Alternities (6 page)

At six o’clock, he left the bed to soak the knotted muscles of his neck and his eternally stiff right knee—blown out ten years ago during a family softball game—in a long, near-scalding shower. He reached the private dining room a minute before his breakfast of scrapple and French toast did.

A single place had been set, and his short stack of newspapers was already there, carefully culled of those sections Robinson had no interest in reading. There was that morning’s New York Times, defiant leader of the eight or ten rebellious dailies not subscribing to the Federal News Service. And the Washington Post, flagship of the FNS and, in Robinson’s mind, symbol of what responsible journalism was all about. And on top, yesterday’s Chicago Tribune, to which he turned first, eager to measure his own thoughts against its sports columnists. Trade talk was in the air in the wake of the Bears’ fourth straight loss, and Piccolo was clinging to the coaching job by his teeth.
At the very least, he has to give the kid quarterback from Stanford a shot—

Robinson expected to finish both his breakfast and his reading without interruption. It was understood by family and staff alike that this time, this room, belonged to him. So when the knock came halfway through, Robinson knew that it foretold something serious.

“Come in,” he called out, folding his paper and setting it aside.

The door opened to admit William Rodman, Robinson’s bald-headed White House chief of staff.

“Good morning, Peter. Sorry to disturb you—”

“That’s all right,” Robinson said graciously. “What’s happening this morning. Bill?”

“There’s been another submarine contact off New York harbor. I thought you’d want to know.”

“When?”

“Within the half-hour, just after dawn. The ship involved is the freighter
Castle Point
, American registry.”

Robinson folded his hands, elbows resting on the table. “Any details?”

“She was outbound in the Ambrose Channel. The captain reports a Soviet submarine surfaced a hundred meters to port and ran with them for five minutes. They counted five tubes, which sounds like a Horizon—class boat. We won’t know for sure until the Coast Guard retrieves the film one of the crewman shot. A copter is on the way to pick it up now.”

“Was that the only shooting?”

“Yes, thank Heaven.”

“And the
Castle Point
. Was she inside or outside the line?” Robinson asked lightly.

“Inside. No question about it.”

Robinson nodded, retrieved his fork, and speared another bite of scrapple. “Thank you. Bill. I’ll be down in a little while,” he said, and engulfed the meat with a quick bite.

“Anything you want me to do?”

Signalling for patience with his fork, Robinson waited until he had swallowed to answer. “O’Neill already knows about it, I presume. Still no answer on the last protest we filed?”

“No.”

“Then there’s no sense drafting another one. Just add it to the gripe file. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

Rodman nodded and removed himself.

Nothing we can do about it
. The admission ate at Robinson all through the rest of his breakfast. Nothing we can do about a Russian submarine playing tag with the shipping coming out of our most important port—

He stopped eating and stared out the window at the trees, remembering a letter he had received in the first year of his first term.

The letter was from a Michael Gaston, a worker in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He had taken his family on a three-day summer expedition to Wildwood, New Jersey. The last day, while they were sunning and playing on the sand, a Soviet submarine had surfaced out past the breakers and cruised briefly along the shore.

“My boy was so excited,” the man wrote, “to see a warship out where it belonged, in the sea. He said it looked like a great big gray shark and kept asking, ‘Did you work on that sub. Daddy?’ I couldn’t bear to tell him it wasn’t one of ours.

“Why does this have to be, Mr. President? Why should my son and the thousand other kids that were there that day have to suffer the humiliation of watching a Russian submarine cruising unmolested off an American beach? Maybe we can’t rid the ocean of Soviet sharks. But I’m sick at heart to think that we can’t even drive the monsters back to deep water where they belong. Something has to be done.”

Slowly, almost mechanically, Robinson finished off his breakfast, collecting the last of the syrup with the last of the French toast. He glanced at his watch. Seven-thirty. Rodman would be waiting for him in the Roosevelt Room.

Nothing we can do about it, Mr. Gaston—still
, he thought as he rose from the table.
But something is being done. Because it doesn’t have to be that way. And I swear that when I leave this drafty old mansion, it won’t be that way any longer.

Albert Tackett’s suite on the thirty-sixth floor of the National Resource Center offered every comfort and convenience he could think to ask for. He had the huge desk and fine furniture which were traditional corporate status symbols; a bank of terminals and phones providing unrestricted access to Defnet, USIA, and the White House; and a personal staff of three to relieve him of the more routine labors of his office.

Few government servants, even in Washington, enjoyed comparable accommodations.

But to Tackett’s mind, one of the office’s most attractive features was what lay outside it. The Tower, as the NRC’s silver and black monolith was commonly called, stood at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Marlborough Street, on the south shore of the Charles. Being a corner room on the top floor, his office boasted the panoramic perspective of both north- and east-facing windows.

Tackett was forever taking issue with visitors who found the Boston cityscape a monotonous, monochromatic expanse of over-crowded real estate. There were many worthy sights that could be seen from his eyrie, even without the aid of the fine Swiss-made 7x50 binoculars he kept at his desk.

To the northeast was the broad, tranquil expanse of the river, now dotted with small sailing craft taking advantage of Indian summer breezes. In the afternoon, the long, slender shadow of the Tower swept across the river surface, the building serving as the gnomon in a twentieth—century sundial. At night, four-car elevated trains crawled across the Longfellow Bridge in the distance, their lighted windows transforming them into strings of pearls.

