A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  The night sky had a faint pinkish tint. It looked like northern lights, like the aurora borealis, but it was in the south.

  “It’s a different color,” Claymore said. “Pink.”

  “Yes, it is,” Homer agreed.

  Loren was holding his breath. “I have one o’clock. Is there anything?”

  All eyes turned toward Albert. He had the receiver pushed up against his ear. He shook his head. Then his eyes were unfocused. “They’re saying…wait…they’re saying the Shield has held. The Shield has held and St. Louis is not destroyed. There is a station at the impact site, and no explosion.” He looked around at them wonderingly. “They think it’s because of the Shield.”

  “Oh,” said Homer. “They’ll soon realize what has happened.” He sat down on the arm of Maria’s chair. She was still looking away.

  “They’re announcing the names of the people responsible for saving St. Louis,” Albert said. “They’re saying it was Armitage and his staff…and Curly Burlingame. Curly Burlingame?”

  “A true American hero,” said Edward.

  “Now they’re announcing some power failures in the U.S.,” Albert continued. “A few power failures. Nothing to worry about, they say. But they suspect minor sabotage.”

  Homer smiled grimly. “Sabotage, yes, minor, no.”

  “Power failures in Europe too. They’re not quite sure what to make of it.”

  Homer waved distractedly at him. “Turn your machine off, Albert. What’s happening isn’t there. It’s right here in this room.”

  Albert put the StratCom receiver down on the cocktail table. He looked out the window again. There was no artificial light visible at all. There were only stars and the faint pink glow, like the light of an hour or so before dawn, but visible in all directions, slightly more noticeable down low near the horizon. “Wow,” he said. “What have we done?”

  Homer sat in the darkness. “What have we done? What have I done? Sentenced some eight million people to their deaths over the next few months. Eight million.” He spoke softly. He was silent for a long moment, and then said, even more softly, “Hitler was a piker.”

  Loren was holding his breath. Kelly leaned down in front of Homer. She extended both arms slowly to his sides, and then, incredibly, tickled him. Homer was horribly ticklish. He jerked up in his seat. “You silly old goat,” she said. “You have just saved St. Louis. You have saved sixty million lives throughout the world. That’s what we figured. You have saved the atmosphere from poisoning. You may have saved life on earth.”

  “Sure, Homer,” Loren chimed in. “You are the greatest hero of all time.”

  “But all the dying that’s ahead…” he said.

  “All that is somebody else’s fault.” Edward had his hand around Homer’s shoulder. “That’s all Rupert Paule’s fault. Rupert Paule and General Simpson and all of them. It’s their fault, Homer.”

  Homer shook his head yes, but he wasn’t convinced.

  Loren disconnected the battery from the Effector. As he had known it would, the tiny pinkish light remained in the center of the card, fueled now by the Earth’s magnetic field. The little device on the card was necessary to keep re-injecting the disturbance that maintained the Effect. As long as it existed and stayed aligned, the Effect would continue. He detached the braking mechanism so that it couldn’t be set by mistake. Then he closed and latched the box.

  Edward was passing out flashlights from a box of supplies they had carried up earlier. He gave each person a list as well with detailed instructions on it for what to do next.

  “Lots of work to do, folks. And only the next few hours to do it in. Let’s get going.”

  16

  HOMER’S PLAN REVEALED

  Homer’s plan was simple, which was lucky because it had to be explained over and again during the next few hours. He reasoned that the powers in Washington would need a day or two to re-establish what they could of their lines of communication. Several of the satellite based networks would still be working and useful. Albert said that there were some four thousand StratCom units like his own. Most of the armed forces and civil authorities could stay in touch via these or with similar facilities connected to the other satellites. They could communicate, though their abilities to move or take any action would be severely curtailed.

  Once the authorities got in touch with Armitage (Homer figured that might take a day) it would be just a matter of time before they understood who the real enemy was. Then the short grace period would be over. There were regular Army troops stationed not 20 miles away from the Marina hotel. A message from the White House would set them in motion. Soldiers might have to walk all the way to Ft. Lauderdale, but they would. Sitting tight on the top floor of their hotel would result in their capture within 72 hours. The Effector would be seized and smashed. So they had to move.

  They needed to play Keep Away, not just for a while, but forever. The most essential thing, Homer said, was to survive the turmoil of the next few months. Their own lives were the only guarantors that the Effector would be kept safe. Staying alive would be a matter of avoiding population centers. There were bound to be food riots and wide-spread anarchy. So their survival, he explained, required them to get away to an uninhabited place. The place he had chosen was the eastern part of Cuba.

  “By getting away to Cuba, we buy ourselves some time. And isolation. The east of Cuba is the only place on earth with short-term provisions for millions of people and almost no one to contend for them.

  “But we can’t go alone. You do see that, don’t you? We need a critical mass of people to join us, enough to form a small community. Enough to share the burden of keeping the Effector safe. So it’s not just the few of us in this room. There have to be enough of us to put up a defense, if need be, when the need arises. Because it will come. They will come after us, the forces of reaction.” His voice was steady enough, but his eyes were just dead.

