Fail-Safe

by Eugene Burdick

  “Doctor, down here we consider this rather urgent,” Colonel Stark said. “After all, the security of the country is involved.”

  “Can you schedule the meeting for tomorrow after noon?” Groteschele asked abruptly.

  The colonel could and did. That afternoon meeting was not easy. For the first time since the captured SS troopers had made the remarks about Jews being like rabbits, Groteschele felt isolated. He was seated at the end of a long table. The other seats were occupied by six generals, five colonels, four civilians, and a secretary who was operating a Stenotype machine. Groteschele glanced at Stark. Stark’s face was completely expressionless. Groteschele did not bother to look at the others. He knew that none of them were yet committed.

  Quite suddenly Groteschele lost his nerve. The whole situation was preposterous. He was only a student who had once been an Army lieutenant and he was talking to professionals who had devoted their lives to the conduct and strategy of war. He sensed that he was about to make a fool of himself. Quickly, and with the telescopic capacity of the tragic moment, he saw the rest of his life. He would slide, slide, slide, always downward. He smiled woodenly down the table as he calculated where he would end, what the academic equivalent of his father’s butcher-shop job would be. He would be a grade-school teacher to a bunch of idiot children. With a terrible self-hatred he was aware of how he had physically declined, was no longer taut and trim. To them, these men of power and elegance around the table, he must look like a fattening, white-grub academic. He looked at Stark, started to ask to be excused.

  “Excuse me, Colonel Stark,” Groteschele said and then paused. To his astonishment his voice came out cold and steady, without a tremor. His mouth was dry, his mind a shambles, his fingers had a quiver-but his voice was rock-hard. The decision was made for him. He would read the paper just as he had written it, using the one physical attribute that was still in control: his voice. Later, reading, he realized that his paper was a wild gamble. He reviewed alternative theories of modern thermonuclear war and, with all the deliberateness of a machine gunner, shredded them to pieces. Inevitably he must be damaging some of the men in the room. The knowledge made his fingers tremble even more. His mouth went cottony, but somehow the words continued to pour out with even more control. When he finished his review of “obsolete alternatives” he sensed that he had probably bruised every man in the room. There was nothing to do but go on.

  When he came to his own theory his voice became sharper, more incisive, although the words were more ambiguous. Without smiling, using his new vocabulary, he presented the alternative of the United States striking first. However, he never quite used those words. He took the people around the table to the edge of the abyss, forced them to look over the edge. Then, his language still cold, be described a situation in which the abyss was not threatening, but was in fact a magnificent and glowing opportunity. The whole presentation took one hour and ten minutes. He was not interrupted once.

  When he had finished and had squared his papers in front of him on the table Groteschele stared straight ahead.

  The first person to speak was an elderly, white-haired man in uniform at the far end of the table. He had a deep and authoritative voice that emanated from a face made of leather, and four stars decorated each shoulder. Groteschele had not noticed him before, but sensed at once that he was the senior officer in the room. He was, in fact, in charge of strategic plans for the Air Force and had deliberately not identified himself with any single point of view. Ruthless on weak logic and thin evidence, he had the reputation of listening with an open mind to any proposal that was sensibly presented.

  “Dr. Groteschele, speaking for myself only, I congratulate you on an extremely clear and lucid presentation of a complex problem,” the general said. The general looked at his hands, smiled, and went on. “Your alternative is a difficult one. I believe it might be the right one. At the least it should be thoroughly discussed.”

  Groteschele relaxed. He was safe. He hardly heard the other voices as they murmured various reasons for approving Groteschele’s paper.

  When the briefing broke up, Stark invited him to dinner. Groteschele smiled, aware that the invitation had come after the briefing rather than before. He accepted. The dinner was small, but Groteschele knew that the men there were powerful. And he was the prize, the sought-after expert. Eyes turned to see him when he spoke. Others broke off their conversations to listen.

  “My God, did you hear the Old Man say that Dr. Groteschele might have ‘the right one’?” Colonel Stark said. “That’s the closest he has ever come to a commitment.”

  They stared at Groteschele. He did not smile. Calmly he went on to describe some of the implications of his position.

  That had been the start.

  Soon he was practically commuting to Washington. Conference followed conference. Discussion papers appeared at regular intervals. Each trip, each conference, gave Groteschele access to new and valuable inforuzation. He was cleared for access to top-secret material, He had free communications with the experts working on the fantastic frontiers of defense developments.

  His doctoral dissertation was published under the title Counter-Escalation. It was instantly reviewed by Hanson Baldwin in The New York Times Sunday book-review section, and was the lead. Walter Millis reviewed it for the Herald Tribune. For a book of its type it sold very well, over 35,000 copies. Its reputation spread everywhere. Liberal journals attacked the book. A pacifist group burned it in Mann County, California, and then had second thoughts about book-burning and apologized to a nonlistening public. The book was discussed on two national television panel shows. People who had never read it had violent opinions about it.

