Fail-Safe

Peter Buck walked up to the Pennsylvania entrance of the White House. It was one of the hard, deceptive, crystal days of early spring. The obelisk of the Washington Monument was white and glittering. Tourists hurried rather than shuffled past the White House. Official limousines went by with their windows rolled up and their back-seat occupants thumbing through papers, their chesterfield collars up. The air was marvelously clear and full of sun, but it was cold.

Of ten Buck had the desire to mingle with the crowds, to wander down the Mall, to loiter in the Smithsonian, actually to visit the capitol and sit in the Senate gallery, to visit the Supreme Court on Monday when decisions were rendered, to regain the innocence he had felt years ago when he first came to Washington. With a soft poignancy Buck realized he had become a new victim of an old malady: he saw less of his city than the tourist. But today he was glad to reach the White House sentry box and looked forward to his warm steam-heated office.

The Pot was on duty in the small wooden guardhouse. The Pot was a thin wiry man, but sixteen years of White House guard duty had given him a hard round belly. He never exercised, but by some odd law of physiology his arms and face remained skinny. Looking out the window of the sentry box he seemed a frail and almost undernourished figure. The moment he stepped outside the impression vanished. He looked precisely as if he had swallowed an ancient cannonball.

Buck did not know his real name. This was part of the White House drill: the guards had to know everyone’s name, but the other employees seldom knew the names of the guards. The Thin Man, the Pot, the Indian, Scar Face, Chief, the Grunt, the Sphinx, were some of the names which the civilian staff had given to the guards. Buck had never heard one of the guards called by a proper name.

The Pot stepped out of the guardhouse and nodded at Buck. His eyes flicked over Buck’s leather attaché case and he grunted.

“Ham and cheese?” the Pot asked.

“Wrong,” Buck said and grinned. He opened the attaché case. It contained two apples, a carton of yogurt, and a chicken leg wrapped in wax paper.

“Pay up.”

The Pot reached in his pocket and took out a nickel. He dropped it in Buck’s hand.

“O.K., I lose today,” the Pot said. “You know where we stand now, Mr. Buck? After 932 bets I have won 501 and you have won 431. What do you think it means?”

“Who knows?” Buck said. He smiled at the Pot and walked on, but the Pot’s question irritated him. For over three years he and the Pot had had this small running bet. It was uncanny how the Pot could estimate when Buck was picking up weight and would start to bring a reducing lunch to the White House. Long ago they had jokingly established categories of food and the Pot would guess what Buck had in his lunchbox. Gradually it had hardened into a bet, had become somewhat serious and, finally, a major part of the day

for each of them. Today was the first time that the Pot had lost a bet in almost a week. In his efforts to deceive the Pot, Buck had become very ingenious in his preparation of lunches. He had instructed his wife, Sarah, to seek out exotic sausages, salad-stuffed eggs, sometimes caviar sandwiches. Once as a joke he had even gone to one of the more expensive delicatessen stores in Washington and purchased a small can of kangaroo meat, but when he produced the kangaroo sandwich, and saw the look on the Pot’s face, he realized he had gone a bit outside the rules. The Pot paid the nickel but his eyes were icy.

Buck went into the East Wing, nodded at the Indian, and then turned left. He entered his small office.

He opened his attaché case, quickly deposited his lunch in the left-hand bottom drawer of his desk, took a copy of the Washington Post from the case and put it on the desk, He closed the case and put it in the corner behind the coat rack. He sat down to the desk. Squarely in the middle of his desk, put there a half hour before by a messenger, were the usual copies of Pravda and Izvestia, plus a monthly Russian literary magazine.

Buck began to read the Russian newspapers. He read with an incredible speed. As he read, repeating a task he had done hundreds of times, he was aware of a slight thrill of pride. He knew, quietly and competently, that he was among the three best Russian translators in the United States. Ryskind at Berkeley might be a hair better on accent, but that was all. Buck was sure that he was better than Watkins over at the Pentagon. After the three of them there was a big gap before one came to the fourth best Americanborn Russian-language expert. Probably Haven at Columbia.

Buck remembered with a stab of malice that at the last meeting of the Slavic Language Association Haven had misused the Russian word for “popery” twice in the same paper. Only Ryskind and Watkins and Buck had been aware of the error. They had smiled across the room at one another and shaken their heads slightly. No one else had noticed it.

Buck had become a Russian expert quite by accident. In the 1950s when he was twenty-two years old he had been called up for military duty just as the Korean War started. He was a junior in college at the time, but had no special interest in languages. He intended to be an engineer. When the Army tested him, however, he placed very high on language aptitude and found himself at the Army Language School at Monterey.

What followed bewildered Buck. By the end of the first week of instruction he was at least two months in advance of the others in the class. The instructor, a Russian immigrant from Kazakstan, was astounded. Not only did Buck learn the Russian alphabet and syntax and peculiarities of grammar quickly, but he could instantly speak back in whatever dialect was being spoken. In two weeks he was something of a celebrity. The Russians on the staff of the Language School would bring him into a room and start to speak Russian to him. Promptly he would respond with the same accent in which he was addressed. If the Russian was Georgian, Buck came back with a Georgian accent, if from Leningrad, the peculiar light inflection of the Leningrad area. The instructors watched him intently, occasionally smiling as he reproduced an obscure accent. At the end of three weeks they took Buck from his class and explained that his presence there was demoralizing to the other students.

From then on he lived a dual existence at the school. Half of his day was spent in an accelerated course in Russian, in which he was exposed to everything from ancient forms of Russian literature to contemporary Russian scientific writing. The other half of the day he was the subject for a group of psychologists who tried to discover why he learned Russian so easily. They put him through an endless series of aptitude, intelligence, personality, and physical tests. The results were a strange nullity. Buck had the I.Q. of an average college student, around 122. He was somewhat high on the tests that measured verbal facility, but his memory was not especially good nor was his eye-hand reflex better than the average student’s. His hearing was actually subnormal. His tone, frequency, and pitch discrimination were phenomenal, but correlated with nothing else. The psychologists were both puzzled and suspicious. They harbored the lingering doubt that Buck was holding back something. One psychologist had the theory that Buck had been exposed at an early age to someone who spoke Russian; to expound it he even wrote a paper called “A Case Study in Infantile Language Imprinting.” He was quite unmoved when no one could discover a Russian-speaking person in Buck’s background.

After a time, the psychologists, sensing Buck’s indifference, began to talk in front of him about their test results. He knew precisely how his Rorschach inkblots were interpreted, the results of the MMPI, his I.Q. on eight different tests, the results of his Strong Vocational Guidance Inventory, his index of neuroticism, how tolerant he was of ambiguity. In everything he came out dose to dead center.

Buck smiled indulgently at the psychologists. He was fully aware that his capabilities were quite average. For his exceptional language skill he had no explanation. It worried him very little.

At the end of a year Buck could speak Russian, in most of its dialects, as well as any of the instructors at the school.

His first assignment was to a division in the Pentagon which translated the more important Russian military documents. Sometimes the articles were said to have been stolen by American espionage agents or purchased from the spy hives of Hong Kong and Berlin and Tangiers. Sometimes they were merely long articles from Russian military journals.

Buck did his work in the Pentagon quickly and efficiently. Even the old hands were startled at the rapidity with which he could translate obscure phrases.

“Sergeant Buck is something of a phenomenon in this division,” his superior wrote in evaluating his work. “Not only does he know the Russian language flawlessly, but when it comes to interpreting a new colloquial phrase, in which Russian abounds, Buck’s interpretation is invariably correct.” After several paragraphs of praise the letter closed by recommending him for training as an officer in rather negative terms. “This person should be sent to OCS because his virtuosity in the language makes it somewhat embarrassing for his superiors to treat him as an enlisted man.”

Buck was aware that others in the division had reservations about him, and he knew why. Everyone else in the division was deeply interested not only in the Russian language, but in Russian politics, personalities, weaponry, economic conditions, and even Russian gossip. Buck did not conceal the fact that he was enormously bored with Russia. He was much more interested in a small red MG which he had brought to a high pitch of mechanical perfection, a soft-spoken girl from Georgia with the name of Sarah, and cool jazz.

There would be days when everyone in the division was in a paroxysm of excitement because some member of the Soviet Presidium had been demoted. They spent hours trying to tease out the significance of this. When they asked Buck his views, he shook his head and said, “No comment.” He was not rude, he was simply not interested. The division traced the rise and fall of obscure Russian bureaucrats, they speculated on Russian agricultural production, they argued bitterly about whether Stalin had been a Marxist or an opportunist. Buck’s very sense of noninvolvement was at first puzzling and then finally unbearable, His sheer flawless ease in translation, the fact that he was the only person in the division who never needed a dictionary, did not make him popular.

At the end of a year of Pentagon duty Buck was ordered to OCS. He emerged a second lieutenant with orders to report to an infantry division in Germany. He sold the red MG with regret, but left the Pentagon with pleasure. He was relieved to escape the tyranny of his strange and unwanted Russian skill. He liked the long war games in which he and his platoon crept through the dark German forests, their rifles tipped with eight inches of bayonet, the rumble of tanks just ahead of them, the occasional crashing sound of a simulated land mine giving the maneuver an element of excitement.

Occasionally he went with other members of the platoon into a nearby town and got drunk on the excellent German beer and ate huge quantities of various German sausages. His spare time was devoted to the care and maintenance of a Porsche coupé which he bought because it was incredibly cheap for an American soldier and he loved its lines. He also wrote a letter a day to Sarah. The Porsche was a miracle of mechanical perfection. Buck tuned it to an exquisite level of adjustment. Occasionally he would take it for a workout on the beautifully intricate forest roads of the nearby mountains. He thrilled to the dangers of the abysses which underlay each hairpin turn, but never pushed the car to its ultimate capacity. After such trips he carefully washed the car, wiped the leather with saddle soap, retuned the motor, and covered the coupé with a red parachute.

After two years of duty, Buck was discharged from the Army. He and the Porsche were returned to America on the same ship. Two weeks after he arrived in New York he married Sarah and took a job as translator at the United Nations. Two years later only two things had changed in Buck’s life: they had a four-months-old son, and Buck had discovered the law.

He had started to read a casebook on the law of torts that someone had left in the translators’ room at the UN building and did not stop until he had finished the whole book. It was a stunning discovery. There was something so symmetrical and neat and perfect about the organization of the law, it seemed so logical and majestic, and so awesome in its certitude. It was like a new complex foreign language with its own special vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Buck found it irresistible.

Sarah, a girl who combined a low metabolic rate with a rare sweet face and a gentle nature, encouraged Buck in his enthusiasm for the law. The only problem was how to support his family and go to school at the same time. Through the network of translators, he heard of an opening on the White House staff for a Russian translator. The job was reputed to make very little demand upon the translator’s time. He merely had to be there in the unlikely case that the President needed to speak directly to a non-English-speaking Russian. The last man who had the job had held it for five years, had not seen the old President and quit out of boredom when the new President took office. Buck had applied for the job and in the competitive examinations had been 14 points ahead of his nearest competitor.

He and Sarah and the child and the Porsche made their way to Washington. Sarah set up housekeeping in Arlington. Buck began to go to Georgetown Law School at night. During the day he spent his time reading law books in his office and occasionally glancing through the heap of Russian documents which were automatically circulated through his office.

A hard-driven student could have gotten through Georgetown Law School in four years while occupying an outside job, but Buck was in no hurry. He loved his law courses and worked at them carefully and patiently, much like a jeweler determined to give a lapidary finish to a rare stone. His law-school professors regarded him as intelligent, hard-working, a perfectionist for detail, and completely lacking in what they called “legal imagination.” Once Buck had asked a professor why he was given only a C on a paper in which he had answered a very long and involved question in the most specific detail.

“Mr. Buck, I agree with you that your answer to that question probably deserved an A,” the professor said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes. “But we are in the business of training practicing lawyers who will be able to think on their feet and in a constantly changing legal context. Your answer was the perfect textbook reply. I could not have done better. But it lacked any flair, any feel for anything outside of the law. Perhaps, Mr. Buck, it is your vocation to be a professor of law rather than a lawyer.”

Buck was thrilled by this answer. He would like nothing better than to spend his life immersed in the intricacies of legal scholarship. Slowly, methodically, with the pure pleasure of the utterly committed, Buck learned the law. The classes came and went but Buck stayed on year after year. He knew that at some point he would finish his legal education and would then become a law professor. Until that time he found life very full,

The White House job took very little time. Over the years he came to regard the White House as a place where he went to study, a kind of refuge which also gave him an income. It was true he had seen the President, but never on business. In the first month after the new President took office he had wandered into Buck’s room, introduced himself, and sat down. Buck was impressed by the President’s youth, his relaxation, the way in which he put his feet up on Buck’s desk and rambled over Buck’s background. It was only later that Buck realized that behind that boyish manner and seeming relaxation was a tough and analytical mind. The pleasant informal meeting had really been a disguised examination. Buck knew he had passed. The President had coolly lopped a half-dozen old-timers from the White House staff and told them bluntly it was for incompetence. He had told them face to face, not through another person.

Despite the President’s toughness Buck had a lingering doubt about the man. Being the scion of a wealthy family, having easy access to politics, and marrying a beautiful woman did not, Buck thought, really equip him to deal with his adversary in the Soviet Union. The Russian leaders, Buck had gathered, were hard to the point of ferocity, committed to a degree that was unbelievable to an American-especially a wealthy American.

Buck’s doubts about the President’s capacity made his own slow-paced and easy job somehow more justifiable to himself.

This particular morning Buck had finished his quick scanning of Pravda and Izvestia and was turning with pleasure to one of Maitland’s essays on the corporation’s personality. He opened the book, began to make careful marks on the margin and entries in his notebook.

Buck was so absorbed in Maitland that the shrill sound pierced through the office for several seconds before he was aware of it. He had never heard the sound before, but instantly he knew where it came from. In the second drawer of his desk there was a red telephone. When he had been given the office and his instructions, he had been told that this telephone would ring only in case of emergency and was never to be used for ordinary communications. The black telephone on top of the desk was to be used for normal business. He had also been told that when the red phone did ring it would not give the short intermittent rings made by an ordinary telephone, but would give off a steady sharp sound until it was answered.

Someone at the White House switchboard had made a mistake, Buck thought. He had been in this office for three years and the red telephone had never rung. Buck was convinced it never would. He pulled open the drawer and instantly the sound of the telephone became more shrill.

Once he saw the red phone something began to nag at his memory; he felt a sharp sense of unease. Then he remembered: the official who had installed him in the office had also given him a logbook labeled “Red Phone Log Book” with instructions to log the precise time that the red phone rang… if it ever rang. Buck had not seen the logbook for over a year. It had become mixed in with the law books, old copies of Izvestia, Russian magazines, notebooks. With both hands Buck pawed through the debris of paper on his desk, pulled open the top drawer, yanked at the three drawers on the left side of the desk. He could not find the logbook. He calmed himself. The call was sure to be a mistake. Nevertheless, he took a dean piece of paper and then looked at his watch. He wrote the time in big black figures in the middle of the white rectangle:

“10:32 A.M.”

With relief he picked up the phone.

“Mr. Buck, this is the President speaking,” a voice said. There was no mistaking the voice. It was calm, New England accented, nas4 “Would you please make your way to the White House bomb shelter as soon as possible?”

“Yes, sir, I…” Buck said and then stopped. As soon as he had said the word “Yes” the President had hung up.

The War Room of the Strategic Air Command at Omaha was not immense. Not in terms of what it had to do. It was no bigger than a small theater. The pools of darkness in its corners, however, gave the sensation of immensity, almost of a limitless reach. The only illumination in the War Room came from the Big Board. It covered the entire front wall and resembled a gigantic movie screen, except that it was made of a kind of translucent plastic. At that moment the Big Board showed a simple Mercator map of the world. The continents and the oceans were familiar, as were the lines of latitude and longitude. But there the similarity to ordinary Mercator maps disappeared. The map was covered with a strange flood of cabalistic signs. Arrows, circles, squares, numbers, triangles were strewn across the screen, sometimes came up bright and clear, sometimes dimmed, and occasionally a sign notation would fade entirely and leave only a phosphorescent glow that persisted for a few seconds.

Even in the uncertain light it was possible to see that there were only a half-dozen men in the War Room. In the dimness the men looked doll-like and diminutive. This added to the impression of vastness.

“I expected a little more action,” Congressman Raskob said. “This is just like a second-rate theater. Where are the ushers?”

Lieutenant General Bogan, United States Air Force, glanced down at Congressman Raskob. The Congressman’s reaction was not uncommon among people who were seeing the War Room for the first time, but General Bogan also knew that he was being baited. He had been briefed on Raskob’s background.

“Right now, sir, we are at our lowest condition of readiness,” General Bogan said. “Right now everything is routine. The moment that something starts to happen there is plenty of action.”

“In a few minutes, sir, your eyes will get adjusted to the light and we can show you some of the more interesting things in the War Room,” Colonel Casdo said. Colonel Cascio was General Bogan’s deputy.

The Congressman grunted. He stood at the raised runway at the back of the War Room, his feet wide apart, his short stocky body held in a posture that was almost arrogant.

He’s going to be a tough one, General Bogan thought. He looked over at the other guest, Gordon Knapp, the president of Universal Electronics. No trouble there.

Knapp was one of the new breed of scientists who, after World War II, had become a scientist-inventor-businessman. Although he was almost six feet tall, Knapp’s body was hunched over as if he had just finished a long and desperate race. In fact it was his habitual posture. Ever since he had discovered science Knapp had run with a zestful enthusiastic desperation which had no element of anxiety. It had taken Bogan some months to realize that Knapp’s adversary was scientific problems. He threw his physical and intellectual power against problems and his record of successes was unbroken. He had become an expert on miniaturization, solid-state physics, semiconductors, and, more recently, problems of data storing. In the process he had become a millionaire and had achieved a high reputation. Both of these facts he forgot constantly. He was oblivious of everything except unsolved technical problems. In the process of mastering them he had ravaged his body, learned to exist on five hours of sleep a night, and was an extremely happy man. He was a man of black coffee, hurried airplane flights, phone calls, technical drawings, intuitions about amperage and voltage, a vast unanswered correspondence, harassed secretaries, rumpled suits, and a burning attention for only one thing: his scientific problems. His wife once said—entirely in jest for she loved and admired him—that she would have divorced him long ago but he was never home long enough to discuss the matter.

This was Knapp’s first visit to the War Room and General Bogan could see that he was quivering with excitement. Many of the mechanisms that he had invented and manufactured were used in the room, and his eyes glittered as he tried to identify the machinery in the gloom.

“It may look simple, Mr. Raskob, but this is one of the most complicated rooms in the world,” Knapp said in a whisper.

“And one of the most expensive,” Raskob said.

