George felt sick. "But I thought--"
"No one thought. Nobody gives a damn. For the last five years we've been in the worst situation the world could possibly be in, and no one stopped making money long enough to notice." The senator picked up the first few folders of George's report. "Starships. I wish I had one now. I would fly far, far away. I'll make a bet with you, George. I'll bet you that the enemy's in Washington within two weeks. And I'll bet you that the U.S. surrenders within a month. And I'll bet you that during all that time, we outnumbered them and outgunned them three or four to one."
"I hope you're wrong."
"I'm being optimistic, George. Now get the hell out of my office and take your starships with you."
George had to call his secretary at Berkeley, which was hard, since the phone lines were crowded, but he got the number of Aggie's lawyer. He caught him in his office just as he was leaving.
"After a year, now, you suddenly decide to call," the lawyer said.
"Things are worse than anyone thinks," George insisted. "Give me Aggies phone number."
"She's forbidden me to give you any information as to her whereabouts, Mr. Rines, and I don't have time to argue with you. I have a case in court in half an hour and I have to leave immediately."
"A case in court! You idiot, I can't believe you're going to a case in court! You're in New Jersey! The Russians aren't two hundred miles away! And you have a case in court!"
"Don't be an alarmist."
"Listen, listen to me. I just talked to Senator Maxwell. He estimates we only have a few days. Days, he said. I have passes and clearances that can let me use high priority aircraft to get Aggie and the girls to California, where it's safer. Do you understand that? I can save their lives or at least let them live without being inconvenienced and heaven knows they love not to be inconvenienced, particularly by bullets, so give me their telephone number and their address and don't give me any more argument."
The lawyer, still reluctantly, gave George the telephone number and the address. It was a Virginia telephone number, and the address was in Sterling Park. Half an hour if the roads were clear.
And, to his surprise, the roads were nearly clear. It was as if there were no war at all. Business as usual. Delivery trucks, the normal number of cars. No exodus into the countryside. No panic. Not even a sense of grim determination to fight. The only grimness was from the habitual speeders who resented the presence of drivers going the normal rate of speed. George was one of those who sped. He turned on the radio-- sure enough, the news was blaring out every fifteen minutes. But in between they were still playing music. The top forty on some stations; easy listening on others; a talk statio was interviewing a man who swam the Chesapeake Bay once a week. "Someday soon I plan to swim it the long way. The only real danger is from the pollution. One swallow of the water is like smoking a pack a day for ten years." Laughter from the studio audience.
Am I living in the same world with these people? George couldn't believe the indifference. If all the world is crazy, I must be the one who's insane.
But he got to Sterling Park, and found his wife and daughters packing a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
"Aggie," he said, and when Agle turned around George was relieved to see that she was happy to see him, that her arms reached out instinctively for him, and he embraced her and told her he could get them to California immediately, it's a good thing they were packing, and hurry.
"We are hurrying," Aggie said. "But George, you don't understand. We've been ready for this for a year now. We knew this was going to happen. We know where we're going to go. And it isn't California."
"But California's safer."
"Wo place is safer, George, except away from the cities. We didn't know you'd be here, George, but we have enough to spare. We even have an extra sleeping bag. Come with us, George."
She meant it. She wanted him. And he remembered the lonely nights coming home to his apartment. He almost said yes. But then he remembered his work at Berkeley.
"I can't," he said. "I have work to do. Why do you think I have the priority passes?"
"Work?" she said, and her face turned, bitter. "Playing with rats?"
"Aggie, I've found the way that we can travel to the stars!"
"And we've found the way we can travel to the hills. Which do you think is more practical?"
She turned her back on him and went back to loading the jeep. He watched for another fifteen minutes or so, trying to think of something to say. Finally he said good-bye.
"Good-bye, Daddy," Diane said.
"I'm afraid for you," he said.
Aggic turned to him and acidly retorted, "Afraid? You'll never notice the war, George."
"I notice it."
"You know it's going on. But it won't change anything, will it? You've got work to do. Save the world. Go to the stars. Clean up rat shit. Nothing, but nothing, can interfere with that."
The words stung. She had said them before, during their many quarrels before the separation, but they stung now, because he saw that he was no different from Aggie's lawyer-- both trying to conduct business as usual, both shutting out the storms that would soon sweep the world away. Almost. Almost he said, "I'll go with you." But he could not. It was impossible.
"It's impossible," he said. "I am what I am. I can't change."
Aggie smiled a little then. "How fatal for you. I am also what I am. I wish it weren't true. I wish I could cultivate your oblivion to reality. "
"I wish I could think my work was as trivial as you do."
"If wishes were fishes."
"We'd never starve." And they laughed in memory of a joke they had shared years ago when they still shared jokes. And then George got back in his car and, because he had priority passes, he was able to get on one of the few airplanes that wasn't shuttling troops to the front, and he was in Berkeley when the news came about the surrender.
The troops had begun fighting, but they kept coming to cities in their slow retreat. And in every city they came to, most of the citizens had refused to evacuate. "Declare us an open city," the mayors would say. "There are too many people to evacuate, and a battle would kill thousands. Millions. Declare us an open city." And so the military declared it an open city and moved on.
In less than a week they were at the outskirts of Washington, D.C., and when the general commanding the division that had just left Baltimore realized that even now Congress couldn't make up its mind, he surrendered and went home. And by that night, the war was over, except for a few futile pockets of resistance in the South and the West and the Midwest.
The first Russian troops to arrive in Berkeley only three days later found George Rines standing guard over his files with a few like-minded graduate assistants, as others, led by Doran Waite, tried to break in to burn the papers. "You can't let the Russians have this!"
"I can't let this knowledge be destroyed!" George yelled back. And then the submachine guns were pointed at them and the fight was over and the files were safe for posterity and it was only then that George realized that what he was fighting for was not knowledge, but his command of it, and the Russian scientists came only a week later and George was out of a job. They occasionally visited him to ask questions, but other than that, he was not allowed into the building. "Security," the Russians told him. "You might try to destroy something."
Eventually, however, they let him back in, offering him a position as a lab assistant. He took it.
And he watched in frustration as they kept making mistakes, kept violating simple rules of procedure, and he realized serious research was dead here. Enough had been done that somec and braintaping could be done on a fairly large scale. It didn't occur to the Russians-- or they were forbidden to let it occur to them-- that there was a great deal more theoretical work to be done on the question of man's soul.