Fail Safe (13 page)

The attention and the flattery were deeply pleasing to Groteschele. He did not disguise the fact from himself. He handled the incidental aspects of fame easily. There was more money, lots more money, and Groteschele turned it over to an expert business manager. He learned to dictate into portable dictating machines while riding taxicabs or airplanes. He learned that it was dangerous to get drunk the night before an important meeting. He became a consultant to various foundations and business firms, but selected them with great care. He wanted nothing to impair his relationship to the Federal government, for he knew full well that his status in Washington and the information which he obtained there were the sources of'his power. Groteschele went through three different administrations without threat. Many of the high military officers and policy-makers did not agree with him, but he was a valuable commodity. He was an innovator, a barb, an egghead with a steel-trap mind, and even those who disagreed with him violently knew they were duty-bound to consider the alternatives which his thinking produced.

Groteschele had been, after the success of his book, besieged by academic offers. He evaluated them very carefully. He finally chose a distinguished university close to Washington which agreed to give him halftime duties for a single semester, but to pay him a full salary. The university also had bought a commodity,

ananie,areputation,andknewit. -

So much had changed for Groteschele so quickly. He thought briefly of his relationship with women. He was not handsome or attractive sexually, and he never had been. He had always explained it to himself by saying that women who were otherwise attracted to him were repelled by his mind. But this, too, had changed. When he walked down the long corridors of the Pentagon, groups of secretaries stared at him with tight little fascinated smiles. He nodded but did not speak. To his surprise, brilliant and beautiful women sought him out. If he wanted, so it seemed, he had only to stand still at a cocktail party, scan the women speculatively, settle on one - . - and then let the situation develop at the woman's initiative. The course often led him to her bed. - -

Groteschele was married and had a fifteen-year-old daughter. Wife and daughter were strangely identical:

slight, nervous, possessed of a thin prettiness. His daughter was a brilliant student and it was her academic record which Groteschele found most attractive about her. Like the wives of many busy and successful men, his wife had faded away into a cool domestic haze. He had married her in Cincinnati years ago and at the time she had had the freshness of youth and it had seemed an appropriate union. Groteschele never took her on trips and when he was home their conversations were brief and perfunctory. She sensed that his sexual life was extramarital, but the knowledge gave her relief. She had never really enjoyed sex, and after Counter-Escalation there had been something about her husband's sexual behavior which disturbed her. Sbe felt ravished and quite impersonal even when locked together with him-as if she were nameless to

him, an anonymous figure upon whom he exploded a deep rage. She tried to convince herself it was passion, but knew it was not.

Passion had recently led Groteschele to an experience that shocked him profoundly in that it revealed so starkly the wellsprings of his power. It had started at one of those frequent off-the-record discussions with a group of high-level businessmen and political leaders. This one bad been in Washington, the Metropolis tan Club. Only a highly selected group was present that evening, about twenty-five men and women altogether. During drinks, one woman had stood out, Elegant, slim and lithe, she was a woman from a world he did not know. He sensed that she had a competence with men that had become almost arrogance. He had seen a few others like her. They gave off the subtle signs of wealth, family background, education and boredom. It was like a number of elegant odors in the air. It also had something to do with the smile: such women smiled infrequently and never at women. When they smiled at a man it was -like a congratulatory handshake; it had nothing of the simper or of the coquette in it. Men for such women were not a diversion, they were a necessity. Groteschele sensed this and felt somehow threatened. He avoided such women.

The speech went well. It was a variation of the same one he gave them all. They never wanted to hear anything new, they just wanted to hear it from him. Afterward, over more drinks, little groups came up to present pet arguments. He looked around the room, wondering when they would start to break up. No sign yet. He could not leave too early. Part of his $750 fee involved just this sort of boredom. There was a slight tug at his elbow. He turned around. It was his hostess and just to the side the woman, the elegant one.

