She finished in a flat voice entirely without self-pity. Her last statement seemed to give Groteschele a new assurance, a place to get back into the conversation and guide it into safe channels. His words came on gently and kindly.
“Betty,” he said, “those of us who know anything about the situation feel almost exactly the same things that you have expressed. But what should we do? All go out and buy morphine? You see, Betty, I’m trying to save your two boys, not narcotize their death. That’s
the whole point of everything I’ve written. In spite of all our efforts, thermonuclear war may come. We must face that possibility rather than, ostrichlike, dose our minds to it. And I’m trying to see that if war comes, men, our kind of men, have the maximum possible chance of surviving it.”
Betty looked composed now but her fingers were digging into Black’s arm.
“General Black, what do you think?” asked Senator Hartmann.
Black looked up slowly from Betty. He fixed his eyes on Foster and thought for a minute.
“I think that Betty is mostly correct,” he said slowly. “Once one knows where he wants to go he can summon a magnificent array of logic and fact to support his argument. I have the awful feeling that. we are reconciled, both we and the Soviets, to mutual destruction. We are now rallying our different logics to support our identical conclusions. We will probably both get the results that we want. In that case, morphine is more. important than a bomb shelter.” He stopped and for a moment he felt an excitement. It was wild and irrationaclass="underline" he understood the Dream. He was in a game in which the things that held him together were being stripped away. Then, quite suddenly, be could go no further.
Betty’s comments had just about done it for the party. Everyone drank and chatted politely for a few minutes. Then there was the Intricate ballet of social disengagement. Black knew that their host would not forget his heretical position. The Senator was a methodical man.
In the taxicab back to their apartment neither Black nor Betty had spoken. She had fallen asleep on his shoulder; her teeth grinding.
General Black snapped back to the present as the Cessna 810 approached Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington. Looking down on the water-veined flats of the Chesapeake Bay area, he regretted that the air approach to Andrews didn’t take him over Washington proper. He never ceased to be stirred by the splendor of the Washington Monument’s slim white spire, the awesome majesty of the Lincoln Monument The Pentagon, though, that was something else again. Its low, squat improbable shape was not designed to capture an airman’s fancy. It was more like a great, bureaucratic land battleship pulled up alongside the Potomac. That’s about what it was, mused Black, laying siege to the helpless flotilla of weaker bureaucratic ships across the Potomac.
Back to work, Blackie, boy-general, he said to himself. Life is earnest, life is real.
He brought the plane in for a skilled and effortless landing. Ten minutes later he was in a staff car and on his way to the Pentagon.
The President looked across the desk at Buck. Buck knew that the President did not see him. His eyes were slightly squinting. Buck twisted in his chair. The motion caught the President’s eye. His face suddenly hardened and he seemed to come back into the room.
“What do you think of that list, Buck?” he asked, pointing at the card that Buck still held. Buck hesitated, lifted the card as if it were very delicate, glanced again at the names. He felt like licking his lips, but resisted. His mind reached for an answer, something that would make sense. It was impossible.
“I only know them as names,” he said quietly. “A few I have never even heard of.”
He saw approval in the President’s face. Then the President was not seeing him any more, but was abstracted.
“Relax, Buck,” the President said. “We’re in an emergency, but we’ve got time, a little anyway. Time and a decision. That’s what an emergency is. Now the decision is what those people on the list have to help us with. The time we can’t control. It just passes.”
It sounded silly, but Buck knew that the President was not thinking what he was saying. His voice and his mind were operating on different levels. Then they came together and the President was seeing Buck again.
“Buck, that group sees one another all the time, day after day,” the President said. “They’ve probably talked over things so much that they’ve got a nice committee solution for everything. Right?”
“Yes, I imagine they have,” Buck said.
“The only problem is that this is something they have no solution for,” the President said. “Bogan told me that in Omaha they had no standard operating procedure for this kind of thing. So we’ve got a novel situation, something completely new.”
The President swung in his chair and looked at his secretary. Quite automatically her pencil lifted, moved toward the notebook.
“Blackie’s in the Pentagon group, isn’t he?” the President asked.
Buck’s eyes ran down the list
“There is a General Black, Mr. President,” he said. His throat felt dry.
“That’s Blackie,” the President said. “We went to college together.” He paused. “Blackie’s a bright boy, got guts and I’d trust him with almost anything. He can think on his feet, deal with a novel situation. Trouble is that either they’ll make a committee solution or they’ll all listen to someone like Blackie. He doesn’t talk much, except when he believes in something….” His voice dropped and he stared at the wall, not seeing it. Then be swung back to them, entirely in focus, speaking briskly. “Next we need someone who’s not a Pentagon person, but who knows his way around. Whom do you suggest?”
He asked the question of both Buck and Mrs. Johnson. Buck stiffened. His mind went flat, incapable of memory. He could, quite literally, not recall the name of a single person. His mother? Gypsy Rose Lee? Old Mr. Carmichael in the apartment below? He must be losing his mind.
Mrs. Johnson looked at the President, then flicked over a few pages in her notebook. “They’ve got that Professor Groteschele out there for the briefing,” she said. “He’s not one of them. I mean he doesn’t work at the Pentagon.”
The President rocked in his chair.
“lie doesn’t work for the Pentagon. That’s right,” he said slowly. “But that book of his almost made him one of them.” He paused. “O.K., Johnnie, he’ll add something to a bunch of people that have been seeing one another too often. Tell the Pentagon to include Groteschele in the advisory group. Tell Swenson that Groteschele is personally cleared by me and that he can say anything he wants on any subject.”
“As long as it’s relevant,” Mrs. Johnson said and smiled tightly.
The President grinned. “Swenson has a pretty well-developed sense of the relevant,” he said.
“I know that, Mr. President,” Mrs. Johnson said.
“I know that you know that, Mrs. Johnson,” the President said and made a mock bow.
She smiled, turned, and left the room.
Buck sat silently with the President of the United States. He knew they were waiting but he did not know what for.
Walter Groteschele awoke at precisely 5:80 A.M. He did not awake at the sound of an alarm dock and, indeed, he did not even wear a wrist watch. Despite this he was certain of the time. He was awake fully. As he swung out of bed his mind began to block out the day. It was a quick, neat process, something that occupied him only from his bed to the bathroom. By 6:10 he would be showered, shaved, dressed, nourished by one cup of instant coffee, and waiting for the train at Scarsdale. An hour to La Guardia—8:30. An hour to Washington (and his second cup of coffee, at 10,000 feet)—9:30. At the Pentagon by ten minutes to ten.