Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  Thorne was trying to concentrate. He had only a vague notion about where this was going, where it was leading; he felt suddenly anxious, but not simply on account of the gun or because of Marcia’s fear.

  “It was considered a great prize, John. Just think what the lucky country might achieve if it won the Big UFO Lottery, eh? Well, I’m trying to tell you that this was the climate in which Asterisk was born.”

  Leach reached for his cane, pushed himself into a standing position, moved a little way across the room. He paused with his back to the window.

  “It was decided at presidential level that the United States would possess its own flying saucer,” he said. “Do you know what I’m saying? The great presidential mentality perceived a golden opportunity, John. Our own flying saucer—”

  “I don’t understand you,” Thorne said.

  “A simple scheme. I believe the modern phrase would be, we wanted to psych our enemies out. If they learned that we had a UFO, what would the effect be on them? Right? Do you think it’s clever? Anyhow, this is what we did. We built a flying saucer.”

  “You expect me to believe this?” Thorne asked.

  “I hardly give a shit one way or the other, John. Don’t ask me to care what you believe.”

  Thorne looked at the automatic.

  “Anyhow, the UFO was duly built in a missile site at Oscura, New Mexico. A full-scale model, beautifully constructed on the basis of photographs and films. It was later moved to its present site. I won’t go into the reasons for the transfer now … But it was built. The second stage of Asterisk was more difficult. Understand the high-level nuclear mentality, John. It’s mainly fear and suspicion and total secrecy. You’re with me?”

  Thorne nodded.

  “Good,” Leach said. “Now try to imagine this. We want our Soviet pals to know that we have this … object. We want them to find out that it’s real. It’s not a mock-up, it’s not a phony, it’s the genuine article. And we want them to think this because we want to play on their fears of losing, of dropping so far behind in the Great Escalation that it’s almost a joke. We have a goddamn flying saucer! You fellows can go shit in the river! That’s the attitude, John. That’s the way the mind works at that level. So, how do we fool the Russians?”

  Thorne, filled with disbelief, shook his head.

  “We can’t let the information fall into their hands just like that, can we? That stinks, John. And they’re not idiots. They can smell a plant. So what do we do? Very simple. We create an intense secrecy around Escalante. We staff it with the most curious personnel you ever saw on a hard missile site. Bit by bit, their intelligence picks up on the weirdness of this personnel. We arrange for that to happen. They’re interested. But that’s not enough. We need to find someone who will feel so strongly about the Asterisk that he’ll want to defect to the Soviets. But that’s still not enough. We want it also to seem that we’re trying to prevent such a defection. The staff at Escalante is populated with people who might by any standards be called security problems. Not risks, problems. Are you still with me, John? Good.”

  Leach licked his lips, which seemed to have become dry.

  “Good,” he said again. “In the course of a few years, one or two people want to make this Asterisk affair public. A couple of humanitarian scientists who think it should be universal knowledge. Types like yourself, John. They want to go to the newspapers. This is too big, they say. They try to get the information out. They’re killed—”

  “Killed?”

  “Precisely,” Leach said. “Remember—they can’t be seen to escape at the drop of a hat, can they?”

  “Major General Burckhardt,” Thorne said.

  “Yes. Among others.” Leach paused. He looked up at the ceiling a moment. “But this still isn’t enough. Killing potential publicists, creating a strange personnel list, it gives the Soviets something to go on, a bone to nibble on, if you like. More is needed. An Asterisk Project Committee—APC—is created. Some of the best people, John, sit on that committee and they have some information on Asterisk, some, but I’m the only member of that committee who knows Asterisk is a charade.”

  “You expect me—”

  “Don’t ask me again, John, I’ll tell you the same thing. I don’t give a damn if you believe me or not.”

  “But—”

  Leach made a gesture with the gun. “Anyway, a couple of potential threats, like Burckhardt, are killed. Now the Soviets must know that something big is going on. After all, we’re killing our own men.”

