Jubal Tries to Intervene in the Crisis by Contacting Douglas

Jubal Harshaw’s attempt to reach Joseph E. Douglas is both an effort to intervene in the danger facing Ben Caxton and a small campaign against the bureaucracy obstructing him. Harshaw knows that invoking Valentine Michael Smith could provoke an immediate response, but might also place the matter in the hands of subordinates whose authority or ambition makes them dangerous intermediaries. Instead, he tries to reach Douglas through the Executive Palace’s chain of officials, using impatience, legal argument, and strategic silence to find a route to someone empowered to act.

Purpose and Obstacles

Harshaw approaches the call with a clear distinction between his own habits and the machinery of government. He answers his own telephone when available, partly because he enjoys the chance to rebuke an unwelcome caller; he knows, however, that the Secretary General will not answer his own phone. The Palace’s flapper system—the layers of intermediaries protecting the head of government—turns a direct request into a prolonged negotiation.

His name carries him through three levels of official defenses, but not to Douglas. Instead, Harshaw is passed from secretary to secretary and eventually reaches a personable young official willing to talk at length without agreeing to connect the call. The delay is not merely inconvenient: with Ben Caxton’s life possibly at stake, Harshaw cannot risk having the matter mishandled by a junior official. He judges that reaching the person at the top is more reliable than triggering a rapid but uncontrolled reaction below.

The Berquist Gambit

Harshaw first tries to make the junior official acknowledge the gap between his position and the decision Harshaw needs. He demands to speak with Gil Berquist, Douglas’s personal assistant, and presses the official to consult his own superior if he cannot reach Berquist himself. Harshaw even supplies a physical description of Berquist, using his memory of reports about the missing aide to make the request sound concrete and to unsettle the person screening him. The response is that there is no Mr. Berquist there.

The denial does not send Harshaw back to the beginning. He asks for someone of Berquist’s rank: one of the people who works directly with Douglas and can speak for the Secretary General. The exchange is a contest over who has the authority to define the call. Harshaw wants a responsible decision-maker; the Palace’s machinery keeps trying to make him explain himself to whoever happens to answer.

Captain Heinrich and the Limits of Disclosure

The hold music stops and the screen fills with a different face, which Harshaw immediately recognizes as a police officer rather than Berquist. The man asks what interest Harshaw has in Gilbert Berquist. Harshaw answers by invoking the limits on a private citizen’s duty to cooperate with police: the officer must identify himself, establish his bona fides, state his purpose, and, if required, show that the demand is reasonably necessary. Captain Heinrich identifies himself as an officer of the Federation Special Service and displays identification, but Harshaw remains focused on the unanswered question of why the call is being intercepted and why he cannot speak with Berquist.

Harshaw then argues that the conversation’s confidentiality is central, not incidental. He will disclose just enough to someone he knows is cleared for sensitive material and trusted by Douglas; Heinrich, he says, is not established as such a person. When Heinrich insists that Harshaw will get nowhere without explaining his business, the officer also reveals that another call to the Palace will be routed to his office. Harshaw takes this as the crucial new information: the route through Berquist has been closed or rendered useless, and the relevant pressure now lies elsewhere in the government’s response.

Reconnaissance and Immediate Aftermath

Rather than disclose his business on the intercepted line, Harshaw ends the exchange. He invokes his status as a senior philosophunculist, mocks Heinrich’s failure to understand his allusive language, and switches off the phone, setting it to refuse calls for ten minutes. The maneuver does not connect him to Douglas, but it preserves the secrecy he considers essential and tests the structure guarding the Secretary General.

Harshaw then returns to the pool area and gives practical instructions: Anne is to keep her Fair Witness robe ready day and night, Valentine Michael Smith is to stay within earshot, and Miriam is to handle the telephone. He expects—or hopes—that the confrontation with Heinrich will bring a return call from someone higher in the hierarchy. The episode therefore ends not with the requested conversation, but with Harshaw having found a weakness in the official barrier and organized his household for whatever response follows. His intervention is characteristically combative, yet its purpose is controlled: to keep a crisis involving Caxton from being handed to officials he does not trust.