| weapons that might protect those people to be dangerous? Isn’t that backwards?” “But if we never use them… Do you think that I could live with such a crime on my conscience?” “No, I don’t think that any man could, but someone might screw up. He’d probably blow his brains out a week after the fact, but that might be a little late for the rest of us. The damned things are just too easy to use. You push a button, and they go, and they’ll work, probably, because there’s nothing to stop them. Unless something stands in their way, there’s no reason to think that they won’t work. And as long as somebody thinks they might work, it’s too easy to use them.” “Be realistic, Ryan. Do you think that we’ll ever rid ourselves of atomic arms?” Narmonov asked. “No, we’ll never get rid of all the weapons. I know that. We’ll both always have the ability to hurt each other badly, but we can make that process more complicated than it is now. We can give everybody one more reason not to push the button. That’s not destabilizing, sir. That’s just good sense. That’s just something more to protect your conscience.” “You sound like your President.” This was delivered with a smile. “He’s right.” Ryan returned it. “It is bad enough that I must argue with one American. I will not do so with another. What will you do with Gerasimov?” the General Secretary asked. “It will be |
There was an open half-liter bottle of vodka beside his evening meal. Misha ate sausage, black bread, and pickled vegetables, not very different from what he’d eaten in the field with his men, two generations before. He’d found that his stomach dealt more easily with rough foods than the fancy ones, a fact that had thoroughly confused the hospital staff during his last bout of pneumonia. After every other bite, he’d take a brief sip of vodka, staring out the windows, whose blinds were adjusted just so. The city lights of Moscow burned brightly, along with the numberless yellow rectangles of apartment windows. He could remember the smells at will. The verdant odor of good Russian earth, the fine, green smell of meadow grass, along with the stink of diesel fuel and above all the acidic reek of propellant from the tank’s guns that stayed in the cloth of your coveralls no matter how many times you tried to wash it out. For a tanker, that was the smell of combat, that and the uglier smell of burning vehicles, and burning crews. Without looking, he lifted the sausage and cut off a piece, bringing it to his mouth atop the knife. He was staring out the window, but as though it were a television screen, what he saw was the vast, distant horizon at sunset, and columns of smoke rising along the perimeter of green and blue, orange and brown. Next, a bite of the rich, thickly textured black bread |
