by Thomas Disch
"But of what use is it to be a perfect spy, if one can't communicate what one has unearthed? The method that had to be employed was soon obvious to us, but we had to wait for Panofsky-Sub-One to think of it, and sometimes that man can be almost military in his thinking. But at last the solution occurred to him. What we do now is this: At a predetermined time, to be indicated on my desk calendar, Bridgetta-Sub-One receives a call here at Elba from Panofsky-Sub-One who is in another city. Today it was Moscow. Once the connection has been established, it is a simple matter for the Panofsky-Sub-Two then in Moscow to be on hand and give his report at the same time.
"It requires a bit of hithering and thithering on Panofsky-Sub-One's part. Usually he goes from Moscow, after the curtain falls at the Bolshoi, to Paris for supper, and returns to Moscow next day for another performance -- and to make the phone call. The sublimated Panofsky does not, of course, appear on the screen of Bridgetta's receiver, but on this one, which has itself been sublimated, he does appear. There is no sound, for the Panofsky-Sub-One on the other end has only the air he has brought with him. But we have learned to lip-read, so that is hunky-dory."
"Hunky-dory!" Jet whispered, with a shudder. "Not hunky-dory!"
While the first Panofsky sat back to savor his Americanism, the other sighed. "I wish there were some simpler way. This method is so wasteful of lives. There are none of the resources in those other cities that we have here at Elba. It is hard to bring everything one requires for even a short visit. The breathing equipment is bulky, and the secret service guards think it strange that Panofsky-Sub-One should always insist on bringing it along."
"Fortunately," the first Panofsky interrupted (they were neither wearing the skull cap at the moment), "he has a reputation for eccentricity. He has invented a delightfully paranoid theory concerning foreign germs."
The two Panofskys smiled in ironic appreciation of this theory.
"But there are compensations," said the second.
"Oh, yes. There is usually time to see one last performance, and from a vantage better even than the conductor's. Since being sublimated I have seen nothing, less than nothing. Here we are in one of the chief cities of the world, the capital of the most affluent culture on earth, and have you ever seen what is called ballet here? It is vomit! I protest against it vehemently. But in Moscow . . . ah! Tonight, for instance, we were told that Malinova was extraordinary in the second act of Giselle ."
The second Panofsky sighed more deeply. "Now more than ever does it seem rich to die. For him , that is."
"Exactly. We shall both be dead inside of two weeks. And we will never have seen that Giselle . I'd willingly give two weeks of my life to see that."
"Two weeks?" Hansard asked.
"Oh, Bernard!" Bridgetta cried out. "You promised not to say anything."
"My dear, excuse me. It just slipped out."
"Why should you be dead in two weeks?" asked Hansard. "There's something you've been keeping back from me. I've felt it in the air ever since I came here."
"May I tell him?" Panofsky inquired of Bridgetta.
"What choice is there now? Nathan, don't look like that. I didn't want you to know, because . . . because we were so happy."
"In two weeks, Captain Hansard, all hell breaks loose. To be precise, on the first of June. My double in Moscow just informed us that the Kremlin is being as foolishly resolute and resolutely foolish as Washington."
"I find that hard to believe," said Hansard.
"Nevertheless, it is so. Bridgetta, may I show him the letter?"
"Try to understand, Mr. Hansard," Bridie said (for Bridgetta, in tears now, was able to do no more than nod her head yes), "that when Bridget followed you that day and took this out of its hiding place in the Monument, she was only concerned to find out who you were. We had no way of knowing if we could trust you. We weren't expecting anything of this sort."
"You mean to say you opened that attaché case? But it was Priority-A!"
Panofsky removed a folded paper from his coat pocket and handed it to Hansard. "The case contained only this letter, Nathan. And since this letter was signed, a month ago, nothing has altered."
After he had digested the President's written order, after he had convinced himself of its authenticity, Hansard said, "But the diplomats . . . Or the United Nations . . ."
"No," said Jet dismally. "I've been watching them here in Washington every day. The President, the Secretary of Defense, the Russian ambassador -- none of them will unbend. Because CASS-9 won't. They've become the slaves of that computer. And now the President and the Cabinet and all the important officers of the Pentagon have gone into hiding. They've been away for a week. It bodes no good."
"I simply can't believe that if nobody wants the war -- "
"Has anybody ever wanted the war? But it was bound to happen, you know. The whole effectiveness of our arsenal as a deterrent force was based on the possibility of it being used. Now that possibility will be realized."
"But there's been no aggression, no provocation . . ."
"CASS-9, apparently, does not need to be provoked. I'll confess that, with respect to game theory, I am naďve."
The second Panofsky, who had been listening intently the while, hit the arm of his wheel chair with his fist and swore.
"He is so especially distressed," his double explained, "because he knows he could stop it. If only there were a way for him to speak to Panofsky-Sub-One."
"If all that you say is true, though," Hansard said, deliberately, "it seems to be too late for the explanations of men of good will."
