Trinity's Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

to pray? the Bible Belt congressman had asked the general. Jee-zuz.
    “Get that mother-humper off the goddamn screen,” he growled into the public-address system.
    The screen dissolved quickly into snow again, then refocused on a large polar map looking down on the northern hemisphere. The view gave the general the pleasing feeling of looking down on the world. The god's view was flanked, on the other screens, by computerized characterizations of his missile installations, his B-52 bases, the Navy's submarines, and endless data about the activities of the adversary. But his eyes did not get that far.
    Out of the polar map he saw computer projections of missiles crossing all American coastlines. He also saw that the flexing molars in Polyarnny had changed. They had become snaking white lines. He knew instantly where the white lines would end, and when.
    The general shuddered for the first time since his wife had died. He quickly hit controls which moved his status from Snow Man to Big Noise and changed the preliminary attack conference, already under way, to an attack conference. He flicked a switch that interrupted SIOP and RSIOP just as RSIOP was about to respond to the nudets marching on Moscow, turning them to a different problem. He also picked up the grungy yellow phone.
     
     
    The kid really had been a little bastard today. Tyler, struggling with former Budget Director Stockman's “The Up Side of Supply Side Economics,” would have been having trouble anyway. But stacking the kid's antics on top of Stockman's obtusities, putting both together in the cramped and overheated library in the Alert Facility with the goddamn sign that asked him always if he were EWO ready, was too much.
    The kid simply had been a little bastard. And his mother hadn't been much better. He was doing all this for them. The Air Force was paying for his master's degree in business administration. So he flew as a navigator aboard a Strategic Air Command B-52 every four days and sat in an overheated blockhouse one week out of three. It was called paying your dues. His wife knew that. Maybe he should chuck it all and become a salesman. Then he could be gone two weeks out of three.
    His wife, of all people, should have handled it better. He could have been PRPed. Kicked out, as he had seen others get the ax for far smaller violations. Six months to go, six months to the degree he had been after so long, six months to the end of his second Air Force tour. Six months to out. And they could have nailed him on PRP. They still could. That would do it nicely, very nicely indeed.
    He read the sentence for the fourth time and clapped the book shut, not able to handle it.
    SAC showed some understanding of the pressures on a twenty-six-year-old father. It was prison, without conjugal privileges, but it wasn't like the submariners, who stayed at sea for months now in the new Tridents. This was one week out of three. SAC had built the little alert annex where families could visit briefly. They had placed the jungle gym and swings out back for the kids. And the boy came almost every day, a little wide-eyed kid who made his father swell with pride. The boy's bulging eyes riveted on the flying suit with its demigod symbols, the child-face painted with both awe and fear the way he watched the Ajax man swoop into a television kitchen, uncertain if the image was there to save or destroy his three-year-old world.
    Tyler hadn't really expected the boy today. It was his first day on alert and a brutally cold winter afternoon, the temperature hovering just at zero. But there he was, a soft little ball wrapped in his snowsuit, and Tyler had swung his son high on the swings, coaxing him: “Take off, Timmie! Reach for the sky!”
    When the time had come to leave, the boy had gone reluctantly and morosely. His mittened hand tugged against his mother as he toddled toward the barbed-wire control point, his snowball head craning back toward the retreating hulk of a