The General's President (22 page)

"How was your day before the glums hit?" Flynn asked. "Or did it start with them?"

"No, it started out fine—about as interesting as any I've had here. I was going to talk about some of it after supper." He looked back through his day. "Everything was fine until a while ago. I was reading a report and got this feeling of futility."

They walked on in silence for a minute or so while Haugen reexamined the moment.

"I see my problem, Steve," the president said at last. "It goes with being president."

That
, thought Flynn,
I can believe.
"Tell me about it."

"There's a lot I'd like to accomplish in this job—or at least start—but it takes so damn much time to work out the operating details. The 'how to's.' Time I just don't have. There are too many things to deal with—coping kinds of things."

"Can others work out the details for you?"

"The fine details, yes. In fact, that's generally the way I operate in product development. The problem is working things out to the point where others can take over. And this time the product is so damn important!"

They continued walking, along a wrought iron fence now. In better times there'd have been tourists on the other side, or local people out for a walk of their own. Now there was no one except armed marines in scattered threes around the neighboring grounds, watching the surroundings and occasionally stealing a look at the president.

"You get as much done in a day as anyone I know," Flynn said. "Can you delegate more of what you're doing?"

Haugen grunted. "I already delegate as much as I feel good about. If I delegated any more, I'd get too out of touch to do the job. Being captain isn't the same in a dangerous storm as in fair weather."

"Suppose you could somehow arrange or make the time. What then?"

Again the president didn't answer at once, and finally Flynn tried another tack.

"What sort of thing is it you want to do? Can you give me an example?"

"Hm-m. What I'm actually doing now is trying to get things up toward a new normal."

He turned to look at the priest. "We can't survive old normal. Not for long. We'd hit the skids again. There are areas in government and economics and society that have been on long downtrends, and we're wasting our time trying to salvage the country if we don't handle them. Not just haywire them together and patch them up. Handle them. Make basic corrective changes.

"And I don't have all the time in the world. Congress is already getting restless about a president having emergency powers."

Haugen turned inward again, his eyes on the ground ahead of him. The Jesuit frowned thoughtfully. The era of kings who ruled, or even of real dictators, seemed to be past, at least in modern nations. Now it was democracy or rule by committee. And in America, one could wonder if enough people were willing to do what was necessary for democracy. If too many wanted quick satisfaction and no responsibility, then salvage was impossible.

But he would not say these things to Arne. To discourage him would be an act of spiritual violence. And it also seemed to Stephen Joseph Flynn that, as things stood, if some strong man didn't face the job and grapple with it, someone who people might follow, there was no hope at all.

"Well, if you had the time," Flynn replied, "how would you go about it?"

Once more Haugen lagged in answering. Finally he said, "Okay. Thanks. I've got it now."

"What's that?"

A break in the clouds had uncurtained the sun again, and it shone slanting down on them walking among the naked trees. The Secret Service men were twitchy; they didn't like the president so exposed, nor as far from them as he was. They'd edged a little closer, to twenty feet or so. Haugen noticed neither sun nor guards; his attention was on what he'd discovered.

"Time's not the big problem; that's a cop-out. My real problem's a lack of confidence, a fear of failing. I'm afraid the country won't go along with me. And if they don't go along willingly, actively, we'll end up with Communism or a military dictatorship." He turned his face to Flynn's. "The end of a dream. A good dream."

"The country seems to have responded pretty well to you so far," Flynn pointed out. "Look at the public opinion surveys. Morale is surprisingly good."

"Yeah, they have at that. But we need to show some solid results; they've seen too many promises fail."

"You haven't told them about the GPC yet."

Haugen brightened. "That's right, I haven't. That could make a heck of a difference to them."

The president looked at Flynn again. Like his long legs, the priest's soul marched to a different cadence than his own, but it seemed to have the same goal. "And suppose they tell me to go to hell," Haugen said. "We won't be any worse off than if I don't try. So I've got nothing to lose and everything to gain."

