[Texas Trilogy 01] - The Ayes of Texas
                       By Daniel Da Cruz
Scanned by BW-SciFi

2 MAY 1943
"NAME?"
"Gwillam Forte."
"Spell it."
Gwillam Forte spelled it.
"Age?"
"Fourteen."
"Race?"
"White."
"Address?"
"Liberty Towers."
The desk sergeant's pen paused in midair. He looked down sternly at the young man. "Get smart
with me, boy, and I'll boot your ass all the way down to the drunk tank-Address?"
The arresting officer coughed discreetly. "That's where he lives, Sarge. I checked."
"The Liberty Towers is a whorehouse."
"Right. The kid here helps out at the bar in the Kit Kat across the street. He works from ten at
night to five in the morning-same working hours as the Liberty. Charley Miller-he owns them both,
you know-lets him sleep on the pool table downstairs."
"What about his family?"
The arresting officer shook his head.
"How long's he been at the Liberty?"
"How long, kid?" The officer hadn't bothered to ask earlier.
"Since November," Forte replied.
Six months. Desk Sergeant Pyle put down his pen. He asked other questions, but those answers
too were not reassuring, and he didn't write them down. The boy had been brought in for assault
with a deadly weapon- a barroom stool-on a Kit Kat customer who proposi-tioned him. The
customer was in the emergency room with multiple contusions and scalp wounds. As a minor,
Forte would appear before Judge Landrum of Juvenile Court. Landrum was a hanging judge. The
sexual provocation was bad enough; he would like even less the Kit Kat's violation of the child
labor laws, and that young Forte worked at night behind a bar and slept in a cathouse by day, and
had been doing so for months in Sergeant Pyle's precinct without him knowing about it. Suddenly,
his chances of making the next lieutenant's list began to look thin. There was one ray of hope,
though: the kid was big for his age. And Pyle hadn't yet written down the particulars of the charge.
Maybe he could work something out.
"Know what the penalty is for assault and battery, young fellow?"
Forte shook his head.
"Three to five years," Pyle said, looking sharply at the arresting officer, who was about to correct
him. Considering the circumstances, even an adult would probably get off with a warning or a
suspended sen-tence. Forte, however, wouldn't get even that. Under common law, he was a
child, presumed incapable of committing a crime. In fact, Judge Landrum would probably pat the
kid on the back for putting a pervert in the hospital. But it wouldn't do to tell the kid that.
Forte licked his lips, but said nothing.
"Yes, some judges would give you three," Pyle went on, his tone grave, "but others would give you
five. Depends on the mens rea."
"Huh?"
"That's lawyers' talk for criminal intent."
Forte's eyes were tired and uncomprehending. He didn't understand a word the man was saying.
"Three to five years," Sergeant Pyle mused. "That's a long stretch for a young man. The best
years of your life." He paused for that to sink in. "But there may be another way to handle this.
You're a big lad. You could easily pass for seventeen, even eighteen. With the war on, nobody
gets nosy about age any more. And think how much better it would be for you to serve your
country-come out with a wad of cash and a string of medals instead of a prison record. You'll see
the world, make friends, find adventure, save your money to start off business when the war's
over."
Gwillam Forte just looked at him.
"Well, what do you say?"
"Say?"
"About joining up. As a matter of fact, one of the Navy recruiters is a friend of mine. Chief
Armstrong. If I put in a word for you, maybe-just maybe-he might be able to get you in."
"I don't know."
The boy was bewildered. He knew there was a war on, but it didn't mean anything to him. Soldiers
and sailors came in the Kit Kat all the time-there were a lot of bases around Atlanta-and they
drank and boasted and cussed a lot and had a lot of fights. He guessed it was all right. He had
just never thought about it.
"I haven't got all night, young fellow," the sergeant said, picking up his pen. "Make up your
mind-the Navy or five years in the state prison."
"All right," the boy said quickly, afraid the big man would change his mind.
Sergeant Pyle smiled. "You've made a wise decision, lad. Now, here's how we're going to handle
this. You're already on the book. I can't do anything about that. But I'm going to write down the
charge as vagrancy. Later this morning, when you appear before the judge, you tell him you just
got into town last night, on your way to join the U.S. Navy. Got that?"
"Yes, sir."
"And if he asks your age, tell him eighteen. Now, how old are you?"
"Fourteen."
"Eighteen. You're eighteen years old. Now, how old are you?"
"Eighteen, sir."
"Good. He'll dismiss the charge-I'll see to it. Then I'll introduce you to Chief Armstrong. . . ."

Everything went as Sergeant Pyle predicted, and at midafternoon that same day, Gwillam Forte
was sworn in as an apprentice seaman in the United States Navy. On 3 May 1943, he joined the
draft headed for boot camp in Norfolk, Virginia.

2 MAY 1945
He used to lie in his hospital bed at night, sleep-less from pain, and try to remember what it was
like to have two hands and two feet. Like everything else about his earlier years, though, the
memories were elusive, probably because so few were fair.
The mean, blustering voice of his father-that was his first recollection. His whiskey-hoarse cursing
seemed to crowd out all other early recollections. It was fol-lowed, as often as not, by a cuff on
the side of the head when Gwillam became old enough to hold down a newspaper route and
came up short when the old man wanted to "borrow" two dollars for his Saturday-night toot. Not
that his mother, with the succession of "old school friends"-all male-who kept her com-pany for
half an hour or so those nights his father passed out on the living room sofa, was all that much
better. Still, when it came to that, neither was Gwillam himself, he had to admit. He peddled pens
and per-fumes pilfered from neighborhood drugstores to finance the movies he sneaked off to see
when he should have been at school, where he squeaked by from one grade to the next only
because his teachers found him too quarrelsome to tolerate another year. His only talent was
playing the trumpet, which he did inexpertly in the school band. But if he didn't play well, he played
loud and fast. It was talent enough, he thought at the age of twelve when he left home in
downstate Illinois to find work in a nightclub band. The closest he got was a succession of cheap
barrooms, which he kept more or less clean, for more or less board and room.
Sometimes he thought about the women at the Liber-ty Towers. In books he read in later years,
whores were always wronged maidens with hearts of gold, but that wasn't the way he
remembered it for the six months he had lived at Liberty Towers, before that police sergeant
conned him into joining the Navy. Of course, by then he had already learned a good deal about
whores, his mother being a part-timer and all that. At Liberty Towers, he learned it wasn't
generosity that prompted them to throw their money around, but stupidity and an indifference
about the morrow. Nor was their line of work-"profession" was hardly the word for a business that
required only a few hours of on-the-gob training to master-picturesque so much as degrading and
mechanical, mere assembly-line produc-tion involving nuts and screws. That they had been
driven into prostitution was only a self-delusive fable: they were mostly lazy, shiftless, dishonest
sluts who would do anything to avoid decent work, and feared only the day when they would be so
old and raddled that there would be no alternative to honest labor. Living in the company of such
females hadn't given him a joyous view of civilian life, and it was almost with relief that he had
walked through the main gate of Recruit Depot in Norfolk, Virginia, to begin what he thought was
going to be a bright new life as a sailor.
Going to sea had been a change, at that, but life was no sweeter than it had been ashore. If he
was big for fourteen, he was small for eighteen, and the target of every bully, bugger, and
boatswain's mate aboard the battleship U.S.S. Texas, to which he had been drafted as a bugler
after finishing Music School in late 1943. For Gwillam Forte, the enemy wasn't the Ger-mans and
Japanese, although during the next eighteen months he would see action against both, but his
own shipmates.
They took advantage of his ignorance by sending him on such fool's errands as fetching five
pounds of beano from the beano locker-an ancient wheeze in-spired by such pronouncements
over the public ad-dress system as "There will be no man-overboard drill today," and the like.
They took advantage of his trust-ing nature by borrowing money they never intended to return, and
cheating him out of the rest of his pay in rigged poker games. They took advantage of his
pre-sumed innocence by trying to bend him on in the spud locker, whereupon he stabbed one of
the two sodomists in the groin with a potato knife and scared the other into retreat. They won
anyway, with perjured testimony before a summary court that got him sixty days in the brig for
unprovoked assault.
Not all of Forte's unpleasant experiences aboard the battleship were the result of his shipmates'
malice or mischief. Most were due to the conflicts inevitable when one hundred officers and
seventeen hundred young men are crammed into a ship making month-long patrols, with little to
do but get on one another's nerves. Watch-standers were constantly on the lookout for enemy
submarines, a morale-sapping and futile precaution, for the Texas possessed no antisubmarine
weapons whatever. The ship was slow, ponderous, and uncomfortable. High seas buried its bow
beneath the waves, flinging icy sheets of water as high and far astern as the pilothouse; in far
northern waters it froze into a frigid mush on one's back and shoulders, and brought on a chill that
the hottest coffee couldn't dispel. The ship's pitch was like riding a gigantic yo-yo in slow motion,
and could turn a veteran sailor green.
Young Gwillam Forte, weary from constantly fight-ing the bucking and plunging ship, often
seasick, and never more than barely tolerated by his older ship-mates, lived a life of lonely misery.
He found it hard to believe that anyone could be happy, as one or two of his shipmates actually
seemed to be, aboard a man-of-war. He found it even more incredible that this floating
concentration camp was once the gem of the ocean. Of course, that was long before his time . . .

In 1912, the year she was launched, the United States Ship Texas was indeed the pride of the
U.S. Fleet, for it was then the most modern and powerful battleship in the world. Its 27,000-ton
displacement was exceeded only by that of the Argentinian battle-ships Moreno and Rivadavia.
The U.S.S. Texas could sail ten thousand miles without refueling-from San Francisco to China
and back-make a flank speed of twenty-one knots-over twenty-four land miles an hour-and had a
main battery of ten fourteen-inch guns in twin turrets, which could fire shells weighing
three-quarters of a ton almost twelve miles. In addi-tion, it had twenty-one five-inch guns as
secondary battery and a thicket of smaller guns for close-in de-fense. The ship was sheathed in
steel armor up to fourteen inches thick.
The "Big T" served with the Allied Grand Fleet in World War I, and lived through some historic
moments. She landed U.S. Marines at Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914, in one of the last unrepentently
imperialist ac-tions of the United States in Central America. From a platform on her number two
turret, on 9 March 1919, Lieutenant Commander F. O. McDonnell, piloting a Sopwith Camel,
made the first flight from a battleship of the U.S. Navy. A full generation later, the U.S.S. Texas
served successively as flagship of the U.S. Fleet, flagship of the Atlantic Training Squadron, and
with the Neutrality Patrol in North Atlantic waters before the United States formally declared war
on Germany in December 1941.
By then, the Texas was a venerable twenty-nine years old, overdue for scrapping and
replacement by a bigger, sleeker, faster, more heavily armed ship. She got a reprieve when
Japan's stunning victory at Pearl Harbor made clear that veteran ships as well as veteran seamen
to man them would be needed to do their duty-again-if the nation was to survive.
Her first service was in the North Atlantic on patrol and convoy duty. Then its big guns covered the
Allied landings in North Africa. Off Mehdia, Algeria, on 7 November 1942, the Texas fired its
fourteen-inch batteries for the first time in World War II, against Vichy French ammunition dumps
and armored columns at Port Lyautey. When the beachhead was secured, she returned to
Norfolk for overhaul. It was there that Gwillam Forte, with his government-issue bugle, re-ported
aboard.

Shipboard routine aboard the Texas in Atlantic waters failed to fulfill Forte's conception of naval
war-fare. Instead of running gunfights against the Germans, there was running of messages from
the captain to his junior officers. Instead of the acrid stench of gun-powder, there was the greasy
stench of stack fumes. Forte's contribution to World War II, it seemed, would be to stand watch
four hours on and eight hours off, and sound Reveille, Mess Gear, Pay Call, Man Over-board,
Church Call, Tattoo, Taps, and the several dozen other calls that constitute the entire bugle
reper-toire. That was all right with him. It wasn't his war.
D-Day, 6 June 1944, found the battleship off Omaha Beach in Normandy, firing three-quarter-ton
shells into German shore batteries four miles away, and against troop concentrations and enemy
columns mov-ing up to support the defenders. During the nineteen days that followed, the Texas
fired 891 rounds of fourteen-inch ammunition. It gave much better than it got: off Cherbourg a
German 280-mm shell wrecked the bridge, killing the helmsman and wounding thirteen others,
the only casualties of the campaign aboard the Texas. During the thirty-two years since the
battleship had been commissioned, the helmsman was the only man to have been killed in action
aboard.
The following spring, while the U.S. Marines in-vaded and captured the Japanese island of Iwo
Jima in the bloodiest and fiercest battle in Marine Corps his-tory, the Texas stood offshore with
the Amphibious Support Force and bombarded the well-dug-in garri-son of 22,000 Imperial
Marines with nearly one thou-sand shells from her big guns. After reprovisioning in Ulithi, in March
1945, the Texas steamed north again, to Okinawa, to take part in the largest amphibious as-sault
of the Pacific war. There the Texas and other ships of the Fifth Fleet mangled pillboxes and
entrench-ments the Japanese had been constructing for thirty years, paving the way for
beachhead operations by the Marines and Army. Simultaneously, her antiaircraft batteries fought
off the Kamikazes that came screaming in out of the clouds, bearing a single suicide pilot astride
a ton of high explosive fitted with stubby wings. For the U.S.S. Texas, the Battle of Okinawa lasted
six weeks. For Gwillam Forte, it would last four. . . .
The second of May, two years to the day since he enlisted in the Navy, began like many another
for Gwil-lam Forte. At three-fifteen in the predawn darkness, "Jimmy Legs," the Navy's
master-at-arms, slapped his night stick against the underside of Forte's hammock to rouse him
for the four-to-eight watch. Forte rubbed the sleep from his eyes and dropped lightly to the deck
from the hammock, rigged seven feet above the divi-sion passageway. He unhitched the
hammock from its hooks, folded the edges in over the thin mattress, and lashed it into a neat
sausage with seven half hitches. He folded it over into a horseshoe and heaved it into the division
hammock nest.
Forte groped his way down the darkened, pitching passageway to the division galley, where a big
galvan-ized pot of coffee and a rack of thick white handleless cups awaited the watch. He poured
a cup and squatted on his heels beside the others to drink his coffee in the dim light of the single
red bulb that illuminated the compartment. Nobody spoke. The warmth radiating through the
linoleum deck from the boiler room below induced a sense of weary detachment that made
con-versation a burden. Anyway, what was there to talk about, when each day was like yesterday,
and even more like tomorrow?
After a second cup of coffee, Forte deposited his cup in the rack and shuffled down the
passageway to the head, first downhill, then uphill, then downhill again in the never-ending rhythm
of the pitching ship. There he shaved and bathed in half a bucket of water heated by immersion
under live steam.
At three-fifty, dressed in the uniform of the day, Forte entered the pilothouse on the bridge.
Sunrise was forty-five minutes away in this latitude, but the shadows of the watch-standers were
already well defined in the light of false dawn. In his high-backed, padded swivel chair, bolted to
the deck, the officer of the deck sat facing forward, his cap pulled down over his eyes. He
appeared asleep, but Forte knew better. Amidships, the helmsman kept his eyes on the
binnacle's illuminated compass card, continually applying minute adjustments to the small brass
wheel, so that the ship's swinging bow was never more than two or three degrees off course.
"You're relieved," Forte said to the duty bugler.
The other man nodded and left the pilothouse. There would be just time enough for him to go
below for coffee and a cigarette. General Quarters, sounded half an hour before dawn and dusk at
sea, would bring him running again to his battle station on the bridge. It was during the twilight of
sunrise and sunset that the ship was most vulnerable; in that gray interval, a sub-merged enemy
could make out a ship's silhouette be-fore its lookouts could detect the feathery wake of a
periscope, and most ships sent to the bottom by torpe-does were lost during those two perilous
periods of the day.
For the next quarter of an hour, Gwillam Forte stood at the rear of the pilot house, lulled by the
hypnotic pitch of the ship, as its bow rose and fell with stately majesty, like a dowager queen
acknowledging the cheers of her subjects. Like all watch-standers at sea, Forte had mastered the
art of sleeping standing up, with his eyes wide open, even when the sun was high in the sky. Such
sleep is neither sound nor refreshing, but so long as nobody spoke to him or made any abrupt
move-ment within his range of vision, he could remain in this state of suspended animation
indefinitely. Aside from the steady swish of the windshield wipers and the faint whistle of the wind
through the rigging, no sound dis-turbed his semiconsciousness until he heard the door to the
captain's cabin behind him open and a mild voice say: "Good morning, gentlemen."
"Good morning, sir," the OOD replied for all.
"I'll take the conn, Mr. Matthews."
"Aye, aye, sir," the officer of the deck replied, vacat-ing the high chair and saluting.
"Anything to report?" The captain, a gaunt figure in his beribboned blue jacket with the four gold
stripes on his cuffs, climbed into the chair and adjusted his binoculars. He slowly scanned the
foamy seas.
"Nothing since I brought in the submarine fix from CincPac at 0230, sir."
"Our position?"
"Twenty-six degrees twelve minutes north, 128 degrees thirty-eight minutes east, sir," the OOD
replied, glancing at the log. "Our course is 122 degrees, speed eleven knots, zigzag pattern x-ray.
All ships on station."
"Weather?"
"Low overcast, breaking up in the north. Wind from the north-northeast at twelve knots. Moderate
seas. Forecast is for light rain before noon, sir."
"Very well . . . Sound General Quarters."
"Aye, aye, sir." The OOD nodded to the boatswain's mate, already at the squawk box. "Sound
General Quarters!"
The boatswain's pipe shrilled twice, then he cried into the microphone: "General Quarters!
General Quarters! All hands man your battle stations!" He stepped back, and Gwillam Forte, his
left hand de-pressing the microphone lever, blasted out General Quarters on his bugle.
Before the last note died in the air, the decks rever-berated with the pounding of feet as the ship's
company dashed for their action stations, pulling on their clothes while scrambling up ladders and
forward on the port side, down ladders and aft on the starboard side, to minimize confusion and
collisions on the crowded and slippery decks of the still-blacked-out ship. Within three minutes all
guns and lookout stations were manned and ready. The destroyers flanking the Texas in diamond
formation would likewise now be at General Quarters, sonar operators on the alert for the sound
of submarine propellers, weather-deck lookouts and others topside with their eyes probing the
sullen skies for signs of enemy aircraft. Gwillam Forte, his duty done, eased back into the
shadows and resumed his wakeful slumber.
It seemed to Gwillam Forte that only seconds later he heard the shout: "Aircraft off the starboard
bow!"
The captain's head snapped around.
A kamikaze had emerged from the low clouds and was boring in on the ship. It was no more than
half a mile away, and the ship's antiaircraft guns were al-ready filling the sky with flak.
"Hard right rudder!" the captain cried instinctively. Meeting the suicide plane head-on would offer a
mar-ginally smaller target than if they turned to port, thus presenting the ship broadside. But it was
instinct wasted: the kamikaze would be upon them before the ship could begin to answer the
helm.
The helmsman was trying, anyway. He frantically spun the wheel all the way over and held it there
with torso-twisting body English.
The kamikaze nosed down toward them in a shallow dive. Gwillam Forte watched the black
cylinder as it was buffeted by the bursts of exploding shells, jostled off course but each time
swerving back toward the battleship. The flames of tracer bullets tracked its passage through the
sky, but incredibly, nothing touched it. The tiny winged torpedo kept coming, grow-ing larger and
blacker every moment, until Forte imag-ined he could see the eyes of the evil little Jap staring
through the square windshield into his own, as if aim-ing the flying bomb straight at him,
personally.
The Texas began to answer the helm. Its bow swung slowly toward starboard, an inch at a time.
The kami-kaze altered course and kept coming. It was now only a little higher than the main truck,
and so close they could make out the red meatball and Japanese script on the nose of the
aircraft. The antiaircraft was com-ing closer too, the gunfire from other warships criss-crossing
through the Texas's rigging. Forte felt sudden panic. If the Jap didn't hit them, stray gunfire would
surely do so.
"Clear the bridge!" the captain shouted, his voice barely audible above the din of exploding
short-fused shells. The kamikaze was now headed directly, un-waveringly toward them. It couldn't
miss. Gwillam Forte dashed for the starboard ladder leading down and aft to the main deck. From
the corner of his eye he saw the captain gripping the arms of his chair, bracing himself for the
impact. Forte leapt through the doorway, reaching for the ladder rails.
What happened next he could never quite recall. He could remember looking straight at the
kamikaze plane and seeing a bright red flash. That would have been the five-inch shell from one
of the destroyers, a piece of its shrapnel apparently striking the control surfaces and causing the
pilot to lose control. The suicide plane disappeared from Forte's line of vision, as if it had been
wiped from a slate. Though he didn't know it, the craft had winged over and slammed into the sea.
A blinding flash was followed by a huge detonation that rocked the ship, buckling splinter shield
around the main-deck 20-mm gun mounts, and raining shrap-nel off the ship's armor plate.
Gwillam Forte was blown back against the side of the pilot house like a dry leaf in a winter's gale.
He passed out.
When he came to, he was lying alone on the steel deck behind a ready box. His mind was still
filled with the vision of that huge black bomb homing on him. He tried to rise, desperate to find
cover. But in that brief moment of unconsciousness, the deck had be-come so slippery he
couldn't gain his footing. In his disordered mind all he could think of was that an oil line had been
severed, spilling its contents all over the deck. But then, he reminded himself, there wasn't any oil
line way up there. Ball bearings, he thought muzzily as he again tried to get to his feet. That must
be it- ball bearings from . . . from . . . somewhere.
He put out his hand to try once more. Then he understood: he had no hand, only a mangled
stump that spurted blood with each beat of a weakening heart. He stared at it dumbly. There was
no pain, only an overpowering languor. He wanted to cradle his head in his arms, stretch out in
the warm sun on clean white sands, and sleep forever.
Just before he lapsed again into unconsciousness, he heard from far away the captain's voice.
He was yell-ing, "Corpsman! Corpsman!" He had never heard the old man sound so upset.
He was wondering why as the rising sun was swal-lowed up in a slowly descending curtain of
blood, and he remembered no more.

1946-1951
It was a strange fellowship, that which developed between Gwillam Forte and Otis Creech, for
they were as unlike as any two patients in the veterans hospital. Forte was barely seventeen, a
triple amputee, morose, uncommunicative, and white. Otis Creech was fifty-five, a giant of a man
with seam-straining muscles, full of laughter, and black. Odd as the relationship seemed, their
fellow patients would have been even more surprised to discover that its basis was mutual envy.
Creech was an old-timer. He had been in and out of veteran’s hospitals since World War I, when
he had been wounded by shrapnel in the Battle of Belleau Wood and, lying helpless in the mud,
nearly smothered in a wave of phosgene gas. Saved by counterattacking Marines and a shift in
the wind, he lost a leg above the knee and the use of his right lung. A determined and proud man,
he refused to become a charge of the U.S. government. Once fitted with a wooden leg, and
having adjusted to a diminished vitality and range of activity, he limped out of the hospital to begin
civilian life as an apprentice auto mechanic. In time, he became expert. But time also worked
against him, for the strain of breathing on one lung ravaged his heart, and with increasing
frequency he had to return for hospi-talization. On the eve of World War II he found him-self
permanently confined in the veterans hospital in Houston, living on pills and potions, waking nights
to the throb of a heart that beat with wild and disturbing rhythms, like a jungle drum.
In January 1946, Gwillam Forte was brought on a stretcher into the ward that had been Creech's
home so long he felt the pride of ownership. There had been a lot of new faces during the
previous two years, mostly young, but a sadder and more hopeless one than Gwil-lam Forte's
Creech had never seen. It was empty of expression, except for the pain registered when the
dressings on his stumps were changed. Forte reacted, when he reacted at all, as if he had been
heavily sedated and seemed only faintly aware of what was going on around him. He didn't smile,
let alone laugh, at the jokes on the Charlie McCarthy or Fred Allen or Jack Benny shows, which
convulsed the other radio listeners in the ward. He had no visitors, read no news-papers or
magazines, spoke to no one except in neces-sary reply to doctors' questions and the insistent
queries of his ward mates. They would ask him how he felt today, and he said fine. They said it's
beautiful weather this time of year, and he said that's fine. They said somebody had just
assassinated the president of Bolivia and raped his wife yesterday, and he said fine, fine. His eyes
were on the ceiling, but his thoughts were considerably further away. The silent young man
seemed to be awaiting only a decent excuse to die.
Otis Creech tried to cheer Forte up. He read the comics to him, and repeated the gossip he
picked up in his rounds of the wards. He stole ice cream and cookies from the kitchen and fed
them to the lad, who ate as if it were a duty. He reminisced on how it was in the Great War, and
goaded veterans of the re-cent conflict into argument within young Forte's ear-shot, in the
unrequited expectation that he might somehow get involved. In vain. Forte's response was always
the same-a nod to show he was listening, and a mur-mured "Thanks" for services bestowed.
Nobody, not even the outgoing Creech, could penetrate that wall of spare civilities. Creech kept
trying, with flagging reso-lution, because he felt it his Christian duty, but he recognized a death
wish when he saw it. Privately, he gave the boy three months, six at the outside.
"Too bad about that boy," Creech remarked to a friend several beds down the line one day, when
his reading of the news of the day had produced only a suppressed yawn from Gwillam Forte and,
a little later, the regular breathing of one fast asleep.
"Yeah," the other agreed. "He don't have much to live for."
"You got it wrong. What I mean is, it's too bad he don't realize he's got everything to live for. He's
one of the luckiest young men I ever met."
The other veteran laughed. "Ever tell him that?"
"Course not. Way he feels, he wouldn't be likely to agree, let alone understand why I think that
way. And that's too bad, because that there's one lucky white boy . . ."
A few days later, when most of the others were still in the dining room, Otis Creech was holding
down the steak on the plate with a fork while Gwillam Forte sawed at it with a knife held in his
good left hand. Suddenly Forte swung the knife up against Creech's neck, the point at the angle of
the jaw and Adam's apple, where the slightest pressure would sever the jugular vein. For the first
time since he had been wheeled into the ward, Forte's eyes glowed with life- and an insane
intensity.
"What do you know about luck, nigger?" he rasped.
Otis Creech swallowed. The knifepoint pricked the skin. A drop of blood appeared.
Gwillam Forte stared at it for a moment, then threw the knife across the ward. He slumped back
against the pillows.
"Oh, so you was awake?" Creech said, getting the breath back in his one good lung.
"I was awake. I'm always awake."
"I thought you was." Creech smiled gently.
"You-you what?"
"I thought you was awake." He wiped away the drop of blood with his thumb. He inspected it. "
'Bout time you woke up, too."
"What do you mean by that?"
"What I said. You're one lucky boy, and it's time you stopped feeling sorry for yourself and did
some-thing."
"Did something?" Forte's expression was a mixture of incredulity and outrage. "Like what? Fight
Joe Louis? Or play the piano, or walk a tightrope, maybe?" He sneered. "What do you think I can
do, nigger?"
Otis Creech's smile faded. "Now, listen here, white boy, if you and I is going to talk, you better
think of something better to call me than 'nigger.' I may be a nigger to you, but the only name I
answer to is Creech." He looked hard into Forte's angry eyes. Forte just stared back at him. "As
for what you can do-well, you may not be able to run a hundred-yard dash, or do card tricks, but
you can do about anything else you put your mind to."
"What the hell do you know, nigger?"
"That's Creech."
"That's nigger."
"Well, have it your own way." Creech got up and started to walk away, limping heavily on his
wooden leg.
"What do you know about me?" Forte's voice fol-lowed him.
Creech paused. He didn't hear the magic word. He turned back to the bed. "Don't know anything
about you, boy, except that-"
"Don't call me 'boy,' nigger."
Creech smiled, showing a lot of tobacco-stained teeth. "Make me a deal."
Gwillam Forte glared stubbornly at the bed sheets. "Okay," he said finally. "What do you think you
know about me?"
The black man remained silent.
". . . Creech?"
Creech smiled. "Why, not a damned thing, Forte, except that you got two legs and a hand off, and
think the world's come to an end."
"That makes me lucky?"
"You're lucky, all right," Creech said with convic-tion.
"Then listen to this . . ."
Gwillam Forte told Creech the story of his life, what he could remember of it. He told it fluently and
well, with a good choice of word and incident. It was some-thing he had recited many times,
although this was the first time anybody had heard it beside himself. It was a litany he had
composed, and edited, and committed to memory, and told to himself, over and over. If no-body
else was going to feel sorry for him, at least he could feel sorry for himself. It wasn't a very long
story, considering that it covered his entire seventeen years, but it made up for its brevity by the
depressing uniformity, of its hardships, disappointments, frustra-tions, and pain.
"Call that lucky, Creech?" he said bitterly when he finished the morbid tale.
"About the saddest story I ever did hear," Creech admitted. "You sure has had it tough."
"Lucky, huh?"
Creech shook his head.
"Where's all that luck you was talking about, Creech?" he goaded the black man.
"Oh, it ain't gone no place. I never said you didn't have a sad life. All I said was, you're lucky. Now."
"How do you figure that?"
"Well, now, let's look at a young man just starting out in life. He's got a few goals if he's any kind of
man. One of them is to serve his country if his country needs him, and to serve it honorably. Well,
Forte, you've done that, and you've lived to tell about it, which is more than a couple of million
other men did these past few years. Okay. Then he's got to make friends, because you can
maybe go through life without friends, but who wants to? You've got a whole ward full of friends
right here, if you want them. Then there's the business of making yourself a living, finding security.
I know a lot of postal clerks and farmers and truck drivers who work their butts off for forty years,
and at the end, what have they got? Debts, is what. They retire on seventy bucks a month from
some damned insurance company they've been supporting all their lives, and they die like they
been living-like dogs. You-you got any debts? No, sirree. You don't owe nobody nothing. You got
security. You don't ever have to move from this hospital bed if you don't want to. Three squares a
day and a roof over your head and the best medical attention-all free. Those are things men work
their lives out for, and most don't get. You've bought and paid for them."
"Sure, but they can walk to work, and play foot-ball, and-and they've got two arms and two legs,
goddammit. I'd trade places with any one of them."
" 'Course you would. But you can't, don't you see? But that ain't the main thing, Forte. Look at
those guys. Every day they spend looking over their shoulder for the bill collector. They live in fear.
They aren't free men. You're free. You have a hundred-percent dis-ability check coming in every
month. You can tell any-body on Earth to screw himself, you don't need his lousy job. You can do
anything you want, take no crap from nobody. But most of all, you're young. You've had a lousy
life-sure. But life is like the weather-one day cloudy, one day fair. It all averages out. So far, you've
had nothing but rain. But now, it's sunshine time, boy-sunshine time . . ."
If Otis Creech thought he had changed Gwillam Forte's outlook with his little lunchtime lecture, he
was mistaken. But the ice that enveloped Gwillam Forte's view of the world, and especially of
himself, had been cracked, and slowly the thaw set in. He still didn't talk much with his other
hospital mates, but increas-ingly he listened to Creech, and imperceptibly the monologues
became dialogues. He also watched Creech with the other men, admiring the man's bulging
muscles as he walked among them and wishing they were his own, wondering if he would ever
be able to talk so easily, and joke, and make men laugh as Creech did with such grace. And
always Creech kept urging him to get out of bed into a wheelchair, and let the doctors fit him with
prosthetic legs and learn to walk with them. Forte, afraid they would only make his disability more
unbearable-in bed, at least, he was practically indis-tinguishable from other men in bed-always
put him off, saying that when his stumps healed better, perhaps then ...
During the Christmas season of 1946, Creech's wish that Forte would get out of bed and on his
feet-or somebody's feet-came to pass, but Creech wasn't there to witness it. In November, he
had died of a heart attack.
For some days, Gwillam Forte retreated into leth-argy, his wakeful hours spent staring blindly at
the ceiling. The doctors and nurses shook their heads, but resisted the impulse to pay the young
man any special attention. They had helped him all they could; any improvement would have to
come from him.
Their instincts proved correct. One day he decided that Otis Creech had been right, for wasn't the
black man now dead, and Gwillam Forte still alive? He had been the lucky one, after all. He
stopped picking at his food and started eating again. By the second week in December he was
being fitted with prosthetic legs, a simpler matter than it might have been because his stumps
were below the knees. On Christmas morning he took his first steps in nearly two years. Just two
steps they were, but enough to prove to himself that he could walk. That realization was his
Christmas gift. It was a Christmas gift to his doctors too: it was the first time they had ever seen
him smile.
By the summer of 1947, Gwillam Forte was a different person. No longer frightened, resentful,
self-pitying, the child was on his way to manhood. He could get around on his prosthetic legs with
reasonable speed and agility, and had mastered the two-pronged hook that served as a right hand
to the degree that he could scrawl his signature, use a fork, pull a handker-chief from his pocket
and blow his nose-carefully if he didn't want it pinched-and tie his shoelaces. By then, he realized
that his disability was only partly physical; perhaps worse was the atrophy of his mental faculties.
Since he had run away from home some six years before, he had not attended a single day of
school, read a book or newspaper, or taken any interest in what was going on in the world at
large. Hitler and Churchill and Roosevelt were names he recognized, and he could locate
Germany, England, the United States, and Mexico on a world map, but that was about the extent
of his understanding of foreign affairs. His knowledge of other subjects was equally profound. He
knew that he was dumb, but considered this a na-tural consequence of having little schooling, a
lush for a father, and a bum for a mother. Mrs. Warren changed his mind about that, just as Otis
Creech had changed his mind about being a bedridden invalid.
Virginia Warren was the hospital librarian, a kindly gray-haired woman of sixty whose only son had
been killed in Normandy. All the patients were her sons after that tragedy, and none was dearer
than Gwillam Forte. To her, he was a lump of clay that wanted shaping, and she began by trying
to wean him from the ward poker game that started just after breakfast and continued nonstop
until lights out at 10:00 p.m. The Hundred Great Books were her bait. Forte lis-tened politely as
she extolled their excellences, dropped A Tale of Two Cities she had left for him the moment she
disappeared down the hallway, and clumped over to the poker table, where a pair of jacks exerted
a more magnetic appeal.
Reflecting on the busted flush of her frustrated en-thusiasm, Mrs. Warren decided to lower her
sights. Her next offering was The Three Musketeers, who also mis-fired: Forte preferred three of
any other kind. By stages, she retreated to Superman and Batman. They proved to be right on
target. Gwillam Forte began to spend more time leaping off rooftops and into outer space, less
trying to fill inside straights. Experimentally, Mrs. Warren inserted an illustrated children's version
of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table into the stack of comic books that he was now
devour-ing at a single sitting. He read that, too. Reading, he found to his surprise, had become a
habit.
Just in time, for comic books had begun to pall. For them, Mrs. Warren substituted the adventure
stories of P. C. Wren, Raphael Sabatini, and Dumas. By the summer of 1948, he had soaked up
all the blood and thunder the library contained, and was reading Conrad, Twain, Dickens, and
Hugo, at the steady rate of a book a day. His interest in poker waned. Compared with the variety
and vitality of the tales he was reading, poker was a bore.
When Mrs. Warren decided the time had come to ex-pand Gwillam Forte's horizons by
introducing him to nonfiction, his resistance had disappeared. First she got his feet wet with the
great voyages of discovery, then biographies of men who had shaped the world, and finally he
found himself immersed in history, where he slowly became aware of the vast panorama that had
been hidden in the mists of his ignorance. Whole days and nights were lost to reading. In one
such stretch, he went without pause through the entire 817 pages of The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh, and never afterward wondered why Armenians hate Turks. He marveled at the ease with
which he absorbed ideas that he would have loathed had he been subjected to them through
lectures by bored and incompetent teachers. For the first time in his life, he realized how lucky he
was to have been denied schooling, and only thus acquired an education.
That education was not achieved by books alone. The more practical aspects of Gwillam Forte's
intellec-tual development came from the intensive care lavished on him by patients as well as
staff at the veterans hospital in Houston, beginning with instruction in poker. For it was at the
poker table that Gwillam Forte learned how men conspire to deceive their fellows, their
stratagems of word and expression, the psychological warfare of bluff and threat and seeming
submission, the construction and baiting of traps-and how to avoid them-and the myriad other
human elements that make the game of poker a microcosm of the larger game of life. Gwillam
Forte learned it well enough to be able to make a living at it-honestly, if necessary-on the outside.
His hospital mates had other contributions to make to his education, too, and once they observed
his appetite for learning, imparted them freely.
John Overholzer, the Army veteran who occupied the next bed, was a thick-fingered old man who
looked more like a retired bouncer than the certified public accountant he once had been. In the
eleven months they were neighbors before Overholzer went to the Final Audit, the old man
introduced him to the mys-teries of creative bookkeeping, and some of the thou-sand ways to
throw sand in the eyes of bank examiners, IRS snoopers, and other enemies of free enterprise.
C. C. Stong, a chronic drunk with a genius for steal-ing sickbay alcohol, passed on what he
remembered of his days as a veterinary surgeon in the mornings, be-fore passing out in the
afternoons; from him, Forte learned mainly that he didn't want to become a vet.
"Goatlips" McClanahan, a wily stocks-and-bonds mechanic who knew all about Wall Street but
nothing about women, having throughout his long life transferred his profits from the one almost
without pause to the other, taught Forte the intricate steps of the financial fandango.
Real-estate operator "Buzz" Battersby instructed Forte in the science of geoalchemy, by which
elaborate-ly engraved and wildly mendacious prospectuses, dis-tributed to credulous maiden
schoolteachers and Iowa corn farmers, can transmute forty acres of alligator-infested Florida
farmland into fifty pounds of pure gold.
Al Barkeley, one-time road commissioner and sena-torial campaign manager, lectured Forte in
political science by the case method, reminiscing about un-marked envelopes stuffed with
twenty-dollar bills, voting the city graveyard, rigging polls, awarding street-paving contracts to the
generous faithful, applying muscle to unfriendly editors, making study trips to the French Riviera at
taxpayer expense, and other demo-cratic practices not envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
The hardest lesson of all, however, was learning to walk. At first, he could only propel himself
clumsily in a cage on wheels, his artificial limbs moving jerkily, as if they had a will of their own.
Gradually he got the hang of it, and was able to move with slow but meas-ured steps, aided by
crutches. Some months later he abandoned the crutches, at the cost of skinned elbows and
bruised ribs when he lost his balance. In a year he could walk with ease and confidence, climb
stairs slowly, and bend at the waist to pick up a book from a low shelf without falling on his face.
But it took four years before his infirmities and the prosthetics to overcome them became such
second nature that he no longer had to think about them. He could then devote his thoughts and
energies to making a living, free of the comfortable insulation against real life that the veterans
hospital provided.
At five o'clock one humid Texas morning in early 1951, Forte eased out of bed, dressed, and
walked out of the ward that had been his home for more than five years. In one hand he carried
the canvas bag with the few possessions he had accumulated during his long hospital stay.
Outside, just as Otis Creech had prophe-sied, after the long dark night of infirmity, the sky was
filled with sunshine.

APRIL 1994
“Will” Governor Thomas (“Cherokee Tom”) Traynor said, settling back in his chair and sipping his
twenty-seven-year-old bourbon appreciatively, "I've come to ask you a favor."
"Sorry," Gwillam Forte replied, shaking his head. "No can do."
Traynor's glass paused in midair. It wasn't the re-sponse he had expected. He and Forte had
been friends and political allies for nearly twenty years. Forte's Sunshine Industries, Inc., had
helped bankroll Tray-nor's successful campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives for three
terms and the governorship of Texas for the past two and, he hoped, for the sena-torial race five
years hence, in the year 2000. The old man on the far side of the polished ebony desk had always
been his mentor, protector, and goad to higher office, for they shared common principles and
outlook. He couldn't understand why Forte would turn him down now, before he had even heard
him out.
"I'll tell you why," Forte said, reading the question on the younger man's face. "You and I know
each other pretty well. We've never had any important dis-agreements, and we've never
double-crossed each other.
We're friends. So you don't need to come in here ask-ing for favors, Tom. Just tell me what you
want, and it's yours, because I know you wouldn't ask for any-thing I wouldn't want to give."
Cherokee Tom relaxed. That was more like it. Still, what he had in mind was no simple favor. It
involved the expenditure of a lot of money-millions of dollars. Not that old Will didn't have them to
spare . . .
Gwillam Forte had, as Traynor knew, walked out of the veterans hospital in Houston almost half a
century earlier, with little more than hope and two wooden legs to sustain him. In his bank account
was a meager $4,200, accumulated from disability payments and poker winnings over the
previous five years. In his mind's eye, however, was the vision of a rapidly ex-panding Houston
propelling him to riches.
For five years he had watched the city growing up outside his hospital window. He had read in the
daily press of the postwar baby boom, of the growth of the suburbs, the expansion of American
industry beyond the confines of the old cities. Already the government was being pressured by the
highway lobby to build a huge network of roads to foster interstate commerce and the future
defense of the nation. The auto industry was surging to provide the vehicles to fill those
high-ways, and all the while the railroads were stagnating, their traffic being drawn away by
automotive and air transport. The one thing all three methods of trans-portation had in common
was a dependence on oil- even the railroads had switched by then from coal to diesel power-and
the oil came, largely, from Texas.
At first, Gwillam Forte had decided that oil was the business for him to get into, and he read
voraciously on all aspects of the industry-exploration, production, refining, transportation,
marketing, and governmental regulation. But he soon came to the conclusion that the small
capital he could scrape up and the knowledge he could bring to a highly technical business would
be insufficient to make much of a mark for a long, long time. On the other hand, oil was bringing
people and prosperity to Houston, and every indicator-especially its strategic location at the
confluence of supply and distribution-pointed to its emergence as the oil capital of the United
States, perhaps of the world. It would grow from the sleepy, backwoods town it was in the late
1940s into a city, and Gwillam Forte intended to grow right along with it.
The essence of his strategy was to forecast real-estate movements, get in fast before the smart
money con-centrated on a particular locality, and sell out before prices peaked. With his winnings,
he would seek out undeveloped areas in the direction the city was moving, wait until the trend was
established, and sell out again, striving always for modest profits and rapid turnover.
As he anticipated, his profits were small. But thanks to the unceasing flood of oil money into
Houston, and the magnetic attraction of the industry for petroleum workers and service industries,
his turnover was very fast, and his marginal profits multiplied. His negotia-tions were facilitated by
a skill he had acquired during the war. Aboard ship Forte, attracted by its excellent coffee, had
been accustomed to spending off-duty hours in the radio shack. There he had picked up
international Morse code, easy enough for one with his musical ear. After he became a
businessman, he found his knowledge of code a priceless business tool. With a speed key
installed on a ledge in the kneehole of his desk, he could exchange confidences with a competitor
come calling, then act on it through instructions relayed to his staff by key, long before the rival
could slip away to a telephone and commit the same duplicity against him. In this wise he had
made many a real-estate coup whose timing competitors found uncannily precise. Within ten
years, Forte was worth several million dol-lars, and Houston had not yet begun its period of most
rapid growth, which would follow the Arab oil embar-go of 1973, nearly a decade later. When it
came, Forte was ready to parlay his tens of millions into hun-dreds.
His system was simple. He concentrated on lands near the periphery toward which the city,
amoebalike, was constantly advancing. He never bought expensive land, on the theory that
property bought at a dollar a square foot would double in price before land bought at a hundred
dollars, while at the same time the mere magnitude of the holding would diffuse the risk. When he
sold such properties, the profits were only partially reinvested in lands where the next upwelling of
invest-ment would occur. The bulk of his earnings he devoted to longer-term, less obvious
schemes.
Houston's future prosperity would be based, he was confident, on a one-crop economy-not the
traditional cattle business, which even then was relying less on open range than on scientific
feeding in small farms, but oil refining and the manufacture of petroleum by-products. The city's
accessibility to the oilfields as well as to the Gulf of Mexico and world markets beyond made it the
ideal middleman. The cost of transporta-tion of petroleum products to those markets would in
large measure determine their profitability. Since water transport was, and always would be, the
cheapest, it stood to reason that the best possible land investment in the Houston area was on
the Houston Ship Channel, that waterway constructed between the city and the Gulf of Mexico,
nearly fifty miles away, which gave promise of making the inland city an important Ameri-can port.
He acquired large tracts of such lands, con-centrating on parcels that included the right of way of
highways, pipelines, and railroads, when they were still cattle range. Once in his possession, he
seldom sold them outright. Instead, he exchanged such lands for equity in the manufacturing and
processing companies to be located there. Their advantageous location, he was certain, would
give them the competitive edge that would ensure their-and Gwillam Forte's-prosperity.
And so it transpired. By 1985, when he was still a robust man in his middle fifties, Gwillam Forte
was one of the richest men in America. He wasn't particularly conspicuous, for while he enjoyed
good living, beauti-ful women, and the exercise of personal power, he was not identified as the
leader in any particular field of commerce or finance. He had interests in a dozen oil companies,
but controlled none. He owned a chain of newspapers, including the giant Houston Herald, but the
chain ranked only number four nationally. He had stock in more than forty companies in Houston
alone, but except for Sunshine Industries, Inc., it was usually as a minority shareholder. Thus he
diluted his risks, avoided managerial headaches, and escaped the scrutiny of government
beagles sniffing about for easy game. To selected charities, he gave bountifully if not
ostentatiously, insisting on being listed anonymously to avoid being tapped by professional
fund-raisers who would pocket the larger part of any donation.
For all his power and influence, not one newspaper reader in twenty had ever read the name
Gwillam Forte, and not one American in a thousand could cor-rectly identify him. Yet those who
did know him-the beef barons and petroleum potentates of Texas, the power brokers in
Washington, and the oil kings of Arabia-were well aware that Forte was richer and more powerful
than all but a handful of them.
Governor Traynor wasn't one of them, but if his personal fortune wasn't great, his ambitions were.
A big, heavy-boned, ruddy-cheeked, hearty-mannered politician of the old school, of the type that
had been common before the trade was taken over by the card-board creations of advertising
agencies, Traynor had enjoyed a career of successive victories at the polls and competent
leadership in office, the last of which he hoped would be the American presidency. He was as
honest as his favor-seeking constituents would allow, rugged enough to stand the campaign
rigors of cold coffee and Styrofoam chicken, and remembered that he was neither God nor His
vicar, but a man who would be seeking reelection one day, and therefore as thought-ful about the
future as he was diligent about the present.
"Last year, Will," he said, "you urged me to run for the Senate this fall."
"And you declined. I still think that was a mistake."
"Maybe. It was a matter of loyalty, not votes. After all, Senator Gunnison helped me get a start in
poli-tics. I just couldn't bring myself to run against him."
"Politics is a rough game, Tom. You may have missed the boat. Gunnison will retire after this next
term, and his party has picked Gallego to succeed him. That will be one tough Chicano to beat.
Remember, Tom, of Texas's eighteen million citizens, more than six million are of Mexican origin,
and hundreds more stream across the border every cloudy night, thanks to the national policy of
courting oil-rich Mexico by ab-sorbing its surplus labor.
The Governor nodded. "That's just the point. It will take some doing to keep the votes of the native
Texans, yet drain enough Mexican votes from Gallego to make the Senate, Will. My statisticians
and pollsters gave me a forecast last Friday: I'll need to capture nearly 25 percent of the Mexican
vote, plus a full 80 percent of the native Texas vote, or I can kiss the Senate good-bye."
"My papers will back you."
Governor Traynor shook his head. "Won't be enough, I'm afraid. I'll need something dramatic."
"Name it."
"Millenary celebrations."
"Hats?"
"No. Hats is spelled with an e. This is the thousand millenary, spelled with an a."
"Spelling aside, I don't follow you."
"Will, my record as governor, however excellent it might be, would not normally influence the
Mexican vote to any appreciable degree. Gallego would merely say, Well then, why weren't the
Mexicans earning more?-carefully omitting to remind them that their pay was three times what
their kin made back in Maña-naland. But I've got one hope. The Mexicans love color, they love
movement-provided they don't have to generate too much of it themselves-and they love
pageantry. Anyone who feeds it to them in large doses will be remembered on election day.
"Bread and games?" Forte inquired.
"Right up to their cottonpickin' eyeballs." Cherokee Tom chuckled. "I'll give 'em speeches-long
flowery speeches full of big words in Spanish, speeches recalling the illustrious and bloody history
of the conquistadores. I'll give 'em barbecues, where they can step up to the table and gorge
themselves on chili and tortillas and enchiladas and prime ribs of beef until it runs out of their hairy
ears. I'll give 'em parades, and fireworks displays, essay contests, beauty contests-I'll arrange for
some dark-eyed señorita to win, and crown her my-self-and track meets, commemorative
medals, lotteries with two-week expenses-paid trips to Old Mexico. The works. I'll keep those
wetbacks so stirred up they won't be able to take an afternoon siesta for a year. And on election
day they'll remember who did it all for them- me."
"Sure, Tom, but so will the native Texans. All that may remind the pale faces of just how few of us
there are left, comparatively speaking. We don't want to be reminded. And we won't like the guy
who reminded us. There just might be enough of us to cut into that 80 percent of our vote you
need to go over the top."
Governor Traynor smiled, showing the snaggletooth that was a major asset, in that it kept him
from being movie-star handsome. "Got to keep you all happy too-right?"
"No other way."
"That's what I'm depending on you to help me do, Will," the governor said.
"Say how."
"I want to appeal to Texan pride, to the great Texan heritage. I want to evoke the greatness of our
state."
"I can't write a history book if that's what you came for. But I can write a check to a guy who can
write it."
"You can do better. You can revive a symbol of the greatness of Texas, in such a way that it's
mere appear-ance will electrify the electorate-I leave the details to you," he added grandly. "You
will make them remem-ber who is preserving that heritage for them-yours truly."
"What symbol is that, O Preserver of Heritages?"
Governor Traynor paused dramatically. "The United States Ship Texas-your old battlewagon."
"Tom-you're crazy."
True, the Texas was a relic of some celebrity and antiquity. It had been given to the State of
Texas after World War II instead of being scrapped, so that senti-mentalists could tow it into a
berth on the Houston Ship Channel and there, with much puffery and snap-ping of flags in the
wind, christen the old ship flagship of the Texas Navy. But that had been long ago, and the ship
had never since been moved an inch from its moorings. Its bottom was fouled with algae and
barna-cles, and it was in such deplorable condition otherwise that hardly any tourists bothered to
visit it these days. As a symbol of the great state of Texas, the citizenry would find it more pathetic
than inspiring.
"I couldn't agree more," said Traynor, when Forte confided his reservations. "But it doesn't have to
be that way. You can do something about it."
"What, precisely?"
Traynor waved his hand airily. "How the hell should I know? I'm just a politician. I deal only in large
con-cepts and the higher morality."
"Uh-huh."
"You, on the other hand, have that subterranean cave you call SD-1 full of overpaid and
underemployed researchers and scientists. Not to mention your bank vaults bulging with ill-gotten
gains. Put them together, and I'm sure you'll come up with something." He smiled an election-day
smile.
"You really think this will work?" Forte asked doubt-fully.
"Something dramatic-really dramatic-built around the Texas? I'm as sure of it as I am that welfare
rolls never shrink."
Forte stood up.
"I'll work on it."
Governor Traynor finished his drink and stood up too. He opened his old brown leather briefcase
and took out a scroll, suitable for framing. He laid it on his friend's desk.
"What's that?"
"I knew you'd insist on helping me, Will, so I made it official. This is your commission in the Texas
Navy. As of today, you're commanding officer of the battle-ship Texas. Congratulations, Captain."

