“I guess you’re right about that, but what if she hadn’t?”
“I don’t know, but now it’s my turn to make a confession. I wrote a story about their little escapade.”
She took a copy of the article from a drawer in the bedside table and gave it to him. He stared at the photo.
“She supposed to be a witch? And who’s the guy with the hat?”
When Amy didn’t respond, he read the article.
“Edna argued with General Clayton. Unbelievable. He led a missile wing. Who knows more about these things than him. And now everyone will think my daughter is a peacenik.”
“Her name’s not in the article.”
Before that talk with Karen, he’d signaled that he was in the mood, but now he rolled away from his wife and turned off the light on his night table. He was more upset than Amy had imagined. When had he ever reneged on the promise of conjugal pleasure? But what she’d reported was news, real news, and if she hadn’t written it someone else would have. She wanted to touch his shoulder, but thought better of it, and didn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Six
She hovers high about the remains of Minot. Miles from the hypocenter, people, hideously burned, stagger aimlessly about. Near the hypocenter the shadow of a child has been etched into what remains of a concrete wall. She is unable to take her eyes off it.
Gripped with horror she awakens.
And there is the moon outside her window having kept silent watch the whole time. It’s message, though delivered coolly, is always a comfort, always the same: it was only a dream.
But how little would be required for the dream to become real. Once the button was pushed mankind’s annihilation would be run by the doomsday machine, inexorably cranking out immediate and prolonged death. The worst thing that could happen would be to survive the blast to die slowly over the following weeks as you watched others die and the world go dark.
How the devil was she supposed to get back to sleep thinking these thoughts? If only she could inject her dreams into the general’s sleep and the sleep of those Grumman people. Into the dreams of the citizens of Minot, of North Dakota, of the country, of the world. If she could do that, she might not have them herself. If she could do that, she’d be able to go to the gravesite.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
As a member of Working Group A, the Chamber of Commerce committee supporting the GBSD program, Rasmussen was dutifully present that Saturday to hear General Clayton, Ellen Conklin, Claudia Cumming and others make their presentations. The truth be told, he was unhappy he’d joined Group A because participating took too much time from his busy practice and he hated burdening his partners with the extra work of covering for him.
During a morning break he stepped out of the Grand Hotel and saw the small gathering—it could not be called a crowd—around Edna O’Hare, who sat behind a card table handing out leaflets. He saw Karen Haugen, one of his patients, among the group. Was she holding up a sign?
As he approached, he heard Edna mention submarines and then watched as Clayton departed with Claudia Cummings. She reminded him of a newspaper photo he’d once seen of Christian Barnard, the first physician to perform a human heart transplant, walking with his entourage amidst photographers, their flashbulbs popping around him. A few steps behind Barnard walked a stunning blonde woman in a form-fitting suit. He had wondered what their relationship was, his thoughts prurient. And now, on seeing Clayton and Cummings together, that question recurred. Prurient thoughts occurred to him more frequently these days.
He took a flyer, folded it in quarters, tucked it into a back pocket, and returned to the presentations. Once, during another break, he read it.
The man who’d been sitting next to him asked, “Hey, Doc, what do you think of that?”
“The Minuteman is over fifty years old,” said Rasmussen, automatically mouthing a GBSD booster’s talking point and dodging the question. “It needs to be replaced.”
Holding up the flyer he asked, “Have you read it?”
“Nah. I just read their signs. There’s a saying in German, “‘Jeder jeck ist anders’. Every kook is different. They’ve got a right to talk baloney and I’ve got a right to ignore it.”
“I think that’s the right attitude,” said Rasmussen. “They’re not hurting anyone.”
His wife had slowly become distant over the years because his long hours at work left him little family time. She remained civil, though she did occasionally comment on the hold his work had taken of him.
“It’s really unnecessary,” she would say. “They’ll still worship you if you take care of yourself.”
And when he told her he’d been invited to join working group A, she said, “Is that really necessary? Do they really need you?”
“Well, Darlene, it’s the civic thing to do and I think it would be good to have a doctor in the group.”
“Why?”
“Uh… For balance.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
She was right. His answer hadn’t made any sense. He didn’t respond.
He even worked on Saturdays, though he’d taken a few hours this Saturday to attend part of the Grumman presentation. He returned to the office to see patients. He was preparing to leave when a mother and her eleven-year-old son arrived by cab. The boy had torn the flesh of his forearm when, taking a shortcut home, he’d climbed a chain-link fence, the jagged fence top snagging his forearm as he jumped off.
Fortunately his arteries were untouched and because he had the presence of mind to keep the arm elevated, bleeding was not excessive.
Rasmussen injected lidocaine along the side of the wound and then sewed it up. The boy did not speak but winced with each stitch.
When Rasmussen had finished, he gently asked, “Mrs. Olsen, why didn’t you go to the emergency room?”
