“I see.”
Gluyas Gant was an uncommonly decent man and a fine engineer. If this little man got his job, it was probably through the usual government application- the application of a knife between the shoulder blades. The suspicion put an edge on Forte’s voice.
“Then why didn’t you come down here the way Gant did-apply for permission twenty-four hours in advance and pick up an escort at the manway head?”
“Because twenty-four hours is all you’d need to cover your tracks.”
“What tracks?”
“Unauthorized hot-water emissions. You’d divert the hot water to another outlet. Not exploring this possibility was the land of sloppy work that got Gant fired.”
Opal had the earmarks of the authentic government snoop, but then so would a Soviet spy.
“I.D.,” Forte snapped to one of the assistants who performed such chores.
At the nearest computer terminal, the assistant punched in the appropriate code.
“Step right up, Mr. Opal,” invited Gwillam Forte. “You’re on the air. If you’re NRC, you know the procedure.”
Opal went through the steps with accustomed ease. He sat down at the console, faced the screen, and intoned: “Izard T. Opal, Ph.D. class of 1988, State University of New York, South Bronx campus.” He then turned his face to present a profile to the screen, at the same time placing his right hand flat on a glass plate beside the keyboard.
After an interval of a few seconds there appeared on the screen a series of still images showing Opal in various kinds of attire, ranging from swimming trunks-he had singularly unlovely fat knees-to street wear, with and without a hat. This was followed by a brief sequence showing Opal walking. A print-out then noted that his voiceprint and fingerprints checked, as did the analysis of his sweat and breath. “Subject,” it said, was “confirmed as Izard T. Opal, born 12 January 1965, white Caucasian, blue eyes, brown hair, height 165 centimeters, weight 71 kilograms. Burn scar right forearm. Presently employed as Regional Safety Engineer, Texahoma District, Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”
Opal turned to Forte with a self-righteous smirk.
“Satisfied?”
“Not since my fifth wife divorced me.”
“Can I go now?”
“Let’s talk about the hot-water emission first. Where did you detect it?”
“You know where,” Opal replied nastily. “Nothing happens at Sunshine Industries you don’t know about. But for the record, the temperature gradient in the Houston Ship Channel, as recorded by satellite infrared detection, indicates clearly that you’re pumping cooling water into the channel just beneath the keel of the so-called flagship of the Texas Fleet. Gant didn’t think of checking there.”
“But you did. Now, that’s what I call smart.”
Opal beamed. His eyes came alight with smugness, arrogance, and a flash of something else. Forte recognized it instantly: the unmistakable gleam of greed.
Forte relaxed. Once Opal proved he was in the pay of the NRC and not the Russians, Forte knew he had nothing to fear. By the time the violation citation for unauthorized emission of hot water had penetrated the successive layers of bureaucratic flab at the NRC, the Texas would have been at the bottom of the channel for months. But Forte’s sudden perception of Izard T. Opal as a man who could be reasoned with made the solution to the problem even simpler.
“Let’s go down to my office,” Forte said with a wink, “where we can have a drink and discuss this matter like civilized human beings.”
Izard T. Opal’s ready acceptance of Forte’s invitation told him he had not erred.
Later that afternoon, Dr. Fallows encountered Forte in the command center from which the computerized, crewless Texas would be directed in the “battle” against the Russians. Forte, like a boy with a new slingshot, was ensconced in the padded command chair, his helmet chin strap buckled tight, Hipping the enemy as the Russian ships appeared in computerized simulations on the 360-degree panoramic screen that formed the wall of the circular chamber. The helmet incorporated variable-magnification lenses, an eye-tracking device, and microcircuitry that coupled eye movements with those of the servomotored Elbows carousels. The principle was ancient, the device having first been used by American helicopter gun-ship pilots in Vietnam as far back as the late 1960s, but as embodied on the Texas it was much refined. The thirty-six carousels on the port side of the ship swung around as one to the target at which Forte’s eyes were directed, almost as quickly as his eye could move. He had only to press the firing pickle in his right hand for a stream of simulated electron beams to zap the targets that had engaged his eye.
“Who’s winning?” an amused Dr. Fallows asked. He rather enjoyed playing with toys himself.
“I always win,” Forte said, unstrapping the helmet. “It’s the only principle I never violate.”
