Forbidden Area

One

THERE IS no lonelier stretch of beach on the Atlantic than the twenty miles between Ponte Vedra and St. Augustine, in northern Florida. A few hundred feet inland Highway AIA parallels the surf, but the coquina road is narrow, pocked, and avoided by wary tourists. It is no scenic drive. High dunes wall the highway from the sea, and where there are no dunes the ocean is curtained by cabbage palms and stunted magnolias fighting for root space in dense palmetto thickets. On a June night in the full of the moon this beach was inhabited only by a boy and a girl lying on a blanket in a white, spoon-shaped hollow between two dunes.

Henry Hazen and Nina Pope, both high school seniors from St. Augustine, had been there before. They called it “our place,” and used it for immature love-making, and confidences, and for dreaming. They did not consider their dreams unreasonable. Nina wanted to go to New York and get a job as a secretary, either to some big business executive or a Broadway producer. She would have her own apartment with full-length mirrors, a built-in dressing table, and a stall shower with sliding glass doors. Henry wanted to be a researcher, or anyway an engineer, for some big electronics company. He would like to find this job in Miami, although he would fly to New York to see Nina, weekends. When he became chief of research, or owned his own company, or invented something really big, like radar, she would give up her job and they would get married. They would live in one of those new Miami houses where when you woke up you pressed a button, the bedroom wall opened, and you rolled out of bed into your own private swimming pool. All this might have to wait a few years. She didn’t know how to type, as yet, and he had just signed up in the Marines.

Just south of their hideaway an unmarked road, simply twin ruts packed with oyster shell, twisted through the dunes from AIA to high-water mark. Since this road was used, on occasion, by the beach buggies of fishermen after red bass, Henry refrained from turning in and blocking it. If he and Nina were seen and recognized, word of it might get back to Nina’s father, a dark, brooding, violent man, and a deputy sheriff. Instead, Henry eased his car into a palm-shrouded pocket off the shoulder of the highway. Then, carrying blanket and swim suits, they climbed across the dunes to the seclusion of their hollow. His caution, or timidity, undoubtedly saved their lives.

This was likely their last date for a long time, and yet their talk faltered. They were a little sad, and a little frightened, for closing a chapter of youth is a small death, with all the chapters-to-come an uncertain hereafter. On Monday Nina would start a secretarial training course at the St. Augustine business school, and on Tuesday Henry would leave for a training camp in the Carolinas. So they swam for a time in the dark waters beyond the breakers and then walked the beach hand in hand until the soft south wind dried them. They returned to the intimacy of their hollow and lay on the blanket, faces to the stars, shoulders touching but thoughts already diverging ahead. Henry raised himself on his arm, thin and knobby as a bamboo pole, and looked down on her face. Nina was a frail girl, small-boned and slender, patches of freckles on her nose and shoulders. Their classmates thought her mousy. Henry thought her beautiful. He leaned over and kissed her and she responded for a moment, her body arching to meet his. Then she pushed him away. “It’s late,” she said. “We’ve got to go. Turn your back while I dress.”

He wanted to protest. He wanted to say that this would be their last chance for a long time. But he saw that she was gone from him, her mind on something else entirely. He rose to his feet and turned his face to the sea.

“Now don’t look,” she said.

“You’ll never get hurt by a look,” Henry said. Nevertheless he did not look. It was their ritual.

Soon she said, “Okay, you can look now.”

He didn’t turn or answer. He was witness to an astonishing sight. Where there had been only water before, there was now a black hump in the sea. It lay less than a mile offshore, solid as a reef.

“What’s the matter?” Nina asked.

“We’ve got a visitor,” he said, and pointed.

She stepped beyond him up the slope of their hollow until she could see over the rim. “Where did it come from?” she asked.

“I don’t know. All of a sudden it was just there.” He felt uneasy. He didn’t want to say that it had popped straight up out of the sea, but now that he thought of it, that’s what must have happened.

“Maybe it’s a whale,” she said. “A dead whale.”

“I don’t think so,” Henry said. “It’s too high out of the water to be a dead whale. Anyway, I think it’s bigger than a whale. Must be a ship, but it’s a funny-lookin’ ship. No masts, no lights.”

“It could be an oiler,” she said. “I’ve seen oilers in the carrier base at Mayport. It could be an oiler in distress.”

“No it couldn’t,” Henry said. “If it was an oiler broke down or something, there’d be a lot of Navy out there with it. Now it could be a menhaden boat that lost its masts in a storm, except there hasn’t been any storm. It looks more like a big ship, capsized.” He hesitated a moment and then added, “Or a submarine.”

So gradually that for a moment Henry thought his eyes were wrong, the black blob on the silvered sea began to change shape. It looked as if it were splitting apart, like an amoeba under the microscope in biology class. Then there was no doubt of it. A small part did detach itself from the larger mass. At first the small part seemed to be drifting, but then it assumed purpose and direction, narrowed, and moved towards shore, its speed increasing until it created a thin, phosphorescent bow wave. Soon it was so close that they could hear the muffled throb of its engine.

Henry had heard stories of dope and Orientals being smuggled in from Cuba, and he was certain that this was what they were witnessing. He pulled on his trousers over his swim trunks, slipped on his shirt without bothering to button it, and his shoes without tying the laces. He took his wrist watch from his trousers pocket and noted the time as he strapped it on. It was 12:15. He said, “Nina, we’d better get out of here right now.”

She put her hand on his arm and said, “Why? This is exciting. Let’s watch.”

He wanted overwhelmingly to attain the security of the car, or at least retreat to the top of the dunes. From the top of the dunes they could watch and then run for it. But he’d feel silly if it turned out that the big boat was just a disabled fisherman and the small one a boatload of men who needed help. He contained his fear, in the greater fear that Nina would think him yellow.

When the boat was inshore of the breakers he recognized its shoe-box shape. It was a landing craft such as the Marines used. It grated on the sand, broached, straightened, and lunged to a stop, its stern still rising and falling to the surge of the surf. So shallow was its draught that its ramp dropped into only a few inches of water.

Men started coming out of the bow, trotting down the ramp, ten or twelve of them, all carrying weapons, sub-machine guns strapped to their shoulders. They fanned out along the beach like fingers of a fist suddenly unclenched. They deployed in a purposeful manner, and then advanced on the dunes in a skirmish line like soldiers. One headed directly for their hollow, as if he knew they were there. It was too late to run for it now, not with the sand so white and the moon so brilliant.

Henry dropped to his knees and pulled Nina to his side. He scrambled to the left where a clump of rice grass bent over the lip of their hollow, drawing her along with him. They pressed themselves into the sand. They tried to mold their bodies to the shape of the grass’s feathery shadow. Henry’s arm, pushing down on the girl’s back, felt an uncontrollable shaking. He didn’t know whether it was her body or his hand that shook. In the space of a few seconds their world had gone crazy. Where only a few minutes before he had been thinking about the future, now there might be no future at all, for these men behaved like hunters moving across the field to flush rabbits or quail, guns held for snap shooting. The hollow was no longer a sanctuary. It was a trap, a convenient pit for killing.

Henry heard the crunch of shoes on crusted sand and looked up, with the slightest movement of his face, and over him was silhouetted the bulk of a man. The man skirted the edge of their hideaway, stopped, and stared up at the ridge of the dunes. Despite the warmth of the night, the man wore black, zippered coveralls and a black helmet. His face was blackened, so that only his eyes shone whitely. His hands, sooty like his face, gripped a stubby gun with a circular magazine. The barrel weaved and probed like the head of a snake with eyes of its own. There was no sound except the breathing of this man. With every exhalation, he wheezed. Several times it seemed that he looked directly down on them, and Henry’s stomach knotted and all his muscles tensed, awaiting a red spurt of flame and the impact of a bullet. Yet the man did not see them. He turned away and walked up through the yielding rice grass, the gun muzzle still weaving in a short arc. When he was out of sight, Nina drew in her breath in a low sob. Henry’s hand tightened on her back and she was still except for quivering that came in spasms. A hundred yards to the south, where the shell road was, a light winked twice.

