She thought of the first time she had been kissed on this couch, when she was fifteen, or maybe it was fourteen, by the boy who lived across the street, and bore the improbable name of Gaston, and who in two years had seemed much too young for her. There had been others, quite a few when you got right down to it. But it was much too cramped for adult love-making with a man as big and sort of wild as Jess. She didn’t want to let him out of her arms but she wished he would pick her up and carry her into the bedroom. That’s what she wanted, but at the same time she hoped he wouldn’t because their first night should be a big thing. She supposed it was Victorian, but if they went to bed together now it would be a little too sudden, a night that might tarnish, and that they might prefer to forget later. If there was to be a later, after Christmas Eve. She said, finally, “We’ve got to stop because when you make love to me I can’t think and I have to think. Don’t you want to hear about Raoul?”
“No.”
She held him away. “I really don’t want to talk about Raoul, but we do have to talk about the forecast, and the B-Ninety-Nines, and Keatton. I don’t know how you feel, but right now, more than anything else, I want to live. I want to live a long time. Raoul was up here today. He asked me to go away with him to his place in Front Royal. With his mother. You see, come next Monday, he wants to be sure that he’ll go on living. I turned him down. I despised him for it. But if you asked me to do the same thing right now, I’d say yes. Isn’t that strange?”
“No. It’s not so strange. I feel the same way. And Monday you may find yourself somewhere safe, or safe as you can get. I won’t ask you. I’ll take you. Because I’m damned if I’m going to die now that I’m just beginning to five.”
“Tell me about that bomber that blew up over Texas,” she said.
He rose, straightened his jacket, and felt in his pocket for a pipe. “Okay,” he said, “back to earth. But let’s not be sensible adults too long, Katy. If all we’ve got is a few days—at least only a few days before the lights go out—we’re going to fly.”
“Sure,” she agreed. “We’ll fly.”
“There are two new and interesting facts about the loss of this last Nine-Nine. The first four all blew within eighteen to twenty-five minutes after takeoff. This one blew fifty-nine minutes after takeoff. Why? The complete communications log from Corpus Christi tower hadn’t come in when I left the office, but when it does I have a hunch it’ll tell us something.” Jesse Price lighted his pipe and stared out of the window, not at anything except the image building in his own mind. “Second thing is, a man survived. If there had been structural failure, and sudden decompression of the crew’s quarters, he and everyone else would have been sucked out through that hole, squeezed into sausages. He wouldn’t have been shot out in his pod. In decompression, death is almost instant.”
“Shot out in a pod? Is that what happened? It wasn’t on the radio.”
“It won’t be,” he said. “The enemy hasn’t been informed, as yet, that the B-Nine-Nine has been modified for escape pods. Anyway, this indicates to me that it was an internal explosion, and that the explosion triggered this radarman’s pod. So before he could burn or disintegrate when the second explosion—all that fuel—came, he was shot out into space.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means it could be sabotage.”
“Jess, you’ve got to go to Hibiscus and tell that to Keatton!”
He laughed. “Honey, General Keatton must have figured that out about four hours ago.”
“You don’t know what he’s figured out, Jess. And maybe if you could get in to see Keatton you’d get a chance to tell him about Clumb, and the forecast.”
Jesse shook his head. “You don’t understand. At this moment Keatton is the busiest man in the world. His air force is blowing up around his ears. He won’t have time to see me, and if he did see me and I started telling him about our brawl with Clumb, and the forecast, he’d throw me out.”
“Unless you showed him that blowing up SAC was part of the plan. You said yourself that the only way they could get away with it was to put SAC out of action. Aren’t they doing it?”
Jesse thought it over and shook his head again, no. “They can’t blow up SAC. You’ve got to be practical. Five planes in two weeks? That’s nothing. We could lose that many in five minutes through one error in navigation at a refueling rendezvous. In one raid on Schweinfurt, the Eighth Air Force lost ninety-nine B-Seventeens. That didn’t stop them from smearing most of Germany before they were through. Anyway, Keatton has half the technicians in the Air Force down at Hibiscus. One more man won’t help, and I don’t see what one man can do.”
Katharine stood up, stepped to the window, and whirled, so that she stood directly before him and his eye could not evade her angry face. “You make me sore! You want to know what one man can do? I’ll tell you. One man, name of Klaus Fuchs. Came to this country to work at Los Alamos. Among other things, he worked on the original planning for a thermonuclear weapon. Then he left us, with everything neatly filed in his head. He went back to Europe and turned it all over to the Russians. If it wasn’t for Klaus Fuchs—and a few others—I wouldn’t be wondering whether you and I will be cinders by Monday night. That’s what one man can do, and did!”
Jesse said nothing.
“I think you’re better than Klaus Fuchs,” she said. “I hope you are. Anyway, it’s always been one man. It’s never anyone else. It’s always you.”
He said, “You’ll go with me?”
“Of course.”
At midnight they sat side by side on an airliner leaving National Airport. They held hands, and kissed as soon as the overhead lights were out. The stewardess was certain they were newlyweds.
At Jacksonville they got out to stretch their legs and in the grimy terminal building Jess bought a paper. There was nothing new from Texarkana or Hibiscus or Washington. But there was a two-column editorial, captioned: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE B-99?”, on the front page. The lead paragraph read: “Americans have been understandably disturbed by the mysterious loss of four of the new B-99 jet bombers. Now comes the news that a fifth has blown up over Texas. The Air Force, while conducting extensive safety tests of the eight-engined intercontinental bombers at Hibiscus Base, has made no announcement as to the cause of any of these mishaps. Since security measures are notoriously stringent around bases of the Strategic Air Command, and since the missions of the five doomed planes originated at three separate bases, the possibility of widespread sabotage seems remote. The inescapable conclusion is that the B-99, perhaps in some small detail that can quickly be remedied, is defective.”
The editorial said that thirty-four airmen had already died and others would certainly die unless the cause of the disasters was discovered.
It spoke of the present equable international situation, with the Russian divisions pulling back from the Western Europe borders, and the Chinese Communists quiet in Southeast Asia. The renewal of strict censorship of Moscow dispatches was not necessarily ominous. It might only reflect internal conflicts within the Kremlin, and a power shift in the Presidium.
The editorial concluded: “Why not ground the B-99 until it is proved safe? Let SAC replace the B-99, for the time being, with the B-47’s and B-52’s, efficient aircraft presently in mothballs.”
Jesse was silent as they walked back towards their plane. Katharine said, “Well?”
“Maybe that’s the answer,” he said. “The Russians aren’t going to destroy SAC. They’re going to let the American people do it.”