Staff Operations & Training
NRC 02-243
CHAPTER 4
* * *
Alpha List
Bethel, Virginia, The Home Alternity
Even with a steel-chassised gas-burner, it was a tedious forty-minute drive from the Capitol garage to the tree-lined approach to Walter Endicott’s rural mansion. But serving in the Senate had conditioned Endicott to the point where his tolerance for tedium was very high, and he was barely aware of the bicycle-snarled approaches to the Potomac bridge or the crawling commuter traffic on the Jefferson-Davis Highway.
It helped that he had nothing to do but ride in the back seat of the Mercedes and read his copy of the day’s Cleveland Plain Dealer. Endicott rarely left his office until the paper arrived, usually shortly after three. It was a daily ritual now nearly a decade old.
Considering how much trouble was involved in getting him the paper, he wished sometimes that he enjoyed it more. Most Senators received their homestate newspapers by federal mail, three to six days late if from east of the Mississippi, ten days or more if from the West Coast.
Endicott’s copy got special handling all the way through—the first of the midnight press run, it was couriered to Cleveland’s interurban train station, shuttled to Pittsburgh, transferred to a Washington-bound train, and picked up at Union Station by a junior staffer from Endicott’s office.
All so it could be discarded by the chauffeur when the car was cleaned at the end of day.
For forty minutes was more than enough time to read this Plain Dealer, and rarely was there anything in it Endicott needed or wanted to read twice. He usually left it behind on the seat of the Mercedes without a thought.
The national section was interchangeable with the national section of any Federal News Service paper. Fair enough—the same could be said of the AP or UPI papers of home. But by comparison with those syndicates, and Endicott had been no great booster of the press, the FNS offered an unpleasant mix of half-truths, studied silence, and propaganda, leavened with what it called “cheer” pieces.
What interested Endicott were the local features, from city government down to the minutia of engagements and obituaries. Through his business connections, his wife’s patronage of the arts scene, his friendships high-placed and low, Endicott knew by face and name literally thousands of people in that “other” Cleveland. Hundreds had partied or been overnight guests on the Endicott yacht berthed along the Gold Coast.
It was an irresistible curiosity to Endicott how those same people had fared in this world, a curiosity partly satisfied by scanning the paper for news of them. On any given day, he would find from five to a dozen references, most of them surprises in one way or another.
Sometimes it was startling how little difference there was, like the Northside city councilman who was arrested in both worlds for taking bribes. Sometimes the twists were startling enough to make Endicott laugh out loud, such as when the woman he had known as a call-girl madam turned up as the owner of a chain of upscale bedroom boutiques.
He came by his curiosity honestly. He had spent most of his first three months in this strange twisted reflection of the world studying his own counterpart, at once repelled and fascinated.
In this world, as in his own, he had done well for himself—perhaps even a bit more so here. His alternate was married, as he had been, but to a different woman—curiously, to a woman with whom Endicott had enjoyed a quiet affair half a dozen years back. When he finally gained entrance to his alternate’s elegant Gates Mills house, he found a hundred familiar objects and a thousand more that were unfamiliar but pleasing to his tastes and sensibilities.
The truth was that Endicott had not planned at first to kill his alternate and replace him. But here was a power base ready for the taking. And as he thought on it, he saw that it would be easy, an invisible crime. If it even qualified as a crime. He was Walter Endicott. These possessions, this life, belonged to Walter Endicott. To him, if he was bold enough to assert the claim.
It was that conviction, as much as need or opportunity, which finally moved him. With each passing day, the existence of his alternate distressed him more. Something which came from deep inside him, from the place where the self fights for recognition, came to find the sight of the other to be intolerable.
He did it by his own hand, at a time of his own choosing. And when it was done, when he had faced himself without flinching and seen himself die without disintegrating, Endicott knew for certain that there were no rules, no cosmic plan, no God. Life truly was a game, and there was nothing to fear in this life but unfriendly Chance and the selfish drives of those more ruthless than himself.
And understanding that, he intended to see that he was not victimized by either.
Washington, D.C., The Home Alternity
Peter Robinson finished scanning the two-page summary of that morning’s submarine contact and pushed it back across the nineteenth-century mahogany table toward the Secretary of Defense.
“This will do for the FNS, but it’s not enough for me,” he said. “A simple answer, please, Gregory. Did we know that sub was sitting in New York harbor? And don’t bother to tell me that it wasn’t actually in the harbor. You know that’s how it’s going to read in the damned Times tomorrow.”
Gregory O’Neill looked pained. He had already endured a minor dressing-down in the Cabinet Room, before a hastily convened meeting of the National Security Council senior membership. Now they were alone in the President’s private meeting room, and it could only get worse.
“We knew it was in the area,” O’Neill said. “There’d been contacts off and on for the last two days. But no, we weren’t on it right at the moment she surfaced.”
“And after?”
“We tracked it for twenty-six minutes. She picked up the liner Kestrel and ran with her for a while, right under her keel a hundred feet down. Then she turned south and went deep and we lost her.”