The landing craft gave birth to something else. Incredibly, it birthed a car, a four-door sedan with whitewall tires, shining as if it had just been rolled off the showroom floor. It had the lines of a Buick. The car slid down the ramp, bounced through a wavelet, and achieved dry, hard-packed sand. Henry thought there were four figures inside, but he could not be sure. The car stopped on the beach, and another man loped down the ramp, waded through the water, walked to the car and spoke to the driver. It seemed to Henry that they were shaking hands, and then the car moved again. Just before it swung into the shell road and vanished between the dunes, its lights came on. Henry could have sworn that it bore an orange-and-blue Florida tag, although the distance was too great to make out numbers.

Soon they heard the car whining south, fast, on AIA. Before the reflection of its lights paled in the sky, the armed men were returning to the landing craft. As if they had practiced the maneuver often, they heaved at its metal sides while its engine roared in reverse. When it was free of the beach the men scrambled aboard and its ramp came up. After it had backed beyond the breakers, the landing craft swung in a sharp circle, gathering speed. Its return to sea was much faster, and somewhat noisier, than its approach.

They watched, motionless, until they saw it join the mother ship. There was a soundless merger, almost as if the smaller boat had been swallowed. Then the whole mass sank straight into the sea. “It was a submarine, all right,” Henry said. He was startled by the sound of his own voice. He realized that these were the first words either had spoken since the landing, which seemed so long ago. He looked at his watch. Since he first sighted the hump in the sea, not more than fifteen minutes had passed. He rose to his feet, his knees stiff, his legs cramped.

Nina got up, too, and held on to his arm and leaned her head against his chest. “My stomach hurts,” she said. “I think I’m going to be sick.” She retched, but she wasn’t sick. He supported her as they started back for the car. When they reached the top of the dunes, both of them began to run.

This incident occurred on the day Russia announced that it had achieved equality with the United States in the production of thermonuclear weapons, a condition thereafter known as H-Parity. Had it been reported immediately, no doubt the car would have been traced, the men captured, and the country alerted.

It was not reported, for one of those curious personal reasons that so often alter the course of history, although when they reached the car Henry had every intention of reporting it. Even as he jammed his foot on the starter of his father’s old Plymouth he was estimating times and distances. The Buick was headed for St. Augustine, but the nearest phone was at the Oasis, the lunch stand and liquor store at the edge of Ponte Vedra, in the opposite direction. If he could get to the phone before the Buick got through St. Augustine, the men would be trapped, for this whole stretch of coast is actually an island, bounded by the Atlantic on the east, by the inland waterway on the west, the St. Johns River to the north, and Matanzas Inlet on the south. So when he swung the Plymouth onto the highway, he headed north.

He got the old Plymouth up to eighty and then hit a pothole and almost went off the road and he slowed to seventy, remembering the condition of the tires and what his father would say if he wrecked the car. His father was a carpenter and the car necessary for his transportation and livelihood and it wasn’t paid for yet.

Nina had been shaking the sand out of her shoes and trying to do her face and comb her hair. Now she looked up, saw that the dunes were on the right, and said, “Henry, where are we going?”

“The Oasis,” he said. “We’ll call the police from there.”

“What’ll you say?”

“Say we saw a whole pack of spies, or something, land on the beach.”

“Spies!” When she said the word aloud it sounded much too melodramatic to be real. Sounded like something you saw in the movies or on television or read in Steve Canyon.

“Spies for sure,” he said. “Never heard of dope runners with a submarine.”

“Dope runners could have a submarine, couldn’t they?”

“No. Only navies have submarines.”

He slowed for a jog in the road and she said, “Henry, who’ll you call?”

“The St. Augustine police or St. Johns County sheriff.”

“Why not the Navy base at Mayport, if you think they really are spies?” Mayport, at the mouth of the St. Johns, was an operating base for carriers. Sometimes there were two or three carriers and half a dozen destroyers at Mayport, loading fresh air groups and new planes for service in the Mediterranean.

“Maybe I’ll call Mayport after I call the police,” Henry said.

“Won’t it be on the radio and in the papers?”

“Sure.”

They were silent for perhaps a minute, each with the same thoughts. Then Nina said, “Henry, I really ought to be home right now.”

“I know it.”

“You know what he’ll do, don’t you?”

“No.”

“I mean when he finds out where we were.”

Henry took his foot off the accelerator. Nina had told her parents she was going to a late movie in Jacksonville, an imperative white lie. And Henry was deathly afraid of her father. Deputy Sheriff Pope, he had heard, had killed two men and shot others. He knew for a fact that Mr. Pope had beaten up a middle-aged tourist who had made a pass at Nina—beaten him so badly he almost died in the hospital. If they reported what they had seen, Mr. Pope would certainly hear of it. Even if the FBI and the police and the Coast Guard and the Navy agreed to keep their names out of the papers, the word would still get around to all the law enforcement people, and that meant to Mr. Pope.

“Are you stopping?” Nina asked.

“No, I was just thinking.” Henry looked at the speedometer and found that he had slowed to thirty.

“Well, I know what my pop will do to me,” she said. “He has an old razor strap. He hasn’t used it on me in years. But he will now. When he finds out we were at our place instead of the movies you know what he’ll think. And he’ll beat me. He’ll run me away from home.” Her right hand crept back over the narrow ridge of her left shoulder, as if she could feel the bite of the strap.

Suddenly they were coming up on the Oasis and Henry saw that there was a light inside. He pulled up to the door and got out. Then he saw that the place was empty. It was closed, and it was locked. A light burned in the barred liquor storeroom, to discourage thieves.

Henry didn’t get back into the car immediately. The desire for haste was gone. He felt, rather, as if he had been given a reprieve. He said, “I guess we can go on to the Innlet, and use the phone there.” The Innlet was an expensive motel, a bit further up the coast.

Nina said, “Henry, can’t we go home? Honest, I’m scared. He might kill you, Henry.”

Henry got back into the car. He did not immediately start the motor. He leaned his forehead on the wheel and tried to think. If there was any way they could report it without giving their names—But that would be silly. Nobody would believe him. They might not believe him anyway. If he called there was bound to be trouble, big trouble. Mr. Pope would take him apart. Finally he said, “Okay, we’ll go on back.” He started the car and headed south again, fast, but not as fast as they had come. He felt miserable, empty, a coward.

After a while she leaned her head against his shoulder and said, “Henry, thanks.”

He didn’t say anything.

“If we’d gone on to the Innlet I’m sure we’d have been too late anyway.”

“I guess so.”

“They must be through St. Augustine by now.”

“Sure.” He told himself that after all Nina had begged him not to call, and the only reason he hadn’t called was to save her. That’s what he told himself, but he didn’t quite believe it. He wished she hadn’t said, “He might kill you, Henry.” If she hadn’t said that, he would have gone on until he found a phone.

As they crossed the first bridge into St. Augustine he said, “Nina, you won’t mention this to anybody, will you?”

“I should say not!”

“Not to anybody at all!”

“I promise, Henry.”

They turned into the narrow street where she lived. It was two o’clock but all the lights were on downstairs in her house and he knew Mr. Pope was waiting up for them. He eased the car to a stop and opened the door gently. He took her as far as the steps, but he didn’t dare kiss her goodbye, he was that afraid of Mr. Pope.

Then he drove on to his own house, three blocks away. He couldn’t get to sleep until dawn. 2

The driver of the Buick sedan, headed south on AIA, was born Stanislaus Lazinoff in Smolensk, but for two years he had been trained to think of himself as Stanley Smith, American, born in Glebe City, Iowa. The choice of birthplace, like everything else in his manufactured past, was no accident. The courthouse at Glebe City had burned to the ground, along with all its records, some years before. An account of the fire had appeared in the Chicago papers, and had been clipped and forwarded to Moscow by a farsighted agent of what was then the NKVD, attached to the Russian consulate in a clerical post.

