Need a crater the size of Richmond cleared? Call Washington. Or, at least, call a consortium of contractors hired by Washington. Want to invent cold-and-drought-resistant wheat? Apply for a federal grant!
Even so, fuel was scarce so Washington traffic during the ride in from Reagan had been sparce. Bureaucrat pedestrians shuffled home from jobs where they allocated scarcity, bundled in long coats in the dead of D.C. summer. Buildings hunkered in the chill, as gray as the sky, unrelieved by a green leaf or a yellow dandelion. Depressing as that ride had been, beyond the Beltway there was only the very scarcity the D.C. bureaucrats were allocating.
President Lewis was trying to revive a flat world. Maybe his work was noble.
But my heart thumped. After all the death and destruction I had been through, what did he and the world want from me now?
Tway cleared her throat. “We need to understand each other.”
“We can’t. I’m no politician.”
“That’s why we need to talk.”
“We already did.”
The flight steward appeared and Tway held up two fingers. “At the least, General, I owe you a drink.”
My stomach growled. “And a sandwich?”
She shook her head. “Protein bar.”
The steward walked aft to the galley.
“Ms. Tway, who are you?”
She nodded. “Fair question. I’m media advisor to the National Security Council. For this assignment I report directly to the President of the United States. I have a master’s in media science from Stanford. In the last twelve years, I’ve remade congressmen, colonels, and captains of industry and saved them from PR disaster. Some of them sulked like thirteen-year-olds, too. I’ll save you, anyway. Because it’s the right thing to do for the world.” She paused. “But you think I’m a duplicitous bitch.”
I shook my head. “Not duplicitous.”
She smiled. “Infantry is an unforgiving business, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. “I can’t say. It’s the only business I know.”
“Well, my business, even though I do it in marble conference rooms and cozy bars, is unforgiving, too.”
“Sure. Raping the truth is a full-time job.”
She sighed as the steward pulled out a side table and set out martinis between us, frosted glasses and little crystal pitchers of gin set in individual silver ice buckets.
Tway waved him off, reached across the table, and poured one pitcher into my glass, then filled her own and raised it. “To the truth, then. Long may it wave, General.”
I held my glass up, crystal sang as we touched rims and we sipped.
“Generals have responsibilities. All I have are protein bars and stars on my collar.”
“We know you’d be content as a lieutenant, but the public wants you to be a general, so a general you stay. For the moment. You’re a hero. You and the others like you saved the human race.” She uncurled her index finger from the stem of her glass and pointed at me. “That’s the God’s truth.”
“And this road show is the administration’s way of thanking me?”
She stared at the ceiling and blinked. “Your chip says you earned a correspondence master’s in military history.”
I nodded.
“During what half century of peace did America spend the greatest percentage of its gross national product on national defense?”
“I don’t think anybody knew what GNP was until the 1940s. So I’d say the last half of the 1900s.”
Tway nodded. “You are smart. In 1945, we won the most destructive war in history. But we were so paranoid about making sure it never happened again, we squandered our capacity to rebuild a better world to fight a ‘Cold War.’”
“I don’t buy that. They accomplished a lot in those years.”
She steepled her fingers. “But what could they have accomplished? The western democracies hung humanity from a cross of iron.”
I recognized the quote. Dwight Eisenhower, a Cold War President, said it in a speech in 1953 about balancing guns and butter.
But I thought of Eisenhower as a general. Everything that I, as a general, wasn’t. Eisenhower orchestrated the resources of pre-environmental society to invade Europe. He juggled egos, obscure today but monumental at the time, like de Gaulle and Montgomery. I don’t think Ike ever fired a shot himself. Eisenhower and I had as much in common as a puppy had in common with Einstein.
Tway continued. “Jason, we stand today upon the threshold mankind stood upon in 1945. Defense industries and those who serve them want to keep spending on space-capable ground forces. To protect against a threat you and the GEF obliterated over two years ago. We don’t need to invade Mars.”