  “How many do we need? I am thinking of two hundred. This is Homer Layton, designer of entire cultures speaking. Two hundred people to make an independent society. A smaller group and we can be overwhelmed. More and we risk not being able to keep them together.”

  The two hundred people Homer had selected to accompany them were participants of the two scholarly meetings taking place at the Marina Hotel. He had made up lists of those present now in the hotel. Some of them were part of the Academy of Arts and Sciences membership and its guests, and others were with the American Society of Physics working group. In each case, Homer had tried to select only those whom he knew to be unattached or present with family. They could not afford to approach anyone who had significant ties left behind. Most of the next hour was spent going through the hotel corridors to the room numbers on Homer’s list, waking up the inhabitants and explaining very briefly what had happened.

  Oddly enough, people seemed ready to accept what they were being told. There had been rumors in the evening news about something going on in Cuba, about suspicious rumblings in the Senate, and, of course, the missile plot scare. There had also been the very strange failure of the main telephone and telecommunications links to Europe. Something was up, something dangerous. People shuffled out of their rooms, many in robes and slippers, and made their way down the fire stairs to the Main Ballroom. Kelly checked them off against her master list as they arrived.

  Homer was on the stage. The others had set up battery powered lights, enough to light up the room dimly and to illuminate Homer as he spoke. He had a portable loudhailer in his hand. All the equipment in evidence, and a good deal more, was what his assistants had spent most of the day acquiring. The rest of it was in the two rented trucks, parked just outside.

  Kelly waved at Homer to begin. There were still some people missing, but the majority were in place. The others had probably gone back to sleep, thinking it was all a bad joke.

  “Hullo. Hullo. Can you hear me at all?” Homer looked small and old, alone on the stage. He still had on the same rumpled suit. His foot
had been too swollen to fit into a shoe, so he now had on a pair of sheepskin slippers. His hair was mussed. “Hullo?”

  Loren shouted OK from the back.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for getting out of your beds and coming down here. I know it sounds crazy, what’s happening. It is crazy. And it’s going to get crazier, much crazier, before it’s done. But thank you for coming down to hear to me.”

  He peered out into the hall. Enough lights were focused on him and so few illuminating the audience that he couldn’t see a thing. The room was silent. He listened for a long moment. “Is there anyone there?” he asked. There were a few voices from the hall. “Oh, good.” He turned to the wing where Kelly was coming up the stair.

  “There are more than 190 of your list here,” she whispered. “We got the hotel manager and her family as you suggested. And some of the young people who work in the hotel. Nearly two hundred, all together.”

  “Oh. Good.” Kelly stayed beside him as he turned back to the audience. “Well. Listen, this is what’s happened. We invented something a while ago that would stop explosions. It’s too complicated to say what it is. When we invented it, we wondered if it would ever be good for anything. And the only thing we could think of was that it might be nice to turn it on if there were a war. Last night, a war began.”

  Homer put his hand his hand up to shield his eyes and peered out again toward the audience. Behind him Kelly whispered that he was doing fine. Edward and Loren and Sonia were at the stairway now, making their way toward him to lend support. They arranged themselves around him on the stage. Edward smiled encouragingly, and Homer picked up the loudhailer once more.

  “We are the ones who invented this thing, this explosion inhibitor. We five. Well, actually I invented it.” He looked sideways at Loren.

  Loren was surprised for a moment, and then he understood. Homer was taking the blame onto his own shoulders for what he anticipated might not be viewed as a great contribution to humanity. Loren shrugged.

  “I invented it. And last night, I turned it on. These people are my assistants. They have given me advice and counsel. But I am responsible for what has happened. I am Homer Layton, by the way.”

  Still a silence in the hall. Homer took a deep breath and went on. He explained about the binary nerve gas released by the attack on the Cuban factory, about the retaliation against St. Louis and about the U.S. launch just before 1 A.M. With the missiles in the air, a few dozen of them, he explained, he had turned on the Effector. The result was that the missiles had not exploded. All this to an almost total silence from the audience.

  “That is the good news,” Homer continued. “That is unfortunately the end of the good news. All the rest is bad. The bad news is that the explosion inhibitor is not at all selective. It doesn’t just inhibit missile propulsion and explosion. Maybe if we had had a few years of further development time we could have refined it. Or maybe not. But what we had when it came time to act was one device that could turn off explosions of all kinds, everywhere. So we used it. I used it. And now that it’s on, I can’t turn it off. I don’t dare. Because there are infinitely many more missiles out there on all sides. And if I turned the Effector off, they would be launched. I don’t pretend to understand why that is, but it is. So there you are. We suddenly have a world where no explosion can happen. Aside from that it’s just the regular, familiar old world. But without explosions. Without internal combustion engines, without generators, without automobiles or airplanes, a world without much electric power. And, I’m afraid, it’s got to stay that way.”

  Homer stopped. There was no use going on until people had digested what he had already said. He thought back over his own words, wondering how he himself would be reacting to such a message were it delivered to him unexpected in the middle of an interrupted night of sleep. How long had it been since he had any sleep himself? He was starting to feel a little dizzy. Now, at last, there was the beginning murmur of reaction from the audience. There was a shouted exclamation from the back part of the hall. Loren took one of the battery lights and shone it out into the mass of standing people. One man at the rear had his hand up. Homer gestured to him.

