A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  Homer looked pained. “I hate to tell you. The cream of the crop, the best and the brightest. There is a special task force on this, people from the White House and from NSA working with the Pentagon.”

  “But it’s too stupid,” said Loren. “It’s suicide. You don’t need a multi-billion dollar computer to tell you how the Cubans are going to respond to this. The administration knows there’s at least one Cuban-controlled group with strategic weapons, the Gloria Verde. They’ll use them.”

  “Yes. I think so too.”

  “I can’t believe we’d ever go through with this.”

  “Of course, that’s what we’re all busy trying not to believe,” Homer agreed. “We’re working on not believing that. This is hard work. But we’re trying. Only, I for one am not succeeding too well.”

  Edward thought for a long moment and then offered a plausible explanation: “They think the Shield is functional, Homer. That’s the only way this could make sense. They have bought the pig in the poke. They’ve convinced themselves that the Shield is up there, ready to use. And now they’re willing to provoke the Gloria Verde in order to try it out.”

  “That’s one of Albert’s theories.” Homer was still staring dully at the display. “He’s got three theories. The second is that even if they know the Shield isn’t functional, they don’t care. There are people in the Pentagon who believe that this is a desirable moment to flex muscles, even nuclear muscles. Because a few years from now we are likely to be disarmed and such action will be impossible. So this is the time to settle old scores. Albert thinks they may ‘discover’ a plot in the making: a secret attack on us being planned by all our old adversaries. They round up all the usual suspects: Iran, North Korea, maybe Russia and China. They go public with the news just before launching the Cuban initiative. Then when the Gloria Verde missile comes, they have the excuse they need to erase some major trouble spots from the map.”

  “I hate the first two theories,” Edward said. “Tell us the third.”

  “The third theory is that there is a small group of religious fanatics that is more or less in control of the plan. They believe they are acting as the hand of God. They are helping the Millennium to come about, the Rapture.”

  Edward rolled his eyes.

  Kelly sat down at the keyboard that Homer had vacated. “I’m going to run this to see what response Simula-7 projects. If I may, Homer?”

  “Oh, sure.” Homer shrugged. “I already saw it.”

  Kelly started the simulator and directed it to accept Homer’s input. There were a few seconds of hesitation. Then the screen cleared to project a map of Cuba. A small marker, twenty miles or so to the east of Guantanamo, was blinking on and off.

  “That’s the factory,” Homer commented. “It’s been there for years. It was a kind of symbolic threat by the Cubans, to make nerve gas just up-wind from our base. Symbolic, but…”

  The display zoomed in slowly on the blinking site, until it showed no more than an area a hundred miles on either side. Just off the coast to the south of the factory, there suddenly appeared the symbol of a submarine with an American flag. Moving dotted lines originating from the sub portrayed two small landing forces, going ashore and making their way toward the factory. There was a delay of a few seconds, representing hours in simulated time. Then the factory blew up.

  A brown cloud lifted from the factory site and began to spread and drift toward the west. “Gas,” Homer said, though they all had known exactly what it was. The display zoomed out to follow the action. The cloud was expanding and moving left along the southern coast of the island, swirling inland. “If they choose the right weather conditions, they get onshore breezes to draw the gas into the interior and then back down the opposite coast.” Already the eastern third of the island was covered.

  As the brown cloud moved along, the color of the land mass faded from green to gray under its passage. By the time it passed out to sea, nearly half the island had turned gray. There was a fatality counter rolling in a separate display. When it finally stopped incrementing, the count of deaths was something over four million. The whole thing had taken less than a minute to display. The simulation clock indicated that it had portrayed the events of a thirteen hour period.

  There was a pause and then a new map flashed onto the screen, this one showing the United States. It zoomed in slowly on the city of St. Louis. The simulation clock in the corner of the screen accelerated to cover 36 hours. The display showed the population of the city flowing out, slowly at first and then in a rush. At hour 36, a single black marker appeared on the left side of the screen and moved rapidly toward the city. When the missile reached its target, the city flashed in a yellow burst. The damages were displayed in dollar values. The number of additional dead was a few hundred thousand. There was the sound of the laser printers coming on to print out a record of the run.

  “Lucky it’s not real,” said Homer.

  Ed was staring at the totals, still displayed on the board. “In a way, the response is remarkably moderate,” he said. “Just one target and few enough fatalities because the Gloria Verde gives notice. It has a contained effect, just in the center of this one city. I wonder what they’ve got against St. Louis.”

  “Middle of the country,” said Homer. “If they’d picked on L.A. or Atlanta, it might imply that their reach was limited to the coasts. This proves they can hit anywhere.”

  “I guess so. I’m still struck by how subdued the retaliation is. It’s barely a slap on the wrist compared to what we’ve just done to them. As if they were trying to clear the score in some sense without enormous escalation.”

  “So big deal.” Loren said. “They haven’t pulled out all the stops. So we do it. Our response to having St. Louis nuked is not going to be moderate. We launch on Havana, and, as Homer says, probably on several other old antagonists. And then Gloria Verde launches the other five that they’ve got and then we…” He tried to imagine what fury the administration would unleash with six American cities in ruin.

