23 JUNE 1998
At ten-thirty on the evening of 23 June, Gwillam Forte kicked off his shoes and sank into his favorite armchair overlooking Houston from the big picture windows of his fifty-eighth-floor downtown penthouse. Reflecting on the day’s activity, he decided that it had not all been unproductive.
It had begun at dawn with a flight to Austin for breakfast with Governor Tom Traynor. Forte hadn’t looked forward to the interview, because he knew he was going to have to lie to his friend, and while lying- like dying-is one of life’s realities, it made neither experience more pleasant.
After their third cup of coffee, Governor Traynor pushed back the breakfast dishes and unrolled the first of the tight cylinder of plans and blueprints Forte had brought along.
“What’s all this about?” he said, running his eye over the Texas deck diagrams and hull profiles, with the specifications of each written in neat draftsman’s script in the margins. “You know I can’t make head or tail of all this.”
Gwillam Forte pointed to the lower diagram. “That’s new. Those four nuclear reactors will power the ship. We’ve eviscerated the engine rooms, removing boilers, engines, drive shafts, and masses of auxiliary equipment to accommodate them. The rudder and screws were also eliminated, as you see. Cleans the hull up considerably.”
“But those reactors are tiny little things,” Traynor protested. “Removing all that mass of metal must affect the weight of the ship. Won’t it ride higher in the water, make it top-heavy, threaten it with capsizing?”
“Oh, yes, you can’t make head or tail of all this,” said Gwillam Forte with a wry face. “Like hell you can’t. But you’re right. We’ve compensated for the reduction in weight by adding extra concrete and steel shielding around each of those reactors. The weight and balance remain substantially the same.”
“And where did the reactors come from? I suppose they were just lying around SD-1.”
“More or less. They were made for the new 19,000-ton Reagan-class submarines, but the Bureau of Ships upgraded their tonnage to 27,000 to accommodate the Ranger ICBMs the Air Force couldn’t squeeze into their budget. The new pig boats require larger power plants, so the Department of Defense told us to put these on ice. What safer place to store them than on a battleship?”
It was the first of what would be a whole parade of untruths that morning, but Cherokee Tom, being only part Indian, accepted it without reservation. He slapped Forte on the back. “You’re a sly one, Gwillam. What if they send an inspector to check up?”
“I’ll buy him off with a box seat at the next Oilers’ game . . . Now, these four reactors will drive turbines pumping water in through bow scoops and expelling it at high speed through subsurface ports astern. Maneuvering is by means of bow and stern thrusters, port and starboard. They divert a portion of the propulsion stream, giving a turning radius and maneuverability like that of a speedboat.”
“And speaking of speed . . . ?”
“Don’t know yet. This can only be estimated so far by computer models. But we calculate speeds of up to sixty-two knots.”
“That’s one hundred kilometers an hour,” marveled the governor. “If that doesn’t grab the crowds, I don’t know what will.”
Maybe, thought Forte dismally, the sight of the Texas sinking beneath the waves of the channel under the proton guns of the Russian Seventeenth High Seas Fleet? He longed to tell his friend that the Texas wouldn’t be around for any Texas Millenary Celebrations, that it had been drafted for a more important role in the national destinies. But of course he couldn’t. President Wilson Wynn had entrusted him with the responsibility of creating an incident that would goad the Russians into a fatal belligerency, and that was a secret even the governor of Texas couldn’t share.
Still, he felt mean and ashamed as the governor poured over the plans for the ship, discussed details that would by next month be completely academic, and praised Forte for the tremendous sacrifices in time and money he was making for the State of Texas.
“Don’t thank me, Tom,” he said, rolling up the diagrams and unrolling another in its place. “I’m only doing what a normally patriotic American would do in my place. Don’t forget that, when the time comes to remember.”
“Never fear, Will,” said Traynor heartily. “Now, then, what’s all this?”
“The assembly site for the Texas National Guard.” ‘ Governor Traynor looked blank.
“Refresh me.”
