“Good thinking. Where is the son of a bitch, by the way?”
“Henry? Oh, he’s safe and sound, Godfrey. He’s been ordering you to report to him for the last hour or so.”
“Um.” Menninger thought for a moment. “Tell you what. Send out a radiation-safe team to escort him here so I can report. Don’t take no for an answer. Tell him he’ll be safer here than in his own hole.” He picked up the pencil, scratching the pit of his stomach. Which was complaining. He wanted orange juice to build up his blood sugar, a stack of flapjacks to give a foundation for the next cup of coffee, and that cup of coffee. He wanted his breakfast, and he was aware that he was cranky because he was hungry. “Then we’ll see who’s President,” he added, to the air.
On the edge of the Bahia de Campeche the Libyan vice admiral had got his crew together and his submarine up to two hundred meters, running straight and level. None of them were functioning well, with prodromal diarrhea and vomiting often enough so that the whole ship smelled like a latrine, but they could serve. For awhile, at least. They did. Libya’s naval doctrine called for one big missile instead of a few dozen little ones. As this one big one broke the surface of the gulf it was immediately captured by a dozen radars. The scared but as yet untouched tourists on their lanais in Merida saw bright, bad flashes out west, over the water, as a Cuban cruiser locked in and fired ABMs. None of them caught it. It was a cruise missile, not ballistic, easy to identify but hard to predict as it drove itself north-northwest toward the Florida panhandle. A dozen times defensive weapons clawed at it as it crossed the coast, and then it was lost to view. There were plenty of installations along the way charged with the duty of detecting and destroying just such a weapon, but none that were functioning anymore.
The latest picture from Margie showed her with one foot on the shell of a dead Krinpit, looking tired and flushed and happy. It was as good a picture of his daughter as God had had since her bearskin-rug days, and he had it blown into a hard print for his wallet. General Weinenstat looked at it carefully and passed it back to him. “She’s a credit to you, God,” she said.
He looked at it for a moment and put it away. “Yeah. I hope she got her stuff. Can you imagine her mother? I told her Margie wanted some dress patterns, and she wanted me to put in about a thousand meters of fabric.”
“Well, if you’d left her raising to her mother she wouldn’t be getting the kind of efficiency ratings you’ve been showing me.”
“I suppose not.” The latest one had been nothing but praise, or at least up to the psychologist’s report:
Latent hostility toward men due to early marital trauma and mild inverse-Oedipal effect. Well compensated. Does not affect performance of duties.
I really hope that’s so, thought Godfrey Menninger. Rose Weinenstat looked at him carefully. “You’re not worrying about her, are you? Because there’s no need — wait a minute.” General Weinenstat touched the thing in her ear that looked like, but wasn’t, a hearing aid. Her expression turned somber.
“What is it?”
She turned off the communicator. “Henry Moncas. His shelter took a direct hit. They’re trying to find out who’s President now.”
“Shit!” Godfrey Menninger stared at the remains of his breakfast for a moment and saw none of it. “Oh, shit,” he said again. “It looks bad, Rosie. The worst part is we never had a choice!”
General Weinenstat started to speak, then changed her mind.
“What? What were you going to say, Rosie?”
She shrugged. “No good second-guessing, is it?”
He pounced on her words. “About what? Come on, Rosie!”
“Well — maybe moving into Canada—”
“Yeah. That was a mistake, all right. I’ll give you that. But not ours! The Greasies knew we couldn’t let them move troops into Manitoba. That was Tam Gulsmit’s mistake! Same with the Peeps. Once we were engaged we had to take Lop Nor out — quick, clean, minimum casualties. They should’ve accepted it instead of retaliating—”
But he could hear voices within him denying it, speaking in the tones of Tam Gulsmit and Heir-of-Mao. “We were safe moving troops in to protect the tar sands, because we knew you couldn’t afford to invade.”
“You shouldn’t have bombed Lop Nor. You should have known we would have to retaliate.” The voices within God Menninger’s mind were the only voices they would ever have again. Heir-of-Mao lay with eyes bulging and tongue protruding from his lips, dead in the deep shelter under Peking, and the atoms that had once been Gulsmit’s body were falling out from the column of fire over Clydeside.
The Libyan missile had bypassed Atlanta and Asheville and Johnson City, matching their terrains against the profiles imprinted in its memory. The safety interlocks on its thermonuclear charge were falling away one by one as its tiny, paranoid brain began to recognize its nearness to the thing it was unleashed to destroy.
“It’s bad, Rosie,” said Godfrey Menninger at last, rising to return to his desk. Maybe he should have let Margie’s mother have the raising of her. Then Margie would probably have had a husband and a couple of kids by now. And perhaps — perhaps the world would have been a different place. He wondered if he would ever hear from her again. “Rosie,” he said, “check Houston. See if the communication links with Jem are holding up. With the other colonies, too, of course.”
“Right now, Godfrey? Give me ten minutes; I’ve got a call coming in from the DoD.”
“Ten minutes is fine,” he said; but before the ten minutes was up he was dead.
TWENTY
THE CORACLE first appeared between showers, far out over the water. In the pit beside Ana Dimitrova, Corporal Kristianides — no, Lieutenant Kristianides now, she corrected herself — stood up and turned the field glasses on it.
“Krinpit,” she said. “Son of a bitch. Lay your gun on it, Nan, but don’t fire unless I tell you to.”
Unnecessary order! Not for worlds would she have fired. Not until she saw for herself that there were only Krinpit in the boat, and not Ahmed Dulla. Perhaps not even then, for this insanity of guns and shooting was awful even to play at. She had not yet had to fire at a living being, was far from sure that she could, and had said as much; but no one wanted to hear. But the good thing about her machine gun was that it had a telescopic sight, and she was glad enough to aim it.
The coracle disappeared into a squall, but not before she had seen that there was no human being in it, though it was large enough for several.
When it appeared again it was larger and nearer, and she could see that the single Krinpit was working furiously to keep it bailed and the trapezoidal sail intact, and paddling to bring it straight into the camp. By then everyone had seen, and at least a dozen weapons were pointed at it. Over the PA system Guy Tree’s voice shrilled an order to hold fire. Down on the beach Marge Menninger stood, a GORR under her arm, oblivious of the rain that soaked her. Ana wiped the wet off her sight as carefully as she had been taught and looked again. She had no skill at recognizing individual Krinpit by sight, but this one did not look familiar.
Disappointment of a hope. But what a foolish hope, she scolded herself. How improbable that Ahmed would once again miraculously appear. And even if he had, who was this Ahmed who had taken her and used her and left her again? He was not the person of Sofia, she thought gloomily, and roused herself and tried to think more constructively.
It was a failure. There was so little to think constructively about! The world she had left was blowing itself up, and the world she had come to seemed determined to do the same. What went on in the secret conferences among Marge Menninger and her warrior knights in the headquarters shed she did not know, nor wish to. But it might well be the death of all of them.