“But Dr. Rasmussen, you’re our doctor and you’re wonderful.”
What could he say to that?
“That didn’t hurt too bad,” said Joey Olsen. “Thank you.”
“No more fence climbing. Doctor’s orders,” said Rasmussen.
“Yes, sir.”
When she saw him in the kitchen, Darlene Rasmussen came in from the garden, staring at her watch as if she’d just missed a flight. Rasmussen hesitated before approaching to give her the customary kiss on the cheek. Over the years, their marriage had grown staid if not starchy. Indeed, it was as if they were only actors, playing husband and wife. The high tides of his libido were minimally higher than the low tides. He approached her every ten days or so, but she smiled weakly and said something that always meant the same thing: not tonight. When he approached her on Sunday afternoons, she would have other plans and, he admitted to himself, he didn’t truly assert himself, nor even express frustration. The marriage was not loveless—or maybe it was—but it certainly was sexless. He understood that his work was a large part of the problem, but that was out of his control he thought.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
“Robert called. They gave him a desk.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“I’ll miss him at Christmas,” she said. “I miss him already.”
“It’s a Catholic country. I’m sure someone will make him welcome at Christmas.”
“I’m not talking about him missing me. I’m talking about me missing him.”
“I was just trying to make you feel better,” he said, immediately regretting his choice of words, regretting even having spoken. She didn’t want to be made to do anything. He would have handled a grieving parent better than he was doing now. Silence was called for.
Should he leave the room, to return in a few minutes? Or should he, with feigned nonchalance, look to see what the refrigerator might contain of interest.
Though when he had looked into it in the past, it was often empty, at least to his eyes. And then, with the ingredients from the same empty fridge, his wife would prepare a tasty meal.
If he left the room too quickl
y it would look like what it was. Escape. If he looked into the fridge too quickly it would look like what it was. Escape. So he stood still.
He put his arms around her as soon as the first teardrop straggled down her cheek. Finally he could do something more comforting than speak, though his timing had to be right and this time it was.
Relieved, she made him a chicken-and-rice dish accompanied by a glass of white wine. He told her about Joey Olsen’s arm and then about the odd confrontation between Edna O’Hare and a general. He didn’t speak of the leaflet’s troubling arguments, which he had yet to find fault with.
In the living room after dinner, she sewed one-inch squares of cloth, each with a unique pattern and color scheme, into their individual little windows in a cathedral window quilt already consisting of almost a thousand framed pieces. By any standard it was a masterpiece.
Rasmussen sat across from her, computer on his lap, verifying the flyer’s facts and figures. Damn if they didn’t match with the reliable sources he’d examined. The submarines, for example, could indeed fire twenty ballistic missiles, each missile able to carry five thermonuclear warheads. A single submarine should be deterrent enough.
“Jesus!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh, something I read surprised me.”
“Well, are you going to tell me or is it a secret?”
He took the flyer from his pocket and read it aloud. Darlene put the quilt aside. He put the flyer back into his pocket.
“So if we have ten submarines at sea at any one time they could hit Russia with as many hydrogen bombs as there are windows on that quilt.”
Darlene picked another square of cloth, then examined the quilt’s border for an area in which the piece would be harmonious.
“And what if they destroy the submarines?”
“There’ve been studies. There’s no plausible way of destroying them all and the submarines that are going to replace the ones we have will be even quieter. Locating, tracking, getting into range of and then destroying a submarine out at sea is almost impossible.”
“So what do you think about the stuff you just read me? I mean, you’re supposed to be a rocket booster—no pun intended—aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what I think.”
“Well,” said Darlene, “if all that’s true, then we shouldn’t waste a lot of money on new missiles, should we?”
“That’s the logical conclusion. Yes.”
“But how come this is only being talked about now? And anyway I can’t see you putting in—” She was about to say, “a lot of extra time.” He had no “extra time.” If he had any time at all outside of work, it should have been family time. She stopped talking, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Rasmussen spent the next forty minutes reading The Future of the ICBM Force: Should the Least Valuable Leg of the Triad Be Replaced? an article on the internet by a nuclear arms control expert.
That night, after lying in bed for thirty-five minutes, sheep counting having failed him, he arose to get a shot of rum. His wife was awake when he returned to bed.
“Is it bothering you that much?”
They said their good-nights. She rolled away from him, almost to the edge of the bed. He remained sitting up in the dark, sipping his rum.
Having put the horror of thermonuclear war out of his mind, he explored the implications for him personally believing what he now believed: that the Minuteman must not be replaced by a modern and extravagantly expensive new weapon, indeed, that the Minuteman itself should be removed. How was it possible that his mind was so easily changed? Or had he never had faith in the Minuteman in the first place? When had the topic of missiles ever come up in conversation at the office, at home, at a party, at a soccer game, anywhere that he could remember? They were literally out of sight, out of mind.
