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 in 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 fundamental 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 abruptly 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 linen.
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 in 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 fay 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 under 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, re-covering 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-niner 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 close to 3,000 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.
Black had seen Ned Black’s library. It was made up of books by John Locke, Fourier, Robert Owens, the great Chartists, Marx, Spencer, Ricardo. The books were worn and used. Ned Black had gone off to the Civil War and came back with an empty sleeve. He was a quiet man before he left and quieter when he returned. He lectured his children on only one thing: man was social, he had a primary obligation to his society.
The Blacks, like all rich San Franciscans, gave to the Opera and the Symphony and museums, but most of their money went into schools, hospitals, and libraries. And not a single building they gave to the city bore the name of Black. Ned’s sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons all followed his quiet, intense, and private way of life. They became ministers, businessmen, educators, and a few of them, to old Ned Black’s great gratification, became politicians. Ned Black thought it the most noble of professions, the most necessary of social tasks. Whenever there was a reform movement, a commission to investigate crime, an effort to broaden education, a Black played an important role.
Warren Black had not found it easy to follow the tradition. He had no flair for politics and little interest in business. Even when he had graduated from one of the best of the Ivy League schools he felt rootless and somehow guilty. In World War II he had joined the Army Air Force and it was there first, and later in SAC, that he found his calling. He flew and fought with unspectacular success and although he loathed the destruction of life he brought himself to agree that it was necessary. He was steady, competent, and with absolutely no desire for publicity. Over the years he had developed a love for the Air Force, although he knew that it should be impossible to love such a great impersonal organization.
He had met Betty when the Air Force sent him back to his Ivy League college after World War II to study international politics and foreign policy with the famous Professor Tolliver. Betty had forced herself into one of Tolliver’s seminars and commuted from Radcliffe once a week to attend. The austere old man had balked, but Betty’s father was a famous professor of naval history and Tolliver had finally yielded. He pointed out bluntly that she was the first girl he had ever had in his foreign-policy seminar, that the talk often got “salty,” that she would not be given grace because she was a female—female was the word he used, not “girl.”
Betty nodded. When she appeared at the seminar it was more like someone coming to do battle than to discuss abstract ideas. Her face was scrubbed and without make-up. She wore severe little gray suits and she seldom smiled. She spoke with a strong even voice that was overcontrolled. It was only midway through the semester, when her anger emerged, that her face took on a striking and handsome look. It surprised Black, for he suddenly realized that she was both an attractive and a very emotional person.
Betty had been tensed against Tolliver from the start. She saw him as an intellectual enemy. To see Tolliver as an enemy was easy. Most of the graduate students did. To reveal antagonism was another thing. Tolliver was formidable.
Tolliver was a senior professor in the field of international relations. He came from old New England stock and his dedication to scholarship was savage, total, and complete. If his ideas led him out of the classroom and the library and into public battle he did not hesitate a moment.
His first public battle, when he was very young, had been a catastrophe. Before World War I he had been a pacifist. He had spoken and lectured and written against involvement with the European power blocs, he had attacked war as inhuman and obsolete, he had led “peace parades” in New York City and Washington. He had studied ancient war, medieval war, nineteenth-century war, twentieth-century war. Quite unknowingly he became one of the foremost experts on warfare in order to attack it.
At some point—it was never identified by anyone precisely and Tolliver never spoke of it—Tolliver changed. It was one of the most famous intellectual conversions of his time. Tolliver became pro-war. He abandoned his pacifist friends and their cause for a position on the other side so extreme that it startled even the interventionists: war was an ingrained part of any society. His argument was not crude, it was stated in the language of the scholar, it was replete with footnote references to history and to the psychology of aggression, allusions to Freud and the death-wish. Tolliver did not argue that war was good or desirable, merely that it would always exist as long as man organized himself into societies.
For several years in the thirties Tolliver had been intensely unpopular. He was labeled pro-English, a subversive, a turncoat. His classes dwindled in size. Liberal and radical magazines attacked him ferociously. But when America entered the war, almost overnight Tolliver became something of a prophet, a culture hero, an intellectual “with his feet on the ground.” Tolliver ignored the praise just as he had ignored the criticism. He survived even the public reason which he gave for not volunteering for military duty. “Some people with brains must stay behind and develop a theory of war and peace. I’m one of those best equipped to do that. That I shall do.”
