by Tom DeMarco
She sat down at her place and typed in the request. SHIELA cleared the plasma board to an even dark blue field and then displayed in yellow letters a table showing all the resident programs and databases and how much memory each one used.
“That’s the entire set,” Homer said, “everything that’s loaded into SHIELA right now. Kelly, if you would just remove all of our own items from the display so we can see what’s left.”
Kelly went through and de-selected all the simulation datasets and Loren’s programs and the two simulators. What was left was a table of five lines:
SHIELA OPSYS V 7.1 9.2 GB EJB
CONFIG.MAP 15 MB
I/O BUFFERS 38 MB
SATCOM EXEC V 6.0 12 MB EJB
REVELATION-13 V 1.0 125 KB LMA
“That’s it!” Burlingame was triumphant. He was pointing shakily at the last item on the screen. “Revelation Thirteen. I know the control program name. That’s it. I told you it was there.”
“It’s there,” said Homer, “but not very.”
“It couldn’t be more there, for Chrissakes.”
“What Homer means,” said Loren, “is that it’s very small. It’s not big enough to be the ShieldCom control software. The ShieldCom software is huge, and this Revelation program only takes up 125,000 characters.”
Burlingame looked dubious. “Well, 125,000 characters, that sounds like a lot to me. I think you can fit a really tremendous amount into 125K with modern techniques and all that.”
“The ShieldCom software was projected to be about 150 million lines of code. So it would take up at least 500 million characters of memory, I’d guess. It would have to be about four thousand times bigger than this little program, maybe more.”
“Well, they’re probably storing it on the ground, just like you people do with your data sets. I wouldn’t doubt they do that to keep the software secure, to keep it away from prying eyes of unauthorized people like yourselves. And then they’ll zap it up to SHIELA the minute things start to get ticklish.” He looked pretty pleased with himself for that thought.
Kelly spoke up. “It’s not instantaneous to transmit data up to SHIELA, even over her fastest link. To send up 150 million lines of code would take about…a day.” The others nodded.
“Oh that’s wonderful.” Barodin couldn’t resist, “Those terrorists get uppity with us so we provoke them into launching all their strategic weapons. And then a day later we’re all set to defend ourselves. It will work fine if they only launch via hot air balloon.”
Burlingame’s color was rising, through pink and headed toward red. “Why am I even listening to this? I know that Revelation-13 is the control program, I know it. They have found some way to shrink it down, that’s all. I know it’s Revelation because that is the name that was decided upon at the highest levels. Revelation-13, it comes from the Bible, Revelation, Chapter 13: ‘I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads with ten diadems upon its horns and a blasphemous name upon its heads.’ That’s the attacking missiles, don’t you see?”
“Oswald,” said Homer gently, “Revelation-13 is just a little demo. That’s why it’s so small. It doesn’t even connect to the sensor satellites. You can see that from the link map, it can’t receive a signal that a missile is coming or where it is. All it can do is send a command to one of the HB satellites to aim a one second laser beam down onto a selected coordinate on the earth. That’s all it can do. They use the Revelation program to test the HBs.”
“How do you know so much about Revelation?”
“We tried it out.”
A pause while the color drained from Burlingame’s face. He made an effort to control himself. “I am simply not hearing this. It is not even conceivable. You actually ran Revelation-13?”
“Sure. It had a protection mechanism to keep people from using it without a password. But Loren and Ed figured out a way around it.”
Loren was grinning. “We hacked our way in. It was a very primitive protection, I mean, any freshman CompSci student could have gotten past it. We gained access and ran the demo. We specified the exact GPS coordinates of the middle of Lake Cayuga, and sure enough, it shot down a short burst. We saw it from the roof.”
Burlingame looked ill. “There must be some other explanation,” he said. “There must be another way to control the HBs. I couldn’t be wrong on this.”
Burlingame was closeted in his office with the door shut. Homer nodded toward the exit door. The five got their coats on and headed down the stairs. Outside there was a cold, blowing rain. They kept their heads down all the way to Statler Hall where there was a small cafeteria, now almost deserted. Homer sat down heavily at an empty table. The others were lined up at the service area.