  With a speed that startled him he now became a public personage outside the defense and academic communities. He analyzed the reasons for his success and finally satisfied himself. There was a morbidity about his subject matter which somehow flowed over onto Groteschele and gave him an aura. He was extremely careful never to discuss classified information in public, but even so he could draw a picture of how the United States would look after a thermonuclear first strike, the awful seductions of surrender, the number of children who would suffer malignant genetic defects from radioactivity. Looking coolly at a room full of people he would tell them how many decades it would take the survivors of a thermonuclear war to regain the standard of living of medieval days. He could see the audience stiffen, tongues licking at the corners of their mouths, the signs of nervousness and fascination multiply.

  Groteschele knew that he was regarded as a magician.

  The awesome powers on which he was expert, the facts of life and death and survival, the new cabalistic language of the nuclear philosophers and high scientists of physics, were merely matters of fact. But the layman, the rich socialite, the industrialist, the politician, endowed Groteschele with control of the things he described.

  The attention and the flattery were deeply pleasing to Groteschele. He did not disguise the fact from himself. He handled the incidental aspects of fame easily. There was more money, lots more money, and Groteschele turned it over to an expert business manager. He learned to dictate into portable dictating machines while riding taxicabs or airplanes. He learned that it was dangerous to get drunk the night before an important meeting. He became a consultant to various foundations and business firms, but selected them with great care. He wanted nothing to impair his relationship to the Federal government, for he knew full well that his status in Washington and the information which he obtained there were the sources of his power. Groteschele went through three different administrations without threat. Many of the high military officers and policy-makers did not agree with him, but he was a valuable commodity. He was an innovator, a barb, an egghead with a steel-trap mind, and even those who disagreed with him violently knew they were duty-bound to consider the alternatives which his thinking produced.

  Groteschele had been, after the success of his book, besieged by academic offers. He
evaluated them very carefully. He finally chose a distinguished university close to Washington which agreed to give him halftime duties for a single semester, but to pay him a full salary. The university also had bought a commodity, a nanie, a reputation, and knew it.

  So much had changed for Groteschele so quickly. He thought briefly of his relationship with women. He was not handsome or attractive sexually, and he never had been. He had always explained it to himself by saying that women who were otherwise attracted to him were repelled by his mind. But this, too, had changed. When he walked down the long corridors of the Pentagon, groups of secretaries stared at him with tight little fascinated smiles. He nodded but did not speak. To his surprise, brilliant and beautiful women sought him out. If he wanted, so it seemed, he had only to stand still at a cocktail party, scan the women speculatively, settle on one and then let the situation develop at the woman’s initiative. The course often led him to her bed.

  Groteschele was married and had a fifteen-year-old daughter. Wife and daughter were strangely identical: slight, nervous, possessed of a thin prettiness. His daughter was a brilliant student and it was her academic record which Groteschele found most attractive about her. Like the wives of many busy and successful men, his wife had faded away into a cool domestic haze. He had married her in Cincinnati years ago and at the time she had had the freshness of youth and it had seemed an appropriate union. Groteschele never took her on trips and when he was home their conversations were brief and perfunctory. She sensed that his sexual life was extramarital, but the knowledge gave her relief. She had never really enjoyed sex, and after Counter-Escalation there had been something about her husband’s sexual behavior which disturbed her. She felt ravished and quite impersonal even when locked together with him-as if she were nameless to him, an anonymous figure upon whom he exploded a deep rage. She tried to convince herself it was passion, but knew it was not.

  Passion had recently led Groteschele to an experience that shocked him profoundly in that it revealed so starkly the wellsprings of his power. It had started at one of those frequent off-the-record discussions with a group of high-level businessmen and political leaders. This one bad been in Washington, the Metropolis tan Club. Only a highly selected group was present that evening, about twenty-five men and women altogether. During drinks, one woman had stood out, Elegant, slim and lithe, she was a woman from a world he did not know. He sensed that she had a competence with men that had become almost arrogance. He had seen a few others like her. They gave off the subtle signs of wealth, family background, education and boredom. It was like a number of elegant odors in the air. It also had something to do with the smile: such women smiled infrequently and never at women. When they smiled at a man it was like a congratulatory handshake; it had nothing of the simper or of the coquette in it. Men for such women were not a diversion, they were a necessity. Groteschele sensed this and felt somehow threatened. He avoided such women.

  The speech went well. It was a variation of the same one he gave them all. They never wanted to hear anything new, they just wanted to hear it from him. Afterward, over more drinks, little groups came up to present pet arguments. He looked around the room, wondering when they would start to break up. No sign yet. He could not leave too early. Part of his $750 fee involved just this sort of boredom. There was a slight tug at his elbow. He turned around. It was his hostess and just to the side the woman, the elegant one.

  “Evelyn, this is Walter Groteschele, our famous guest; Evelyn Wolfe. Evelyn has been dying to meet you. She’s made me promise to take a small group to a bar so she can hear you at doser range,” the hostess said, and fled.

  “She overdid it a bit, but I would like to talk to you,” Evelyn Wolfe said.