General Bogan resisted the tendency to sigh. Raskob was a tough and intelligent man. He came from a congressional district in Manhattan which was made up partly of new and expensive apartment houses and partly of old tenements gradually being taken over by Puerto Ricans and Negroes. The first time he had been elected it was by a narrow margin and Raskob had known he must work out some formula of political appeal which would be equally attractive to the new and poor and to the old and wealthy. His political reputation was as carefully hewn as the work of a master sculptor. On every welfare and civil-rights issue he voted liberal and made sure that this fact was widely disseminated among the Puerto Ricans and Negroes. On military appropriations he was invariably critical, stating that they were inflationary, were expended by shortsighted generals and admirals, and only added to the tax burden. This posture benefited him in two ways: his constituents in the big expensive apartments saw him as anti-inflation and pro-lower taxes; his working-class constituency, too poorly skilled to qualify for entry into the big unions or for work in the large armaments industry, saw him as antimilitarist, and thus attractive. He had been reelected eight times, each time by a higher plurality.

Raskob’s squat figure was somewhat reminiscent of La Guardia and Raskob played on the similarity. He wore a wide-brimmed fedora hat and when he made speeches he constantly banged the fedora against the podium. Whenever he spoke before a foreign-speaking group he had at least a few lines which he could render in the language of the group. In the wealthy part of his constituency his speeches were calm, deliberate, short, and concerned with the future. In the working-class district he was more flamboyant and talked of pay checks and pork chops. In hard fact his voting record was almost straight Democratic but few in his district knew that. Nor did they care. Raskob was a personality.

“Where are you from, son?” Raskob asked Colonel Cascio. His eyes were still peering, not yet adjusted to the thin light. His words were an automatic political response to fill vacant time.

“New York City, sir,” Colonel Cascio said.

Raskob’s head swung around and he stared at Colonel Cascio. His interest now was real.

“What part of the city?” Raskob asked.

Colonel Casdo hesitated a moment. “Central Park West,” he said, “in the Seventies,”

“Probably in the Twentieth District,” Raskob said speculatively. “You’re getting some Puerto Ricans in there now. It’s one of those swing districts. Might go either Democrat or Republican. In a few years it will be solidly Democratic.”

“Actually, Congressman Raskob, my family moved over to the East Side some years ago,” Colonel Cascio said. He turned his head sideways and glanced quickly at General Bogan. Then he added as an afterthought, “As a military man I really don’t follow politics very closely.”

General Bogan felt a slight sense of unrest, a barely recognizable sense of protectiveness. Then he recalled the carefully buried memory. It was during one of the frequent visits that General Bogan and Colonel Casdo made to New York City. One night General Bogan had been called and told that SAC was staging one of its endless surprise drills. He must be back in Omaha by morning. An Air Force car was already outside of his hotel and General Bogan ordered it to the address where Colonel Cascio was “visiting his family.”

The address was an old apartment house, aged with wind and soot, but respectable. There was, however, no cascio on the long line of door bells. Impatiently General Bogan pushed the MANAGER button and a neat, hard-faced and stocky woman appeared at the door.

“I’m looking for the Cascio apartment,” General Bogan said. “It’s rather urgent.”

“He in trouble again?” the woman asked. “You from the police?”

She squinted, made her watery blue eyes come to a focus, but could not distinguish the uniform.

“Casdo’s got no apartment here,” she said. “He lives in the janitor’s quarters down the steps to the left. If it’s a police thing you can tell him for me it’s the last time. He can just dear out.” She leaned forward, sharing a confidence in a faintly whining voice. “Officer, I’d of fired the sonofabitch a long time ago, but janitors are hard to keep.”

General Bogan went down the steps two at a time and rapped on the door at the bottom. There was a shuffle inside and he heard a Southern-accented voice say, “You got no right, son, to barge in and start in on us like this. Damn it, I won’t stand for it.”

The door swung open and the light from four naked bulbs in an old brass chandelier caught everything in the room in a pitiless and hard illumination.

The man at the door was unquestionably Cascio’s father, they had the same features. But the man was drunk, his face slack, his eyes bloodshot, his pants baggy. He had the pinched, furtive, crabbed look of the long-time drunkard. He looked like an older, ruined version of his son.

Colonel Cascio was sitting behind a table covered with a linoleum cloth. He sat straight in the chair, an untouched plate of barbecued spare ribs and black beans in front of him. Leaning against a stove was Colonel Cascio’s mother. She had a waspish look and was very thin and wore an old cotton dress and black felt slippers which were too large for her. General Bogan realized that she also was a drunkard… and not only because she held a pint of muscatel in her hand. It had to do with the posture, the beaten face, the suspicious eyes.

“Sir, I am General Bogan and I am calling for Colonel Cascio,” General Bogan said. Standing in darkness he realized that his aide had not yet recognized him. At his words Colonel Cascio came half out of his chair, a look of pure agony on his face.

“Let the gennelmun in, Walt,” Colonel Cascio’s mother said. Her face spread into a mask of welcome, so broad it was grotesque. She stepped toward the door, her feet spread, balancing carefully. An amber thread of muscatel flowed from the bottle onto the floor.

The father, cued on some deep level, bowed to General Bogan. He muttered some extravagant words of welcome. “Son always speaks well of you, sir… honored have ya’ eat with us… or anything… just anything.”

There was a long moment of silence, a moment in which General Bogan understood something which he had never bothered to analyze before. Colonel Cascio’s parents had Tennessee accents; they were hill people who never adjusted to the city life. And they were the reason that Colonel Casdo never spoke with a Southern accent, never drank, and was unmarried. His military career was everything.

Colonel Casdo had broken the squalid tableau. He stood straight, walked to the doorway and saluted General Bogan.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and he was under perfect control. “I gather we’re needed for a drill.”

“That’s it, Colonel Sorry to break up your time at home.”

Colonel Cascio smiled thinly at him. He turned and, deliberately and heavily, as if he were swinging shut a bank vault, dosed the door. Behind the thin panels his father’s voice yelped, “Ungrateful damned snot-nosed kid. So damned uppity.”

They got quietly in the car and neither of them had ever spoken of the episode.

General Bogan himself came from a Tennessee family with a strong military tradition. They had always lived in the high hills of Tennessee and the land had never been able to support all of the sons. The milltary had been the only acceptable nonfarsning occupation for Bogan’s family. Ever since colonial days at least one Bogan had been in the armed forces of the United States. Some had been enlisted men, some officers. During the Civil War, Bogans had fought on both sides. Bogan’s grandfather had been a naval captain and an aide to Admiral Mahan. His father had been a sergeant in the infantry and had been decorated twice in World War I with the Silver Star. General Grant Lee Bogan’s first and middle names came to him, not because his father had a sense of humor, but because he thought that General Grant and General Lee were the greatest generals in American history. The fact that they had fought on opposite sides did not appear to him to be ironic. Grant Lee Bogan was the first of the Bogans to be a general officer.

Bogan’s attention snapped back to the War Room. It was Knapp’s voice saying, “It’s almost like working in a submarine, isn’t it, General?”

“Only the air lock reminds me of a submarine,” General Bogan said. “After a while you get used to being four hundred feet under the surface and it’s just like any other job.”

General Bogan was not telling the complete truth. In fact he had disliked the War Room when he was first assigned as its commander. He had joined the Air Force back in the l930s for one specific reason: to fly planes. For almost thirty-two years he had done precisely that. He had flown the early biplane fighters, later the P-38, the P-5l, and after the war he had moved into the jet bombers. He flew “by the book” and had a reputation for being more methodical than imaginative. But to his methodicalness there was also added courage. These two things had earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II.

He had been flying a P-38 escorting a group of B-17s on a day raid over Germany. It was early in the war and the fighter pilots could not resist temptation. Some of them made passes at Focke-Wulfs which were still at a considerable distance. Others could not resist joining in a dogfight which was already being amply handed by other fighters. General Bogan flew a perfectly mechanical and orthodox flight. He stayed with the bombers he had been ordered to defend, he nursed his fuel supply, he fired only in short bursts. The result was that every other one of the escorting fighters had reached its fuel range fifty miles before the target was in sight. One by one they swung away for the flight back to England. When the B-17s came over target General Bogan was the only fighter with them. He stumbled into a perfect setup. The Focke-Wulfs, thinking that all the fighters had left, became careless. A long string of eight fighters came up from below to strike at the bellies of the B-17s. Bogan put on additional speed and methodically began to clobber the line of German fighters. He came in on the blind port quarter of each of the Focke-Wulfs, gave a short burst directly into the cockpit hoping to kill the pilot before he could give a warning. Neatly, following the instructions he had been given during months of training, Bogan shot down six of the eight Focke-Wulfs. In avoiding the exploding debris of the six planes he pulled back quickly on the yoke and gained several hundred feet of altitude. In that moment the seventh and eighth planes saw him and instantly put on speed and began to loop back toward him. Again Bogan followed the book. Using the slight speed advantage which the P-38 had he kept just far enough ahead of the two German fighters to be Out of cannon range. They followed him almost to the English Channel, tantalized by the prospect of a kill, made reckless by the death of their six comrades. Bogan had calmly called ahead on his radio and twenty miles from the English Channel a group of P-38s were circling high in the sky waiting for him. They came screaming down, every advantage on their side, and thirty seconds later the last of the Focke-Wulfs were destroyed.

Bogan always felt guilty about receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. All he had done was follow instructions. Like everyone that flew in combat he had felt fear, deep and rooted and unending, as long as he was in action. But on the operation which earned his decoration he felt no special danger or risk-only the same familiar fear.

The last plane which General Bogan had flown in operation was the B-58, the Hustler. Then he had almost failed a physical examination. It was not clear-cut. The flight surgeon had hesitated, evaded his eyes, talked about the kinesthetic atrophy and its correlation with age, eye-hand reflex and reaction times. The discussion had been general but they both knew what it meant. If General Bogan insisted on flying the Hustler he would be labeled physically unfit. If he would content himself with flying the slower bombers or, fly as a copilot he could stay in the air. It had been a hard moment. Then General Bogan had mentioned, quite casually, that he’d been thinking of turning his efforts away from operations and more to strategy. “Flying is a young man’s game,” he lied. “We oldsters have to accept the responsibility for the big picture.”

In the end the two men wordlessly agreed. Bogan would shift to a ground assignment provided he could occasionally fly T-33s, “to keep his hand in.”

In two weeks General Bogan had been promoted to lieutenant general and assigned as commanding officer of the War Room.

General Bogan looked sideways at Raskob. He understood something of the disappointment that Raskob felt. He could recall his own initial impression of the WarRoom all too sharply. General Bogan had hated the elevator. The elevator shot downwards in one long sickening 400-foot drop. The last five feet of deceleration gave him a sharp sense of leaden helplessness. Then, after the elevator doors dosed, the small room in which one stood became a compression chamber. The air pressure in the War Room was kept a little higher than normal atmosphere so that no dust could filter in to foul the machinery or atomic fallout to contaminate the humans.

Another thing that General Bogan had disliked was the smell of the room. All of the dozens of desks on the long sloping floor of the War Room were in fact electrical consoles, which contained thousands of electrical units each coated with a thin layer of protective shellac. When all of the consoles were warmed up the smell of shellac became thin and acrid, slightly sickening.

It had taken General Bogan a long time to forget the old familiar smells of airplanes. These were the muscular and masculine odors of great engines, the kerosene stink of jets, the special private smell of leather and men’s sweat which hung in every pilot’s cockpit.

For months the War Room had seemed effete and too delicate and also quite unbelievable. With time General Bogan had changed. He came to realize that the desks, small and gray, were incredibly intricate. The quiet, low-pitched, gray and trim room was enormously deceptive. Simplicity was its mask. Its primness hid an intricacy and complexity that, when fully apprehended, was almost an artistic concept. By radio, teletype, message, written report, letter, computers, memory banks, card sorters, conveyors, tubes, telephones, and word of mouth, information came to the War Room. It came in the form of calculations, fear, courage, intuition, deduction, opinion, wild guesses, half-truths, facts, statistics, recommendations, equivocations, rumor, informed ignorance, and ignorant information; all were put through a rigorous procedure with one of two conclusions. Either a statement was a fact or it was expressed as a probability of fact.

General Bogan looked at Raskob and wished he could communicate his secret vision. The War Room had become a ship, a plane, a command, a place of decision. Although locked in hundreds of tons of concrete and millions of tons of earth the room gave him a curious sense of motion. Perversely, the descent by elevator came to have something of the excitement of the takeoff. From his desk, in the front center of the room, he had the impression of flying, and flying entirely on instruments. He also came to respect the crew of this strange vehicle of his imagination. They were professional, every bit as professional as any air crew he had ever commanded. He was not the faceless servant, an automatic cog, in an elaborate machine. The War Room was the most delicate of man-machines. Most of the time the machines received, analyzed, and made the decision. But just often enough it had been made clear to him that he was the commander. He was still in the profession of making decisions.

General Bogan knew that his visitors’ eyes were probably now adjusted enough so that they could walk down the incline to the Command Desk.

“Colonel Cascio, will you project the naval situation in the Pacific on the Big Board?” General Bogan said, starting to walk down the slight incline.

“Yes, sir,” Colonel Cascio said and walked briskly ahead of the party. By the time they reached the big central desk he had pressed down a lever labeled PACIFIC, NAVAL. Instantly the picture on the Big Board began to dissolve. The Mercator projection of the world disappeared. For a moment the screen was blank. Then in sharp strong outline the entire screen was covered by a map of the Pacific Ocean. Colonel Casdo looked up at General Bogan. “Would you like to start with the Russian submarine layout?” Colonel Cascio asked.

General Bogan nodded agreement. Colonel Cascio pushed two levers. Suddenly the map of the Pacific contained sixteen red blips. At the same time a small machine at a nearby desk began to click and a tape poured out of its side. One of the red blips seemed to be only a few inches off of Los Angeles. Another was a foot or so due west of Pearl Harbor. The remainder were scattered around the Pacific.

Raskob went rigid. Unthinkingly he jammed his fedora on his head.

“Well, sweet Jesus, you don’t mean to tell me that all those little things are Russian submarines?” Raskob asked. “That one there looks like it’s almost in Los Angeles harbor.”

“Sir, that Soviet submarine is approximately fifty miles from Los Angeles harbor, and in or under the high seas of the Pacific,” General Bogan said quietly. “Unless they come within the three-mile limit or give signs of acting in an aggressive manner all we can do is observe them.”

“Look, General, this looks dangerous to me,” Raskob said, “What the hell are they doing with submarines that dose to our shores?”

“I would presume they are doing the same thing that we do when we send U-2 planes and surveillance satellites around and sometimes over the Soviet border or set up radar stations in Turkey. They are scanning us.”

It was the kind of explanation that Raskob understood. He relaxed slightly. When he spoke his voice had a new hardness.

“How do you know that those submarines are Russian and that they are really there?” he asked.

“Sir, the Navy has spread a pattern of sonobuoys around the Pacific,” Colonel Cascio said. “They are extremely sensitive instruments and they pick up any kinds of sounds that are made any place in the Pacific. The information is transmitted to Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii and interpreted by a sailor-specialist there. The specialists are so good that they can tell the difference between a whale breaking wind and a submarine blowing tanks.”

Colonel Cascio turned to the machine on the adjoining desk and tore off the tape. He handed it to Raskob. “When the Big Board is switched to a specific projection a signal is tripped and simultaneously the various memory banks which store millions of bits of information are automatically searched for bits which are keyed to the projection. These come out on the tape.”

The four men bent over the tape which was stretched out on the desk. The first sentence read, “Soviet submarine Kronstadt, two torpedo tubes, operated radar equipment for 30 seconds at 1820 slant line 18 slant line 00. Submerged depth 120 feet, proceeded northwest to point WLDZ at 6.5 knots.” The tape went on to give estimates of the fuel level in various Soviet submarines in the Pacific, the number of messages they had transmitted, the time they had been on patrol.

“If we wanted we could tap another memory bank and get the complete strategic information on the Russian submarine situation around the entire world,” General Bogan said. “That would include the percentage of their national steel product that has gone into submarines, how many of them are nuclear powered, how many have atomic missiles. Almost anything.”

“I’ll be damned,” Raskob said. “That’s a nice gadget.”

“That gadget and the other gadgets in this room cost over a billion dollars, Mr. Raskob,” General Logan said, carefully keeping any irony out of his Voice. “There is another room like this at the Pentagon and another at Colorado Springs. There are also several smaller versions at other locations around the world. There are also a number of planes, one of which is in the air at all times, which give a miniature version of this same information.”

“Where are all these other rooms?” Raskob asked.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I cannot give you that information except on orders from my superiors or the President,” General Bogan said. He hesitated and then went on, warned by the flush on Raskob’s face. “It’s what we call ‘top secret for concerned eyes only.’ That means that only those people who have a need for the information and can demonstrate that need have access to the information.”

Suddenly Raskob smiled. “That rules me out,” he said. “The only use I could have for the information would be to sell it to the Communists or use it to beat hell out of the military people at an appropriation hearing. What other kind of stuff can you show up on that board?”

Colonel Cascio leaned toward the levers on the desk. Before he touched them, however, a blue light began to flash over the Big Board. It flashed quickly a half-dozen times and then glowed steadily. The levers on the desk snapped back to neutral position without being touched by Colonel Cascio’s fingers. General Bogan and Colonel Cascio stared at the Big Board. Already it had gone into another dissolve. A ticker machine at another desk-console started to stutter. The screen went blank and then steadied down on a large projection of the area between Greenland and Canada. From a door at the side of the room six officers entered and moved to various desks. As instruments and scopes at the desks went on the illumination began to brighten the room.

Both Raskob and Knapp were staring at the board and glancing around the room with fascination.

“What’s happened, General?” Raskob asked.

“I don’t know yet,” General Bogan said. Nothing in his manner indicated there was any cause for concern. “All I know is that we have gone to Condition Blue, which is our lowest position of readiness.” He glanced at Colonel Cascio.

Colonel Cascio turned and walked over to the machine that was stuttering. He looked at the tape and then tore it off. By the time he returned to the desk the map had steadied down and a tiny bright red blip showed between Greenland and the eastern coast of Canada.

“Gentlemen, that is an unidentified flying object which has been picked up by our radar,” General Bogan said, his eyes fastened to the Big Board. “Until we identify it positively it will remain a red blip and we will regard it as hostile.”

The two visitors stared, mesmerized, at the red blip. It moved slowly across the projection. General Bogan knew precisely what was going through their minds. There was a possibility that they were viewing a real enemy, a plane or a missile, which was flying toward the United States with a hostile intention.

“What are you going to do about it?” Knapp asked. Since he had entered the War Room his voice had never been raised above a whisper. Now the whisper was almost hoarse.

“That information, Mr. Knapp, is not classified,” General Bogan said with a smile. “The Soviets can make a good guess about what we are doing. We always have a certain number of SAC bombers in the air. They have been informed of the Condition Blue and will start to fly toward their Fail-Safe points,” General Bogan said.

“Fail-Safe?” Raskob asked,

“The Fail-Safe point is different for each group,” General Bogan explained. “They also change from day to day. This is a fixed point in the sky where the planes will orbit until they get a positive order to go in. Without it they must return to the United States. This is called Positive Control. Fail-Safe simply means that if something fails it is still safe. In short, we cannot go to war except by a direct order. No bomber can go in on its own discretion. We give that order.”

