An hour later, and Lilith had had to go to work. The saki was dwindling fast. Mark was feeling good. Joanna was feather-light in his lap, while he and Frank talked around her.
Mark had been living with Joanna for almost two years now. Sometimes it struck him as strange, that he had gotten himself involved with a total monogamist. It had changed his lifestyle, sure—and he liked it. Granted he didn’t dare sleep with anyone else; but he didn’t get into as many fights either. And he still met interesting people. He’d been afraid that would end.
“You’d have a hell of a time getting back in shape,” said Frank.
“Huh?” Mark tried to remember what they’d been talking about. Oh, yeah: the duels they’d fought on the racing circuit years ago. For Mark the dirt tracks were a spectator sport these days. He still had the muscles, but he had grown a great soft pillow of a beer belly. He glanced down and said, “Right. Well, Joanna’s making me have the baby.”
“Fair’s fair,” Joanna said. “You lost the toss.”
“I’m gettin’ too old for fooling around. I should sign up permanently with Randall.” He picked up Joanna and set her on her feet (yes, the muscles were still there) and went to the kitchen for the last of the saki. He called, “What do we do if the Hammer hits?”
“Don’t be there,” Stoner answered. A few seconds later, “Don’t be at the beach either. Don’t be near a coastline. Three out of four it’d be an ocean strike. Bring me a beer.”
“Yeah.”
“You got a map of the fault lines in California, don’t you?”
Mark was sure he did. He began hunting for it.
Frank said, “I think I’d want the same bike I took to Mexico. The big single, the Honda four-stroke. Not so much problem getting spare parts.” Frank let his mind track possibilities, taking its time. He and Joanna and Mark, they’d known each other a long time. They didn’t have to talk just to fill in silences, though Mark did have a touch of that. “You’d have to think about riots and rip-offs. The rain and the tidal waves and earthquakes, they’d wipe out all the services, cops included. I guess I’d want gas and bike parts hidden outside the city, someplace where nobody could steal them.”
“Guns?”
“I brought a souvenir back from ’Nam. Registered lost.”
“So did I.” Mark gave up on the map. “We’d want a siphon. For a while you’d find abandoned cars—”
“I always carry a siphon.”
“Hey. Why don’t we get together about the time the head’s supposed to pass?”
Frank didn’t answer immediately. Joanna said, “Even if nothing happens, it’d be a great comet-watching party. Maybe we could get Lilith in.”
Frank Stoner thought it over for a few seconds longer than was tactful. He did not make promises lightly, and the comet was becoming real to him. Mark was a good man in a fight, but he couldn’t always do what he said he could do, and he tended to drop things, and there was that brand-new beer belly. To Frank, that belly was a piece of personal sloppiness. Still…“Yeah. Okay. Not here, though. Say we take some sleeping bags up onto Mulholland the night before.”
Mark raised his saki cup in salute. “Good. It’d take a bitch of a tsunami to reach that high. And we could go off the road if we had to.” He would have been displeased if he could have followed Frank’s reasoning.
Frank was concerned for Joanna. He didn’t think Mark could protect her. And Joanna, with her kung fu training and Women’s Lib self-confidence, probably thought she could protect herself.
■
It took Eileen almost half a minute to realize that Mr. Corrigan was sitting on the edge of her desk, studying her. Bolt upright at her desk, she sat with her fingers motionless on the keyboard. Her eyes seemed to study a blank wall…and then, somehow, they found Corrigan in the foreground. She said, “Yah!”
“Hi. It’s me,” said Corrigan. “Care to talk about it?”
“I don’t know, Boss.”
“About a month ago I would have sworn you were in love. You’d come in with that sappy look, and sometimes you’d be dead tired and grinning all over. I thought your efficiency would go down, but it didn’t.”
“It was love,” she said, and smiled. “His name’s Tim Hamner. He’s indecently rich. He wants me to marry him. He said so last night.”
“Um,” said Corrigan, not liking that. “The crucial question, of course, is whether the business will collapse without you.”
