carefully lowered back to its base.
Although an intercontinental ballistic missile requires only twenty minutes to reach a target in Eurasia, hours are required to get a missile ready for its short white-hot trajectory. Scores of men working with a network of computers, calculating, checking, double-checking, all moved at top speed but with great deliberation. The total operation was coordinated by the firemaster. Each missile also had its Fail-Safe point, but it was a point in the process of checking rather than a point in space. It was a clerical, a calm, a well-ordered Fail-Safe. But it could only proceed to a certain time. Past a precise and well-known “Positive Control” point in the countdown each missile passed into the “terminal sequence.” The sequence could only be started at the order of the President of the United States.
The cavernous life, the manufactured secrecy, the incredible pitch of training, made a missile base into a strange experience. The crews lived a buried existence. The end of a tour of duty was like the end of a sentence. As the crewmen were relieved they came out into the air, blinking at the brightness, never certain that they were returning to a normal world of shopping centers and baby-tending and love-making. They had been taught that it was altogether possible that they would emerge into a black incinerated world in which their chief duties would be to avoid deep contamination and then to wage a savage fight for existence.
The details of this fight were deliberately kept ambiguous. To prepare a corps of men for defeat is almost certain to destroy their capacity for retaliation. They knew that in the ultimate situation their mood should be ferocious, but the object of the ferocity was not specified.
The men who expended their lives raising and lowering these gigantic masses of intricate and explosive material were not without intelligence or heart. They were aware of the eerie, nightmarish quality of their existence. They thought of their strange condition and they discussed it. It was a surrealistic dialogue. It was conducted by technicians with no more than an eighthgrade education and by officers with a Ph.D. The environment gave them an awesome quality. These subterraneans moved nervelessly through their artificial world, developed new outlooks and insights and oddly twisted views of themselves and of reality, evoked a new humor which was both loving and profoundly cynical, grinned a new way, were nostalgic for things like fresh air and grass, had fantasies which no man had known before because no man had lived as they lived.
Out of their subterranean places they reverted to the life aboveground without effort or strain. They seemed as normal, as uniform, as ordinary, as anyone else. But while they were below ground they were a separate breed.
In a form which would surprise a student of the classics they told the ancient myth of Sisyphus in which Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder laboriously up a hill only to have it tumble back again ready for another push upward. The myth trickled down from the officers to the men in strange and vulgar forms but no one mistook its import. It was always told, regardless of the language, with a strange sense of wonder and relevance.
The more speculative of the missilemen, the egg-heads among them, had also discovered an unofficial poet laureate: Albert Camus. Camus, who had understood fully the futility and the antic and the senselessness of much of modern life, had also, in a perverse way, found the principle and will which allowed him to live through the awful stresses of the French underground during World War II. Like Camus, the missilemen had learned to live seriously in a world which was absurd.
To enter a missile compound on Gold Alert was like entering a severe monastic order, utterly dedicated to the service of ununderstood mechanical totems. Quietly and systematically, without any public announcement and without any realization on the part of the public, the nation rose to a full and ominous alert.
There was also another element in the subterranean life which was pervasive, perfectly known, understood, and never discussed. There was the knowledge that the enemy was doing precisely what they were doing. Somewhere halfway around the world there was another set of silos, another pattern of hard sites, another organization of men-almost, they assumed, precisely like theirs. This is no easy knowledge to carry. It is one thing to arm the thermonuclear warhead on an immense missile. It is another to know that another person, with almost the same training, is doing the identical thing—and that he must be thinking of you—and knowing that you are thinking of him thinking of you, and on and on.
It was no life for ordinary men. One must have vision and no vision, nerve and nervelessness, absolute obedience and independent judgment. One must be outwardly friendly and inwardly cool, for life in the silos is intimate and forced and to open too much is fatal and to stay too much closed is fatal.
The subterranean men were proud men, sure of their ability. They also had developed to an almost sublime degree the capacity to forget the sum total of their task and to concentrate on their small role. They were a hard- working, magnificently trained team. They were even an enthusiastic team. But they carefully avoided any discussion of the end result of their teamwork.
Brig. Gen. Warren A. Black came starkly awake: his eyes wide open, his toes spread and digging into the sheet beneath him, his fingers forming into fists, his stomach flat and tight. His skin was covered with a sweat that was really a slime of fear. He knew that in a few more minutes his wrist-watch alarm would go off. Aware of a thin scratchiness behind his eyeballs, he wanted to go back to sleep. But he jerked awake. Sleep was dangerous.
Sleep was where the Dream happened.
Until six months ago Black could not remember dreaming. Now his sleep was almost always broken by some variation of the Dream. It brought him awake, arched and sweating. At first he was torn between the desire to sink back in restful blackness and the fear that he might, instead, fall into the Dream. Recently he always stayed awake.
He knew there was one way that he could end the Dream: by resigning his commission. He said it to himself in a score of ways; sometimes mockingly, sometimes cruelly, sometimes in an antic mood. But the Dream did not vanish. It was also invulnerable to logical analysis. He knew, in a fleeting but dreadfully sure sense, that he could never exorcise the Dream. He could end it only by resigning. But the thought of resigning from the Air Force was torture.
The Dream always opened on a bullfight arena. Although Black had never been to a bullfight in his life, since the Dream he had checked some bullfight books, The Dream was accurate, replete with detail of picadors on padded horses, banderillas, bad music, and the background of huge ads for beer and automobiles and a milling crowd. Perhaps, Black thought, he supplied the detail from some long-forgotten book.
That bull was real enough, charging out of the gate, pawing and snorting. Its charge came to a grinding halt, its immense body reared back on its hind legs, as frozen as statuary. It came down on all fours, swung its horns around the arena, and looked, with puzzlement, for the adversary. The bull gave off a deep fundamental bellow. It was the sound of confidence. And from the people in the arena came back a deep funds-mental silence.
The bull’s roar ended on a tiny shattered sound of agony. A stripe of red appeared on the deep black hide of its shoulder.
The bull wheeled, spun on its hooves with magnificent speed and grace-and again gave off the thin cry of agony. Another stripe, this one white, appeared on its flank. Quickly then the bull charged and charged again and then a third time… endlessly, with no seeming diminution of power. But it was confused. Each time it wheeled to a stop there was another white or red stripe on its hide.
There is a matador in the arena, Black said to himself. But I cannot see him. He must be hidden by some refraction of sun on the glittering sand, some unintended camouflage of costume, perhaps by the strange assault of the colors of the arena. Black turned his head, tried vainly to see the matador, but he was never successful.
Looking around the arena, Black realized with a pleasant feeling that everyone in the stands was familiar. They were his associates, the people he saw in his everyday work-privates, civilian secretaries, generals, colonels, technicians, majors, scientists, professors. But he could not identify any one of them exactly. He could not attach names to faces. He only knew they were familiar and that their faces were reassuring.
The invisible matador worked the bull closer and closer to where Black was sitting. He could hear the wind from its huge lungs, see the little puffs of sand kicked up by its hooves, see the massive neck muscle swing the horns. The bull came very close.
Then Black understood the white and red stripes. The bull was being flayed naked. The invisible matador was not using a regular sword. He was using some sort of instrument which neatly shaved off long narrow slices of the bull’s hide. The white stripes were cartilage and fat; the red were made by blood which ran down the great suffering body and dripped into the sand.
Now, directly in front of Black, the bull showed fatigue and confusion. The matador sliced and soundlessly another stripe fell away from the living flesh beneath. There were only a few spots on the bull’s body where the
