Trinity's Child

by William Prochnau

  “Yeah, it was. It was a lot like life. Like what we're doing. I wanted to beat it.”

  “But you couldn't.”

  “No.” Kazaklis paused thoughtfully. “That was the hook. You could never beat it.” He paused again briefly. “You said it. The better you got, the better it got. So you just kept feedin' it quarters. Funny, I think I had that damn computer game's secrets figured out better than the Jap who programmed it. I got to the point where I lost only to random malfunctions. They were programmed into it, too.”

  “Programmed malfunctions?”

  “Yeah. The shits, huh? How do you beat programmed random malfunctions?”

  Moreau stared out the window into the false peace of the Pacific. “You think that's what we're in now?” she asked quietly.

  “Sorry?” Kazaklis missed the subtle shift in direction.

  “You think the world's in a programmed malfunction?”

  Kazaklis stared at her but said nothing. He understood. He had no answer.

  “You learned everything about that game except the ultimate secret, Kazaklis,” Moreau said without rancor. “You never discovered the secret of the narcotic.”

  Again Kazaklis said nothing. But he had sensed that secret, too.

  “You just keep shoving money into it, getting better and better, discovering new secrets, developing new strategies, escalating your ability, escalating your mind's technology.” Moreau paused. Her voice grew still more pensive. “Every time you escalate, the other side escalates. You advance. The adversary advances.” She slipped almost unnoticeably into a language of equal-versus-equal, man-versus-man. “You got better. He got better. You cracked one secret. He sprang another. You slugged in money. He responded. But the escalation never stopped. You could never win, Kazaklis, no matter how good you got. That was the secret. The only way to win was to stop.”

  “And if you didn't stop, the malfunction got you.” Now Kazaklis sounded wistful. “Pretty smart little college girl, aren't you?”

  Moreau felt tears forming again. “Not that smart,” she said. “My father explained it to me. It took him a lifetime to understand the narcotic.” She sniffled and tried to hide it. Kazaklis reached out and squeezed her elbow in support. “He must have been quite a guy,” Kazaklis soothed. “You loved him very much, didn't you?”

  Moreau spun toward him, shuddering, the past tense jarring her sensibilities. Kazaklis understood instantly. “I'm sorry, Moreau,” he said quickly. “I didn't mean it that way. There's a good chance he made it.”

  “Not a good chance,” she said flatly, pulling herself back together. “A chance. If he was home, he made it through the bombing. Now the fallout's coming.” She paused, but the tears were gone and the strength back. “He lectured a lot at the Academy. If he was there . . .” She thought of Christmas again. “I think he was ready.” She looked at Kazaklis. She knew so little about him. “Your family?” she asked.

  Kazaklis glanced at his watch, seeing it was eight A.M. along the Coos. “My pa,” he said. “Mean old bastard. Tough as the Oregon woods. The old fart will fight it all the way.” The words were harsh but the voice soft and full of wonderment. Moreau had never heard Kazaklis speak quite that way.

  “You also love him deeply,” she said.

  A perplexed expression spread across his face. “Love him?” he asked vacantly. “My God, I guess I never thought I did. The old bastard.” He turned away and gazed thoughtfully into the eternity of the ocean. “I don't suppose the fallout's made it to Coos Bay yet.” He paused. “Another day. Two maybe.”

  “What will he do?” Moreau asked softly.

  Kazaklis turned back toward her with an ear-to-ear grin, no rascality in it at all, only pure pleasure. “If anybody will make it, Pa will make it,” he said with certainty. “The old coot wouldn't mind goin' in a flood or a forest fire. Anything natural. But he'll fight this shit like he'd fight the devil himself. Shoot a deer, find a cave, send out for all the whores in Coos Bay, and start himself a new master race.”

  Moreau could not prevent herself from laughing, Kazaklis having presented the image of his father with such bizarre exuberance. “A master race?” she sputtered through her laughter.

  “Sure!” Kazaklis exuded, and he was laughing harder than Moreau now. “Just look at me!”

