Fail-Safe

by Eugene Burdick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He had been doing it ever since.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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