"You mistake my meaning, Nathan. He, Bernard Panofsky, singlehanded, could stop the war -- snap! like that. It is all written out on vellum; a splendid, magnificent, preposterous plan. But it cannot be carried through by any of us, only by someone of the Real World. And so it is all no good, a failure . . ."
"Singlehanded?" Hansard asked, with a note of proessional incredulity.
"Alas, yes," said both Panofskys in chorus.
Then one of them removed the skull cap from his pocket and put it on his head. "If you please, Bernard -- I will tell him how."
THIRTEEN
MARS
Here there were no usual measures of time. The Camp lived on a twenty-four -hour earth-day; but a complete rotation of Mars took thirty-six minutes longer, so that only once in forty days was the high noon of the sun in perfect agreement with the high noon dictated by the clocks on the wall.
Five weeks of anxious waiting had slipped by in a twinkling. Five weeks in a limbo of inactivity and the ritual gesturing of the run-throughs and inspections. Five weeks going up and down the olive-drab corridors, eating tinfoil dinners, swilling hot coffee, thinking the same well-worn thoughts which, through repetition (just as the food seemed to lose its flavor day by day), grew wearisome and were set aside.
Like a spring brook in the dry season of the year, conversation subsided to a trickle. The enlisted men passed the long hours with endless poker games. General Pittmann kept more and more to himself, and so, perforce, did Captain Hansard.
A strange condition, a condition difficult to describe except in negatives. Life was reduced to a minimum of automatic processes -- waking, sleeping, eating, walking here and there, watching the time slip by, listening to silences. The Camp's narrow world of rooms and corridors came to seem somehow . . . unreal.
Or was it himself that seemed so? He had read a story once, or seen a movie, of a man who sold his shadow -- or perhaps it was his reflection in a mirror. Hansard felt like that now -- as though at the moment of the Mars jump five weeks before, he had lost some essential, if intangible, part of himself. A soul perhaps, though he didn't exactly believe he had one.
He wished that the countermand to the President's order would come, but he wished even more that be might be called back to the fuller reality of earth. Yet these were neither very strong wishes, for the reservoirs of all desire were drying up within him. He wished mainly for an ending, any ending, an
event to accent this drear, uninflected, trickling time.
So perhaps there had been a sort of wisdom behind the decision to keep the men at the Mars Command Posts two months at a stretch, even though there was no technical necessity for it, the same wisdom that is at the root of all the compulsory dullness of military life. For boredom makes a soldier that much more able and that much more willing to perform the task that it is especially given a soldier to perform.
Ex-Sergeant John Worsaw sat in the guard bay before the door to the control room reading a tattered personalized novel. Because of his reading habits, Worsaw had a reputation around Camp Jackson/Mars as an intellectual. This was an exaggeration, of course. But, as he liked to point out in his more ponderous moments (after about two beers), you couldn't get anywhere in the year 1990 without brains, and brains wouldn't do you much good either -- without an education. (Worsaw had earned a College Equivalent Diploma in Technics.) Take Wolf Smith, for example, the Army chief of staff. That was a man who had more facts at his command than a CASS-9 computer. For a man like Smith, facts were like ammunition.
Facts. Worsaw had nothing but contempt for people who couldn't face hard facts. Like that fairy Pittmann in the control room now, worrying about the bombs probably, and afraid of the button. No one had told Worsaw of the President's order, but he knew what was in the air by the looks on the two officers' faces. What were they scared about, as long as they were here on Mars? It was the sons of bitches back on earth who had to worry!
Thinking something to this effect, though rather more hazily, Worsaw found that he had read down a quarter of a page of the novel without taking any of it in. With a more concentrated effort, he returned to the last passage he remembered:
Worsaw lobbed another grenade in the bunker entrance and threw himself flat, pressing his face into the jungle dirt. Thunder rent the air, and thick yellow smoke belched from the crumbling structure.
"That oughta do it, Snooky!" yelled the corporal, thumbing the safety off his M-14. "Let's mop up now." And Corporal O'Grady leaped to his feet.
"Look out, Lucky!" Even as Worsaw screamed, it was too late. The sniper bullets had caught O'Grady in a vicious cross-fire, spinning him and flinging him mudward, a dead man.
"The yellow-belly sons of bitches," Worsaw muttered. "They'll pay for this!"
A few feet away the blood of Lucky O'Grady seeped out into the jungle soil. The man who had been Worsaw's best friend had run out of luck at last.
Strangely moved by this last paragraph, Worsaw laid his book aside. He had heard someone coming down the corridor, and it was likely, at this hour of the day, with the men playing cards in their barracks, to be Hansard. The captain spent a lot of his time roaming about in the corridors.
"General Pittmann?"
"Yes, he's inside, sir."
Hansard went into the control room, closing the door after him. Worsaw cursed him softly; but there was in that quiet obscenity a trace of respect, even affection. Despite the pressure to restore his rank that Worsaw had put on him through Ives (who owed Worsaw more than a few favors and could be counted on to pay his debt), Hansard wasn't backing down. Which showed guts. Worsaw admired guts.