  Thorne felt he was standing on the edge of a chasm of total disbelief; it was as if he had been told that everything he believed in was completely false, utterly hollow. “You’re asking me to believe that we killed our own people just because—”

  “Ah,” Leach said. “The cynicism in this thinking is bedazzling, John. The technical staff chosen for duty at Escalante were all dragged out of retirement and told they could pursue whatever research they liked. They were told nothing about any flying saucer. If they happened to see it, and if one or two of them thought they wanted to blow the thing open, well … they were old men, and pretty tired ones, and the waste wasn’t anything really tragic—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Thorne said.

  “The nuclear fear mentality,” Leach said. “You’re underestimating it.”

  “I don’t—” He broke off, looked at Marcia, whose mouth was partly open, whose eyes now were without expression.

  “Finally, a man came along who felt, like you, that Asterisk was too important for one country. He also felt, I guess, that the balance of power would be so distorted by our having this wonderful source of technology that he saw only disaster lying ahead. He defected. He fought our attempts to kill him—I’m glad to say—and two days ago he defected to the Soviets with a false file on Asterisk, a file that contains some specifications on antigravity and not much else. But now the Soviets think we’ve got something. And Asterisk, finally, is an unqualified success.”

  “Unqualified?” Thorne felt dizzy, lightheaded, his weight cast off, as if he had swallowed some kind of soporific. He held Marcia tighter. There was a gloating quality in Leach’s voice and a curious light in his eye; he looked like a man who has seen the realization of a dream which, in the first place, was demented.

  “Yes. Unqualified,” he said. “Doesn’t it strike you that way? Our enemies think we have a flying saucer, John.”

  Thorne looked at the gun again. Stall, he thought. What else? Try to stall. “What does Foster know about this?”

  “Foster inherited the whole shooting works. He doesn’t like it much but what can you do in the middle of a ball game? What can you do?”

  “I don’t believe Foster would support anything as murderous as this,” Thorne said. And thought: But now, now you are prepared to believe almost anything. A UFO dreamed up by a committee of lunatics whose madness lay somewhere at the heart of a possible nuclear holocaust, whose idiocy stemmed from some disease of power. You can believe almost anything now. The sheer fucking waste of lives—you can believe even that. A man defects because he believes in the balance of a hideous power—and for what? Because he has been manipulated, he has become a toy in a game, a jagged fragment of glass in the kaleidoscope. And me, Thorne thought—what about me? What have I come through all this for? To die at the point of a gun? But what was his death, what was Marcia’s—when you realized that others had been killed; when you knew that even the builders of Asterisk must have lost their lives? What were a couple more?

  He watched Leach hobble across the floor. He felt the black depression of a cage. Trapped. They were trapped and there was going to be more waste … was there a point along the way, a clearing, a space in all this where it would stop? Stall: Jesus Christ, stall. Make time, make space. He watched Leach where he now stood in the doorway of the kitchen, the small gun in his hand. His eyes were barely more than two slits in the chalky face, his forehead grooved: the old pol and his last monstrous achievement. Time, T
horne thought. Make time.

  “What would happen if the Russians said they’ve got a UFO of their own?”

  Leach coughed slightly. “It isn’t something we’ve ever discussed and I don’t intend to debate it with you now.”

  “The whole scheme—” Thorne said: the whole scheme was what? What words did he have? What kind of inadequate language?

  “The whole scheme worked,” Leach said. “It worked.”

  “And that’s the only criterion?”

  “The only one.” Leach leaned against the wall, looking at them. “Babes in the woods. The pair of you.”

  Thorne felt a dreadful dryness inside his mouth, as if his tongue were swollen and heavy, as if he might never speak again. He looked at Marcia: how in hell had he contrived to drag this lovely woman into such a lunacy? She was pale, her hair untidy as it dried, her lips cracked. She shouldn’t have to die because of him. In his stupidity, in his naïvety, he had drawn her through the whole shit mess. Time, he thought. I must find time. He couldn’t let this happen to her.

  But the gun. The gun.

