by Tom DeMarco
“All that is required of us now is to keep to our resolve. To persevere, gentlemen, in the path of righteousness. To stay the course: Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord with slackness; and cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed. That is written in Jeremiah: 48, 10, and I know it to be true. It is written for us.”
Gallant had learned on the stump over three decades ago that there is a doubting Thomas in every audience. You can always count on him to raise a timorous voice, just as the most glorious vision of a new order has been spoken. If you’re ready for him, you can use him like a shill. The doubting Thomas today was the young fellow Paule had recruited from Treasury, Gallant could never remember his name. He had a high whining voice:
“I’m just wondering about our timing, fellows. That’s all. I mean, I don’t doubt that the HBs will work eventually when we’ve got them perfected, and when we’ve got enough of them in place. But the press was always going on about how the whole notion of the Shield was flawed and how it couldn’t work at all, or at least not with the current state of technology. And I’m just wondering if this might not be a bit early to start goading anyone. I mean, we could be wrong, couldn’t we? We’re only human, aren’t we? Maybe the Shield won’t hold…well, I’m just thinking about all those lives.”
Gallant smiled tolerantly. “We are only human. How true. We can be wrong. How profound are those words. But the Lord is not only human and He cannot be wrong. What are we afraid of my friends? That we may act as the unwitting workers of His will? That we might be the tools of His perfection by fire of human society? Can Armageddon come without His permission? And if it comes, and behind it the second appearance of Our Savior, then which of us, looking back, will be able to regret the enabling actions we are taking here today?”
He affected a sudden tiredness. “But who am I to give you strength if you are weak? I am just a country preacher from the hill country, a child of poor humble people. I’ve held the floor for too long, my friends. Perhaps I was wrong to speak up at all. Perhaps our senior member, Secretary Murdoch, could favor us with a short passage from the good book, and then, Mr. Secretary, you might give us your own instruction, inspired by that passage?”
“Well, of course, Nolan. Of course.” Murdoch reached for his bible.
“If I could just suggest, Bill, starting with the 6th verse of Exodus 15?”
“An excellent choice, Nolan,” said the Secretary, though he had not the foggiest notion of what Exodus 15 might have to say. “I couldn’t have chosen better myself.” The Reverend Gallant closed his eyes as Secretary Murdoch began to read:
“Thy right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, Thy right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy. In the greatness of Thy majesty Thou overthrowest Thy adversaries; Thou sendest forth Thy fury, it consumes them like stubble.”
The Secretary checked it again to be sure he’d got it right. “Well. Yes, ‘stubble,’ as it says. That was…Nolan, that was, I think, just the right choice. Stubble. Well. Reflecting on that passage in these Times of Trouble, might we not be led to ask aloud, How long, O Lord, how long…”
Gallant had set out four objectives for the meeting. The first three had been no trouble at all. He’d given direct instructions to General Archer’s attaché and to the undersecretary for Defense. They had enough influence in the Pentagon to pull off nearly anything in the short run. The fourth objective was a rather delicate one, though. He was going to have to go himself, as Gustafson had said, to talk to the President, to put some backbone into the man. Getting in was not a problem: Rupert Paule had control of the President’s schedule. It would have to be on the QT, as the press would howl bloody murder at the President lending an ear to Nolan Gallant just before the Vienna talks. But leave it to Paule to take care of that.
The difficult part was to figure out just what to say to the President. He was sure the man didn’t have the gumption to flirt with Armageddon. As the others were leaving, Gallant took Paule and Hodge off into the adjacent office and explained his concerns. Hodge was a born intriguer. Gallant put the question to him directly. “Taylor, tell me, what is the best way to approach the President?”
Hodge reflected a moment. “It’s the judgment of history that is on the President’s mind now,” he said. “His nightmare is that history will view him as a blunderer who muddied the waters and let a major American corporation be blown away in the confusion of his own ill-advised adventuring. But if you could just plant the suggestion that it’s the Cubans who have muddied the waters, that history will see that an adroit President acted swiftly and courageously to profit from their ill-advised adventuring…”
“I see. I see. It was our side that was just waiting for them to provide the opportunity. The cowardly attack on Texaco was our opening.”
