The Tercentenary Incident
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The Tercentary Incident is a science-fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It was published first in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1976 and was also included in The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories.
[edit] Plot
This story takes place on July 4, 2076. The United States itself is no longer its own country, but part of a Global Federation.
The story details the speech of the 57th president, Hugo Allen Winkler, who is decribed by Secret Service Agent Lawrence Edwards as a "vote-grabber, a promiser" and has failed to get anything done.
The president is walking near the Washington Monument, and suddenly disappears. He reappears very shortly afterwards on a guarded stage and gives a stirring speech which is quite different from the kind he usually makes.
Two years after that occurrence, Edwards talks to a government official named Janek, to whom he describes a possible murder weapon, a disintigrator. Edwards explains the back-up president process, and then correctly surmises that it was not the robot pretending to be the president who had died, but the president himself. The robot had then taken office.
The concept of a robot taking political office in the guise of a human was the theme of a much earlier Asimov story, Evidence
| The Complete Robot |
| A Boy's Best Friend | Sally | Someday | Point of View | Think! | True Love | Robot AL-76 Goes Astray | Victory Unintentional | Stranger In Paradise | Light Verse | Segregationist | Robbie | Let's Get Together | Mirror Image | The Tercentenary Incident | First Law | Runaround | Reason | Catch that Rabbit | Liar! | Satisfaction Guaranteed | Lenny | Galley Slave | Little Lost Robot | Risk | Escape! | Evidence | The Evitable Conflict | Feminine Intuition | —That Thou art Mindful of Him | The Bicentennial Man |
