“He can’t do it, General,” Raskob said in a quiet voice. His eyes were blank, like something painted on marble. “You can stop him. Even if they call it mutiny you can stop him.” He paused and seemed to be talking to himself. “Emma, the kids, the house, all gone. The whole 46th Congressional District. All gone.” Raskob’s voice took on a lilting, persuasive, hectoring tone. It was the voice he used in the House. “Congress will support you to the hilt, General. You will go down as the most famous patriot of all time.”
General Bogan sensed that by some peculiar psychological quirk the shock had simply turned Raskob’s inner thoughts into words. He was talking to save his sanity.
“I’m sorry, Congressman Raskob,” General Bogan said. “My God, I’m sorry! I know tour family lives in New York. But eighty or ninety or a hundred million lives in America and as many more in Russia are at stake, Congressman Raskob,” and General Bogan realized he was using the title deliberately to bring Raskob back to reality. “Congressman Raskob, think of that. And even if I did not understand his decision, I would not disobey the President.”
Raskob’s eyes came back to life and the look in them made General Bogan turn away. It was a look of pure desolation.
“I can understand the decision if I forget it’s my home, if I just think of politics. The power balance must be reestablished or the world will explode-I can see that. An eye for an eye, a city for a city. It is the way justice works when it rests on power. We sacrifice a city to save the nation,” Raskob said and his voice was gentle and rational. “But my city… my home… my family… mine… mine…” Raskob lowered his head to the table. Both hands were palm up and he buried his face in them. It was a brief reversion to a gesture of sorrow as old as man himselL But Raskob raised his head quickly. His face was composed. “It must be done,” he said simply. “An eye for an eye. There should be some other way, but there isn’t.” His eyes, that had been marble-dead a moment before, were filling with tears, but his voice was controlled. “Politics is filled with hard decisions, but this is the hardest one ever made. And it is correct.”
“I think it is correct, sir,” General Bogan said.
“General, would there be time for me to fly to New York?” Raskob said. “I would like to be with my family.”
“No, sir, there would not be time,” General Bogan said. “And even if there were I would not allow you to leave this room until the situation was resolved.”
Raskob nodded understanding. He walked over and sat down at a desk.
“The machines and the men and the decisions got out of phase,” Knapp told General Bogan. “We knew that something like this could happen in theory, but no one wanted to take it past that. No one knew how to turn it into diplomatic terms without seeming to be dealing from weakness.”
General Bogan listened, but aside from a sense of respect for Knapp, he did not follow Knapp’s words. He was thinking of Raskob.
He sensed somehow the disbelief that must be gripping Raskob. It was almost beyond grasping that all of the skyscrapers, the scores of office buildings, the tenements, the housing developments, the bridges, and the millions of people would, in a few minutes, be gone. It would be a place of fire, dust, great winds, and a landscape of black mounds of melted steel, carbonized flesh.
Would Raskob ever go back to New York, General Bogan wondered? For no apparent reason he was sure that Raskob would. Not out of morbidity, but out of curiosity as to what the ruins would look like. And out of love for what had been. The ancient image of the Wandering Jew came to Bogan’s mind and under it a kind of caption: politician without a constituency.
The General shook his head to clear it of another man’s sorrow, only to find that it was his own.
In the Pentagon the heads swung toward Swenson when the President had finished speaking. Most of the people around the table knew that Swenson’s family lived in New York and that the headquarters of his business was also located there. Swenson’s face did not change expression.
“Are there any papers or documents in New York which are absolutely essential to the running of the United States?” Swenson asked. “And would there be time to get them out of New York, General Stark?”
“No-no, sir, there would not be time,” Stark said. He was having trouble with his voice. “There are a nuniber of irreplaceable documents in New York, but none of them are absolutely crucial for the running of the country. Of course, the records of a large number of private companies—”
“They will be able to rebuild without those papers,” Swenson interrupted. He looked sharply around the table for signs of revolt, cracking nerve, a break in the diain. What he saw he found reassuring.
Because time must be passed and the group might be called upon for further decisions, Swenson forced a discussion of steps that would be taken by companies to reconstruct the records that would be destroyed in New York. The conversation was bizarre. It was led by a man whose entire family might be burnt to death in a very few minutes and carried on by men who had not the slightest interest in the subject matter. But Swenson forced them to it, snapped roughly at the CIA man once, caught Stark in an error in logic.
Groteschele when he had heard the President’s words thought first of his family, but only briefly. Chiefly he thought of them because he had always heard that in emergencies men thought of their families. In Scarsdale they would probably escape the effects of the fireball and direct blast. If they survived that they would be able to go to the bomb shelter which Groteschele had bad built in their back yard.
Then, having done his duty toward family, Groteschele thought of his future. If both Moscow and New York were destroyed it would be the end of his present career. After such a catastrophe, triggered by an error which no one could identify, the world would not tolerate further discussion and preparation for nuclear war. Surely the great powers would disarm to a point below the level where such an accident could be repeated.
