The Forge of God

  He hung up and crossed a central courtyard to a snack shop, ordering a turkey-pastrami sandwich and Coke. Twenty-five minutes. Sitting on a tall stool by a diminutive table, he forced himself to eat the entire sandwich.

  Bread. Mayonnaise. Bird taste of turkey beneath an overlay of pastrami. Solid but not convincing. He made a face and took the last meatless dry double wedge of bread into his mouth.

  For a moment, and no more, he felt himself slide into a spiritual ditch, a little quiet gutter of despair. To simply give up, give in, open his arms to the darkness, shed all responsibility to country, to wife and son, to himself. To end the game—that was all it was, no? Take his piece from the board, watch the board swept clean, a new game set up. Rest. Oddly, coming out of that gutter, he took encouragement and strength from the thought that if indeed they were going to be swept from the board, he could then rest, and there would be an end. Funny how the mind works.

  At fifteen minutes after two, he stood at the gate, to one side of a crowd of waiting friends and families. The open double doors brought forth business men and women in trim suits gray and brown and that strange shade of iridescent blue that was so much in fashion, peacock's eyes Francine called it; three young children holding hands and followed by a woman in knee-length black skirt and austere white blouse, and then Harry, clutching a leather valise and looking thinner, older, tired.

  "All right," Harry said after they hugged and shook hands. "You have me for forty-eight hours, max, and then the doctor wants me back to blunt more needles. Jesus. You look as bad as I do."

  In the small government car, winding through the maze of a bare concrete parking garage, Arthur explained the circumstances of their meeting with the President. "Schwartz is putting aside half an hour in Crockerman's schedule. It's getting very tight. He's supposed to be in New Hampshire this evening for a final campaign rally. Hicks, you and I will be in the Oval Office with him, undisturbed, for that half hour. We'll do what we can to convince him he's wrong."

  "And if we don't?" Harry asked. Had his eyes lightened in color? They seemed less brown than tan now, almost bleached.

  Arthur could only shrug. "How are you feeling?"

  "Not as bad as I look."

  "That's good," Arthur said, trying to relax that anonymous something in his throat. He smiled thinly at Harry.

  "Thanks," Harry said. "I have an excuse, at least. Is everybody else around here going to look like extras in a vampire movie?"

  "What do you weigh now?" Arthur asked. The car moved out into watery sunlight. Snow threatened.

  "I'm back to fighting trim. I weigh what I weighed in high school. Graduation day."

  "What's the prognosis?"

  Harry crossed his arms. "Still fighting."

  Arthur glanced at him, did a frank double take, and asked, "Is that a wig?"

  "You guessed it," Harry said. "Enough of that shit. Tell me about Ormandy."

  The wide double doors to the Oval Office opened and three men stepped out. Schwartz nodded at them. Arthur recognized the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Secretary of the Treasury.

  "An emergency meeting," Schwartz murmured after they had passed. Hicks raised his eyebrow in query. "They're thinking of implementing Section 4 of the Emergency Banking Act, and Section 19a of the Securities and Exchange Act."

  "What are those?" he asked.

  "Temporarily close the banks and the stock exchanges," Schwartz said. "If the President makes his speech."

  The President's secretary, Nancy Congdon, came to the doors and smiled at the four of them. "Just a few minutes, Irwin," she said, silently easing them shut.

  "Do you need a chair?" Schwartz asked Harry. Harry shook his head calmly. He was already used to people being solicitous. He takes it with something beyond dignity —with aplomb.

  The secretary opened the doors and invited them in.

  Mrs. Hampton had redecorated the President's office, hanging the three windows behind the President's large, ornately decorated desk with white curtains and ordering a new oval green rug with the presidential seal. The room seemed filled with light, verdant and springlike despite the gray winter skies outside. Through the windows, Arthur caught a glimpse of the snow-patched Rose Garden. He had last been in the Oval Office a year and a half before.

  Crockerman sat behind the Victorian-era desk, looking over a stack of briefs tucked into brown folders. Some of the folders, Arthur noticed, were marked DIRNSA— Director, National Security Agency. Others were from the offices of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. He's not going off half cocked. He's preparing, and he deeply believes in what he's doing. He hasn't stopped being presidential.

