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Jonathan’s father cursed and grimaced. Jonathan’s mother patted him on the shoulder. Jonathan himself hardly noticed. He was staring, transfixed, at the television screen.
“ ‘Fleetlord Atvar presented us with a dreadful choice,’ ” Earl Warren’s press secretary read. “ ‘Either withdrawal of our weapons and installations from space and the great reduction of our ground- and sea-based weapons systems-essentially, the loss of our independence-or the destruction of a great American city. “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” If neither of those, then war, war we could not hope to win.’ ”
Hagerty paused to wipe his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “Excuse me,” he said to the millions watching. Then he resumed: “ ‘I could not, I would not, sacrifice our future by reducing our installations as the Race demanded. And I could not lead us into a war where, however much we might hurt the foe, the United States would surely suffer the fate of the Greater German Reich. That left me with no choice but to sacrifice Indianapolis to the vengeance of the Race.’ ”
“Jesus,” Jonathan muttered. He wondered what he would have done in Warren’s shoes. The devil and the deep blue sea…
“ ‘Having made that decision,’ ” the press secretary continued, “ ‘I also decided that I… could not live when the men, women, and children I had sacrificed were dead. I hope I may find forgiveness in the hearts of the living and in the sight of God. Farewell, and may God bless the United States of America.’ ”
James Hagerty looked up from the podium, as if about to add a few words of his own. Then he shook his head. His eyes overflowed with tears again. Fighting back a sob, he hurried away. The camera lingered on the empty podium, as if unsure where else to go.
“Are you all right, dear?” Jonathan’s mother asked his father. For a moment, Jonathan had no idea what she meant. But then he saw that, if the blood of the people of Indianapolis was on Earl Warren’s hands, it was also on the hands of his dad. If the Lizards hadn’t found out who’d attacked the colonization fleet, they wouldn’t have destroyed the city. He too looked anxiously toward his father.
“Yeah, I’m okay, or pretty much so, anyhow.” Sam Yeager’s voice was harsh. “Warren couldn’t live after he had to throw Indianapolis into the fire. Okay, but what about all the Lizards he killed? He didn’t lose a night’s sleep over them, and they hadn’t done anything to anybody, either. They couldn’t have-they were in cold sleep themselves. If Lizards aren’t people worth thinking about, what are they?”
Slowly, Jonathan nodded. “Truth,” he said-in the Lizards’ language.
At last, the TV screen cut away from the podium with nobody behind it. But when it did, Jonathan wished it hadn’t, for what it showed were the ruins of Indianapolis. Chet Huntley’s voice provided commentary: “These are the outskirts of the city. We cannot get closer to the center. We are not altogether sure it is safe to come even so close.”
A man walked into the camera’s line of sight. The right side of his face looked normal. The left, and his left arm, had been dreadfully burned. “Sir,” called a newsman behind the camera, “what happened, sir?”
“I was watering my lawn,” the man with half a normal face said. “Watering my lawn,” he repeated. “I was watering my lawn, and the whole god-damn world blew up.” He swayed like a tree in a high breeze, then slowly toppled.
“Flash must have got him,” Jonathan’s dad said. “If he’d been turned the other way, it would have been the other side of his face. Or if he’d been looking right at it…” His voice trailed away. Jonathan had no trouble figuring out what would have happened then. His stomach lurched. The camera panned across devastation.
The telephone rang. He sprang up and ran to answer it, as much to escape the images on the TV screen as for any other reason. “Hello?”
“Jonathan?” It was Karen. “My God, Jonathan…” She sounded as ravaged, stunned, disbelieving as he was.
“Yeah,” he said, for want of anything better. “This is what we were sitting on.”
“I know,” she answered. “I never imagined it would turn out like this.”
“I didn’t, either. I’m just glad they turned Dad loose and he got home okay.” Looking at some tiny private good in the midst of general disaster was a very human trait. Maybe that thought impelled what came next: “Karen, will you marry me, dammit?” She hadn’t said yes and she hadn’t said no.
It was the wrong time. It couldn’t have been a worse time. Maybe it couldn’t have been a better time, either, though, for she answered, “Yes, I think we should do that.” And then, before he could say anything else, she hung up.
Dazed, he walked back into the living room. He still didn’t get a chance to say anything, because his mother told him, “They’ve caught up with Vice President-President-Stassen.”
Sure enough, there was Harold Stassen, with the words THIEF LAKE, MINNESOTA superimposed on his image. He wore a fisherman’s vest that was all over pockets, a floppy hat, and an expression as sandbagged as everybody else’s. Jonathan thought it was cruel for a reporter to thrust a microphone in his face and bark, “In light of the present situation, Mr. President, what do you intend to do?”
Stassen gave what Jonathan thought was about the best answer he could: “I’m going to go back to Little Rock and find out exactly what happened. After that, with God’s help, I’ll try to take this country forward again. I have nothing else to say right now.”
In spite of that last sentence, the reporter asked, “Mr. President, were you aware that the United States launched the attack on the colonization fleet?”
“No,” Stassen said. “I was not aware of that, not until you told me a moment ago. Some officers will have some things to answer for. I expect to find out which ones.”
“You can start with Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay,” Jonathan’s father said, and then, thoughtfully rather than in anger, “I wonder if he’ll have the decency to kill himself. Too much to hope for, unless I’m wrong. And I wonder just how many know. Not a lot, or the secret wouldn’t have stayed secret this long.”
“Dad, Mom,” Jonathan said, “Karen just said she’d marry me.”
“That’s good, son,” his father said.
“Congratulations,” his mother added. But neither one of them heard him with more than half an ear. Almost all of their attention was on the TV screen, which cut away from the most unpresidential images of the new president to new scenes of the ruin that had without warning overtaken Indianapolis. Jonathan would have been
angrier at them if his own eyes hadn’t been drawn as by a magnet to the television set.
“I was in orbital patrol when that satellite launched on the ships of the colonization fleet,” Glen Johnson said in the galley of the Lewis and Clark. “I figured it had to be the Nazis or the Reds. I never imagined the United States would do such a thing.”
“Now that you know better,” Dr. Miriam Rosen said, “what do you think of what President Warren did?”
“Falling on his sword, you mean?” Johnson said. “The country would have strung him up if he hadn’t.”
But the doctor shook her head, which made her dark, curly hair flip back and forth in a way that would have been impossible under gravity. “No, that’s not what I meant. What do you think of his sacrificing a city instead of everything we’ve done in space?”
Before Johnson could answer, Mickey Flynn said, “If the United States survives as an independent power, he’ll go down in history as a tragic hero of sorts. If we don’t, he’ll be a villain, of course.”
Johnson ate another mouthful of beans and diced peppers. The peppers provided essential vitamins. They were also hot enough to make his eyes cross. In a way, that was a welcome change from the blandness of most of what he ate aboard the spaceship. In another, more immediate, way, though, it made him drink from his plastic bottle of water before he could speak. When he did, he said, “Winners write history, sure enough.”
Flynn had another question: “What do you think of the fellow who let the Lizards know what we’d done?”
“That’s a funny thing,” Johnson said. “I watched those ships blow up. I don’t know how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of Lizards were in them. They never had a chance. They never even knew they died, because they never woke up out of cold sleep. If I’d known whether the Germans or the Russians launched on them, I’d’ve told the Race in a red-hot minute. I wouldn’t have felt bad about it. I’d have figured the bad guys were getting what they deserved.”
