Alternities by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Read Free Book Online Page A

was a congenital early riser. Though his family had moved off their Hazelhurst farm when he was twelve, his father trading the tractor for a wartime assembly line in Rockford, the habit had stayed with him. A reliable internal alarm usually woke Robinson within a few minutes of five A.M.—winter or summer, White House bedroom or Minnesota lake retreat.
    He awoke not only early, but clear-headed and energetic. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the Washington world did not, including his wife Janice. It was the one serious mismatch in their natures, intruding as it did on the more intimate parts of their lives. He would gladly have traded their late-night “sleep-making” for a morning tumble with the sheets warm and the fire high.
    On rare occasions, wakened by a dream or his movements in bed, she would turn to him in the early hours. And from time to time, if the hunger stayed with him, he would keep his first appointment of the day, then excuse himself to return to bed and Janice nearer her natural waking time. From time to time, and time and again. In college, his sexual appetites had earned him the hated nickname Peter Rabbit. In his five years in the White House, those appetites had made his “9:00 A.M. conferences” an insider’s knowing joke.
    But most mornings, he would lie quietly beside his wife’s sleeping form. Staring at the ceiling with folded hands tucked behind his head, he would compose his plans for the day, his remarks for an appearance, his thoughts about an unresolved problem.
    Some mornings, like this one, he would he there and simply enjoy looking at her.
    It was a tribute to his own appeal that he had been able to overcome the liability of an attractive wife in a national election, where the well-kept but mature look was ever synonymous with responsibility and respectability. At forty, Janice still had real beauty, the kind that survives the removal of makeup and morning-after tousledness. Not like the plastic beauty so many Washington wives sport, whale-oil and flower-squeezings pasted half an inch thick—
    A mercy, considering his drives, that she still excited him. A mercy, considering his position, that he could satisfy so much of his need at home. Opportunities and alternatives were there for a President as they had been for a Congressman. But the back-door romance that had destroyed the Vandenberg administration was too fresh a memory for Robinson to give himself permission to indulge.
    At six o’clock, he left the bed to soak the knotted muscles of his neck and his eternally stiff right knee—blown out ten years ago during a family softball game—in a long, near-scalding shower. He reached the private dining room a minute before his breakfast of scrapple and French toast did.
    A single place had been set, and his short stack of newspapers was already there, carefully culled of those sections Robinson had no interest in reading. There was that morning’s New York Times, defiant leader of the eight or ten rebellious dailies not subscribing to the Federal News Service. And the Washington Post, flagship of the FNS and, in Robinson’s mind, symbol of what responsible journalism was all about. And on top, yesterday’s Chicago Tribune, to which he turned first, eager to measure his own thoughts against its sports columnists. Trade talk was in the air in the wake of the Bears’ fourth straight loss, and Piccolo was clinging to the coaching job by his teeth. At the very least, he has to give the kid quarterback from Stanford a shot—
    Robinson expected to finish both his breakfast and his reading without interruption. It was understood by family and staff alike that this time, this room, belonged to him. So when the knock came halfway through, Robinson knew that it foretold something serious.
    “Come in,” he called out, folding his paper and setting it aside.
    The door opened to admit William Rodman, Robinson’s bald-headed White House chief of staff.
    “Good morning, Peter. Sorry to