The Throne of Saturn, page 18
“Then why has she betrayed me?” Percy Mercy demanded, and for a moment it seemed to the president that there was a genuine anguish in the little man, under all the righteous poses. “Why have we never done what we should have done, why have we always destroyed the hopes of mankind, why have we made of our stated goals a mockery, and of our greatest dreams a shambles? Why have we not done what I, and not only I but many millions, have believed to be best for the world? How could we have destroyed so many hopes and been so false to ourselves? How could we?”
“That’s what I want to know, too,” Kenny Williams said, and the president was thankful for his heavy-handed intervention, for it gave him time to think. He did not for a moment minimize the forces in the country these two represented, so he framed his answer with some care.
“Of course, you know perfectly well,” he said with a flat calm he hoped would restore some semblance of everyday reason to the conversation, “that I am not responsible for the policies of my predecessors. I have had to take the situation as I found it and go on from there, just as they did in their time, and as my successors will do in theirs. Sometimes this has not been easy, but always it has been inevitable. I also have had to act, as they have had to act, on information which is not known to the general public, or even to a small fraction of it, or even, hard though it may be to accept, Percy, to you. And I have had to act bearing in mind that nations nowadays do not get many second chances, and that if I do the wrong thing, my nation may not survive it. Why, good God, man!” he exclaimed with a sudden, bitter asperity. “You prattle on in your little editorials about the ideal things America ought to do, but I am responsible for what America actually has to do in order to survive. Survival isn’t always pretty and perfect and ideal. Sometimes it’s a damned grubby, serious business. Sure, it would be great if America could be the noble, humble, meek, turn-the-other-cheek country you would apparently like her to be, but if she were, she’d be dead in a minute.
“Now, I tell you,” he said, and his voice became level and grim, “that regardless of what your friend Kuselevsky wants you and your wishful-thinking readers to believe, the Soviet Union is preparing a launch to Mars, and it is attempting to gain an advantage over this country again, and I don’t give a damn how gullible you and your pals may be, that is the fact, and anybody who helps the Soviet Union in this by weakening his own government is playing the Soviet Union’s game and will live to regret it. If, that is, he really cares what happens to America. Or did you,” he concluded with a deliberately savage sarcasm, “give up on that fifteen years ago, too?”
“Now, see here,” Senator Williams began. “If you’re accusing me of—”
“You were still wetting the bed fifteen years ago,” the president said. “Let this man answer for himself, if you please.”
“You may use all the old clichés,” Percy Mercy said with a certain serene disdain that he seemed to have recaptured during the president’s reply, “but the basic facts do not change. You cannot prove to me that the Soviet Union is doing anything but what Alexei says it is, preparing to conduct a perfectly reasonable series of experiments at Space Station Stalin—”
“But I can prove it,” the president said. “I can show you the reports.”
“I should not believe them,” Percy said in the same serene fashion, “for reports can be doctored and documents can be faked, when it suits the purpose of a suspicious and fearful government that wishes to deny the hopes of mankind for peace and cooperation in space.”
“But you have it turned upside down,” the president began. “It is not we who are the suspicious and fearful government—” But then he dropped it, for something in the smug and self-certain face that confronted him told him its defenses could not be penetrated, so convinced was Percy of his own infallibility, so closed, illiberal, and intolerant his mind to any ideas that did not agree with his own.
“Very well,” the president said. “And what do you propose to do about it, just write more drivel like this and fly in the face of the facts?”
“I have already gone beyond that,” Percy said calmly, “as you know. CAUSE is already a functioning organization and our temporary headquarters downtown on L Street is absolutely swamped with incoming phone calls, telegrams, letters, and pledges of support. You saw our ad in the New York Times this morning, demanding assignment of Dr. Halleck and Commander Weickert to the crew, and demanding that the Administration invite Russia to participate as an equal partner in this unilateral attempt on our part to launch a hasty and ill-advised expedition to Mars—”
“You and your kind just won’t believe the facts when they are unfavorable to Russia, will you?” the president asked in a wondering tone. “You just simply will not believe.”
“The word of a government in which we have no faith?” Percy asked calmly. “No, sir, we will not.”
“How invaluable people like you are to the Communists,” the president said, still in the same almost awestruck way. “How infinitely invaluable, placed as you are and with the influence you have.”
He swung his chair around to cut off the start of Percy’s indignant reply; stared out across the lawn hunched and thoughtful for a long moment; apparently came to some decision; swung back. “I suppose there is no point in asking you to restrain these efforts a little until I have time to review the situation further?”
“What good would that do?” Percy asked. “The choices are simple enough.”
“They will be when I get through presenting them to the Senate,” Kenny Williams promised dourly.
“There is nothing I can do to make you change your minds?” the president asked, with what appeared to be the beginning of capitulation, and was taken by them to be such. “Nothing to even get you to grant me a little time?”