“They must get the order to ‘go’ by radio,” Raskob said. “Is that right?”

“That’s right, Mr. Raskob,” General Bogan said. “Actually they do not receive the order verbally but it is transmitted to a small box which we call the FailSafe box, which is aboard each plane. That box is operated by a code which changes from day to day and can be operated only at the express order of the President of the United States. You have probably read that he is accompanied everywhere by a warrant officer from the Air Force who has the current code that would operate the box.”

“Why don’t you just give them a direct verbal yes or no and save yourself all this trouble?” Raskob asked.

General Bogan could tell Raskob was becoming restless. His eyes were fastened on the red blip and its inexorable progress.

“Actually we do both. But an enemy could easily come up on the same radio frequency and give whatever message it wanted just by imitating the voice of the President or one of our commanding officers,” General Bogan said. With a smile, he added, “Remember that our President has a rather distinctive regional accent which can be easily imitated. Also, when people talk over the radio there is often a misunderstanding of what is said, especially if there is any radio interference. But there can be no interference with the FailSafe box. It can be activated in only one manner and at the express order of the President.”

The Congressman turned from the board and spoke sharply to the General. “And what if someone up there—or down here—cracks?”

“You will probably remember, Congressman Raskob, that last July, the Air Force testified before your committee on our program to give a psychological screening to any airman who had anything to do with nudear weapons,” General Bogan added, trying to keep the irony from his voice. “From generals down to privates.”

“Yes, sir, there are a number of people who believe that the Air Force has a high incidence of madmen among its air crews,” Colonel Cascio said with a smile. “A few years back there was a lot of upset about whether or not an individual madman, ranging from a general down to the pilot of a plane, could start a war. With this procedure we may still have the madmen around but there is nothing they can do to start a war.”

Raskob’s eyes were back on the Big Board. Now he licked his lips. When he spoke his voice had something more than the rasp of irritation in it.

“Well, what else are you doing?” he asked brusquely. “Jesus Christ, that could be an ICBM or a Russian bomber and as far as I can tell you aren’t doing very much about it.”

General Bogan could not resist. “We are doing a good deal right now. Fighter planes are flying toward the unidentified object, ICBMs are going through the initial stage of preparation for launching, whole squadrons of bombers are being fueled and armed in case it really is an enemy vehicle that is coming toward us,” be said, “But, Congressman Raskob, if we went full out every time an unidentified object appeared on the screen we would need four times the appropriations that we now get from Congress. All-out safety is a very expensive thing.”

Raskob missed the irony. “What do you mean ‘every time that this happens’?” Raskob asked. “How often does this happen?”

“About six times a month,” General Bogan said. “And if we went straight to Condition Red each time it would probably cost around a billion dollars.”

Instantly Raskob’s face relaxed, his whole posture became easy. He laughed.

“O.K., General, you win,” Raskob said. “I got that bit about the congressional appropriations. But you should have told me that, it happened six times a month. It can’t be very dangerous if it happens that often.”

“Sir, we never take a chance,” Colonel Cascio said. His voice had an odd sharp inflection to it, almost reproving. “Right now we don’t know what that object is. We treat it exactly as if it were an enemy vehicle of some sort. If we cannot identify it in a few more minutes or it acts suspiciously we will go to Condition Yellow. If we still are unsatisfied or things occur that complicate the picture we might even go to Condition Green. The last condition, as you know, is Condition Red. We have never gone to Condition Red, for that would mean that we actually considered ourselves at war and would launch weapons, all of our weapons, at the enemy. What all of this machinery assures is that if we do go to war it is not by accident or because of the act of some madman. This system is infallible.”

Colonel Cascio was wrong.

Branching off from the War Room is a warren of powerfully built and beautifully orchestrated rooms. Each room has a function. Each is protected by sheaths of reinforced concrete and a layer of lead. Each is air-conditioned. Each is linked to the War Room by alternate methods of communication. The whole thing is as symmetrical, efficient, and orderly as the mind and muscle of man can make it.

One room in the warren about the War Room is labeled Presidential Command Net. The door is guarded by an Air Force man twenty-four hours a day. Within the room-of classified length and classified breadth-there are six low, gray, squat machines. Above them is a sign which reads Fail-Safe Activating Mechanisms. Below that sentence and in heavy raised red letters are the words To be used only at express Presidential order. There are two desks in the room. One of them is in front of the bank of six machines. The other is behind the bank of machines.

Seated behind each of the desks is an enlisted man whose sole duty is to check the mechanical condition of the activation machine. The machines are deliberately not covered. All of the operating parts must be visible to the two inspectors. The air which is forced into the room is triple-filtered so that it is dustless.

At about the moment that Colonel Cascio said the word “infallible” a sergeant sitting at one of the desks stood up and walked around the bank of machines.

“Frank, how you fixed for cigarettes?” the sergeant asked. “I’m out.”

Frank tossed him a pack of Chesterfields. The sergeant reached to catch them. At that moment in Machine No. 6 a small condenser blew. It was a soundless event. There was a puff of smoke no larger than a walnut that was gone instantly.

The sergeant sniffed the air. He turned to Frank. “Frank, do you smell something?” he asked. “Like something burning?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Frank said. “You bumming cigarettes all the time and then not paying me back, that burns me.”

They grinned at one another. The sergeant returned to his desk. Things returned to normal… almost. A small shield hid from the sergeant’s view the tiny knob of burnt carbon on top of the disabled condenser. No instruments on the table indicated a malfunction.

Congressman Raskob was a tough man. He regained his composure quickly. Now he was even enjoying the situation. It had something of the elements of politicsmit.

“Can you project the fighter planes that are flying toward the unidentified object onto the Big Board?” Raskob asked.

“Certainly, sir,” Colonel Cascio said.

He moved some levers. A few feet from the red blip a phosphorescent worm began to glow, became more distinct, and then broke itself into six separate blips, all black. They were diminishing the distance between themselves and the red blip at a rate which was perceptible to the human eye.

“Those are Canadian fighters. They are probably subsonic planes so they will dose the unidentified object in a half hour or so.”

“Colonel Cascio, what information do we have on the UFO?”

Colonel Cascio walked over to the machine and tore off a piece of tape. He handed it to General Bogan. It read, “UFO at Angels 30, speed 525, heading 196.”

“That means that it’s at 30,000 feet going 525 miles an hour on a compass heading of 196,” General Bogan said.

“Just suppose, General, that the planes get there right on schedule, what are they likely to find?” Raskob asked.

“Usually it is a commercial airliner that has neglected to file a flight plan or has been blown off course by high winds,” General Bogan said. “But keep in mind, sir, that there is a big blank space over the Atlantic where neither the radar sets from Europe nor America have the range to pick up planes. This wasn’t much of a problem with slow-flying planes at low altitudes, but with jets going at high speeds and altitude they can drift a couple of hundred miles while they are ‘in the gap.’ Occasionally the radar itself makes a mistake and gets a blip off the moon or a swarm of geese or gets a false echo from a satellite. But the radar mistakes have pretty well been eliminated since 1960.”

“Suppose it just looks like a commercial airliner but has actually been loaded up with thermonuclear bombs and is trying to sneak through, masquerading as a commercial plane?” Raskob asked.

“It’s possible, but not likely,” General Bogan shrugged. “The fighter pilots would raise the plane on radio and ask where it had started from and what its destination was and this would then be checked out with Federal Aviation Agency operators to make sure it was a legitimate flight. Also the fighter pilots, if they are the least suspicious, get dose enough to the plane to give it a good inspection. If there were seams and hinges that indicated a bomb bay on what looked like a DC-8 that would change the situation. Plenty.”

“What would you do in that case?” Knapp asked. “I mean that even after the fighters see the plane they still have some suspicions?”

“Probably not a great deal,” General Bogan said. “The fighter pilots would order the plane to land or to turn around and if it ignored orders then we would have a tough decision. We would probably go to Condition Yellow and would start to launch more fighters and also bring up some of the bombers to a higher degree of readiness. But just a single unidentified plane by itself, still over a thousand miles from any Canadian or American city, doesn’t constitute a very great danger. Any conceivable enemy would be launching a number of planes at us. What we would do is make sure that the single plane did not have a runaway pilot who wanted to commit hara-kiri on New York or Montreal.”

“General, can you add the SAC bombers that are flying toward their Fail-Safe point to the board?” Raskob asked.

“Yes, sir,” General Bogan said. He nodded at Colonel Cascio. Colonel Cascio started to move some levers. “What you will see is a fuller projection of the Northern Hemisphere. It’s something like looking down at the earth from directly above the North Pole and at an altitude of about one hundred miles.”

Again there was a slow dissolve on the Big Board. When it had firmed up, the longitude lines came together at a neat point in the center of the board. The unidentified flying object and the six fighters were now tiny and because the scale was much greater they were closing at what seemed a much slower pace. Six large green blips, fragmented into small dots of luminosity, swam into clear visibility. Even to the unaccustomed eyes of Raskob and Knapp it was dear that these blips were moving at a much higher speed than either the fighters or the unidentified flying object. Each of the green fragmented blips was moving toward a green cross which in each case was well outside the Soviet boundaries, but which formed a rough circle around her borders.

“As you can see, the bombers are moving much faster than either the fighters or the UFO,” Colonel Cascio said. “Those are Vindicator Bombers and they fly at over 1500 miles an hour. You also notice that some of them, such as the group based on Okinawa, can get to their Fail-Safe point very quickly so they jink around a good deal. The idea is to have all of the planes arrive at the Fail-Safe point at the same moment. The one which has the farthest distance to travel is Group Six, which is the one over the Bering Strait. As you can see, it is moving fast and straight toward the green cross over St. Matthew Island, which is just about at longitude 80 degrees. That is its Fail-Safe point.”

“Seven minutes to Fail-Safe,” a loud dear voice suddenly said in words that could be heard throughout the whole War Room. It was a tape-recorded voice that was geared to one of the calculating machines.

“That is a recorded voice and it goes on automatically at seven minutes and starts a countdown,” General Bogan said. “It is very unlikely that the planes will actually get to the Fail-Safe point. That happens very rarely. Usually the UFO or the radar disturbance is identified well before the bombers get to the Fail-Safe point. When that happens we simply raise the Vindicators on a predetermined radio frequency and order them back to their bases, or to a refueling point. I would say that in only one in twenty Conditions Blue do the planes reach the Fail-Safe point.”

“But assume that they reach the Fail-Safe point and the unidentified object is still unidentified, then what?” Raskob asked.

“Just one helluva lot,” Knapp said unexpectedly.

All three of the men looked at him.

“Mr. Knapp’s firm manufactures some of the equipment that goes into operation at that point,” General Bogan explained. “The first thing that happens is that automatically we go to Condition Yellow. Even if the situation has not changed materially, the passage of time constitutes a danger. Secondly, a number of supporting light jet bombers equipped with defensive gear and groups of fighter planes would start to fly toward the Fail-Safe point in support of the entire operation.”

“Six minutes to Fail-Safe,” the mechanical voice said.

One of the doors in the side of the War Room opened and four officers walked in and sat down at various desk-consoles.

“Actually you are seeing a pretty unusual Condition Blue,” General Bogan said. “Usually we have the situation analyzed and solved well before this. Just as a precaution, once we get to six minutes to Fail-Safe we start to man the various machines in the War Room.”

Both General Bogan and Colonel Cascio were looking steadily at the UFO. The two blips seemed almost to have merged. For a few seconds the larger fragmented blip of the fighter plane obscured the blip of the UFO. General Bogan nodded his head at Colonel Cascio. Colonel Cascio walked to a machine and pulled off a piece of tape. He handed it to General Bogan.

At this moment the UFO disappeared from the screen.

“The unidentified object is now over the Nenieux Islands off Baffin Bay,” General Bogan read. “The UFO is losing altitude rapidly. Our fighters overflew and are now making a visual search. No visual contact as yet. The radar signal is erratic.”

“Five minutes to Fail-Safe,” the mechanical voice said. “From now until Fail-Safe, time will be given in half minutes.”

“General, what the hell happened to that thing?” Raskob asked. “It’s gone.”

“Colonel Cascio, let’s go to Condition Yellow,” General Bogan said briskly.

Raskob and Knapp both swung about and stared at General Bogan. He did not take his eyes from the Big Board.

“There is nothing to worry about, gentlemen, this is fairly orthodox,” General Bogan said. “The UFO is not acting in the characteristic way and I have the option to go to Condition Yellow. I have taken that option, because the UFO has dropped from 30,000 feet and disappeared in the grass. ‘Grass’ is the fuzz at the bottom of a radarscope which is caused by interference from hills, some inherent defect in the tubes, and other things we don’t quite understand. But once the plane is ‘in the grass’ it is lost to radar. It may be a plane with mechanical trouble about to crash, but it is conceivable that it is an enemy plane taking evasive action.”

General Bogan turned and looked at the two visitors. Both of them had a look which he had come to recognize. It was a look compounded of excitement, horror, and malice. It was not a pleasant look to see, but General Bogan had learned long ago that even for experienced airmen there was a morbid fascination with plane crashes.

“Four and one-half minutes to Fail-Safe,” the voice said.

On the Big Board the six Vindicator blips were drawing close to the Fail-Safe crosses. It was an elegant maneuver, possessing all of the grace of ballet dancers positioning themselves on a stage. Each group was precisely the same distance from its Fail-Safe point and each was now moving at maximum speed.

“Four minutes to Fail-Safe.”

One of the desk-consoles started to chatter. A major tore off the tape and handed it to General Bogan. He did not even have to think about the words.

“Go to Condition Green,” General Bogan barked. “And project the light bombers, the Skyscraper support, and the jet tankers on the Big Board.”

“What the hell—” Raskob started to say, but stopped in mid-sentence as General Bogan raised his hand.

The light over the Big Board went green. There was a sharp, piercing klaxon sound that cut through the room. Doors began to open and in thirty seconds every desk-console in the room was manned.

“Three and a half minutes to Fail-Safe,” the voice went on relentlessly.

Strange shapes were blossoming all over the Big Board. Behind each of the Vindicator groups appeared a large single blip. These were air-borne tankers. Two fragmented blips appeared on the port and starboard quarter of the Vindicators and began to angle toward them. These were the support fighters which are always activated in a Fail-Safe maneuver but which had not been projected on the Big Board until that moment.

Colonel Cascio quickly explained the situation to the two visitors, but without taking his eye from the board.

“Three minutes to Fail-Safe.”

“Can you tell us why you went to Condition Green?” Knapp asked, in a whisper.

“No, sir, I cannot tell you, for the reason which I gave earlier,” General Bogan said without looking at them. His voice was flat and imperative. “Colonel Cascio, will you come with me to the 413-L desk?”

He looked at Raskob and Knapp as he turned, felt an impulse to explain, and then felt a sudden pressure of anxiety.

When they reached the desk General Bogan handed the slip of paper to Colonel Cascio. It said, “Extended DEW Line Station No. 4.6 on UFO. Some atmospheric interference, but UFO is not air-breathing vehicle.”

“Two and a half minutes to Fail-Safe,” the mechanical voice said. Now the voice was not as loud, for the dozens of machines in the room gave off a low collective hum which toned down its harsh clarity.

“Not an air-breather?” Colonel Cascio asked. There was awe in his voice. Colonel Cascio turned to the officer at the desk and said, “Try to get DEW Line No. 4.6 and see if they have any dope on the conformation of the UFO.”

The officer repeated the order but even as he spoke his fingers were adjusting dials and levers. A line of three green lights went on.

“Two minutes to Fail-Safe.”

“If it is riot an air-breather,” General Bogan said slowly, “it might be a commercial plane which has lost power on all four engines. It would not give off enough air turbulence for even the DEW system’s new turbulence detectors to be able to pick up.”

“One and a half minutes to Fail-Safe.”

“If it is a commercial plane that has lost power, we’ll know the answer right away,” Colonel Cascio said. “A pilot can stretch a flight with dead engines only just so far and then he’ll have to crash. If the blip disappears we can assume that it is a commercial plane that crashed with all engines dead.”

General Bogan stared at Colonel Cascio for a moment. “Not necessarily,” he said evenly. “Get those two visitors out of here.”

Colonel Cascio moved toward Knapp and Raskob with an animal-like speed. He spoke to them quickly. Raskob’s voice was raised in protest. At once General Bogan moved toward him.

“Now look here, God damn it, General, if we are going to go to war our lives are as involved as yours and I want to know all about it,” Raskob said.

“Who said anything about going to war?” General Bogan asked. Suddenly his voice had a whiplike quality. “Colonel Cascio ordered you out of this room and that was my order he was carrying out.”

“One minute to Fail-Safe.”

Raskob had spread his feet. He had a pyramidal, fundamental, ferocious look about him. General Bogan realized instantly that here was a man used to fighting.

“Don’t try that crap on me, General,” Raskob said. “As I read the situation right now we are one minute from going to war and either I am going to get the hell out of here and back to my family in New York or I am going to stay right here and see what happens. The one thing I am not going to do is let you put me off in a toilet or one of these little cells of yours. Not without a fight. I mean that, General.”

“One-half minute to Fail-Safe,” the voice said. “Count down will now be by seconds. Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three…”

General Bogan looked at Raskob and knew that he could not get the man out of the room without a fight. There were other things to do. He turned away and spoke to Colonel Cascio.

“It might not be a commercial plane on a crash angle,” he said. “It might be an enemy mocked-up rocket plane which faked a flame-out on all four jet engines and then when it got below 500 feet it would be below the effective range of our radar and come in low.”

A look of pain went across Colonel Cascio’s face.

“You are right, General,” Colonel Cascio said. “It is a possibility.”

General Bogan realized suddenly that the look of pain was on Cascio’s face because he had ignored a point of logic and not because of the situation.

“Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…”

The teletype on the 41 3-L desk started to datter. The officer in charge of the desk leaned back, away from the tape, so that the other two men could have a dear view of it. The tape came Out at the normal speed but to General Bogan it seemed to emerge with deliberate slowness.

“UFO has conformation of Boeing 707 but ‘grass’ obscures total impression,” the tape said. “Operators state that despite interference UFO had normal 707 conformation.”

“Eight, seven, six, five…”

On the Big Board the six bomber groups were at the very edge of converging with the green crosses which marked their Fail-Safe points. Each of them was exactly the same distance from its green cross. But the distance was tiny. The blip of the UFO was now invisible although occasionally it glowed and then disappeared. In countless war games General Bogan had seen fighters and even heavy bombers come in so low and fast, jinking, weaving, taking advantage of every copse of trees and every low hill, and managing to evade the mechanical eye of the radar for hundreds of miles.

By a deliberate act of will, as deliberately as uncurling a fist into a hand, General Bogan made himself relax. Even so he felt a single drop of sweat, acid from tension, roll slowly down his spine. It did not feel like sweat. It felt like a tiny solid hot piece of shot.

