Pat Frank - Forbidden Area

She had tried to keep her voice low. She realized she hadn’t succeeded.

Price said, “It’s the best I can give you.”

Simmons, disturbed at this friction, began, “Now, Katy—” but it was Fromburg who broke the tension. “Major Price’s answer is good enough for our purposes,” Fromburg said, his dark, active eyes begging Katharine for caution. “But it’s not exactly what I was trying to get at. Even if they know the ICBM is coming up, how can they risk war now? How could they win it?”

Colonel Cragey stirred. Just as Simmons knew Russia, Cragey knew China. He was China-born, the son of a missionary. He had fought in the Far East, for the Chinese against Japan, against the Chinese in Korea. He didn’t look like a fighter. He looked like what he was primarily, a professor, and he wore his uniform as an amateur actor wears an uncomfortable costume. He had been lecturing on the Orient at the University of Virginia when, for the second time, the Army called him out of reserve, this time to serve on the Intentions Group where a specialist on the Orient was needed. He said, “I’ll try to catch that one. Maybe the Kremlin can’t help itself. The Kremlin has an unmanageable tiger by the tail. Name of China. Six hundred million people. Peiping controls twice as many people as Moscow and won’t be run by Moscow. The rulers of Peiping have something they call face. It’s more important to them than country, than party, than their life. They’ve sworn they were going to drive us out of the East. They couldn’t get away with it and they lost face and they have to get their face back, even if it means war.”

“Go ahead,” Simmons encouraged him.

“If Russia fails to support China, the whole Communist world will fly apart. Yet if Russia is dragged into war on China’s tail, they’ll surely lose because we’ll be on a war footing, and ready. In either case the men at the top in the Kremlin would surely be purged. They would die, personally. So Russia has to plan a war it can win. That means a one-day blitz. In one day they must create a hundred Pearl Harbors.”

“They have to do a little more than that,” said Major Price. “First they have to eliminate SAC. A hundred Pearl Harbors won’t save Russia if SAC is still around.”

Commander Batt leaned forward. “SAC and the Navy,” he amended. “Of course, like the Air Force we’re in a transition period. We’re changing our weapons systems. For us, too, rockets are the ultimate answer, A screen of sea-to-air rockets to protect our carrier striking force. That’s what we’ve got to have.”

“Very well,” said Simmons. “It’s too late to get technical.” One of his duties, as senior in the group, was to fend off the endless arguments between Navy and Air. “Let’s assume that the Russians decided to launch their peace offensive at the January, ’fifty-five, meeting of the Presidium, but at the same time they began preparations for their alternative, war. At some time in the recent past they decided the peace offensive was faltering. I think operations were initiated as soon as this occurred, and I think these operations, preliminary or paramilitary operations, are now going on. What are they? How do they plan to strike? That’s all we have to figure out.” Simmons smiled, an admission that he recognized, as they all did, that their task was impossible. And the meeting was over.

Felix Fromburg, as security officer for the group, stayed for a few minutes after the others left. He drew dark blue curtains across the walls to shield the maps. He tore the notes and doodles from the scratch-pads. It was said that a man’s unconscious doodling revealed his character. Simmons’ pad, as usual, reflected his neat mind. Single, numbered words represented the subject they had discussed. Major Price always covered his pad with airplanes and rockets, although on this day there was something new—the profile of a girl. Colonel Cragey had drawn an oldtime fortification, a walled city with a moat. Raoul Walback’s squiggles consisted of tiny stars and crescents all grouped in one corner of the paper. Commander Batt had drawn rowboats and fishes. Now what was so subconscious about that? Maybe he was trying to be too Freudian. Batt probably wished he was out on the Severn, fishing. On Katy Hume’s pad was some sort of an equation with symbols Fromburg couldn’t decipher. He folded them all up and dropped them into the burn bag. His job as security officer was finished for the day. In a way, he thought, it was all very silly. 4

When Katharine Hume stepped out of the River Gate she paused on the entrance walk and shook her head as one does to rout a nightmare in the reassuring sunlight. To her right the Jefferson Memorial rose like a white bubble against the cobalt sky. To her left the Lincoln Memorial gleamed in serene splendor, the nearest thing to a temple that her countrymen had erected to mortal man. Two girls in white shorts, carrying tennis rackets, brushed past her. From the river she could hear the dissonance of racing outboards. Overhead an airliner lowered its undercarriage and gracefully wheeled into the glide path for National Airport. A tiny foreign car, a girl and golf bags inside, came to a stop directly in front of her. A young lieutenant with the patch of SHAPE on his sleeve came down the steps two at a time, kissed the girl, climbed into the car, and they laughed and drove off. Katharine wished she were the girl in that car. I don’t live in a real world, she thought. That air-conditioned vault inside isn’t real. It’s grisly. It’s out of Dante. Real people make love and have babies and worry about bus fares and PTA politics and the starling plague. She lifted her face to the sun. If you brought the sun down to earth, and touched it to Washington, the result would be about the same as the kiss of the enemy’s thirty-megaton bomb. That also was a fact, true and real, but few people were troubled. A half million of the untroubled would be away from Washington that afternoon. They would be up in the Shenandoahs and clustered on the beaches from Jersey to the Carolinas and three foursomes deep on every hole of every golf course within fifty miles, or perhaps only walking, by twos, in Rock Creek Park. They could live in the present while she stirred the muddy cauldron of the future. She felt a hand on her arm and Raoul Walback said, “Give you a lift, Katy?”

She said, “Thanks, Raoul,” and walked with him to his car. She felt better. It had been bitterly lonely, there for a moment.

They were crossing Arlington Bridge when he said, “Doing anything tonight, Katy?”

“Yes. I’ve got a heavy date with a couple of books on biophthora.”

“That’s a big word.”

“It has a big meaning. The destruction of life—all life, that is. It’s from the Greek.”

“Katy, why don’t you relax for twenty-four hours? How’s about driving up to my place in the mountains?”

“I’m not playing any one night stands this season.”

He drove in silence until they reached Dumbarton Road and pulled up in front of the red brick apartment building, saved from ugliness and uniformity by shrubbery and vines, in which she lived. Then he said, “I’ll make you another proposition. Let’s get married.”

She had realized that one day he would ask and she would have to answer. At first there had been lunches in the Pentagon cafeterias, and then dinners at Hall’s and Herzog’s and Normandy Farms, and then dancing at the Shoreham. There had been a quite proper professional weekend visiting the Crageys in Charlottesville. She had been invited to dine at the Walback home, a marble mausoleum big as an embassy, on Massachusetts Avenue, and she had been presented to his mother, an authentic Washington cave dweller. Yet now that the question had been put she found herself off guard, with no answer ready. In a city where unmarried young women outnumber eligible males three to one, this was unfortunate. “Are you serious?” she asked, to gain time.