  "Hello, Irwin, Arthur . . ." Crockerman stood and reached across the desk to shake their hands. "Trevor, Harry." He pointed to the four leather-bottomed, cane-backed chairs arranged before the desk. Addressing Hicks in particularr he said, "Sarah mentioned I might be meeting with you."

  "I think we've all joined forces, Mr. President," Schwartz said.

  "Are you feeling up to this, Harry?" Crockerman asked, politely solicitous.

  "Yes, Mr. President," Harry replied smoothly. "I'm not needed back with the mice and monkeys until the day after tomorrow."

  "We need you here, Harry," the President said earnestly. "We can't afford to lose you now."

  "That's not what I've been hearing, Mr. President," Harry said. Crockerman showed some puzzlement. "You haven't been, listening to anybody I trust around here, much less myself."

  "Gentlemen," Crockerman said, raising his eyebrows. "Time to speak openly. And I apologize for being inaccessible recently. Time has been precious."

  Schwartz leaned forward on his chair, clasping his hands. As he spoke, he raised his eyes slowly from his feet to Crockerman's face. "Mr. President, we're not here to mince words. I've told Harry, and Trevor, and Arthur, that it's going to take some powerful persuasion to move you back onto a rational course. They've come loaded for bear."

  Crockerman nodded and rested his hands lightly on the edge of the desk, as if he might push away at any moment. His expression remained pleasant, alert.

  "Mr. President, the First Lady did indeed speak to me," Hicks said.

  "She's not speaking to me, you know," Crockerman said levelly. "Or not often, at any rate. She doesn't share our convictions."

  "Yes," Hicks said. "Or rather, no . . . Mr. President, my colleagues—" He cast a pleading look at Arthur.

  "We assume you're still planning to tell the public about the Death Valley bogey," Arthur said, "and about the Guest."

  "The story will break soon one way or the other," Crockerman said. "It must be kept quiet past the election and the inauguration, but after that . . ."He lifted three fingers from their grip on the edge of the desk and shrugged slightly.

  "We're not at all sure about your emphasis, sir . . ." Arthur paused. "Surrender will not sit well with the country."

  Crockerman hardly blinked. "Surrender. Accommodation. Nasty words, aren't they? But what choice have we against superhuman forces?"

  "We do not know they are superhuman, sir," Harry said.

  "It would take us thousands, perhaps millions of years to rival their technology—if indeed we can even call it technology. Think of the power to destroy an entire moon, and push its fragments into collisions with other worlds ..."

  "We don't know that these events are connected," Arthur said. "But I think we could equal them with a couple of hundred years of progress."

  "What does it matter, two centuries or two millennia? They can still destroy our world."

  "We don't know that," Schwartz said.

  "We don't even know of whom we speak when we say 'they,' " Hicks said.

  "Angels, powers, aliens. Whatever they might be."

  "Mr. President," Hicks said, "we are not facing God's wrath."

  "It seems we face something equivalent in force, whatever the ultimate source," Crockerman said. "Can something so
catastrophic happen to the Earth without God's approval? We are His children. His punishments are not random, not when they're on such a huge scale."

  Hicks noted that the President's pronoun for God had assumed traditional gender now. Was that Ormandy's doing?

  "We have no evidence the Earth can be destroyed," Harry said. "What we need ... we need a smoking gun, something that proves that the power they claim to have does indeed belong to them. We don't have a smoking gun."

  "They reveal their intentions clearly enough," Crockerman said. "The self-destruction of the Australian robots shows them to be bringers of false testimony. When their lies are discovered, and pointed out to them, they vanish. Their message of hope is a deception. I believe I knew that, sensed it, before the news from Australia arrived. Ormandy certainly did."

  "None of us puts any faith in Mr. Ormandy," Schwartz said.

  Crockerman was obviously irritated by this, but kept his calm. "Ormandy does not expect the accolade of scientists. He—and I—believe affairs have passed out of the control of our particular witch doctors. Not to show disrespect for your hard work and expertise. He and I realized there was a job to do here, and that we are the only ones capable of doing it."

