The "not earlier than" argument is duly countered with the physicists' expert testimony about what they term a "synchronous link" between our world and that other, whereby it doesn't take you any longer to fritter away your time there (or then) than it does here (or now). The Silurian days are shorter and the year's longer by a few dozen of these shorter days, due to the primeval earth's faster rotation, itself due to the primeval moon's proximity. But we don't want to get into the laws of motion here, and neither do you.

As to whether the term "abroad" extends to an alternate universe, the argument is advanced that the Anomaly does in fact or at least in a sense occur within our national boundaries; to get through the Anomaly, one must first get to the facility where the Anomaly is kept under lock and key, and which indisputably occupies sovereign U.S. real estate. Does it then follow that the world beyond the Anomaly is an extension of U.S. territory? All of it, not just proto-North America but also the continents smushed together into Gondwana? Is what we're talking about here preemptive domain?

Good legal minds, which is to say, perfectly evil ones, can keep this ball rolling until exasperation wrings a concession of defeat from one or the other or preferably both candidates.

What have the candidates themselves to say on the matter? It's cruel to inflict quantum physics and alternate continua on a President who takes the Copernican theory as a personal affront and thinks lunar craters were made not by meteor impacts but during the war between the hosts of Heaven and the legions of Lucifer -- a President who, furthermore, is on record as believing that there's no just real proof there ever was a prehistoric age at all. "Have these scientists seen a single dinosaur? No, they have not." So there. Nevertheless, should he need a few votes to prevail against Dribbleglass, they must come from somewhere. They might as well come from military personnel attached to the expedition, who, even if they don't like his cosmology, adore his patronage. Re-elect the President, and his party will continue to serve up the lion's portion of discretionary spending, and several lesser predators' as well. But so, too, the challenger's party.

And what of the challenger, a man so inflexible he's often mistaken for a chordate? (Politicians are usually classified as invertebrates.) The senator may have no more use for alternate universes than he does for alternate life-styles; the idea of worlds where things are done differently might make him queasy. Yet he seems aware that the earth isn't flat and, moreover, actually goes around the sun. Such intellectual rigor has got to count for something with the expedition's scientists.

"Politics," a former expedition member informs us (on condition of anonymity and also that we pay for lunch), "is one (expletive deleted) thing everybody there is glad not to have to think about. How meaningless it all seems when it's so far away." Ah, if only everyone were able to view politics from such a remove. But, of course, it isn't meaningless, however far away. Our interviewee admits that, by and large, her colleagues are a cranky uncouth mutinous lot thanks to His Incumbency's passion for slashing funding for non-military research.

Well, as we said at the outset, the expedition's thousand votes almost certainly won't make an atom's worth of difference in an election that won't make much more than a molecule's worth of difference in most folks' lives: they'll still be miserable. Perhaps the Silurian age is the perfect metaphor for this campaign: It's almost as uninteresting, except to people with special interests, and all it has to offer are slugs and slime.