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 Cascio 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 paychecks 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 Cascio 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 Cascio 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 doorbells. 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.
“Cascio’s got no apartment here,” she said. “He lives in the janitor’s quarters down the steps to the left. If it’s a police thing you can tell him for me it’s the last time. He can just clear out.” She leaned forward, sharing a confidence in a faintly whining voice. “Officer, I’d of fired the sonofabitch a long time ago, but janitors are hard to keep.”
General Bogan went down the steps two at a time and rapped on the door at the bottom. There was a shuffle inside and he heard a Southern-accented voice say, “You got no right, son, to barge in and start in on us like this. Damn it, I won’t stand for it.”
The door swung open and the light from four naked bulbs in an old brass chandelier caught everything in the room in a pitiless and hard illumination.
The man at the door was unquestionably Cascio’s father, they had the same features. But the man was drunk, his face slack, his eyes bloodshot, his pants baggy. He had the pinched, furtive, crabbed look of the long-time drunkard. He looked like an older, ruined version of his son.
Colonel Cascio was sitting behind a table covered with a linoleum cloth. He sat straight in the chair, an untouched plate of barbecued spare ribs and black beans in front of him. Leaning against a stove was Colonel Cascio’s mother. She had a waspish look and was very thin and wore an old cotton dress and black felt slippers which were too large for her. General Bogan realized that she also was a drunkard… and not only because she held a pint of muscatel in her hand. It had to do with the posture, the beaten face, the suspicious eyes.
“Sir, I am General Bogan and I am calling for Colonel Cascio,” General Bogan said. Standing in darkness he realized that his aide had not yet recognized him. At his words Colonel Cascio came half out of his chair, a look of pure agony on his face.
“Let the gennelmun in, Walt,” Colonel Cascio’s mother said. Her face spread into a mask of welcome, so broad it was grotesque. She stepped toward the door, her feet spread, balancing carefully. An amber thread of muscatel flowed from the bottle onto the floor.
The father, cued on some deep level, bowed to General Bogan. He muttered some extravagant words of welcome. “Son always speaks well of you, sir… honored have ya’ eat with us… or anything… just anything.”
There was a long moment of silence, a moment in which General Bogan understood something which he had never bothered to analyze before. Colonel Cascio’s parents had Tennessee accents; they were hill people who never adjusted to the city life. And they were the reason that Colonel Cascio never spoke with a Southern accent, never drank, and was unmarried. His military career was everything.
Colonel Cascio had broken the squalid tableau. He stood straight, walked to the doorway and saluted General Bogan.
“Yes, sir,” he said, and he was under perfect control. “I gather we’re needed for a drill.”
“That’s it, Colonel. Sorry to break up your time at home.”
Colonel Cascio smiled thinly at him. He turned and, deliberately and heavily, as if he were swinging shut a bank vault, closed the door. Behind the thin panels his father’s voice yelped, “Ungrateful damned snot-nosed kid. So damned uppity.”
They got quietly in the car and neither of them had ever spoken of the episode.
General Bogan himself came from a Tennessee family with a strong military tradition. They had always lived in the high hills of Tennessee and the land had never been able to support all of the sons. The military had been the only acceptable non-farming occupation for Bogan’s family. Ever since colonial days at least one Bogan had been in the armed forces of the United States. Some had been enlisted men, some officers. During the Civil War, Bogans had fought on both sides. Bogan’s grandfather had been a naval captain and an aide to Admiral Mahan. His father had been a sergeant in the infantry and had been decorated twice in World War I with the Silver Star. General Grant Lee Bogan’s first and middle names came to him, not because his father had a sense of humor, but because he thought that General Grant and General Lee were the greatest generals in American history. The fact that they had fought on opposite sides did not appear to him to be ironic. Grant Lee Bogan was the first of the Bogans to be a general officer.
Bogan’s attention snapped back to the War Room. It was Knapp’s voice saying, “It’s almost like working in a submarine, isn’t it, General?”
“Only the air lock reminds me of a submarine,” General Bogan said. “After a while you get used to being four hundred feet under the surface and it’s just like any other job.”
General Bogan was not telling the complete truth. In fact he had disliked the War Room when he was first assigned as its commander. He had joined the Air Force back in the 1930s for one specific reason: to fly planes. For almost thirty-two years he had done precisely that. He had flown the early biplane fighters, later the P-38, the P-51, and after the war had moved into the jet bombers. He flew “by the book” and had a reputation for being more methodical than imaginative. But to his methodicalness there was also added courage. These two things had earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II.