He had gotten to the Fail-Safe point before but General Bogan had never had a UFO which acted in such a strange way. As he looked at the board three things happened. The mechanical voice said, “All groups at Fail-Safe point.” And the six bomber blips simultaneously and beautifully merged with their green crosses.

The teletype on the 41 3-L desk began to clatter again. General Bogan’s head turned about. As it did he saw the faces of Knapp and Raskob. Raskob’s jaw was set. His eyes were unafraid. His shrewd, intelligent face understood perfectly what was happening. Knapp seemed mesmerized by the machinery. General Bogan had the impression that he did not realize what was happening. The words came, again at an excruciatingly slow pace, out of the 413-L machine. They said, “UFO is now at 1,050 feet and is dearly air-breathing vehicle. Best estimate is that it is BOAC, Commercial Boeing 707, which has regained power on two of its jets.”

“It’s all right, Colonel Cascio,” General Bogan said. “It didn’t make much sense anyway, because if they did come they surely would come with more than a single plane. Let the Vindicators orbit at their FaBSafe point, however, until we get a positive confirmation from the Canadian fighters.”

Colonel Cascio stood up and, although his face was smiling, his pink tongue licked at the corner of his mouth.

“General, they’ll orbit whatever we do,” he said, “it’s SOP. But I’m still not sure about that UFO. Couldn’t the Russians anticipate exactly the way we would interpret it and just add a couple of jet pods to the mocked-up plane and turn them on when they get within range of 4l3-L System?” out of the room. The hum of the machines diminished.

It was Raskob who first noticed. He stared at the Big Board for a moment and turned to General Bogan with a grin.

“Now what the hell is that blip up there at No. 6 doing?” he said. “It’s gone right by the Fail-Safe point and is moving toward Russia.”

General Bogan spun around, his elbow lashed into the taut nervous body of Knapp and he was quite unaware of it. He stared at the board, his body suddenly felt like a terrible tortured muscle. His mind was white-hot and utterly blank. It perceived only one thing. Group 6 had flown past its Fail-Safe point. He spoke out of the side of his mouth, suddenly and comically aware of how much like a movie character he seemed.

“Colonel Cascio, get on the red telephone to the President,” General Bogan said, in a firm low unnatural voice.

As he handed General Bogan the red telephone Colonel Cascio picked up the Red Phone Log. He glanced at the clock on the wall and wrote down “1030.”

“It’s possible,” General Bogan said casually. “But not very likely. The whole picture just doesn’t make sense.”

The two men smiled at one another, but suddenly General Bogan had the sense that they were in conflict. Colonel Cascio lowered his eyes.

General Bogan turned to his guests. “The UFO is pretty well established as a BOAC commercial airliner which lost power on its engines and then regained them at a low altitude,” General Bogan said to the visitors. “We have to stay at Condition Green until we have confirmation, but ft is my best judgment that there is no danger.”

“I kinda like this whole operation,” Raskob said softly. “I mean it’s a nice orderly thing to meet people who can tie everything up with a ribbon and foolproof. And let me tell you, General, in this world there are damn few things that are foolproof.”

The teletype on the 413-L dattered.

This time General Bogan waited until the major handed him the tape. He read it to the visitors. It said, “UFO sighted visually and contacted by radio. It is BOAC Flight No. 117. It was off course due to high tail winds and loss of power on two port engines because of throttle failure which locked the throttles in OFF position. It regained power at 850 feet.”

“That’s it, gentlemen. I am sorry that we alarmed you,” General Bogan said.

Colonel Cascio bent forward and operated a single lever. Instantly the radio-transmitted order became apparent on the Big Board. The fighters started to move in a long curve back toward their bases. The jet tankers angled away from their Vindicator group. The defensive bombers made a quick 1800 turn. The big light over the Big Board went out. Men began to drift

At 10:84 Buck left his office. Out of some compulsion to orderliness he had straightened his desk, put on his jacket, and then brushed the jacket with a pig-bristle brush which he kept in one of the drawers of his desk. He thought of going to the men’s room to comb his hair. The moment he stepped outside his door he realized that would be impossible.

Standing squarely in front of the door and four feet away from it, was a Marine Corps major. He was breathing hard.

“Are you Mr. Buck?” the major asked.

“Yes,” Buck said and then after a pause added, “sir.”

“May I please see your identification, sir?” the major asked.

Buck fumbled through his wallet looking for the card. Over the years it had become an empty formality when he passed through the White House gate. He merely lifted his entire wallet toward the Pot who nodded and he walked on in. For a moment Buck felt a sense of embarrassment. It was altogether possible that he had left the identification card at home.

He flipped through the cards in their cellophane holders. The major stared straight ahead, ignoring Buck’s discomfort. The major was still breathless and the sound of air sucked in and pushed out of his nostrils was the loudest noise in the corridor. Diners Club card, law-school library card, a picture of his daughter, a picture of the Porsche just after it had been waxed, a gas-company credit card, a membership card in a professional language association, a picture of his parents. He looked in the billfold of the wallet: seven dollars. Buck looked up at the major. There was one more pocket in the wallet. The identification card was there. He almost sighed with relief.

The major took the card firmly, and glanced at the identification picture. Then he moved sideways to study Buck’s profile. Buck’s embarrassment deepened.

“Mr. Buck, this card says you have a small scar on your left wrist,” the major said. “May I see that scar, sir?”

“Just a little thing from a high.school football game,” Buck said, pulling his sleeve up.

The major stared intently at the scar. He came back to attention and extended the card to Buck.

“Follow me, sir,” the major said. He started off down the corridor at a crisp walk.

“Yes,” Buck said and then hesitated. If the major called him “sir,” perhaps he was not supposed to call the major “sir.” Buck decided not to. It gave him a sense of satisfaction as he stuffed the card back in the wallet.

By now the major was several steps ahead of Buck. Buck trotted until he had overtaken the major and then fell in stride with him. Buck, who was several inches shorter than the major, found that he was almost at a slow run.

They passed out of the White House Annex into the White House and down several corridors which Buck had never seen before. They swung around a corner and in midstride the major stopped and came to attention. Walking toward them was a tall lanky man and a woman who was taking notes on a note pad. Immediately to the left of Buck and the major was an elevator. Buck realized two things almost simultaneously: first, the elevator was painted GI green and was operated by an Army officer, secondly, the man walking toward them was the President and the woman was Mrs. Johnson, his secretary.

Buck had heard of the woman before. Her nickname was “Johnnie” and she had an aura of her own. She walked with authority and self-assurance. She struck a delicate balance in her attitude toward the President: she was both a nanny and a secretary. She had started her career as secretary to the President’s famous father over forty years before. Since that time she had become a competent and efficient instrument of the family without becoming in the least familiar. When the President first entered politics as a candidate for Congress he had begged Johnnie’s services from his father. Years later, when he entered the White House, Johnnie quite automatically accompanied him. Her hair was now white, her figure heavy, but her manner toward the President was completely unchanged. She was not the least afraid of him nor was she the least familiar.

When the President was five strides away the major snapped off a salute. The President nodded at the major, moved toward the elevator with a springy walk, the stride of an athletic person who liked physical motion. “Tell Pete not to even hint to the newspaper people about an emergency,” the President said to the secretary. She scribbled in her notebook. “Also call the Vice-President and tell him exactly what has happened. He will know what to do. Call Senator Fuibright and ask him to call the Vice-President. Better have him drop by the Vice-President’s office.”

The President came to a stop in front of the elevator. He shook hands with the major. He turned to Buck,

“Hello, Buck,” the President said. “I remember seeing you in your office a while back.”

“A while back” had been several years, but even so Buck was flattered.

“Yes, sir,” Buck said. “I am the Russian translator.” Without a verbal order, but more by motion of his body, the President moved all of them into the elevator, induding the secretary. Despite its GI color, Buck realized that the elevator was new and efficient. Its one odd feature was in the back: a large wheel with a plaque above it which said, FOR ELEVATOR OPERATION IN CASE OF POWER FAILURE. TURN TO RIGHT TO LOWER. TURN TO LEFT TO RAISE.

The doors of the elevator snapped shut and instantly they were propelled downward. To Buck it seemed that they were dropping like a stone, in a free fall. His knees loosened slightly as the floor dropped beneath him, but he stiffened; he felt a sad and desolate heaviness in his viscera. He braced against the wall for he had the sensation that he might become sick. He had no notion of how far beneath the White House the bomb shelter was located. To vomit here, in this impeccable GI elevator with the officer-operator and the President leaning comfortably against the wall and the secretary listening to his words, and the wooden major standing at an apparently easy attention, would be too much.

They came to a cushioned stop after a few seconds. Buck’s knees bent a few inches, but so did those of everyone else in the elevator. He felt relieved.

The doors snapped open. They stepped out into a large room which held half a dozen desks. On the left there was a luminous screen which covered the entire wall. It was somewhat like a movie screen, but it had thickness, a texture to it. Strange objects crawled across it, wormlike and glowing. Buck had only time to notice six green crosses, five of them standing alone, and one with a queer blob of light a few inches from the cross.

Sitting behind the desks were a number of people who were vaguely familiar to Buck. He recognized one, a special assistant to the President, and realized that the others were also special or White House assistants or staff men. All of the men in the room came to a relaxed attention. The President nodded, but did not speak. The heads of all the assistants swung back to the luminous wall. The President turned right and led his little group through a door which was swung open by a captain, his naval aide.

“That’s all, Major,” the President said casually. The major did not go into the other office with them.

Buck felt respect for abilities he did not possess. First, he realized that all of the assistants were at ease with the President, and, considering their credentials, degrees, books written, speeches made, reputations established, crises survived, toughness established, and the rumors of their outspokenness, he was not surprised by their poise. Secondly, he marveled at the peculiar physical ease of the President. It showed in the way he had indicated that the major should not come farther with them. It was not humiliating, it was not brusque, it was not even very obvious. It was merely a kind of easy shrug which told the major a good deal, but was not offensive.

The President led them into a small office. It held a medium-sized desk which had a number of telephones on it. There was a chair on each side of the desk. The sound of the air conditioning was like a massive pulse. The President sat down behind the desk. He motioned to Buck to sit in the other chair. The President turned to Mrs. Johnson.

“Look, Johnnie, it won’t work with Pete and the newspaper people,” the President said. “Pete can handle it all right, but someone else will crack and start to call Scotty or one of the wire services or some damned thing.” He paused, leaned back in the chair, held a pencil up and studied it carefully. “Tell Pete to let them all know it’s urgent, but not a bonebreaker. Not yet. Off the record. No leaks. Any leaks on this and the guy and his paper are dead. Now and forever. O.K.?”

“I’ll tell Pete, just like that,” Mrs. Johnson said and smiled.

“What about the Pentagon group?” the President said, smiling at Mrs. Johnson, but not responding to her remark. “You’re supposed to have a list or something.”

“Yes, Mr. President, it’s right here,” Mrs. Johnson said. She shuffled through the papers she was carrying. She did it with all the expert quickness of a gambler making a fast riffle. A white card appeared in her fingers.

The precision of the riffle again reassured Buck. In the presence of people so poised and prepared he knew he would perform well.

“Give it to Mr. Buck,” the President said.

Mrs. Johnson handed Buck a stiff white card. He glanced at it. At the top of the card were the words PENTAGON ALERT GROUP. It had been dated at 0800 that morning and Buck realized that the list was probably made up each day. The list contained all the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretaries, and a representative from the National Security Council. Buck noticed that after the name of the Secretary for Air there was a handwritten sentence which said “In Dallas to dedicate new missile site. Back Thursday.”

One of the phones on the President’s desk rang and a light went on.

“That will be Bogan at Omaha,” the President said.

Mrs. Johnson started to turn toward the door. “Wait just a second, Johnnie.”

The President picked up the phone. He did not say “hello,” but someone obviously had started talking to him at once.

By reflex Buck looked at his watch. It was 10:87.

Mrs. Johnson moved toward Buck. For the first time he noticed that her middle-aged and very smooth cheeks were flushed with excitement. She bent over Buck and spoke to him in a low urgent voice.

“At least we’re better off than President Truman was in 1950 when the Korean thing started. That’s one of the first things I changed around here,” she said primly. “That poor man could hardly find anyone to advise him. He practically had to make the decision single-handed. He called State, the Pentagon, the Hill, here, there, everywhere. Nobody home. So he did it alone.”

Did what, Buck thought to himself.

Buck looked up at Mrs. Johnson and smiled thinly. Her memory was said to be limitless, her knowledge encyclopedic, her antagonism fatal. He had heard, and he could not remember where, that when her cheeks showed small patches of pink it was the equivalent of Hitler throwing an epileptic fit.

For the first time Buck realized that this was something more than a drill, that great decisions might have to be made. His throat went dry and then, as he had trained himself to do when he was tense, his smile broadened into a wide and very good imitation of genuine amusement. He saw the President’s eyes above the telephone regarding him curiously.

Five seconds after General Bogan had stopped speaking to the President the phone was back on its cradle and he and Colonel Cascio had started toward a door fifteen yards from the desk. Both were aware that they must not alarm Raskob and Knapp. They moved quickly, but without haste. It was an old drill. This was the first time their walk had intention and, even so, they walked at drill pace.

The door was labeled TACTICAL CONTROL. Colonel Cascio opened the door and the two men walked in. The room was served by a sergeant who even as he snapped to attention continued to let his eyes roam over the controls and lights and mechanisms which filled the room. The central machine in the room was a long lean console with a bank of switches running down its spine. The room hummed, a faint, rather pleasant hum, like beehives heard at a great distance on a warm day. On a table in front of the console was a desk with a single telephone on it.

“All command posts to Condition Red, Sergeant,” General Bogan said.

“All command posts to Condition Red,” the sergeant repeated.

With an expert practiced gesture he ran his hand down the row of thirty switches and beneath each of them a light instantly glowed red. Identical green lights above each switch went off.

“Verification?” Colonel Cascio said, looking at the sergeant.

General Bogan felt a flash of confidence as Colonel Cascio spoke. His aide knew every drill, procedure, maneuver, and manual of every room which served the War Room, and it pleased the General. Partly, he thought, because it confirmed his judgment of men, partly because Colonel Cascio’s pure and simple ability was reassuring.

The sergeant wheeled and looked at the face of another machine. The machine did two things: it verified that the long central console was operating properly and it also confirmed that each of the command posts of SAC throughout the world was actually “cut in” and had received the “Condition Red.” It was merely another precaution to make sure that no mechanical failure could occur.

“All command posts cut in and tactical control circuits operative,” the sergeant said.

General Bogan picked up the phone on the table. When he spoke his voice would be transmitted over a network of transmitters on at least three frequencies to each of the SAC command posts.

“This is General Bogan at Omaha,” General Bogan said. “I am ordering a Condition Red, not a ‘go’; please confirm.”

This was the “Condition Red” system. It was the step between alarm and action. It was the bringing of a massive network of men and machines to a condition of readiness. Fragments of the system would, in fact, be active, but the enormous bulk would merely come to a tense ready. Long ago the SAC researchers had learned that “color alerts” were confusing. For veterans of World War II “Red” was ominous. For others it simply meant a casual stop at a casual traffic signal.

Everyone in the widespread system knew that the ultimate alert simply meant a riding of tension, enormous preparation, an intricate series of precautionary steps. The moment that the switches were tripped and the words were spoken, a mechanism went into operation which was such a blending of the delicate and the gross, the individual and the chorus, that it was an orchestration.

As General Bogan listened to the individual duty officers confirm both the mechanical and spoken order he remembered something Colonel Cascio had said months ago about Condition Red.

It’s like the start of a 100-yard dash, the colonel had said. Except that you keep coming through “on your marks” and “gets sets” and you hang there with sweat breaking out on your face and every muscle tensed to go… and the pistol never cracks, no one ever says.

General Bogan never thought of it that way. But then Colonel Cascio had been a sprint star in college, had run the hundred in 9.6. Even now there was a rumor among the enlisted men that he could run the hundred in under 10 seconds. General Bogan had never asked but the colonel looked it; he had a jaguar-lean look about him. He kept in perfect physical shape, but never made a point of it. He never talked of his workouts at the gym, never lectured anyone on obesity or physical fitness. He merely kept himself taut.

When General Bogan finished receipt of the acknowledgments, the Condition Red order was completed. It was initiated by a man, checked by a machine, counterchecked by a man, who was countercounterchecked by another machine, and all men and machines were carefully watched by other counterpart men and machines. The immense man-machine activated itself, checked itself, coordinated itself, restrained itself, passed information to itself, carefully filtered incoming information, automatically tripped other systems that were serving it.

At Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, the officer in charge of the Second Air Force put down the telephone after he had confirmed General Bogan’s order. He pushed a machine which electronically checked to make sure that General Bogan’s verbal order had also been fed into the responsible machine at Omaha. He then pressed a button close to the telephone. At once a scream went up from a score of klaxon horns scattered around the base. A gigantic barracks building transformed itself. An entire wall rolled away. Inside were ten station wagons, each with its exhaust plugged into a special hole in the floor, and each turning over slowly. An enlisted man sat behind each wheeL In the area behind the station wagons there were a snack bar, card tables, television sets, sofas and chairs. The space was occupied by approximately fifty men. The mood thirty seconds ago had been tranquil, an odd mixture of a fraternity house, a BOQ, and a ready room. The moment that the door swung open and the klaxons started to wail, each of the men ran for the predesignated station wagon. With a beautiful practiced precision, the station wagons tore across the vast expanse of the field. Each station wagon’s journey ended beside a Vindicator bomber and the crews piled out. The supersonic bombers were already prepared by special warmup crews. They not only warmed up the engines but they kept a constant running check on every part of the intricate bomber. The warm-up crews turned over their planes to men who were perfect strangers, keeping their eyes on the instruments until the last moment, then grinning at the strangers and relinquishing command, swinging out of the plane and into the waiting station wagons.

Two and a half minutes after the alert had sounded the first of the bombers wheeled to the head of the runway and started to whine down the long black asphalt track. Five minutes later all of the “ready” planes were in the air.

The activity at Barksdale did not cease. Instead it speeded up. As the first wave of bombers took off another series of bombers were being warmed up and another series of crews had occupied the barracks. The station wagons were back idling.

The barracks doors had slid shut. Neither the people who had gone through them a few moments ago nor the present occupants knew whether they were at war or repeating a familiar drill. The men appeared to be casual. This was also their inner reality. Anxiety had long ago been burned out.

At some bases the metabolic rate was increased so slightly by the Condition Red that it was hardly perceptible. The crews of jet tankers, for example, walked to their huge aircraft knowing there were only two alternatives: if enemy missiles were already in flight not one of the crewmen would reach his plane, but all Would be crisped black somewhere along their leisurely walk. Their tankers were unprotected and in the open. The other alternative was that they were participating in a drilL The crewmen had long ago given up worrying about the two alternatives. They had learned a lesson: there was nothing they could do to alter anything in any situation.

