In the cockpit of the Looking Glass, the communications officer also snapped an unnecessary salute. But she did it intentionally, with tears in her eyes, a smile on her face, and a single Pall Mall cigarette proffered in her other hand. Alice accepted a cigarette, snorted through his nose as if he were catching a cold, snapped his hand to his brow in a flawless West Point tribute, and quickly turned away so she would not see the real him, as if she had not already. He stared through his own mist at the other aircraft, still too distant. His people had given him everything. But they were not going to make it. His watch read 2036. He snorted again, trying to cover that tribute to them, too, by giving Smitty an unusually brusque order to futilely push the Looking Glass beyond limits already reached. Then he grabbed the cockpit phone to the President, placing the cigarette behind his ear.
On the flight deck of the E-4, the pilot with the black eyepatch turned his head away from the wispy clouds ahead of him and probed the shadows in the rear of his spacious cockpit. The Secret Service agent stood at the door with his Uzi, still symbolizing his protection against madness. With a shiver of sadness mixed with surprise, the pilot suddenly saw madness in a different perspective.
“I have the Premier on the other line, Alice. His people are monitoring the transmission. The E-4 has begun the authenticator codes. You have three, maybe four minutes. That transmission must be interrupted.” The President paused, hoping he did not have to ask. “Can you do it in that time?”
Alice stared straight ahead. The Looking Glass flew slightly above the E-4, Smitty avoiding the five-mile copper trailing wire normally used as a VLF radio antenna. It was out as a snare now, whipping dangerously beneath them. The heat warps from the command plane’s giant engines rippled the air between them, causing the massive tail section to wobble like a ghostly mirage, always beyond his grasp. On the side of the stabilizer fin Alice could see the American flag fluttering in the heat rivulets, painted stars wobbling in triumph, stripes flowing as if the nation’s proud emblem had been planted atop a hill taken. The hill remained more than a quarter-mile away, and it remained secure.
“No, Mr. President, I cannot,” Alice said.
On the phone the silence seemed endless and deafening. Alice could hear his own pulse pounding in the earphone. The President finally spoke, and Alice shuddered at the eerie calm of his voice.
“You understand what this means?”
“All too well, Mr. President.”
“It’s hopeless?”
Alice held his eyes unflinchingly on the E-4. “Another ten minutes, sir…” he said quietly. “Another twenty. If the pilot made one false move, one small slip…” The general’s voice also was eerily calm. “Any man could make that slip, Mr. President. Any man would. Eventually. But I know the pilot. I helped train him. He’s good. When I place myself in his position, I… I…”
Alice fumbled only briefly, his voice catching. Then he continued. “If I place myself in the cockpit of the E-4, sir, I see myself pursued by a madman. I see the President of the United States pursued by a madman, with only me between the two.” He paused. “I would not slip, sir.”
The President’s voice turned pensive. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can see that. Madness takes many forms, general. I’m afraid I can see that more clearly now, sightless, than I did with both eyes. It’s a heavy burden to carry out of this world.”
Alice said nothing. The floor vibrated beneath him, the engines screaming in the torture of their impossible reach for the giant plane cutting through the clouds just ahead of them.
“General?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Against your wishes, I am going to thank you.” The President paused and Alice thought he heard a sniffle on the other end. “Not all our people programming was that faulty.”
Alice swallowed hard, blinking his eyes against the increasing mist. He was unable to reply, reaching behind his ear for the cigarette instead. He fondled it, as he might a fine Havana.
“The people,” the President began again, his voice curious, as if he had found one truth too late and now sought another, “the crew aboard the bomber that turned… who were they?”
The general swallowed again and took a deep breath. They had time now. Not much. But they had no better way to use it.
“I don’t know what to tell you, sir,” Alice responded painfully. “The pilot was very good. The copilot was the daughter of one of my best friends. You knew him. General Moreau. Devoted his life to this, convinced like all of us that we could prevent it by keeping it ready. That’s a tough mistake to take upstairs, too… ” Alice found it almost impossible to continue, his voice dropping off to a whisper. “What can I tell you? They weren’t average, whatever the hell that means. They weren’t that special, whatever that meant in our world… Does it make any difference?”
The clocks ticked past 2038.
“Why?” the President asked. “Why did they do it? Scared—?”
Alice suddenly flared in uncontrollable anger and hurt. “Scared? You’re damned right they were scared! Just like I’m scared! Just like you’re scared, the Premier’s scared, the whole fucking world is scared out of its wits! You want me to say they were cowards? Cowards, sir? Heroes, sir? Mad, sir? Sane, sir? How the hell do I know?!” Alice broke it off just as suddenly. “They gave us a glimmer of hope, Mr. President,” he added softly.
“That’s why I wanted to know, general.” The President sighed. “They gave us, for whatever reason, more than I gave. That’s a heavy one to carry, too.”
Alice paused. Suddenly he felt as if he had no time and all the time in the world. “Mr. President?”
“Yes, general.”
“I saw General Moreau a month ago. I thought he was growing senile. He said we were losing.”
The President bristled slightly. He had built every weapon the military wanted. He drew a deep breath. Every weapon you wanted, too, buster, he said to himself. “Losing,” he said quietly. “To the Soviets?”
“To the system, sir.”
At 2039 Zulu a series of explosions occurred almost unnoticed in the wastelands of eastern Kazakhstan. The world’s sensing devices did not record them, and their relevance would have been puzzling in any case. The ground-burst explosions carved craters nearly a kilometer wide and more than fifty meters deep in the place known as Zhangiztobe. Of the crews of the two Backfire bombers flying over the isolated region, one intentionally failed to pull up and out. The other flew home.
Condor and the Librarian calmly supervised the methodical tap-tap-a-tap of authenticator codes soaring upward toward two Soviet satellites orbiting over the earth and back downward toward two American aircraft orbiting over the oceans. The clock read 2039 Zulu, the codes more than half delivered, when they looked at each other in confusion. They felt the sharp lurch of their command plane as it banked hard left.
At 2039 Zulu, Alice withdrew the cigarette from the cranny above his ear. The general’s reach was subconscious, so mesmerized was he by the marvelous aircraft racing untouchably ahead of him. In some deep and entrenched way, he admired the pilot who was beating him. The man was so good, trained to be entrusted with the President of the United States, trained to lose an eye to a manmade sun and blithely take the protective patch off his good eye, exposing it so he could fly onward, the President secure.
Behind the two aircraft, in the late afternoon, the winter sun was setting again now, casting fiery beams across the white plateau of clouds through which the fruitless chase continued. The E-4’s wing sliced gracefully through a pink cotton-candy cloud bubble, cut majestically through the ebbing blue of a fading day, dashed easily toward the darkness of a last night.