14 MAY 1994:10:00 A.M.
Striding purposefully down the passageway to-ward the Prosthetics Research Unit of the
veterans hospital on Old Spanish Trail in Houston, Gwillam Forte seemed extraordinarily fit for a
man of 65. His step was springy, and his clear blue eyes and full head of tawny hair, only now
beginning to silver around the edges, were those of a younger man. A plaid bow tie encircled a
thick neck that sloped down to the shoulders of a weight-lifter and arms that terminated in hands
equally adept at wielding a squash racquet and tying trout flies. His silver brows were too bushy,
his slightly crooked nose too long, his smiling mouth too wide, his face too lined, for him to be
termed handsome, yet enough lovely women had found him-and, he sus-pected, his
fortune-irresistible for him to have wed, and almost as quickly shed, five of them, and to have
loved and lost as many more. He felt as good as he looked, and wondered whether he wasn't
wasting his time coming to the PRU for his semiannual overhaul. After all, how could they improve
on nature?
Over the years, they had come very close to doing so, he had to concede.
When he made his first big real-estate killing, he had set aside enough money to endow an
autonomous pros-thetics research unit attached to the VA hospital. The beginnings were modest:
a prosthetics technician and a physiotherapist, whose mission was simply to im-prove the clumsy
wood-steel-and-leather contraptions that were then the only substitutes for legs and arms lost by
veterans. As his fortunes improved, so did the size and quality of the staff he endowed. By 1975 it
peaked with thirty-five specialists, including mechanical and electrical engineers, artists,
orthopedic surgeons, neurologists, mathematicians, computer programmers, psychologists, and
other experts in a field they them-selves created almost from scratch. In distinction to former
prosthetic devices, which were basically life-less appendages, the hands and feet the PRU
designed worked by impulses from the central nervous system and feedback from minuscule
sensors that replaced the missing tactile nerves.
Early results were as disappointing as the concept was audacious. It took seven years for the first
artificial hand merely to clench its fingers on command from the brain and feed back a signal to
the brain that resistance was encountered as the fingers met. The problems were legion:
materials to duplicate the flexibility of muscle, skin, and connective tissue (a synthetic collagen
ana-logue alone cost University of Texas researchers six years and Forte thirteen million dollars
to formulate); a miniaturized power source to animate the "muscles" made of carbon filament,
nylon, and other materials-eventually solved with microminiaturized nuclear-ener-gy packets; a
control system that began with crude transistors and evolved into enough microcircuitry to
navigate a man to the moon; and the exceedingly diffi-cult task of interfacing the natural nerve
endings to a stainless-steel coupling. That alone required more than a dozen painstaking
operations for each limb so equipped.
By 1991, it seemed to Gwillam Forte that they could go no further. Each new-year model was only
a mar-ginal refinement of its predecessor in terms of strength, durability, appearance, and
dexterity. He was im-pressed when, fitted for a new right foot and calf in 1992, he had discovered
that the tactility was so pre-cise that he could thread a needle with his toes, but what was the use
of that when he didn't even have to sew a button on a shirt? Already he could dart back and forth
on the squash court with a nimbleness that many a younger opponent envied, detect a three-hour
chin stubble with his fingertips, play half-forgotten jazz tunes on his trumpet. What more could his
scien-tist have up his sleeve?
Dr. Robert Reeves's hearty greeting as Forte entered the room told him that whatever it was, it
must be something special.
"How nice to see you, Mr. Forte," Dr. Reeves said, steering him by the elbow directly into the main
laboratory where the white-jacketed staff was congre-gated around a concert grand piano. "How
do you feel these days?"
"I'm-"
"You look fine. Never looked better. Have a seat," he said, indicating the quilted leather stool in
front of the piano.
Gwillam Forte sat, wondering whether the researchers were under the impression that because
he could finger the three valves of the trumpet, he should also be able to manipulate eighty-eight
keys.
Dr. Reeves rolled up a small table covered with a white sheet. On it was a black box. He opened
it. Inside was a prosthetic right hand and forearm that exactly matched Forte's own, down to hair
and freckles.
Forte shucked his jacket, rolled up his sleeve, and pushed firmly with his left forefinger on the
latch that disconnected the prosthesis he was wearing. It dropped to the table lifelessly.
With ether, Dr. Reeves wiped the stainless steel annulus that ringed the stump, inserted the new
pros-thesis in its grooves, and locked it in place.
"Voila," Reeves said. "I christen thee Gwillam Van Cliburn. Play, maestro!"
Gwillam Forte felt like a fool. Surrounded by thirty-odd scientists, who struck him as 'thirty odd
scientists' at that moment, as they seemed intent on embarrassing him, he swung around on the
stool to play the one tune he could pick out on the piano-Star Dust.
But something funny happened on the way to the keyboard. The moment his right hand
approached the keys, it seemed to be endowed with a life of its own. All by itself it began to play.
The first chord, to be sure, was from Star Dust, but the next was a change of key that transposed
Hoagy Carmichael to Johann Se-bastian Bach. He watched, fascinated, as his right hand raced
up and down the keyboard in a flawless per-formance of music he recognized as a Bach sonata.
His real left hand lay limp in his lap, as useless and unin-volved as Forte himself felt, in contrast to
his private enterprising right hand.
A chorus of applause greeted the last notes of the first movement of the sonata, which ended just
as abruptly as it began. Personal control returned to the hand. Gwillam Forte, his initial annoyance
submerged by the wonder of it all and the obvious pride of the men and women who surrounded
him, grinned and stood up to take a little bow.
"Pretty slick, Bob. I must say, I never knew I had it in me."
"You didn't." Dr. Reeves parted the crowd around the piano and lifted its lid. Inside, in a plastic box
between the strings and the sounding board, was a cassette player. He removed it and held it up
for inspection.
"Still pretty crude, Mr. Forte," he explained, "but what we have here is a device that transmits
instruc-tions to the nerve cells implanted in the artificial hand to trigger certain muscle movements
in programmed sequence. The whole thing's in the conceptual stage so far, but we've got a
perfected model two or three years down the road."
"What'll it do-put all the concert artists out of work?"
"No, it won't do that. The rapport between the audi-ence and the performer will never be possible
to dupli-cate by electronic circuitry, but it will provide a source of pleasure for thousands of
amputees who would like to make music, yet are too young, old, or infirm to endure the grind that
distinguishes a top musician. Don't look at it as electronic gimmickry or musical
re-production-we've developed this strictly as spiritual therapy."
"Seems promising, judging by what you've done so far."
"We've only just begun, Mr. Forte. On our drawing boards is a hand that will be able to play up to
two hundred concert selections, from sonatas to concertos. All the memories will be contained in
the hand itself, and to initiate the recall the performer has only to play the first four notes or
chords; the mechanism takes over from there."
Gwillam Forte thought about his real, but useless, left hand lying quiescently in his lap while his
artificial one handled Bach. It didn't take much imagination, nor would it take much additional
engineering, to coordi-nate the efforts of two artificial hands to play two-part music. For those
unfortunates with two prosthetic hands, it was a long step forward.
"But where does that leave guys like me, with only one artificial hand?" he asked. "How do we play
music written for two hands?"
It was Reeves's turn to be embarrassed.
"Yes, we've been working on that. So far we've pretty well mapped out the neural pathways from
each hand to the corresponding lobe of the brain that pro-cesses the electrical impulses
controlling the respective muscles. But until we understand better how the two lobes of the brain
communicate with each other, sort out their individual responsibilities and capabilities in solving
the various aspects of the problem the con-sciousness perceives as originating from a single
mo-dality, we can only surmise-"
"And so forth and so on," Gwillam Forte interrupted dryly. "After I dig my way out of that avalanche
of double-talk, I suspect I'll discover that the English translation is 'more money.' Correct me if I'm
mistaken, Doctor."
Dr. Reeves coughed apologetically.
"How much?" Forte persisted.
"Well, a team of five neurologists and neurosurgeons, along with the requisite laboratory
equipment, and of course the-"
"In dollars."
"Not less than four million over the next five years," Reeves said quickly.
"Will it be worth the expense?"
Dr. Reeves shook his head. "Probably not."
Gwillam Forte, slipping back into his old familiar right hand, looked up sharply.
Reeves was smiling impishly. "Unless you happen to love Bach."
Forte didn't return the smile. "I don't like Bach."
Reeves's smile vanished.
"But I do like money. There's a commercial future for this hand of yours, Bob, so I'm going to
finance the research."
Dr. Reeves licked his lips. He wasn't any more dis-honest than most doctors, but he couldn't
afford to give Forte any false impressions.
"I'm afraid there isn't much of a-"
"Just think how we could clean up by programming this thing to strangle mothers-in-law."

14 MAY 1994: 3:30 P.M.
Dr. Wilkie Phillips caught up with Gwillam Forte just as he was leaving the hospital. "Do you have
time for a word, Mr. Forte?"
Forte looked at his watch. At four-fifteen he was scheduled to chair a meeting of Stenco, a
Sunshine Industries subsidiary that was slowly expiring despite intensive care. He didn't want to
miss it, but he would if he paused for a word with Dr. Phillips: the good doctor's words had a way
of eating up an afternoon.
"Can it wait until next week?" said Forte.
"Sure, it can wait. Another week probably won't kill them.
"Kill who?"
"The twenty-three men on the danger list."
"What's wrong with them?"
"That's what I wanted a word with you about."
Forte surrendered. He always did, for he felt an overwhelming responsibility for the patients at the
Houston veterans hospital. In his time of need they had kept him alive and, eventually, hopeful for
better days; he could do no less for them. In fact, he did considerably more. To these men, whom
he considered family, he gave everything. One of his first large real-estate acquisitions in Houston
was El Caballejo, a horse-breeding ranch then on the outskirts of the city, now hemmed in by
refineries and factories. There he held open house for his hospital shipmates-even those he had
never known, even those who had fought in wars he had been spared. El Caballejo was a
spacious, comfortable spread. The disabled veterans could drop in unannounced and stay for a
day, a week, even a month, if they liked. There were plenty of inducements to do so: they had the
use of his pleasure craft on the channel for boating and fishing, the swimming pool, the bowling
alley, the pistol and skeet ranges, library, sauna, solarium, and stables. Most guests ended the
day at the bar, where drinks were on the house, and the dark-eyed barmaids weren't quite so hard
to get as they looked. On festive occasions, nearly the entire ambulatory population of the hospital
could be found at El Caballejo, soaking up the sun, steam, and scotch and lying to one another
about ancient battles they had fought.
Those whose condition confined them to bed weren't forgotten. Acting alternately as ombudsman
and angel, Forte made periodic trips to record their grievances and fight them out with the VA
bureaucracy, and apply the soothing balm of ready cash when the veterans' prob-lems were
financial. By the time Dr. Phillips had inter-cepted him, in fact, he had just put in half a day on
rounds of the bedridden, dispensing the kind of first-aid the medical profession can't give.
"What's this about the twenty-three men who are- how did you put it-dying?" Gwillam Forte asked
when they reached Dr. Phillips's tiny book-stuffed cubicle.
Phillips cleared a space on his desk and filled it with Manila files from a green filing cabinet. They
made a stack nearly a foot high. Dr. Phillips placed his hands on them, and regarded Gwillam
Forte gravely across the desk. For a moment he said nothing, for though no obstetrician, he was
a devotee of the pregnant pause.
"Mr. Forte," he said finally, "these are the files of twenty-three men who are going to die before
their time. The wounds and illnesses that brought them here have long since been stabilized. All
are ambulatory, in fair-to-good health considering their infirmities, and yet all have entered a
decline that is usually irreversible."
"Why?"
"In layman's language, they believe they have noth-ing to live for."
Forte nodded. He knew the feeling.
Dr. Phillips opened the top file.
Charley Protock, forty-five, a basket case left over from the Vietnam War. He had been confined
to bed for fifteen years, then to a motorized wheelchair, be-fore twenty-first-century technology
provided him with prostheses that put him back on his feet, and gave him hands for tasks he had
long ago forgotten how to per-form.
Barry Burton, seventy-one, an ex-Seabee, had what was left of a small intestine after a Japanese
machine-gunner had stitched his belly with nineteen .25-caliber bullets. Thin as a pencil, he
survived on soft foods, and walked with a permanent stoop.
Gene Morton, sixty-five, was a two-faced man. The first had been seared away by a Chinese
flamethrower at Chosin Reservoir, while the second had been recon-structed from skin of his
thighs and buttocks over a period of years. Judging by his pictures, his first had been handsome.
T. D. Roebuck, sixty-nine, Morton's best buddy, was a quiet sort whose face was wreathed in a
perpetual half-smile. A former hospital corpsman, his mind had become unhinged during an
eighteen-hour bombard-ment on Iwo Jima in which all but three of his platoon had been killed.
Except for a few hours a week, he was perfectly normal; for those few, he was a raging bull.
"Ski" Modeljewski, forty-seven, bore scars of cigarette burns and bamboo barbs over his entire
body, but the wounds that never healed were deep within. There he harbored a pathological
hatred for the poli-ticians who had surrendered to those who had tortured him for five years,
especially the architect of that craven surrender who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,
for Christ's sake . . .
Only in the details of their personal tragedies did the dossiers of the eighteen veterans differ.
"As you know from your own experience, Mr. Forte, some men so afflicted snap out of their
depression in time, and do their best to rebuild normal lives. Others don't make it, and slide into
ever deeper melancholy. Some of the older ones here-World War II vets mainly-have been
hospitalized so long that their per-spectives of the outside world have worn out and dis-appeared.
They're perilously close to becoming vege-tables. I've seen this kind slip quietly away. 'Debilities
of old age exacerbated by war wounds,' we write on the death certificate, but it really isn't that."
"Then what is it?"
"Challenge," said Dr. Phillips. "They have none. This hospital is like a prison in that security here
is total. Here they'll be cared for the rest of their lives. But man is not built to live that way, Mr.
Forte. Chal-lenge is a part of nature. It is the constant battle to meet those challenges that gives
men strength, self-respect, character. In their youth, these men were strong, brave, useful. Their
country needed them. It does no longer, and has found it easier to forget than repay them with the
devotion that earned them their wounds. War crippled their bodies; peacetime neglect has
crippled their spirits. In cases like these, I some-times wonder if homeopathy isn't the answer."
"That bunch of ass-grabbing characters?"
"No, no-homeopathy, not homosexuality. It's a method of treating a disease by using small
amounts of a drug that, in healthy persons, would produce symp-toms similar to those of the
disease being treated."
"You mean these men need a little war?" Forte was shocked.
"Precisely. The best years of their lives-the war years-are behind them. They were terrible,
difficult, harrowing years, but they were vital and exciting. The men felt alive. If they could only
somehow relive them . . . But obviously that's impossible. For one thing, there's no war. . . ."
True, Gwillam Forte reflected, nor was there likely to be one for a long time to come. To be sure,
there had been a time during the middle 1980s when warfare threatened to become the
permanent condition of man-kind. But then the sun shone through, and in 1987 the guns fell silent
throughout the world for the first time since the Japanese invaded Manchuria in September 1931.
For eight years peace had presided over the affairs of man, and all signs indicated that it would
endure.
In 1980, Forte remembered, there had been only night at the end of the tunnel. The Soviet Union
and its surrogates had gobbled up Vietnam, Laos, Cam-bodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, the
Ogaden, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan in a few years without any interference from the free world.
The Russians were busily at work in El Salvador, Iran, Lebanon, and Thailand, and less
conspicuously in a dozen other countries. At one time, American confrontation with the Soviet
Union might have stemmed the tide, but in Vietnam the Americans failed to honor their heritage
and so encouraged the aggressors. Then President Car-ter and a nation distracted from
self-survival by guilt feelings over Vietnam opposed Russian might not with the force of arms but
with sermons on human rights. Unilateral American disarmament in the face of a Russian arms
build-up opened a window of American vulnerability that would peak between 1982 and 1986.
President Reagan tried to slam the window shut, but it was already too late: by late 1983 the bear
was clambering over the sill. In November of that year, Russia dropped all pretense of peaceful
intentions. In-viting NATO chiefs to Moscow, the Russians gave them a grand tour of defenses
the West had suspected but never confirmed: vast underground cities beneath Moscow and
Leningrad, with schools, hospitals, bulg-ing granaries, factories, oil depots, and living
accommo-dations for millions; antiballistic missile defenses that could destroy incoming missiles
while they were still in the stratosphere; advance-warning measures that in six hours could
disperse much of the Soviet population to hardened positions capable of resisting nuclear at-tack.
Those precautions, along with the Soviet's vastly superior ICBM capability, made clear to the
West that while Russia could annihilate the rest of the world, the Soviet Union itself was relatively
invulnerable. The moral of the demonstration was clear: oppose Russia, and be destroyed.
With supreme confidence that would shackle the world into impotence, Russia embarked upon a
pro-gram of world-wide hegemony, annexing-generally with a minimum of bloodshed-a few
countries at a time. By 1985, Iran, the Arab states, Israel, Turkey, most of black Africa, Mexico,
Brazil, Peru, and Ecua-dor were under Soviet domination. The United States, meanwhile, stood to
arms-too strong to be attacked by Russia without risking a blanket of nuclear fallout covering the
entire Earth, too weak to interpose its arms in the defense of nations that couldn't, and usually
wouldn't, defend themselves. By 1986, fifty-three coun-tries of Asia, Africa, and South America
laid their weary heads on the communist bloc. In 1987, En-gland joined the rest of Europe in the
communist camp when left-winger Tony Buncombe was appointed Prime Minister. It seemed
only a matter of time-and a very short time at that-before the entire world would be enslaved.
But then a seeming miracle occurred. As if the So-viet war machine had run out of gas, the
conquests suddenly ceased. The pundits explained that the Russians had become seriously
overextended, and needed all their armed forces to contain the still-restive con-quered nations. It
may have been so, for indeed the world map of September 1987, when the advance of the
Cuban, East German, and Ethiopian surrogates of Russia abruptly halted, was reassuring to the
eye of the optimist. In terms of land and population, rather less than half the world was under
Russian control. Spared were seven poor countries-China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria,
Egypt and Indonesia-and five of the world's richest-the United States, Canada, Aus-tralia, South
Africa, and Japan. And not only had the Russian guns fallen silent; anticapitalistic propaganda
dried up, subversion and sabotage ceased, KGB spying and assassination became memories.
Military analysts don't believe in miracles. Accord-ing to them, Russia had advanced as far as it
dared. One more step, they maintained, and the United States would have been goaded into a
preemptive nuclear strike. Such a strike, with dirty bombs the United States had thoughtfully
manufactured, would have been fatal, despite all of Russia's careful defense precau-tions, due to
fallout. In contrast, by 1987 Russia itself had such a preemptive option no longer. With the
suc-cessful series of Columbia space launches, backed by frantic defense research begun under
Reagan in 1981, the United States had established a chain of laser and particle-beam antimissile
stations in geostationary Earth orbit. Still, the stand-off would be only temporary. The Russians
were developing Earth-based weapons to shoot down or otherwise make harmless the American
satel-lites. When they did, the Russian conquest would resume.
So reasoned the leaders of the West, who decided a daring new strategy was imperative. The
strategy was obvious: the United States and the four other wealthy free nations would unleash the
tremendous military power latent in the seven poor countries-comprising more than two billion
souls. Harnessed to the technologically superior war machine of the West, they would build an
impenetrable wall against future Rus-sian expansion.
Accordingly, the United States initiated a mammoth rescue operation. Together with its reluctant
allies, who thought that the money would be better spent strength-ening their own defenses, it
poured grain, meat, manu-factured goods, technological assistance, and weapons into the seven
starving sisters, who soaked it up like the parched desert after a summer shower. During the next
seven years, the tempo of aid increased. But so did the population of the poor, stimulated by the
hand-outs of the West, whose production was immediately absorbed by the pauper nations' baby
boom. The only legions that materialized were armies of the barefoot, indigent, and ill; far from
being eager to defend them-selves, their sole battle was for ever larger subsidies. To satisfy the
demand, the five rich nations could devote only a shrinking proportion of their production to their
own military defenses.
Not that defenses seemed to matter any longer. Rus-sia, while maintaining its armed forces at
high levels of readiness, did nothing to provoke its neighbors even when, as in the case of Egypt,
surrounded on all sides, it could have toppled the ruling regimes in a day. Few dared to guess
what was in the minds of the men in the Kremlin, but judging by their total abstention from
aggression during the past eight years, it certainly wasn't conquest. . . .
Gwillam Forte considered the problem of the twenty-three veterans, good men wasting away,
according to Dr. Phillips, for want of a war. Personally, he didn't subscribe to the theory. He had
seen war, and could recall no single redeeming feature. And certainly, even among its most
persuasive partisans, he had never heard it recommended as a cure for depression and other
mental illness.
"I've got a fair amount of influence in this state, Dr. Phillips," he said finally, "but it doesn't extend to
the declaration of war."
"Oh," Phillips replied airily, "I wasn't speaking of war war, but rather the total engagement of the
spirit in some great activity, with the urgency, deadlines, ex-citement, danger, suspense, the
sense of sacrifice and camaraderie that comes with war. Bingo in the hospi-tal morning room is
not the answer, Mr. Forte."

The answer came two days later, when Governor Cherokee Tom Traynor called for a progress
report on the Texas from the captain of the Texas Navy.
"No, nothing concrete yet," Forte confessed. Ac-tually, the matter had completely slipped his
mind. The millennium was still six years away, and he was a busy man. "I've been thinking about
it, though."
"Good. Any tentative conclusions?"
"Well," said Forte, "the minimum we can do is to restore the ship to the shape it was when in
commis-sion."
"I want maximum, not minimum, Will. I want a crowd-stopper, not a static museum piece. You'll
have to do better than that."
"Well, how about rigging it up with great metal wings and making it fly?" Forte replied with leaden
irony.
Now you're talking, Will. I knew I could count on you for something dramatic. A battleship that flies!
By God, Will, you do that and I'll be elected by a land-slide. Get on it, and keep me posted. A flying
battle-ship, by God!"
"But-" Forte began.
But the governor had already hung up.
Forte replaced the telephone gently in its cradle and gazed out the window at Houston fifty-seven
stories be-low him, spreading out almost as far as he could see. He should have known better
than to play word games with a politician.
For the first time since Governor Traynor had broached the subject, he really thought about it.
Thought came hard, because his memories of the Texas were bleak and heavy, and he had
spent years trying to obliterate them. But gazing out the window of his skyscraper office, looking
into the future six years dis-tant, a picture of the Texas transformed began to take shape. To
remodel the old hulk that lay rusting in its berth at San Jacinto National Monument into the image
that was forming in his mind would be no easy task. It would take money, imagination, dedication,
gigantic effort-the moral equivalent of war.
Suddenly it came to him. Cherokee Tom, Dr. Phil-lips. Two problems, one solution.

19 MAY 1994
The battleship was nearly a century old, and looked its years. Its gray paint was peeling and
flaking, and leprous patches of rust spread up from the water line. One of the foremast stays had
rusted and parted, and now trailed in the stagnant water of the basin, festooned with algae. A
tampion had been stolen from the muzzle of one of the fourteen-inch guns, and a wad of
newspaper had been inserted in its place to keep out the rain and dust. In the muzzles of the
casemate five-inch .51-caliber broadside guns, birds had nested, and their droppings were
liberally distributed across the turrets and decks. Bilge waste pumped from the double-bottoms
streaked the basin waters and cast up the musty odor of neglect and old age. From the fantail the
flag of the State of Texas hung tattered and limp from the ensign staff, while on the mainmast the
American colors were snarled and strangled in the lines. Candy wrappers, cigarette butts, and
crushed Styro-foam cups littered deck and dock. A single Chicano family strolled listlessly on the
quarter-deck.
"Beautiful," Ski Modeljewski commented.
Gwillam Forte made -no reply. He led the party of veterans up the gangway onto the quarter-deck.
It was the first time he had come aboard in the forty-nine years since he had been wounded on
the bridge. He was too busy to indulge in nostalgia, he always claimed when someone suggested
he visit the old ship; the truth was that he had consciously put out of his mind all recollection of his
past when he left the hospital, and wanted no reminder of it. Strangely, seeing the Texas for the
first time since 1945 did not evoke the dread and repulsion he was sure he would feel. It evoked
no emotion at all. His only thought was of how small it was, where once it had been his world.
When in uniform, the proper procedure on boarding a naval vessel is to stop at the brow, salute
the flag on the ensign aft, then make a quarter turn to the right and salute the officer of the deck on
the quarter-deck, and ask permission to come aboard. Out of uniform, Forte wasn't sure what he
should do, especially since no officer of the deck had commanded the quarter-deck in almost half
a century. Still, some vestige of naval protocol made him pause at the brow, face aft at attention,
then the quarter-deck, before stepping aboard. To his surprise and annoyance, the deck was
surfaced with concrete-he later learned that this had been done to withstand the scraping and
scuffing of cowboy-booted tourists-where once it had been a velvety camouflage gray.
"We'll start back at the fantail," Forte told them when the twenty-three others had come aboard.
"The fantail is the rear of the ship, in case the exdogfaces and other inferior species among you
were about to ask. Since the purpose of this tour is to acquaint you with the ship and get
suggestions from you as to how it can be fashioned into a really proud symbol of a proud state
come the Millenary Celebrations six years from now, we're going to take our time and see it all.
The fact that some of you never set foot on a battle-ship is no disadvantage: you'll bring a fresh
perspec-tive, and maybe some originality to the project. If any of the terms that come up baffle
you, just ask me or one of the other old tars, and we'll be happy to share our superior wisdom.
This way, men."
Assembling them beneath the twin barrels of the number 5 fourteen-inch turret, Gwillam Forte
gave his party the benefit of his researches of the previous eve-ning, when he relearned data
about the U.S.S. Texas that had been long and thankfully forgotten.
"For all you landhogs who've never sailed blue water," he said, "let me give you a quick rundown
on the Texas. This is the former U.S.S. Texas, BB35, authorized by the Congress in an Act of 24
June 1910, keel laid 17 April 1911, launched 18 May 1912, com-missioned 12 March 1914 in
Newport News, Virginia. In a representative fighting year-1943, say-this ship carried a
complement of 100 officers, 85 Marines, and 1,625 enlisted swine. It displaced 34,000 tons, had a
length of 573 feet, a beam of 106 feet, and was 132 feet from the foretop to the water line. Its two
counter-rotating engines could push this big loaf of bread through the water at up to twenty-one
knots, but it usually moved at about ten nautical miles per hour, the speed of a middle-aged jogger
who's just spotted a mugger closing in. At that pace, it could sail halfway around the world without
refueling.
"It could also hoist a lot of iron into the air. It has ten fourteen-inch guns like these two above our
heads, in five turrets, shooting three-quarter-ton shells up to fifteen miles. In addition, it had
something like thirty-five smaller guns, ranging from 20-mm antiaircraft guns to five-inch
broadside batteries, lobbing fifty-pound shells up to ten miles.
"Now, reading from the fantail forward, you see two after-turrets with two naval cannon each, then
the mainmast fourteen-inch battery with a catapult for the OS2U Kingfisher on top. The Kingfisher
flew about one hundred miles an hour when scared; it took a brave man to fly her, and a skilled
one to land in the curving wake of the ship. Then you have the ship's single stack-smokestack to
landlubbers-the main-mast, and finally the two forward turrets.
"A man-of-war is a self-contained community, a floating fortress that can wage war or run away
from it. To keep a ship functioning efficiently requires many specialties, only a few of which are
directedly con-cerned with shooting off all that impressive armament. Here on the main deck you
have the gunnery office, bakery, galleys, spud locker, butcher shop, armory, air castle, admiral's
cabin, and other compartments easily accessible to the ship's company on the lower decks. On
the superstructure deck of the foremast, above the main, or weather, deck, is the captain's cabin,
gear locker, fruit locker, paint locker, and the motor whale-boats in their cradles. You-"
"Whaleboats?" Protock said. "You were hunting whales?"
"Only by accident, when we ran into one asleep on the surface. These whaleboats you see here,
though, are direct descendants of the two-prowed craft whalers used two hundred years ago.
Okay, up the ladder on the foremast is the signal bridge with the navigation office and the radar
motor room, while at the next level are the combat-information and fire-control centers. Above
them are the navigation bridge and chart house, radio shack, and pilothouse, and above that is the
flag bridge, where the Admiral can keep his eye on the whole task force. Above all the rest, you
can make out secondary battery control, forward battle lookout, main battery control, and finally,
up on top, the radar an-tenna.
"All that stuff is in the foremast. In the mainmast toward the stern you find radar and fire direction
apparatus, and the secondary conn from which the ship is controlled in case the pilothouse is
knocked out of action-Any questions so far?"

There were-lots of them-but Gwillam Forte re-fused to answer the one uppermost in the minds of
the twenty-three men until later that afternoon, when they had made a complete circuit of the ship,
from the pilot-house to the engine rooms, and were back at El Cabal-lejo having a beer to wash
away the dust of the long hot day.
"Okay, Will, the suspense is killing us," Ski Model-jewski said, wiping foam from his lip. "When are
you going to tell us why you dragged us out into the hot sun to spend the day looking at that
floating scrap heap?"
"A little respect from the white-hat jungle," Forte said severely. "I'll have you know that you're
speaking about the ship I love and, as it happens, command. Allow me to introduce the
commanding officer of the flagship of the Texas Navy: me. All rise."
From the assembly came a chorus of raspberries.
"All is now clear," drawled Jimmy Rawlins, a Viet vet who had been hit by a castrator mine, but
because he was uncommonly tall lost only two legs instead of his manhood. "You are captain of a
ship without a crew. You want to press-gang us into the job. Wouldn't that be cute-a crippled ship
with a crippled crew."
"Is that what this is all about?" Zeno Defrees asked. "Because if it is, I demand a promotion. When
I was hit aboard the old Enterprise, I was a machinist's mate second. Guarantee me three stripes
and I'm game."
"You'd sign up just to be machinist's mate first?" Ski asked. "You must be around the bend."
"I was thinking," Defrees said stiffly, "of the three stripes of commander."
"When you clowns are finished," Forte said, "I'll tell you the deal. In six years, as I mentioned, that
ship will be part of the Texas Millenary Celebrations. It's going to be fully restored. I need your help
to do it."
"What do we know about reconditioning a ship, Will?" a voice complained. "We're disabled vets,
not shipyards stiffs."
"Now, this is not going to be a matter of a coat of paint and shining up the brasswork," Forte said,
ignor-ing the interruption. "I could turn loose a gang of ship-yard types six months before the
events are to begin, have them chip the paint, rerig the standing gear, brighten up the brass, but
with all that taking place for months before, where would be the drama on opening day?"
"You want drama?" said Roebuck.
"That's what I want."
"Then have the old rust bucket towed away and sunk some dark night, and offer a big reward to
the finder. Every skin-diver and shrimp fisherman in the southern U.S. would be gaffing one
another trying to find her. The blood would attract the sharks, and- well," he concluded lamely,
when he saw Forte regard-ing him with narrowed eyes, "you want drama."
"What I thought of was announcing, come opening day, that the Texas was being retired, that it
would be towed away to the breaker's yard on the morrow, and that everybody who wanted to pay
last respects to this symbol of the state-and partake in a gigantic, free barbecue-should come
down to see her off on her last cruise.
"Imagine the scene. . . . Hundreds of thousands of Texans line the banks of the Houston Ship
Channel. Some are indignant, others philosophic, others merely curious. Tugs plod solemnly up
the channel in two columns, swing in toward the Texas's berth. A bugler mounts the gangway,
climbs the ladder to the bridge. The crowd is hushed, tears mist the eyes of the old salts, the very
wind is stilled, as he puts the bugle to his lips to play a funereal taps over the ship, soon to die.
"Instead, from the bugle comes the electrifying blast of Attention! A moment later the call is
followed by Assembly! and from every hatch pour sailors in dress whites. They sprint down the
deck to their muster stations and silently form, rank on rank, as their offi-cers appear, swords
drawn, to take command of their units. A Navy band materializes, marches to the fore-castle, and
plays the national anthem.
"As the last notes die away, the voices of the multi-tude stilled, the band strikes up 'Anchors
Aweigh.' The crew breaks formation at the run, heading for its get-ting-underway stations. Lines
are cast off from bollards and cleats. Engine room telegraph bells tinkle. A spume of black smoke
spurts from the stack. The deep-throated horn sounds once, its echoes reverberating across the
silent, expectant horde of Texans.
"The ship shudders from the vibration of its engines coming alive. The water of the slip churns as
the great brass screws begin to turn. The ship backs down out of its berth, picking up speed as it
swings around in the middle of the channel and slows to a stop.
"The turrets of the big fourteen-inch guns train to broadside. They slowly elevate to forty-five
degrees. As one, the ten guns fire, a tremendous blast that rolls the ship over until its port side is
awash. It rolls back, steadies, then another salvo thunders out across the assembled populace,
smoke rings from the muzzle blasts floating lazily toward shore. Another, then
an-other-twenty-one in all-are fired, the salute of a great ship to the state it symbolizes.
"On the twenty-first salvo, the upper deck undergoes a miraculous transformation. From bare
masts streams a cloud of bunting, and suddenly the ship is dressed from stem to stern in flags all
the colors of the rain-bow. But this is not all: before the reverberation of the last salvo fades, the
ship itself is transfigured. Its dull, dirty gray is obliterated in a flash, as if by a thousand brushes,
and the ship is a gleaming white.
"A cheer goes up from a million throats on both sides of the channel as the U.S.S. Texas, its
engines res-ponding to a full head of steam, squats stern down in the water and races away at
thirty knots, headed for the open sea. ..." Forte paused.
There was silence.
"Aw, come on, Will," somebody said.
"I've discussed it with the scientists of my research staff. They assure me it can be done. It will
need hard work, high standards of performance, dedication, time, money-but it can be done. In six
years. If I can get the men . . ."
Again, silence.
Ski Modeljewski looked around the room at the faces of his friends and shipmates. He shrugged.
"Well," he said, "I always was a sucker for lost causes."

JUNE 1994
The subterranean workshops of sunshine indus-tries had been built in the scary days of the early
1980s. At the time, it seemed that the Russians had solved the American missile defense
equation, that they could drop their ICBMs with assurance that they would atomize everything
American right out to the horizon. Russia itself, thanks to an efficient antiballistic missile system
that had been extended from mere point defense of major cities ever farther into the hinterland,
had less and less to fear from America's nuclear might.
By 1984, Gwillam Forte's men had been digging in for four years. Not having mountains that they
could hollow out, as the Swiss and Swedes had done to pro-tect themselves, their stores, and
industry, Forte determined to burrow underground. At first it seemed an im-possible goal to
excavate millions of cubic meters of rock and earth far enough beneath the surface to be
invulnerable to megaton bombs. A team of economists and scientists said the costs would
bankrupt Sunshine Industries before he installed even a tenth of SII's manufacturing capacity
twelve hundred meters down, considered the minimum depth necessary to dissipate anticipated
shock blasts. Forte didn't argue with his experts: he paid them to be right.
But one night while gargling with the salt-and-soda mixture he favored over over-the-counter
frauds, a bal-loon blossomed in the bathroom mirror. Inside was a glaring light bulb. He paused,
and looked thoughtfully at the gargle water.
The next day he called in his geologists and told them what he was looking for. Poring over
geological maps of the area, they soon found it. Encouraged, Forte instructed his mechanical
engineers to conduct an energy survey of the mainly petroleum-related in-dustries along the
Houston Ship Channel, with special attention to flared gas and other waste heat. Some weeks
later they returned with an exhaustive two-volume study. On their heels came Forte's chief civil
engineer, who listened with skepticism as Forte out-lined his plan.
"Stifle your doubts, and talk to the men who will do the work," Forte told him. "Determine whether
they can do it. If they can, bring back two figures: the cost, and the completion date."
"Right."
Twenty-two days later, a weary chief engineer brought to Forte the required two figures. Forte
studied them with a frown. The sum was large-even by Forte's standards $78.8 million was a lot
of money. And the date was a lot further in the future than he had antic-ipated. Nevertheless, he
nodded and said: "You're in complete charge. Bring it in under budget before this date, and you'll
get a bonus of double the savings. Exceed the target date or go over budget, and you're fired."
Forte kept his word. He usually did. The project came in $1.2 million over budget and twelve days
late. The chief engineer was fired. Still, he had been on the payroll longer than the experts who
said the subter-ranean workshops were an economic impossibility: they had all been kicked out
the day work began, and from that day on Forte never allowed an economist on the premises.
Forte's solution had been just that-a solution. Ob-serving the salt and soda dissolving in the glass
of warm water, he reasoned that the same process might work on a larger scale. His geologists
confirmed the presence of a suitable site 1,450 meters below his El Caballejo ranch property
beside the Houston Ship Channel. There, seismic surveys of oil exploratory companies in the
1920s had turned up a number of salt domes, although precious few of them sat atop the
hoped-for reservoirs of crude. Forte's mechanical engineers had likewise discovered promising
energy sources in the millions of BTUs flared off in petrochemical plants and refineries that
extended some thirty miles along the channel.
At a modest investment, Forte was able to buy up the flare gas and pipe it to a steam-generation
plant con-structed above the salt dome under the ranch property. Superheated water was forced
down a drill pipe into the dome, where it liquified the halite deposit, which was then forced up by
the same pressure through a sec-ond pipe to the surface. The hot brine was evaporated and
purified in stills and sold to chemical, glass, and agricultural industries in which Forte had
interests. Had the brine recovery been planned as a strictly money-making proposition, the project
probably would have lost money. But speed was Forte's purpose, and the fact that the excavation
was made close to the break-even point was considered a financial success.
Into the enormous chambers excavated nearly a mile underground, Sunshine Industries installed
almost its entire manufacturing capacity, its offices, research cen-ter, library, fuel supplies,
raw-material stockpiles, ware-houses, electric generators, leisure and sporting facili-ties, air
conditioning machinery, food and water re-serves to last the entire work force for three years, and
dormitories extensive enough to house the workers and their families twice over. The
transportation system alone was equivalent to that of a town of twenty thou-sand, with electric
buses running on regular schedules, a small electric railroad for heavy equipment and sup-plies,
and even a radio-taxi service for executives. Ac-cording to defense experts, it was the ultimate in
bomb shelters, invulnerable even to zero-error hits by mega-ton-yield nuclear missiles. To be
sure, it was impossible to forecast casualties from blast effects, but the facili-ties themselves
would survive, even should everything else in the United States be destroyed.
So would its secrets, which ranged from gaseous storage batteries, lasers, ion-drive vehicles and
other high-tech products being tested in its laboratories, to arcane theories of submarine and
satellite warfare de-veloped by SII researchers, along with designs for hard-ware to carry them
out, for SII was a prime U.S. de-fense contractor. As such, security was virtually abso-lute.
Admission to the underground offices and work-shops was via one of two entry shafts after a
thorough security check of the individual, who typically spent an entire week at work below the
surface, followed by a week of total freedom at home. Those who talked about their work outside
quickly discovered they had no work to talk about. Thus, over the years, a work force was built up
that was relatively small, efficient, healthy, and very well paid. Working conditions in the
cavernous factories below ground were excellent: no air pollution, very little noise, absolute
temperature and illumination control, and performance goals that kept workers, who were shifted
around from one job to an-other to counteract boredom, constantly challenged to produce. It was
a tough shop, but a happy ship. The loyalty of the workers to Forte was correspondingly fierce and
possessive.
He depended on it now as he assembled the engineer-ing chiefs who would be responsible for
the rehabilita-tion of the U.S.S. Texas. One would take charge of propulsion, another of
instrumentation, a third of arma-ment, a fourth of paintwork, and so on.
"Keep always in mind," Forte warned them, "the purposes of this job. They are to regenerate the
U.S.S. Texas-make it the fastest, leanest, cleanest, most ex-citing ship afloat, while preserving its
outside appear-ance unchanged, and to ration the work so as to stretch it out for five and a half
years, to coincide with the Texas Millenary Celebrations in January 2000. You will schedule the
work to produce a crescendo of ex-citement, a tempo that will pick up as the TMC draws to a
close. That's vital. These war veterans must feel that they've got to keep humping to get the work
done on time. That feeling of urgency will keep them alive and productive. To me, that's more
important than getting the old ship rebuilt. Anybody who lets slip that the work can easily be done
in two years will hear from me. The words he will hear are 'good' and 'bye.' " His blue eyes rested
on each of his engineers in turn.
"These men will have direct responsibility for getting the work done, and you'll devise work
schedules so they can handle it. But there'll be no free rides. See that they have plenty to do."
"Seems to me like this is about three parts ego-build-ing and one part ship-building," one of the
engineers grumbled.
"Your proportions are correct," agreed Forte. "Now get cracking."
The U.S.S. Texas, as a state monument, was open to the public seven days a week. Enough
tourists still came to make impossible any overt work on the ship if secrecy was to be preserved.
A major overhaul on a 34,000-ton vessel under the very noses of the visitors without them
suspecting it was obviously impossible- until Gwillam Forte thought of a way.
"Tunnel," he ordered.
They tunneled.
A Mountain Mole was hired away from its more prosaic role in the construction of subways and
was lowered piecemeal into the underground cavern of SD-1. There, within the walled, guarded
confines of the transportation-pool area, it was reassembled, then moved to the point on the
perimeter of the chamber nearest the ship channel.
The engineer in charge mounted the ladder to the cab and switched on main power. Brilliant lights
sprang to life, revealing a machine as big as a two-story house. The front of the Mole was a huge
steel ring, bristling with diamond-tipped titanium-steel teeth the size of wheelbarrows. The
engineer touched a button, and the giant ring began to rotate. He pressed a lever, and the 283-ton
monster clanked forward on six caterpillar treads until the cutting disk touched the wall. A sheet of
protective blue glass slid up to cover the windows of the Mole's control room. The engineer's hand
de-pressed a switch. From within the ring, a multitude of laser beams pierced the limestone wall
with eleven-sec-ond bursts of energy. The intense heat was followed by bursts of liquid CO 2. The
din was like the explosion of cannon, as the differential expansion of the rock caused it to star with
a million minute fissures.
The diamond-tipped teeth of the rotating ring now bit into the crumbly rock as if it were just so
much dry bread. When the ring reached the limit of the fissured stone and struck the native
bedrock, a sensor retracted and shut down the rotating mandible.
Horizontal conveyor belts at ground level, mean-while, were carrying the spoil in a continuous
stream to the rear of the Mole, where electric rail cars hauled it away to skips. The skips, in turn,
raised the broken rock to the surface. The Mole then ground forward-the upward gradient was
one-in-ten-on its huge steel-shod feet to take another bite.
The air was filled with churning rock dust despite a constant stream of water across the drilling
surface, and the noise of the clanking, whirring, sparking, thun-dering machinery was so intense
that the Mole's atten-dant workers, some 140 per shift, wore hardhats with earmuff speakers and
throat mikes, in addition to respirator masks against the rock dust.
Operating around the clock, three crews drilled an average of seventy-two linear centimeters a
minute, driving a circular passage 5.8 meters in diameter. The spoil truckers worked fast to keep
up with it, as did the concrete crew, which braced and cemented the floor and walls of the tunnel
behind the Mole. In their wake came the track-layers and electricians, putting down twin
standard-gauge railways-traffic would proceed in both directions when the tunnel was completed-
signal system, fresh-air tubing, bundles of electrical cable, and overhead lighting. Bringing up the
rear was a gang laying pipe for fresh water and others for sewage and liquid-waste disposal.
It took ten days to drill the 9.1 kilometers from SD-1, as SII's underground complex in the salt
dome was called, to the edge of the basin where the Texas was berthed. Two weeks after the
first trucks rumbled away with spoil, the last carried its load of rock to the skip. By then, some
250,000 cubic meters of rock had been excavated and hauled to the surface, put on barges, and
shipped twenty kilometers downstream to Galveston Bay for dumping in deep water. The quantity
was sufficient to cause comment from environmentalists. Gwillam Forte's press representative
explained it away by saying that it came from a tunnel to a nearby salt dome, where SD-2 would
soon be built.
An airtight passageway now was extended through the remaining rock and silt separating the
tunnel from the Texas's slip. In order to prevent a breakthrough from flooding SD-1 at the base of
the steep tunnel, an airtight caisson punched through the remaining rock and was jacked forward.
One steel section at a time was added to the rear of the caisson, until with a metal-lic clank! it
closed against the hull of the battleship two meters below the water line, invisible from the
sur-face in the murky waters.
Divers welded the connection watertight. The cais-son's air lock opened so metal workers could
cut through the battleship's six bulging layers of protective hull armor, which had been added in
1925 to protect her from torpedos. A continuous passageway now con-nected SD-1 with the
engine room of the U.S.S. Texas.
The first man to go aboard was Gwillam Forte.
In the engine room, he addressed the assembled veterans, engineers, and technicians: "As. you
all know, only certain areas of the ship are open to the public. As of now, hatches leading from
those areas to this will be welded shut. Under no circumstance is the pub-lic to get the idea that
any work is going on down here. To make sure they don't, in future we work night shifts only." He
paused. "The future starts now."

