by Tom DeMarco
“Porter.”
“Yes. Just as you said earlier, um, William…”
“Walter.”
“Yes. With increasing professionalism will come, in the natural course of things, more money to reward that professionalism, and of course its concomitant excellence. More money, I mean to say, in the decades to come.”
“More money for next semester, that’s what’s called for. A big hefty increase. Otherwise I’ve got two bright young associates who are going to walk. And Claudia here has a similar problem.” He gestured toward ‘Economics’ across the table. “And the same in the sciences, too.”
Chandler pounced on that. “The sciences! Well, we have the sciences well represented at this meeting, fortunately, in the persons of Dr. Layton’s three assistants.” He turned to Loren. “We haven’t heard from you yet, Dr. Martine.”
“Hm?”
“Have we?”
“Have we what?”
“Heard from you?”
“Heard what from me?”
“What you’re going to say. We haven’t heard it.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“I would be very pleased to have your opinion on what would best serve to assure the professionalism of our science faculty as we proceed through the twenty-first century.”
“The twenty-first century.”
“Yes.”
“Well. What could I say about the twenty-first century? I’m sure something.”
“Indeed. Wouldn’t you be inclined to agree that the professionalism that Chancellor Brill has referred to is what is required to motivate and inspire our science workers? And here, I’m not thinking only of the future of a single university, but of the whole American culture. I can’t think of anything that could be more essential at this time, there is nothing more essential than building that sense, don’t you agree.”
“Oh yes. As you say.”
“Professionalism is the bending of the individual to the will of the institution, for the benefit of all. And that is the subject on the table, Doctor Martine. How best to instill the willingness to bend.”
“Bend.”
“Yes. How would you have us attract the very best young researchers and how shall we bend them to strive toward excellence? What do you think?”
“I was thinking that this might be a good time to break for coffee.”
Chandler looked at him uncomprehendingly. “We just began. You have a fresh cup of coffee right in front of you.”
Loren stared stupidly at his full, steaming cup. “Oh.”
Maria had her eyes closed, her chin down on her chest. Sonia opened her folder to the agenda handout. It listed topics to be covered from 9 AM until 12:30 PM and then a working lunch. She glanced at the clock on the wall behind Chandler. It read 9:09.
In the living room of the top floor suite, Kelly jumped up from the desk where she had been copying sources of supply from the yellow pages. She approached the TV, listening worriedly to an item sandwiched in at the end of the CNN international news segment. When it was done, she jotted a note in block capitals and headed toward the door.
“Keep an eye on Curtis, please, Claymore. I’ll be right back. Don’t let him destroy anything.”
“OK Kelly.”
“And keep an ear out for the phone. Oh, you know.”
“OK Kelly.”
Claymore was still modeling Kelly’s head and shoulders. After she was gone, he shifted his attention from her real form to an image of that form in his mind. He sat back for a moment to consider the image. Her hair seemed closer to her head today than it usually did. Maybe she hadn’t had a chance to wash it. Clay adjusted the mental image to reflect Kelly’s usually fluffy clean hair. He then replaced her tee shirt with the white cotton blouse she sometimes wore with a high collar. He removed the stress from her forehead and from the corners of her mouth. That took a bit of experimentation, because he was still learning what stress was on the human face. Next he revised her lips into a tiny smile that almost always (except for these last few days) had been Kelly’s expression. Much better. He reached forward to make the same changes to the clay figure.
Kelly headed down the hall toward the elevators. Near the end of the corridor was a concierge lounge where tea and coffee and fruit and pastry were made available for guests of the VIP floor. As she passed, she heard the muffled sound of a printer. She went back and followed the sound into a little Guest Services office behind the lounge. There was a copier next to the printer for use of guests. Kelly made copies, then she returned to the suite and sent Curtis out to carry the copies down to the Flamingo Room for the others.
