Rotterjack shook his head and grinned. “You’d think Ormandy was one of them.”
“Who?” Schwartz asked.
“The invaders.”
Schwartz frowned. “See what’s going to happen if the President goes public? We’re even beginning to think like gullible idiots.”
“Have you thought what could be happening?” Rotterjack persisted. “If they ‘manufactured’ the Guest, couldn’t they make robots that look human, human enough to pass?”
“I’m more frightened about what that idea can do to us than I am about it’s being true,” Arthur said.
“Yeah, well, there it is,” Rotterjack said. “Take it for what it’s worth. Somebody out there is going to think of it.”
“It’ll tear us apart,” Schwartz said. “Just what they might want. Christ, now I’m talking like that.”
“Maybe it’s just as well we bring it out in the open,” Arthur said. “We haven’t accomplished anything keeping it quiet.”
“Not the way he’d release it,” Rotterjack said. “What’ll you do if McClennan fails to get his point across — again?” he asked Schwartz.
“Eventually, after the election, I could resign,” Schwartz said, his tone flat, neutral. “He might want to put together a wartime Cabinet anyway.”
“Will you?”
Schwartz stared down at the sky-blue carpet. Arthur, following his gaze, thought of the myriad of privileges suggested by that luxurious color, so difficult to keep clean. A myriad of attractions to keep men like Schwartz and Rotterjack working.
“No,” Schwartz said. “I’m just too goddamn loyal. If he does this to me — to us, to all of us — I’ll resent him like hell. But he’ll still be the President.”
“There are quite a few congressmen and senators who’ll work to change that, if he does go public,” Rotterjack said.
“Don’t I know,”
“They’d be the real patriots, you know, not you and I.”
Schwartz’s face filled with pained resentment and frank acknowledgment. He half nodded, half shook his head and stood up from the desk. “All right, David. But we’ve got to keep the White House together somehow. What else is there? Who’ll take his place? The Veep?”
Rotterjack chuckled ironically.
“Right,” Schwartz said. “Arthur, if I make an appointment — if I ram it down the President’s throat — can you get Feinman out here, and can you and Hicks and he do your best to…you know? Do what we can’t?”
“If it can be in the next day or so, and if there are no delays.”
“Feinman’s that sick?” Rotterjack asked.
“He’s in treatment. It’s difficult.”
“Why couldn’t you have found…never mind,” Rotterjack said.
“Feinman’s the best,” Arthur replied to the half-stated query.
Rotterjack nodded glumly.
“We’ll give it a try,” Arthur said.
Arthur walked through the afternoon crowds at Dulles, suit hanging on him, hands in pockets. He knew all too well that he resembled a scarecrow. He had lost ten pounds in the last two weeks, and could ill afford it, but he was seldom hungry now.
Glancing at the American Airlines screen of arrivals and departures, he saw he had half an hour until Harry’s plane landed. He had a choice between forcing down a sandwich or calling Francine and Marty.
Arthur was still trying to remember his wife’s face. He could picture nose, eyes, lips, forehead, the shape of her hands, breasts, genitals, smooth warm white stomach and breasts the color of late morning fog, the texture of her thick black hair. He could recall her smell, warm and rich and breadlike, and the sound of her voice. But not her face.
That made her seem so far away, and him so isolated. He had spent ages, it seemed, in offices and in meetings. There was no reality in an office, no reality among a group of men talking about the fate of the Earth. Certainly no reality surrounding the President.
Reality was back by the river, back in the bedroom and the kitchen of their house, but most especially under the trees with the smooth hiss of wind and the rushing music of water. There he would always be in touch with them, could be isolated and yet not alone, out of sight of wife and son yet able to get back to them. If death should come, would Arthur be away from them, still performing his separate duties…?
The airport, as always, was crowded. A large tight knot of Japanese passed by. He felt a special kinship with Japanese, more so than with foreigners of his own race. Japanese were so intensely interested, and desirous of smooth relations, one-on-one. He walked around the knot, passed a German family, husband and wife and two daughters trying to riddle their boarding passes.
He could not remember Harry’s face.
The open phone booth, with its ineffective plastic half bubble, accepted his credit card and thanked him in a warm middle-aged female voice, teacherlike and yet less stern, impersonally interested. Synthetic.
The phone rang six times before he remembered: Francine had told him the night before that Marty would have a dentist’s appointment in the morning.
He hung up and crossed a central courtyard to a snack shop, ordering a turkey-pastrami sandwich and Coke. Twenty-five minutes. Sitting on a tall stool by a diminutive table, he forced himself to eat the entire sandwich.
Bread. Mayonnaise. Bird taste of turkey beneath an overlay of pastrami. Solid but not convincing. He made a face and took the last meatless dry double wedge of bread into his mouth.
For a moment, and no more, he felt himself slide into a spiritual ditch, a little quiet gutter of despair. To simply give up, give in, open his arms to the darkness, shed all responsibility to country, to wife and son, to himself. To end the game — that was all it was, no? Take his piece from the board, watch the board swept clean, a new game set up. Rest. Oddly, coming out of that gutter, he took encouragement and strength from the thought that if indeed they were going to be swept from the board, he could then rest, and there would be an end. Funny how the mind works.
At fifteen minutes after two, he stood at the gate, to one side of a crowd of waiting friends and families. The open double doors brought forth business men and women in trim suits gray and brown and that strange shade of iridescent blue that was so much in fashion, peacock’s eyes Francine called it; three young children holding hands and followed by a woman in knee-length black skirt and austere white blouse, and then Harry, clutching a leather valise and looking thinner, older, tired.
“All right,” Harry said after they hugged and shook hands. “You have me for forty-eight hours, max, and then the doctor wants me back to blunt more needles. Jesus. You look as bad as I do.”
In the small government car, winding through the maze of a bare concrete parking garage, Arthur explained the circumstances of their meeting with the President. “Schwartz is putting aside half an hour in Crockerman’s schedule. It’s getting very” tight. He’s supposed to be in New Hampshire this evening for a final campaign rally. Hicks, you and I will be in the Oval Office with him, undisturbed, for that half hour. We’ll do what we can to convince him he’s wrong.”
“And if we don’t?” Harry asked. Had his eyes lightened in color? They seemed less brown than tan now, almost bleached.
Arthur could only shrug. “How are you feeling?”
“Not as bad as I look.”
“That’s good,” Arthur said, trying to relax that anonymous something in his throat. He smiled thinly at Harry.
“Thanks,” Harry said. “I have an excuse, at least. Is everybody else around here going to look like extras in a vampire movie?”