Military analysts don’t believe in miracles. According 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 precautions, due to fallout. In contrast, by 1987 Russia itself had such a preemptive option no longer. With the successful 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 satellites. 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 Russian expansion.
Accordingly, the United States initiated a mammoth rescue operation. Together with its reluctant allies, who thought that the money would be better spent strengthening their own defenses, it poured grain, meat, manufactured 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 handouts 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 themselves, 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. Russia, 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, excitement, danger, suspense, the sense of sacrifice and camaraderie that comes with war. Bingo in the hospital 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. Actually, 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 commission.”
“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 landslide. Get on it, and keep me posted. A flying battleship, 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 below 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 distant, 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. Phillips. 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 Styrofoam 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 quarterdeck 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 battleship is no disadvantage: you’ll bring a fresh perspective, 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.”