Asterisk (34 page)

“Pretty much.” Thorne saw Marcia come in from the kitchen. She was carrying a tray with coffee and a glass of Laphroaig. Leach took his drink and raised it, in a somewhat mocking toast, in the air.

“I salute you, John. For your persistence as much as anything.”

Leach sipped his drink, smacked his lips, then sat back in silence and stared inside the glass. Thorne took his coffee, wrapped his fingers around the warm china mug. He sipped some, feeling immediately revived, stoked back into awareness. He watched Marcia, who was standing at the window, smiling thinly, drinking her coffee in quick gulps.

“What now, John?” Leach said.

“It deserves to be made public—”

“I ought to have been able to predict that response,” Leach said. The liquor appeared to have stimulated him; there were pink patches of color now high on his cheeks. “Given your early brainwashing I ought to have been able to predict it.”

“Brainwashing?”

“Sitting at your dad's feet,” Leach said. “Having the pristine visions drummed into you.”

“Maybe,” Thorne said.

“So. You go public, huh? A newspaper, maybe?”

“Yes,” Thorne said.

“You think they'll print it?”

“It remains to be seen,” Thorne said.

“I doubt it.” Leach sipped from his glass. “I doubt it would ever see the light of day. Besides, it would make you look crazy. Have you thought about that? Suppose you go to a newspaper, suppose you find a writer who believes you, suppose you even get the support of that newspaper—what then? You haven't followed it through, have you? You haven't thought it all out. Where's your evidence? What can you show them? The whole goddamn world is going to break up about you. You'll be a minor nine-day wonder. Then instant oblivion. No, you haven't thought it through. You'll be known as just another nut, a conspiracy theorist, someone who's created his own Dallas, his own assassination, someone who sees faces in the patterns of trees and assumes some extra gunmen standing in the shadows. Ah, John. Don't you see? Don't you? You can't go anywhere. You can't take it with you.”

Thorne put his coffee cup down. “If it's so easy to write it off as some lunacy on my part, why the hell did you go to so much trouble to put me away? Huh? Why did you do that?”

Leach rapped the tip of his cane on the floor, still smiling. The expression irritated Thorne, almost as if he knew that the congressman had some secret, something still to reveal.

“Little green men, John,” Leach said. “You'd be known as the man who has irrefutable evidence of little green men except when anybody asks to see it you have to point all the way to Arizona, to some secret missile sites no less, by which time, as a precautionary measure, your flying saucer will have been moved. Back to square one, John. You haven't thought it through, John. You've been sloppy and hysterical. You've been hasty.”

Thorne stared at Marcia. She was watching him carefully, as though she were waiting for him to counter the congressman's argument at one stroke, as though she were hoping that he might pull from his pocket a Polaroid snapshot of Asterisk.

“I'll take my chances,” Thorne said. “I'll go to Donaldson—”

“A muckraker, a guttersnipe.” Leach snorted, drained his glass, then looked at Marcia. “You look like an intelligent person, why don't you try to make him see the sense of what I'm saying?”

“Because I don't think
you're
making any sense,” Marcia said sharply.

“Another one, eh? Thorne's converted you, I see. Okay, John. Maybe Donaldson would believe you. Maybe there's a faint chance he'd print your story. So what? You think people are going to credit the story when you fail to come up with evidence? Do you?”

“Like I said, I'll take my chances.”

“Why would you want to do this, John?”

“I think it's too goddamn important, Congressman, that's why. You can't sit down on your fat asses on revolutionary stuff like this, you can't keep a thing like Asterisk to yourself—”

“Ah, the global argument?”

“Call it what you like,” Thorne said.

“You're being an internationalist, an idealist, is that it?”

Thorne paused, conscious of how the situation here was changing, conscious, uncomfortably so, of how it had shifted since he had first entered. Leach was growing, Leach seemed to have gained the upper hand.

“I think a thing like Asterisk transcends any parochialism, any insularity,” Thorne said.

Leach laughed in a dry way. “You would want our potential enemies to learn about Asterisk, would you?”

