The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  He had paused in his work for a moment, and Susan must have sensed what was passing through his mind because she touched him, something she almost never did during the working day. He smiled at her, and, in a gesture even more rare, kissed the hand she had laid on his shoulder. There were hours left to wait.

  At seven o’clock Susan dismissed the secretaries. Mallory had that in common with Lockwood: he didn’t believe in unnecessary night work either. Franklin and Marilyn Mallory had made themselves millionaires by the time they were forty, with a fast-food chain that had spread all across the country. The Mallory’s fast food was the fastest of all, and the one nobody had thought of before them: eggs. The stands by the highway that sold omelettes and egg sandwiches, fried and scrambled eggs, egg soufflés and egg surprises, were in the shape of an egg. Mallory’s political enemies naturally called him the Egg King.

  It was evident to Mallory when he and Marilyn were young that two competent people, working ten hours a day as a unit, were superior to one person working twenty hours alone. He had always organized his staff in two-person units, from top management down to kitchen help. In Mallory’s campaign for re-election, Mallory and Susan Grant were the prime two-person unit, as they had been in his White House; dozens of others supported them. Paired workers, sharing jobs and rewards in absolute equality, developed very strong bonds to each other and to their leaders. The system worked as well in government and politics as it had worked in business—and, before that, as Mallory said, among Spartan infantry. Those incomparable soldiers, willing to die together if necessary, had always been lovers too.

  Susan, after making the call that shut down all the telephones in the suite except the confidential line, went into her bedroom. She washed her face and hands and loosened her pale hair, brushing it out until it hung to her shoulders. When she returned to the sitting room, she found Mallory shaking cocktails; he liked only one sort of drink, a vodka gimlet weakened with cracked ice. He poured one for each of them and brought them to a table in front of the sofa.

  As he handed Susan her drink he leaned down and they touched each other for the second time that day—a soft kiss on the lips. Susan touched the tip of his tongue with hers, then stepped back and smiled. Mallory had put some Mozart on the tape deck while she was out of the room; he liked music played a bit louder than she did, but she had got used to it. They sat down together on the sofa, close together, her hand lying loosely in his, thighs touching, and drank their gimlets. They were waiting for eight o’clock. Vaguely disturbed by each other’s body, but as peaceful after the exhausting day as they might have been after making love, they watched through the window as the great nickel sun of summer went down through tendrils of fog into the Pacific.

  Almost four hundred million miles from earth, a pioneering force of thirty human beings, fifteen men and fifteen women organized in a hierarchy of pairs, had landed that day on Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter’s moons. Franklin Mallory had put them there. He had launched their expedition into space before he left office so that Lockwood was powerless to call it back to earth.

  On the floor of the convention, projection screens had been erected so that the delegates could see the landing. The television images, delayed thirty-five minutes in their voyage at the speed of light over the vast distance between the two planets, were as always more brilliant than the true colors of life. The cameras on Ganymede were able to capture, even from a distance of almost seven hundred thousand miles, only a portion of the unimaginably huge disk of Jupiter. But from the rubbled landing site on Ganymede, everyone on earth could see the boiling surface of the planet, thirty-five times as bright as the full moon seen from earth, the eruptions in its atmosphere—storms that were larger than earth and older than the human race. The earthly mind had been projected onto the surface of another astral body.

  Franklin Mallory had done this. He and Susan Grant, still in their quiet room with the feeble lights of San Francisco outside the window, watched the transmission from Ganymede. After a long time, the networks began intercutting shots of other watchers: the silent rows of delegates on the floor of the convention that was going to nominate Mallory for the presidency for a third time later that evening; silent crowds in public squares; presidents and dictators and the last kings left on earth. Many faces, like Susan Grant’s, were wet with tears. For once there were no interviews. Men with microphones stood silent in the silent crowds.

