A Creed for the Third Millennium Read online

  Dr Carriol looked at her watch. 'Mr Magnus will still be in his office, no doubt, so I'd better go see him.' She sighed, glancing at the thick block of used pages in her secretary's notebook. 'Poor John! Can you start transcribing right away?'

  'No trouble,' he said, and began to gather up all the file copies from the places where the Operation Search chiefs had sat.

  The Secretary for the Environment's offices were down the same hall as the executive conference room, which he too used when necessity demanded.

  The big anteroom which served as a reception and waiting area was deserted, for it was well after five; from its sides it opened through discreetly closed doors into the typing pools, the photocopying rooms, ancillary offices, and conveniences which the Secretary commanded entirely for his own work. The door ahead of the two glass entrance doors led into the spacious office of the Secretary's private secretary, who was still there when Dr Judith Carriol strolled in. Mrs Helena Taverner's extramural life was the object of considerable Departmental curiosity, since she seemed to spend all her time dancing devoted and largely thankless attendance upon Harold Magnus; some said she was divorced, others that she was widowed, yet others that Mr Taverner had never existed at all.

  'Why, hello, Dr Carriol. Nice to see you. Go right in, he's been hoping you'd come. Shall I send in coffee?'

  'Please, Mrs Taverner.'

  Harold Magnus sat behind his gigantic walnut desk, which was his own personal property, his big leather chair swung away from the entrance door to face the window. Through this he could watch, when he so chose, the small amount of traffic that proceeded up and down K Street. Since darkness had fallen and there was no rain to coat the road with a little gloss from reflected lights, it was a dimmer version of his own office and himself that he was watching so intently. But as the door closed he rotated a full circle and a half and ended facing Dr Judith Carriol.

  'How did it go?' he demanded.

  'In a minute, after Mrs Taverner brings coffee.'

  His brows mated. 'Dammit, woman, I am far too eager to find out how things went to bother with food or drink!'

  'So you say now. But two minutes into it, when I won't want to stop, you'll decide you're going to die without some form of sustenance,' she said, not in the indulgent tones of a female in mild defiance of entrenched power, but matter-of-factly. For the true situation was the reverse; hers was the entrenched power, his the grace and favour of political caprice. She sat down in a wide chair which stood in front of his desk and to one side of its middle.

  'You know, when I first met you, I made a great mistake about you,' he said suddenly, as was his habit darting off down what seemed an irrelevant sidetrack.

  Dr Carriol was not fooled; this man's irrelevancies were usually calculated. 'What mistake was that, Mr Magnus?' she asked.

  'I wondered whose bed had got you where you were.'

  She looked amused. 'What an old-fashioned attitude!'

  'Garbage!' he said vigorously. 'Times may change, but you know and I know that there will always be a certain amount of bed hopping when women manoeuvre for power.'

  'Certain women,' she said.

  'Exactly! And I thought you were that kind of woman.'

  'Why?'

  'You looked the part. Oh, there are plenty of very attractive women who don't use the bed to climb higher, but I've never thought of you as attractive. I think of you as glamorous. And in my experience — which is considerable! — glamour usually goes hand in hand with the oblique approach.'

  'But of course you've changed your mind about me.'

  'Of course! After one short conversation with you, in fact.'

  She settled into her chair more comfortably. 'Why tell me this now?'

  He looked derisive, but didn't answer.

  'I see. To keep me in my place.'

  'Perhaps.'

  'It isn't necessary. I know my place.'

  'Good!'

  Mrs Taverner came in bearing coffee and a pair of fine decanters, one containing cognac, the other extremely rare unblended Scotch whisky. 'Sun's way over the yardarm, Mr Magnus.'

