In front of him the main screen fluttered briefly in a televideo snowstorm and then came into focus.
Jee-zuz, the general muttered to himself. Visiting congressmen were the bane of all their existences. Billy Joe Harkins, here yesterday to play Dr. Strangelove war and sit in the general’s chair, had been even dumber than most. Would you take time to pray? the Bible Belt congressman had asked the general. Jee-zuz.
“Get that mother-humper off the goddamn screen,” he growled into the public-address system.
The screen dissolved quickly into snow again, then refocused on a large polar map looking down on the northern hemisphere. The view gave the general the pleasing feeling of looking down on the world. The god’s view was flanked, on the other screens, by computerized characterizations of his missile installations, his B-52 bases, the Navy’s submarines, and endless data about the activities of the adversary. But his eyes did not get that far.
Out of the polar map he saw computer projections of missiles crossing all American coastlines. He also saw that the flexing molars in Polyamny had changed. They had become snaking white lines. He knew instantly where the white lines would end, and when.
The general shuddered for the first time since his wife had died. He quickly hit controls which moved his status from Snow Man to Big Noise and changed the preliminary attack conference, already under way, to an attack conference. He flicked a switch that interrupted SIOP and RSIOP just as RSIOP was about to respond to the nudets marching on Moscow, turning them to a different problem. He also picked up the grungy yellow phone.
The kid really had been a little bastard today. Tyler, struggling with former Budget Director Stockman’s “The Up Side of Supply Side Economics,” would have been having trouble anyway. But stacking the kid’s antics on top of Stockman’s obtusities, putting both together in the cramped and overheated library in the Alert Facility with the goddamn sign that asked him always if he were EWO ready, was too much.
The kid simply had been a little bastard. And his mother hadn’t been much better. He was doing all this for them. The Air Force was paying for his master’s degree in business administration. So he flew as a navigator aboard a Strategic Air Command B-52 every four days and sat in an overheated blockhouse one week out of three. It was called paying your dues. His wife knew that. Maybe he should chuck it all and become a salesman. Then he could be gone two weeks out of three.
His wife, of all people, should have handled it better. He could have been PRPed. Kicked out, as he had seen others get the ax for far smaller violations. Six months to go, six months to the degree he had been after so long, six months to the end of his second Air Force tour. Six months to out. And they could have nailed him on PRP. They still could. That would do it nicely, very nicely indeed.
He read the sentence for the fourth time and clapped the book shut, not able to handle it.
SAC showed some understanding of the pressures on a twenty-six-year-old father. It was prison, without conjugal privileges, but it wasn’t like the submariners, who stayed at sea for months now in the new Tridents. This was one week out of three. SAC had built the little alert annex where families could visit briefly. They had placed the jungle gym and swings out back for the kids. And the boy came almost every day, a little wide-eyed kid who made his father swell with pride. The boy’s bulging eyes riveted on the flying suit with its demigod symbols, the child-face painted with both awe and fear the way he watched the Ajax man swoop into a television kitchen, uncertain if the image was there to save or destroy his three-year-old world.
Tyler hadn’t really expected the boy today. It was his first day on alert and a brutally cold winter afternoon, the temperature hovering just at zero. But there he was, a soft little ball wrapped in his snowsuit, and Tyler had swung his son high on the swings, coaxing him: “Take off, Timmie! Reach for the sky!”
When the time had come to leave, the boy had gone reluctantly and morosely. His mittened hand tugged against his mother as he toddled toward the barbed-wire control point, his snowball head craning back toward the retreating hulk of a father-hero returning to the blockhouse.
“Timmie!” Tyler heard his wife scream.
He turned to see the little boy romping toward him. Tyler froze, arms cocked angrily on his hips, and glared at the boy. The boy froze too, fleetingly, staring uncertainly at this other father. He turned and saw his mother racing at him. He bolted in panic, away from both of them, off toward the drooping wings of the airplanes his father flew. He skidded on a patch of ice, slid on his padded behind under a huge sagging wingtip, colliding with a wheel beyond which slender projectiles jutted. Suddenly a white form loomed above him. He heard his mother nearby, heard her land on the frozen tarmac too, the air whooshing out of her in a moan.
Tyler, who understood, moved more slowly toward them. He had watched the security patrol, a SWAT squad cloaked in winter-camouflage white, appear out of nowhere, training their weapons on the child first, the mother second. He saw one guard trip his wife, instantly spread-eagling her on the runway and placing a foot on her back, a sawed-off Italian riot gun inches from her head. He saw another guard’s foot land on the boy, only slightly more gently, but firmly, with a riot gun directed at him, too.
Tyler edged methodically toward them.
“Cottonmouth,” he said to the snowmen.
The foot came off the boy first, then off the woman, more slowly. Tyler picked up the boy and, wordlessly, struck him sharply on the rump. The boy’s eyes filled with water that would not leak. Tyler handed him to his mother.
“You do not go near the bombs,” Tyler said to her tonelessly.
His wife stared back blankly, stricken eyes saying nothing and everything.
Now, as it became almost time for lights out in the alert bunker, Tyler reopened the book and reread the sentence, still unable to handle it.
“Yes?”
The voice was groggy and slurred.
Jee-zuz, the general thought. He’s drunk.
“Mr. President, we face an extremely serious situation. I have asked for a full attack conference. Under my authority, I have moved us from Cocked Pistol to Fast Pace.”
“Cocked Pace?”
Jee-zuz.
The President represented everything the Joint Chiefs had wanted since the bleak days following Vietnam, the rise of OPEC, the humiliation of the hostages, and the Soviet adventures in Africa and Afghanistan. He had begun the development of a trillion dollars’ worth of new strategic weapons, although their deployment was just beginning. He had sent the Russians into a cold sweat, yelping that this was the pathway to war. He had ended the the last vestiges of detente with the Soviets. Good stuff.
“Mr. President, I know you are upstairs. But the line is secure. The call was moved, through standard emergency procedures, directly up from the Situation Room.”
“Who is this?”
The general slumped slightly in his swivel chair. Who the blazes did he think it was? On the Command Balcony, the siren-red lights had stopped spinning. The room was still blue. The white lines out of Polyarnny had inched ahead. The lines over the coasts looked like the Fourth of July weekend at the O’Hare Traffic Control Center. The general did not like his most recent code name.
“Icarus.”
The phone seemed dead, the silence was so leaden, although the general heard some babbling in the background. The President was beginning to make him very nervous, bringing back some old, nagging doubts. The general had dealt personally with four Commanders-in-Chief, briefing each of them on the complexities of this moment. Of the four, this President was the only one who had joked during the briefing. The others had been dead serious as they listened. One broke into a heavy sweat, left the room abruptly, and slipped into such a deep depression afterward that he spoke only to his wife for a week. But this President had listened in what appeared to be satisfaction and quiet confidence until they reached the communications portion of the briefing.