Дэймон Найт: Orbit 5

I whistled. The civilians were finally coming to their senses. Or were they?

“But what does that have to do with—?”

“Public opinion,” the Under Secretary said. “It was conditional upon a drastic change in public opinion. At the time the plan was approved, the polls showed that seventy-eight point eight percent of the population opposed the use of tactical nuclear weapons, nine point eight percent favored their use and the rest were undecided or had no opinion. The President agreed to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons by a date, several months from now, which is still top secret, provided that by that date at least sixty-five percent of the population approved their use and no more than twenty percent actively opposed it.”

“I see . . . Just a ploy to keep the Joint Chiefs quiet.”

“General Carson,” the Under Secretary said, “apparently you are out of touch with the national mood. After the first Four Horsemen show, the polls showed that twenty-five percent of the population approved the use of nuclear weapons. After the second show, the figure was forty-one percent. It is now forty-eight percent. Only thirty-two percent are now actively opposed.”

“You’re trying to tell me that a rock group—”

“A rock group and the cult around it. General. It’s become a national hysteria. There are imitators. Haven’t you seen those buttons?”

“The ones with a mushroom cloud on them that say ‘Do it’?”

The Under Secretary nodded. “Your guess is as good as mine whether the National Security Council just decided that the Horsemen hysteria could be used to mold public opinion, or whether the Four Horsemen were their creatures to begin with. But the results are the same either way—the Horsemen and the cult around them have won over precisely that element of the population which was most adamantly opposed to nuclear weapons: hippies, students, dropouts, draft-age youth. Demonstrations against the war and against nuclear weapons have died down. We’re pretty close to that sixty-five percent. Someone—perhaps the President himself—has decided that one more big Four Horsemen show will put us over the top.”

“The President is behind this?”

“No one else can authorize the detonation of an atomic bomb, after all,” the Under Secretary said. “We’re letting them do the show live from Yucca Flats. It’s being sponsored by an aerospace company heavily dependent on defense contracts. We’re letting them truck in a live audience. Of course the government is behind it.”

“And SAC drops an A-bomb as the show-stopper?”

“Exactly.”

“I saw one of those shows,” I said. “My kids were watching it. I got the strangest feeling ... I almost wanted that red telephone to ring. . . .”

“I know what you mean,” the Under Secretary said. “Sometimes I get the feeling that whoever’s behind this has gotten caught up in the hysteria themselves . . . that the Horsemen are now using whoever was using them ... a closed circle. But I’ve been tired lately. The war’s making us all so tired. If only we could get it all over with . . .”

“We’d all like to get it over with one way or the other,” I said.

T minus 60 minutes . . . and counting , . .

I had orders to muster Backfish's crew for the live satellite relay of The Four Horsemen's Fourth. Superficially, it might seem strange to order the whole Polaris fleet to watch a television show, but the morale factor involved was quite significant.

Polaris subs are frustrating duty. Only top sailors are chosen and a good sailor craves action. Yet if we are ever called upon to act, our mission will have been a failure. We spend most of our time honing skills that must never be used. Deterrence is a sound strategy but a terrible drain on the men of the deterrent forces—a drain exacerbated in the past by the negative attitude of our countrymen toward our mission. Men who, in the service of their country, polish their skills to a razor edge and then must refrain from exercising them have a right to resent being treated as pariahs.

Therefore the positive change in the public attitude toward us that seems to be associated with the Four Horsemen has made them mascots of a kind to the Polaris fleet. In their strange way they seem to speak for us and to us.

I chose to watch the show in the missile control center, where a full crew must always be ready to launch the missiles on five-minute notice. I have always felt a sense of communion with the duty watch in the missile control center that I cannot share with the other men under my command. Here we are not Captain and crew but mind and hand. Should the order come, the will to fire the missiles will be mine and the act will be theirs. At such a moment, it will be good not to feel alone.

All eyes were on the television set mounted above the main console as the show came on and . . .

The screen was filled with a whirling spiral pattern, metallic yellow on metallic blue. There was a droning sound that seemed part sitar and part electronic and I had the feeling that the sound was somehow coming from inside my head and the spiral seemed etched directly on my retinas. It hurt mildly, yet nothing in the world could have made me turn away.

Then two voices, chanting against each other:

“Let it all come in. . . .”

“Let it all come out. . .”

“In . . . out . . . in . . . out . . . in . . . out . . .”

My head seemed to be pulsing—in- out , i n-out, in-out —and the spiral pattern began to pulse color-changes with the words: yellow-on-blue (in) . . . green-on-red (out) . . . In -out- in -out- in -out- in -out. . .

In the screen . . . out my head ... I seemed to be beating against some kind of invisible membrane between myself and the screen as if something were trying to embrace my mind and I were fighting it . . . But why was I fighting it?

The pulsing, the chanting, got faster and faster till in could not be told from out and negative spiral afterimages formed in my eyes faster than they could adjust to the changes, piled up on each other faster and faster till it seemed my head would explode—

The chanting and the droning broke and there were the Four Horsemen, in their robes, playing on some stage against a backdrop of clear blue sky. And a single voice, soothing now: “You are in . . .”

Then the view was directly above the Horsemen and I could see that they were on some kind of circular platform. The view moved slowly and smoothly up and away and I saw that the circular stage was atop a tall tower; around the tower and completely encircling it was a huge crowd seated on desert sands that stretched away to an empty infinity.

“And we are in and they are in . . .”

I was down among the crowd now; they seemed to melt and flow like plastic, pouring from the television screen to enfold me . . .

“And we are all in here together. . .”

A strange and beautiful feeling . . . the music got faster and wilder, ecstatic ... the hull of the Backfish seemed unreal ... the crowd was swaying to it around me . . . the distance between myself and the crowd seemed to dissolve ... I was there . . . they were here. . . . We were transfixed . . .

“Oh yeah, we are all in here together . . . together . . .”

T minus 45 minutes . . . and counting . . .

Jeremy and I sat staring at the television screen, ignoring each other and everything around us. Even with the short watches and the short tours of duty, you can get to feeling pretty strange down here in a hole in the ground under tons of concrete, just you and the guy with the other key, with nothing to do but think dark thoughts and get on each other’s nerves. We’re all supposed to be as stable as men can be, or so they tell us, and they must be right because the world’s still here. I mean, it wouldn’t take much—just two guys on the same watch over the same three Minutemen flipping out at the same time, turning their keys in the dual lock, pressing the three buttons . . . Pow! World War III!