The president said: “He may be putting out another letter.”

That turned out to be the truth. In the next few minutes, further reports made the situation clearer. Khrushchev was making a completely separate new proposal, and had broadcast it on Radio Moscow.

“He’s got us in a pretty good spot here,” said President Kennedy. “Most people would regard this as not an unreasonable proposal.”

Mac Bundy did not like that idea. “What ‘most people,’ Mr. President?”

The president said: “I think you’re going to find it difficult to explain why we want to take hostile military action in Cuba when he’s saying: ‘Get yours out of Turkey and we’ll get ours out of Cuba.’ I think you’ve got a very touchy point there.”

Bundy argued for going back to Khrushchev’s first offer. “Why pick that track when he’s offered us the other track in the last twenty-four hours?”

Impatiently, the president said: “This is their new and latest position—and it’s a public one.” The press did not yet know about Khrushchev’s letter, but this new proposal had been made through the media.

Bundy persisted. America’s NATO allies would feel betrayed if the U.S. traded missiles, he said.

Defense Secretary Bob McNamara expressed the bewilderment and fear that they all felt. “We had one deal in the letter, now we’ve got a different one,” he said. “How can we negotiate with somebody who changes his deal before we even get a chance to reply?”

No one knew the answer.

• • •

That Saturday, the royal poinsettia trees in the streets of Havana blossomed with brilliant red flowers like bloodstains on the sky.

Early in the morning Tanya went to the store and grimly laid in provisions for the end of the world: smoked meat, canned milk, processed cheese, a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of rum, and fresh batteries for her flashlight. Although it was daybreak there was a line, but she waited only fifteen minutes, which was nothing to someone accustomed to Moscow queues.

There was a doomsday air in the narrow streets of the old town. Habaneros were no longer waving machetes and singing the national anthem. They were collecting sand in buckets for putting out fires, sticking gummed paper over their windows to minimize flying shards, toting sacks of flour. They had been so foolish as to defy their superpower neighbor, and now they were going to be punished. They should have known better.

Were they right? Was war unavoidable now? Tanya felt sure no world leader really wanted it, not even Castro, who was beginning to sound borderline crazy. But it could happen anyway. She thought gloomily of the events of 1914. No one had wanted war then. But the Austrian emperor had seen Serbian independence as a threat, in the same way that Kennedy saw Cuban independence as a threat. And once Austria declared war on Serbia the dominoes fell with deadly inevitability until half the planet was involved in a conflict more cruel and bloody than any the world had previously known. But surely that could be avoided this time?