Читать книгу An Affair of State - Pat Frank - Страница 29

Jeff said, "Mr. Locke, I'm sure with all your experience you'll be called on eventually. But why can't you do anything now?"

Horace Locke didn't seem to hear. He leaned back in his chair and half turned, so that he looked out over the White House, and The Hill beyond. "We were so proud of the Twentieth Century," he said softly. "Why, we even named a train after it."

"What happened to you? Why aren't you a Chief of Division any more?" Jeff hazarded.

"I'm going to answer you," Locke said, his voice still low. "Because I have dangerous and unfashionable thoughts. Because I won't go along with the 'you're another' school of diplomacy. Because I believe we can have another war, or we can have civilization. We cannot have them both."

Jeff said, "Maybe I've got dangerous and unfashionable thoughts too."

"Knowing your father, I thought you would have. But we are not alone. We are only two in a great majority. True, it is a majority inarticulate, confused, and almost ashamed of displaying its consuming will for peace. We turned over our leadership to those who have a vested interest in war, and we have had trouble getting it back. My judgment tells me that we will never get it back, that the odds are for another war, and the dissolving of all our rights and freedoms. We will believe that thus we can beat the Russians, and survive. But if we survive it will be only as blind ants underground, fearfully guarding their eggs and breeding more soldier ants so they can continue to exist, always blind and underground."

"That's a pretty black picture."

"I know it. We have the choice of believing Patton, who said, 'Man is war,' or of believing Sherman. I'm afraid we'll believe Patton."

Jeff thought of the Nebelwürfe coming in on the slopes of Mt. Altuzzo, and the terrible winter of '44, when it was always cold and always wet on Route 65, which the homesick doughs called Easy Street. "When it comes," he laughed, "I want to be the guy who hands out the doughnuts on the dock at Hoboken."

Horace Locke smiled, as though he had followed Jeff's chain of thought perfectly. "I don't think that would help you much. There was 'Remember the Maine' and then there was 'Remember Pearl Harbor,' and the next one will be 'Remember New York.'"

He paused, and the smile disappeared. "In every country are men who want war for one reason or another. The military we can understand. They have been trained and educated for one purpose, and when they pursue their raison d'être it is understandable. But there are many others who want war, and their motives are not always so clear as, say, the greed of our local Krupps, and the fear and suspicion of the men in the Kremlin. All of them have some personal reason--and to them a good reason--for bringing down the house of man in atomic shambles."

"So what can we do?" said Jeff.

"We do what we can. It won't be much, but more than most. Most people cannot make themselves heard above the din for war. In the Foreign Service you can observe, you can report, you can even act."

"I hope so. But I'm not sure how."

"I can't tell you. You'll know when the time comes."

"A Third Secretary can't do much."

"You'd be surprised what Third Secretaries have done. Of course they can bottle you up. They can stop all your reports. But there's even a way to get around that. It's been used many times."

"Yes?"

"When you have something to say, and you cannot say it officially, put it in a letter to some friend in the Department. A man you trust."

"Isn't there a regulation about that?"

"There is, but it's pretty elastic."

"I don't have any friends in the Department," Jeff said.

"You can have me."

Jeff wondered whether he was engaging in a conspiracy. He didn't feel as if it were a conspiracy. It seemed perfectly natural and normal. "I'll remember that," he said.

"I don't know whether I'll be able to do anything with what you write me, if you do write," Horace Locke said, "but I'll try." He put his hands on the arms of his chair, and Jeff knew their talk was over. "I have to keep trying," Locke said as he rose, "until they finally kick me out of here. But I'm afraid it is hopeless. If there is to be peace, it must be dictated from up there." He pointed his hand towards the old-fashioned, soaring ceiling, not self-consciously, but matter-of-fact as if of a certainty there were something up there.

Jeff could not help but look, and there was nothing up there except an embossed Great Seal, dirty and yellowing, and Jeff realized this once had been part of the suite of the Secretary of State.