Fail Safe (8 page)

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 lcnowing 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 ip 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 hide remained. His head hung low and his nostrils blew two tiny volcanoes of dust, no bigger than a fist. The dust flew in its eyes and the bull, with sadness, slowly, closed its lids.

Black looked around the arena. The familiar faces were enjoying the scene. Their open mouths roared approval-but no sound came out. They smiled, pointed their fingers at the spectacle, bellowed soundlessly, beat one another on the back, danced with excitement. Tears of pleasure rolled down their faces.

Black's mood of reassurance vanished.

Then the terrible thing happened. The bull lifted its head, its agonized eyes fastened on Black. For a moment they stared at one another. And then, in some unknowing way, a pact was made. The bull's eyes showed relief.

Black felt himself becoming the bull. It was done effortlessly. It was as if his body oozed like a fog into the shape of the bulL The familiar Black dissolved, lost form and substance, slid into the body of the immense animal. Now he was looking up at the audience, he was bewildered by the strange colors and sounds, he was swinging his head looking for the matador.

He felt a great confusion. He also felt two kinds of dread.

The two things he dreaded had always brought him sharply awake. First, he knew that in another moment the pain of the flaying would come crashing down his nerve fiber and into his bull-brain. Secondly, he would turn and see, with his bull-eyes, the matador. Both things were so frightening that he awoke instantly.

Black tossed in his bed, looked at his watch, and saw, that he had another few minutes. Idly he wondered at what point in a dream a person began to sweat. His pajamas were wet around the neck and waist and under the arms. He felt as if he had been sweating for hours. And yet, he sensed, it was probably only for a few seconds.

He forced himself to relax. Be logical, he said to himself. He sensed again that the Dream and SAC were linked. If he could resign his commission the Dream would go. But he loved the organization, he respected the people in it, it meant as much to him, almost, as his family. And its mission was so important. But a shadow lurked in his mind, a tiny burr of unrest. It vanished when held up for examination, yet an elusive doubt remained. Something was very wrong.

He felt a moment of despair. Would he continue to awaken like this, to crash from a black terror into total wakefulness? He did not like the sudden awakenings, though as an airman, some twenty-five years before, he had gotten used to them. In those days, other sounds had brought him awake abruptly, almost like shock, with an instant heightening of the metabolic rate, a gushing of adrenalin. The whine of sirens, a rough hand shaking his shoulder on a cold English morning during World War II, the thin growing frenzy of the sound of a bomb in flight. . . then, oh yes, then he had come awake instantly. But it was a different kind of wakefulness, lacking in the interior terror of his Dream.

He made a decision and sat up in bed. The Dream was forgotten. He must start the long business of getting through the day. He forced himself to smile. No sweat. Getting across midtown New York this early would be a cinch. With luck he'd be able to check out a Cessna "Blue Canoe" and run down to Andrews by himself. In any case his time was O.K. The shuttle plane could get him to the Pentagon for the ten o'clock briefing. One way or another he'd make it. No sweat.

He looked over at the sleeping figure beside him. Betty had not stirred. She needed the sleep and he wanted to shave, dress, and clear out without awakening her. He eased out of bed and fumbled in a dresser drawer for clean lineü.

Black was a tall man. He had a roughly hewn, square, rugged handsomeness about him. Even his head conveyed the impression of angularity and squareness, as if it had been built up out of those sharply angular plane surfaces seen ip the opening examples of "How to Draw" books. He was like an unfinished piece of sculpture, sharp edges not yet

rounded off. It was not simply massiveness he conveyed, it was also a sense that he would not soften with age, his flesh would not turn to fat. He had been designed by a good draftsman, rather than by a fine artist.

His head was thickly covered with deep-brown wavy hair which he kept closely trimmed. Once in prep school he had let it grow and it had turned into a tight cap of curls. A slim and fey instructor had smiled at him across the room and said, "Our forest satyr." Black had never let his hair grow long again. His eyes were revealing and as if for protection were deep-set. They were brown eyes which fixed steadily on people. Even when he had to give a harsh reply his eyes did not waver. His perceptive subordinates could anticipate Black's mood from the narrowing of his eyes, the slow forming of laugh lines.

Black detoured into the boys' bedroom on his way to the bathroom. He had the old pilot's habit: a secret, almost subconscious, trace of permanent leave-taking with each good-bye. The boys were too big now to accept a public kiss from their father, though he would have gladly bestowed it. But early in the morning he could steal in alone and softly kiss their foreheads.

John, the twelve-year-old, was tightly balled and had orbited halfway down toward the foot of the bed, his head hidden tinder the covers. Black straightened him out gently, rearranging and retucking the blankets around his shoulders and neck. David, the fourteen-year-old, was spread-eagled across his bed, half uncovered and one foot out over the edge. Black recomposed the second bed and body. The two boys were opposites in this as in so many other things. He had spent his life, it seemed, recovering David and unsuffocating John.

As he shaved, quickly and expertly with a safety razor and Aerosol lather, he regretted the time he had

to spend away from the boys. Somehow, because Betty was seven years younger than he, Black felt a kind of paternalistic distance between himself and the three of them. He grinned into the mirror, That melted pretty damned fast when he was alone with Betty on what she laughingly referred to as her "responsive nights."

He had been born into the immensely wealthy Black family of San Francisco. They had been wealthy since the Forty-finer days when a young and anonymous man named Ned Black had made a strike on the small fork of the Yuba and had returned to San Francisco with a burro carrying dose to 8,000 ounces of gold dust and nuggets. No one knew where he was born or if he had a family. The Blacks of San Francisco began with Ned Black. He had bought great sandy tracts of San Francisco and had sold them for huge profits.