Forrester said, “We’ll try to keep out of your hair.”

“Sure. Bud Sims will take you around—the birds are really his bailiwick. I’m just the landlord. Major Chandler here has authority to clear you into any area you want to see. Professor, good to meet you.” Ryan shook hands with Moskowitz and Spode, batted Forrester’s arm and went inside the tower. Colonel Sims was corning through and held the door for him and they exchanged a few words in the doorway, and when Sims came out onto the apron his face was screwed up into a mild perplexity.

“Gentlemen, I’m very sorry to cop out on you but I’ve just had a call from a hospital in Yuma—my wife was down there looking over some real estate and she’s been taken ill. I’m sure it’s nothing serious, but I’m going to fly down there.”

“Of course,” Forrester said. “I’m terribly sorry to hear that—I hope she’ll be all right.”

“I’m sure she will. But she’ll want me there. My deputy will be taking over my duties until I get back. I’m afraid Colonel Winslow can’t run the store and show you folks around at the same time but I’ve told him to cooperate with you to the best of his ability. Major Chandler here will guide you wherever you want to go. I’m sorry to duck out this way but they’re warming up a plane for me down there right now. Gentlemen?”

There was a quick round of handshaking and Sims went, walking fast, a tall man who wore the uniform as if he’d been born to pose for a recruiting poster.

Jaime Spode’s outdoor eyes were crinkled into suspicious slits. “They’re dropping off like flies. If I didn’t know better I’d think we had bad breath.”

Major Chandler uttered an uneasy laugh. “It must look like that. But I’ll do my best to fill in for the Colonel.” Chandler’s eyes were covered by huge curved mirror-lensed motorcycle sunglasses and he wore gray Air Force coveralls, cut very tight, with a dozen zipper pockets. Forrester thought he must have spit-shined his boots with lighter fluid and a nylon stocking: the toes had a wicked shine and altogether the meaty-shouldered chief of base security gave a sinister impression of latent violence. The polished ones were often the pathologically sadistic ones.

Standing rigidly with his chest out like an aquatic bird’s, Chandler said, “At your service, gentlemen. Where to?”

“The launch complex, I think,” Forrester said and Chandler took them downstairs through the admin tower and whistled up a gray USAF Chevrolet, For Official Use Only. Forrester got in back with Moskowitz; Spode slid into the middle of the front seat between the Major and the driver, and Chandler turned with his left arm over the back of the seat and said, “We’ll be bumping into a little more confusion than you’d normally find out there today. We’ve got a standardization-and-evaluation team down here from Z.I. Command to inspect our combat capability. I’d like to avoid getting underfoot—if they trip over us they’ll score points against the base.”

Moskowitz’ eyes twinkled and Forrester nodded; Chandler was going by the book but he wasn’t going to go out of his way to make things easy.

A B-52 bomber circled high overhead with vapor trails spreading from its eight jets and Major Chandler kept up a running monologue thick with jargon that both explained and obscured the installations they drove past. The road went through a guarded gate in the security fence and across absolutely empty desert—greasewood, cholla, manzanita, ocotillo, paloverde, sand. A narrow side road ran off to the right and Chandler said, “One of our ABM silos, about a mile over there.”

“Sure,” Moskowitz said, “to defend our investment.”

“To defend our strike capability, Professor. We can’t just leave the birds wide open for the Reds to knock out with their first strike.”

“I know, but it’s still a strange world in which people are defenseless and only strategic weapons can be protected.”

“We could protect everybody”—Chandler’s face twisted toward Forrester—“if Congress gave us the money to build a full-scale ABM system.”

Forrester said, “I’m not the department of sympathetic cars, Major. That’s over in Congressman Breckenyear’s office.”

Chandler’s face made no visible change. Forrester wished the man would take off those infernal sunglasses. Chandler said, “War travels fast these days, Senator—we’re just keeping up with the Ivans.”

“Or are they the ones who’re just keeping up with us?”

“You rather let them get ahead of us, Senator?”

“Ahead and behind are words that don’t mean much when you’ve already passed the finish line. I’m talking about overkill now.”

“I know. I read your speech in the paper.”

“And you think I’m wrong.”

“Senator, we don’t keep moving, they’ll move right ahead and figure out ways to neutralize our birds. Then it’s not overkill any more, it’s We Lose. God knows we don’t want a thermonuclear war but maybe the real danger isn’t in going to the brink of war but in shrinking from the brink of war.”

It was a speech he’d heard Woody Guest make once and hearing it from Chandler’s lips made him smile slightly. “You have a lot of faith in technology, don’t you, Major?”

“Kept us alive this long, sir.”

The door to the concrete dugout was marked simply WING HQ and it was guarded by armed sentries in white helmets and a KMS machine which compared the thumbprints on their ID cards with their own thumbs. Chandler said, “Be pretty tough for a saboteur to get in past this, Senator, if that was on your mind.”

“I see you have seen my speeches.” Forrester smiled his political smile.

“Yes, sir. It usually pays.”

“Know your enemy.”

Chandler slid his card into the machine and pressed his thumb to the scanner. “An unauthorized visitor would have an easier time getting into Fort Knox. The cards are magnetically coded like a printed circuit sealed inside the plastic. It took a direct order from the Secretary of Defense to get them for you and they’ll be destroyed the minute you leave the base. Well then, in we go—after you, gentlemen?”

The nerve center reminded Forrester of an airport controllers’ console room: tiers of screens above a vast curved desk surface. Chandler kept up a running commentary: “If one of my inspectors spots any of these boys goofing off just once his ass is grass.… I guess you already know we’ve got all kinds of redundancies and duplications so it’s impossible for a crazy to go off his nut and shoot off a bird. The President has to push the button. Nobody else. We’ve got double-check, verification procedures and the whole procedure can be stopped at any point right up to ignition by a countermand from the President or NORAD. It’s a whole lot easier to stop it than it is to start it.”

Jaime Spode was looking at everything and Forrester knew the information was being absorbed into Spode’s mental computer, sorted for weaknesses, filed for later recovery.

Professor Moskowitz watched with a detached expression and when he turned toward Chandler he said, “You’re talking about a preignitiont countermand. On the old birds we had self-destruct mechanisms but I understand they’ve eliminated them on these. What if the missiles have already been launched? Can you still stop them?”

“No. Once they’re in the air they’re gone. Unless you can shoot them down and that’s damned unlikely. If we had a radio signal to stop them the Reds could use it to neutralize our strike—you can’t keep a radio code private forever. I mean, everything’s got to be tested and the Reds watch us with everything they’ve got whenever we test a bird. If we used open radio transmission to control them they’d pick up the signals and work out the codes and frequencies. Can’t be done, Professor.”

Forrester said, “You’ve never tested the missiles with live warheads.”

“No sir, but we’ve tested the warheads underground and we’ve tested the birds with dummy warheads. Everything works, Senator, honest to God, I give you my word.”