Harkness was the committee chairman and he had been Braden’s personal campaign manager in the ‘96 run. The President rose and said, “Excuse me, Senator, but I don’t permit people to speak about Jim Harkness like that in my presence.”
Senator Horton distractedly ran his hands through his shock of hair. “I didn’t mean to offend you. God knows I don’t mean to offend anyone. Not even the Secretary of Interior, though if he thinks- No, I won’t say that. All I want is to get the C.S.B. on the floor and get the construction work under way. Mr. President, how long can all this go on?”
The President remained standing, looked at his watch and said coolly, “All what, David?”
“We are in the fifty-third year of the Political War, Mr. President. Somehow, by a succession of last-minute, hairs-breadth accidents, we have escaped nuclear bombing. It can’t go on forever! If the missiles came over the Pole today they’d annihilate this nation, and I don’t give one juicy damn that China and Russia would be annihilated in the next forty minutes-“
He was trembling. The President’s earphone whispered tinnily: “Hospitalized one year; nervous breakdown. The guard-ports have him covered with sleep guns, sir.” That was a relief; but what about this Horton? He was Doane’s personal choice, chairman of the National Committee; had Doane put a raving maniac in the Senate? The President remembered, from those young, county-committeeman days when he remembered things clearly, that something like that had happened before. It had been during the Party of Treason’s first years-a lunatic from the Northwest got elected to Congress and was mighty embarrassing until he committed suicide. The President, then a schoolboy, had chuckled with the rest of the nation over Congressman Zioncheck; but now he was not chuckling. It was his Administration and in the Senate. And a member of, God help him, his party.
The President did not look toward the guard-ports and the riflemen behind them. He said quietly, “David, I want you to calm down. No pledges have been forgotten and no pledges are going to be violated. Ill speak to Jim Harkness about the Shelter Bill today. That’s a promise.”
“Thank you,” Horton said gratefully, and tried to smile. “I’ll hold you to that, sir. Good day.”
The President buzzed, not for his next appointment but to talk to his secretary. “Murray, get me Senator Harkness on the phone.” And to his chest microphone: “Trans-prompter desk? Get out of circuit. I’ll buzz you.” He heard the faint carrier tone in his ear die and the guard-ports’ click. For the first tune since he stepped out of his shower that morning, the President was able to say a word that no one but himself could hear. He said it. It had only one syllable, but it improved his mood very much.
Harkness’s voice was resonant and comforting. The President, sometimes nagged by a secret feeling that he was not very bright, knew damned well that he was brighter than Harkness.
He said: “Jim, I’ve got to wondering about this C.S.B. that you’ve got in Public Works. The day’s young yet and I’ve had two questions about it. I know we campaigned on it-what is it, exactly?”
Harkness said comfortingly: “It’s under control, Brad. That fellow Horton is trying to unbottle it, but we can keep him quiet. He doesn’t know the ropes.”
“Know that, Jim. I just had him in here, wailing and mad. What’s it all about?”
“Why,” said Senator Harkness, with something less of assurance in his voice, “it’s about building shelters, Brad. Against nuclear attack.” He pronounced it “nookyoular,” in the approved White House fashion.
“Not quite my point, Jim. I mean-“ the President searched for what it was he did mean-“I mean, I can find out the facts and so on, but what’s got people so stirred up? Put it this way, Jim: What’s your philosophy about the Civilian Shelters Bill?”
“Philosophy?” Harkness sounded vaguely scared.
“Well, I would not know about philosophy, Brad. It’s an issue, C.S.B. is, and we’re very fortunate to have got it away from the Nationalists. C.S.B.’s very popular.” The President sighed inaudibly and relaxed; Senator Harkness was clearly about to launch into one of his famous explanations of things that never needed to be explained. “You see, Brad, an issue is lifeblood to a party. Look over the field today. What’s to ‘argue about? Damn little. Everybody knows the Party of Treason is the Party of Treason. Everybody knows the Commies are crazy hoodlums, can’t trust ‘em. Everybody knows atomic retaliation is the only sound military policy. There, at one sweep, you knock domestic, foreign and military policy off the board and haven’t anything left to play with except C.S.B.” He paused for breath, but before the President could try to get him back on the track of the question he was rushing on: “It’s a godsend, Brad! The Nationalists guessed wrong. They turned C.S.B. down in the name of economy. My opinion, they listened too much to the Defense Department people; naturally the generals didn’t want to admit they can’t intercept whatever the Commies throw at us, and naturally they want the money for interception instead of shelters. Well, that’s all right, too, but the people say the last word. We Middle-Roaders guessed right. We slapped C.S.B. in our platform, and we won. What else is there to say about it? Now, we’re not going to turn loose of an issue like that. Fools if we did. The strategy’s to milk it along, get it on the floor just before we adjourn for campaign trips and if a Nationalist filibuster kills it, so much the better. That saves it for us for next year! You know, you never get credit in this game for what you’ve done. Only for what you’re going to do. And, hell, Brad,” he crowed, suddenly exultant as a child who has found a dime in the street, “this thing is good for years! There has to be a big conference committee with the House on financing C.S.B., we haven’t even set up liaison with Military Affairs. We’ve got four more years easy. How’s that sound, Brad, eh? Ride right in to reelection in Twenty Oh Oh, the first President of the twenty-first century!”
“Thanks, Jim,” said the President, “I knew I could get a straight answer out of you.” It was the only way to stop him. Otherwise he might go clear on to the C.S.B. and its effect on the Integrationists, the C.S.B. and Labor, the C.S.B. and Colorado water diversion or the C.S.B. as viewed in the light of Craffany’s benching of Little Joe Fliederwick.
And yet, pondered the President, he still didn’t know even the question, much less the answer. Why was C.S.B. a good issue? The missiles hadn’t hit in the past fifty-three years, why should a voting population march to the booths and elect its leaders because of their Shelter philosophy now?
Braden changed the subject. “What do you think of Horton, Jim?”
He could always count on Harkness being frank, at least. “Don’t like him. A boat-rocker. You want my advice, Brad? You haven’t asked for it, but it’s get rid of him. Get the National Committee to put a little money in his district before the primaries.”
“I see,” said the President, thanked his former campaign manager and hung up.
He took a moment before buzzing Murray for the next appointment to sip Ms lightly tinted soda water and close his eyes. Well, he’d wasted most of the thirty-five minutes he’d gained, and not even a nap to show for it. Maybe General Standish was right.
Once when Braden was younger, before he was governor of New Jersey, before he was state senator, when he still lived in the old Rumford house on the beach and commuted to Jersey City every day-once he had been a member of the National Guard, what he considered his obligation as a resigned West Pointer. And they had killed two of their obligatory four-hours-a-month one month watching a documentary film on nuclear attack. The arrows marched over the Pole and the picture dissolved to a flight of missiles. The warheads exploded high in ah-. Then the film went to stock shots, beautifully selected and paced: the experimental houses searing and burning on Yucca Flats, the etched shadows of killed men on the walls of Hiroshima, a forest fire, a desert, empty, and the wind lifting sand-devils. The narration had told how such-and-such kind of construction would be burned within so many miles of Ground Zero. It remarked that forest fires would blaze on every mountain and mentioned matter-of-factly that they wouldn’t go out until the whiter snow or spring rams, and of course then the ground would be bare and the topsoil would creep as mud down to the oceans. It estimated that then, the year was no later than 1960, a full-scale attack would cost the world 90 percent of its capacity to support life for at least a couple of centuries. Braden had never forgotten that movie.