  From Ganymede came another image: the glittering mother ship Humanity setting like a heavenly body over the horizon of Jupiter’s moon. Humanity transmitted one final picture of the landing craft, an ovoid sheathed in gold foil lying on Ganymede’s barren plain; and then this alien object, the shape out of which all warm life on earth had emerged, was lost from view.

  “You might know,” said Patrick Graham, watching from the floor of the convention at the Cow Palace with Emily by his side, “that Mallory would make the landing craft in the shape of an egg. The Egg King’s ultimate commercial message.” Emily took out her notebook and wrote down Patrick’s words. He expelled breath through his nostrils in annoyance; Emily was learning that few people like being reported upon less than reporters do.

  Jupiter’s image vanished from the television screen. Franklin Mallory said, “Those were the loveliest moments of my life.”

  He wiped away Susan’s tears with his fingers. The landing on Ganymede had been planned as his valedictory—had he been reelected four years before, Humanity’s destination and Mallory’s last hour in the presidency would have been reached at the same time. Now Humanity would carry Mallory back into the presidency. It was his achievement, and the symbol of his idea of man’s destiny.

  Mallory and Susan went by helicopter to the Cow Palace. Awaiting Mallory on the podium was the only other presidential candidate the party had ever had. He was an uncompromising old oilman who had run on Mallory’s ideas before the country was ready for them. Twice he had gone down to defeat to make Mallory’s final victory possible. Now he struck the gavel twice and filled his lungs.

  “My fellow Americans,” he cried in his sonorous Texas basso, “the true President of the United States!”

  Mallory entered alone, with no further ceremony. He walked quietly across the wide stage, arms hanging loose at his sides, his white hair catching the light. He glanced courteously at the throng of delegates and spectators, all on their feet and chanting his name, as calmly as he might have raised his eyes from his work to acknowledge the arrival of a familiar visitor in his office. Scenes of the landing were being replayed on the big screens suspended from all sides of the hall.

  Mallory stood easily behind the podium and waited for the noise to die. It ceased after many minutes, when Mallory, without making even the simplest gesture, spoke his first word.

  “Humanity,” he said, and when the murmur died, said the name of the ship again. “Humanity has reached the moons of Jupiter. Years ago, when I named that ship and set her course, I had a purpose in mind. I want to remind men and women everywhere on earth, the race for whom Humanity was named, what that purpose was. It was to renew the idea that anything is possible.

  “Anything, that is, except to go back. That is not possible. Mankind can never be what it was at any time in the past. It must be what it is at the hour in which it is living. It must accept that it will change and be something new in the future. Man is changing. He must change. He cannot say no to that fact.

  “Humanity, the finest machine man has yet constructed, has made the greatest voyage in the history of living things, and it has taken the eyes and minds of mankind with it. We are all on Ganymede.

  “Yet this is only the first step on our journey. The hardship and the glory lie ahead of us. We are going to take our own evolution into our own hands.

  “Those who want the past to return may not have it. What is it they want? To live by mysteries. Superstition, starvation, the hateful separation of mankind into hostile colors and sexes and religions. The supremacy of emotion over reas
on. Murder. War. Savagery. Crime. They may not have it.

  “There are no mysteries. There is only what we don’t yet know. There is only life. If men and women as frail as you and I can sail in that fragile craft, which we call Humanity, into the face of Jupiter—a body four times as far away from us as the sun—if they can do that, putting away fear, putting away jealousy, leaving behind warmth and gravity and air and water, what can mankind not do? We can do anything. I promise you, in Humanity’s name, we shall.”

  Mallory stopped speaking as abruptly as he had begun. The atmosphere in the convention hall was split by the cries of the delegates. They leaped onto their chairs, fists upraised, and shrieked.

  Patrick Graham stood among them with his camera crew. Emily, writing furiously in her pad, studied Patrick’s smooth face as it turned and watched, the famous features white with emotion. All around him were faces drenched crimson by feeling.

