… Capitol Building. Emergency crews under the direction of Capitol Architect James Delaney are already shoring up the chambers, but until a thorough survey has been made we’re assuming the entire building is unsafe, and all individuals and offices are being evacuated into temporary.…

Jeanette’s voice continued on the wire and he wasn’t really listening to her words but he heard her voice, her tone, the soft warm nesty feeling she created so easily; it occurred to him that her real reason for calling him was not so much to reassure herself as it was to remind him of their unbroken romantic communion—to give him that to lean on; so that suddenly he felt a quick welling in his throat of gratitude and adoration.

… President will speak to the nation this evening at seven o’clock eastern standard time.…

“I’d better ring off, sweet. I’m expecting word from President Brewster.”

… ordered flags to fly at half-mast until further.…

“Do you think he’ll ask you to come home?”

“I don’t know. We talked about it and he said he’d get back to me.”

“What do you think you should do, Cliff?”

“If they’d hurt Dex Ethridge at all of course I’d have had to come right home, but he appears to be all right, and since they’ve caught the perpetrators I doubt there’ll be any need for me to——what?”

“I couldn’t hear you for a minute. The connection seems to be fading. I guess I’d better get off the line now. But call me when you’ve got it decided. Love me?”

“Love you,” he said very soft into the phone cupped against his shoulder. He heard the click and the static of the transatlantic cable.

… list of the dead includes Senators Adamson, Geiss, Hunter, March, Nugent.…

His hand rested on the cradled phone as if to retain the thread of contact with Jeanette. He looked up. Ordway, Oxford, Robinson, Scobie, Tuchman.… Perry Hearn’s mouth, moving not in synchronization with his radio voice, was an evil ugly thing and Fairlie wrenched his eyes away from the screen and carried his glass to the Dubonnet bottle.

Jeanette: soft lips and upswept hair. Not that much different from the girl he had courted back in the medieval days when you still courted girls: she had been a psych major at Vassar in pleated skirt and saddle shoes and for six months she had returned his weekend invitations unopened because when a Vassar girl received anything with a Worcester postmark she knew it was from a Holy Cross man and Vassar girls did not date Holy Cross men. Finally a classmate had informed Fairlie of this and he had had the presence of mind to drive over to Cambridge to mail the next invitation. She must have received that one: at least it was never returned to him. But there was no reply. That summer he wrote two invitations from his home outside Cheyney, Pennsylvania. These she had regretted with formal little notes. Finally in the fall he had prevailed upon a botany professor who was going off on sabbatical. The professor had taken the sealed envelope and agreed to post it. A week later Fairlie won: a phone call from Vassar—“What on earth were you doing in Alaska?”

After his first year at Yale Law she had agreed to marry him. After his second year she had married him. After the bar exams he had moved her to Cheyney and she had fallen in love with the place, the great trees, the rolling hills, the struggling Negro college and its eagerly tutorable students.

Young with childless zeal she had become compulsively tidy and organized. She took to making lists of things to do and things for Fairlie to do; she posted them on the refrigerator door, boldly penned in her expansive hand. Finally he had cured her by appending an item to her itemized list: 9) Check likelihood of obsessive list-making on part of second wife.

They were an idyllically and atypically happy couple. The children had come soon—Liz was now fourteen, Clay was going on ten, which was to say he was more than six months past his ninth birthday—and the pressures of twenty-four-hour politics had had inevitable effects on the fabric between them, but their respect for each other’s individuality and their private sense of humor had secured them pretty well: once last fall he had got up early to dress for a campaign breakfast and when he was ready to leave the hotel suite he had crept into the bedroom where she was half asleep, and had nibbled her ear and caressed her breast and when she made a low smiling throat-sound he had whispered in her ear, “Where’s Cliff?” and she had shot bolt upright and yelled. She had scolded him for weeks about that, but each time with laughter.

“President Brewster.”

He looked up. It was McNeely, holding the phone out toward him. Fairlie hadn’t heard it ring. At least McNeely hadn’t said, “It’s the pisspot Napoleon.”

He took the receiver from McNeely and said into the mouthpiece, “Fairlie here.”

“Hold on please, Mr. Fairlie.” Brewster’s secretary.

Now the President came on the line. “Cliff.”

“Hello Mr. President.”

“Thanks for waiting.” An unnecessary courtesy: where would Fairlie have gone? Howard Brewster’s flat Oregon twang sounded very tired: “Bill Satterthwaite’s just talked to them over at Walter Reed. Old Dex Ethridge is fine, just fine.”

“They’re releasing him, then?”

“No, they want to hang onto him for a day or so, run him through that damned battery of tests they like to do.” He could almost hear the President shudder over the six-thousand-mile telephone wire. “But there’s nothing wrong with Dex, he’s fine and dandy. I always said it’d take more than a whap on the head to do any damage to a Republican.”

Fairlie said, “It’s that elephant hide we all wear.”

There followed Brewster’s energetic bark of laughter and then a ritual clearing of throat, and Brewster said in his matter-of-fact voice, “Cliff, I’m going to talk to the people tonight. It’ll be pretty late your time but I’d appreciate it a whole lot if you’d hold off on making any kind of statement until after I’ve made mine.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“And then I’d be truly obliged if you’d step out and back me up. We need to have a pretty good show of solidarity on this thing.”

“I can see that,” Fairlie said—cautious, not wanting to commit himself to a blank-check promise. “Do you mind if I ask what the substance of it will be?”

“Don’t mind a bit. “Brewster dropped into his man-to-man confidential voice:

“I’m going to talk tough, Cliff. Very tough. There’s a lot of screwballs out there with loud voices and I don’t think we can afford to give them time to start broadcasting conspiracy alarms and sniping at us the way they did when JFK was shot. There’s a risk of panic here, and I mean to head it off.”

“By doing what, Mr. President?’’ Fairlie felt the fine hairs prickle at the back of his neck.

“We’ve just had an emergency meeting of the National Security Council together with various interested parties—the Speaker, some others. I’m declaring a state of national emergency, Cliff.”

After a moment Fairlie said, “I thought you’d captured the bombers.”

“Well, we’ve got some pretty damn fast T-men and thank God for them. They nailed those degenerate savages before they’d got two blocks from the Hill.”

“Then what emergency are we talking about?”

“There’s some others mixed up in this thing—five or six that didn’t get caught, maybe more.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Yes. I do. We do know there were more people involved in this than we actually caught at the scene.”

“You’re declaring a national emergency mainly to hunt down a handful of co-conspirators?”

“Well, we don’t know how many they are, but that’s beside the point, Cliff. The thing is, we’ve been rocked by this. Warshington’s out of kilter. Now God knows how many other groups of vicious animals we’ve got out there in the woodwork—suppose they decide it’s time to jump on the bandwagon and whip up this big revolution they’re always yelling about? What if they get the violence stirred up until we’ve got riots and snipers and bombs crawling out from under rocks in every city and state across the country? We’ve got to forestall that, Cliff, we’ve got to demonstrate that this government’s still vigorous enough to react speedily and decisively. We’ve got to defuse the savages, we’ve got to show a little muscle.”