Smith realized that the situation had to be handled. It was necessary that Cusack get off the base, and necessary that he forget all about those thermos bottles in the closet. The way to make him forget was get him a girl. There was only Betty Jo, and Betty Jo wouldn’t go for Cusack. But Betty Jo would know plenty of other girls, and maybe she could find one of about Cusack’s age. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Phil. I’ll give you a note to my girl. Name’s Betty Jo Atkins. Works at the Sea Trout. She’ll get you fixed up.”
Smith got out of bed, found a pad of Air Force stationery, sat down at the table, and wrote the note: “Dear Betty Jo—This will introduce my roommate, Phil Cusack. He’s a good kid. Wants a date. Take care of him, will you? Love, Stan.”
He slipped the note into an envelope, wrote her name across the face of it, and handed it to Cusack. “She gets off work at five. You know where the Sea Trout is, don’t you?”
“Sure. Thanks a million, Stan.” While Cusack was trotting down the steps of Barracks 37, whistling, he unfolded the two tens. They were new bills, but Stan’s fist had crushed them into a moist, twisted knot. Stan was a wonderful guy, all right, but about some things he sure was funny. 2
Clint Hume was back in time for a late breakfast, as he had promised. He showed up at the Gresham house with Red Gresham, his aircraft commander, shortly before eleven. The long-range search had been back since nine, but de-briefing had required almost two hours. It had been difficult to determine what the electronic eyes of the B-99’s had seen, if anything.
Katharine and Jesse and Margaret Gresham were waiting, sipping orange juice and listening to the radio in the kitchen. Jesse was contemplating, aloud, a peculiar facet of American manners. In times of tension and crisis people kept their radios going all day and most of the night, to the neglect of television. He rarely had been out of earshot of a radio for the whole week. People knew, instinctively, that a radio program could and would be interrupted for a news flash. It was different with television, which might be showing a film at the moment, or be engrossed with an expensive and complex dramatic production or situation comedy which on no account must be blighted by a news bulletin.
Clint Hume and Gresham, heavy-eyed and unshaven, sat down at the table and Gresham nodded at the radio and said, “What’s the news?”
Jesse laughed. It was easy for a man to lose his perspective in their business. He said, “Red, if there’s any really important news in the world it’s probably right in your head.”
“Not mine,” Gresham said. “Clint’s. Unless he had spots in front of his eyes. He can’t seem to make up his mind.”
Clint Hume said, “We’d been more than halfway to Europe, and were coming back when I picked up what looked like a whole fleet of ships on my screen. Fringe area. Just when the pips came into the hundred mile circle, they disappeared. Just faded away. Never saw anything like it before.”
“How many pips?” asked Jess.
“Oh, more than a dozen. About nine hundred miles due east of New York. I don’t know whether it was some freak reflection, or what. That’s what I can’t make up my mind about.”
“Anybody else see them?”
“No. We had the northeast quadrant and they all seemed to be in our sector. That’s the trouble. Anyway, we sent on the sighting to Washington, followed by a question mark.”
The music on the radio faded away, and an announcer’s voice said: “We interrupt this program for an important news bulletin. Radio Ankara has just announced that it has learned, from a reliable diplomatic source, that two well-known marshals of the Red Army and an admiral of the Red Navy have been executed. Marshals Jullnick and Kuznoff, and Admiral Zubarov were arrested on November fifteenth, secretly tried as enemies of the state, and shot in Lubianka Prison, according to the official Turkish radio. There has been no confirmation of this report from Moscow. The Associated Press and United Press have received no dispatches from their correspondents in Moscow for the past twenty-four hours, indicating that a most rigid censorship has been imposed. For further developments, keep tuned…”
Margaret Gresham turned down the radio’s volume and asked, “What’s it mean?”
Red Gresham smiled and said, “Sounds like everything’s S.O.P. in Russia.”
Katharine Hume frowned, wondering how a military purge fitted into the Soviet puzzle, and traced watery circles on the yellow plastic tabletop with the tips of her fingers.
Jesse Price said what he was thinking, “Wish Clark Simmons were here to tell us.” 3
Clark Simmons believed he knew what was going on, and theoretically he was in the spot where his knowledge could do the most good, except that it was a Saturday, with only one more shopping day until Christmas. Simmons was one of eight men around a conference table in the office of the Under Secretary of State in Washington. The conference was considering two cables just decoded. One, from the embassy at Ankara, gave the source of the report of the purge. An economic advisor in the Russian consulate-general in Istanbul, enamored of a Turkish girl, had refused to return to Moscow when ordered. He had sought and received the protection of the Turkish government, and in return told what secrets he knew. The other cable came from Moscow. The Russian government would not discuss the purported death of Marshals Jullnick and Kuznoff, and Admiral Zubarov. It was true that the men had not been seen in Moscow for two months, nor had their names been mentioned in the press.
Clark Simmons had not yet attempted to voice his opinion. Since his judgment, at the moment, was being questioned in the Department, he was hoping that one of the others would broach what he had in mind. It would be best if he supported a theory, rather than advanced one. But nobody was seeing it his way, and finally he knew he must speak. “All of you seem to believe that this shows further weakness in the regime,” he said. “I disagree. I have had some dealings with Jullnick and Zubarov. Kuznoff I never met. Jullnick and Zubarov, on the whole, struck me as moderate men. At a time when Stalin and Molotov were hostile without any reservations, they were as friendly as they dared be. When the great thaw came, they supported our efforts towards full inspection of atomic armaments. It is my opinion that some momentous decision, of which we know nothing, was taken around the middle of November. These three men were not politically ambitious. They had no connection with the conduct of international affairs on the highest level. They were concerned strictly with military matters. So their disagreement must have concerned military action.”
Walter McCabe, the Special Assistant for Eastern Europe, challenged him. “Simmons, we’re all aware of your belief that war is imminent. You’re just twisting the facts to fit your theories. Look at the record. The Soviet Union is always least aggressive after some internal eruption like this. Look what happened after Stalin’s big Army purge. He appeased Hitler. What happened after Stalin died, after Beria was executed, after Malenkov was deposed? Periods of sweetness and light. Takes ’em time to shake down after one of these purges. I think we can rest easy for a while.”
“Rest easy?” Simmons asked. “May I quote a bit of Lenin. The soundest strategy in war is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy makes the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy.’”
McCabe leaned across the table, angry. “I’m not morally disintegrated!”
“When you rest easy you are,” Simmons said. “And what about SAC? How do you think the morale is in SAC today?”
“I think you’re in over your head,” McCabe said.
The under secretary looked at his watch. He was already late for another conference, and he had promised his wife, whom he hardly remembered having seen all during the week, that he would take the afternoon off and help with the last-minute shopping. How could she be expected to select presents for some of his government friends whom she didn’t even know? The under secretary said, “Well, it’s an enigma. We’ll just have to wait and see.” He was usually an optimistic man, but at this moment he felt disturbed, inwardly. Every conference on Russia seemed to end with him calling it an enigma. This was hardly an original description, but what else was there to say?