He finished his rum, put the glass on the night table, lay down, and gave thanks for the warm bed, for his good life, and for domestic tranquility if not—” Well, nothing was perfect.
The alarm awoke him at five the next morning as usual. He took a good look at himself in the mirror, asking if he were still sure he really believed what he thought he’d believed the night before.
At the office there was no such thing as free time. Even at lunch, when he had lunch, he talked about patients, office finances, diagnoses, or related matters. Today, however, Rasmussen spoke for a minute with his partners Rich Kovacs and Ben Mazurski, handing them copies he’d made of O’Hare’s flyer.
“I’m curious what you guys think of this.”
They took the flyers and got back to work.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Claudia Cummings was born in Los Vegas, not a hundred miles from the family’s home in the little Mojave Desert community of Prickly Pear, California. Though she enjoyed and was good at her job writing for her high school newspaper, her parents urged her to become a doctor. Prickly Pear was doctorless, a common problem throughout rural America.
The last thing she should be was a reporter. They were only a little less disappointed that her college major was public relations than they would have been had it been journalism.
But she found a job at the prestigious New York public relations firm of Jinks, Nixon, Brinkwater, and Spitz only a few years after college graduation and, because she was spunky, ambitious and—it must be noted, attractive—was soon given important responsibilities, the most important of which was temporarily filling in for Grumman’s staff public relations person who was out on prolonged sick leave. Cummings main responsibility was assuring, as far as she could in her position, public support for the GBSD project.
Paid well and seeing no reason to marry, she had an active and varied sex life and was amused by the thought that some people might have referred to her as a slut puppy, slut no longer quite the pejorative it once had been, and puppy never having been one. She reveled in the impropriety of the description, which contrasted with her public presentation of serious professionalism. With two personas she felt special. Work and play, though, were separated by a steel fence. She cooled noticeably when any man at work showed that kind of interest in her.
She had been intrigued by the young man who’d stood by O’Hare’s side. With those feathers in his hat and a witch as a companion, was he supposed to have been a wizard? Well, he’d cast a little spell on her. Whether it will come to anything, who knows, she thought, noting the unintentional pun. What a dirty mind you have, Claudia. Sweet and dirty.
She drew the curtain closed on erotic mental images. She had work to do.
Sitting on the bed in her hotel room she picked up the phone and called.
“Mr. Schmidt, hello, this is Claudia Cummings. Do you have a few minutes?”
Her message was simple. Neither the general nor the vice president of the GBSD team was pleased, to put it mildly, with that little protest, though it wouldn’t—couldn’t—make any difference in the long run. Nevertheless, prudence demanded that it be discouraged, and if that was not feasible, to find out who was behind it. Whose manure pile did that weed spring from? It was hard to believe that it sprang from the old lady’s herself. Schmidt couldn’t have been more willing to comply than if she’d asked him to keep breathing.
Next she called Mathew Johnson.
“Well, you know the chamber of commerce is totally supportive,” he said. “We’ll do whatever you think would be helpful, but frankly people in Minot are simply going to think she’s a crank and ignore her.”
“The GBSD team is grateful for your support and you may well be right, but we would appreciate it if you would find out what you can about this protest. Speak individually with those three, not with them in a group. Just say you’re interested, or better, that you’re fascinated by what they have to say. Don’t be critical or they won’t speak up. Oh, and get me the names of the two young people who were with her.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Grumman Missile Team Visits Minot dominated the first page of the Minot Da
ily News, followed, three pages later, by General Argues with Witch over Rockets, which either mildly amused or mildly annoyed readers. A few, though, were outraged. Why would anyone from this area wish to question Grumman’s outreach to the community, which promised contracts, jobs, and all-around support for the city and the air force base?
They’d be installing the new rockets and removing the old ones for years, teams of people staying at Minot’s hotels, eating at Minot’s restaurants, going to Minot’ shops, renting Minot’s, tools, tractors, and trucks. The list went on.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
RE: General Argues with Witch over Rockets.
* * *
Not ironically this protestor dresses as an evil person trying to rid the air force base of a good thing. Some people are just plain ignorant.
Pete Gunderson, Minot
* * *
RE: General Argues with Witch Over Rockets
* * *
The Grumman team comes here to form a partnership so they can be ready on the first day to work with our businesses to everyone’s advantage. This woman has obviously been infected with some vile pro-Russian disarmament propaganda. It makes me sick. These missiles have kept us safe for over fifty years.
Ralph Peterson
Of the readers of Amy Haugen’s article, a scant number were moved to doubt the value of the Minuteman missiles or the need to replace them with new missiles. How could doubt be seeded if there was no seed, that is if there were no details of O’Hare’s argument in the report.
Amy Haugen had considered putting the details into her article but in the end removed them. As it was, the piece would irk her husband. Repeating Edna’s arguments would have made Amy seem sympathetic to them. Indeed, she thought Edna had gotten the better of the general.
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