A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  Kelly watched after him as he headed up the dock. “He’s a sweetheart.”

  “And a very high-powered mathematician. But it’s too bad, in a way. When I saw there was another doctor among the Academy people, I had hopes he might be a medical doctor. I’m wondering how many people on this island could remove an appendix. Imagine the famous Peter Chan stringing crossbows, though, that’s a switch.”

  “Yes. I was thinking he might become a commodore, instead.”

  “Commodore?”

  “Yes. For the expedition to Guantanamo.”

  “I don’t see why we need a commodore. Mostly what we need are strong backs to dismantle equipment and load it onto the boats.”

  “I think you need an effective and authoritative commodore, someone to appeal to the Chinese sailors that are going to be waiting when our boats sail into the base.”

  “What makes you think…?”

  “Nearly five percent of US population is Chinese. So nearly five percent of the base will have been Chinese. As you know, ethnic Chinese survived the nerve gas for some reason no one can guess. So there will be approximately thirty Chinese sailors to greet our expedition when it arrives.”

  “Thirty. My god, I never thought about it.”

  “Don’t you see, Loren, they could be an enormous asset. They’re young and healthy, and knowledgeable about all the things we know next to nothing about: combat, logistics, sailing and navigating and provisioning vessels.”

  “But they’re the enemy. They’re on the other side.”

  “Nobody can be your enemy without wanting to be. These sailors are going to be hopping mad when they understand what happened in May. Their own government made the callous decision to sacrifice them and all of their mates. They happen to be alive due to a quirk in their genes. If they can be made to understand that, then they will be on our side.”

  “We can use them. As usual, Kelly, you’re right on target. We’ll ask Dr. Chan to serve as the expedition’s commodore. Being Chinese can only give him an edge. As you say, he’s a sweetheart. He’ll charm them before the explanations have even begun. Could you talk to him, please?” Kelly nodded. “Tell him exactly what to say. I’ll square it with the rest of the group so they know Peter’s in charge. And why.”

  “Good. Now, I want you to look at this.” She pulled a folded garment from her canvas bag. It was a light blue cotton jump suit with a silver stripe of silk down each side. “We’ve found hundreds of these in the attic of the sports center. They come in all sizes. Aren’t they beautiful? I think they were intended for the Olympic teams that trained here during the summer. Feel the material.”

  Loren reached out to handle the soft cotton. “You’re thinking of uniforms.”

  “I am. A snappily dressed party will make a much better impression on the Guantanamo sailors. It’s not just of this expedition that I’m thinking. If and when we have to fight, whenever that happens, we’ll need to feel like a fighting force. And maybe uniforms will help.”

  “Sure Kelly. Good idea.” Loren looked down at his list of the crews of the three boats. “I’ll have them all stop by the sports center to be fitted.” Kelly was always right. He was beginning to feel a bit redundant.

  “I’ll be there. We’ve got the suits all laid out by size.”

  “Well, I don’t see why we have to use up all this effort rebuilding our radios.” Proctor Pinkham’s voice was a whine. “They work just fine for keeping the boats in touch with each other. Why can’t we just leave them alone?” The core of the defense group was seated in a circle in the grassy square of the faculty village.

  “Because,” Edward explained patiently, “when we jam their radios, we will jam our own as well.”

  “I don’t see why we need to jam their radios. Maybe the best thing would be for us to talk to them as they approach, to reason with them. And for that we need radios.”

  “If they come all this way, Ted, it won’t be to talk.”

  “If they come. If they come.”

  “They’re coming. And when they come, we have to jam them. That means we need our own radios to operate on light. We’re going to modulate a voice signal onto a light beam. There will be transceiver units on the top of each mast. That way, we can stay in touch even though the jammers are on.”

  “I don’t understand any of this. What the hell does it mean to modulize a voice onto a light beam? How can I decide if I don’t even understand?”

  “Modulate.”