Albert Tomkis flashed his pass at the gate in front of Blair House. The guard waved their taxi in. There was just a chance that the Secretary was here. Albert hoped to catch him between meetings and convince him of the need to reach the Chief Executive before any further harm was done. If he was indeed at Blair House, they could walk across Pennsylvania Avenue and arrive unannounced at the Oval Office in only a few minutes. As they approached the entrance, Albert smiled, pointing to a long gray limousine with license plate STATE-1.
Homer stepped out the right side of the cab as Albert paid. He paused on the steps, feeling foolish about his missing right shoe. He was going to meet a cabinet officer and the President of the United States and try to convince them of a complicated and dangerous course of action, and he was going to have to do that with only one shoe.
He stiffened at the approach of a handsome young man in a dark suit and tie. “Doctor Layton. You’re in good hands, sir. I work for Mr. Tomkis.” Homer breathed a sigh of relief at the words. “The Secretary is waiting for you inside.”
“Oh, good. I guess Tracy Laxalt got through to him.” He let himself be ushered up the stairs by the young man. “Or what? How did the Secretary know we were coming?”
“He got a message just as you suggested. A message from Mr. Laxalt.”
“That’s good.” It took a moment to register. “Mister?”
“Right this way, sir.”
“Wait.” Homer looked back for Albert. There was no sign of him. The taxi was moving down the drive with several persons inside. The young man had an arm linked through Homer’s arm, pulling him forward. There was another man on the other side, taking his left arm. Homer looked up to see a shock of pale blond hair, sullen blue eyes and a mass of white bandages over the nose.
“Oh oh.”
Curtis opened the door of the Flamingo Meeting Room as quietly as he could, and tiptoed in, just as Kelly had instructed. He kept his head down, thinking that would make him less conspicuous. There was a plump old man with white hair and reddish eyebrows holding forth at the front of the room. Curtis made his way over to Sonia’s place to give her one of the copies of Kelly’s note. He could feel eyes on him from various parts of the room. Standing up as tall as he could, he leaned close to Sonia and cupped his hand over her ear. “Hi, Sonia,” he whispered. Sonia rumpled his hair. He passed her one copy of Kelly’s note, which she enclosed in her folder without reading it. Chandler was looking directly at her.
“Just a note from Kelly. About…” She couldn’t think for a moment of anything that it might be about. “About arrangements. But you were saying, Senator?”
“I was saying that the Great Books program shows every possible promise of being the single act that will turn the tide of American education in order to focus the American Mind, so to speak, on, well, on great books”
“Uh huh.” Sonia tried her best to look convinced. She was dying for a peek at the sheet Curtis had brought, but Senator Hopkins had decided to make this part of his presentation explicitly to Sonia.
“I’m just wondering why we haven’t hit upon it before. Can you just imagine the effect of having every single freshman reading Tristram Shandy, for example? Just think of that.”
“Yes. I am thinking of that.” Sonia nodded grimly.
Curtis had made his way over to Loren’s position. He whispere
d Hi Loren in his ear before giving him the sheet. Loren grabbed the paper. He shoved it into his lap where he could read the large print:
PINAR DEL RIO, CUBA: 8:50AM. LOCAL RADIO SAYS CHEMICAL/GAS SPILL EAST AREA PINAR. POSSIBLE FATALITIES. NO DETAIL. RADIO HAVANA SILENT FROM 5AM. SOURCE OF SPILL UNKNOWN.
Senator Hopkins could feel the attention of his audience faltering. Barodin and Dean Sawyer were staring wide-eyed at the little messenger boy, now making his way toward them. And young Martine was reading something in his lap. Others in the room were wondering what was going on. Chandler had not been a teacher all those years without learning how to handle such a lapse of attention. He pushed his chair back and stood, leaned forward over the table to engage each pair of eyes separately. He was thinking of Jimmy Stewart as he did this, Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or maybe it was in Anatomy of a Murder, but anyway Jimmy Stewart riveting the attention of a table full of people. “Great Books!” he said, raising his voice. He rapped on the table in front of him to make the point. “That’s the ticket.” He whirled around to face Loren. “Great books starting off with Tristram Shandy. Don’t you think that will have the effect we’re hoping for, Dr. Martine?”