  They turned back as a group to stare at the screen. At last Sonia said softly, “Please make it go away, Kelly.” She gestured toward the map and the tables of dead and damages. Kelly typed a command to clear the display. Sonia looked up again at the now empty screen. Its emptiness was somehow not very comforting. She closed her eyes.

  Edward was tapping sharply on the edge of the console with a pencil. “Brains back to the ON position, people. This is not the time to go limp. We’ve got a lot of hard thinking to do.”

  He looked around at them one by one. Loren could sense what was coming next. He felt a moment of panic. But Edward forged on, “We know now why Homer brought us in here to look at the Cuban scenario at just this moment. And now we’re all in it together.” He gestured toward the display. “If the blunderings of these idiots lead us to the brink of war…then what do we do? We have an option that never existed before: We can intervene. We have to decide under what circumstances we would. We’re going to have to talk about the option of turning on the Persistent Effector.” A collective intaking of breath.

  All eyes slowly turned to Homer. They had looked up to him for so long as their leader, their chief. When he gave direction, they followed. He could end this dreadful matter here and now with a simple statement that it would never come to that, that turning on the Effector was unthinkable, now and forever, no matter what. Each hoped that he would now say just that. But he didn’t. What he said instead was, “If we once turn it on, we can never turn it off again, you know. Never. Because the weapons would still be there…would still be ready to go the instant we turned it off.”

  Kelly made a soft moaning sound.

  Edward took charge again: “Before we even think about making our decision, there are some details to clear up. The U.S. Guantanamo base, Homer; the cloud passed right over it. Do they really mean to sacrifice the base and all its personnel?”

  “That’s what Albert says. The base is our sacrificial pawn. That’s what giv
es the cover story its only credibility. We can say it was an accident at the Cuban’s own nerve gas facility. And we are the victims as much as Cuba herself. The Cubans will see right through that, of course, as Loren says. The timing, the perfect timing to catch the winds, and the devastating effect on the island…it would be too much to hope they would swallow that was coincidence. But the cover story might be of some use at home.”

  “Not so fast, Homer. Packaging could be everything here. Maybe the story could be presented so cleverly that they can accept it without losing face. All it would have to do is introduce real doubt that the explosion might have been an accident, might have been the Cuban’s own fault. Then the Gloria Verde couldn’t react, or at least they could refrain from reacting. They might. We have to assume that Washington has thought up some way to present the story to preserve doubt. Then their plan might not be so awful.”

  “But four million people dead, Edward! What could be more awful than that?”

  “I don’t mean it’s not awful ethics, Kelly, only that it might not be awful strategy. It might not lead irrevocably to retaliation. That’s important for us to understand, because our own alternative isn’t very pretty either.”

  She nodded unhappily. They turned their attention back to Edward, who seemed to be taking charge.

  “The Cuban proxy action against St. Louis seems familiar. Didn’t we run something like this earlier? In the winter?”

  “Right,” said Loren. “In February. I was thinking that too, that the result was nearly the same. Simula-7 wasn’t so precise then about which city, it just specified some Midwestern city.”

  “But what was our input to produce that result? I can’t believe we even speculated on anything as dumb as this.”

  “Our hypothesis was that a Cuban exile group might stage an attack on the island to make it look like US action. They would hope to force a Cuban response that the US couldn’t ignore.”

  “We’ve got to go back and look at that entire series. Some of them ended up as standoffs, as I remember. They might suggest what kind of context this plan could be wrapped up in to prevent escalation. Didn’t the Pentagon receive copies of the February series, by the way?”

  Homer confirmed, “They did. Probably fed them directly into the shredder with the rest.”

  “Even so, we’ve got to put out a quiet inquiry through Tomkis’s contacts in the Pentagon to find out who saw the February results and what effect they had. That might help us to better understand their thinking…if ‘thinking’ is not too optimistic a word for it.

  “Homer, you’re going to have to get in to the President as soon as he gets back from Vienna. If you can get in, you can tell him flatly that there is no Shield, and what’s going to happen if he goes ahead with this Cuban initiative. That means you’ll need to stop in Washington on the return from Ft. Lauderdale. Tomkis is going to have to pull whatever strings he can to force the meeting for you. That gives us only tonight to generate the material Homer’s going to need. We’ve got to think up the best possible ways they might package the story, and then run simulations showing how well or how badly such packaging will work. We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  Homer looked up at Edward again. “Tell us what to do, Edward. Make the assignments.”

  By 3 AM they had run a dozen variations of the plan, all producing the same result. They racked their brains for ways the administration might present the attack to the international community, anything that would have a chance of passing muster. But Simula-7 wasn’t buying any of them; Simula-7 wasn’t projecting that the Cubans would buy any of them. The underlying facts were too drastic to be explained away. With four million deaths, no amount of public relations could avert response.