He had been flying a P-38 escorting a group of B-17s on a day raid over Germany. It was early in the war and the fighter pilots could not resist temptation. Some of them made passes at Focke-Wulfs which were still at a considerable distance. Others could not resist joining in a dogfight which was already being amply handled by other fighters. General Bogan flew a perfectly mechanical and orthodox flight. He stayed with the bombers he had been ordered to defend, he nursed his fuel supply, he fired only in short bursts. The result was that every other one of the escorting fighters had reached its fuel range fifty miles before the target was in sight. One by one they swung away for the flight back to England. When the B-17s came over target General Bogan was the only fighter with them. He stumbled into a perfect setup. The Focke-Wulfs, thinking that all the fighters had left, became careless. A long string of eight fighters came up from below to strike at the bellies of the B-17s. Bogan put on additional speed and methodically began to clobber the line of German fighters. He came in on the blind port quarter of each of the Focke-Wulfs, gave a short burst directly into the cockpit hoping to kill the pilot before he could give a warning. Neatly, following the instructions he had been given during months of training, Bogan shot down six of the eight Focke-Wulfs. In avoiding the exploding debris of the six planes he pulled back quickly on the yoke and gained several hundred feet of altitude. In that moment the seventh and eighth planes saw him and instantly put on speed and began to loop back toward him. Again Bogan followed the book. Using the slight speed advantage which the P-38 had he kept just far enough ahead of the two German fighters to be out of cannon range. They followed him almost to the English Channel, tantalized by the prospect of a kill, made reckless by the death of their six comrades. Bogan had calmly called ahead on his radio and twenty miles from the English Channel a group of P-38s were circling high in the sky waiting for him. They came screaming down, every advantage on their side, and thirty seconds later the last of the Focke-Wulfs were destroyed.
Bogan always felt guilty about receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. All he had done was follow instructions. Like everyone that flew in combat he had felt fear, deep and rooted and unending, as long as he was in action. But on the operation which earned his decoration he felt no special danger of risk—only the same familiar fear.
The last plane which General Bogan had flown in operation was the B-58, the Hustler. Then he had almost failed a physical examination. It was not clear-cut. The flight surgeon had hesitated, evaded his eyes, talked about the kinesthetic atrophy and its correlation with age, eye-hand reflex and reaction times. The discussion had been general but they both knew what it meant. If General Bogan insisted on flying the Hustler he would be labeled physically unfit. If he would content himself with flying the slower bombers or fly as a copilot he could stay in the air. It had been a hard moment. Then General Bogan had mentioned, quite casually, that he’d been thinking of turning his efforts away from operations and more to strategy. “Flying is a young man’s game,” he lied. “We oldsters have to accept the responsibility for the big picture.”
In the end the two men wordlessly agreed. Bogan would shift to a ground assignment provided he could occasionally fly T-33s, “to keep his hand in.”
In two weeks General Bogan had been promoted to lieutenant general and assigned as commanding officer of the War Room.
General Bogan looked sideways at Raskob. He understood something of the disappointment that Raskob felt. He could recall his own initial impression of the War Room all too sharply. General Bogan had hated the elevator. The elevator shot downwards in one long sickening 400-foot drop. The last five feet of deceleration gave him a sharp sense of leaden helplessness. Then, after the elevator doors closed, the small room in which one stood became a compression chamber. The air pressure in the War Room was kept a little higher than normal atmosphere so that no dust could filter in to foul the machinery or atomic fallout to contaminate the humans.
Another thing that General Bogan had disliked was the smell of the room. All of the dozens of desks on the long sloping floor of the War Room were in fact electrical consoles, which contained thousands of electrical units each coated with a thin layer of protective shellac. When all of the consoles were warmed up the smell of shellac became thin and acrid, slightly sickening.
It had taken General Bogan a long time to forget the old familiar smells of airplanes. These were the muscular and masculine odors of great engines, the kerosene stink of jets, the special private smell of leather and men’s sweat which hung in every pilot’s cockpit.
For months the War Room had seemed effete and too delicate and also quite unbelievable. With time General Bogan had changed. He came to realize that the desks, small and gray, were incredibly intricate. The quiet, low-pitched, gray and trim room was enormously deceptive. Simplicity was its mask. Its primness hid an intricacy and complexity that, when fully apprehended, was almost an artistic concept. By radio, teletype, message, written report, letter, computers, memory banks, card sorters, conveyors, tubes, telephones, and word of mouth, information came to the War Room. It came in the form of calculations, fear, courage, intuition, deduction, opinion, wild guesses, half-truths, facts, statistics, recommendations, equivocations, rumor, informed ignorance, and ignorant information; all were put through a rigorous procedure with one of two conclusions. Either a statement was a fact or it was expressed as a probability of fact.
General Bogan looked at Raskob and wished he could communicate his secret vision. The War Room had become a ship, a plane, a command, a place of decision. Although locked in hundreds of tons of concrete and millions of tons of earth the room gave him a curious sense of motion. Perversely, the descent by elevator came to have something of the excitement of the take-off. From his desk, in the front center of the room, he had the impression of flying, and flying entirely on instruments. He also came to respect the crew of this strange vehicle of his imagination. They were professional, every bit as professional as any air crew he had ever commanded. He was not the faceless servant, an automatic cog, in an elaborate machine. The War Room was the most delicate of man-machines. Most of the time the machines received, analyzed, and made the decision. But just often enough it had been made clear to him that he was the commander. He was still in the profession of making decisions.