“Why not?” Thorne said. “I don't see why the information about Asterisk can't be—”

“Shared?” Leach gripped his cane, knocked it against the floor, looked suddenly angry. “You would want our enemies and our potential enemies to learn the secrets of Asterisk—the means of interstellar travel, the specifics of antigravity, you would suggest we just give this all away?”

“I don't see why information like that can't be used peacefully—”

“John, you're wet behind the ears, wet,” the congressman said. “You don't know the game, and you don't know how it's played. We don't share things at this level. Don't you understand that? We don't go around giving our strengths away.”

“People like you,” Marcia said suddenly, “people like you, who've been on the whole shitty Washington merry-go-round for too long and who've become too stale, too stupid, and too self-centered, don't have a goddamn clue about how the world should work—”

Leach, once more, laughed. “I'm surrounded by idealists and fools,” he said. “
Should work!
We're not dealing in
shoulds
, young woman. We're dealing in
things as they are
. Realities. Hard facts. Don't you see that much? Are you so goddamn dense—”

Marcia turned her face away. She opened the curtains with her hand and, in silence, stared out into the rain. Thorne did not move for a time. He was thinking of the disk, he was seeing once more the red lights burning on the disk's huge, smooth surface; and he was wondering if Leach were right. Was he being, as the congressman said, naïve? Wet behind the ear? Was he? Had the same kinds of thoughts occurred to the major general? He saw Anna Burckhardt lying face down on the sofa. The major general suspended in the bright-blue waters of a motel pool. He was thinking of lives trampled and crushed and he was remembering his father, he was seeing the light of belief in his father's face, he was seeing that again, feeling that again—and he asked himself: What would Senator Thorne have done with all this? Exactly what? But he was not Senator Thorne, he was another person, he was a different kind of man. He looked at Leach, who was sighing, shaking his head, and staring down inside his empty glass, knocking the melting ice cubes back and forth.

Thorne struggled now with a renewed fatigue. He was suddenly barely conscious of his own body; it was almost as if he were adrift, spinning, leaving himself. He watched Marcia: what is she thinking? he wondered. What?

He got up from the arm of the sofa and walked in silence around the room. He stopped by the telephone, looked down at it, touched it with the tips of his fingers.
No. I can't buy Leach. I can't operate in that way. I can't sell out. Everything's meaningless if I do
.

He picked up the receiver. He was conscious of Marcia turning at the sound. He saw Leach get up, propped by the cane, and cross the floor to a cabinet; he moved far quicker than Thorne would have thought possible. He reached the cabinet, opened it, and when he had swung around to look at Thorne, Thorne realized, with a sensation of suddenly sinking, that he had been too slow.

Leach held a small gun in his fist. It was neat, stainless steel.

“You can't call Donaldson, John,” he said.

Thorne looked at the gun.

“You can't call him because you've nothing to tell him.”

Thorne dropped the receiver, heard it fall back into the cradle, the dial tone cut. He had no more strength. No more left to fight with.

Leach was smiling, but this time in a sad way, as if all he felt now were some deep regret.

“What you saw at Escalante, John, simply doesn't exist.”

The sun was hot against his closed eyelids. Unfamiliar scents, sounds. Thousands of Bowers opening in bright light, fragile little birds hovering hundreds of feet above. Not on such a day, Brinkerhoff thought. Not sorrow, not now. He opened his eyes. Across the hospital grounds a nurse was pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. Strains of their conversation drifted toward him, soft, incomprehensible, interrupted by the occasional squeak of the wheels turning. He sat upright, conscious of an orderly moving toward him, a man in a uniform so white that as he moved he created a sequence of tiny halos. Brinkerhoff waited. The orderly's shadow fell across him; there was a piece of flimsy paper. Brinkerhoff took it, knowing what it would say, knowing already. And he thought of Hollander slumping sideways in the bed.
Are you going to use that on me?

Brinkerhoff stared at the paper. It was the standard stuff. It was predictable, unimaginative. Hollander had been hospitalized in 1972: nervous breakdown. Yes, Brinkerhoff thought. A breakdown. He suffered from occasional schizophrenic delusions. What else? During his hospitalization he had been treated with lysergic acid diethylamide. Sometimes he had flashbacks, illusions—there was a history of paranoia. Of course, Brinkerhoff thought. It had to be. There was nothing new under the sun, even the Havana sun. Poor Hollander. Poor Ted Hollander. He crumpled the paper and stuck it into his jacket.