“You mentioned how beautiful it would be if the Texas National Guard could somehow be rung in as an honor guard for the Texas?”
“Yes, but what-”
“And you said you’d leave the details to me?”
“Sure. On the other-”
“Well, this is what my men have come up with during the past twenty months. I thought it would be a nice surprise for you.”
“It’s that, all right.” Traynor laughed. “But what is it? It looks like a bunch of underground pipelines.”
“It is-people pipelines. . . . When you came to me four years ago with your Texas brainstorm, you’ll remember I had to obtain a Mole-one of those enormous machines used to bore subway tunnels-to provide access from SD-1 to the Texas basin about nine kilometers away.”
“I remember.”
“At the time we began, I put a study team to work out your suggestion about the Texas National Guard as honor guard for the Texas. This is the plan the team worked out. And today, the first phase of that plan is a reality-the ‘pipelines.’
“The team first of all surveyed the channel banks between which the Texas will cruise upstream toward the city center. When the channel was deepened a few years ago, you may recall, most industry along the banks was relocated some hundreds of yards inland in accordance with the new industrial development master plan. The banks are thus relatively unobstructed for a stretch of nearly three miles. Along each bank, come next June-just a year hence-will be erected grandstands twenty-eight tiers high. They will have a clear view of the channel. They’ll be provided with parking facilities to the rear, equipped with food services, rest rooms, first-aid stations, and crowd-control officers’ quarters beneath the stands. The whole complex will take 3,200 men five months to construct, and when it’s all finished, and the TMC opens on the first of January, 2000, it will accommodate 2.8 million people simultaneously. You get first choice of seats.”
“Fantastic!” exclaimed Governor Traynor. “I-I don’t know what to say.”
Say it ain’t so, Joe, Forte thought sadly, because it ain’t going to be. The plans were sound enough, but what’s the use of a bowl without the cherries? By next June, the Texas would have been on the bottom of the channel for eleven months.
“That’s what’s going to be on top, although construction hasn’t started yet, of course. What you’re looking at is underneath the channel, and it’s already completed. That Mole cost me a lot of money, and when we finished drilling the tunnel to the Texas, my staff was given the job of finding other uses for it. They got together with the TMC team and came up with this: two sets of subterranean tunnels running the width of the Houston Ship Channel, just ten feet below the bottom. The two sets are about one hundred meters apart-something to do with the geophysical properties of the bottom, although the separation is of no particular importance. Each set consists of three stacks of three tunnels, nine in all. Each tunnel in the set is separated from the next by only a few feet. Each tunnel is 5.8 meters in diameter.”
“Making a total of eighteen tunnels beneath the channel,” mused the governor. “I suppose it would take that many to transport 2.8 million people from one side of the channel to the other.”
“People, hell,” chuckled Forte. “No visitor is going to get near these tunnels.”
“Huh?”
“One other detail will give you the tip-off: the center tunnel of each three-tier stack is provided with toilets, mess halls, emergency aid stations and a communications center.”
Traynor shook his head. “No help, I’m afraid.”
“In the dark, eh? Well, so is the public. Until the TMC’s opening, nobody will be aware of their existence. Keeping the secret has been the toughest part of the project so far, in fact, because we had to shift something like 1.5 million cubic meters of soil from those tunnels, barge it down to Galveston Bay, and dump it during hours of darkness. When I think of the state and federal regulations we broke, I-”
“I’ll square the rap for you, Will, if you’ll just tell me what all this is in favor of.”
“The Texas National Guard, Your Excellency-what else?”
“You’re going to put the National Guard in those tunnels?”
“Right. A few companies at a time, from assembly points outside the city the night before the ceremonies begin. When the stands are full of your constituents, and you’ve cut the ribbon and the oratory declaring these proceedings open, the band will strike up ‘The Eyes of Texas,’ and from those tunnels will materialize the Texas National Guard. Ten abreast, one division will march up one side of the channel before the reviewing stand, the second division up the other, flags snapping in the breeze, cymbals clashing, Texans cheering. Can you visualize it?”