Loren and Kelly and Sonia came back with a tray of steaming cups. Nobody said anything while they waited for Edward. When he arrived it was with five plates of pastry. “End of World approaching,” he said, “All diets cancelled.” Nobody laughed They took the plates mechanically and began to eat.
Loren broke the silence. “Burlingame is an idiot. He’d heard a rumor, that’s all. So he thought there was an effective shield. But nobody else believes that. The Pentagon knows better.”
“Maybe,” said Homer.
“This might not be so bad. Let’s consider the worst case,” said Sonia. “The worst case is that they all believe what Curly believed, that Revelation 13 is the ShieldCom and that it’s up and ready to go, armed with three Hard Bodies. They take some action based on that belief and then Revelation turns out to be nothing more than a demo, as we know…”
“Kaboom,” said Edward.
“OK, the worst case is awful,” Sonia allowed. “But it’s also impossible. Armitage knows what Revelation is, he wrote it. Those were his initials next to the program in the memory listing. And he’s not going to tell anyone that it’s the full ShieldCom. Edward says that the man forgets inconvenient facts sometimes, but he’s not going to invent a fantasy like this. I mean, it would be a total fantasy to say that nearly 150 million lines of missing code didn’t matter.”
“Po 150 million lines.”
“Be serious, Ed. Armitage is not crazy. He’s got to live on this earth too.”
“I don’t know, Sonia. He’s in his own world, sometimes, that’s the problem. But I hope you’re right.”
“And who would believe him if he did say it? Everybody knows that the software project was cancelled when it was at least a billion dollars from done. Who’s going to believe that Lamar and his tiny staff and a few graduate students finished up a billion dollars worth of programming in their spare time? They know it’s just a demo. These people aren’t jerks. You don’t get on the White House staff or get to work with the Joint Chiefs of Staff by being a jerk.” She looked at Homer for confirmation.
“Maybe not jerks. Maybe zealots,” said Homer.
Kelly shivered. She was thinking of the briefing they had received from members of the project oversight group during the summer. “The ones that we met, General Simpson and Mr. Paule from the White House, seemed to be so sure of themselves. It was frightening. You want your nation’s leaders to be confident, but not the way they were. They were, I don’t know, disconnected. Their certainty seemed to be an isolated thing, independent of any facts. I can believe they are zealots.”
Sonia gestured with her fork. “But Kelly, even if there are a few zealots in the Pentagon and in the White House, the facts have got to get through. Armitage can’t be telling the President an outright lie. Even if he shades the truth a bit, the President ends up knowing pretty much what’s in SHIELA and what’s not.”
“Only maybe Doctor Armitage doesn’t get to the President at all,” Kelly said. “Homer almost never gets in. Sometimes he does, but never when it matters. Or he wouldn’t be sitting with us now eating Boston creme pie. He would be sitting down with the President to make sure he understood. Most of what we say goes through Mr. Burlingame who tells General Simpson or General Buxtehude and one o
f them tells Mr. Paule and he’s the one who talks to the President.” She looked around the table in distress. “I have this awful image of a giant game of Gossip. Doctor Armitage says that his demo can shoot a hole in some location, given its coordinates. And his contact passes on the information that the Hard Bodies can shoot at will. And the next guy says the software is up and running. And by the time it gets to the President, the message is that the Shield is in place and impermeable.”
“It seems frightening from our perspective,” Sonia pressed on. “But we don’t know everything. I’m sure the President knows more than we do. If we knew what he knows we might understand.”
They paused for a moment, trying to take some comfort from the idea. Homer broke the silence at last, speaking very softly, “I remember that idea from the 1960s. A familiar idea, an old friend. We were all saying that about President Johnson in 1967 and 68. ‘He probably knows something that we don’t know,’ we would say. ‘If we knew everything that he knows then we would understand why it’s all OK what’s happening in Cambodia and Viet Nam.’ Only it wasn’t OK. And when the truth came out, it was that the President didn’t know things that every other American knew. The Executive Branch was going crazy in those days over information leaks. Plugging leaks was a key element of our national security program. There were articles about it in the press. We all thought it was so the secret information couldn’t leak out of the White House. Only it wasn’t that at all. They were plugging leaks to make sure that information didn’t leak in.”
