Jem

NINETEEN

GODFREY MENNINGER woke up wondering who was shaking the foot of his bed.

No one was. He was alone in his room, exactly like a hundred thousand Holiday Inn or Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge rooms all over the world. There was the phone on a nightstand beside the bed, the TV set staring grayly across at him from the long desk-plus-chest-plus-luggage-rack that stood against the wall. The phone was almost the only visible element that made it different, for it was a push-button jobber with colored lights flickering across its face. The other element of strangeness was harder to see. The drapes over one wall covered an immense likris display panel, not a window. There was no point in having a window. He was two hundred meters under the earth.

It was 6:22 on the clock.

Menninger had left orders to be awakened at seven. Therefore it was not a call that had awakened him. Therefore there were only a couple of other possibilities, and none of them were attractive. God Menninger considered picking up the phone or switching on the TV or pulling back the drapes over the likris situation screen, any of which would have told him at once what was happening. He decided against doing so. If it had posed an immediate threat he would have been notified at once. Margie’s disciplined and hierarchical approach to problem solving had not been taught at West Point; it had come to her on her father’s knee. If she was good at putting unwanted thoughts out of her mind, he was superb. He dismissed the question, slipped into his brocaded robe, went into the bathroom, and made himself a cup of instant coffee with tap water.

God Menninger’s waking-up minutes were precious to him. He was of the opinion that both his marriages had failed because he had been unable to make either wife understand that he was never, not ever, to be spoken to for at least half an hour after waking. That was coffee time and summoning-up-strength time and remembering-what-he-had-to-do time. Conversation destroyed it. A weakness of Godfrey Menninger’s character was that he was apt to destroy anyone who infringed on it.

The coffee was at just the right temperature, and he drank it like medicine, swallow by swallow, until it was down. Then he threw off the robe, sat cross-legged on the bed in the half-lotus position, let his body go calm, and began to say his mantra.

Godfrey Menninger had never really understood what happened among his neurons and synapses when he practiced transcendental meditation, nor had he ever really tried. It did not seem to do any harm of any kind, except to cost him some twenty-four hundred seconds out of every twenty-four hours. He seldom discussed it with anyone else and therefore did not have to defend it. And it seemed to work. Work how? Do what? He could not exactly have said. When he did it he felt more confident and more relaxed about his confidence. That was not a bad return on the investment of less than three percent of his time. As he sat, his body withdrawing from him, the reiterated ta-lenn, ta-lenn of the mantra becoming a sort of drapery of sound that surrounded him without being present, his whole brain became a receptor. It contributed nothing. It only perceived. On the inside of his eyelids he saw faces and shapes that melted into each other. Some were beautiful and some gargoyles. Some were etched in the sharpest of drypoint lines. Some seemed to be beaten out of gold. They held no emotional content for him. The demon snarls did not frighten. The loveliness did not attract. They were only there. Wispy chains of words floated past his consciousness like snatches of conversation from the next table at a restaurant. They spoke of ultimata and megatonnages and a remembered caress and the need for a haircut, but there were no imperatives in them anywhere. The circulating memory that pumped them past his mind sucked them away again without residue. More than two thousand kilometers away and half a kilometer down, inside a submarine belonging to the Fuel Bloc, a vice admiral in the Libyan navy was programming The One That Had His Name on It. Menninger did not know it. His thoughts floated free into infinity in all directions, but all directions lay within that inner space of his mind. He could not have done anything useful about it if he had known.

The bed moved again.

It was not an earthquake. There were no earthquakes in West Virginia, he thought, bringing himself up out of reverie, getting ready to open his eyes. It was sharper than an earthquake would have been, more quick and trivial than the slow battering of a crustal slip. It was not particularly strong, and if he had still been asleep it might not even have awakened him. But it was something. And then the lights flickered.

Two hundred meters down in the side of a West Virginia mountain, the lights were not meant to flicker. A²³⁹Pu megawatt generating plant, vented through a kilometer of piping to emerge on the other side of the hill, was immune to most external events. Lightning bolts did not strike transformers underground. Winds could not tear loose a line, since there were no lines in the open air. And then, tardily, the flickering colors on the base of the telephone all went out. A single red light flared, and the buzzer sounded. He picked up the phone and said, “Menninger.”

“Three missiles came in, sir — near misses. There’s no structural damage. Point of origin backtracks probably to near Sinkiang province. The city of Wheeling is out.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. He was still coming up from his meditation, and so he did not look at his own situation panel, but he also did not stop to shower or shave. He rubbed deodorant on his armpits — French whore’s bath, but good enough — ran a brush over his hair, pulled on his coveralls and shoes, and walked briskly down the placid, beige-carpeted corridor to his command room. The situation map was alight from end to end. “Here’s your coffee,” said General Weinenstat. That was all she said. She knew his ways. He took the cup without looking at her, because his eyes were on the board. It displayed a Mercator projection of the earth in outline. Within it, bright red stars were targets taken out. Bright blue stars were also targets taken out, but on the wrong side: that was Washington and Leningrad and Buenos Aires and Hanoi and Chicago and San Francisco. Broken red profiles in the ocean areas of the map were enemy missile-launching vessels destroyed. There were more than a hundred of them. But there were also nearly sixty broken blue ones. Pulsating targets, red and blue, were major concentrations not yet destroyed. There were relatively few of them. The number decreased as he watched. Kansas City, Tientsin, Cairo, and the whole urban complex around Frankfurt ceased to exist.