He had been doing it ever since.
He was entirely a person of the mind. His age was indeterminate and no one had dared ask him. He could have been a burned-out fifty or a well-preserved seventy. His white hair was thin and seldom brushed. He had several suits; no one knew how many, for they were all the same conservative cut, the same excellent English cloth, the same hue. They all looked ruined in a few months for they were never pressed or cleaned and they were decorated with pin-point holes where live ashes from the endless cigarettes he smoked had burned themselves out. When he stood up a small cloud of ashes fell away from him.
In a relaxed mood his face appeared weakly muscled. But it was an illusion and he was seldom relaxed anyway. Usually he seemed to be burning with fury. It showed most in his eyes—bright, blue, New England granite eyes, glittering with the hunter’s excitement. In argument his face went hard-muscled; his nose seemed more beaked. At the slightest criticism of his ideas, even the suggestion of indifference, Tolliver attacked. He moved forward in his chair, his body tense. He looked somehow like a logic-chopping rat, teeth slashing into flimsy arguments, gnawing at more solid evidence with a terrible persistence. He rarely left an argument with the decision in doubt. His knowledge of war and society was so vast, his dedication so single-minded, that it seemed unlikely while listening to him that anyone could know more than he or develop a viewpoint which he had not anticipated and worked into his master view.
Tolliver paid no attention to university politics, his colleagues, campus social occasions, or other trivia. His students received his intense and narrowly focused attention, for he saw them as the carriers of ideas. Personally he knew only their names; intellectually he knew them completely. It was impossible to flatter the man; his eyes merely went icy with contempt.
The first time Betty differed with Tolliver the students in the seminar had tensed, leaned forward in their chairs and waited for the blood to flow. It did not happen quite that way. Betty had introduced some anthropological evidence that a certain Melanesian tribe waged peace rather than war. They competed at giving one another gifts, at doing small favors, at multiplying courtesies. It was clear that the example was new to Tolliver, but he attacked at once. The data were insufficient for general conclusions, he said. Let the tribes be attacked once and they would respond with conventional warlike reactions. But they had been attacked and had not so responded, Betty said. She read from the study.
When she finished Tolliver came back with a ripping analysis. Betty countered with further evidence.
Black broke in with a neutral question and Betty glanced at him with contempt. He was in uniform and she had assumed that he would automatically support Tolliver’s views on the inevitability of war.
The argument had ended in a draw. Tolliver had muttered that he would check the original study and also other anthropological evidence. From Tolliver this was close to a glowing tribute. Black congratulated Betty as they filed out of the seminar room. She cut him short. It was plain that she did not like men in uniform.
There had been other things besides his uniform she had not liked. When she learned that he was from the San Francisco clan of Blacks, she invested him automatically with all responsibility for the misdeeds of the Huntingtons, the Hopkinses, and old Grandfather Black. She knew Black was wealthy and she thought that the Air Force was Black’s hobby. Once she told him, “To paraphrase Will James, you seem to have made war the moral equivalent of being a playboy.”
It was during that semester that the man who was now President had started in politics, running for Congress in a nearby state. Needing all the campaign help he could get, he naturally called on his old classmates. Black was one.
Betty supported him in that initial campaign, and once chided Black and some others for their political inactivity. When Black revealed that he commuted on weekends to help in the same campaign Betty was startled. In an ornery and hilarious way, which Black later came to love, she then attacked him for being linked with the Eastern “great wealthy.”
To Betty, Black seemed a perfect example of a dangerous breed: the power elite from the industrial, financial, military, and political world. It was Tolliver’s seminar which gradually dissolved Betty’s notions about Black. One particular afternoon Tolliver had let himself go a little further toward preemptive war than usual. A young Ph.D. candidate named Groteschele, who had just recently transferred to political science from mathematics, had been present. He argued that the war against fascism was not over: the military struggle against black fascism must now be converted into the military struggle against red fascism.
