Stan Lee - The God Project.pdf - Stan Lee - widez2

This was proofed by the scanner and called (v1.0). The OCR program that I use interfaces with MS Word.

My scans are done so I can read the books on my smart phone.

The

GOD

Project

STAN LEE

GROVE WEIDENFELD

New York

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of

the publisher.

Published by Grove Weidenfeld

A division of Wheatland Corporation

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003-4793

Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd.

renewed 1946 by Carl Sandburg, reprinted

by permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Stan.

The GOD Project / Stan Lee.—1st ed. p. cm.

ISBN 0-8021-1128-9 (alk. paper) I. Title.

PS3562.E3648G6 1990 813'.54_dc20 89-38362

CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

First Edition 1990

123456789 10

To Sandra Lucas

PART I

The Trouble

with

November

NOMINATION

T here was a burned-out quality to summertime Washington that Elmer Jessup reveled in; it was the only

time he actually felt at home in the place. For one thing, it was empty. Congress wasn't in session, which

was always a plus for the commonweal. For another, the Democrats were all down in New Orleans at their

presidential convention busily knocking each other off. The Republicans were on the way to the coronation

of President McKay in San Diego. The President himself was still on his ranch in Arizona, pulling strings

and twisting arms and patting backs to be sure he was renominated by popular acclamation. Best of all, it

was even too hot and muggy for the tourists. In August, Washington was for connoisseurs of the bleak and

the blasted. Which was why Elmer Jessup, Director of Central Intelligence, did something entirely out of

character for him. He had his driver stop at the Mayflower Hotel so he and his aide, Nye, could watch the

roll call of the states in the cocktail lounge.

They didn't go in through the main hotel entrance; it was subtler to enter by the cocktail lounge's own door,

which was the kind of calculation that Jessup did on automatic pilot. They entered the darkened room of

brown wood and dark red leather chairs and couches and headed straight for inconspicuousness, a

darkened nook with a good sight line to the television set.

Washington, D.C., capital of the world, blocks away from the White House, and they had the baseball game

on. Jessup waited while Nye bribed the manager. After the roll call, they could switch it back to that opiate

of the people, Boston vs. the New York Yankees.

There was a nice muted feel to the place. There were fluorescents, but they were blunted; they were

installed behind thick stained-glass panels. The only other light was from dim spots recessed in the ceiling

which seemed to disperse before it reached the dark rug. Best of all, the air was good; almost as good as

the limousine's.

The room was two-thirds empty, and no one seemed to notice the difference between baseball and politics.

He took out his tally sheets. It was almost as though everything would go wrong if he personally didn't

watch it, supervise it, stay with it every step of the way; this thing was too important to leave to chance.

Nye came back and took his own tallies out, and they sat there contentedly sipping white wine spritzers as

the roll call of the states got under way.

Jessup didn't like conventions, but then he didn't like elections. What? You went around asking Joe Doakes

what to do about NATO? The Philippines? The bomb? But he was managing to enjoy this one anyway; it

was the quadrennial meeting of the Democrat Suicide Club.

He looked at the names supered on the screen—Halliday, Lindstrom, Rottenburg, and Stonewell—and

watched California go ecstatically for the governor of New York, Richard Halliday. He winked at Nye;

they'd been worried about California.

Stonewell could conceivably make trouble in November. He had survived twelve years of the

shoot-on-sight politics of North Carolina and, unlike most of the Democrats, had a following throughout the

South and Southwest. He also had the best campaign organization of any of them. The last candidate

Jessup wanted to see running against President McKay was Stonewell.

Rottenburg, a Texan, a solid budget-balancing conservative governor who was willing to spend like a

drunken sailor on farm programs, might be a threat. Rottenburg had the second-best political organization

among the Democrats as well as eight children, which took care of abortion and prayer in the schoolroom; it

was entirely possible that he could pick up the fundamentalists, which McKay would badly need.

The problem was that McKay had too many problems. An even worse corruption record than Reagan, and

he had managed to do it in only four years; a noticeable fraction of McKay's political cohort was sitting out

the election year in various federal correctional facilities around the country. Plus his former Secretary of

State had turned out to be gay. Plus the worst unemployment since the thirties depression. Plus an inflation

rate that was running at 9.5 percent annually. Going up against a morally impeccable Rottenburg would be

chancy.

Then there was Lindstrom. An imponderable. Lindstrom was a pussycat from Ohio who in eighteen years

in the Senate hadn't made a single enemy; in a low-turnout election, he conceivably could squeak past

McKay and win it. Only Halliday would be a sure loser in November, and according to Jessup's intelligence,

it was going to go all the way to Wyoming before Halliday won the nomination by an eyelash. He sat there

happily checking off states, his numbers, so far, correct to the last half-delegate. Jessup's sixty-five-year-old

pulse was beginning to make itself felt. Twenty years of mayhem in the CIA had not blunted his ability to

get excited, to be on tippy-toes when great affairs were hanging in the balance. In fact, getting excited was

his genius. He thought of it as his ability to be revirgined, to be able to go into anything as though it had

never happened before, quivering with anticipation spiced with a little dread.

