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FORTY

The air was thick with large wet snowflakes, and Jumper Cromwell had ridden to the White House in a chauffeured staff car. Even with slippery streets, a car seemed better than a helicopter in the heavy snowstorm. He got out in front of the South Portico, where a snowman greeted him with widespread arms—brooms—and a jaunty grin dug into the snow face as if with two fingers. It wore a scarf whitened with new flakes, and a snow-covered basket resembling a coolie hat that shielded the bottle-cap eyes.

The new roof on the East Wing Theater had been completed over the weekend, Cromwell noticed. The mortar attack had done the first hostile damage to the White House since the British had burned it in 1814, and surely the most aggravating. The trial was already over, and the three men sent to Alcatraz Penitentiary, renovated during the Wheeler Administration.

Cromwell had deliberately arrived nearly a quarter hour before the NSC meeting was scheduled to begin. He walked briskly to the Executive Wing through eight inches of white, stomping the snow off his feet in the small portico there. Then he went in, returning the salutes of the marines at the door, and entered Martinelli's office.

"Good morning, Jeanne," he said. In these days almost everyone addressed her as the president did.

"It is if you like snow," she answered cheerfully. "Shall I let President Haugen know you're here?"

"Yes, if you please."

She did, then looked up again at the general. "You can go in now, sir."

The president had rolled his chair back from the desk and watched Cromwell enter. "What do you think of the weather?" he asked with a grin.

"It looks like your marines like it. They built a snowman in your south yard."

"Huh! That wasn't the marines; that was Lois and me. We got up early to play in the snow. The snow in Duluth is usually too dry to make snowmen; we figured we'd better take advantage of the opportunity." He grinned. "We don't expect to be here another winter. Not past New Years."

Cromwell's eyebrows raised. "In that case, sir, you've got less than a year to find a new vice president and break him in.

"Meanwhile I've got an interesting piece of agreeable news for you."

"I'm always open to good news. What is it?"

"Trenary. We were talking yesterday, and he told me he'd been wrong about you. He liked your speech the other night, I guess. About Wall Street and the IRS. What he actually said was, "That old sonofabitch is sharp and tough, and he's good for the country."

"Well I'll be damned! I kept thinking I needed to replace him, and never got around to it."

He chuckled. "When I find myself putting something off, something I'm not afraid of, I usually leave well enough alone. I tell myself I've probably got a good reason for putting it off, that I just haven't spotted yet."

He gestured at the coffee station. "Cuppa?"

Cromwell glanced at the clock and shook his head. "I don't suppose you saw the papers this morning?"

"Just the usual summary." Haugen grinned again. "We seem to be getting better press lately. Maybe getting shot at helps."

He got up. "We might as well go. And thanks, Jumper, for telling me about Trenary. Maybe some other people are changing their minds about me. Favorably."

They strolled through the west wing, past the old press area, then took the elevator to the "second floor." In a sense it was more of a third floor—ground, first, second—and Haugen used the Cabinet Room there for NSC meetings. A number of staff aides had been ordered to attend, and no one was late despite the weather. At 0930 sharp, the president opened the session.

"All right," he said, "I guess we're all here. The meeting will come to order." He looked at the new CIA director. "Barry, update us on the South African situation."

Roy Barry stood up. "Yes sir. It's been a bloody week there. The RSA government slapped on a complete press censorship of course, and their usual ban on cameras around civil disorders was applied over the entire country. They also slapped on travel restrictions: stopped all air traffic in and out. Crews of foreign ships weren't even allowed on the dock except to handle hawsers."

He smiled. "But we have some cameras a little out of their reach, not only in overflights but from embassy and consulate roofs. And of course, eyewitness descriptions from informants, via embassy and consulate communication centers, not to mention radio monitoring. There were extensive fires in and around Johannesburg and Bloemfontein, and they were pretty bad in Durban, though not so bad in Pretoria and Cape Town. A number of small towns were largely or entirely burned out."

He paused. "It was incomparably worse than the troubles we had here. And there were pitched battles in the black townships, with a lot of shooting. The blacks had succeeded in caching considerable guns and ammunition, including anti-tank rockets which somehow we hadn't gotten an inkling of.

"There've been pitched battles in the townships before of course, but nothing at all like these. And equally relevant, this time the blacks made some obviously planned and fairly disciplined armed raids into white districts. The fires there weren't just a matter of blacks with work permits running amok. Outsiders came in shooting, some in cars and trucks.

"The blacks got more than they dished out, of course; they were outgunned, untrained, and their organization is still rudimentary. But they dished out a lot more than they ever had before. They made considerable use of gasoline bombs, and mostly they didn't pause to watch or loot. It was hit and go on to the next block. Apparently white deaths ran well into the thousands; white police and military casualties alone clearly ran into the hundreds. Black deaths ran into the tens of thousands. And property damage..." He shrugged. "It has to have been well into the billions.

"The RSA called all their troops home from Namibia, partly because of stepped-up raids out of Mozambique. And even Zimbabwe, which has been pretty cautious about harboring guerrillas. But the raids weren't as heavy as we'd thought they might be; apparently the blowup caught them unprepared to take full advantage of it."

He stopped and looked around the large table. "That's it in a nutshell," he said, and sat down.

"How is the white population taking all this?" Haugen asked him.

"The word is that the number of people trying to get air reservations or ship passage out of the country is way up. Apparently a lot of the moderates have decided it's time to leave. Of course, there's always the problem of selling their property, but a lot of them undoubtedly got burned out anyway. And property isn't going to be as big a holding factor as it's been in the past; I think we'll see a considerable white exodus over the next month or two.

"But the ordinary Afrikaner is probably more grimly determined to hold out now than he ever was."