How many times had I read that generals prepared to fight the last war? I couldn’t disagree with Tway. As a post-war infantryman, I already felt like a 180-pound dinosaur. The monthly cost of maintaining one space-capable infantryman would probably pay the prescription drug bill for sub-Saharan Africa for a decade.
Tway swirled her martini. “Sensible people want to redirect those defense resources to rebuild the world. The stakes are more than important.”
“And a little truth-stretching never hurt anybody?”
“Politics are a bitch, Jason. You’ve commanded in combat. How much did you have to stretch to win the war?”
“We won the battle. I’m not sure we won the war.”
“Even Hibble thinks we did. The Slugs have been absent without leave for almost three years.”
“The absence of proof isn’t proof of absence.”
“Jason, your caution is understandable. I’m not asking you to dishonor the truth. I’m asking you to honor the data.” She tapped her finger on the table with each word, hard enough that her martini shimmered. “There . . . is . . . no . . . evidence . . . that . . . Slugs . . . still . . . exist!”
I stared at her. Accepting the obvious has never been Infantry’s strong suit. There’s a reason the Army mascot is a mule.
Tway grunted. “Okay. Assume, against all rational thought, that you’re right. We’re maintaining necessary defense assets.”
“What does that mean? Tell me in terms somebody from outside the Beltway can understand.”
“I’m doing better than telling you. I’m showing you. That’s why we’re going to Canaveral. I owe you that.”
She drained her glass, set it on the table, and stared into it, like she could find something in its emptiness. Tway could be two people in one body. Hard as flint one minute, then sentiment fought its way to the surface.
A silent hour later we landed at Canaveral. A limo hauled us from the plane to the headquarters building, past gantries set with Interceptors, noses to the clouds. Tway pointed. “Space Force remains generously funded. We’ve built a new generation of Interceptors. And they’re on alert twenty-four/seven.”
The Interceptors weren’t the ancient, airplane-on-fuel-tank space shuttles from the days of the Slug Blitz. These were big, single-stage UN-taupe wedges. Venture Stars.
Tway said, “We’ve got four times as many Interceptors operational as we had of the old, space shuttle–based crates at the height of the Blitz. These are faster, more maneuverable, better armed, and better coordinated. It’s an impenetrable defense.”
I sighed. “So was the Maginot Line. The Germans bypassed it twice. Impenetrable. Says who?”
“Says COIC. Commanding Officer, Interceptor Command. He’s retiring. We’re sitting in on his replacement’s briefing.”
The limo dropped us outside headquarters and Tway led me through security.
The Ops room stretched around us in a semicircle, ballroom-sized and ranked with data displays that were state-of-the-art holotanks. I stopped counting personnel bustling around when the number reached fifty. Space Force had progressed. During the Blitz, they had dusted off cathode-ray-tube boxes and flatscreens.
The COIC sat in a swivel chair on a podium in the semicircle’s center. He was a gray-headed Air Force major general.
>
The gray-hair’s replacement stood alongside him. Brace. I groaned to myself.
“Welcome to United Nations Space Force Base Canaveral. Canaveral is the consolidated Space Defense and Research and Development Facility of UNSF.” The COIC grinned at Tway, me, and Brace. Brace and I grinned at no one, least of all each other.
Tway turned to me. “Counting civilian contractors plus military personnel contributed from forty member nations, that’s eighty thousand solid jobs. Always work in facts like that.”
With Projectile strikes on Miami and Tampa, Florida was one of the hardest-hit states. No wonder it was getting military-spending dollars.
We three clattered after the outgoing COIC, up catwalk stairs, outside onto the building roof. Salt breeze off the Atlantic chilled us and the general raised his voice to be heard. He swung his arm at an arc of four dozen gantries, half with V-Stars poised, half empty. “At any time, twenty-four V-Stars are on-station in orbit. We can put up another squadron within hours. We’ve completed a runway long enough to recover the newer V-Stars. Lop Nor will finish theirs next year. Scramjets also operate from the Long Strip. They don’t need it, but every pilot likes extra space.”