  Over their midnight meal, Edward started the discussion again: “I’m going to propose a change of gears for the rest of the night. Let’s break up into two teams, one to continue with variations of the scenario. Homer, I think that you and Loren might work on that together with Albert.” Tomkis was awake in his Georgetown home and had been participating by phone in their strategy sessions.

  “OK, boss,” said Homer.

  “The rest of us,” Edward looked at Sonia and Kelly, “are going to open Pandora’s box, or at least think about opening it.”

  The two young women were staring down at their plates.

  “Sonia…” He waited for her to look up. “I want you to work up a simulation to project the consequences of a world-wide Layton Effect. Transportation and industry will grind to a stop, a permanent stop, but can people still survive? How many? What will the initial fatality count be? What population can be maintained? Kelly can help by hunting down the information you’re going to need about population densities, food consumption, grains in storage, etc. Most of it will be available on the Net, Kelly, or in the reference books we’ve got right here. It doesn’t have to be perfectly accurate. Meanwhile I’ll be calculating the likely die-back from ten nuclear detonations. If this ever gets started, there are unlikely to be fewer than that, and if there are many more it’s hardly worth doing the math. That will give us a basis to answer the question, if and when we have to: Do more people survive on an earth that has just absorbed ten major nuclear detonations or on one where the Layton Effect has inhibited the explosions but turned off most of the technology of the industrial age?

  The little kitchen around them was so normal, so full of normal objects and sounds, it seemed to give the lie to the terrible logic of the last few hours. This was reality, and the rest no more than morbid speculation. The open jar of mayonnaise on the table was real, the dishes in the sink were real. The other, the morbid speculation, perhaps was not. It was a comfort to be here, among the reminders of their usual, unchangeable world. Then the refrigerator at the far end of the room suddenly turned off its compressor, leaving a surprising quiet. Loren suppressed a shudder.

  Homer cleared his throat at last to break the silence. He spoke slowly, looking at each of them in turn: “Up until this time,” he said. “we have applied ourselves together to the solving of puzzles and riddles. That was our work. We would stare off at the ceiling and wonder what was happening to electrons or why a computer program seemed not to be running properly. There was never a human problem except sometimes just a question of why we were getting along well or not so well. But never a problem of ethics or morality. And now there is. I feel like what has gone before was easy, and what is to come is hard. Because physics is easy, and ethics is hard. But I also feel that the four of you, whose qualities I have come to respect so much, are just the four I would want to have with me for this hard work.” He reached for Edward’s hand on one side and for Kelly’s on the other. Sonia and Loren solemnly completed the ring. Homer went on, “It is possible that we may have to make some decisions today, or some other day, about the Effector. If that happens, we will decide together. There will be five votes. Please accept this, the votes will have to be unanimous for any action. We will act together, or not at all.”

  No one had anything to add. They finished their sandwiches, cleaned up, and headed back to their assigned tasks.

  Kelly was reading numbers from her browser to Sonia, who keyed them in at her own keyboard. Kelly’s face was ashen. Sonia seemed furious as she typed. Loren went over to her.

  “I am a scientist, Loren, not a goddamned undertaker.” She kept on typing. “There is nothing I have ever done to prepare me for this. Look at this. Look at it!”

  The cumulative total of fatalities was displayed on her screen. It increased as she added each new fact. Loren looked away from the number.

  “I am up to my elbows in death. The longer we think about it, the more deaths we can foresee. People on ships, think of that…. Kelly estimates that there are nearly 50,000 people at sea at any given time and what happens to them? They drift around powerless and die of thirst. Remote communities that depend on shipments of food and water, people on kidney dialysis, diabetics who need drugs that can no longer be made or delive
red, people who…”

  Edward had come up in back of Loren to listen. He stepped around to put his hands on Sonia’s shoulders from behind. “We have to be mechanical about this, Sonia,” he said. “We need to approach this as an exercise in pure mathematics. We’re not going to start the Effector on a nice normal Tuesday and mess up the whole world. We would only start it if there were already missiles in the air. The act of turning on the Effector would be to save the millions of lives, tens of millions, that had been consciously sacrificed by the dunderheads who control the missiles. Do the math, Sonia. Figure out the numbers, carefully and thoughtfully, so we know how to act to save those lives.”

  Homer was asleep with his head down on the console. Loren’s thoughts were drifting back to the little town of Alba de Tormes where he’d grown up near Salamanca, back to the days before his entry at the university. That had been a time when questions of life and death and the ethic governing personal action had been on his mind almost constantly. While others their age were devoting their free time to sports and play, the Martine children, as each one came of age, were conscripted by their uncle Tómas into the town’s ambulance service. The ambulance corps had been Tómas’s passion.

  By the age of 12, Loren knew how to perform CPR and to administer oxygen. There were posters in his room showing the treatment of various wounds, first aid for burns, and fitting of the traction splint. At the age of 14, he made his first run. His sister Sierpa was at the wheel (Loren was still too young to drive), shouting encouragement over her shoulder, while Loren did heart compressions and forced respirations on an elderly woman who had arrested. On the return trip they fielded a call for an auto accident with multiple victims.