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He was sixty-one years old, a small round-shouldered man with a bald head that seemed too big for his body. Superficially he looked healthy, having just returned from ten days in Florida, yet observed closely his tan had a gray pallor and the skin of his face sagged in flaccid folds underneath his dull eyes.

Right now his body wasn't the only thing that disgusted him; this meeting, and in particular these people, he found utterly distasteful.

"You keep insisting we have no choice but to implement this plan, Major Madden. As I see it, that's precisely what we do have--a choice. We still have our nuclear capability, which is superior to anything the Soviets can muster."

From his position at the head of the table Lebasse looked along the two rows of faces, all turned attentively toward him. Three members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An admiral who had made a special study of deep-draft cargo vessels. Two high-ranking air force officers, experts in missile deployment. A civilian scientist named Farrer whose function here today Lebasse wasn't entirely clear about.

Plus the two prime movers of DEPARTMENT STORE: Gen. George ("Blindeye") Wolfe and his henchman, Maj. Lloyd F. Madden. They had nursed their baby with tender loving care, Lebasse knew, not to say ruthless opportunism, and they put him in mind of ambitious, hard-eyed parents who would stop at nothing to protect their offspring.

"Mr. Secretary, with respect," Major Madden was saying in his cultured New England voice, "we are faced with a radical new situation."

Appearance matched voice perfectly: neat dark hair, carefully parted, smooth sharp-featured face, tailored uniform with lapel badges burnished to winking brightness. His was the kind of face that became more youthful with the passing years, in contrast with General Wolfe, who at sixty-two could have passed for a man of seventy. Two things had contributed to this: high blood pressure, which had forced him to lose weight and made his neck scrawny, and his early years spent under foreign suns, which had imprinted a crazed mosaic on what had once been a strong, rugged face.

"The use of nuclear weapons is becoming an outdated concept in terms of global strategy." Madden spoke with the smug knowingness of a schoolboy who thinks himself brighter than his teacher but isn't smart enough not to show it. "The MX missile system will be obsolete even before it's fully operational, and already the budget is way off the graph. Now, we know from intelligence reports and satellite photore-connaissance that the Soviets are well advanced in their scheme to divert the Ob and Yenisei rivers; that within three years maximum the scheme will be completed. With respect, Mr. Secretary--"

"Forget the respect," Lebasse snapped. "Say what you have to say."

"Simply that we have to be ready to meet this new threat, sir. The balance of power must be maintained if we're to safeguard the nation. After all, that is our prime responsibility."

"Thank you, Major Madden," said Lebasse icily. "I don't need you to remind me of my--our--responsibility to the nation. What you're telling me is that we're entering a new phase in which nuclear weapons are only of minor, or at least secondary, importance. Instead, the confrontation is potentially of the kind that you term 'environmental war.' Have I got it right?"

"Yes, Mr. Secretary. That is correct." Lloyd Madden doodled on the blank pad in front of him, holding himself tight inside. He'd been too forthright; too damn obvious in fact. Better not to further arouse this sick old man, who should have stayed in Florida with the rest of the senile geriatrics. So he would wait, bide his time, let somebody else take the lead, he decided, drawing a cock and pair of balls.

That somebody else was U.S. Air Force Gen. Walter Stafford of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose support was crucial because he was known to take a moderate line (dubbed by the media as a "dawk"--midway between dove and hawk) and, more important, because he had known

Lebasse since they were students together at Columbia in the early fifties.

"I share your misgivings, Tom, but I'm afraid Major Madden is right. We have no real alternative but to bring DEPARTMENT STORE to full operational status as quickly as possible. Nothing else will contain the Soviets, that's a dead certainty."

" 'Dead' being the operative word," Lebasse remarked stonily. He was thinking of his four grandchildren, whose ages ranged from seventeen to five. This was a fine legacy to bequeath them--global death. He wondered bleakly if it had been any different since 5:30 on the morning of July 16, 1945, when the atomic bomb stopped being a row of symbols in a physicist's notebook and was transformed into a five-thousand-degree fireball above the Trinity site in Arizona. That had happened two days before his ninth birthday.