Stanley Smith was a stocky, thick-chested, handsome man with close-cropped, sandy hair and intelligent gray eyes. He was in his early thirties but looked younger. Indeed, all his credentials, including his driving license and Social Security card, asserted he was twenty-nine, this being considered a more suitable age for his exact role. He and his companions were very special people, the end result of a scientific experiment utilizing the Pavlov-Lysenko theories of conditioned reflexes. A new environment had been painstakingly grafted on personalities of unquestionable and fanatic loyalty to the state. An American body and mind had been synthetically created, while the heart remained Russian.

Stanley Smith was a second generation Communist. His father, a soldier in the Czar’s Army, had led the mutiny of a regiment in Leningrad, then St. Petersburg. Unfortunately his father worshipped the Army leader Trotsky, and had died suddenly and mysteriously. Stalin himself had helped carry the Lazinoff coffin, a clear indication that Stanley’s father, while misguided, was still an old Bolshevik hero.

At the age of sixteen Stanley enlisted in the Red Army for the Fatherland War, mistakenly called World War II by Western historians. Even then he knew it was no true world war—but one was coming. During the storming of Berlin, as the youngest lieutenant of engineers in Zhukov’s armies, he performed deft and daring feats with explosives that won him two Red Stars, promotion, and marked him for the future.

When he was twenty-five, and a major attached to the Army intelligence service in Budapest, he was recalled for special schooling. For five years, in Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev, he attended agitprop, espionage, and counter-intelligence schools, and became proficient in such esoteric branches of military knowledge as silent killing and cryptography. He took language courses and studied English and American history. He crammed the fundamentals of nuclear physics, and the basics of biological warfare.

A major military operation is the most complex undertaking yet attempted by man. It may be recalled that the planning for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy in June, 1944, was begun by a British staff four years earlier. Stanley was to participate in something infinitely more ambitious, the subjugation of a powerful nation with one massive blow. Just as a jet bomber must be on the drawing boards five to ten years before it can be launched against the enemy, so a human weapon must be prepared with equal thoroughness. This is particularly true if the humans mission is likely to be of critical importance. So Stanley’s education was still not complete. He was sent to a place that its inhabitants and a few people on the General Staff called, jokingly, “Little Chicago.”

Little Chicago was laid out in a section of the Ukraine so thoroughly and often devastated by draught, famine, and war that it was necessary to evacuate only a few kulaks to clear an area of a hundred square miles. This reservation was barricaded by mine fields, electrically charged wire, and watchtowers. In its center was erected a town in microcosm. Except that it nested in no suburbs and farmland and all its buildings were new, externally it could have been Glebe City, Iowa.

The concept behind the training of Stanley Smith and his companions was as old, in warfare, as the Trojan Horse. Something of the kind had been tried, spectacularly but without success, by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. A battalion of English-speaking soldiers had been dressed in American uniforms and infiltrated through the lines to spread confusion and seize bridges in Bradley’s rear. The Germans, usually so methodical, had not had time for adequate preparation and training. The Red Army did not intend to make the same mistake.

For two years Stanley Smith lived in Little Chicago, speaking only English, reading only American newspapers, magazines, and books. Three nights a week he attended an American movie in a replica of an American theater, complete with popcorn and soft drink machines. He not only learned to play baseball, but developed into a passable shortstop. He listened to the World Series on short wave, and could quote batting averages.

He took a course in American television and radio. Every Tuesday afternoon he listened to recordings, and watched kinescopes, of the most popular programs. He learned to identify the voices and faces of Eddie Fisher, Liberace, Jackie Gleason, Edward R. Murrow, and Lucille Ball. Some of the comedy programs, in which laughter was heard when nothing was funny, he found entirely incomprehensible. But he was assured by his tutor, a Hungarian who had worked for several years at the Ford plant in Detroit, that his reaction was quite normal.

He drew his pay in dollars. He learned the value of American clothing, and the variety of purchases that could be made in drugstores. He learned to buy, cook, and enjoy American food. He absorbed American poker, which is more conservative than Russian poker, and discovered gin rummy and craps. He acquired a taste for bourbon. He studied the history and geography of the United States until he was, unknowingly, better informed on these subjects than most American high school graduates. He could even name the members of the President’s Cabinet.

Only a small proportion of the population was receiving training. Most of the people were members of the permanent staff, the housekeeping detail, and instructors. He was certain that many of the men were in the Osoby Otdel, the military security system that was called, or whispered, O.O. Among the special tutors were Czechs, Rumanians, Poles, Letts, and even a few Russians who had lived in America. There were Germans, graduates of the Abwehr and Gestapo, skilled in techniques of espionage. There were women, of course. They were there in the capacity of instructors as well as for morale and convenience. The emotional language of love may be the same the world over, but the colloquialisms and subtleties of the boudoir differ.

He lived in an apartment with men he knew as Gregg Palmer, Ralph Masters, and William Johnson. It was obvious that their backgrounds were much like his own, but they never revealed their Russian names. On orders, when you entered Little Chicago you forgot your past. It was an important psychological factor in the creation of a new personality. These four had stayed together from the moment they entered Little Chicago. They were a team, their mission one.

In their first week of training the four had been supplied with American credentials and were constantly tested in their uses until their new identities were fused in their minds. While Stanley Smith had been born in Iowa, he noted that he was now a resident of Florida. Since he was a man of considerable strategic knowledge and active imagination, this gave him a clue to their mission long before their first official briefing. He wasn’t being sent to Florida because of the climate or because any vital industrial complex existed there. Florida’s military importance lay in the air. Florida was one big landing field, a center of air bases. There was the Navy Station in Jacksonville, with its statellite fields and its companion carrier base at Mayport. But more important were the great bases of the Strategic Air Command. There was Pinecastle in Orlando and Mac Dill in Tampa and Eglin in Pensacola and the gigantic new Hibiscus Field which had recently been described in the news magazines. Why they were located in Florida was understandable. The flying weather was almost always good, and Florida was about as far from Russia as you could get and still stay on the continent of North America. Distance gave the Florida bases an immunity not enjoyed by SAC bases elsewhere. He would bet his bottom dollar (he used the phrase often) that his target would be one of those bases. But he did not mention what he suspected. Silence never sent a man to Siberia.

In his last month of schooling Stanley Smith was examined by a board of three visitors. One of them, Smith was fairly certain, was a native American, although he could not be sure. He was asked some pretty tricky questions, such as who invented the airplane and the electric light. He found that he had almost forgotten they were invented by Mozkaiski and Lodygin, respectively, and promptly gave the answers he knew were wanted: the Wright brothers and Thomas A. Edison. He also received a physical checkup and it was discovered that some dental work was necessary. An incisor was pulled and replaced by a shining stainless steel tooth. The dentist, new to Little Chicago, muttered in Russian. It was the first Russian Smith had heard in two years and he was forced to translate it, in his head, into English. A man’s transformation is complete when he does his thinking in an alien tongue.

Ordinarily, the road out of Little Chicago never doubled back through Russia, a necessary security precaution. In the case of Stanley Smith and his three companions there had been a deviation from normal procedures because of the peculiar nature and importance of their mission. They were flown to Moscow, taken inside the Kremlin walls, and lodged in an office-apartment annex, once barracks. That they were guarded like prisoners, and that security officers slept in their rooms, ate with them, and even eavesdropped in the toilets, did not seem unusual to Smith. All his life he had been watched. Sometimes, as in Budapest, his duty had been to watch others. Only in this way could the state be protected. It was normal, or, as he now said, S.O.P.

In the Kremlin they were introduced to an American—a genuine, Texas-born American—of whom they had been told. They had been warned that this American was erratic, and at times might seem crazy, but that they should be respectful to him, and listen carefully to anything he had to say. He was a great prize. He had been a sergeant in the Strategic Air Command, at a base in England. He had defected to the East while on tourist leave in Vienna. Because of a woman, it was said. His name was Horgan and he was a thin, red-faced, nervous man of about Smith’s age. He wore the uniform of the Red Air Force and the epaulets of a colonel, which was not surprising when one considered that in all Russia he was the only man who knew SAC intimately, as a child knows his father’s house.

