“What have you got against a climax, dear?”
“Yours or his, Moreau?”
“Ours.”
The other woman looked at Moreau blankly. She didn’t get it. An orgasm with Edward Teller? Sick. An orgasm with her? Not so sick. But after living six months with Moreau, the tanker pilot was quite sure that wasn’t the meaning.
She did understand the map. Everyone had one of those. The rest of the 92nd Bombardment Wing kept the maps in their minds. Only Moreau had spread one above her bunk. Only a woman could get away with that, enjoying the base commander’s discomfort every time he brought a visiting VIP into the fortress. Women in the Strategic Air Command were a recent phenomenon, women in nuclear-combat B-52’s very recent, and every visiting senator, every visiting newspaper reporter had to check in on the ladies of SAC. They usually laughed at the chastity belt, quickly averted their eyes from the mushroom between Teller’s varicose veins, and riveted on the map.
“An attack flight plan?” the most recent visitor, a senator from Vermont, had asked the commander.
“A joke, senator,” the commander had replied uneasily. “A common joke. These are not easy places, the B-52 bases and the ICBM bases. Prime targets. We call them the First Good-Bye, Bull’s Eye, Ten Strike.”
He shot a withering glance at Moreau’s passive face.
The map did contain a flight plan. It showed a B-52 heading north, up toward the pole and the adversaries beyond, then diverting and making a beeline for Tahiti. It was a common joke. Everyone had an island, and the big bomber, which could pull ten thousand miles with refueling, had the range. No one was serious, least of all Moreau, an Air Force brat raised on all this, with a SAC general for a father. General Moreau was retired now, but he had been something. Still was. The coldest of the cold warriors, the press had called him as she grew up. She knew another side. But he had been a looming national figure for a generation, a natural and more sophisticated successor to SAC s legendary General LeMay. She grew up determined to follow in his footsteps. Still, she delighted in exploiting the odier side of the sexual double standard. The commander would never say a word to her about the map—not because she was General Moreau’s kid but because she was a woman. She knew that. And she used it.
Inside the mountain, an orange light had begun flashing. The general stared at it, perplexed.
Beneath him, at a new bank of computers, still another watcher was flipping his screen on and off, then pulling the picture in tight for magnification. The screen showed flexing molars, like computer-game aliens. They represented silo doors opening at Polyarnny, the Soviets’ northernmost—and nearest—land-based missile field on the Arctic edge of the Barents Sea.
The general flicked Lemon Juice to Snow Man and reached to his right. The last time it had gone this far, back in 1980, he thought unhappily, some idiot had slipped a training tape into the main computer bank. Nice exercise, scrambling fighter pilots north over Canada. Bad politics, with the Russians sending hostile notes and the general giving his least satisfactory performance before the Senate. His right hand paused briefly, his peripheral vision catching the three stars on his shoulder. This is no way to get the fourth, he thought.
Then his hand picked up the direct-line phone. He had many ways to communicate with Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, far across the fruited plain. But the telephone still was best.
In the Fairchild bunker, Halupalai quietly watched Kazakhs begin another assault on the aliens. He knew that Kazakhs, the ultimate SAC jet jockey oozing all the near-perfect animal instincts that once had drawn the world to him, too, and Mo-reau, the kind of woman that always attracted Halupalai but whom he never could attract, were a somewhat dangerous combination in their hostility. He knew how many directions those sparks could fly, how many different fires they could ignite inside the claustrophobic confines of a B-52. He also knew a lot about the Personnel Reliability Program. After Vietnam, PRP had worried him. He was afraid it would get him, and he wanted to stay in the wonderful cocoon of his B-52, even though the exhilarating tail bubble was gone, victim of another technological advance.
He had gone the psychotherapy trip, required after his Vietnam experience, the depression was so deep. A potency crisis, natural to men in war, natural to a man who had found his only function to be not enough, the shrink had said. No sweat, pal. It will pass. But he had sweated. He wanted to be part of the post-Vietnam Air Force world. He studied PRP. He knew how it was linked to being EWO ready, how crucially the Air Force viewed the combination. He knew that men had been bumped out of nuclear missions because they were taking antihistamines or fighting with their wives. He knew that crews were expected to look for flaws in their buddies, to turn diem in for the security of all, look for the littie quirks that meant they might rebel or question too much or crack up around all the weapons, or simply not go at the moment of truth. He could quote at length from the regs of the Personnel Reliability Program established to maintain sanity even if the situation were not sane.
Halupalai had memorized Air Force Regulation 35-99, especially the section dealing with “Personality and Behavior Factors That May Affect Reliability.” He recalled the category “Factors Relating to Thinking or Attitude.” One of the first line items instructed the crews to look for “Arrogance—Individual assumes or presumes the possession of superior or unique ideas or abilities.” Kazakhs at his Space Invaders game? Or the next line item: “Lack of humor—especially the inability to laugh at oneself, at one’s mistakes or weaknesses.” Moreau stalking away from the pilot’s toothy grin? Halupalai himself, still dreaming about a weakness almost fifteen years old? Halupalai knew that Air Force Regulation 35-99 could get anyone in this bunker on one item or another. Or it could get none of them. He had memorized the PRP regs, run his life by them, so they would not get him.
Still, he also knew that Kazakhs, so cocksure of his own ability, passed. And he knew that Moreau, so steeled in her determination to cover the pensive side of her nature with Darth Vader jeeps and maps to Tahiti, also passed. Even together, two scorpions in the bottle of a B-52 cockpit, they made it. The Air Force was far more likely to bump Tyler for his family troubles, far more likely to come at Halupalai if he weren’t careful. Kazakhs was safe; Moreau perhaps safer. They would never pull the trigger in paranoia; they would always pull it when ordered. You got to know people well in this kind of life—six people crammed into the tiny upstairs-downstairs crew compartment of a giant bomber scraping American rooftops in practice after practice for a suicidal low-level run into Russia.
At forty-four, Halupalai was far older than anyone else in the crew. Kazakhs was next at thirty-one; Moreau just twenty-seven; the others still younger. This was a youthful game. They kept him here only because he was a gunner, an anachronism who filled a seat, the only noncommissioned officer aboard the bomber. He knew he had less function now that he had in that most splendid world above Vietnam, where at least he had his bubble and the sky was beneath him, endless in its eternity. In the nuclear bomber he had been placed forward with the rest of the crew, no windows for him in either the alert facility or his airplane, his useless gun run by remote control and radar. Still, he was content with that, and careful with it.
It had occurred to Halupalai that he should put in for retirement. His twenty years were up. But what other world was there for him? Back to the islands, which he had left after high school, a muscular and sought-after prep football player, one of those Hawaiian wonders who had spun into glamour and success in the Coast Conference in the sixties? UCLA’s headlines had eliminated any chance of that, especially when he became an All-American, the young blonds hanging on him the way they hung on Kazakhs now. Then his college glory expired into flaky real-estate huckstering and flimflam Southern California deals selling overpriced sports cars to the few aging alums whose memories yellowed more slowly than his scrap-books. He joined the Air Force shortly before Vietnam really ignited, spuming the chance at officers’ school to avoid any more disappointments. He also raced through three marriages with less and less likely women, all island-struck, starting with a UCLA cheerleader who was more attracted to the beachboy than the man in him. Now, in middle age, he knew where none of the women were, not even the fifteen-year-old daughter he had fathered so long ago.