It was the first time Black had ever heard Walter Groteschele speak, and as he listened he had no notion that it would be the first of scores of times. Groteschele was the earliest of the brilliant group of mathematical political scientists that developed after World War II, a group which later included such as Henry Kissinger, Herman Kahn, Herbert Simon, and Karl Deutsch. But for a few years in the beginning, Groteschele stood alone, without peer, just as he had planned it. Now Black was only aware of a faint rasp of irritation at what Groteschele said. There was nothing on which he could put his finger, nothing he could use his intellect against—only a dim kind of restlessness, a sense that there was some obscure danger in what Groteschele said.
The professional liberals in the seminar shifted in their seats but did not speak.
Tolliver turned to Black. But instead of giving the expected reply Black outlined what he thought were the military reasons Russia, though dangerous, was a manageable threat to America.
Black spoke calmly and with authority and his eyes never wavered when Tolliver began to tense into his rigid posture of attack. When the attack came Black handled it calmly, constantly referring to expert opinions, studies, statistics, probabilities.
Betty was torn and it showed on her face. She found it difficult to side with Black the militarist but when finally she did it was with a fierce eloquence. The seminar did not end with the neat trimmed summation that Tolliver liked. It ended in a sense of tension, an odd unbalance. The students walked out gingerly.
Black moved toward Betty as the seminar ended. She got up quickly, folded her papers, snapped them into her briefcase, walked out without glancing at Tolliver. Her face was flushed and attractive. Black thought: she has all the charm of a bawd unmasked at a Sunday-school picnic.
“How about continuing this over a beer?” he said in a low voice, leaning down just behind her ear. She turned so quickly her nose brushed against his cheek before he could withdraw. A blush spread over her face and deepened as she realized it. He knew for sure then what had remained true ever since. Betty was the most attractive, the most interesting, and the most quixotic girl he’d ever known. He was on the verge of kissing her on the spot, and she knew it.
In a way, they both decided their future in having that beer. The rest was just making all the moves and countermoves required to carry out the decision. There had been some difficulty about the “Black unearned fortune,” but Betty had been reassured when Black told her that he lived entirely on his colonel’s pay and that his share of the family income went into a fund at Wells Fargo Bank. Black said he had no notion of what the fund amounted to, but that it was “maybe around four million,” and they both burst into laughter.
Once, a month later, they’d taken a picnic lunch to Walden Pond.
“But why the Air Force?” she asked. “I can understand going in at the start of the war, but I can’t understand why you’d stay in afterward.”
“It was simple,” Black said. “What work could I do where ‘success’ would be mine and not because of family background? The Air Force work was mine. The commendations came in from majors and colonels who couldn’t have cared less about the San Francisco Blacks even if they had known of them.” He looked at her directly and for the first time she sensed his bluntness and honesty. “You heard I was one of ‘those’ Blacks and put me into a category.”
Betty nodded her head in a silent agreement that was also an apology.
“You’re my favorite militarist,” she said softly.
“Don’t use labels, Betty,” he commanded. “Do you think the SAC people are all anxious to have war? Don’t be a fool. We’re as scared as everyone else. Look, I was on the Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany after the war. It’s not something that’s liable to make you a warmonger.”
Black paused. The survey had been a pause in his life too. It had troubled him. For the one big conclusion that came out of the Survey was that, for all the apparent devastation, the main thing destroyed was people. The factories and the railways were put back into fairly good running order in an unbelievably short time. Indeed, bombing seemed to be an odd prod to survival, to sharpen the impulse to strike back.
“Blacky.” She took his hand and he looked down at her, startled. She put back her head and laughed loud enough to startle some birds into flight across the pond. “You look as if you thought you were about to be raped.”
He could not believe his ears. He was delighted and confused and definitely embarrassed. “Am I?”
“Are you what?”
“Am I about to be raped?”
She choked with laughter and somehow they had their arms about each other, quite clumsily. She said into his shirt, “I’m such an ass.”
On this note—more or less—they were married three months later.
***
Black’s early morning drive out Long Island to Mitchel Air Force Base was not slowed down by traffic. He arrived with plenty of time to spare for the flight to Washington. The day was clear and mild, and he checked out a Cessna 310. He had never lost his affection for a small, light plane. Even the 310 was automated, but it was still fun to fly. Someday he wanted to buy one of the quick stubby stunt biplanes that were now being reproduced, and recapture the old thrill of flying, to fly rather than to administer a plane.