Some parts of the system were nothing more than great offices. They were part of the “logistic pipeline.” Their men and their machines performed a clerkly function, but a necessary one. They made sure that everyone in the operation had adequate supplies of everything: chewing gum, one million tons of jet fuel, tiny needles in plastic containers which had a smear of poison on the tip that could kill a man in three seconds, fresh tomatoes, black boxes in infinite variety, tubes, screws, bolts, typewriters, rubber tires, little gray cubes that, soaked in water, expanded into beef steaks, aspirin, morphine syrettes, paper and carbon paper in every size known to man, “canned” jet engines, ready to ship jet engines fresh and tuned, beans both canned and dried, life jackets, codebooks, cigarettes, leather jackets, brandy flasks, comic books, straitjackets, Geiger counters, Demarol pills, death jackets in wood or silk. You name it, we got it, a sleepy and very proud master sergeant said as he looked over his rows of filing cabinets and calculating machines. Around the world a hundred other men like him did the same… in confidence, with pride, and without question.

Thousands of sleek fighter planes were being readied but only a few of them were launched. They were loaded behind revetments and in ready rooms and at the ends of runways, poised like polished needles, their wings drooping. Their time would come later.

In all of this vast system there was not a single man who knew for certain what had started the operation. Not a single man knew whether this was a genuine “go alert” or another of the hundreds of practices they had endured. The men were calm. The whole intricate mechanism functioned flawlessly.

The second system that General Bogan had activated was the Gold System. This was different from the gold telephone which connected a handful of policy-making men directly to the White House. This was the global system of missiles. These were the strange new vehicles which were launched by men, but had no living creature aboard them. Once launched, some were guided by men. But others used stars and planets to position themselves, constantly making small alterations in direction while moving at a speed of 20,000 miles an hour. They could not be launched by the men who readied them but only by the man at the very top of the pyramid. Once launched they could not be recalled. And the fact of the launching could not be concealed from the enemy.

The missiles ranged in size from the big bulky stub-nosed strategic missiles weighing hundreds of tons down to the light-weight jeweled devices for tactical operations.

The work of readying the giant missiles was complex and time-consuming. Missiles like the Atlas and the Titan began to give off weird clouds as liquid oxygen filled their tanks. The Minute Man and the Polaris, which used solid fuel, began the elaborate countdown which had been done hundreds of times before.

At the Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado there was no visible sign from the air or from the ground that a huge missile operation occupied seventy square miles of Colorado prairie. This was a “hard site” base. Everything was deeply submerged below ground. Only a direct hit could incapacitate one of the three Titan missiles operated from each of the six shock-mounted complexes comprising the Lowry Missile Wing. Even if one of the complexes were put out of commission the other five would remain operational, for no one of the complexes was closer than eighteen miles to another. Inside each submerged missile complex life was completely self-contained, sealed off from the rest of the world. The missile-site base was the enemy’s prime target.

The crews of the bases, depending on their literacy and background, expressed it differently: bull’s-eye, homer, 4.0, knockout, prime, top priority, ten-strike, No. 1, après vows le deluge, horse’s ass, the first goodbye. They all meant the same thing. They all knew that the enemy, any enemy, would strike first at these bases. The cities, the seaports, the ships, the planes, those could come-or go-later.

When one descended into the deeply buried command post and personnel quarters there was the sensation of entering an ingenious collective coffin. Each time might be the last. But no one really believed in either extreme-that it might be the last time, or that it was just another practice. They were emotional neuters. Long ago, under the scrutiny of hard-eyed psychologists, the claustrophobic and the easily panicked men had been weeded out. The rest had been made deliberately nerveless. They were technicians of a greater terror taught to ignore the unalterable end of their work. And, in honest fact, most of them did not believe in their work. It was a gigantic child’s play, a marvelous art. It had to be done perfectly each time and it was. But it came to nothing. Hundreds of times they had run through their procedure, checked off the thousands of items, made the hundreds of thousands of reports, tabulated the millions of facts… and then stopped just short of climax.

As the Titan started up its massive elevator, and passed between its open 200-ton concrete doors, as its umbilical cord began to fall away in the clouds of chill swirling LOX, each man worked as if war were about to start. But each time, each of the hundreds of previous times, the order had come to stand down. The Titan had been carefully lowered back to its base.

Although an intercontinental ballistic missile requires only twenty minutes to reach a target in Eurasia, hours are required to get a missile ready for its short white-hot trajectory. Scores of men working with a network of computers, calculating, checking, double-checking, all moved at top speed but with great deliberation. The total operation was coordinated by the firemaster. Each missile also had its Fail-Safe point, but it was a point in the process of checking rather than a point in space. It was a clerical, a calm, a well-ordered Fail-Safe. But it could only proceed to a certain time. Past a precise and well-known “Positive Control” point in the countdown each missile passed into the “terminal sequence.” The sequence could only be started at the order of the President of the United States.

The cavernous life, the manufactured secrecy, the incredible pitch of training, made a missile base into a strange experience. The crews lived a buried existence. The end of a tour of duty was like the end of a sentence. As the crewmen were relieved they came out into the air, blinking at the brightness, never certain that they were returning to a normal world of shopping centers and baby-tending and love-making. They had been taught that it was altogether possible that they would emerge into a black incinerated world in which their chief duties would be to avoid deep contamination and then to wage a savage fight for existence.

The details of this fight were deliberately kept ambiguous. To prepare a corps of men for defeat is almost certain to destroy their capacity for retaliation. They knew that in the ultimate situation their mood should be ferocious, but the object of the ferocity was not specified.

The men who expended their lives raising and lowering these gigantic masses of intricate and explosive material were not without intelligence or heart. They were aware of the eerie, nightmarish quality of their existence. They thought of their strange condition and they discussed it. It was a surrealistic dialogue. It was conducted by technicians with no more than an eighthgrade education and by officers with a Ph.D. The environment gave them an awesome quality. These subterraneans moved nervelessly through their artificial world, developed new outlooks and insights and oddly twisted views of themselves and of reality, evoked a new humor which was both loving and profoundly cynical, grinned a new way, were nostalgic for things like fresh air and grass, had fantasies which no man had known before because no man had lived as they lived.

Out of their subterranean places they reverted to the life aboveground without effort or strain. They seemed as normal, as uniform, as ordinary, as anyone else. But while they were below ground they were a separate breed.

In a form which would surprise a student of the classics they told the ancient myth of Sisyphus in which Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder laboriously up a hill only to have it tumble back again ready for another push upward. The myth trickled down from the officers to the men in strange and vulgar forms but no one mistook its import. It was always told, regardless of the language, with a strange sense of wonder and relevance.

The more speculative of the missilemen, the egg-heads among them, had also discovered an unofficial poet laureate: Albert Camus. Camus, who had understood fully the futility and the antic and the senselessness of much of modern life, had also, in a perverse way, found the principle and will which allowed him to live through the awful stresses of the French underground during World War II. Like Camus, the missilemen had learned to live seriously in a world which was absurd.

To enter a missile compound on Gold Alert was like entering a severe monastic order, utterly dedicated to the service of ununderstood mechanical totems. Quietly and systematically, without any public announcement and without any realization on the part of the public, the nation rose to a full and ominous alert.

There was also another element in the subterranean life which was pervasive, perfectly known, understood, and never discussed. There was the knowledge that the enemy was doing precisely what they were doing. Somewhere halfway around the world there was another set of silos, another pattern of hard sites, another organization of men-almost, they assumed, precisely like theirs. This is no easy knowledge to carry. It is one thing to arm the thermonuclear warhead on an immense missile. It is another to know that another person, with almost the same training, is doing the identical thing—and that he must be thinking of you—and knowing that you are thinking of him thinking of you, and on and on.

It was no life for ordinary men. One must have vision and no vision, nerve and nervelessness, absolute obedience and independent judgment. One must be outwardly friendly and inwardly cool, for life in the silos is intimate and forced and to open too much is fatal and to stay too much closed is fatal.

The subterranean men were proud men, sure of their ability. They also had developed to an almost sublime degree the capacity to forget the sum total of their task and to concentrate on their small role. They were a hard-working, magnificently trained team. They were even an enthusiastic team. But they carefully avoided any discussion of the end result of their teamwork.

Brig. Gen. Warren A. Black came starkly awake: his eyes wide open, his toes spread and digging into the sheet beneath him, his fingers forming into fists, his stomach flat and tight. His skin was covered with a sweat that was really a slime of fear. He knew that in a few more minutes his wrist-watch alarm would go off. Aware of a thin scratchiness behind his eyeballs, he wanted to go back to sleep. But he jerked awake. Sleep was dangerous.

Sleep was where the Dream happened.

Until six months ago Black could not remember dreaming. Now his sleep was almost always broken by some variation of the Dream. It brought him awake, arched and sweating. At first he was torn between the desire to sink back in restful blackness and the fear that he might, instead, fall into the Dream. Recently he always stayed awake.

He knew there was one way that he could end the Dream: by resigning his commission. He said it to himself in a score of ways; sometimes mockingly, sometimes cruelly, sometimes in an antic mood. But the Dream did not vanish. It was also invulnerable to logical analysis. He knew, in a fleeting but dreadfully sure sense, that he could never exorcise the Dream. He could end it only by resigning. But the thought of resigning from the Air Force was torture.

The Dream always opened on a bullfight arena. Although Black had never been to a bullfight in his life, since the Dream he had checked some bullfight books, The Dream was accurate, replete with detail of picadors on padded horses, banderillas, bad music, and the background of huge ads for beer and automobiles and a milling crowd. Perhaps, Black thought, he supplied the detail from some long-forgotten book.

That bull was real enough, charging out of the gate, pawing and snorting. Its charge came to a grinding halt, its immense body reared back on its hind legs, as frozen as statuary. It came down on all fours, swung its horns around the arena, and looked, with puzzlement, for the adversary. The bull gave off a deep fundamental bellow. It was the sound of confidence. And from the people in the arena came back a deep funds-mental silence.

The bull’s roar ended on a tiny shattered sound of agony. A stripe of red appeared on the deep black hide of its shoulder.

The bull wheeled, spun on its hooves with magnificent speed and grace-and again gave off the thin cry of agony. Another stripe, this one white, appeared on its flank. Quickly then the bull charged and charged again and then a third time… endlessly, with no seeming diminution of power. But it was confused. Each time it wheeled to a stop there was another white or red stripe on its hide.

There is a matador in the arena, Black said to himself. But I cannot see him. He must be hidden by some refraction of sun on the glittering sand, some unintended camouflage of costume, perhaps by the strange assault of the colors of the arena. Black turned his head, tried vainly to see the matador, but he was never successful.

Looking around the arena, Black realized with a pleasant feeling that everyone in the stands was familiar. They were his associates, the people he saw in his everyday work-privates, civilian secretaries, generals, colonels, technicians, majors, scientists, professors. But he could not identify any one of them exactly. He could not attach names to faces. He only knew they were familiar and that their faces were reassuring.

The invisible matador worked the bull closer and closer to where Black was sitting. He could hear the wind from its huge lungs, see the little puffs of sand kicked up by its hooves, see the massive neck muscle swing the horns. The bull came very close.

Then Black understood the white and red stripes. The bull was being flayed naked. The invisible matador was not using a regular sword. He was using some sort of instrument which neatly shaved off long narrow slices of the bull’s hide. The white stripes were cartilage and fat; the red were made by blood which ran down the great suffering body and dripped into the sand.

Now, directly in front of Black, the bull showed fatigue and confusion. The matador sliced and soundlessly another stripe fell away from the living flesh beneath. There were only a few spots on the bull’s body where the hide remained. His head hung low and his nostrils blew two tiny volcanoes of dust, no bigger than a fist. The dust flew in its eyes and the bull, with sadness, slowly, closed its lids.

Black looked around the arena. The familiar faces were enjoying the scene. Their open mouths roared approval-but no sound came out. They smiled, pointed their fingers at the spectacle, bellowed soundlessly, beat one another on the back, danced with excitement. Tears of pleasure rolled down their faces.

Black’s mood of reassurance vanished.

Then the terrible thing happened. The bull lifted its head, its agonized eyes fastened on Black. For a moment they stared at one another. And then, in some unknowing way, a pact was made. The bull’s eyes showed relief.

Black felt himself becoming the bull. It was done effortlessly. It was as if his body oozed like a fog into the shape of the bulL The familiar Black dissolved, lost form and substance, slid into the body of the immense animal. Now he was looking up at the audience, he was bewildered by the strange colors and sounds, he was swinging his head looking for the matador.

He felt a great confusion. He also felt two kinds of dread.

The two things he dreaded had always brought him sharply awake. First, he knew that in another moment the pain of the flaying would come crashing down his nerve fiber and into his bull-brain. Secondly, he would turn and see, with his bull-eyes, the matador. Both things were so frightening that he awoke instantly.

Black tossed in his bed, looked at his watch, and saw, that he had another few minutes. Idly he wondered at what point in a dream a person began to sweat. His pajamas were wet around the neck and waist and under the arms. He felt as if he had been sweating for hours. And yet, he sensed, it was probably only for a few seconds.

He forced himself to relax. Be logical, he said to himself. He sensed again that the Dream and SAC were linked. If he could resign his commission the Dream would go. But he loved the organization, he respected the people in it, it meant as much to him, almost, as his family. And its mission was so important. But a shadow lurked in his mind, a tiny burr of unrest. It vanished when held up for examination, yet an elusive doubt remained. Something was very wrong.

He felt a moment of despair. Would he continue to awaken like this, to crash from a black terror into total wakefulness? He did not like the sudden awakenings, though as an airman, some twenty-five years before, he had gotten used to them. In those days, other sounds had brought him awake abruptly, almost like shock, with an instant heightening of the metabolic rate, a gushing of adrenalin. The whine of sirens, a rough hand shaking his shoulder on a cold English morning during World War II, the thin growing frenzy of the sound of a bomb in flight… then, oh yes, then he had come awake instantly. But it was a different kind of wakefulness, lacking in the interior terror of his Dream.

He made a decision and sat up in bed. The Dream was forgotten. He must start the long business of getting through the day. He forced himself to smile. No sweat. Getting across midtown New York this early would be a cinch. With luck he’d be able to check out a Cessna “Blue Canoe” and run down to Andrews by himself. In any case his time was O.K. The shuttle plane could get him to the Pentagon for the ten o’clock briefing. One way or another he’d make it. No sweat.

He looked over at the sleeping figure beside him. Betty had not stirred. She needed the sleep and he wanted to shave, dress, and clear out without awakening her. He eased out of bed and fumbled in a dresser drawer for clean linen.

Black was a tall man. He had a roughly hewn, square, rugged handsomeness about him. Even his head conveyed the impression of angularity and squareness, as if it had been built up out of those sharply angular plane surfaces seen in the opening examples of “How to Draw” books. He was like an unfinished piece of sculpture, sharp edges not yet rounded off. It was not simply massiveness he conveyed, it was also a sense that he would not soften with age, his flesh would not turn to fat. He had been designed by a good draftsman, rather than by a fine artist.

His head was thickly covered with deep-brown wavy hair which he kept closely trimmed. Once in prep school he had let it grow and it had turned into a tight cap of curls. A slim and fey instructor had smiled at him across the room and said, “Our forest satyr.” Black had never let his hair grow long again. His eyes were revealing and as if for protection were deep-set. They were brown eyes which fixed steadily on people. Even when he had to give a harsh reply his eyes did not waver. His perceptive subordinates could anticipate Black’s mood from the narrowing of his eyes, the slow forming of laugh lines.

Black detoured into the boys’ bedroom on his way to the bathroom. He had the old pilot’s habit: a secret, almost subconscious, trace of permanent leave-taking with each good-bye. The boys were too big now to accept a public kiss from their father, though he would have gladly bestowed it. But early in the morning he could steal in alone and softly kiss their foreheads.

John, the twelve-year-old, was tightly balled and had orbited halfway down toward the foot of the bed, his head hidden tinder the covers. Black straightened him out gently, rearranging and retucking the blankets around his shoulders and neck. David, the fourteen-year-old, was spread-eagled across his bed, half uncovered and one foot out over the edge. Black recomposed the second bed and body. The two boys were opposites in this as in so many other things. He had spent his life, it seemed, recovering David and unsuffocating John.

As he shaved, quickly and expertly with a safety razor and Aerosol lather, he regretted the time he had to spend away from the boys. Somehow, because Betty was seven years younger than he, Black felt a kind of paternalistic distance between himself and the three of them. He grinned into the mirror, That melted pretty damned fast when he was alone with Betty on what she laughingly referred to as her “responsive nights.”

He had been born into the immensely wealthy Black family of San Francisco. They had been wealthy since the Forty-finer days when a young and anonymous man named Ned Black had made a strike on the small fork of the Yuba and had returned to San Francisco with a burro carrying dose to 8,000 ounces of gold dust and nuggets. No one knew where he was born or if he had a family. The Blacks of San Francisco began with Ned Black. He had bought great sandy tracts of San Francisco and had sold them for huge profits.

Black had seen Ned Black’s library. It was made up of books by John Locke, Fourier, Robert Owens, the great Chartists, Marx, Spencer, Ricardo. The books were worn and used. Ned Black had gone off to the Civil War and came back with an empty sleeve. He was a quiet man before he left and quieter when he returned. He lectured his children on only one thing: man was social, he had a primary obligation to his society.

The Blacks, like all rich San Franciscans, gave to the Opera and the Symphony and museums, but most of their money went into schools, hospitals, and libraries. And not a single building they gave to the city bore the name of Black. Ned’s sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons all followed his quiet, intense, and private way of life. They became ministers, businessmen, educators, and a few of them, to old Ned Black’s great gratification, became politicians. Ned Black thought it the most noble of professions, the most necessary of social tasks.

Whenever there was a reform movement, a commission to investigate crime, an effort to broaden education, a Black played an important role.

Warren Black had not found it easy to follow the tradition. He had no flair for politics and little interest in business. Even when he had graduated from one of the best of the Ivy League schools he felt rootless and somehow guilty. In World War II he had joined the Army Air Force and it was there first, and later in SAC, that he found his calling. He flew and fought with unspectacular success and although he loathed the destruction of life he brought himself to agree that it was necessary. He was steady, competent, and with absolutely no desire for publicity. Over the years he had developed a love for the Air Force, although he knew that it should be impossible to love such a great impersonal organization.

Hehad met Betty when the Air Force sent him back to his Ivy League college after World War II to study international politics and foreign policy with the famous. Professor Tolliver. Betty had forced herself into one of Tolliver’s seminars and commuted from Raddiffe once a week to attend. The austere old man had balked, but Betty’s father was a famous professor of naval history and Tolliver had finally yielded. He pointed out bluntly that she was the first girl he had ever had in his foreign-policy seminar, that the talk often got “salty,” that she would not be given grace because she was a female-female was the word he used, not “girl.”

Betty nodded. When she appeared at the seminar it was more like someone coming to do battle than to discuss abstract ideas. Her face was scrubbed and without makeup. She wore severe little gray suits and she seldom smiled. She spoke with a strong even voice that was overcontrolled. It was only midway through the semester, when her anger emerged, that her face took on a striking and handsome look. It surprised Black, for he suddenly realized that she was both an attractive and a very emotional person.