  The two of them broke down into hysterical laughter, venting all the guilt of Elsies and Klickitats and duties and fathers left behind; venting all the fears and sorrows, the griefs and uncertainties, too. In the back of the cabin, Halupalai heard the strange sounds over the roar of the engine. He turned to see them convulsed in mutual laughter. He nodded appreciatively. He liked that. It was a good sign. Going home was, too, and they were getting close now.

  Long after the two injured men had been hoisted across the teenagers' muscular backs, and long after the perilous trek toward Olney had begun, Sedgwick emerged from his mind's blackness. He had no idea how much time had transpired. The scene made no more sense to him than the crazy half-dreams of the ghostly trip across the countryside. He awoke to see the large black woman present herself regally to a man in a hooded white suit. She announced, quite authoritatively, “We has brought you the President of the United States.”

  A hollow and tinny voice responded from inside the white hood. “Sure thing, lady,” it said, “and the Pope's knocking at the back door.”

  Kazaklis and Moreau had stopped laughing and were checking vectors. Halupalai's islands lay forty-five minutes away.

  Moreau's mind had trouble focusing on the work. It raced with a dozen questions about the dead world they were about to pass over, still more about the unknown world that lay beyond. “I wish I had gotten to know you better,” she said suddenly. Kazaklis looked up from his plotting, surprised. “We don't even know each other,” she continued. “None of us. Do you think we can survive, locked together in some New Yorker cartoon of a desert island?”

  Kazaklis turned away. His voice went very quiet. “We can't do any worse than the four billion people locked together on that big island beneath us. I like our odds better.”

  She shook her head slowly. It was not a very optimistic reading. “Percentage baseball, huh?” she asked forlornly.

  “To hell with percentage baseball,” Kazaklis said without emotion. “At some point, Moreau, you have to get out of Yankee Stadium and back to the sandlots.”

  “Yes,” Moreau said. She gazed for a moment into the fluttering yellow gauges of the flight panel and the life she had chosen. “The roar of the madding crowd gets hard on the ears,” she said wistfully. “After a while that's all you hear and you can't understand the person next to you.” Kazaklis turned back toward her. “I still wish I had taken the time to know you better,” she said. He looked at her a moment longer. Then he said, “Check the vectors, will you?”

  Moreau methodically returned to work, cross-checking their course. After a moment she looked up and asked, “We're really going to make the overflight?”

  “Yes,” he replied tersely. But it was clear he was worried too. “Moreau, take a look out there.” He gestured disconsolately at the spectacularly clean and serene panorama that immersed them. “The world doesn't look that way anymore. We have to see the world once.”

  She nodded in understanding. But she still asked, “And Halupalai, too?”

  Kazaklis drew bleakly inside himself, not answering. Halupalai's islands had controlled this entire ocean. They had been the repository for more of the gray instruments of control than any other place in the country whose flag Polar Bear One flew. They had contained submarine pens and air bases for rapid dispersal of the weapons throughout their realm. They had contained the headquarters of CINCPAC and the Pacific fleet, satellite-tracking stations and elaborate communications bases to tie the control together. In Halupalai's paradise, grass-skirt hula dancers had fluttered talking hands at hidden megatons. No war would be fought without taking out Hawaii.

  “Maybe Tyler was right,” he said. “This is all a bad dream. A
great hoax. A test we failed.” He touched his symbolic glove and paused. “It's the height of the tourist season, Moreau. The gonzos will be cruising the curls off Waikiki and the flower shirts will be guzzling maitais at the Ilikei.” His voice trailed off.

  “I understand, Kazaklis,” she said.

  “I had a buddy once . . .” Kazaklis grew distant. “Did grunt duty in Vietnam. Halfway through, they pulled him out of the mud and the crud and the blood, stuffed him aboard Pan American, and twelve hours later they dropped him in paradise. Six days of rest and recreation on Waikiki. He chased poon and watched the fat flower shirts swillin' martinis like there was no mud and crud and body bags anywhere. For the flower shirts, there wasn't. Then the Army collared him and took him back. Jesus.” Kazaklis grunted. “Hell to heaven. Heaven to hell. All he did was duck after that. Said Hawaii was the reason we lost the war. Half the Army was waitin' for R and R and duckin'. The other half was rememberin' and duckin'.” He grunted again and stopped.

  Moreau kept her gaze trained on him.

