Despite the President’s toughness Buck had a lingering doubt about the man. Being the scion of a wealthy family, having easy access to politics, and marrying a beautiful woman did not, Buck thought, really equip him to deal with his adversary in the Soviet Union. The Russian leaders, Buck had gathered, were hard to the point of ferocity, committed to a degree that was unbelievable to an American-especially a wealthy American.
Buck’s doubts about the President’s capacity made his own slow-paced and easy job somehow more justifiable to himself.
This particular morning Buck had finished his quick scanning of Pravda and Izvestia and was turning with pleasure to one of Maitland’s essays on the corporation’s personality. He opened the book, began to make careful marks on the margin and entries in his notebook.
Buck was so absorbed in Maitland that the shrill sound pierced through the office for several seconds before he was aware of it. He had never heard the sound before, but instantly he knew where it came from. In the second drawer of his desk there was a red telephone. When he had been given the office and his instructions, he had been told that this telephone would ring only in case of emergency and was never to be used for ordinary communications. The black telephone on top of the desk was to be used for normal business. He had also been told that when the red phone did ring it would not give the short intermittent rings made by an ordinary telephone, but would give off a steady sharp sound until it was answered.
Someone at the White House switchboard had made a mistake, Buck thought. He had been in this office for three years and the red telephone had never rung. Buck was convinced it never would. He pulled open the drawer and instantly the sound of the telephone became more shrill.
Once he saw the red phone something began to nag at his memory; he felt a sharp sense of unease. Then he remembered: the official who had installed him in the office had also given him a logbook labeled “Red Phone Log Book” with instructions to log the precise time that the red phone rang… if it ever rang. Buck had not seen the logbook for over a year. It had become mixed in with the law books, old copies of Izvestia, Russian magazines, notebooks. With both hands Buck pawed through the debris of paper on his desk, pulled open the top drawer, yanked at the three drawers on the left side of the desk. He could not find the logbook. He calmed himself. The call was sure to be a mistake. Nevertheless, he took a dean piece of paper and then looked at his watch. He wrote the time in big black figures in the middle of the white rectangle:
“10:32 A.M.”
With relief he picked up the phone.
“Mr. Buck, this is the President speaking,” a voice said. There was no mistaking the voice. It was calm, New England accented, nas4 “Would you please make your way to the White House bomb shelter as soon as possible?”
“Yes, sir, I…” Buck said and then stopped. As soon as he had said the word “Yes” the President had hung up.
The War Room of the Strategic Air Command at Omaha was not immense. Not in terms of what it had to do. It was no bigger than a small theater. The pools of darkness in its corners, however, gave the sensation of immensity, almost of a limitless reach. The only illumination in the War Room came from the Big Board. It covered the entire front wall and resembled a gigantic movie screen, except that it was made of a kind of translucent plastic. At that moment the Big Board showed a simple Mercator map of the world. The continents and the oceans were familiar, as were the lines of latitude and longitude. But there the similarity to ordinary Mercator maps disappeared. The map was covered with a strange flood of cabalistic signs. Arrows, circles, squares, numbers, triangles were strewn across the screen, sometimes came up bright and clear, sometimes dimmed, and occasionally a sign notation would fade entirely and leave only a phosphorescent glow that persisted for a few seconds.
Even in the uncertain light it was possible to see that there were only a half-dozen men in the War Room. In the dimness the men looked doll-like and diminutive. This added to the impression of vastness.
“I expected a little more action,” Congressman Raskob said. “This is just like a second-rate theater. Where are the ushers?”
Lieutenant General Bogan, United States Air Force, glanced down at Congressman Raskob. The Congressman’s reaction was not uncommon among people who were seeing the War Room for the first time, but General Bogan also knew that he was being baited. He had been briefed on Raskob’s background.
“Right now, sir, we are at our lowest condition of readiness,” General Bogan said. “Right now everything is routine. The moment that something starts to happen there is plenty of action.”
“In a few minutes, sir, your eyes will get adjusted to the light and we can show you some of the more interesting things in the War Room,” Colonel Casdo said. Colonel Cascio was General Bogan’s deputy.
The Congressman grunted. He stood at the raised runway at the back of the War Room, his feet wide apart, his short stocky body held in a posture that was almost arrogant.
He’s going to be a tough one, General Bogan thought. He looked over at the other guest, Gordon Knapp, the president of Universal Electronics. No trouble there.
Knapp was one of the new breed of scientists who, after World War II, had become a scientist-inventor-businessman. Although he was almost six feet tall, Knapp’s body was hunched over as if he had just finished a long and desperate race. In fact it was his habitual posture. Ever since he had discovered science Knapp had run with a zestful enthusiastic desperation which had no element of anxiety. It had taken Bogan some months to realize that Knapp’s adversary was scientific problems. He threw his physical and intellectual power against problems and his record of successes was unbroken. He had become an expert on miniaturization, solid-state physics, semiconductors, and, more recently, problems of data storing. In the process he had become a millionaire and had achieved a high reputation. Both of these facts he forgot constantly. He was oblivious of everything except unsolved technical problems. In the process of mastering them he had ravaged his body, learned to exist on five hours of sleep a night, and was an extremely happy man. He was a man of black coffee, hurried airplane flights, phone calls, technical drawings, intuitions about amperage and voltage, a vast unanswered correspondence, harassed secretaries, rumpled suits, and a burning attention for only one thing: his scientific problems. His wife once said—entirely in jest for she loved and admired him—that she would have divorced him long ago but he was never home long enough to discuss the matter.
This was Knapp’s first visit to the War Room and General Bogan could see that he was quivering with excitement. Many of the mechanisms that he had invented and manufactured were used in the room, and his eyes glittered as he tried to identify the machinery in the gloom.
“It may look simple, Mr. Raskob, but this is one of the most complicated rooms in the world,” Knapp said in a whisper.
“And one of the most expensive,” Raskob said.
General Bogan resisted the tendency to sigh. Raskob was a tough and intelligent man. He came from a congressional district in Manhattan which was made up partly of new and expensive apartment houses and partly of old tenements gradually being taken over by Puerto Ricans and Negroes. The first time he had been elected it was by a narrow margin and Raskob had known he must work out some formula of political appeal which would be equally attractive to the new and poor and to the old and wealthy. His political reputation was as carefully hewn as the work of a master sculptor. On every welfare and civil-rights issue he voted liberal and made sure that this fact was widely disseminated among the Puerto Ricans and Negroes. On military appropriations he was invariably critical, stating that they were inflationary, were expended by shortsighted generals and admirals, and only added to the tax burden. This posture benefited him in two ways: his constituents in the big expensive apartments saw him as anti-inflation and pro-lower taxes; his working-class constituency, too poorly skilled to qualify for entry into the big unions or for work in the large armaments industry, saw him as antimilitarist, and thus attractive. He had been reelected eight times, each time by a higher plurality.