General Bogan knew that his visitors’ eyes were probably now adjusted enough so that they could walk down the incline to the Command Desk.
“Colonel Cascio, will you project the naval situation in the Pacific on the Big Board?” General Bogan said, starting to walk down the slight incline.
“Yes, sir,” Colonel Cascio said and walked briskly ahead of the party. By the time they reached the big central desk he had pressed down a lever labeled PACIFIC, NAVAL. Instantly the picture on the Big Board began to dissolve. The Mercator projection of the world disappeared. For a moment the screen was blank. Then in sharp strong outline the entire screen was covered by a map of the Pacific Ocean. Colonel Cascio looked up at General Bogan. “Would you like to start with the Russian submarine layout?” Colonel Cascio asked.
General Bogan nodded agreement. Colonel Cascio pushed two levers. Suddenly the map of the Pacific contained sixteen red blips. At the same time a small machine at a nearby desk began to click and a tape poured out of its side. One of the red blips seemed to be only a few inches off of Los Angeles. Another was a foot or so due west of Pearl Harbor. The remainder were scattered around the Pacific.
Raskob went rigid. Unthinkingly he jammed his fedora on his head.
“Well, sweet Jesus, you don’t mean to tell me that all those little things are Russian submarines?” Raskob asked. “That one there looks like it’s almost in Los Angeles harbor.”
“Sir, that Soviet submarine is approximately fifty miles from Los Angeles harbor, and in or under the high seas of the Pacific,” General Bogan said quietly. “Unless they come within the three-mile limit or give signs of acting in an aggressive manner all we can do is observe them.”
“Look, General, this looks dangerous to me,” Raskob said. “What the hell are they doing with submarines that close to our shores?”
“I would presume they are doing the same thing that we do when we send U-2 planes and surveillance satellites around and sometimes over the Soviet border or set up radar stations in Turkey. They are scanning us.”
It was the kind of explanation that Raskob understood. He relaxed slightly. When he spoke his voice had a new hardness.
“How do you know that those submarines are Russian and that they are really there?” he asked.
“Sir, the Navy has spread a pattern of sonobuoys around the Pacific,” Colonel Cascio said. “They are extremely sensitive instruments and they pick up any kinds of sounds that are made any place in the Pacific. The information is transmitted to Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii and interpreted by a sailor-specialist there. The specialists are so good that they can tell the difference between a whale breaking wind and a submarine blowing tanks.”
Colonel Cascio turned to the machine on the adjoining desk and tore off the tape. He handed it to Raskob. “When the Big Board is switched to a specific projection a signal is tripped and simultaneously the various memory banks which store millions of bits of information are automatically searched for bits which are keyed to the projection. These come out on the tape.”
The four men bent over the tape which was stretched out on the desk. The first sentence read, “Soviet submarine Kronstadt, two torpedo tubes, operated radar equipment for 30 seconds at 1820 slant line 18 slant line 00. Submerged depth 120 feet, proceeded northwest to point WLDZ at 6.5 knots.” The tape went on to give estimates of the fuel level in various Soviet submarines in the Pacific, the number of messages they had transmitted, the time they had been on patrol.
“If we wanted we could tap another memory bank and get the complete strategic information on the Russian submarine situation around the entire world,” General Bogan said. “That would include the percentage of their national steel product that has gone into submarines, how many of them are nuclear powered, how many have atomic missiles. Almost anything.”
“I’ll be damned,” Raskob said. “That’s a nice gadget.”
“That gadget and the other gadgets in this room cost over a billion dollars, Mr. Raskob,” General Bogan said, carefully keeping any irony out of his voice. “There is another room like this at the Pentagon and another at Colorado Springs. There are also several smaller versions at other locations around the world. There are also a number of planes, one of which is in the air at all times, which give a miniature version of this same information.”
“Where are all these other rooms?” Raskob asked.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I cannot give you that information except on orders from my superiors or the President,” General Bogan said. He hesitated and then went on, warned by the flush on Raskob’s face. “It’s what we call ‘top secret for concerned eyes only.’ That means that only those people who have a need for the information and can demonstrate that need have access to the information.”
Suddenly Raskob smiled. “That rules me out,” he said. “The only use I could have for the information would be to sell it to the Communists or use it to beat hell out of the military people at an appropriation hearing. What other kind of stuff can you show up on that board?”
Colonel Cascio leaned toward the levers on the desk. Before he touched them, however, a blue light began to flash over the Big Board. It flashed quickly a half-dozen times and then glowed steadily. The levers on the desk snapped back to neutral position without being touched by Colonel Cascio’s fingers. General Bogan and Colonel Cascio stared at the Big Board. Already it had gone into another dissolve. A ticker machine at another desk-console started to stutter. The screen went blank and then steadied down on a large projection of the area between Greenland and Canada. From a door at the side of the room six officers entered and moved to various desks. As instruments and scopes at the desks went on the illumination began to brighten the room.