Betty had been tensed against Tolliver from the start. She saw him’ as an intellectual enemy. To see Tolliver as an enemy was easy. Most of the graduate students did. To reveal antagonism was another thing. Tolliver was formidable.

Tolliver was a senior professor in the field of international relations. He came from old New England stock and his dedication to scholarship was savage, total, and complete. If his ideas led him out of the classroom and the library and into public battle he did not hesitate a moment.

His first public battle, when he was very young, had been a catastrophe. Before World War I he had been a pacifist. He had spoken and lectured and written against involvement with the European power blocs, he had attacked war as inhuman and obsolete, he had led “peace parades” in New York City and Washington. He had studied ancient war, medieval war, nineteenth-century war, twentieth-century war. Quite unknowingly he became one of the foremost experts on warfare in order to attack it.

At some point-it was never identified by anyone precisely and Tolliver never spoke of it-Tolliver changed. It was one of the most famous intellectual conversions of his time. Tolliver became pro-war. He abandoned his pacifist friends and their cause for a position on the other side so extreme that it startled even the interventionists: war was an ingrained part of any society. His argument was not crude, it was stated in the language of the scholar, it was replete with footnote references to history and to the psychology of aggression, allusions to Freud and the death-wish. Tolliver did not argue that war was good or desirable, merely that it would always exist as long as man organized himself into societies.

For several years in the thirties Tolliver had been intensely unpopular. He was labeled pro-English, a subversive, a turncoat. His classes dwindled in size. Liberal and radical magazines attacked him ferociously. But when America entered the war, almost overnight Tolliver became something of a prophet, a culture hero, an intellectual “with his feet on the ground.” Tolliver ignored the praise just as he had ignored the criticism. He survived even the public reason which he gave for not volunteering for military duty. “Some people with brains must stay behind and develop a theory of war and peace. I’m one of those best equipped to do that. That I shall do.”

He had been doing it ever since.

He was entirely a person of the mind. His age was indeterminate and no one had dared ask him. He could have been a burned-out fifty or a well-preserved seventy. His white hair was thin and seldom brushed. He had several suits; no one knew how many, for they were all the same conservative cut, the same excellent English cloth, the same hue. They all looked ruined in a few months for they were never pressed or cleaned and they were decorated with pinpoint holes where live ashes from the endless cigarettes he smoked had burned themselves out. When he stood up a small cloud of ashes fell away from him.

In a relaxed mood his face appeared weakly muscled. But it was an illusion and he was seldom relaxed anyway. Usually he seemed to be burning with fury. It showed most in his eyes-bright, blue, New England granite eyes, glittering with the hunter’s excitement. In argument his face went hard-musded; his nose seemed more beaked. At the slightest criticism of his ideas, even the suggestion of indifference, Tolliver attacked. He moved forward in his chair, his body tense. He looked somehow like a logic-chopping rat, teeth slashing into flimsy arguments, gnawing at more solid evidence with a terrible persistence. He rarely left an argument with the decision in doubt. His knowledge of war and society was so vast, his dedication so singleminded, that it seemed unlikely while listening to him that anyone could know more than he or develop a viewpoint which he had not anticipated and worked into his master view.

Tolliver paid no attention to university politics, his colleagues, campus social occasions, or other trivia. His students received his intense and narrowly focused attention, for he saw them as the carriers of ideas. Personally he knew only their names; intellectually he knew them completely. It was impossible to flatter the man; his eyes merely went icy with contempt.

The first time Betty differed with Tolliver the students in the seminar had tensed, leaned forward in their chairs and waited for the blood to flow. It did not happen quite that way. Betty had introduced some anthropological evidence that a certain Melanesian tribe waged peace rather than war. They competed at giving one another gifts, at doing small favors, at multiplying courtesies. It was dear that the example was new to Tolliver, but he attacked at once. The data were insufficient for general condusions, he said. Let the tribes be attacked once and they would respond with conventional warlike reactions. But they had been attacked and had not so responded, Betty said. She read from the study.

When she finished Tolliver came back with a ripping analysis. Betty countered with further evidence.

Black broke in with a neutral question and Betty glanced at him with contempt. He was in uniform and she had assumed that he would automatically support Tolliver’s views on the inevitability of war.

The argument had ended in a draw. Tolliver had muttered that he would check the original study and also other anthropological evidence. From Tolliver this was dose to a glowing tribute. Black congratulated Betty as they filed out of the seminar room. She cut him short. It was plain that she did not like men in uniform.

There had been other things besides his uniform she had not liked. When she learned that he was from the San Francisco dan of Blacks, she invested him automatically with all responsibility for the misdeeds of the Huntingtons, the Hopkinses, and old Grandfather Black. She knew Black was wealthy and she thought that the Air Force was Black’s hobby. Once she told him, “To paraphrase Will James, you seem to have made war the moral equivalent of being a playboy.”

It was during that semester that the man who was now President had started in politics, running for Congress in a nearby state. Needing all the campaign help he could get, he naturally called on his old dassmates. Black was one.

Betty supported him in that initial campaign, and once chided Black and some others for their political inactivity. When Black revealed that he commuted on weekends to help in the same campaign Betty was startled. In an ornery and hilarious way, which Black later came to love, she then attacked him for being linked with the Eastern “great wealthy.”

To Betty, Black seemed a perfect example of a dangerous breed: the power elite from the industrial, financial, military, and political world. It was Tollver’s seminar which gradually dissolved Betty’s notions about Black. One particular afternoon Tolliver had let himself go a little further toward preemptive war than usual. A young Ph.D. candidate named Groteschele, who had just recently transferred to political science from mathematics, had been present. He argued that the war against fascism was not over: the military struggle against black fascism must now be converted into the military struggle against red fascism.

It was the first time Black had ever heard Walter Groteschele speak, and as he listened he had no notion that it would be the first of scores of times. Groteschele was the earliest of the brilliant group of mathematical political scientists that developed after World War II, a group which later included such as Henry Kissinger, Herman Kahn, Herbert Simon, and Karl Deutsch. But for a few years in the beginning, Groteschele stood alone, without peer, just as he had planned it Nbw Black was only aware of a faint rasp of irritating at what Groteschele said. There was nothing on which he could put his finger, nothing he could use his intellect against-only a dim kind of restlessness, a sense that there was some obscure danger In what Groteschele said.

The professional liberals in the seminar shifted in their seats but did not speak.

Tolliver turned to Black. But instead of giving the expected reply Black outlined what he thought were the military reasons Russia, though dangerous, was a manageable threat to America.

Black spoke calmly and with authority and his eyes never wavered when Tolliver began to tense into his rigid posture of attack. When the attack came Black handled it calmly, constantly referring to expert opinions, studies, statistics, probabilities.

Betty was torn and it showed on her face. She found It difficult to side with Black the militarist but when finally she did it was with a fierce eloquence. The seminar did not end with the neat trimmed summation that Tolliver liked. It ended in a sense of tension, an odd unbalance. The students walked out gingerly.

Black moved toward Betty as the seminar ended. She got up quickly, folded her papers, snapped them into her briefcase, walked out without glancing at Tolliver. Her face was flushed and attractive. Black thought: she has all the charm of bawd unmasked at a Sunday-school picnic.

“How about continuing this over a beer?” he said in a low voice, leaning down just behind her ear. She turned so quickly her nose brushed against his cheek before he could withdraw. A blush spread over her face and deepened as she realized it. He knew for sure then what had remained true ever since. Betty was the most attractive, the most interesting, and the most quixotic girl he’d ever known. He was on the verge of kissing her on the spot, and she knew it.

In a way, they both decided their future in having that beer. The rest was just making all the moves and countermoves required to carry out the decision. There had been some difficulty about the “Black unearned fortune,” but Betty had been reassured when Black told her that he lived entirely on his colonel’s pay and that his share of the. family income went into a fund at Wells Fargo Bank. Black said he had no notion of what the fund amounted to, but that it was “maybe around four million,” and they both burst into laughter.

Once, a month later, they’d taken a picnic lunch to Walden Pond.

“But why the Air Force?” she asked. “I can understand going in at the start of the war, but I can’t understand why you’d stay in afterward.”

“It was simple,” Black said. “What work could I do where ‘success’ would be mine and not because of family background? The Air Force work was mine. The commendations came in from majors and colonels who couldn’t have cared less about the San Francisco Blacks even if they had known of them.” He looked at her directly and for the first time she sensed his bluntness and honesty. “You heard I was one of ‘those’ Blacks and put me into a category.”

Betty nodded her head in a silent agreement that was also an apology.

“You’re my favorite militarist,” she said softly.

“Don’t use labels, Betty,” he commanded. “Do you think the SAC people are all anxious to have war? Don’t be a fool. We’re as scared as everyone else. Look, I was on the Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany after the war. It’s not something that’s liable to make you a warmonger.”

Black paused. The survey had been a pause in his life too. It had troubled him. For the one big conclusion that came Out of the Survey was that, for all the apparent devastation, the main thing destroyed was people. The factories and the railways were put back into fairly good running order in an unbelievably short time. Indeed, bombing seemed to be an odd prod to survival, to sharpen the impulse to strike back.

“Blacky.” She took his hand and he looked down at her, startled. She put back her head and laughed loud enough to startle some birds into flight across the pond. “You look as if you thought you were about to be raped.”

He could not believe his ears. He was delighted and confused and definitely embarrassed. “Am I?”

“Are you what?”

“Am I about to be raped?”

She choked with laughter and somehow they had their. arms about each other, quite dumsily. She said into his shirt, “I’m such an ass.”

On this note-more or less-they were married three months later.

Black’s early morning drive out Long Island to Mitchel Air Force Base was not slowed down by traffic. He arrived with plenty of time to spare for the flight to Washington. The day was clear and mild, and he checked out, a Cessna 310. He had never lost his affection for a small, light plane. Even the 310 was automated, but it was still fun to fly. Someday he wanted to buy one of the quick stubby stunt biplanes that were now being reproduced, and recapture the old thrill of flying, to fly rather than to administer a plane.

As he settled on course for Washington, he felt the need suddenly of a cold drink of water, and last night’s cocktail party came flooding back through his mind. He had not wanted to go at all. Betty had never taken to Groteschele. Black also knew he would be listening to Groteschele at today’s briefing. So when Senator Hartmann’s secretary called he’d tried to beg off.

But Hartmann was insistent. He had collared Emmett Foster, the editor of the Liberal Magazine, which constantly criticized nuclear testing and supported unilateral disarmament. What Hartmann wanted was a cocktail party confrontation between Foster and Groteschele. Each in his way was distinguished. They merely happened to be at opposite ends of the controversy over thermonuclear warfare. Hartmann was no fool. A Midwestern Republican with a vigorous shock of white hair, sanguine complexion, and Falstafflan girth, he orated like William Jennings Bryan and generally looked like a musical-comedy senator. But under that shock of white hair operated one of the finest minds in Washington. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he wanted to hear the two points of view in an informal environment. He knew that Black was considered a “brainy” general and was a link between the purely tactical people in SAC and the Big Planners at the Pentagon. Groteschele had, of course, become famous after the publication of Counter-Escalation, which Foster had dissected and left for dead in the pages of his magazine.

Usually Betty refused to go to military-government-academic cocktail parties. To Black’s surprise she insisted on going to this one.

They had arrived late. Foster was there, but Groteschele, as usual, was even later. Foster stood in a corner talking in a firm, even voice. Black realized that the man would be no pushover. To Black most “professional liberals” had shrill voices, spoke in a rush, and accused anyone who questioned their facts of favoring nuclear extermination. Facts were unimportant. Survival, common morality, humanity, damage to unborn generations-this was their chant.

Not Emmett Foster. He was a cool one and Black could tell it instantly. Even as they moved across the room, Foster, a short muscular man with hard black eyes, used words and phrases which indicated he had read the Congressional Record and the scientific journals and probably interviewed a number of military people. Also Foster didn’t skip around. He answered questions precisely, sticking relentlessly to the point and relying on real evidence. Betty and Black listened for fifteen minutes and Betty turned to Black,’ her eyebrows arched.

“No fool,” she said.

“No fool,” Black agreed.

M that moment Groteschele arrived. He had not changed much physically since graduate-school days. A bit heavier, but not grossly so. But he was dressed better and he had the air of authority about him. He is almost silken, Black thought He smiled easily, said something to everyone he was introduced to, patted Black on the shoulder, kissed Betty on the cheek. He smelled slightly of men’s cologne.

Hartxnann introduced him to Foster, but Groteschele smiled and said they had already met. Without a wasted motion Groteschele moved beside Foster, stationed himself for the debate, but with no sign of antagonism or of condescension.

Foster waited until the introductions were over and went on.

“Times have changed since Clausewitz. True, war was an institution like church or the family or private property. But institutions grow obsolete, exhaust their function,” Foster argued. “Real tough-mindedness consists in recognizing that thermonudear war is not the extension of policy by other means, it is the end of everything-people, policy, institutions.

“Groteschele,” Foster said in his firm unyielding manner, “is a modern Don Quixote, dashing through the stratosphere on nuclear jaunts, talking of obliteration as if it could be made partial, hypnotized by his own words.”

Foster stopped almost politely, and looked at Groteschele. Groteschele rocked on his heels, looked down at his scotch and water. He let the silence draw out. He shook his head once, a slight puzzled motion as if he were considering one argument and had abandoned it.

Betty, who seldom drank, took a long scotch from one of the passing waiters. Black noticed that her hand trembled slightly.

Finally Groteschele spoke. His voice was extremely gentle.

“In a full.scale nuclear war between America and Russia a hundred million people, more or less, will be killed-right?” he asked Foster.

“A hundred million,” Foster repeated, “or more.”

The circle of people about the speakers moved restlessly. Betty finished her drink in a gulp and looked for a waiter. Black moved closer to her.

“Things would be shaken up,” Groteschele went on. “Our culture and their culture would not be the same. Granted?”

“Granted,” Foster said. He grinned toughly.

“Now this is a tragedy and no one here denies that,” Groteschele said and his eyes swept generously over the group, lingered on Senator Hartmann. “But would you not grant that the culture which is the best armed, has the best bomb shelters, the best retaliatory capacity, the strongest defense, would have an ancient and classical advantage?”

“Which is?” Foster asked.

“It would be the victor in that it would be less damaged than its enemy,” Groteschele said. “Every war, including thermonuclear war, must have a victor and a vanquished. Are you suggesting, Foster, that we should be the vanquished? Do you value American culture less than the Soviet culture?”

Betty’s hand had tightened on Black’s arm.

“Marvelous,” Foster said and his grin was now so deep it was almost ferocious. “Simply marvelous. So neat, so logical, so well ordered.”

He paused and looked at Groteschele. Groteschele did not nod for he knew this was the opening of an attack. He smiled at Foster and for the first time it was a smile of condescension.

“Groteschele, it should persuade a monkey, a high-school kid, maybe an Air Force general, maybe a Senator, but not many others,” Foster said savagely. “It indicates only that you are a prisoner.”

“Of what?” Groteschele said.

“Of the past, of stale ideas, of cliches,” Foster said. He paused and looked around the group. “What is called for,” he said, “is a complete and revolutionary breakthrough in our thinking. We are like men enclosed in a paper sack of old ideas and assumptions. The sack surrounding us appears to be complete and seamless, when in reality all we have to do is to break out of it to stand in the freedom of entirely new thoughts and approaches. What the times call for is a new Karl Marx—”

“A new Marx, Foster,” Groteschele broke in, “an arresting thought What would the new manifesto proclaim?”

“It would proclaim peace,” Foster said without hesitation. “Not because peace is nice or I like. my fellow humans or it is Christian or Gandhi hated violence or the sick-sick-sick kind of liberal chants it. Peace because it is the only way we can live. Get with it, Grotesehele. Probability and the cobalt bomb made you oldfashioned ten years ago. Be realistic.”

Foster’s magazine had a circulation of only thirty thousand. The affluent and influential people he spoke before now were-one would think-more the Henry Luce type. Yet they were visibly impressed.

“Moving, very moving,” Groteschele said. “But somewhat dangling, a bit suspended, no indication of how we get from war to peace. No one wants war, Foster.’ But the possibility of war just happens to be a reality. I want us to face realities.”

“All right, Groteschele, look at it from the view-

point of the anthropologist,” Foster said. “What is war’s function?”

“The resolution of conflict,” Groteschele snapped.

“In primitive societies how do men resolve their conflicts?” Foster asked.

“By individual combat,” Groteschele said. He had pulled his shoulders back and was somewhat more tense. This type of dialogue where his opponent turned Socrates made him restless.

“And when they become organized into tribes?” Foster said.

“Then the fighting becomes collective,” Groteschele said.

“And when they become nation-states?”

“It is still violence, damn it, Foster,” Groteschele said. “What is irresponsible is to suggest that as groups become bigger and the power of weapons more immense that anything is changed.”

Foster cut in rudely. “Are you suggesting that a spear thrown and a nuclear bomb dropped are comparable? Just a difference in degree? Nonsenset Is it not possible, Groteschele, that war itself has become obsolete? Your superbly reasoned Counter-Escalation indicates that in any possible war the overwhelming majority of citizens are going to be killed. Does this suggest to you still that war is a resolution of conflicts?”

“Foster, you are hopelessly sentimental,” Groteschele said. “The situation is no different than it was a thousand years ago. There were primitive wars in which populations were totally destroyed. The point is, who is going to be the victor and who the victim? It is still a question of the survival of a culture.”

Foster rocked on his heels.

“A culture,” he said slowly, his voice full of wonder. “A culture with most of its people dead, the rotting smell of death in the air for years, its vegetation burned off, the germ plasm of survivors contaminated. You say I am the utopian and you are the realist. Do you really think that this world you describe is a culture?”

Groteschele was familiar’ with every gambit. His reply was reasonable, quietly uttered, and difficult to refute. He drew it out to great length. The spectators listened respectfully.

It was Betty who broke the spell. Before Black realized it, she had moved from his side, drunk, yet at the same time rigidly controlled.

“It is hopeless,” she said, staring at the two men. “You are both romantics caught up in your fantasy world of logic and reason and that is why it is so damned hopeless. Because man himself has become obsolete. He is like the dodo and the dinosaur but for the opposite reason. His damned brain has gotten us into this mess because of its sophistication and we cannot get out of it because of his pride. Man has calculated himself into so specialized a braininess that he has gone beyond reality. And he cannot tap the truth of his viscera because that, for a specialist, is the ultimate sin.”

Black had not heard her speak with such overcontrol for years. Her words fell like a pall on the group. Even Groteschele was at a loss for the right thing to say. He went through a ritual of taking a Philippine cigar from a small leather cigar case in his pocket. Since the Bay of Pigs episode he had stopped smoking Cuban cigars.

“You think I’ve overdone it?” As Betty spoke a new quality seemed to come over her. Black looked at her with increasing concern. An inner intensity was flow big from her, almost visibly. It acted like a powerful magnet on everyone present, drawing their eyes to her, holding their rapt attention.

