John Updike - Terrorist

"The poor saint. He's so conscientious, the whole country on his shoulders, I'm honestly afraid it might kill him. He has high blood pressure, you know."

"He looks pretty healthy on TV. I wonder, though, if he could use a slightly different haircut. It makes him look belligerent. It puts the Arabs and the liberals on the defensive." She can't chase from her mind the image of one more oatmeal-raisin cookie-how it would crumble in her mouth, her saliva leaving the raisins for her tongue to find and fiddle with before she bites down. She used to settle with a cigarette for a phone chat; then the Surgeon General kept telling her it was bad for her, so she gave it up and gained thirty pounds the first year. Why should the government care if the people died? It didn't own them. That many less to govern, she would think they'd be relieved. But, oh yes, lung cancer was a drain on Medicare, and cost the economy millions of productive work-hours. "I suspect," Beth offers helpfully, "a lot of this chatter is just high-school and college kids making mischief. Some of them, I know, call themselves Mohammedans just to annoy their parents. There's this boy at the high school Jack has been advising. He thinks he's a Muslim because his deadbeat father was, at the same time ignoring this hardworking Irish-Catholic mother he lives with. Think of what our parents would have said if we'd brought home Muslim men to marry."

"Well, you did the next-best thing," Hermione tells her, paying her back for the haircut criticism.

"Poor Jack," Beth continues, rising above the slur, "he's been knocking himself out to get this boy out of the grip of his mosque. They're like Baptist fundamentalists, only worse, because they don't care if they die." A born peacemaker-maybe all younger sisters are-she reverts to Her-mione's favorite subject. "Tell me what he's especially worried about these days. The Secretary."

"Ports," came the ready answer. "Hundreds of container ships go in and out of our American ports every day, and nobody knows what's in a tenth of them. They could be bringing in atomic weapons labelled Argentinean cowhides or something. Brazilian coffee-who's sure it's coffee? Or think of these huge tankers, not just the oil, but, say, liquid propane. That's how they ship propane, liquefied. But think of what would happen in Jersey City or under the Bayonne Bridge if they got to it with just a few pounds of Semtex or TNT. Beth, it would be a conflagration: thousands dead. Or the New York subways-look at Madrid. Look at Tokyo a few years ago. Capitalism has been so open -that's how it has to be, to make it work. Think of a few men with assault rifles in a mall anywhere in America. Or in Saks or Blooming-dale's. Remember the old Wanamaker's? How we used to go there as children with such happy hearts? It seemed a paradise, especially the escalators and the toy department on the top floor. All that's gone. We can never be happy again- we Americans."

Beth feels sorry for Hermione, taking everything so much to heart, and says, "Oh, don't most people just bumble along still? There's always some kind of danger in life. Plagues, wars. Tornadoes out in Kansas. People keep going. You go on living until you're made to stop, and then you're unconscious."

"That's it, that's just it, Betty, they're working on stopping us. Everywhere, anywhere-all it takes is a little bomb, a few guns. An open society is so defenseless. Everything the modern free world has achieved is so fragile."

Only Hermione still called her Betty, and only then when she was miffed. Jack and her college friends called her Beth, and after she was married even her parents tried to switch over. To erase the little slip-up, Hermione courts her, trying to enlist her in her own infatuation with the Secretary. "He and these experts we have try to think day and night of worst-case scenarios. For instance, Beth, computers. We've built them into the system so that everybody's dependent, not just libraries but industry, and banks, and brokerage houses, and the airlines, and nuclear-power plants-I could go on and on."

"I don't doubt it."

Hermione entirely misses the sarcasm, going on, "There could be what they call a cyberattack. They have these worms that get by the firewalls and plant these applets, they call them, that send back covert messages describing the network they've penetrated and paralyzing everything, scrambling what they call the routing tables and getting by the gateway protocols so that not just the stock market and traffic lights but everything freezes-the power grids, the hospitals, the Internet itself, can you imagine? The worms would be programmed to spread and spread until even that television you were watching would go on the fritz, or else show nothing but Osama bin Laden on all the channels."

"Herm, honey, I haven't heard anybody say 'on the fritz' since Philadelphia. Aren't these worms and viruses being sent out all the time, and the source turns out to be some pathetic maladjusted teen-ager sitting in his grubby room in Bangkok or the Bronx? They make a little mess for a while but they don't bring the world down. They get caught and put in jail, eventually. You're forgetting all the clever men, and women too, that design these firewalls or whatever. Surely they can keep ahead of a few fanatic Arabs-it's not as if they invented the computer like we did."

"No, but they invented zero, as you may not know. They don't need to invent the computer to wipe us out with it. The Secretary calls it cyberwar. That's what we're in, like it or not, cyberwar. The worms are already out there running around; the Secretary every day has to sift through hundreds of reports that tell him about attacks."

"The cyberattacks."

"That's right. You think it's funny, I can tell from your voice, but it's not. It's deadly serious, Betty."

This Shaker chair is beginning to hurt. They must have had different body types back then, the Quakers and the Puritans: different philosophies about comfort and necessity. "I don't think it's funny, Herm. Of course very bad things can happen, some already have, but-" She forgets what the "but" was to preface. She thinks of walking with the portable phone into the kitchen and reaching into the cookie drawer. She loves the texture of these particular ones; that only one old-fashioned corner store left on Eleventh Street sells. Jack picks them up for her. She wonders when Jack will be back; his tutorials seem to take longer than they used to. "But I'm not aware of too many cyberattacks lately."

"Well, thank the Secretary for that. He gets reports even in the middle of the night. It's aging him, it honestly is. He's getting white hairs above his ears, and hollows under his eyes. I feel helpless."

"Hermione, doesn't he have a wife? And umpteen children? I saw them in the paper, all going to church at Easter."

"Yes, of course he does. I know that. I know where I stand. Our relationship is purely official. And, since you're being so provocative-and this is very confidential-one of the areas we get most reports from is northern New Jersey. Tucson, and the Buffalo area, and northern New Jersey. He's very tight-lipped-he has to be-but there are some imams, if I'm pronouncing it right, that distinctly bear watching. They all preach terrible things against America, but some of them go beyond that. I mean, in advocating violence against the state."

"Well, at least it's imams. If the rabbis start in, Jack'll have to join up. Though he never goes to temple. He might be happier if he did."

Hermione's exasperation breaks out: "Really, I wonder sometimes what Jack makes of you; you don't take anything seriously."

"That was part of the attraction," Beth tells her. "He's a depressive, and he liked my being such a lightweight."

There is a pause in which she feels her sister resisting the obvious rejoinder: she is no lightweight now. "Well," Hermione sighs down there in Washington. "I'll let you get back to your soap opera. My other phone is blinking red; he wants something."