Sex and the High Command (21 page)

Apparently, the Russians assumed the yak boy had led them into a trap, and the Tibetan had paid with his life for the Russians’ mistake.

Now, the silence of the Himalayas was broken only by the clip-clop of the ambling yak.

Very likely, Lamar figured, the Russians would think him a squad of Chinese soldiers and decide that life was too dear a price to pay for an evening’s entertainment.

He crouched, waiting for the chug-chug of the helicopter’s motor.

After half an hour’s wait, with the westering sun casting a glare on the icefield, it occurred to him that these were the boys who had invented Russian roulette. For them, life was not too dear a price to pay for an evening’s entertainment: Paying the price with a life was part of the evening’s entertainment.

Distracted by the glare in his eyes and by the yak, which mistook him for something to eat and ambled up to nose him, Lamar did not notice a brown shape belly through the defile and worm along the edge of the snowfield to his upper right, slipping from boulder to boulder. When the yak finally ambled away and wended on toward the village, Lamar grew more alert from the certainty that the helicopter was not taking off.

Scanning the terrain carefully, he glimpsed a pair of boots disappearing behind a boulder above him and slightly behind him. He had been outflanked. The Russian would have a straight run for the settlement, and his girls were exposed.

Some ancestral ghost from Pickett’s Brigade stirred in Dalton Lamar. Now it was either git or git got. He rose and charged, bending low, and, as he charged, he split the silence of the Himalayas with a Rebel yell, following it up with a battle cry which carried the defiance and fury of his spurned sex.

A carbine spit. Dalton Lamar spun, landed on his back, and slithered a few feet uphill over the snow.

From behind a boulder, the brown clump stood up, lifted a carbine high in the air, and shouted toward the defile with the singsong accent of Leningrad: “He’s finished, girls. Forward!”

Lamar’s fallen body drew them out of hiding and brought them waddling over the snowfield as the sniper clambered down the slope. They gathered around the body where it lay, the rifle still clutched at port arms, the eyes mirroring the blue Tibetan sky.

One of the soldiers, wearing the epaulets of a captain, looked down and said, almost sadly, “His eyes were very blue. What was he shouting, little sister, as he charged?”

“Something in a language that I could not understand. Perhaps Italian. He was screaming ‘Poo-see!’ ”

For three weeks following the cocktail party, Hansen was known around the Pentagon as the host with the most, even though much happened in those weeks of greater national importance.

Dr. Carey came up with a movie actress for Vice President—Kip Wednesday, who was all basketballs and poise. She had been married six times and seemed good for six more except that she was disillusioned by men and most of her speeches were tales of blasted hopes in search of happiness with males. According to Defense, she was attempting to organize a Males Anonymous.

Despite the opposition, McCormick was well ahead of the FEM ticket. Gallup gave him 80 percent of the men and 50 percent of the women.

McCormick spoke for all men, everywhere, men huddling in lonely farmhouses on the Northern Plains, men rolling along highways in Diesel rigs or gathering at bars of friendly taverns which had once been family taverns. As a man sincerely in love, he spoke with a voice that stirred old gallantries in hearts now diverted, but the high point, always, for his speeches, for Hansen, came when he invited Cora Lee to come to the rostrum and stand beside him.

Two weeks after the convention, Dubois announced that he could no longer support McCormick. Dubois had converted to the Catholic Church and he felt that the candidate did not have the interests of Negro or Catholic constituents at heart. Dubois withdrew from both parties to form the Afro-Catholic Party.

Despite such pebbles on the pavement, the McCormick steamroller kept rolling, and the romance between Mac and Cora Lee was on everyone’s tongue.

Hansen seldom listened to Dr. Carey. Her fiscal policy was insane; she proposed to scrap all armaments despite the country’s investment in ships, armor, planes, and nuclear weapons. Her foreign policy was equally ludicrous; she would eliminate all tariffs and permit freedom of exit or entry across borders without passports. She would eliminate NASA and space exploration. “If anyone out there wants to visit us, let them pay their own passage.”

Two weeks before November 2, Dr. Carey, in a rather contrite speech, admitted that she was not entirely against males and had, in fact, been hoping for an invitation to the McCormick-Barnard nuptials. After her wedding speech, the polls stabilized, and three days later she even recovered a little lost ground by promising the use of her yacht for a honeymoon cruise. It would be better, she hinted, if McCormick lost the election, for then he could have a carefree honeymoon.