As he settled on course for Washington, he felt the need suddenly of a cold drink of water, and last night’s cocktail party came flooding back through his mind. He had not wanted to go at all. Betty had never taken to Groteschele. Black also knew he would be listening to Groteschele at today’s briefing. So when Senator Hartmann’s secretary called he’d tried to beg off.
But Hartmann was insistent. He had collared Emmett Foster, the editor of the Liberal Magazine, which constantly criticized nuclear testing and supported unilateral disarmament. What Hartmann wanted was a cocktail party confrontation between Foster and Groteschele. Each in his way was distinguished. They merely happened to be at opposite ends of the controversy over thermonuclear warfare. Hartmann was no fool. A Midwestern Republican with a vigorous shock of white hair, sanguine complexion, and Falstaffian girth, he orated like William Jennings Bryan and generally looked like a musical-comedy senator. But under that shock of white hair operated one of the finest minds in Washington. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he wanted to hear the two points of view in an informal environment. He knew that Black was considered a “brainy” general and was a link between the purely tactical people in SAC and the Big Planners at the Pentagon. Groteschele had, of course, become famous after the publication of Counter-Escalation, which Foster had dissected and left for dead in the pages of his magazine.
Usually Betty refused to go to military-government-academic cocktail parties. To Black’s surprise she insisted on going to this one.
They had arrived late. Foster was there, but Groteschele, as usual, was even later. Foster stood in a corner talking in a firm, even voice. Black realized that the man would be no pushover. To Black most “professional liberals” had shrill voices, spoke in a rush, and accused anyone who questioned their facts of favoring nuclear extermination. Facts were unimportant. Survival, common morality, humanity, damage to unborn generations—this was their chant.
Not Emmett Foster. He was a cool one and Black could tell it instantly. Even as they moved across the room, Foster, a short muscular man with hard black eyes, used words and phrases which indicated he had read the Congressional Record and the scientific journals and probably interviewed a number of military people. Also Foster didn’t skip around. He answered questions precisely, sticking relentlessly to the point and relying on real evidence. Betty and Black listened for fifteen minutes and Betty turned to Black, her eyebrows arched.
“No fool,” she said.
“No fool,” Black agreed.
At that moment Groteschele arrived. He had not changed much physically since graduate-school days. A bit heavier, but not grossly so. But he was dressed better and he had the air of authority about him. He is almost silken, Black thought. He smiled easily, said something to everyone he was introduced to, patted Black on the shoulder, kissed Betty on the cheek. He smelled slightly of men’s cologne.
Hartmann introduced him to Foster, but Groteschele smiled and said they had already met. Without a wasted motion Groteschele moved beside Foster, stationed himself for the debate, but with no sign of antagonism or of condescension.
Foster waited until the introductions were over and went on.
“Times have changed since Clausewitz. True, war was an institution like church or the family or private property. But institutions grow obsolete, exhaust their function,” Foster argued. “Real tough-mindedness consists in recognizing that thermonuclear war is not the extension of policy by other means, it is the end of everything—people, policy, institutions.
“Groteschele,” Foster said in his firm unyielding manner, “is a modern Don Quixote, dashing through the stratosphere on nuclear jaunts, talking of obliteration as if it could be made partial, hypnotized by his own words.”
Foster stopped almost politely, and looked at Groteschele. Groteschele rocked on his heels, looked down at his scotch and water. He let the silence draw out. He shook his head once, a slight puzzled motion as if he were considering one argument and had abandoned it.
Betty, who seldom drank, took a long scotch from one of the passing waiters. Black noticed that her hand trembled slightly.
Finally Groteschele spoke. His voice was extremely gentle.
“In a full-scale nuclear war between America and Russia a hundred million people, more or less, will be killed—right?” he asked Foster.
“A hundred million,” Foster repeated, “or more.”
The circle of people about the speakers moved restlessly. Betty finished her drink in a gulp and looked for a waiter. Black moved closer to her.
“Things would be shaken up,” Groteschele went on. “Our culture and their culture would not be the same. Granted?”
“Granted,” Foster said. He grinned toughly.
“Now this is a tragedy and no one here denies that,” Groteschele said and his eyes swept generously over the group, lingered on Senator Hartmann. “But would you not grant that the culture which is the best armed, has the best bomb shelters, the best retaliatory capacity, the strongest defense, would have an ancient and classical advantage?”
