Just make it interesting, one of his new colleagues had suggested.
But it is interesting, Peter had said.
He struggled to find his focus, a problem he’d been having ever since the problems with Megan.
“Decapitation, of course, is from head cutting-off of, that is, it’s the idea that you could paralyze a whole society by sort of removing, like in the French Revolution, with the, um, the guillotine, the—”
“Uh, Dr. Thiokol?”
Ah! A question! Peter Thiokol loved it when someone in his class asked a question, because it got him off the hook, even if for just a minute or two. But there were hardly ever any questions.
“Yes?” he said eagerly. He couldn’t see who had spoken.
“Uh,” an attractive girl asked, “are we going to get our midterms back before we have the final?”
Peter sighed, seeing the pile of exams, ragged blue booklets smeared with incomprehensible chickentracks in ballpoint, sitting on the table next to his bed. He’d read a few, then lost interest. They were so boring.
“Well, I’m almost done with them,” he lied. “And yes, you will get them back before the final. But maybe nuclear war will break out and we’ll have to cancel the final.”
There was some laughter, but not much. Peter lurched onward, trying to relocate his direction. He had expected to be so much better at this, because he loved to show off so for Megan.
“You show off very well, I must admit,” Megan Wilder, his ex-wife, had once said. “It’s your second greatest talent, after thinking up ways to end the world.”
The teaching had seemed to offer so much after his breakdown — a new start, a sense of freedom from the pressures of the past, a new city, new opportunities, a discipline he loved. But the kids turned out not to be very interesting to him, nor he to them. They just sat there. Their faces blurred after a while. They were so passive. And this performing took so much out of him. He went home at night bleached out, too tired to think or remember.
He’d just stare at the phone, trying to figure out if he should call Megan or not, and praying that she’d call him.
The memory was still brittle. He’d even seen her two weeks ago, in a wretched, maybe heroic, attempt at reconciliation. She’d simply showed up after months of staying out of touch. For a night it had been spectacular, a greedy carnival of flesh and wanting; but in the morning the old business was there, his guilt, her guilt, the various deceits, the betrayals, his narcissism, her vanity, his bomb, his fucking bomb, as she called it, the whole ugly pyramid of it.
“Anyway,” he said, still scattered, “urn, on decapitation stuff, um — look, let’s be frank here.” He had this sudden weary urge to cut through to the truth.
“Write this down. Decapitation is about killing a few thousand people to save a few million or billion people. The idea is that Soviet society is so centralized and authority-crazed that if you kill the top few, you wreck them. So you build a missile that’s really an intercontinental sniper rifle. You become the guy in Day of the Jackal. The only problem is, they can do it to us, too.”
They looked at him dumbly. Not even murder touched them.
He sighed again.
And so the mighty have fallen. The great Peter Thiokol, magna cum laude, Harvard, a Rhodes scholar, a master’s in nuclear engineering from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in international relations from Yale, golden boy of the Defense Department, prime denizen of the inside-the-beltway Strategic Community, author of the famous essay in Foreign Affairs, “And Why Not Missile Superiority?: Rethinking MAD,” was drowning.
Peter was a tall, reedy looking man of forty-one who looked thirty-five; he had thinning blond hair that exposed a good stretch of forehead, which made him look intelligent. He was also rather handsome in an academic sort of way, but he had a disorganized quality to him, an alarming vagueness that put many people off. Outside his area of expertise, he cheerfully admitted, he was a complete moron.
In a no doubt desperate attempt to camouflage his discomfort, he was dressed as he imagined a professor should dress, that is, as he had remembered them dressing from twenty years before: He wore a tweed jacket so dense it looked like a map of a heather Milky Way, and a Brooks Brothers blue oxford-cloth shirt, that deeper, stormier blue that only Brooks offers, with a striped rep tie, a pair of pleated khakis from Britches of Georgetown, and a pair of beat-up, nearly blackened Bass Weejuns.
The student tried again.
“Uh, Dr. Thiokol? Could you at least tell us if it’ll be an essay exam or a multiple choice? I mean, the test is next week.”
The girl looked a little like Megan. She was dark and beautiful and very slender and intense. He stared at her neurotically, then struggled with the question. Reading more of their essays would just about kill him. But he knew he didn’t have the energy to go back through his chaotic notes to develop some kind of objective thing. He’d probably just give them all B’s, and go back to staring at the phone.
“Well, why don’t we take a vote on it?” he finally said.
But he was suddenly drowned out in the hammering of a huge roar. The class turned from their lecturer to the window, and watched in amazement as a scene from a fifties monster movie began to unreel. A large insect appeared to be attacking the parking lot. As it got closer, the bug became an Army UH-1B Huey helicopter, a great olive drab creature with a huge Plexiglas eye, a bloated thorax, and an almost delicate tail, and as it floated down out of the sky, adroitly sliding through a gap in the trees, its howl caused all the fixtures in the lecture hall to vibrate. Preposterously, it landed in the parking lot, whirling up a windstorm of dust and snow and girls’ skirts.
Peter could hear the giggles and the gossip as two officers in dappled combat fatigues came loping out of the hull of the craft, grabbed a kid, spoke to him, and then headed toward his building. But he himself did not smile. He understood that they were here for him and that something was terribly wrong. He felt the blood drain from his face.
It took them about thirty seconds to reach Shaffer.
And in the next second the doors flew open, and a lean middle-aged officer walked with utter lack of self-consciousness to the front of the room.
“Dr. Thiokol,” he said without a smile, “we need to talk.”
Their eyes met; the fellow looked focused and excited at the same time. Peter knew many career military types; they were okay, a little literal-minded, perhaps. And generally quite conformist. But this guy had something a little extra: He looked like a young dragoon officer racing toward Waterloo in 1815. Peter had seen it in a few bomber pilots, usually the wilder kinds, the ones who wanted to go thermonuclear three times a week.
“Okay,” Peter said to his students, “you guys get out of here now.”
The students trundled out, gossiping among themselves.
Then the officer held up Nuclear Endgames, Prospects for Armageddon by Peter Thiokol, Ph.D.
“In this book you talk about what you call the John Brown scenario, where a paramilitary group takes over a silo.”
“Yes,” said Peter. “I was told by a very high-ranking officer that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever read. It hadn’t happened since 1859 at Harpers Ferry and it couldn’t happen now.”
“Well, it seems to have happened.”
“Oh, shit,” said Peter, who didn’t like to swear. He found his breath suddenly ragged. Somebody took over a bird? “Where?” But he knew.