A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  By nine thirty, Sonia was clearly running out of things to say. Loren found the head waiter and suggested that they begin to serve the meal. He had a note sent up to the head table to the effect that dinner would be served before, not after Homer’s acceptance. Senator Hopkins and Mr. Taft put their heads together to confer worriedly. At last, Mr. Taft passed the note on to Sonia. She finished up her remarks and stepped down. The waiters began carrying in the hot dishes. Loren was halfway to his place before he thought of Claymore. He turned back toward the door. Just as he arrived there, Claymore and Edward entered. He turned around to make his way with them toward their assigned seats at the front table.

  What happened next was so obvious, in retrospect, that they should have expected it. The audience saw the little gray-haired man in a tuxedo being escorted toward the head table. Claymore did not look much like his brother, but the audience didn’t know either of them. The resemblance to Homer’s book jacket photo was enough. Who else would be dressed in a tux for the awards dinner anyway? The audience began to stand and applaud. Corliss Taft, who had never set eyes on Homer in his life, leapt to the stage. He was clapping noisily, more out of relief than enthusiasm. He stepped to the microphone: “Ladies and Gentlemen, a man who needs absolutely no introduction!”

  Chandler waved, trying to get Taft’s attention. He started toward him. Taft was at the edge of the stage, shaking Claymore’s hand and guiding him up the stairs. Loren reached out to restrain Taft, to tell him, but the man shrugged off his arm. The applause was deafening. Taft led Claymore up to the podium. He shoved an ornate plaque into Claymore’s hand and stood back, joining in the applause. Clay was not sure why everyone was applauding him, but seemed pleased. His face broke into a lovely, child-like smile. He stepped in front of the podium and gave a deep bow. The audience responded by applauding even more loudly.

  As the wave of sound began to subside, Chandler, red faced and trembling slightly, stepped up onto the stage to repair the damage. At just that moment, the Halls of Ivy made their appearance from the wings. At his seat at the second table, Williams crossed his fingers. Just let it not be The Young Maiden from Delhi, he thought. He need not have worried. The singers were far too blotto to have any thought of changing the program. They sang Cornell Victorious, just as he had told them, on the Senator’s instruction. If they swayed a bit during the song, it looked to the audience to be pure musical exuberance. Chandler stepped down from the stage. He seated himself beside Candace, and buried his head in his hands.

  There was more applause at the end. The singers made their exit, leaving Claymore alone at the podium, holding the award. He was smiling still his enchanting smile. There had always been something terribly lovable about Claymore. Now it was the audience that sensed it. They poured out their respect and admiration, but also a huge wave of fondness toward the small elderly man, with his ingenuous smile. Claymore bowed deeply again.

  As the applause died down, Clay stepped up to the mike. He tapped it tentatively. Still smiling, but now somewhat perplexedly, he spoke into it.

  “Well, what shall I say?” he asked. He looked down at Loren at the head table. “What shall I say to them, Loren?”

  Loren shrugged. “Anything you like, Clay. It’s all yours.”

  “Well,” said Claymore, “I shall talk about Chocolate Mousse then.”

  The audience began to applaud again, delightedly. They had so persuaded themselves that the speaker could do no wrong, that he could in fact do no wrong.

  When they were settled, Claymore became serious. “The mousse au chocolat,” he began, “dates from the 17th century. In the year 1644, a Danish chef had arrived at the Court of Versailles and begun to cook for Louis the 14th, the Sun King. The great sensation of his cuisine was a kind of sherbet, called a granite. Louis just loved it. His favorite was the chocolate granite. But the problem was, how to make a sherbet during the summer months when there was no ice. The chef told Louis the problem, and Louis said he had better solve it or he would be spending the summer in the Bastille.” A wave of laughter rippled through the room. “So the chef began to experiment with a concoction of beaten egg whites and chocolate…”

  Loren looked around. The audience seemed engrossed in what they were hearing. They appeared to have no doubt that the speaker would end up by making it clear what chocolate mousse had to do with 21st century physics or with the Academy of Arts and Sciences or with the award or with something. Only at the head table were there signs of concern. Loren couldn’t take it. He left his seat to go back to the doorway to wait for Homer. From that position, he could see the audience, still held in rapt attention. Just in front of him, a man leaned toward his wife and said in a loud whisper, “In case you’ve missed it, egg white is Luminous Matter and chocolate is Dark Matter.” She shushed him, annoyedly. “Of course I didn’t miss it,” she whispered back. “I’m not stupid.” All around the room, people were beginning to nod in happy understanding.

  At the end, there was another thunderous round of applause. Claymore said he would take questions. A man stood near the front of the room and asked the following: “I’m a little confused by the relative proportions of chocolate to egg white. Are they the same as the proportions of earth to frost?”

  “Is that your question?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “I’m a little confused by that.”

  Claymore thought a moment. “Your confusion is natural,” he said. By that he meant not that the confusion was understandable; the man was just dumb.

  “Have you ever been at all confused by that?”

  “Never.”

  The audience applauded again. Lesser minds might be confused, but not their guest of honor.