Loren, his mouth hanging open, stared up at the Senator. “What was the effect we were hoping for again?”
“Curing the national malaise, nothing less than that.” Chandler swept his hand out over the room as though it stood for the whole country. A dramatic gesture to hold them. “That is not a minor matter, I might add. It is that malaise that has subverted the youth of this great nation, deterred it from its greatness. Confronting and defeating malaise, getting America going again is of the very first import. That’s what we’re here for today. What we’re engaged in this morning is a simple matter of saving the bacon for our entire culture.” He finished up focused directly on Sonia.
“Oh, yes, bacon,” she said. “Well, then I think that Tristram Shandy may be just the ticket, as you say.”
She had not actually read Tristram Shandy. In fact, no one in the room had read it, not even Chandler. He had picked it as an example of the great books that no one read (though he hadn’t admitted to not reading it himself), thus contributing to the national malaise. But it was a bit inconvenient now to be talking about a book on a subject unknown, written in a forgotten century by an author whose name had slipped his mind. Chandler decided to switch gears.
“Or we might set them to work reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbons. Now there is something for the national malaise. It’s practically tailor-made for national malaise.” He had read Decline and Fall, as it had been assigned reading when he was a student at the Hill School. He remembered with some satisfaction that it had been deadly. “Which will it be, Dean Sawyer, Decline and Fall or Tristram Shandy?”
“Paradise Lost, I think. Then Childe Harolde.” Maria told him. “And after that, The Odyssey in the original Greek. Only then Decline and Fall. Otherwise, they won’t understand a thing.”
Chandler looked at her closely to see if he was being spoofed. But she was busy reading the sheet the little boy had handed her.
There were two doors leading out of the lavishly decorated parlor of Blair House, both of them locked. Homer was locked in. He had been staring unhappily out the window for last half hour. There was a wide ledge outside, leading under the window and around the corner to god knows what. He supposed that he ought to step out onto the ledge at risk to life and limb and make good his escape. He supposed that he ought to, but he damn well wasn’t going to do any such thing. He was scared of heights. He was scared of falling into the rose bushes two stories below and being “rescued” by the guards. They would undoubtedly return him to this very room, no better off but full of thorns. There was also an armed guard on the lawn beneath him. The man had waved up to Homer when he’d first looked out the window.
He heard steps in the hall outside. A moment later the door was opened by a young woman in a suit. She stepped aside for Rupert Paule to enter. She placed his small attaché case for him on the floor beside the chair he was settling into, then let herself out. Homer wondered idly what GS rating was given to attractive females hired to open doors and carry attaché cases for senior advisors.
He had no illusions about the interview to come. Paule would hear him out but not let him see the President. He would send him away with the advice to let the professionals run government. The professionals were people like Rupert Paule.
Homer suppressed a sigh. Nothing to do now but play out the hand as it was dealt. “Hi Rupe.”
“Doctor Layton. Always an honor.”
“Oh equally. Very equally.”
“I hear you’ve been playing secret agent.”
“Actually not. A business trip. Quick little trip to see the President. It’s essential that I see him, but it won’t take but a few minutes. I know he’ll want to hear what I have to say.”
“He is hearing it. Telling something to me is like saying it right into the President’s ear.”
“Oh, now I’m very sure that’s true. You can’t imagine how sure I am. Only this particular time, I’ve got to talk to the man himself.”
“Unfortunately, he’s having his nap. He is suffering from jet lag from his trip back from Europe.”
“I confess to thinking it might be OK to wake him, just this once. He might like to be involved in averting a nuclear incident.”