In the week that followed, Smith and the others were closeted with Horgan for many hours. Their conferences were held in a comfortable, unmilitary room furnished with leather chairs, with caviar and cheeses always on the table, and liquor, much liquor. Sometimes Horgan grew excitable, and rambled. Sometimes he digressed in tirades at the brass and the officer clique which had refused to recognize his abilities and commission him. Sometimes he cursed, by name, officers who he said had conspired against him. He had even been reduced to KP, when such duty was allowable punishment. Once he quoted from a letter he had written his congressman. Once he broke down and put his head on the table and wept and announced that his wife was no better than an embarcadero whore. She had divorced him while he was in England, and was remarried, now, to a lieutenant. Yet what he had to say about the inner workings of a SAC base, and its security system, was clear enough and had the ring of truth in it. Horgan’s ideas were ingenious, and his advice explicit, but Smith wondered how long he would be allowed to live. Not long, surely, after he had been pumped dry and began to repeat himself and got on the nerves of the O.O. agents who guarded him and the intelligence officers who fawned on him, and dressed him in the trappings of a colonel, while despising him.

The final briefing for Smith, Palmer, Masters, and Johnson was delivered by a general of the Red Air Force, a Hero of the Soviet Union. The general emphasized timing. They must always remember that their mission was only a small part of a larger plan. At the same time their assignment was vital. Unless they succeeded, there might be no larger plan. They were essential as a tiny jewel in the heart of a watch. The general had no doubt that one, at least, would succeed. If only one succeeded, the names of all four would live forever in the history of the world revolution. They would be greater than Stakhanov. They would enjoy privileges and honors, upon their return, such as no young men had ever received before.

They would enter the United States with funds more than sufficient for their mission. They must be careful with their money as with their tongues, for a display of money could attract attention and betray them. If they ran into trouble, they were on no account to contact the Russian embassy or the consulates and thus compromise the diplomatic situation. Nor must they approach any American Communist, for the Party in the United States was riddled with spies and unreliable. In great emergency, there was one man who had been instructed to assist them. The name of this man, his address, and the manner in which he could be approached would be communicated to them before the landing. Also, in case of a shift in timing or change in orders, this man would contact them. He was to be trusted. Whenever they changed address, this man was to be informed. The general had then smiled and said he was now turning them over to the Navy. He had shaken hands with each of them, and wished them good luck.

The voyage from the naval base at Tallin required nineteen days. The submarine was a new 3,000 tonner, designed along the lines of the French Surcouf, with comfortable living quarters, a hangar, and a catapult. The hangar could accommodate four large guided missiles or two jet aircraft, so it received a landing barge with ease. Inside the landing barge was a car. In the car’s luggage compartment were five suitcases, four filled with the essential tools of their job, concealed under lightweight clothing, one filled with money.

They were chaperoned, on this voyage, by two dour O.O. men and an uncommunicative, thin, gray-faced man, much older, who represented the MVD, or perhaps the Presidium itself. On their last day at sea, this man called them into the captain’s cabin, which he had occupied since the voyage began. He spoke to them in Russian, repeating much of what the Air general had told them in the Kremlin. Then he gave them the name and address of Robert Gumol, a banker in Upper Hyannis, a suburb of Philadelphia. They had only to tell Gumol, “I am from Five-Star Electric” to establish their identity. Smith was at first surprised that a banker should be an agent, but the more he thought about it the more he was impressed by the cleverness of his superiors. In the United States bankers were the most respected and conservative group in a community. Bankers handled large sums of money as a matter of routine. And a bank’s doors were open to all, and in a bank’s inner offices private and personal discussions were usual.

Only one small incident disturbed Stanley Smith during the landing. The navigator of the submarine was not a Russian, but a German, a former officer of the German Navy. This man, Karl Schiller, was chosen for the mission because he had been a Leutnant on a U-boat that had landed eight German saboteurs at exactly the same spot, on the same coast, in 1942. Schiller and Smith both enjoyed chess and they had become friendly, and Schiller had sometimes invited Smith topside for a breath of fresh air and a glimpse of the stars when they ran on the surface, nights. Schiller often related, with pride, the details of the previous voyage. It had been a much more difficult undertaking, he assured Smith, with the British and American navies to dodge and the coast itself patrolled. Now it would be simple, with the world basking in peace.

It was Schiller who commanded the landing craft in its run for the beach, and it had been Schiller who ran down the beach to the car and shook his hand. At that moment Smith asked a question that had been troubling him. “By the way,” he said, “you never told me what happened to the sabotage team.”

Schiller had smiled and said, “Oh, I forgot. They were all caught and executed.”

It was hardly a pleasant way to bid one goodbye, Smith thought as he drove through the night. It could shake a man, until you considered that it had been wartime, and the eight Germans probably had not been so thoroughly conditioned as he, Palmer, Masters, and Johnson.

The speedometer crept past sixty and Palmer, sitting next to him, said, “Hey, Stan, slow down. Florida law is sixty by day but only fifty by night. Remember?” Palmer was the most cautious of the four.

Smith slowed, although he was confident that there were no cops on the road at this hour. Anyway, back in Little Chicago they had even schooled him not to panic when stopped by the police. It had been a hard thing to learn, but he was ready to test it.

In St. Augustine Smith pulled into an all-night filling station and said, “Fill ’er up with high test.”

The attendant, alert despite the hour, filled the tank and checked under the hood. He whistled and said, “Say, lucky I looked. Your battery water’s way down.” He immediately filled the battery with distilled water, without instructions. Then he wiped the windshield. Smith was impressed with this service and efficiency. He wondered whether all travellers received such service, or whether it was only because the Buick was new and large. He realized that there was still much to learn about America. He had not been told everything.

The attendant said, “Three eighty-four, please,” and Smith handed him a five dollar bill. The attendant noted that the four men in the car all wore bright sport shirts. The license prefix was 2-W, which meant Duval County. Four young guys from Jacksonville, he thought, away from their wives for a big weekend in Miami, or maybe a fishing trip down on the Keys.

Smith pocketed the change and drove on. He felt elated. For the first time he had encountered an American on American soil, and had passed inspection.

Just before dawn they pulled off the road and split up the money in the extra suitcase. Smith realized that even by American standards all four were rich men. The thought occurred to him that once they dispersed in Miami his companions could take their money, lose themselves in this fat, careless country where security controls were almost non-existent and a man could travel at will, and enjoy life. In America it was not necessary to register with the police, not anywhere, nor were permits required for work, or for purchasing luxury goods. But he doubted that the others would be tempted. Like himself, they were responsible and dedicated men. Also, one day there would come an accounting, for one day the Marx-Lenin ideal would stand supreme over all nations, united in the comradeship of proletarian order and peace.

In Miami, they breakfasted for the last time together, in a restaurant of antiseptic cleanliness, with walls mostly of glass. Smith felt naked, as if he were eating in a shower room. The eggs, bacon, toast, marmalade, and in particular the coffee tasted different from the same breakfasts in Little Chicago, just as borscht in Kiev might be more flavorful than borscht in Boston. From Miami, Johnson was to go to Louisiana, Masters to Texas, and Palmer to Arizona. Palmer was to take the car, and dispose of it as he wished. As for Smith himself, he could buy another car later, if he found need of one and if a car befitted his station. His first objective, now, was to find a job in a restaurant, start a small bank account, and establish himself as a reliable citizen, suitable for enlistment in the United States Air Force. 3

Of the forty thousand people who went to work in the Pentagon that morning, Katharine Hume was somewhat of an oddity. Genius shows no discrimination of race, creed, sex, or physique when it chooses a body to inhabit. It can lodge in the twisted shape of a Steinmetz, or behind a sightless, soundless wall, as in Helen Keller. It can even pick the body of a young and desirable woman.