  Eight of them wound up in one of those countless chic hotel bars of Washington. Evelyn Wolfe sat next to Groteschele and in a few moments he had the bewildering sensation that they had somehow been cut off from the others at the corner table, almost as if some barrier to sound had been drawn around him and Evelyn Wolfe. Groteschele slowly began to realize that this was an extraordinarily attractive woman. She -was intelligent, she was poised, mannered, informed, and intense, but he had met at least a score of women that possessed these qualities. What she possessed in addition was a kind of burning intensity, a hard focusing of all her emotions on some undefined objective. She did not converse. She aimed at a target. By the time they had had four scotch and waters Groteschele realized that the target was himself. Normally he would have been flattered. But this time he felt a slight shiver of apprehension. This woman had an almost cobra-like manner of following what he said. Her beautifully coiled head, her face marred only by a mouth that was too small, actually wove back and forth with slight undulations as Groteschele talked about war games, the strategy of surrender, megatons, and Doomsday systems.

  Most people, especially women, listened to Groteschele’s description of American and Soviet tactics with a kind of unconcealed look of either bafflement or horror. Groteschele could not make out the look on Evelyn Wolfe’s face. He only knew that her concentration was enormous. She spoke very little. When he described the Doomsday system, hinting that it was semidassified, she closed her eyes for a moment and a slight smile started at the corners of her mouth.

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  Just that single word unaccompanied by an expression of horror or astonishment or dismay. For a moment Groteschele’s careful poise was broken. He went on automatically talking about the likeliest survivors of an all-out thermonuclear war, his way of giving a droll ending to his macabre description, of letting people down easily. They would be the most hardened of convicts, those in solitary confinement. Another group likely to survive would be the file clerks for large insurance companies, because they would be housed in fireproofed rooms and insulated by tons of the best insulator in the world, paper.

  “Then, my dear Miss Wolfe, imagine what will happen,” Groteschele said, feeling himself regaining his poise. “The small group of hardened criminals and the army of file clerks will war with one another for the remaining means of life. The convicts will have a monopoly of violence, but the file clerks will have a monopoly of organization. Who do you think will win?”

  Evelyn Wolfe looked straight at Groteschele. Then she shook her head. Groteschele was confused.

  “I would like you to take me home now,” Evelyn Wolfe said, and she was up on her feet and into her mink coat before he responded. She did not say goodbye to the rest of the group, but they all looked up as she and Groteschele left.

  They were in Groteschele’s car and three blocks from the bar before Evelyn Wolfe spoke.

  “You were being mischievous about the war between the convicts and the file clerks,” she said, leaning her head back against the seat. “In fact, you know that no one will survive the Doomsday system. That is the beauty of the whole thing.”

  “No one, Miss Wolfe, has ever called it beautiful before,” Groteschele said with a laugh.

  “They have been afraid to,” she said. “But that is what they feel.”

  “You mean that everyone is possessed by the death-wish?” Groteschele asked in his best professorial manner.

  “No, damn it, don’t be so deliberately stupid,” she said sharply. “Everyone knows they are going to die. What makes you fascinating and what makes your subject fascinating is that it involves the death of so many people. Quite literally everyone on earth.” She paused a moment and then spoke savagely. “Damn it, I wish I were a man and a man who could push the button. I would not push it, you understand that. But the knowledge that I could.” She shivered in her mink coat.

  As Groteschele turned off of Massachusetts Avenue and threaded through Rock Creek Park, he felt a sudden hard understanding cross his mind. It was not he, Groteschele, the physical man, who was attractive to women. It was Groteschele, the magic man, the man who understood the universe, the man who knew how and when the button would be pushed. He was a master of death and somehow that gave him pote
ncy.

  “Why wouldn’t you push it?” Groteschele asked softly. “There it sits. More power in that button than anyone in all time has ever possessed. But it’s never used until you push the button. Why not push it?”

  “Because I would die along with everyone else,” Evelyn Wolfe said.

  Her voice came to a queer faltering halt. Groteschele felt a very deep excitement.

  “That is one statement you do not really believe,” he said with authority. “Do you think that life is the most important thing to a person? You don’t think it for a moment. You know I don’t. I can name a dozen ways of living to which you would prefer death.”

  She was leaning back against the seat, her eyes closed, the lacquer of sophistication dissolved from her face. She looked curiously young. Like a hungry young girl.

  “Go on,” she said. It was the first time that night she had implored him.

  “Knowing you have to die, imagine how fantastic and magical it would be to have the power to take everyone else with you,” Groteschele said, spinning out what he had never said to himself. “The swamis of them out there, the untold billions of them, the ignorant masses of them, the beautiful ones, the artful ones, the friends, the enemies… all of them and their plans and hopes. And they are murderers: born to be murdered and don’t know it. And the person with his finger on the button is the one who knows and who can do it.”

  The sound Evelyn Wolfe made was not a moan. It was the sound of wonderment that a child makes… even if the sees cruelty.

  “Stop in one of those little side roads,” Evelyn Wolfe ordered.

  Groteschele obeyed.

  The moment that he turned off the motor her neat trim head struck at him. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before. She kissed him violently and then whispered words in his ear at the same time that her hands moved over his body. In one way he felt raped, attacked by someone stronger than himself. At the same time her words were words of the most extreme submission, bringing out every bullish impulse in his body.