The second cup of coffee was not medicine but comfort. He took a sip of it and then asked, “What’s their remaining second-strike capability?”

“Marginal, Godfrey. Maybe one hundred missiles operational within the next twenty-four hours, but we’re cutting that down all the time. We have almost eighty. And only two of our hardened installations are scratched.”

“Local damage?”

“Well — there are a lot of casualties. Otherwise, not bad. Surface contamination is within acceptable limits — inside shielded vehicles, anyway.” She signaled an orderly for a coffee refill and added, “Too early to tell about long-lived isotope capture, but most of the Corn Belt looks okay. So’s Mexico and the Pacific Northwest. We did lose the Imperial Valley.”

“So we’re not bad for now.”

“I would say so, yes, God.”

“For the next twenty-four hours. Then they can start to redeploy.” She nodded. It was a known fact that every major country had squirreled away missiles and components. They were not at ten-minute command like the ones in the silos or on the subs. They could not be launched by pushing a button. But they could not be taken out at long range, either, since you didn’t know where they were hidden. He added, “And we can’t look for them, because the satellite busters have half-blinded us.”

“We’ve all-blinded them, Godfrey. They don’t have an eye in orbit.”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” he said testily. “We’ve won the exchange. The damn fools. Well, let’s get to work.”

Menninger’s “work” was not directly related to the exchange of missiles that was remodeling the surface of the earth to a facsimile of hell. That was not his responsibility. It was only a precursor, like a friend’s retiring to the bathroom to fit in her diaphragm while he slouched, waiting, on the edge of the bed. She would not need his advice or his help at that stage, and neither would the Chiefs of Staff while the actual fire fight was going on. His involvement would be central immediately thereafter.

Meanwhile, one of the damn fools had finished the pro gramming and was trying to round up enough of a crew for the launch. It wasn’t easy. The neutron bomb had done just what ERW weapons were supposed to do — penetrated the carelessly scant meters of water and the steel tube of his submarine and knocked out most of the crew. The Libyan vice admiral himself had taken nearly five thousand rads. He knew he had only hours to live, but with any luck his target would have less than that.

Three hours’ sleep was not enough. Menninger knew that he was quick-tempered and a little fuzzy, but he had trained his people to know that too, and they made allowances.

At five-minute intervals the map disappeared and the likris screen sequenced itself through a round of ten-second displays: profiles of industrial capacity destroyed and remaining, curves of casualties, histograms of combat-effectiveness estimates. In the Ops Room next to God Menninger’s command post, more than fifty persons were working on overdrive to correct and update those figures. Menninger hardly glanced at them. His concerns were political and organizational. Rose Weinenstat was on the scrambler to the Combined Chiefs every few minutes, not so much to give information or to get it as to keep them aware, every minute, that the most powerful unofficial figure in government had his eye on them all the time. His three chief civilian liaisons were in touch with state governments and government agencies, and Menninger himself spoke, one after another, with cabinet officers, key senators, and a few governors — when they could be found. It was all US, not Fats; the rest of the Food Bloc was in touch through the filter of the Alliance Room, and when one of them demanded his personal attention it was an intrusion.

“He isn’t satisfied with me,” General Weinenstat reported. “Maybe you should give him a minute, Godfrey.”

“Shit.” Menninger put down his pen at the exact place on a remobilization order where he stopped reading and nodded for her to switch over.

The face on his phone screen was that of Marshal Bressarion of the Red Army, but the voice was his translator’s. “The marshal,” she said, sounding tinny through the scrambler, “does not question that you and the Combined Chiefs are acting under the President’s orders, but he wishes to know just who the President is. We are aware that Washington is no more, and that Strongboxes One and Two have been penetrated.”

“The present President,” said Menninger, patiently restraining his irritation, “is Henry Moncas, who was Speaker of the House of Representatives. The succession is as provided in our basic law, the Constitution of the United States.”

“Yes, of course,” said the translator after Bressarion had listened and then barked something in Russian, “but the marshal has been unable to reach him for confirmation.”

“There have been communications problems,” Menninger agreed. He looked past the phone, where Rose Weinenstat was shaping the words “in transit” with her lips. “Also,” he added, “I am informed the President is in the process of moving to a fully secure location. As the marshal will realize, that requires a communications lid.”

The marshal listened impatiently and then spoke for some seconds in rapid-fire Russian. The translator sounded a good deal more uptight as she said, “We quite understand, but there is some question of lines of authority, and the marshal would appreciate hearing from him directly as soon — hello? Hello?”

His image faded. General Weinenstat said apologetically, “I thought it was a good time to develop transmission difficulties.”

