Line of Succession

She sat up. Squeezed her eyes tight shut and popped them open. “God I’m tired.”

“Pot of coffee over there. Take it down with you—he might need some.” As she struggled to her feet Sturka was adding, “He must talk this time, Peggy.”

“If he’s not dead.” The anger was returning.

“He’s not dead,” Sturka said with a kind of disgusted patience. “Alvin has been sitting up with him.”

She took the coffee down to the cell. Alvin nodded to her. Fairlie was on his back, flat out on the cot, asprawl and asleep, his chest rising and falling very slowly.

“Wake up please.” Her professional nurse voice. She touched his cheek—gray and cool, an unhealthy pallor. Respiration still low, she noted clinically. The pulse was slow but not terribly weak.

His eyes fluttered, opened. She gave him a few moments to absorb his surroundings. “Can you sit up?”

He sat up without help. She studied his face. “How do you feel this morning?” Echoes of the tutor in nursing school: And how do we feel this morning? An infuriating chirp.

“Logy,” Fairlie was mumbling. He was making strange faces, popping his eyes, rolling them around, grimacing—trying to clear his head.

Cesar appeared in his robes carrying a plate of food. She spent twenty minutes forcing Fairlie to eat and pouring coffee down him. He consumed everything obediently but without appetite and he chewed very slowly and sometimes seemed to forget to swallow.

At seven o’clock Sturka entered with the tape recorder. “All ready now?”

But Fairlie hadn’t even glanced to see who had entered. He’s still out of it, she thought. Too far out of it to put on the performance Sturka wanted?

She waited in growing fear: she didn’t know what Sturka would do if it didn’t work. To Fairlie, or to her. The past few days Sturka had let his anger show through. She had never seen that before; he had always been emotionless; now the strain was showing and Sturka had begun to slip. She caught the edge of his feelings once in a while and the intense force was alarming. It was a chill that came off him like death.

Sturka switched on the machine. Cesar sat on the corner of the bunk holding the microphone where it would pick up Fairlie’s voice. This time there wouldn’t be any editing; they wanted the pigs to know it was no trick this time, that Fairlie was talking without revisions.

They had spent a long time working out the wording. There had to be topical references to prove the tape had been made recently.

It was a fairly long speech because it contained detailed instructions for the release of the Washington Seven. Fairlie would have to read the whole thing cohesively. If his voice sounded weary and low that was all right but he couldn’t stumble over every other word.

Sturka put his hand under Fairlie’s chin and lifted his head sharply. “Listen to me. We’ve got something for you to read aloud. Another speech like last time. You remember last time?”

“… Yes.”

“Then just do it. When you’ve done it you can go back to sleep. You’d like that wouldn’t you—to go back to sleep?”

Fairlie blinked rapidly; it was as much of an affirmative as anyone needed. Sturka became harsh: “But if you don’t read this for us we’ll keep you awake until you do. You’ve heard of what happens to the minds of men who are prevented from sleeping for too long? They go completely insane. You know that?”

“… I know. I’ve heard that.”

His voice did sound better than it had last night. Peggy walked in relief to the front corner, out of the way.

Sturka held the paper out to Fairlie—a long yellow ruled sheet from a legal pad.

“Read this aloud. That’s all you have to do. Then you can sleep.”

Fairlie held it in his lap and frowned at it as if trying to focus his eyes on the hand lettering. A finger came down on the sheet. “What’s this? El Dzamiba?”

“El Djamila. It’s the name of a place.”

Fairlie tried to sit up but it seemed to require too much effort. He sagged back against the wall and held the speech up, squinting at it. Cesar moved the microphone closer.

“When should I start?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Fairlie’s eyes wandered over the sheet. “What’s this about Dexter Ethridge—and this about Milton Luke?”

“It’s all true. They’re dead.”

“My God,” Fairlie whispered.

The shock of that seemed to bring him around. He sat up again and maintained the position this time. “They’re dead? How?”

“Ethridge seems to have died of natural causes,” Sturka lied. “Luke was killed by a bomb which blew up his limousine. Please don’t ask me who did it. I don’t know. As you can see it was none of us—we’re here, we’re not in Washington.”

“My God,” Fairlie muttered again. “Has it started then?”

“The revolution? If it hasn’t it’s about to.”

“What time is it? What day?”

“Tuesday. The eighteenth of January. It’s early morning. Who knows, if you cooperate promptly enough you may be home in time to be inaugurated. Or perhaps you’d rather just sleep a while. But you have to read this first.”

Fairlie was trying to grapple with it but he was too far under, too drowned by the resistance-destroying weight of the drugs. He picked up the yellow sheet and began to read in a listless monotone, eyelids drooping, voice wandering into whispers every once in a while:

“This—this is Clifford Fairlie speaking. I am very tired and under the influence of mild tranquilizers, which have been administered to me to insure that I don’t do any reckless things that might—uh—jeopardize my physical safety. That will explain the … sleepy sound of my voice. But I am in good health.

“Uh—I have been informed of … deaths of Vice-President-elect Dexter Ethridge and Speaker Luke, for which I am allowed to express … deepest personal anguish.

“The seven … political prisoners from Washington have been delivered to Geneva as instructed, and my captors have asked me to a

“If any survillance—surveillance is detected, I am told I will not be released. Neither the Algerian Government nor any other government is to follow the prisoners or make any other effort to determine their whereabouts. The prisoners will be provided by my captors with fresh transportation out of Algeria, but before they are sent on they will be stripped and examined by X ray to insure that no electronic devices have been concealed in their clothes or on their bodies.

“If all conditions are met precisely, the seven prisoners will have forty-eight hours in which to disappear into asylum in a country that has not been identified to me.

“If there is no indication of betrayal on the part of the United States or any other government, I will be released twenty-four hours after the release of the seven prisoners.

“There is one final instruction. The seven prisoners are to be in their car leaving El Djamila at precisely six o’clock in the evening—that is eighteen hours by the European clock—on Thursday the twentieth of January. And I am told to repeat that any attempt to follow the prisoners’ car or to track it electronically will be detected and will result in my … death.”

7:45 A.M. EST “… defies the whole purpose of the Constitution,” Senator Fitzroy Grant said.

Satterthwaite was thinking of Woodrow Wilson’s phrase to describe the Senate: little group of willful men.… He said, “That has a high moral tone, but would you still say the same thing if Howard Brewster happened to be a Republican?”

“Yes.” The Senate Minority Leader almost snapped it.