28 DECEMBER 1997
How brief the future might be Gwillam Forte had learned forty-two months later, when he was
sum-moned to the White House for a secret conference with President Wilson Wynn and eight
fellow moguls of the American press, radio, and television. Together, the nine media men sitting
around the polished ebony table in the cabinet conference room had daily access to more than 97
percent of American readers, listeners, and viewers. President Wynn rightly considered their
influence crucial in the formation of American public opinion. How the nine men felt about any
public issue was how, ultimately, the American people would be persuaded to feel. Usually the
nine were divided, and thus Americans were divided, and politicians like Wynn exploited such
divisions to win high office. But today, Wynn was praying he could unite them: the nation's future,
no less than his own, depended on it.
"I have asked you here today, gentlemen," the Presi-dent began, "to seek your support of an
important foreign policy initiative. How important it is, and the secrecy you should attach to it, you
may judge from the absence of anyone but the ten of us in these dis-cussions. No tape recording
is being made, and I shall ask you to take no notes and to keep what will be said here confidential.
Anyone who does not agree to maintain confidentiality may leave before I proceed."
He waited. No one stirred.
"I am happy to know I can count on you all," Wynn said with a cryptic smile. "Let me begin by
remarking that most of you have been generous with support for my foreign policy during my first
administration, with-out which I doubt that I would have been reelected last year, considering the
primacy of foreign policy issues. I now thank you collectively, as I have previ-ously thanked you
individually, for that vote of confi-dence, gentlemen." He nodded to each of seven of the nine, who
smilingly acknowledged his gratitude. "How-ever, honesty obliges me to confess that perhaps-
only perhaps, mind you-this foreign policy has given birth to disaster."
Seven smiles faded from seven faces, and were trans-ferred to those of Gwillam Forte and J. D.
Pascal, the eighty-eight-year-old New England press lord who had bitterly, consistently, and long
repudiated the premises of America's one-world foreign policy.
"Disaster?" the owner of CBS exclaimed. "How can you even suggest that a policy that has
bought us ten years of peace is a disaster, Mr. President?"
"That is all it is, so far, David," the President re-plied equably, "-suggestion. The suggestion
comes from my service chiefs, and I've asked you here to help me examine it. If you think it has
merit-which, I might add, my political advisers do not-then I hope you will have some ideas about
how we can prepare the American public for a drastic change in official United States policy, for
that will be a first priority. If, on the other hand, you think the criticism has no merit, I hope you will
give me the ammunition with which to shoot it down."
The President leaned back in his high leather chair and regarded his steepled fingers.
"The watershed in recent international relations was, I am sure you will agree, the abandonment
of world conquest by the Soviets just ten years ago. Since then, the guns have remained stilled,
although Russia's war readiness remains at high pitch. That, of course, doesn't alarm us, since
both Russia and the United States have achieved nuclear parity and the capability of destroying
each other's ICBMs the minute they leave their launch-ing pads, by means of satellite-based
weapons in geo-synchronous orbit. If we need fear Russia at all, it is that nation's conventional
offensive weapons that we must look to."
"Then we can quit worrying, Mr. President," inter-jected Frank Twigg, the dynamic young
chairman of a Washington-based chain of eighty-three large Ameri-can dailies. "My group has
recently completed a survey of American opinion about the strategic forces of the two great
powers. American opinion is inescapable: 63 percent of Americans believe Russia would be
creamed if it tried to invade the United States today, against only 8 percent on the other side and
29 percent 'don't know.' After all, the Russians have no new secret weapons-at least that we
know of-and without such weapons they could never launch the two-ocean amphibious assault
that would be necessary to subdue this country. Besides, if they tried, using their full military
strength, their unguarded satellite countries would im-mediately revolt. That's confirmed by a poll
we took only last month-81 percent of Americans affirm it."
"You speak of today, Frank. What about tomorrow?"
Twigg shrugged. He was a newspaperman. Today was what counted.
"Consider what happened ten years ago," the presi-dent said. "Russia could have conquered the
United States then-and if not the United States, at least South Africa, Japan, Australia, and
Canada. Yet it did no such thing. Why not?"
That was a moot question, one that evoked the strongest and most varied opinions, because
short of reading the minds of the men in the Kremlin, no one could be sure. Fear of a universal
holocaust in which they too would be consumed, territorial indigestion, a triumph of the Russian
peace party over the hawks, dissension within the Kremlin, a fight for leadership that immobilized
all parties-these were some of the theories advanced for the halt to Russian imperialism.
"But my military and naval analysts have finally . agreed on a more complex scenario. They
believe that what most of you maintain-that the Russians feared a nuclear war that would
exterminate humankind-is substantially correct. Russia feared that if it attacked the last of the few
reliable allies the Americans pos-sess-South Africa, Canada, Australia, and Japan- the Americans
would, in desperation, push the button. So far so good. But what, then, about the countries they
could have taken with impunity, but did not-Egypt, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, India,
and China? Why did they leave these inexhaustible sources of manpower and armies for the free
world to exploit?
"According to my service chiefs, because they were sure, having dealt with such Third World
countries for decades without benefit to themselves, that far from being a blessing, the backward
nations would be the graveyard of the West."
"Nonsense!" roared Bernard Davis, the television king of America and the second most powerful
man in the room.
"You think so, Bernie? Well, we've poured a steady stream of wheat and trucks and building
materials and arms into these seven pauper countries for the past ten years, and what have we
reaped besides an enormous internal and external debt? We've got 700 million more mouths to
feed than when we began a short decade ago, and we've subsidized armies that couldn't beat
that of Paraguay in a stand-up fight. I'll grant you, they have a lot of field marshals and beautifully
tailored uniforms and rows of fruit salad on their chests and put on impressive parades, but they
can't fight!"
"They need time," said Davis aggrievedly. This was his beloved Third World the president was
knocking. "After all, Rome wasn't built in a day."
"We're not building Rome. We're trying to build armies. We've failed. Today, having strewn our
food and technology and materiel on foreign sands, we're barely able to defend ourselves against
a conventional amphibious attack by Russia and its armies of slaves. That's not theory; that's
fact."
"But Russia is peace-loving," Davis said soothingly.
"They keep saying so," President Wynn admitted. "But do you believe them?"
"Of course, because they keep demonstrating it. Look at South Africa. They could have knocked
off South Africa any time they wanted."
President Wynn's distinguished patrician face was creased in a scowl. What Davis said was all
too true.
"Still, my analysts feel that this whole scenario was constructed deliberately to weaken the West.
The Rus-sians knew the pauper Third World would make no contribution to free-world defense.
They knew the Third World's exploding population and demands to feed it would impoverish us-as
they have. In time, we will be too weak, at the rate we're going, to resist a determined push. A little
shove will do, and the U.S. will crumble."
He licked his lower lip. He could see that his words were making little impression, except on Forte
and old Pascal, who had been saying the same things as long as he could remember. With the
others, ten years of peace was hard to argue away.
"Is this why we've been called together?" said Dr. Werner Spoke, the scholarly chief of the
Continental News Service. "Is it to inform us that we are so weak that a Russian attack is
imminent?"
President Wilson Wynn shook his head. "No, on the contrary, I have received new proposals from
the Rus-sians. We have examined them, and while on the sur-face they seem most attractive, we
believe they carry the seeds of national disaster."
"Let's hear the good news first, Mr. President," said Davis tartly.
"Very well. The proposal is quite long, complicated in the Russian manner, and detailed. But it
boils down to this: the Russians propose the total demilitarization of the Third World-plus their
poor possessions such as Poland and England as well as those that are tech-nically our allies,
such as, China and India."
The men around the table nodded. The better-armed, better-organized Russian satellites would
be a greater loss to Russia than America's client nations would be to the United States. A distinct
plus for the United States.
"Next, Russia proposes the conversion of its arms industries to the production of plowshares, pen
wipers, petroleum pipe, and other products for peaceful pur-poses. Russia will assume the
burden of supplying the entire Third World with capital and consumer goods."
"What?" Spoke exclaimed. "But that's wonderful. What do we have to do in return?"
"In return, we too convert our arms industries to peaceful endeavors. But we will supply fertilizers,
desalination plants, seed, and other products, and pro-cesses for the agricultural sector of the
world, and intensify our own agricultural production at home and in Canada and Australia."
"Then that is wonderful," said a grinning Dr. Spoke. "It is indeed the millennium."
"So the Russians claim," President Wynn remarked warily. "But how do you figure it, Dr. Spoke?"
"Isn't it obvious? We have, as you justly remarked, Mr. President, exhausted ourselves in
producing arms, building materials, and other necessities for the Third World. We could use a
rest. Russia is giving it to us by assuming the burden of providing for the growing needs of the
world's poor. We, on the other hand, are preeminent in food production. By concentrating on this,
an American specialty that no one in the world has come close to equaling in efficiency, we can
supply all the food mankind requires. The two hands wash each other-Russia providing capital
and consumer goods, and the United States the wherewithal to eat."
"Yet-"
"But there is another dividend even more vital," con-tinued Spoke, declining to yield the floor.
"Neither can exist without the other. Russia cannot wage war against us without losing its daily
bread. It would starve in six months. We, for our part, could not be enticed into martial adventures,
because we would no longer have the capacity to produce arms. Whoever thought up the
Russian plan is a genius, and I take off my hat to him. Always providing, of course, that there will
be mutual inspection to be sure that the terms of the agreement are carried through."
"Oh, yes," the president said, "there are provisions for mutual inspection, all right."
"You seem, nevertheless, to have reservations," Ber-nard Davis noted. "Care to share them with
us?"
"I'm thinking about the United States becoming an agricultural nation. I'm not sure I like the idea."
"Thomas Jefferson did," Davis shot back.
"Thomas Jefferson lived two hundred years ago. Times have changed."
"For the worse. It's time we went back to the soil."
"Six feet under?"
"Ah," said Dr. Spoke. "So there's more to the story. I might have known it was too good to be true.
What's the catch, Mr. President?"
President Wynn rubbed his jaw. "We're not sure. But we're suspicious. Leopards don't change
their spots, and Russians who have been shooting their way down the road to expansion for four
hundred years don't suddenly stop and build rest houses. I'm thinking about their proposed fleet
visits, and I don't like the idea at all. Neither do my service advisers."
"Fleet visits?"
"Yes, this is another part of their proposed package. The concept is an ancient one, actually-an
exchange of hostages. The idea is that if either party tries to dis-honor its undertaking, the other
has a hostage to deal with, in this case the whole country."
"I don't understand," said Davis.
"I'm not sure I do, either," Wynn sighed. "The way it is supposed to work is this: a large portion of
each nation's fleet will visit the other nation's ports each summer; a trial visit this summer I have
already authorized, by the way. Presumably, the courtesy calls will help dispel suspicion by letting
the crews meet the people on a person-to-person basis. Another part of their mission will be
overflights as an element in the inspection procedure to ensure that no covert arms build-up takes
place. But mainly, as the Russians envi-sion it, the fleets will be able to take immediate punitive
action if they detect any sign of aggressive movement on the part of the other side, and this option
is de-signed to inhibit such aggressive action absolutely."
"Well," Spoke said, "that sounds fair. In fact, it sounds great. What possible reservations could
you entertain about such an intelligent suggestion? It's fail-safe."
For a long moment the president didn't reply. Then he leaned forward, his hands clasped before
him on the table. His expression was somber. "I have reserva-tions about the whole
agreement-even the name they proposed for it: the Washington Protocols. The Russians even
give us the benefit of naming the agreement after our capital. Like everything else in the
agreement, its uncharacteristic of the Russians. They never give any-thing away.
"Take the economic clauses of the protocols. Why are they willing to relieve us of the burden of
support-ing the Third World, when our misguided philanthropy is bankrupting us very nicely
without their help? Why are they trying to save us?"
"They've decided that peace is preferable to war," Davis concluded. "Not a very difficult concept to
under-stand."
"For us-not for Russians. Their whole history is built on aggression, from Alexander Nevski in the
thirteenth century right down to the present day. It's in their blood. Then note their plan for the
division of labor: the Russians take over manufacturing, we take over farming."
"Quite right, too. We farm better than they do, that's all," commented Davis.
"We manufacture better, too-if you exclude what comes out of Detroit. But you can easily switch
manu-facturing capacity from consumer goods to arms, from automobiles to tanks. You can't
switch from rutabagas to rockets."
"True, Mr. President," Spoke countered, "but such a conversion to armaments would take several
years, and its very first stages would be detected by our inspection. Could-"
"Perhaps," said the president, cutting Spoke off, "I should confide in you what my staff thinks will
happen if I sign and the Congress ratifies the protocols: for the first few years, everything will
proceed precisely as the Russians outline. We will concentrate on agriculture, the Russians on
manufacturing. The living standards of the whole world will benefit, for nearly one-third of the
world's gross national product is presently con-sumed in military preparations. Meanwhile, the
fleets exchange visits without incident or observed enemy build-up. This state of affairs lasts four
or five years- long enough for our industry to run down, to pass beyond the point of no return, to
be plowed under like a rank weed. That of Russia will have grown commensurately while their
farming, to be sure, lan-guishes.
"At this point, we must ask ourselves: how long does it take to build a national industry from
scratch? Five years? Ten? And how long does it take to plant the fields and reap a crop? One
year.
"Now then, at some point the Russians, conscious that we are no longer capable of
manufacturing the means to defend ourselves, on the short or long term, begin to rearm, quite
openly. Naturally we halt our grain shipments. But the Russians have carefully with-held large
portions of their grain and stored them in underground silos for just such a day. They can survive
eighteen months or two years without additional ship-ments, and meanwhile they are replanting
the Ukraine.
"Their fleet, in American waters at the time, now is in a position to cover the Russian invasion-an
inva-sion not of Russians but of South and Central Ameri-cans who have been under training ten
or fifteen years. Their weapons will be the simplest-rifles, pistols, grenades-because remember,
the arms industry has been dead for five years. But such weapons, which the United States no
longer manufactures, will suffice to permit the invaders to swarm up through Mexico in their
millions and overrun the United States and Cana-da. Any trouble spots will be dealt with by the
aerial cover of the Russian fleet, which-"
"Which would bring instant reprisals against Europe by our fleet," Dr. Spoke said triumphantly.
"Very true, but of no significance in strategic terms.
After all, we have no army on Russia's doorstep ready to invade. Then too, would Russia worry if
our planes killed several thousand, or several million, Europeans? Just fewer mouths to feed
when the conquest of the United States is complete."
"What you have outlined is pure conjecture," Ber-nard Davis said acidly. "Not one of these
catastrophes need happen. Admit it, Mr. President."
The president admitted it.
"On the other hand, they could. On form, the Rus-sians can be expected to pull something very
much like what I have just outlined. And if it did, gentlemen, the United States would cease to
exist."
Dr. Spoke cleared his throat. "I agree with Bernie here, Mr. President. We must distinguish two
things: the certainty of peace and prosperity now, so long as guarantees are made and enforced,
and the possibility of Russian betrayal at some nebulous future time. The advantages so
obviously outweigh the potential-note well the word 'potential'-handicaps that, in my opin-ion, we
have no choice but to accept the protocols. And rejoice!"
The president seemed to shrivel in his high-backed chair. He had invited the men in the hope that
they would heed his appeal for caution, for a deliberate and exhaustive examination of the
protocols, before the clamor of the American people for the instant eternal-peace fix stampeded
the Congress and himself into signing what he believed would be the death warrant of his country.
The issue was too serious to be decided quickly. But now, he knew, it would be. If he failed to
release the terms of the protocols very soon, the Russians would leak them to obtain a cheap
propa-ganda victory. He would be branded a warmonger for having tried to suppress proof of the
Russians' pacific intentions. The peace-at-any-price partisans would in either case be mobilized
by the seven men who had so vigorously supported the salvation of the Third World. The ensuing
pressures on him to sign would be irresistible. If he didn't, against the unanimous opposition of the
nation, he would likely be impeached.
The irony was that, though his instincts said to be wary, cold logic said there was nothing to fear.
As Spoke pointed out, the alternatives were present peace and prosperity, and the possibility of
betrayal at some vague future date. By then, the Russian regime might see the benefits for all
mankind of part one of their carefully contrived scheme to conquer the United States-if that was
what it was. Besides, whatever he thought personally was immaterial in the face of the
unanimous accord of the people of the United States: he was their voice, and he would be a traitor
to his trust if he said no to a peace agreement they-or at least these seven men who told them
what to think- believed in.
The voice of Dr. Spoke recalled him from his reverie.
"I'm sorry, Werner," he apologized, "I was thinking about . . . What were you saying?"
"I merely asked, Mr. President, whether copies of the Washington Protocols will be released any
time soon?"
President Wynn smiled sadly. There was his answer. The news. News was what mattered, not
the security of the nation.
"I'll tell my press secretary to give you copies," he said, "right after lunch. It will be for immediate
re-lease."


28 DECEMBER 1997: P.M.
Lunch was strained and awkward. The press lords were plainly anguished as they endured
course after leisurely course, each trying to contrive an excuse that would permit an early
departure so as to break the news of Russia's magnanimous offer before his rivals. CBS,
pleading that rich desserts and coffee gave him heartburn, was the first to take his leave. One by
one, the others were quick to follow. President Wilson Wynn and Gwillam Forte, who had spoken
but few words dur-ing the morning's discussions, were left alone in the Executive Dining Room.
"It occurs to me, Will, that with all the flak flying around I didn't get hit with any from you. That's a
novel experience."
Forte shook his head. "I'm afraid, Mr. President, that's because as yet I have nothing to shoot at.
You advance one theory, the others the precise opposite, to account for the Russian initiative.
Either, it seems to me, could be right."
"But you agree that it's Russian intentions-not pro-tocols, declarations, guarantees-that count?"
"Of course. But, as usual, we have no way of know-ing what they are. No one has yet succeeded
in bugging the Kremlin."
Wynn smiled, the crafty politician's smile reserved for the boys in the back room. A voter, having
seen that smile, would have automatically cast his vote for Wynn's opponent, on the grounds that
no one with a smile so cagey, so cunning, so sly, could possibly be entrusted with the destiny of
the great open-faced American people.
"We've done better. We've got a piece of the Krem-lin-right here in the White House."
"What?"
"More coffee, sir?" came a grave voice at his elbow.
Forte looked up. He had thought they were alone. The tall gray-haired man with the silver tray
looked down at him with an expression at once deferential and cool.
"Uh-no thanks," Forte said, wondering how much the man had heard.
"No?" the man in the steward's jacket said. "Well, in that case you won't mind if I have a cup. It's
quite good. Made it myself."
With that, he filled the cup at the place next to Forte, put down the tray, and settled comfortably
into the chair beside him.
"Who the hell's this?" Forte demanded, turning to the president.
The president chuckled.
"Allow me to present Nikolai Vasilievich Grimm, former admiral of the Red fleet. Nick, meet
Gwillam Forte."
"You're supposed to be dead." Forte pushed back his chair and turned to face the other man.
"Missing at sea. I read your obituary-last July, I seem to remem-ber."
"Typical Soviet disinformation." The man in the white jacket shrugged. "I can assure you that I'm
alive."
"I also remember your face. It wasn't the one you're wearing now," Forte said coldly.
"If it were, I could scarcely have become the presi-dent's favorite steward. Plastic surgery, of
course."
Gwillam Forte turned to Wynn. "I don't suppose... ?"
The president shook his head.
"No doubt whatsoever. This is Nick Grimm, no question about it. He's been under interrogation
eight to ten hours a day since he defected, and the informa-tion he's given us has been confirmed
many times over. Besides, I've known Nick for years, and I saw him be-fore the surgeons got to
work on him. He-"
"Allow me to explain, Mr. President. In brief, Mr. Forte, as a Ukrainian of German descent, early in
life I decided that frank, cold opportunism was the only way to survive and prosper in my land.
That was my path, and it took me to the top. I married in cold blood, joined the Communist Party
in cold blood, curried favors with the Politburo in cold blood, be-trayed friends when it was in my
interest, corrupted superiors and then blackmailed them to advance my-self. In short, the portrait
of a successful Party man. I'm afraid you won't find that I conform to American standards of
morality, but then I wasn't living in Ameri-ca. The important point is, I survived-survived and
reached the top."
"Then why aren't you still there?"
Admiral Grimm took a cigarette from the silver box on the table and lit it. He blew twin streams of
smoke from his nose and regarded Forte thoughtfully. "I'm getting old. Backstabbing is a sport for
the young and fleet of foot. I could feel the breath of the ambitious on my neck, and it gave me a
chill. I'm unusually sus-ceptible to chills, I might say. So before the wishes of my subordinates
could become reality, I arranged for my own demise-aboard a nuclear submarine of which, I am
happy to report, I am the sole survivor of an explosion conveniently close to Charleston, South
Caro-lina.
"Nick proposed a deal," the president said. "We'd give him a new identity and a discreet but very
lavish future. And for this he'd allow us to pick his brains."
"Treason, in other words," Forte remarked.
"Ah-the very word I've been looking for." Admiral Grimm snapped his fingers. He chuckled. "I don't
have to justify my life to you, Mr. Forte, only to myself. And I can tell you that if treason always paid
off so handsomely as mine has for the United States, you'd advertise for traitors like me in The
New York Times."
"What he says is true," President Wynn affirmed. "He has given us information of enormous
import-ance."
"Such as?"
"Such as the hypothesis I attributed to my service staff, concerning a possible Russian attempt to
invade the United States in four or five years via Mexico, using a Soviet fleet in American waters
as cover."
"It's not a hypothesis but a fact," Grimm inter-jected. "I was one of the chief planners of Project
Lime Kiln, as it is known in the Kremlin. The target date is the fifth of July, 2001, but the exact date
depends on the degree of obsolescence and attrition of American arms that could oppose the
onslaught. Already, in antic-ipation of the signing of the protocols, a steady stream of
soldiers-Russian, German, Turkish, and Bulgarian, mostly-is flowing toward assembly points and
training camps in Central and South America. When the time approaches, they will move north in
small groups, form into divisions, and roll over the border of Mexico on a broad front into Texas
and California. We-the Kremlin, that is-anticipate the subjugation of the United States and Canada
will be complete by the following summer."
"Has this man's story been thoroughly checked out?" Forte asked the president.
"Yes-again and again. He's been subjected to truth serum, lie detector tests, voice-stress
analysis- every method known to science. Furthermore, in the six months he's been with us, the
predictions he's made-such as the movement of East Bloc soldiers into South American
camps-have been right on the money. I wish I didn't have to believe him, but I must."
"All right, then-it's all true. Why are you telling me? Why didn't you bring in Grimm and have him
say his piece at the meeting this morning? Instead of sounding the alarm against the Washington
Protocols, at this moment my colleagues are preparing media cam-paigns in its favor."
President Wynn nodded somberly.
"Naturally, I considered it. In the first place, it wasn't until after Grimm received his new identity
that he divulged the information you heard today. If I had confronted them with Grimm today,
they'd have in-sisted he was a ringer sent by the hawks-his or ours-to sabotage Russia's peace
proposals. After the series of operations, even I couldn't prove he was really Grimm, you see."
"Your assurances were good enough for me."
"That's why I confided in you, Will, and not them. They are press and television tycoons, neither
pure nor simple. They've seen and heard and manufactured lies all their lives. It's their profession.
Why should they believe me?"
It was a good question. Forte wondered whether he was believing any of this himself.
"But there was a greater danger," President Wynn went on. "The danger was that they would
believe that it was Grimm, that he had defected from Russia with the connivance of the Kremlin
hawks and was intent on sabotaging the peace process. They would feel even more compelled to
trumpet the virtues of the protocols than they already are. And even if they did go along with my
plea to counsel reason and due deliberation on the part of the American people, give them time to
understand the dangers inherent in the protocols, it would only give the Russians the leisure to
formulate an alternative strategy-once they knew Grimm was alive and talking, as they surely
would, given your colleagues' propensity to share their secrets with the world."
Forte's head felt as though stuffed with cotton wool. The president's words had registered, and
they seemed to make sense, but the tableau-the president of the United States, a defected
admiral of the Red fleet dressed as a waiter, and a triple-amputee industrialist from Texas, all
sitting cosily around the table talking about World War III-greatly disturbed him and con-fused his
thoughts. President Wynn and he were old acquaintances, but hardly friends, having stood on the
opposite side of almost every public issue in the twenty-five years since Wynn had emerged on
the national scene. So what was Forte doing there? And why was Wynn confiding in him?
He asked the questions, but as is usual with politi-cians, President Wynn eschewed the
straightforward reply.
"Nick," he said, turning to where the Russian lounged in his chair, apparently as bored and aloof
as a boyar watching peasants being flogged, "what would it take to make the Russians abandon
Project Lime Kiln, make them pull in their horns and leave us the hell alone?"
"The same medicine that has always worked with the Soviets-a good punch in the mouth," the
admiral drawled through a cloud of smoke.
"Where did you learn English like that?" Forte asked.
"As a lieutenant in the Soviet Navy, I became an illegal-I used faked papers to enlist in the U.S.
Navy. Spent six years on cans and flattops. I could pull my time on you, Mr. Forte."
Forte regarded Grimm thoughtfully, more at sea than ever.
"Be specific, Nick-what can we do about the Rus-sians?" the president repeated.
"Very well." He took the cigarette from between his lips, flicked off the ash in his coffee cup, and
took a deep drag.
"From earliest times, the Russians have been a con-servative people, like peasants everywhere.
They're not risk-takers. They prefer the certainty of suffering to the risks of revolt. They bury their
rubles and kopeks under the apple tree rather than gamble them on a turn of the cards. They'd
rather fight a bear than grapple with a new idea. In war, they never take the offensive un-less they
are three hundred percent sure of winning. By July 2001, they will be in that pleasant situation if
you sign the Washington Protocols. It's as simple as that."
"And if I don't?"
"But you will. Thanks to the press campaign of Mr. Forte's colleagues, which will cater so
sedulously to the Americans' craving for peace, you'll have no choice but to sign."
"In that case, there's no way to avoid a Russian in-vasion in 2001."
"There is a way. The Soviet fleet will arrive six or seven months from now on the trial summer
cruise. The Soviets will be on their best behavior, to convince the Americans of their peaceful
intent. If this facade can be shattered, if the Americans can be made to see that the pearly smile
conceals a sharp set of bear's teeth, then perhaps your countrymen will forget their television
programs and ball games and Big Macs long enough to put their defenses in order. Only a
dramatic incident, an incident that lays bare Russia's true char-acter, can save your country
now."
"A dramatic incident," Forte mused. "Like what?"
"Do you recall the Panay?"
"No."
"No. That would be before your time. During the Japanese struggle to conquer China in the 1930s,
the invader found the presence of American warships on the China station an annoyance and an
embarrassment. As a hint to keep their distance, a Japanese warplane 'ac-cidentally' dropped a
bomb on the U.S.S. Augusta, killing a sailor. Their 'apology' was accepted, but the Americans
remained. Another incident was arranged, the bombardment of the American river gunboat, the
Panay, on the Yangtse. In this incident, two American sailors were killed. Again an 'apology,' but
the aggres-sion was so blatant that it produced a nationwide wave of outrage, entirely
unanticipated by the Japanese. The
American anti-Japanese policy, the embargo on arms and oil, the internment of Japanese during
World War II-all these had their inception in the bombing of a simple gunboat."
"I'll take your word for it," Forte said. "So what?" Admiral Nikolai Vasilievich Grimm reached for
an-other cigarette, took his time about lighting it, and let the silence build. Finally he looked
Gwillam Forte in the eye.
"If such an effect could be produced by the bombard-ment of a riverboat, just think what one might
do with a battleship."

3 JANUARY 1998
It had been three and a half years since Gwillam Forte set foot on the U.S.S. Texas. His hospital
ship-mates superintending the ship's rebirth were dis-appointed and resentful of his seeming
disinterest in their work, he knew, but though he kept scheduling inspection trips, somehow they
never materialized. Something about the ship made him nervous and ap-prehensive. Every time
he thought of visiting it, a foreboding shadow seemed to close out the sun.
But since the conference with President Wynn a week earlier, he knew he could avoid the Texas
no longer. The ship had been given one last mission, and it was up to Gwillam Forte to make her
ready.
At 7:30 a.m. on the first raw, dirty, windy day after the White House conference, the kind of day
that would discourage casual visitors, Forte's limousine pulled up to the Texas basin. The only
figure visible on deck was that of Ski Modeljewski, in charge of hull painting. His chilled,
cigarette-scarred face and hands, Forte reflected, bore a striking resemblance to the pitted,
blue-gray exterior of the ship itself-except for the ironic smile that greeted him.
"About time you came for a look-see, Captain."
Forte made an apologetic gesture. "You know how it is with us tycoons, Ski-affairs of state,
momentous decisions, nations trembling at our every word-"
"And your secretary trembling on your lap-sure, I understand. Well, how's she look to you-the
ship, not the secretary?"
"Same as always," Forte replied truthfully. "Awful."
Ski beamed. "If it looks the same after forty-one months of hard work, we're doing pretty good.
Want a rundown?"
"That's what I'm here for."
"Right." Ski led the way down the gangway to the concrete pier. Beneath his hooded parka his
shoulders were hunched against the cold drizzle. He extended a hand whose gnarled and
misshapen knuckles said all there was to say about the methods of Vietcong inter-rogators. "If
you look close at the water line," he said, "you just may notice how clean it looks below the
surface. One group of engineers said that after we refinished the ship's bottom, we should attach
fake algae and barnacles, make it look natural. But we took a vote, democratic-like, and I decided
that the water is dirty enough to conceal any possible contrast with the way it was before."
"Anyway, why fake barnacles and algae?" asked Forte. "As I remember, the real stuff needed no
en-couragement."
Ski looked at him appraisingly. "You are out of touch. I'd better start at the beginning . . ."
In the beginning, a special access chamber was con-structed and attached by an accordion
umbilical to the tunnel air lock. This umbilical extended out to the bottom of the ship, where the
chamber was held flush against the hull by electromagnets; a neoprene seal kept the water out
once the accordion tube was pumped dry. The work crew then entered through the air lock, set
up tubular-steel stages, and began the painstaking job of replacing the bottom paint.
The old paint was removed with organic solvents. The steel side and bottom plating, rough and
pitted through nearly a century of corrosion, was ground down to the smooth texture of an optical
lens. The rivets holding the plating to the hull stringers were drilled out, and replaced by the
titanium equivalent of tree nails, holding the plates together by pressure, having been turned out
.04 mm larger than the holes into which they were driven. Their exterior projection was then
ground down to the level of the surrounding plate. Finally, an enormously powerful electrical
charge was applied to the titanium plug and steel plate, causing a mutual migration of molecules
from one metal to the other and resulting in a superstrength bond. When each section of hull was
finished, it had the glassy smooth-ness of a funeral director's smile.
To this surface was applied, by ionic exchange, a very fine coating of an epoxy resin that not only
ex-cluded contact between metal and water but was itself only a few molecules thick. The surface
was so smooth-far smoother than the polished steel be-neath-that hull resistance was practically
eliminated. The frictionless, laminar flow of water around the ship's hull, engineers computed,
would increase the speed of the Texas by more than twelve knots at maximum speed, with no
increase in power. The epoxy alone, bonded to the polished surface of the hull, in effect boosted
the ship's speed more than fifty percent.
As for algae and barnacles, there were none to befoul the ship's bottom, causing a turbulent flow
of water to reduce the vessel's speed. They couldn't survive, let alone reproduce, in the basin's
waters, thanks to time-release canisters of algacides and molluscicides now anchored at
intervals in its depths.
The stagnant water of the ship's basin was, as Ski noted, sufficiently murky to obscure the
bottom's trans-formation from all but the most careful observation. The ship's exposed
superstructure was another story. Similarly treated and covered with epoxy resin, it re-ceived
several other coats of paint, the last one of the same old dirty blue-gray with which it had started.
At least, so it seemed. The blue-gray paint was es-sentially the same in optical reflectivity and
grain, but chemically it was a totally new product, devised in the research labs of Sunshine
Industries, Inc., especially for the Texas. Gwillam Forte himself had given his chem-ists the seed
of the concept, from which grew a whole plant dedicated to the paint's manufacture. He had
remarked one day to his chief chemist, Dr. Tom Lee, when they were discussing the exterior
paint, that res-onance might be the answer.
"You know that old gag about the soprano who hits A above high C, and the mirror shatters?"
"Sure."
"So make a paint that will shatter and flake off, when it's subjected to a high-frequency sound
wave."
The chemist suppressed an urge to laugh. "You may be a crackerjack businessman, Will," he
said, "but as a scientist . . . You see, glass is a noncrystalline but rigid substance that can, it is
true, resonate when ex-cited by the proper sound frequency. If the amplitude is sufficient, then the
glass may indeed shatter. Paint, on the other hand, displays the essential features of a hot fudge
sundae in this respect. There is no single fre-quency at which it will resonate. Given its structure,
there can't be."
"Then change the structure," Gwillam Forte sug-gested coolly. "Change it fast, and change it right.
I want a paint that can be made to flake off completely, instantly, and without residue. If resonance
isn't the answer, then find out what is." He regarded the scien-tist with wintery eyes. "I'm counting
on you, Dr. Lee."
Dr. Lee knew from the experience of others at SII that if he met the challenge, his career would be
secure. If he didn't, of course there was always his widowed sister's chicken farm. Dr. Lee
loathed chickens.
Perhaps because of this aversion, he worked his staff round the clock until they perfected a paint
that, sur-prisingly enough, did what Forte demanded. When subjected to a 180,000-volt jolt of
electricity, it instan-taneously atomized in the air.
". . . so that when the captain pulls that switch on the bridge," Ski was saying, "the whole damned
ship is suddenly transformed from the dingy-gray monster you see now to a gleaming knight in
shining armor. Just be wearing rubber-soled shoes when you pull that switch, though, or you'll be
spread in a thin layer over southern Texas."
"Sounds great, Ski," Forte said abstractedly.
His mind was elsewhere, on the troubling cloud that had appeared the week before out of Russia.
Time was now a crucial factor because of Russia's recent moves on the diplomatic front. The
Millenary Celebrations were already a dead letter so far as the Texas was con-cerned, but a more
important fate awaited it-if there was time.
"I suppose you're pretty near to finishing up?" he said.
"I'm on schedule, if that's what you mean. Need twenty-seven more months. The hull is
completely re-painted. Some of the rigging and superstructure has been treated. The rest
remains to be done."
"Any problems?"
"Not really. Of course, we can't work topside on the scale we did below the water line. Up here we
have to do a single square-meter patch at a time, under cover of darkness."
"What would you need to finish the job in, say, six months?"
"Ten more crews like the one I've got. Why?"
"Just asking ..."
The engine room was Forte's next stop. Six Bureau Express three-drum oil-fired boilers had been
installed when the ship was converted from coal to oil back in 1925. They provided steam for two
sets of four-cylinder triple-expansion engines that, even at the time they were newly built, were
inferior to the steam-turbine engines used by most European navies. But fidelity to the original, not
efficiency, was what Forte desired when the renovation began. Therefore the boilers, en-gines,
and auxiliary gear had been dismantled piece by piece and removed to the SD-1 workshops,
where the machinery was cleaned, repaired, and painstakingly reconstructed.
"Looks fine," Forte observed as he inspected the various improvements that had been wrought in
the engine room. "How much time do you need to wrap it up?" he asked T. D. Roebuck, the man
in charge.
"Twenty-six months. Right on schedule," he said proudly.
"If we put the engine room repairs under forced draft, how long would it take to put her back into
commission?"
Roebuck considered.
"Oh, maybe thirteen or fourteen months. Why?"
"That long?" Forte was dismayed. Various other improvements could be dispensed with, but a
ship couldn't move without engines.
"You see," Roebuck explained, "some of the con-necting rods were in such sorry shape from
metal fatigue that they flunked the tests last November. We could put them back as is, but they
might fail if we ever got real steam up."
"Replace them."
"Can't. Spares don't exist for these old model en-gines."
"Then have them manufactured."
"We've looked into that. The only plants in this country capable of turning out shafts like these are
backlogged with high-priority orders for the new missile frigates the Navy is working on."
"You're telling me we aren't going to get this old ship underway in under a year, no matter what?"
"That's what I'm telling you, Will."
"Thanks, T. D. Thanks a lot."
Forte's mood was still sour as he sought out Lincoln Bellamy, in charge of deck and bulkhead
recondition-ing.
"It was more complicated than I thought it would be," said Bellamy, when Forte asked him how the
work was going. "For one thing, I had to go to your chemists for help."
"That's what they're paid for. What was the hitch?"
"You'll see. Now, take this stretch of deck. This is what I had to work with."
Kneeling, Gwillam Forte inspected the gritty gray surface. He grimaced. If it was a sacrilege to
paint gleaming white holystoned oak decks, what had hell in store for those who slapped a layer of
concrete on top? He rose.
"Nastiest gunk I ever saw," he said.
"Let's go sit and I'll tell you about it."
Forte followed Bellamy to two squat, fireplug-sized iron bitts around which hawsers were looped,
holding the ship immobile in the slip.
Bellamy glanced casually toward the foretop, where a lookout scanned the mist-shrouded area
around the ship.
The lookout could discern no sign of life except the two men sitting on the bitts far below him. He
ex-tended his arm, thumb up.
Bellamy nodded.
A sizable section of the deck at their feet was sud-denly enveloped in a flash of blinding fire so hot
it singed the nylon hairs on the back of Forte's right hand. When the smoke cleared a moment
later, a neat square patch of concrete deck had vanished. In its place was pristine white
holystoned planking.
"How the hell did you do that?"
Bellamy chuckled contentedly.
"You should have seen your face, Will. You looked as surprised as a senator who's passed a lie
detector test."
"For a second I thought the Other Place had opened up and the Devil come to take me."
"That figures, because we had one devil of a time working it out. It was easy to remove the
concrete and to sand down the deck to the original bare wood. But then we somehow had to
transform the whole deck from concrete to white at the same moment the hull was transformed
to white. The chemists said it couldn't be done."
"They always say that."
"Yeah. The hull paint, they said, ionizes and is dis-persed by an electric charge. It wouldn't work
with a wood base like oak. Anyway, they couldn't duplicate the toughness and texture of
concrete."
"So?"
"So I threatened to take the problem to an outside consultant, quoting you as authority. After that
they got to work. In a couple of months, they came up with this stuff. It looks thick and it looks as if
its bonded to the deck. But actually it's several distinct layers of material. On the bottom, the
holystoned deck, then on top of it a very thin vylar film. To the vylar film is bonded the top
'concrete' layer you see-about three-hundreths of an inch thick. When the top layer is ignited
electronically, it flares up with considerable heat and flame, as you saw, but the vylar film protects
the oak deck from scorching during the instant the heat and flame needs to disperse in the
atmosphere."
"And the vylar film?"
"It decomposes in the heat of the burning 'concrete.' An instant later it crumbles to dust. In fact it's
the vylar dust, not smoke, you saw just now. Nobody better be on deck at the time, though, or
they'll have a hot foot they'll never recover from. . . ."
And so it went for the rest of the day. Forte in-spected the main and secondary batteries, the AA
batteries, radar and fire-control stations, bridge, and pilothouse. He inspected the motor launches
and whale-boats and captain's gig and admiral's barge, and the hundreds of pieces of equipment
and living and work-ing spaces that had once accommodated two thousand men. The work had
been done meticulously and with considerable imagination, and most of it was right on schedule.
In two years, at the present rate of progress, the Texas would be ready for the Texas Millenary
Cele-brations that Governor Traynor had recently decreed.
But if President Wynn had his way, in six months the ship would be at the bottom of the sea.
As he left the ship that rainy afternoon, Gwillam Forte still had not decided which would be its fate.

