The flickering stopped and the diffused bead-lights resumed their steady glow. Jim stirred uncomfortably and raised his head to peer at her. "Blow your nose, sit up," he said. He wasn't giving orders. He was just describing what she would be doing for the next few minutes, and he was quite right, and she discovered he was right about needing to blow her nose, too; good heavens, had she been weeping?
She said bitterly, "I might as well, since nothing's happening here."
Jim rolled over and yawned. That was a sort of answer, signifying that he didn't care much one way or the other. As she pulled on the wraparound that she still usually wore he absentmindedly stroked her flank. That was the rest of the answer, meaning that they could make it some other time when she was feeling more cheerful.
When she exited Honeymoon Hotel, Flo and Ann were standing exactly as she had imagined them, and they neither stopped their discussion nor looked at her as she walked past to the shaft, tugged the line to make it rise, and put her foot in a stirrup. She envied them. She wished that someone on the ship cared enough about what she did or thought to argue with her about it.
8
AS KNEFHAUSEN WAS LEAVING HIS OFFICE, MRS. AMBROSE came running after him. Telephone? At this time? But it was urgent and from Goldstone; he took it, listened for a moment, slammed the phone down, and left, scowling. So! The telemetry had stopped! Really, those young people were almost no longer excusable! He barked at the driver of the scout car and scowled at the machine gunner until he moved over to make room in the back seat. At least now they gave him a driver again, and an armored helicopter even for the actual entry to the White House. But that was not really courtesy; it was simply the only way one could get there.
So. This new aggravation, should he tell the President about it? He thought not. There was no need to trouble the President with extraneous details. Perhaps even there was some simple explanation, perhaps technical, and by the time he got back to his office it would have been analyzed and corrected—a relay failure, some sort of radio interference from the solar wind, who could know?
He knew this was untrue. The telemetry did not matter for its overt purposes, for there was no need to go on reporting the same densities of H+ ions and the same blue-shift measurements, and if anything changed the young people would surely observe and report. That at least one could count on! But what the young people might not tell was the measurements of pheromones in the air, the scraps of their pillow talk, the hundred other little sampling snoops he had seen to. They had discovered this. Yes, that was the case. They had closed off his eyes and ears and nose in their ship. He now could know only what they chose to tell him of their states of sexual arousement, their private confidences, their developing interests and discoveries. And it did not matter if he liked this or loathed it, there was no help, it was done!
Well, other matters pressed. He throttled his indignation and entered the helicopter.
Under other circumstances it might have been a pleasant ride. Spring was well advanced, and along the Potomac the cherry blossoms were beginning to bud, and Rock Creek Park was all the pale green of new leaves. There were darker prospects. Even over the whup, whup of the helicopter rotor Knefhausen could hear an occasional rattle of small-arms fire from around Georgetown, and the Molotov cocktails and tear gas from the siege at the Kennedy Center were steaming the sky with smoke and fumes. They never stopped! For what reason should one try to help people like this?
And his children in the Constitution, were they any better? Such reports they were sending, hints where there should be only facts. He had had to get expert help in translating what the latest one was all about. He didn't like the need, and even less liked the results. What had gone wrong? They were his kids, handpicked! How had he missed the signs of this, this hippiness, this moral decay? There had been no suggestion of such a thing in any of their records, at least not past the age of twenty or so when one might forgive it, and even then only for Ann Becklund and Eve Barstow. So then! How had they got into this I Ching foolishness, and the stupid business with the Achillea millefolium, better known as the common yarrow? What "experiments" were these they spoke of? Who among them started this disgustingly unscientific thing of acupuncture? How dared they depart from their programmed power budget for "research purposes," and what were these purposes, then? Above all, what was the "damage to the ship"?
He pulled a pad out of his briefcase and scribbled a note:
With immediate effect, cut out the nonsense. I have the impression you are all acting like irresponsible children. You are letting down the whole ideals of the program.
Knefhausen
As soon as he had run the short distance from the chopper pad to the sandbagged White House entrance, he gave the slip to a page from the Message Center for immediate encoding and transmission to the Constitution via Goldstone, Lunar Orbiter, and Farside Base. All they needed was a reminder, he persuaded himself. Then they would settle down. But he was still worried as he allowed himself to be strip-searched and his crevices investigated, and worried as he dressed himself again under the eye of the guards. Still. What could one do? He peered into a mirror as he adjusted his tie, patted his hair down, smoothed his mustache with the tip of a finger, and presented himself to be led away.
This time they went down, not up. Knefhausen was going to the basement chamber that had been successively Franklin D. Roosevelt's swimming pool, the White House press lounge, a TV studio for taping jolly little two-shots of the President with Congressmen and Senators for the folks back home to see, and, now, the heavily armored bunker in which anyone trapped in the White House in the event of a successful attack from the city outside could hold out, could at least have some real hope of holding out, for several weeks, during which time the Fourth Armored would surely be able to retake the grounds from its bases in Maryland. It was not a comfortable room, but it was a safe one. Besides being armored against attack, it was as thoroughly soundproof, spyproof, and ieakproof as any structure in the world, not excepting the Under-Kremlin or the Colorado NOROM base.