Both Raskob and Knapp were staring at the board and glancing around the room with fascination.
“What’s happened, General?” Raskob asked.
“I don’t know yet,” General Bogan said. Nothing in his manner indicated there was any cause for concern. “All I know is that we have gone to Condition Blue, which is our lowest position of readiness.” He glanced at Colonel Cascio.
Colonel Cascio turned and walked over to the machine that was stuttering. He looked at the tape and then tore it off. By the time he returned to the desk the map had steadied down and a tiny bright red blip showed between Greenland and the eastern coast of Canada.
“Gentlemen, that is an unidentified flying object which has been picked up by our radar,” General Bogan said, his eyes fastened to the Big Board. “Until we identify it positively it will remain a red blip and we will regard it as hostile.”
The two visitors stared, mesmerized, at the red blip. It moved slowly across the projection. General Bogan knew precisely what was going through their minds. There was a possibility that they were viewing a real enemy, a plane or a missile, which was flying toward the United States with a hostile intention.
“What are you going to do about it?” Knapp asked. Since he had entered the War Room his voice had never been raised above a whisper. Now the whisper was almost hoarse.
“That information, Mr. Knapp, is not classified,” General Bogan said with a smile. “The Soviets can make a good guess about what we are doing. We always have a certain number of SAC bombers in the air. They have been informed of the Condition Blue and will start to fly toward their Fail-Safe points,” General Bogan said.
“Fail-Safe?” Raskob asked.
“The Fail-Safe point is different for each group,” General Bogan explained. “They also change from day to day. This is a fixed point in the sky where the planes will orbit until they get a positive order to go in. Without it they must return to the United States. This is called Positive Control. Fail-Safe simply means that if something fails it is still safe. In short, we cannot go to war except by a direct order. No bomber can go in on its own discretion. We give that order.”
“They must get the order to ‘go’ by radio,” Raskob said. “Is that right?”
“That’s right, Mr. Raskob,” General Bogan said. “Actually they do not receive the order verbally but it is transmitted to a small box which we call the Fail-Safe box, which is aboard each plane. That box is operated by a code which changes from day to day and can be operated only at the express order of the President of the United States. You have probably read that he is accompanied everywhere by a warrant officer from the Air Force who has the current code that would operate the box.”
“Why don’t you just give them a direct verbal yes or no and save yourself all this trouble?” Raskob asked.
General Bogan could tell Raskob was becoming restless. His eyes were fastened on the red blip and its inexorable progress.
“Actually we do both. But an enemy could easily come up on the same radio frequency and give whatever message it wanted just by imitating the voice of the President or one of our commanding officers,” General Bogan said. With a smile, he added, “Remember that our President has a rather distinctive regional accent which can be easily imitated. Also, when people talk over the radio there is often a misunderstanding of what is said, especially if there is any radio interference. But there can be no interference with the Fail-Safe box. It can be activated in only one manner and at the express order of the President.”
The Congressman turned from the board and spoke sharply to the General. “And what if someone up there—or down here—cracks?”
“You will probably remember, Congressman Raskob, that last July, the Air Force testified before your committee on our program to give a psychological screening to any airman who had anything to do with nuclear weapons,” General Bogan added, trying to keep the irony from his voice. “From generals down to privates.”
“Yes, sir, there are a number of people who believe that the Air Force has a high incidence of madmen among its air crews,” Colonel Cascio said with a smile. “A few years back there was a lot of upset about whether or not an individual madman, ranging from a general down to the pilot of a plane, could start a war. With this procedure we may still have the madmen around but there is nothing they can do to start a war.”
Raskob’s eyes were back on the Big Board. Now he licked his lips. When he spoke his voice had something more than the rasp of irritation in it.
“Well, what else are you doing?” he asked brusquely. “Jesus Christ, that could be an ICBM or a Russian bomber and as far as I can tell you aren’t doing very much about it.”
General Bogan could not resist. “We are doing a good deal right now. Fighter planes are flying toward the unidentified object, ICBMs are going through the initial stage of preparation for launching, whole squadrons of bombers are being fueled and armed in case it really is an enemy vehicle that is coming toward us,” he said. “But, Congressman Raskob, if we went full out every time an unidentified object appeared on the screen we would need four times the appropriations that we now get from Congress. All-out safety is a very expensive thing.”
Raskob missed the irony. “What do you mean ‘every time that this happens’?” Raskob asked. “How often does this happen?”
“About six times a month,” General Bogan said. “And if we went straight to Condition Red each time it would probably cost around a billion dollars.”
Instantly Raskob’s face relaxed, his whole posture became easy. He laughed.
“O.K., General, you win,” Raskob said. “I got that bit about the congressional appropriations. But you should have told me that it happened six times a month. It can’t be very dangerous if it happens that often.”