“Exactly. Operation Cuba Libre was ready for them. And he will be remembered as the man who got Cuba back for us.”
“But it’s been weeks since the Honduras strike and the counterattack on Texaco. Our action now is hardly a lightning response.”
“Who’s to say that? Cuba Libre could be pulled off within ten days. The plan is simple. It requires almost no people, and damn little equipment. From the perspective of next month it’s going to look like an instantaneous response. And it’s going to catch our friends in Havana flat-footed.” Hodge looked relaxed and confident. He had no doubts at all. “They’re going to…how shall I say it, to…”
“…piss in their britches,” Gallant finished up.
“Nicely put,” said Hodge.
In the back of his black limousine, Gallant went back over the meeting. The ways of the Lord are beyond the comprehension of mere mortal men. He leadeth us to lie down with total idiots, to suffer the Murdochs and Tollivers of the world, the fawning little people placed upon earth for reasons that no man could discover. He calleth upon us to take some surprising steps. On occasion, He even leadeth us to tell a few Whoppers.
He considered options for discrediting the Cornell simulations. Little lies, he decided, are for little men. He would look the President right in the eye and tell him that the Cornell data was fudged, that they had concocted their Honduras ‘simulation’ after the fact and postdated it. He would say that the Secretary of State was a party to the forgery. The implication would not be lost on the President: The State Department was trying to increase its power by using these counterfeit scenarios. They were trying to frighten the President, to make him incapable of acting in a time when courageous action was called for.
It would work. The President might try to weasel out of his duty, but would be no match for Gallant. He had the man by his spiritual balls. Within two weeks Cuba Libre would be a fait accompli.
Power politics is heady stuff. It can have a positively erotic effect. The moving of troops, the plotting of bold strokes, he knew, would give some men an erection. For Gallant, the effect was different; it only made him hungry. He tapped on the glass screen of the limo and signaled the driver to turn in at Kentucky Fried Chicken just ahead.
3
THE PRISONERS’ DILEMMA
It wasn’t the sex life of beetles that Homer Layton wanted to study, but the movement of electrons in a water and diopside crystal medium. The crystal was his laboratory. The effect that he was trying to explain took place over a distance of a few atomic diameters, provoked by the interaction of a thin stream of electrons and a single atom of hydrogen. To observe the effect, he used a dry cell battery, a diffraction grating and a piece of high contrast black and white film. The total cost of performing the experiment was well within the budget of a high school science fair project.
What cost real money, though, was the hard work of figuring out what the curious result of the experiment could possibly mean. The filmed pattern of electrons passing out of the aura of the atom’s nucleus, implied a kind of motion that was, well, peculiar. Homer had first run the experiment more than a decade ago at Columbia, and had been puzzling over its significance ever since.
“The
economical way to figure out the puzzle,” Homer told Loren, “is to apply the Einstein method.” This had been back in September, on Loren’s first full day in America, his first day on the project. He had flown in from Spain with Homer, arriving at Kennedy only the evening before.
“Now what would Einstein do to unlock the secret of Peculiar Motion?” Homer gave an encouraging look to Loren for an answer.
“Um…” Loren said.
“Right. He would take off his shoes and put his feet on the desk and apply pure think power. It would take him, oh, a morning. Total cost of the analysis: a plate of eggs or whatever he had for breakfast to fuel the thought process. Now why couldn’t I do that?”
“Well,…”
“Right. Not enough think power. So I got to have assistance. And assistants. And computers. And a computer operator and offices and a payroll. Instead of the Einstein method, I use the Layton method. I throw a barrel of money at the problem. So where do I find a barrel of money?”
“I don’t know, Homer.” Loren was trying to remember what a barrel was.