  “And I don’t even want to understand it. Don’t tell me.”

  “You don’t have to understand it. You don’t have to understand how television works in order to watch one.”

  “There is no television!” It was a wail. “You can’t even watch television anymore. There were things I was following, and now we’ll never know how they turned out.”

  D.D. Pease weighed in. “The jamming is Loren’s idea, and I think it’s a good one. Jamming their radios will keep the different vessels from acting in concert. So it will give us an advantage. And it’s going to be easy, since there is a Cuban government jamming station nearby in the hills. All we’ll have to do is turn it on when the battle begins. Re-rigging our own radios is pretty trivial. Dr. Barodin has already got one pair running on light. The real problem is jamming the StratCom frequencies. Fortunately we have one transceiver to take apart. Mr. Tomkis gave us his unit. His ID has been locked out of the network, but from the circuits used to access the network, we think we can figure out a way to jam their StratCom transmission too.”

  “Why do we even care about StratCom? You say they will only have one unit with them. So it’s only good to communicate back to the States. That’s a thousand miles away. So who cares?”

  “Jamming StratCom is part of the plan,” Pease responded. “It’s because of the psychological effect. If we beat them once fair and square, and let them communicate back to their superiors exactly what happened, then they will just come back again, better prepared, and knowing exactly how we beat them before. It will go on and on. But if all they see is that their attack party has simply disappeared from the face of the earth without a word, without a trace, that’s different. That’s scary. That is what Loren’s plan is trying to effect.”

  Proctor Pinkham was exasperated. All this talk about fighting was getting on his nerves. His business was keeping college kids in line, not fighting wars. The closest thing to war in his experience was a panty raid. He had had to deal with many panty raids during his time at Cornell. Near the end, he had worked up a pretty good strategy to deal with them, always one step ahead of the students. Now, as he considered how to deal with an attacking naval force, he kept returning to his old panty raid strategy. A key element of the strategy had always been the implicit use of force, the guns carried by the campus police. “Why can’t we invent some kind of weapon to scare them away? What hell is the use of having all these scientists? If we had guns and the other side didn’t, why, that would change everything. Don’t you see? We could just wave our guns at them, and they would have to put their tails between their legs and go home.”

  “We’re trying to come up with something,” said Edward. “Maybe there will be a breakthrough and maybe not. One thing we’re thinking about is a giant reflector that would focus sunlight at a distance. It could be used to burn up the sails of the attacking vessels.”

  “Nice if the sun is shining,” said Mr. Pease. “We couldn’t mount it on a sailboat because it would be huge. But we could put one up on Little Inagua Island, since we know they’ll be coming by there.”

  “And how do we know that?” moaned the Proctor. “I don’t know that. Why does everyone assume they’ll come down from the north instead of up along the coast?” Why wouldn’t they just sail across from the keys? They might come searching up the coast. It will take them a year to get here. That’s what I think is going to happen. In a year we can invent some kind of a gun.”

  Loren shook his head. “They won’t do that just because it w
ould take a year. And they don’t want to take a year. In a year they will have all had apoplexy. So they will follow a plan that is much, much quicker.” The others were nodding in agreement, all except the Proctor.

  “They’ll be coming down by sail, probably in Naval Academy boats,” Loren went on. “They’ll stay well off shore, down the Bahama Channel. That will take them past Little Inagua where they’ll turn south to enter the Windward Passage. Then they’ll take up positions along the south and east of the island. Because their plan is gas again; they are going to do the same thing they did in May. They are going to open up canisters of nerve gas to blanket the island. They’re not coming to find us at all. They’re coming to kill us.”

  Ted Pinkham was twisting his hands, unhappily. “I can’t believe it. They wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t just kill people that they had never even looked in the face. It wouldn’t be fair.” He appealed to the rest of the group. “Would it?”

  “We’ve all been putting in an hour each afternoon carting bodies out of Baracoa,” said Mr. Pease after a moment. “All those bodies…nobody looked them in the face.”

