“Sweetie, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Mike told her.
She exclaimed again at the hotel room, which was bigger than her apartment in Wakamatsu. Mike went out and sent his telegrams. When he came back, he asked the desk clerk about nearby restaurants. He splurged and took Midori to a steakhouse.
How much she got amazed her all over again. “This is too much for three!” she said, which didn’t keep her from making a big dent in it. Mike finished what she couldn’t.
They had an American honeymoon at the hotel for a couple of days. Then they took a cab to the train station. Mike bought tickets. He hadn’t made much in his Army time, but he’d spent even less. He had plenty of money for now. Once he’d got the tickets, he sent one more wire.
By dumb luck, the train left in less than an hour. They went to their seats. The roomy car and big, snorting engine impressed Midori, too. She squashed her nose against the window as the train pulled out. After they left town and got out into the open, she mashed it even tighter.
“So much space!” she breathed after a while. “So much! I knew America was wide, but I had no idea how wide. Our generals must have been crazy to think they could fight so much.”
She said the same kind of thing several more times as they rolled east. The more of America she saw, the bigger it seemed. The farther east they went, the colder it got, too, as they left the mild coastal climate behind. Snow, though, unlike broad open spaces with no people in them, Midori was used to.
They changed trains in Salt Lake City. Sunrise on the snow-covered salt flats outside of town was one of the most beautiful things Mike had ever seen. Midori was dozing, though, and he didn’t want to wake her.
From Utah, they went into Wyoming and crossed the Continental Divide. The prairie on the far side of the Rockies astonished the woman from Japan all over again. Then the conductor called, “Casper! All out for Casper!”
“That’s us, babe,” Mike said. He and Midori hurried out.
John Dennison waited on the platform. He might not have aged a day in the ten years since Mike had last seen him. A slow smile stretched across his face as he stuck out his hand. “Howdy, scalp,” he said.
* * *
Joe Steele took the Presidential oath of office for the sixth time on a cool, cloudy day. Chief Justice Prescott Bush administered it. Bush was as pliable a Chief Justice as even Joe Steele could want. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he was friendly and gregarious and smart enough not to say no to the man who’d appointed him.
At the lectern, the President fumbled with the text of his latest inaugural address. Charlie watched from the bleachers behind the lectern. These days, he always wondered how well Joe Steele would get through a public event. Sometimes he was fine. Sometimes, he wasn’t.
Today, he pulled himself together. It wasn’t a great speech, but he never gave great speeches. He gave speeches that got the job done. “Man’s power to achieve good or to inflict evil surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears of all ages,” he said. “We can turn rivers in their courses, level mountains to the plains. Nations amass wealth. Labor sweats to create-and turns out devices to level not only mountains but also cities. Science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.
“The Reds know no god but force, no devotion but its use. They tutor men in treason. They feed upon the hunger of others. Whatever defies them, they torture, especially the truth.”
Charlie carefully didn’t wonder about accurate election returns from the last few years divisible by four, and from the ones divisible only by two. That took work, but he did it.
“Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark,” Joe Steele went on. “It confers a common dignity on the French soldier who dies in Indochina, the British soldier killed in Malaya, the American life given in Japan. The strength of all free peoples lies in unity; their danger, in discord. We face the Red threat not with dread and confusion, but with confidence and conviction.”
He waited for applause, and he got it. He went on to talk about the need to keep America prosperous and to boost trade around the world. And he finished, “Patriotism means equipped forces and a prepared citizenry. Moral stamina means more energy and more productivity, on the farm and in the factory. Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible. This is the work that awaits us all, to be done with bravery, with charity, and with prayer to Almighty God.”
He stumbled a little turning away from the lectern. He caught himself before he fell, though. He was shaking his head as he went to the limousine that would take him back to the White House. Getting old had to be a terrible business. You could feel your grip slipping day by day, but you couldn’t do anything about it.
Charlie didn’t go to any of the inaugural balls and banquets. He never had. Esther didn’t enjoy them. More to the point, she didn’t enjoy the people she would run into at them. Going to a ball by himself wasn’t Charlie’s idea of fun. It wasn’t like election nights. His absence at the social gatherings might be noticed, but he wouldn’t be missed.
After January 20, things went back to normal in a hurry. With so many under his belt, one more inauguration day was only a formality for Joe Steele. He kept the lid on at home and dueled with Trotsky by proxy around the world. Trotsky was no spring chicken, either-he was the President’s age, give or take a few months.
“I’m waiting for him to drop dead,” Joe Steele said at a meeting of his aides. He had held more of those the past couple of years than he’d been in the habit of doing before. Chuckling, he went on, “That place will fall to pieces as soon as his hand comes off it.”
No one wondered out loud what might happen to this place as soon as Joe Steele’s hand came off it. Anyone who did wonder out loud about such things wouldn’t stick around long enough to learn the answer.
Joe Steele called another one of those meetings on a bright almost-spring day in early March. The general in charge of U.S. forces near the Japanese demilitarized zone had complained that his troops didn’t have enough ammunition in reserve if the North Japanese came over the border. Eisenhower seemed to think General Van Fleet was worrying over nothing.
Even though the President had summoned his henchmen, he had trouble acting interested in what they said. He kept frowning and raising his left hand to rub behind his ear. Finally, Charlie asked him, “Are you all right, sir?”
The frown deepened into a scowl. “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” Joe Steele said. He started to bring up his left hand again, but never finished the gesture. His eyes widened, then slid shut. He slumped forward, his chin hitting the table hard.
His aides all jumped up, shouting and cursing. “Get him to the couch next door!” Scriabin said urgently. “And for Christ’s sake call Doc Pietruszka!”
Charlie helped carry the President out of the conference room. “Be careful,” Joe Steele muttered, half conscious at best. They laid him on the couch, as the Hammer had suggested. Mikoian loosened his tie. His breathing still sounded bad: slow and irregular and harsh. He looked bad, too. He was pale, almost gray. Charlie fumbled for his wrist to take his pulse. It felt weak and much too fast.
“What is it?” Kagan asked.
“I wasn’t counting, but I don’t think it’s good,” Charlie answered.
“What do we do now?” Mikoian said.
“Wait for Pietruszka and hope he can help,” Scriabin snapped.
By Mikoian’s expression, that wasn’t what he’d meant. “We’d better let Betty know,” he said.
Joe Steele’s wife waited with the aides, all of them shivering and numb, till Dr. Pietruszka got to the White House. It took less than fifteen minutes, but seemed like forever. Joe Steele had gone grayer yet by then. The aides described what had happened. The doctor took the President’s pulse and peeled back his eyelids to examine his pupils. “He’s had another stroke, a bad one this time,” he said. That answered whatever questions Charlie might have had about the headache a couple of years before.