Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

It was harmless conceit, in Selby’s view. It fooled no one and wasn’t meant to. But it was a private source of strength for Tishie, an affirmation of what might or could have been, if her parents had sold their shop and left Germany in time.

She had been afraid of much in life, and with good reason; you couldn’t call all her fears groundless. But she hadn’t been afraid of dying. At that kind of thunder and lightning she had shrugged and paid the two dollars.

Selby wondered why he had been thinking of Tishie so often lately, and now he knew why. Sarah’s mother had been certain there was something dark and terrifying on the very edge of life, just beyond her straining, frightened eyes, a creature, a Leviathan, swimming soundlessly through the depths to destroy her. And Selby felt that same fear now. Something complex and dangerous, but completely silent and invisible, was threatening him and everything and everyone important and precious to him.

Tishie had at least known at last the name and shape of her fears.

As Selby started back toward the house, Davey came running down the meadow to join him, tossing a football in the air and occasionally fumbling it, and stopping to pick it up. He threw the ball in a wobbly pass to his father, but it fell short and bounced end over end on the slick grass.

“A man called, dad,” Davey shouted. “A photographer, Mr. Parks, J. D. Parks, he said. He wants you to call him back — not today, but tomorrow. He’s in Philadelphia shooting some pictures of a circus, he told me.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“He thinks he’s got something you want, dad, what you talked about. That’s all he told me.”

Davey scooped up the football and tossed it to his father. “Throw me a pass, will you? A real long one, okay?”

“All right, Davey,” Selby said and waited while his son ran down the meadow, looking over his shoulder, waving his hands over his head. There was a touching urgency in the look of his stout, churning legs...

Cocking his arm, Selby let the ball fly in a high arcing spiral, and watched his son running to get under it, remembering with the sweat drying on his face another moment like this, a football in flight at dusk near a lake and youngsters racing after it, laughing with buoyant energy and exhilaration. A troubled memory, worrisome and disturbing. Boys, two little black boys... who hadn’t remembered where they lived...

Camp Saliaris (in General Adam Taggart’s original and highly classified precis) was described to the projects board of the U.S. Chemical Corps as a “locus for experiments in synthetic behavioral concepts,” experiments to be independent of standard civilian or military overview.

A rubber stamp from the relevant congressional committee (Senator Mark Rowan’s) had approved these conditions and appropriated the camouflaged funding to implement them.

Camp Saliaris was twenty miles from Summitt City. Much of its hundred-odd acres was in sandy soil. Stunted pines and tangled bracken bordered the camp’s parade ground and playing fields where members of the post stood formations and engaged in various athletic activities.

In this closely guarded inner area were air-conditioned mess halls, officers’ quarters, laboratories, auditoriums and classrooms.

The table of organization at Saliaris was top-heavy with brass, field grade officers (majors, colonels) and general officers (one to three stars). The camp’s name had been chosen by General Taggart in honor of the Roman celebration of Coena Saliaris . Taggart had first learned of this ancient feast as a cadet at Virginia Military Institute, and had pondered the legend of the holy shields during his tours of duty in Europe and Korea. The fate of Rome, according to legend, depended on the veneration and safekeeping of these sacred shields, the ancilia, dropped from the sky by the gods in answer to that eternal city’s prayers. These myths appealed to the general’s imagination, coupled as it was to a highly practical view of world affairs.

On a chill morning, a Correll Group four-engine jet landed at Camp Saliaris, having cleared customs at New Orleans en route from Portugal. The passengers, sixteen men and five women, were delivered by limousines to the general officers’ mess hall, where breakfast was waiting, foods and beverages chosen to respect and satisfy ethnic backgrounds and religions: yoghurts, semolina cakes, Turkish coffee with chocolate almonds, lamb savory with rice, pita breads, rashers and grilled tomatoes, kola nuts as big as tulip bulbs, roast okra, sausage puddings and fragrant kedgerees of smoked fish and cream requested by the Lord Conestain party. Also on the sideboard were Darjeeling and gunshot teas, bottled soda and palm-wine beers.

Later the group was conducted to the auditorium, a soundproofed room with overhead lighting, and a high ceiling of patterned acoustical tiles.

The rows of spectator seats were separated by a single aisle, the chairs made of chrome frames and leather slings. The double doors were guarded by post soldiers wearing side arms.

The passengers from the Lisbon flight filed past these guards after breakfast and selected seats, their common mood subdued but expectant.

They had come here from Pakistan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Sri Lanka. From Great Britain, Yugoslavia, Italy and Algeria.

At the Correll Group’s headquarters near Escorial, each had received final briefings on the financial responsibilities his (or her) government would assume as participants in the Correll Group program.

Individually, the delegates were hardly known outside their own countries. Even within their particular departments and ministries, most were virtually anonymous. Their names — Feisal Bonahan, Niles Smythe, Jomo N’kruma, Morris Plumb and the others — were familiar, however, to geopolitical specialists who studied the international scene and made it their business to keep watch on these seemingly inconspicuous men and women who shaped, decided and carried out their governments’ policies.

When the house lights were turned down, General Taggart and George Thomson entered through side doors and took their seats.

Simon Correll’s security chief, Marvin Quade, appeared in the stage wings and stood studying the dimmed theater. After a moment of silence, broken only by someone with a nervous cough, Simon Correll walked from the wings to the speaker’s stand. His body was almost lost in the shadows, but his deeply tanned face was outlined by the thin spotlight from the proscenium arch. Characteristically, he began speaking without introduction or greeting.

“What we will presently show you on film may outrage some of you. You may be disposed to deny that the past history of the world has ordained this experiment, and therefore deserves it. But we have learned by now that optimism in human affairs is nonsense.”

As the audience stirred, Correll said, “I’m pleased you are paying attention. You can wake people who are sleeping, Gandhi observed. But if they are only pretending to sleep, you will have no effect on them.”

Turning to the control panel beside the speaker’s rostrum, Simon Correll depressed a tab on the keyboard. A white light illuminated the screen, twin beams flooding it from a projection booth.

Pictures appeared without sound: homes, apartment buildings, lakes and green belts. Children playing baseball. Men in golf carts. A crowded shopping mall. Industrial buildings with antiseptically clean windows.

As the camera panned slowly over these scenes, picking out smiling faces, gardens of shrubs and flower beds, running youngsters, a flag at full staff, Correll pressed a tab which froze the frame in a long, high angle shot of the city, its industrial plants, homes and recreational facilities spread out under sunny skies.