Fran was shaking her awake.
“You okay?” Fran asked her. “You okay? You were making this moaning.” Her eyes were piggy without her glasses on and her hair was tangled seaweed. “It was awful.”
For a time Kit only looked up at her. Then she said: “I had a bomb dream.”
“Oh God,” Fran said.
Kit lifted herself to her elbows. The world was real, solid, but also somehow tentative, able to go either way. “What time is it?”
Fran read the time from her big wristwatch, which she wore sleeping, something Kit couldn’t do. It was late. They both had early classes; they had stayed up late talking, passing back and forth their stories; Kit had told about what had become of her that summer, not all of it though. Still filled with the dream-feelings she had felt, of wonder and relief and then awful understanding, she struggled to rise and dress and get ready.
They went out past the dining hall that smelled repellently of eggs and soured milk, and into the bright still day.
“So you never told me,” Fran said. “Are you going to keep on working with him? Falin. Like you were doing.”
“No.”
Fran stopped to light a Camel. “Did you have sex with him?”
“No,” Kit said, after a moment.
“Did you want to?”
“Yes.”
“Did he know you did?”
“Yes. I think.” There was so much now she couldn’t say, would maybe never be able to say, that this hardly seemed a secret at all. “He said it was hard not to. But he said it’s not what he’s for.”
“Not what he’s for?” Fran asked.
Kit shrugged. “It’s what he said.”
“And did he say,” Fran asked, “what he is for?”
“And how ’bout you?” Kit asked. “Did you?”
“Did I what.”
“Have sex. This summer.”
Fran flicked the end of her cigarette with a thumbnail. “Depends on what you mean,” she said. Kit saw that though she looked only at the way ahead, following her big nose, she smiled a little.
They went up the steps of the student union and waited in line for coffee. Fran bought the New York Times and opened it by her cup. “I heard a viola joke,” she said.
“Oh yes?”
“If a guy comes into a bank with a violin case, everybody gets nervous, because they think maybe he’s got a tommy gun in there, and he’s going to take it out and use it.” She studied Kit solemnly as she spoke. “If a guy comes into a bank with a viola case, everybody gets nervous; they think he’s probably got a viola in there, and he might take it out and use it.” And on her face, after a long moment, another small smile dawned. Kit laughed as much to see that as at the joke. Fran shook the pages of the paper, lifted her cup by the body and not the handle, and drank thirstily.
“Oh God,” she said. “Speaking of the bomb.” She folded over the page and scanned it. “Here’s Ken Keating saying the Russians are putting missiles in Cuba.”
“Who’s Ken Keating?”
“He’s our senator. I mean New York’s. He says they may have MRBMs in Cuba. These names, how can they call them BMs, it’s so bad.”
“What are they?”
“Medium-range ballistic missiles.”
“With bombs?”
“He doesn’t say that. He says they could have. And they could reach as far as Washington and Indianapolis. He says.”
She lifted her eyes to Kit. “We’d lose Indianapolis,” she said.
Kit gathered her books. “I’ve got to go. So do you.”
“This is such shit,” Fran said with sudden vehemence, folding up the paper furiously, and Kit couldn’t tell what the words were directed at.
When she went to the Castle later she found them reading the same paper, Max and Saul and Rodger, drinking coffee too except for Saul, who drank only water.
“And how does Keating come to know this?” Saul asked, one of those questions he asked because he already had the answer. “Someone is feeding him this stuff, because the public has to know it. We have to know that those pesky Cubans have Soviet missiles pointed at us. So when the strike against Cuba comes we won’t be shocked.”
“But do they have the missiles?” Max asked. “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Saul said. “Kennedy doesn’t know. He’s making a case. That’s all.”
“It matters,” Rodger said. “It matters if they stomp on Cuba and missiles get fired. That’s the end.”
“How can they find out if they have them?” Kit asked. “They hide them, don’t they?”
“Spy planes,” Saul said. “U-2s.”
“Cratology,” said Max, and everyone looked at him. “Hey, their word,” he said. “It means being able to tell what’s coming out of the hold of a ship by the shape and size of the crate. Cratology.”
“Okay,” Saul said. “Here’s what Dorticos said yesterday at the UN.” He looked at Kit: “He’s President of Cuba.” He read: “If we are attacked, we will defend ourselves. I repeat, we have sufficient means with which to defend ourselves; we have, indeed, our inevitable weapons, the weapons we would have preferred not to acquire and which we do not wish to employ.”
“Man,” Max said. “That sounds like a warning.”
“That sounds like a threat,” Rodger said.
“What does that mean?” Kit said. “Inevitable weapons?”
“Inescapable, unavoidable,” said Max.
“Maybe a mistranslation,” Saul said. “Maybe he meant something else.”
“Ultimate,” said Rodger. “The end.”
All the reconnaissance flights over the island of Cuba had in fact shown nothing so far, and had been given up out of fear that a plane might be shot down, causing a diplomatic incident. It was agents on the ground who reported the long trailer trucks bearing tarpaulin-covered cargoes moving through the town of San Cristóbal in the west: trailers so long that they couldn’t negotiate the streets of the little town, and knocked down telegraph poles and chipped the walls of tabernas as they ground around corners. Something was going on, the agents said: from San Cristóbal to Palacios and up to Consolación del Norte there was activity, Soviet military movements, something big. The CIA dismissed these reports, but the Secretary of Defense pondered them, and brought them to President Kennedy; and the President ordered U-2 surveillance to begin.
The weather over the Midwest was preternaturally clear, but it was the season of autumn storms in the Caribbean. Not until October 13 was the sky cloudless enough for a successful overflight of the San Cristóbal triangle; the resulting photographs showed a Gods’-eye view of the newly stripped earth of San Cristóbal, and there, the photo intelligence officer said, were the trailers and their cargoes. How do you know this is a medium-range ballistic missile? the President asked. (He had recently had the office he sat in equipped with recording devices; the switches were in the kneehole of his desk, and he had turned them on; years later we would listen to him thinking.)
The length, sir, the intelligence officer answered.
The what? The length?
The length of it. Yes.
Is this ready to be fired?