  There was another questioner on his feet. “Could you make any sort of a connection between the mousse and the whole matter of peculiar motion?” he asked.

  “Motion?”

  “Yes, movement. When it’s peculiar.”

  Claymore frowned. “From binding, you mean?”

  “I guess so. What does that say about the mousse?”

  “Well, perhaps it’s too stiff. You could lighten it up. Or you could mix prunes in, I suppose. If it bothers you.”

  The questioner stared at Clay without comprehension. There was a rustle of people turning in their seats. Loren was coming down the aisle toward the front of the room with Homer and Albert just behind him. Homer went directly up to stairs and mounted the dais. The audience stared at the old man in rumpled suit, missing one shoe, as he made his way toward the podium. His left sock was in tatters, there was blood visible on the foot.

  “Hi Homer.”

  “Evening, Clay. Are you about done?”

  “Maybe I’ll finish with a summary.”

  “OK.”

  “It’s a compound one, a tri-partite summary.”

  “Fine.”

  Clay turned back to the audience. “Chocolate mousse is easy to make, but delicious, but fattening. Thank you very much.”

  He stepped down to a smattering of now rather nervous applause. Homer approached the microphone. “Ladies and Gentlemen. I am Homer Layton. Thank you for this honor. I understand there will be an open bar after this dinner. Good Evening.”

  Homer walked back to his place at the head table. He was starved. He tucked a napkin into his collar and attacked the meal. The room was silent. The waiters began clearing plates and serving the chocolate mousse.

  15

  THE MAN WHO INTERVENED

  Homer had sent them all to bed. They had been up the night before, he said, and needed to be fresh for whatever was to happen. But for Loren and Edward at least, sleep was impossible. They sat by the window of Edward’s room, looking out over the cityscape. Ed had turned the light off, then turned it back on and back off again, wondering over that simple action, repeated so many times through the years. But would it be possible tomorrow? He crossed in the darkness to the empty chair across from Loren.

&nbs
p; “I feel I know what’s going to happen,” he said. “Kelly said the same thing. It seems to be in the cards.”

  Loren nodded unhappily.

  “The off-shore Cubans are going to do exactly what Simula-7 has predicted. They’re totally predictable. They are going to fire on St. Louis, just as their note said they would. They won’t reconsider. They will assume that the U.S. will evacuate the city. They will also convince themselves that we won’t escalate. It would be stupid of us to do so because the destruction of an empty city by a single missile is just a slap on the wrist after what we’ve done to Cuba. Jesus. I still can’t believe that we did that.”

  Loren nodded again. “Dumb,” he said.

  “They’ll convince themselves that we won’t retaliate, but they’ll be wrong. We know better. Imagine what happens when they launch their single missile on St. Louis. Maybe the modified Revelation13 takes it out, maybe not. It might be capable of intercepting a single missile. Let’s assume it does. What do we do then?”

  Loren considered. “The logical thing would be to do nothing further. The world might be convinced that our Shield is in place and fully functional. That would be a powerful position for us.”

  “But we’re not using logic. We’re zealots.”

  “Right. So we go crazy. We’ve been attacked, challenged. We have to strike back. It’s a matter of offended male honor.”

  “So we launch. We clean up Iran and North Korea and Pakistan and whatever else. That’s what happens if the Shield holds. If it doesn’t, then we’re sitting with the smoldering ruins of St. Louis. Lots of fatalities, because we haven’t evacuated. What do we do then?”

  “We have to hit back. We pin it on somebody and launch.”

  “Either way, our side launches.”

  “Either way.”

  They stared out over the twinkling lights. After a time, Edward picked up: “In Greek tragedy, there is a moment of transition, just at or after the climax. Prior to that moment, events have been controlled by men, and after, men are controlled by events. I feel that we passed that moment this morning. The rest is all the grisly end of the Greek tragedy, playing itself out. The players are just spectators.”

  “Except us,” said Loren. “We are different. We can intervene. We have an option, to turn on the Effector.”

  “Only we really don’t have an option, do we? We have to turn on the Effector. The numbers dictate it, a lot more lives are lost by even the most limited nuclear exchange. Even if we could know there’d be no further escalation, we have to intervene. So we are controlled by events, just like everyone else. We have no options. The second part of what I feel is bound to happen tonight is that we turn on the Effector. The world grinds to a stop. People are still alive, for the moment—we’ve saved all those lives. But now nothing works. Every motor is dead, the electric power system closes down, aircraft fall out of the sky, the missiles that have been fired clatter harmlessly down to the earth and don’t explode. Now the real nightmare begins.”

  “Maybe we can turn it off afterwards. Eventually. After the crisis is past.”

  “Never. There will always be more weapons, waiting for their chance.”

  “We can turn it on and off.”

  “Loren. Think what you’re saying. If we begin playing games turning the Persistent Effector on and off, how long does it take the establishment to guess that it’s us?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Rupert Paule goes to his man Armitage, a world class physicist. And he says, ‘What the hell is happening? What is this strange force that keeps killing our missiles and our motors and our power generators?’ So Armitage runs a few tests while the Effect is on. What does he learn?”

