The two agents had little appreciation of the absurd. They weren’t collectors of ironies, either, and in some future time they wouldn’t hoist a glass in salute to the ludicrousness of this moment.
“Dr. Thiokol, there were thirteen senior people in the MX Basing Modes Croup at the Hopkins Applied Physics Lab that the Department of the Air Force Strategic Warfare Committee employed to design South Mountain. There are arrest warrants on all of them. It’s a technicality, designed to speed things up, just in case. Now, we have some questions, I’m afraid.”
Peter wondered if he had the energy to explain anything. He felt himself tumbling toward incoherence, as he had before his students that morning. And he knew also where the questioning would go, where it would have to go: toward Megan. He could not stand to go over it, to work out the theories. He had just put it into his bottom drawer and thrown away the key. It was in the deep under-mountain silo of his subconscious.
But the two agents were grimly bland men of indeterminate age and strong will who simply plunged ahead. They were probably not all that different from the Delta officers: hardworking types who drew their power and identities from the potent organizations they had chosen to join and to whose dictates they would not be disloyal.
“For the record, you’re the son of Dr. and Mrs. Nels Thiokol of Edinah, Minnesota.”
“Dr. and Dr. Thiokol. My mother was a damned good ob-gyn. My father was a surgeon. Do we have to go through my whole life?”
They did. This went on for a little while and he answered all the stupid who/when questions curtly, pretending to a charmless boredom in his eyes. But as usual, he felt himself tightening when it came to his twisted adolescence, his wretched relationship with his father, whom he could never please until it occurred to him he wasn’t supposed to please him, and what this led to, all the schools, the expulsions, the business with the sleeping pills, the time he thought of now as only a long dark tunnel as he crawled through slime toward the light.
“Yet you got excellent grades through all this. And your test scores—”
“I’m smart, yes. I finally got my act together my sophomore year at Harvard.”
“What did you discover there?”
Yes, it was the crucial question of his career. He remembered it well, November of ’66, that funky, dreary room in Brattle Hall, which he shared with Mike De Masto, who was now a shrink in Oakwood, just outside of the glamorous burg of Dayton, O. Mike had long hair to his shoulder blades that year and was about Peace. Mike smoked dope and read his sacred texts and organized, orchestrated, and led the burgeoning Harvard antiwar movement. Which of course meant he was getting laid, sometimes two, three, and four times a day. Meanwhile Peter, the soggy little grind with a history of instability, spent the months in the exile of the library, depressed near unto suicide, working like a demon to figure out a way to keep himself alive. And one day he found it.
He found the bomb.
“I became interested in strategic thought at Harvard,” he told the FBI agents. “The bomb, you know. The big bomb. For reasons that were doubtlessly pathological, I drew some queer comfort from an instrument that could wipe us all out in a blinding flash. It gave point to the pointlessness.”
Peter still remembered the image of the nuclear mushroom climbing from its fiery birthing, clawing ever skyward, opening, devouring its way through the heart of civilization.
The bomb became a kind of focal point for his existence: he lost himself in its culture, its byways, its traditions, its intricacies. He learned how to build one, how to hide one, how to plant one, how to use one, how to deliver one. He pored over the interesting work in strategic thought being done at Rand and later at Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute. The strategic thinkers, men like Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Rowan, and Andy Marshall, were his heroes, outlined against the blue-gray November sky of his imagination. His senior thesis reflected their thought but was his own in the way a promising apprentice can take the line of the masters and push it way out until it’s something altogether new: Strategic Reality: Crisis Thinking for a Nuclear Age, which was later published by Random House.
In fact, everything that Peter ever became, that he ever got, he owed to the bomb. Sometimes, he thought back on that crimped, desperate, achingly lonely little shit he’d been in prep school.
You beat them, he’d tell himself, swelling with radiance at the power of his becoming what he wanted to become, which was important. Everything you have is because of the bomb.
And most of all, he had Megan because of the bomb.
He’d met her in England when he was on his Rhodes studying the impact of weapons systems on policy decisions in immediate pre-Great War Europe in a political science seminar at Balliol. She was on a Rhodes, too, studying art at Keeble, after four years at Bennington. They met at the Bodleian, far from the radical unrest of America and the Vietnam War. She was dark and Jewish and he’d known she was American because she was blowing a bubble.
I beg your pardon, he said, is that real Double-Bubble? Fleers Double-Bubble?
She just looked at him. No smile, her frank eyes devouring him, her beautiful jaw ripping away at the gum. She blew another bubble. Then she reached into her purse and pushed a single piece of genuine Fleer’s Double-Bubble across the three-hundred-year-old oak table at him.
Who are you?
He told only the truth.
I’m the smartest guy you ever met in your life, he had said.
“Did you meet any Communists at Oxford?” one of the agents said.
Peter just looked at him. What could one do with such idiots?
“No. Look. I don’t see any of those people anymore. I haven’t seen them in years.”
The agents exchanged looks. He could tell they thought he was being “difficult.” They tried a different approach.
“Of the eleven senior members of the MX Basing Modes Group, were any of them politically suspect?” asked one of the agents.
“You’ve seen the files. I haven’t.”
The two agents looked at each other, then sighed. One of them wrote something down.
“I’m running very low on time here, guys,” Peter said, smiling with what he thought was a great deal of Ivy League charm. They appeared not to hear.
“Well, then, psychologically suspect? It seems to be a pattern among senior defense analysts, and defense engineers and researchers, particularly the farther reaches of—” The agent struggled for a word.
“The farther reaches of blowing the world up, right?”
“Yes, Dr. Thiokol. Anyway, our investigations have shown that a significant number of these men and women burn out. That is, lose heart, have radical changes in religion, sexual orientation, political ideology.”
“It’s a very intense life. You’re gaming out the end of the world nearly every day, trying to figure new wrinkles, new ways to do it. Nobody gets old.”
“What about this Dr. Michael Greene?”
“Mike? Mike found out he was queer. Anyway, he bailed out before we’d really gotten to the interesting stuff.”
“He’s disappeared, that’s what makes him so interesting. And he’s got AIDS, did you know that, Dr. Thiokol?”
“No, I didn’t. My God, that’s awful.”
“Isn’t it possible that a man who’s dying — well, he’d be vulnerable emotionally to pressures or, rather, too fragile to withstand them. And someone—”
He didn’t know what to say. He knew the weakness of each member of the MX Basing Modes Group. Mike Greene’s was for thin-hipped Gentile athletes, Maggie Berlin’s for greasy mechanics. Niles Fallow had an alcoholic wife; Jerry Theobald suffered from almost incredible drabness; Mary Francis Harmon was a virgin who talked dirty; Sam Bellows was perpetually horny, yet so hangdog he never got laid; Jeff Thaxter was a workaholic who abused his kids; Jim Diedrickson had a son with cystic fibrosis; Maury Reeves’s wife Jill walked out on him for a Marine colonel. And on and on … each of them held in a matrix of weakness and duty. They used to have a joke about what they were doing. They called it the Revenge of the Nerds: little techies, sealed away in anonymous offices in the beast of a building complex called the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab out in picturesque Howard County, figuring out whether the world would end in fire or ice, and if fire, how hot, what color, spreading at what rate, and influenced by what wind patterns?