9 JANUARY 1998
"You're said to be the best in the business."
The four men on the other side of Forte's private bar in the depths of SD-1 smiled deprecatingly,
but no-body raised a voice in protest. They were the best. Their combined salaries of more than
$1.3 million a year, five doctorates, seven columns in Who's Who, and two Nobel Prizes attested
to it. At various times in recent years, they had all occupied high government posts, and their Top
Secret clearances had been one of the requisites for the consultancies Forte had offered them at
fees they couldn't refuse.
Two of them had asked for Scotch on the rocks, one a glass of California white wine, and the
other for any brand of non-American beer available, which proved they were men of discernment
as well as intellect. Forte poured the drinks, wiped his hands on a towel, and got right down to
business: at something in excess of three thousand dollars an hour, their time was too valuable
for chitchat.
"You've all read about the Washington Protocols?"
The four nodded.
"What do you think of them, Professor?" he asked Dr. Edward T. Curry, the oldest and most
distinguished among them, a man recently retired as vice-president for research and
development for one of America's leading aerospace companies.
"My wife is the political scientist in the family. She thinks the protocols are the berries. Babbles
about 'peace in our time' and similar nonsense."
"I gather you don't agree?"
Dr. Curry harrumphed. "Unmitigated imbecility. Even from one's wife. Man is an aggressive
animal- one of the very few that fights merely for the fun of it. Monday night football is proof. There
won't be peace in our time or anybody else's time, especially if the president signs those
protocols."
"Why not?"
"It sticks out a mile, doesn't it? The Russians shift their agricultural labor to manufacturing, giving
them the capability to produce plowshares-which can quickly be forged into swords. Meanwhile,
we're all down on the farm wading through pig shit to grow grain for them, which they'll squirrel
away for den Tag. How can we be so dumb as to swallow that bilge?"
The others drank to that, none more deeply than old Oxonian Dr. Herbert Chilton Fallows, naval
architect and strategist, who ventured a discreet "Hear! Hear!" and begged to add that it wasn't
just the economic arrangements that disturbed him.
"Look here," he said, taking a cocktail napkin and placing it flat on the bar. "Here's the United
States, surrounded mostly by sea. Here comes the Russian fleet. According to the protocols,
each year they will visit Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, Houston, New Orleans, Charleston,
Washington, New York, and Bos-ton." With his pen he inked nine dots on the periphery of the
napkin.
"And which nine ports does the United States fleet call at in the Russian domain?" He took
another nap-kin, and supplied it with nine dots, mostly at one side. "London, Le Havre, Oran,
Barcelona, Naples, Pireaus, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, and Tripoli. Kindly observe the difference. The
Russian fleet calls at points that almost surround the United States, no part of which is more than
one hour by naval aircraft from one of these ports. Our fleet, on the other hand, never approaches
the heartland of Mother Russia, which is several thou-sand miles inland. This bestows on them
the capability of all sorts of mischief denied to us."
"Such as?"
"Oh . . . sneak atomic attacks from their carriers; sowing atomic bombs in the shallows on both
coasts, so that radioactive mists would blanket the continent; poisoning our ground-water
supplies with botulism or anthrax-any number of unpleasant things, in fact."
"Then we're agreed that the Washington Protocols shouldn't be signed?"
"Yes, I think we are," said Professor Hamilton Reed, whose specialties were higher mathematics
and com-puter technology. "But they will be, you know. The nation wants it, and Wynn and his
Congress will slide down the bear-greased poll of public opinion despite what I understand are
their private reservations."
"Right," Forte said. "Now, the legislative timetable calls for Congressional hearings on the
protocols be-ginning in March, just two months from now. Then while the Congress is in summer
recess, the Soviet fleet arrives-the first of June, I believe-in Seattle. It will spend ten days in each
port, coming to Houston the first week in July. The fleet winds up in Washington late August, when
the Russian premier is to meet President Wynn for the signing ceremony, after which the Senate
is expected to ratify the protocols overwhelmingly.
"All this is contingent, as I see it, on the outcome of the fleet visit. Obviously, the Russians are
going to behave like little Soviet gentlemen, to show America what fine, trustworthy fellows they
are. But if we can jostle them off balance, make them show themselves for the cynical and nasty
types they really are, the United States public will have second thoughts about the protocols. If
they do, Wynn won't sign. It is im-perative for our national security, as you all concede, that he
does not ... Gentlemen, I have asked you here to help me plan a surprise party for the Russian
fleet."
He told them about the Texas, how it was being re-conditioned to take part in the Texas Millenary
Cele-brations, and how it might, with their expert assistance, be the goad that would make the
Russian bear say Ouch! and bare its claws.
"My God!" Emilio Salvatore protested. The physicist was on leave from the vice-presidency of the
Warfare Systems Division of Allied Aircraft Corporation. "You're not talking about sending that old
hulk out against the Russian fleet, are you? That would be an act of war."
"Not if it isn't armed."
"Then how-"
"What I want is a demonstration that looks to them like an act of war. The ship will roar out among
them, at very high speed-speed, gentlemen, will be your number-one concern-shooting its guns in
all direc-tions. Its sudden appearance will disconcert, and its speed will discombobulate and
terrify them in its un-expectedness, and the gunfire will, I fervently hope, prod them into firing back,
before they realize that the barrage consists of blank saluting shells, and that the apparition of the
ship among their fleet is merely a big Texas hello! I'm depending on surprise to stampede them
into shooting off everything they have and sinking the old Texas before they tumble to the fact that
it was only an elaborate and boisterous welcome."
The four men sipped their drinks, alone with their thoughts.
"Yes, that might work," one said finally.
Another added: "We'll film the whole hilarious epi-sode and blanket the TV networks."
"They'll look like asses," said a third, "and what's more, villainous asses."
"Christ," Professor Reed said, warming to the idea, "I can see it now-that huge white ship
whipping in between the columns of Russian men-of-war like a PT boat, flames leaping from its
muzzles, the gunners- say! If the Russians are supposed to sink the Texas, what about the
crew? Who would volunteer to sail her?"
"You, my dear Professor," said Forte gently. "You'll sail her. You and your little black boxes. There
won't be a drop of American blood shed aboard the U.S.S. Texas and, if our idea works,
anywhere else either, for a long, long time."
18 JANUARY 1998
Salt Dome-1 was aswarm with talent, with an admixture of genius and a leavening of imaginative
madness. Much of the talent and genius had been ac-cumulated over the years by Sunshine
Industries, Inc., to fulfill its manufacturing commitments to the U.S. government in the fields of
advanced weaponry, com-munications, high-speed surface transportation, and submarine
propulsion. The pool of brains and technological skill had been augmented during the past week
by teams of bright young men-and a handful of creative crackpots-temporarily seconded from
their regular work by the four experts Gwillam Forte brought in to ramrod the Texas conversion,
phase two.
Over the years, the SD-1 work force had settled down into a comfortable routine, cushioned from
layoffs by long-term government contracts, made complacent by high pay and ample time off, and
deliberately paced rather than hurried in order to assure the highest stand-ards of production and
quality control. Into this secure world the outsiders came like a blast of arctic wind, blowing away
established methods and procedures, sprinting rather than strolling, speaking in phrases rather
than sentences, holding frenzied corridor con-ferences, drinking gallons of coffee, banging away
two-fingered at computer terminals far into the night, and arguing and pleading and cajoling with,
overruling, ignoring, sneering at, commanding, warning, evading, lecturing, and defying their
nominal superiors according to mood, their insubordination excused by the vast amount of sound
work they produced. They were for-ever building models-clay and mathematical and balsa wood,
proposing, testing, perfecting, and rejecting theories, and leaving masses of shredded paper,
dis-carded hypotheses, empty coffee cups, and wounded feelings in their wake.
Gwillam Forte, striding through the drafting rooms, past the test stands, model basins,
instrumentation cen-ter, and especially the canteen and bar, where it seemed the really important
business was being transacted, was invigorated. He didn't know precisely what was going on,
but something was, and his scientists assured him that the Texas would go down, not only in
glory be-neath the waters of the Houston Ship Channel as planned, but in the annals of naval
history as a ship absolutely unique: a man-of-war that sank the enemy's foreign policy without
firing a shot.
On that point Forte had been adamant. There must not be so much as a bullet hole in any of the
Russian ships for them to cite as provocation for sinking the U.S.S, Texas. Nor could there be
any armament capable of doing the slightest damage aboard the Texas when it slid down into the
depths, for the depths of the channel were so inconsiderable-despite dredging so it could
accommodate megatankers-that it would be easily accessible to inspection by frogmen.
"But there's the rub, Mr. Forte," demurred Emilio Salvatore, the young weapons specialist at a
conference convened to discuss the subject. "There must be weap-ons aboard capable of
inflicting major damage or your scenario won't hold water."
"No dice," Forte said firmly. "If we shoot real bullets at the Russians, they'd have every excuse to
defend themselves by shooting back. That's the whole idea- that they sink a defenseless ship. A
ship with guns popping off using real ammunition is scarcely defense-less."
"Very well, sir," Salvatore said, with the air of a professor explaining a simple truth to a backward
pupil, "let us examine your scenario step by step and see where it leads us. As the Russian fleet
steams slowly up-channel, in column formation because of the relative narrowness of the
channel, and at respectable intervals to maximize the impact of the naval display on the
spectators, the Texas breaks out of its basin. It-"
"That's right," Forte said, warming to the sight in his mind's eye. "It cuts its mooring lines, and
backs down into an interval in the line of Russian ships. Then it takes off at high speed-how fast
that will be we still don't know-and starts weaving among the slow-moving Russian ships. This
calls for an extraordinary degree of maneuverability, by means also under discus-sion. But the
Texas's high speed, its cutting in and out among the Russian ships, firing blanks and making a
terrific din, are going to spook the Russians into firing back and sinking the ship pronto."
"Why?" said Salvatore mildly.
"Why what?"
"Why are they going to fire back?"
"Because we're shooting at them, of course."
Salvatore coughed politely. He was a small, self-effacing man, dressed neatly in striped
seersucker suit and a bow tie. His hairline mustache, smooth black hair, and Latin good looks
were reminiscent of the 1920s gigolo, but his great romance was with weapons even more lethal
than women.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Forte, but your knowledge of surface warfare seems to date from World
War II, if you will pardon my saying so. You see, these days a ship's commanding officer doesn't
observe smoke issuing from enemy gun barrels, then immediately order his own to commence
firing. First of all, he would be astounded, and certainly amused, to see anything as archaic as a
naval cannon shooting in his direction. What his reaction would be when no explosion followed is
difficult to predict, but I would assume that he- even a humorless Russian-would consider it a
species of joke. Ordinary guns are too slow, too puny, to be a factor in today's warfare, you see.
In any case, he would not order his own weapons to commence firing on the basis of visual
evidence."
"And why not?" said Forte, his eyes narrowing.
"Because, had any projectile been fired, he would have a report of its origin, azimuth, and point of
im-pact almost instantly from his radarmen, who are charged with tracking flying objects so that
they can compute the trajectories of their own missiles to silence the batteries that fired at them.
The Russian captain, lacking such a report, would check to see why he didn't receive it. The
answer would come forthwith: because no projectile had been fired. In such a case, Mr. Forte, do
you think that the captain would fire upon the Texas? Or would he, rather, conclude that he had,
for whatever reason, been subjected to a series of realistic sound effects?"
Forte growled something unintelligible. He didn't like being made a monkey of by a young twerp,
especially in front of dozens of assorted staff, who were carefully avoiding his eye while they
waited to see whether reason or pride would triumph.
In the winter of his life, Gwillam Forte had learned that pride, like summer, goeth before the fall.
"Very well, Mr. Salvatore, what do we do-spit at them?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"Just a little, mind you. You are the prime contrac-tor for Elbows, and-"
"Now hold on a damned minute," Forte said, start-ing out of his chair. "We're not putting any
Elbows on the Texas. Get that straight. Those gadgets are still in the Top Secret category, and
even if the U.S. govern-ment permitted us to use them-which they wouldn't- I'd refuse. I want the
Russians to sink the Texas, not vice versa."
Forte sat down, agitated by the thought. He had allowed Sunshine Industries to bid on and accept
the contract for the electron-beam weapons before he real-ized just how destructive the things
could be. In the testing cells, one of the circuit breakers failed at peak strength, and the beam had
drilled a hole forty centi-meters through the concrete protective shield and severed a technician's
arm before they could shut down main power. And that had been only the first of a series of
mishaps. Elbows made him nervous, and the less he had to do with it, the better.
"The scenario, as you've outlined it, Mr. Forte," Emilio Salvatore was saying, "leaves few
alternatives to Elbows."
"No soap."
"If you'll kindly let me explain," the little Italian said with sudden asperity, "you'll understand what is
in-volved."
Forte nodded curtly. He'd been made a fool of once; there was no reason to compound the folly.
"Real projectiles and missiles are excluded, for reasons we both know and appreciate. What
does that leave us? One: lasers, which are relatively ineffective in the dense atmosphere. Two:
proton guns, which the Russians possess, but on which we are only now mak-ing a beginning.
Three: electron weapons, which we have fully developed."
Forte started to speak, then thought better of it. He sat back in his chair and moodily nibbled his
artificial right index finger.
"Electron weapons are, as you know, quite lethal at short ranges. With sufficient power, they
become cor-respondingly lethal at longer ranges. Now, Russian par-ticle detection sensors are
pretty well developed, but their instrumentation aboard ship is not integrated to the same degree
as ours."
"What does that mean?"
"That means, one device discriminates the bearing of the beam, but another one entirely then
locks onto the beam and calculates its strength. A third computes the range. It does this by
measuring the width of the 'hole' that is burned through the air by the beam. Theoretically, this
hole is of uniform width, from muzzle of the electron gun to target-that, after all, is the rationale of
the weapon: an intense concentration of electrons along a single axis. In reality, the
second-generation Elbows SII manufactures still has not been able fully to reduce the shotgun
effect-that is, the beam spread-to zero. Therefore the farther the beam travels, the wider the 'hole'
it burns in the atmosphere. The path is thus conical, not cylindrical, although the flare can be
measured in angstrom units per meter. So you see, by measuring the width of the 'hole,' you can
compute the range. That's simple enough, isn't it?"
Gwillam Forte said he understood, which indeed he very nearly did.
"Well, then," said Salvatore, smiling, "let's put one of your Elbows aboard the Texas and see how
it works. As it passes the target ship, it shoots a stream of electrons. The beam, if focused
correctly at a sufficiently close range, would burn a hole right into the Russian ship. But we
deliberately leave the beam not focused. The shotgun effect is pronounced. The scattered
elec-tron beam burns no holes through anything, though it would give you a hell of a suntan, I'll
admit. But notice, the power is the same, and the Russian detec-tion apparatus registers that the
incoming beam is at full strength and from such and such a direction; both these data are entirely
accurate. Simultaneously, the third detection apparatus measures the range of the enemy ship by
computing the width of the electron beam. The beam is degraded, wide; therefore the
com-puter-which assumes the beam is focused-comes up with a much longer range-say, three
thousand meters instead of three hundred-for the American ship. Are you with me, Mr. Forte?"
"Sure." Forte nodded.
"Of course you are. Now, then, all three data are transmitted to the bridge instantaneously. They
tell the captain that a lethal charge of particles, from such and such a direction, is being directed
at his ship. The range is still too great, however, for the beam to do any great damage.
"Now, the captain sees the Texas with his own two eyes, and his eyes tell him that it is closer-a
lot closer-to three hundred meters than the three thou-sand the range finder reported. And it is
firing a lethal beam at his ship. Something's wrong, but what? Either his radar ranging device is
haywire or the focusing ele-ment on the Elbows firing at him is out of adjustment. He knows
instantly that the radar report is wrong-his eyes tell him so. But, on the other hand, the spread of
the enemy beam cannot be ignored. Why would an enemy deliberately fire an ineffective beam?
Therefore, he reasons-and all this goes through his head in a split second-the enemy will quickly
see that its beam is not having the desired deadly effect, and will adjust the beam's spread to
zero, at which instant the Russian ship will be incinerated or cut in two.
"The Russian captain must act, and act at once, to save his ship. He'll order his own proton guns
into action, and worry about second thoughts at some future date. Ecco! The Texas, hit by
dozens of proton guns, goes to the bottom. Mission accomplished."
He folded his arms, and waited for Forte to voice the obvious objection.
It took some time in coming. Forte sat in his chair, his eyes on the floor, rehearsing the sequence
of events. He went over what Salvatore had said three times. There didn't seem to be any holes in
the argument.
"Yes," he said slowly, "maybe what you- Hey! What about the frogmen who'll go over the wreck
after the Texas is sunk? If we fired projectiles, the empty shell casings would be evidence."
"True."
"Then how about the Elbows? They're a hell of a lot bigger than a shell casing."
"True. In fact, the Elbows carousel is about the size of a large wastebasket. Mostly electronic gear
and wir-ing. It weighs exactly eighty-three pounds five ounces. We haven't decided on how to do
it, exactly, but we're working on it."
"Working on what?"
"How to get rid of the Elbows units, of course."
"Can't be done," Forte said categorically, glad to find an objection to using the beam weapons.
"On the contrary, we have four foolproof methods already designed and under test. Merely a
matter of choosing the best one. As a matter of fact, I thought of a fifth only this morning."
"While drinking it?"
Salvatore laughed dutifully. "You see, when the ship sinks, a water-sensitive timer set for, say,
twelve hours, begins running. The Russians won't send down frogmen immediately, for fear of
running into booby traps. They'll wait until daylight. So we'll have all night to get rid of the Elbows
carousels. When the twelve-hour time period elapses, at two in the morning, say, an
encap-sulated balloon inflates from a bottle of compressed helium gas. When fully inflated, it will
trigger explosive bolts to fire, severing the Elbows carousel from its foundation on the deck. The
balloon shoots to the sur-face, with the carousel on its tether, and right on up into the dark night
sky. The prevailing winds carry the carousels far inland. There a second explosive charge, set to
go off at twenty thousand feet, distributes the wreckage over five square miles of farmland, safe
from detection by the enemy. Of course, it might kill a few cows. How does that sound?"
"Pretty fancy, if somewhat hard on the cows. Do you think it will work?"
"Oh, it'll work all right. I tested it this morning in computer simulations. But the other four ideas are
better. The point is, whichever one we use, the Russian frogmen will find nothing to justify having
sunk the Texas. That's what counts, isn't it?"
"It is."
"Well?"
Forte smiled grimly. "Shoot!"

19 JANUARY 1998
speed.
One word said it all. Without blazing speed, the sudden apparition of the Texas, even with Elbows
blazing, wasn't likely to inspire the panic that would ensure a furious Russian bombardment. And
only the sinking of the flagship of the Texas Navy would arouse the bitter condemnation of Russia
that President Wil-son Wynn was counting on to support him in his re-jection of the
booby-trapped Washington Protocols. Speed they had to have.
They didn't have it.
This realization became depressingly clear as the team of naval architects and propulsion
experts, led by Dr. Herbert Chilton Fallows, toured the engine and boiler rooms of the Texas. T. D.
Roebuck's assessment that it would be twenty-six more months before the propulsion train was
again operative was borne out by the extreme disorder of the below-decks spaces. Huge valves,
snarled hosing, gear boxes, stacks of pipe, parts of a disembowled turbine, chain hoists, a
disassembled pump, and severed multi-colored wiring hanging from the overhead formed an
almost impenetrable jungle of litter in the narrow passageways through the machinery. From a
boiler a cloud of acrid smoke issued as welders labored to reinforce the lining where hairline
cracks had appeared. At a makeshift table of two-by-fours, three engineers tried to make sense of
a blueprint. In the next compartment, a shipfitter was heating a two-gallon coffee pot with a
blowtorch. To a layman's eye, everywhere was confusion, disorder, pools of water from overhead
leaks, work half done and abandoned. But to Fallows and his companions, everything made
sense and seemed to be proceeding with an efficiency they could do little to improve upon. In their
mind's eye, they could visualize what it would look like twenty-six months hence. It would be a
vast improvement over previous design and performance. Still, it wouldn't be anything like good
enough. Despite all the innovations and refinements in the engine room and laminar-flow hull, the
old Texas wouldn't steam at above thirty-five knots flank speed. That was fast for even a new
man-of-war-but not fast enough, by a long shot.
Back in SD-1, Fallows convened his assistants in the cafeteria. He pulled a crumpled paper from
his pocket. "Got this from the naval attache at our embassy in Moscow, via Washington this
morning. Says: 'Best information now available indicates Presidium will send newly formed
Seventeenth High Seas Fleet to American waters on courtesy visit preceding signing of
Washington Protocols. Seventeenth Fleet consisting of newest and most powerful Red units,
presently in-cludes the following: the super-battle cruiser Karl Marx, 76,000 tons; helicopter
carriers Beria, Yezhov, and Zinoviev; aircraft carriers Dzerzhinsky and Andro-pov; six missile
cruisers; twelve Kura-class destroyers; and a communications ship, two fleet tankers, two mine
sweepers, one amphibious support ship, three at-tack submarines, and four supply ships. The
auxiliaries are expected to lie off shore and take no part in port calls. Updates will be filed as
compiled.'
"That's our competition, gentlemen: twenty-four of the most modern, fastest ships afloat, not
counting sup-port ships-Serdyuk, you're the house expert on the Soviet Navy. What is the speed
of the fastest ships that will come calling?"
The small, bald, bespectacled Ivan Serdyuk put down his coffee. "The Kura-class destroyers are
the fastest afloat. They've been clocked at fifty-three knots in a moderate sea. Analysts believe
they can make up to sixty knots. Even the Karl Marx can exceed thirty-three knots, and it is the
slowest of the ships you've named."
"And the Texas may make thirty-five knots," Fal-lows said. "Well, there's the problem in a
nutshell. Un-less we can somehow put a much larger press of canvas on that old scow,
somehow beef up the speed fifty percent or more, we won't be doing the job we're being paid to
do."
Bitter laughter greeted his solemn words.
"You're asking for heaven-tomorrow," one of his assistants commented drily. "Increments in
speed of this type of ship have been at the rate of about one knot every seven years over the past
century, as you know better than anybody. Yet you want us to add something like thirty knots to
the speed of that bloody bucket of rust within four months. With all due respect, Dr. Fallows,
you're barmy."
Fallows nodded. "You're right-I'm barmy. Still, we're going to do it. Start thinking . . ."
In the nonstop brainstorming sessions that continued through the week, the first thought upon
which all could agree was that the present propulsion system had to be scrapped outright. For
one, it could not be reas-sembled anywhere near the deadline. And even if it were, the screws
weren't designed for higher speeds: whatever gain was achieved in increased speeds of shaft
rotation would be canceled out by cavitation. One engineer, with a taste for overkill, had even
computed that, with a shaft speed sufficient to propel the ship at only twenty-nine knots, the
vibration of the screws would shake the ship apart.
Something radically different was required. Further-more, whatever solution was found had to be
abso-lutely and irrefutably practical, for while there would be time for computer-model simulations,
there would be none for scale-model tests. It had to be right the first time.
A bright young engineer, Leften Stravrianos, a refu-gee from Turkey, came to the morning
conference one day with the galley proofs of a yet unpublished scientif-ic paper that purported to
prove that extremely high-speed air jets, thrusting downward from the periphery of a vehicle,
would replace the heavy, inefficient plastic aprons used in ground-effect machines. According to
the paper's calculations, there appeared to be no theo-retical limit to the weight such OEMs could
support.
"That's antedeluvian," Fallows scoffed. "It's been tried in laboratories and in the field. It doesn't
work. If I had time, I could spend two or three hours telling you why it doesn't- Next screwball, front
and center!"
"You've got a closed mind, boss," Stavrianos said stiffly. "Look, this is really the stuff. Instead of
direct-ing the jets downward at ninety degrees, they're angled inward 3.7 degrees. The proper
deviation from the ver-tical was discovered when the researchers tried fore-and-aft deviations. So
far, they haven't been able to establish any theoretical basis at all for the results, but talk about
synergism, why-"
"Here, let me see that," Fallows said impatiently. He grabbed the paper from the young man's
hand and rapidly scanned the dense lines of text. At first, he punctuated his reading with a
muttered "Twaddle," or "Nonsense!" or "God preserve us!" But after a time he fell silent, absorbed
in the experimental data. He strode over to the nearest computer terminal and busied him-self for
the next ten minutes checking out the computa-tions in the article.
"Well, I'm a monkey's uncle," he confessed finally. "That is something else. Interesting-very
interesting. I'll hang on to this for a while, Leff, if you don't mind."
"Then we use it?" Stavrianos's smile brightened his dark Mediterranean countenance.
Dr. Fallows sidestepped the question and addressed the group at large. "According to the author
of this paper, some broad named Dr. Faith Hamilton-that's why I checked out the figures-I never
take anything on faith-the speed and direction of the jet streams is such that when the main
thrusters' air jets touch them, it curves back on itself hyperbolically, producing a turbulence that
piles up under the machine in what seems to be a very controlled-and better yet,
con-trollable-manner, supporting it as gently as if it were riding along on glass. A real magic
carpet, if we can believe the experimental data. The math is all right, I can attest to that. But the
real kicker is this: la Hamil-ton says that it takes only 22 percent of the energy expended by a
state-of-the-art GEM to produce the maximum hypothesized speed." He returned to the computer
keyboard and made a few entries. "Unless I'm way off base, this could work on the Texas. We
could squeeze speeds of nearly fifty-eight knots out of the old wagon, depending of course on the
size of the power plant. And it would operate, naturally, across dry land as well as water, although
I'd hate to be within a country mile when that baby started through a forest of ponderosa pine." His
smile was wistful as he visualized the old battleship plowing across the land-scape like a giant
bulldozer from another world.
"We use it?" said Stavrianos again.
"No."
"But you just said-"
"I said, 'Unless I'm way off base.' Despite the con-suming faith of all present in my infallibility, I
have missed guesses-oh, perhaps once or twice in a long lifetime. But this-it's never been tried
outside the laboratory. What if we convert the old Texas to a GEM and it just sits there, making
noises like a vacuum sweeper? If that happens, the Russian fleet won't be the only thing red
around here- Any other geniuses to be heard from this morning?" he inquired sweetly.
There was, as usual, no shortage of them. One pro-posed to convert the Texas to a hydrofoil.
Mount huge blades that could be deployed horizontally once the ship was in the channel, and then
conventional power could be applied to raise the ship up on the blades, re-ducing water friction
against the hull to the extent that speed would be increased nearly threefold. He had the figures to
prove it.
Dr. Fallows examined the figures and pronounced them beautiful.
"Trouble is," he went on, "you're talking about a five-year project."
First there was the question of designing, testing, forging, and fitting the huge underwater foils, a
task of much greater magnitude than simply forging new con-necting rods, and one that could
hardly be carried out in secret. Second, the machinery to manipulate huge blades at high speed
didn't yet exist. Third, where would the fins be installed? Installation would require transfer of the
Texas to a graving dock, for no floating drydock in service could accommodate it. Russian
satellites would pick It up before it left its slip, and where would the surprise be then? And finally,
even if the foils were installed, and a computerized guidance system developed to control them,
even if the ship were assumed to be balanced without dock and sea trials, there still remained the
matter of propulsion.
Propulsion. They always came back to it, empty-handed . . .
A week passed. Ten days. Two weeks, and they were no closer to a solution than when they had
begun. Dr. Fallows, hounded almost daily by Gwillam Forte, finally had to confess that not only
had no solution been found, but none was in sight.
"There must be," Forte said.
Dr. Fallows shook his head.
"Atomic power?"
"Well, of course, there's atomic power. But there is no shipboard power plant available in the
United States that is big enough for the job. To produce the speed you require in the 34,000-ton
Texas would take a power plant big enough to propel a 90,000-ton air-craft carrier. None is now
abuilding."
"Submarine power plants?"
"Too small. All committed under current construc-tion programs, anyway. You ought to
know-you're a prime contractor."
Gwillam Forte considered the problem. "It's a ques-tion of priorities. I could go to the top."
"Still wouldn't solve the problem. As I said, the sub-marine power plants haven't the capacity we
need."
"Would two of them do?"
"No."
"Four?"
Fallows broke into a smile. "Now you're talking. Could you really get four released?"
"It all depends on which the White House wants first-the Texas or those subs. Let's say, for the
sake of argument, the Texas wins the toss. What then?"
"What stage of completion have they reached?"
"Two are in the test stands down here in SD-1. Two of the other five under contract are in the
sub-assembly stage. They could be ready to install in two months or ten weeks."
"That's cutting it pretty close, but we could do it. ... What next? There's only one way to go, Will.
Conventional screw propulsion is out, and so are all the attractive but hopelessly esoteric
alternatives my staff has been brainstorming. We have to go with the tried and tested."
"Which is?"
"Jet propulsion. Water jet. We can obtain the req-uisite power from the four reactors with a good
mar-gin to spare, I should imagine, although of course I haven't made any calculations yet. We'll
install huge water intakes at the bow, and impeller turbines amid-ships, to shoot the water in two
streams out the stern under tremendous pressure. For guidance, we remove the rudder and put
in bow and stern thrusters port and starboard, also working on water jets. It's quiet, effi-cient, and,
compared with the other ideas floating about, easy to install, as it minimizes parts and
engineering. Need a lot of manpower, though."
"You'll get it. Can it achieve the speeds we need?"
"Yes, I'm glad you asked about that, because there's a piece of the puzzle that we've been
pushing around that really doesn't fit the way you've been thinking."
"Oh?"
"It's this business of top speed. First, we must re-member that all the Russian ships are going to
be limited by the speed of the slowest. That's the Karl Marx, which can make a bit better than
thirty-three knots. The top speeds of the other ships, since they will all be staying together in
column formation, is irrelevant."
"That's true."
"Another thing: the Texas won't be encountering them on the high seas, where they will be going
at top speed. On the contrary, they'll be in relatively narrow, calm, protected waters-the Houston
Ship Channel. They'll be ascending the channel in stately procession, so that the natives can get
an eyeful. That means at a relatively low speed-say, ten or eleven knots. Any craft moving at a
speed three times that will seem to be flying. If the old Texas barrels through the Soviet fleet at
fifty knots-and with nuclear power and water-jet propulsion I see no problem in attaining that-it'll
look like a speedboat among coal barges."
"But you do think it'll work?"
"Hell, Will, I don't know. I'll certainly give it the old college try. Do you think you can get the White
House to spring those nuclear power plants?"
"Hell, Chil, I don't know."
"But you'll give it the old college try?"
"Don't know how-never got past the seventh grade."

28 FEBRUARY 1998
"Hobe Caulkins is outside, sir. He'd like to speak with you."
"Tell him I've gone to Alaska," Gwillam Forte grumbled.
"I told him that yesterday."
"Good. Tell him I'm still there."
"I did. He saw you get in the elevator this morning. He wants to welcome you back."
Forte sighed.
"Send him in."
He rose from behind his desk as a young man who looked as though he had just put down his
hoe and dressed in his Sunday best shambled into the room. His brown hair was carelessly
slicked down, his ankle showed a lot of white sock below the cuffs of blue trousers, and a button
was missing from his beige sports jacket. He had freckles across the ridge of his nose, which
went perfectly with the Huckleberry Finn grin and the wholesome aroma of country bumpkin. Forte
wondered why he bothered with the yokel act: every-body knew he had graduated summa cum
laude in political science from the University of Texas, bruised many a linebacker who imagined
all quarterbacks to be fragile, and was a damned smart newspaperman.
"Have a chair, Hobart."
"Thanks, Mr. Forte." The cheerful young man sat down and draped a long leg over the arm. He
looked around the spacious modern office. "Redecorated your office again, I see."
"Gives my secretary an excuse to get off the couch from time to time. What's on your mind
besides the new décor, Hobe?"
Caulkins laughed apologetically. "Well, Mr. Forte, I've run into a little problem, and I thought you
might be able to help me with it."
"Shoot," Forte said, wistfully wishing he could. Hobe Caulkins was the cleverest investigative
reporter in Texas, and where he went, trouble followed. In his wake floated the debris of an
implacable curiosity- divorces, hasty resignations, indictments, libel suits (rarely won), fist fights
(rarely lost), sudden disappear-ances, suicides, and consent decrees. Anything that smacked of
scandal was grist for his grinder, and the fatter the victim, the sharper the ax. He had never taken
on Gwillam Forte before-not because he feared his connections or the clout of Forte's own
Houston Herald, but simply because Forte had a reputation for straightforwardness and
indifference to public opinion. Forte had never dodged the unpleasant truth that in business, as in
love and war, where there are winners there must be losers. Forte did whatever was necessary
to win, and made no apologies about it.
"Got a list of names here." The young man dipped into an inside pocket and extracted a notebook.
"Thought you might be able to tell me something about them." He flipped it open and slid it across
the glass-topped desk.
Forte glanced down the list. It contained twenty-one names, the names of veterans-hospital
shipmates he had put in charge of the Texas restoration two years earlier. The only omissions
were those of Lester Bates and Haig Gargurian, who had died the previous year.
"What about them?"
"Do you know them?"
"They're patients at the veterans hospital over on Old Spanish Trail. Yes, I know them."
"Anything special about them?"
"Plenty. They served their country and paid for the privilege with their limbs and their health. Their
coun-try has rewarded them with bed, board, and amnesia. The usual Tommy Atkins
treatment-garbage disposal, American style."
"Tommy Atkins?"
"Kipling. Tommy Atkins is the nickname for the British soldier, and Rudyard Kipling had things to
say about civilians 'making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep,' and how in
peacetime 'it's Tommy this and Tommy that, and "Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Savior of 'is
country," when the guns begin to shoot.'"
"Before my time. What else can you tell me about them?"
"Nothing."
"But they're working for you."
"If you want to know anything about them," Forte said, feeling his lips tighten, "they're the people to
talk to."
"They won't talk to me."
Forte shrugged.
Hobe Caulkins's eyes hardened. "It's going to be that simple, Mr. Forte. They may be involved in
ac-tivities adversely affecting the national interest. And that involves you, because they are on
your payroll."
"So are approximately 8,300 other people, at latest count. Are you suggesting that Sunshine
Industries, Inc., is working against the national interest? Because if you are, you should tell the
Department of Defense right away: I have $2.3 billion in prime defense con-tracts, and you
wouldn't want them to worry, would you?"
"I wouldn't know about-"
"I'm busy, Caulkins. Get down to cases or get out."
Caulkins retrieved his notebook and flipped a page. "Okay. These twenty-one men are veterans of
foreign wars. They all have horrible, disabling wounds. They range in age from forty-three to
seventy-eight, and have hope neither of full recovery nor of leading full, useful lives on the outside.
"Second, for some time they've been observed pass-ing regularly through the main gate to your
La Porte property. On that property is located Sunshine Indus-tries' underground manufacturing
and research facility, SD-1."
"Not to mention the barge landing on the Houston Ship Channel, a 65,000-barrel-per-day refinery,
a cat-cracker, and a PVC factory. Not a horse- and cattle-breeding spread, El Caballejo. After all,
that property's 960 acres."
"But we both know they're going down to SD-1, don't we, Mr. Forte?" Caulkins winked
conspiratorially. "And in the bowels of SD-1 you do atomic research and weapons development."
"That's classified information." Forte's stomach muscles were tightening.
"Sue me. You can always claim I was a Russian spy. Third, I've discovered that the nearest
relatives of every one of these veterans I've checked on have been receiving substantial cash
payments each month.
I guess I don't have to tell you the checks are drawn on Sunshine Industries, do I?"
"Where did you get that information, Caulkins?"
"Informed sources."
"Care to name them?"
Caulkins laughed good-naturedly. "With all due respect, go to hell, Mr. Forte. Where was I?"
"Fifth," said Forte, with a malicious twinkle in his eye, "as in that bottle of Scotch over in the bar, in
case you need inspiration."
The newspaperman studied the ceiling. "Fourth, my informed sources tell me that five of these
veterans have developed a sudden interest in atomic energy. They've been boning up on the
subject from reference books in the VA hospital library. . . . How'm I doing, Mr. Forte?"
You're getting warm, thought Gwillam Forte, getting cold as the implications of what Caulkins was
saying sank in. There was nothing he had said so far he could use as a basis for a story, but
there was enough to en-courage him to continue prying. Forte had to head him off at the pass.
"So, what does all this signify to you, Caulkins?"
Caulkins scratched his head in feigned perplexity.
"Damned if I know. But a lot of interesting explana-tions spring to mind, which I owe to my readers
to check out."
"For instance."
"Waaal, let's try this one for size- Everybody knows how you feel about the Washington
Protocols. Your editorial writers froth at the mouth every day, making dire predictions of the
demise of the West if they're signed. One of the provisions you most object to is that the
protocols promise a tremendous revival of American agriculture, which everybody else believes to
be a useful and sensible international division of labor, but which you pretend to see as the death
of American industrial might."
"First sensible thing you've said today. Please con-tinue."
"Now, if you wanted to sabotage the protocols be-fore they had a chance to justify their promise of
last-ing world peace, what I've found out would go far to demonstrate that such a program of
sabotage exists."
"How?"
"The veterans-they're expendable. They know it, and are willing to trade the last few painful years
of their lives for assurance that their families will be well provided for after they die. You've been
making that provision. Next, their sudden interest in atomic energy. Atomic radiation is invisible,
and damned dangerous; Houston is the major American port of origin for overseas shipment of
wheat and other food grains. Put these two facts together, and you get the suggestion that these
men are somehow involved in secret research- probably as guinea pigs-to poison that grain with
atomic radiation, perhaps in order to sterilize the Rus-sians and others who eat it, or give them
cancer, and thus permit the gradual, painless, and undetectable elimination of those peoples you
insist are our enemies. Your guinea pigs would-"
Forte gestured impatiently. "Quit talking nonsense. All this you're saying is plain preposterous, and
you know it." Inwardly, Forte sighed with relief. Caulkins was only guessing. But at least he hadn't
guessed the Texas connection. That was the important thing.
"Well, of course it's preposterous," Caulkins ad-mitted easily, "but it's only one theory among
many. One of them's got to be right, and none of them are pretty. I'll keep digging until I uncover
the one that fits all the facts. Then I publish . . ."
The newspaperman's face was suddenly grim, and Forte knew why. Fear was a participant in
every Caul-kins interview. Digging was precisely what could not be permitted. The danger to
national security of pre-mature disclosure, by so much as a minute, of the Texas plan, overrode
every personal consideration.
Though Forte respected, even liked, the young man immensely, for a moment he contemplated
calling in several of his competent assistants and instructing them to take Mr. Hobart Caulkins to
a remote and private place, and there keep him until sometime in August.
But there might be another way . . .
On the speed key in the kneehole of his desk, Forte's right hand began tapping out terse
instructions. He knew Caulkins's character well. Money had no attrac-tion for him. But he loved
good living-excellent cui-sine, praise of his column, creature comforts-and especially the
company of lovely women who gave him these things. Before Caulkins had finished reminding
Forte of the implications of the revelations he intended to make, Forte's instructions were already
being car-ried out.
"Well, now, Hobe," Forte said when the other settled back in his chair, his face flushed from his
own elo-quence, "that's some program. I wish I could convince you you're wasting your time."
"I'll bet you do. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be getting along to work on it. I've found that when I
start floating a few facts in my column, readers begin phoning in. First thing you know, the dam
breaks, and somebody's catching the next plane to Brazil. Hope it doesn't have to be you, Mr.
Forte." He rose. "Thanks for seeing me."
"Would it help if we paid a call on those fellows to see exactly what it is they're doing at El
Caballejo?"
"Oh, sure." Caulkins snorted. "I'll come back next week, and we'll drive out to see the production
your scriptwriters have put together. No thanks."
"We'll go out right now, if you prefer."
"Huh?" said Caulkins, his hand on the doorknob.
"Miss Barker," Forte said over the intercom, "would you please bring in the medical files of those
twenty-one veterans who have been coming out to El Caballejo lately?" He turned to Caulkins.
"You'll want to look these over before you talk to the men. Data for your story."
"Yes, I guess I'd better have all the facts." Caul-kins's tone was wary. He didn't know what Forte
was trying to pull, but so long as Forte wasn't left alone to stage-manage his meeting with the
veterans before it actually came off, he didn't see any harm in playing along.
Forte glanced at his watch as the svelte Miss Barker brought in the files and put them before
Hobart Caul-kins. It was twelve-fifteen.
By twelve-fifty Hobe Caulkins had leafed through fifteen of the files, occasionally jotting down
notes in his book. Gwillam Forte continued his own paperwork, only occasionally glancing at his
watch and noting with satisfaction that the minutes were slipping by. He calculated that
preparations at El Caballejo could be completed within two hours at the most: the men could be
mustered from the Texas inside of twenty minutes, and the other players in the drama he had
ordered up for Hobe Caulkins summoned from various parts of Houston within an hour and a half.
Already more than half an hour had passed. He went back to his company reports with the
reassuring feeling that all was going well.
At precisely one o'clock a discreet knock on the door told him that the lunch he had ordered by
speed key-he customarily ate nothing at noon at all-had arrived from the caterer.
"Come in!"
A uniformed waiter pushing a cart, followed by an-other with a table draped in crisp linen and a
third with a straight-backed chair, entered in single file.
"Oh, I'm vairy sorry, sair," said the maître. "I deed not know you had ze company zees lunchtime.
Shall 1 eenstruct the cuisiniere to send anozair-"
"No, Gustave, that won't be necessary. I had a bit of an upset stomach this morning, and I'm
going to settle for a bottle of soda water."
"C'est dommage! Because for lunch today we have brought you Courgettes à la Grecque, Salade
Cauchoise, Petits Soufflés aux Frontage, Rede au Beurre Noir, Queue de Boeuf aux Olives
Noires avec des Epinards à la Crème, and ferry special for you, zee-"
Gwillam Forte waved his hand.
"Take it away, Gustave," he said, observing Hobe Caulkins' trying not to drool. "Can't bear the
thought of food."
"But, Monsieur-"
"Absolutely not."
"Perhaps your guest . . ." Gustave ventured.
Gwillam Forte seemed to remember that he was not, after all, alone. "Oh, sorry, Hobe-I didn't
mean to-"
"Quite all right, Mr. Forte," Caulkins said stiffly.
"Would you care to-that is, if you don't mind tak-ing potluck."
"Wouldn't think of it."
"You can snack while you're reading the rest of those files, Hobe. Got to keep Gustave honest,
you know. Besides, it's a shame to waste food."
"Well . . ." Caulkins tucked the napkin under his chin and pulled a chair up to the table. "My mother
al-ways did tell her boy Hobe that it was a sin and a shame to waste good food . . ."
At El Caballejo ranch an hour and a half later, Hobe Caulkins stepped out of the elevator on the
basement level, and into a hash fiend's vision of an Arabian Nights harem.
In the center of the room a fountain sprayed scented, multicolored water into the air, its mist
mixing with the aroma of expensive cigars whose smoke floated lan-guidly about the room in
swirling layers. The floor was carpeted with a lush pile so thick that walking was like wading
through water. At one side arose a convivial medley of tinkling glasses, the full-throated voice of a
man telling an off-color story, the giggle of appreciative female laughter.
Caulkins could just make out, through the smoke and flashing lights interrupted by opaque
slashes of absolute darkness, the figures of seven people. In a cluster at the long mahogany bar
were two men-old men-and five women.
And what women! Unconsciously, Caulkins licked his lips. He had never seen five such lovely
creatures all at once outside a chorus line. In fact, judging by their meager attire and abundant
bosom, they may well have just stepped down from the stage. Everybody seemed to be having a
wonderful time.
On low leather divans scattered around the room, a lot of interesting business seemed to be
going on, but the lights were so faint that it was impossible to tell just what it was. Caulkins now
appreciated the wisdom of the flashing lights, apparently directed toward new arrivals to distract
their minds while they were getting into the spirit of things.
There was definitely no lack of spirits, as was evident when Gwillam Forte led him to the bar and
invited him to name his poison. The glass shelves behind the bar were fully five meters long and
contained every alcoholic beverage Caulkins had ever heard of, and a good many he hadn't.
A young shapely woman wearing high heels and not much else appeared at his elbow with a large
tray of coronas, diplomaticos, partagas, belvederes, pyramides, cheroots, Madrigals, Havanas,
and other aromatic cigars. He chose an aristocratic Montecristo, accepted a light from the grave,
white-waistcoated barman, and took a deep draught of the incredible smooth-textured Scotch the
barman produced with the next flourish. He felt it might clear his head of the perplexing thoughts
that were chasing one another through it.
He had been so sure. All the evidence, all his clever deductions, had pointed to the existence of
some dia-bolical conspiracy in which these men-he had already identified several present from
their pictures in the dossiers supplied by Forte-were involved. And yet the evidence was wrong.
For the men, supposedly engaged in dark doings, were here-engaged in dark doings, all right, but
hardly of a sinister kind. As if to drive home the falsity of his inferences, a sudden lull in the music
allowed to slip through a snatch of conversation, or rather proposal, followed by a quick assent as
a couple rose from their cushions and went unobtrusively toward the door at the far end of the
room.
"Where does that go?" he asked, although the an-swer was self-evident from the tenor of the
whispered suggestion he had overheard.
Instead of Forte's reply, another caressed his ears.
"Three guesses," intoned a husky, sardonic voice behind him.
He turned-and nearly fell off the barstool. Tall, with flawless skin and a regal bearing that could
only have been the fruit of ballet training, she was at once erect and as supple as a serpent. Her
lustrous eyes studied him with smoky suggestion, while the rise and fall of her breasts, with the
majesty of the tides in the Bay of Fundy, mesmerized him.
"Say!" she said with a sudden, excited look of recog-nition. "You're Hobe Caulkins!"
He admitted it, shyly.
"Meet your greatest admirer in Texas-Lorry Vine," she said, extending a slim-fingered, exquisitely
modeled hand. He took it, and felt an electric tingle pulse through his body. No woman had done
that to him since he had learned about sex behind the barn at eleven in the morning of his life. He
didn't hurry to release the hand.
"I just love your exposes," she was saying.
"You do?"
"Sure. Professional respect, you might say. I'm in the expose business myself. Maybe you've
heard of me-Lorry Vine?" Her lips parted in a suggestive curve, revealing almost too-perfect teeth.
Caulkins's heart was hammering hard enough to fracture a rib. With effort, he wrenched his eyes
from her heaving breasts, and instead reexamined his as-sumptions. Obviously, he had done
Gwillam Forte a grave injustice. These men had been in the last stages of depression not too long
ago, according to their medical records. They could look forward to nothing but a lonely, bitter end.
Forte, well known for his con-cern for his shipmates, had presumably observed their declining
condition, and resolved to do something about it, in his inimitable, flamboyant way. What else
could explain all this?
Caulkins felt like a fool. But he was a fair man, and he owed Forte an apology. He turned.
Forte wasn't there.
He turned back to Loretta Vine. She hadn't dis-appeared, at least.
"Where's Mr. Forte?" he asked.
Loretta Vine slid up on the barstool beside him. Her skirt parted to reveal a thigh-smooth, silky,
swans-down soft-and one millimeter of bare hip. She didn't seem to notice his eyes on it. She
looked at him for a long moment before answering. "Does it matter?" she whispered.

