On the far side of the zone, he got glimpses of far-off North Japanese soldiers laying barbed wire and digging tank traps. They’d invaded the Constitutional Monarchy, but now they were getting ready for somebody to invade them. Mike just scratched his head. He didn’t follow that kind of logic, if it was logic.
Joe Steele would, he thought, and laughed quietly to himself.
XXV
Only a couple of months after atomic fire seared Sendai and Nagano, Mao ran Chiang off the Chinese mainland. Chiang and his Nationalists Dunkirked across the Formosa Strait to the island of the same name (though most maps also called it Taiwan). Without any navy to speak of, Mao’s Reds couldn’t follow them. Chiang declared that the Nationalists still were the legitimate government of all of China, and that one fine day they’d go back to the mainland for another few rounds with Mao.
Joe Steele recognized Chiang as rightful President of China. Some of America’s allies did, too, but not all of them. Charlie wasn’t particularly surprised. Joe Steele hadn’t recognized Trotsky as ruler in Russia till they ended up on the same side in the war against Hitler.
He did remark to Stas Mikoian, “I wondered if the boss was going to use some more A-bombs in China to give Chiang a helping hand.” Not by word or by inflection did he let on about how much the idea scared him. Showing that anything the boss might do scared you was an invitation to the Jeebies to come pick you up. The only way you could mention such things was with a neutrality more scrupulous than Switzerland’s.
Mikoian nodded. “There was some discussion of it,” he answered, also as coolly as if he were talking about how much vermouth to put in a Martini. He was smoother with that tone than Charlie was. As far as Charlie could tell, Mikoian was smoother with it than anybody. He might have been lightly amused as he continued, “Remember when Gromyko visited last month?”
“Sure,” Charlie said. The Russian ambassador always looked as if he had a poker shoved up his behind. The Great Stone Face was his Washington nickname. He made Vince Scriabin seem jolly by comparison, and that wasn’t easy. “Why? What did he say?”
“He said that if we dropped anything on Shanghai or Peiping, for instance, he couldn’t answer for what might happen to Paris or Rome.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. After that, there didn’t seem to be much more to say. A moment later, Charlie did find one more question: “He persuaded the boss he meant it or Trotsky meant it or however you want to put that?”
“He must have, or the bombers would have flown,” Mikoian answered. “Myself, I thought they were going to. But the world can probably live through one atomic bomb from each side. Once you start throwing them around for every little thing, pretty soon there’s not much left to throw them at. Chances are there’s not much left of you, either.”
“Is that you talking, or are you quoting Joe Steele?”
“I’m quoting what I told him. General Marshall said the same thing,” Mikoian replied. “He thought it over, and he decided we were right.”
“I see,” Charlie said, in place of the Thank heaven! he felt like shouting. He added, “You know, there are times it doesn’t break my heart that I’m not a big enough wheel to sit in when you guys talk about stuff like that.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The glint in Mikoian’s eye gave his sardonic words the lie. With a wry chuckle, he said, “I didn’t expect I’d need to worry about blowing up the world when I came to Washington with Joe Steele right at the end of the First World War. All you can do is roll with the punches the best way you know how.”
“Hey, I didn’t think I’d wind up here, either. I figured I’d write stories for the Associated Press the rest of my life, or maybe get good enough at what I did so a paper like the Boston Globe or the New York Times or the Washington Post would pick me up,” Charlie said. “But here I am.”
“It hasn’t worked out too badly,” Mikoian said.
Charlie couldn’t even tell him he was wrong. He’d done well for himself here. But the quote from Matthew that Esther hadn’t quite been able to remember kept coming back to mind. He hoped he hadn’t lost his soul. He thought things were better here with him than they would have been without him. He hadn’t exactly stood up to Joe Steele, though. He’d gone along with some things he wished he hadn’t.
It was cold and rainy and getting close to Christmas when GBI men swooped down on half a dozen scholars of Chinese history, literature, and culture and dragged them off their campuses (in one case, straight out of a lecture hall) and into prison. The charge was aiding and abetting the fall of mainland China to the Reds.
“We know who lost China for Chiang Kai-shek!” Andy Wyszynski boomed at a press conference. “Yes, we know, and those people will pay the price for their disloyalty!”
“Haven’t we heard this song before?” Esther asked.
“We aren’t just hearing it-we’re watching it,” Charlie said. And they were. The television set seemed an awful lot of cabinet-and an awful lot of money-for not much screen, but there was the Attorney General, bellowing away right in their living room.
“Those treacherous fools deserve the long prison terms we will impose on them!” Wyszynski shouted, pumping the air with his clenched fist.
When he said that, Esther raised an eyebrow. “What? He’s not going for the death penalty? Is Joe Steele getting soft?”
Charlie gave one of those let-me-check-the-children looks. Then he said, “I don’t think he’s getting soft. I think he’s getting old. He really is slowing down some now that he’s passed seventy.”
“About time, wouldn’t you say?” Esther made sure she kept her voice down.
A commercial came on: a smiling blond girl who wore a costume that covered her torso with a rectangular cigarette pack pranced around in fishnet stockings while a background chorus sang about how wonderful the brand was. Charlie clucked sadly. “Boy, I didn’t think anything could be dumber than radio advertising, but this TV stuff shows me I was wrong.”
“It’s pretty bad, all right.” Esther didn’t return to talking about Joe Steele. Charlie wasn’t sorry. Talking about the President had been dangerous at any time during his long, long administration. It seemed all the more so now that he was visibly starting to fail. He might lash out to show that his sand wasn’t really running out after all.
Or he might live, and stay President, another ten years. Just because he was slowing down, that didn’t mean he had to stop soon. If he had any reason to live on, wasn’t it to spite John Nance Garner?
* * *
Every few weeks, a technical sergeant with a Geiger counter drove a jeep along the southern edge of the demilitarized zone, checking radiation levels from the bomb that had fallen on Nagano-and also, Mike supposed, from the one that had fallen on Sendai. The United States and Russia had both added to Honshu’s postwar misery.
“How does it look?” Mike asked the guy, whose name was Gary Cunningham. “I mean, besides cold?”
“I’m from Phoenix, Arizona. Not the weather I grew up with-that’s for goddamn sure.” Cunningham waved at the snow on the ground. “Didn’t have to worry about crap like this. But the radiation? It’s going down-seems to be dropping pretty much the way the slide-rule boys figured.”
“Is it dangerous?” Mike asked.
“I don’t think so, not where it’s at now. I mean, the smart guys don’t think so,” Cunningham answered. “All I do is, I get the numbers they want, and then I listen to them going on about what the shit means.”
Mike suspected he was sandbagging. Plainly, he was nobody’s dope, even if he wasn’t a scientist himself. He would have seen enough and heard enough to make some pretty good guesses of his own. “I was in Yamashita when we dropped the one on Sendai,” Mike said. “What’s that going to do to me over time?”