  “But how do we know that’s what they’re going to do? How could we possibly know?"

  “We don’t know it absolutely,” Loren conceded. “But it’s the most likely thing. This is like a game of chess, Ted. We’re thinking about the moves our opponent can make. And this is the one that makes the most sense. It’s a good plan, from their point of view. It has already worked once. The details have all been worked out. It doesn’t take anything they haven’t got handy. Albert says that there is a stock of the nerve gas at the Aberdeen Arsenal in Maryland. They could bring it overland to Annapolis in a matter of days. From there it’s less than a week’s sail to get to the release positions.

  “But it wouldn’t even help them to kill all of us. We would be dead, but the Effectors would still be on. The Effectors are hidden.”

  “But they don’t know that, you see.”

  “So we have to tell them. We have to use the radios to tell them that the gas won’t help them at all.”

  “They would just do something else.”

  “But not that. We don’t want them to do that. Not the gas.”

  “But that’s what war is all about, Ted. The other side is trying to do the things you don’t want them to do.”

  “Still,” said Edward, “Ted has got a point. If they did get by us through the Passage, we could stop the jammers and explain their predicament to them. It might make them think twice about releasing the gas.”

  “They wouldn’t just go away, of course,” said Van Hooten.

  “No.”

  “The real problem,” Loren said, “is how to stop them. We know how to detect their positions and how to mess up their communication. We have some advantages there. And we’ll have the advantage of being upwind. But at some point we have to engage them. And if it’s just our medieval weapons against their medieval weapons, we are likely to lose. Because they will be better at fighting than any of us. With nothing but arrows and swords and such thing, the professional warrior will always win. We need some kind of advantage.”

  Around the circle of his colleagues was a wealth of high tech think power: Barodin, Cardenas and his two assistants and Loren himself. If it was going to be possible to invent a weapon for the Layton Effect world, and do it within the short time they would have, then this group might be up to it. It was a comforting thought, but not very. Two of the finest minds on the island, Homer and Sonia, had dropped out. Sonia refused to have anything to do with the defense effort; she had taken up residence as a dorm counselor and was teaching science to the older children during the days. And Homer was just too tired and too discouraged to take part. The five scientists seated here, together with the small task force Edward had working now on the problem would have to come up with some sort of weapon. It was that or fight for their lives with machetes and bows and arrows on the bloody decks of heaving boats. Loren winced at the thought.

  Kelly and Curtis found him just before dinner time, working in the little command center Proctor Pinkham had set up near the docks.

  “Swim time,” she said.

  “I can’t, Kelly. Too much to do.”

  “All work and no swimming makes Loren a dull boy. I stopped by your cottage and found your bathing suit.” She waved it at him. “You can change in the bushes.” Kelly took him firmly by the hand. “Come on, Loren, you can use a break.”

  Loren allowed himself to be led off toward the beach. He was thinking that he had not bathed in the sea even once since his return from Punta Caleta. It would feel good.

  After their swim, Loren and Kelly sat on the slate outcropping at the side of the beach, keeping one eye on Curtis as he played in the shallows.

  Kelly engaged him on the only subject he was likely to take an interest in: “As you describe, ‘the game of chess,’ you’re thinking about, Loren, I can’t help thinking that you’re doing a mental simulation of the other side’s logic.”

  “Yes. That’s what it is.”

  “You’re acting like Simula-7.”

  “Call me Simula-8. A little slower than the computerized version.”

  “Yes.” She was examining some tiny shells affixed to the rock. “Slower, less powerful simulation.” She scratched at one of the shells to see if it would move. “I don’t suppose more simulation power would be of use.”

  “A computerized simulation, you mean? Oh, I don’t know. Simula-7 would be overkill for this situation. And so much has changed, anyway. It would take ages to enter all the new parameters.”

  “Undoubtedly. Even if SHIELA were still working…” She trailed off, still examining the shells.

