logbook for over a year. It had become mixed in with the law books, old copies of Izvestia, Russian magazines, notebooks. With both hands Buck pawed through the debris of paper on his desk, pulled open the top drawer, yanked at the three drawers on the left side of the desk. He could not find the logbook. He calmed himself. The call was sure to be a mistake. Nevertheless, he took a dean piece of paper and then looked at his watch. He wrote the time in big black figures in the middle of the white rectangle:
“10:32 A.M.”
With relief he picked up the phone.
“Mr. Buck, this is the President speaking,” a voice said. There was no mistaking the voice. It was calm, New England accented, nas4 “Would you please make your way to the White House bomb shelter as soon as possible?”
“Yes, sir, I…” Buck said and then stopped. As soon as he had said the word “Yes” the President had hung up.
The War Room of the Strategic Air Command at Omaha was not immense. Not in terms of what it had to do. It was no bigger than a small theater. The pools of darkness in its corners, however, gave the sensation of immensity, almost of a limitless reach. The only illumination in the War Room came from the Big Board. It covered the entire front wall and resembled a gigantic movie screen, except that it was made of a kind of translucent plastic. At that moment the Big Board showed a simple Mercator map of the world. The continents and the oceans were familiar, as were the lines of latitude and longitude. But there the similarity to ordinary Mercator maps disappeared. The map was covered with a strange flood of cabalistic signs. Arrows, circles, squares, numbers, triangles were strewn across the screen, sometimes came up bright and clear, sometimes dimmed, and occasionally a sign notation would fade entirely and leave only a phosphorescent glow that persisted for a few seconds.
Even in the uncertain light it was possible to see that there were only a half-dozen men in the War Room. In the dimness the men looked doll-like and diminutive. This added to the impression of vastness.
“I expected a little more action,” Congressman Raskob said. “This is just like a second-rate theater. Where are the ushers?”
Lieutenant General Bogan, United States Air Force, glanced down at Congressman Raskob. The Congressman’s reaction was not uncommon among people who were seeing the War Room for the first time, but General Bogan also knew that he was being baited. He had been briefed on Raskob’s background.
“Right now, sir, we are at our lowest condition of readiness,” General Bogan said. “Right now everything is routine. The moment that something starts to happen there is plenty of action.”
“In a few minutes, sir, your eyes will get adjusted to the light and we can show you some of the more interesting things in the War Room,” Colonel Casdo said. Colonel Cascio was General Bogan’s deputy.
The Congressman grunted. He stood at the raised runway at the back of the War Room, his feet wide apart, his short stocky body held in a posture that was almost arrogant.
He’s going to be a tough one, General Bogan thought. He looked over at the other guest, Gordon Knapp, the president of Universal Electronics. No trouble there.
Knapp was one of the new breed of scientists who, after World War II, had become a scientist-inventor- businessman. Although he was almost six feet tall, Knapp’s body was hunched over as if he had just finished a long and desperate race. In fact it was his habitual posture. Ever since he had discovered science Knapp had run with a zestful enthusiastic desperation which had no element of anxiety. It had taken Bogan some months to realize that Knapp’s adversary was scientific problems. He threw his physical and intellectual power against problems and his record of successes was unbroken. He had become an expert on miniaturization, solid-state physics, semiconductors, and, more recently, problems of data storing. In the process he had become a millionaire and had achieved a high reputation. Both of these facts he forgot constantly. He was oblivious of everything except unsolved technical problems. In the process of mastering them he had ravaged his body, learned to exist on five hours of sleep a night, and was an extremely happy man. He was a man of black coffee, hurried airplane flights, phone calls, technical drawings, intuitions about amperage and voltage, a vast unanswered correspondence, harassed secretaries, rumpled suits, and a burning attention for only one thing: his scientific problems. His wife once said— entirely in jest for she loved and admired him—that she would have divorced him long ago but he was never home long enough to discuss the matter.
This was Knapp’s first visit to the War Room and General Bogan could see that he was quivering with excitement. Many of the mechanisms that he had invented and manufactured were used in the room, and his eyes glittered as he tried to identify the machinery in the gloom.
“It may look simple, Mr. Raskob, but this is one of the most complicated rooms in the world,” Knapp said in a whisper.
“And one of the most expensive,” Raskob said.
General Bogan resisted the tendency to sigh. Raskob was a tough and intelligent man. He came from a congressional district in Manhattan which was made up partly of new and expensive apartment houses and partly of old tenements gradually being taken over by Puerto Ricans and Negroes. The first time he had been elected it was by a narrow margin and Raskob had known he must work out some formula of political appeal which would be equally attractive to the new and poor and to the old and wealthy. His political reputation was as carefully hewn as the work of a master sculptor. On every welfare and civil-rights issue he voted liberal and made sure that this fact was widely disseminated among the Puerto Ricans and Negroes. On military appropriations he was invariably critical, stating that they were inflationary, were expended by shortsighted generals and admirals, and only added to the tax burden. This posture benefited him in two ways: his constituents in the big expensive apartments saw him as anti-inflation and pro-lower taxes; his working-class constituency, too poorly skilled to qualify for entry into the big unions or for work in the large armaments industry, saw him as antimilitarist, and thus attractive. He had been reelected eight times, each time by a higher plurality.
Raskob’s squat figure was somewhat reminiscent of La Guardia and Raskob played on the similarity. He wore a wide-brimmed fedora hat and when he made speeches he constantly banged the fedora against the podium. Whenever he spoke before a foreign-speaking group he had at least a few lines which he could render in the language of the group. In the wealthy part of his constituency his speeches were calm, deliberate, short, and concerned with the future. In the working-class district he was more flamboyant and talked of pay checks and pork chops. In hard fact his voting record was almost straight Democratic but few in his district knew that. Nor did they care. Raskob was a personality.
“Where are you from, son?” Raskob asked Colonel Cascio. His eyes were still peering, not yet adjusted to the thin light. His words were an automatic political response to fill vacant time.
“New York City, sir,” Colonel Cascio said.
Raskob’s head swung around and he stared at Colonel Cascio. His interest now was real.
“What part of the city?” Raskob asked.
Colonel Casdo hesitated a moment. “Central Park West,” he said, “in the Seventies,”
“Probably in the Twentieth District,” Raskob said speculatively. “You’re getting some Puerto Ricans in there now. It’s one of those swing districts. Might go either Democrat or Republican. In a few years it will be solidly Democratic.”
“Actually, Congressman Raskob, my family moved over to the East Side some years ago,” Colonel Cascio said. He turned his head sideways and glanced quickly at General Bogan. Then he added as an afterthought, “As a military man I really don’t follow politics very closely.”
General Bogan felt a slight sense of unrest, a barely recognizable sense of protectiveness. Then he recalled the carefully buried memory. It was during one of the frequent visits that General Bogan and Colonel Casdo made to New York City. One night General Bogan had been called and told that SAC was staging one of its endless surprise drills. He must be back in Omaha by morning. An Air Force car was already outside of his hotel and General Bogan ordered it to the address where Colonel Cascio was “visiting his family.”
The address was an old apartment house, aged with wind and soot, but respectable. There was, however, no cascio on the long line of door bells. Impatiently General Bogan pushed the MANAGER button and a neat, hard- faced and stocky woman appeared at the door.
“I’m looking for the Cascio apartment,” General Bogan said. “It’s rather urgent.”
“He in trouble again?” the woman asked. “You from the police?”
She squinted, made her watery blue eyes come to a focus, but could not distinguish the uniform.