Brace asked, “You launch from Earth every time?”
I whistled. “That must cost The Brick!”
Tway and the COIC looked at me and frowned, for no apparent reason.
COIC paused, then continued. “That’s why we’re minimizing recovery-runway spending.” He turned and pointed to other, more distant gantries. “That’s the heavy-lift complex. Space Base One will be launched to orbit from there, in sections. Interceptors should be operating from permanent orbit within a year. Not V-Stars but true space-capable fighters. The V-Star’s a sound ship, but she’s a design that was discarded four decades ago. We’re also putting up an unmanned tracker and hunter-killer satellite umbrella, too. Those launch out of Vandenberg.”
It sounded impressive. And expensive. And a hell of a responsible job for Brace. Me, my responsibility was to not spill jelly on my uniform.
I turned to Tway, as the Atlantic breeze snapped at her coat, and said, “Why do you need me to shill for this?”
She ran a hand through her hair. “Expenditures for this project would fund a couple of brand-new cities, domestically. So half of the country thinks it’s a defense pork barrel.”
“Is it?”
Tway looked away and continued. “And the jobs and factories and this base are in the U.S. The rest of the world thinks this project is just America rebuilding itself with the rest of the world’s money, while the rest of the world starves.”
“Is that true?”
Tway crossed her arms.
Brace asked the outgoing COIC, “Research and Development’s based here, too?”
COIC nodded. “Conventional and PTR.”
PTR was Pseudocephalopod Technology Recovery. I asked the old general, “What about PCBR?” That was Howard’s baby, Pseudocephalopod Cryptozoology and Behavioral Research.
COIC wrinkled his nose and pointed at a small building that seemed set apart, out on the horizon. “The Spook House is over there.”
I smiled. The military recognized that Howard Hibble’s intuitive genius was critical to its success. I always believed that if we dissected Howard’s brain, we’d find the definitive history of the galaxy already written in there somewhere. The military also recognized that professorial Howard’s wrinkled uniforms and freak-show sidekicks—yours truly excluded—didn’t fit its paradigm.
So Howard and his merry band of loons functioned in a parallel military universe. The generals and politicians set him off to the side, disconnected his leash, and let him run. Then they allowed themselves to be pleasantly surprised at the bones he brought back.
The Department of Defense had finally set, in isolated bricks and mortar, the unspoken organizational chart that Howard barely fit into.
Tway spent the rest of the afternoon with Brace, presumably educating him on the fine points of media relations.
I hitched a ride to the Spook House. The building was two stories tall and brand-new. Hacking up green worms was Howard’s idea of an all-day frolic, so I expected to find him there. I didn’t expect to find Munchkin and Jude.
Sixteen
Howard had toured me through labs, collection rooms where catalogued Projectile fragments were stored, and data-processing facilities. I didn’t expect our last stop to be a playroom. The place was classroom-size, the walls painted with pandas and smiling purple lizards. In the room’s center, Jude caught bean bags, chucked underhand by a lab-coated woman in a clown wig, which was actually her hair, while a lab-coated guy who wore a separate goatee on each cheek holo-cammed each toss.
Munchkin sat in a room corner in civvies, arms crossed.
I tiptoed alongside her. “Home movies?”
She spun her head toward me. “Jason!” She smiled, then jerked her head at Jude. “Howard wants to measure his reaction times. The Army gave me alternatives. Bring Jude down here or they would.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Howard strong-armed you?”
She shook her head. “Howard wouldn’t strong-arm a goldfish. It was Space Force. Anyway, it’s warm down here.” She hugged herself. “Well, not like home.”
Even Munchkin’s home, Egypt, wasn’t warm since the war. I pointed at the catch game. “What’re they trying to prove?”
She glowered. “That he’s different because he wasn’t born here.”
Howard stepped alongside us. “You make it sound like Apartheid.”
“It is.” Munchkin pouted. If Munchkin ever got U.S. citizenship, which her son had because his father was born here, I doubted she would register Republican.