6
VARIOUS TANGOS
Senator Hopkins stood in his yellow pajamas just inside the wide glass doors of Fiske House. As usual, the newspaper deliverer had left the paper a good two hundred feet away from the porch. He could see it nestled under the rhododendrons along the drive. Newspapers were now delivered by adults from distribution company trucks, rather than by boys on bicycles, but the quality of delivery had not improved a whit. Sometimes the plastic-enclosed paper made it as far as the turnaround circle, but more often not. It never made it to the porch. None of this mattered in theory, of course, since Williams would trot out there at 7:30 and fetch the thing to be placed on the Senator’s breakfast tray. At 7:45, he would tap on the bedroom door, and a few minutes later, the highest ranking official of this major university would be opening up his paper while enjoying breakfast in bed. That was the way things were supposed to work, and that was the way things were going to work as long as Chandler Hopkins was in charge.
The weak link in this carefully designed scheme was the fact that the Senator often woke up at 5:30 or 6:00 A.M. On this particular morning, he was positively itching for a look at the news. Damn, damn, damn. Go back upstairs and dress, or take a chance in his PJs and robe? He opened the door and peered cautiously around the pillar toward the back of the sorority house that was his nearest neighbor. The trees had begun to fill in with new leaves, but there was still a fair view of the front of Fiske House and its driveway from the upper floors of the sorority. Certainly the young ladies of that residence would have better things to do at this early hour than wait by the windows with binoculars. He studied the windows for a moment nonetheless, looking for signs of life. Nothing. Go for it. He was down the stairs in a flash, hopped a mud puddle and skirted another, picked up the paper on the fly and dashed back to the door.
Still huffing, he headed into the library with the paper. No one in the house would be up for an hour at least, so he would have all the privacy he could ask for. He wrapped himself in an afghan, then settled into the red chesterfield chair by the window. He found what he was looking for on the next to last page, among the letters from readers. The editors had placed it under the blurb, “FBI Kept Dossier on 13-Year Old Girl.” The letter was signed by Stacey Hopkins, his daughter. He read it through quickly.
She had been writing to public figures, the letter said said, since the age of 10, giving them her own considered advice on how to run the world. She’d written to agency heads, committee chairs and the like, often critically. After this long career of public advocacy, it occurred to her that one of our nation’s security agencies might have noticed. On a lark, she had filed under the Freedom of Information Act for access to her files. To her surprise, she received a large envelope full of information collected on her by the FBI. It included copies of all of her letters as well as an on-site investigation report, naming her school, her teachers and several of her classmates. She concluded her letter to the editor saying that she’d just turned 13 and didn’t expect to be much real danger to the nation for another few years, so perhaps the FBI would do better to free up her surveillance team for other work.
The Senator read the letter through a second time. Not a bad letter, really. There was a dangling participle in the first paragraph, and a few too many adverbs, but not bad. Most of all, the letter had not revealed a certain guilty secret of his own. He folded the paper on his lap and stared up at the ceiling.
It was a source of continuing enchantment to Chandler that he and Candace had produced a child. He would have had some difficulty explaining this to anyone, but the most astonishing aspect of having Stacey was the fact that she had been the result of lovemaking. Other people’s children — he understood this in a purely intellectual sense — were produced in much the same way. However, Stacey’s conception was so clear in his mind and had been so startlingly enjoyable, that he felt that complete strangers must be aware of those origins just from being in her presence. It was more than a little unsettling.