"He'll be the biggest beauty since Adlai Stevenson," Jessup said to Nye. "He'll talk over everyone's head

and he'll win three states."

Illinois went for Halliday.

"If I were religious," Nye replied, "I'd say, 'Thank the Lord.' Maybe I should anyway, it couldn't hurt."

"The Lord had nothing to do with it," Jessup said, having managed to bribe the key members of the Illinois

delegation into supporting Halliday. At least they'd come cheap; he had gotten nine of them for under a

hundred thousand dollars. It always astonished Jessup how cheaply the typical politician sold himself.

"I hate to admit it, but it's looking good," Jessup said, showing a narrow slit of teeth that wasn't so much a

smile as a simulation of a smile, or maybe a rough draft of a smile, a tentative, exploratory stab at some kind

of nonhostile muscular alignment in the general area of the mouth. Everything was going as predicted. He

ordered a rare second drink, but as he looked toward the waiter he spotted Anatoly Malenki half a dozen

tables away. Malenki was officially the Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy but was undoubtedly

KGB. Jessup considered him to be the slimiest man in America. Malenki and another Russian had tally

sheets out too. Malenki looked over and smiled weakly. Jessup nodded a tenth of an inch.

Malenki had only just finished bribing the manager to switch the TV to the Democratic Convention when

he'd spotted the most evil man in Washington strolling into the lounge. One of his eyebrows had gone up, an

uncharacteristic display of emotion for him. The one time in months when he'd decided to go out—because

there was no one left in either Moscow or Washington who could make trouble for him—and the Director

of Central Intelligence strolls in. Out on the town? Drinking? Elmer Jessup?

Malenki was an unusual Russian. He had been born in Kiev, but his parents had immigrated to Brooklyn

when he was six months old. He was eighteen years old when they had emigrated back to the Soviet

Union. It meant that Malenki could not only talk like an American, he could think like one.

Malenki tore his eyes away from the Director of Central Intelligence and went back to his tallies. There

hadn't been any surprises, except maybe Illinois which, some thought, might have gone to Lindstrom but

had, unexpectedly, voted solidly for Halliday. Halliday was behind at the moment, but New York had

passed, and he was going to get all 212 of their votes. It was depressing. If Halliday got the Democratic

nomination, he would assuredly lose in November and they'd have four more years of the conservative

fanatic McKay.

The problem traced all the way back to Harry Truman. Truman and Eisenhower, actually. Their idea was

to make arms offers that seemed the height of sweet reasonableness to the American public but which

invariably contained a joker clause so disadvantageous to the Russians that a "Nyet" was guaranteed. The

U.S. establishment had become infatuated with nuclear weapons from the moment of the trinity explosion

and didn't want to give them up.

Gorbachev foiled this strategy. Gorbachev simply grabbed at just about anything that was offered—no

matter how unfair to Russia—in order to dispel the Cold War mood. Gorbachev had possessed what

previous Soviet leaders lacked: a sense of humor.

But George Bush had defeated him. The old Busher, the wimp himself, had done Gorbachev in. It had been

easy. He had used the interchangeability of weapons systems to do it. The American public thought in

terms of types of weapons, which was actually an irrelevant category. If both sides gave up, say, mobile

land-based missiles in Europe, that would seem fair and peaceful and equitable to the public. Bush

cheerfully went along with such deals while at the same time pushing alternative weapons systems that

accomplished the same mission, such as land- and sea-based cruise missiles and attack planes, categories in

which the Russians were way behind.

Eventually the Soviet military had clamped down on Gorbachev because he was endangering Soviet military

security with his penchant for giving away the store in order to play to Western public opinion. President

McKay had continued the Bush game plan. And now there was yet another new American weapons

system coming on line.

Malenki's biggest failure in America so far was that he had not yet discovered the nature of the newest

Pentagon project. A satellite had picked it up first: a large compound in Colorado. The dominant structure

was peculiar. There was a circular installation, mostly underground, that had a diameter of three hundred

feet. A second structure was a diameter of that circle, three hundred feet long, seventy feet high, eighty-six

feet wide. There was no structure like it in the Soviet Union or anywhere else on earth. You couldn't get

near it on the ground. And, for once, American security had held, had been absolutely airtight. There was

so much in the American arsenal already that was hellish— Malenki couldn't even imagine what it might

be. He'd requested that a seminar be held in Moscow, where leading Soviet experts in all disciplines could

cross-pollinate in an attempt to divine—the word came from his American background—what the next

ultimate weapon might be. The seminar had produced twenty-five technically ingenious crackpot ideas

which Malenki—and everyone else at KGB and the Kremlin—had refused to take seriously. If it should

turn out to be a breakthrough system—and in the hands of President William C. McKay, a fanatic and a

risk-taker—it could mean mortal trouble for the Soviet Union, where there still wasn't enough money to

keep up with the Joneses. Now, Malenki was sitting there appalled

Wyoming had yielded to New York.

Stan Lee - The God Project.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: