William Prochnau - Trinity's Child

“No, Mr. President, I cannot,” Alice said.

On the phone the silence seemed endless and deafening. Alice could hear his own pulse pounding in the earphone. The President finally spoke, and Alice shuddered at the eerie calm of his voice.

“You understand what this means?”

“All too well, Mr. President.”

“It’s hopeless?”

Alice held his eyes unflinchingly on the E-4. “Another ten minutes, sir…” he said quietly. “Another twenty. If the pilot made one false move, one small slip…” The general’s voice also was eerily calm. “Any man could make that slip, Mr. President. Any man would. Eventually. But I know the pilot. I helped train him. He’s good. When I place myself in his position, I… I…”

Alice fumbled only briefly, his voice catching. Then he continued. “If I place myself in the cockpit of the E-4, sir, I see myself pursued by a madman. I see the President of the United States pursued by a madman, with only me between the two.” He paused. “I would not slip, sir.”

The President’s voice turned pensive. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can see that. Madness takes many forms, general. I’m afraid I can see that more clearly now, sightless, than I did with both eyes. It’s a heavy burden to carry out of this world.”

Alice said nothing. The floor vibrated beneath him, the engines screaming in the torture of their impossible reach for the giant plane cutting through the clouds just ahead of them.

“General?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Against your wishes, I am going to thank you.” The President paused and Alice thought he heard a sniffle on the other end. “Not all our people programming was that faulty.”

Alice swallowed hard, blinking his eyes against the increasing mist. He was unable to reply, reaching behind his ear for the cigarette instead. He fondled it, as he might a fine Havana.

“The people,” the President began again, his voice curious, as if he had found one truth too late and now sought another, “the crew aboard the bomber that turned… who were they?”

The general swallowed again and took a deep breath. They had time now. Not much. But they had no better way to use it.

“I don’t know what to tell you, sir,” Alice responded painfully. “The pilot was very good. The copilot was the daughter of one of my best friends. You knew him. General Moreau. Devoted his life to this, convinced like all of us that we could prevent it by keeping it ready. That’s a tough mistake to take upstairs, too… ” Alice found it almost impossible to continue, his voice dropping off to a whisper. “What can I tell you? They weren’t average, whatever the hell that means. They weren’t that special, whatever that meant in our world… Does it make any difference?”

The clocks ticked past 2038.

“Why?” the President asked. “Why did they do it? Scared—?”

Alice suddenly flared in uncontrollable anger and hurt. “Scared? You’re damned right they were scared! Just like I’m scared! Just like you’re scared, the Premier’s scared, the whole fucking world is scared out of its wits! You want me to say they were cowards? Cowards, sir? Heroes, sir? Mad, sir? Sane, sir? How the hell do I know?!” Alice broke it off just as suddenly. “They gave us a glimmer of hope, Mr. President,” he added softly.

“That’s why I wanted to know, general.” The President sighed. “They gave us, for whatever reason, more than I gave. That’s a heavy one to carry, too.”

Alice paused. Suddenly he felt as if he had no time and all the time in the world. “Mr. President?”

“Yes, general.”

“I saw General Moreau a month ago. I thought he was growing senile. He said we were losing.”

The President bristled slightly. He had built every weapon the military wanted. He drew a deep breath. Every weapon you wanted, too, buster, he said to himself. “Losing,” he said quietly. “To the Soviets?”

“To the system, sir.”

At 2039 Zulu a series of explosions occurred almost unnoticed in the wastelands of eastern Kazakhstan. The world’s sensing devices did not record them, and their relevance would have been puzzling in any case. The ground-burst explosions carved craters nearly a kilometer wide and more than fifty meters deep in the place known as Zhangiztobe. Of the crews of the two Backfire bombers flying over the isolated region, one intentionally failed to pull up and out. The other flew home.

Condor and the Librarian calmly supervised the methodical tap-tap-a-tap of authenticator codes soaring upward toward two Soviet satellites orbiting over the earth and back downward toward two American aircraft orbiting over the oceans. The clock read 2039 Zulu, the codes more than half delivered, when they looked at each other in confusion. They felt the sharp lurch of their command plane as it banked hard left.

At 2039 Zulu, Alice withdrew the cigarette from the cranny above his ear. The general’s reach was subconscious, so mesmerized was he by the marvelous aircraft racing untouchably ahead of him. In some deep and entrenched way, he admired the pilot who was beating him. The man was so good, trained to be entrusted with the President of the United States, trained to lose an eye to a manmade sun and blithely take the protective patch off his good eye, exposing it so he could fly onward, the President secure.

Behind the two aircraft, in the late afternoon, the winter sun was setting again now, casting fiery beams across the white plateau of clouds through which the fruitless chase continued. The E-4’s wing sliced gracefully through a pink cotton-candy cloud bubble, cut majestically through the ebbing blue of a fading day, dashed easily toward the darkness of a last night.

To Alice, buried now in dreary thought, the hopeless race seemed to be taking them both beyond the clouds, beyond the sun, and over the very edge of their earth. He snapped a match to light the cigarette. In the flare, he lost the first move. Smitty lost it too, so suddenly had the hunted made himself vulnerable.

In front of them, the giant aircraft turned broadside to the Looking Glass. Alice dropped the match and the cigarette, tightening hs grip on the phone. Smitty froze, ever so briefly, in puzzlement. The E-4’ s wings tipped slightly one way and then the other in an invitation and also in one man’s acknowledgment that he understood. It would happen very quickly now.

Smitty nudged the Looking Glass into a shallow, banking dive to the left. Alice’s eyes flooded. His knuckles turned rigid on the phone. “Mr. President,” he said quickly. “Do better next time, sir.” He did not hear a reply.

In the windshield, the blue letters spelling “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” swelled instantly. Without pause or thought, Smitty veered his prow into the loop of the U just forward of the E-4’s wings, just aft of the presidential plane’s pilot.

In that final microsecond, the one that turns infinite for each being, Alice was certain he saw a vision from the lefthand seat of the other aircraft’s flight deck. In the side window he saw a man in a black eyepatch snap a perfect, academy-taught salute. Alice was equally certain that, from the cockpit of the Looking Glass, the salute was returned with proper flair and suitable honor.

The explosion, high over the black and rich earth near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, was small by the standards of the day. It was measured in neither kilos nor megas but merely in tons. It emitted no rays harmful to man’s programming, mechanical or otherwise.

Six hundred miles to the east and north, in a hole in the ground, the President of the United States said “Alice” once, but not twice, into the huzz.