  "What exactly will your job be, Mr. President?" Arthur asked.

  "Not an easy one, I assure you. Our country doesn't believe in giving up without a fight. I acknowledge that much. But we cannot fight this. Nor can we go to our fate ignorant of what is happening. We have to face the music courageously. That's my job—to help my country face the end bravely."

  Crockerman's face was pale and his hands, still pushing on the edge of the desk, trembled slightly. He might have been close to tears.

  Nothing was said for several long seconds. Arthur felt a blanket of shock closing around him. Microcosm of what the country will feel. The world. Not a message we want to hear.

  "There are alternatives, Mr. President. We can take action against the bogeys, both in Australia and Death Valley," Harry said.

  "They're isolated," Schwartz said. "The political repercussions . . . almost nil. Even if we fail."

  "We can't simply do nothing," Arthur said.

  "We can do nothing effective, truly," Crockerman said. "I think it would be cruel to raise false hopes."

  "More cruel to dash all hope, Mr. President," Schwartz said. "Are you going to close the banks and stock exchanges?"

  "It's being seriously considered."

  "Why? To preserve the economy? With the end of the world in sight?"

  "To keep calm, to maintain dignity. To keep people at their jobs and in their homes."

  Hicks's face was flushed now. "This is insanity, Mr. President," he said. "I am not a citizen of the United States, but I cannot imagine a man in your office . . . with your power and responsibility . . ."He waved his hands helplessly and stood. "I can assure you the British will not react so mildly."

  Ganging up on him, Arthur thought. Still can't see her face.

  Crockerman opened the folder marked DIRNSA. He pulled out a group of photographs in Mylar envelopes and spread them on the table. "I don't think you've seen the latest from the Puzzle Palace," he said. "Our NSA people have been very busy. The National Reconnaissance Office has compared Earth satellite photographs from the last eighteen months for almost all areas of the globe. I believe you initiated this search, Arthur."

  "Yes, sir."

  "They've found an anomaly in the Mongolian People's Republic. Something that wasn't there a year ago. It looks like a huge boulder." He gently pushed the photographs at Schwartz, who examined them and passed them on to Arthur. Arthur compared three key photographs, beautiful computer-enhanced abstractions of blue-gray, brown, red, and ivory. A white circle about an inch wide surrounded a bean-shaped black spot in one photograph. In two earlier, otherwise practically identical photos, the black spot was absent.

  "That makes a triad," Crockerman said. "All in remote areas."

  "Have the aliens talked with the Mongolians, the Russians?" Arthur asked. The Mongolian People's Republic, despite a fiction of autonomy, was controlled by the Russians.

  "Nobody knows yet," the President said. "If there are three, there could easily be more."

  "What sort of . . . mechanism do you envisage them using?" Harry asked. "You and Mr. Ormandy."

  "We have no idea. We do not second-guess the agents of supreme power. Do you?"

  "I'm willing to try," Harry said.

  "Will you disband the task force?" Arthur asked.

  "No. I'd like you to keep on studying, keep asking questions. I am still capable of admitting we might be wrong. Neither Mr. Ormandy nor I are fanatics. We must talk with the Russians, and the Australians, and urge cooperation."

  "Can we ask you to postpone your speech, Mr. President?" Schwartz asked. "Until we are more sure of our position?"

  "You already have almost two months. I do not know to the day when the speech will be delivered, Irwin. But once it becomes clear to me when I must speak, it will not be postponed. I must go with my convictions. Ultimately, that's what this office is all about."

  The four of them stood in the hallway outside, their half hour concluded, clutching copies of the NSA report.

  "Fat lot of good my being here did," Harry said.

  "I'm sorry, gentlemen," Schwartz said.

  "He's going to be very effective on television," Hicks said. "He almost convinces me."

  "You know the worst of it?" Arthur asked as they left through a rear door, Schwartz following them out to their cars. "He's not crazy."

  "Neither are we," Schwartz said.

