"Well, it was only New York," he said.
"And Boston and Atlanta," his executive officer said.
"Well, if you're going to nitpick--"
Peasants, Naismith thought. He would have been just like them a few months ago, in their cotton or regulation underwear, their regulation shoes, their simple cars, their print-dress wives, and steak-and-corn cookouts. Did any of them appreciate a really significant mousse, a wine with a real nose to it, morning on a Caribbean beach while it was snowing in Dayton, Ohio?
He had once been like them. Your basic vanilla. He had thought he had lived, thought he had lived well and decently, but he had been a fool.
Valerie had taught him that. Valerie with her laughter and champagne and love of life. He knew how to live life now and to seize its precious moments. What were the others? Little breathing machines who would press a button or not press it on command. They were the pilotless drones of the world.
He stared at the screen, ignoring his men. No matter what happened now, he knew he had taken life full and well. He had used that grand accident from Insta-Charge, and no matter what happened now, he was glad of it.
He remembered how his account showed a higher than proper balance. He remembered letting it be, sure that it would be caught. When it wasn't caught the next month, he telephoned the bank to say they had made not only one mistake, but two. They couldn't find the mistake. The money grew. It became a family joke, about how he was going to be a millionaire until some computer chip somewhere got to working correctly.
And then he met Valerie, laughing Valerie, darkhaired Valerie, who loved champagne and afternoons in fine cars and the Caribbean; Valerie, who just happened to have a flat tire and wouldn't accept help from just any airman.
"Look, I don't want to be picked up. I just have a flat tire."
"I'm not the sort who picks up strange women," said Lieutenant Colonel Armbrewster Naismith. "I am willing to help, but I do not pick up strange women."
"You said that so well," she said. She had that mellow California accent as if words just happened to come out along with the sweetness of her voice, taking a ride, so to speak, with the song of her presence.
"I don't like tires," she had said. "I don't like dirty things and I don't like mechanical things."
"Then why are you leaning so close?" he had said. She had worn the sort of perfume you didn't smell but sensed.
"Because I like men who do mechanical things," she said.
Naismith reached for a wrench. He felt something soft. It was too soft for a wrench. It was a thigh. Her name was Valerie and she didn't move her thigh. She didn't move it the first time he asked or the second. He didn't ask a third.
They met in a motel out of the state where his own men wouldn't see him. To keep everything above suspicion, Naismith used some of that computer money as he called it, money that had come into his bank account by a computer accident.
It was going to be a quickie, one passionate affair, remove that overwhelming sudden lust he could not control and then go home to his wife. The only thing quick about it was the time it took.
He started to apologize for being so premature. But Valerie did not mind. Valerie was like that. Beautiful and young, yet understanding in ways the colonel's wife could never comprehend. His wife called his snoring annoying and used earplugs. Valerie called it manly sleep. She was tired of boys and wanted a man. But she didn't like motels. She wanted a romantic weekend in Chicago. She wanted the Pump Room. She wanted the best hotels.
By the end of the month, the colonel had used up almost all the extra money and was thinking of cashing in stocks when his checking account did the miraculous. It came up with enough additional money to cover everything. It was one small step to the pair of matched Mercedeses, the property in the Caribbean, Valerie, and life. Above all, life.
He wanted to resign his Air Force commission but Valerie insisted he keep his job. Coming into the bunker became a torture. Dull men in dull uniforms with dull outlooks. He wanted to fly in the sun and all they wanted was to make sure all systems were functional.
He wanted to smell the grass. Valerie had taught him that. Smelling the grass. The others only used their noses when they smelled wiring burning. They drank beer and ate steak, and corn with butter was a big treat. What did they have to live for? Colonel Naismith asked himself this many times, but most of all, he asked it when the missile battery was alerted and his key was required to activate the system.
And if he didn't need his upcoming pension to add to his funds, he would not have turned it at all.
And then when he did, the screen flashed. It screamed silently:
FINAL. GO. GO. GO. CONFIRM GO. GO. GO.
The war was on.
Naismith had to press in the code to release the button to fire. There were three numbers and he hesitated over the first. The war was on. There was going to be nothing left of large parts of America. Would the battery itself be destroyed? He had sworn an oath. He pressed the first number and then the second and his hand trembled over the third. He felt his stomach jump and his hands were hot. He didn't know fingertips could sweat. He wiped his hands on his trousers.
The system voided because of the delay and he had to press the three numbers again. He pressed the first two. His mouth tasted salty. He thought of life and he thought of Valerie and he thought of the missiles going off. He saw Valerie's face on the screen laughing. He saw her beautiful body. He saw so many things.
When they finally removed him from the bunker, his hand was frozen over the last code key. It was still unpressed. The colonel was taken to the base hospital where his wife and children visited and were told by the base psychiatrist that their father and husband might never come out of his trance. It was, the shrink believed, a shock induced by a conflict so severe, so cruelly manipulated as to leave a human being the battleground between two powerful opposing ideas. The only way most people could respond was to go into severe shock. Very few ever recovered.
At Strategic Air Command headquarters in the bowels of the Rocky Mountains, the staff was grateful for this psychological horror inflicted on one of their officers. Naismith, by his paralysis on duty, had barely stopped World War III. Somehow, the system had malfunctioned and the battery had been given all the wrong information and all the wrong orders. New York had not been destroyed; the Russians had fired no missiles; and it was only a stroke of providential luck that America had not obliterated much of Russia.
The Strategic Air Command appointed a committee to find out what had gone wrong.
And in Malibu, on the California coast, Abner Buell gave himself ten-thousand points for Naismith and fifteen thousand for proximity to nuclear war. He was annoyed that the war had not started, but he did not deduct any points for that. He told himself that he had been turning people around and testing systems and next he would test the Russians, and then he would start World War III in his own good time. He decided to do it at night when the flash of nuclear weapons exploding would be more visible.
He cleared the screen of the Nuclear War Game and the computer notified him that he was in a chase.
It came from Pamela Thrushwell. The chaser had noticed the monitors at the New York computer center and the chaser had seemed to track every move the cameras made. The computer had footage of Pamela Thrushwell throwing her ample body at the chaser, who was a young white man with dark hair and eyes and very thick wrists.
Abner Buell, boredom gone for a moment, began to trace the man who was with Pamela Thrushwell. It proved to be even more exciting than he had thought. Fingerprints were picked up from Ms. Thrushwell's desk but there was no evidence that those fingerprints were on file anywhere.
A secret agent was after him, Buell decided. An agent so secret that he had no fingerprints on file anywhere.
Maybe they were working together.
If so, he could reach the man through Pamela Thrushwell.
It might be fun, Buell thought.
So few things were these days. These last few days that were left to the world.
sChapter Five
"Don't you eat?" asked Pamela as she put on her robe and went into the kitchen for a snack.
"No," said Remo. "Tell me again why you couldn't trace that phone number the obscene caller gave you."
"First we tried and the office manager had her ears blown out. Then we tried again and the phone company said there was no such number. There never had been. Why do you care so much?"
"Because I'm with the phone company and we're trying to find out what's going on."
"Is everybody in the phone company as good as you?" she asked.
Good? Remo tried to remember what she was talking about. Good? Oh, sex. Remo hadn't even cared when they coupled in the computer center's back room. He had let his body be used to service her and she had had to notify him when she was done. He was busy thinking. Her sex life must be awful if she rated that as good.
Now he asked her, "The cameras in your office that always watch when you get one of those calls? You don't know who controls them?"
"You saw me check the circuits this afternoon. They're on random motion. It must have just been a coincidence that they were all aiming at me," Pamela said.