turns, using at times foreign or regional accents, then replaying the sounds, perhaps backward, perhaps starting with a middle syllable, and finally reading the word as word, overpronouncing slightly, noses to the page as if in search of protomorphic spoor. Some of the words put Myna into a state of mild delirium; she thought their beauty almost excessive. We kept reading for half an hour. The words were ways of touching and made us want to speak with hands. We went into a far corner of the high stacks. There I started taking off her dress. The great cumulus breasts came rolling out of handbeaded blue Victorian velvet. We laughed loudly, then tried to quiet each other with soft punches to the arm. A button fell to the floor, rolling unsteadily into a distant corner. I made bubbling noises, rubbing my face in her breasts, scratching an itch just under my eye with her left nipple. Together we got the dress down over her hips, hitting each other lightly to warn the laughter off, and in time it was at her feet. I made strange noises of anticipation
'What's your name, young man?'
'Robert Reynolds,' I said, slipping into my southern accent.
29
One night the major and I played a crude form of war game in his motel room. He sat facing me, about four feet away, a small table between us. On the table were pencils, pads, maps, and a chart that I was having a great deal of trouble trying to read upside down. The major said that one of the big problems with war games, whether they were being played at the Pentagon, at NORAD or Fort Belvoir, at a university or think tank, was the obvious awareness on the part of all participants that this wasn't the real thing. (What we were playing, he added, was barely the simulated thing; we had no computer, intelligence reports, projection screens, and only a few numerical estimates of troop units, missile inventories, production capacities.) The gaming environment, as he called it, could never elicit the kind of emotions generated in times of actual stress; therefore gaming was probably just a secondrate guide (hopefully not too misleading) to what might be expected from governments when the armies were poised and lithe missiles were rising from their silos. As I sat there, listening, I wondered why we were meeting in a motel. It seemed to me that the major's house should have been ready for occupancy by this time and that his family should have joined him. However, it did not seem appropriate to comment.
He looked through the material in front of him, then glanced around the room before spotting what he wanted, a world atlas. It was on the bed, about eight feet away. He asked me to get it for him.
'Now this scenario is premised on futuribles,' he said. 'The basic situation as I've set it up for us is definitely in the area of what we know to be projected crisis situations. It could happen. Tensions. Possible accidents. Unrelated hostilities. Or maybe not so unrelated. Precedents: one act of aggression tending to legalize another. Then finally a showdown between two major powers. That's the basic situation, the starting point or premise as I'll conceptualize it for you in a minute. What happens after that is up to us. Now, before I forget, the two major powers are just who you might expect them to be except I've changed their names slightly, just to make them a little less appealing or distasteful to our emotions, as the case may be. COMRUS is one and AMAC is the other. It's not supposed to fool anybody and it just gives you a glimpse of what we might be able to do in the future in terms of totally our own situations, not depending on existing bodies or preconceptions. So it's just to neutralize our emotions a little bit. In fact I haven't bothered to change much else, just a designation here and there since I'm just beginning to get into this. So we're a little bit disorganized and inconsistent this first time and we'll probably have to improvise as we go along. But to get back, what happens after I introduce this thing is up to us. We might become wildly implausible or we might run right through the crisis game from escalation to escalation with absolutely traditional military logic-if there is such a thing and I'm not sure there is. We might not even get to the point of using nuclear weapons. Or we might start pitching right off.'
The major outlined the crisis.
It begins in the Sea of Japan. An AMAC destroyer of the Seventh Fleet, on maneuvers, is strafed by two NORKOR MIGs. Damage is light; there are no casualties. Two days later a Polaris submarine in the East Siberian Sea is reported missing. In Germany three highranking agents defect to the West; unmarked planes drop leaflets over East Berlin, over Prague, over Budapest. There are a dozen explosions of suspicious origin at military bases throughout Spain and Turkey. An unmanned AMAC intelligence plane is downed by COMCHIN missiles in the Formosa Strait. Fires break out on successive days at the atomic power laboratory in Los Alamos and in the civil defense command center at Cheyenne Mountain. The commander of an AMAC truck convoy, following orders, fails to stop at an East German roadblock along the Autobahn; shots are exchanged and the convoy breaks through. A Dutchbuilt factory ship, being delivered to NORKOR, is struck by torpedoes and sunk outside Chongjin. COMRUS objects strongly. Several explosions damage NikeHercules installations on Okinawa. COMCHIN negotiators suspend talks with the Japanese over ownership of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Within a timeframe of ten hours there are over a dozen small clashes, involving demonstrators and troops, on both sides of the Berlin wall. Messages are exchanged. There are reports that Egyptian troops have retaken El Arish. COMRUS demands gradual allied withdrawal from West Berlin. COMRUS demands withdrawal of all AMAC auditors in Indochina. NATO reports largescale troop movements west of Leipzig, east of Lubeck, near Klatovy. COMRUS claims an overkill factor of three in relation to Western Europe. A dozen light bombers of the Warsaw Pact air forces are spotted over Bonn. An RAF reconnaissance plane is shot down by MIG23s after violating East German airspace. More ultimatums. Troops of the Warsaw Pact nations, using conventional weapons, clash with NATO forces at three different locales along the West German frontier. SAC is put on alert. Twelve COMRUS infantry divisions-about a hundred twenty thousand men-are moved to Western Europe from Lake Baikal north of Mongolia. AMAC navy jets from the carrier
The major went through this scenario very slowly. He referred to his maps at least ten times, showing me the precise locations of certain countries, cities, military bases. Often he paused during these map readings as if waiting for me to comment, perhaps on the subtle geographic patterns he had devised for the various conflicts. I had trouble finding any particular pattern but I could tell quite easily how much tune and work he had put into the project. It seemed almost sad. I was hardly a competent enemy. I had no experience in this sort of thing. I had been plagued by joyous visions of apocalypse but I was not at all familiar with the professional manipulations, both diplomatic and military, which might normally precede any kind of largescale destruction. All I could do was try to react intelligently, if that word can be used, to whatever the major did with his divisions, his air force, his warships, his missiles. I wasn't feeling very involved. In fact I considered the scenario somewhat boring despite all the frenzy
