He had made his speech without a stumble or uncalculated pause; but it had wearied him. My fellow Americans, on Thursday, we shall make history… Mockery. Calvin nodded toward the bottom of the passenger steps, at Miles Coltrane, his vice-president, who grinned and suddenly raised his hands, clasped together, in a signal of triumph, like a champion boxer might have given. Like shaking dice, Calvin thought. Miles, you re maybe a better actor than I am. Then Coltrane saluted him and backed away as the ground crew approached the ladder. Calvin looked out over the cameras toward the roped-back crowd, already being shunted farther from the runway. A sea of featureless blobs — black and brown and white faces… My fellow Americans, I leave you to engage upon the greatest betrayal of my country any American citizen has ever contemplated or achieved… He waved once more and stepped back off the passenger steps, ducking his tall frame to pass into the interior of Air Force One.
Uniforms, civilian clothes, salutes, and acknowledgments. His wife's pale, relieved features. He patted her shoulder, then passed her seat, toward Remsburg and Gunther.
He understood their expressions, as clearly as if they were miming for his benefit.
"Nothing — nothing at all?" he snapped, waving his hand at the huge map table in the center of the aircraft's main section. He did not even look down at its surface. Both men seemed surprised at the persistence of optimism.
"It's twelve hours now, Mr. President," Gunther began. The CIA director had joined them like a man uncertain of his reception. His face was drawn, his eyelids heavy with lack of sleep. Calvin looked at him with the distaste he suspected he might show toward a mirror at that moment.
"Twelve hours. And you know nothing more than you did then? What the hell is happening over there?"
The operators and technicians manning the command center studiously avoided the small group around the map table. Senior officers hovered, as if out of their natural element. Calvin saw his wife, Danielle, watching him as if for signs of exertion or illness. Rings flashed on the pale, long fingers of the hand that rested on the seat. The aircraft's captain hovered, too, another frivolous uniform.
"There's been no signal — no nothing, sir," the director offered. Remsburg's heavy jowls quivered as he shook his head in solemn negation. Gunther merely shrugged.
"Then I don't have anything?"
"You could try to challenge Nikitin when you meet before the signing — bargain with the guy," Gunther murmured. "Stall for time — pretend we know what's happening. Maybe even go on TV and call his bluff?"
"They'd fry me, Dick, and you damn well know that." Calvin looked over their heads, then snapped at the captain: "For Christ's sake, let's get this show on the road, Colonel." The aircraft's captain flinched, then saluted. Calvin shuddered. Already, they would be beginning to despise him. He couldn't stall for time, not even that. No one, no one in the whole damn world would stand for it. "OK, OK — let's take our seats."
As he sat down next to Danielle and patted her hand — which reached for his but which he would not take and hold — he glanced through the window. The crowd was at an anonymous distance now, hardly distinguishable in the flashing darkness, yet he felt their pressure on him just as surely as if they had surged against the fuselage. He looked into his wife's face. It was drawn, the fine lines around her eyes and mouth were emphasized. He wanted to flee into a contemplation only of her.
Without proof, he could not delay. Without proof…
The engine note changed, and he felt the restraint of the brakes. He swallowed, as if fearing air sickness or an accident during takeoff. Danielle grabbed his hand. He felt the impression of one of her rings; it had turned on her narrow finger and dug into his flesh.
He looked out of the window. Coltrane could still be picked out. He'd been called Uncle Tom by some militant blacks when he agreed to become part of the Calvin ticket. What would they call him now, a party to this deal? He turned back to his wife and attempted to grin. The Inauguration Ball came back suddenly, ambushing him with triumph. Her smile, her pleasure for him that night, amid the whirl of people and the endless handshaking and backslapping and the glittering chandeliers and the brisk waiters and the deals beginning to be struck and the lobbyists to meet. But the success of it, the winning! Now its fragmented scenes merely made him dizzy—
— like his Inauguration speech, recollected in its most strident and hollow fragments, which now made him want to retch. A time of hope… I pledge this administration to work unceasingly, with every nerve and sinew, in the cause of peace… a planet fouled and desecrated with nuclear weapons… a time of opportunity… on the edge of the abyss we might also be at the border of a Promised Land… our children… a time of hope, time of…
He shook his head savagely, as if to countermand the aircraft's first movements. He must meet Nikitin tomorrow — he glanced at his watch—today, Wednesday. It was twelve-ten on Wednesday morning. Today. In Geneva. Twenty-four hours before the signing ceremony, and he could not stall or bluff or call Nikitin to show his cards, because if he did, the Russian president would act up his outrage and go directly on TV to challenge him to explain to a desperate world why he wouldn't sign the treaty the billions of inhabitants of the planet were waiting for…
… all day, on TV screens around the world, they'd have seen the wire being cut and rolled away, that obscenity of a Berlin Wall being dismantled, the bombers going into mothballs and the aircraft carriers in dry dock; the missiles being loaded aboard flatcars and being taken home under joint military supervision. Calvin remembered his own particular desire to see the sleek, black-backed dolphinlike submarines coming home, rendezvousing off the East Coast, from Maine to Florida, emerging like a forgotten and terrible army from beneath the sea. So many of them — the Trident force, the deterrent — rising out of distressed white water…
… intended as a final symbol and gesture of peace. Every U.S. submarine on the surface, identifiable and heading home.
Twelve noon. Twenty-four hours before the shuttle was to be launched — no, twenty-eight, Priabin corrected himself feverishly, with inordinate self-criticism for his error. It was to coincide with the signing in Geneva, and Baikonur was — it was twenty-nine hours! Baikonur was four hours ahead of Geneva; the launch was to take place tomorrow afternoon. He rubbed his hand through his already disheveled hair, in reaction to the strange, distracting panic of his concern over time. Time, after all, was irrelevant.
Katya, he saw, was watching his every movement; like a faithful dog or an animal ready to spring, he did not know. The dog itself was oblivious, untidily heaped near the radiator. Katya had returned him — when? Half an hour ago — before she was aware of Lightning. A time of innocence.
"I'm sorry," he blurted out. "Sorry I told you. I shouldn't have. I've endangered you."
Katya shook her head. "It doesn't matter," she murmured; evidently it did. She did blame him for imparting his secret to her. Sunlight fell across his desk, across her pale hands as she twisted them together on the edge of the desk; across her denims where she had crossed her legs at the knee; across the carpet to the toes of his boots as he stood staring into the blank square of the window, fuzzy in his vision. "It doesn't matter now."
He moved to her and gripped her shoulder. She flinched. "It does matter," he muttered through clenched teeth. "That's the bloody trouble — it does matter, more than anything else."