He asked her if something was the matter.
“It’s just that I have this friend—not really a friend, someone I know—that works in the Pentagon. And he says they weren’t paid there at all for several months . . . but now they are getting paid again . . . only now the checks are from your company . . . Do you know Mr. Lewis?” This was said with many pauses and hesitations.
“I’m his assistant,” Peters said.
“Well, would it be possible . . . The staff here hasn’t been paid since January. . . . Most of them are gone, and you wouldn’t have to pay them, of course; I live with my mother, and anything you could get for us . . .”
“I don’t—,” Peters began, then changed it to: “I don’t see why we couldn’t put you under military administration. I mean, nominally. Then you’d be civilian employees of the Department of Defense.”
“Oh,” the girl said, and then, “Oh, thank you.” And then, “I—I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten what it was you wanted. I’m a graduate of Maryland—I really am. Library science.”
“The history tape,” Peters said. “You ought to get more rest.”
“So should you,” the girl said. “You look tired.”
“I’m drunk.”
“Well, we’ve had so many requests for that tape that we just looped it, you know. We run it all the time. I’ll connect you.”
She pushed buttons on her own vidlink, and her face faded until only her mouth and bright eyes were visible, overlaying the helmeted figure of an astronaut. “All right?” she said.
Peters asked, “Is this the beginning or the end?”
“Sir?”
“I wanted to know—” He heard the door open behind him and hit the Cut button. “Later.” The screen filled at once with incoming calls. He turned.
It was Clio Morris. She shut the door behind her and said, “Enough to drive you crazy, isn’t it?”
He looked at her and made some commonplace reply, paying no more attention himself to what he had said than she would. She said, “Who do I remind you of?”
“Was I staring?” he said. “I’m sorry. Did you come to relieve me?”
“No, just to get away from the mess out there for a while. All right if I sit down?” She sat on the bed.
He said, “You don’t remind me of anyone.”
“That’s good, because you remind me of somebody. Mr. Peters. I’m going to have a drink—want me to bring you one?”
“I’ll get them,” Peters said. He stood up.
“No, I will. Back in a minute.”
Automatically Peters seated himself at the vidlink again and pressed the first Ready button. A man appeared who said he wanted, quite frankly, to tell Peters his management was worried about the way things were going, and that they already had a great deal sunk in this thing and could not afford to lose more. Peters agreed that things were going poorly (which disconcerted the man) and asked for positive suggestions.
“In what way?” the man said. “Just what do you mean?” “Well, we clearly need to apply greater force to Detroit than we have so far. The question, I suppose, is how we raise the force and how we can best apply it.”
“You certainly don’t expect us to commit ourselves to any plan with this little preparation.”
Peters said, “I just hoped you might have a few off-the-cuff suggestions.”
The man shook his head. “I can take the question to my management, but that’s as far as I can go.”
Peters told the man that he had heard certain foreign countries might have soldiers for hire, and that it would be possible for the man to ask among his own employees for volunteers to fight in Detroit. The man said that he would keep that in mind and signed off, and Clio came in with two old-fashioneds, one of which she handed to Peters. She asked him if he had gotten anywhere with Burglund.
Peters shook his head. “Is that who I was talking to?”
“Uh-huh. He works for ——.” She named a conglomerate, and Peters, suddenly curious, asked what they made.
“They don’t make anything,” Clio said. “Not themselves. They own some companies that make things, I suppose, and some oil tankers and real estate. Pulp-wood holdings in Georgia.”
Peters said, “I guess this is different from running pulpwood holdings in Georgia.”
“Sure,” Clio said. She sat down on one of the beds. “That’s why Lowell is losing his war.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Four or five months ago when he started all this I thought they could handle it—I really did.” When Peters looked at her questioningly she added, “The companies. I thought they could hold things together. So did Lou, I guess.”
“So did I,” Peters said.
“I know. You’re a lot like Lou—when he was younger. That’s what I meant when I said you reminded me of somebody: Lou when he was younger.”
“You couldn’t have known him then,” Peters told her.
“I didn’t. But about a year ago he showed me some tapes he had. They were training tapes he made twenty or twenty-five years ago. They showed him explaining some kind of machine; he was an engineer originally, you know. He looked a lot like you—he was a handsome man, and I guess he wanted me to see that he had looked like that once.”
“You sleep with him, don’t you?”
“I used to. Up until about six weeks ago. Now I’m trying to figure out why.”
Peters said, “I wasn’t asking you for an explanation.”
“I know,” the girl said. “You just wanted to find out if it was safe to fight with me, right?”
“Something like that.”
“The formal business power structure and the informal one.”
“Something like that.”
“You still think there’s a chance we’ll win and you’ll have a career with U.S.”
Peters shrugged. “With my education I don’t see anything else to shoot for— that’s something I didn’t understand until recently: you don’t get that degree; it gets you. Now, for me, it’s this or nothing.” He moved away from the vidlink and sat down beside her on the bed. The spread was satin, and he began to stroke it with his fingers.
“You think people like Burglund are going to pull us through? I mean, really?”
Peters was silent for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. “He won’t, but I still don’t know why not.”
“I do,” Clio said. “I’ve been helping Lou deal with some of them. What do you think it takes to be a successful businessman? Enterprise, lots of guts, hard work, high intelligence—right?”
“Roughly.”
“You want to tell me how you use those things to manage a tree farm in Georgia?”
“I don’t know,” Peters said. “I don’t know anything about the lumber business.”
“Neither does he. Or if he does, it doesn’t do him any good. Look, they’ve got all this land, with pines growing on it. When it starts getting mature—ready to cut—anyplace, people make them offers for it: paper mills and lumber companies. And since some of it gets mature every year they know quite a bit about price—all they have to do is look up last year’s bids. When one comes in that looks good, they can tell that company to go ahead if it’s a cash deal, and if it isn’t they can look up their credit in Dun and Bradstreet. They’ve got a regular crew that comes around and replants when the cutting’s done.”
“You make it sound easy,” Peters said.
“No, it isn’t easy—but it isn’t your kind of hard either. It takes a special kind of men who can go year in and year out without rocking the boat in any way. People who never get so bored with it they get careless, and that know when they have to bow to the state legislatures and when they ought to threaten to fight a new law through the courts. But now you’re telling them to get out and recruit soldiers—well, most of them were in the army themselves at one time or another, they were majors and colonels and all that, at desks, but they don’t know anything about soldiers, or thinking, or running anything that doesn’t go by routine. We used to say that what we wanted was initiative and creativity and all those things, just like we said we wanted kindness and human values, and the American frontier, while it lasted, actually encouraged and rewarded them, but we’ve been paying off on something else for a hundred years or so now, and now that’s all we’ve got.” Peters had slipped his hand between her thighs, and she looked down at it and said, “That took you a long time.”