"Evelyn, this is Walter Groteschele, our famous guest; Evelyn Wolfe. Evelyn has been dying to meet

- you. She's made me promise to take a small group to a bar so she can hear you at doser range," the hostess said, and fled.

"She overdid it a bit, but I would like to talk to you," Evelyn Wolfe said. -

Eight of them wound up in one of those countless chic hotel bars of Washington. Evelyn Wolfe sat next to Groteschele and in a few moments he had the bewildering sensation that they had somehow been cut off from the others at the corner table, almost as if some barrier to sound had been drawn around him and Evelyn Wolfe. Groteschele slowly began to realize that this was an extraordinarily attractive woman. She -was intelligent, she was poised, mannered, informed,

*nd intense, but he had met at least a score of women that possessed these qualities. What she possessed in addition was a kind of burning intensity, a hard focusing of all her emotions on some undefined objective. She did not converse. She aimed at a target. By the time they had had four scotch and waters Groteschele realized that the target was himself. Normally he would have been flattered. But this time he felt a slight shiver of apprehension. This woman had an almost cobra-like manner of following what he said. Her beautifully coifed head, her face marred only by a mouth that was too small, actually wove back and forth with slight undulations as Groteschele talked about war games, the strategy of surrender, megatons, and Doomsday systems.

Most people, especially women, listened to Groteschele's description of American and Soviet tactics with a kind of unconcealed look of either bafflement or horror. Groteschele could not make out the look on

Evelyn Wolfe's face. He only knew that her concentration was enormous. She spoke very little. When he described the Doomsday system, hinting that it was semidassified, she closed her eyes for a moment and a slight smile started at the corners of her mouth.

"Beautiful," she said.

Just that single word unaccompanied by an expression of horror or astonishment or dismay. For a moment Groteschele's careful poise was broken. He went on automatically talking about the likeliest survivors of an all-out thermonuclear war, his way of giving a droll ending to his macabre description, of letting people down easily. They would be the most hardened of convicts, those in solitary confinement. Another group likely to survive would be the file clerks for large insurance companies, because they would be housed in fireproofed rooms and insulated by tons of the best insulator in the world, paper.

"Then, my dear Miss Wolfe, imagine what will happen," Groteschele said, feeling himself regaining his poise. "The small group of hardened criminals and the army of file clerks will war with one another for the remaining means of life. The convicts will have a monopoly of violence, but the file clerks will have a monopoly of organization. Who do you think will win?"

Evelyn Wolfe looked straight at Groteschele. Then she shook her head. Groteschele was confused.

"I would like you to take me home now," Evelyn Wolfe said, and she was up on her feet and into her mink coat before he responded. She did not say goodbye to the rest of the group, but they all looked up as she and Groteschele left.

They were in Groteschele's car and three blocks from the bar before Evelyn Wolfe spoke.

"You were being mischievous about the war between the convicts and the file clerks," she said, leaning her head back against the seat. "In fact, you know that no one will survive the Doomsday system. That is the beauty of the whole thing."

"No one, Miss Wolfe, has ever called it beautiful before," Groteschele said with a laugh.

"They have been afraid to," she said. "But that is what they feeL"

"You mean that everyone is possessed by the death-wish?" Groteschele asked in his best professorial manner.

"No, damn it, don't be so deliberately stupid," she said sharply. "Everyone knows they are going to die. What makes you fascinating and what makes your subject fascinating is that it involves the death of so many people. Quite literally everyone on earth." She paused a moment and then spoke savagely. "Damn it, I wish I were a man and a man who could push the button. I would not push it, you understand that. But the knowledge that I could." - She shivered in her mink coat.

As Groteschele turned off of Massachusetts Avenue and threaded through Rock Creek Park, he felt a sudden hard understanding cross his mind. It was not he, Groteschele, the physical man, who was attractive to women. It was Groteschele, the magic man, the man who understood the universe, the man who knew how and when the button would be pushed. He was a master of death and somehow that gave him potency.

