In Montana, coyotes howled in the foothills of Bear Paw Mountain while in the hardened shelters of Strategic Air Command on the snow-covered Great Plains, an air force instructor was telling Rick Stacy and the other eleven silo cadets not to hesitate. “If your partner goes berserk under pressure, you not only have the right but the duty to shoot him or her.” He paused. None of them showed any surprise — which was good. “Now, the air force has taken great pains to select the best possible people for this job. But none of us knows for sure how we’ll perform if things start coming apart — that is, if it comes to a nuclear exchange — if other silos in your sector were to be hit. You all passed A-okay on the simulators, but tomorrow you’ll be in silo on solo ride.”
Stacy smiled across at Melissa Lange. The instructor saw it, gave no sign of disapproval, but made a mental note that these two were to be kept apart in the two-member team drills. You couldn’t stop fraternization. In fact, it could be a stabilizing factor off duty, but you kept them well apart in training and in the silo. Despite the advancement of women in the forces, the no-mixed-sex rule remained inviolate at “Ground Zero.”
“There’s something else I want to mention,” the instructor continued, neat and tan in knife-edged ironed pale blue uniform and tie. “In any crew, you’ll find there’s a tendency for one partner to become leader by default. Know what I mean, Lieutenant Stacy?”
“Yes, sir. One team member relies too heavily on the other.” Stacy looked pleased with himself.
“Not really,” replied the instructor. “You’re all taught to rely on one another, Lieutenant. The problem, however, is when one member habitually relies on the other so that in the event of a slipup by the one who’s been leading, we are likely to risk either aborting launch or executing an inappropriate release at the critical moment. It is not,” the instructor emphasized, “a pilot-copilot situation down there. In the silo there are two of you with equal responsibility. You’re a team. No one of you can launch. And forget all that BS you’ve read about a ‘string and second key’ game where one of you supposedly goes bonkers, shoots the other, and then catapults us into a nuclear exchange by using a connecting string to turn both keys at once. You can’t. We fixed it. You need a two-key insert to initiate your launch procedure.” The instructor paused. “You got that, Corporal Lange?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Let’s recap before you all head off to get drunk.” There was a polite ripple of laughter. None of them were heavy drinkers. The air force had carefully checked that out in the psychiatric profile on each recruit. Besides, everyone knew that if they so much as took an aspirin, it had to be reported. If anyone climbed aboard the pickup van and had taken so much as an antihistamine, they’d have to immediately declare themselves DNIA — duty not involving alert. Not to do so carried the same penalty meted out to a fighter pilot who hadn’t reported himself DNIF — a verbal reprimand, a fine, and confined to barracks. With launch crews of necessity required to live in and around the silos, being CB meant staying in the plusher SAC living quarters. But in the middle of the snow-covered prairie with all calls automatically monitored, the only recreation was to watch TV, get laid — difficult, given the long duty hours — eat, get overweight, and risk a WRC — weight reduction course.
For some reason Melissa couldn’t understand, the U.S. Air Force did not want their missile shooters fat. Rick Stacy, a fitness fiend, postulated that “excessive poundage,” in his words, made people slower on the controls. Melissa said she knew a cab dispatcher who was fat, enormous, and the most competent dispatcher around.
“We’re not dispatching cabs, Lissa,” Stacy told her. “We’re into kilotons on the front line.”
Melissa didn’t bother pursuing the fact that the front line was five thousand miles away in Europe, and nine thousand in Korea. In a way, she knew Rick was right, but his egocentric habit of automatically assuming the “front line” wherever he was annoyed her. Still, he was kind to her, considerate, and in this world where the casualties in Europe and Korea meant that there were about four women for every man back home, Richard was a better catch than most. And he’d given her good advice. While some of her friends at college had put their professional goals on permanent hold to have a good time, “while the world lasts,” as they’d put it, Melissa had signed up for the silo program, which would help pay for her degree. After the war, her degree and experience in such a highly skilled job would stand her in good stead.
In any case, she and Rick, by planning on getting married in the spring, were going to try both for the “good time” and, in Rick’s words, improve their “marketable skills.”
The only thing she regretted was that Rick was as organized and efficient in bed as he was in class. It was all very purposeful and unerringly “on target,” as he so romantically put it. And it was all over in ten minutes. She was reminded of some vulgar engineering student in Portland talking about “slam, bam, thank you, ma’am.” Part of the problem was that Rick detested sweat.
Now and then she found herself conscious of the stares of a local contractor, a man the air force used for base and silo support building repairs. He was a big man, very hairy, known to some of the unmarried women team members — and, it was said, some of the married women — as “KITS — Killerton in the SAC.” Melissa hadn’t been listening to the instructor, idly wondering whether “KITS” referred to his weight on top of you or to his actual performance in bed.
The instructor was rambling on about how “weather bias,” such as differences in air density, could cause possible “skipping” of a reentry warhead vehicle and how one way around this was for the kiloton or megaton warhead to effect reentry at a steeper angle than usual, which would make it more accurate, but that this in turn would generate more heat.
“So be alert,” said the instructor, “when we’re going through PALFIR — which is?” He was pointing at Melissa. Rick Stacy was watching her.
“Prearming,” she replied. “Arming, launching, firing, releasing,” she added smartly.
“Very good! Okay, that wraps it up for today. Remember, tomorrow you’re on solo, which may or may not include a problem with the blast valve. Three ways to clear?” He looked about the room, using a stick of chalk as a pointer. “Johnson?”
“Ah—”
The instructor laughed. “Unfair question. Tomorrow, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Zipping up his parka before going out in the thirty-below “icy hell,” as Rick Stacy called it with what he thought was a fine piece of irony, he complimented Melissa on her PALFIR answer. “Right on the button, Lissa. Very impressive!”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped.
“What?”
“Lissa.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“What’s right with it? My name’s Melissa.”
“Sorreeeee.”
In the pickup van, there was a lot of loud talk as the class members unwound. No one spoke of estimating warhead yield, launch reliability factors, or reentry penetration. Only when it was suggested that the PX might have run out of Coors did one of the silo cadets, a tall youth from Louisiana, drawl that if the PX manager hadn’t ordered in enough beer, the manager’s TKP — terminal kill probability — would be 1.0—absolutely certain.
Melissa ignored the small talk, thinking instead about the bungalow she and another woman trainee shared. The bungalow had developed a leak in the roof. It would be all right for the time being, but once there was any melting, it’d be like a waterfall. “Be spring,” Rick said sulkily, “before there’s any melting around here.”
“You might be right,” she said, “but I thought you didn’t like my place looking unkempt — the ceiling’s stained.”
“I don’t.”
“Well then?”
“Melissa, I have better things to do right now than to mend roofs. We go solo tomorrow, remember?”
“I remember,” she said tartly.
“What’s gotten into you?” he asked brusquely.
“Nothing.”
“Well, if you want it fixed that badly, call Base Repairs. They’ll send someone over.”
“I thought you liked doing that kind of stuff.”
“I would if I had the time. Okay?”
“Okay. I’ll get Base Repairs.”
“Right.”
The van suddenly slid on black ice. There was a chorus of “whoa”s as it slithered further, then righted itself. It was all very funny, but for a second Melissa felt they were going to go right off the road and smash into the ice-hardened ditch. Life was too short — full of hazard.