  “So now you know,” Leach said. “And now I’m going to have to kill you both because it doesn’t make much difference any longer. I’m tired. The game has tired me. But I want this last thing to be a success. Do you understand that? I want this last thing to work.”

  Thorne caught the look in Marcia’s eyes, couldn’t define it: resignation? Had she reached that point? He had to get her out of all this. But what were you supposed to do? Go down on your knees? Pray? Leach, I’ve been a bad boy and I’m very sorry and it won’t happen again no-sir Mister Congressman, sir? He saw the light of a flickering determination on Leach’s face and he thought: You can see the old guy in the smoke-filled rooms of legend, issuing patronage like rubber checks, you can see him slice a political opponent, banish his enemies to some bewildering oblivion, you could even see him pass down the orders that would mean death, death for some greater cause—but what you couldn’t see was any appetite there for using the gun, as if—faced with the prospect of having to pull that trigger himself, face to face with physical victims—he were concerned over the mess on the rug, the disposal of flesh, the sounds that might disturb his neighbors. You could see that all this was real for him for the very first time, not some contract that passed across a desk, not a document he could rubber-stamp, not even an ugly whisper on a telephone line. It was real for him.

  No: do I underestimate?

  Beside him, he could hear Marcia’s breathing, feel the insistent beat of a pulse in her wrist. You can’t let it happen to her, Thorne: not for all the power plays and schemes and nuclear idiocies in the world. Leach had called it a game: okay, it was a game but it was wretchedly late in the day to be learning the rules for the first time.

  Marcia sighed suddenly; Leach, in the manner of one who has arrived at an impossible conclusion, who likes the outcome, was smiling. The gun, Thorne thought. Go for the gun. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do? They’ll get you in the desert anyway. He could hear echoes in his own head, voices coming back from all the shuttered rooms of memory. Run for Congress. Go to Paris. I want you to send roses, red roses. Vital, vital. He didn’t expect to be allowed to live. Faces: Burckhardt standing in a cemetery, Anna gripping his wrist. Morgenthau leading him down a brick corridor to a tunnel. Somewhere in there, somewhere in that untidy grouping of snapshots, there had to be an exit.

  Major General Burckhardt.

  Major General—

  Leach gestured with the gun, no longer smiling now. The room streamed away from Thorne, appeared to tilt on its axis, and for a moment he imagined he was going to lose all balance, go down, lie there powerless to prevent Leach from picking his spot, any spot. He held on to Marcia. This is the most terrible room of my life.

  He will pull the trigger: he doesn’t have the stomach for it but he’ll do it anyway. Old Glory. Stars and Stripes forever. The flag—who named the flag, John? Who called it Old Glory? Said to be one William Driver, sea captain, of Salem, Mass. Correct. How many stars were there on the original flag? No, that’s a trick question, a snare.

  Burckhardt—

  How did you get me into this?

  An attaché case, right?

  A blank manuscript, no?

  Major General—

  He looked at Leach. Was it a clock ticking? a faucet leaking? The sound of coffee kicking against the lid of a percolator? He closed his eyes a moment; a faint impression of Leach’s face in the dark of his head.

  “Congressman,” he said. It wasn’t his own voice. It was distorted, maybe the sound of a flawed Dictabelt. Truth is the divine ventriloquist, dummy. “Congressman,” he said again. Opening his eyes, he looked at the gun. There wasn’t a hope in hell of seizing it away. There were no choices, no other routes now: this is where you committed yourself to a course of action.

  Leach was watching him: the look said, I know what you’re doing, John. I know you have an eye on the second hand running down to the minute. I know.

  “Congressman—what I want to know is how you’re going to save your own ass.”

  “Me? I think you’re confusing things, John. I think you’ve got it a little mixed up there.”

  “I don’t think so,” Thorne said. He wanted to sit; he wanted to lie down. Suddenly it scared him to realize that he had stepped beyond caring now; he had arrived at some stage, some transcendental point at which dying no longer interested him personally. It was something you saw from outside; an event you witnessed as an observer. Fight it, he thought. Fight that one.