  “What is the inhibitor, the Effector, as you call it?” It was one of the physicists, Loren couldn’t remember his name.

  “Doctor Cardenas, is that you?” Homer asked. “Vincent, is that you?”

  “Yes,” the man shouted.

  “A false constant in time,” Homer shouted back. He didn’t use the loudhailer. “It’s Andronescu’s Paradox. You remember Andronescu?”

  Cardenas looked surprised, but at least he appeared to believe what he was hearing. “My god,” he said finally. “Is the effect general? Over the whole world?”

  “Yes. Wherever there is a magnetic field,” Homer shouted. “It is propagated onto the magnetic field. I think.”

  Cardenas was shaking his head. “My god,” he said again.

  There were more hands waving now. Homer picked one at random and pointed toward it. It was the Newsweek reporter who had been sent to report on the award, a young woman with her husband and small child beside her.

  “Yes?” said Homer.

  “No explosions? No motors? No trucks to carry food? No pumps to irrigate? No airplanes to carry us home? What have you done?”

  “No guns, no bombs, no nuclear warheads. In the short term I have made nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. Very impotent and very obsolete. And in the long term, I don’t know what I have done. But I think it’s better that what we’d be looking at now if I hadn’t acted: sixty million dead and clouds of fallout settling on all the rest of us.”

  A man in the front row held up a hand and got Homer’s attention. He was feeling in his jacket pocket for something. “You can understand, Dr. Layton, if we’re made a bit tense by all this, I mean missiles actually being launched.” He looked a bit sheepish. “Would it be OK to smoke?”

  Homer shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

  The man came up with a cigarette and a lighter. He scratched the lighter several times, then looked at it in puzzlement. Homer looked around at his colleagues. They were all grinning. Kelly leaned toward him. “The man who saved St. Louis,” she whispered, “has also ended the world’s most lethal addiction. Not bad for a night’s work.”

  There were a few more questions. But mostly people were too stunned to know how to react. Homer took up the loudhailer again and began his pitch. This was the ticklish part.

  “We almost had a nuclear incident tonight. We did have a nuclear incident, even though nothing went off. That happened because there are madmen in charge. This is not exactly news to you. You have seen other signs of the madness. We did something wrong, sometime in the past. We set it up so that megalomaniacs and zealots gravitate toward power. Not just in our country, but everywhere. There wasn’t a good way to clean house. So it got worse and worse, zealots bringing in more and madder zealots. We were brought to the brink of war because of crazy people who believed they were guided by the hand of God. They believed that war was inevitable, that we had a temporary advantage, that now would be better than later. Some of them believed we could win such a war because of secret weapons they thought would save the day. And others thought they were just carrying out instructions from their God.

  “Now here’s what you have got to understand. Those madmen are tearing their hair out this very minute. They are screaming for blood. The person who frustrated their plan is the biggest villain of all history. It’s not going to take long for them to figure out that that villain is me. And when they find out, they will be here in force. They’re coming to capture me and to get the little box, the Effector, that is the only thing holding back Apocalypse. When they get their hands on that box, they will smash it. And then we will get to see the conclusion they had planned for this night.”

  This day and night were full of potential turning points, and here was another. These people could rise up and rebel; they could charge the stage to tear apart t
he man who had set himself in the way of what the nation’s leaders thought must happen. They could act in place of the soldiers, doing exactly what the soldiers would soon be marching this way to do. If I could impose my will on them for just a few hours, Homer thought, then they would be caught up in the momentum of the thing. And then their reason could only come to our support. But just for this one moment, all was in the balance. He looked out into the audience, half expecting them to surge forward in a snarling rage. Instead of that, they did nothing. He raised the loudhailer to his mouth and began again over the same ground. Never be shy about repetition; he had taught himself that in the classroom many years ago. People need to hear things twice or even three times.

  The rest was mechanical. People are docile when they’re stunned enough and tired enough and frightened. They listened to what Homer said. When he was done, Sonia took the loudhailer, and told them what they had to do next. They listened, and then they did it. They climbed back up the stairs to their rooms, dressed in sensible clothes and shoes, packed all that they could carry and stumbled back down the stairs to the ground floor.

  17

  “NOW IS THE SEASON…”

  The power failure was no great inconvenience for the United Services security guard on duty at the marina, a certain Dwight David (D.D.) Pease. He was used to reading during the quiet hours after 2 A.M., but for that purpose he had a battery powered book light in his bag. He usually took his bag of books and his portable light and set up a chair at the end of the pier where a warm night breeze could be expected to keep the bugs away. There he would stay undisturbed most nights. He could usually count on at least four hours. The book for tonight was a profile of some of the leaders of the French Revolution. He had picked it up in the library on his way home from work the morning before. The thick volume had promise: It focused on the characters of Louis-Antoine Saint-Just and Maximilien Robespierre, and the strange chemistry they made together. It was a matter that had always intrigued him. He expected to finish the volume by morning. He would make notes in one or more of the several notebooks he brought with him each night. The power failure wouldn’t make any difference at all.