For a moment he felt a pang of theoretical regret. He really would have liked to see the thermonuclear war fought out along the lines which he had debated, expounded, and contemplated. It was not true, he told himself, that one fears death more than anything. One might be willing to die to see one’s ideas proven.
Then Groteschele swung his attention to what his future work would be. If there were drastic cutbacks in military expenditures many businesses would be seriously affected; some of them would even be ruined. A man who understood government and big political movements could make a comfortable living advising the threatened industries. It was a sound idea, and Groteschele tucked it away in his mind with a sense of reassurance.
He threw himself into the discussion about the reconstruction of records with zest. Swenson eyed him carefully and guessed almost exactly what had gone through Groteschele’s mind.
“Mr. Secretary, will there be any effort to warn the people in New York about the bombs?” Wilcox said.
Swenson looked sharply at Wilcox. When he spoke his voice was cold.
“That is the President’s decision, Wilcox,” Swenson said. “I assume he has discussed it with Premier Khrushchev and taken whatever action he considers appropriate.”
Stark looked at the Big Board. At one side of it there was a line of buttons, all of them glowing green. One of those buttons would have turned red if an air-raid alarm had been signaled or the Civilian Defense agencies had been alerted. Stark knew that Swenson also knew that, but that Wilcox probably did not.
“A lot of lives could be saved if people had even a few moments to take cover,” Wilcox said stubbornly. He was not a man who frightened easily. His voice was controlled and Swenson knew that he had nothing to fear on the score of Wilcox becoming hysterical. But the mood of the room was becoming what Swenson had anticipated but not found a few minutes before-that of an unbelievable tension, an eerie overcontrol.
Wilcox reached in his brief case and took out that day’s copy of The New York Times. He threw it on the table so that it slid to a stop in front of
Swenson. Squarely in the center of the front page was a picture of the President’s wife. She was in New York for the opening of a new art center.
Everyone at the table except Swenson stared rigidly at the picture. The President’s wife was a beautiful woman who had captured the imagination of the American public as few other women in public life before her. With a simple elegance, she did a great many things: painted, dedicated children’s hospitals, wore handsome clothes, entertained the great and the powerful, traveled around the world representing her husband, and cared for her children.
Swenson looked sharply at Wilcox, then at the other men around the table. He had read a great deal about how people behaved under stress. One thing emerged from the studies: a group could stand a very high level of tension, of terror even, if they were certain that everyone in the group was equally exposed. Allow even the suggestion of preferential treatment and a composed group would disintegrate into a chaotic melee of desperate individuals.
Was Wilcox trying to suggest that the President’s wife would or should receive some sort of preferential treatment? Even officers as magnificently trained as those gathered in this room could be shattered if they thought that the President might be calling New York to get his wife out of the city.
“I don’t quite understand you, Wilcox,” Swenson said. “Make yourself clear and quickly.”
Wilcox’s finger went past the picture of the President’s wife and pointed at a story in the left-hand column of the Times. “CIVIL DEFENSE CHIEF STATES SURVIVAL RATE WOULD GO UP GEOMETRICALLY WITH TIME OF WARNING.” It was an article in which the Civilian Defense Director had issued a reassuring statement that with a few hours warning casualties in an all-out war could be cut drastically.
Swenson realized that Wilcox had not even considered the fate of the President’s wife. It had never occurred to him that the President would do such a thing as give prior warning to his own family.
Groteschele, Stark, and the CIA man all laughed simultaneously. It was a short, mirthless but relieving laugh. Swenson looked at them and smiled. Wilcox looked at the others in astonishment, then growing irritation.
“On very short notice an alert to a big city would probably do more harm than good,” Swenson said. “A couple of hours and people can be dispersed and moved. But with a couple of minutes warning all you would do is produce an enormous amount of panic, crowding of the streets, a frantic searching of parents for children, and the rest. Statistically, more people are in protected spots just before the alarm than they are right after it.”
Stark started to say something and Swenson looked at him and shook his head silently.
He knew what Stark was going to say: if four 20-megaton bombs are dropped on Manhattan no one is going to survive even if they are in the strongest bomb shelter made for civilian use. Of course, there would be a few exceptions-some technician at a hospital who happened to be in a room supplied with oxygen and surrounded by stout walls, some janitor in a deeply buried basement in which by some quirk he could suck in the sewer air and subsist on that for a few hours. But it would not be more than twenty or thirty people, Swenson felt sure.
Some old reflexive control kept Swenson from thinking of his own family. It could do no good. And at the core of his personality was an almost fierce love and sentimentality about his family. Once exposed, once allowed to express itself, this torrent of love and anguish would render him worthless as a leader. So his cool mind reminded him over and over in an endless subconscious chant: there is nothing you can do, nothing you can do, nothing.
His job was to keep this group of men intact, in command of the situation, ready to move in whatever direction the President ordered. It was still possible that the Vindicators would not get through, it was possible that the Soviets might not believe that New York was actually destroyed, it was possible that some third power might panic and start to launch nuclear weapons.