“Sir, we never take a chance,” Colonel Cascio said. His voice had an odd sharp inflection to it, almost reproving. “Right now we don’t know what that object is. We treat it exactly as if it were an enemy vehicle of some sort. If we cannot identify it in a few more minutes or it acts suspiciously we will go to Condition Yellow. If we still are unsatisfied or things occur that complicate the picture we might even go to Condition Green. The last condition, as you know, is Condition Red. We have never gone to Condition Red, for that would mean that we actually considered ourselves at war and would launch weapons, all of our weapons, at the enemy. What all of this machinery assures is that if we do go to war it is not by accident or because of the act of some madman. This system is infallible.”
***
Colonel Cascio was wrong.
Branching off from the War Room is a warren of powerfully built and beautifully orchestrated rooms. Each room has a function. Each is protected by sheaths of reinforced concrete and a layer of lead. Each is air-conditioned. Each is linked to the War Room by alternate methods of communication. The whole thing is as symmetrical, efficient, and orderly as the mind and muscle of man can make it.
One room in the warren about the War Room is labeled Presidential Command Net. The door is guarded by an Air Force man twenty-four hours a day. Within the room—of classified length and classified breadth—there are six low, gray, squat machines. Above them is a sign which reads Fail-Safe Activating Mechanisms. Below that sentence and in heavy raised red letters are the words To be used only at express Presidential order. There are two desks in the room. One of them is in front of the bank of six machines. The other is behind the bank of machines.
Seated behind each of the desks is an enlisted man whose sole duty is to check the mechanical condition of the activation machine. The machines are deliberately not covered. All of the operating parts must be visible to the two inspectors. The air which is forced into the room is triple-filtered so that it is dustless.
At about the moment that Colonel Cascio said the word “infallible” a sergeant sitting at one of the desks stood up and walked around the bank of machines.
“Frank, how you fixed for cigarettes?” the sergeant asked. “I’m out.”
Frank tossed him a pack of Chesterfields. The sergeant reached to catch them. At that moment in Machine No. 6 a small condenser blew. It was a soundless event. There was a puff of smoke no larger than a walnut that was gone instantly.
The sergeant sniffed the air. He turned to Frank. “Frank, do you smell something?” he asked. “Like something burning?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Frank said. “You bumming cigarettes all the time and then not paying me back, that burns me.”
They grinned at one another. The sergeant returned to his desk. Things returned to normal… almost. A small shield hid from the sergeant’s view the tiny knob of burnt carbon on top of the disabled condenser. No instruments on the table indicated a malfunction.
***
Congressman Raskob was a tough man. He regained his composure quickly. Now he was even enjoying the situation. It had something of the elements of politics in it.
“Can you project the fighter planes that are flying toward the unidentified object onto the Big Board?” Raskob asked.
“Certainly, sir,” Colonel Cascio said.
He moved some levers. A few feet from the red blip a phosphorescent worm began to glow, became more distinct, and then broke itself into six separate blips, all black. They were diminishing the distance between themselves and the red blip at a rate which was perceptible to the human eye.
“Those are Canadian fighters. They are probably subsonic planes so they will close the unidentified object in a half hour or so.”
“Colonel Cascio, what information do we have on the UFO?”
Colonel Cascio walked over to the machine and tore off a piece of tape. He handed it to General Bogan. It read, “UFO at Angels 30, speed 525, heading 196.”
“That means that it’s at 30,000 feet going 525 miles an hour on a compass heading of 196,” General Bogan said.
“Just suppose, General, that the planes get there right on schedule, what are they likely to find?” Raskob asked.
“Usually it is a commercial airliner that has neglected to file a flight plan or has been blown off course by high winds,” General Bogan said. “But keep in mind, sir, that there is a big blank space over the Atlantic where neither the radar sets from Europe nor America have the range to pick up planes. This wasn’t much of a problem with slow-flying planes at low altitudes, but with jets going at high speeds and altitude they can drift a couple of hundred miles while they are ‘in the gap.’ Occasionally the radar itself makes a mistake and gets a blip off the moon or a swarm of geese or gets a false echo from a satellite. But the radar mistakes have pretty well been eliminated since 1960.”
“Suppose it just looks like a commercial airliner but has actually been loaded up with thermonuclear bombs and is trying to sneak through, masquerading as a commercial plane?” Raskob asked.
“It’s possible, but not likely,” General Bogan shrugged. “The fighter pilots would raise the plane on radio and ask where it had started from and what its destination was and this would then be checked out with Federal Aviation Agency operators to make sure it was a legitimate flight. Also the fighter pilots, if they are the least suspicious, get close enough to the plane to give it a good inspection. If there were seams and hinges that indicated a bomb bay on what looked like a DC-8 that would change the situation. Plenty.”
“What would you do in that case?” Knapp asked. “I mean that even after the fighters see the plane they still have some suspicions?”
“Probably not a great deal,” General Bogan said. “The fighter pilots would order the plane to land or to turn around and if it ignored orders then we would have a tough decision. We would probably go to Condition Yellow and would start to launch more fighters and also bring up some of the bombers to a higher degree of readiness. But just a single unidentified plane by itself, still over a thousand miles from any Canadian or American city, doesn’t constitute a very great danger. Any conceivable enemy would be launching a number of planes at us. What we would do is make sure that the single plane did not have a runaway pilot who wanted to commit hara-kiri on New York or Montreal.”