Not that Katharine Hume was a classic beauty. She wasn’t. But in a city where a woman’s allure is often measured by the collective influence of the guests she can entice to a party, her position on the protocol lists, or her Civil Service rating if she works, and where it can be undiplomatic to have legs finer than those of your senator’s wife, Katy Hume was a rarity. She had a dancer’s rhythm of movement and sway of hips. Her full lips were usually half open and she had a habit of moistening them with her tongue before speaking. That this was the result of a slight nasal obstruction didn’t make her mouth appear less sensual. Her hair was of an undecided color, so she had tinted it ash-blond, which contrasted with dark eyes, in the Viennese manner. Her flair for style she held in check, for in Washington, especially if you are in a responsible or sensitive position, it is chic to be dowdy. The oddest thing about her could not be seen. In her head was a questing brain equipped with an astonishing memory and capable of the most complicated mathematical acrobatics. Her intelligence quotient was 180, minimal, and she possessed Q-clearance for atomic security. She was by nature warm-blooded and friendly, but she was isolated by her profession and its taboos and secrets. Her profession was war.

She entered the River Gate of the Pentagon, showed a pass, and pinned a badge to her gray linen suit. She was admitted to the central corridor over which is a sign that reads: “Joint Chiefs of Staff—Restricted Area.” She came to a double door, guarded by Military Police, on which was stencilled: “Planning Division—Authorized Personnel Only.” Passing this barrier she walked to the end of the corridor beyond, and stopped at a door unnumbered and unmarked except for the curt notice: “Entrance Forbidden.” If you could go through that door uninvited you were one of seven people, six men and a woman, who comprised what the Planning Division called its Intentions of the Enemy Group, and unofficially its “dirty trick department,” or “private Kremlin.” The guard on duty smiled and opened the door for her. She was the woman. She represented the Atomic Energy Commission.

The conference room was unusual, even for the Pentagon. It was windowless, soundproofed, and devoid of files or safes. Its secrets were held only in the heads of the conferees. Except for the standard government-issue oval table and chairs of bleached oak, the only furniture was a mobile lunch stand, its electric coffee-maker steaming and cartons of milk and stacks of sandwiches, wrapped in wax paper, on its tray. Maps on sliding panels blotted out three walls. The largest was a target map of the United States, marked with every important military installation and industrial complex, every Navy base and heavy bomber field, population and communications centers, areas of nuclear production and research, hydroelectric sites, refineries, bottleneck roads and bridges. Another map showed the polar approaches to the North American continent, pinpointing picket ships, Texas islands, radar webs, Canadian and Alaskan interceptor strips, and anti-aircraft and guided missile batteries. There were smaller maps of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific, and Iceland and Greenland. On these maps American Air and Navy bases were indicated. Just such maps, it could be presumed, arrayed the walls of the Soviet central command post, and the war plans rooms of the Red Army, Navy, and Air Force. Over the map of the United States was the group’s slogan: “THINK LIKE THE ENEMY!”

Katharine Hume saw that all six of her colleagues were there before her. The attendance and punctuality, unusual for a Saturday morning, reflected the news, not critical news, or even unexpected, but as interesting as the first bold commitment of the queen in a championship chess match. Quietly, she slipped into the vacant chair. Clark Simmons, a spare, balding man who was senior in the group and who represented State, was speaking. “. . . two questions to answer. First, is the Russian announcement true? Recall that in February of ’fifty-five Molotov made a somewhat similar boast, although not quite so explicit. At that time the AEC decided it wasn’t true. Secondly, if true, why a public announcement of H-Parity, and why at this time?” As usual, as he spoke Simmons kept his eyes on the white scratch-pad in front of him and doodled. He raised his eyes to acknowledge Katharine and said, “We waited for you, lady. We’ve just started.”

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I stopped off at my shop on the way.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d do,” Simmons said. “Get anything?”

Katharine removed her glasses. They were necessary only when her eyes tired from reading, but she wore them most of the time. She was twenty-nine, an age considered immature for strategic planning. By wearing glasses, adopting a severe hairdo, using little makeup, and choosing clothes of neutral shading, on occasion she managed to look over thirty. “I think I can answer your first question,” she said. “In the past three days there has been intensified radioactivity in the upper air currents over Alaska and northern Canada, and some fallout on Hokkaido. Analysis and seismographic reports indicate that the Russians blew two thermonuclear devices or bombs on Tuesday and two more on Wednesday.”

She rose, went to the side of the room, slid out a map of Asia, and ran her fingers along a loop of the Yenisei River, in Siberia. “I should say about here. The bombs—I believe they were bombs rather than devices—were of four distinct types. Two were rigged with U-238.” She hesitated for a moment, and looked down at the others to invite absolute attention. “The yield of one of these explosions—the last—exceeded thirty megatons.”

Jesse Price, the Air Force major newly assigned to the conference, pretended he was about to duck under the table. Price was a large, loose-jointed man with a black patch over his right eye and an arrow-shaped burn scar that ran from the patch to his chin. He talked flight jargon and behaved with the insouciance of a hot pilot. Katharine had wondered why the Air Force assigned him to the Intentions Group until she looked up his record. This record included graduation from the National War College after Korea, two years as Air Attaché in Moscow, another year as observer in Indo-China, and later service with SHAPE Air headquarters in Fontainbleau. In addition, she reflected that the Air Force would never keep a one-eyed pilot unless he had much else besides. Now that Price saw she was looking at him, he straightened and said, “Are you sure?”

“Very sure, Major. The AEC is now ready to admit that they have maximum capability.” She took her seat. For these men, no further explanation was necessary. Thirty megatons meant the equivalent of 30,000,000 tons of TNT. A five-megaton bomb could kill Chicago; ten, New York. Maximum capability was a phrase newly in use. It meant the capacity to utterly destroy any enemy. It meant all the bombs necessary.

For a moment, each was silent with his private thoughts. Four of the men were married and had children, and for them it was impossible to banish concern for their families from their considerations. Simmons had just bought a home in Chevy Chase, a somewhat overpriced Colonial, a bit extravagant for a Foreign Service career officer without independent income. He and his wife and three children, in the event of trouble, were trapped by an inexorable mortgage within blast radius of a primary target city. Commander Stephen Batt, Navy, was thankful for his cottage on the Severn. Annapolis was by no means safe, when you contemplated the danger of fallout. His whole family could die, horribly, because of a bomb on Washington or Baltimore. But it gave him maneuvering space. Colonel Philip Cragey, Army, had been planning to move his family from Charlottesville, where they would be about as safe as you could get on the eastern seaboard, to Washington. At that instant he decided they had better think it over. Felix Fromburg, the quiet little lawyer who represented the FBI, also made a decision. If the international situation tensed up again, he would talk to that real estate agent who had been trying to sell him a farm in Warrenton. A thirty-megaton bomb was beyond all reason.

Major Price scratched his face at the white border of the scar, and Katharine could see that he was still not satisfied. “They announced they had parity,” he said. “How would they know? How would they know how many bombs we’ve got?”

“I don’t think they know and I don’t think it matters,” Katharine said. Sometimes Major Price flew slowly. He would not proceed until everything on the navigation chart was clear in his head, even the most obvious landmarks. “Force, like space and time, is relative,” she continued, trying not to talk like a schoolmarm. “If they have enough bombs to destroy us, they have maximum capability, which means parity, because we can’t do anything worse than destroy them. Now I’ll make an assumption. For every bomb they blow in tests, they have stockpiled thirty to fifty. They aren’t quite as profligate as we are. Their resources aren’t quite as large. They don’t have tritium and deuterium to burn.”

Raoul Walback, of Central Intelligence, said, “I’ll buy that. As you know, all our reports from escapees show stepped-up production in the past eighteen months. Particularly in the Angara River area near Irkutsk, where their new hydroelectric plant is operating. There’s another new plutonium complex on the Ob, near Novosibirsk. Big. Real big.”

They absorbed Walback’s words with respect. Raoul was Princeton, had served in Paris headquarters of the OSS during World War II, and rejoined the government during the Korean War, after OSS became CIA. Espionage and intelligence on a high level were more fascinating to Raoul than finance. It had been easy for him to make easy money. He was unmarried, but he too had personal considerations. He was a rich and thoroughly civilized man, a perfectionist in his manner of living, and he hoped to remain that way.