  “Probably would be, I guess. She runs on photo-voltaics, which would still function properly.” Loren’s mind was elsewhere. The Proctor’s one good contribution had been to station three sailboats with radar off to the north and east for early detection of any invading fleet. Loren needed to work out a schedule to relieve the crews. They could stay out for only a few more days before the batteries needed recharging. So the next set of relief boats would go out with enough extra batteries to last another week. But maybe a week was too long for the crews. How long could they stay vigilant?

  Kelley was chattering on: “And SHIELA’s beyond the earth’s magnetic field anyway. So outside of the Effect. Imagine her up there computing away on nothing at the rate of 850 trillion cycles a second.”

  “Mm.” His mind went back to the three radar vessels. How long could a crew stay vigilant? Nothing could be more boring than staring at a radar screen all day and all night. Maybe Pease could rig some sort of detector to ring a bell if something appeared on the screen.

  “All that compute power.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Seems a shame to waste it.”

  “Mmm.” If it was beyond Pease, Edward could probably help. He was the electronics genius. If only he weren’t busy on so many other things.

  “I always thought before that computers were just academic. You used them to compute pi to a billion places and dumb things like that.”

  “Yes. Dumb things.”

  “But then they turn out to be able to do real things, things that matter.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “That was kind of a revelation to me.” She tossed one of the periwinkle shells out into water. “A real…revelation.”

  Loren was silent. But he wasn’t thinking about shipboard radar anymore. He was thinking about what Homer had called, only a few months ago, a “dinky little demonstration program,” Revelation-13.

  “My god, Kelly, how could I not have thought of it before? We can use Revelation. Revelation-13. We can use it to defend ourselves.”

  “We can?” Her face was a blank.

  “Of course we can.” His head was full of the details. “It controls the HB satellites. We can rig up the Mac laptop computer to communicate with SHIELA and run Revelation from on-board ship. We’ll blast them o
ut of the water, the invading ships. We can triangulate their positions by putting observers on different boats, widely separated. Then we just figure each target’s position and have SHIELA direct a one-second laser burst down on them. It will be like lightning.” He was on his feet, nearly dancing with excitement.

  “Oh Loren. That’s wonderful. I feel better already.”

  “I must tell Edward. We’ve got tons of things to do.” He dashed off up the beach, leaving his clothes in a pile behind him. Kelly folded the clothes neatly and put them into her canvas bag to be returned later to Loren’s cottage.

  Loren had slept over in the Proctor’s beach command center. He was awakened by one of Dan McCree’s teen-aged followers, a young woman who was leading an electric circuit into the little hut. The whole school village and part of the town were now running on hydro-electric power. He stared at her, trying to remember her name. She had “McCree’s Volunteers” painted across the back of her blue jumpsuit. It was ‘Chiqui,’ he thought, one of the two Hispanic youngsters who had helped to translate the school’s first-aid manuals for everyone else. She nodded at him, then went back to her work. It was still very early in the morning; most people weren’t up yet.

  There was a sudden crackling from the radio speaker. “Hello beach command. This is Yunque Mountain.” Loren leapt for the microphone.

  “Yes. Loren here.”

  “Loren, we’ve got a blip on the radar. Something coming up along the coast from the west, right on the beach. We think it’s at about twenty miles. Coming pretty fast.”

  “How many vessels.”

  “How the hell do I know? All I see is a blip.”

  There was no one handy except the girl. Loren reached out for her shoulder. “Get a swim suit on, quick. I want you to take a windsurfer down the coast.”

  “Sure, Loren. I’ve got my suit on under my blues.” She began to peel off the cotton jumpsuit.

  Loren dumped out the contents of his backpack. He found a pair of binoculars and threw them in. There was a portable light-modulated radio with directional antenna on the desk which he also put into the pack. He looked in a drawer where there were two granola bars in foil packages and an apple. Those went in too.