“But that’s what they’ve always said, Dad!” Appalled by this argument, Jim’s face twists: “Generation after generation—machine guns, tanks, planes, atomic bombs, now this—they were all supposed to make war impossible, but they don’t! They just keep the cycle going!”
“Not impossible. You can’t make war impossible, I didn’t say that. Nothing can do that. But you can make it damned impractical. We’re getting to the point where any invasion force can be electronically detected and electronically opposed, so quickly and accurately that the chances of a successful invasion are nil. Nil! So why ever try? Can’t you see? It could come to a point where no one would try!”
“Maybe they’ll just try with nuclear weapons, then! Be sure of it!”
Dennis waves the wrench dismissively, looks at it as if surprised at its presence, puts it down carefully on the top of the sidewall. “That would be crazy. It may happen, sure, but it would be crazy. Nuclear weapons are crazy, I don’t have anything to do with them. The only work I do in that regard is to try and stop them. I wish they were gone, and maybe someday they will be, who knows. But to get rid of them we’re going to have to have some other sort of deterrent, a less dangerous one. And that’s what I work at—making the precise electronic weapons that are the only replacement for the nuclear deterrent. They’re our only way out of that.”
“There’s no way out,” Jim says, despair filling him.
“Maybe not. But I do what I can.”
He looks away from Jim, down at the concrete of the driveway.
“But I can only do what I can,” he says hoarsely. The corners of his mouth tighten bitterly. “I can’t change the way the world is, and neither can you.”
“But we can try! If everyone tried—”
“If pigs had wings, they’d fly. Be realistic.”
“I am being realistic. It’s a business, it’s using up an immense amount of resources to no purpose. It’s corrupt!”
Dennis looks down into the motor compartment, picks up the wrench, turns it over. Inspects it closely. His jaw muscles are bunching rhythmically, he looks like he’s having trouble swallowing. Something Jim has said…
“Don’t you try to tell me about corruption,” he says in a low voice. “I know more than you’ll ever imagine about that. But that’s not the system.”
“It is the system, precisely the system!”
Dennis only shakes his head, still staring at the wrench. “The system is there to be used for good or bad. And it’s not all that bad. Not by itself.”
“But it is!” Jim has the sinking feeling you get when you are losing an argument, the feeling that your opponent is using rational arguments while you are relying on the force of emotion; and as people usually do in that situation, Jim ups the emotional gain, goes right to the heart of his case: “Dad, the world is starving.”
“I know that,” Dennis says very slowly, very patiently. “The world is on the brink of a catastrophic breakdown. You think I haven’t noticed?”
He sighs, looks at the motor. “But I’ve become convinced… I think, now, that one of the strongest deterrents to that breakdown is the power of the United States. We can scare a lot of wars away. But up till now most of our scare power has been nuclear, see, and using it would end us all. So little wars keep breaking out because the people who start them know that we won’t destroy the whole world to stop them. So if… if we could make the deterrent more precise, see—a kind of unstoppable surgical strike that could focus all its destructiveness on invading armies, and only on them—then we could dismantle the nuclear threat. We wouldn’t need it because we’d have the deterrent in another form, a safer form.
“So”—he looks up at Jim, looks him right in the eye—“so as far as I’m concerned, I’m doing the work that is most likely to free people from the threat of nuclear war. Now what”—voice straining—“what better work could there be?”
He looks away.
“It was a good program.”
Jim doesn’t know what to say to that. He can see the logic of the argument. And that fearful strain in his father’s voice… His anger drains out of him, and he’s amazed, even frightened, at what he has been saying. They’ve gone so far beyond the boundaries of their ordinary discourse, there doesn’t seem any way back.
And suddenly he recalls his plans for the night: rendezvous with Arthur, assault on Laguna Space Research. He can’t stand across from Dennis with that in his mind, it makes him sick with trembling.
Dennis leans against the car, face down, the averted expression as still as stone. He’s lost in his own thoughts. His hands are methodically working with the wrench, loosening a nut on the next point casing. Jim tries to say something, and the words catch in his throat. What was it? He can’t remember. The silence stretches out, and really there’s nothing he can say. Nothing he can say.
“I—I’ll go in and tell Mom you’re about ready to eat?”
Dennis nods.
Unsteadily Jim walks inside. Lucy is chopping vegetables for the salad, over by the sink, in front of the kitchen window that has the view of the carport. Jim walks over and stands next to her. Through the window he can see Dennis’s side and back.
Lucy sniffs, and Jim sees she is red-eyed. “So did he tell you what happened down at work?” she asks, chopping hard and erratically.
“No! What happened?”
“I saw you talking out there. You shouldn’t argue with him on a day like today!” She goes to blow her nose.
“Why, what happened?”
“You know they lost that big proposal Dad was working on.”
“Sort of, I guess. Weren’t they appealing it?”
“Yes. And they were doing pretty well with that, too, until today.” And Lucy tells him as much as she knows of it all, pieced together from Dennis’s curt, bitter remarks.
“No!” Jim says more than once during the story. “No!”
“Yes. That’s what he said.” She puts a fist to her mouth. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as down as this in my whole life.”
“But—but he just stood out there… he just stood out there and defended the whole thing! All of it!”
Lucy nods, sniffs, starts chopping vegetables.
Stunned, Jim stares out the window at his father, who is meticulously tightening a nut, as if tamping down the last pieces of a puzzle.
“Mom, I’ve gotta go.”
“What?”
He’s already to the front door. Got to get away.
“Jim!”
But he’s gone, out the door, almost running. For a moment he can’t find his car key. Then he’s found it, he’s off and away. Tracking away at full speed.
Dennis will think he’s left because of their argument. “No!” Jim can barely see the streets, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he just tracks for home. Halfway there he goes to manual and tracks to the Newport Freeway. Southbound, under the great concrete ramp of the northbound lanes, in the murky light of the groundlevel world, in the thickets of halogen light.… He punches the dashboard, gets off at Edinger to turn back north, then returns to the southbound lanes. Where to go? Where can he go? What can he do? Can he go back up there to dinner with his parents? Eat a meal and then go blow up his father’s company? For God’s sake!—how could he have gotten to this point?
On he drives. He knows the defense industry is a malignancy making money in the service of death, in the face of suffering, he knows it has to be opposed in every way possible, he knows he is right. And yet still, still, still, still, still. That look on Dennis’s face, as he stared down at the immaculate motor of his car. Lucy, looking out the window about to cut her thumb off. “It was a good program.” His voice.