23 JUNE 1998
At ten-thirty on the evening of 23 June, Gwil-lam Forte kicked off his shoes and sank into his
favorite armchair overlooking Houston from the big picture windows of his fifty-eighth-floor
downtown penthouse. Reflecting on the day's activity, he decided that it had not all been
unproductive.
It had begun at dawn with a flight to Austin for breakfast with Governor Tom Traynor. Forte hadn't
looked forward to the interview, because he knew he was going to have to lie to his friend, and
while lying- like dying-is one of life's realities, it made neither experience more pleasant.
After their third cup of coffee, Governor Traynor pushed back the breakfast dishes and unrolled
the first of the tight cylinder of plans and blueprints Forte had brought along.
"What's all this about?" he said, running his eye over the Texas deck diagrams and hull profiles,
with the specifications of each written in neat draftsman's script in the margins. "You know I can't
make head or tail of all this."
Gwillam Forte pointed to the lower diagram. "That's new. Those four nuclear reactors will power
the ship. We've eviscerated the engine rooms, removing boilers, engines, drive shafts, and
masses of auxiliary equip-ment to accommodate them. The rudder and screws were also
eliminated, as you see. Cleans the hull up considerably."
"But those reactors are tiny little things," Traynor protested. "Removing all that mass of metal
must affect the weight of the ship. Won't it ride higher in the water, make it top-heavy, threaten it
with capsizing?"
"Oh, yes, you can't make head or tail of all this," said Gwillam Forte with a wry face. "Like hell you
can't. But you're right. We've compensated for the re-duction in weight by adding extra concrete
and steel shielding around each of those reactors. The weight and balance remain substantially
the same."
"And where did the reactors come from? I suppose they were just lying around SD-1."
"More or less. They were made for the new 19,000-ton Reagan-class submarines, but the Bureau
of Ships upgraded their tonnage to 27,000 to accommodate the Ranger ICBMs the Air Force
couldn't squeeze into their budget. The new pig boats require larger power plants, so the
Department of Defense told us to put these on ice. What safer place to store them than on a
battleship?"
It was the first of what would be a whole parade of untruths that morning, but Cherokee Tom,
being only part Indian, accepted it without reservation. He slapped Forte on the back. "You're a sly
one, Gwillam. What if they send an inspector to check up?"
"I'll buy him off with a box seat at the next Oilers' game . . . Now, these four reactors will drive
turbines pumping water in through bow scoops and expelling it at high speed through subsurface
ports astern. Maneu-vering is by means of bow and stern thrusters, port and starboard. They
divert a portion of the propulsion stream, giving a turning radius and maneuverability like that of a
speedboat."
"And speaking of speed . . . ?"
"Don't know yet. This can only be estimated so far by computer models. But we calculate speeds
of up to sixty-two knots."
"That's one hundred kilometers an hour," marveled the governor. "If that doesn't grab the crowds, I
don't know what will."
Maybe, thought Forte dismally, the sight of the Texas sinking beneath the waves of the channel
under the proton guns of the Russian Seventeenth High Seas Fleet? He longed to tell his friend
that the Texas wouldn't be around for any Texas Millenary Celebra-tions, that it had been drafted
for a more important role in the national destinies. But of course he couldn't. President Wilson
Wynn had entrusted him with the responsibility of creating an incident that would goad the
Russians into a fatal belligerency, and that was a secret even the governor of Texas couldn't
share.
Still, he felt mean and ashamed as the governor poured over the plans for the ship, discussed
details that would by next month be completely academic, and praised Forte for the tremendous
sacrifices in time and money he was making for the State of Texas.
"Don't thank me, Tom," he said, rolling up the diagrams and unrolling another in its place. "I'm only
doing what a normally patriotic American would do in my place. Don't forget that, when the time
comes to remember."
"Never fear, Will," said Traynor heartily. "Now, then, what's all this?"
"The assembly site for the Texas National Guard." ' Governor Traynor looked blank.
"Refresh me."
"You mentioned how beautiful it would be if the Texas National Guard could somehow be rung in
as an honor guard for the Texas?"
"Yes, but what-"
"And you said you'd leave the details to me?"
"Sure. On the other-"
"Well, this is what my men have come up with dur-ing the past twenty months. I thought it would
be a nice surprise for you."
"It's that, all right." Traynor laughed. "But what is it? It looks like a bunch of underground pipelines."
"It is-people pipelines. . . . When you came to me four years ago with your Texas brainstorm,
you'll re-member I had to obtain a Mole-one of those enor-mous machines used to bore subway
tunnels-to pro-vide access from SD-1 to the Texas basin about nine kilometers away."
"I remember."
"At the time we began, I put a study team to work out your suggestion about the Texas National
Guard as honor guard for the Texas. This is the plan the team worked out. And today, the first
phase of that plan is a reality-the 'pipelines.'
"The team first of all surveyed the channel banks between which the Texas will cruise upstream
toward the city center. When the channel was deepened a few years ago, you may recall, most
industry along the banks was relocated some hundreds of yards inland in accordance with the
new industrial development master plan. The banks are thus relatively unobstructed for a stretch
of nearly three miles. Along each bank, come next June-just a year hence-will be erected
grand-stands twenty-eight tiers high. They will have a clear view of the channel. They'll be
provided with parking facilities to the rear, equipped with food services, rest rooms, first-aid
stations, and crowd-control officers' quarters beneath the stands. The whole complex will take
3,200 men five months to construct, and when it's all finished, and the TMC opens on the first of
January, 2000, it will accommodate 2.8 million people simul-taneously. You get first choice of
seats."
"Fantastic!" exclaimed Governor Traynor. "I-I don't know what to say."
Say it ain't so, Joe, Forte thought sadly, because it ain't going to be. The plans were sound
enough, but what's the use of a bowl without the cherries? By next June, the Texas would have
been on the bottom of the channel for eleven months.
"That's what's going to be on top, although con-struction hasn't started yet, of course. What
you're looking at is underneath the channel, and it's already completed. That Mole cost me a lot of
money, and when we finished drilling the tunnel to the Texas, my staff was given the job of finding
other uses for it. They got together with the TMC team and came up with this: two sets of
subterranean tunnels running the width of the Houston Ship Channel, just ten feet below the
bottom. The two sets are about one hundred meters apart-something to do with the geophysical
properties of the bottom, although the separation is of no particu-lar importance. Each set
consists of three stacks of three tunnels, nine in all. Each tunnel in the set is separated from the
next by only a few feet. Each tunnel is 5.8 meters in diameter."
"Making a total of eighteen tunnels beneath the chan-nel," mused the governor. "I suppose it would
take that many to transport 2.8 million people from one side of the channel to the other."
"People, hell," chuckled Forte. "No visitor is going to get near these tunnels."
"Huh?"
"One other detail will give you the tip-off: the center tunnel of each three-tier stack is provided with
toilets, mess halls, emergency aid stations and a communica-tions center."
Traynor shook his head. "No help, I'm afraid."
"In the dark, eh? Well, so is the public. Until the TMC's opening, nobody will be aware of their
exis-tence. Keeping the secret has been the toughest part of the project so far, in fact, because
we had to shift something like 1.5 million cubic meters of soil from those tunnels, barge it down to
Galveston Bay, and dump it during hours of darkness. When I think of the state and federal
regulations we broke, I-"
"I'll square the rap for you, Will, if you'll just tell me what all this is in favor of."
"The Texas National Guard, Your Excellency-what else?"
"You're going to put the National Guard in those tunnels?"
"Right. A few companies at a time, from assembly points outside the city the night before the
ceremonies begin. When the stands are full of your constituents, and you've cut the ribbon and
the oratory declaring these proceedings open, the band will strike up 'The Eyes of Texas,' and
from those tunnels will materialize the Texas National Guard. Ten abreast, one division will march
up one side of the channel before the re-viewing stand, the second division up the other, flags
snapping in the breeze, cymbals clashing, Texans cheer-ing. Can you visualize it?"
"Yeah," said Traynor in a reverential whisper. "I can see it. I can see it." He turned to Gwillam
Forte and stuck out his hand. "I think you've just assured my election to the United States Senate,
Will. I don't know how to thank you."
"Forget it, Tom," Forte said.
And he meant it.

Back at Hobby Airport in Houston at 10:30 a.m., Gwillam Forte found Station KATY-TV's news
heli-copter, Fubar, gassing up to cover a condominium fire in Pasadena. Since the Houston
Herald owned the tele-vision station, and Forte owned the newspaper, he was able to persuade
the pilot to drop him off at SD-1 en route to the fire, sparing the use of his private heli-copter. He
hadn't got rich by throwing his money around.
In that section of SD-1 devoted to the Texas project, he met by prearrangement with Emilio
Salvatore in the model chamber, a large room occupied by two scale models of the U.S.S. Texas
in cradles, side by side. Constructed on the scale of one to forty, they were nearly fifteen feet long,
with the foremast truck lights reaching almost to the level of Forte's shoulders. To casual
inspection, the models were identical, but close study would have revealed differences.
Differences were the reason for the models: one represented the Texas before work had begun
on her while the second in-corporated every change, however minute, made since then. The
technical men feared that small alterations in appearance dictated by the renovation, which might
not be noticeable from day to day, in time would be notice-able in aerial photographs or to
Russian high-resolution satellite reconnaissance from space. So long as the changes were,
taken together, minuscule to the unaided eye, Forte's experts judged that they would not be
de-tected, by friend or enemy.
"Notice anything?" Emilio asked, when the two men were alone.
Gwillam Forte looked from one model to the other. He shook his head.
"Look closer," prompted the weapons expert. "Look at the deck mounts for the Elbows
carousels."
Forte bent down and inspected the tiny circular ar-rays of pale blue dots at intervals along the
main deck, where the carousels would be anchored the night before the Russian fleet appeared
on the Houston Ship Chan-nel. Again he shook his head.
"Good," said Salvatore with satisfaction. "On the outboard side of each carousel, we've replaced
sections of the scuppers with strips of a cobalt-manganese-nickel steel alloy. Rub it with your
fingers."
Forte did so with the tips of the fingers of his arti-ficial right hand, the more sensitive of the two.
"Feels rough."
"In full scale, that roughness resolves into thimble-size protuberances. They throw up a powerful
mag-netic field."
"What's the point?"
"I got to thinking, what if the Russians, instead of sinking the Texas out of hand, zeroed in on the
El-bows? That's a possibility, you know, if they aim at the source of the electron beams firing at
them. Then the Elbows would be knocked out, leaving the Texas afloat, and no international
incident to torpedo the protocols."
"That's a risk, I suppose, but one we have to take."
"No, we don't. If they can't knock out our Elbows, they'll have to gun for the weapons platform-that
is, sink the ship. The magnetic devices make sure they do."
"How?"
"Simple. These magnetic strips are energized by the ship's nuclear generators. When an enemy
proton beam locks onto an Elbows carousel, it triggers activation of the magnetic field just in front
of it, and the incoming particle beam is deflected."
"If it's deflected, it would hit another part of the ship."
"That's the idea, isn't it? But in reality, the deflected particles will do very little damage. Think of a
powerful water jet directed against the side of a building-in this case the magnetic field: the jet
breaks up into a shower of droplets that can drench you, but not knock you off your feet as the jet
can."
"And what about our Elbows beam, when it hits that magnetic field?"
"Same thing. It's dispersed in a shower of relatively harmless radiation. But remember, that
happens only when the enemy's proton guns are firing directly at a carousel. With seventy-two
carousels firing at once from the Texas, in self-defense they'll have to sink the ship fast. Or, so
they'll think in the panic of the mo-ment."
"I see. Have you tested this setup?"
"Yes. We've installed a command station aboard the flag bridge on the Texas-well camouflaged
and magnetically shielded in case of malfunction of our own Elbows. We've had a series of night
tests at each of the carousels using an experimental proton gun of a design similar to the Russian
model. The system works like a charm ..."

But so did that of the Russian Seventeenth High Seas Fleet, Gwillam Forte reflected at his
penthouse office in the Houston Herald building that afternoon, as he scanned the press reports
of the fleet's visit to San Francisco, where it was currently anchored. As in Seattle, the fleet's
previous port of call, the keynote of the Russians' behavior, in fact, was charm.
Russian sailors went ashore on liberty, in parties of ten, under the command of a commissioned
officer and an English-speaking political adviser. They were im-maculately turned out, politely
attentive to the descrip-tions of the sights they were shown, drank nothing stronger than
lemonade, and spoke, when they spoke at all, only in Marxian cliches about the brotherhood of
man and the solidarity of the working masses. They toured museums, parks, and zoos, attended
ball games-where they applauded both winner and loser impartially-ate sea food at Fisherman's
Wharf, ex-posed yards of stainless-steel teeth to press photog-raphers, and were always back
aboard ship by night-fall. The local ladies of the night had no part of their custom, nor did the
sin-and-skin palaces, waterfront bars, and gambling hells, the sailors pleading-honestly if
disconsolately-short liberty and low pay.
Their reception by the burghers of Seattle and San Francisco had been equally restrained and
aloof. These cities not only had experience with sailors long at sea and far from home but a
growing suspicion that the Washington Protocols, which would be ceremonially signed at the
conclusion of the fleet visit some weeks hence, were somehow booby-trapped. The East Coast
press had been so unanimous in praise of the protocols that West Coast conservatives were
convinced they must be dangerous. As a consequence, they treated the Rus-sian sailors as they
would messengers of death-with respect, but a respect filled with cold foreboding.
Between the Russians and the Americans, after two Seventeenth Fleet port calls, there had been
neither friction nor affection, and Gwillam Forte, perhaps alone among Americans, didn't like it.
The natural buoyancy of sailing men, which bubbles to the surface on liberty in fun and laughter,
shattered beer halls and fistfights, dames and demolition, hangovers and fractured limbs, was
being suppressed both by the ships' officers and their American hosts ashore. If the visit to San
Diego proceeded with the same decorum and lack of incident, the U.S.S. Texas plan was in
jeopardy. After all, the American people were not likely to believe the prim and mannerly men of
the Soviet Navy capable of cold-bloodedly sinking a defenseless old man-of-war that had steamed
out to offer them hospitality and greetings on behalf of the State of Texas. It would be completely
at variance with the Russian behavior that they had already experienced first-hand. That the
behavior was a well-rehearsed sham they would not pause to con-sider. The image, Gwillam
Forte decided, would have to be altered, and at once, to conform with the true Soviet nature.
After Seattle and San Francisco, the Russians would expect the same coldly formal reception in
San Diego. They would be prepared psychologically for a correct and civil welcome, but without
smiles, friendly toasts, escorted tours, invitations to dine en famille.
Forte chuckled. They were in for a shock.
At four-ten that afternoon, Forte's Gulfstream IV rolled up to the VIP gate at the San Diego Airport.
Waiting on the tarmac was Mayor Archibold Grace, who was there to do Gwillam Forte, a man he
had never met but knew by reputation, a favor. He was more than willing to grant it sight unseen,
for Gwillam Forte was known as a man who paid his debts most handsomely.
"Mr. Mayor," Forte said, stepping out of the plane and taking the other's preferred hand, "I'm
Gwillam Forte, a man who's very much obliged to you for con-senting to receive him on such
short notice."
"Delighted, Mr. Forte." Grace beamed. "Welcome to our fair-"
He broke off as a pair of lovely long legs appeared in the doorway of the plane, and a moment
later a breathtaking young woman in a linen suit of dazzling white descended, with a smile that
made Grace forget that he was years past dreams populated by such lovely women.
"Lorry, may I present His Honor the Mayor, Mr. Archibold Grace," said Forte, leading her by the
hand to hizzoner. "Mr. Mayor, this is Miss Loretta Vine, my social secretary."
Mayor Grace took her hand. He was an experienced shaker of hands, and managed to hold on to
hers until they were inside the airport conference room seated in club chairs opposite his, where
he could keep Loretta Vine fully in view.
So delicious was the sight of those long, slender, well-bronzed legs that his mind kept wandering
from Gwillam Forte's presentation, although his politician's instincts told him that Forte's words
were sound and reasonable. From time to time, when Forte paused, Mayor Grace would nod
encouragingly and make noises of understanding and assent, and then let his thoughts graze on
greener pastures, just barely retain-ing the thread of Forte's discourse.
In fact, Forte had come with a very reasonable re-quest. It was that the City of San Diego show a
rather warmer and more human face to the Seventeenth High Seas Fleet than it had been
accorded in Seattle and San Francisco. His motives in making the request were strictly business:
certain clauses in the Washington Protocols, not yet made public, concerned trade con-cessions
the Soviet Union was considering to benefit the American economy. These concessions might be
re-scinded if the chill in their reception in American ports continued. On the other hand, if the
Russians were really warmly received from now on-which Forte had taken upon himself to
ensure-all Americans would benefit from Russia's gratitude. Washington, in turn, would favor in
the award of government contracts those who facilitated this patriotic purpose.
The mayor saw, and saw clearly. Yes, of course he would make the Russians feel welcome.
Indeed, he would immediately convene a committee of the heads of colleges, social service
agencies, fraternal organiza-tions, civic groups, chambers of commerce, voters' leagues, and the
like and devise a program of official and unofficial entertainment that would make the Rus-sians
realize they had found a second home. He would lay out a welcome on as lavish a scale as
Gwillam Forte could wish. There was just one thing . . .
"Send the "bills to me," Forte said. He had been waiting for the bite. "I'm an exsailor, and the
drinks are on the house. I know what it's like to hit a great liberty port like San Diego without a pair
of green-backs to rub together. I want these young men to enjoy themselves to the hilt-get drunk,
dance with the bears at the San Diego Zoo, see flicks being made in Holly-wood, applaud the
seals at Marineland applauding them, go dune-buggying on the Mojave Desert, loll on muscle
beach at La Jolla, roll a joint, spend the night in the comforting arms of an understanding woman-
Miss Vine will introduce a note of professionalism into this aspect of the operation to keep San
Diego's maiden-hood, so to speak, intact-in short, they're to have a week that will be the high point
of their lives even if they all make admiral."
"Well, Mr. Forte," said Mayor Grace doubtfully, "the way you put it, it's going to run into a lot of
money. We've had a lot of experience with fleet visits to San Diego, you know. The breakage, the .
. ."
His voice faded as he strained to read the check Forte was writing on the briefcase balanced on
his knees. Forte signed it with a flourish and handed it over.
Grace, who had read the check upside down, regret-ted he hadn't poor-mouthed with greater
conviction, for the sum barely exceeded the rough estimate he had mentally made of the likely
cost of the fleet visit. Then he read the check right side up, and saw that he had missed a zero.
"Well," he said, "Well! That's very handsome of you, Mr. Forte."
"I'll get it all back, with interest," Forte promised. "A week-long, nonstop, no-holds-barred party, for
every man in the Soviet Seventeeth High Seas Fleet, from Admiral of the Fleet Grell down to
Seaman Third Class Ivan Ivanovich-agreed?"
"When they leave port, they'll be so high they'll be lucky if they come down this side of Denver,"
Mayor Grace promised.
"You're sure you can handle it?"
"A lead-pipe cinch."
"Because if you need any help, Miss Vine can stay for a couple of weeks for moral support."
"On second thought . . ." Mayor Grace grinned like a little boy in ice-cream heaven.

It was nine-fifty Houston time when Gwillam Forte alighted from his plane at Hobby Airport, alone,
and boarded his chopper for the heliport atop the Herald tower. As working days went, it was only
slightly more vigorous than usual, but what it lacked in incident it more than made up for in
expenditure. Still, it was money well spent. If the Washington Protocols were signed, it would be
the beginning of the end of an inde-pendent United States, as well as the freedom and for-tunes of
all those who lived within its borders. He had done his part. Now all depended on Mayor Archibold
Grace-and Lorry Vine.
He looked down on the lights of Houston from his fifty-eighth floor eyrie. That wasn't quite
accurate, he reflected-with Lorry Vine in charge of the entertain-ments, the fate of the Soviet
Seventeenth High Seas Fleet was chiseled in stone.


27 JUNE 1998
Forte, Dr. Ed Curry, and Dr. Herbert Fallows were shucking off their white lab coats and hard hats
in the shower room of the nuclear test area when they heard the commotion. A moment later the
door burst open and a man stumbled in, shoved along by four stern-jawed security officers. He
collapsed on the floor, a rivulet of blood trickling down his forehead, another larger stream from
his nose. His face was puffy and bruised, and one sleeve of his white overall was torn at the
shoulder.
Forte looked interrogatively at the security men.
"Spy, sir," said one of them, who also guarded his words.
"Let's have a look at him."
Two of the security men hauled the recumbent one to his feet. Clipped to his lapel was the
standard SII radiation plaque, and beneath it a plasticized identifica-tion card. The picture of a
sallow, fat-nosed man with pale-blue eyes matched his face. The name on the card was Izard T.
Opal.
"Mr. Opal?" Gwillam Forte asked the man, who was sagging between the guards, as limp as
spaghetti al dente.
Opal opened a puffy eye. "You'll answer for this, Forte."
One of the guards casually elbowed Opal in the ribs. He gasped with pain.
"Mr. Forte to you, cheese-head."
Opal set his lips in a firm line.
The guard repeated his recommendation, punctuating it with a sharp rap of his night stick on
Opal's elbow. Opal faulted.
When he revived, his arm was throbbing with pain and his rib cage seemed to have caved in.
Obduracy, he decided, must wait until he could try it on someone more impressionable than
Gwillam Forte.
"This is illegal," he said through tumescent lips. "The law is explicit," he continued, warily eying the
man with the sharp elbow and leaden night stick.
"Absolutely," Forte replied. "At the shaft head of SD-1 there is a sign that says 'Authorized
Personnel Only.' You are here illegally."
"The law says-"
"The law down here is these gentlemen who have been interviewing you. I suggest you tell me
what they wanted to know."
"Or else?" Opal said sarcastically, his nerve return-ing with the use of his arm. "You'll have your
goons work me over some more?" Automatically he flinched, and felt foolish when nothing
happened.
Forte laughed.
"They were just auditioning you for the company lacrosse team, Mr. Opal. You're free to leave."
The two men released him. Opal shook the wrinkles out of his rumpled clothes and drew himself
up to his full five feet five inches.
"Thank you," he said stiffly.
He turned on his heel and marched out the door toward the principal manway, just around the turn
in the passage.
Gwillam Forte and the others put their lab clothes in their lockers and were about to go when Izard
T. Opal returned.
"They won't let me in the lift," he said plaintively. "They said that only authorized personnel are
admit-ted."
"I warned you," Forte sighed. "This plant's strong on authorization. You need it to get into work
spaces, to get a drink of water or a bite of food, to use the toilets. However, you're free to walk up
and down the corridors, Mr. Opal."
Forever, Opal thought desperately. The old man's manner was mild enough, but beneath it was
steel. He might last five or six hours treading water in this sea of hostility among men with elbows
like pickaxes, but in the end he would have to capitulate.
Forte saw submission surfacing in Opal's watery eyes. He waited.
"I want to make a statement . . . My name is Izard T. Opal. Dr. Izard T. Opal, Regional Safety
Engineer, Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
"Oh? What happened to Gluyas Grant?"
"You mean Gluyas Gant," Opal replied, sidestepping the trap. "He-ah-resigned. I was his
assistant. I re-placed him."
"I see."
Gluyas Gant was an uncommonly decent man and a fine engineer. If this little man got his job, it
was probably through the usual government application- the application of a knife between the
shoulder blades. The suspicion put an edge on Forte's voice.
"Then why didn't you come down here the way Gant did-apply for permission twenty-four hours in
ad-vance and pick up an escort at the manway head?"
"Because twenty-four hours is all you'd need to cover your tracks."
"What tracks?"
"Unauthorized hot-water emissions. You'd divert the hot water to another outlet. Not exploring this
pos-sibility was the land of sloppy work that got Gant fired."
Opal had the earmarks of the authentic government snoop, but then so would a Soviet spy.
"I.D.," Forte snapped to one of the assistants who performed such chores.
At the nearest computer terminal, the assistant punched in the appropriate code.
"Step right up, Mr. Opal," invited Gwillam Forte. "You're on the air. If you're NRC, you know the
pro-cedure."
Opal went through the steps with accustomed ease. He sat down at the console, faced the
screen, and in-toned: "Izard T. Opal, Ph.D. class of 1988, State University of New York, South
Bronx campus." He then turned his face to present a profile to the screen, at the same time
placing his right hand flat on a glass plate beside the keyboard.
After an interval of a few seconds there appeared on the screen a series of still images showing
Opal in vari-ous kinds of attire, ranging from swimming trunks-he had singularly unlovely fat
knees-to street wear, with and without a hat. This was followed by a brief se-quence showing
Opal walking. A print-out then noted that his voiceprint and fingerprints checked, as did the
analysis of his sweat and breath. "Subject," it said, was "confirmed as Izard T. Opal, born 12
January 1965, white Caucasian, blue eyes, brown hair, height 165 centimeters, weight 71
kilograms. Burn scar right fore-arm. Presently employed as Regional Safety Engineer, Texahoma
District, Nuclear Regulatory Commission."
Opal turned to Forte with a self-righteous smirk.
"Satisfied?"
"Not since my fifth wife divorced me."
"Can I go now?"
"Let's talk about the hot-water emission first. Where did you detect it?"
"You know where," Opal replied nastily. "Nothing happens at Sunshine Industries you don't know
about. But for the record, the temperature gradient in the Houston Ship Channel, as recorded by
satellite infra-red detection, indicates clearly that you're pumping cooling water into the channel
just beneath the keel of the so-called flagship of the Texas Fleet. Gant didn't think of checking
there."
"But you did. Now, that's what I call smart."
Opal beamed. His eyes came alight with smugness, arrogance, and a flash of something else.
Forte recog-nized it instantly: the unmistakable gleam of greed.
Forte relaxed. Once Opal proved he was in the pay of the NRC and not the Russians, Forte knew
he had nothing to fear. By the time the violation citation for unauthorized emission of hot water had
penetrated the successive layers of bureaucratic flab at the NRC, the Texas would have been at
the bottom of the channel for months. But Forte's sudden perception of Izard T. Opal as a man
who could be reasoned with made the solution to the problem even simpler.
"Let's go down to my office," Forte said with a wink, "where we can have a drink and discuss this
matter like civilized human beings."
Izard T. Opal's ready acceptance of Forte's invita-tion told him he had not erred.

Later that afternoon, Dr. Fallows encountered Forte in the command center from which the
computerized, crewless Texas would be directed in the "battle" against the Russians. Forte, like a
boy with a new slingshot, was ensconced in the padded command chair, his helmet chin strap
buckled tight, Hipping the enemy as the Russian ships appeared in computerized simulations on
the 360-degree panoramic screen that formed the wall of the circular chamber. The helmet
incorporated variable-magnification lenses, an eye-tracking device, and microcircuitry that
coupled eye movements with those of the servomotored Elbows carousels. The prin-ciple was
ancient, the device having first been used by American helicopter gun-ship pilots in Vietnam as far
back as the late 1960s, but as embodied on the Texas it was much refined. The thirty-six
carousels on the port side of the ship swung around as one to the target at which Forte's eyes
were directed, almost as quickly as his eye could move. He had only to press the firing pickle in
his right hand for a stream of simulated elec-tron beams to zap the targets that had engaged his
eye.
"Who's winning?" an amused Dr. Fallows asked. He rather enjoyed playing with toys himself.
"I always win," Forte said, unstrapping the helmet. "It's the only principle I never violate."
"Even with Izard T. Opal?"
"Especially with Izard T. Opal."
"How much did he cost you, Will?"
Forte started to reply, then thought better of it.
"I think I'll pass that one, Herb. If 1 told you, you'd want a raise."

1 JULY 1998
During the last days of June, the mood of Texas turned sullen, paranoid, mean and a little crazy,
and nowhere more so than in Houston.
Loving couples fought knock-down, drag-out battles. The rape rate quintupled; women ceased
going abroad at night unless accompanied by an armed escort, and on the streets during daylight
hours ostentatiously clutched black cylinders of Mace in sweaty hands. In schools, students were
openly rebellious and teachers more than usually indifferent to their depredations, which in one
case involved hallucinating seventh-graders, at midmorning recess, torching a Good Humor man
and his truck. Local industrial production was off 36 percent due to absenteeism. The drunk tank
at the city jail had to be emptied twice daily to make room for new arrivals. Automobile collisions,
hit-and-runs, casual shootings, coronaries, teen-age runaways, peti-tions for divorce,
wife-beatings, suicides, and armed robberies multiplied at a record rate. On 30 June,
Cherokee Tom Traynor put the Texas National Guard on alert to back up the local police and the
Texas Rangers, already on duty in Houston.
For perhaps the only time since 1845 were the citi-zens of Texas in such close accord as to the
cause of their discontent. Then it had been the approach of General Santa Ana's armies; today it
was the approach of the Russian fleet.
Texans, echoing the editorial stand of the Houston Herald and other Forte-owned newspapers
and tele-vision stations, had been at best suspicious of the Washington Protocols, at worst
absolutely hostile. This was but natural, considering the composition of the population. White,
Protestant, cattle-rasing, oil-drilling Texans reflexively rejected any position embraced by the
Eastern establishment, and few initiatives had been so rapturously hailed by the establishment as
the Wash-ington Protocols. The Chicanos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, Chinese, and recent
immigrants who made up the rest of the state's population had too-recent experi-ence with
Russian policy to want to have any further connection with it. The views of both old and new
elements were reinforced by the hair-raising accounts of the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas
Fleet's "good-will" visit to San Diego during the last ten days of June.
The twenty-four ships anchored in San Diego harbor on the evening of 21 June, and the senior
commanders were received at a sumptuous banquet ashore by a delegation of city fathers who
assured them that San Diego, unlike Seattle and San Francisco, was waiting to greet officers and
men like the prodigal son returned. Heartened and off-guard by this unexpected windfall of
hospitality, Fleet Admiral Vladimir Grell gave orders to his captains to allow one-half their officers
and one-third their enlisted men to go ashore at noon the next day, before the handsome offer
was rescinded. The liberty parties totaled just under ten thousand men, most of whom were
rounded up at gunpoint and returned to their ships by armed patrols during the fol-lowing ten days.
The day began sedately enough, with tight little groups of sailors in freshly laundered whites
fanning out from the port area in search of the sailor's simple pleasures. They quickly learned that
pleasures in San Diego were more abundant and available than they could have dreamed, and
best of all, they were free. Taxis refused to accept payment, as did the restaurants, which heaped
their plates with seafood, and the bars and lounges, which plied them with spirituous bever-ages.
By midafternoon, their anabasis had carried the ten thousand from Chula Vista to Encinitas, from
Coronado to El Cajon. Considering their numbers, they were relatively invisible during the course
of the after-noon and early evening, for most had gravitated to the myriad bars, where they were
made welcome, and were proceeding to drink their way through the available stock of firewater. In
this endeavor they were ably assisted by the platoons of lissome women, and regi-ments not so
lissome, whom Lorry Vine had recruited from up and down the coast to do what, after long
experience, came naturally.
Of liquor there was too much, of female companion-ship too little-even Lorry Vine couldn't at such
short notice assemble more than a fraction of the host-or rather, hostesses-required, and the
disparity led to dis-cussion between the haves and have-nots, in the best Marxist dialectical
tradition. By ten o'clock that fateful day, 22 June, the wail of police and ambulance sirens became
continuous, as did the crash of shattering glass, stentorian cursing in an assortment of Slavic and
Altaic languages, the crack of chair against skull, and, above all the rest, the outraged howls of the
damsels caught in the cross fire. Such were the beginnings of that muggy June night, and from
that point onward the fortunes of the great city of San Diego declined.
It was two days before order was restored, by the combined police forces of neighboring cities of
southern California. (Admiral Grell wisely forbore to launch his shore patrols into the maelstrom,
fearing they would be sucked into the melee in their turn.) Bloody, tat-tered survivors were flung
into then: whaleboats and motor launches en route to the brigs aboard their respective ships,
which soon resembled so many floating Black Holes of Calcutta. Some sailors had taken their
liberty literally, seeking it as far away as Des Moines, Iowa, before being rounded up and brought
back. The city itself looked as if it had come through-only barely-a typhoon. Mayor Archibold Grace
was in hiding, wondering bitterly whether the money he had skimmed from Forte's bankroll before
the descent of the Slavs would be sufficient to put out a contract on that eminent Texan's life.
Admiral Grell released to the press an excoriation of the city of San Diego, which had with
consummate capitalist cunning provoked his blameless men into riotous excesses, and hinted
darkly that they had been drugged, seduced, poisoned, debauched, and otherwise abused by the
scheming natives. With that, the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet raised anchor and stood out
to sea.
The devastated and benumbed city tallied the cost of its hospitality. With the results still
incomplete, the score stood at 2 murders, 76 rapes, 332 aggravated assaults, 13 arsons, 20
kidnappings-mostly of teen-aged girls-56 robberies with violence, uncounted cases of public
drunkenness and disorderly conduct, and several thousand lesser misdemeanors such as child
abuse, micturating on and throwing bottles at pedes-trians from hotel windows, driving stolen
buses off bridges, hijacking an airliner, pulling down statues in public parks, defilement of
churches and cemeteries, and destruction, theft, burning, and looting of private property valued at
$33 million.
Gwillam Forte read the reports with both distress and exhilaration. He grieved for the bereaved,
and felt a twinge of guilt for having been the author of their misfortunes. On the other hand, viewed
as realpolitik, a decisive victory had been won by making the fraudu-lent Washington Protocols
politically unacceptable to all thinking Americans. Seen in this light, the costs had been negligible
compared with the eventual, inevitable defeat and enslavement of the United States. It was thus
with sanguine expectation that Forte awaited the out-pouring of national indignation from the
media, which would crystallize resistance among Americans against the Russian foe.
He waited in vain.
With the exception of his own newspaper and tele-vision chain and that of New Hampshire's J. D.
Pascal, the media seemed to have taken its cue from TASS, blaming "rightist adventurers" and
"cold-war mas-todons" for inciting the impressionable young sailors of the Russian fleet to
ungentlemanly behavior. Estab-lishment editorialists attributed the tragedy of San Diego variously
to youthful high spirits, the collision of cultures, tensions of shipboard life, and the innocent
misunderstandings that must always arise at the inter-face of linguistic, social, and geographical
disparities. None were so indelicate as to recall parallels of Soviet criminality and rapine in Berlin,
Prague, Vienna, Warsaw, and Budapest in 1945 and thereafter.
By the end of the first week in July, except in Cali-fornia, where the Russians had been, and
Texas, where they were headed, the San Diego 'events' had been oblit-erated from the American
consciousness by the deluge of euphoric newspaper and television commentary on the benefits
of prosperity that the Washington Protocols promised-just around the corner.
In Las Vegas, political pollsters were giving eight-to-one odds on a national consensus that would
make the protocols law of the land by October, ushering in a new era of international relations and
peaceful co-operation between the Russian and American blocs. At a press conference televised
nationally, President Wynn stated that, as he had always done, he would respond to the will of his
countrymen; when pressed, he ad-mitted that, up to the present moment, that will was
overwhelmingly in favor of the Washington Protocols.
He wasn't speaking for Texas.
In the State house in Austin, the legislature had gone into continuous executive session at noon
on 24 June, when the true dimensions of the sack of San Diego be-came apparent. The
lawmakers were of one mind con-cerning the imminent visit of the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas
Fleet to Houston: they wanted it canceled. To allow the Russians to repeat their barbarities on the
maidenhood and the business capital of the south-west was obviously unthinkable, especially in
view of the refusal of the Russian high command to take any responsibility for the tragedy of San
Diego-which practically guaranteed its repetition in Houston.
A resolution outlining the reasoning of the legisla-ture, and respectfully requesting that the
President of the United States change the venue of the Soviet fleet's visit to another site, was
drafted, passed unanimously, endorsed by Governor Tom Traynor, and sent by hand of a
confidential messenger to the White House.
The president read the missive with relief. Here was the first evidence of the existence of an
organized, powerful, and vocal pressure group opposed to the Russian program of creeping
conquest of America. A whole state, and a pivotal one, was on his side. Cali-fornia, too, had
weighed in against the Russians. This antipathy could, if nurtured, be translated into active
political resistance against the protocols. But even as President Wilson Wynn savored the
thought, his politi-cal instincts told him Texan and Californian anger would not be enough for
victory against the overwhelm-ing influence on the electorate of the media, which had come down
hard on the side of the Russian initiative. From this point of view, and incidentally that of the
Californians and Texans, the situation would have to get worse-much worse-before it would get
better.
The president took pen in hand, and using it like a coal scoop, shoveled salt into the open wound.
The messenger who brought the Texans' courteous petition took back President Wynn's
blistering response.
The president reminded the governor and legislature that when he, as president of the United
States, had informed them of the Russian request that the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet
pay a courtesy call at Houston, they had answered that Texas would be "honored and delighted to
receive" the fleet with the "customary and generous hospitality for which Texas has been famed
down through history." He declared that it was much too late in the day for the President of the
United States to face the embarrassment of tell-ing the Russians they would have to cancel their
ten-day port call, disrupting their logistical arrangements and necessitating finding another port
that could ac-commodate the fleet on short notice, an obvious im-possibility. He observed that
any disruption of plans now would imperil delicate negotiations between the two powers, and even
jeopardize the signing of the Washington Protocols, which all thinking and patriotic Americans
realized represented the only hope for a peaceful and secure future. He added that only
small-minded and vicious men could doubt the friendship of the great Russian people and the
benefits that would evolve upon closer cooperation with them. He warned that neither he nor other
decent Americans would tolerate any break in the united front for peace by renegade
troublemakers. He cautioned the Texans, say-ing that this matter transcended petty state
interests, and indeed impinged upon foreign policy, reserved to the president and the Senate. He
recalled the fate of Texas when, in 1864, it reaped the bitter harvest of sedition, and suggested
that a short memory should not put Texas in a position to suffer the same tragedy once more.
                                               *     *   *
The speaker of the Texas House of Representatives rose behind the lectern before the joint
session of the legislature and ceremonially received the letter of the President of the United States
from the courier. He slit the envelope and removed the message. The chamber was hushed as
he scanned the single page and opened his mouth to begin reading. He closed it again, as his
eyes swept the lines of text. His face flushed, then slowly paled.
He leaned over and whispered a few words to the clerk of the House, who got up and replaced the
speaker at the lectern.
The speaker retired to the well of the House and took a seat. He remembered that the messenger
who brought evil tidings to the king in olden times generally had his head cut off. He was afraid he
wouldn't be so lucky.

3 JULY 1998
For six months-ever since his discussion with President Wynn and Nikolai Vasilievich Grimm-
Gwillam Forte had heard the time's winged chariot hurrying near. In the past weeks, when it
became apparent that no engineering miracle could be wrought that would give the Texas the
blazing speed that must scare the Russians into sinking the ship in panic, the pressure had
become unbearable. Forte was one of those who compulsively step on the lines on a sidewalk,
though knowing it breaks his gait and slows his pace- and is stupid, to boot. So it was with the
larger things in life, projects he had spawned, promises he had made: they had, somehow or
other, to be reconciled; until they were, each night he went to bed a miserable man.
He had promised Governor Traynor to make the U.S.S. Texas a spectacular symbol of a proud,
progres-sive state. He broke that promise with another, one to President Wynn, to bait the
Russians into sinking the Texas. The promises were irreconcilable.
But now the San Diego Outrage, as his headline writers called it, changed everything. American
public opinion would now tilt against any dealing with Russia, reprieve the Texas to lead the Texas
Millenary Celebra-tions, and save Forte from welshing on either of his promises. Anti-Russian
feeling was at high pitch in the Statehouse, he knew, and it would spread like poison throughout
America. By midweek, the President would cancel the fleet visits altogether, tear up the
Washington Protocols draft, and thus buy time for the nation to put its defenses in order. With the
Texas legislature still in secret session, he couldn't predict the exact sequence of events, but he
was so confident of the final result that, when he slept that second night in July, for the first time in
months he was not afflicted with nightmares.
The next morning, refreshed and filled with unac-customed vigor, and the Texas on the back
burner, he was ready to give full attention to urgent matters that had been piling up since that
White House conference the last week of December.
His administrative assistant had thoughtfully ar-ranged the problem files in his in-box in the order
of priority, the toughest on top. When he saw the first, he almost wished himself back in SD-1
grappling with the problems of the Texas.
The folder was labeled "Stenco."
Stenco was the acronym for Satellite Technology and Extraterrestrial Nucleonics Company.
Around the shop it was referred to as "Stinko," and there was no denying that it gave off a
disagreeable odor.
Sunshine Industries had acquired Stenco when space technology had been full of promise and
atomic fuels were the propellant of choice for maneuvering large structures in space during the
building of agricolonies, powersats, and free-fall factories. But all such projects withered quickly in
the shadow of the East-West armed-satellite confrontation in outer space. Stenco, always a
bridesmaid, never a bride, stayed alive on hope and the expectation of lender banks that Gwillam
Forte, with his riches, would eventually bail it out.
Forte had no such intention. He had never taken day-to-day charge of its activities or research-its
proj-ects were much too recondite for him to understand- and in the end, it was wise that he
hadn't. For its company officers had begun to share his disenchantment despite-or perhaps
because of-having acquired a majority interest in the company through the purchase of stock
Forte was only too glad to sell. He had quietly reduced his holdings to their present level of 16
percent, sufficient to exercise control over the faltering company, but not enough to give him a
bath if it went under.
When it went under. Persistent reports claimed the president of Stenco was, with the active
collaboration of certain other officers, looting what cash remained in the till. Investigators from the
Bureau of Internal Revenue, the state's Attorney's Office, and the Securities and Ex-change
Commission were sniffing around, holding per-fumed handkerchiefs to their noses. It was only a
mat-ter of time until the chief thief grabbed his satchel and ran. Gwillam Forte could easily have
replaced him. But executives who could turn Stenco around also knew that whoever occupied the
executive hot seat when the sheriff came calling would spend a long time repenting it behind big
doors that cast narrow shadows. A real hoodoo, Stenco.
It was after some minutes of idly shuffling through Stenco papers, his mind mostly elsewhere,
that Gwillam Forte became aware that a voice at his elbow had been making sounds for what
now seemed quite some time.
"Yes, Miss Barker?"
"It's a Mr. Opal, sir."
Gwillam Forte eyed his secretary's legs. They were long, slender, shapely, and, despite all their
antiseptic excellences, extremely sexy. They must have won her the job; it couldn't have been her
syntax.
"What's a Mr. Opal?" he asked.
Her jaw fell just enough to reveal a row of perfect teeth. He thought back. It may have been the
teeth. And those lovely lips, which always seemed swollen with sleep.
"The man in my office," she stammered. "Izard T. Opal."
"Ah-that explains it. Push tun in, preferably with a long stick."
She walked out, her hips swaying like ripe grain at harvest time. It could, Forte decided, have only
been the hips. The reflection was brief, for this pleasant train of thought was abruptly derailed by
the appearance of Dr. Izard T. Opal. A week's absence had not squared his rounded shoulders,
or corrected his insolent stare, or straightened the vulpine curve of his lips. He was every bit as
disagreeable to the eye as he had been the last time Forte saw him.
Forte rose and extended his hand with a smile. After all, the man was his guest. Perhaps he had
come to make amends for his none-too-subtle blackmail a few days earlier.
"An unexpected pleasure, Dr. Opal," he said, batting exactly .500 in the truth department.
"Hi there, Will," Opal replied, causing the corners of Forte's smile to wilt.
Opal sat down without invitation, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, and lit one. Gwillam
Forte was a nonsmoker, and his antipathy was complete when Opal blew a plume of smoke in
his direction. Forte decided that the man had come to put the bite on him again: his manner was
that of a pimp making the rounds to collect the day's take.
"Care for coffee, Dr. Opal-or perhaps you'd prefer a drink?" He waved his hand at the rows of
bottles and crystal behind sliding glass doors at the far end of the room.
Opal shook his head.
"I'm here on business."
"Business? I thought we concluded our business last week."
"That was last week's business. I'm here on this week's business."
"I see."
Opal examined the end of his cigarette. It seemed to annoy him.
"I guess you, with your scientists in white coats and big underground laboratories, think nobody
else can do research-one of the little people like me, for in-stance."
Forte felt his choler rising. Those who identified themselves with the great faceless masses-the
stock-in-trade of politicians and other charlatans-never failed to enrage him.
"What research have you been doing?" Forte en-quired softly.
Opal puffed his cigarette and looked at Forte with a self-satisfied smirk.
"I knew you had something up your sleeve when you-" He tensed suddenly and looked about the
room. Then he relaxed and with studied casualness took an-other drag on the cigarette. ". . .
when you and I had that discussion."
"Personally, I'd put hot water pretty far down on the list of mortal sins," Forte observed.
"The government doesn't," Opal snapped.
"So you've reported the incident, after all?"
"Not yet."
"Why not?"
"You see, a few days ago I rented a helicopter and fitted it out with high-resolution infrared
sensors. Then
I coupled it to the helicopter's own inertial navigation system. I taped the output of both devices
over a thirty-square-kilometer search area around SD-1. I then ran the tapes through the NRC
computer and had a print-out superimposed on a map of the channel area. What do you think I
found?"
"That a straight beats three-of-a-kind?" On the knee-hole speed key he tapped out a message to
his security staff to have two men standing by outside his office. . He didn't have to specify that
they be tough, mean, and efficient: they all were.
"I found," Opal said, "that the thermal energy radi-ated by the heat sinks you have registered with
the NRC for recirculation of nuclear reactor water in your test units was close to zero. On the
other hand, that emanating from the Texas basin damn near busted the readout."
"So? You knew that when you came calling on us at SD-1 last week."
"Yes, but I hadn't checked the currents in the chan-nel then. I did yesterday. For all practical
purposes, the channel is filled with dead water. And that changes the whole picture."
"I don't see how."
"Come on, Will." Opal chuckled. "Of course you do. I had naturally assumed that the reactor heat
had been carried far out into the channel by currents. But if the currents don't exist, then the only
explanation for tem-perature transfer of that magnitude is by radiation, not convection. Heat
radiation through water is a much slower process than convection. That means that the diversion
of hot water has been going on-not days or weeks, as you had led me to believe-but months."
"Pretty shrewd, Doctor."
"Just wait. . . . Early this morning I took a stroll along the channel bank. I talked with some of the
old-timers there, asked about their catches lately. Surprising thing, they told me-ever since
January, fishing has improved considerably in waters around the Texas basin. They couldn't
account for it. But I could: the heated waters, particularly during winter and spring, had caused a
proliferation of macroscopic fauna and flora on which fish live. I rented a boat and spent two hours
trolling along the channel. Didn't catch a thing, except three little ones down near the Texas. Get
the picture, Will?"
"Draw it for me."
He did. ...
According to Opal, creating a new cooling basin of adequate dimensions for Sunshine Industries'
nuclear-reactor testing program would have meant the sacrifice of a large land area adjacent to
SD-1. Land in the area was at a premium because of its proximity to the Hous-ton Ship Channel.
Rather than condemn valuable land, Forte had drilled an underground conduit to the Texas basin,
where he thought it wouldn't be noticed. Except of course, Dr. Opal admitted, by someone of
extraor-dinary perspicacity. Somebody like Dr. Opal.
Forte breathed a silent sigh of relief. So the nasty little man wasn't a threat to the Texas project
after all. National security was no longer at issue, since the Washington Protocols were as good
as dead, but those four nuclear reactors aboard the Texas were something the NRC had best not
learn about.
Forte tapped out a message on the kneehole speed key.
"I wish I had met you before you went to work for the NRC," Forte said wistfully.
"Why?"
"Isn't it obvious? You're a fast thinker. Fast thinking is what makes my business go. You don't
think I built Sunshine Industries all by myself, do you? No, Indeed- this empire was built by smart,
resourceful, imaginative men. About the only smart thing I did was recognize them and hire them."
Dr. Izard T. Opal, who had come to the office with the intention of talking about hard cash, was
startled into another train of thought.
"Well," he said, choosing his words with care, "I am not, after all, married to the Nuclear
Regulatory Com-mission. If ever the occasion arose that my special tal-"
The door opened, and an erect, distinguished gray-haired man came in.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Forte," he apologized. "I didn't realize you had company. Your appointment
calender was clear."
"Come on in, James," Forte said, introducing his executive vice-president, James R. Rogette, to
Opal. "What's on your mind?"
"Oh, nothing that can't wait," he said, looking side-wise at Opal.
"Go ahead and talk. We were just shooting the breeze."
"It's-uh-rather sensitive."
"Dr. Opal is a man who can keep secrets-isn't that right, Doctor?" Forte said conspiratorially.
"Right."
"Well . . . it's about Stenco."
"Stenco." Forte grimaced.
"Yes. We've got troubles."
"Stenco's always got troubles," Forte scoffed. "I can't figure why. If you'd only hire and keep the
right executives, it'd run like a clock. Great future, Stenco- space travel, nuclear development,
broad-spectrum re-search."
"This is different. Jackson Freed has just resigned."
"Jack? I don't believe it!"
"Effective immediately. Cleaned out his desk and took off. Pressure got to him. He said bleeding
ulcers aren't worth ten times what the president of the United States makes, let alone three
times."
"But-but-"
"Yes, I know. Who can replace him? Freed is a rare type-sharp brain, understanding of nuclear
engineering, enough experience with government to handle bureau-cracy, a young man with vigor
and imagination, the kind of man who gets things done."
"And ruthless," Forte added. "Just what we needed to get rid of the deadwood. I guess we'll have
to go with Alcott now. He's next in line."
Rogette laughed. "Alcott's a pussycat. You need a tiger."
"Then Bascom?"
"Good administrator, but no imagination. Can't risk it."
"van Cleve, then. He's got imagination."
"Yes, but he has to call a meeting to decide whether to scratch his itching ass. I'm telling you, Mr.
Forte, the cupboard's bare."
Forte sighed heavily.
"Then get your outside-recruitment people cracking. Meanwhile, let me sleep on it. Maybe I can
shift some-body from one of my operating divisions. I'll let you know when I've seen your list."
After Rogette left, there was a long silence as Forte stared out the window, apparently in deep
thought.
A discreet cough roused him from his reverie.
"Oh, excuse me, Dr. Opal," he said, turning around in his chair.
"Maybe it won't be such a hard job as you think."
"What's that?" Forte asked absently. "Oh, you mean the hot-water problem? No, I suppose it
won't. We'll work out something."
"No, no-the job."
"The Stenco presidency? You're a hundred-percent wrong. It's probably the toughest slot of any in
my forty-odd companies. A real man-killer."
"I didn't mean the job itself," Opal said, his voice tightening. "I meant filling it."
On Forte's face, comprehension slowly dawned.
"Me," Opal said. "The man Rogette described is me, isn't it-young, smart, conversant with nuclear
engineering, a man of action, experience with the govern-ment. Fits me like a glove."
"Well, now, Dr. Opal-"
"Izzie."
"Well, now, Izzie." Forte repressed a shudder. "What we're talking about is big league."
"Put me in, coach. I'm ready. Besides, I'm wasted in this job-getting people in hot water. Get it-hot
water?"
Forte produced a little gallows laughter.
"I can do things," Opal said, his narrow-eyed expres-sion conveying just the right amount of
menace.
"That's true," Forte said nervously. He rubbed his finger along his lower lip. "But you don't know
what you'd be letting yourself in for. It's a big job, a respon-sible job."
"I eat responsibility for breakfast."
"Risky, too. It's a man-eater, a real meat-grinder."
"A job's no bigger than the man who fills it," said Opal sententiously.
"Knowing you might get burned? You wouldn't be the first."
"It's all settled, then," said Opal briskly, before the old fool changed his mind.
"There's a contract to be signed, of course," Forte said. "In Sunshine Industries' companies, the
buck stops at the president's desk. He's the one who gets the pay and the kudos if all goes
swimmingly. By the same token, he's the one who drowns if things go wrong. I must warn you of
that."
But Dr. Izard T. Opal wasn't listening.
Forty-five minutes later Opal signed the contract that made him new president and CEO of
Satellite Tech-nology and Extraterrestrial Nucleonics Company. Right up to the last minute, Forte
several times seemed on the verge of second thoughts. Opal did not, therefore, read the contract
with the deliberation he usually ac-corded such documents. His chief concern was the clause
concerning the salary, which was beyond his wildest ambitions.
"Board approval is only a formality," Forte said, after congratulating Opal on his new job. "I'll have
an extraordinary meeting convened tomorrow. You can take charge immediately afterward."
"You won't be sorry," Opal assured him.
"I hope not."
"In fact, Will, what you did today is the smartest thing you've done in years."
"I hope so."