  “How the hell do I know, Moreau?” he asked, finally answering the question about Halupalai's needs. “I just know we can't run forever from something we haven't seen.”

  She stretched her arm out toward him again. “I'll go back and talk to him before we make the approach,” he said. Then he went silent again, staring out the left-hand window at a sun ballooning upward into a perfect sky.

  IV

  Jericho’s Walls

  I am not proud of the part I've played in it .... 1 think we will probably destroy ourselves, so what difference does it make?

  —Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine

  Thirteen

  1700 ZULU

  The fog of war blurs all human conflicts. It hangs in a heavy mist, clouding men's minds and warping their judgments. It is a strange phenomenon, causing some men to vacillate disastrously, others to move with an equally disastrous certitude. It instantly transforms enemies into beasts and sadly human errors into methodically inhuman calculations. In a moment of desolate passion an infantryman, unable to cope with the horror surrounding him, mindlessly performs the machine-gun stitching of women and children. The infantryman's distant leaders view the mysteriously ruthless response of husbands and fathers and, through the fog of war, see the new act as that of a barbaric enemy requiring swift retribution. So goes it. And goes it.

  At 1600 Zulu on this winter day, as the pilots of Polar Bear One watched the sun pop out of the deceptively undisturbed expanse of the Pacific, the fog of war hung heavy indeed over the rest of the battlefield. Just five hours remained before the American submarines would rise, attempt to penetrate the fog, and almost certainly deliver the penultimate retribution for lost wives and children. A few moments later the Soviet ICBM reserves would respond in kind. Remaining throughout the world, of course, would be thousands of additional weapons, the arsenals were so large and well dispersed. These weapons would be expended without any semblance of even semicivilized restraint over the next days, weeks, months. Their use would be somewhat redundant.

  Among the elite few who had even a lottery player's chance of altering the events, the miscalculation, and confusion were almost total. They were making assumptions that were logical but wrong. They were treating truths as falsehoods and falsehoods as truths, and acting on both. In fact, in all the beleaguered world, not a single person had the access or the wisdom to understand the swirl of events engulfing them.

  Nor did the events of the last several hours, since the bombers had turned, help lift the fog. In the Soviet Union two more cities had been destroyed. Pushkin, a medium-sized town just outside Leningrad, had been leveled by an American submarine cornered in the North Sea. Nadhodka, a Siberian port city, had been hit by a trapped outrider cruising beneath the Sea of Japan. In the United States the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina had been sprayed randomly, like Baton Rouge, by a Soviet submarine off the Outer Banks. All three attackers had been losing deadly chases by enemy hunter subs. They had unloaded on available targets, as their orders dictated. So goes it.

  Limited communications gradually were returning. But as often as not, the sketchy information caused as many problems as it solved, creating as much fog as it dispelled. Nor did it help that in Cherepovets the Soviet Premier now had gone more than thirty-six hours without sleep. Nor did it help that in Olney two frightened but dedicated young nurses, steeped in the sisterhood's time-honored tradition of giving solace and relieving pain, were adding their own brand of fog to the intravenous solution they had begun feeding through the forearm of a hurting and semiconscious American President. Nor did it help that the American government appeared to have two Presidents and that only one man—a bureaucratic second-level civil-defense director— held that information.

  In the massive underground labyrinth south of Cherepovets, the Soviet Premier popped another amphetamine. He had been taking the uppers most of the day to keep himself alert. He was taking an occasional vodka as well, to settle his racking anxiety. He glanced quickly about the sterile room to see if anyone had observed him taking the pill. Already today he had quelled the inevitable coup attempt, employing methods far more sweeping than those used in the cockpit of the E-4. Still, his political control was tenuous, at best. The loyalist advisers and military officers with him in the multilevel bunker were edgy and doubtful, even about him. Little wonder, he grumped. His grand plan—he had been completely honest with the American President—had lurched nightmarishly out of control. Had he been a fool to think it would not? But why? Why, after the Americans had reacted so rationally to an attack on their own territory, had they acted so irrationally to such a minor event in China? Were the Americans that protective of the fuck-their-mother Chinese? The little yellow devils had obliterated fifteen of his Red Army divisions! So the rebellious commanding general of the Rocket Forces had struck back at Peking and Wuhan. Against his orders. And starting the coup. Also starting, he presumed, and he shook his head in despair at the thought of it, the spasm launches of ICBM's bursting out of the American prairies. Then the rebellious general's response out of the steppes. Then the prairies again. Then the steppes again. He groaned, swallowing hard to get the amphetamine all the way down. Could he control anything now? Anyone? He glanced about the room. There were only three other persons here—a radio operator, a decrypter, and the new commanding general of the Rocket Forces, whom the Premier had appointed only hours ago after dealing directly—and finally—with the man's predecessor. All seemed preoccupied except the general.