“Naturally that was the first thing I thought of,” said Eileen, but with a pensive look that Corrigan didn’t quite know how to take.
“Occupational hazard,” he said briskly. “Do you love him?”
“Oh…yes. But…nuts. I’ve already made up my mind,” she said, “but I don’t have to like it.” And she attacked her typewriter with a ferocity that drove Corrigan back to his own desk.
She called Tim three times before she found him home. Her first words were, “Tim? I’m sorry, but the answer’s no.”
Long pause. Then, “Okay. Can you tell me why?”
“I’ll try. It’s…it’d make what I’ve been doing look silly.”
“I don’t see that.”
“Just before we met I made Assistant General Manager at Corrigan Plumbing Supplies.”
“You told me. Listen, if you’re afraid of losing your independence, I’ll settle, say, a hundred thousand dollars on your cringing head and you’ll be as independent as anyone.”
“I don’t know how I knew you’d say that, but…that isn’t it. It’s me. I’d change more than I’d like. I made myself what I am, and I want to stay proud of the result.”
“You want to keep your job?” Tim had trouble getting the word out; he must have thought the idea was silly. But—“Okay.”
Eileen pictured herself arriving at Corrigan’s every morning in a chauffeured limousine—and she laughed. After that, things went all to hell.
■
Colleen was reading a paperback novel. Her hair was in curlers. She’d switched on the stereo, and sometimes her fingers tapped in rhythm on the table beside her easy chair.
Fred wondered wistfully what she was hearing. He knew what she was reading; he couldn’t see the title, but the cover bore a woman in long, flowing garments in the foreground and a castle in the background, with one lighted window. Gothics were all alike, outside and in. And he didn’t mind the curlers. She looked cute in them. Half the joy was in the anticipation. Soon, soon, they would meet. Sometimes the guilt was overwhelming. Then the mad temptation would come on Fred Lauren: to destroy his telescope, to destroy himself, before he could hurt Colleen. But that really was insane. A month and a week from now he would be dead anyway, and so would she. Any hurt he did her would be a passing thing, and done for love.
For love. Fred yearned for the girl in his telescope. His hands were tender on the little wheels that controlled the image, and the fingers trembled. It was too soon, much too soon.
June: Two
General, you don’t have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, 1961
The policy of the United States remains unchanged. Upon confirmation of actual nuclear attack on this nation, our strategic forces will inflict unacceptable damage on the enemy.
Pentagon spokesman, 1975
Sergeant Mason Jefferson Lawton was SAC and proud of it. He was proud of the sharply creased coveralls, and the blue scarf at his throat, and the white gloves. He was proud of the .38 on his hip.
It was late afternoon in Omaha. The day had been hot. Mason glanced at his watch again, and just as he did, the KC-135 swept out of the sky and down the runway. It taxied over to the unloading area where Mason waited. The first man out was a colonel permanently stationed at Offutt. Mason recognized him. The next man fit the photograph Security had furnished. They came over to the jeep.
“ID, please?” Mason asked.
The colonel took his out without a word. Senator Jellison frowned.
“I just came in on the General’s plane, with your own colonel—”
“Yes, sir,” Mason said. “But I need to see your ID.”
Jellison nodded, amused. He took a leather folder from an inside pocket, then grinned as the sergeant came to an even more rigid position of attention. The card was Jellison’s Air Force Reserve Officer ID, and showed him to be a lieutenant general. And that, Jellison thought, ought to shake the kid up.
If it did, Mason showed no other signs. He waited while another officer brought Jellison’s bag and put it in the jeep. They drove down the runway past the specially equipped Looking Glass ship. There were three of those ships, and one was in the air at all times. They carried a Strategic Air Command general officer and staff.
Back at the end of World War II, SAC Headquarters was put in Omaha, at the center of the U.S. The command center itself was built four stories belowground, and reinforced with concrete and steel. The Hole was supposed to withstand anything—but that was before ICBMs and H-bombs. Now there were no illusions. If the Big One came off, the Hole was doomed. That wouldn’t keep SAC from controlling its forces, because Looking Glass couldn’t be brought down. No one except its pilots ever knew where it was.