  'Thanks, Helena.' But he poured himself coffee only, and nodded towards the tray. 'Help yourself, Dr Carriol'

  He was a fat man, grossly so without giving an impression of grossness; the sort of adiposity that said power rather than self-indulgence, though he indulged himself mightily. His lips were thick, nicely balancing his prawnlike eyebrows, and his sandy thatch of hair showed no sign of thinning or greying despite his sixty-plus years. He had the tiny, delicate hands and feet which so often went with his type of physique, so that the hands resembled starfish and the feet fallen-down sections in his trouser bottoms. His voice, as rich and full and round as his paunch, was a melodious instrument he knew how to play with the aplomb of a master, and did. Before Tibor Reece had appointed him to this most important of all the Executive portfolios, he had been a famous legal advocate specializing in cases with a bearing on the environment, and he had argued as persuasively on behalf of those who sought to destroy it as he had on behalf of its champions. This fact had made him an unpopular choice in many circles, but President Reece had routed the opposition by observing with characteristic detachment that surely Harold Magnus's hopping from one side of the fence to the other had given him an unparalleled opportunity to taste the grass in both yards. His job as Secretary for the Environment was to ensure that the policies of his superior in the White House were faithfully carried out by the Department, and because he did largely confine his activities to this end, he was suffered with fairly good grace by the permanent chiefs of the Department. Indeed, had he not dabbled in things like secret passwords, they would probably have apostrophized him as the best Secretary in Environment's short history. He had been in the job for the seven years which had elapsed since Tibor Reece had been elected President of the United States of America, and by now it was generally felt throughout the Washington establishment that he would remain in Environment as long as Tibor Reece remained in the White House. Since the Constitutional amendment of Augustus Rome's time had never been repealed, and the election coming up in November held out no hope for the opposition, that meant at least another five years of Harold Magnus.

  The Secretary studied Dr Judith Carriol, who also chose to drink nothing stronger than coffee, without affection. He could esteem her, and he did, but he could not like her. An ineffectual mother followed by an ineffectual wife had not inspired him with a high opinion of women, so he had never bothered to pursue his acquaintance with the sex further, preferring to direct his marked sensual proclivities towards food and drink. That this choice had seriously undermined his health was something he flatly refused to admit, either to his doctor or to himself.

  Judith Carriol. Indisputably the eminence grise of Environment. By the time she had come to him five years earlier with her plan called Operation Search worked out to the last predictable detail and all its reasons for being meticulously tabulated, he already knew enough of her to want to steer a wide berth around her whenever he could. She set his teeth on edge; to be so brilliant, so cold, so awesomely efficient and so freed from emotional fog just didn't agree with his conception of Woman. His may have been an outdated attitude, it may have been an erroneous one; but all that Judith Carriol was, that he knew her to be, sat so ill upon such a glamorous, feminine-looking woman that she threw him into disorder. Afraid of her was putting it too strongly. Wary of her was nearer the mark. Or so he told himself.

  When she had first presented Operation Search to him, his reaction had been mixed and cautious. But no administration had ever been as conscious of the mood of the people as Tibor Reece's. Nor had any President ever been faced with such profound consequences of national humiliation and demoralization, even Tibor Reece's predecessor in office, Augustus Rome. For old Gus Rome had held the people together by the sheer force of his personality, and in that respect his successor in office was not so fortunate.

  Harold Magnus, playing safe, h
ad taken Dr Judith Carriol and her schema for Operation Search to the President, and the President, while not wildly enthusiastic (he did not have an enthusiastic nature), had seen enough potential to direct them to go ahead immediately.

  Dr Carriol was perfectly aware of how Harold Magnus felt about her, for he was not a man able to conceal his instinctive reactions to people. It suited her to work for a man of this type; she didn't have to waste time and energy flattering and fluttering him into assent. Actually they understood each other very well, for they were both ring-wise fighters who had learned to spar for points.

  'Hillier, of course,' he said.

  'Yes. And eight others.'

  'It has to be Hillier!'

  She looked at him very directly. 'Mr Secretary, if Senator Hillier was a foregone conclusion, we had no need to spend so much time and money mounting an Operation Search! Hillier's was the name that sprang to mind in the beginning, but he was too young then. However, Operation Search was not mounted merely to buy the Senator time! It was mounted to make as sure as human fallibility can that we pick the one and only man for the job. It is the most important job this country — or possibly any country — has offered a man in God knows how long. I can't even think of an equivalent.'