  The Premier moved his eyes to a clock—1600 hours, Greenwich mean time, ten hours after he had begun this lunacy. How much longer could he hold it together? He had one newly rebellious ICBM wing commander in control of the isolated Zhangiztobe field in the south-central deserts. The man's wife and children had been in Pushkin. The Premier shook his head wearily, fought to stifle a yawn, and felt a powerful hand land lightly on his shoulder.

  “Comrade,” the general said, “why don't you get some sleep? We will awaken you.”

  “Sleep,” the Premier replied. “Sleep is for the innocent, comrade general.”

  The general's broad brow knitted in concern.

  “Figure of speech.” The Premier smiled without conviction. “And the Rocket Forces? No change?”

  The general shrugged. “They will go, if necessary.” He paused.

  “They will be somewhat more difficult to stop.” The general probed the Premier's face for hidden messages. “If necessary,” the general added.

  “Zhangiztobe?” the Premier asked bleakly.

  The general shrugged again. “Even getting through to them is difficult, Comrade Premier. And threats have little effect tonight.”

  The Premier sighed in acknowledgment, flicking his fingers to dismiss his military commander. He was having extraordinary difficulty communicating with the surviving Rocket Forces. He was having extraordinary difficulty communicating with anyone. Why couldn't he get through
to the Americans? He looked at the arched back of his radio operator and cursed silently.

  The Premier brushed the wetness from his forehead and tried to review what he knew. The American President was dead, his command plane not having made it out of Andrews. The death was most unfortunate and unintended. He felt no love for his old antagonist and still blamed him, rightly or wrongly being irrelevant now, for pushing them both into this disaster. Still, the Premier was a practical man. He had not wanted to deal—if any dealing could be done—with a leaderless country out of political control. Nor had he wanted to deal with an amateurish successor drawn out of the insignificant ranks of the American Congress or the President's Cabinet. But a successor was in charge. The sketchy information intercepted from conversations between the E-4 and the Looking Glass was incomplete and incomprehensible. Still, orders of some kind were moving back and forth. And that confirmed it.

  So. He was dealing with a faceless man. He had no clue as to his identity or his background. But, to his surprise, the Premier had developed a tremendous respect for the man already. It had been beyond reasonable hope to find such a sophisticated man drawn out of the lower reaches of either of their governments. But the chess moves with the bombers! Masterful! Turn one bomber, wait for a response, and then turn the others! Ingenious! The man had reinvented the carrier pigeon. It had bought them some time. The Premier slumped in his seat. Perhaps not enough, he thought bleakly. Pushkin. Nadhodka. He knew the system. He knew the orders to take his cities had not come from the E-4, just as the decision to hit Baton Rouge had not come from Cherepovets.

  It further amazed the Premier that the presidential successor had shown such wisdom after that bit of insanity. The Premier had issued orders to have the idiot submarine commander shot if he ever made it back to the motherland, which was doubtful. The American submarine commander had shown far greater wisdom as he prepared to die in the North Sea. Had he unloaded his missiles on Leningrad instead, there would have been no controlling the people in this bunker, loyalist or not. The Premier knew people. He knew that neither side could tolerate many more Pushkins or Baton Rouges. His hands were shaking. He reached for another small vodka to settle his nerves. The American had sent him a sign of good intentions. Still, even with the best intentions, the Premier knew the system he once thought he controlled was hanging on by a most slender and fraying thread. He was certain the new President had the same problem—especially with the submarines. Those infernal American submarines. He absolutely had to talk with the man.