Eugene Burdick - Fail-Safe

Peter Buck walked up to the Pennsylvania entrance of the White House. It was one of the hard, deceptive, crystal days of early spring. The obelisk of the Washington Monument was white and glittering. Tourists hurried rather than shuffled past the White House. Official limousines went by with their windows rolled up and their back-seat occupants thumbing through papers, their chesterfield collars up. The air was marvelously clear and full of sun, but it was cold.

Of ten Buck had the desire to mingle with the crowds, to wander down the Mall, to loiter in the Smithsonian, actually to visit the capitol and sit in the Senate gallery, to visit the Supreme Court on Monday when decisions were rendered, to regain the innocence he had felt years ago when he first came to Washington. With a soft poignancy Buck realized he had become a new victim of an old malady: he saw less of his city than the tourist. But today he was glad to reach the White House sentry box and looked forward to his warm steam-heated office.

The Pot was on duty in the small wooden guardhouse. The Pot was a thin wiry man, but sixteen years of White House guard duty had given him a hard round belly. He never exercised, but by some odd law of physiology his arms and face remained skinny. Looking out the window of the sentry box he seemed a frail and almost undernourished figure. The moment he stepped outside the impression vanished. He looked precisely as if he had swallowed an ancient cannonball.

Buck did not know his real name. This was part of the White House drill: the guards had to know everyone’s name, but the other employees seldom knew the names of the guards. The Thin Man, the Pot, the Indian, Scar Face, Chief, the Grunt, the Sphinx, were some of the names which the civilian staff had given to the guards. Buck had never heard one of the guards called by a proper name.

The Pot stepped out of the guardhouse and nodded at Buck. His eyes flicked over Buck’s leather attaché case and he grunted.

“Ham and cheese?” the Pot asked.

“Wrong,” Buck said and grinned. He opened the attaché case. It contained two apples, a carton of yogurt, and a chicken leg wrapped in wax paper.

“Pay up.”

The Pot reached in his pocket and took out a nickel. He dropped it in Buck’s hand.

“O.K., I lose today,” the Pot said. “You know where we stand now, Mr. Buck? After 932 bets I have won 501 and you have won 431. What do you think it means?”

“Who knows?” Buck said. He smiled at the Pot and walked on, but the Pot’s question irritated him. For over three years he and the Pot had had this small running bet. It was uncanny how the Pot could estimate when Buck was picking up weight and would start to bring a reducing lunch to the White House. Long ago they had jokingly established categories of food and the Pot would guess what Buck had in his lunchbox. Gradually it had hardened into a bet, had become somewhat serious and, finally, a major part of the day

for each of them. Today was the first time that the Pot had lost a bet in almost a week. In his efforts to deceive the Pot, Buck had become very ingenious in his preparation of lunches. He had instructed his wife, Sarah, to seek out exotic sausages, salad-stuffed eggs, sometimes caviar sandwiches. Once as a joke he had even gone to one of the more expensive delicatessen stores in Washington and purchased a small can of kangaroo meat, but when he produced the kangaroo sandwich, and saw the look on the Pot’s face, he realized he had gone a bit outside the rules. The Pot paid the nickel but his eyes were icy.

Buck went into the East Wing, nodded at the Indian, and then turned left. He entered his small office.

He opened his attaché case, quickly deposited his lunch in the left-hand bottom drawer of his desk, took a copy of the Washington Post from the case and put it on the desk, He closed the case and put it in the corner behind the coat rack. He sat down to the desk. Squarely in the middle of his desk, put there a half hour before by a messenger, were the usual copies of Pravda and Izvestia , plus a monthly Russian literary magazine.

Buck began to read the Russian newspapers. He read with an incredible speed. As he read, repeating a task he had done hundreds of times, he was aware of a slight thrill of pride. He knew, quietly and competently, that he was among the three best Russian translators in the United States. Ryskind at Berkeley might be a hair better on accent, but that was all. Buck was sure that he was better than Watkins over at the Pentagon. After the three of them there was a big gap before one came to the fourth best Americanborn Russian-language expert. Probably Haven at Columbia.

Buck remembered with a stab of malice that at the last meeting of the Slavic Language Association Haven had misused the Russian word for “popery” twice in the same paper. Only Ryskind and Watkins and Buck had been aware of the error. They had smiled across the room at one another and shaken their heads slightly. No one else had noticed it.

Buck had become a Russian expert quite by accident. In the 1950s when he was twenty-two years old he had been called up for military duty just as the Korean War started. He was a junior in college at the time, but had no special interest in languages. He intended to be an engineer. When the Army tested him, however, he placed very high on language aptitude and found himself at the Army Language School at Monterey.

What followed bewildered Buck. By the end of the first week of instruction he was at least two months in advance of the others in the class. The instructor, a Russian immigrant from Kazakstan, was astounded. Not only did Buck learn the Russian alphabet and syntax and peculiarities of grammar quickly, but he could instantly speak back in whatever dialect was being spoken. In two weeks he was something of a celebrity. The Russians on the staff of the Language School would bring him into a room and start to speak Russian to him. Promptly he would respond with the same accent in which he was addressed. If the Russian was Georgian, Buck came back with a Georgian accent, if from Leningrad, the peculiar light inflection of the Leningrad area. The instructors watched him intently, occasionally smiling as he reproduced an obscure accent. At the end of three weeks they took Buck from his class and explained that his presence there was demoralizing to the other students.

From then on he lived a dual existence at the school. Half of his day was spent in an accelerated course in Russian, in which he was exposed to everything from ancient forms of Russian literature to contemporary Russian scientific writing. The other half of the day he was the subject for a group of psychologists who tried to discover why he learned Russian so easily. They put him through an endless series of aptitude, intelligence, personality, and physical tests. The results were a strange nullity. Buck had the I.Q. of an average college student, around 122. He was somewhat high on the tests that measured verbal facility, but his memory was not especially good nor was his eye-hand reflex better than the average student’s. His hearing was actually subnormal. His tone, frequency, and pitch discrimination were phenomenal, but correlated with nothing else. The psychologists were both puzzled and suspicious. They harbored the lingering doubt that Buck was holding back something. One psychologist had the theory that Buck had been exposed at an early age to someone who spoke Russian; to expound it he even wrote a paper called “A Case Study in Infantile Language Imprinting.” He was quite unmoved when no one could discover a Russian-speaking person in Buck’s background.

After a time, the psychologists, sensing Buck’s indifference, began to talk in front of him about their test results. He knew precisely how his Rorschach inkblots were interpreted, the results of the MMPI, his I.Q. on eight different tests, the results of his Strong Vocational Guidance Inventory, his index of neuroticism, how tolerant he was of ambiguity. In everything he came out dose to dead center.