  Leach said, “You can’t try to shit me, John. Nobody’s been able to do that in a quarter of a century.”

  “I’m not trying,” Thorne said. Horribly, his mind was a blank: his mind was an empty cartridge, a dud. Something you fired but that didn’t make a dent on any target.

  “What the hell are you trying?”

  “Major General Burckhardt—”

  “Yeah?”

  Pause: Marcia’s pulse. “He left me an attaché case.”

  Leach laughed. “I heard.”

  “You heard?”

  “Yeah.” The congressman wiped his mouth with the corner of a handkerchief. Inside, from a deep point, he was coming apart; some central seam was unraveling.

  “You heard about the case.” Thorne looked at Marcia a moment. “He wasn’t a great stylist, was he?”

  Marcia shook her head. “Dangling participles and mixed metaphors, all over—”

  Leach interrupted quickly: “John, John, John. I’ve been around too long. I don’t have milk behind my ears. I have other people’s bullshit, that’s all.”

  It wouldn’t work: but there was nothing else left to play. Thorne stared at the congressman: “Still, the man’s grammar isn’t what should interest you, Leach.”

  “What should I be interested in?”

  “The whereabouts of the manuscript,” Thorne said.

  Leach paused a moment. “John, there were blank papers in that case. I know.”

  “No, Congressman. There were no blank papers except for the ones I put in there.”

  Leach smiled. You old shit, Thorne thought: you’re suddenly enjoying yourself, getting off on all this.

  “You’re asking me to believe, if I can get this straight, that Burckhardt left you a manuscript?” Leach laughed again, then coughed, and went into his routine with the handkerchief, flapping it around his lips. “What was it, John? The story of a flying saucer? Huh? Aliens from space?”

  “Something like that.” Thorne felt a chill, an emptiness of the heart. What more could he offer?

  “Let me get it together, John. Burckhardt thought the saucer was for real. Okay? So even if I believe in this manuscript, and I don’t, what could it be but the stupid ramblings of an old guy we’d have no trouble in proving was off the wall in no uncertain fashion?”

  Answer that, Thorne thought: answer that. Lost at the crossroads. Mapless in bad territory. Which way did you go? A coin
tossed in the hair or a random sequence of bones thrown on the rug—what the hell difference did it make? There was no UFO: only Asterisk. Only the counterfeit.

  But the sole logic here is that of survival.

  The only valid syllogism is the one that concludes: We’re alive. What else?

  “Congressman,” he said, “I don’t believe I’m getting through to you. Burckhardt’s papers—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Thorne feigned a resignation he didn’t feel. Have it your way, Leach. “I just wanted you to know.”

  “Tell me, John. Tell me what it is you want me to know about these—these papers.”

  “You’re being obtuse, Congressman.”

  “How?”

  “Names. Names and dates and places. That’s how fucking obtuse you’re being.”

  Leach motioned with the gun. “You’re asking me to believe that when your young corpses turn up, or if you should suddenly vanish off the face of the earth, then this ridiculous manuscript becomes public? How? Donaldson?”

  “You don’t expect me to answer that, do you?” Thorne heard himself laugh, a high-pitched quirky noise. “The problem for you, Leach, is how to get your own ass out of it—”

  “No,” Leach said. “I don’t buy it. If Burckhardt had left you anything but blanks, if he had left you this … let’s jokingly call it information … why didn’t you blow it before now?”

  Easy, Thorne thought. The structure is weakening.

  From somewhere in the building he could hear the sound of an elevator rising in its shaft.

  “Why? Because I thought it was totally crazy, that’s why. I wanted to check it. Wouldn’t you?”

  Leach said nothing.

  Press it, Thorne thought. Go straight to the target. You could see the doubts begin. All you could hope for now was that the congressman was so far gone into a world of treachery, betrayal, and madness, a world in which truth values were assigned to phony propositions, in which lies were truths, in which conspiracy was standard behavior, so far gone into the demented mythology of power, that even a mythical manuscript would be believed. Play that card, he thought. It’s Leach’s world: turn it around against him, throw it back in his face.