  Where Patrick was struck dumb by Mallory’s performance, these people were given voice—a single voice, chanting in unison the three-syllable name of their hero: “Mal-lo-ry! Mal-lo-ry!”

  Graham was the opposite of these people; it wasn’t just a matter of politics, it was physical. As if his body were composed of different atoms from theirs. Emily scribbled: matter and anti-matter, silicon and carbon.

  In the broadcasting booths above them, Emily could see the faces of the commentators, as agitated as those in the mob; their mouths moved in attempts to describe the scene, analyze what Mallory had said, understand what he had released in these people.

  Mallory himself, standing quiet and unsmiling at the podium, did not show the least sign that he was surprised that his speech, with all its appeal to reason, should have touched off this storm of emotion. His eyes roved over the crowd. Emily had the feeling, irrational as the hypnotic repetition of Mallory’s name, that Mallory was looking directly at her. He was hundreds of feet away, he couldn’t possibly have singled her out of that hopping, shrieking mob. Yet looking up at him she believed his eyes were locked to hers. Did everyone there feel the same? Emily dipped her head to write that down on her pad.

  Patrick said something to her but she couldn’t hear him; he was mute inside the roar of Mallory’s people.

  Swallowed, wrote Emily. Patrick looked like a man who was disappearing down the gullet of some great beast. That was the image his cameraman transmitted over the network, and in its way it was as telling as anything the audience had seen that night.

  10

  Emily remained at the convention until the balloting for the presidential nomination was completed. Mallory won the vote of every delegate from every state, with the chairman of each delegation echoing the words of the old Texan who had introduced Mallory after the landing on Ganymede: “Alaska proudly casts all its votes for the true President of the United States; Franklin Douglass Mallory of New York!… Mr. Chairman, Washington is unanimous and casts all its votes for the true President of the United States!…”

  Patrick Graham roved the floor, taping the brief interviews with delegates that he meant to use as a montage to introduce as a live talk with Mallory at the end of the convention. Mallory’s people were calm and happy; not even Patrick’s taunting questions or the memory of what he had done to them in the last election could rouse them to reckless answers. He grew sharper: he wanted drama, a glimpse of the primitive mind of this crowd of Pavlovian believers. Nothing worked. Emily wrote in her book: O Patrick where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?

  At two in the morning she and Patrick drifted out of the hall while the delegates joined hands and sang “America the Beautiful.” The scene was transmitted through the space communications system to the crews of the American ships moored in Jupiter’s gravity.

  On the way to the hotel, Patrick slumped in the back seat beside Emily, smoking. Gagging on the fumes of his cigarette, Emily rolled down the window. She put a hand to her long hair to keep it from blowing against Patrick’s face in the narrow back seat of the car. They were close, and it required effort to keep their bodies from touching; Emily faintly remembered the wide comfortable cars of her childhood. Everything had been bigger then—houses, cities, distances, portions of food. There had been more lights; windows white with them in the night. It wasn’t only growing up that had changed her perspective; the scale of all material objects had been reduced in her short lifetime because Earth was running out of materials, and therefore no one really had wealth anymore. Money meant little: there was less and less that could be bought.

  At the Fairmont, as they left the elevator on their floor, Patrick gave Emily an undisguised look of sexual invitation. She had been expecting it. All through the week, she had seen desire gathering in him; his eyes were often upon her legs and breasts. Charlotte Graham had warned her. No warning had been needed. Emily was used to having her male subjects suggest bed when her research arrived at a certain point; she supposed they felt penetrated and wanted to do to her physically what she was doing to them emotionally.

  She didn’t let Patrick even ask the question. “I’m feeling ill,” she told him. “It’s no sleep and all that noise in the Cow Palace. And your cigarettes. I warn you you’re going to suffer in my piece for blowing smoke at me.” Emily kissed Patrick on the cheek and swatted his head lightly with her notepad. He shrugged and left her without saying good-night.

