“You see?” Luchenko said resignedly to President Traynor. “The United States insists on keeping its aggressive imperialist power intact. To construct a peaceful world, we need hammers and sickles, not bullets and bayonets.”
Traynor raised an eyebrow toward President Turn-bull.
“Understanding-that’s what we need,” said Turn-ball, speaking without notes. “We need trade, exchange of students, a common planning policy for the underdeveloped countries and a common budget to implement it, a free press, free elections, free speech. Only when we can achieve these goals will suspicion and enmity between our two great countries be dispelled.”
“Fine,” commented President Traynor, “but it seems to me you’re talking about ends, not means. What’s the first step? What do we do next week?”
“We begin with free elections, of course,” President Turnbull said grandly. “Let all the men and women assembled here in Houston submit their resignations, and free elections be held. The voice of the people will determine which leaders and policies will prevail.”
Premier Luchenko with difficulty kept his lips in a straight line. If this man of the people thought he, a military man who had fought and conspired his way to the top, was going to submit to the judgment of a nation of peasants, factory workers and petty bureaucrats, he was much mistaken. But the soft answer, he had read, confounded the enemy. He had one at hand: “Yes, Mr. President, what you say is very sound indeed. But even in the United States the electoral process requires months. We have but seven days.”
They flew.
If anything, by week’s end the Russians and Americans were farther apart than they had been the first day. Their positions hardened with a repetition of demands, a refusal to concede that to get they had to give. At bottom, the Russians were convinced that only if the Americans joined the march of the proletariat toward the beckoning horizon of universal communism would the world be saved. The Americans, in turn, believed that if the Russians embraced a system of representative government based on the American model, as all reasonable men had to concede was only just, mankind’s problems would be washed away in that great democratic solvent -cooperation, goodwill, and fraternity. The passage of days weighed upon them. Each morning the lines in the faces of the twenty-two men-one Russian delegate had been hospitalized by a heart attack-deepened. Their voices became hoarse, their expressions taut. Hands that lit cigarettes trembled. The seventh day came and went.
On the eighth day President Tom Traynor, who had abstained from the discussions, brought the meeting to order and announced that the time for deliberation had come to an end. “Since you cannot decide among yourselves how to avoid war, gentlemen, a decision must be made for you.”
“By you?” said Premier Luchenko.
President Traynor shook his head. “No. I seldom make decisions I lack the power to enforce.”
“Then who?” asked President Turnbull.
“The man who controls the destiny of us all-Ripley Forte.” He nodded to an aide, and behind him the large wall television screen was illuminated. Traynor moved his chair to one side and addressed the empty screen. “Have you heard it all, Rip?”
“Enough,” came a voice from the screen, and the craggy face of Ripley Forte came into view. He was wearing a turtleneck sweater and stood before the periscope on the quarterdeck of a submarine. “Believe me, I wish you gentlemen had been able to sort out your national differences in a reasonable and imaginative fashion. Since you didn’t, I’m afraid I’ve got to do it for you.”
Premier Luchenko reddened and shot to his feet. “I cannot speak for the President of the United States, but if you think the Premier of the Soviet Union will accept dictation from a criminal renegade like yourself, you are mistaken. I shall return to the Soviet Union immediately, and we shall resolve our dispute in the traditional way.”
“The forum of war?” said Forte.
“If necessary.”
“You’ve already lost, Mr. Premier. If you’ll step to the window, you will observe that the building is surrounded by tanks and heavy artillery. Technicians of the Texas Army have laser-zapped your transmitters. Communications between your delegation and Kiev have been severed. The same is true of communications between Houston and Washington.”
“This is an outrage!” shouted President Turnbull, joining Luchenko and the others at the plate-glass window overlooking the street fourteen stories below. He had naturally expected that Forte, being a dual-national Texican-American, would side with him and force Russia into unilateral disarmament.
“Call it power politics,” said Forte, unmoved. “You boys are playing with big toys, and unless I take drastic measures, everybody’s going to die before his time-including you.”
“And precisely what do you propose to do?” said Turnbull, livid at the thought of being betrayed by a man he thought his friend-a Texican, at that. “Hold us for ransom?”
“Not me.”
“Then what?”
“The two delegations are going to be put aboard their respective aircraft and fly out of here to Kiev and Washington.”
Luchenko and Turnbull looked at each other, bewildered.
“I don’t understand,” said Turnbull, speaking for both.
“Unless your official biographers lie more than usual, you both studied classical history. Do you recall how the Greeks and Romans made hostile tribes behave?”
Luchenko and Turnbull looked at each other and paled.
“That’s right,” said Forte grimly. “You’re each other’s hostages. The Russians will go to the banks of the Potomac and administer Russia from the White House and Capitol Hill. The Americans will go to Kiev and run the United States from the banks of the Dniepr. Somehow, I have the feeling that the chances of either of you declaring war, when you yourselves will be among the first to be atomized, will be pretty slim.”
Once Forte’s dictum spread through the American and Russian delegations, second thoughts about the attractions of the political life began to sink in.
American senators, congressmen, and cabinet members would no longer have the luxury of large and compliant staffs, chauffeured automobiles, foreign junkets, the fawning attentions of lobbyists, and inflated salaries-what was worth buying in Russia, after all? Their staffs, Forte promised, would consist of a single Russian each. The president would have more, but not enough to crowd a commodious coat closet. Living conditions would be Spartan. They would be surrounded by Russians, who would quickly reward any sign of hostility against Russia by the armed forces the Americans commanded in the United States. But as diluted as their authority would undoubtedly become, life as an American politician, even in Russia, was more attractive to most of them than actually working for a living.
The Russians headed for Washington had different concerns. To be sure, their standard of living would vastly improve. Also, though senior KGB officials would be among them, the secret police would no longer be able, on a whim, to cause them to disappear into the far reaches of Siberia. On the other hand, the one great benefit of holding office in Russia was the status it conferred, the ability to command the attention and the obedience of the masses. In Washington, that perquisite would be missing. They would be so many faceless clerks.
Lacking the machinery of command, both the style and substance of Russian and American national leadership would undergo a profound metamorphosis. Public servants in both countries, shorn of their propaganda machines and their power to coerce through pork barrel and security apparatus, would shrink to more human dimensions. An officeholder would be chosen by the consonance of his public policy with the will of his electorate; lacking the power of patronage and a public relations staff, he would be turned out of office when seen to violate promises to constituents.
The behavior of military leaders, too, would be modified. No longer surrounded by yes-men eager for promotion, they would concentrate on their nation’s defenses. But observing those of the enemy daily and at close hand, the respective forces would tend toward parity as each sought to imitate the other. Eventually the futility of attempting to gain decisive superiority over the enemy would become apparent, and mutual agreement-or mutual exhaustion-would presage a wholesale and mutual disarmament.
By then the nationalism that had been responsible for the slaughter of millions since Napoleonic times would have come to a natural end: the Brownian Movement, whose fortunes Ripley Forte had closely followed, convinced him of that. With the national executive and national legislature absent from direct control of each nation’s daily affairs, the states in America and the republics in the Soviet Union would at long last reclaim the sovereignty their peoples craved. Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Georgians, Ukranians, Uzbeks, Khirgizians, Moldavians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, and dozens of other Soviet cultural and linguistic minorities, which nearly a century of forced association had failed to homogenize into a “Russian” people, would vote with their feet and secede from central control. The Russian army would crumble. Remnants would, very probably, form militias responsive to their own ethnic interests, but the day of a Soviet juggernaut steamrolling over Europe and Asia would be gone.