Paule sat back in his chair smirking. He crossed his legs. Homer was trying to think of the character from literature that Paule suggested. Suddenly it came to him: Ichabod Crane. His long spindly wrists extended a good six inches from the sleeves of his shiny black suit jacket. And his ankles too were exposed to well above the top of his black socks. The hawk-like features and close-cropped hair with deep recessions of the hair line on each side also suggested Ichabod Crane. But Crane, of course, was supposed to have a look of fear, and Paule showed only boredom. He yawned, waiting for Homer to go on. Homer waited him out. There was some comfort to be had from the fact that the black suit looked like it had been slept in. It made Homer less self-conscious about the fact that he himself was missing a shoe.
“Averting conflict is fine if you don’t get obsessed with it,” Paule said at last.
“Oh, I’m obsessed with it. What do you say that you and I just run across the street to the White House, my friend, and tell the President what’s about to happen in Cuba, just as soon as the wind changes.”
The thin gangling man smirked again. “Oh the wind already changed, Dr. Layton.” Homer flinched. “You know,” Paule went on, “our meteorological people suggested that the foul wind might hold for days. But it didn’t. It turned right around on schedule. We caught a break on that one.” He looked as if it was a break that they had been able to count on. “We have friends in high places.”
“So it’s done.” Homer said. “The island is dead. Mostly dead.”
“Liberated. Yes, it is. More than half of Cuba is free of communists for the first time in a quarter of a century.”
“Free of life.”
“Free of human life. The factory produced a very sophisticated product.” Product. He might have been talking about a toothpaste. “They got their recipe from the Russians. It did no harm to the wildlife, probably didn’t kill so much as a single cow. Very sophisticated.”
“Nothing more sophisticated than killing people in great numbers. You’re really in the big leagues now, aren’t you?”
“We’re playing hardball, that’s all. They had to expect something like this. They are the ones to blame. We have acted in an entirely responsible matter, simply taking back what is ours.”
“And the Guantanamo base?”
“A regrettable loss. We removed a few senior personnel. The rest have died heros’ deaths. It couldn’t be avoided. It would hardly have suited our purposes to give away our intentions with a mass evacuation.”
“I don’t suppose there has been any word from certain off-shore terro
rist groups?”
“A rather petulant little communication. It came in this morning. They have declined to accept our version of what happened. They have even gone so far as to suggest reprisals may be in the offing.”
“St. Louis.”
Paule looked surprised. “How on earth did you know that?”
“Just a lucky guess. They propose to use a medium sized missile to remove St. Louis. This evening or tonight, approximately. They suggest that we use the intervening time to evacuate the population.”
“I can’t imagine how you have learned that, but yes. We, of course, are taking no action. We don’t have to.”
“Only a few million American lives, I guess that doesn’t matter much.”
“No lives at all, Dr. Layton. We have secret weapons.”
“Oh yes, Revelation-13.”
“My god, you do have your sources, don’t you? But yes, since you mention it, Revelation-13 is one of our secret weapons. It will render their puny missile impotent and useless. That’s if they dare to fire it at all. They really would be advised not to. They would be much better off simply swallowing their loss. Because if they did fire on St. Louis, the city would be saved by Revelation-13, but then we would obliged to take action of our own. Most reluctantly, of course.”
“If the shield holds, you’re going to launch on Havana.”
“Reluctantly. And while we’re at it…well, other targets are being discussed. Nothing undeserved, mind you.”
“And if the shield doesn’t hold?”
“Oh it will, Dr. Layton. I can assure you of that. We have put in a few highly productive weeks of work on Revelation-13.”
“Weeks?! It would take years.”
“Not with the team of software specialists we have assembled under Dr. Armitage. They are the best of the best, a dozen of the very finest. Their productivity is maybe ten times higher than that of the next best software team on earth.”
“Oh, that’s good to know. Of course they would have to be a few thousand times more productive than that to get the work done in the time they’ve had for it.”