manner.
“No, damn it, don’t be so deliberately stupid,” she said sharply. “Everyone knows they are going to die. What makes you fascinating and what makes your subject fascinating is that it involves the death of so many people. Quite literally everyone on earth.” She paused a moment and then spoke savagely. “Damn it, I wish I were a man and a man who could push the button. I would not push it, you understand that. But the knowledge that I could.” She shivered in her mink coat.
As Groteschele turned off of Massachusetts Avenue and threaded through Rock Creek Park, he felt a sudden hard understanding cross his mind. It was not he, Groteschele, the physical man, who was attractive to women. It was Groteschele, the magic man, the man who understood the universe, the man who knew how and when the button would be pushed. He was a master of death and somehow that gave him potency.
“Why wouldn’t you push it?” Groteschele asked softly. “There it sits. More power in that button than anyone in all time has ever possessed. But it’s never used until you push the button. Why not push it?”
“Because I would die along with everyone else,” Evelyn Wolfe said.
Her voice came to a queer faltering halt. Groteschele felt a very deep excitement.
“That is one statement you do not really believe,” he said with authority. “Do you think that life is the most important thing to a person? You don’t think it for a moment. You know I don’t. I can name a dozen ways of living to which you would prefer death.”
She was leaning back against the seat, her eyes closed, the lacquer of sophistication dissolved from her face. She looked curiously young. Like a hungry young girl.
“Go on,” she said. It was the first time that night she had implored him.
“Knowing you have to die, imagine how fantastic and magical it would be to have the power to take everyone else with you,” Groteschele said, spinning out what he had never said to himself. “The swamis of them out there, the untold billions of them, the ignorant masses of them, the beautiful ones, the artful ones, the friends, the enemies… all of them and their plans and hopes. And they are murderers: born to be murdered and don’t know it. And the person with his finger on the button is the one who knows and who can do it.”
The sound Evelyn Wolfe made was not a moan. It was the sound of wonderment that a child makes… even if the sees cruelty.
“Stop in one of those little side roads,” Evelyn Wolfe ordered.
Groteschele obeyed.
The moment that he turned off the motor her neat trim head struck at him. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before. She kissed him violently and then whispered words in his ear at the same time that her hands moved over his body. In one way he felt raped, attacked by someone stronger than himself. At the same time her words were words of the most extreme submission, bringing out every bullish impulse in his body.
He never recalled perfectly his feelings. It was too quick a mixture of self-revelation, of shame, of wonderful obscenity, of feeling a child under his hands and knowing she was a woman, of her words ending and her hoarse breathing beginning, of a savage pride that his softening body was capable of so much, of all this happening in the little universe ringed round by gear-shift and leather seats and instrument panel, of soft little hands that arched into claws, of the sound of cloth ripping, of expensive perfumes mixed with the smell of her, and, chiefly, that this was a complete surrender.
When finally he placed her small body in the corner of the car he knew she was satisfied. But he was wrong. Her eyes still glittered and she came back across the seat at him. She took his hand and raised it to her lips. She kissed the palm of his hand and then taking his little finger in her mouth she softly sucked it and then bit it so sharply that he jerked.
Suddenly, in a way from which he had always protected himself, Groteschele realized that in his own person, convoluted and intertwined, were two knowledges of death. In one way, the public way, he was a respectable high priest of civic death. This dialogue he had raised from a secretive conversation to a respectable art. It was a game at which he was exquisite. Almost by his own single-mindedness and wit he had introduced to a whole society the idea that a calm and dispassionate and logical discussion of collective death was an entertainment. By refinements and logical innovation he had made municipal death a form of style and a way of life.
But now, with his body aching and sweat soiling his shirt, he realized that in him there was also a personal beast of death. He realized that he bad always feared women because in each of them there was the buried but inextinguishable desire to love a man to death. Evelyn Wolfe was simply more obvious and direct about it than the others. She would, without mercy and as if it were her due, draw the energy and juices and fluids and substance from his body through the inexhaustible demands of pure sex.
Groteschele realized that he had never in his life distinguished between sex and love. And now it was too late.
He pulled his hand away from Evelyn Wolfe’s mouth, started the car, and, accelerating wildly, shot through Rock Creek Park. He roared a single great peal of laughter as the car left the park. The black internal beast of death he would never recognize again. And he would not have to, for he had the other great and public death as his amulet. It was enough for any man. And it was more than most had ever had.
When they got to Evelyn Wolfe’s house, she leaned toward him and invited him in. He reached over and gave her a short savage slap across her open mouth. She did not recoil, she did not cry, she did not even move. She simply sat silently for a moment, her eyes crystalline with a sense of loss. She waited a full fifteen seconds and then opened the door and walked firmly up to her house.
At ten minutes to ten, Groteschele entered the Pentagon without haste or any sign either that he had exerted himself to get there or that he worried about what lay ahead. In the four hours and twenty minutes that he had been awake, he had organized the briefing he would give that day, anticipated the reactions of certain secretaries and generals, and decided upon the arguments he would hold in reserve to counter their possible challenges.
It was going to be a more than usually satisfying day.
The President was looking at his pencil intently. He held it up to the light, seemed to be studying the lettering on its side, to wonder at its six sides, to admire the point.
Buck looked at his watch and felt a dull shock: it was only 10:88.
As the time spun out, a long second after a long second, like half-frozen drops unable to separate themselves from a nameless mass, Buck became calmer. The pencil is like a totem to the President, he thought. He looks at it and thinks of other things.
He quickly calculated the difference in age between himself and the President. It was only twelve years. For the first time he realized the maturity of the man facing him. Somehow it made Buck sad, gave him a sense of loss. There was no way, and he knew it deeply, that he could ever overtake this other man in experience, in toughness, in drive, in durability, in span. It gave Buck no great sense of regret and surely not of envy; it was merely that until that moment he had thought everything was possible. Not that he wanted to do everything, but he wanted it to be theoretically possible. But he knew that in ten times twelve years he could not become like this man across the desk.
“Buck, this may all be over in the next few minutes,” the President said, turning the pencil slowly, looking away to see Buck. “It probably will be. The bombers will find out their mistake and turn around and head back or we will make radio contact and recall them. Right now we don’t know why they flew past their Fail-Safe point and.we can’t raise them by radio. By itself neither event is catastrophic. But this particular situation has never occurred before. The entire positive control system depends on our ability to maintain verbal contact by radio. That’s why we are here. Possibly it will get very sticky.”
The President paused. Buck knew he did not have to respond, but he found himself speaking.
“I don’t know about the details, Mr. President,” Buck said, surprised at his own words, “but if the military people were sure it was something they could solve themselves they wouldn’t have called you. You’re down here because they know it is a serious problem.”
The President stopped turning the pencil. “You interested in politics?” he asked.
Buck paused. “No, sir, not particularly.”
“I remember. You’re studying law.”
“Yes, sir.” Again Buck was amazed by the man’s memory, and profoundly flattered.
“You’ve got a nice political feel,” the President said. “Bogan in Omaha has instructions to get through to me in a number of very specific and detailed situations.
He also has one general instruction just in case something happens that the specific instructions don’t cover.