He laughed then. "You know what? I hadn't even thought about the GPC today; it's as if it didn't exist. I'd gotten too deeply into 'problems' to remember the ace in my sleeve."

The president angled toward the White House now, legs moving briskly, strongly. "It's time for me to get back to work, Steve. I've got a few things to do before supper. Don't forget you're eating with us." He grinned at the long-striding Jesuit beside him. "And thanks for the help."

***

There was dinnerware enough in the family dining room to feed a convention, and Lois Haugen had familiarized herself with all of it. She'd been having dinner served on a different set each day, on the basis of "why not?" This evening they were eating from plates of a beautiful gold-leafed porcelain.

She'd pointed it out to her husband when he failed to comment.
He has a good sense of aesthetics
, she told herself,
but he hardly notices these days.

"Stephen," she said when they were nearly finished eating, "Arne and I don't often take seconds. But if you'd like, the cook has another filet ready. I specifically told him to."

"Thank you, Lois, but I'd best leave well enough alone."

"Dessert then?"

"No thank you. I'll settle for conversation."

She laughed. "Conversation? I don't know." She looked at her husband, and her still warm alto voice became suddenly old and accusatory.
"Haugen! Ska' vi ha samtal eller föredra'?"
She turned back to Flynn. "It's a little game we play—have for years. We assume the roles of old people we once knew. I was wondering whether we were going to have conversation or a lecture tonight—whether to wear my wife and buddy hat or my official sounding board hat."

Her husband grinned sheepishly. "Wear them both, but the sounding board hat goes on top."

They left the table to the dirty dishes—someone would pick them up—and went into the sitting room, where the president poured an after-dinner wine.

"Steve," he said, "you may have thought it overdone a bit when you were interviewed here for security clearance. That was so I could legally talk to you about anything. But I'd never expected anything quite as confidential as I'm going to talk about this evening.

"And I don't want to lay something on you that may be more than you want to hear. Are you willing to hear it?"

Flynn's usually sober countenance was more sober still. "I am," he said.

The president nodded. "And at the same time, to fulfill my responsibility for official secrets, I need to emphasize the confidentiality of what I want to talk about. From what you told me once about the Seal of Confession, no priest, except I suppose an utter renegade, would violate it. Is that right?"

"That's right, Mr. President."

"Does that hold for something a Protestant or non-Christian might tell you under the Seal?"

"It would, but Arne, the Seal of Confession applies only to Sacramental Confession, not to other confidences. Not even the most important."

"I see." Haugen shrugged thick shoulders. "Well, I've made my point: This belongs in the most rarefied stratum of Top Secret. And I'm telling it to you on the basis that you're both close personal advisors of the President of the United States, and need to know what's going on with him."

Haugen got up then, and pacing slowly about, summarized his session with Cromwell and Gupta. When he was done, the others looked both stunned and mystified, their wine untouched since he'd begun.

"Arne," Flynn said, "what is scalar resonance?"

"Without getting into the physics of it, let's say—let's just say there is now a means of setting up a standing wave... No, let's just say that—for one thing, we can establish and maintain high or low pressure cells in the atmosphere that can shunt a jet stream around. And both we and the Soviets can use these to manipulate the weather to a very considerable degree. Anywhere on the planet. For example, the Soviets have played around with making Siberia warmer. Unfortunately for them, this caused a series of droughts farther south in their Central Asian provinces, hurting their wheat crops there.

"And we know pretty conclusively that some of the weird North American weather in the seventies and eighties resulted from Soviet tests.

"A more straightforward aspect of the work involves the ability to set up and manipulate local resonances anywhere in the Earth's crust. Within close limits of accuracy.

"What you're actually doing when you do that, is transferring energy. If you do it in one abrupt, concentrated dump, the effect is explosive. Do it in a fault zone where there's enough existing stress, and you'll generate an earthquake. There's pretty conclusive evidence that the Mexico City quake in 1985 was a Soviet test."