Robinson leaned back in his chair and toyed with a pencil. “I’ve given the Navy fifteen billion dollars for Cyclops on the promise that I’d know when a Russian sub had its nose up our ass. What’s going on here, Gregory?”
“That’s about the busiest waterway we have, sir. I think the boys with the headphones did a good job to stay with it as well as they did.”
“Are you telling me that this is the best I can hope for?”
Conscious of past history, O’Neill hesitated. He had survived longer than either of Robinson’s previous Secretaries of Defense, but the common element in their departures had been an attempt to explain to the President why something he had asked for wasn’t possible.
Robinson read the hesitation and guessed the reason for it. “Shoot straight, Gregory. You’re not in that much trouble with me—yet.”
With a rueful nod, O’Neill complied. “Operationally, we’re right there. Communications are first-class. The Bell Labs people have really come through. It’s the front end that’s weak. We’re pushing the limits of this generation of sub detection technology. This isn’t news to you.”
“No.”
“The moored sonobuoys are sensitive but not reliable, not as reliable as something that hard to get to needs to be. The look-down rigs in the P-5 planes aren’t worth a damn in shallow water. We don’t have enough ASW frigates to patrol the whole coastline. On top of which their Horizon-class boats are quiet as a whisper at a hundred paces. So, yes—this is the best you can hope for. For now.”
Robinson mulled that for a moment. “What about our friends in Boston? Is there anything better in the pipeline?”
“Nothing that I’m aware of.”
Idly, Robinson drummed his fingers on the desk. “What’s the head count?”
“As of about two hours ago, fifteen subs within the two hundred-mile range of the Javelin batteries.”
“And if I gave the order to take them out, how many would you expect to survive?”
“Under present conditions—with no war alert?”
/> “Under present conditions. This very moment.”
There was something about the way Robinson had framed the question that disturbed O’Neill, but then the whole Javelin program had never sat well with him. It was hard to see the defensive value of fixed coastal missile batteries against a mobile submarine force, especially when the same money could have bought badly needed patrol boats.
The Javelin batteries had some PR value domestically, that was true. But the only tangible impact of their presence so far was to prompt the Soviet Naval Command to bring in extra deep-water boats on both coasts, presumably to target the batteries. Within ten minutes of the outbreak of war, the batteries would be gone.
The way O’Neill added it up, unless they were used preemptively—an idea which deserved no consideration, in light of the total strategic picture—the Javelins were next to worthless. It didn’t much matter how many subs with empty silos the Coast Guard sank. It didn’t matter to the Russians, and it didn’t matter to the targets of the inbound missiles.
But there was no point in arguing the point. The Coast Guard was delighted with their expanded role, the Navy was officially indifferent, and Javelin was the issue over which Robinson’s first Secretary had departed.
“Five,” he said curtly. “Minimum. Maybe as many as eight.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“I know. Not when we’re targeting boats with a hundred men in them and they’re targeting cities of a hundred thousand.” What would you say if I told you we could get them all? he wondered.
“So what are you doing to do about it?”
O’Neill bristled. “We’ve increased our capability five hundred percent since Cyclops deployment started—”
“It looks like another couple hundred percent is in order.”
“With all due respect, sir, you’re not making allowance for the difficulty—”
“I make no allowances for people who tell me they can hit a target and then fall short.”
“Rayedon Electronics made the promises, sir, not DOD. And I specifically cautioned—”
“Then pull the contract out from under them and give it to someone who can do the job,” Robinson said quietly.
“The learning curve on the technology the NRC is fronting to Rayedon—”
At that moment the telephone rang. On the second ring, O’Neill started toward it, but Robinson stopped him.
“Don’t. It’ll be for me.” Just as a playful child might have, Robinson backpedaled from the table in his chair, coasting on silent casters to the corner table where the telephone rested.
“Yes, Walt. How are you? Just a moment.” Robinson looked back toward O’Neill. “Push it, Gregory. Find an answer.” Then he swiveled a half-turn in his chair, turning his back on O’Neill, dismissing him.
“No, I wasn’t aware of that—”
Bethel, Virginia, The Home Alternity
The Tower Guard courier was waiting in his usual place, seated on the upholstered bench in the entry foyer. He came to his feet as Endicott came through the front door.
“Good afternoon, Senator.”
“Collecting already, Donovan?” Endicott asked lightly. “I thought I already paid you for this month. Well, come on in.”
It was an old joke, and the young courier answered it with a polite smile as he fell in behind Endicott. In the courier’s brown case was another Cleveland Plain Dealer, also bearing that day’s date. There the similarity ended.
This was the real paper, the one that described the world Endicott had left behind. This one was feisty, opinionated, defiantly liberal. This one was important enough to justify the trouble involved in getting it into his hands. And this one could not be casually discarded. Donovan would wait until Endicott was finished reading, then take it away again to wherever the Guard filed or destroyed outworld originals.
At first it had annoyed Endicott that Tackett refused to trust him with permanent custody of so much as a photograph clipped from the social pages. Who did the bastard think he was going to betray the secret to? The house was safe. Divorce was unaccountably difficult in this world, but Grace had effected an equivalent separation by staying behind in Cleveland. Endicott lived alone, and his one live-in servant had long since proven his discretion concerning matters easily as sensitive.