They talked through the lunch hour and into the afternoon. They brought into their discussion every fact—military, political, and economic—known in their departments. They had been chosen for this job because of imagination plus background. Because they were all young, as years are now measured, they were sometimes considered brash in a military community where a ripe age is often mistaken for wisdom. Their forecasts at times had proved uncannily accurate—so accurate as to embarrass certain of their elders and superiors with contrary views. They received encouragement and backing from a few ranking officers, a few aggressive and inquisitive members of the congressional Armed Services committees, and, on rare occasions, from the White House itself. Their powerful friends regarded them as a useful catalytic agent in a compound that preferred to settle down in an orderly and comfortable manner, the way a military organization should. The group dreamed up logical moves for the enemy to make, and stirred Washington to meet them. When the enemy made such a move, military or political, the Pentagon was already alerted. Sometimes the Kremlin crossed them up, and the Intentions Group was branded a wild-eyed crew of sensationalists, soothsayers, and worse. Yet their prophecies were reliable enough so they could not be ignored.

At last they talked themselves out, and Simmons, his face lined and weary, said he would try to sum up their conclusions. The Russian announcement, coming after several unusual years of peace, indicated another shift in policy, and perhaps a reshuffle of command. Russia’s tactics changed, but strategic objectives always remained the same. One group, while in command, might steer the Soviet ship-of-state on the tack of peace while other leaders, in the background, planned war. When progress towards world hegemony was no longer possible on the peace tack, the second crew took over and changed course. This was nothing new. It had happened before. The announcement indicated such a change. The H-bomb tests, probably unnecessary for scientific reasons, simply emphasized the warning, as when an angry man pounds the table. The warning, sinister as a rattlesnake’s whir, was to Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and Germany. It said: “Stand clear!” At the same time it was designed to spread fear and doubt in the United States, and encourage appeasement and dissension.

“But most important,” Simmons said, “is its effect on the Russian people. For a long time—ever since December of ’fifty-four when they cut down on civilian goods and increased the production of guided missiles and aircraft and nuclear weapons—it has been tough on the Russian people. Now they are heartened, and at the same time they are steeled for what is coming. They are told that this is what their sacrifices have accomplished. Now they need fear no one, and an end to their austerity is in sight. Since all their efforts and sacrifice have been for war production, the end can only mean an enforced peace, with the collapse of the Western alliance—or victory by arms.”

Simmons made two small marks on the pad before him, and crossed one out. “Since we haven’t knuckled under, not at the Summit or anywhere else, and since the alliance stands, they must proceed towards the other alternative.”

Raoul Walback was impatient. Walback often thought Simmons as prissy as an old maid aunt. “Why don’t you say war?” he challenged.

Perhaps because of his baldness, his weariness from the long session, Simmons suddenly looked sixty, rather than forty. “I hate the word!” he said. Simmons had spent all his adult life in study of Eastern Europe, which meant study of Russia principally. He had served two tours of duty at the embassy in Moscow. He explained, “You cannot know a people very well—any people—without finding much to admire in them. I hate to say war between my country and Russia but I have to say it. War. Oh, they haven’t made the decision yet. They’d much rather have us appease them. But that we’ll never do and so they move towards war. I don’t know why this insanity, just when things seemed to be shaking down.”

“If we’d had another depression,” said Walback, “war wouldn’t be necessary. I think they counted on a depression. We cut down on production of aircraft and guns, but we built roads and schools instead. We fooled ’em.”

Fromburg, who as usual had said little, and who was so inconspicuous it was hard to remember whether or not he attended meetings, spoke up. “I want to ask a question.” Fromburg was their skeptic. While others concocted adventures, military and political, for the enemy to attempt, Fromburg decided whether such moves were feasible. “Just one question—why war now?”

“I think I can answer that,” said Jesse Price. “It’s now—or never.”

Katharine Hume was surprised. The Air Force major had been sitting in with them for a month, but this was the first positive opinion he had volunteered. He had asked and answered questions, made statements of fact, but he had offered no opinions. The major kept three pipes on the desk in front of him and smoked them in rotation. Now he picked up number three, filled it, and continued. “‘Never’ will come on the day we have perfected the ICBM, and enough of them are emplaced and aimed so that our retaliation will be automatic—and nothing can stop it.”

ICBM meant Intercontinental Ballistics Missile. Speed: 8,000 miles an hour. Range: 5,000 miles with a thermonuclear warhead. Its aim could be pre-set, like that of a cannon, or it could be guided by radar stations on its path. Eventually its more intelligent siblings would take their own star sights and solve their own navigation problems. All of them, there in the conference room, knew that a prototype had been tested at Patrick Air Force Base on Cape Canaveral. It had soared up and out into space, down the range of islands, past San Salvador, past the Dominican Republic, past Puerto Rico, even past Ascension Island, the rock with an airstrip carved through its middle in the distant South Atlantic. This first ICBM had carried no payload, and like all new weapons it doubtless had bugs. But the bugs would be eliminated, and the ICBM, whose German mother was named V-2, was on the way. Katharine Hume couldn’t help asking, “How soon will never day come?”

Jesse Price frowned and his teeth clamped down on his pipestem as if determined to dam any careless flow of words. “I know,” he said hesitantly, “that all of us here are cleared for Top Secret and most of you have Q-clearance to boot, and yet I’m not going to give you an exact answer. Anyway, all I could tell you would be the target date of our research and development people. I’m not going to do that without their permission. I can tell you this, though, Miss Hume. Your never day can hardly come sooner than eighteen months, and I hope not later than five years.”

Katharine was instantly angry. This was the first time that a fact had been withheld from the conference, and since she had asked the question she felt that the rebuff was aimed at her. While other girls were getting married and having babies and settling down to homes, she had been absorbing and storing and even creating secrets. She had never been indiscreet. Her clearances meant not only that her patriotism, loyalty, and discretion were above suspicion, but her past and present personal life spotless. It meant that she had never been arrested, befriended a person of bad character, or joined a questionable organization. She had no close relatives on the wrong side of the curtain. Her drinking stopped after the first cocktail, and she always paid her bills. She didn’t gamble, associate with homosexuals, and she was not a drug addict. She neither gossiped, nor was gossiped about. Her neighbors in Georgetown had attested to her rectitude. Her personnel files and report cards, back to grammar school, had been scrutinized for any trace of unstable behavior. None had been found. She said, “That isn’t much of an answer, Major.”

She had tried to keep her voice low. She realized she hadn’t succeeded.

Price said, “It’s the best I can give you.”

Simmons, disturbed at this friction, began, “Now, Katy—” but it was Fromburg who broke the tension. “Major Price’s answer is good enough for our purposes,” Fromburg said, his dark, active eyes begging Katharine for caution. “But it’s not exactly what I was trying to get at. Even if they know the ICBM is coming up, how can they risk war now? How could they win it?”

Colonel Cragey stirred. Just as Simmons knew Russia, Cragey knew China. He was China-born, the son of a missionary. He had fought in the Far East, for the Chinese against Japan, against the Chinese in Korea. He didn’t look like a fighter. He looked like what he was primarily, a professor, and he wore his uniform as an amateur actor wears an uncomfortable costume. He had been lecturing on the Orient at the University of Virginia when, for the second time, the Army called him out of reserve, this time to serve on the Intentions Group where a specialist on the Orient was needed. He said, “I’ll try to catch that one. Maybe the Kremlin can’t help itself. The Kremlin has an unmanageable tiger by the tail. Name of China. Six hundred million people. Peiping controls twice as many people as Moscow and won’t be run by Moscow. The rulers of Peiping have something they call face. It’s more important to them than country, than party, than their life. They’ve sworn they were going to drive us out of the East. They couldn’t get away with it and they lost face and they have to get their face back, even if it means war.”

“Go ahead,” Simmons encouraged him.

