Debt of Honor

field of work was formidable.

'Sure.' Scott didn't mind the intrusion. Betsy was also the office's designated mom.

'Our old friend the SS-19,' she observed, taking her seat. 'Wow, I like what they did with it.'

'Ain't it the truth?' Scott observed, stretching to shake off his post-lunch drowsiness.

What had once been quite ugly was now rather beautiful. The missile bodies were polished stainless steel, which allowed a better view of the structure. In the old Russian green, it had looked brutish. Now it looked more like the space launcher it was supposed to be, sleeker somehow, even more impressive in its purposeful bulk.

'NASA says they've saved a whole lot of weight on the body, better materials, that sort of thing,' Scott observed. 'I really believe it now.'

'Shame they couldn't do that with their g'ddamn' gas tanks,' Mrs. Fleming observed. Scott grunted agreement. He owned a Cresta, and now his wife refused to drive in it until the tank was replaced. Which would be a couple of weeks, his dealer had informed him. The company was actually renting a car for him in their vain effort to curry public goodwill. That had meant getting a new parking sticker, which he would have to scrape off before returning the rental to Avis.

'Do we know who got the shots?' Betsy asked.

'One of ours, all I know.' Scott flipped to another slide. 'A lot of changes. They almost look cosmetic,' he observed.

'How much weight are they supposed to have saved?' He was right, Mrs. Fleming thought. The steel skin showed the circular patterns of the polishing rushes, almost like jeweling on a rifle bolt…

'According to NASA, over twelve hundred pounds on the missile body…' Another click of the remote.

'Hmph, but not there,' Betsy noted.

'That's funny.'

The top end of the missile was where the warheads went. The SS-19 was designed to carry a bunch of them. Relatively small and heavy, they were dense objects, and the missile's structure had to account for it. Any intercontinental missile accelerated from the moment its flight began to the moment the engines finally stopped, but the period of greatest acceleration came just before burnout. At that point, with most of the fuel burned off, the rate at which speed increased reached its maximum, in this case about ten gees. At the same time, the structural rigidity lent to the missile body by the quantity of fuel inside its tanks was minimal, and as a result, the structure holding the warheads had to be both sturdy and massive so as to evenly distribute the vastly increased inertial weight of the payloads.

'No, they didn't change that, did they?' Scott looked over at his colleague.

'I wonder why? This bird's supposed to orbit satellites now…'

'Heavy ones, they say, communications birds…'

'Yeah, but look at that part…'

The foundation for the warhead 'bus' had to be strong across its entire area. The corresponding foundation for a communications satellite was essentially a thin steel annulus, a flat, sturdy donut that invariably looked too light for its job. This one was more like an unusually heavy wagon wheel.

Scott unlocked a file drawer and removed a recent photo of an SS-19 taken by an American officer on the verification team in Russia. He handed it over to Mrs. Fleming without comment.

'Look here. That's the standard structure, just what the Russians designed in, maybe with better steel, better finish. They changed almost everything else, didn't they?' Fleming asked. 'Why not this?'

'Looked that way to me. Keeping that must have cost them—what? A hundred pounds, maybe more?'

'That doesn't make sense, Chris. This is the first place you want to save weight. Every kilo you save here is worth four or five on the first stage.'

Both stood and walked to the screen. 'Wait a minute…'

'Yeah, this fits the bus. They didn't change it. No mating collar for a satellite. They didn't change it at all.' Scott shook his head.

'You suppose they just kept the bus design for their trans-stage?'

'Even if they did, they don't need all this mass at the top end, do they?'

'It's almost like they wanted it to stay the way it was.'

'Yeah. I wonder why.'

14—Reflections

'Thirty seconds,' the assistant director said as the final commercial rolled for the Sunday-morning audience. The entire show had centered on Russia and Europe, which suited Ryan just fine.

'The one question I can't ask.' Bob Holtzman chuckled before the tape started rolling again. 'What's it like to be the National Security Advisor in a country with no threat to its national security?'

'Relaxing,' Ryan answered with a wary look at the three cameras. None had their telltale red lights burning.

'So why the long hours?' Kris Hunter asked in a voice less sharp than her look.

'If I don't show up for work,' Jack lied, 'people might notice how unimportant I am.' Bad news. They still don't know about India, but they know something's up. Damn. He wanted to keep it quiet. It was one of those things that public pressure would hurt, not help.

'Four! Three! Two! One!' The assistant director jerked his finger at the moderator, a television journalist named Edward Johnson.

'Dr. Ryan, what does the Administration make of changes in the Japanese cabinet?'

'Well, of course, that's a result of the current difficulties in trade, which is not really in my purview. Basically what we see there is an internal political situation which the Japanese people can quite easily handle without our advice,' Jack announced in his earnest-statesman's voice, the one that had taken a few elocution lessons to perfect. Mainly he'd had to learn to speak more slowly.

Kris Hunter leaned forward. 'But the leading candidate to take the prime ministership is a long-standing enemy of the United States—'

'That's a little strong,' Ryan interrupted with a good-natured smile.

'His speeches, his writings, his books are not exactly friendly.'

'I suppose,' Ryan said with a dismissive wave and a crooked smile.

'The difference between discourse among friendly nations and unfriendly ones, oddly enough, is that the former can often be more acrimonious than the latter.' Not bad, Jack…

'You are not concerned?'

'No,' Ryan said with a gentle shake of the head. Short answers on a show like this tended to intimidate reporters, he thought.

'Thank you for coming in this morning, Dr. Ryan.'

'A pleasure as always.'

Ryan continued to smile until the camera lights blinked off. Then he counted slowly to ten. Then he waited until the other reporters removed their microphones. Then he removed his microphone and stood up and moved away from the working part of the set. And then it was safe to speak. Bob Holtzman followed Jack into the makeup room. The cosmeticians were off drinking coffee, and Ryan took a fistful of HandiWipes and passed the container to Holtzman. Over the mirror was a large slab of wood engraved on which was, IN HERE EVERYTHING IS OFF THE RECORD.

'You know the real reason behind equal rights for women?' Holtzman asked. 'It wasn't equal pay, or bras, or any of that crap.'

'Right,' Jack agreed. 'It was forcing them to wear makeup. We deserved everything we got. God, I hate this shit!' he added, wiping the pancake off his forehead. 'Makes me feel like a cheap whore.'

'That isn't too unusual for a political figure, is it?' Kristyn Hunter asked, taking wipes to do the same.

Jack laughed. 'No, but it's kind of impolite for you to say so, ma'am.'

Am I a political figure now? Ryan asked himself. I suppose I am. How