“Good thinking. Where is the son of a bitch, by the way?”

“Henry? Oh, he’s safe and sound, Godfrey. He’s been ordering you to report to him for the last hour or so.”

“Um.” Menninger thought for a moment. “Tell you what. Send out a radiation-safe team to escort him here so I can report. Don’t take no for an answer. Tell him he’ll be safer here than in his own hole.” He picked up the pencil, scratching the pit of his stomach. Which was complaining. He wanted orange juice to build up his blood sugar, a stack of flapjacks to give a foundation for the next cup of coffee, and that cup of coffee. He wanted his breakfast, and he was aware that he was cranky because he was hungry. “Then we’ll see who’s President,” he added, to the air.

On the edge of the Bahia de Campeche the Libyan vice admiral had got his crew together and his submarine up to two hundred meters, running straight and level. None of them were functioning well, with prodromal diarrhea and vomiting often enough so that the whole ship smelled like a latrine, but they could serve. For awhile, at least. They did. Libya’s naval doctrine called for one big missile instead of a few dozen little ones. As this one big one broke the surface of the gulf it was immediately captured by a dozen radars. The scared but as yet untouched tourists on their lanais in Merida saw bright, bad flashes out west, over the water, as a Cuban cruiser locked in and fired ABMs. None of them caught it. It was a cruise missile, not ballistic, easy to identify but hard to predict as it drove itself north-northwest toward the Florida panhandle. A dozen times defensive weapons clawed at it as it crossed the coast, and then it was lost to view. There were plenty of installations along the way charged with the duty of detecting and destroying just such a weapon, but none that were functioning anymore.

The latest picture from Margie showed her with one foot on the shell of a dead Krinpit, looking tired and flushed and happy. It was as good a picture of his daughter as God had had since her bearskin-rug days, and he had it blown into a hard print for his wallet. General Weinenstat looked at it carefully and passed it back to him. “She’s a credit to you, God,” she said.

He looked at it for a moment and put it away. “Yeah. I hope she got her stuff. Can you imagine her mother? I told her Margie wanted some dress patterns, and she wanted me to put in about a thousand meters of fabric.”

“Well, if you’d left her raising to her mother she wouldn’t be getting the kind of efficiency ratings you’ve been showing me.”

“I suppose not.” The latest one had been nothing but praise, or at least up to the psychologist’s report:

Latent hostility toward men due to early marital trauma and mild inverse-Oedipal effect. Well compensated. Does not affect performance of duties.

I really hope that’s so, thought Godfrey Menninger. Rose Weinenstat looked at him carefully. “You’re not worrying about her, are you? Because there’s no need — wait a minute.” General Weinenstat touched the thing in her ear that looked like, but wasn’t, a hearing aid. Her expression turned somber.

“What is it?”

She turned off the communicator. “Henry Moncas. His shelter took a direct hit. They’re trying to find out who’s President now.”

“Shit!” Godfrey Menninger stared at the remains of his breakfast for a moment and saw none of it. “Oh, shit,” he said again. “It looks bad, Rosie. The worst part is we never had a choice!”

General Weinenstat started to speak, then changed her mind.

“What? What were you going to say, Rosie?”

She shrugged. “No good second-guessing, is it?”

He pounced on her words. “About what? Come on, Rosie!”

“Well — maybe moving into Canada—”

“Yeah. That was a mistake, all right. I’ll give you that. But not ours! The Greasies knew we couldn’t let them move troops into Manitoba. That was Tam Gulsmit’s mistake! Same with the Peeps. Once we were engaged we had to take Lop Nor out — quick, clean, minimum casualties. They should’ve accepted it instead of retaliating—”

But he could hear voices within him denying it, speaking in the tones of Tam Gulsmit and Heir-of-Mao. “We were safe moving troops in to protect the tar sands, because we knew you couldn’t afford to invade.”

“You shouldn’t have bombed Lop Nor. You should have known we would have to retaliate.” The voices within God Menninger’s mind were the only voices they would ever have again. Heir-of-Mao lay with eyes bulging and tongue protruding from his lips, dead in the deep shelter under Peking, and the atoms that had once been Gulsmit’s body were falling out from the column of fire over Clydeside.

The Libyan missile had bypassed Atlanta and Asheville and Johnson City, matching their terrains against the profiles imprinted in its memory. The safety interlocks on its thermonuclear charge were falling away one by one as its tiny, paranoid brain began to recognize its nearness to the thing it was unleashed to destroy.

“It’s bad, Rosie,” said Godfrey Menninger at last, rising to return to his desk. Maybe he should have let Margie’s mother have the raising of her. Then Margie would probably have had a husband and a couple of kids by now. And perhaps — perhaps the world would have been a different place. He wondered if he would ever hear from her again. “Rosie,” he said, “check Houston. See if the communication links with Jem are holding up. With the other colonies, too, of course.”

“Right now, Godfrey? Give me ten minutes; I’ve got a call coming in from the DoD.”

“Ten minutes is fine,” he said; but before the ten minutes was up he was dead.