessing, with a p. It actually was tried, once. They went back and altered an order form, and a chair suddenly changed from blue to red. It worked. Anyway, here’s the takeaway. You go back and you change what one document said. To do this, you have to have the actual surviving document in your hands, not a copy. Then the whole history around that document, say a letter, changes. It’s as if the letter had always read the way you make it read. Do you see? And the whole world jumps into agreement with the letter.”

“Wait a minute,” Bush says. “You’re talking about changing the whole world?”

“Some of it,” Rove says. “The relevant parts.”

“What if I kind of like the world I’m in? ” Bush says.

“Do you want to be President of the United States?” Cheney says.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to beat Gore in 2000?”

“In 2000?”

“Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about here,” Cheney says.

“This is a little freaky, boys. I’m gonna wake up and find myself in a different world?”

“No, Governor, that’s not exactly it,” says an angular figure who slips into the booth beside Rove. “You’ll be in a different world but you’ll never know you were in this world!”

“Gentlemen, I give you Dr. Lieserl,” Rove says.

“Let me put it to you this way,” Lieserl says. “In our test, we ordered a blue chair, it came, we kept it in a glass booth. Then we precessed the order form and changed blue to red. The thing is, before we ordered the first chair we wrote notes to ourselves telling ourselves the whole plan. The next thing, we were in the office and the chair in the booth was red. And thanks to the notes, we knew the experiment had worked.”

“We can’t do that this time,” Cheney says.”No, Mr. Cheney. No notes this time. So we’ll just create a different past and then inherit it. We won’t know we changed it. But it’ll be a better past — and present.”

“It’s genius,” Rove says. “Fabuloso. And now back to our story. We brainstormed — by phone and computer. Some people thought we could just change a headline in a newspaper, make it say Bush won . . . but that turns out to violate — what was it, Doctor?”

“The Event Load. It would be too great. When too many contemporaneous events have to change to agree with the document. It takes too much energy: we just can’t budge the document. You have to bite off something smaller.”

“Right,” Rove says, “we had to start with something more localized. And this is what I laid out. To stop Gore, we have to injure Clinton. Hit him with a body blow he can’t recover from. He has to be too damaged to help Gore. Then Gore will lose. We thought of a million scenarios, but one of them just crept up on us. Another sex scandal. One more would have crippled him. We were almost there with Paula Jones.”

“Damn it,” Cheney says. “That effing interview is on again.”

They all look up at the TV as Katie Couric says, “Mr. President, was firing George Tenet a key to stopping the 8/11 plot?”

Gore says, “George Tenet served his country long and well. I just felt it was time for some fresh blood.”