“Even with Izard T. Opal?”
“Especially with Izard T. Opal.”
“How much did he cost you, Will?”
Forte started to reply, then thought better of it.
“I think I’ll pass that one, Herb. If 1 told you, you’d want a raise.”
1 JULY 1998
During the last days of June, the mood of Texas turned sullen, paranoid, mean and a little crazy, and nowhere more so than in Houston.
Loving couples fought knock-down, drag-out battles. The rape rate quintupled; women ceased going abroad at night unless accompanied by an armed escort, and on the streets during daylight hours ostentatiously clutched black cylinders of Mace in sweaty hands. In schools, students were openly rebellious and teachers more than usually indifferent to their depredations, which in one case involved hallucinating seventh-graders, at midmorning recess, torching a Good Humor man and his truck. Local industrial production was off 36 percent due to absenteeism. The drunk tank at the city jail had to be emptied twice daily to make room for new arrivals. Automobile collisions, hit-and-runs, casual shootings, coronaries, teen-age runaways, petitions for divorce, wife-beatings, suicides, and armed robberies multiplied at a record rate. On 30 June,
Cherokee Tom Traynor put the Texas National Guard on alert to back up the local police and the Texas Rangers, already on duty in Houston.
For perhaps the only time since 1845 were the citizens of Texas in such close accord as to the cause of their discontent. Then it had been the approach of General Santa Ana’s armies; today it was the approach of the Russian fleet.
Texans, echoing the editorial stand of the Houston Herald and other Forte-owned newspapers and television stations, had been at best suspicious of the Washington Protocols, at worst absolutely hostile. This was but natural, considering the composition of the population. White, Protestant, cattle-rasing, oil-drilling Texans reflexively rejected any position embraced by the Eastern establishment, and few initiatives had been so rapturously hailed by the establishment as the Washington Protocols. The Chicanos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, Chinese, and recent immigrants who made up the rest of the state’s population had too-recent experience with Russian policy to want to have any further connection with it. The views of both old and new elements were reinforced by the hair-raising accounts of the Soviet Seventeenth High Seas Fleet’s “good-will” visit to San Diego during the last ten days of June.
The twenty-four ships anchored in San Diego harbor on the evening of 21 June, and the senior commanders were received at a sumptuous banquet ashore by a delegation of city fathers who assured them that San Diego, unlike Seattle and San Francisco, was waiting to greet officers and men like the prodigal son returned. Heartened and off-guard by this unexpected windfall of hospitality, Fleet Admiral Vladimir Grell gave orders to his captains to allow one-half their officers and one-third their enlisted men to go ashore at noon the next day, before the handsome offer was rescinded. The liberty parties totaled just under ten thousand men, most of whom were rounded up at gunpoint and returned to their ships by armed patrols during the following ten days.
The day began sedately enough, with tight little groups of sailors in freshly laundered whites fanning out from the port area in search of the sailor’s simple pleasures. They quickly learned that pleasures in San Diego were more abundant and available than they could have dreamed, and best of all, they were free. Taxis refused to accept payment, as did the restaurants, which heaped their plates with seafood, and the bars and lounges, which plied them with spirituous beverages. By midafternoon, their anabasis had carried the ten thousand from Chula Vista to Encinitas, from Coronado to El Cajon. Considering their numbers, they were relatively invisible during the course of the afternoon and early evening, for most had gravitated to the myriad bars, where they were made welcome, and were proceeding to drink their way through the available stock of firewater. In this endeavor they were ably assisted by the platoons of lissome women, and regiments not so lissome, whom Lorry Vine had recruited from up and down the coast to do what, after long experience, came naturally.
Of liquor there was too much, of female companionship too little-even Lorry Vine couldn’t at such short notice assemble more than a fraction of the host-or rather, hostesses-required, and the disparity led to discussion between the haves and have-nots, in the best Marxist dialectical tradition. By ten o’clock that fateful day, 22 June, the wail of police and ambulance sirens became continuous, as did the crash of shattering glass, stentorian cursing in an assortment of Slavic and Altaic languages, the crack of chair against skull, and, above all the rest, the outraged howls of the damsels caught in the cross fire. Such were the beginnings of that muggy June night, and from that point onward the fortunes of the great city of San Diego declined.