4 JULY 1998
For days, the statehouse in Austin had been in a state of siege. None but legislators-not even
clerks or coffee runners-were allowed inside the guarded doors. And once in, no lawmaker had
been allowed to leave, for fear of premature disclosure of the seditious deliberations taking place
in the chamber.
Sedition? Some called it revolution, and wanted no part of it. But they were distinctly in the
minority, and took care to be inconspicuous, for their fellow repre-sentatives and senators were
breathing fire.
The morning of American Independence Day found the legislators queuing up before the six wash
basins in the men's lounge to shave, or taking delivery of card-board boxes of pastry and big
insulated jugs of coffee passed through by the Rangers, or gossiping in the cloakroom while doing
household chores. One distin-guished member from the Panhandle, temporarily manning a
broom handle, observed that today would be the day.
"Not necessarily," his companion said, a lady who had so far forgotten her station as to be picking
cigarette butts from a brass receptacle. "They're still three days away." She smoothed the sand
with her hand. "I heard this morning over the radio they're steaming slowly northward off Vera
Cruz."
"I wasn't talking about Russia's Seventeenth Fleet. I'm talking about us. If we don't decide to act
today, it'll be too late to act at all."
"But you're sure we'll act?" the lady needled. Her distinguished fellow sweeper had made a career
of fence-sitting. It was rumored that even when the voting was secret, he sometimes cast a blank
ballot.
"Little lady," he intoned, brandishing his broom like a scimitar, "I speak not for the others, but as
for me-"
She never learned the as-for-him, for at that moment the quorum-call bell shrilled, and the
members hurried to their places, for Cherokee Tom Traynor was sched-uled to address the
House. His orotund delivery was worth a hearing anytime, especially by aspiring politi-cians
seeking an effective oratorical style to emulate. Adding to his appeal today was his total ignorance
of the past days' deliberations by the House and Senate. Would he take the line of moderation,
wherein lay political safety, or would he opt for one of the two riskier extreme positions-prostration
before the Rus-sians as demanded by President Wilson Wynn, or de-fiance?
Striding down the center aisle of the chamber, his grim face looking neither right nor left, Governor
Tray-nor ascended the podium. He grasped the lectern in both meaty hands and glared the
buzzing House into silence. Another minute passed as his eyes touched, and briefly held, those of
every one of the lawmakers. He was calling the roll. He wanted to know who it was who today
would decide the fate of Texas. He opened his mouth to speak.
"Texans!" he roared, raising the hair on the napes of a hundred necks.
For a long moment he said nothing else.
He let the legislators simmer in the juice of that holy word, which evoked visions of endless vistas
of lush cattle range, the golden wheatlands of the Panhandle, the spuming oil rigs of East Texas,
leggy Cowboys' pompon girls, fresh shrimp from the Gulf, haute cou-ture from the Galleria,
line-camp camaraderie, eagles silhouetted against the sun, and that indelible image of the
immolation of the Good at the Alamo fighting the forces of Evil. The word hung in midair. His eyes
were on far horizons, as if the word had floated away from his lips and had come to rest
somewhere way out there, like a guiding star by which mankind fixed its course.
For that long, long moment there was silence, an eerie silence, as if he spoke to an empty
chamber. Then someone broke the spell with a rebel yell, and sud-denly the capitol exploded with
the thunder of shouting and deafening, sustained tumult.
At that moment, Cherokee Tom Traynor could have run for God and won by acclamation.
Wistfully, he re-minded himself to use the device-which in fact had been no device at all, but
merely a pause to give him-self time to think of something appropriately solemn to match the
gravity of the occasion-during his next campaign ... if there ever would be one, after the Russians.
He raised his hand for silence. After a few moments he got it.
"Texans are not strangers to peril," he began, in quiet tone. "We have had famines, hurricanes,
Indian massacres, outlawry, dust storms, floods, range wars, foreign invasions. Some we have
won, some we have lost. But we have never run away from adversity, never shirked battle. We've
fought for our freedom on many past occasions, and it looks like," he went on, his voice rising, "if
you ladies and gentlemen concur, that-"
He was drowned out in a flood of acclaim.
The governor raised his hands.
". . . and it looks like we'll have to do it again. We won't run away, and we won't surrender, for we
know that those who won't fight for their liberty don't deserve it. Besides, the odds are right: Texas
against everybody else in the world!"
He waited for the laughter and cheering to subside. Then his tone became serious once more.
"Fighting for what's right has been the basic philoso-phy of Texas ever since this beloved land
was first hacked out of the wilderness by men who valued their independence and self-respect
more than they did their lives. We, their sons, must be worthy of those men.
"Is it possible for free and self-respecting men to submit to the indignities and foul ingratitude and
blatant criminality that the Russian Seventeenth High Seas Fleet heaped upon the good people of
San Diego, in the name of friendship? I say to you no! We will not submit. We will not-"
This time the cheers were louder, even more frenetic than before.
Cherokee Tom, a medicine man expert in taking the political pulse, recognized the fever signs of
willing submission to messianism. This moment would be the pinnacle of his career. Never again
would he command such support; if only he could freeze-dry it for the senatorial campaign in
2000 . . .
"All my life I've been a patriotic American," he went on. "But I was born in Texas, and have
allegiance to this great state as well. God forbid that I should ever have to choose between the
state and the nation. Cer-tainly, that choice need not be made today, for when I say that I,
Cherokee Tom Traynor, will fight and die for my State of Texas, I am also fighting to protect the
best interests of the United States itself, which the Russians seek to destroy.
"We cannot defy our president. We cannot allow our land and our daughters to be ravished by the
Russian serf. Then what can we do? We can do this: we can inform the President of the United
States that we refuse to allow the Russians into Texan waters, and that if they come, we will fight.
One part of the nation cannot be at peace while the other is at war, you'll say. True- and therefore
we further say that the moment a Rus-sian man-of-war enters Texas's territorial waters, it will be
fired upon. And at that instant the Sovereign State of Texas will secede from, and declare its
independence of, the Union.
"The choice devolves upon our president. Does he want Texas to remain in the Union? Then he
must tell the Russians to refrain from sullying our shores. Does he wish to sue for a craven
peace with the Russians without the encumbrance of a restive Texas? Then he will bid us
farewell and Godspeed, taking no responsi-bility for our actions.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I recommend to your con-sideration a bill, a declaration of independence
of the Sovereign State of Texas, to become effective the mo-ment the Russian fleet invades our
waters. This bill gives to us, and to the President of the United States, the widest scope for action
for our mutual benefit. It also narrows the choices of Russia to two: war or peace."
No cheering punctuated the conclusion of his speech. When he stepped down from the dais, a
reflective si-lence closed about the chamber. For the remainder of the morning that mood
prevailed, as the legislators de-bated the issue.
At noon, with twelve members voting nay, and one abstaining, the two houses overwhelmingly
approved the draft bill for the independence of Texas, condi-tional upon the outbreak of hostilities
between the State of Texas and the Soviet Union. . . .
At nine o'clock that cloudless night, an hour after sunset, Governor Traynor went on television. His
ap-pearance had been announced at ten-minute intervals since early afternoon. It was estimated
that fully 97 percent of the population of Texas would be watching.
His speech was dignified and brief, with none of his customary imagery and rhetorical flourishes.
He spoke of the Russian menace. He gave a resume of his re-marks in the Statehouse that
morning. He noted the resolution by both houses of the Texas legislature call-ing for immediate
succession from the United States of America and the promulgation of the Second Republic of
Texas in the event of Russian incursion into Texas' waters. Then his voice became grave.
"It is for us, your representatives, to propose. It is for you, the people of Texas, to decide. At this
moment, in geosynchronous orbit 38,000 kilometers above Texas, the lenses of TexComSat
23-LBJ are focused on us. In exactly five minutes"-he consulted his watch- "at 9:25 p.m., all
power-generating equipment in the State of Texas, except for emergency facilities, will be cut.
The state will be in total darkness.
"Those who favor Texas remaining in a union that submits to the Russian yoke-if any such there
be- will step outside into the night and show a light. A match's flare, a flashlight, even the glow of a
cigarette, will be picked up and registered by TexComSat 23-LBJ and relayed to Earth for instant
tabulation. I say again: anyone who wishes to remain a citizen of a craven, misguided, gutless
United States will step out-side, and in his loneliness show his feeble beam."
He paused.
"At 9:35 p.m.," he resumed, "just fourteen minutes hence, all those in favor of a proud,
independent Re-public of Texas, ready to fight anybody and everybody who denies us the honor
we will die to preserve, will step proudly out into the velvety blackness of the Texas night and light
the lamp of freedom. . . ."
At nine-twenty-five, there were brief, isolated flashes of light from one end of Texas to the other.
More often than not, they were followed by even briefer flashes as indignant Texans, their firearms
at the ready for such expressions of disloyalty, zeroed in on the dis-sidents and let fly. As a test of
loyalty toward the United States, it was a candle snuffed out in a high wind.
At nine-thirty-five, firehouse sirens wailed in every city in the state, and people poured out of
houses and apartment buildings. From the Rio Grande to the Okla-homa Panhandle, from the
borders of Louisiana to the sands of New Mexico fifteen hundred kilometers away, the state was
ablaze with the light of impending battle in twenty million defiant ayes of Texas.
6 JULY 1998
President Wilson Wynn had left instructions to be awakened the moment the Texas referendum
results were in, and shortly after midnight he was.
The frown of his political counselor, Manuel Silva, told him all he needed to know. It was what he
ex-pected. A spellbinder like Cherokee Tom Traynor, the lessons of the Civil War forgotten in an
appeal to state pride and states' rights, the colossal arrogance and stupidity of the Russians
during and after the fleet visit to San Diego . . . The result could scarcely have been otherwise.
"How bad?"
"As bad as bad can be, Mr. President. The nays were about as numerous as Bible salesmen in
Mecca."
"That's good."
Silva was taken aback.
"I beg your pardon, sir?"
"Sit down, Manny," the president said, motioning his aide toward a chintz-covered chair. "I'll tell
you a little bedtime story . . . Once upon a time there was a Little Red Riding Hood-no, that's not
quite true. I'd better begin again. Once upon a time there was a Big Red Hood named Ivan, an
ambitious but very careful man who one day felt the breath of his fellow wolves on his neck. As a
ranking member of the Kremlin hierarchy, he was naturally privy to their secrets. The most
im-portant of all was Project Lime Kiln, Russia's plan to use the Washington Protocols to destroy
our manu-facturing capabilities while they themselves stockpiled grain, whereupon they would
present us with an ulti-matum to surrender. The story has many twists and turns, but that's the
bare bones. And the barest of all the bones is that we'd have no choice but to accept, as our
defenses would by then be in shambles. We-"
"But why wasn't I told of this, Mr. President?" Silva asked indignantly.
"Manny, there's an old saying: He that tells a secret is another's slave. But keeping you in the dark
about Lime Kiln was more than a matter of security. Your job is to reflect the sense of the nation,
without being influenced by any inside information the electorate doesn't possess. You're my
sounding board. As your heart beats, so does that of America. I feel your fore-head and know
whether John Citizen is running a fever. Why do you think I never look at polls but have you read
them and tell me what, if anything, they mean?"
"Because what people say and what they think so seldom correspond."
"That's it-and you're expert in deducing one from the other. Now, then, what was the nation's
mood about the Washington Protocols yesterday, Manny?"
The small man with the dark eyes and six-hour stubble shrugged. "Well, Mr. President, yesterday
they were for the protocols. Naturally enough, after the media gush about the manifold advantages
of lower taxes thanks to decreased defense spending, the boon for the corn-belt farmers, the
boom for the inner city and small industry-oh, the man-in-the-street's for it, no question."
"That's yesterday. And tomorrow?"
Silva shrugged. "About the same, I'd guess. People prefer the comfortable lie to the inconvenient
truth. They want to believe the Russians have changed."
"What it amounts to," President Wynn concluded, sinking back in the pillows and regarding the
ceiling, "is that unless I rescind the invitation for the Soviet Seventeenth Fleet to visit Houston, the
State of Texas will secede-that's sure, because you can always count on somebody shooting off
a gun in Texas."
"We could send federal troops to prevent it."
"Federal troops," Wynn said wryly. "In the current state of our defenses, they'd need six weeks to
ford the Potomac . . . What happens if I accede to Texan pres-sure and rescind the fleet invitation,
Manny?"
Silva drew a finger across his throat.
"Impeachment-probably no later than next Friday, considering the strength of the
peace-at-any-price party. The only states you could count on to vote against your ouster are
California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexi-co, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Wyoming. I've al-ready
made soundings. In which case Vice-President Blackborn would be in, and his first act would
prob-ably be to reinstate the invitation. Back to square one."
Wilson Wynn was silent. For five minutes he lay there, drumming his fingers on the night table. At
last he turned to his political aide.
"Thanks for coming in, Manny. See you at the seven-thirty briefing."
"But-but, Mr. President, what have you decided? The staff is waiting outside. What shall I tell
them?"
President Wynn rolled over on his side and snapped out the light.
"Answer to both questions: nothing."

The red hot-line telephone just sat there, silent. It had been silent when Wilson Wynn entered the
Oval Office at seven-fifty, following the overnight briefing at breakfast, and it had been silent ever
since. It was now eleven-thirty, and just seeing it there made Wynn ner-vous. More than likely,
Premier and Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Vasily Vasilyevich
Vavilov was sitting in his office in the Kremlin, looking at his red telephone, waiting for the proper
psychological moment. Well, Wynn was good at waiting . . .
The telephone shrilled. Wilson Wynn reached for it automatically, caught himself, dropped his
hand, and leaned back in his chair. He let it ring six times before he picked up the receiver and
said a cheery "Hello, Vee! You caught me just as I was on my way out the door for lunch. Nice to
hear from you."
"Hiya, Will-how's tricks?" Vasily Vasilyevich prided himself on his command of American slang,
which went back, new words mixed indiscriminately with old, to the 40s.
"Not bad, if never worse," said Wynn mischievously, knowing that Triple Vee would instantly
commit to memory the phrase translated literally from the Spanish, but never heard in English.
"Good deal . . . Not bad, if never worse, eh? Yet, from what I pick up at the hustings, your not bad
could become very worse at any minute."
"Translation?"
"Governor Traynor's declaration of independence- on July fourth, speaking of interesting timing."
"Oh, that. You know how impulsive these Texas cowboys are-shoot first, ask questions after."
"So you think there will be shooting?" the Russian said darkly.
"I sure hope not-not by anybody."
"But you can't guarantee it."
"Who could? There must be eighty million unregis-tered guns in the United States-if you can
believe Trud. And there's always some hothead-on one side or the other-wanting to make a name
for himself as the fastest gun in the west."
"Then I take it that you, the president of the United States, are not recalling your official invitation
for the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet to visit Houston, Texas, the day after tomorrow?"
"God-if you'll excuse the expression-no!" said the president. "Why should I?"
"Have you communicated this to the authorities in Texas?"
"I'm afraid such a question intrudes in the internal affairs of the United States, Vee," President
Wynn noted stiffly. "But between us, I have not and will not. I alone, with the advice and consent of
the Senate, have sole jurisdiction over our foreign policy. Texas has nothing to say about this visit.
Nothing at all."
"And yet," Premier Vavilov persisted, "what if they . . . what if firing breaks out between our fleet
and certain unruly elements?"
"It won't, if the Soviet Fleet doesn't enter Texas waters."
"But you just said-"
"-That it's welcome, as indeed it is. It is for you to decide as to the advisability of the visit."
Wilson Wynn could visualize Vavilov squirming and making silent appeal to the other members of
the Presidium tuned in to the telephone conversation. The reply took some time in coming.
"We-I see no reason at this moment to instruct Admiral of the Fleet Grell not to visit Houston as
planned and approved by your government." Vavilov chose his words with care.
"So there's no problem."
"There is if we're shot at. I demand you provide the protection any host guarantees for the safety
of his guest."
"And how do I do that, Vee-station a soldier with his rifle at the head of every Texan?"
"Gee whiz, Will, you're making it tough on me."
"You can always skip Houston," President Wynn suggested.
Ho-ho! Vavilov thought. Now I have the picture. This is all an American plot to induce the Russian
fleet to avoid Houston, thus making the Russians look like cowardly fools in the face of Texan
bluff. He nodded knowingly to his comrades around the table. Their smiles told him they had seen
through the American trick, too.
"Nooo, Will, I think we should stick to our arrange-ments. But I still hope shooting can be avoided."
"Me, too, Vee," the president said. "Especially since once fighting erupted, I would be in a very
peculiar position."
"How so?"
"That Declaration of Texas Independence is condi-tional upon hostilities erupting. So long as they
don't, I'm still president of the fifty United States. But the moment they do, Texas will become a
foreign country, and I shall cease to exercise control over its foreign policy."
"Unless you send American troops to put down the rebellion."
"Never. I will never allow American soldiers to fire on their fellow citizens," Wynn declared firmly.
"We've made that mistake once. Never again."
But you won't mind if we shoot a few of them, you cagey old fox, Vasily Vasilyevich Vavilov
remarked to himself. That would solve a lot of problems for you, wouldn't it, Wilson Wynn? Your
hands would stay clean. We'd administer a badly needed taste of dis-cipline to the rumbustious
Texans, which you'd much appreciate, since they never voted for you, anyhow. Your
commitments to the fleet visits and the protocols would be intact, and your Eastern-establishment
constit-uents would be delighted to see the Texans chastised. Of course you wouldn't shoot your
fellow citizens,
Vavilov thought dourly. Why should you, when we're willing to do it for you?
"I believe we understand each other," Vavilov said.
"I hope so, Vee. But in the event I have not made myself clear, let me reiterate that the official
invitation of the United States to the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet remains unaltered and in
force. I trust it will be concluded to the complete satisfaction of all who love peace."

"Governor Traynor on one," President Wynn's per-sonal secretary announced in midafternoon.
Wynn lifted the receiver and said smoothly, "Tom! How nice of you to call, and how opportune-I
was just about to call to congratulate you on your speech at the Statehouse yesterday. A real
stem-winder. If I could declaim like that, I'd have been elected president twenty years ago."
"Thank you, Mr. President I just said what had to be said."
"I know. Public service can be brutal."
"Mr. President," Traynor said, clearing his throat, "I have something disagreeable to say.
Disagreeable, but necessary if innocent lives are to be spared."
"Then by all means say it."
"I may have got carried away with my rhetoric- I'll admit that-but I've dealt the hand and we'll play
it. Trouble is, we're short of chips."
"By which you mean, I suppose, that you lack the arms to launch a rebellion against the United
States?"
"We lack arms to defend our homes and families, sir. The National Guard is standing by, awaiting
orders. But there are tens of thousands of veterans and plain Texans armed only with deer rifles
and Saturday-night specials. As their governor, I cannot let them commit suicide."
"Then let them stay at home. That would be a wise course, and a dignified one. It would-"
"Sorry to sound impatient, sir, but that's neither here nor there. My people need weapons. There
are plenty in the federal arsenals at Nacogdoches, El Paso, and Amarillo."
"Hmmm, that would be a problem, Governor. You see, yesterday, to celebrate Independence Day,
I gave all employees at federal arsenals in Texas a week's holiday. My secretary of Defense said
they'd been work-ing overtime and badly needed a rest, I seem to recall. Now, ordinarily the
commanding officer of the arsenals would be available to tell you why it is legally impos-sible to
release any materiel for the purposes you have in mind. But under the circumstances, I doubt that
you'd find him or anybody else within miles of Nacog-doches, El Paso, or Amarillo. I'm really
sorry, Tom...."

Even now, at close to midnight, they kept coming. Texans were alive to the Russian threat; they
had voted secession from the United States rather than submit to it; and they were coming to
Houston to fight for it.
None came unarmed, but other preparations-provi-sions, accommodations, a supply of ready
cash-had been ignored in the rush of the moment. The urge to kill their invader blotted out all other
considerations. Sleep? They would have little time for that. Hunger? They hungered not for food
but for Russian scalps. Money? What they wanted only courage, not cash, could buy.
From his office high in the Herald building, Gwil-lam Forte watched them come, and wished Karl
Marx could be at his side. That bearded philosopher con-ceived of man as an economic animal, a
puppet pulled this way and that by the strings of the profit motive. What would he have made of
this ingathering, where men were ready to sacrifice fortune and life for that most impalpable of
things-self-respect?
His secure-line telephone rang.
"That you, Will?" Governor Traynor boomed.
"It's me, Tom. I heard your sermon in stone, and I want-"
"My wants first, tonight."
"Shoot."
"Have you observed the traffic lately?"
"I have."
"Well, so far it's only cars. In about an hour you'll be seeing trucks coming down from
Nacogdoches. Early tomorrow they'll be rolling in from El Paso and Am-arillo as well. Thousands
of trucks, full of arms and ammunition, from anti-tank guns to Peregrine missiles to .45-caliber
pistol ammo. Thousands of tons of the stuff, and it's got to be put out of sight on arrival. If it isn't, it
will be spotted by Russian spy satellites."
"Where did this stuff come from?"
"It's where it's going that matters now, Will. It's got to be undetectable by the Russians, yet
accessible to the ship channel for our defenders when the Rus-sians come."
"SD-1?"
"I was thinking of those huge tunnels you drilled under the channel. Open up the entrances, and
the trucks could drive right in."
"Tell them to come right along."
"Thanks, Will-I already have."


6 JULY 1998: MORNING
At dawn, along the fifty-kilometer-long Hous-ton Ship Channel from Houston down to Galveston
Bay, factories and refineries, warehouses and wharves, were astir with business. The business
was war.
Behind the earthen bunds that surrounded oil tank farms, men young and old were digging in and
siting artillery pieces. Atop the tangled scaffolding of cat-crackers and fractional distillation
columns snipers stockpiled food, water, and cases of ammunition for the long day ahead, already
as hot and muggy as a tropical swamp, when they would pick off individual sailors on warships
steaming up the channel. The roads were jammed with vehicles bearing supplies and
ammu-nition, some already daubed with red crosses to bear away the inevitable casualties.
Here and there ingenious citizens were preparing a welcome of a different sort for the Russians.
At a loading dock, a hundred men and women formed an assembly line to make mines to be
sown in the path of the advancing Russian column of ships. Oil drums were filled with dynamite,
with just enough air spaces to provide buoyancy, then sealed, painted dirty brown-the color of the
channel water-and fes-tooned with contact fuses. The drums were linked to-gether and towed
downstream in a long line, with an interval of a hundred meters between drums. One end of the
string was secured to a convenient dock, the other to the opposite shore. When the first ship hove
into view, the string would be loosed from its moorings.
The lead ship would run into it, and the drums would swing in toward its hull. Three or four would
explode, sowing others along the path of the following ships. Wholesale devastation would ensue.
...
Old salts gave the sweaty saboteurs the horselaugh: dynamite wouldn't so much as dent the
Russian water-line armor plate, they claimed. The grim man in charge-a former captain in the
U.S. Naval Reserve, newly commissioned at the same rank in the Texas Navy-told them to sheer
off. He was well aware that it was all labor in vain, but the exploding barrels would make a hell of a
racket, convey the illusion of fire power the Texas Navy didn't possess, and give his people
something to keep their minds off the over-whelming superiority of their foe.
Another group of enterprising if misguided defenders had somewhere collected five solar mirrors
ranging up to two meters in diameter and were installing them atop a grain elevator at water's
edge. Their leader, who recalled the legend of Archimedes setting fire to the Greek fleet at
Syracuse, proposed to make the blazing sun their ally. The concentrated rays of the sun were to
be focused on the bridges of the oncoming ships, blinding helmsmen and navigating officers
conning the ships and causing them to run up on the channel banks. There they would be game
for the slum youth, who were already busily digging foxholes from which they intended to emerge,
like pirates of old, boarding the enemy with grappling irons and bashing Russians with ball bats
and bicycle chains.
Meanwhile, three dredges used to keep the channel clear were busily shifting the bottom and
building shoals in the hope that deep-draught Russian vessels would run aground. Like a lot of
other Texans that day, they were embracing fantasies and clutching at phantom hopes.
By four-thirty that July morning, with the sun lazily hugging the horizon, an estimated 600,000
men, wom-en, and what the courts called children but their families proudly called men, had
converged on the ship channel from all over Texas.
They were the amateurs.
The professionals-men who had served in the American armed forces, made more practical
disposi-tions. The earliest-mobilized sited their artillery at ad-vantageous points along the
entrance to the channel, with overlapping fields of fire, reinforcing them with sandbags and even
hastily poured concrete revetments. They organized provisioning parties, ammunition trains,
first-aid stations, command posts, and observation sta-tions, and were linked together by
citizen-band radios from their automobiles. Enough ex-generals were on hand to staff twenty
divisions, but Governor Traynor went over the heads of all of them to appoint a young, tough,
energetic colonel to command.
By 0800 on 6 July, Colonel Walker had his day-old Texas Army in position facing the channel
mouth, wait-ing for the enemy, as ready as it would ever be.

Fifteen miles out at sea, just over the horizon, the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet and its
train of auxiliaries steamed slowly toward the Texas coast, just making steerageway. In the van,
with destroyers on each beam and off the bow, was the flagship Karl Marx, a huge long ship
whose main deck seemed to hug the surface of the sea. In the cabin of Admiral of the Soviet
Union Vladimir Grell stood a handsome young man at rigid attention.
The young three-striper repeated his orders: "Sir, I am to take the point with the destroyer under
my command, the Borodin, and proceed to the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel at normal
cruising speed. One kilometer from the channel marker buoy I will break out holiday bunting and
muster the men on the main deck for coming into port. I shall order speed reduced to ten knots. If
any challenge comes by radio, blinker, voice, or other means, I shall ignore it. If any hostile fire
comes from air, land, or sea, I shall ignore it, not returning fire. If no fire or hostile action prevents
it, I shall proceed to the designated anchorage in the ship basin in downtown Houston. Sir, this is
my under-standing of the admiral's orders."
The admiral looked at him sadly and nodded. The destroyer Borodin was a stalking horse. The
young man knew it, his crew knew it. It was their reward for being the best destroyer complement
in the Seventeenth Fleet. None other could be depended upon not to fire back, possibly destroying
the battle plan. Because they were the best, they had been chosen for the suicide mis-sion-for
reconnaissance of the Texan's dispositions and their repeated warnings for the Russians to keep
their distance left no doubt that, within hours, they would all be dead. They were going to their
deaths because he had ordered it, just as many Texans would die immediately after because the
Kremlin had ordered it. The admiral wished there was another way.
"Good luck, Captain," the admiral said, saluting.
The young commander saluted, his jaw line firm, tears springing to his eyes. He knew how much
the old man must be suffering.
The admiral suddenly stepped forward and clasped him in a hard embrace. "God bless you," he
whispered, then turned away.
When he turned again, the young man was gone. He cursed himself for an old fool, but then, with
sagging shoulders, excused himself on the grounds that this was the first such emotional display
of which he had been guilty in his forty-four years in the Soviet Navy. And the young captain was,
after all, his only son.

"Range?" said Major Motley, commanding the Chan-nel Delta Sector.
"Eight hundred fifty meters and closing."
The major swore.
"All means have been used to raise them-you're sure?"
"Yes, sir," Captain Biddle replied. "We've been guarding their radio frequencies for the past
thirty-six hours, and have sent warnings in English and Russian at one-minute intervals since the
first sighting to stay clear of our territorial waters or be fired upon. We've used international code,
signal flags, loudspeakers on the pilot boat that was sent to intercept them-every-thing. Chief
Charley Red Horse even tried Indian sign language."
"And they refuse to reply?"
"Yes, sir. They stand at attention on deck like dum-mies in a show window, and take no notice of
us whatever."
"Are they bluffing?"
"That's a negative, sir."
"I suppose not."
"But I can tell you one thing, Major: if 7 were the admiral, I'd kill myself before I sent my son on a
suicide mission like this."
"That's why you're a captain, not an admiral. Be-sides, he may have switched commanders on
the Boro-din."
He studied the advancing destroyer, a sleek white ship sliding through the water, as eerie in its
silence as the Flying Dutchman. "Try raising it once more," Major Motley said.
Keys rattled and voices spoke urgently into micro-phones as the ritual warnings were repeated.
There was no reply.
"Range?"
"Two hundred twenty meters, sir. Point-blank."
"All guns on target?"
"Yes, sir."
"Commence firing! Blow the son-of-a-bitch out of the water!"
And within twenty seconds, they did.


8 JULY 1998: NOON
The sea lanes between Tampico, Vera Cruz, and other Mexican oil ports and the European
continent, which depended largely on Mexican oil products, were as crowded during the closing
years of the twentieth century as the Straits of Hormuz had been a genera-tion earlier. The
million-ton tanker was now standard among world fleets, an immense brute that looked like a
black iceberg looming over the relatively tiny ships of the few remaining navies. The 98,000-ton
aircraft carrier U.S.S. Truman, for instance, was dwarfed when crossing the bows of the Russian
tanker Omsk during fleet maneuvers in the Caribbean, and its flight deck was only two or three
meters higher than the main deck of the Omsk when the tanker was fully loaded; in bal-last, it
towered over the Truman and every other man-of-war afloat.
Built in Soviet shipyards on the ultrasecret warm-water coast of Khuzistan, far from inhabited
areas of the Iranian Soviet Socialist Republic, the construction of the Omsk and other such
megatankers had aroused speculation among naval architects as to the reason for all the
mystery. After all, it was just another tanker, wasn't it?
Not quite. As a tanker, its compartmentation was singularly ill-designed, and its full cargo of crude
would scarcely have fueled the automobiles of Pocatello, Idaho, for a year. "Loading" operations in
Mexico, however, were always handled by reliable Communist
Party members, who also fudged account books and tank farm records to conceal the fact that
no more than a few thousand tons of crude were loaded at any port of call. Yet the ship sank
steadily in the water during its loading, and nobody who didn't need to know ever realized that the
cargo was salt water. This it would pump out in Europe-where onshore "oil" tanks regis-tered as
filling-only to take on later somewhat less sea water for the return to Mexico in ballast. In common
with many Russian inventions, its purported function was camouflage.
The Omsk's real cargo was not crude at all, but very refined. It had been designed by the best
naval archi-tects in the Soviet Union, and tested in computer simu-lations for every possibility, for
to participate in live maneuvers would have given away its vital secret to enemy reconnaissance
satellites. The crew was trained and retrained to razor sharpness. During the Soviet Seventeenth
High Seas Fleet's courtesy calls at Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego, the Omsk's sister
ship Pinsk had three times been "incapacitated with main-shaft lubrication problems" just out of
sight of land, but never more than a hundred or so miles from the fleet's anchorage. When the
fleet sailed south to pass through the Soviet Union's Panama Canal, the Pinsk, too large to clear
the locks, proceeded from its station off San Diego to its usual destination, the oil terminus of
Callao, Peru. As the shadow of the Seventeenth Fleet, it was replaced in the Gulf of Mexico by
the Omsk, which had been cruising on station just over the hori-zon from the fleet ever since.
At dawn on 6 July 1998, the Omsk received orders to move toward the Texas coast at full speed,
with all hands at action stations.
When it received its orders from Admiral Grell, the Omsk was eighty kilometers south of
Galveston. The day was hot and sunny. Not a cloud obscured the sky. Perfect helicopter weather.
                                               *     *     *
"Pilots! Man your planes!" ordered Captain Ugarov, air operations officer of the Omsk.
The main deck of the tanker at the moment of the command resembled that of any other
megatanker at sea-a sailor in salt-streaked blue dungarees was on his way by motorcycle from
his fo'c's'le quarters to the bridge aft, two of his mates were over the side on stag-ing touching up
the black paintwork, a lookout was aloft in the crow's-nest on the foremast. But otherwise the
decks were devoid of humanity. Running fore and aft were the huge layers of pipe, neatly aligned
like black spaghetti, that allowed crude to be pumped from one compartment to another to
maintain the ship's trim. Aft, the multiple decks of the poop reared like a ten-story apartment
building grafted onto the ship's fantail.
As the echoes of Captain Ugarov's order faded in the air, the Omsk began to undergo a
metamorphosis, like an enormous black caterpillar giving birth to but-terflies. The mass of the
deck piping parted down the middle and rolled back smoothly to the port and star-board sides.
Below was a grid of forty-eight round wells in the main deck, in mathematically precise ranks of
twelve fore and aft, four athwartships. Sunlight flashed from the blades of forty-eight helicopters
as they rose on their elevators into the light of day. A moment later the tiny craft lifted into the air,
four by four, and bored through the hazy sky toward Galveston. The ele-vators sank out of sight
only to deliver another brood of black gunships three minutes later. Wave on wave the Omsk
disgorged, until from a distance they ap-peared as a swarm of monstrous mosquitoes homing on
the fat flank of southern Texas.
"Course!" barked Captain Gregori Semenev, leader of Red Wing One, the first group of eight
helicopters launched.
"Two hundred and seventy degrees true," the navi-gator replied.
"Distance to target?"
"Seventy-three kilometers, sir."
The pilot cranked the information into his autopilot and read off the estimated-time-over-target. At
his present speed, his ETOT would be twenty-four minutes hence. "Very well," he said, leaning
back in his armored seat and lighting the last cigarette he would have be-fore finishing the run. He
handed the packet over to his copilot.
"Visuals?"
"In a few minutes Galveston will come up off our port beam, sir. Won't see much of it at sixty
meters alti-tude, of course. Then we cross Galveston Bay with Texas City off our portside,
northwest of Galveston. Open water until our check-in position over Smith Point. According to the
briefing, Texas air defense will have been alerted by then, and we can expect light to medium flak
as we approach Baytown on the north side of Jacinto Bay, where Galveston narrows into the
Houston Ship Channel maze."
"Pick it up," Semenev said to his copilot.
"Yes, sir," said the copilot. "Galveston Bay is pinched in by Baytown on the north and La Porte on
the south. From there to downtown Houston, a distance of some forty kilometers, the channel
dodges peninsulas and islands all the-"
"Good enough. References, Navigator-and don't use the map."
"Yes, sir." The navigator looked up from the chart table. "Hog Island first, then Spilman Island, then
Black Duck peninsula to the right and Jennings Island to the left, around Alexander Island and
Peggy Lake, skirting Crystal Lake peninsula to the starboard side, and the U.S.S. Texas basin.
Then we make a ninety-degree turn to port, enter the narrower portion of the navigation channel,
which snakes into the old city past La Porte and Galena Park. Near the-"
Captain Semenev yawned. "Okay. I guess between the three of us we'll find it somehow. And
speaking of Peggy Lake, did you ever hear the one about
A lovely young dancer named Peggy,
Whose performances were always quite leggy,
Could spread her-"
"We're expected," said the copilot, nodding toward the puff of black smoke up ahead, over Smith
Point.
A moment later an antiaircraft shell burst ahead of them, too far off-target to do any damage.
Captain Semenev unhurriedly reached to one side and pulled the red handle that armed the
helicopter's machine guns and rockets. He pressed the mike button on the control column.
"All units: fifty-five-degree descent. Fan formation. Take evasive action."
In his earphones he heard the crackle of acknowl-edgment in quick succession from the seven
other gun-ships in his wing. Meanwhile, his helicopter slid down through the sky until he was
flat-hatting across the water at five meters. He inched the throttle forward. His air-speed now
registered 311 kilometers per hour. Compensating for air pressure, temperature, and an
eighteen-kph tailwind, they were clipping the waves at 340 kilometers per hour.
As they made landfall, the flak seemed to become a solid curtain. The Texans were shooting at
them with everything they had, but without coordination or signif-icant effect. Intelligence reports
from agents among the defenders had assured the Soviet fleet commander that, while the
Texans expected helicopter reconnais-sance and would do their best to down the choppers, the
defenders were certain that the main assault would come from the fleet's shipboard weapons as
it attempted to shoot its way up the channel. Therefore, though tactical surprise had been denied
the Soviets, they achieved strategic surprise, for relatively little Texan fire-power was deployed
against low-flying aircraft. Even the Texans' dual-purpose "Chicago organs," firing 52-mm shells
from eight barrels at a rate of 550 per minute, were aimed in flat trajectory, and were not brought
to bear effectively until the first wave of Rus-sian aircraft had already passed overhead.
Captain Semenev glanced down the line of heli-copters to his port and starboard. The ten wings,
eighty aircraft, were largely intact and almost perfectly aligned. Once the coastline was crossed,
the formation would separate into two columns. The lead helicopter would speed up, while each
one behind took up posi-tion in echelon. The two columns, starting at a point five kilometers from
the banks of the channel on each side, were to come together like the blades of a shears, one at
twenty meters altitude, the other at fifty meters. Instead of successive targets, the defenders
would have only a single helicopter to shoot at before the whole flight passed over. The starboard
flight would then crisscross below the port flight, and each wing would make a pass at the
opposite channel bank before re-forming and repeating the maneuver farther upstream. The
tracks of the flights were like two sine waves can-celing each other out, except that today it was
the Texan enemy that was to be erased.
In the brief moments they overflew their confused adversaries on the ground, the Russians
unleashed a furious barrage of Gatling-gun fire, rocket-propelled explosives, nerve gas, and
napalm. The wake of each Russian gunship was a broad band of desolation. The answering fire
was brief: before the antiaircraft bat-teries could swing around to follow an attacker dis-appearing
over the channel, another would come in low from the opposite direction, its guns belching fire
and streaming a deadly fog of poisonous gas. Like twin shuttles on a loom, the Russian columns
stitched to-gether the two sides of the channel in devastation as complete and terrifying in its
magnitude as a thousand Stalingrads. For while the World War II Battle of Stalingrad claimed the
lives of 175,000 Germans in ninety days, the Battle of the Black Channel, as it would become
known to history, witnessed the slaughter of double that number in half as many minutes.
The Russians were not invulnerable. Despite heavy armor on the underside of their aircraft, the
sustained Texan barrage, which became more concentrated and effective as the battle raged
nearer the city proper, brought Russian gunships smoking down in growing numbers. Those who
survived the crash were hauled out of smashed cockpits by eager hands. Some died quickly.
Of the 498 Russian helicopters that participated in the Battle of the Black Channel that July sixth,
fewer than three hundred returned to their cryptotanker. Though the surviving air crews didn't
share in the general jubilation of the senior officers, who had viewed the battle as televised from
airborne and satel-lite cameras, there was no question that the day had been a huge success for
the Russians. Compared with World War II battles against the Germans, the costs in men and
materiel had been trifling. More important was the Russian political victory.
So long as Russia's military and naval might had not been demonstrated, there would always
remain some residual doubt as to its efficacy after so many years of disuse-at least in the minds
of Americans. President Wynn's hands-off policy had given the Soviet Union a treasure that the
signing of the Washington Protocols later in the year would merely formalize: proof of the futility of
defying Russia's awesome power.
The icing on the cake was the extraordinary propa-ganda value of the battle. Within hours,
Russian re-ports were being picked up by American newspapers and television from intercepts of
Russian communica-tions traffic to Moscow. Sent in the clear after suitable laundering to conceal
the extent of Russian losses, the news was heard and seen in American homes even while the
battle still raged. The contrast between American and Russian casualties was appalling: an
estimated 450,000 to 500,000 Texans dead-mostly by gas-and uncountable wounded, as against
a re-ported Russian loss of thirty-seven helicopters and their crews, scarcely more than a
hundred men in all- an unprecedented kill ratio of five-thousand-to-one. Russian reconnaissance
planes had been scanning the battlefield from low and high altitudes since the mo-ment the last
helicopter wheeled and headed for the Omsk. The vision of hell their cameras relayed to
American television networks was etched forever in the minds of those who saw it.
Close-ups showed mangled, incinerated bodies hud-dled around their pathetic World War II
weapons, no match for the enemy's sophisticated machines of de-struction. Buildings were
splashed and spattered with human remains, as if a city of slaughterhouses had been
simultaneously detonated. Here a child's arm lay in the middle of the road, the leg half a block
away, the rest of the body God knew where. From the rubble came whimpers of the half-dead,
mangled, and blinded in the darkness of fallen structures, struggling for breath that would, when it
came, bring the peace of the grave, for the air was still layered with the haze of masonry dust
mixed with poison gas. The horror of the carnage up close was compounded by the view of the
battle-ground from high altitudes. For a stretch of nearly twenty kilometers, from Galveston Bay
almost to the San Jacinto Monument, where it makes its looping swing to the west and south, the
ship channel was a huge, angry black scar. The channel waters between the ravaged banks
glistened with oil from ruptured tanks. Charred flotsam-the bodies of the dead and carcasses of
ships that had been in the path of the raiders-clogged the shallows of the wide waterway. By
midafternoon, not a living thing save for the in-domitable Houston cockroach was stirring in an
area of some one hundred square kilometers.
The American people saw it all, and pondered its implications.
The holocaust had been wrought by the helicopter complement of a single Russian ship, which
had, more-over, survived unscathed. One Russian ship. And it was a mere auxiliary to the main
battle fleet, untouched, not having deigned to risk smudging its paintwork by en-gaging the ragtag
Texans. In a sense, the Russians were merciful, for the tens of thousands of entrenched Texans
around the channel bend, close in to the down-town district, had been spared. The Russians
an-nounced over helicopter-borne loudspeakers, however, that anyone showing further resistance
would share his countrymen's fate.
The announcement, curiously, had the opposite effect.
Like lemmings in the grip of the irresistible magne-tism of the sea, American men-and not a few
women, too-were being drawn to Texas. Many were veterans of earlier wars. They switched off
the television in quiet rage, and decided forthwith they had had enough. Ac-cording to the
television news, on the morrow the Russian Seventeenth High Seas Fleet, bunting aloft, would
steam up the Houston Ship Channel and anchor in the densely populated downtown area. There
the Texans, having been given a lesson in manners, would honor their visitors with a twenty-one
gun salute, fol-lowing which the Russians would parade en masse down Navigation Boulevard.
Led by Admiral of the Fleet Grell, they would be met by the mayor of Hous-ton and the governor of
Texas and be given the Peace of the City and the Key to Houston. So, at least, did the Russians
propose, and let it be known that eager compliance was expected.
The mass of quiet Texans, hitherto uninvolved, ex-ploded in rage. If the Soviet Union believed
Texans be-haved like Russians, who, once given a taste of the knout, are as docile as sheep unto
the tenth generation, they were much mistaken. By the thousands, grim-faced men and women,
carrying anything that would fire, converged on the city during the night and found places in rooms
and offices overlooking Navigation Boulevard.
By daybreak, whole buildings were crammed to the eaves with hunters determined to bag the limit
during the open season on Russian bear.