President Habersham entered the fray. Since the FEM’s were attempting to make political capital of young love, the couple could have the Presidential yacht which would be made available immediately after the wedding, scheduled for November 3.

One morning in mid-October, shortly after the battle of the yachts, Defense, HEW, and Labor dropped by the admiral’s office while Hansen was present to discuss the latest polls; 88 percent of the males and 48 percent of the females were for McCormick. There was a certain amount of crowing in the talk, and Hansen decided to needle the boys. “Percentagewise, gentlemen, it looks good. Numerically, it could get a little sticky…”

“Ben, you’ve got something,” Primrose said. “What’s our latest mortality rate, Bones?”

“Better let me check the latest figures,” Dr. Drexel said, and he virtually ran from the office.

“I had lunch with Farnsworth yesterday,” Defense commented, “and he mentioned that felony convictions had soared in the past two months.”

“Ogie,” the admiral said, “let’s feed the figures to the Mark Thirty-seven and get our deadline.”

“Well,” Captain Hansen said, “if you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ve got to get back to my office and nuke Nebraska.”

Fatigue, more than Nebraska, prompted Hansen’s departure. With the Helgalian formula, he could have figured the Nebraska drop in half an hour, but the activity had stepped up so around the house that he was almost hoping that Helga would resume night courses in comparative literature.

At 1530, Primrose called, using the blue and gold phone. “Ben, where’ll you be, election night?”

“At home.”

“We fed your theory into the box, and it comes out November twenty-eight. That’s too close for comfort. If our mortality and felonization rates step up appreciably, we might have to work faster on Operation Ultimate Thule.”

“Well,” Hansen said, groping through his tired brain for some rejoinder. Dr. Carey had promised to cancel the Venus probe, so they would not have the cold stars as Dubois had promised, and he added, “As long as we’ve got the priesthood…”

“I hadn’t thought of that!” Primrose almost shouted. “Let me feed it to the Mark Thirty-seven. I’ll call you back.”

Hansen went back to his planning board. With the tactical situation as presented, he had a problem. Either he would have to recommend a widening of the Soo Canal or request that the Navy construct smaller subs.

At 1610 the blue and gold phone rang again. “Captain Hansen, prepare your wife and daughter for a quick trip to Madagascar. The critical date is October thirty-one.

“You’ll receive no official orders, but on election night, stay close to your telephone. If the security officer calls, identify yourself with the countersign: ‘Primrose says, “Evacuate.” ’

“If it’s flash green, proceed according to routine. If it’s yellow, prepare to leave with your family within two days. If it’s flash red, proceed immediately to Dulles Airport, alone, and board Air Force One.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Hansen said, and trudged back to his drawing board.

From the admiral’s remarks, he could detect the broad outlines of Operation Ultimate Thule. No wonder Primrose had spoken of the alternate plan with such dread. Surviving remnants of Western civilization would join Kenyatta and a handful of Moslems for a last-ditch defense of bisexual society on Madagascar. Life would be rough on that steaming island. Helga was wearing him to a frazzle in the North Temperate Zone. He hoped Madagascar had an adult education program which would offer Helga something physically more taxing than tailoring and taxidermy.

Helga was so excited by the trip to Madagascar that she took her shears to the toolshed and sharpened them to cut out a pair of denim shorts and a bra halter for jungle wear, chanting “Me, Jane.” With some trepidations, Hansen realized that she would create a stir among the veiled wives of the Moslems and the muumuu-clad black women.

On the day of the election, the Bensons motored up from Norfolk. Sue was eager to share the victory with her fellow partisan fighter, but Sue’s husband, no longer Ensign Benson but plain Mr. Benson, was apparently looking for a place to drink, since the bars were closed. Benson had resigned from the service to open an organically grown foods store in Virginia Beach. “I don’t relate to ordinance supply and trajectory problems as I do to wheat germs and alfalfa,” Benson explained, “and I’m more interested in maintaining the purity of body cells than in disarranging them.”

“From the way you’re talking, young man, it seems to me you’ve embraced that woman’s platform.”