  Loren thought it over. “The potential energy in any combustible substance would suddenly appear to be reduced when the Effect was on, and back to normal when the Effect was off. It would provide a clue to the whole theory of t- prime. What took us years to understand…”

  “…would take Armitage only how long? Weeks?”

  “A few days,” Loren admitted.

  “Probably. And then Paule would ask, ‘Who is doing this terrible thing to us, Dr. Armitage?’ And Lamar would have to think about that for a whole second before coming up with the answer: Homer Layton and his team. Homer’s article in Science about Peculiar Motion is a dead giveaway.”

  “So they are suddenly all over us. They take our Effector away and turn it off.”

  “They turn it off except sometimes.”

  Loren saw then what Edward was driving at. “Oh.”

  “Right. They can turn it on when they detect any strategic action aimed at them, and then turn it off when they are aiming at anyone else. It is the ultimate Shield.”

  “That might not be so bad.”

  “It would be terrible. Because they’ll realize that other countries have got physicists too. They can figure out t-prime with the hint we’ve given them. So given a few weeks they could make their own Effector. But that wouldn’t suit the zealots at all. They would realize that their advantage would be neutralized in a few weeks. So what do they do?”

  “They have to act to consolidate their advantage. Or at least they might…”

  “Exactly. They might. We have to assume they will.”

  It took a while to absorb. The decision to turn on the Effector was the decision to leave it on forever. “Maybe the Effector won’t work,” Loren said.

  “That’s our most optimistic hope.” Edward was smiling bitterly. “Then we get cooked along with half the rest of the world or poisoned from fallout or whatever. We’re dead, which we were going to be eventually anyway. But at least we’re not haunted forever after that any of it was our fault.”

  Oswald Burlingame was awake that night. His new assignment was technical liaison to the revived Shield project, now taking form at Johns Hopkins University. The project was located in what had been a field house for the University’s intra-mural sports program. The setting was reminiscent of the football stadium that had been home to the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. Burlingame was particularly conscious of the similarity, having recently seen a film about the Manhattan Project. He showed his pass to the armed guard and signed himself in. It was one minute before midnight.

  At twelve on the dot, he arrived for his meeting with Dr. Armitage. The professor was waiting for him. Two members of his staff were also in attendance. Burlingame smiled warmly and shook hands with each of the three. The warmth of his greeting, of his entire demeanor, in fact, was something new for Burlingame. He had given substantial thought to the unfortunate relationship that had made it so difficult for him to be a productive part of the Cornell effort. That was not going to happen again. He was going to be a booster on this project. The participants were going to know that he was on the team. And they were going to be positively eager to let him hear the good news about their progress. That eagerness had been distinctly missing at Cornell. With great humility, Burlingame was now prepared to accept the blame for that. He had been too much the adversary. No wonder none of the Cornell group had ever been willing to give him any good news. Well, that wasn’t going to happen this time around.

  Sometimes it is the way you ask a question that makes it possible for the other party to give you the best answer. Burlingame led off with “Well, I trust everything is going along well?”

  “Oh, very well. Very well.” Armitage looked glum.

  “Lots of progress?”

  “Uh huh. Oh yes.”

  “I’ll bet we’ve made some substantial steps.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, it’s going along fine then, isn’t it?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Burlingame wrote “substantial progress” and “going along fine” in his journal. What he really wanted to ask was Is the fucking thing done yet? But that was not the kind of question that the New Burlingame would be likely to ask; that would just be begging for rejection.

  “Let me ask you this, Dr. Armitage, of the pr
ogress that you’ve been making what might you be able to show me this evening? Not to press, you understand. Only it might be nice to know what is strictly speaking working, you see.”

  “Yes. Well, we can focus a one-second beam on a location. We type in the coordinates and the software selects the closest Hard Body and aims it and gives the instruction to fire. It is precise and stable.”

  “Well. That’s excellent. Just excellent. Of course, that is not entirely what I meant by ‘progress’ since we’ve been able to do that for some time. But it really is excellent. You gentlemen are to be complimented.”

  No one looked too pleased. After a moment, Armitage said, “Stability is the progress, I guess. There were some bugs in the software that would sometimes cause it not to fire at all or to fire at some location other than what we specified. Now those bugs have been fixed.”

  Burlingame made an effort to stay pleasant. He didn’t have a great appreciation for progress that meant the removal of problems he had not ever known existed. “Well that is fine. Now, in addition to that progress, I’ll bet you’ve been making progress in other realms, or am I overly optimistic about that?” The other realms, they all knew, referred to the collection and interpretation of the sensor data, the system’s vision of incoming missiles.

  “We have been able to demonstrate some rudimentary vision. Yes.”

  “Well, that is splendid news. Just splendid. The system can spot targets.”

  “Not quite. First of all, it can only see a single object. There are a few hundred sensors deployed, but so far, we can only use them in tandem. That means when all of them are focused on the same object, we could say that SHIELA can ‘see’ that object.”