“Do you think that?”
Giddings shook his head slowly.’ “I don’t.”
“Neither,” Nat said, “do I.”
9
Watching the arriving guests-and the still orderly crowds behind the barricades, considering the waving signs in all their shade* of meaning or non-meaning, Patrolman Barnes said “Security. Ten years ago, Mike, did you ever hear the word?”
“The name of the game,” Shannon said, as if the cliché explained everything. He was a fine figure of a man and conscious of it. In front of the barricades he did not exactly strut, but neither did he try to make himself inconspicuous “You not only read too much, Frank, you think too much.”
“Fret the Russian Jews,’” Barnes read from a nearby waving sign. “The last time I saw that sign was in the UN plaza.”
“With today’s prices,” Shannon said, “you save what you can to use over and over again. At the ballpark you see the same banners game after game.”
“Not quite the same,” Barnes said. He was smiling. He and Mike Shannon got along fine, and if there was disparity between them in education or even quickness of intellect, well, what of it? Other factors, like ease, rapport, and loyalty, were far more important. “Have you been inside this building at all, Mike?”
Shannon had not. It was not exactly that a building is a building is a building, although some of that concept did color his thinking: it was rather that in the city there are so many buildings, as there are so many neighborhoods, that a man could drive himself daft trying to keep up with them all and did best to mind his own business in his own familiar areas. He said as much. “But you,” he said, and shook his head, “you take in too much territory, Frank. It isn’t healthy.” He paused. “What about the inside of this building? What sets it apart?” He paused again and looked heavenward. “Aside from its size?”
“A central security desk,” Barnes said. “There is that word again. It’s a command post in touch with every floor. There’s a computer center that controls temperature and humidity and heaven knows what all throughout the whole building. The fire doors to the stairwells are locked electronically, but if there is an emergency, they automatically open from the stair side. There is a double fire-alarm system that can be activated from any floor—” He was silent, smiling faintly.
“And what is funny?” Shannon said.
“I heard a story once,” Barnes said. “The airplane of the future. It takes off from Heathrow Airport near London. It tucks up its flaps and gear and swings its wings into supersonic position. Then a voice comes on the loudspeaker: ‘Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen,’ the voice says. ‘This is Flight One Hundred, London to New York. We will fly at an altitude of sixty-three thousand feet, at a speed of seven hundred twenty miles an hour, and we will arrive at Kennedy Airport at precisely three-fifty-five New York time. This is the most advanced aircraft in the world. It is entirely automated, and there is no pilot aboard. All operations of the aircraft are handled electronically, all contingencies have been anticipated, and nothing can possibly go wrong go wrong go’ wrong … wrong.’”
Shannon shook his head. “I don’t know where you get them,” he said.
Grover Frazee, that fresh carnation in his buttonhole, waited hatless and smiling at the foot of the platform steps in the Tower Plaza, as automobile after automobile drew up in the cleared street lane to discharge its passengers. Every one of them wore, Frazee thought, the expression that is reserved for weddings, parliament or legislature openings, to dedications. Oh, yes, and for funerals. Now where did that thought come from?
He stepped forward, hand outstretched. “Mr. Ambassador.” he said, “how generous of you to take the time to come here today.”
“I would not have missed it, Mr. Frazee. This huge beautiful building dedicated to man’s communication with man—” The ambassador shook his head in admiration.
Senator John Peters had shared a taxi from LaGuardia with Representative Cary Wycoff. They had flown up from Washington together on a shuttle, and part of their conversation stuck in Cary Wycoff’s mind. The conversation had begun idly enough while they were still on the ground at National Airport.
“Time was,” the senator had said as they fastened their seat belts “when it was the railroad or nothing. Back before the war. You-don’t remember that, do you?”
Cary Wycoff did not. He was thirty-four years old, in his second term in Congress, and even the Korean War was before his time, let alone World War H, which obviously Jake Peters was referring to. “You are pulling rank on me, Senator,” Cary said.
The senator grinned. “Pure envy. I’d like to be your age again just starting out.”
“Now,** Cary asked, “or then?” He had never thought of it before in quite this way, but was the wish for renewed youth pure nostalgia or simply a desire to stick around and see what came next? Sheer selfishness or intelligent curiosity?
“Now,” the senator said with emphasis. “I have no hankering for the past. I went down to Washington in thirty-six. Depression is only a word now. It was a pustulating sickness then, and no matter how much we told ourselves we were making progress in curing it, actually all we were doing was feeding the patient aspirin and putting Band-Aids on his open sores and hoping to God he wouldn’t die on our hands.”
Against this kind of elder statesman talk Cary always felt defensive. “We have problems today,” he said. “You won’t deny it?”
“Oh, hell, son, you know better than that. But the difference is that today we have the means to improve things. We have the knowledge, the wealth, the production, the distribution, the communication—above all, the communication—and what we had then was damn little more than hysteria and despair.”
“The knowledge?” Cary said. “It seems to me—”
“I used the word advisedly,” the senator said sharply. “Knowledge we have. The question is whether we have the wisdom to use it properly. That’s why I’d like to be your age again, just starting out, but in a world that could be a better world than it’s ever been since Eve gave Adam that apple. Only I doubt if it was an apple; I never heard of apples in Mesopotamia, where the Garden of Eden is supposed to have been. Ever think of that?” Cary had not. Thinking about it now, he was amused, not so much by the question as by the senator’s adroitness in bringing it up and thereby switching the conversation without even seeming to shift gears.
Jake Peters was an anomaly: he spoke with a big-city working-class accent that was almost the “dese,” “dem,” and “dose” type, but his erudition in astonishing areas could rock you right back on your heels. If you argued with Jake Peters, as a long list of his Senate colleagues could testify, you did well to have your homework letter-perfect.
The senator was already off on another subject. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I almost didn’t come today.” He smiled. “Ever get hunches, son?”
Cary Wycoff did, but disliked admitting it. “Now, Senator.’* he said.
“Oh, I’m not clairvoyant,” the senator said. He was smiling. “And I’ve known Bent Armitage a long time and this mean* a lot to him.” He paused. The smile faded. “At least I think it does. I never asked him.”
“I should think,” Cary Wycoff said, “that it means a lot to many people. A new building means new jobs, new businesses attracted into the city, more taxes—”