  An hour after they left the White House, Hicks, Arthur, and Feinman ate lunch at Yugo's, a steak and rib restaurant favored by those in the know, despite its location in one of Washington's less decorative neighborhoods. They ate in silence, Hicks finishing his plate while Arthur and Harry barely picked at theirs. Harry had ordered a salad, a wilted and blue-cheese-overloaded mistake.

  "We've done everything we can," Arthur said. Harry shrugged.

  "What next, then?" Hicks asked. "Carry on scientists?"

  "We haven't been shut down," Harry said.

  "You've just been ignored by your Chief Executive," Hicks commented dryly.

  "You've always been the odd man out here, haven't you?" Harry said. "Now you know how we feel. But at least we had a definite niche to fill."

  "A role to play in the grand comedy," Hicks said.

  Harry began to bristle but Arthur touched his arm. "He's right."

  Harry nodded reluctantly.

  "So begins phase two," Arthur said. "I'd like for you to join us in a larger effort." He stared at Hicks.

  "Outside the White House?"

  "Yes."

  "You've made plans."

  "My plans take me back to Los Angeles, and nowhere else," Harry said.

  "Harry will consult," Arthur said. "Presidents' minds can be changed any number of ways. If the direct approach doesn't work . . ."He smoothed his fingers across the granite-patterned Formica tabletop with a squeak. "We work at a grass-roots level."

  "The President's a shoo-in, as you say ..." Hicks reminded.

  "There are ways of removing standing presidents. I think, once he makes his speech—"

  Harry sighed. "Do you realize how long impeachment and a trial would take?"

  "Once he makes his speech," Arthur continued, "all of us at this table are going to be in big demand on the media circuit. Trevor, your book is going to be the hottest thing in publishing . . . And we're all going to be on talk shows, news interviews, around the world. We can do our best ..."

  "Against the President? He'* a very popular figure," Hicks said.

  "Schwartz hit the nail on the head, though," Arthur said, picking up the tab from its plastic tray. "Americans hate the thought of surrender."

  Hicks looked over the neatly folded clothes in his suitcase with some satisfaction. If he could pack his belongings with dignity and style, while all about him hung their laund
ry out to dry . . .

  The number of stories about the self-destruction of the Australian aliens and the Death Valley mystery had declined in both newspapers and television. Election eve was gathering all the attention. The world seemed to be taking a deep breath, not yet consciously aware of what was happening, but suspecting, anticipating.

  Hicks jumped as the desk phone beeped. He answered with a nervous jerk of the handset, fumbling it. "Hello."

  "I have a phone call for Trevor Hicks from Mr. Oliver Ormandy," a woman stated in pleasant, well-modulated midwestern American.

  "This is Hicks."

  "Just a moment, please."

  "I'm pleased to speak with you," Ormandy said. "I've admired your writings."

  "Thank you." Hicks was too surprised to say much more.

  "I believe you know who I am, and the people I represent. I've been discussing some things with the President, as a friend and advisor . . . sometimes, as a religious counselor. I think we should meet and talk sometime soon. Could you make a space in your schedule? I can have a car pick you up, bring you back, no difficulties there, I hope."

  "Certainly," Hicks said. "Today?"

  "Why not. I'll have a car pick you up at one."

  Precisely at one, a white Chrysler limousine with a white landau roof drove up in the hotel loading zone and Hicks climbed in through the automatically opened door. The door closed with a quiet hiss and the driver, a pale, black-haired young man in a conservative dark blue business suit, smiled pleasantly through the glass partition.

  Snow lay in white and brown ridges, rucked up at the street edges by plows. This was one of the coldest and wettest falls in memory. The air smelled unusually sharp and clean, intoxicating, pouring against his face through the window, opened a small crack by the driver at Hicks's request.

  The car took him out of the concentric circles and confusing traffic loops of the Capital and into the suburbs, along expressways lined with young skeletal maples and out to country. An hour had passed when the Chrysler turned into the parking lot of a modest motel. The driver guided him through the lobby to the second floor and knocked on a room at the rear corner of the building. The door opened.