“Which is?” Foster asked.
“It would be the victor in that it would be less damaged than its enemy,” Groteschele said. “Every war, including thermonuclear war, must have a victor and a vanquished. Are you suggesting, Foster, that we should be the vanquished? Do you value American culture less than the Soviet culture?”
Betty’s hand had tightened on Black’s arm.
“Marvelous,” Foster said and his grin was now so deep it was almost ferocious. “Simply marvelous. So neat, so logical, so well-ordered.”
He paused and looked at Groteschele. Groteschele did not nod for he knew this was the opening of an attack. He smiled at Foster and for the first time it was a smile of condescension.
“Groteschele, it should persuade a monkey, a high-school kid, maybe an Air Force general, maybe a Senator, but not many others,” Foster said savagely. “It indicates only that you are a prisoner.”
“Of what?” Groteschele said.
“Of the past, of stale ideas, of clichés,” Foster said. He paused and looked around the group. “What is called for,” he said, “is a complete and revolutionary break-through in our thinking. We are like men enclosed in a paper sack of old ideas and assumptions. The sack surrounding us appears to be complete and seamless, when in reality all we have to do is to break out of it to stand in the freedom of entirely new thoughts and approaches. What the times call for is a new Karl Marx—”
“A new Marx, Foster,” Groteschele broke in, “an arresting thought. What would the new manifesto proclaim?”
“It would proclaim peace,” Foster said without hesitation. “Not because peace is nice or I like my fellow humans or it is Christian or Gandhi hated violence or the sick-sick-sick kind of liberal chants it. Peace because it is the only way we can live. Get with it, Groteschele. Probability and the cobalt bomb made you old-fashioned ten years ago. Be realistic.”
Foster’s magazine had a circulation of only thirty thousand. The affluent and influential people he spoke before now were—one would think—more the Henry Luce type. Yet they were visibly impressed.
“Moving, very moving,” Groteschele said. “But somewhat dangling, a bit suspended, no indication of how we get from war to peace. No one wants war, Foster. But the possibility of war just happens to be a reality. I want us to face realities.”
“All right, Groteschele, look at it from the viewpoint of the anthropologist,” Foster said. “What is war’s function?”
“The resolution of conflict,” Groteschele snapped.
“In primitive societies how do men resolve their conflicts?” Foster asked.
“By individual combat,” Groteschele said. He had pulled his shoulders back and was somewhat more tense. This type of dialogue where his opponent turned Socrates made him restless.
“And when they became organized into tribes?” Foster said.
“Then the fighting becomes collective,” Groteschele said.
“And when they become nation-states?”
“It is still violence, damn it, Foster,” Groteschele said. “What is irresponsible is to suggest that as groups become bigger and the power of weapons more immense that anything is changed.”
Foster cut in rudely. “Are you suggesting that a spear thrown and a nuclear bomb dropped are comparable? Just a difference in degree? Nonsense! Is it not possible, Groteschele, that war itself has become obsolete? Your superbly reasoned Counter-Escalation indicates that in any possible war the overwhelming majority of citizens are going to be killed. Does this suggest to you still that war is a resolution of conflicts?”
“Foster, you are hopelessly sentimental,” Groteschele said. “The situation is no different than it was a thousand years ago. There were primitive wars in which populations were totally destroyed. The point is, who is going to be the victor and who the victim? It is still a question of the survival of a culture.”
Foster rocked on his heels.
“A culture,” he said slowly, his voice full of wonder. “A culture with most of its people dead, the rotting smell of death in the air for years, its vegetation burned off, the germ plasm of survivors contaminated. You say I am the Utopian and you are the realist. Do you really think that this world you describe is a culture?”
Groteschele was familiar with every gambit. His reply was reasonable, quietly uttered, and difficult to refute. He drew it out to great length. The spectators listened respectfully.
It was Betty who broke the spell. Before Black realized it, she had moved from his side, drunk, yet at the same time rigidly controlled.