Swenson’s neat prudential mind sorted out the alternatives, weighed them, thought ahead to which man should be entrusted with what tasks in the alternative situations.
The conference line connecting Moscow, Khrushchev, the United Nations, and the White House was open, but there was very little conversation.
Buck no longer felt confusion or embarrassment. He merely felt that during the course of the last few hours he had been greatly toughened. The pressure and tension, so sudden and immense as to be incalculable, had first bewildered him, turned him soft with contradictory moods. But now he felt weathered and sure. Without looking ahead he knew that his life would be different after this day.
He found himself looking at the President and running over different ways of approaching the situation.
If the situation had been reversed, if Soviet planes had accidentally been launched toward the United States, would the President have demanded the sacrifice of a Soviet city?
Probably, Buck thought to himself, although a part of the American tradition and political character would have allowed for time to see if the Soviet attack had been accidental. But how else could it be proved to be an accident? No way, he thought. The Soviet mentality, however, steeped in its own version of Maraist toughness, would not afford the time to wait, must always make its interpretation on the basis of utmost suspicion of its opponents.
“Mr. President, the activity here in Moscow seems quite ordinary, just like any other day,” the American Ambassador said.
Buck sensed that the Ambassador wanted to say something and was asking for permission. The President leaned forward, understanding in his eyes.
“A general alert would be useless, Jay,” the President said. “With the amount of time left it would only cause a mass hysteria and probably not save a single life.”
“That is correct, Mr. Ambassador,” Khrushchev said.
His voice was quiet “I have activated only those parts of our defense that have a chance of shooting down the Vindicators. Our ICBMs have already begun to stand down from the alert. I want no chance of some harebrained lieutenant getting excited and taking things into his own hands.”
It was the opening that the Ambassador wanted.
“What steps will you take to make sure that this most terrible of tragedies is not repeated, Premier Khrushchev?” the Ambassador asked.
“This is not the most terrible of tragedies,” Khrushchev said, but his voice was not belligerent. “In World War Ii we lost more people than we will lose if the two planes get through and Moscow dies. But what makes this intolerable is that so many will be killed so quickly and to no purpose"-he paused, took a breath, and then went on-"and by an accident. The last few hours have not been easy for me, Mr. Ambassador. They are not made easier by the fact that I am talking with you and Ambassador Lentov who will probably be dead in a few minutes. I have learned some things, but I do not have the time to tell them all to you. One thing I can say: at some point in the last ten years we went beyond rationality in politics. We became prisoners of our machines, our suspicions, and our belief in logic. I am willing to come to the United States and to agree to disarmament. Before I leave I will take steps that will make it impossible for our armed forces to repeat what has happened today.”
“Premier Khrushchev, I will welcome you and I shall also take the same steps that you have mentioned in regard to our armed forces,” the President said. “You have put your finger on something that has been gnawing at my mind during these last few moments.”
The President paused. A calm fell on the line.
“Premier Khrushchev?” There was a tentative note to the President’s voice.
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“This crisis of ours-this accident, as you say…. In one way it’s no man’s fault, No human being made any mistake, and there’s no point in trying to place the blame on anyone.” The President paused.
“I agree, Mr. President.”
Buck noticed the President nod, receiving the agreement as if both men were in the same room talking together. The President continued, in
part thinking aloud: “This disappearance of human responsibility is one of the most disturbing aspects of the whole thing. It’s as if human beings had evaporated, and their places were taken by computers. And all day you and I have sat here, fighting, not each other, but rather this big rebellious computerized system, struggling to keep it from blowing up the world,”
“It is true, Mr. President. Today the whole world could have burned without any man being given a chance to have a say in it.”
“in one way,” continued the President, “we didn’t even make the decision to have the computerized systems in the first place. These automated systems became technologically possible, so we built them. Then it became possible to turn more and more control decisions over to them, so we did that. And before we knew it, we had gone so far that the systems were able to put us in the situation we are in today.”
“Yes, we both trusted these systems too much.” A new grimness crept into Khrushchev’s voice. “You can never trust any system, Mr. President, whether it is made of computers, or of people—” He seemed lost in his own thoughts and his voice faded.
“But we did trust them,” said the President. “We, and you too, trusted our beautiful Fail-Safe system, arid that’s what made us both helpless when it broke down.”
Buck was translating quickly. The President’s thoughts came tumbling out, were arrested for a moment, then started again. He had been speaking as if long-pent-up worries were suddenly being released. A thought flashed through Buck’s mind. These two men seemed to understand each other now even before their words were translated. Out of the crisis shared they were developing an intuitive bond. Buck watched the President’s face as he was thinking, searching for his next words, and Buck realized a strange fact. There were some things, some profoundly important problems, that the President could communicate to only one other man in the world: Premier Khrushchev. Buck sensed that both men felt this and were grateful for the empty moments now available to them, It let them make a breach in the awful isolation of their positions.
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