“General, can you add the SAC bombers that are flying toward their Fail-Safe point to the board?” Raskob asked.
“Yes, sir,” General Bogan said. He nodded at Colonel Cascio. Colonel Cascio started to move some levers. “What you will see is a fuller projection of the Northern Hemisphere. It’s something like looking down at the earth from directly above the North Pole and at an altitude of about one hundred miles.”
Again there was a slow dissolve on the Big Board. When it had firmed up, the longitude lines came together at a neat point in the center of the board. The unidentified flying object and the six fighters were now tiny and because the scale was much greater they were closing at what seemed a much slower pace. Six large green blips, fragmented into small dots of luminosity, swam into clear visibility. Even to the unaccustomed eyes of Raskob and Knapp it was clear that these blips were moving at a much higher speed than either the fighters or the unidentified flying object. Each of the green fragmented blips was moving toward a green cross which in each case was well outside the Soviet boundaries, but which formed a rough circle around her borders.
“As you can see, the bombers are moving much faster than either the fighters or the UFO,” Colonel Cascio said. “Those are Vindicator Bombers and they fly at over 1500 miles an hour. You also notice that some of them, such as the group based on Okinawa, can get to their Fail-Safe point very quickly so they jink around a good deal. The idea is to have all of the planes arrive at the Fail-Safe point at the same moment. The one which has the farthest distance to travel is Group Six, which is the one over the Bering Strait. As you can see, it is moving fast and straight toward the green cross over St. Matthew Island, which is just about at longitude 80 degrees. That is its Fail-Safe point.”
“Seven minutes to Fail-Safe,” a loud clear voice suddenly said in words that could be heard throughout the whole War Room. It was a tape-recorded voice that was geared to one of the calculating machines.
“That is a recorded voice and it goes on automatically at seven minutes and starts a countdown,” General Bogan said. “It is very unlikely that the planes will actually get to the Fail-Safe point. That happens very rarely. Usually the UFO or the radar disturbance is identified well before the bombers get to the Fail-Safe point. When that happens we simply raise the Vindicators on a predetermined radio frequency and order them back to their bases, or to a refueling point. I would say that in only one in twenty Conditions Blue do the planes reach the Fail-Safe point.”
“But assume that they reach the Fail-Safe point and the unidentified object is still unidentified, then what?” Raskob asked.
“Just one helluva lot,” Knapp said unexpectedly.
All three of the men looked at him.
“Mr. Knapp’s firm manufactures some of the equipment that goes into operation at that point,” General Bogan explained. “The first thing that happens is that automatically we go to Condition Yellow. Even if the situation has not changed materially, the passage of time constitutes a danger. Secondly, a number of supporting light jet bombers equipped with defensive gear and groups of fighter planes would start to fly toward the Fail-Safe point in support of the entire operation.”
“Six minutes to Fail-Safe,” the mechanical voice said.
One of the doors in the side of the War Room opened and four officers walked in and sat down at various desk consoles.
“Actually you are seeing a pretty unusual Condition Blue,” General Bogan said. “Usually we have the situation analyzed and solved well before this. Just as a precaution, once we get to six minutes to Fail-Safe we start to man the various machines in the War Room.”
Both General Bogan and Colonel Cascio were looking steadily at the UFO. The two blips seemed almost to have merged. For a few seconds the larger fragmented blip of the fighter plane obscured the blip of the UFO. General Bogan nodded his head at Colonel Cascio. Colonel Cascio walked to a machine and pulled off a piece of tape. He handed it to General Bogan.
At this moment the UFO disappeared from the screen.
“The unidentified object is now over the Nenieux Islands off Baffin Bay,” General Bogan read. “The UFO is losing altitude rapidly. Our fighters overflew and are now making visual search. No visual contact as yet. The radar signal is erratic.”
“Five minutes to Fail-Safe,” the mechanical voice said. “From now until Fail-Safe, time will be given in half minutes.”
“General, what the hell happened to that thing?” Raskob asked. “It’s gone.”
“Colonel Cascio, let’s go to Condition Yellow,” General Bogan said briskly.
Raskob and Knapp both swung about and stared at General Bogan. He did not take his eyes from the Big Board.
“There is nothing to worry about, gentlemen, this is fairly orthodox,” General Bogan said. “The UFO is not acting in the characteristic way and I have the option to go to Condition Yellow. I have taken that option, because the UFO has dropped from 30,000 feet and disappeared in the grass. ‘Grass’ is the fuzz at the bottom of a radarscope which is caused by interference from hills, some inherent defect in the tubes, and other things we don’t quite understand. But once the plane is ‘in the grass’ it is lost to radar. It may be a plane with mechanical trouble about to crash, but it is conceivable that it is an enemy plane taking evasive action.”