“If by ‘that woman’ you mean Mother Carey, I certainly have, sir. I voted a straight FEM ticket.”

“Are you insane, Benson?”

“No, sir. I’m a realist. We’ve been living in a matriarchy for the last two hundred years and we might as well face it.”

“While your young lady has been beating the bushes to save our hides, you’ve betrayed her on the home front.”

“Not at all, Captain. Sue and I talked this over long ago, and we decided to hold to our identities. Two mature adults cannot relate to each other in a master-servant, dominant-regressive sexual pattern.”

“Since you brought up the subject in mixed company,” the captain said, “I’ll tell you, if that woman gets in, she’ll dissolve marriage.”

“It’s any woman’s prerogative to dissolve a marriage.”

Helga, seated beside the television set and scissoring away on an old pair of Levis, rushed to her husband’s defense. “Ben’s right. That woman would not be above divorcing people by edict, if she could.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the first projection from Poll-Pro. On the basis of fragmentary returns from Maine and New Hampshire, the computer gave the election to McCormick by 81 electoral votes, 30 votes less than Time’s consensus. Dejected, Hansen wandered into the kitchen to fix himself a drink. Helga, sensing his mood, followed him.

“She’s cutting into his margin by having the girls entice the men, and she’s having fine weather for it. I checked the meteorological charts, and Florida is the only high-humidity area.”

“It won’t matter much, there,” the captain said. “
Time
put Florida in the ‘Safe for Carey’ column because of Miami.”

“I’ll lay my femininity against your masculinity that Florida goes McCormick.”

Since the presence of house guests had denied Helga her pre- and postprandial activities, Hansen felt in the mood to accept a wager he couldn’t lose. “We’ll drink on that.”

They drank.

Before midnight, Florida went for McCormick.

New York was the big disappointment. Initial returns from upstate showed McCormick ahead 2 to 1, but when the precincts began to report in the metropolitan area, the picture shifted rapidly. Harlem went solid for Dubois. The Catholic vote was split down the middle, half for Carey and half for Dubois. The Jewish and Puerto Rican vote was 4 to 1 for Carey. After all the minority group votes were tallied, there weren’t enough male Protestant Caucasians to elect a mayor for Cordele, Georgia.

Despite the loss of New York, Poll-Pro was holding steady at an 81-vote plurality for McCormick.

Hansen was shocked by New York and submerged when Pennsylvania was dragged down by Philadelphia. New England went solidly McCormick, and so did the Atlantic Coast states from New Jersey to Florida, but McCormick was not piling up the expected lead. No sooner would an Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia stand up for McCormick than, plop, they would be bowled over by an Ohio and Michigan going for Carey.

But Poll-Pro held steady at an 81-vote plurality for McCormick.

Along toward morning, a totally unexpected trend developed. Dubois was carrying Louisiana and Mississippi and not merely cutting into McCormick’s plurality as predicted. Most of the Middle West farm states and the Rocky Mountain states held for McCormick, but Missouri and Illinois went for Carey. Texas squeaked by. Along the border, the Mexican-Americans with their woman-oriented culture almost swung the state for Carey until Dallas came barreling in with 92 percent for McCormick.

By 1 a.m., it was obvious that the key state was California, regardless of the way Oregon and Washington went, which meant that Poll-Pro, holding - steady at 81, was predicting McCormick would take California and one other Pacific Coast state.

Dr. Carey came on television at 1:15 to assure her followers that victory was in the bag, basing her prediction on the automatic response of the California electorate to a ballot with a movie star’s name on it, but when the cameras switched to Los Angeles, Dr. Carey’s words rang hollow. A shot of the Democratic-Republican headquarters at the Olympic Hotel revealed a happy and enthusiastic crowd. Word had just come in that Orange County was going 98 percent for McCormick, and celebrants were waving placards reading: WE ADORE YOU, MAC and MAD ABOUT THE BOY.

Benson, who apparently had no compunctions about nonorganically grown bourbon, was slopping his shirt front and muttering in alcoholic jubilance, “She’s gonna murder ’im in LA.”

“
In vino veritas
,” Helga said solemnly.

“In bourbon, bunk!” Sue snapped. “If she wins, it will be the end of the world we’ve known.”