“Can you schedule the meeting for tomorrow after noon?” Groteschele asked abruptly.
The colonel could and did. That afternoon meeting was not easy. For the first time since the captured SS troopers had made the remarks about Jews being like rabbits, Groteschele felt isolated. He was seated at the end of a long table. The other seats were occupied by six generals, five colonels, four civilians, and a secretary who was operating a Stenotype machine. Groteschele glanced at Stark. Stark’s face was completely expressionless. Groteschele did not bother to look at the others. He knew that none of them were yet committed.
Quite suddenly Groteschele lost his nerve. The whole situation was preposterous. He was only a student who had once been an Army lieutenant and he was talking to professionals who had devoted their lives to the conduct and strategy of war. He sensed that he was about to make a fool of himself. Quickly, and with the telescopic capacity of the tragic moment, he saw the rest of his life. He would slide, slide, slide, always downward. He smiled woodenly down the table as he calculated where he would end, what the academic equivalent of his father’s butcher-shop job would be. He would be a grade-school teacher to a bunch of idiot children. With a terrible self-hatred he was aware of how he had physically declined, was no longer taut and trim. To them, these men of power and elegance around the table, he must look like a fattening, white-grub academic. He looked at Stark, started to ask to be excused.
“Excuse me, Colonel Stark,” Groteschele said and then paused. To his astonishment his voice came out cold and steady, without a tremor. His mouth was dry, his mind a shambles, his fingers had a quiver-but his voice was rock-hard. The decision was made for him. He would read the paper just as he had written it, using the one physical attribute that was still in controclass="underline" his voice. Later, reading, he realized that his paper was a wild gamble. He reviewed alternative theories of modern thermonuclear war and, with all the deliberateness of a machine gunner, shredded them to pieces. Inevitably he must be damaging some of the men in the room. The knowledge made his fingers tremble even more. His mouth went cottony, but somehow the words continued to pour out with even more control. When he finished his review of “obsolete alternatives” he sensed that he had probably bruised every man in the room. There was nothing to do but go on.
When he came to his own theory his voice became sharper, more incisive, although the words were more ambiguous. Without smiling, using his new vocabulary, he presented the alternative of the United States striking first. However, he never quite used those words. He took the people around the table to the edge of the abyss, forced them to look over the edge. Then, his language still cold, be described a situation in which the abyss was not threatening, but was in fact a magnificent and glowing opportunity. The whole presentation took one hour and ten minutes. He was not interrupted once.
When he had finished and had squared his papers in front of him on the table Groteschele stared straight ahead.
The first person to speak was an elderly, white-haired man in uniform at the far end of the table. He had a deep and authoritative voice that emanated from a face made of leather, and four stars decorated each shoulder. Groteschele had not noticed him before, but sensed at once that he was the senior officer in the room. He was, in fact, in charge of strategic plans for the Air Force and had deliberately not identified himself with any single point of view. Ruthless on weak logic and thin evidence, he had the reputation of listening with an open mind to any proposal that was sensibly presented.
“Dr. Groteschele, speaking for myself only, I congratulate you on an extremely clear and lucid presentation of a complex problem,” the general said. The general looked at his hands, smiled, and went on. “Your alternative is a difficult one. I believe it might be the right one. At the least it should be thoroughly discussed.”
Groteschele relaxed. He was safe. He hardly heard the other voices as they murmured various reasons for approving Groteschele’s paper.
When the briefing broke up, Stark invited him to dinner. Groteschele smiled, aware that the invitation had come after the briefing rather than before. He accepted. The dinner was small, but Groteschele knew that the men there were powerful. And he was the prize, the sought-after expert. Eyes turned to see him when he spoke. Others broke off their conversations to listen.
“My God, did you hear the Old Man say that Dr. Groteschele might have ‘the right one’?” Colonel Stark said. “That’s the closest he has ever come to a commitment.”
They stared at Groteschele. He did not smile. Calmly he went on to describe some of the implications of his position.
That had been the start.
Soon he was practically commuting to Washington. Conference followed conference. Discussion papers appeared at regular intervals. Each trip, each conference, gave Groteschele access to new and valuable inforuzation. He was cleared for access to top-secret material, He had free communications with the experts working on the fantastic frontiers of defense developments.
His doctoral dissertation was published under the title Counter-Escalation. It was instantly reviewed by Hanson Baldwin in The New York Times Sunday book-review section, and was the lead. Walter Millis reviewed it for the Herald Tribune. For a book of its type it sold very well, over 35,000 copies. Its reputation spread everywhere. Liberal journals attacked the book. A pacifist group burned it in Mann County, California, and then had second thoughts about book-burning and apologized to a nonlistening public. The book was discussed on two national television panel shows. People who had never read it had violent opinions about it.
With a speed that startled him he now became a public personage outside the defense and academic communities. He analyzed the reasons for his success and finally satisfied himself. There was a morbidity about his subject matter which somehow flowed over onto Groteschele and gave him an aura. He was extremely careful never to discuss classified information in public, but even so he could draw a picture of how the United States would look after a thermonuclear first strike, the awful seductions of surrender, the number of children who would suffer malignant genetic defects from radioactivity. Looking coolly at a room full of people he would tell them how many decades it would take the survivors of a thermonuclear war to regain the standard of living of medieval days. He could see the audience stiffen, tongues licking at the corners of their mouths, the signs of nervousness and fascination multiply.
Groteschele knew that he was regarded as a magician.
The awesome powers on which he was expert, the facts of life and death and survival, the new cabalistic language of the nuclear philosophers and high scientists of physics, were merely matters of fact. But the layman, the rich socialite, the industrialist, the politician, endowed Groteschele with control of the things he described.
The attention and the flattery were deeply pleasing to Groteschele. He did not disguise the fact from himself. He handled the incidental aspects of fame easily. There was more money, lots more money, and Groteschele turned it over to an expert business manager. He learned to dictate into portable dictating machines while riding taxicabs or airplanes. He learned that it was dangerous to get drunk the night before an important meeting. He became a consultant to various foundations and business firms, but selected them with great care. He wanted nothing to impair his relationship to the Federal government, for he knew full well that his status in Washington and the information which he obtained there were the sources of his power. Groteschele went through three different administrations without threat. Many of the high military officers and policy-makers did not agree with him, but he was a valuable commodity. He was an innovator, a barb, an egghead with a steel-trap mind, and even those who disagreed with him violently knew they were duty-bound to consider the alternatives which his thinking produced.