“Mr. President,” Percy Mercy said, and his voice held the start of triumph, “there need be no time to make the decision so patently just.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” the president said thoughtfully. “Then perhaps there will really be no need for that fighting speech of yours this afternoon, either, Kenny. Right?”
Senator Williams gave him a sudden sharp look.
“I—don’t—know,” he said.
“Well, think it over,” the president suggested with a certain tartness. “You’ll look a little foolish if you launch a clarion-call for action I’ve already taken, won’t you?”
“How do I know you’ll take it?” Kenny asked.
The president leaned forward.
“Look,” he said, “be a little realistic, you fellows, will you? I have a lot of touchy personalities involved here, and it’s going to take me at least a few hours to get them all in line. Now, suppose you hold that speech for twenty-four hours, at the request of your president—which,” he said dryly, “ought still to carry a little weight with you—and then if you think it’s still needed, fire away. But in the meantime—ease up. Give me a chance. O.K.?”
“Well—” Senator Williams said doubtfully.
“What do you want?” the president asked, still dryly. “Some dam or other? A new highway project? My job?” He smiled at Kenny’s involuntary start. “It takes a big man to fill it. Prove you are: give me time.”
“How do I know—” Kenny began, but the president stared him down. “Well,” he said grumpily, sounding like the spoiled child his older Senate colleagues often considered him. “All right. If you say so. But only for twenty-four hours.”
“Twenty-four hours,” the president agreed promptly; so promptly that it immediately revived their doubts, as he intended it should. He stood up and began to move them firmly toward the door.
“Then we have your word, Mr. President—” Percy began, trying to hang back. But the president’s hand on his elbow was polite and irresistible.
“You have my word,” the president said as they reached the door, “that during the next twenty-four hours I shall do my best to reach the fairest possible decision in this difficult situation. Isn’t that, really, all you have the right to demand?”
“Twenty-four hours,” Kenny Williams repeated uncertainly. “After that—”
“After that,” the president said cheerfully, “who knows what hell may not break loose?”
Which, he told himself as he closed the door behind them with considerable relief, might well be true; although, having successfully convinced his guests and himself that he still had independence of choice in the matter, he did not really believe it.
Percy, however, did; and when he returned to View’s hushed and elegant offices on Connecticut Avenue just below Dupont Circle, he resumed without a moment’s hesitation the planning interrupted by his visit to the White House.
He did not trust the president, and he did not approve of him. Like so many in his particular sector of the political spectrum, Percy had gone through a series of changing attitudes toward the chief executive which were as fixed and inevitable as the orbit of Mars itself.
These had begun with initial fanatic support which had progressed to inevitable later disillusion as the president had proved to be, not the doctrinaire liberal Percy and his friends had at first assumed, but a hardworking pragmatist forced to accommodate himself to the realities he found in the White House.
For Percy, for his friends on the Times, the Post and similar self-appointed guardians of the True Grail, the metamorphosis—which had occurred with monotonous regularity in the case of each of their candidates down these latter decades of the twentieth century—had produced with this president, as with others, its inevitable corollary. It made them disillusioned, bitter, intolerant, and suspicious of their former idol, overreactive in their opposition to the things he did.
It also made them, on an issue such as the Mars mission, a formidable, unrelenting, vindictive, and destructive political force behind which could, and did, gather every element in America which wished America ill.
It was necessary to understand this recurring political dismay of Percy and his pals in order to understand why it was possible for them to get involved in the kind of protest that now was being mounted all across the country against NASA, the president, and their plans for Planetary Fleet One. Only in this context did it make sense that Percy Mercy, presumably responsible editor of a presumably responsible magazine, could deliberately associate himself with the sort of sinister scum that was rushing to join the many decent and genuinely concerned citizens who were responding to the appeal of the Committee Against Unilateral Space Exploration.
He could perceive easily enough the way in which the decent and genuinely concerned were responding, when he reached for the Picturephone and checked with his organization’s wildly excited headquarters on L Street. Behind the happily confused face of the youthful director he could see on the little screen the bright-eyed college kids, the bearded professors, the clever clerics, the self-conscious authors, the pompous movie stars and the little old ladies in hippie beads who had formed the working backbone of every campaign organization from Eugene McCarthy to the president himself. It was like old times, he realized, the contagion catching him a little, too, for all his sophistication and experience. This outpouring of native idealism was one of those things that restored one’s faith in America.
It was good to be engaged in a campaign against the government once more, and to have such honest support for it. It made a man feel Right to be blackguarding his own country again and to know that many millions of his good-hearted, innocent fellow citizens were with him one hundred percent.
For Percy, as for many of his colleagues, it resolved a lot of doubts.
Because they did have doubts, and they too were quite sincere and quite genuine. They epitomized that most peculiarly American product, the Americans who despise America because she isn’t as perfect as they think she ought to be.
Thus, they were impaled forever on the anguished knife of a most genuine and most desperate belief in their country—and a most genuine and most desperate dismay that she did not always, on every occasion, in every situation, live up to the ideals she was supposedly in the world to represent. Percy had not been engaging in sophistry when he had cried out bitterly to the president, “Why has she betrayed me?” It was an absolutely sincere and personal wail.