8 JULY 1998: EVENING
It was central to Russian strategy to trumpet the horrors of the attack on the Houston Ship
Channel to the widest possible American audience, in the con-viction that fear of a similar fate
would cow the rest of the population into terrified submission. Thus the heli-copters of the
half-dozen local television stations, circling like carrion over the scenes of devastation, had not
been molested in any way. Flying at altitudes above 1,000 feet, where they could get the big
picture, the commercial copters interfered not at all with the com-bat operations of the low-flying
Russian aircraft.
On a large screen in the bar of SD-1, Gwillam Forte's Texas-project division chiefs-Dr. Ed Curry,
Dr. Her-bert Chilton Fallows, Professor Hamilton Reed, and Emilio Salvatore-watched the
slaughter grimly. They had imagined that the Russians would make a short, sharp response to
the sinking of the Borodin, perhaps the shelling of Galveston by the Seventeenth Fleet, but had
been unprepared for the unparalleled ferocity of the Russian attack.
"They're crazy," Ed Curry whispered when the last of the black helicopters wheeled against the
sun and headed back to the Omsk.
Ham Reed nodded. "They read no history books but their own. If they did, they'd remember Pearl
Har-bor and how it took that humiliation to get America off its, ass and on its feet. Can they really
believe we'll roll over and play dead after this?"
Herb Fallows laughed mirthlessly. "Why shouldn't they? What can we do about it? Our fleet's in
Ham-burg today, under a thousand Russian guns. All we've got here is the old Texas. What do
you think they'll do now?" Fallows asked Reed, the mathematician who had spent a career at the
Pentagon trying to second-guess the Russians.
"Today's made a hash of all my assumptions," Reed confessed. "From here on, it's all surmise.
But my guess is that they'll now proceed precisely as planned, to demonstrate that nothing stands
in the way of the Soviet steamroller. If we'd sunk half their fleet, they'd still come. It's essential to
their strategy of giving the appearance of invincibility. Once that façade is cracked, the whole myth
of Soviet superiority crumbles."
"You think they'll really come into Houston?" Sal-vatore asked.
"With bells on. They said they would. I believe them."
"In the face of that?" He pointed to the television screen, which now showed the superhighways
leading into Houston, still choked with incoming traffic as if nothing had happened, although
descriptions of the fighting and the Russian victory had filled every radio channel.
"Sure. The Russians think they can't lose against a disorderly mob of civilians, however
numerous. And why shouldn't they think so, after today?"
The four men finished their drinks thoughtfully.
The bartender, a dignified, gray-haired man, had kept discreetly to one side but listened to every
word of the scientists' desultory conversation. He now ap-proached and filled the glasses.
"Pardon me for intruding into your discussions, gentlemen, but am I correct in assuming that we
would like to inflict the maximum possible damage on the Russian fleet?"
"You can say that again, Charles," Salvatore affirmed flatly.
"But if Professor Reed is correct in his assumption that the Seventeenth Fleet will steam into the
inner-city basin as planned, surely there is an obvious way to do them grievous bodily harm."
"It isn't obvious to us," said Fallows, stung. "Being a bartender, you obviously know all about the
Texas preparations-not to mention dendrochronology, gene-tic engineering, astrophysics, and
plate tectonics-but we are-"
"Oh, I wasn't thinking of the Texas at all," Charles said equably, for like all professional barmen he
was impervious to taunts.
"No?"
"I had in mind, rather, those under-channel tunnels. They have been crammed with ammunition
and other explosives for the past two days and nights, and the trucks are still streaming in. It
occurred to me that if, as the Karl Marx was passing along the channel above, the tunnels were
detonated, why-"
The four men looked at one another, stunned. They smiled. A cry of delight went up, and a joyous
clink of glasses.
"Of course-the tunnels! Talk about tunnel vision," Salvatore said, "just when we most needed it, it
failed us. Pour yourself a drink, Charles-on second thought, take the bottle ..."

Adjourned to a conference room, the four scientists fell to their calculations. Charles's idea, while
basically sound, was susceptible to a single, exciting modifica-tion, and it took the four men until
early evening to determine whether it was within the realm of tech-nological feasibility.
"Well," Curry asked Reed, who was at the computer terminal keyboard making final calculations,
"will it fly?"
"There's your answer," Reed said after a moment, pointing to the VDU.
"Damn!" Curry slapped Reed on the back. "I never imagined it would really work. But if you and
Chill haven't goofed somewhere, maybe-just maybe. . . ."
Reed sighed. "All this is paperwork, you know. We haven't had time to plan a single experiment.
We've had to work from raw figures, like the approximate amount of explosives in the tunnels."
"Not quite approximate. We've got the exact figures from the loading sheets."
"Sure we have," Salvatore rejoined. "But we don't know how old each lot is-and explosives
become notoriously unstable and enfeebled with age, you know-or whether some inspector at the
factory was bribed to pass a substandard load of mortar shells, or-hell, the variables are endless."
"We've made allowances at both ends of the curve."
"Still, we're taking a big chance."
"But not, mind you, with anybody's life. Even if it doesn't work, not a single American life is
jeopardized. If it does work, a lot of Russians will be pushing up daisies."
"Okay. But what about old Forte? What if he doesn't approve of what we're doing? His idea was to
have the Ruskies sink the Texas, not vice versa."
"Tough. Times have changed. If he doesn't like it, we go ahead without him. But knowing him, I
think he'll like it."
Dr. Fallows made a gesture of impatience. "We're wasting time. We've still got a lot of work to do.
You, Emilio, recalibrate the Elbows so they'll fire concen-trated rather than dispersed beams.
Tomorrow, they've got to kill. See if you can beef up the magnetic de-fenses, too; though you may
not have enough time for them all, at least strengthen those around the flag ridge relay center."
"It means going aboard and activating the auxiliary control system to test power and alignment."
"Then go aboard and activate it. Tonight, nobody is going to pay any attention to the Texas.
Tomorrow, when the Russians come, we'll switch control to SD-1."
"Then there's the matter of filling the interstices be-tween the ammunition boxes in the tunnels.
I've got an idea about that."
He outlined it. Like most good ideas, it was simple in concept, but it did require a certain
administrative talent to carry it out. Dr. Curry volunteered to supply it.
"The gasoline is no problem," he observed. "Dozens of tank farms within spitting distance, many
of them intact. As for the aluminum soaps, I know offhand of three sources, all within ten miles."
"It's only nine hours to daybreak."
"If you stop jawing and get to work," Curry said, "it'll be enough."

6 JULY 1998: MIDNIGHT
Dr. Izard T. Opal sat alone at the bar of a dark, dingy cocktail lounge on the fringes of Houston
Inter-national Airport, north of the city, nursing the second of two stingers, which were his
self-imposed ration for a twenty-four-hour period. He was feeling mellow, full to the brim with
self-satisfaction.
In addition to the Russian attack, which would be remembered as one of history's great victories,
there was the matter of his personal coup, which had vaulted him into the presidency of
security-sensitive Stenco.
Uncle would be astonished at his success, no doubt, but even more pleased and grateful, for was
not Stenco a veritable cornucopia of space secrets? He might be promoted to KGB colonel, even
brigadier general. So carried away with the euphoria of his speculations was Opal, that he
knocked back the stinger and ordered a third. Tonight he owned the world, and felt a little
reckless.
A heavy hand fell on his shoulder.
He turned and looked up into the face of Hobart Caulkins.
"You're late," Opal complained.
"I'm half an hour late," Caulkins admitted. "You're two days late. Where have you been, Little
Bo-Peep?"
"Ah!" Opal said, savoring the moment, for Caulkins had always shown contempt for his talents.
"That is the question."
"That is. Answer it, and make it snappy. I have other people to see tonight."
Opal looked slowly around the bar. Two men in battered ten-gallon hats were arguing about the
Russian attack at a jukebox over in one corner, a couple with heads together occupied one of the
booths, and a drunk slumped at the far end of the bar. Otherwise, they were alone.
"You're looking at the new president of Stenco." said Opal proudly.
"I'm looking at what?"
"Stenco-Satellite Technology and Extraterrestrial Nucleonics Company. I'm the new president."
"Tell me what happened. Tell me fast, tell me straight, and don't leave anything out, Opal."
Caulkins was obviously furious.
Taken aback, Opal hesitated, thought fast, and gave a carefully edited version of the previous
days' events. He had, per Caulkins's orders, investigated the hot-water emissions violations at
SD-1, he said. The emis-sions were indeed a violation of the NRC regulations. But it had been
going on only for four days due to an inadvertent valve blockage, which blockage he had
con-firmed by an inspection of maintenance reports. How-ever, more detailed investigation at the
Texas basin- undertaken at his own initiative-revealed that the dis-charge had been going on for
some time, maybe months. He confronted Gwillam Forte with the evi-dence. The violation, though
venial, Opal had cleverly parlayed into the job of president of Stenco; the threat to report the
infraction to NRC had apparently been enough. They both knew that if Forte hadn't come across,
he was in danger of losing his huge government contracts for submarine nuclear reactors.
Hobart Caulkins listened to the story impassively.
"So you see," Opal continued, "I am now on the inside, and can feed the Center every single
scrap of classified information on the premises. What do you think of that?"
Caulkins regarded him coldly. "I think you're a stupid, greedy, lying little man, Izzy. I've had a man
in Stenco for years. Now, then, I want to hear your story again. Just the parts you left out. Tell it
straight, or I'll kill you here and now."
Dr. Opal, suddenly stone sober, told it straight, omit-ting no detail.
"You're a scientist, Izzy," Caulkins said thought-fully when the other had finished. "What do those
hot-water emissions tell you?"
Opal licked his lips. Maybe he could save himself if he told Caulkins something really useful.
"That nuclear reactors are aboard the U.S.S. Texas, of course."
"How do you figure that?"
"Cooling water temperature. The temperature of the cooling water that comes from the reactor
jacket is known. I measured the temperature that comes from the Texas basin. The two are
almost identical."
"They would be."
"Only if the water came from the Texas, you see. If it was merely discharged into the Texas
basin, having come from SD-1 some nine kilometers distant, as Forte claimed it did, the water
would have lost a significant amount of heat."
"Well, that makes sense, Izzy." Caulkins smiled for the first time since he came in. "So Forte has
reactors aboard the Texas. Why?"
"Propulsion."
"Propulsion where?"
"Down the Houston Ship Channel, obviously. Into the Seventeenth High Seas Fleet. My guess is
it's loaded with TNT to blow up the Texas itself along with as much of the fleet as possible."
"You know something, Izzy," Caulkins said gravely, "I think you're right. Why didn't you tell me?"
"I-I was going to."
"When?"
"Tonight. I was going to give you a full report."
"Uh-huh." Caulkins marveled at the ease with which Opal's greed had overpowered his political
judgment and instinct for survival. Too bad, Opal.
Opal grinned weakly. "It's just that with all these things going on, I haven't had time to write it up
yet."
"Well, don't you think you'd better?"
"Yeah. I'd better get on it."
He rose, and put a ten-dollar bill on the bar.
"I'll go with you," Caulkins said.
Outside it was dark, the clouds mixed with the black greasy smoke that still boiled up from the
fires far to the south. Half a dozen cars were parked hap-hazardly by the side of the rundown
building, whose isolation was its reason for having been chosen by Caulkins as a meeting place.
A neon sign leaned for-lornly into the night wind, casting a pool of dappled red light on the bare
earth beneath. Hobe Caulkins inspected the surroundings. No one seemed to be around. He
walked to one side of the little frame build-ing, and in the shadows unzipped his trousers.
"That cheap beer gets to you," he said. "Join me?"
Dr. Izard T. Opal knew that if he didn't, Hobe Caulkins would laugh at him for being a snob; he had
done it before. Opal didn't like that snide laugh. He went to stand alongside the other man.
Suddenly Caulkins's hand clamped around his throat. Opal tried to kick him in the crotch, but
Caulkins blocked the kick with his thigh and kept on squeezing. Opal battered at his attacker with
his fists, but his fists were too small, his arms too short, his muscles too soft to discommode the
other man, who was, without haste, squeezing the life out of him.
Opal felt his eyes starting from their sockets, the ringing of a million bells in his ears, the blood
rushing to his head but not getting there. He tried to bite, and bit his tongue half in two, although he
didn't notice the pain. He tried to scratch, but his nails futilely clawed the air. He tried to scream,
but could only manage a faint gurgle.
Trying became too much of an effort. He felt death stealthily edging closer. It was a more peaceful
sensa-tion than he had imagined it would be. He wondered why he was bothering to put up a fight
at all. It wasn't dignified for a man in his position, a doctor of philoso-phy, the president of Stenco.
He wanted to turn to greet it, but before he could do so, he found it was already there, grinning at
him. . . .
Just before he died, a brilliant flash of light illumi-nated his fading vision. A glimpse of heaven?
It was the headlights of a police cruiser, which had turned off the access road into the lane leading
to the bar-and-grill, and for a brief instant it trapped the two men in its beams. Caulkins wasn't
sure he had been seen, so brief had been the stab of light. Nor was it likely that, if he had been
seen, he had been observed, for his body partly obscured that of Dr. Opal.
He squeezed on, and didn't release the body until he was sure the other man was dead. Then he
stepped away, started to go back the way he came, changed his mind and walked quietly around
the back of the build-ing where there was nothing but darkness.
A flashlight beam struck him squarely in the eyes.
"Hold it right there, bud," a deep voice said.
Caulkins stopped, smiled his best yokel smile, and held up his hand before his eyes.
The police officer marched him at the point of his revolver back the way he had come, grunted
when he saw the body of Dr. Opal, and instructed Caulkins to spread-eagle on the hood of the
patrol cruiser.
Hobe Caulkins complied.
With the revolver pressing against his prisoner's kid-ney, the policeman slowly but methodically
fanned him for weapons. Finding none, he straightened.
He was a man built along Texan lines-big, beefy, and hard. He was half a head taller than
Caulkins and outweighed him by fifty pounds. Looking down at the smaller man, the policeman
holstered his pistol and reached for his handcuffs.
Caulkins held out his wrists and in the same forward movement plunged what seemed to be a
ball-point pen into the other man's neck.
It went in too easily and too deep to be a ball-point pen.
Caulkins leaped lightly back to avoid the gush of blood as the policeman staggered back against
the wall of the bar-and-grill and slid to the ground. Caulkins bent over him and examined the
wound in the dim light. It was gushing blood, which confirmed to Caulkins that he had, as he had
aimed to do, punctured the carotid artery, which would leave the policeman dead within two or
three seconds.
He returned unhurriedly toward his car, unlocked it, and got in without another glance at the man
he had just stabbed.
The flow of blood, copious though it was, was steady rather than pulsating. It came, not from the
carotid artery, but from the superior vena cava. The policeman remained conscious just long
enough to drag his revolver from its holster, raise it shakily, and fire a single shot before the recoil
knocked the weapon from his hand. Ten seconds later he was dead.
Hobe Caulkins wasn't. But the bullet slammed through the window frame of his car into his left
shoul-der. Unless he got medical attention, and fast, he knew that he too would bleed to death.

7 JULY 1998: DAYBREAK
Gwillam Forte was aloft in the Houston Herald's television helicopter Fubar before dawn, winging
south-ward toward the mouth of the ship channel near Galveston. The helicopter flew with
navigation lights blazing and transponder on, its pilot hoping that the immunity that had spared it
and other news-gathering choppers the day before still prevailed. Apparently it did, for the
reconnaissance helicopters and jet aircraft from the Russian carrier that flew by northward
seemed not to notice them.
The channel had been cleared of major obstructions during the night by Russian minesweepers,
but evidence of the previous day's battle saturated the air, for from the blackened banks on both
sides, and the channel's black, waxy, fetid water, came the stench of tens of thousands of
charred and decomposing bodies, stream-ing through Fubar's air intakes.
According to the Russian announcement broadcast on American television the evening before,
the Red fleet would proceed as scheduled, one day late, up the channel to its reception in the
inner city. The Karl Marx would lead the column and drop anchor in the Buffalo Bayou Basin. In its
wake would come two fixed-wing-aircraft carriers, three helicopter carriers, six missile cruisers,
and eleven destroyers. The train of fleet tankers, mine-sweepers, amphibious support ships,
communications ship, tenders, and the cryptotanker Omsk would remain in Galveston Bay; that
they were defenseless against even the most modest conventional naval force was simply
another indication of their con-tempt for the Texans they had defeated with such ease the day
before.
Russian intelligence, as usual, had been excellent. The channel bottom was sounded by airborne
depth finders to confirm the accuracy of the latest navigation chart. The survey showed that even
megaton tankers could still maneuver without difficulty over the hulks of ships sunk the day
before. Aerial reconnaissance had revealed no appreciable signs of life in the twin belts of
desolation along the channel banks. Russian pre-cautions even extended to sending an agent
disguised as a Coast Guard commander to inspect that forlorn old relic, the Texas, to ensure that
the Texans had not somehow contrived to put its rusty guns back into com-mission. At virtually
point-black range, the ship's two twin-turreted fantail guns could maim the bigger ships and even
sink destroyers in a single salvo. The agent found the ship completely deserted, and the guns'
muz-zles fouled with birds' nests. There would be no sur-prises here. . . .
The Karl Marx was just entering the channel. It proceeded slowly: speed would have conveyed an
im-pression of nervousness the Russians didn't feel.
"Can you estimate the speed of the column?" Gwil-lam Forte asked of the pilot.
The pilot nodded. "I can do better than that." He flipped on a radio switch, exchanged some
esoteric pal-aver with an unidentified contact, and reported that the fleet was making something
over eight knots.
That would put the flagship opposite the Texas basin in about three hours, Forte calculated, and
in Buffalo Bayou Basin in less than six, just before noon.
"SD-1," he instructed the pilot.
Ten minutes later the Fubar fluttered down like an autumn leaf atop the blast shielding that served
as SD-l's heliport. Some miles to the north of the region of devastation, El Caballejo Ranch and
the adjacent industrial areas had been untouched, but the ghost-town quiet of the streets and
workshops testified that the workers who had once populated them had gone, never to return.
Forte stepped wearily out of the heli-copter, grim-faced and gray.
He rode the big elevator alone down the manway to SD-1. Here, a mile underground, the workers
were few, hollow-eyed, and pale. They avoided his eyes, as if they shared some guilty secret.
Forte walked through deserted passageways to the command center, where he had been told his
department chiefs were assembled.
They were all there: the scientific department heads, the twenty-one veterans who had worked so
hard and long on the Texas, and the two dozen technicians who had labored on the later stages
of the Elbows installa-tion, the computerized controls for the Texas, and the magnetic antibeam
devices that were to protect the Elbows. Some were drinking coffee at the long mess table to one
side of the large circular room, others stood in tight little groups second-guessing the previous
day's events. A few men were checking the instruments and computer programs, already
checked and rechecked during the past twelve hours.
Their greetings were subdued, but their expressions cool and determined. Whatever they had to
tell him, he sensed, at least there was hope in it.
"Well, Ed," he said, leaning against the conference table, "what's the good word?"
"Better than it was yesterday at this time."
"I'm all ears."
"First of all, we've recalibrated the Elbows. Instead of emitting a diffused beam, the seventy-two
weapons will generate a beam of the minimum possible spread. They're as lethal as we can
make them."
"Good. What else?"
"We've devised a decoy. On the mainmast we've rigged an array of transmitters sending out UHF
signals on thirty-five different channels."
"What does that do?" asked Forte.
"Not a damned thing-not for us, anyway. For the enemy, it sows confusion. He'll be trying to sort
out the relation between the frequencies and the Elbows fire, which, because of the magnetic
screening, he can't take out. Well, there isn't any relation, of course. So he concentrates his fire
on the mainmast-now also heavily screened magnetically, I need not add-think-ing it's some kind
of fire-control apparatus. Meanwhile, our Elbows will be hammering away, their fire direction
coming from this invulnerable, undetectable base down here in SD-1."
"Good. Anything else?"
They told him about the cross-channel tunnels. Openly skeptical at first, Forte was convinced by
their calculations and fervent assurances that it might, after all, have a chance of working. Indeed,
there was hardly any other.
"You really think exploding them will inflict major damage-like destroying half a dozen ships?"
Forte said.
"More," Emilio Salvatore promised him. "Half a dozen destroyed outright, that many more
disabled. If the Texas gets in among the survivors before their damage-control parties can take
charge, we could even sink a couple more. But I've got to warn you, the whole proposition is
untried. It's never been done before. We could fall on our faces, with not so much as a scratch to
their paintwork."
"I guess we'll have to try it," Forte observed. "We can't let the Russians get away with what they
did yesterday without trying. They probably think they've scared the American people into
unanimous support of the Washington Protocols by their-"
"They nearly have," Ham Reed said dryly. "Despite what you might think after witnessing the sight
of thousands still streaming into Houston, the radio re-ported now that 88 percent of Americans
polled by telephone last night, after the bombing, favor going through with it. Before the bombing, it
was 79 per-cent."
"All the more reason to go ahead as planned. Who gets the hot seats?"
"We've drawn straws, Will," Ed Curry said. "Fred Bateson, T. D. Roebuck, Terry Jones, Ski
Modeljewski, Gil Persoe, and Chill Fallows will be the gunners, and Ham Reed gets overall
command by consensus, since he's the resident war-games wizard."
On a dais dominating the command center were six padded seats in two lines of three, back to
back. A seventh faced them at right angles. Each of the six con-trolled twelve Elbows mounts,
and each had respon-sibility for a sixty-degree field of fire, although Ham Reed, from his post,
could override their com-mands. Together, the gunners covered the six sextants of the horizon
depicted on the big wraparound tele-vision screen that girdled the room. The image tele-vised
from the ship's cameras was projected onto the circular screen. Each gunner was equipped with
head-gear linking his eyeballs' movements to the computer-driven fire control system. The gunner
had only to fix his eyes on the target and press the firing pickle to activate his battery. Instantly the
twelve Elbows would swing toward the target and loose their electron beams-eleven 6,000-MeV,
125-kiloampere bolts per second. The bolts could bore through three centimeters of armor plate
per second at 1,950 meters. Repeated hits on the same spot could penetrate any known
de-fensive armor, slice through the sturdiest steel beams, cut through mast and rigging as if it
were so much soft cheese.
The battle would be fought from here. It would cost Russians lives-lots of them, but not a single
American. The sparing of American lives was more than merely humanitarian: Forte wanted to
demonstrate to the enemy that it could be made to suffer appalling losses, at a ratio of-not five
thousand to one, but five thou-sand to zero.
Gwillam Forte pronounced himself satisfied with the preparations. They had now only to wait until
the Karl Marx and its sister ships ascended the ship channel. Just beyond the bend, beneath the
thick channel mud, lay the two tunnel complexes. They were crammed to their watertight doors
with arms, ammunition, boxes of TNT, RDX, and dynamite, the interstices filled with gasoline and
viscous aluminum soaps. Farther inland, less than a mile distant, was the San Jacinto National
Monument, with its basin for the Texas, flagship of the Texas Fleet. According to the dozens of
surveillance monitors aboard the Texas, all was quiet, not a soul to be seen within range of its
cameras.
But Gwillam Forte was restless. As the hour ap-proached for the Karl Marx to appear on the
television monitors, as the super-battlecruiser turned southwest toward the inner city, he could
restrain his impatience no longer.
"Where're you going?" Ed Curry asked as Forte started out of the command center. "The big
show's about to start. Any minute now the Karl Marx will be steaming onto the screen."
"Never much liked movies," he called back. "I want to see the real thing. If you want me, radio the
Fubar."
And he was gone. . . .
Ten minutes later, at fifteen hundred feet, Gwillam Forte was witnessing the majestic procession
of white ships as they made their graceful turns, one after the other, toward downtown Houston
and Buffalo Bayou Basin. Their formation was still single column, with a destroyer between each
capital ship. They were aligned perfectly, like beads on a string, and the interval be-tween ships
seemed to have been measured off with the same piece of string. As a demonstration of
precision seamanship, it was impressive but wasted, for the banks of the channel-green here
instead of black-were de-void of humanity.
Nearly a dozen helicopters were cruising the skies, some very close indeed to the Russian ships,
transmit-ting their video record back to their home studios. The Russian sailors, now mustering at
their coming-into-port stations on the weather deck, their anchor details already standing-by,
waved cheerily to the chop-pers.
Two-thirds of the Russian ships had now turned to-ward the southwest, passing by the Texas
basin, main-taining their stately eight knots.
Suddenly there was a cry from the cabin radio speaker on the SD-1 channel.
"Will-we've got visitors!"
"In SD-1?" This was a possibility he hadn't even considered. He damned himself for not having
doubled the guard force at the entrance.
"No-aboard the Texas," Ed Curry's voice crackled.
"How many?"
"One. At least one's all we can see. He's prowling around the restricted area, and he's got a
crowbar in one hand. He's trying to break in through the boats-wain's locker."
"Isn't it welded shut?"
"Yes, but the paint locker isn't. He'll be there any minute."
"Can you get to him?"
"Not before he could do some damage. It's four minutes from here to the Texas tunnel, nine
minutes by railway, three or so up through the- No, we'll never make it in time."
"Then I'll try."
Forte instructed the pilot to head for the Texas.
"How long will it take?" Forte asked anxiously.
"Minute and a half," the pilot replied.
"Make it snappy, and set me down on the dock as close to the gangway as you can manage."
"Aye, aye, sir."
"Any weapons aboard?"
"None. None at all."
"Jesus!" Forte couldn't see himself going up against a man with a crowbar empty-handed. He
was too old for that.
"Nothing at all?"
"Well, there's a flare gun-a Very pistol-for emer-gencies."
"This is an emergency-gimme!"
The helicopter was settling onto the dock when Ed Curry's voice again crackled through the
loudspeaker.
"Hey, Will!"
"What is it?" Forte paused with his hand on the door handle.
"We just got a glimpse of the guy close up. His left arm is in a sling-can't use it at all. And he's
some-body we know."
"Well who, for the love of Pete?"
"Your old buddy Hobe Caulkins."

7 JULY 1998:9:30 A.M.
Aboard the Karl Marx Admiral Grell presided at the conference in the flag office, reviewing plans
for the victory parade. He turned to Commander Blino-vich, liaison officer of the Omsk's aerial
strike force. "How does your captain propose to neutralize resis-tance along Navigation
Boulevard, Commander?" In-telligence had some hours earlier radioed a situation report,
indicating the presence of more than 300,000 hostiles concentrated in that area of the city.
"Two hundred twenty gunships are standing by, awaiting your orders to take off, sir."
"Will the single strike by 220 gunships suffice?"
"According to our calculations-yes, sir."
"They'd better. We have to root out resistance in one strike. I won't permit any coming and going
of air-craft. It would make our operation look like an aerial circus."
"I believe I can assure you on that point, Admiral. The first wave will drop high-explosive charges
to destroy the structural integrity of the buildings where the guerrillas are concealed. The second
will release napalm to set the buildings afire-Houston's housing is notoriously flimsy-and drive
their defenders into the streets. The third wave will drop pellet-bombs to decimate those who
remain. The final wave of sixty gunships will annihilate the surviving hostiles with Gat-ling-gun fire.
We are confident of inflicting up to 98 percent casualties, most of them dead."
Grell's eyes drifted to the scene of desolation outside. Through the portholes of the cabin he could
see little but blackened, smoking ruins of twisted metal and scorched earth. The devastation
would not compensate for the loss of his son, but there was one small consola-tion in it: from this
zone of destruction no resistance would again appear. As a naval man, he dealt in abso-lutes-war
or peace, victory or defeat, life or death. There was no middle way. While one enemy remained
alive, danger threatened. History offered abundant proof of that somber truth. Had a certain
Corsican junior artillery officer been killed at the siege of Toulon in 1793 instead of emerging
victorious, for example, Russia would have been spared the cataclysmic French invasion of 1812.
From such examples Grell had forged a personal creed: diplomacy and debate, failing which,
annihilate!
"I'd prefer 100 percent to 98. Cannot this be done?" "Assuredly, sir. But it would take poison gas,
and that would interdict the parade to follow."
"True." The admiral built a steeple of his fingers and prayed that Blinovich was right. One more
good battering and the Texans would be completely de-moralized, incapable of organized
resistance, finished. Then the remainder of the port calls would be a suc-cession of triumphs,
with the momentum picking up right up to the moment the protocols were signed in Washington.
"Very well, Blinovich," he said finally. "I depend on you. Now then, Kolkash, what are your plans?"
Rear Admiral Kolkash, the shaven-headed officer responsible for fleet amphibious operations,
was in charge of the parade as well as of defensive actions by naval infantry in the event of
opposition.
"The same as I outlined last night, sir."
"Some of the staff here weren't present."
"Yes, sir. We announced, gentlemen, that the parade would take place today on Navigation
Boulevard, parallel to the channel on the southern side. This an-nouncement was made to draw
the Texas malcontents to this area, where, as you heard from Commodore Blinovich, they will be
annihilated. The parade will actually take place on Campbell's Run, a new broad thoroughfare built
five years ago on what used to be Clinton Road."
"Without advance notice," Grell noted, "the number of natives attending the parade will be much
reduced."
"As will the risks, sir."
"Yes, there's that. What other steps have you taken to ensure security?"
"We'll have helicopter surveillance as well as armed troops lining the route," said Kolkash. "We'll
give notice of the change of venue only after the parade par-ties disembark on shore. This will
prevent unruly ele-ments having time to assemble from other parts of the city to prepare against
us."
"Very well."
One question remained: how many sections would participate in the parade? The Soviet Navy,
like the
American, divides its crews into four sections. In times of danger, it is customary to have at least
two sections on duty at all times, to keep the guns manned and the ship operating at peak
efficiency. In peace time, usually only one section stands watch at any given moment, giving the
crew four hours on duty followed by eight hours off.
Grell's innate caution told him to have only two sections parade. As a blue-water sailor, he didn't
feel comfortable with land crowding him in on all sides, despite the absence of any armed force
that could do his fleet injury. On the other hand, the intimidating presence and prestige of the Red
fleet would be in-creased by 50 percent by parading three sections in-stead of two. In the
discussion that followed, this was the course advocated by the fleet's political commissar, a man
whose advice it was usually wise to take.
"Pass the word to execute the parade plans as de-tailed by Admiral Kolkash," Grell said to his
chief of staff. "Three sections will participate."
This would leave his ships with only a quarter of their battle complement, but, as his political
adviser noted, the danger was behind them.
Nine miles behind him, had he only known.

7 JULY 1998: 11:15 A.M.
Gwillam Forte found Hobe Caulkins on the navi-gation bridge, trying to pry open the locked
chart-table drawer with a crowbar. To ascend the near-vertical ladder to the bridge with his left
arm in cast and sling would have been impossible for the average man, but Forte remembered
that Caulkins was a superb athlete, a reminder to keep his distance. He remained on the port
wing outside the pilothouse, the Very pistol dangling at his side.
"Breaking and entering, Hobe? There seems to be no end to your talents."
Caulkins turned slowly, on his face a boyish grin.
"They seem to include getting taken in by you, Mr. Forte. Or maybe I should put that in the past
tense." The grin dissolved. "What's the story on the nuclear reactors you've got aboard this old
bucket? I want to know, and I don't have time to waste."
Obviously not. The Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet would just have dropped anchor in Buffalo
Bayou Basin nine miles to the southwest. The parade parties would be swarming over the sides
into motor launches. In about a quarter of an hour the fireworks would begin, and Caulkins
seemed to sense it. There was little he could do about it, so long as Forte kept him away from the
flag bridge, the level above them on the foremast. On the flag bridge was the test con-sole used
to calibrate the electron-beam weapons, and through it ran the control circuitry. If Caulkins pried
the lid off the console and wrecked the equipment- a lively possibility since the anonymous unit
with its push-button combination lock would probably strike Caulkins as anachronistic-the Elbows
would be in-operative. And without the Elbows, the Texas was just what Caulkins called it, a
toothless old bucket.
"They're not nuclear reactors-they're nuclear de-vices, Hobe. They're going up any minute, and
unless you get some yardage between this ship and yourself, you're going up with them-you and
the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet."
"You're lying."
"Stick around and find out." Forte was mentally calculating. In fifteen minutes the balloon would go
up. During that interval, Forte had to get clear himself, or meet an unpleasant fate. But if he could
keep the newspaperman entertained a while longer, the opera-tion would go off as planned.
Hobe Caulkins apparently wasn't going to wait. He pulled a .38-caliber hammerless pistol from his
pocket. For all his athletic prowess, he wasn't a quick-draw artist, and Forte could have slammed
the pilothouse door and made a getaway, had that been his purpose. Thinking of the vulnerability
of the Elbows control unit, he stood his ground, hoping to buy a little more time.
"Talk, Forte. Talk fast. What's going on here?"
"All right, Hobe. There's a regiment of U.S. Marines hiding in the spud locker, with a-"
Caulkins fired. He had aimed at Forte's right knee-cap, but the pain of the bullet wound in his own
shoul-der, his exasperation, and above all the fact that he was not a very good shot anyway
conspired to send the bullet into what would have been his right calf-if Forte had had a right calf.
Instead it shattered the steel-and-plastic carapace protecting the electronic cir-cuitry, springs,
rods, and other gear that constituted his prosthesis.
He stumbled, and in muscular reaction discharged the Very pistol. The flare struck the binnacle in
a shower of sparks, caromed off the overhead and the bulkhead behind Caulkins, and hit him a
glancing blow on the backside before shooting past Forte out into space.
Caulkins's trousers were ablaze. He dropped the pis-tol and tried to beat out the flames with his
one good hand.
Forte hobbled toward the ladder down to the main deck, hesitated, and dragged himself up the
ladder to the flag bridge. There was still time for Caulkins to beat out the fire, climb to the flag
bridge, and wreck the Elbows control panel. Caulkins had probably in-spected each separate level
in turn as he ascended the mast from the main deck. The flag bridge would be next.
Forte needed a weapon to replace the Very pistol, its sole cartridge expended. He tore open a
gear locker. Nothing there but wads of oil waste, two un-opened gallons of red lead, an oil can,
some brushes stiff with dried paint, a broom with a shattered handle, a pair of overalls. He
slammed the locker shut.
He ripped open the drawer of the flag bridge chart table. Empty.
From below, he heard the scraping of feet on the steel deck and the hollow ring of the ladder tread
as Caulkins put his foot on the bottom rung. One thing was sure-Caulkins couldn't climb with one
hand and hold the pistol at the same time. Maybe that shattered broom handle would be enough.
He could use it like a spear as Caulkins's head came flush with the upper-most rung, to send him
plunging to the deck below.
Forte limped back to the locker and grabbed the broomstick. His eye fell upon the oil can. With a
mali-cious grin, he dropped the broomstick and picked up the oil can. It was full, and provided with
a handy spout for those hard-to-reach places.
Forte dragged himself onto the starboard wing, curs-ing his maimed leg. Caulkins was halfway up
the ladder, breathing hard. He was pantless, and the pistol was tucked into the arm sling, but he
didn't look any less dangerous. Forte looked down and caught Caulkins's eye.
With deliberation, he raised the oil can and squirted a thin stream of oil down the ladder rail
Caulkins wasn't clinging to. As Caulkins watched it, fascinated, the color drained from his face.
"You son-of-a-bitch!" he rasped.
"Ain't it the truth?" Gwillam Forte shifted his opera-tions to the rail that Caulkins now gripped like
death.
The oil streamed down. Caulkins strove mightily to retain his hold as the oil soaked his hand, but
gradually he weakened, and he finally dropped to the deck eight feet below with a thud and a
bellow of pain from the jolt to his injured shoulder.
"Write about that in your next column," Forte said. He tossed the oil can contemptuously down at
Caulkins, barely missing his head.
Caulkins looked up, his eyes alive with triumph. He had him! The stupid old fool had thrown away
his only defense. Caulkins would simply climb the ladder on the port side, and hammer the truth
out of him before chucking him over the side.
He ran quickly to the other ladder, and had reached the top rung, one laborious step at a time,
when he heard the thump! of Forte's feet on the navigation bridge below. The old man had foxed
him again, slid-ing down the greased handrails, intent on a getaway. But it wouldn't do him any
good. He was old and crippled. Caulkins was young and in splendid condi-tion, despite a
shattered left shoulder and third-degree burns to his backside. He lowered himself, a rung at a
time, listening to the retreating feet, confident he would catch the old man before he could escape
from the ship.
Forte had calculated as closely as he dared. He wanted to get clear of the ship and lure Caulkins
after him before the big explosion. As he limped down the main deck toward the gangway, he
heard Caulkins running aft on the opposite side of the ship. A few more steps and he would be
clear, down the gangway onto the pier. Within seconds, Caulkins would follow, thirsting for blood.
As he hobbled toward the gangway, he glanced at his watch. There were still six minutes to go.
Too much. If he made it ashore now, Hobe Caulkins would be right behind him. Caulkins would
have ample time to kill him, regain the ship and the flag bridge, and disable the Elbows console.
He must, somehow, throw Caulkins off the scent.
If Caulkins started down the gangway and didn't see Forte on the pier, he would assume the old
man had hidden himself among the bushes, or behind one of the refuse barrels, or in the men's
room of the deserted snack bar.
Forte reversed his course. Forward of the gangway brow was the galley, its door open. He
remembered the galley from the old days, when he was dispatched to fetch big pots of coffee for
the watch. Careful not to drag his wounded foot, he scuttled through the door-way just as Hobe
Caulkins shot across the ship from the port side and halted, looking down the gangway to the
deserted pier.
Caulkins cocked his ear, listening for some sign of Forte's presence. Somewhere came the
screech of metal-familiar, yet for the moment unidentifiable. It sounded as if it came from the
ship-forward. He padded softly up the main deck. He stopped at the galley, went in, opened the
lockers. He remembered now-it sounded like a locker opening. But all were empty. He shot
another glance around the galley and ran out. He looked around him. There was no other place
aboard Forte could have hidden so quickly. He must have managed to get ashore and hidden.
Like a sprinter leaving the starting blocks Caulkins was over the brow and down the gangway, his
footsteps resounding on the wooden slats as he pounded onto the pier, an incongruous and
somehow sinister figure in scorched underpants, with his left arm in plaster cast and sling, his
right hand clutching a pistol. Had any-body been there to see him, he would have laughed, until he
saw the look of murderous rage in Caulkins' eye.
Caulkins was some distance from the ship, searching the grounds in ever-widening circles, when
the explo-sion came. It was as if an atomic bomb detonated, in a mammoth, long, slow-motion
eruption that would en-velop the world. The jolt knocked Caulkins off his feet. When he sat up and
shook the dust out of his ears, he was surprised to find the Texas still afloat at its moorings. If the
Texas hadn't exploded, what the hell had?
Aboard ship, the shock wave popped open the doors of the big galley ovens. From one of them
tumbled Gwillam Forte, who, curled into a ball, rolled halfway to the door before coming to rest,
unconscious.

7 JULY 1998:11:22 a.m.
After it deposited Gwillam Forte on the Texas pier, the argus-eyed Fubar lifted off and lumbered
after the Russian fleet. At two thousand feet, its panoramic, fish-eye, and zoom lenses captured
and transmitted in a steady stream to the Houston Herald's channel 16 the varied images of the
Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet proceeding majestically up-channel to anchor. As they
reached their anchorage, the ships let go their anchors and swung to a standstill like soldiers at
drill. Within seconds their motor launches and whaleboats were swung over the side, loaded to
the gunwales with white-clad sailors ready to assemble ashore for the big parade. The small
boats made their short run, dis-gorged their cargoes and sped back for more.
Through a medium-magnification lens, the picture on the number-3 monitor was a study in speed,
meticu-lous organization, and nautical splendor. Sky Crew Chief Producer Ken Clover, in Fubar's
rear compart-ment, which served as the aerial studio, had to admit it, even though his brother and
a nephew had been in-cinerated the day before by these same precision-parad-ing barbarians.
The Russian ships were dressed in holiday bunting running from the bow to foremast to
mainmast to stern, twenty-three rainbows of brilliant colors resplendent in the morning sun. The
colors complimented the long low lines of the men-of-war, all of them painted an arctic white, and
the long still columns of men waiting at parade rest at the gangways to take their turn in the small
boats scurrying to shore. Seen from above it was hard to associate these peaceful ships and
their orderly crews with the massacre of the day before. Yesterday's horror was too vivid in
Clover's mind ever to be washed away, yet the placid scene below was lapping at the edges of
his recollection, and he had to keep jerking his mind back to the reality that these particular men in
white were doctors of death, and America's mortal enemy. He wished that some miracle would
happen, that the earth would open beneath them and-
The shock wave struck the helicopter and sent it reel-ing across the sky. Clover was flung into the
monitors, badly bruising his head and shoulder. He slid to the floor groggily as the pilot wrestled
the helicopter back on even keel. For a moment, he thought the Russians had lobbed an
antiaircraft shell at the Fubar, then realized that a shock that severe would have been
ac-companied by enough shrapnel to riddle the cabin.
Clover got shakily to his feet and resumed his seat before the bank of small screens, this time
buckling his seat harness. Whatever happened, he realized, would have been recorded on tape.
He rewound the videotape and played it back.
Far down the channel, some ten miles away it seemed, the waterway had suddenly erupted with
the force of a volcano blowing its top. In fact, the playback he viewed looked like a volcano. A
gigantic discharge of fiery stones and rubble mixed with thousands of tons of channel mud and
water, which vaporized in a cloud of superheated steam, seemed to have issued from the depths
of the Earth right in midchannel. As the enor-mous mass of mud and earth hung in the sky, for a
moment the channel bed ripped open by the explosion of thousands of tons of high explosive,
packed in nine tun-nels, was desert dry. During the space of several seconds, there was nothing
but a huge, raw transverse ditch, dry and wide enough for Moses to have marched the chil-dren of
Israel across from bank to bank, if they stepped smartly. Then with an earthshaking rumble, the
parted waters, hurrying to fill the vacuity, met in tre-mendous collision. Another wall, this one of
water, shot heavenward. The wall of water was taller than a redwood and stretched across the
width of the channel.
As it collapsed, it generated two mighty tsunamis.
They weren't ordinary tsunamis, of the type that roll across the Pacific from undersea
earthquakes and de-populate beaches and sometimes whole islands with thundering force. Not
only were these two larger than had even been seen by man who lived to tell about it, they were
sheathed in fire, for the combination of gasoline and aluminum soaps with which the tunnels had
been charged formed jellied gasoline-napalm- which ignited with the blast of the detonating
incendiary explosives.
The fiery waves fled from each other, one down-stream toward the sea, the other inland toward
the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas fleet riding placidly at anchor. The burning waves, some
eighty-five meters high, swamped and seared everything in their paths.
Huge coal barges tied up at wharves were upended like cardboard boxes, their flaming cargo
sown across a square mile, bursting like shrapnel and impaling whomever it hit with its fire-tipped,
needlelike shards. Smaller craft rolled like dice and disappeared promptly from view, or else were
tossed, bits of blazing firewood, hundreds of feet inland. One proud seventy-six foot yacht landed
a mass of pulped steel and wood atop a distillation tower of a nearby refinery, a moment later
exploding and ripping the tower apart. Those in small boats out in the channel heard the first
premonitory thunder, and scrambled frantically for shore as they saw the wave bearing down
upon them. But, at nearly a hundred miles an hour, the wave was too fast for the fleetest craft,
and it engulfed all with democratic im-partiality.
The wave that boiled downstream toward the sea found little to oppose its passage. The attack of
the day before had killed almost every mortal being on the channel, leaving only charred specters
floating dead in the water. Like a great cleansing hand, the wave scoured both banks, leaving
behind a solid sheet of fire to burn them anew. So great was the force of the water that it uprooted
buildings and flung them end over end into the depths of the channel. As it surged silently
seaward, the wave and its fiery tongue gradually lost height and fury, for the channel steadily
widened to-ward its estuary. Still lofty enough to inundate and set fire to low-lying Alexander Island
and Jennings Island, by the time it reached Galveston Bay, its force had largely been spent, the
napalm nearly all burned out. Ten miles down the coast the wave aged and withered, the flame in
its eye grown dim; it was now scarcely a meter high, a threat only to children's sand castles along
the beach.
Upstream, the situation was reversed. The channel progressively narrowed as it approached the
Buffalo Bayou Basin. Instead of subsiding, pressure of the con-stricting banks caused the
upstream wave to mount ever higher. Sluicing over the shallower portions of the banks, it swept
people, cars, houses, trees-even the streets-into its fiery maw. It was as if some monstrous
bulldozer with a white-hot blade had made a single untidy pass, leaving behind a scorched
wasteland.
Three minutes and fifty-five seconds after the up-stream wave reared into the air and rumbled off
on its destructive course, it reached the Russian fleet at an-chor.
Sonarmen registered the explosion-they would have heard it clearly even without their
earphones-and im-mediately signaled the bridge. Simultaneously, Russian radarmen reported the
sudden appearance of an enor-mous unidentified flying object bearing down on the fleet. It had,
they reported in panic, a wingspan that filled their scopes, yet was flying at an altitude of less than
one hundred meters. Their commanding officers on the bridges of a dozen ships heard the report
with incredulity, notwithstanding which they immediately sounded General Quarters and Recall of
the parade parties.
All hands were running to their battle stations when the great red wave struck the last ship in line,
the missile cruiser Suslov.
The Suslov had set bow anchors to port and star-board. The muddy bottom furnished small
purchase to the anchor flukes; little was needed, for the flow of the channel this far upstream was
so slow as to be scarcely perceptible. Still, when the wave smashed into the stern of the ship,
pooping her, the leverage of anchors and chains held the bow just long enough for the wave to
swing the stern broadside. Broadside it rose up to the crest of the wave with roller-coaster speed,
hung there for a sickening instant with the flames climbing her sides, then cartwheeled into the
trough as the wave passed. Trapped air brought her stern briefly to the surface half a minute later,
before it dissipated in a burst of huge gurgling bubbles and the ship sank slowly out of sight in the
midnight-dark waters.
From the moment the Suslov was seized by the wave until it capsized and disappeared from
view, less than ten seconds elapsed. By then the crest of the wave was racing upstream,
scattering the Red fleet like chaff.
The slender destroyers were easy victims of the wave's fury. One was caught broadside and
thrown, like a stick to a dog, high up on the banks of the channel, streaks of fire licking at its hull.
Minutes later, as the waters drained away, the few bruised and dazed sur-
vivors heard the clatter of feet on the decks above. Wounded, unable to fight, the crew waited
terror-struck and helpless in their darkened compartments as the flashlight beams of vengeful
Texans sought them out.
In Fubar, Ken Clover lived a nightmare. Though he knew what appeared on his screens was
actually hap-pening, he couldn't quite grasp it. As the wave struck the line of ships, they rode to
the top one by one in slow motion, there to be enveloped by flames, which set off machine-gun
ammunition like strings of Chinese fire crackers. But as the wave slid away from under them,
their fates were various. Like the Suslov, some were flipped end over end and plunged straight to
the bottom. Others balanced on stern or bow at the peak of the wave, then fell with sickening
suddenness, their hulls striking the water with a bone-shattering jolt that sent a sheet of boiling
waters and fire a thousand meters in all directions. Even the stoutest ships are not built to resist
tsunamis, and all along the line hull plates were sprung and water flooded engine rooms while
bilge pumps worked frantically against the rising tide. Only the biggest ships survived, and not all
of them. Stunned but still afloat were the flagship, super-battle cruiser Karl Marx, the helicopter
carriers Beria and Yezhov, the missile cruisers Rykov and Litvinov, and the aircraft carrier
Dzerzhinsky.
Six ships, of a fleet which a moment before had been twenty-three.
All had been flung on their beam's ends. Their super-structures had been smashed out of shape
by the crush-ing impact of the water. All of the helicopters and planes and most of the men
aboard were at least tem-porarily out of action. Enveloped by flaming napalm, many of the crew
on weather decks leapt in agony from their ships, to drown in the channel's muddy waters.
Lifeboats were ablaze, the proud bunting was but a string of dangling cinders, and the smoke
from count-less fires rose in a pall around each of the six ships.
Leaks from ruptured plates sent dark channel waters coursing through their lower decks, and
emergency power was switched on to run the pumps and lights at top speed while damage
control parties rigged collision mats against the worst rips in the hull. Injured seamen screamed in
pain, but their grievously bruised and shaken shipmates could spare no time for them. They
staggered to their emergency stations down smoke-filled passageways, men drunk on the dark
wine of di-saster.
Once the wave receded in the distance, the channel was silent except for the cries of the
wounded and dying, many of them on the channel banks. The water itself swirled with eddies
from the suction of sunken ships, trapped communist bodies making a few point-less revolutions
on circular currents before sinking into a darkness as black as a Siberian winter's night. Bubbles
belched up from the channel bottom as water invaded the inner spaces of the sunken ships.
Occasional secon-dary explosions occurred as hidden fires reached muni-tions or overheated
cryogenic accumulators. The entire waterway was littered with smoking, floating human remains,
the wreckage of lifeboats, wooden ammunition boxes, and the roofs of nearby houses carried
away by the wave. Atop one crouched a black cat, aloof and uncaring. Coating the water and
flotsam was a greasy layer of oil from sunken ships, patches of which were aflame, quickly to
spread the width of the channel.
The fate of the thousands of sailors lined up for parade on Campbell's Run was quick, nasty, and
inevi-table: those who weren't crushed by the wave drowned in it, and those who didn't
drown-along with those who did-were promptly cremated by the blazing napalm.
Ken Clover urged the pilot to lower levels. He realized he risked the fire of antiaircraft crews
crazed and vengeful by the sudden catastrophe, but that day God was his copilot. So busy were
the Russians merely trying to keep their ships afloat that none looked up, no more than a man
clinging to a precipice notices the circling butterfly. He filmed it all, making pass after pass, from
directly overhead to near water level, as order slowly returned to the ragged remains of the fleet.
Fires on deck were extinguished, one by one. Soaked, sooty and disheveled sailors and officers
ap-peared on deck, heaving dead bodies over the side along with other wreckage. But almost as
soon as they appeared they took cover again, as sniper fire from the channel banks peppered
their exposed decks. The Texans ashore poured in fire as if they would never have another
chance. Indeed, they wouldn't, once the Russian gunners manned their proton guns.
Ken Clover felt he had been recording the carnage for hours. He glanced at the digital clock. He
was shocked. Five and a half minutes had elapsed. Unbe-lievable, until he observed that the Karl
Marx was still rolling gently from side to side, the oscillations set up by the wave not quite yet
dampened.
He looked down at the monitors from which his eye had wandered and realized that he had
missed some-thing: the flashes of ten thousand Texan guns had abruptly ceased. The men who
had been shooting from behind the concealment of uprooted trees and over-turned automobiles
suddenly stood up, looked down-stream, and ran for their lives, up and away from the channel
banks.