General Bogan turned and looked at the two visitors. Both of them had a look which he had come to recognize. It was a look compounded of excitement, horror, and malice. It was not a pleasant look to see, but General Bogan had learned long ago that even for experienced airmen there was a morbid fascination with plane crashes.
“Four and one-half minutes to Fail-Safe,” the voice said.
On the Big Board the six Vindicator blips were drawing close to the Fail-Safe crosses. It was an elegant maneuver, possessing all of the grace of ballet dancers positioning themselves on a stage. Each group was precisely the same distance from its Fail-Safe point and each was now moving at maximum speed.
“Four minutes to Fail-Safe.”
One of the desk-consoles started to chatter. A major tore off the tape and handed it to General Bogan. He did not even have to think about the words.
“Go to Condition Green,” General Bogan barked. “And project the light bombers, the Skyscrapper support, and the jet tankers on the Big Board.”
“What the hell—” Raskob started to say, but stopped in mid-sentence as General Bogan raised his hand.
The light over the Big Board went green. There was a sharp, piercing klaxon sound that cut through the room. Doors began to open and in thirty seconds every desk-console in the room was manned.
“Three and a half minutes to Fail-Safe,” the voice went on relentlessly.
Strange shapes were blossoming all over the Big Board. Behind each of the Vindicator groups appeared a large single blip. These were air-borne tankers. Two fragmented blips appeared on the port and starboard quarter of the Vindicators and began to angle toward them. These were the support fighters which are always activated in a Fail-Safe maneuver but which had not been projected on the Big Board until that moment.
Colonel Cascio quickly explained the situation to the two visitors, but without taking his eye from the board.
“Three minutes to Fail-Safe.”
“Can you tell us why you went to Condition Green?” Knapp asked, in a whisper.
“No, sir, I cannot tell you, for the reason which I gave earlier,” General Bogan said without looking at them. His voice was flat and imperative. “Colonel Cascio, will you come with me to the 413-L desk?”
He looked at Raskob and Knapp as he turned, felt an impulse to explain, and then felt a sudden pressure of anxiety.
When they reached the desk General Bogan handed the slip of paper to Colonel Cascio. It said, “Extended DEW Line Station No. 4.6 on UFO. Some atmospheric interference, but UFO is not air-breathing vehicle.”
“Two and a half minutes to Fail-Safe,” the mechanical voice said. Now the voice was not as loud, for the dozens of machines in the room gave off a low collective hum which toned down its harsh clarity.
“Not an air-breather?” Colonel Cascio asked. There was awe in his voice. Colonel Cascio turned to the officer at the desk and said, “Try to get DEW Line No. 4.6 and see if they have any dope on the confirmation of the UFO.”
The officer repeated the order but even as he spoke his fingers were adjusting dials and levers. A line of three green lights went on.
“Two minutes to Fail-Safe.”
“If it is not an air-breather,” General Bogan said slowly, “it might be a commercial plane which has lost power on all four engines. It would not give off enough air turbulence for even the DEW system’s new turbulence detectors to be able to pick up.”
“One and a half minutes to Fail-Safe.”
“If it is a commercial plane that has lost power, we’ll know the answer right away,” Colonel Cascio said. “A pilot can stretch a flight with dead engines only just so far and then he’ll have to crash. If the blip disappears we can assume that it is a commercial plane that crashed with all engines dead.”
General Bogan stared at Colonel Cascio for a moment. “Not necessarily,” he said evenly. “Get those two visitors out of here.”
Colonel Cascio moved toward Knapp and Raskob with an animal-like speed. He spoke to them quickly. Raskob’s voice was raised in protest. At once General Bogan moved toward him.
“Now look here, God damn it, General, if we are going to go to war our lives are as involved as yours and I want to know all about it,” Raskob said.
“Who said anything about going to war?” General Bogan asked. Suddenly his voice had a whiplike quality. “Colonel Cascio ordered you out of this room and that was my order he was carrying out.”
“One minute to Fail-Safe.”
Raskob had spread his feet. He had a pyramidal, fundamental, ferocious look about him. General Bogan realized instantly that here was a man used to fighting.
“Don’t try that crap on me, General,” Raskob said. “As I read the situation right now we are one minute from going to war and either I am going to get the hell out of here and back to my family in New York or I am going to stay right here and see what happens. The one thing I am not going to do is let you put me off in a toilet or one of these little cells of yours. Not without a fight. I mean that, General.”
“One-half minute to Fail-Safe,” the voice said. “Count down will now be by seconds. Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three…”
General Bogan looked at Raskob and knew that he could not get the man out of the room without a fight. There were other things to do. He turned away and spoke to Colonel Cascio.
“It might not be a commercial plane on a crash angle,” he said. “It might be an enemy mocked-up rocket plane which faked a flame-out on all four jet engines and then when it got below 500 feet it would be below the effective range of our radar and come in low.”
A look of pain went across Colonel Cascio’s face.
“You are right, General,” Colonel Cascio said. “It is a possibility.”