Due east, the green stripe of Commonwealth Avenue pointed the way toward the parklike Boston Commons. But his was the least attractive vista from which to view the regal four-story red-brick homes which lined both sides of the avenue. From above, the view was of flat tar-paper roofs and a forest of chimneys, not the bay windows, turrets, and wrought iron which gave the street its charm. Beyond the Commons lay the heart of the city with its hundred Colonial treasures, the wonderful restaurants of Winter Place and Hanover Street, the stone churches.

True, there were blots on the landscape as well, such as the somber institutional housing development sprawled across former railroad land west of the Navy base. Officially, it was known as the Fort Point Federal Housing Center, but the broad expanses of unadorned, windowless concrete had earned it a simpler and more descriptive name—South Block.

But Tackett was forgiving, even of such blight. He knew so many special places hidden in the confusion of streets which made up the old city that his affection for Boston could not be dimmed.

There was one sight visible from Tackett’s office that could be seen from no other vantage point in the city except the Tower, through windows which faced inward rather than out. For the Tower was built around a great central atrium and within the atrium was nestled a piece of the past—the nineteeth-century Cambridge Hotel, gate house to the alternities.

The Tower’s architecture was a practical one, designed to enclose, secure, and protect the precious gate house. But the design was also appropriately symbolic, for the gate house was the focus of everything that went on in the Tower. The Cambridge was the pipeline through which flowed the knowledge the nation needed to revitalize its moribund economy and tip an unfavorable balance of power.

It was astonishing what the NRC had already brought back—secrets of computer chips equal to the best the Germans were providing the Soviet bloc. Maps of undiscovered oil deposits exact to the best location for the wellheads. Plans for superconducting electronic circuits which virtually powered themselves.

The gleanings were beginning to pile up, in fact, faster than they could be absorbed by NRC experts and injected into the body economic. Though only four years new, the Technology Transfer Division occupied ten floors of the Tower and claimed nearly half the agency’s employees. So many Transfer agents were in the field that, despite pointed requests for discretion, they had already created a potent societal mythos.

There were a hundred versions of the same story: the man in the three-piece suit, the man with the black briefcase, the stranger who knows your own business better than you do. He comes to a defense contractor, an engineering office, a mining co-op. He is from Washington, from Boston, from a think-tank named the NRC. He gives them a gadget, a plan, an idea, and a promise that if they’ll only try it, they’ll see that it’s a better way.

And the promise always comes true.

The nickname bestowed on the Transfer agents was as inevitable as it was undignified. It was the same in Topeka and Trenton, San Francisco and Shreveport—a spontaneous linguistic acclamation. What else could you call them but Santa’s elves?

Vandenberg had built the Tower and created the Guard when the mystery was new and the benefits to be gained only a dream. It was an act of boldness and vision, the invisible crowning achievement of what most considered a failed presidency.

The sheltering walls of the base section had risen in just sixteen months, cannibalizing a church, several dozen homes, and pieces of three streets. Tackett had built the organization even faster, from fifty to five hundred to more than five thousand employees.

It was almost too big now, almost too much for Tackett to see clearly and direct wisely. He saw Section chiefs and second-hand reports exclusively, spent almost as much time holding hands in Washington as he did looking over shoulders in the Tower.

And when Tackett was in Boston, the growing demands of coordinating Rathole gobbled more and more of his time. It was the one task he could not delegate, the one mission on which Robinson expected him to be dirty to the elbows. Day-to-day supervision of the rest of NRC’s operation had gone by default to the deputy director and his staff.

But the old street spook in him refused to let go completely, insisting that no Executive Operational Order go downstairs without his informed signature. With ExOps averaging a dozen a week, that insistence sentenced him to enough long days in the office that the nighttime cityscape was rapidly becoming as familiar as the daytime.

Marian complained, and justly. She filled her days well enough with her clubs and friends, but with the boys gone the house on Nahant was a tomb, a beautiful prison, and nights alone were hard. She couldn’t understand why someone in Tackett’s position had to work so hard—wasn’t leisure one of the privileges of power?

He could not explain without violating security, and she could not have understood without violating her view of the world. The Tower Guard was his—his creation, his responsibility. It bore the stamp of his personality: hardworking, pragmatic, fiercely loyal, committed. And its success was his gift to the old friend, now disgraced, who had lifted him out of the morass of the CIA and entrusted to him the mystery of the gate.

As Tackett watched from on high, a lone runner emerged from the Cambridge and crossed the hundred-foot-wide buffer strip to the gate control complex. Another transit completed. The sight reminded him that there was work that needed doing, and he had been away from his desk longer than conscience would allow.

But it was envy, not guilt, that stayed with Tackett as he turned from the window. Envy of the runners, the moles, anyone for whom the gate made the unreality of an alternity a tangible world, anyone taking part in the adventure of the millennium.

For Tackett had never made a transit of the gate, and barring disaster never would. It was his own ExOp that shut him out, as it shut out all those born too soon. He belonged to the Common World, the history the alternities all shared. An Albert Tackett was alive in every alternity, each living its own life, following its own path. And there was no room for another, even as a visitor.

Because it was his own decision, he knew it was a good one. The danger to the Guard was too great even to consider a self-indulgent one-time exception. The maze and the worlds beyond it belonged to the children.