"Val," the president said, turning to the Secretary of State, "what have you got to add to that?"

"Not much, Mr. President. A number of countries have registered official condemnation of what they've generally termed 'the genocidal response' to 'the black demonstrations.' That includes all the eastern bloc and African countries of course, and a lot of others."

"Umm. Anyone else have anything on this?"

No one did. The president meant meaningful contributions, and they knew it.

"All right. Val, is there anything you need from this conference now? Anything we need to talk about here?"

"No sir. I've sent the statement you approved. I believe that's as far as we should go for now."

"Fine. Barry, what's new on the Soviets that we should know?"

The CIA director stood back up. "Nothing everyone here hasn't seen in the intelligence summaries. There've been scattered mini-mutinies in the Soviet invasion army. Nothing overt: the 'sit down and pretend the equipment doesn't work' kind, At least sometimes with a little strategic sabotage to make the breakdowns convincing. It would be worse if the army hadn't been careful to transfer all Soviet Moslem troops out of the invasion units.

"And there was a major mutiny, an officers' mutiny, in their East Asian military district at Khabarovsk. We don't have any information on what inspired that, but it ended in a pretty respectable fight."

Haugen said nothing, but he was feeling a little more hope for his Gurenko plan.

"Meanwhile," Barry was saying, "the Kremlin continues to shift their mobile ICBM launchers around, and they've sent up eleven anti-satellite and anti-missile satellites in the past week, in contravention of the Wheeler-Gorbachev agreements." He shrugged. "It could be posturing, or they could be planning a nuclear strike, but even if they are posturing, it could turn into something real."

He sat down again. "Thank you, Barry," the president said, and turned to Cromwell. "General, anything to report on the strategic alert?"

Cromwell shook his head. "No sir. Even a yellow alert is something of a strain on personnel at first, but they get used to it. And after a while they get less alert."

"Anything more we ought to be doing?"

Only Valenzuela spoke. "I'd recommend you talk to Pavlenko."

"I'll get with you later on that." He turned to Paul Van Breda, his new defense secretary. "You too, Dutch."

It occurred to Haugen that Van Breda hadn't yet been told about the scalar resonance weapons. He should be. But not in front of all these people.

They went from the subject of the Soviets to the same old Malaysian troubles, and then to the renewed Moro uprising in the Philippines. The Malaysian situation was three-cornered, involving the Moslem government, a fundamentalist Moslem insurrection, and a Buddhist separatist movement. The Wheeler government's policy had been to help keep the government in power and get it to conciliate the Buddhists. Under Donnelly, Covert Operations had been phased out, and Haugen was disinclined to get them reinvolved.

The Moro uprising was simpler: The Moslem provinces in the southern Philippines wanted independence, though apparently they'd settle for autonomy within the Philippine republic. After brief NSC discussion, the president decided to confer on the subject, via telephone, with Ireneo Malaluan, the islands' reform president. Haugen had at least some common ground with Malaluan; he'd participated in the liberation of his home province, Batangas, half a century earlier, and had a speaking knowledge of Tagalog, gained partly there and partly from a Filipina housekeeper he and Lois had employed for several years.

After that, the conference reviewed ongoing projects and adjourned by 1120.

It seemed to Haugen that they were living a dual existence. In some respects, foreign as well as domestic, things seemed to be going better and better. They were going to hell in South Africa of course, but people had been expecting that, and it didn't seem to threaten the United States. On the other hand, the Soviet threat seemed more dangerous, if harder to evaluate, than during the Khrushchev-Kennedy confrontation in 1962.

After the meeting, the president and Secretary Valenzuela gave the new defense secretary a minibriefing on the UFOs and scalar resonance. Van Breda left looking even more sober than before.

***

At lunch, Father Flynn asked permission to teach a night school class in written English for some members of the domestic staff whose literacy was poor.

"Getting a little boring around here, is it?" Haugen asked.

"Not boring so much as—unproductive for me."

"Sure, go ahead. Sounds like a good thing to do. And I appreciate your company; I'm glad you didn't ask to leave."

Flynn nodded.

"President," Haugen mused. "Emergency president. Lots of death threats and assassination attempts, no speaking trips—I've never been so house-bound in my life! Tell you what, Steve. I'm still having fun, but I'll be more than happy to leave."

Yet even as he said it, and true as it was, it seemed to Arne Haugen that he'd never again have the freedom of movement he'd had before.

***

It was just a little after lunch when the president got a call from the CIA. The Kremlin had announced that, since the "Iranian genocides" had been driven from Iraq, Soviet troops were no longer needed there. The Soviet army was beginning an evacuation that would probably take it back across the central Zagros to the Iranian cities of Qom and Hamadan, and perhaps farther.

And the next morning, both his intelligence summary and his news summary informed him that a Syrian army coup had overthrown the pro-Soviet government.

Judas Priest! he thought. Things are happening fast!

A pang of anxiety struck him. He had such hopes for what he was doing! The nation was climbing out of the economic hole it had dug for itself. It was showing new morale. Manufacture of GPCs had begun, or soon would, by licensees in Greensboro, Detroit, Seattle, and three foreign countries. A number of corporations, including Ford, GM, Chrysler, and International Harvester were falling all over themselves to complete production designs for geo-powered cars, tractors, and trucks. Eddie Wing's summary reports told of intense excitement developing around the new research in what they were already calling Tesla matrices, and what it implied in fields as diverse as cosmology, "space" travel, and apparently, human consciousness.

The whole darn human species was promising to leap to a new and higher level!

And suddenly it seemed to him beyond bearing if nuclear apocalypse, or any apocalypse, should trash it all.

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Framed