Mason ushered the Senator into the big brick building and up the stairs to General Bambridge’s office. The office had an old-fashioned air about it. The wooden furniture, most with leather upholstery, was ancient. So was the huge desk. The walls were lined with shelves, each holding USAF models: WWII fighters, a huge B-36 with its improbable pusher props and jet pods, a B-52, missiles of every description. These were the only modern features except the telephones.
There were three on the desk: black, red and gold. A portable unit containing a red and a gold phone stood on a table near the desk. Those phones went with General Bambridge: in his car, to his home, in his bedroom, in the latrines; he was never more than four rings from the gold phone and never would be during his tour of duty as Commander in Chief, Strategic Air Command. The gold phone reached the President. The red one went downhill, from Bambridge to SAC, and it could launch more firepower than all the armies in history had ever employed.
General Thomas Bambridge waved Senator Jellison to a seat, and joined him in the conversation group near the big window overlooking the runway. Bambridge didn’t sit behind his desk to talk to people unless there was something wrong. It was said that a major once fainted dead away after five minutes standing in front of Bambridge’s desk.
“What the hell brings you out here like this?” Bambridge asked. “What couldn’t we settle on the phones?”
“How secure are your phones?” Jellison asked.
Bambridge shrugged. “As good as we can make them—”
“Maybe yours are all right,” Jellison said. “You’ve got your own people to check them. I’m damned sure mine aren’t safe. Officially, it’s what I told you, I need some help understanding budget requests.”
“Sure. You want a drink?”
“Whiskey, if you’ve got it here.”
“Sure.” Bambridge took a bottle and glasses from the cabinet behind his desk. “Cigar? Here, you’ll like ’em.”
“Havana?” Jellison said.
Bambridge shrugged. “The boys get ’em in Canada. Never have got used to U.S. cigars. Cubans may be bastards, but they sure can roll cigars.” He brought the whiskey to the coffee table and poured. “Okay, just what is this all about?”
“The Hammer,” Arthur Jellison said.
General Bambridge’s face went blank. “What about it?”
“It’s coming pretty close.”
Bambridge nodded. “We’ve got some fair mathematicians and computers ourselves, you know.”
“So what are you doing about it?”
“Nothing. By order of the President.” He pointed to the gold phone. “Nothing is going to happen, and we mustn’t alarm the Russians.” Bambridge grimaced. “Mustn’t alarm the bastards. They’re killing our friends in Africa, but we shouldn’t upset them because it might mess up our friendship.”
“It’s a hard world,” Jellison said.
“Sure it is. Now what is it you want?”
“Tom, that thing’s coming close. Really close. I don’t think the President understands what that means.”
Bambridge took the cigar out of his mouth and inspected the chewed end. “The President doesn’t take much interest in us,” he said. “That’s good, because he leaves SAC pretty much to run itself. But good or bad, he’s President, which makes him my Commander in Chief, and I’ve got funny notions. Like I ought to obey orders.”
“Your oath’s to the Constitution,” Jellison said. “And weren’t you a Pointer? Duty, Honor, Country. In that order.”
“So?”
“Tom, that comet’s coming really close. Really. They tell me it’ll knock out all your early-warning radars—”
“They tell me that, too,” Bambridge said. “Art, I don’t want to be a smart-ass, but aren’t you trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs?” He went to the desk and brought back a red-covered report. “We’ll see what looks like an attack that isn’t really there, and we won’t be able to see a real one—if there is one. Sure, the day they think they can win clean, they’ll hit us, but Air Intelligence tells me things are pretty quiet over there right now.” Bambridge thumbed through the document again, and his voice fell. “Of course, if we can’t see them coming, they couldn’t see us—”
“Get that look off your face!”
“Well, I can’t be court-martialed just for thinking.”