“If Russia fails to support China, the whole Communist world will fly apart. Yet if Russia is dragged into war on China’s tail, they’ll surely lose because we’ll be on a war footing, and ready. In either case the men at the top in the Kremlin would surely be purged. They would die, personally. So Russia has to plan a war it can win. That means a one-day blitz. In one day they must create a hundred Pearl Harbors.”

“They have to do a little more than that,” said Major Price. “First they have to eliminate SAC. A hundred Pearl Harbors won’t save Russia if SAC is still around.”

Commander Batt leaned forward. “SAC and the Navy,” he amended. “Of course, like the Air Force we’re in a transition period. We’re changing our weapons systems. For us, too, rockets are the ultimate answer, A screen of sea-to-air rockets to protect our carrier striking force. That’s what we’ve got to have.”

“Very well,” said Simmons. “It’s too late to get technical.” One of his duties, as senior in the group, was to fend off the endless arguments between Navy and Air. “Let’s assume that the Russians decided to launch their peace offensive at the January, ’fifty-five, meeting of the Presidium, but at the same time they began preparations for their alternative, war. At some time in the recent past they decided the peace offensive was faltering. I think operations were initiated as soon as this occurred, and I think these operations, preliminary or paramilitary operations, are now going on. What are they? How do they plan to strike? That’s all we have to figure out.” Simmons smiled, an admission that he recognized, as they all did, that their task was impossible. And the meeting was over.

Felix Fromburg, as security officer for the group, stayed for a few minutes after the others left. He drew dark blue curtains across the walls to shield the maps. He tore the notes and doodles from the scratch-pads. It was said that a man’s unconscious doodling revealed his character. Simmons’ pad, as usual, reflected his neat mind. Single, numbered words represented the subject they had discussed. Major Price always covered his pad with airplanes and rockets, although on this day there was something new—the profile of a girl. Colonel Cragey had drawn an oldtime fortification, a walled city with a moat. Raoul Walback’s squiggles consisted of tiny stars and crescents all grouped in one corner of the paper. Commander Batt had drawn rowboats and fishes. Now what was so subconscious about that? Maybe he was trying to be too Freudian. Batt probably wished he was out on the Severn, fishing. On Katy Hume’s pad was some sort of an equation with symbols Fromburg couldn’t decipher. He folded them all up and dropped them into the burn bag. His job as security officer was finished for the day. In a way, he thought, it was all very silly. 4

When Katharine Hume stepped out of the River Gate she paused on the entrance walk and shook her head as one does to rout a nightmare in the reassuring sunlight. To her right the Jefferson Memorial rose like a white bubble against the cobalt sky. To her left the Lincoln Memorial gleamed in serene splendor, the nearest thing to a temple that her countrymen had erected to mortal man. Two girls in white shorts, carrying tennis rackets, brushed past her. From the river she could hear the dissonance of racing outboards. Overhead an airliner lowered its undercarriage and gracefully wheeled into the glide path for National Airport. A tiny foreign car, a girl and golf bags inside, came to a stop directly in front of her. A young lieutenant with the patch of SHAPE on his sleeve came down the steps two at a time, kissed the girl, climbed into the car, and they laughed and drove off. Katharine wished she were the girl in that car. I don’t live in a real world, she thought. That air-conditioned vault inside isn’t real. It’s grisly. It’s out of Dante. Real people make love and have babies and worry about bus fares and PTA politics and the starling plague. She lifted her face to the sun. If you brought the sun down to earth, and touched it to Washington, the result would be about the same as the kiss of the enemy’s thirty-megaton bomb. That also was a fact, true and real, but few people were troubled. A half million of the untroubled would be away from Washington that afternoon. They would be up in the Shenandoahs and clustered on the beaches from Jersey to the Carolinas and three foursomes deep on every hole of every golf course within fifty miles, or perhaps only walking, by twos, in Rock Creek Park. They could live in the present while she stirred the muddy cauldron of the future. She felt a hand on her arm and Raoul Walback said, “Give you a lift, Katy?”

She said, “Thanks, Raoul,” and walked with him to his car. She felt better. It had been bitterly lonely, there for a moment.

They were crossing Arlington Bridge when he said, “Doing anything tonight, Katy?”

“Yes. I’ve got a heavy date with a couple of books on biophthora.”

“That’s a big word.”

“It has a big meaning. The destruction of life—all life, that is. It’s from the Greek.”

“Katy, why don’t you relax for twenty-four hours? How’s about driving up to my place in the mountains?”

“I’m not playing any one night stands this season.”

He drove in silence until they reached Dumbarton Road and pulled up in front of the red brick apartment building, saved from ugliness and uniformity by shrubbery and vines, in which she lived. Then he said, “I’ll make you another proposition. Let’s get married.”

She had realized that one day he would ask and she would have to answer. At first there had been lunches in the Pentagon cafeterias, and then dinners at Hall’s and Herzog’s and Normandy Farms, and then dancing at the Shoreham. There had been a quite proper professional weekend visiting the Crageys in Charlottesville. She had been invited to dine at the Walback home, a marble mausoleum big as an embassy, on Massachusetts Avenue, and she had been presented to his mother, an authentic Washington cave dweller. Yet now that the question had been put she found herself off guard, with no answer ready. In a city where unmarried young women outnumber eligible males three to one, this was unfortunate. “Are you serious?” she asked, to gain time.

“Absolutely.”

He was handsome enough, goodness knows. He was witty and companionable. They danced well together, a definite indication, he claimed, that they would get along fine in bed. He deferred to her at the conference table, a tonic for her ego. He was rich. Katharine didn’t remember her own mother, who had died when she was nine, very clearly, but she did remember one thing her mother had said: “Katy, it’s just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor one.” This had been said, half in jest, at the dinner table at the end of a polite argument over a bill at Woody’s. Her father was not poor. His salary, as Military Curator of the Library of Congress, was considerably above the average paid government workers. But he was poor according to the standards of people like the Walbacks. It was curious that out of the total advice her mother must have given her, this alone she recalled exactly. Yet she found it necessary to say, since she was resolutely honest, “Raoul, I’m not sure I love you. If I loved you, we’d be on the way to the mountains right now. You wouldn’t have to bribe me with marriage.”

“You haven’t given me a chance, really, to find out whether you love me or not.”

Katharine inspected him as she never had before. You look at a man differently after he suggests that you live with him for the rest of your life. Raoul did everything properly, everything right. His courtliness was a little something extra, like the dimple in the clean buttress of his chin. She had no doubt that their life together would be a symphony of gracious living, as glossy and impeccable as the color plates in Town and Country and House and Garden. Yet when she projected her thoughts ahead, she was disquieted. He would want her to quit her job, and eventually she would have to because there would be children. She would find her political discussions confined to discreet chitchat at receptions, and her research downgraded to equations involving boiled water, evaporated milk, Karo syrup, and pablum. He would want her to live in the Massachusetts Avenue house, at least for a year or two, but she doubted that twenty rooms would be big enough for both her and Raoul’s mother. Or fifty. She would find herself Mrs. Walback, junior, the one who had tried such an odd career, now producing grandchildren for the Mrs. Walback. She wondered whether, at this moment in history, she wanted children at all. The first legacy that a child should have was a reasonable chance to grow up. She said, “Sorry, Raoul, but I’m going to stay Katy Hume.”

He put his hand on her arm. He was so very civilized, Raoul was. She would bet that he never took a girl without verbal permission. “Think it over some more,” he said. “I’m going to ask again. Perhaps if we tried it out—”

“Are you sure that what you want isn’t simply a twirl with a girl?”

“Plenty of girls in Washington,” he said. “What I want is a wife. I’m choosy. I want you.”