“The world,” Betty continued, her voice now edged with despair, “is no longer man’s theater. Man has been made into a helpless spectator. The two evil forces he has created-science and the state-have combined into one monstrous body. We’re at the mercy of our monster and the Russians are at the mercy of theirs. They toy with us as the Olympian gods toyed with the Greeks. And like the gods of Greek tragedy, they have a tragic flaw. They know only how to destroy, not how to save. That’s what we’re now watching in our cold war: a Greek tragedy in modern form with our godlike monsters playing out the last act of their cataclysmic tragedy.”

She stopped and looked at Black quickly, as if seeking help. But before he could speak or move toward her she was speaking again.

“We all know that the big explosion is going to happen. Your concern, the two of you, is to make sure that you die intellectually correct. But my problem is more primitive. I only want to make sure that when it comes and my boys are dying that I am there to ease their last pain with morphine.”

She finished in a flat voice entirely without self-pity. Her last statement seemed to give Groteschele a new assurance, a place to get back into the conversation and guide it into safe channels. His words came on gently and kindly.

“Betty,” he said, “those of us who know anything about the situation feel almost exactly the same things that you have expressed. But what should we do? All go out and buy morphine? You see, Betty, I’m trying to save your two boys, not narcotize their death. That’s

the whole point of everything I’ve written. In spite of all our efforts, thermonuclear war may come. We must face that possibility rather than, ostrichlike, dose our minds to it. And I’m trying to see that if war comes, men, our kind of men, have the maximum possible chance of surviving it.”

Betty looked composed now but her fingers were digging into Black’s arm.

“General Black, what do you think?” asked Senator Hartmann.

Black looked up slowly from Betty. He fixed his eyes on Foster and thought for a minute.

“I think that Betty is mostly correct,” he said slowly. “Once one knows where he wants to go he can summon a magnificent array of logic and fact to support his argument. I have the awful feeling that. we are reconciled, both we and the Soviets, to mutual destruction. We are now rallying our different logics to support our identical conclusions. We will probably both get the results that we want. In that case, morphine is more. important than a bomb shelter.” He stopped and for a moment he felt an excitement. It was wild and irrational: he understood the Dream. He was in a game in which the things that held him together were being stripped away. Then, quite suddenly, be could go no further.

Betty’s comments had just about done it for the party. Everyone drank and chatted politely for a few minutes. Then there was the Intricate ballet of social disengagement. Black knew that their host would not forget his heretical position. The Senator was a methodical man.

In the taxicab back to their apartment neither Black nor Betty had spoken. She had fallen asleep on his shoulder; her teeth grinding.

General Black snapped back to the present as the Cessna 810 approached Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington. Looking down on the water-veined flats of the Chesapeake Bay area, he regretted that the air approach to Andrews didn’t take him over Washington proper. He never ceased to be stirred by the splendor of the Washington Monument’s slim white spire, the awesome majesty of the Lincoln Monument The Pentagon, though, that was something else again. Its low, squat improbable shape was not designed to capture an airman’s fancy. It was more like a great, bureaucratic land battleship pulled up alongside the Potomac. That’s about what it was, mused Black, laying siege to the helpless flotilla of weaker bureaucratic ships across the Potomac.

Back to work, Blackie, boy-general, he said to himself. Life is earnest, life is real.

He brought the plane in for a skilled and effortless landing. Ten minutes later he was in a staff car and on his way to the Pentagon.

The President looked across the desk at Buck. Buck knew that the President did not see him. His eyes were slightly squinting. Buck twisted in his chair. The motion caught the President’s eye. His face suddenly hardened and he seemed to come back into the room.

“What do you think of that list, Buck?” he asked, pointing at the card that Buck still held. Buck hesitated, lifted the card as if it were very delicate, glanced again at the names. He felt like licking his lips, but resisted. His mind reached for an answer, something that would make sense. It was impossible.

“I only know them as names,” he said quietly. “A few I have never even heard of.”

He saw approval in the President’s face. Then the President was not seeing him any more, but was abstracted.

“Relax, Buck,” the President said. “We’re in an emergency, but we’ve got time, a little anyway. Time and a decision. That’s what an emergency is. Now the decision is what those people on the list have to help us with. The time we can’t control. It just passes.”

It sounded silly, but Buck knew that the President was not thinking what he was saying. His voice and his mind were operating on different levels. Then they came together and the President was seeing Buck again.

“Buck, that group sees one another all the time, day after day,” the President said. “They’ve probably talked over things so much that they’ve got a nice committee solution for everything. Right?”

“Yes, I imagine they have,” Buck said.

“The only problem is that this is something they have no solution for,” the President said. “Bogan told me that in Omaha they had no standard operating procedure for this kind of thing. So we’ve got a novel situation, something completely new.”

The President swung in his chair and looked at his secretary. Quite automatically her pencil lifted, moved toward the notebook.

“Blackie’s in the Pentagon group, isn’t he?” the President asked.

Buck’s eyes ran down the list

“There is a General Black, Mr. President,” he said. His throat felt dry.

“That’s Blackie,” the President said. “We went to college together.” He paused. “Blackie’s a bright boy, got guts and I’d trust him with almost anything. He can think on his feet, deal with a novel situation. Trouble is that either they’ll make a committee solution or they’ll all listen to someone like Blackie. He doesn’t talk much, except when he believes in something….” His voice dropped and he stared at the wall, not seeing it. Then be swung back to them, entirely in focus, speaking briskly. “Next we need someone who’s not a Pentagon person, but who knows his way around. Whom do you suggest?”

He asked the question of both Buck and Mrs. Johnson. Buck stiffened. His mind went flat, incapable of memory. He could, quite literally, not recall the name of a single person. His mother? Gypsy Rose Lee? Old Mr. Carmichael in the apartment below? He must be losing his mind.

Mrs. Johnson looked at the President, then flicked over a few pages in her notebook. “They’ve got that Professor Groteschele out there for the briefing,” she said. “He’s not one of them. I mean he doesn’t work at the Pentagon.”

The President rocked in his chair.

“lie doesn’t work for the Pentagon. That’s right,” he said slowly. “But that book of his almost made him one of them.” He paused. “O.K., Johnnie, he’ll add something to a bunch of people that have been seeing one another too often. Tell the Pentagon to include Groteschele in the advisory group. Tell Swenson that Groteschele is personally cleared by me and that he can say anything he wants on any subject.”

“As long as it’s relevant,” Mrs. Johnson said and smiled tightly.

The President grinned. “Swenson has a pretty well-developed sense of the relevant,” he said.

“I know that, Mr. President,” Mrs. Johnson said.

“I know that you know that, Mrs. Johnson,” the President said and made a mock bow.

She smiled, turned, and left the room.

Buck sat silently with the President of the United States. He knew they were waiting but he did not know what for.

Walter Groteschele awoke at precisely 5:80 A.M. He did not awake at the sound of an alarm dock and, indeed, he did not even wear a wrist watch. Despite this he was certain of the time. He was awake fully. As he swung out of bed his mind began to block out the day. It was a quick, neat process, something that occupied him only from his bed to the bathroom. By 6:10 he would be showered, shaved, dressed, nourished by one cup of instant coffee, and waiting for the train at Scarsdale. An hour to La Guardia—8:30. An hour to Washington (and his second cup of coffee, at 10,000 feet)—9:30. At the Pentagon by ten minutes to ten.

The check list was complete. The day was under control.

Groteschele stepped on the bathroom scales—185. He had weighed 165 when he was twenty-one. He knew some men who refused to weigh themselves, were afraid to get the bad news. Groteschele weighed himself every day of his life. As he stepped off the scales he even forced himself to think what the additional fat meant. Face reality, he told himself with a quiet pride. Facing reality was what had gotten him where he was.

As he showered, rubbing his body with a rough natural sponge, he ran over the physical differences between twenty-one and forty-eight Then he had been lean and muscular. Now there was an overlay of fat about the torso. Not gross, but noticeable in a suit. Softer. Around the waist the flesh was a bulge. Where it showed most was in his neck and face. His collars were usually tight and bit into the flesh, making his face slightly pink. As he shaved he calculated whether or not it would be possible to exercise the fat off. The calculation did not take long.

He did not have time for exercise.

Only once during his five-stage (car, train, taxi, plane, taxi) trip from Scarsdale to Washington did Groteschele’s mind relax and think of anything except the briefing he would present It was in the taxicab from Grand Central to La Guardia. There was something about the luxury of a taxicab, to ride alone while others rode in buses, that made Groteschele think of his youth. Briefly he permitted himself the luxury of letting his mind, wander.

Groteschele’s father was a tough, brilliant, and hardworking physician, a highly skilled surgeon. He was also a Jew, unfortunately in Germany. Early in the 1930s he had seen what was coming. He had argued withother Jews in his native Hamburg that there were only two alternatives: arm and fight, or leave Germany. The great majority of his friends and relatives, anchored by their possessions and inured to the prospect of suffering, stayed in Germany. Many of them died in gas ovens.

Walter Groteschele was fifteen when his father abandoned his medical practice and moved from Hamburg, via London and New York, to Cincinnati. Before his father could practice medicine in America it was required that he take two years of residency and pass a series of examinations. He was never able to get enough money ahead to do the two years’ residency. Emil Groteschele worked first as a ditchdigger for a utilities company. He could not, however, stand the calluses and the coarsening of his surgeon’s hands. Eventually he wound up as a butcher in a kosher butcher shop. This was an irony, for Emil GroteSchele was a Reform Jew and anything but devout. But the work did allow him to use his hands in somewhat the fashion for which they had been exquisitely trained.

Emil Groteschele was not an embittered man. He had understood clearly what his prospects were when he left Berlin. He was saving his life and the lives of his family. Nothing more. One of the few times that his son had seen him angry was when the subject of the Diary of Anne Frank came up. Emil Groteschele had offended the Jews of Cincinnati by arguing that Anne Frank and her family had acted like imbeciles. Rather than hiding in an attic and clutching their Jewishness to them they should have made plans to escape. Failing that, they should have been prepared to fight the Nazis when the final day came. “The steps leading up to that miserable attic should have been red with Nazi blood-and that of the Frank family,” Dr. Groteschele argued bitterly.

“If each Jew in Germany had been prepared to take one SS trooper with him before he was sent to the camps and the gas ovens, precious few Jews would have been arrested,” Emil Groteschele argued. “At some point Hitler and the SS would have stopped. Face it. If every Jew who was arrested had walked to the door with a pistol in his hand and started shooting at the local heroes, how long would the Nazis have kept it up? At around a few hundred they would have started to think twice. At a few thousand they would have started to shake a bit. If it got to twenty thousand, they would have called it off. But the first Jews who shuffled quietly off to death camps or hid like mice in attics were instruments of destruction of the rest.”

Groteschele knew that his father considered all of life a battle. He was a complete Darwinian; so much so that he never expressed self-pity for his fall from master surgeon to journeyman butcher.

“It’s a new environment. I’m not as efficient as the Americans,” the muscular determined man said in a pitiless voice, as if he were talking of someone else. “The American was bred for this environment; the weak ones disappeared long ago. I was bred for a softer environment: Jewish ladies with too much fat, rabbis with ulcers, people who ate too much sour cream, lox, matzoth balls.” He stared at his son. “Every group protects itself, just as the individual does. Don’t waste time whining. Be good enough to get into the group you Want.”

His son had taken the advice seriously. He attacked knowledge as if it were an enemy. By the time he was a senior he had won every academic honor in the Cincinnati public schools.

When Groteschele went off to a small Ohio college he had three separate scholarships and not the slightest notion of what he wanted to study. His first year he took liberal-arts courses and studied his classmates. It was reassuring. They were uncertainly motivated, pleasant, anxious about dates, inattentive to lectures, obsessed with material objects-cashmere sweaters, convertibles, record players, stolen college banners. They were the new Jews, Groteschele thought, binding themselves with the invisible links of possessions, but they lacked the drive and ability to absorb punishment that the real Jew had.

Grbteschele majored in mathematics. He went about making the choice systematkally. He learned nothing from talking to his classmates. Instead he. sought out the brightest professors on the campus and questioned them. He pushed them on what American industry would be like in five years. Their advice was unanimous. The nation would be at war or finishing a war and science would be going through a new surge of progress. It would be sparked by mathematics. He was a Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year and summa cum laude at graduation; and did not, literally, know the names of more than a dozen of his classmates.

Before Groteschele could find a job, waves of Japanese planesawept over Pearl Harbor and changed all of our lives. By now Groteschele had developed a prescience, a hard intuition, about what would happen in the future. He did it by the elimination of hopes and the substitution of the calculation of realities. He applied his father’s Darwinism in a methodical and tough manner. He was no Cassandra but he tended always to look carefully and cautiously at where he would be in five years and to move with what was inevitable. His calculation led him to volunteer at once for military duty.

He was selected for OCS and when he finished he was assigned to a group of officers who interviewed German prisoners as part of their processing before being sent to POW camps throughout the country.

At first the job had a delicious undertone of vengeance to it and Groteschele did not deny this to himself. Day after day the men who had bullied Jews in the comfortable little towns of Germany, had swaggered in their party uniforms, had roared and lusted for war, now paraded in front of him. They were bitter-eyed, frightened, uncertain, homesick. Groteschele found them a disappointment and he was surprised at his own reaction.

After a few weeks the interviewing became dull. It was impossible to stay angry at lines of potato-fat men with vacuous eyes who were slack and weary from the Atlantic crossing, who always whined their ignorance of concentration camps. “Konzentration camps, ach nein, Herr Leutnant,” eyes bulging with fake surprise. “Impossible. I never heard of it.” And then the inevitable statement about being a little man, a man in the ranks, a man who carried out orders, a man who did his duty, a man who was secretly anti-Nazi.

After a few months Groteschele, because of his skill In German, was able to get himself transferred to the section which interviewed SS troopers. These interviews were longer, more concentrated, more meaningful. The interviewing officer could, in fact, question an SS man as long as he wished. Groteschele always guided the conversation to the Jewish question. The SS men stared back at him, unafraid and their faces expressionless, and said, “Rabbits. The Jews are like rabbits, but without the speed of a rabbit.” Always it was a rabbit or an undernourished rat or a mouse to which they compared the Jews.

It-was during this time that Groteschele found himself trimming off excess weight and taking daily exercises. Finally he was doing hours of bar-bell exercises, pushups, and road-work every day. He became as physically tough as the SS troopers, his belly as flat, his face as expressionless. Always, just before the interview was over, Groteschele let slip the fact that he was a Jew. Never as a direct admission, always slyly and as if the prisoner had known from the start.

It was the only thing that made the SS troopers crack, even a little. They would stare at Groteschele’s well-muscled body, his inscrutable face, lila bard eyes. Then, for a moment in time, Groteschele could see fear in their eyes. It was gone instantly, the eyes shut, the expression lost. But it was enough for Groteschele. They had seen a different kind of Jew and it frightened them.

By the time the war was over Groteschele had developed a new interest. It was the study of politics. Americans had mastered technology and the scientist would continue to be a hero for some time. But the real decisions, the real power would lie with those who understood politics. Competence in pglitics would be the ultimate sanctuary, although partisan elective politics would be as volatile as ever. He must, he reasoned, be an expert in politics but not subject to popular opinion. He calculated that with the GI Bill and the money be had saved he would be able to get a Ph.D. at an Ivy League college an, still be a few thousand dollars ahead.

His father had only one piece of advice. “If you are going to become a professor change your name to Groth,” he said. “American universities have too many German Jews. They will lose their tolerance for them.”

Groteschele had not changed his name. It was the first time he had rejected his father’s advice, but now he was surer than his father about some things: the character of Americans, for instance, and the favorable attitude toward the Jewish intellectual in the academic world. This did not mean that he was insensitive to names. In fact he found them fascinating. He had, for example, noticed that his name was considered by most to be German and he knew that his appearance was not distinctively Jewish. He considered the possibility that he might even suffer somewhat from anti-German feeling, but he also remembered the guilty conscience which Americans had had over their anti-Getinanign after World War II. All in all, when everything was added up, he calculated that he would benefit by sticking with his name and identity.

Once this decision was made the plan was simple. He knew that it would take some luck, but he was also determined to do everything possible to minimize the importance of that element.

The first thing was to become a protégé of Tolliver. Groteschele sensed that Tolliver had an ego of formidable proportions. This was what led him to work in the area of great sweeping diplomatic moves, intricate military strategies, and it was also what led him to an instantaneous and ferocious defense of his views.

For the first year in graduate school Groteschele made no move toward Tolliver. He sat quietly in his classes and read every book and article the man had written. He watched the other graduate students as they slowly learned the pitfalls and terrors of the academic world. By the end of the first year none of them regarded it as “the ivory tower” any more. By then they - bad learned it was more like Kafka’s Castle: a place of enormous tension, the scene of ununderstood conspiracies, a place of stalking and frantic flight from an unseen enemy. Groteschele watched some of the others break and remained impassive. Groteschele was certain that he would not be one of those who broke. He had been prepared for the fact that the big beautiful buildings and the book-lined studies and the quiet seminar rooms would really be scenes of battle.

At the end of the first year Groteschele’s chance came. Tolliver published a book called Models for the Future War. The title had been a mistake. It suggested that Tolliver was, somehow, advocating war. The reviews of the book were generally negative, some of them, scathing. Groteschele read the reviews carefully. Finally he found one in a liberal monthly in which it was clear that the author had not read the whole book but had skimmed the first few chapters and then used that much as a platform to expound his own theories about “the rising tide of militarism.”

Groteschele wrote a 2,000-word letter to the magazine. It was a model of careful and biting analysis. The editor of the monthly, in a spasm of regret, sent Groteschele a check for $25 and published the letter as an article.

Groteschele wisely did not send Tolliver a copy of the article, but inevitably Tolliver read it. He never thanked Groteschele for the article, in fact, he never mentioned it. But in his second year of graduate work, Groteschele received a written invitation from Tolliver to be his research assistant. Groteschele never worked so hard in his life. His eyes constantly burned from reading in bad library light. He had no time for exercise and could feel his body go slack, the fat start to gather, the hard muscularity he had liked disappear.

Carefully and patiently Groteschele read all of the memos which Tolliver, as a long-time consultant to the Pentagon, received from Washington. By studying the memos and by careful questioning of Tolliver, Groteschele found what he wanted: a public gap in American military thought. Stretching over a generation, the notion had arisen that America would never start a war. Even the most hardened of the military people cautiously skirted around this question. As a result a mood had grown up which made a discussion of America striking first impossible. A few officers had mentioned it in “off-the-record” briefings and bad promptly been branded warmongers and their careers carefully altered so that they disappeared from the public eye. Even among themselves the military had developed a theory and lexicon and strategy which always skirted the idea of the United States starting a war.

In his Ph.D. dissertation Groteschele attacked this taboo. He provided a respectable language and theory within which the “first strike” or “preemptive war” could be discussed. The name of the dissertation was The Theory of Counter-Escalation Postures in a Thermonuclear World. He gave Tolliver five copies of the first draft of the dissertation. Tolliver knew why he had received extra copies. He sent them along to Washington.

