Fail Safe (2 page)

"Mr. Buck, I agree with you that your answer to that question probably deserved an A," the professor said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes. "But we are in the business of training practicing lawyers who will be able to think on their feet and in a constantly changing legal context. Your answer was the perfect textbook reply. I could not have done better. But it lacked any flair, any feel for anything outside of the law. Perhaps, Mr. Buck, it is your vocation to be a professor of law rather than a lawyer."

Buck was thrilled by this answer. He would like nothing better than to spend his life immersed in the intricacies of legal scholarship. Slowly, methodically, with the pure pleasure of the utterly committed, Buck learned the law. The classes came and went but Buck

stayed on year after year. He knew that at some point he would finish his legal education and would then become a law professor. Until that time he found life very full,

The White House job took very little time. Over the years he came to regard the White House as a place where he went to study, a kind of refuge which also gave him an income. It was true he had seen the President, but never on business. In the first month after the new President took office he had wandered into Buck's room, introduced himself, and sat down. Buck was impressed by the President's youth, his relaxation, the way in which he put his feet up on Buck's desk and rambled over Buck's background. It was only later that Buck realized that behind that boyish manner and seeming relaxation was a tough and analytical mind. The pleasant informal meeting had really been a disguised examination. Buck knew he had passed. The President had coolly lopped a half-dozen old-timers from the White House staff and told them bluntly it was for incompetence. He had told them face to face, not through another person.

Despite the President's toughness Buck had a lingering doubt about the man. Being the scion of a wealthy family, having easy access to politics, and marrying a beautiful woman did not, Buck thought, really equip him to deal with his adversary in the Soviet Union. The Russian leaders, Buck had gathered, were hard to the point of ferocity, committed to a degree that was unbelievable to an American-especially a wealthy American.

Buck's doubts about the President's capacity made his own slow-paced and easy job somehow more justifiable to himself.

This particular morning Buck had finished his

quick scanning of Pravda and Izvestia and was turning with pleasure to one of Maitland's essays on the corporation's personality. He opened the book, began to make careful marks on the margin and entries in his notebook.

Buck was so absorbed in Maitland that the shrill sound pierced through the office for several seconds before he was aware of it. He had never heard the sound before, but instantly he knew where it came from. In the second drawer of his desk there was a red telephone. When he had been given the office and his instructions, he had been told that this telephone would ring only in case of emergency and was never to be used for ordinary communications. The black telephone on top of the desk was to be used for normal business. He had also been told that when the red phone did ring it would not give the short intermittent rings made by an ordinary telephone, but would give off a steady sharp sound until it was answered.

Someone at the White House switchboard had made a mistake, Buck thought. He had been in this office for three years and the red telephone had never rung. Buck was convinced it never would. He pulled open the drawer and instantly the sound of the telephone became more shrill.

Once he saw the red phone something began to nag at his memory; he felt a sharp sense of unease. Then he remembered: the official who had installed him in the office had also given him a logbook labeled "Red Phone Log Book" with instructions to log the precise time that the red phone rang. . . if it ever rang. Buck had not seen the logbook for over a year. It had become mixed in with the law books, old copies of Izvestia, Russian magazines, notebooks. With both hands Buck pawed through the debris of paper on his desk, pulled open the top drawer, yanked at the three drawers on the left side of the desk. He could not find the logbook. He calmed himself. The call was sure to be a mistake. Nevertheless, he took a dean piece of paper and then looked at his watch. He wrote the time in big black figures in the middle of the white rectangle:

"10:32 A.M."

With relief he picked up the phone.

"Mr. Buck, this is the President speaking," a voice said. There was no mistaking the voice. It was calm, New England accented, nas4 "Would you please make your way to the White House bomb shelter as soon as possible?"

"Yes, sir, I . . ." Buck said and then stopped. As soon as he had said the word "Yes" the President had hung up.

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 Casdo 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 pay checks 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 Casdo 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 Casdo 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 door bells. 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.

"Casdo'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 dear 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.