Free Fail Safe by Eugene Burdick, Harvey Wheeler Page A

Camus. Camus, who had understood fully the futility and the antic and the senselessness of much of modern life, had also, in a perverse way, found the principle and will which allowed him to live through the awful stresses of the French underground during World War II. Like Camus, the missilemen had learned to live seriously in a world which was absurd.
    To enter a missile compound on Gold Alert was like entering a severe monastic order, utterly dedicated to the service of ununderstood mechanical totems. Quietly and systematically, without any public announcement and without any realization on the part
    of the public, the nation rose to a full and ominous alert.
    There was also another element in the subterranean life which was pervasive, perfectly known, understood, and never discussed. There was the knowledge that the enemy was doing precisely what they were doing. Somewhere halfway around the world there was another set of silos, another pattern of hard sites, another organization of men-almost, they assumed, precisely like theirs. This is no easy knowledge to carry. It is one thing to arm the thermonuclear warhead on an immense missile. It is another to know that another person, with almost the same training, is doing the identical thing-and that he must be thinking of you-and lcnowing that you are thinking of him thinking of you, and on and on.
    It was no life for ordinary men. One must have vision and no vision, nerve and nervelessness, absolute obedience and independent judgment. One must be outwardly friendly and inwardly cool, for life in the silos is intimate and forced and to open too much is fatal and to stay too much closed is fatal.
    The subterranean men were proud men, sure of their ability. They also had developed to an almost sublime degree the capacity to forget the sum total of their task and to concentrate on their small role. They were a hard-working, magnificently trained team. They were even an enthusiastic team. But they carefully avoided any discussion of the end result of their teamWork.
    Brig. Gen. Warren A. Black came starkly awake: his eyes wide open, his toes spread and digging into the sheet beneath him, his fingers forming into fists, his stomach flat and tight. His skin was covered with a sweat that was really a slime of fear. He knew that ip a few more minutes his wrist-watch alarm would go off. Aware of a thin scratchiness behind his eyeballs, he wanted to go back to sleep. But he jerked awake. Sleep was dangerous.
    Sleep was where the Dream happened.
    Until six months ago Black could not remember dreaming. Now his sleep was almost always broken by some variation of the Dream. It brought him awake, arched and sweating. At first he was torn between the desire to sink back in restful blackness and the fear that he might, instead, fall into the Dream. Recently he always stayed awake.
    He knew there was one way that he could end the Dream: by resigning his commission. He said it to himself in a score of ways; sometimes mockingly, sometimes cruelly, sometimes in an antic mood. But the Dream did not vanish. It was also invulnerable to logical analysis. He knew, in a fleeting but dreadfully sure sense, that he could never exorcise the Dream. He could end it only by resigning. But the thought of resigning from the Air Force was torture.
    The Dream always opened on a bullfight arena. Although Black had never been to a bullfight in his life, since the Dream he had checked some bullfight books, The Dream was accurate, replete with detail of picadors on padded horses, banderillas, bad music, and the background of huge ads for beer and automobiles and a milling crowd. Perhaps, Black thought, he supplied the detail from some long-forgotten book.
    That bull was real enough, charging out of the gate, pawing and snorting. Its charge came to a grinding halt, its immense body reared back on its hind legs, as frozen as statuary. It came down on all fours, swung its horns around the arena, and looked, with