Groteschele curbed his hopes. He knew the copies of the dissertation might well disappear in the labyrinths of Washington. Or the central idea might be attacked by a powerful person, or, even more damaging, be dismissed as trivial or nutty. But his luck held. One day the phone call came.

“Dr. Groteschele, this is Colonel Stark of the Air Force in the Pentagon,” a calm voice said. “We have read your dissertation with great interest and wonder when you can come to Washington to discuss it.”

Technically Groteschele was not yet a Ph.D., but he sensed this was not the time to point out that fact.

“Colonel Stark, my schedule is fairly full for the next five or six days,” Groteschele said cautiously. “Maybe sometime next week.”

Stark cut in abruptly. There was an edge of irritation in his voice, but there was also something of respect.

“Doctor, down here we consider this rather urgent,” Colonel Stark said. “After all, the security of the country is involved.”

“Can you schedule the meeting for tomorrow after noon?” Groteschele asked abruptly.

The colonel could and did. That afternoon meeting was not easy. For the first time since the captured SS troopers had made the remarks about Jews being like rabbits, Groteschele felt isolated. He was seated at the end of a long table. The other seats were occupied by six generals, five colonels, four civilians, and a secretary who was operating a Stenotype machine. Groteschele glanced at Stark. Stark’s face was completely expressionless. Groteschele did not bother to look at the others. He knew that none of them were yet committed.

Quite suddenly Groteschele lost his nerve. The whole situation was preposterous. He was only a student who had once been an Army lieutenant and he was talking to professionals who had devoted their lives to the conduct and strategy of war. He sensed that he was about to make a fool of himself. Quickly, and with the telescopic capacity of the tragic moment, he saw the rest of his life. He would slide, slide, slide, always downward. He smiled woodenly down the table as he calculated where he would end, what the academic equivalent of his father’s butcher-shop job would be. He would be a grade-school teacher to a bunch of idiot children. With a terrible self-hatred he was aware of how he had physically declined, was no longer taut and trim. To them, these men of power and elegance around the table, he must look like a fattening, white-grub academic. He looked at Stark, started to ask to be excused.

“Excuse me, Colonel Stark,” Groteschele said and then paused. To his astonishment his voice came out cold and steady, without a tremor. His mouth was dry, his mind a shambles, his fingers had a quiver-but his voice was rock-hard. The decision was made for him. He would read the paper just as he had written it, using the one physical attribute that was still in control: his voice. Later, reading, he realized that his paper was a wild gamble. He reviewed alternative theories of modern thermonuclear war and, with all the deliberateness of a machine gunner, shredded them to pieces. Inevitably he must be damaging some of the men in the room. The knowledge made his fingers tremble even more. His mouth went cottony, but somehow the words continued to pour out with even more control. When he finished his review of “obsolete alternatives” he sensed that he had probably bruised every man in the room. There was nothing to do but go on.

When he came to his own theory his voice became sharper, more incisive, although the words were more ambiguous. Without smiling, using his new vocabulary, he presented the alternative of the United States striking first. However, he never quite used those words. He took the people around the table to the edge of the abyss, forced them to look over the edge. Then, his language still cold, be described a situation in which the abyss was not threatening, but was in fact a magnificent and glowing opportunity. The whole presentation took one hour and ten minutes. He was not interrupted once.

When he had finished and had squared his papers in front of him on the table Groteschele stared straight ahead.

The first person to speak was an elderly, white-haired man in uniform at the far end of the table. He had a deep and authoritative voice that emanated from a face made of leather, and four stars decorated each shoulder. Groteschele had not noticed him before, but sensed at once that he was the senior officer in the room. He was, in fact, in charge of strategic plans for the Air Force and had deliberately not identified himself with any single point of view. Ruthless on weak logic and thin evidence, he had the reputation of listening with an open mind to any proposal that was sensibly presented.

“Dr. Groteschele, speaking for myself only, I congratulate you on an extremely clear and lucid presentation of a complex problem,” the general said. The general looked at his hands, smiled, and went on. “Your alternative is a difficult one. I believe it might be the right one. At the least it should be thoroughly discussed.”

Groteschele relaxed. He was safe. He hardly heard the other voices as they murmured various reasons for approving Groteschele’s paper.

When the briefing broke up, Stark invited him to dinner. Groteschele smiled, aware that the invitation had come after the briefing rather than before. He accepted. The dinner was small, but Groteschele knew that the men there were powerful. And he was the prize, the sought-after expert. Eyes turned to see him when he spoke. Others broke off their conversations to listen.

“My God, did you hear the Old Man say that Dr. Groteschele might have ‘the right one’?” Colonel Stark said. “That’s the closest he has ever come to a commitment.”

They stared at Groteschele. He did not smile. Calmly he went on to describe some of the implications of his position.

That had been the start.

Soon he was practically commuting to Washington. Conference followed conference. Discussion papers appeared at regular intervals. Each trip, each conference, gave Groteschele access to new and valuable inforuzation. He was cleared for access to top-secret material, He had free communications with the experts working on the fantastic frontiers of defense developments.

His doctoral dissertation was published under the title Counter-Escalation. It was instantly reviewed by Hanson Baldwin in The New York Times Sunday book-review section, and was the lead. Walter Millis reviewed it for the Herald Tribune. For a book of its type it sold very well, over 35,000 copies. Its reputation spread everywhere. Liberal journals attacked the book. A pacifist group burned it in Mann County, California, and then had second thoughts about book-burning and apologized to a nonlistening public. The book was discussed on two national television panel shows. People who had never read it had violent opinions about it.

With a speed that startled him he now became a public personage outside the defense and academic communities. He analyzed the reasons for his success and finally satisfied himself. There was a morbidity about his subject matter which somehow flowed over onto Groteschele and gave him an aura. He was extremely careful never to discuss classified information in public, but even so he could draw a picture of how the United States would look after a thermonuclear first strike, the awful seductions of surrender, the number of children who would suffer malignant genetic defects from radioactivity. Looking coolly at a room full of people he would tell them how many decades it would take the survivors of a thermonuclear war to regain the standard of living of medieval days. He could see the audience stiffen, tongues licking at the corners of their mouths, the signs of nervousness and fascination multiply.

Groteschele knew that he was regarded as a magician.

The awesome powers on which he was expert, the facts of life and death and survival, the new cabalistic language of the nuclear philosophers and high scientists of physics, were merely matters of fact. But the layman, the rich socialite, the industrialist, the politician, endowed Groteschele with control of the things he described.

The attention and the flattery were deeply pleasing to Groteschele. He did not disguise the fact from himself. He handled the incidental aspects of fame easily. There was more money, lots more money, and Groteschele turned it over to an expert business manager. He learned to dictate into portable dictating machines while riding taxicabs or airplanes. He learned that it was dangerous to get drunk the night before an important meeting. He became a consultant to various foundations and business firms, but selected them with great care. He wanted nothing to impair his relationship to the Federal government, for he knew full well that his status in Washington and the information which he obtained there were the sources of his power. Groteschele went through three different administrations without threat. Many of the high military officers and policy-makers did not agree with him, but he was a valuable commodity. He was an innovator, a barb, an egghead with a steel-trap mind, and even those who disagreed with him violently knew they were duty-bound to consider the alternatives which his thinking produced.

Groteschele had been, after the success of his book, besieged by academic offers. He evaluated them very carefully. He finally chose a distinguished university close to Washington which agreed to give him halftime duties for a single semester, but to pay him a full salary. The university also had bought a commodity, a nanie, a reputation, and knew it.

So much had changed for Groteschele so quickly. He thought briefly of his relationship with women. He was not handsome or attractive sexually, and he never had been. He had always explained it to himself by saying that women who were otherwise attracted to him were repelled by his mind. But this, too, had changed. When he walked down the long corridors of the Pentagon, groups of secretaries stared at him with tight little fascinated smiles. He nodded but did not speak. To his surprise, brilliant and beautiful women sought him out. If he wanted, so it seemed, he had only to stand still at a cocktail party, scan the women speculatively, settle on one and then let the situation develop at the woman’s initiative. The course often led him to her bed.

Groteschele was married and had a fifteen-year-old daughter. Wife and daughter were strangely identical: slight, nervous, possessed of a thin prettiness. His daughter was a brilliant student and it was her academic record which Groteschele found most attractive about her. Like the wives of many busy and successful men, his wife had faded away into a cool domestic haze. He had married her in Cincinnati years ago and at the time she had had the freshness of youth and it had seemed an appropriate union. Groteschele never took her on trips and when he was home their conversations were brief and perfunctory. She sensed that his sexual life was extramarital, but the knowledge gave her relief. She had never really enjoyed sex, and after Counter-Escalation there had been something about her husband’s sexual behavior which disturbed her. She felt ravished and quite impersonal even when locked together with him-as if she were nameless to him, an anonymous figure upon whom he exploded a deep rage. She tried to convince herself it was passion, but knew it was not.

Passion had recently led Groteschele to an experience that shocked him profoundly in that it revealed so starkly the wellsprings of his power. It had started at one of those frequent off-the-record discussions with a group of high-level businessmen and political leaders. This one bad been in Washington, the Metropolis tan Club. Only a highly selected group was present that evening, about twenty-five men and women altogether. During drinks, one woman had stood out, Elegant, slim and lithe, she was a woman from a world he did not know. He sensed that she had a competence with men that had become almost arrogance. He had seen a few others like her. They gave off the subtle signs of wealth, family background, education and boredom. It was like a number of elegant odors in the air. It also had something to do with the smile: such women smiled infrequently and never at women. When they smiled at a man it was like a congratulatory handshake; it had nothing of the simper or of the coquette in it. Men for such women were not a diversion, they were a necessity. Groteschele sensed this and felt somehow threatened. He avoided such women.

The speech went well. It was a variation of the same one he gave them all. They never wanted to hear anything new, they just wanted to hear it from him. Afterward, over more drinks, little groups came up to present pet arguments. He looked around the room, wondering when they would start to break up. No sign yet. He could not leave too early. Part of his $750 fee involved just this sort of boredom. There was a slight tug at his elbow. He turned around. It was his hostess and just to the side the woman, the elegant one.

“Evelyn, this is Walter Groteschele, our famous guest; Evelyn Wolfe. Evelyn has been dying to meet you. She’s made me promise to take a small group to a bar so she can hear you at doser range,” the hostess said, and fled.

“She overdid it a bit, but I would like to talk to you,” Evelyn Wolfe said.

Eight of them wound up in one of those countless chic hotel bars of Washington. Evelyn Wolfe sat next to Groteschele and in a few moments he had the bewildering sensation that they had somehow been cut off from the others at the corner table, almost as if some barrier to sound had been drawn around him and Evelyn Wolfe. Groteschele slowly began to realize that this was an extraordinarily attractive woman. She -was intelligent, she was poised, mannered, informed, and intense, but he had met at least a score of women that possessed these qualities. What she possessed in addition was a kind of burning intensity, a hard focusing of all her emotions on some undefined objective. She did not converse. She aimed at a target. By the time they had had four scotch and waters Groteschele realized that the target was himself. Normally he would have been flattered. But this time he felt a slight shiver of apprehension. This woman had an almost cobra-like manner of following what he said. Her beautifully coiled head, her face marred only by a mouth that was too small, actually wove back and forth with slight undulations as Groteschele talked about war games, the strategy of surrender, megatons, and Doomsday systems.

Most people, especially women, listened to Groteschele’s description of American and Soviet tactics with a kind of unconcealed look of either bafflement or horror. Groteschele could not make out the look on Evelyn Wolfe’s face. He only knew that her concentration was enormous. She spoke very little. When he described the Doomsday system, hinting that it was semidassified, she closed her eyes for a moment and a slight smile started at the corners of her mouth.

“Beautiful,” she said.

Just that single word unaccompanied by an expression of horror or astonishment or dismay. For a moment Groteschele’s careful poise was broken. He went on automatically talking about the likeliest survivors of an all-out thermonuclear war, his way of giving a droll ending to his macabre description, of letting people down easily. They would be the most hardened of convicts, those in solitary confinement. Another group likely to survive would be the file clerks for large insurance companies, because they would be housed in fireproofed rooms and insulated by tons of the best insulator in the world, paper.

“Then, my dear Miss Wolfe, imagine what will happen,” Groteschele said, feeling himself regaining his poise. “The small group of hardened criminals and the army of file clerks will war with one another for the remaining means of life. The convicts will have a monopoly of violence, but the file clerks will have a monopoly of organization. Who do you think will win?”

Evelyn Wolfe looked straight at Groteschele. Then she shook her head. Groteschele was confused.

“I would like you to take me home now,” Evelyn Wolfe said, and she was up on her feet and into her mink coat before he responded. She did not say goodbye to the rest of the group, but they all looked up as she and Groteschele left.

They were in Groteschele’s car and three blocks from the bar before Evelyn Wolfe spoke.

“You were being mischievous about the war between the convicts and the file clerks,” she said, leaning her head back against the seat. “In fact, you know that no one will survive the Doomsday system. That is the beauty of the whole thing.”

“No one, Miss Wolfe, has ever called it beautiful before,” Groteschele said with a laugh.

“They have been afraid to,” she said. “But that is what they feel.”

“You mean that everyone is possessed by the death-wish?” Groteschele asked in his best professorial manner.

“No, damn it, don’t be so deliberately stupid,” she said sharply. “Everyone knows they are going to die. What makes you fascinating and what makes your subject fascinating is that it involves the death of so many people. Quite literally everyone on earth.” She paused a moment and then spoke savagely. “Damn it, I wish I were a man and a man who could push the button. I would not push it, you understand that. But the knowledge that I could.” She shivered in her mink coat.

As Groteschele turned off of Massachusetts Avenue and threaded through Rock Creek Park, he felt a sudden hard understanding cross his mind. It was not he, Groteschele, the physical man, who was attractive to women. It was Groteschele, the magic man, the man who understood the universe, the man who knew how and when the button would be pushed. He was a master of death and somehow that gave him potency.

“Why wouldn’t you push it?” Groteschele asked softly. “There it sits. More power in that button than anyone in all time has ever possessed. But it’s never used until you push the button. Why not push it?”

“Because I would die along with everyone else,” Evelyn Wolfe said.

Her voice came to a queer faltering halt. Groteschele felt a very deep excitement.

“That is one statement you do not really believe,” he said with authority. “Do you think that life is the most important thing to a person? You don’t think it for a moment. You know I don’t. I can name a dozen ways of living to which you would prefer death.”

She was leaning back against the seat, her eyes closed, the lacquer of sophistication dissolved from her face. She looked curiously young. Like a hungry young girl.

“Go on,” she said. It was the first time that night she had implored him.

“Knowing you have to die, imagine how fantastic and magical it would be to have the power to take everyone else with you,” Groteschele said, spinning out what he had never said to himself. “The swamis of them out there, the untold billions of them, the ignorant masses of them, the beautiful ones, the artful ones, the friends, the enemies… all of them and their plans and hopes. And they are murderers: born to be murdered and don’t know it. And the person with his finger on the button is the one who knows and who can do it.”

The sound Evelyn Wolfe made was not a moan. It was the sound of wonderment that a child makes… even if the sees cruelty.

“Stop in one of those little side roads,” Evelyn Wolfe ordered.

Groteschele obeyed.

The moment that he turned off the motor her neat trim head struck at him. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before. She kissed him violently and then whispered words in his ear at the same time that her hands moved over his body. In one way he felt raped, attacked by someone stronger than himself. At the same time her words were words of the most extreme submission, bringing out every bullish impulse in his body.

He never recalled perfectly his feelings. It was too quick a mixture of self-revelation, of shame, of wonderful obscenity, of feeling a child under his hands and knowing she was a woman, of her words ending and her hoarse breathing beginning, of a savage pride that his softening body was capable of so much, of all this happening in the little universe ringed round by gear-shift and leather seats and instrument panel, of soft little hands that arched into claws, of the sound of cloth ripping, of expensive perfumes mixed with the smell of her, and, chiefly, that this was a complete surrender.

When finally he placed her small body in the corner of the car he knew she was satisfied. But he was wrong. Her eyes still glittered and she came back across the seat at him. She took his hand and raised it to her lips. She kissed the palm of his hand and then taking his little finger in her mouth she softly sucked it and then bit it so sharply that he jerked.

Suddenly, in a way from which he had always protected himself, Groteschele realized that in his own person, convoluted and intertwined, were two knowledges of death. In one way, the public way, he was a respectable high priest of civic death. This dialogue he had raised from a secretive conversation to a respectable art. It was a game at which he was exquisite. Almost by his own single-mindedness and wit he had introduced to a whole society the idea that a calm and dispassionate and logical discussion of collective death was an entertainment. By refinements and logical innovation he had made municipal death a form of style and a way of life.

But now, with his body aching and sweat soiling his shirt, he realized that in him there was also a personal beast of death. He realized that he bad always feared women because in each of them there was the buried but inextinguishable desire to love a man to death. Evelyn Wolfe was simply more obvious and direct about it than the others. She would, without mercy and as if it were her due, draw the energy and juices and fluids and substance from his body through the inexhaustible demands of pure sex.

Groteschele realized that he had never in his life distinguished between sex and love. And now it was too late.

He pulled his hand away from Evelyn Wolfe’s mouth, started the car, and, accelerating wildly, shot through Rock Creek Park. He roared a single great peal of laughter as the car left the park. The black internal beast of death he would never recognize again. And he would not have to, for he had the other great and public death as his amulet. It was enough for any man. And it was more than most had ever had.

When they got to Evelyn Wolfe’s house, she leaned toward him and invited him in. He reached over and gave her a short savage slap across her open mouth. She did not recoil, she did not cry, she did not even move. She simply sat silently for a moment, her eyes crystalline with a sense of loss. She waited a full fifteen seconds and then opened the door and walked firmly up to her house.

At ten minutes to ten, Groteschele entered the Pentagon without haste or any sign either that he had exerted himself to get there or that he worried about what lay ahead. In the four hours and twenty minutes that he had been awake, he had organized the briefing he would give that day, anticipated the reactions of certain secretaries and generals, and decided upon the arguments he would hold in reserve to counter their possible challenges.

It was going to be a more than usually satisfying day.

The President was looking at his pencil intently. He held it up to the light, seemed to be studying the lettering on its side, to wonder at its six sides, to admire the point.

Buck looked at his watch and felt a dull shock: it was only 10:88.

As the time spun out, a long second after a long second, like half-frozen drops unable to separate themselves from a nameless mass, Buck became calmer. The pencil is like a totem to the President, he thought. He looks at it and thinks of other things.

He quickly calculated the difference in age between himself and the President. It was only twelve years. For the first time he realized the maturity of the man facing him. Somehow it made Buck sad, gave him a sense of loss. There was no way, and he knew it deeply, that he could ever overtake this other man in experience, in toughness, in drive, in durability, in span. It gave Buck no great sense of regret and surely not of envy; it was merely that until that moment he had thought everything was possible. Not that he wanted to do everything, but he wanted it to be theoretically possible. But he knew that in ten times twelve years he could not become like this man across the desk.