Here he is, sounding like Lucy. And Dan, drunk and miserable, far past the code, will have none of it: “Make the best of it! How can we make the best of it? Even if we could get it to work, all the Soviets have to do is put a bucket of nails in orbit and wham, ten of our mirrors are gone. Talk about cost-effective at the margin! A ten-penny nail will take out a billion-dollar mirror! Ha! ha! So we defend those mirrors by claiming that we will start a nuclear war with anyone who attacks them, so it comes right back to MAD to defend the very system that was supposed to get us away from all that.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know.” McPherson can feel the margaritas fuzzing his brain, and Dan has had about twice as many as he has. Dan’s getting sloppy drunk here, McPherson can see it. So he tries to prevent Dan from ordering another pitcher, but Dan shoves his hand away angrily and orders another anyway. Nothing McPherson can do about it. He feels depression growing in him, settling into a knot around the tequila in his stomach. This is a waste of his time. And Dan, well, Dan …

Dan mutters on while waiting for the next drink to arrive. “Soviets get their own BMD and we don’t like it, no no no, even though the whole strategy demands parity. All sorts of regional wars start so our hard guys can express their displeasure without setting off the big one. Boom, bam, hook to the jaw, jab in the eye, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists sets the war clock at one second to midnight—one second to midnight, man, set there for twenty years! And, and the Soviets’ beam systems could be trained on American cities, burn us to toast in five minutes, and we could do the same to them like I was saying today but we all ignore that, that’s not real no no no, we pretend they’re defensive systems only and we work on knocking each other’s stuff down before the other side does, so we can MIRV each other right into the ground—”

“All right, all right,” McPherson says irritably. “It’s complicated, sure. No one ever said it wasn’t complicated.”