But the deeper motive of Worsaw's admiration was simply that he knew Hansard to be a veteran of Viet Nam, the last of the big fighting wars. Worsaw himself had been born four years too late to enlist for that war and so he had never, to his chagrin, undergone a soldier's baptism by fire. He had never known, and now perhaps he never would, what it was like to look at a man through the sights of a loaded rifle, squeeze the trigger and see that man fall dead. Life had cheated Worsaw of that supreme experience, and it had offered very little by way of compensation. Why else, after all, does a person go Army?
He fished the novel out of his back pocket and started to read again. He skipped ahead to the chapter he liked best, the burning of the village of Tam Chau. The anonymous author described it very well, with lots of convincing details. Worsaw liked a realistic-type novel that showed what life was like.
FOURTEEN
THE BRIDE
Love will intrude itself into places where it simply has no business to be -- into lives or stories that are just too occupied with other matters to give it its due. But somehow it can always be squeezed in. Marriage is an exemplary institution for this purpose, because conjugal love can usually "go without saying," whereas the more exotic forms of romance demand the stage all to themselves, scornful of the ordinary business of life. A married man can divide his life comfortably in half, into a private and a public sector which need never, so long as both run smoothly along, impinge upon each other.
Thus Hansard had fallen in love, paid court, proposed, been accepted, and now it is the very morning of the wedding -- and all these things have already taken place, as it were, in the wings. We should not suppose, because of this, that Hansard's was a milder sort of love than another man's, or that the romance was so ordinary and undistinguished as to be without interest for us -- or even, perhaps, for the principals involved. We need only point out the singular circumstance that the rivals of the beloved were essentially her exact doubles to dispel such a notion.
No, if there were time, it would be most interesting to linger over their month-long idyll, to document the days and nights, to smile at the follies, to record the quicksilver weathers of their growing love. For instance, notice how Hansard's expression has relaxed. There is a sparkle in his eyes that we have not seen there before. Or is it, perhaps, that they seem deeper? He smiles more often -- there can be no doubt of that; and even when he is not smiling there is something about his lips . . . what is it? Do they seem fuller now? See, too, how his jaw has relaxed, and when he turns his head how the tendons are less prominent. Small changes, but taken as a whole they give his face an altogether different stamp. Surely it is a change for the better.
Already it is May 26, the morning of the wedding. How quickly a month can go by! And is there no time left to tell how splendid a month it has been, or what has been happening back there in the wings? By all means, let us take the time, while the bride and her three bridesmaids (for Bridgetta-Sub-One had gone through the transmitter once more, increasing the Sub-Two population by one; and the newcomer immediately assumed the role of Bridget, for the bride would now be neither Bridie nor Jet nor yet Bridget, but Mrs. Hansard), the two Panofskys, and Hansard are walking down the May-morning streets to the church.
The month had gone by as though they'd been playing a game all the while. There had been such fun . Sometimes Hansard spent the day alone with "his" Bridgetta; at other times one or more of her doubles would come out with them to "swim" in the municipal police station or in the Senate buildings. He and Bridgetta had made love in heaps of flowers in a florist's window. They had taken picnic lunches to diplomatic dinners where, because there was no room for them around the table, they had sat on top and dangled their legs through the tablecloth.
They'd played tennis, singles and doubles, after spreading slices of the linoleum rugs about the court so that they wouldn't lose the tennis balls. The greatest lark, once Hansard got over his embarrassment at playing a child's game, had been Bridgetta's special version of hide-and-seek which they played in the most crowded streets and offices of the city while the sober workaday population milled about them.
They'd sneaked into the most expensive theatres and left during the first act if they found the play not to their liking -- left without any regret for the money wasted. (And, more often than not, the plays were boring because they had to be seen in dumb show.) At especially bad performances, Hansard and one or more Bridgettas would get up on the stage and ham it up themselves.
Such fun, and much, much more, too; gentler moments that might be only a word, a caress, a glance, forgotten as quickly as it happened. But what, if not the sum of such moments, is love? A moment, a month -- how quickly -- and here they are already on the way to the church!
The bride was wearing a makeshift gown sewn together from damask
tablecloths and synthetic lace plundered from various articles of lingerie, no one back in the Real World having had the forethought, or the occasion, to provide for such a contingency as this today. If only fashion were considered, the bridesmaids might have been thought a good deal better dressed than the bride. But the bride was wrapped in the glory of a myth that quite out-tops all that fashion can do.
Both Panofskys were wearing formal clothes, because they had usually set off through the transmitters attired formally for the theatre. Hansard, however, had nothing better than his everyday uniform, for which the hat was still missing.
The church was crowded when they arrived, and there was no room for the invisible intruders except before the altar. Bridie put a tape of the Tannhäuser wedding march on the portable phonograph and let it play at medium volume. There was a stir in the waiting crowd, and heads turned to regard the bride advancing down the center aisle, her train borne up by three children. "A pity we couldn't get orange blossoms for you, my dear," Panofsky whispered to the bride-to-be, who was holding a bouquet of yesterday's wilted roses, the transmitters of Elba having provided nothing more appropriate for the day.
