glamorous burg of Dayton, O. Mike had long hair to his shoulder blades that year and was about Peace. Mike smoked dope and read his sacred texts and organized, orchestrated, and led the burgeoning Harvard antiwar movement. Which of course meant he was getting laid, sometimes two, three, and four times a day. Meanwhile Peter, the soggy little grind with a history of instability, spent the months in the exile of the library, depressed near unto suicide, working like a demon to figure out a way to keep himself alive. And one day he found it.
He found the bomb.
“I became interested in strategic thought at Harvard,” he told the FBI agents. “The bomb, you know. The big bomb. For reasons that were doubtlessly pathological, I drew some queer comfort from an instrument that could wipe us all out in a blinding flash. It gave point to the pointlessness.”
Peter still remembered the image of the nuclear mushroom climbing from its fiery birthing, clawing ever skyward, opening, devouring its way through the heart of civilization.
The bomb became a kind of focal point for his existence: he lost himself in its culture, its byways, its traditions, its intricacies. He learned how to build one, how to hide one, how to plant one, how to use one, how to deliver one. He pored over the interesting work in strategic thought being done at Rand and later at Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute. The strategic thinkers, men like Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Rowan, and Andy Marshall, were his heroes, outlined against the blue-gray November sky of his imagination. His senior
In fact, everything that Peter ever became, that he ever got, he owed to the bomb. Sometimes, he thought back on that crimped, desperate, achingly lonely little shit he’d been in prep school.
You beat them, he’d tell himself, swelling with radiance at the power of his becoming what he wanted to become, which was important. Everything you have is because of the bomb.
And most of all, he had Megan because of the bomb.
He’d met her in England when he was on his Rhodes studying the impact of weapons systems on policy decisions in immediate pre-Great War Europe in a political science seminar at Balliol. She was on a Rhodes, too, studying art at Keeble, after four years at Bennington. They met at the Bodleian, far from the radical unrest of America and the Vietnam War. She was dark and Jewish and he’d known she was American because she was blowing a bubble.
I beg your pardon, he said, is that
She just looked at him. No smile, her frank eyes devouring him, her beautiful jaw ripping away at the gum. She blew another bubble. Then she reached into her purse and pushed a single piece of genuine Fleer’s Double- Bubble across the three-hundred-year-old oak table at him.
Who are you?
He told only the truth.
I’m the smartest guy you ever met in your life, he had said.
“Did you meet any Communists at Oxford?” one of the agents said.
Peter just looked at him. What could one do with such idiots?
“No. Look. I don’t see any of those people anymore. I haven’t seen them in years.”
The agents exchanged looks. He could tell they thought he was being “difficult.” They tried a different approach.
“Of the eleven senior members of the MX Basing Modes Group, were any of them politically suspect?” asked one of the agents.
“You’ve seen the files. I haven’t.”
The two agents looked at each other, then sighed. One of them wrote something down.
“I’m running very low on time here, guys,” Peter said, smiling with what he thought was a great deal of Ivy League charm. They appeared not to hear.
“Well, then, psychologically suspect? It seems to be a pattern among senior defense analysts, and defense engineers and researchers, particularly the farther reaches of—” The agent struggled for a word.
“The farther reaches of blowing the world up, right?”
“Yes, Dr. Thiokol. Anyway, our investigations have shown that a significant number of these men and women burn out. That is, lose heart, have radical changes in religion, sexual orientation, political ideology.”
“It’s a very intense life. You’re gaming out the end of the world nearly every day, trying to figure new wrinkles, new ways to do it. Nobody gets old.”
“What about this Dr. Michael Greene?”
“Mike? Mike found out he was queer. Anyway, he bailed out before we’d really gotten to the interesting stuff.”
“He’s disappeared, that’s what makes him so interesting. And he’s got AIDS, did you know that, Dr. Thiokol?”
“No, I didn’t. My God, that’s awful.”
“Isn’t it possible that a man who’s dying — well, he’d be vulnerable emotionally to pressures or, rather, too fragile to withstand them. And someone—”
He didn’t know what to say. He knew the weakness of each member of the MX Basing Modes Group. Mike Greene’s was for thin-hipped Gentile athletes, Maggie Berlin’s for greasy mechanics. Niles Fallow had an alcoholic wife; Jerry Theobald suffered from almost incredible drabness; Mary Francis Harmon was a virgin who talked dirty; Sam Bellows was perpetually horny, yet so hangdog he never got laid; Jeff Thaxter was a workaholic who abused his kids; Jim Diedrickson had a son with cystic fibrosis; Maury Reeves’s wife Jill walked out on him for a Marine colonel. And on and on … each of them held in a matrix of weakness and duty. They used to have a joke about what they were doing. They called it the Revenge of the Nerds: little techies, sealed away in anonymous offices in the beast of a building complex called the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab out in picturesque Howard County, figuring out whether the world would end in fire or ice, and if fire, how hot, what color, spreading at what rate, and influenced by what wind patterns?
At last they moved to him.
“Any approaches in the last few months? Any sense of being watched? Any peculiarities in your mail, say, being intercepted, your house being broken into, your papers messed up”
“Absolutely not,” he said, swallowing hard.
They missed it.
“What about your wife? You hear from her?”
“Leave her out of it, please. She’s — she’s off somewhere, that’s all.”
“The marriage. When did it break up?”
“Nine months ago. I don’t talk about it with anybody, do you understand?”
“Megan Wilder, she never gave up her maiden name?”
Peter didn’t like this at all.
“I said I’d prefer not to discuss my private life. She’s with another man now, all right? That’s all there is to say. I upset her, she went with somebody else. How much longer is this going to take?”
“When did you last see her?”
“She came up to Baltimore two weeks ago. It was a kind of a stab at reconciliation. It was kind of okay at the beginning; but the next morning it turned into catastrophe again.”
“This was before or after your breakdo—”
“It was months afterward. That was in July, when I left the committee. But it was no big deal. It was a very mild nervous breakdown, yes, created by a great deal of work stress and the end of my marriage. I just felt used up and incapable of being with other human beings. I spent four weeks at a very discreet loony bin in Ellicott City, where I reread the collected works of Agatha Christie and talked to an insufferable fool about my God complex. In the end I allowed him to convince me that I wasn’t that august gentleman. I was too smart for the job description.”
The agents didn’t crack a smile at this deflection. Nevertheless, tactically the gambit worked; both agents missed his discomfort, and the interrogation headed into less interesting areas.
“Now, let’s go back to this Mike Greene …”