He shut his eyes again. He thought that if he lived a long life, if he lived to be a hundred, if he found himself well and thriving through old age in the back country beyond his native Penza, he might never know the truth about Edward Hollander.

But truth, he realized, had no real part in any of it.

The afternoon sky was prematurely dark, clouded over, and rain was still falling in hard lines. Dilbeck felt it soak through his coat, he felt his scarf at his neck as though it were a sodden rope. Beside him in the rain Sharpe was shivering.

“Lost them,” Sharpe said.

Dilbeck wasn't so ready to give it up yet. He looked along the street in which they stood; there were already lights on the windows, bright against the bleakness of the day.

Sharpe sneezed. “Thin air,” he said. “Why don't we go back and dry out?”

Dilbeck shook his head and thought: No spirit, that was the trouble these days. No fire. Give in too easily. He stared up at the yellowy windows of the buildings. And then an odd thought occurred to him; he was prepared to dismiss it except for the fact that he had come to learn never to underestimate Thorne. It was the right neighborhood. Maybe, just maybe, a similar thought had occurred to Thorne. At the least, it was worth checking. At the very least, it was worth that.

“Let's check one more thing out,” he said.

Sharpe, with a sigh of reluctance, shrugged. He followed Dilbeck off into the rainy darkness.

7

The small steel gun in Leach's hand was mesmerizing. It caught the light and threw it back in dull, broken lines. His hand was steady. Thorne put his arm around Marcia's waist, drawing her toward him, as if he might protect her from the line of fire if the gun should explode.

Leach drank the last few drops of water, left by the melted cubes, from his glass; then he put the glass down and jerked the gun in the air somewhat awkwardly. He saw Thorne flinch slightly.

“It isn't going to go off, John, unless I want it to,” he said. “A double safety.”

Thorne glanced at Marcia. He could feel her tremble against him and he wondered: Fear or cold? Something of both? He looked back at the congressman.

“If you want to understand all this, you need to go back about five years,” Leach was saying. “You need to go back to the previous occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania. Before our good friend Foster had the luck to get himself elected.”

Thorne heard rain on the window and thought: Death and rain. A grim combination somehow. But maybe you couldn't die in a rage of sunlight. Maybe this was the appropriate, the only, way.

“Five years ago we had certain intelligence reports that were dismaying to us,” Leach was saying. “Are you listening, John? Don't you want to know, huh? Isn't your curiosity aroused?”

The voice seemed to Thorne to fade in, fade out; he tried to concentrate. Leach looked at the barrel of his automatic a moment.

“These reports told us that the Soviets were our equals in the arms race, if not exactly our superiors. It was, I might admit, a shock to some of us. But it had the effect of bringing certain heads out of the clouds. It was a taste of harsh reality, John.”

The congressman—he looked suddenly smug, as though he were revitalized, all his sickness having left him. He was in control and enjoyed it. Thorne experienced a sense of hatred toward him. He caught Marcia's eyes. She was looking at him in a way that pleaded:
What have you gotten me into? What are we going to do about it?

“A small select committee was formed, John. It consisted of the then president of the United States, his chief of staff, a high-ranking member of the National Security Council, the secretary of state and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I was the congressional member of the committee. Its purpose was to evaluate the arms situation. Our evaluation, though, was pretty gloomy. I remember …” Leach's voice trailed away; he was recalling something. He smiled to himself, then returned his attention to Thorne. “I can't tell you the precise moment when Asterisk was born because I don't exactly remember it. But at that period, if you recall, there was a lot of UFO activity around the world. The United States Air Force had lost a not insubstantial number of jets making interceptor flights. Only the tip of that particular iceberg was ever revealed. And Project Blue Book … well, that was Project Whitewash. We weren't alone in trying to intercept a UFO. No, considerable sums of money had been spent in the Soviet Union, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Benelux countries, in Brazil, in the Argentine, and, God knows, maybe even in China, all with one purpose in mind—to bring down an unidentified flying object. All this is a matter of record, John. A matter of fact.”