“I see,” said the President, and paused for a second. Oddly, there was no voice from the prompter in his ear to suggest his next words. He frowned.
“I see,” he said again, louder. The tiny voice in Ms ear said at last:
“Well, sir, uh-“ It cleared its throat. “Sir, there seems to be some confusion here. Perhaps you could ask the Senator to continue to brief you.”
“Well-“ said the President.
“David,” whispered the prompter.
“-David, let’s get our thinking organized. Why don’t you continue to fill me in?”
“Gladly, sir! As you know, I’m Shelters all the way. Always have been. But what this young man here says has shaken me to the core. Mr. Venezuela says-“ Valendora grinned sullenly at the rug-“that at this very moment we would be in atoms if it hadn’t been for his timely publication of the statistical breakdown of our vulnerability. He’s even a little sore about it, Mr. President.”
“Sore?”
The senator grinned. “We spoiled his prediction,” he explained. “Of course, we saved our own lives . . . The Other Side has computers too; they must have assessed our national preoccupation with baseball. Beyond doubt they intended to strike. Only the commotion his article caused-not only in our own country but, through their embassies, on the Other Side-plus of course your immediate reaction when I telephoned you asking for a Red Alert, kept the missiles from coming down today, sir. I’m certain of it. And this other young fellow, Mr. Chase-“ Walter Chase bowed his head modestly-“brought out a lot of data in his term paper, or whatever it was. Seemed like nonsense, sir, so we checked it. Everything he said is not only fact but old stuff; it’s been published hundreds of times. Not a word of new material in it.” Chase glared. “That’s why we’ve never built deep shelters. They simply won’t stand up against massive attack- and cannot be made to stand up. It’s too late for shelters. In building them we’re falling into the oldest strategic trap of human warfare; We’re fighting yesterday’s war today.”
President Braden experienced a sinking feeling when the earprompter said only, and doubtfully, “Ask him to go on, sir.”
“Go on, si -go on, David.”
“Why,” said the senator, astonished, “that’s all there is, Mr. President. The rest is up to you.”
President Braden remembered vaguely, as a youth, stories about the administration of President -who was it? Truman, or somebody around then. They said Truman had a sign on his desk that read: The buck stops here.
His own desk, the President noticed for the first time, was mirror-smooth. It held no such sign. Apart from the framed picture of his late wife there was nothing.
Yet the principle still held, remorselessly, no matter how long he had been able to postpone its application. He was the last man in the chain. There was no one to whom the President could pass the buck. If it was time for the nation to pick itself up, turn itself around and head off in a new direction, he was the only one who could order it to march.
He thought about the alternatives. Say these fellows were right. Say the shelters couldn’t keep the nation going in the event of all-out attack. Say the present alert, so incredibly costly in money and men, could not be maintained around the clock for any length of time, which it surely could not. Say the sneak-punchers were right...
But no, thought the President somberly, that avenue had been explored and the end was disaster. You could never get all the opposing missile bases, not while some were under the sea and some were touring the highways of the Siberian tundra on trucks and some were orbital and some were airborne. And it only took a handful of survivors- to kill you.
So what was left?
Here and now, everybody was waiting for him to speak-even the little voice in his ear.
The President pushed his chair back and put his feet up on the desk. “You know,” he said, wiggling his toes in their Argyle socks, “I once went to school’too. True,” he said, not apologizing, “it was West Point. That’s a good school too, you know. I remember writing a term paper in one of the sociology courses . . . or was it history? No matter. I still recall what I said in that paper. I said wasn’t it astonishing that things always got worse before they got better. Take monarchy, I said. It built up and up, grew more complex, more useless, more removed from government, in any real sense, until we come to things like England’s Wars of the Roses and France’s Sun King and the Czar and the Mikado-until most of the business of the government was in the person of the king, instead of the other way around. Then-bang! No more monarchy.”
“Mr. President,” whispered the voice in his ear, “you have an appointment with the Mongolian Legate.”
“Oh, shut up, you,” said the President amiably, shocking his prompter and confusing his guests. “Sorry, not you,” he apologized. “My, uh, secretary. Tells me that the Chinese representatives want to talk about our ‘unprecedented and unpeace-loving acts’-more likely, to see what they can find out.” He picked the plug out of his ear and dropped it in a desk drawer. “They’ll wait. Now, take slavery,” he went on. “It too became more institutionalized-and ritualized- until the horse was riding the man; until the South here was existing on slaves, it was even existing for slaves. The biggest single item of wealth in the thirteen Confederate states was slaves. The biggest single line of business, other than agriculture, was slavery, dealing and breeding. Things get big and formal, you see, just before they pop and blow away. Well, I wrote all this up. I turned it in, real proud, expecting, I don’t know, maybe an honorary LL.D. At least a compliment, certainly ... It came back and the instructor had scrawled one word across the top of it: Toynbee. So I read up on Toynbee’s books. After, of course, I got over being oppressed at the instructor’s injustice to me. He was right. Toynbee described the whole thing long before I did.
“But, you know, I didn’t know that at the time. I thought it up myself, as if Toynbee had never lived,” said the President with some pride. He beamed at them.
Senator Hort6n was standing with open mouth. He glanced quickly at the others in the room, but they had nothing but puzzlement to return to him. He said, “Mr. President, I don’t understand. You mean-“
“Mean? I mean what’s happened to us,” said the President testily. “We’ve had our obsessive period. Now we move on to something else. And, Senator, Congress is going to have to help move; and, I’m warning you, you’re going to help me move it.”
When they left the White House it was late afternoon. The lilacs that bordered the wall were in full, fragrant bloom. Denzer inhaled deeply and squeezed the hand of Maggie Frome.
Passing the sentry box at the end of the drive, they heard a voice from a portable radio inside. It was screaming:
“It’s going . . . it’s going . . . it’s GONE, folks! Craffany has pulled one out of the fire again! And that wraps it up for him, as Hockins sends one way out over centerfield and into the stands.. .” The guard looked out, rosily beaming, and waved them on. He would have waved them on if they had worn beards and carried ticking bombs; he was a Craffany rooter from way back, and now in an ecstasy of delight.
“Craffany did it, then,” said Walter Chase sagely.
“I thought when he benched Hockins and moved Little Joe Fliederwick to-“
“Oh, shut up, Chase.” said Denzer. “Maggie, I’m buying drinks. You want to come along, Venezuela?”
“I think not, Mr. Denzer,” said the research man. “I’m late now. Statist. Analysis Trans. is expecting me.”
“Chase?” Politeness forced that one out of him. But Chase shook his head.
“I just remembered an old friend here in town,” said Chase. He had had time for some quick thinking. If the nation was going over to a non-shelter philosophy-if cave-dwelling was at an end and a dynamic new program was going to start-maybe a cement degree wasn’t going to be the passport to security and fame he had imagined. Walter Chase had always had a keen eye for the handwriting on the wall. “A-young lady friend,” he winked. “Name of Douglasina Baggett. Perhaps you’ve heard of her father; he’s quite an important man in H. E. and W.”