During the time leading up to their wedding, he had never anticipated a strong sensual component to their union. If Candace had explained to him at any point along the way that theirs was to be a sexless marriage, he would have accepted the fact as normal. He had been, after all, fifteen years her senior, nearly fifty at the time. Candace would have been a catch, even without the physical relationship. She was socially well connected, and so pretty as to take his breath away. When she spoke her words came through a little smile, as though the smile just couldn’t wait for its chance to come out. She had almost lavender eyes and regal posture. He couldn’t believe his luck when she’d said she would marry him. He was fond of Candace, and hoped to spare her the distress that he assumed a woman would feel about sex. He had even meant to mention it to her that she needn’t be concerned about “any of that stuff.” But it had been an uncomfortable topic, so he’d never brought it up. Nor had she. Instead, she’d led him back to the guest cottage on her father’s estate on the day before their marriage and made love to him, the first of many glorious couplings. Who would have thought?
Since he hadn’t anticipated sex, he hadn’t thought about pregnancy either. And then, after one dizzying afternoon during the first summer of their marriage, Candace announced shyly that she thought she could feel conception taking place within her. Nine months later, Stacey was born.
The idea that Chandler loved his wife would have struck most of their acquaintances as absurd. Chandler? They would have thought that his capacity for love was limited to the love of limousines, of pomp and circumstance, and power. But he did love her. The unlikeliness of the sentiment was as clear to him as to anyone else. It didn’t fit, it didn’t belong, but when he looked inside himself, there it was.
The child Stacey was the living symbol of the surprising union of Chandler and Candace. He would creep into his daughter’s room in the evenings to look at her sleeping face. There in one person were his own and his wife’s features combined. He could see Candace in the lips and in the corners of the eyes. And there were ringlets of his own reddish hair around her face and perhaps a little of that same upturned nose that he had been shaving under all these years. How he loved her as she slept.
He loved her fiercely when she was asleep, but when she was awake was another matter. Stacey was the most maddening child. Or rather, she didn’t seem to be a child at all. She seemed more like a very short adult. Almost from the time she could talk, she would engage him on subjects that o
ught to have been out of bounds for children. Nothing ever seemed to be out of bounds to Stacey. So, during their stay in Washington, he could spend an entire day on the Hill without facing a single hard question (people begin to accept that you are the expert when you’re a senator) and then go home to hear from his own ten year old daughter, “Senator Hopkins, why do we use up all our conservation money killing wolves and coyotes and wild horses? Is that conservation?” She was old enough to ask the questions but not really old enough to understand the very complex answers, even if he could figure out what those very complex answers were. She challenged him on foreign policy, on armaments, on civil rights, on just about anything. Ten years old! Of course he was proud of her precocious grasp. There were just days when a little less precociousness would have been welcome.
He rearranged himself now in the red easy chair in order to examine his left foot for signs of fungus between the toes. As the letter admitted, Stacey had a long history of writing advice to anyone in charge of anything. Chandler cringed when he thought of some of her efforts. Her Letter of Ten Non-negotiable Demands to President Kibaki of Kenya had been particularly worrisome. If the press had ever gotten hold of that one and linked it to her father there would have been hell to pay. And the letter telling Netanyahu to be nicer to the Palestinians…he shuddered. Fortunately, most of her letters went off into the void without anyone ever learning about them.
There was a streak of liberalism in Stacey that quite baffled her father. Where other parents of 13-year olds worried incessantly about drugs or teen age pregnancy, Chandler was concerned about a much more imminent threat: His daughter showed every sign of becoming a Democrat.
He might have told her to keep a low profile, to leave the letter-writing to adults. But of course you couldn’t tell Stacey anything. He had strictly forbidden her to file for her dossier and she’d done it anyway. Then he’d forbidden her to write to the Daily Sun and she’d done that too. She wasn’t a disobedient child; she simply didn’t hear instructions that made no sense to her. When she had shown him the draft of her letter to the Sun, he had really put his foot down. That sentence about her father’s voting record had to be removed. He stood over her while she crossed it out. Really, nothing was safe from her inquiry. It was terrifying to think of her poring over the Congressional Record looking for embarrassing facts. And that one of those facts might be published for all to see—the Senator groaned inwardly.
