malignant genetic defects from radioactivity. Looking coolly at a room full of people he would tell them how many decades it would take the survivors of a thermonuclear war to regain the standard of living of medieval days. He could see the audience stiffen, tongues licking at the corners of their mouths, the signs of nervousness and fascination multiply.
Groteschele knew that he was regarded as a magician.
The awesome powers on which he was expert, the facts of life and death and survival, the new cabalistic language of the nuclear philosophers and high scientists of physics, were merely matters of fact. But the layman, the rich socialite, the industrialist, the politician, endowed Groteschele with control of the things he described.
The attention and the flattery were deeply pleasing to Groteschele. He did not disguise the fact from himself. He handled the incidental aspects of fame easily. There was more money, lots more money, and Groteschele turned it over to an expert business manager. He learned to dictate into portable dictating machines while riding taxicabs or airplanes. He learned that it was dangerous to get drunk the night before an important meeting. He became a consultant to various foundations and business firms, but selected them with great care. He wanted nothing to impair his relationship to the Federal government, for he knew full well that his status in Washington and the information which he obtained there were the sources of his power. Groteschele went through three different administrations without threat. Many of the high military officers and policy-makers did not agree with him, but he was a valuable commodity. He was an innovator, a barb, an egghead with a steel-trap mind, and even those who disagreed with him violently knew they were duty-bound to consider the alternatives which his thinking produced.
Groteschele had been, after the success of his book, besieged by academic offers. He evaluated them very carefully. He finally chose a distinguished university close to Washington which agreed to give him halftime duties for a single semester, but to pay him a full salary. The university also had bought a commodity, a nanie, a reputation, and knew it.
So much had changed for Groteschele so quickly. He thought briefly of his relationship with women. He was not handsome or attractive sexually, and he never had been. He had always explained it to himself by saying that women who were otherwise attracted to him were repelled by his mind. But this, too, had changed. When he walked down the long corridors of the Pentagon, groups of secretaries stared at him with tight little fascinated smiles. He nodded but did not speak. To his surprise, brilliant and beautiful women sought him out. If he wanted, so it seemed, he had only to stand still at a cocktail party, scan the women speculatively, settle on one and then let the situation develop at the woman’s initiative. The course often led him to her bed.
Groteschele was married and had a fifteen-year-old daughter. Wife and daughter were strangely identical: slight, nervous, possessed of a thin prettiness. His daughter was a brilliant student and it was her academic record which Groteschele found most attractive about her. Like the wives of many busy and successful men, his wife had faded away into a cool domestic haze. He had married her in Cincinnati years ago and at the time she had had the freshness of youth and it had seemed an appropriate union. Groteschele never took her on trips and when he was home their conversations were brief and perfunctory. She sensed that his sexual life was extramarital, but the knowledge gave her relief. She had never really enjoyed sex, and after Counter-Escalation there had been something about her husband’s sexual behavior which disturbed her. She felt ravished and quite impersonal even when locked together with him-as if she were nameless to him, an anonymous figure upon whom he exploded a deep rage. She tried to convince herself it was passion, but knew it was not.
Passion had recently led Groteschele to an experience that shocked him profoundly in that it revealed so starkly the wellsprings of his power. It had started at one of those frequent off-the-record discussions with a group of high-level businessmen and political leaders. This one bad been in Washington, the Metropolis tan Club. Only a highly selected group was present that evening, about twenty-five men and women altogether. During drinks, one woman had stood out, Elegant, slim and lithe, she was a woman from a world he did not know. He sensed that she had a competence with men that had become almost arrogance. He had seen a few others like her. They gave off the subtle signs of wealth, family background, education and boredom. It was like a number of elegant odors in the air. It also had something to do with the smile: such women smiled infrequently and never at women. When they smiled at a man it was like a congratulatory handshake; it had nothing of the simper or of the coquette in it. Men for such women were not a diversion, they were a necessity. Groteschele sensed this and felt somehow threatened. He avoided such women.
The speech went well. It was a variation of the same one he gave them all. They never wanted to hear anything new, they just wanted to hear it from him. Afterward, over more drinks, little groups came up to present pet arguments. He looked around the room, wondering when they would start to break up. No sign yet. He could not leave too early. Part of his $750 fee involved just this sort of boredom. There was a slight tug at his elbow. He turned around. It was his hostess and just to the side the woman, the elegant one.
“Evelyn, this is Walter Groteschele, our famous guest; Evelyn Wolfe. Evelyn has been dying to meet you. She’s made me promise to take a small group to a bar so she can hear you at doser range,” the hostess said, and fled.
“She overdid it a bit, but I would like to talk to you,” Evelyn Wolfe said.
Eight of them wound up in one of those countless chic hotel bars of Washington. Evelyn Wolfe sat next to Groteschele and in a few moments he had the bewildering sensation that they had somehow been cut off from the others at the corner table, almost as if some barrier to sound had been drawn around him and Evelyn Wolfe. Groteschele slowly began to realize that this was an extraordinarily attractive woman. She -was intelligent, she was poised, mannered, informed, and intense, but he had met at least a score of women that possessed these qualities. What she possessed in addition was a kind of burning intensity, a hard focusing of all her emotions on some undefined objective. She did not converse. She aimed at a target. By the time they had had four scotch and waters Groteschele realized that the target was himself. Normally he would have been flattered. But this time he felt a slight shiver of apprehension. This woman had an almost cobra-like manner of following what he said. Her beautifully coiled head, her face marred only by a mouth that was too small, actually wove back and forth with slight undulations as Groteschele talked about war games, the strategy of surrender, megatons, and Doomsday systems.
Most people, especially women, listened to Groteschele’s description of American and Soviet tactics with a kind of unconcealed look of either bafflement or horror. Groteschele could not make out the look on Evelyn Wolfe’s face. He only knew that her concentration was enormous. She spoke very little. When he described the Doomsday system, hinting that it was semidassified, she closed her eyes for a moment and a slight smile started at the corners of her mouth.
“Beautiful,” she said.
Just that single word unaccompanied by an expression of horror or astonishment or dismay. For a moment Groteschele’s careful poise was broken. He went on automatically talking about the likeliest survivors of an all-out thermonuclear war, his way of giving a droll ending to his macabre description, of letting people down easily. They would be the most hardened of convicts, those in solitary confinement. Another group likely to survive would be the file clerks for large insurance companies, because they would be housed in fireproofed rooms and insulated by tons of the best insulator in the world, paper.
“Then, my dear Miss Wolfe, imagine what will happen,” Groteschele said, feeling himself regaining his poise. “The small group of hardened criminals and the army of file clerks will war with one another for the remaining means of life. The convicts will have a monopoly of violence, but the file clerks will have a monopoly of organization. Who do you think will win?”
Evelyn Wolfe looked straight at Groteschele. Then she shook her head. Groteschele was confused.
“I would like you to take me home now,” Evelyn Wolfe said, and she was up on her feet and into her mink coat before he responded. She did not say goodbye to the rest of the group, but they all looked up as she and Groteschele left.
They were in Groteschele’s car and three blocks from the bar before Evelyn Wolfe spoke.
“You were being mischievous about the war between the convicts and the file clerks,” she said, leaning her head back against the seat. “In fact, you know that no one will survive the Doomsday system. That is the beauty of the whole thing.”
“No one, Miss Wolfe, has ever called it beautiful before,” Groteschele said with a laugh.
“They have been afraid to,” she said. “But that is what they feel.”
“You mean that everyone is possessed by the death-wish?” Groteschele asked in his best professorial