Since he felt betrayal as he did, it was therefore logical that Percy, like his friends, should on many occasions work with, and advance the cause of, less idealistic and less loyal souls whose attitude toward America was far more sinister. Percy and most of his friends were not Communists laboring, as Communists had for more than half a century, to destroy America: they were simply well-meaning and deliberately self-blinded fools who did Communism’s work for it.
They were, as Lenin had described them many years ago with a cruel contempt, the “useful idiots of the West” upon whom Communism could rely to scornfully reply to its critics, scathingly denounce its enemies, eagerly smooth its pathways and, with a fatal complacency, willingly open its doors.
Thus, in utter stupidity but quite good faith and innocence, Percy could eagerly publish, devoutly believe, and bitterly defend the cynical lies of an Alexei V. Kuselevsky. And he could with equal stupidity, innocence, and good faith call Miami, as he proceeded to do now, and talk to the individual who appeared on the Picturephone with all the customary ease and friendship of two old campaigners who had championed many a cause, sat on many a committee, agreed in many a seminar, linked arms on many a march.
It would have shocked him and provoked his virulent scorn if anyone had suggested that his friend was not loyal to America. Indeed, he had written one or two bitter editorials in View defending him against even the vaguest imputation of such a thing when it had been raised, years ago, by some obviously vicious, reactionary, and demagogic member of Congress.
His friend said he would be happy to accept appointment as one of the national co-chairmen of CAUSE.
He would also be happy, though he did not tell Percy the extent of his pleasure, to interrupt his vacation at the Fontainebleau and fly up to the Cape immediately on the errand he had been contemplating all morning without knowing quite how to find a logical way to go about it. Now Percy, all crusading innocence, had given it to him. He was properly grateful.
“Thanks very much, old pal,” he said with a fervor Percy found a little excessive and puzzling for a second. “You’ve just handed me a great opportunity.”
“We must all stand together against this crazy, mismanaged adventure,” Percy told him solemnly.
“We sure must,” his friend said cheerily, and Percy forgot his puzzlement in the face of such satisfying enthusiasm. “You can count on me!”
After he faded from the screen, Percy sat back with a feeling of righteous satisfaction. He did not believe for a moment that the president intended to do anything constructive in the next twenty-four hours. And so, hell might indeed break loose. And justifiably so, in Percy’s estimation.
He knew he could perhaps be considered to be helping it along, but he did not regret it for a second. It was probably the only way to restore some sanity to the situation and rescue the Administration and the country from the disastrous errors that were developing around the unfortunate mission of Planetary Fleet One.
Chapter Nine
What a foolish old man you are, he told himself as he went humming about his office, or checked and rechecked the rapidly expanding personnel lists, or had himself driven out, as he was now, to the area where the workmen were placing the first preliminary stakes for Pad C. What a foolish, sentimental old soul, to be skipping about inside his head like a schoolboy, jumping and kicking his heels and hugging himself for joy in a world suddenly made glorious and exciting and young again. All because stakes were being driven in the ground, scientists and technicians were being rehired, plans were beginning to move off the drawing board into reality. All because he was going to be allowed once more to perform, to the fullest extent of his great administrative abilities, the job he had been put on Earth to do. All because his beautiful, monstrous birds would soon be flying again.
“You are a fool, Albrecht Freer,” he told himself in a gently chiding whisper as he got out of the car, told the driver to wait, and walked slowly across the hot earth of Florida, under the steaming Florida sky, toward the busy workmen. “You are absolutely an old softhead, with Saturns where brains ought to be … But,” he added happily, “so are we all. So are we all, in NASA today.”
And this he knew to be generally true, even though he was as aware as anyone of the personality difficulties in Houston, the bothersome disturbance yesterday in Washington, the hostile criticisms echoing across the land. Over and beyond these things, which he knew to be just “the growing-pains of an unexpected rebirth,” as he had described them to his wife this morning, he could literally feel the space program beginning to move again.
It was in the clipped tones of his old friend and competitor Hans Sturmer in Huntsville, trying to be businesslike but not quite hiding the excitement in his eyes as he chatted briskly on the Picturephone. It was in the newly confident smile of Andy Anderson in Washington, as the administrator assured him cheerfully after yesterday’s demonstration, “Don’t worry, Al, no little gang of unwashed thugs is going to stop us now.” It was in the pleased tones and quick suggestions of Jim Matthison at North American Rockwell as he called to discuss some minor but necessary change in the vehicle. It was in the engaging grin of Bob Hertz from Houston as he called to offer personal congratulations, “Because you and I, Al, we really know the fun of this thing.” And it was in the happy faces of Stu Yule and Roger Webb, Dave McWharter and Bill Wheatley, and the other astronauts in training at the Cape, as they came out of the simulators to wave and grin and give him thumbs-up when they saw him beaming down upon them from the glassed-in visitors’ catwalk, high above.