7 JULY 1998:11:34 A.M.
Gwillam Forte struggled to his knees. He was too old for this, he told himself. Running up and
down ladders, popping in and out of ovens, being chased by a would-be murderer with short
pants and a long gun- that was young men's work. He shook his head to re-move the last
vestiges of muzziness, and wondered how long he had been unconscious.
Not long, for the Texas was still where it had been when the big explosion rent the skies. Down in
SD-1 his scientists would now be watching the clock, their fingers hovering over the button. He
wondered whether they had witnessed the chase on the closed-circuit tele-vision monitors that
had first detected Hobe Caulkins. They must have, but they might not realize that, even though he
had left the ship and was now out of camera range, Caulkins was still close enough to kill him.
Caulkins was facing away from the Texas now, look-ing upstream from his vantage point atop the
conces-sionaire's stand about two hundred yards from the ship, which he had mounted to follow
the wave's progress. In a minute or two, it would strike the first ships in line, too far away for
Caulkins to see anything, but his busy mind would fill in the details. With Caulkins' attention thus
engaged, Forte could steal off the ship and hide someplace where Caulkins had already
searched.
Forte moved noiselessly toward the gangway. He had just reached the brow when a voice
crackled over the ship's public address system:
"Thirty seconds, Will," came the voice of Ed Curry.
"Get clear! Countdown has begun. Thirty seconds . . . twenty-nine . . . twenty-eight . . ."
Hobe Caulkins's head snapped around, his eyes fas-tened on Gwillam Forte. In the next instant
he had leapt lightly to the ground and was running across the parking lot toward the Texas.
Cut off, Forte could only retreat the way he had come. For a moment he considered leaping into
the water to swim for it, but reflected that even Caulkins could hardly miss him at that range.
Despite his bat-tered leg and sixty-nine years, Forte moved fast, seek-ing a ladder that would
even out the odds between himself and his pursuer.
"Twenty-one . . . twenty . . . nineteen-get the hell out of there, Will!-seventeen . . . sixteen . . ."
Curry's voice was becoming frantic.
Forte reached the foremast and was scrambling up the signal bridge ladder. He reached the top
just as Caulkins put his foot on the bottom rung. At least Caulkins wouldn't shoot before he found
out what was going on. Forte limped over to the next ladder and went on climbing. By the time he
reached the naviga-tion bridge, Caulkins had closed to half a ladder length.
Forte seized the rails to the flag bridge ladder and nearly fell on his face when his hands slipped
on the oily surface. He had forgotten all about the oil. He ran athwartships, wiping his hands on his
trousers, and stumbled over the oil can he had thrown at Caulkins. He scooped it up and limped
on.
"Four . . . three . . . two . . ."
Forte grabbed the top rung with his final reserve of strength and breath. He felt a hand seize his
trouser leg. Holding tight, he kicked. The hand held fast.
"One! Initiate!" blared the loudspeaker.
From port and starboard, from bow, midships, and stern, came six staccato cracks! as explosive
charges severed the hawsers tying the ship to the bollards on shore. Simultaneously, another
explosion neatly cut the gangway in two, and it fell with a splash into the water.
The Texas, which had been prisoner in still water for half a century, was finally free.
So was Gwillam Forte. The sudden explosions had taken Caulkins-unlike Forte-completely
unawares, and he relaxed his grip long enough for Forte to kick his leg loose and fling himself onto
the flag bridge and out of sight. The frustrated Caulkins snapped off two shots at him, missing by
a large margin. Then he began to mount the ladder.
Waiting until he was nearly halfway up, Forte stood up and looked down at his adversary.
"Your shooting's rusty, Hobe," he said mildly. "May-be a little oil would help." Whereupon he
liberally doused both rails with oil from the long-spouted can and watched grimly as Caulkins
again fought the losing quest for the oily rails and slipped heavily back to the navigation bridge.
Forte dashed through the doorway into the flag bridge, dogged the door tight behind him, and shot
the bolt. He was safe from Caulkins now, but it was the safety of a man who nails his coffin
shut-from the inside.
He crossed the bridge quickly to the control panel. He slumped in the padded high chair and
reached for the phone on the bulkhead.
"Ed."
"We see you, Will," said Ed Curry somberly. "We didn't know Caulkins was still-"
"Never mind that."
"No. Is there any way to get clear before the ship-"
Forte shook his head. He was safe from Caulkins in the flag bridge, but the ship and everything
aboard it was doomed. If he opened the dogged-down door, he would be dead even sooner.
"No-no way."
"There must be," Curry insisted, knowing he lied.
"No." Forte felt suddenly drained. On this ship he had lost three-quarters of himself more than fifty
years ago. Today he would lose what remained. He laughed bitterly. At least there wasn't much
left to lose.
A jagged sound, like the ripping of a thousand sheets, tore through the ship. Looking forward
through the bridge's portholes, he saw a sheet of fire carpet the weather deck. It blazed fiercely,
but only for a moment. When the smoke cleared, the deck was a glaring white. An instant later,
the crackle of high-voltage energy bathed the superstructure, rigging, and the hull itself with an
aura akin to St. Elmo's fire. When it too van-ished in a cloud of mist, the ship was no longer a
dingy gray, but a uniform, aching white.
And then the Texas began to move.
It moved without sound, as softly as a zephyr across a millpond. But it moved fast-faster than
ever before in its eighty-four years. Powerful jets of water from nozzles below the water line made
a witches' cauldron of turbulence at the bow, and a rising white spume foamed about the stern as
it parted the waters and the ship backed down into the channel. With the accelera-tion of an
outboard racer, the Texas shot out into mid-stream. There the force of the port-bow and
starboard-quarter thrusters slewed the battleship around in a quarter turn, her bow now headed
upstream toward the Russian ships, still wallowing in the backwash of the wave nine miles away.
No escape now. For anybody.
"What's the combination on this doodad, Ed?"
Ed Curry read it off.
Forte's fingers groped for the buttons on the under-side of the steel cover, punched them in the
proper sequence on the second try, and dropped the cover into its slot. The console was alive
and blinking, like some monster emerging from its cave, indicating the readi-ness of its weapons
systems, performance of its power units, and quite a few other things that Gwillam Forte didn't
pretend to understand. From a recess, he drew out the helmet, already plugged in, and buckled
the strap under his chin. He climbed into the padded chair and fastened the harness around his
shoulders. From this elevation his eyes could sweep a front of more than two hundred degrees;
the solid bulkhead to the rear kept him from seeing what was behind, but that he already knew:
Hobe Caulkins with a pistol in his hand and a lust for Forte's life in his heart-Unless Caulkins had
been fried by the Texas's new paint job.
Forte was as ready as he would ever be. Maybe, with a lot of luck, he might just manage to ...
Then he cursed himself for a fool, and switched off the dream machine. He thrust his feet into the
metal stirrups be-neath the console to brace himself against the thrust of the ship that would
come momentarily.
He waited.
The great battleship began moving again, almost im-perceptibly at first, then with increasing
speed. He was pushed back into the padding of his chair by the ac-celeration as the Texas took
off upstream, her stern settling into the water like that of a racing boat. Through the portholes, the
hard hot wind whipped his shirt open in a shower of buttons. He felt alive, more alive than in years.
The digital speed indicator on the panel showed they were approaching critical speed. The Texas,
with three nuclear power plants providing steam pressure for its water jets, had a revised flank
speed of seventy-one knots, but his scientists had calculated 63.7 knots to be the critical speed at
this moment. If they had calculated wrong, the Texas would be at the bottom of the chan-nel in-he
checked the estimated-time-to-run clock on the console-twenty-six seconds.
Suddenly the ship began to shake, like a rag doll in a dog's mouth, then a split second later a
stupendous explosion sounded as the second of the channel tunnel complexes blew. The noise
and vibration were even greater than the first, and the tsunamis produced by the explosion would
be correspondingly greater. Again, channel waters would rush from both sides to fill the
emptiness, carrying everything along with them, including the Texas. It was essential that the
Texas be pulled as close to the brink of the enormous ditch as possible, in order to catch the
tsunami as it was being created. But the slightest miscalculation and it would plunge over the
precipice and be crushed under millions of tons of water.
Five seconds after the blast, the Texas's movement relative to the shoreline slowed, then
stopped. The ship began to move backward. The engines strained, but the backward pull was
inexorable. Now they were racing astern at nearly fifty knots. Ships aren't built to back down at
anything like such a speed, and it began to shudder and vibrate, threatening to throw Forte from
his perch. Water was building up beneath the stern, lifting it ever higher.
But just as Forte feared it would be shaken apart, the ship slowed, stopped, and then again shot
forward on its water jets. It steadied on sixty-eight knots pre-cisely, and at that moment, suddenly
the land on either side of the channel seemed to fall away before his eyes. The ship was borne
higher and higher, until he could clearly see downtown Houston, with the banks of both shores
now far beneath him. It felt like the Fubar when it hit a powerful thermal updraft. Yet the vertical
ascent was inconsequential compared with the forward velocity that now slammed him back in
his seat. It was as if he had been shot out of a cannon. The thirty-eight-degree bow-down tilt of the
ship's deck had him cling-ing to the arms of his chair for dear life. If tragedy is going to strike, he
thought grimly, now is the moment.
If the ship's forward propulsion, the speed and the height of the wave, the ship's alignment with
the wave crest, its displacement-if all these and other factors so carefully computed and
coordinated weren't abso-lutely on the mark, catastrophe was about to overtake them. If the ship's
forward momentum, for example, was a fraction too great, it would slide down the wall of water
into the trough, and the following wave would spin it around like a top, capsizing and sending it to
the bottom. If the ship lagged, the wave crest would ride under it and it would tumble into the
following trough, breaking up like kindling under the enormous impact.
Neither of these unpleasant things happened. They had mounted the curl of the wave like an
expert surf-boarder, and the jet-propulsion engines automatically throttled back, keeping them
balanced precariously on top of the world.
Forte's muscles uncoiled.
From the towering wave, he could now see the pin-points of Russian ships in the distance. In a
matter of minutes the Texas would descend upon them. The first tsunami, judging by the
evidence that came to his eyes, had apparently done its work well, for he could discern only a
handful of survivors.
The gap between the Texas and the enemy shrank. Very soon the range would be optimum for
the Elbows, and still the enemy guns were silent. Could it be that previous tsunami had destroyed
their offensive capa-bility utterly? If not, he would, he thought grimly, as the wave carried him
onward. He glanced down. A display told him that the nearest enemy ship, identified by the
comparator as the aircraft carrier Dzerzhinsky, was only 2,800 meters away, and coming up fast.
His hand closed on the pickle.
But before he could fire, the first salvo of Russian missiles from ships down the line struck the
tsunami that bore the Texas. He counted six as they streaked toward the ship. Miraculously, all
missed, drilling straight through the wave on both sides of the ship and exploding far behind with a
tremendous din.
But already it was too late for the Dzerzhinsky.
The carrier loomed so close Forte felt he could have hit it with a flung stone. Through the
high-magnifica-tion lenses built into the helmet he could see the crew, some frozen to the spot,
others running frantically away from the oncoming wave.
He pressed the firing pickle. A chorus of shrieks enveloped the ship, like a million bows across a
million rusty saws, as the Elbows unleashed an electron bar-rage on the hapless carrier. Forte's
target was the enemy bridge, the brain and nerve center of the ship. Keeping his eyes focused on
that point of maximum vulner-ability, he poured it on. The fire of the thirty-six El-bows on the port
side he could bring to bear on the enemy aircraft carrier in moments reduced the bridge to scrap
metal. She was a ship whose captain would never give another order, whose crew would never
obey one. The ship was dead.
But Gwillam Forte was alive, the fear that had clutched his stomach like a cold hand had
disappeared, and his spirit was soaring near the realms of exalta-tion.

7 JULY 1998: 11:39 a.m.
From the eminence of his flag bridge, Admiral Grell watched the second wave sweeping
toward them from afar. Unlike his staff officers, who goggled at it in open-mouthed disbelief, he
had half expected it. A wave of such magnitude as the first could not be natural. Had it been
produced by an earthquake, the only logical explanation in the absence of a mushroom cloud,
then why had the buildings ashore been totally unaffected? And they hadn't swayed by so much
as a millimeter. True, a tsunami from some submarine con-vulsion in the Gulf of Mexico breaking
on the shores of Galveston Bay could conceivably have sent a giant wave racing inland. But not to
this particular stretch of channel, which dog-legged beyond the Texas basin. A wave from the gulf
would have dissipated its force on the shore directly ahead. And then there was the flaming
napalm. That was no natural phenomenon. The wave was man-made, and what man created
once he could create again. In fact, he would: was not America the land of the assembly line?
These thoughts had passed in rapid review even as he battled a ship that bucked like a brahman
bull. The diabolical mind behind the near-total destruction of the Soviet Seventeenth Fleet would
send another wave, and another, until his fleet was wiped out. Grell didn't pause to speculate on
the source of that gigantic wave, but concentrated on the problem at hand: how to counter its
appalling power.
In the brief interval before another wave crashed down upon them he must align the ships so that
their bows were struck head-on by the wave. So deployed, they could survive any number of
tsunamis. Had not six of them done so? They would slice the wave cleanly, pitch bow-up, then
bow-down, in a matter of seconds, but they wouldn't roll on their beam's ends and capsize.
He gave the order on TBS-talk-between-ships-to get up steam, up anchor, and come to a heading
downstream exactly parallel to both banks. All ships acknowledged except the Dzerzhinsky,
whose communi-cation equipment had apparently been knocked out.
"All missile batteries load!" was his next command. "Elevation four degrees, deflection zero
degrees. All batteries report readiness and stand by to fire."
One by one the batteries called in. Less than 10 percent were in operation. They might suffice,
Admiral Grell thought, removing his drenched cap and wiping his sweating forehead with the back
of his hand.
On the Russian ships, bruised and shaken officers were shouting orders to the damage-control
parties, switching emergency power to cryogenic proton-gun ac-cumulators, clearing
passageways, juggling the depleted gun crews to man the missile batteries. A dozen things had
to be done at once if the remaining ships of the once-glorious High Seas Fleet were to be saved.
Admiral Grell left them to it. To him, what mattered was the next wave. Putting dripping binoculars
to his eyes, he peered down the channel.
Grell was tough and courageous, but the sight that greeted his eyes turned his knees to mush.
The wave was coming! And poised below the lip of the wave like a surfboard was a vessel right
out of a sailor's fantasy. The ship's lines and arrangement of guns told him instantly that it was the
U.S.S. Texas, but a Texas transformed. For one thing, the old gray lady he had passed less than
an hour before was now a gleaming white, from water line to foretop. All the painters in Texas
couldn't have done the job so fast, and yet ... More astounding, how did the Texas mount that
ram-paging wave, manage to maintain its balance just below the lip without being overwhelmed?
Admiral Grell was so unnerved that he automatically crossed himself.
"Did you raise the Dzerzhinsky?" he demanded of his young staff lieutenant.
"No, sir. We're still trying."
"Don't bother. In thirty seconds the wave will be upon us. ... Forward missile units: stand by!"
"All missile units ready, sir."
Grell watched in fascination as the American ship roared down upon the hapless Dzerzhinsky,
blasting away with its Elbows. The Russian ship did not return the fire, and as the Texas shot
past the battered hulk, the rearing wave engulfed the Russian aircraft carrier, flung it on its beam,
and passed on. The Dzerzhinsky rolled slowly over, belly up, like a dead whale.
By then the Texas was well upstream, its carousels pouring a deadly fire into the next ship in line,
the heli-copter carrier Yezhov. But the wave was now at last within range.
"Forward missile batteries: fire!" Admiral Grell bel-lowed.
A blinding flash rippled outward in flat trajectory from the forward missile tubes of the remaining
ships.
In less than a second, a missile from the Yezhov blasted through the wave to one side of the
Texas. Two from the Rykov, a thousand meters upstream, struck an in-stant later-and went
through. From the other ships three other missiles pierced the wave's wide front at the base and
its very lip, barely missing the Texas main-mast.
And still the Texas came on.
"Aft batteries: fire!" Grell shouted.
This time there were only three missiles, and they missed the Texas by an even greater margin.
But their fuses were correctly set. All three missiles exploded on impact with the advancing wave.
The tsunami collapsed.
It didn't collapse all at once, or along the full breadth of the channel. That segment descending
upon the Rus-sian fleet was dispersed in a roiling cauldron of steam-ing water, whirling the
Russian ships like macaroni in a cookpot.
The Beria broached, capsized, and sank.
In the magazines of the Litvinov, a missile was jarred loose from its hoist. It exploded. A chain of
detonations erupted within the ship, and it was blown apart in a cloud of smoke and flames.
Only three Soviet ships-the helicopter carrier Yez-hov, the missile cruiser Rykov, and the
flagship Karl Marx-remained afloat.
The three survivors regained steerageway. As one, they turned broadside to the Texas, which
had come careening down on their port sides only to be smothered beneath a mountain of water
from the collapsing wave, which completely obliterated it.
For nearly a minute, nothing could be seen where the American battleship had been save a
curtain of water that kept coming down like a mighty cloudburst, flail-ing the channel surface into a
cloud of impenetrable froth. But as the seconds ticked by, the faint outlines of the Texas
appeared.
A single lifeless body hung in the foremast rigging. The ship's main deck was completely
submerged, and the wreck appeared to be sinking. The stack was bat-tered and its boats were
swept away.
Then, shaking itself like a wet dog, it porpoised from the bow, with water cascading from its white
decks, now a litter of snarled cables, mangled steel stanchions, and fittings flattened from the
immense mass of water that had nearly sunk her.
Grell regarded the enemy ship with eyes of ice.
"All batteries-fire at will!" he commanded.

7 JULY 1998: 11:41 A.M.
Running down upon the surviving ships of the devastated High Seas Fleet in the comforting
embrace of the gigantic wave, the exaltation Forte experienced was headier than sex, sweeter
than love: it was the exaltation of victory.
The keels of capsized ships, the bobbing bodies of their crews, the hordes of Texans converging
on the carnage in the hope that some Russians remained alive to nourish their vengeance, and
especially the disarray of the remaining men-of-war were evidence that the battle was won and
that he and the Texas were trium-phant. No matter that the combined fire power of the enemy
ships would now be concentrated against them, or that they could not possibly survive the
assault- they had struck a blow from which Russian prestige could never recover. The
Washington Protocols, which would have ensnared the United States in Russia's diplomatic web,
was a dead letter, as dead as Admiral Grell and Gwillam Forte and the U.S.S. Texas soon would
be.
For a moment, while the Texas's Elbows had raked the Dzerzhinsky without drawing answering
fire, Forte experienced a wild rush of hope: perhaps by some miracle the Russian fleet's guns
had all been stilled and he would yet sink them every one. That hope drowned under the
collapsing wave, which buried Forte and his flying fortress in a cataract of foam and spray.
Sputtering, half-blinded, and bruised by the force of the water, Forte was saved from being flung
against the bulkhead and crushed only by his shoulder harness. The bridge was knee-deep in
water that had poured through the open portholes during the inundation. It sloshed about the chair
as the ship wallowed in the trough, where it had almost disappeared for good. The ship itself was
out of control. It careened crazily from the opposing forces of gravity dragging its saturated hull
down, buoyancy pulling it back up, jet thrusters propelling it around in a tight circle. Forte was
riding a bucking bronco with a burr under its saddle.
"Why the hell are we circling?" Forte demanded through his mike. The radio circuits, at least, had
sur-vived, for Ed Curry's voice came crackling back.
"We're checking, Will. Stand by."
"The ship's spinning like a top."
"I know-something's gone haywire. Hold on."
"What the hell do you think I'm doing?" Forte growled, his left hand white-knuckled from his grip on
the chair arms.
"Port-side stern thruster valves are inoperative- jammed shut," Curry reported after a moment.
"The starboard thrusters are on full power, spinning the ship."
"Well, shut 'em down!"
"Can't. We've tried," Curry said unhappily. "They're jammed open. The impact must have knocked
the con-trol jet out of line or displaced the splitter."
"Well, do something! If the ship can't maneuver before the Russians get steam up and close in,
I'm a sitting duck."
"We're doing the best we can. But-"
But already through the spray and mist that still separated the Texas from its enemies, the
Russian pro-ton guns had found the target and were hammering away at the ancient ship.
The Russian weapons had high-capacity but old-fashioned cryogenic storage rings, which could
deliver pulses with energy outputs of up to 175 kilojoules. Pulses at that level were as destructive
as medium-size lightning bolts. But the ships' generators had been put on stand-by when they
anchored. For the moment, the PGs scarcely pitted the armor plate of the old battleship. For the
moment, the Texas was safe.
Still, power would build fast, and Forte knew that salvation lay either in flight or in sinking his three
enemies before they could bring their combined power to bear. Fight or flight . . .
Flight was impossible-the jammed stern thrusters ruled out that possibility.
The crackle of proton streams striking the super-structure was a symphony of riveting guns as
the power of the Russian weapons slowly built up. Hot metallic chips rained down on the flag
bridge overhead, and the air was filled with the stench of burning paint. Some-where nearby a
stanchion was severed from its base, and tumbled to the deck with an ear-splitting clang. Another
tremendous thud on the flag bridge as part of the mast fell indicated that the decoy transmission
from the foretop was working, that the Russians were con-centrating their fire on what they
mistakenly considered the Texas's nerve center. Sooner or later, though, despite the protection of
its magnetic deflectors, it would be pounded into melted rubble.
Meanwhile, his own guns were exacting a toll from the enemy. As his ship swept around in
circles, Forte blasted each enemy in succession. But with sinking heart he realized that the
Russian fire power was increasing faster than he could destroy it, even though he zeroed in on
the enemy's PG mounts rather than the ships themselves. At this rate, they would sink the Texas
before he could put a single one of them out of action.
One more-that was all he asked. Just let him sink one.
And he would, if only his guns had more power. If only the damned ship would come to rest, rather
than waste its ...
Power.
"Ed!" he cried, "switch the power-"
"No can do," Curry interrupted. "The valves are stuck, and we-"
"Stick the valves! Switch the power from steam to electrical generation. Shift it from the
propulsion units to the Elbows accumulators. Can you do it?"
"Why-why I guess-of course we can do it."
"How soon?"
"A few seconds." He turned away from the mike in SD-1 to issue a stream of orders. He came
back on. "Listen, Will-there's one thing: those accumulators can store only so much juice without
blowing up. Once the switch is made, you've got to keep those Elbows firing."
"Don't worry about that."
"Because if you stop for a second, the accumulators will overload, and you'll blow up the Texas."
"Got it-now give me the power, boy!"
"It's going on-line now."
The number-two reactor, generating power for the Elbows, was joined by the other three, as Ed
Curry's technicians switched them one by one on-line.
The effect was, well-electrifying. The ship slowed, as the water jets and stern thrusters shut
down, and the destructive force of the Elbows leapt to unprecedented, untested levels. Before, the
electron beam had drilled holes in the enemy superstructures, cut through splinter shields
surrounding enemy PG mounts, and creased the armor-plated command centers. Now the beam
sliced through armor plate like a knife through water. Up to this moment, Forte's battle plan had
been the methodical attrition of the enemy's fire power, since there was relatively little of it. With
the tremendous power now at his fingertip, he could go after the ships themselves.
The shorter the distance the electron beams had to travel, the less energy was dissipated boring
holes through the atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen mole-cules. That meant that the Yezhov, the
closest of the enemy ships, was most vulnerable. By the same token, its PG weapons were
inflicting the most damage on the Texas.
Forte focused his eyes on the Yezhov's bridge, the command center. A blaze of white light
obliterated it, and the vaporization of the boiling metal cast its own yellow incandescence over the
ship. Its support cut away, the Yezhov's foremast collapsed, toppling like a giant of the forest onto
the forecastle. The Russian ship's proton weapons fell silent.
Forte's gaze fell to the Yezhov's water line. In-stantly a hole appeared in the hull of the ship, and
channel water heated to the boil by the beam-heated hull surged into the ship. Forte's eyes moved
fifty yards aft, and another hole appeared in the water-line armor. From within the ship came a
brilliant flash as the Elbows beam penetrated the after magazine, igniting the missiles stored
there in a chain of explosions that tore off the whole portside of the helicopter carrier, spewing
fragments of its hundred aircraft broadcast down the channel. Belching fire to the last, the Yezhov
settled on its side, the oily channel waters closing in over it like a pall.
The vastly increased fire power of the Texas was as yet unmatched by that of the two remaining
Russian ships, but the gap was beginning to close. Furthermore, while the Texas lay dead in the
water, the speed and maneuverability of the missile carrier Rykov and the superbattleship Karl
Marx were rapidly increasing. Worse yet for Forte, to achieve maximum performance from their
PG weapons, Admiral Grell had ordered his ships to steer straight for the Texas where they could
fire at point-blank range, reducing the advantage of the Texas's beefed-up electron guns.
The Rykov was now off the Texas's port bow, a floating shambles that somehow kept coming
despite the fire Forte was pouring into it. Its masts had been sheared off, its boats were cinders in
their cradles, its stack and armored sides perforated with a thousand holes. Still, it didn't sink. He
had knocked out at least 80 percent of its guns, but those PGs still operating blinked back at him
with ever brighter eyes. Their aim, too, had been diverted from the foretop decoy to the bridge and
superstructure. So far, magnetic deflection had turned aside the streams of protons directed
toward the flag bridge, but the Russian crews were hammering away at the base of the mast
now. Any minute it could begin to buckle; if the mast fell, Forte would fall with it.
Suddenly a bluish beam struck the rim of one of the portholes, and the hot twist of metal it had
blasted away ricocheted off the control panel and buried itself in his shoulder harness. Instinctively
he dropped the firing pickle and clawed the chip out with his right hand. The stink of burning
plastic assailed his nostrils. He looked down: his prosthetic right hand was smol-dering.
Warning lights flashed all over the control panel. The capacitors were overloading. Where was the
damned pickle? Unless he discharged the Elbows-and quick-ly-the Texas would blow.
Forte groped for the pickle in the swirling smoke that was beginning to drift into the bridge from the
ship, afire now in a dozen places. He finally found it dangling from the module jack, and pressed it
fran-tically as his eyes found the Rykov bearing down on his ship.
The clangor of falling metal, the screech of the El-bows and the PGs, the whistle of severed
rigging flailing the air like scimitars, were deafening. And the Rykov was looming larger every
second. Nothing Forte had hit it with so far had stopped it. It was no more than four hundred yards
away now, coming in on a collision course at some twenty knots, as fast as a man can run. At
that speed, it would shear off the Texas's bow and sink her like a stone.
Forte had been shooting at the PG batteries. Now, with sudden inspiration, he shifted his eyes to
the prow of the missile cruiser. The Russian jack staff dis-appeared in a puff of smoke, along with
the Red fleet jack that had proudly streamed there an instant before. The tremendous heat of the
concentrated Elbows fire began to melt the steel stem. Liquid metal ran down the side plates
where they met to form the bow. Loos-ened plates flaked off, like chips of old paint, from both
sides. As the electron beams descended to water level, the two sides of the bow, with nothing to
join them together, peeled back as though cleaved with a meat ax. The ship was transformed by
the Elbows into a huge funnel, scooping up the unrushing water and pour-ing it into the bowels of
the ship. It stopped as if it had run into a wall.
It was less than the length of a football field distant now. In an instant thousands of tons of water
had been swallowed by the gaping bow. The weight of the water on the forward part of the ship
tilted the bow below the surface. The ship's stern rose into the air, its screws spinning futilely. As
though sliding down a greased ramp, the Rykov plunged toward bottom and was seen no more.
Forte wiped his sweating neck. He was numb with fatigue and strain. His left hand was wrapped
around the firing pickle with a deathlike grip, and the bolts of man-made lightning streaked from
the Texas in an un-ceasing stream, churning up the water even after the Rykov vanished.
Any moment now the Karl Marx would appear through that veil of mist and steam, Forte was
certain, determined to ram and sink the Texas. Where its PG weapons had failed, its superior
bulk would prevail. With its 76,000 tons hurtling along at more than twen-ty-five knots, it would run
the Texas down like a truck squashing a jack rabbit.
But when the Rykov came to a sudden stop, the Karl Marx, only five hundred meters astern, had
to swing wide to avoid ramming the doomed ship. As it emerged beyond the curtain of mist
churned by the Texas's batteries, for the first time it was exposed to the undivided fury of the old
battlewagon, which hereto-fore had given the Russian flagship only intermittent attention.
Observing the enemy from less than half a kilometer away as he came abreast, Grell was
astounded that so concentrated and deadly a fire could come from such a battered hulk. The
Texas no longer had the appear-ance of a man-of-war, but of a barge-load of scrap metal,
chewed up and spit out by the dogs of war. He wondered how the old ship stayed afloat, holed as
it was in a million places from foretop to water line. Small fires had broken out the length and
breadth of the ship, sending up clouds of smoke that blackened the immaculate paintwork. The
mainmast had crumpled. The fourteen-inch guns, sheared off from three of the five turrets, were
jagged stumps. Sheet metal, rigging, antennas, splinter shield, boat cranes, large sections of the
bridge, aircraft catapult-all were piled amidships in an indiscriminate smoking mass. The foretop
dangled drunkenly from one of the three tripod masts still in-tact. And yet the ship's
electron-weapon fire continued unabated.
Grell's practiced eye noted anomalies in the picture of devastation. Certain areas of the Texas
seemed rela-tively unaffected by the Russian fire. The navigation bridge was shot to pieces, yet
the flag bridge above it was intact. And there were islands of seeming inde-
structability at regular intervals along the weather deck, and from these islands came the deadly
fire that had destroyed his ships. A sailor's combative instincts ordered him to close in and
engage the enemy, but an admiral's experience countermanded the order, and he instructed the
quartermaster to come up on the helm and head down-channel at full speed.
As increasing distance attenuated the Texas's fire, Admiral Grell pondered the significance of his
obser-vations. Foremost, it was apparent that the Texas had fire power superior to his own. In a
battle of broad-sides, the Karl Marx would be bested, despite the ruined condition of his
adversary. That the Texas was still afloat, its weapons delivering a withering barrage, indicated
that its batteries were somehow protected, which his own were not. Apparently, too, the Texas's
propulsion system had been knocked out. Its superiority in fire power was offset by its lack of
mobility. In fact, now that the Karl Marx was some three kilometers beyond the American ship,
well beyond the range of its particle weapons, nothing opposed its escape down the channel to
the safety of the Gulf and open sea- nothing but Admiral Vladimir Grell's pride, and his anger and
frustration at having been humiliated by this museum piece of a battleship and American cunning.
He wouldn't flee. He would fight. But on his own terms, and to win.
"Damage report," he said to his first lieutenant.
The first lieutenant began reciting what promised to be a lengthy bill of particulars. Admiral Grell
cut him off.
"Just the condition of our missile launchers."
"Five are back in operation, sir. Another can be re-paired within four hours. The others-"
"Crews?"
"Shifted to the PG mounts, sir. After the second salvo, the admiral so ordered."
True. Time had been short, and so was crew. Load-ing missiles into the launchers was a
complicated process. With only remnants of the ship's company having survived the onslaught of
the first tsunami, he had been obliged to divert the missile loading crews to the PGs. But now . . .
"All missile crews to their posts," he commanded. "Load all launchers and report readiness."
Admiral Grell raised his binoculars. The Texas, still firing steadily-why was he wasting his
power?-in the direction of the Russian flagship, had not moved. Its stern was toward him and the
ship seemed, as it had from the first, completely deserted.
But even as he watched, the Texas very slowly ro-tated ninety degrees and again came to rest,
its star-board side, the least damaged, now facing him down-stream. As it turned, it seemed to
Grell that the particle weapons' fire power diminished markedly, and picked up again when the
ship was again dead in the water. He conveyed his observation to the flag secretary, who agreed.
"Check with Fire Control Plot."
"Aye, aye, sir," said the flag secretary.
Moments later he confirmed that instrument readings showed a sharp drop in the strength of the
enemy weapons during the Texas's turn to starboard.
Grell nodded. This was consistent with the theory that was forming in his mind that, while the ship
had power, and power to spare, its propulsion machinery was inoperative. Had it not been so, the
Texas would certainly have pursued the out-gunned Karl Marx. Whoever was conning the
American ship had done the next best thing to pursuit: turned its intact weapons broadside to the
Karl Marx. The move was intelligent but futile: deprived of mobility, nothing in the world could save
the Texas now . . .
On the flag bridge of the Texas, Gwillam Forte saw the Karl Marx steam out of range of his
Elbows. Was the Russian ship seeking safe haven in the Gulf of Mexico? Forte doubted it.
Admiral of the Fleet Vladimir Grell had been the architect of the new Soviet Navy, and until today
he had never fought a major naval engagement at sea. But he was known to be proud and tough,
and if he ran, it was from tactical considerations, not fear. A man like Grell would fear very little-not
the death that would now await him for allowing the High Seas Fleet to be destroyed by a decrepit
old American museum piece, not death at the hands of the enemy. He would fear disgrace and
the laughter of history for running from battle. No, Grell would be back.
"Ed?"
"My God!" cried Ed Curry. "We thought you were-"
"Not yet. Ed, can you turn the ship broadside?"
"Sure. We'll just bleed a little power from the El-bows and-say, are you all right?"
"Yes," sighed Forte. "I'm all right."
"Then get out while there's still time. You've won, Will."
"Not yet."
"Drop over the side and swim to shore. You can do it, Will."
"Grell will be back."
"We'll fight him from here. The fire-control link is intact. Sacrificing yourself will gain nothing."
Forte wavered. His eyes were fixed Wearily on the shadowy Russian flagship some miles down
the channel. His hand still gripped the firing pickle, and the streams of electronic fire issued from
the mouths of the Elbows mounts without cessation, to be dissipated in space long before it could
reach the enemy ship. He felt a tre-mendous languor taking possession of him. He sup-posed this
was the "peace" those with but moments to live experienced at the end. Perhaps it was peace, if
peace meant the absence of thought, or desire, or pain. He felt as though he were floating free of
the Earth and looking back at himself, imprisoned in that familiar quarter-limbed body, which
nevertheless seemed not to belong to him at all, he-
He blinked. The Russian flagship had ceased to shrink. It was growing again. The Karl Marx was
com-ing back.
"Will, get out of there!" Ed Curry said with quiet intensity.
"Later, Ed. Right now . . ."
There was a glint of sunlight in the sky. The glints quickly resolved into trails of fire as the Karl
Marx's salvo of five missiles plunged toward the Texas. In-stinctively Forte focused his gaze on
the line of pro-jectiles, the stream of particles from his Elbows lancing through the sky to meet
them.
One exploded, then another, and a third, in rapid succession. But the fourth streaked down toward
the Texas, passed across the old battleship's bow, and ex-ploded with terrific impact in the water
just beyond, a moment before the fifth missile struck the Texas squarely on the fantail.
The twin concussions knocked Forte out. His head fell forward on his chest, and the coupled
Elbows, following the inclination of his eyes, bombarded the oily, flotsam-filled water between the
Texas and the advancing Russian flagship. A cloud of steam rose be-tween them, obscuring one
from the other.
The Russian ship, its launchers reloaded, its missiles aimed by radar, sent its second salvo
winging toward the Texas before Gwillam Forte, only slowly coming around, was aware of what
was happening. He lifted his head and eyes only in time to see the five silvery fingers of fate
coming directly at him.
This time, instinct didn't preserve him. One missile detonated before it reached its target, but the
other four struck in deadly unison, two on the superstructure, the other two at the water line.
Within seconds, the Texas followed Gwillam Forte into the watery corridors of death. Battered
beyond recognition, with columns of smoke rising high into the sky from a dozen raging fires, its
watertight integrity breached, plates sprung and superstructure flattened and twisted or blown
clear away, the old ship settled in the black channel waters and sank out of sight.
The victorious Karl Marx, now but a kilometer away, ceased fire and slowed to avoid ramming the
sinking remains of its adversary.
The Texas seemed quite dead-dead and buried, in fact, but in the watery darkness the ship's
heart still beat.
The old ship's power plant had been encased in ferroconcrete as a shield against radiation if the
hull were breached and the reactor-room bulkheads frac-tured. The reactor rooms were
separated from the rest of the ship by watertight doors. These doors had held throughout the
battle. Only when the enemy's missiles slammed into the hull, twisting the frames, did they
buckle. Water began to trickle in across the combing.
At the bottom of the ship channel, the dark waters invaded the reactor spaces. There the nuclear
engines were pulsating, still producing power at such a tre-mendous rate that the
high-energy-density capacitors became oversaturated. When the water at last pene-trated to the
reactors themselves, the result was cata-clysmic.
The sunken hulk detonated with the force of an atomic bomb.
A column of water shot up from the bottom of the channel. Two hundred meters across, it flung
the Karl Marx, at that moment passing overhead, into the Texas sky like a Ping-Pong ball lifted
aloft on the jet of a garden hose. The shock wave knocked buildings flat halfway across Houston,
and pieces of the Karl Marx were hurled miles across the Texas country-side. . . .
The Battle of the Black Channel, second day, had lasted sixteen minutes, and ended with the
extinction of all combatants.
For the rest of the day and the following night, an unearthly silence hung over the city. The song of
night birds was stilled, the blast having exterminated them along with townspeople for miles
around. Here and there, a candle proclaimed the survival of some hardy soul, but the candles
burned without a flicker of move-ment, like altar candles burned for the dead.

7 JULY 2002
The memorial service on the banks of the Hous-ton Ship Channel was brief, as brief as the
occasion it commemorated, the Battle of the Black Channel and the historic defeat of the Russian
fleet by the Texas Navy.
Cherokee Tom Traynor's address to the huge but subdued crowd was the shortest of all that day,
but longest remembered.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "Leonidas and his three hundred Greek soldiers sacrificed
themselves to delay the advance of the Persian army of 180,000 strong at the Pass of
Thermopylae, thus giving Athens and Sparta time to regroup, defeat the Persian in-vaders, and
save Greek civilization for the world. That feat of arms has been justly enshrined for twenty-five
centuries as the epitome of martial valor. If this is so, then how long will Captain Gwillam Forte of
the Texas Navy be remembered, a triple-amputee of ad-vanced years, who, alone in an ancient
battleship, gallantly battled twenty-three modern warships, crewed by twenty thousand highly
trained Russian sailors, and left not a single ship afloat or a single enemy alive on the field of
battle?
"I shall tell you how long, ladies and gentlemen- forever!"
Later, with bowed head, listening to the benediction, his thoughts drifted off into the world of
might-have-been. Had it not been for Forte and the Texas, would the Russians even now be
launching their invasion of North America? Would the entire Earth be wrapped in a great
radioactive cloud, its hapless inhabitants gasp-ing out their last poisoned breaths in bomb
shelters, tombs for the imminent dead? Would a single witness to the Russian will-o'-the-wisp of
world domination survive to record this final stupidity of man, a creature who could conquer
everything but himself?
But these speculations were philosophical, and being philosophical, futile. More rewarding were
thoughts of things as they were, here and now, and considering them broadly, he could find little
reason to complain.
The scorched banks of the ship channel had been plowed up, landscaped, and replanted. Now
they were a verdant park linking Houston to the sea, trees and grass, young lovers and frolicking
children keeping green the memory of Gwillam Forte and his fellow martyrs on that fateful day four
years ago. Economi-cally, his people had made a rapid recovery and were on the verge-if one
were so naive as to believe econo-mists-of an unprecedented boom. With the closure of the
borders to unrestricted immigration, a social and economic equilibrium among the diverse
popula-tion was finally a beckoning possibility.
His personal destiny, while as blessed as that of his people, wasn't what he had anticipated seven
years earlier, when he had roped in Gwillam Forte to assist his grand strategy for gaining the U.S.
Senate and later the White House. He had never got to the Senate. Neither, to be sure, had
Ernesto Gallego, although it had been Traynor's inspiration to rid himself of his rival by sending
him to New York in the prestigious but empty post of ambassador to the United Nations. Nor, of
course, would Cherokee Tom ever sit in the Oval Office in Washington.
No, being president of the Republic of Texas wasn't the same as being President of the United
States. Certainly not.
It was better.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For 30 years Daniel da Cruz has lived and worked- as a diplomat, teacher, businessman, and
journalist-in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
He spent six World War II years as a U.S. Marine volunteer, serving ashore, afloat (in 1941 aboard
the Texas), and aloft in the three war theaters. A magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown
University's School of Foreign Service, da Cruz has been variously a census enumerator,
magazine editor and editorial consultant, judo master-he holds a second degree Black Belt of the
Kodokan Judo Institute, Tokyo-taxi driver, farmer, public relations officers for an oil company,
salesman, foreign correspondent, publishers' represen-tative, vice-president of a New York
advertising agency, slaughterhouse skinner, captain of a Texas security organization, American
Embassy press attache in Baghdad, and copper miner. He is currently Adjunct Professor of
Anthropology at Miami University.
da Cruz has published eleven books, among them an American history text, a monograph on
Amerindian linguistics, and three suspense novels for Ballantine Books, the most recent of
which, The Captive City, was awarded a special "Edgar." He has written one other science-fiction
novel, The Grotto of the Formi-gans, also published by Ballantine/Del Rey (1980).