But his annoyance had fallen on paranoia-deafened ears, and Endicott had fallen into the habit of reading the papers back to back just to be rid of the courier’s presence as quickly as possible. Sometimes, just to twit the courier, he would leave them both lying on the table side-by-side when he was done, both tangibly real, and yet both completely contradictory.
Invariably, the courier would gather up that which he had brought with barely a glance at the other. It seemed sometimes to Endicott that the Guard selected for a lack of curiosity. Even its leadership was painfully parochial. Their world was real—the others were false, mutants, shadows.
Well, he had lived in one of those shadows and knew better. It was this world, with history books full of Presidents named Vandenberg and Stevenson, where Tennessee Williams never wrote A Morning of Mourning, where a Triple-Crown winning horse named Stalwart had turned the memory of Citation to a yes—but—it was this world that was hard to take seriously.
Donovan followed him into the study, politely closed the door behind them, and spun the dial on the pouch’s combination lock. “Here you go, sir,” he said a moment later, handling the paper over.
“You keep on hitting the flowerbeds, there’ll be no tip for you,” Endicott said with mock gruffness.
Donovan grinned; that was a new variation, and welcome for its novelty. “I don’t know how many more of them there’ll be,” he volunteered, retreating to his chair by the door. “The director is talking about shutting down operations in Red.”
“I’d be sorry to hear that,” Endicott said lightly, settling in an armchair which caught the afternoon sun from the sheer-draped windows.
He said nothing more, but the comment opened a second channel in his thoughts which remained busy until after Donovan was gone. Then he moved to the telephone and dialed a number from memory, a number the very possession of which denoted power.
“Peter, this is Walter. Yes. I won’t keep you long, Peter. I understand that the Guard is considering terminating its operation in Alternity Red. That’s right. Well, then Albert isn’t doing his job. I want you to know that I wouldn’t be pleased by that. I wouldn’t be pleased by that at all—”
Boston, The Home Alternity
Rayne Wallace stood at the pickup chute outside the Tower’s west entrance shivering in the wind. The temperature was just above freezing, a record cold for Boston on that date, thanks to a front which had moved down from Canada overnight, surprising everyone, Wallace most of all. When he last left home two days ago, it had been sixty degrees and Indian summer was in the air. Time to get the heavy coat out of the box.
Predictably, two smoke-belching flesh-haulers stopped before the company van appeared, one for the Dorchester route, the other headed for Arlington. They swept up most of those waiting with Wallace, leaving him feeling not only cold but abandoned. Wallace accepted it fatalistically. Riding the company van was considered a privilege, but sometimes the advantages were more perceived than real.
He advanced to curbside and stood there with arms crossed over his chest, looking hopefully down Marlborough toward the mouth of the garage. A few moments later, another of the waiting joined him there, a hook-nosed man with hair the color of his gray tweed coat.
“You run today?”
Wallace took a second glance at the man. Ops. Or Tech Transfer. Too old for the Guard, anyway. “Yeah.”
“Where to?”
“Red.”
The man shook his head. “It’s getting nasty over there.”
“I know,” Wallace said, looking back down the street. “From what I hear, we won’t be there long.”
“Yeah.” The man hesitated. “Listen, do you ever get over to Yel
low?”
Wallace knew what was coming—he had heard it at least twenty times before. “I’ve got papers.”
“They have a perfume there that just drives me crazy. Fire and Ice—from Revlon. I guess it’s in all the stores. My wife got some from a friend about six months ago, and I tell you, friend, it made her feel like—you know how some women change when they put on a slinky dress or climb into a nice pair of heels? That’s what it was like—”
Amused, Wallace let the man chatter on, careful not to give him any of the standard cues that said he was interested. Officially, runners were sternly forbidden to bring any alternity-specific materials back through the gate or any unscreened materials from Home through the other way.
But enforcement was more a matter of honor than strict gate security, and there existed a minor black market in outworld commodities. From what little Wallace knew of it, perfumes from Yellow were a popular item, along with fine stone jewelry from White and pornography from Green. Wallace had also heard of an avid philatelist, supposedly a Tower executive, who had posted a standing offer of $40 for any post—1950 mint U.S, stamp from beyond the gate.
The bootleggers were tempted by the lure of pure profit, since in most alternities their stock could be purchased with “funny money”—the Guard’s perfectly authentic Home-minted counterfeit currency, issued freely to runners and moles for their expenses. Wallace was not tempted, especially not today. The security his family enjoyed because of his Guard appointment was too valuable to risk. He had enough cause for worn—already on account of the fiasco in Red.
But the hopeful buyer prattled on, his voice showing a touch of nervousness over Wallace’s continued silence. “The damn thing is that it was just a half-ounce bottle and it’s just about gone. I wrote to Revlon and they said they had a perfume by that name thirty years ago, but they stopped making it. Can you imagine that? The most intoxicating scent I’ve ever found on a woman and they stopped making it! I told them I’d pay a hundred dollars to get hold of some more—”
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