Page 131 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

George was relieved to hear the words next time. It meant that he was not going to be fired. "Thank you," he said. "I'll remember that."

"You'd better." Bobby went into his office.

"You got away with it," Wilson said to George. "Lucky bastard."

"Yeah," said George. He added sarcastically: "Thanks for your help, Dennis."

Everyone returned to their work. George could hardly believe what he had done. He, too, had inadvertently poured fuel on the flames.

He was still feeling depressed when the switchboard put through a long-distance call from Atlanta. "Hi, George, this is Verena Marquand."

Her voice cheered him up. "How are you?"

"Worried."

"You and the whole world."

"Dr. King asked me to call you and find out what's happening."

"You probably know as much as we do," George said. He was still smarting from Bobby's reprimand, and he was not about to risk another indiscretion. "Pretty much everything is in the newspapers."

"Are we really going to invade Cuba?"

"Only the president knows that."

"Will there be a nuclear war?"

"Even the president doesn't know that."

"I miss you, George. I wish I could sit down with you and just, you know, talk."

That surprised him. He had not known her well at Harvard, and he had not seen her for a half a year. He was not aware that she was fond enough of him to miss him. He did not know what to say.

She said: "What am I going to tell Dr. King?"

"Tell him . . ." George paused. He thought of all the people around President Kennedy: the hotheaded generals who wanted war now, the CIA men trying to be James Bond, the reporters who complained of inaction when the president was being cautious. "Tell him the smartest man in the United States is in charge, and we can't ask for better than that."

"Okay," said Verena, and she hung up.

George asked himself if he believed what he had said. He wanted to hate Jack Kennedy for the way he had treated Maria. But could anyone else handle this crisis better than Kennedy? No. George could not think of another man with the right combination of courage, wisdom, restraint, and calm.

Late in the afternoon, Wilson took a phone call, then said to everyone in the room: "We're getting a letter from Khrushchev. It's coming through to the State Department."

Someone asked: "What does it say?"

"Not much, so far," Wilson said. He looked at his notebook. "We don't have it all yet. 'You are threatening us with war, but you well know that the least you would receive in reply would be to experience the same consequences . . .' It was delivered to our embassy in Moscow just before ten this morning, our time."

George said: "Ten o'clock! It's six in the evening now. What's taking so long?"

Wilson answered with weary condescension, as if tired of explaining elementary procedures to beginners. "Our people in Moscow have to translate the letter into English, then encrypt it, then key it. After it's received here in Washington, State Department officials must decrypt it and then type it. And every word must be triple-checked before the president acts. It's a long process."

"Thank you," said George. Wilson was a smug prick. However, he knew a lot.

It was Friday night, but no one was going home.

Khrushchev's message arrived in bits. Predictably, the important part was at the end. If the United States would promise not to invade Cuba, Khrushchev said, "the necessity for the presence of our military specialists would disappear."

It was a compromise proposal, and that had to be good news. But what, exactly, did it mean?

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