“It is hopeless,” she said, staring at the two men. “You are both romantics caught up in your fantasy world of logic and reason and that is why it is so damned hopeless. Because man himself has become obsolete. He is like the dodo and the dinosaur but for the opposite reason. His damned brain has gotten us into this mess because of its sophistication and we cannot get out of it because of his pride. Man has calculated himself into so specialized a braininess that he has gone beyond reality. And he cannot tap the truth of his viscera because that, for a specialist, is the ultimate sin.”
Black had not heard her speak with such overcontrol for years. Her words fell like a pall on the group. Even Groteschele was at a loss for the right thing to say. He went through a ritual of taking a Philippine cigar from a small leather cigar case in his pocket. Since the Bay of Pigs episode he had stopped smoking Cuban cigars.
“You think I’ve overdone it?” As Betty spoke a new quality seemed to come over her. Black looked at her with increasing concern. An inner intensity was flowing from her, almost visibly. It acted like a powerful magnet on everyone present, drawing their eyes to her, holding their rapt attention.
“The world,” Betty continued, her voice now edged with despair, “is no longer man’s theater. Man has been made into a helpless spectator. The two evil forces he has created—science and the state—have combined into one monstrous body. We’re at the mercy of our monster and the Russians are at the mercy of theirs. They toy with us as the Olympian gods toyed with the Greeks. And like the gods of Greek tragedy, they have a tragic flaw. They know only how to destroy, not how to save. That’s what we’re now watching in our cold war: a Greek tragedy in modern form with our godlike monsters playing out the last act of their cataclysmic tragedy.”
She stopped and looked at Black quickly, as if seeking help. But before he could speak or move toward her she was speaking again.
“We all know that the big explosion is going to happen. Your concern, the two of you, is to make sure that you die intellectually correct. But my problem is more primitive. I only want to make sure that when it comes and my boys are dying that I am there to ease their last pain with morphine.”
She finished in a flat voice entirely without self-pity. Her last statement seemed to give Groteschele a new assurance, a place to get back into the conversation and guide it into safe channels. His words came on gently and kindly.
“Betty,” he said, “those of us who know anything about the situation feel almost exactly the same things that you have expressed. But what should we do? All go out and buy morphine? You see, Betty, I’m trying to save your two boys, not narcotize their death. That’s the whole point of everything I’ve written. In spite of all our efforts, thermonuclear war may come. We must face that possibility rather than, ostrichlike, close our minds to it. And I’m trying to see that if war comes, men, our kind of men, have the maximum possible chance of surviving it.”
Betty looked composed now but her fingers were digging into Black’s arm.
“General Black, what do you think?” asked Senator Hartmann.
Black looked up slowly from Betty. He fixed his eyes on Foster and thought for a minute.
“I think that Betty is mostly correct,” he said slowly. “Once one knows where he wants to go he can summon a magnificent array of logic and fact to support his argument. I have the awful feeling that we are reconciled, both we and the Soviets, to mutual destruction. We are now rallying our different logics to support our identical conclusions. We will probably both get the results that we want. In that case, morphine is more important than a bomb shelter.” He stopped and for a moment he felt an excitement. It was wild and irrational: he understood the Dream. He was in a game in which the things that held him together were being stripped away. Then, quite suddenly, he could go no further.
Betty’s comments had just about done it for the party. Everyone drank and chatted politely for a few minutes. Then there was the intricate ballet of social disengagement. Black knew that their host would not forget his heretical position. The Senator was a methodical man.
In the taxicab back to their apartment neither Black nor Betty had spoken. She had fallen asleep on his shoulder, her teeth grinding.
***
General Black snapped back to the present as the Cessna 310 approached Andrews Air Force base outside of Washington. Looking down on the water-veined flats of the Chesapeake Bay area, he regretted that the air approach to Andrews didn’t take him over Washington proper. He never ceased to be stirred by the splendor of the Washington Monument’s slim white spire, the awesome majesty of the Lincoln Monument. The Pentagon, though, that was something else again. Its low, squat improbable shape was not designed to capture an airman’s fancy. It was more like a great, bureaucratic land battleship pulled up alongside the Potomac. That’s about what it was, mused Black, laying siege to the helpless flotilla of weaker bureaucratic ships across the Potomac.
Back to work, Blackie, boy-general, he said to himself. Life is earnest, life is real.
He brought the plane in for a skilled and effortless landing. Ten minutes later he was in a staff car and on his way to the Pentagon.