“Sure you don’t know. That’s why I’m telling you. You get a barrel of money from the Department of Defense. You send away for it through the mail. Some days I got the magic touch. I write up my request and send it off and the next thing you know we are buried in cash.”
“Nice.”
“Very nice.” Homer made a face. “Only if you’re not careful, there is a price to pay. If you ask for money to study Peculiar Motion of electrons, they are liable to turn it around and fund you a project to build a Peculiar Motion bomb. The little changes they make tend to reduce the amusement value of the work.”
“I can see that.”
“So the trick is to write up your request in the most abstract possible way: describe it as an exercise in pure thought, something so detached from reality that no one could think of a way to make it into a weapon.”
“Like a mathematical study,” Loren offered.
“Or a computer simulation. At least that’s what I thought. What could be more abstract than that? Construction of a mathematical model inside the brain of a machine, a harmless excursion into inner space. I wrote it up like a piece of poetry. Sent it off to the DoD.
“The next thing I know they are here with their money truck. How could I know that ‘simulation’ is suddenly a magic word at the Pentagon? They don’t want to fund one simulation, but two. We get to build a computer simulation of particles wending their happy way past the nucleus, but while we’re at it, we also have to build…”
“…the ‘crystal ball’ simulator.” Loren knew part of this already from the flight with Homer.
“Right. A crystal ball to predict the balance of power at each stage of disarmament, to make sure we don’t get blind-sided in the process. General Buxtehude’s aide comes here with a wonderful little lecture. Tells us that all computer simulations are the same. We can probably build their Disarmament Simulator, and then just tweak it a little and ask it very nicely to simulate electron motion on Saturdays. My best offer, I tell him, is a fifty-fifty split. Half the time we get to think about particle physics on the government payroll, and the other half we think about the balance of powers.”
Sonia and Ed were sitting in on Loren’s orientation session. “We have a very elegant term for that other half of the work,” Sonia told Loren, “a term for working on the disarmament simulator. We call it ‘turning tricks.’” She took Loren’s sudden smile for a sign that he knew what ‘turning tricks’ meant.
Ed Barodin picked up the history: “So we built two simulators. Actually we built a whole bunch, but we ended up with two: Simula-6 to model particle movement, and Simula-7 to model the balance of powers. Homer designed them and Sonia and I wrote the programs.”
Homer’s eyes were sparkling. “With the Simula-6 program, we can investigate any imaginable hypothesis about what is happening at the particle level. We think up speculations and Simula-6 tells us if they might explain observed reality. Beautiful speculations! Imagine, I say, that the electron is decaying into a muon, and the muon in the presence of light is transformed right back into an electron. So Edward puts that speculation into Simula-6. And Simula-6 comes back and says, if that were happening, electron motion would not just be peculiar but weird. Only we can observe that real electron behavior is peculiar, and not weird. And so we reject that hypothesis and think up another one.
“If we ever think up the right hypothesis, then the simulator will tell us Aha. It will give us the You Folks are on the Money message. The speculation you just fed in is the very one that explains Peculiar Motion. The simulated diffraction pattern it prints out will be the same as the one we see in real life. And then we will know. The mystery of Peculiar Motion will be solved and with it, a big chunk of the mystery of quantum reality.” Homer was warming even more to his subject. “This could be big,” he said. “Even bigger than big. If we do it, if we solve the riddle of Peculiar Motion, then we are top bananas. Think of that. The top bananas of all bananas. The top! We stand the world on its ear. Princeton will be green with envy. Lincoln Labs, green too. Berkeley…But you look confused, Loren.”
“Bananas?”
“Sure. And prizes. And fame and fortune.”
“Homer is very excited about Peculiar Motion,” Sonia came to Loren’s aid. “If we can substantiate that particles move not just in discrete steps but in overlapping discrete steps, sometimes interacting with their own past instances, as Homer believes…well it’s going to mean abandoning the entire middle-ground theory of particle physics. We could be looking at a whole new science.”
Homer was nodding. “So for this, my young friends, for this we turn some tricks.” A big, sheepish grin.