“That’s a very pretty speech,” she said. “I’ll put the matter on the agenda.” 5

Katharine Hume’s apartment was as unorthodox, for a young woman, as her job. Dominating the living room, claiming most of two walls, was an enormous L-shaped desk, built to her specifications from drafting-table boards. Books were stacked on the desk. Books rose to the ceiling above it. Books monopolized most of the remaining wall space, and even narrowed the entrance corridor. From her father she had inherited a minuscule estate but one of the finest private military libraries in the country. She constantly augmented it, and acquired an impressive scientific library of her own. She never loaned a book, she never asked for any other gift, and when in New York she spent her days prowling for books on Fourth Avenue as most women scout for gowns and fur bargains on Fifth. On H-Parity Day she was reading a history of the German General Staff, Nettleship’s book on biophthora, and Sturtevant’s papers on the same subject. Her furniture, an old-fashioned sofa with graceful lines, a few still-sturdy Hepplewhite chairs, a Queen Anne lowboy—all was from the family house in Alexandria. The furniture seemed adrift, the individual pieces scattered like lifeboats in a sea of books.

She read through the late dusk until at last she could no longer ignore hunger and was forced to face a penalty of spinsterhood—the dreary alternatives, cook for herself or eat out alone. There is no joy in cooking for oneself. Even the juiciest roast is tasteless unless spiced with a friend’s praise. And eating in the gayest and most intimate French restaurant, alone, is an experience cold and cheerless as spreading a cloth on a marble counter in a bank. What she needed was a roommate, but the apartment wasn’t big enough for both a roommate and her books. That, or a permanent guy. Trouble was, the commission’s security people would frown on either a roommate or a beau unless they were provided with security clearances as aristocratic as her own. That limited the possibilities considerably. As if she talked in her sleep, or brought home classified documents. Being a logical and farsighted woman, she realized that if Raoul allowed her to eat alone often enough, she’d marry him, mother and all.

She had minute steaks in the refrigerator. She had decided to cook one of these, open a can of peas, and dine at her desk, when someone knocked. She supposed it was Callie Kantor, who worked for Interior and lived down the hall and sublimated, so she said, by raising parakeets and walking to work every morning. If it was Callie, she’d invite her out for a lobster dinner. “Come in,” she called, and opened the door.

Major Price came in, bulking ominous and piratical in the shadowed hallway, his cap tilted over his eye patch and scar. He lived only a few blocks away, on R Street, and he had been to her apartment with a few of the others for a Sunday brunch two weeks before. She was not surprised at his call. The relations of seven people who three days a week face each other across a conference table, as equals, are naturally informal. She said, “Sit down, Jess, and I’ll make you a drink. Bourbon?”

“With water. I saw your lights were on. I wanted to talk.”

“Go ahead, talk.” She went into the kitchen alcove and brought out ice and glasses and mixed drinks at her combination tea table and portable bar.

“I want to explain about this morning.”

“Not necessary,” she said. “Felix was right. You gave us all the information we required.”

“I just don’t believe in telling anyone—anyone at all—about future operations. Only ones who should know are the people who have to know to do their jobs.”

She handed him a drink and said, “Sit down, there.” She indicated the sofa. She sat at her swivel chair at the desk so her head was higher than his, an advantage if this talk was to be serious. “That reasoning is valid,” she said, “up to a point. Is there anything else?”

“Yes, there is,” he said. “There was a wing of B-Two-Nines on Okinawa in ’fifty-one. They were briefed to go up the Korean west coast and hit the Yalu bridges. Everybody in the wing was briefed. Not just the nine crews who were to make the strike. The night before the strike we lost a reconnaissance plane up there. Some of the crew bailed out, and were captured. They were good men, I suppose, but they talked. God knows what the Commie interrogators did to them. Anyway, when the nine B-Two-Nines got over the Yalu they were jumped by sixty Migs. We lost three up there, three more were washed out in forced landings in Japan, and one of the three that got back to Okinawa had its hydraulics shot out and blew up after a belly landing. We never ran unescorted B-Two-Nines up to the Yalu again. If we had got those bridges, just at that time—”

“A personal experience?” she asked.

“Yes. It was my squadron. I blew at Okinawa. The burned child dreads the fire.” He touched the scar with his fingers.

She ran her tongue along her lips. “I understand. But suppose the information I requested had been essential to our plans, our forecasts that were coming up? What then?”

“I don’t think you’d get it.”

“Why not?”

“Because you couldn’t do anything with it. Our group has neither responsibility nor authority. It can’t act, but there is always the possibility it might leak.”

She was angry all over again. She stared down into his single, unwavering, disconcerting gray eye. She told herself that this was, after all, an unofficial discussion, and he was a guest in her house, and she must not lose her temper. “Go on,” she challenged.

“What makes you think that in our echelon we are better equipped to divine the intentions of the enemy than the people right at the top, say the National Security Council?”

She was on her feet. “I’ll tell you why! Because we haven’t anything else to do! It is precisely because we have no responsibility or authority, or administration either, to worry about, that we can do this thing. The people at the top have a million things to do. They can’t devote all their time to the enemy.”

“Stop pacing up and down like a leopard,” he said. “Sit down and take it easy.”

“I won’t take it easy. I’m mad. Take the Secretary of Defense. Next to the President and perhaps the Secretary of State he’s the most important man in the country. He runs three departments, each five times as big as General Motors. These departments are designed to do different things in different ways, and there is more rivalry between them than there is, say, between Oldsmobile and Buick. If you were running fifteen General Motors, but each one more complex than General Motors, do you think you could spend all your spare waking hours reading everything that has ever been written, including all the classified files, about the schism between the Army and the Party in Russia, as Simmons did last week?”

“Well, you have a point,” Price said. “That’s something I hadn’t considered.”

“If you don’t believe in the Intentions Group,” she demanded, “why did you join it?”

“If you’ll sit down I’ll tell you. You make me nervous.” She sat down, irritated by the ring of military command in his voice, but obeying nevertheless. “Two reasons,” he said. “First, Keatton asked me to.” Keatton was General Thomas Keatton, Commander of the Air Force. “Secondly, the Air Force hasn’t any place in its T.O. for one-eyed pilots. They don’t let one-eyed pilots fly a B-Nine-Nine, which is what I ought to be doing to earn my pay. But they will let a one-eyed Pilot sit in on the Intentions Group, and I want to stay in the Air Force.”

“You like the Air Force?”

“Maybe it can save us,” he said. “Maybe.” He finished his drink, rose, and stretched. When he stretched, his arms seemed too long for his frame, and altogether he seemed too large and unwieldy for the apartment. His eye took in the opened books on her desk, the notebook and pencils, and the fact that she still wore the gray suit. “Katy,” he said, “why don’t you relax for twenty-four hours?”

“Do you by any chance have a place in the mountains?” she asked.

“No,” he said, looking puzzled. “I don’t have anything but an apartment no bigger than this. But I do have a car and I can take you out to eat. I hate to eat alone.”

“Just wait a minute,” she said, “while I comb my hair.” 6

After that, for more than a year very little happened. It was an era of comparative peace, with no shooting wars such as the half-forgotten wars of Korea and Indo-China. There was much talk of disarmament, although no nation actually disarmed. There was much talk of neutrality, although few governments were actually neutral. Russia was quiet except when internal convulsions, hidden like earthquakes at the bottom of the sea, ruffled the flat surface exposed to men’s eyes.

Americans were concerned with automobile production, the new television shows, the national road-building program, the possibility that antibodies could be stimulated to fight cancer, and the new space satellite.

The Intentions Group concentrated on its impossibly bold divination of events to come.

Katharine Hume dined out quite often, sometimes with Raoul Walback and sometimes with Jesse Price. Since she also entertained them in her apartment, she added a collection of cookbooks to her library.

Stanley Smith enlisted in the Air Force without difficulty, applied for a rating as Food Service Helper, and passed his aptitude tests easily. After ninety days of basic training he was promoted to Airman 2/c and requested and received assignment to the Strategic Air Command.

Henry Hazen survived boot camp, was trained as a radar operator at Quantico, and was then shipped to Camp Pendleton, California, preparatory to overseas duty.

Nina Pope got a job as a stenographer in a St. Augustine real estate office. In mid-November of the following year, when she was dating an automobile salesman and memory of the night in the dunes had dimmed to the proportions of a bad dream, a B-99 on a training flight from Hibiscus Base, Florida, vanished without trace in the Gulf of Mexico.