"Why wouldn't you push it?" Groteschele asked softly. "There it sits. More power in that button than anyone in all time has ever possessed. But it's never used until you push the button. Why not push it?"

"Because 1 would die along with everyone else," Evelyn Wolfe said.

Her voice came to a queer faltering halt. Groteschele felt a very deep excitement.

"That is one statement you do not really believe," he said with authority. "Do you think that life is the most important thing to a person? You don't think it for a moment. You know I don't. I can name a dozen ways of living to which you would prefer death."

She was leaning back against the seat, her eyes closed, the lacquer of sophistication dissolved from her face. She looked curiously young. Like a hungry young girL

"Go on," she said. It was the first time that night she had implored him.

"Knowing you have to die, imagine how fantastic and magical it would be to have the power to take everyone else with you," Groteschele said, spinning out what he had never said to himself. "The swamis of them out there, the untold billions of them, the ignorant masses of them, the beautiful ones, the artful ones, the friends, the enemies.. . all of them and their plans and hopes. And they are murderees: born to be murdered and don't know it. And the person with his finger on the button is the one who knows and who can do it."

The sound Evelyn Wolfe made was not a moan. It was the sound of wonderment that a child makes... even if the sees cruelty.

"Stop in one of those little side roads," Evelyn Wolfe ordered. -

Groteschele obeyed.

The moment that he turned off the motor her neat trim head struck at him. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before. She kissed him violently and then whispered words in his ear at the same time that her hands moved over his body. In one way he felt raped, attacked by someone stronger than himself. At

the same time her words were words of the most extreme submission, bringing out every bullish impulse in his body.

He never recalled perfectly his feelings. It was too quick a mixture of self-revelation, of shame, of wonderful obscenity, of feeling a child under his hands and knowing she was a woman, of her words ending and her hoarse breathing beginning, of a savage pride that his softening body was capable of so much, of all this happening in the little universe ringed round by gear-shift and leather seats and instrument panel, of soft little hands that arched into claws, of the sound of cloth ripping, of expensive perfumes mixed with the smell of her, and, chiefly, that this was a complete surrender. -

When finally he placed her small body in the corner of the car he knew she was satisfied. But he was wrong. Her eyes still glittered and she came back across the seat at him. She took his hand and raised it to her lips. She kissed the palm of his hand and then taking his little finger in her mouth she softly sucked it and then bit it so sharply that he jerked.

Suddenly, in a way from which he had always protected himself, Groteschele realized that in his own person, convoluted and intertwined, were two knowledges of death. In one way, the public way, he was a respectable high priest of civic death. This dialogue he had raised from a secretive conversation to a respectable art. It was a game at which he was exquisite. Almost by his own single-mindedness and wit he had introduced to a whole society the idea that a calm and dispassionate and logical discussion of collective death was an entertainment. By refinements and logical innovation he had made municipal death a form of style and a way of life.

But now, with his body aching and sweat soiling his

shirt, he realized that in him there was also a personal beast of death. He realized that he bad always feared women because in each of them there was the buried but inextinguishable desire to love a man to death. Evelyn Wolfe was simply more obvious and direct about it than the others. She would, without mercy and as if it were her due, draw the energy and juices and fluids and substance from his body through the inexhaustible demands of pure sex.

Groteschele realized that he had never in his -life distinguished between sex and love. And now it was too late.

He pulled his hand away from Evelyn Wolfe's mouth, started the car, and, accelerating wildly, shot through Rock Creek Park. He roared a single great peal of laughter as the car left the park. The black internal beast of death he would never recognize again. And he would not have to, for he had the other great and public death as his amulet. It was enough for any man. And it was more than most had ever had.

When they got to Evelyn Wolfe's house, she leaned toward him and invited him in. He reached over and gave her a short savage slap across her open mouth. She did not recoil, she did not cry, she did not even move. She simply sat silently for a moment, her eyes crystalline with a sense of loss. She waited a full fifteen seconds and then opened the door and walked firmly up to her house.