  Emily woke at dawn, violently ill. She ran to the bathroom and knelt, retching. Afterwards, brushing her teeth, she felt fine again and wondered why; always before, being sick had left her limp and disgusted. She switched on the light over the mirror and looked at herself. Her sleepy face glowed; she might just have come in from a walk in the woods with Julian. She wore one of his pajama jackets, the one he had hung up behind the bathroom door on the morning she had left, and she lifted the striped cloth of the loose sleeve to her nose and inhaled a trace of her husband’s odor. Emily grinned at herself in the glass and raised her clenched hands above her head: the same gesture of triumph made by all those thousands of Mallory people the night before. She went back into the bedroom and punched out the area code and number of the telephone that rang on Julian’s desk without going through the White House switchboard.

  “Julian? I have morning sickness.”

  Julian’s laughter came over the line. Emily heard a thud and knew that he had put his feet on the desk. He was settling back to talk to her for more than his usual measured minute. Emily loved the telephone; Julian, for a man who lived by the instrument, seemed to despise it. He didn’t trust it to convey the nuances of face-to-face conversation or the precision of the written word. He refused to exchange endearments over the Bell system. When he told Emily that he loved her, he had to touch her. She was sure that Julian wasn’t going to let her talk about the baby. She had turned in too many false alarms.

  “Start thinking of names for your child,” she said. “Give me a list for each sex. No—I want it to be Julian if it’s a boy.”

  “Horace. We never name our sons for ourselves, and we already have an Elliott. Emily if it’s a girl. That’s the complete list.”

  “I don’t get a vote? I’m just the incubator?”

  “Exactly.” Julian listened, chuckling, as Emily went on about the symptoms of pregnancy for several more sentences.

  “I tried to call you last night,” he said at last.

  “I was at the Cow Palace, watching Patrick suffer. We didn’t get back to the hotel until two-thirty or three. I’ve barely slept.”

  “Patrick is suffering?”

  “Hardly the word. He can’t bear it. He thinks he’s been transported to the Nuremberg Rally by time machine.… Don’t quote that, it’s for my profile.”

  “Is Patrick going to like you writing such things about him?”

  “Mmmm. Rules of the game.”

  “Patrick is really upset?”

  Emily described the look of Graham among the triumphant delegates, his disgust with Mallory during their conversation in the hotel suite.

  “How
did you like Mallory?”

  “Julian, he’s as marvelous in his way as Frosty Lockwood. The same magnetism—only more so, I’m sorry to tell you.”

  “I don’t think I’m going to enjoy this article of yours much more than Patrick. Mallory marvelous? Really, Emily.”

  “Look, love,” Emily said, “I’m not a Lockwood voter this week, I’m a reporter on assignment. I have no loyalties—only eyes and ears. Mallory has force. Didn’t you see him make that speech last night?”

  “Yes, and saw the Jupiter extravaganza. Of course he can turn people who respond to his kind of gibberish into whirling dervishes. It’s politics by circus.”

  Emily yawned. “It’s six o’clock out here,” she said. “As soon as the first doctor opens I’ll take in a sample of my waters. I’ll be home tomorrow or the day after with the results.”

  “Is Patrick really so edgy about Mallory?”

  “Patrick?” Emily was annoyed to go back to Patrick as a subject. “Of course he is. He’s worse than you. He thinks poor old Mallory’s the Antichrist.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I mustn’t have evil thoughts about anyone, Julian. I’m among the blessed.”

  Julian broke the connection. Horace, seated once again in the worn visitor’s chair, had heard the whole conversation over the speaker phone. He made no comment.

  Julian turned his back for a moment and gazed through the bulletproof glass onto the lawns. “‘The true President of the United States,’” he said. His lips twisted in disgust and he wiped them hard with his knuckles before letting Horace see his face again. “It’s possible,” Julian said, “that if Patrick feels as Emily says he does, he can be dealt with.”