I changed the subject. “Howard, when do you want to download Jeeb’s data?”
He shrugged. “You brought him to Florida? Well, bring him by when it’s convenient.”
I turned to Munchkin. “See? I’m letting them examine my baby with no fuss.”
She rolled her eyes and muttered in Arabic.
I asked Howard, “Speaking of examining strange machinery. Where’s The Football from Ganymede?”
He said, “Space Force R and D still has it.” He frowned. “They’ve been studying it like they were going to cut the Hope Diamond. They start intrusive testing in a week.” He circled his finger at us. “We’re all invited. Ceremony to demonstrate spin-off technology gains from the war.”
I snorted. “Space Force will be lucky if they don’t blow themselves into rutabagas.” In the Projectile days, Howard always used to complain that the biggest fragments he recovered for study were the size of rutabagas. Whatever they were.
Munchkin thrust Jude at me. “Here. Your robot doesn’t need changing. Your godson does.”
I never made that comparison again.
Howard took us all to dinner and spent most of the night watching Jude eat.
My eyes were gritty from a long day when I drifted, alone, through the lobby of the Ritz-Orlando.
The night concierge called across lavender carpet, “General Wander? Holo!”
He pointed across the silent room at a holo booth with a light flashing above the door.
I cocked my head at him and called back, “Who is it, Rudy? Holo calls cost The Brick.”
He motioned me over, then leaned across his curlicue-legged desk. “General, nobody uses that expression in polite society anymore. Today, it refers to”—he dropped his voice—“constipation.”
Every day I learned again that five years in space and training had left me out-of-touch.
I nodded.
He nodded back, toward the booth. “Sir, the gentleman has been a guest here. You’ll recognize him.” Ritz guests paid for privacy and discretion and got it.
The man in the booth wore a flowered shirt, untucked over shorts, and sandals. He held a stemmed glass in one hand and I recognized him from someplace, too.
“Jason?” He smiled through a salt-and-pepper full beard that cover
ed a fleshy face. “Aaron Grodt.”
Ah! I nodded. It might seem strange that anybody wouldn’t recognize Aaron Grodt, but I hadn’t seen the Oscars for six years. Also, he had grown a beard since I had met him. “How’s the producing business been, sir?”
He shrugged. Blue liquid slopped over the lip of his glass. I wondered whether it was really blue. The booth was so old that Grodt was fuzzy around the edges. “Would have been better if you had taken that job I offered you.”
In the war’s early days, Grodt had offered to weasel me out of the Army. I would have been a consultant for the military-story holos he planned to make. Really, I would have been a glorified Holo-wood go-fer, I suppose. Somebody else would have gone to Ganymede. I doubted that would have changed history. I was an accidental hero.
“Well, you look simplement fabuloso!”
After two years in space I looked as flabby and pasty as unbaked bread.
Grodt was sixty pounds overweight with an artificial tan and teeth. Greased hair curled fashionably over his collar. “Thank you, sir. You, too.” I had learned during our one prior meeting that, in Holo-wood, everyone and everything was simplement fabuloso.
“I’m having a few friends over to my little place in Orlando tomorrow night. Would you join us?”
My last visit to Grodt’s little place, all twenty thousand gilded square feet of it, nearly got me laid. “That would be great, sir.”
He grinned. “I’ll send a car.”
He didn’t know that my last visit ended with me hungover, hauled off by MPs, shot to the moon in an antique rocket, and attacked by monsters. “I hope it’s as great as last time, sir.”
The Daimler limo that purred up under the Ritz portico the following twilight was polished to its last square inch, but ten years old. The black-suited driver scurried around to open the rear passenger door for me. “Been away long, sir?”
I nodded while I eyed my uniformed reflection in a Plasteel fender. “Long enough to save the price of a Daimler. Could we detour by a dealership on the way to Mr. Grodt’s?”
I’d never owned a car. Mom had driven a family Electra with synwood sides. In the passenger seat, I used to bend down and tie my shoes when we drove past anyone I knew.
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