Mrs. Canby also had a daughter, a little girl named Dinah who’d just turned four last month and who was a solemn quiet little child who’d been brought in for introductions and then ushered right back out again. Usually Robert professed himself relieved that his marriage to Kit had produced no children — their emotional attitude toward one another had never stabilized sufficiently for them to feel secure about adding such a volatile third element — and of course he was right to be relieved, since the split would have had to be much more complex and un-final if there had been a child to consider, but on those rare occasions when he was introduced to a young child he invariably found himself totting up his own years — thirty-one next month, thirty-one — and thinking that the time to start a family was fast slipping away.
But a child was such a complication. As witness Mrs. Canby herself. A pleasantly attractive woman, widowed for over a year, she had obviously made no effort yet to find herself another man — burying herself away in the woods here, for one thing, and wearing such plain clothing and sparse make-up and obsolete hair styling — and that was surely, Robert thought, because she had a child. Without Dinah to occupy her time and attention, where would she be now? In New York or Washington or Philadelphia, some urban center in the BosWash megalopolis, finding herself a man.
Though that wasn’t necessarily true. He had no child to tie him down, he’d been divorced nearly three years now, and had he done very much yet toward finding another woman? Of course, the situation was different in his case, but still—
“What do you think, Robert?”
He looked up, startled, to see that they were all looking at him, and that Elizabeth had just asked him a question. A conversation had been going on around him while he daydreamed, but he had no idea even what the subject had been. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My mind was wandering.”
“I said,” Elizabeth repeated, “that NATO today is totally useless, simply a drain of resources that could be better used elsewhere. That even by the time of Brad’s term NATO was nothing more than an appendix, not useful for any good purpose but perfectly capable of suddenly turning bad and killing us all.”
What a rotten question! Robert gave her an aggrieved look, his face turned so his host couldn’t see, and then he said, “I don’t think it’s ever been that bad, really. I think it had two values, and probably still does.”
Bradford Lockridge said, “What would those two values be, Robert?”
Robert turned to see that Lockridge was amused behind his stern features. “Well, sir,” he said, “in the first place, NATO coordinated Western military policy, which was certainly a good idea. Each country was going to have its army and air force anyway, so it was safest to have a central control. Otherwise, one nation could have made a bad decision all by itself and dragged the rest of Europe right in after it.”
“Right,” said Lockridge, nodding emphatically. “And what’s the other?”
“Reassurance,” Robert said. He felt a bit nervous, talking global strategy with a man at Bradford Lockridge’s level, but if he just sat there silent all day he’d hate himself tomorrow, and that would be far worse. So he said, “The fact is, there never was a possibility for a Third World War, the atom bomb made that impossible. War at that plateau is suicidal, and national leaders just don’t tend to be suicidal types.”
“Hitler was,” Howard said sourly. Whether he was sour at the thought of Hitler, or at the thought of the time being taken from his galleys was impossible to tell.
Robert nodded. “Yes, you’re right. But you can’t defend against a Hitler, anyway, there just isn’t any defense.”
“One defense,” Bradford said, and waited till they were all looking at him before going on. But it was to Robert that he spoke directly: “A sound global fiscal policy,” he said. “If the Allies hadn’t bled Germany quite so greedily in the twenties, there would have been no Hitler at all. Money makes the mare go. Biafra was a dispute over oil fields, Vietnam a struggle for rubber plantations. Given a sufficiently sound and stable global fiscal policy, which has never yet happened on this Earth, life would become positively dull.” He smiled with one side of his mouth, and said, “Which takes us away from NATO. You said its other value was reassurance, and I’m not quite certain I understand what you mean by that.”
Robert said, “Well, you’ve heard the old saying about military men always getting ready for the war they’ve just finished instead of the one that’ll come next.”
Bradford nodded. “Not necessarily accurate, but frequently.”
“Well, it isn’t just military men,” Robert said, “it’s almost everybody. When the Cold War built up, the people wanted reassurance, and the kind of reassurance they would most easily understand was in terms of the war that had just been won. That’s why there was so much interest in fallout shelters in the fifties. If the bombs did fall, they would destroy everything for fifty miles around and fill the air with lethal radiation for seven years, and everybody knew that, but what did they do? They pretended the problem was simply a bigger version of the London blitz, because that they could contend with. They could dig bomb shelters and change the term for them.”
Bradford frowned. “You’re saying that NATO is of the same order?”
Robert felt a chill of uncertainty, with the older man’s eyes on him. He was merely a theoretician himself, but Bradford Lockridge had been there. Still, there was nothing to do at this point but go forward, so he said, “That’s the way it seems to me. NATO is a carefully planned and brilliant defense against Hitler and the German army of the early forties. Since if there were a Russian attack against the West it would bypass Europe entirely and strike first at the United States, NATO has never been anything but a beautiful window display to reassure the folks back home; to let them know if the Second World War ever comes back, we’re ready for it.”
Bradford smiled, but he said, “Is that merely a funny joke, or do you mean it?”
“I mean it,” Robert said. “At the beginning of the Cold War, the government knew it had to reassure the people that they were safe, so they—” But at that point he suddenly became aware again of who he was talking to, and faltered. “That is, the way it worked out—”
“That’s all right,” Bradford said gently. “That was before my administration.”
Robert gave him a grateful smile and said, “Thank you, sir. The point was, there was no defense against the Third World War, but the people were going to lose confidence in a government that didn’t promise to defend them, so what they were given was a perfectly adequate defense against the war we’d just won. The whole object of NATO, besides coordinating European military policy, was to give people the comfortable feeling that something was being done.”
Mrs. Canby, who until now hadn’t said a word throughout the meal, suddenly said, “Isn’t that awfully cynical, Mr. Pratt? The people I’ve met in government have tended to be more honest than that.”
Robert turned to her, both in surprise at hearing her speak up and in relief at the opportunity to get out from under Bradford Lockridge’s scrutiny for a few seconds. “I hope it isn’t cynical,” he said. “I don’t really believe that someone sat down in the White House or somewhere and cynically worked out this whole complex global con game to delude the masses. I believe the people generally were scared and worried, and their attitude communicated itself to the decision-makers—”