The Senator said, “You’ve had it in your craw for a while, Les. You may as well cough it up now.”
Suffield’s shoulders dropped, as if with relief. “All right,” he said. “I will.” He was beginning to perspire. “You’ve been right in there waving all the right flags. Right in there reforming welfare, civil rights, getting a fair shake for the chicanos, whipping the tails of the nasty bad guys behind environmental pollution. It’s all fine by the voters—our voters, we haven’t got any thick-smoke industries down home and they don’t build cars in Arizona. You went out on a limb pushing tax penalties for big families but you probably picked up enough support from the anti-population-explosion crowd to offset the damage you did with the diehard Catholics. You get high marks right down the line as the perfect image of the crusading young progressive Republican. The right amount of stir in the press about standing you for President in a few years’ time. In short, an impeccable record, a toothpaste smile, broad-based popularity, and no skeletons in your closet. No mortal enemies either. You’ve never made the mistake of pushing anybody into a corner he couldn’t get out of gracefully. The extremists won’t vote for you, but they won’t spend their every last dime fighting your reelection. Nobody’s got a chance in hell of unseating you this November. With the right stand-off at the next convention, you could walk right into the presidential nomination, and who have the Democrats got who could beat you for the White House?
“Those are the stakes,” Suffield continued, “and you want to forfeit. You want to tie the rope around your own neck and hand the end of it to Woody Guest and Webb Breckenyear.”
The Senator smiled. “In other words, don’t rock the boat.”
“Rock it my ass. You’re hell-bent to sink it. Don’t I make any sense to you at all? Don’t you see what happens when you go after Breckenyear’s hide? For openers you’ll get Senator Guest on your ass, and when you get Woody Guest on your ass you get Woody Guest’s friends on your ass. You have any idea how many friends he’s got?”
The Senator murmured, “It happens to be a simple question of right and wrong.”
“This is no simple question of right and wrong. This is a question of the precedence of one right over another. Go after the old guard now and I guarantee you, come November they’ll hand you your head. Then you’re out of office and how many wrongs can you right from there?”
“You’re talking like a campaign manager, Les, and this isn’t—”
“I am your campaign manager!”
“—the time for it. I’m not running for anything right now. The primary campaign doesn’t open till June. A lot can happen in three months.”
“Hell, the minute you got elected five years ago you were running for reelection.” Suffield leaned forward, elbows on knees, earnest and intense. “You want to monkey with the sacred cow of National Defense—why don’t you just lie down on the floor right now so you won’t have so far to fall when they stick the knife in you? Down home in Tucson and Phoenix the Pentagon stands for Daddy Warbucks and Santa Claus and Jesus H. Christ all at once—and you want to charge right in on your horse and break your lance against it!”
Spode studied his galoshes. A little pool of melted snow was drying into the carpet beneath his foot.
Suffield hunched farther forward on the edge of his seat. “Without the defense establishment your whole constituency would dry up and blow away. It was fine for Ike to bleat about the military-industrial complex—he was retiring, he wasn’t looking for votes from the good people of Arizona. Am I getting through to you yet?”
“You’re waving an empty gun in my face, Les. I’m sorry. I’ve never attacked legitimate defense needs. There’s a difference between real needs and phony boondoggles.”
“Try that persuasion on a voter with a four-second attention span.”
“I will.”
“You say one unkind word about the Pentagon and all they’ll remember is who got them their jobs.”
Forrester looked at him and smiled a little but he wasn’t amused. “All right. You’ve had your say, now I’ll have mine.”
Spode studied the hard jut of the Senator’s face. Alan Forrester went on, “If Breckenyear’s buddies have a little accident and it happens to set the planet on fire then it’ll make just a whole lot of difference how well the civil-rights fight goes in Arizona, won’t it.”
“We’ve been over all that before. They’re not going to have any little accidents. They never have before, why should they now?”
“The odds have caught up. The mathematics is no good.”
“That’s what Moskowitz told you, but he’s just one scientist. Look, suppose you’re right, suppose Moskowitz is right and they’re going to blow up the world if they get Congressional authorization. Then suppose I tell you you’re still crazy. You open you mouth in public and you’ll get an ICBM crammed right down your throat, multiple warhead and all.”
“You can’t always go by that.”
“Look, I’ll tell you what, you’re so dead set on this, at least keep a low profile till November—get reelected first.”
“That would be too late, I’m afraid.”
“Too late for what?”
“Too late to stop the Pentagon from building the Phaeton Three system.”
Jaime Spode sat bolt upright and blinked. The Senator added, “They’ll be rolling on it by then. The appropriation is scheduled to come out of Breckenyear’s House committee in May, eight weeks from now.”
Spode interrupted. “Where’d you get this?”
“Sometimes it helps to be in high places, Top.” The Senator went back to Suffield. “Unless we make a great deal of noise between now and May, Breckenyear will follow his usual pattern: draw up the bill by himself, walk into the committee with copies already printed up, pass them around the table and give the committee half an hour to discuss it and eighteen hours to get up a minority report before he shoves it out onto the floor as a rider to some harmless bill. He’ll get it to a vote before anybody knows enough about it to start a floor fight. He’s always operated that way. And Woodrow Guest will ram a carbon copy of it through the Senate in exactly the same way.”
Suffield’s upper lip was pinched between his teeth. The Senator said, “It’ll add thirty billion dollars’ worth of redundant hardware to the capacity we’ve already got for overkill. It’ll multiply the chance of an accidental nuclear explosion by a thousand times. I don’t think we need that kind of protection, Les.”
Suffield scowled at the floor. “And you’re willing to stake your political future on it.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re still a fool. All right, look, do it off the record. Leak it to the press, let them send up a trial balloon, see what the public thinks. Find some lame-duck Congressman on Breckenyear’s committee and get him to make the indignant speeches and feel out the reaction. There’s a hundred ways to do it without showing your own face. You’ve got to stay out of it—you just can’t afford to be the one who pulls the plug. Not on the record.”
“I can’t do it that way,” the Senator said, and smiled because he was anticipating Suffield’s inevitable reaction.
“Sure,” Suffield said obliviously. “Now tell me how you’re too honest and red-blooded and forthright to work behind the scenes. You that was born in a smoke-filled room with a silver campaign promise in your mouth.”
“No comment, but it’s beside the point. Suppose we leak the information. Suppose the public takes off with it. Now, I’m a member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. I’m supposed to know about things. When the disclosure hits the press, it’s going to be assumed I know all about the Phaeton program. At that point I’ve got no choice but to speak out, because if I keep my mouth shut my silence has to imply acquiescence with the Pentagon party line. No. I’d have to speak out anyway—and I may as well do it right in front. At least that way if it catches on I can run with the ball and not get left back with the pack.”