  'Hillier,' he said, obdurate.

  'Mr Magnus, if I had had my way we would have excluded political men and women even from our first sample! I do not consider a politician suitable for this job.'

  They would never agree about Hillier, so he abandoned the argument. 'What about phase two?' he asked.

  'It goes forward at once. I've given Dr Hemingway Dr Abraham's candidate to investigate, and vice versa. I am investigating Dr Chasen's three people myself.'

  The Secretary sat up straight. 'What's happened to your blue-eyed boy Chasen?'

  'Nothing. He did brilliantly. To use him on phase two would be a waste of the man. Besides which, he's not a good personal investigator, where the other two are. So I'm giving him the job of revamping our relocation methodology.'

  'Shit! That ought to keep him busy!'

  'Yes, it ought. I've turned over Abraham's and Hemingway's teams to him as well as allowing him to keep his own staff. There's no point in having trained twelve people to really complex work and then putting them back into chickenshit computer routines like analysing the amount of money we're having to spend dropping feed by helicopter to starving deer in the national parks. The relocation mess is big enough for Moshe to use eighteen assistants, probably until they and he are due for retirement'

  'Pessimist!'

  'Realist, sir.'

  'So phase two involves only you and Hemingway and Sam Abraham.'

  'The less people involved, the better. With John Wayne holding the Washington fort, we certainly won't need the U.S. Cavalry,' she said, and grinned.

  'What shall I report to the President, then?'

  'Oh, that we're moving from phase one to phase two right on schedule, and that phase one went very much according to expectation.'

  'Oh, come on! I'll have to tell him a bit more than that, Dr Carriol!'

  She sighed. 'All right, then tell him Hillier rose to the final nine, as predicted. That of the nine selected for phase two investigation, seven are men and two are women. One candidate has two children, SCB second-child approval, of course. Only two are unmarried, one man and one woman. Three of the nine are directly concerned with NASA and with Phoebus in particular, which just goes to show how important our space programme has become, and how prominent its personnel have become. Tell him too that no candidate met with hard-line opposition from anyone present this afternoon.' 'Any genuine household names besides Hillier?' 'Oh, I would classify seven as household names, including the two women. Two of the men are not nationally well known.' 'Who didn't get to the top of the pyramid?' 'Impossible to tell, really, as I deliberately refrained from personally checking the hundred thousand names in the final sample. There must, I imagine, have been many who didn't even make it that far. As to who fell by the wayside between one hundred thousand and nine, I don't know that, either. If I did, Mr Secretary, I would be defeating the whole purpose of Operation Search.'

  He nodded, swung round rudely to face the window. 'I thank you, Dr Carriol. Keep me informed,' he said to the big sheet of triple-layered glass insulating him from the cold hard world outside on K Street.

  She didn't go home at once. Section Four was deserted until she entered her own offices, where John Wayne looked up from his desk as she passed. Good John! If you want your boy to be a tower of strength to those around him, name him John. What's in a name? Dr Carriol believed in names, only from personal experience. She had never known a Pam who wasn't a sexpot or a John who wasn't a tower of strength or a Mary who wasn't down to earth. Joshua Christian.

  In the small safe built into the lower regions of her desk all the files were already tucked away, filling it to the last millimetre of its capacity. She brought them out and strewed them around the desk in front of her, frowning as she debated how many of the nine candidates' file copies she should retain, how many destroy. John Wayne walked in just as her hands crept over Joshua Christian.

  'Sit down, John. What did you think?'

  Section Four's chief recreation was rubbernecking to see exactly what was the nature of the boss's relationship with her odd-looking secretary, its chief amusement ribald and mostly physically impossible speculations about them; but when Section Four was not present to see Dr Carriol with her secretary, he changed, became much less a neuter without becoming more a man. Only he and she knew that with the single exception of herself, he possessed the highest security rating in the entire Department; they both rated far higher than Harold Magnus.

  'I think it went very well,' he said. 'A few surprises, one really unexpected. Do you want the minutes?'

  'Done already?'

  'In very rough draft only.'