Flynn's face had been solemn; now it looked shocked.

"Is that the electrical energy you talked about?" Lois asked.

"No no. The electrical energy simply powers the condenser and transmitter. You extract ambient energy from—the environment. What I think of as matric energy. You can do this from a fairly large volume of the environment, and it can be at a distance. Then you transfer it to where you want to release it; not through real space, distance, but through what I think of as the Tesla Matrix.

"Do you remember the case of the mysterious giant mushroom cloud witnessed by pilots of at least five airliners over the western Pacific in 1984?"

Lois nodded; Flynn shook his head.

"It was a mushroom cloud that would have done credit to a nuclear bomb, but without an initial flash and with no radioactivity at all. It came from 'dumping' an immense quantity of heat at an underwater coordinate, dumping at a distance by an installation in the USSR. The mushroom clouds in the southwestern Indian Ocean recorded from orbit in 1979 and 80—the ones that had the media speculating about South African nuclear tests—those were the same kind of phenomenon, but they were ours."

Smiling grimly, he looked at his wife and the priest. "Heavy duty, eh? That sort of thermal release in a metropolitan area would leave nothing but the nonflammable rubble. Or by releasing it more slowly and diffusely, you could heat the atmosphere and form a low pressure cell."

He chuckled without humor. "Potentially the balance of terror can cover more than nuclear and biological weapons. Publicize this with the millenium so close at hand, and the apocalyptic churches would really pull in converts."

Lois Haugen looked as sober as Stephen Flynn just then. "At least it wouldn't poison the atmosphere and crops," she said. "And the soil."

"True. And by the nature of the equipment, you couldn't use it to cover an entire continent with quick destruction. But it's another tool for international extortion, and the Soviets have a much larger network of generators than we do. So since Wheeler's Brussels Conference, we've relied partly on the threat of nuclear retaliation to help discourage the Soviets from using them.

"But that's not as effective now as it was. The Soviet ABM network provides them with a degree of protection against nuclear attack even greater than the media have been suggesting."

"Is there nothing you can do about this?" Flynn asked.

"Beyond the threat of retaliation? If there is, I haven't found it yet. Right now the only thing I can think of is to hang tough, rebuild the country, and play with the possibilities."

Flynn looked thoughtful. "And when will you tell the nation about the GPC?"

"The GPC? Within three weeks, probably. As soon as we have the stage set for it."

***

Arne Haugen's body was not unaesthetic, Lois told herself as she watched him disappear into the bathroom in his shorts. Not if you found aesthetic compatible with sturdy. She didn't know exactly how much he weighed these days; somewhere around two hundred and ten on his five-foot-eight frame. If not aesthetic, he was at least strong, definitely strong. And durable.

Now if he'd let her shave the patches of hair on his back... She chuckled. Actually he probably
would
let her; he was probably the most amiable person she knew. But she preferred him as he was, tufts and all.

She heard the sound of tooth brushing. He'd always taken care of himself. He was only getting about six hours sleep a night lately, getting up earlier than usual, but it didn't seem to be harming him.

Her mood slumped a bit then. She thought about "scalar resonance" weapons, and nuclear weapons, and all that Arne had to worry about. Everyone else was in the same danger of course, but Arne was president. It had become his job to worry about it. Although with him, worry might not be the right word. "Take responsibility for" was more like it.

And somehow it didn't seem right that he should have to carry so much of it at his age.

Not that he'd agree with her on that. She'd mentioned taking it easier, a year or so earlier. "At your age," she suggested, "maybe you shouldn't work so hard."

He'd snorted. "Age! Bodies wear out eventually, and a lot of the time they take the mind with them. But they're to use, and as long as mine works reasonably well, I'm not going to baby it." And his did work well. He didn't hear as well as he had, but it wasn't a problem yet. And he still got by without bifocals, which amazed her, considering the way he went through books. He even had all thirty-two teeth, albeit most of his molars had fillings.