“This is serious, Tom. I don’t think the Russians will start anything—so long as it’s only a near miss. But…”
Bambridge cocked his head to one side. “Jesus! My people didn’t tell me it would hit us!”
“Nor did mine,” Jellison said. “But the odds are now hundreds to one against. Used to be billions. Then thousands. Now it’s only hundreds. That’s a little scary.”
“It is that. So what am I supposed to do? The President ordered me not to go on alert—”
“He can’t give you that order. Your charter says you have authority to take any measure needed to protect your forces. Anything short of launching.”
“Christ.” Bambridge looked out the window. The Looking Glass KC-135 was taking off, which meant that the airborne ship would be coming in after its replacement was safely airborne and lost. “You’re asking me to defy a Presidential direct order.”
“I’m telling you that if you do, you’ve got friends in Congress. You might lose your job, but that’ll be the worst.” Jellison’s voice was very low and urgent. “Tom, do you think I like this? I doubt that goddam comet will hit Earth, but if it does and we’re not ready…God knows what will happen.”
“That’s for sure.” Bambridge tried to imagine it. An asteroid strike in some remote part of the Soviet Union—would they believe it wasn’t a U.S. sneak attack? Or why remote? Moscow! “But if we’ve gone to alert status, they’ll know it, and it’ll give ’em that much more reason to think we did it,” Bambridge said.
“Sure. And if we haven’t gone to alert, and they see this as a golden opportunity? If the Hammer hits, Washington may be gone, Tom. Washington, New York, most of the eastern seacoast.”
“Shit. All we’d need would be a war on top of that,” Bambridge said. “If the Hammer really does hit, the world is going to be in a big enough mess without starting the Big One to go with it. But if it hits us and not them, they’ll want to finish the job. It’s what I’d do, if I was them.”
“But you wouldn’t—”
“Not from this office,” Bambridge said. “Not even if I got orders that I’ll never, thank God, get.” The General stared at the missile models on the far wall. “Look, what I can do is see that my best people are on duty. Put my top men in the holes, and I’ll be up in Looking Glass myself. But how do I tell a meteor hit from a missile attack?”
“I think you’ll know,” Jellison said.
■
Outside was night and glory. In the Apollo capsule Rick Delanty was moored to his couch. His eyes were tightly closed and he lay rigid, fists clenched. “All right, dammit. I’ve been sick ever since we came up. But don’t tell Houston. There’s nothing they could do anyway.”
“You damn fool, you’ll starve,” Baker told him. “Hell, it’s no disgrace. Everybody gets space sickness.”
“Not for a whole week.”
“You know better. MacAlliard was sick the whole mission. Not as bad as you, but he had help. And I’m getting Dr. Malik.”
“No!”
“Yes. We haven’t got time for macho pride.”
“That’s not it and you know it.” Delanty’s voice was pinched. “She’ll report it. And—”
“And nothing,” Baker said. “We’re not going to scrub this mission just because you keep puking up your guts.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yeah. They can’t abort unless I say so. And I won’t. Unless—”
“Unless nothing,” Delanty said. “That’s the whole point. Good God, Johnny, if this flops because of me…Hell, I wish they’d picked somebody else. Then it wouldn’t matter so much. But I’ve got to keep going.”
“Why?” Baker demanded.
“Because I’m—”
“A gentleman of color?”
“Black. Try to remember.” He tried to grin. “All right, get the lady doc. Something’s got to help. Mothersills, maybe?”
“Best thing is to keep your eyes closed.”
“Which I’m doing, and a fat lot of help I am,” Delanty said. His voice was bitter. “Me, old Iron Ear, space-sick. It’s insane.” He realized Baker had left, and nervously began buttoning up his fly.
The official name was “sustained duty clothing.” Everyone else would have called them long Johns. Or a union suit. What the well-dressed spaceman will wear. It’s a very practical costume, but Rick Delanty couldn’t quite hide his nervousness: He wasn’t used to having women see him in his underwear. Especially not white women.
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