“Half our time,” Edward went on, “is ‘beautiful speculations,’ as Homer calls them, but then the other half we have to dedicate to the Simula-7 project. That’s when we consider some very un-beautiful speculations that come to us from the client, like what would happen if both Iranian oil ports were mysteriously blown up, or if the C.I.A. arranged a little accident for this or that obnoxious dictator.”
Loren was nodding his head. “Then you use the Simula-7 simulator to analyze the action and predict what the other side would do.”
“Right.”
“Not so terrible, I think, as a way to pay the rent. I mean, it sounds like kind of fun.”
Sonia grimaced. “If you don’t think too much about all the blood dripping out of the computer. While the rest of the world is contemplating a new era of peace, we are obliged here to think about war. That’s what you have to do to test out the power balance for whatever level of arms reduction is proposed: You simulate actual confrontation using those remaining arms, and see who comes out ahead. Simula-7 simulates war. It imagines the unimaginable, and prints out numbers of dead to be expected. Some of the results are measured in ‘mega-deaths,’ a term I never even heard until this project began.” She shuddered.
“But it’s all inside a computer,” Loren countered. “It’s just a simulation, so nobody gets hurt.”
“Mm,” she said. “That’s what you have to keep telling yourself.”
Homer set an equal time rule for the two projects: mornings on Simula-7, afternoons on Peculiar Motion. That schedule lasted only a few weeks until the arrival of the Pentagon liaison officer, Oswald (“Curly”) Burlingame. He set up an office next to theirs on the third floor of Clark Hall and announced they should treat him as part of the team. Homer and his staff began coming in in the evening to avoid him and staying until breakfast. Sonia, who was trying to help Loren learn new English words, explained that Burlingame was an “asshole.”
The study of Peculiar Motion was not the kind of a problem you could chip away at, making a little bit of progress each day. They were coming to suspect there would be no progress at all until, in a sudden breakthrough, the problem would be solved in a minute. If only that minute would arrive. During most of the autumn, they were stalled. They would si
t together in silence for hours, staring at the same few equations. It wasn’t that much fun. They would often turn to the disarmament simulation exercise, just for relief.
Simula-7 was more than a little diverting. The hardware that the Pentagon had made available seemed like an assembly of the most expensive imaginable toys. Ed and Loren spent one night installing an enormous plasma board in the computer room. It was the largest color video display they had ever seen, measuring eight by twelve feet. They set it up on a pair of ping pong tables placed side by side. After a few hours of programming, they had situation maps of the world displayed on the board in real-time. You could zoom in on any area and see troop emplacements, missile sites or population masses.
Miss Corsayer, the computer operator, was staring at the display. “The red triangles I understand. They are the old Soviet silos and a few missile subs. And the blue are ours. But what are these black ones?”
Edward nodded, smiling grimly. “That’s what keeps the game amusing, Kelly m’dear — six ex-Soviet missiles presently unaccounted for. Of course, they may just be lost in a warehouse somewhere, but we don’t think so. We think they may have been passed to, let’s say, ‘other parties.’”
“Oh my.”
“Of course, we don’t know exactly where they are. That’s where Simula-7 comes in. It thinks up awful possibilities and warns us about them. For example…” He entered a few keystrokes at the console. “…Suppose we decide to flex our muscles in the Middle East and the ‘other parties’ don’t like that…” The six black triangles took up new positions around the periphery of the U.S. Edward pointed toward one on the western coast of Mexico. “They weigh about as much as a normal agricultural harvester, so they can be trucked around pretty easily and set up in any deserted place. Or put onto a modest sized fishing vessel.” He indicated a black triangle off the coast of South Carolina. “Now just when we’re busy carrying out our little Middle East adventure…” He typed again and the Mexican triangle moved off of its launch site, leaving a fiery red tracer line behind. It moved slowly over American territory and came down on Atlanta. There was a pop from the loudspeaker and a widening gray blot covered the city.