  'Thanks, but no thanks. I remember enough to suit my purpose for the moment. Plenty to mull over.' She sighed, put her fingertips against her closed eyes, then suddenly dropped her hands and looked at John Wayne piercingly; this was one of her favourite tricks, and a very effective one. It didn't work on John Wayne, nor had she intended it to. Sheer habit was all.

  'Old Moshe Chasen really trumped the other two, didn't he? I knew that man was worth stealing from HEW!'

  'A brilliant man,' John agreed. 'You're going to put him to work on relocation, of course.'

  'Of course.'

  'And have a look at his three candidates yourself.'

  'There's no way I'd let anyone else!' She gave a huge involuntary yawn and smothered it behind her hand, her eyes watering. 'Oh, Lord, I'm flagging! Do you mind getting me some coffee? I don't want to take any of this stuff out of my office, so I'm going to stay for a while.'

  'Does that mean you'd like me to order you a dinner of some kind?'

  'Too much trouble for you. If there's a sandwich left from the conference cart, that'll do.'

  'Who are you going to tackle first, ma'am?' Even when they were alone he never addressed her by her given name, and she never asked him to. It kept the status quo nicely.

  She opened her eyes wide and contorted those expressive brows. 'Why, who else than Senator David Sims Hillier VII? He's right here in Washington.' She shivered, a new thought occurring. 'Brr! Do you realize I'm going to have to go to Connecticut and Michigan for the other two? In winter!'

  John Wayne smiled wryly; he had nice teeth, but this was not the kind of smile that showed them. 'The new Alaska.'

  'Oh, not quite!' Then she shrugged. 'Well, not yet.'

  In the end she stayed in her office until after the sun had risen. By then she knew the entire contents of every file, could place names and faces with even the most unimportant scraps of history, and hypothesize about possible strengths and weaknesses. Two of the candidates she had mentally discarded already, sure that when the big moment came they would not be worth mentioning to Tibor Reece.

  Of course Dr Joshua Chris
tian was not one of the two candidates thrown onto that internal refuse heap; after reading the thick wad of notes and reports on him, she was intrigued. The man had coined some very quotable quotes, and his name for the increasing depression and lack of hope which had begun to creep across the country thirty years before she found most satisfyingly apt. Millennial neurosis.

  He was going to be difficult to investigate, though. Already she had tabulated the points his dossier revealed as negative; he was a maverick in his field rather than well accepted and respected by his peers, he was not always very consistent in his attitudes, his operation was so small-scale it suggested he thought on a small scale, and there was a distinct possibility that he was riddled with Oedipal guilts. Dr Carriol did not think highly of the internal resources of men in their thirties who still lived with Mother and to all intents and purposes had never embarked upon a sexual encounter with man or woman. Like the rest of the world, she found self-imposed celibacy a great deal harder to understand than any alternative sexual state, including the basest perversions; and this in spite of the fact that she was herself a frigid woman. The strength to resist one's primal urges was far more suspect than the weakness of succumbing to them or avoiding them. For he didn't have the eyes of a cold or an unfeeling man…

  No use just fronting up to his clinic out of the blue; after studying his file she thought him bound to view her with alarm and mistrust. Nor could she breathe the word 'Washington' to him; his opinion of the federal capital and its bureaucracy was not exactly hostile, but it was wary. Unlikely too that she could wangle an invitation from him to visit by going through one of her many contacts in the Chubb psychology echelons. No, whatever approach she finally selected would have to seem so natural that he would find it — and her — unimpeachable.

  Time to go home. Time to run the gauntlet of the main entrance and its daily suicides on the way to catch the bloody bus. It wouldn't be forever, she told herself. One of these days she would be numbered among the very few people anywhere in the country privileged enough to command a car for going to and from work. In the case of the general population, cars were permissible for vacation purposes only, a maximum of four weeks annually. Sensible and farsighted, turning vacation time into a precious interlude eagerly welcomed and mournfully farewelled. No government in the history of the United States of America had been so dedicated to sensibility and farsightedness as the one currently in office. But no government in the history of the United States of America had been so depressing, either. Hence the need for an Operation Search.