General Bogan realized suddenly that the look of pain was on Cascio’s face because he had ignored a point of logic and not because of the situation.
“Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…”
The teletype on the 413-L desk started to clatter. The officer in charge of the desk leaned back, away from the tape, so that the other two men could have a clear view of it. The tape came out at the normal speed but to General Bogan it seemed to emerge with deliberate slowness.
“UFO has confirmation of Boeing 707 but ‘grass’ obscures total impression,” the tape said. “Operators state that despite interference UFO had normal 707 confirmation.”
“Eight, seven, six, five…”
On the Big Board the six bomber groups were at the very edge of converging with the green crosses which marked their Fail-Safe points. Each of them was exactly the same distance from its green cross. But the distance was tiny. The blip of the UFO was now invisible although occasionally it glowed and then disappeared. In countless war games General Bogan had seen fighters and even heavy bombers come in so low and fast, jinking, weaving, taking advantage of every copse of trees and every low hill, and managing to evade the mechanical eye of the radar for hundreds of miles.
By a deliberate act of will, as deliberately as uncurling a fist into a hand, General Bogan made himself relax. Even so he felt a single drop of sweat, acid from tension, roll slowly down his spine. It did not feel like sweat. It felt like a tiny solid hot piece of shot.
He had gotten to the Fail-Safe point before but General Bogan had never had a UFO which acted in such a strange way. As he looked at the Board three things happened. The mechanical voice said, “All groups at Fail-Safe point.” And the six bomber blips simultaneously and beautifully merged with their green crosses.
The teletype on the 413-L desk began to clatter again. General Bogan’s head turned about. As it did he saw the faces of Knapp and Raskob. Raskob’s jaw was set. His eyes were unafraid. His shrewd, intelligent face understood perfectly what was happening. Knapp seemed mesmerized by the machinery. General Bogan had the impression that he did not realize what was happening. The words came, again at an excruciatingly slow pace, out of the 413-L machine. They said, “UFO is now at 1,050 feet and is clearly air-breathing vehicle. Best estimate is that it is BOAC, Commercial Boeing 707, which has regained power on two of its jets.”
“It’s all right, Colonel Cascio,” General Bogan said. “It didn’t make much sense anyway, because if they did come they surely would come with more than a single plane. Let the Vindicators orbit at their Fail-Safe point, however, until we get a positive confirmation from the Canadian fighters.”
Colonel Cascio stood up and, although his face was smiling, his pink tongue licked at the corner of his mouth.
“General, they’ll orbit whatever we do,” he said, “it’s SOP. But I’m still not sure about that UFO. Couldn’t the Russians anticipate exactly the way we would interpret it and just add a couple of jet pods to the mocked-up plane and turn them on when they get within range of 413-L System?”
“It’s possible,” General Bogan said casually. “But not very likely. The whole picture just doesn’t make sense.”
The two men smiled at one another, but suddenly General Bogan had the sense that they were in conflict. Colonel Cascio lowered his eyes.
General Bogan turned to his guests. “The UFO is pretty well established as a BOAC commercial airliner which lost power on its engines and then regained them at a low altitude,” General Bogan said to the visitors. “We have to stay at Condition Green until we have confirmation, but it is my best judgment that there is no danger.”
“I kinda like this whole operation,” Raskob said softly. “I mean it’s a nice orderly thing to meet people who can tie everything up with a ribbon and foolproof. And let me tell you, General, in this world there are damn few things that are foolproof.”
The teletype on the 413-L clattered.
This time General Bogan waited until the major handed him the tape. He read it to the visitors. It said, “UFO sighted visually and contacted by radio. It is BOAC Flight No. 117. It was off course due to high tail winds and loss of power on two port engines because of throttle failure which locked the throttles in OFF position. It regained power at 350 feet.”
“That’s it, gentlemen. I am sorry that we alarmed you,” General Bogan said.
Colonel Cascio bent forward and operated a single lever. Instantly the radio-transmitted order became apparent on the Big Board. The fighters started to move in a long curve back toward their bases. The jet tankers angled away from their Vindicator group. The defensive bombers made a quick 180° turn. The big light over the Big Board went out. Men began to drift out of the room. The hum of the machines diminished.
It was Raskob who first noticed. He stared at the Big Board for a moment and turned to General Bogan with a grin.
“Now what the hell is that blip up there at No. 6 doing?” he said. “It’s gone right by the Fail-Safe point and is moving toward Russia.”
General Bogan spun around, his elbow lashed into the taut nervous body of Knapp and he was quite unaware of it. He stared at the board, his body suddenly felt like a terrible tortured muscle. His mind was white-hot and utterly blank. It perceived only one thing. Group 6 had flown past its Fail-Safe point. He spoke out of the side of his mouth, suddenly and comically aware of how much like a movie character he seemed.
“Colonel Cascio, get on the red telephone to the President,” General Bogan said, in a firm low unnatural voice.
As he handed General Bogan the red telephone Colonel Cascio picked up the Red Phone Log. He glanced at the clock on the wall and wrote down “1030.”