The Silicon Dagger

by Jack Williamson

  Continue? How?

  I recalled Alden’s comment on the weekly Freeman and its editor, “one sane man.” Next morning I rode my bike downtown and found FREEMAN in time-dimmed letters on the age-stained brick of an old two-story between a parking lot and the vacant front of what had been a furniture store, a block off the courthouse square.

  The front office was almost a museum, with wooden roll-top desks standing along the walls and ancient manual typewriters collecting dust. A chime had rung when I opened the door. The man who stood up to greet me had aged with the building.

  “Good day, sir.”

  A thin little man with a neat little tuft of iron-gray chin whiskers blinked at me through bright-rimmed glasses. In shirt sleeves, he wore wide green suspenders and a battered black hat on a lean old head. Spry enough, he came to offer a blue-veined hand.

  “I’m Cass Pepperlake. Glad to see you, sir.”

  “Clay Barstow.”

  He waited to see what I wanted.

  “I’m a graduate student out at McAdam,” I told him. “I took communication courses at Georgetown University and worked on the student infonet desk. I’m looking for a part-time job.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Barstow.” He nodded at a chair. “Let’s hear your problems.”

  I sat down, a little uneasy. I had problems enough, but few I was free to talk about. I told him I was a history major, planning to write a thesis on the county. He spent half a minute looking me over before he asked what brought me to McAdam County.

  “That book, really.” I had seen a red-jacketed copy of Alden’s Terror in America on the corner of his desk. “You’ve read it?” “Twice.” His gaze sharpened. “What’s your interest here?” “The history in that book.” I couldn’t tell him much of the truth. “History happening today, right here in the county.”

  “Disturbing history.” Frowning soberly, he picked it up and riffled through the pages. “I met Alden Kirk. Got him to sign the book.” His lips pursed ruefully. “I suppose he’d dug too deep into something ugly.”

  “Something that killed him?”

  “Maybe.” Noncommittally, he shrugged. “Maybe not. He was looking at violence coming to a boil all over America. He certainly found it simmering here, but I’m afraid the investigation has come to nothing.”

  “That’s what I want for my thesis,” I said. “The culture of violence. Causes and effects, if I can pick them out. A newspaper job should let me meet local people, listen to their feelings, pick up background. If you have any sort of opening—”

  “I wish I did.” Shaking his head, he seemed to see my disappointment. “We’re a small paper. Little weeklies like the Freeman have become an endangered species, if you understand?”

  I looked around the room and said I understood.

  “People today watch the tube; scan the infonet if they read any print at all. Kids don’t learn to read, not really.” He stopped to study me again. “There’s one possibility, if you’re interested. We do take on a few interns from the college.”

  “I’m certainly interested.”

  “There’s an unfortunate drawback. We can’t pay in actual dollars. All you get is experience and credit hours.”

  “No matter. I’d be grateful for the opportunity.”

  And I wanted to know who killed my brother. He was frowning thoughtfully through the steel-rimmed lenses.

  “Okay.” He finally nodded. “We’ll give you a trial, if your professor approves.”

  He offered his hand when I thanked him, and got up again to show me around the office.

  “The Freeman has a proud past, Mr. Barstow. It dates from 1855, another time of danger to the Union. The founder was Cassius Pepperlake, a Congregationalist minister who preached against slavery. The cellar under the back room is said to have been a station on the Underground Railroad. Morgan’s raiders wrecked the press and set fire to the building in 1862. Cassius fought for the Union. He died at Perryville.

  “His son Caleb revived the paper after the war. Tried to patch up wounds and push for something better. Exposed graft in Grant’s administration and right here at home. We Pepperlakes have kept the paper alive, fighting for what we thought was good, though I guess our greatest days are gone.”

  He paused to sigh.

  “I was teaching out at the college when my father died. Journalism and philosophy. hen nobody wanted to buy the paper. I retired to keep it alive. Times are hard for us—and getting harder— but I think the Freeman is needed now as much as it was in Abolition days."

  In the back room, he showed me a rusting Linotype machine, a massive press gone to rust and dust, an antique desk under a lithographed pin-up girl on a calendar many years out of date. The Masons had met in the empty hall upstairs, he said, before they built new quarters.

  “Victims." He shook his head as if in pity for the ancient equipment. “Victims of the new technologies."

  Trying to size him up. I waited for more.

  “It’s what we used to call progress." His shoulders twitched to a small wry shrug. “All the dawning wonders of the electronic revolution and the information age. Not so wonderful for the Freeman. We’ve lost half our circulation. That press hasn’t run since my father died. Now we make the paper up on the computer and pay the Messenger to print it. That’s the McAdam Messenger. Now owned by a big media chain. Their national ads and most of their editorial content come down from a satellite."

  I followed him back toward the front room.

  “America’s trapped in a sort of battlefield—if you can excuse a few words from the column Tm composing. A battlefield at night, where lost and leaderless men are firing at the flashes of one another’s guns, never knowing who or what the actual enemy is. As I see the danger—”

  He checked himself, blinking critically at me through the steel-rimmed glasses.

  “Do you think I’m some kind of nut?"

  “No sir. Not at all.”

  I wanted the job. I had my orders from the bureau, and a more urgent mission of my own. And he was making sense. Thinking of Alden. I asked what enemy he saw.

  “Information technology." Nodding at the computer on his desk, he paused for words and went on in a tone of sober emphasis. “The African slavers three hundred years ago had no concern about the seed of conflict they were sowing. Our information engineers today are just as blind to consequences, but they’re enslaving us just as surely.

  “Splitting us into classes. The elite classes that can master and control the technology. The underclass that can’t. Brains, you might say, at war with brawn. In the hands of the masters, information technology becomes what I like to call the silicon dagger. A weapon of stealth. Its masters slip up behind us to strike out of the dark.”

  A stooped old man in suspenders and shirt sleeves, shuffling across the creaky floor. His voice was slow and raspy, but the drama in the quiet words made me peer at him in astonishment.

  “I keep alert for trouble, Mr. Barstow. That’s the business of the Freeman. I lived through the Cold War. The balance of terror was terrible enough, but we thought we knew who the enemy was. We did defend ourselves, but times have changed. Kirk’s book alarmed me. His murder frightens me now, because of what he had revealed: enemies here among us, a more insidious threat than the Soviet empire ever was, armed with this silicon dagger.

  “All the new technologies of storing information, transmitting it, using it for a weapon, they’re killing the world where I grew up. Killing the values I love. Killing individual freedom. Killing privacy.”

  I thought of Elizabeth McAdam.

  “How do computers enslave us?” He paused for an instant, but not for any answer I might offer. “They know everything about us. They squirrel away endless bits of fact from tax rolls and credit agencies, police records and subscription lists and mail orders, from charitable donations, even the cash register in the supermarket. All those bits—each harmless in itself—are shared, combined, analyzed, forged into their blades against the helples
s underclass.

  “The computer masters—I call them the infomasters—they control the media: newsprint and radio, TV and the infonet, books and lecture circuits. They strike the rest of us in a thousand ways you never notice, the sound bites on the news, the appeals to kids on cereal boxes, the subliminal overtones in infomercials. You’ve probably never stopped to notice how they rule the way you vote, what you buy, what you eat, what you believe. They’ve created an invisible empire.”

  Perhaps. I shook my head.

  “The infomasters may think they rule us all, but they’ve enslaved themselves just as surely. The computer and its electronic kin are melding us into a single amorphous mental mass. They’re erasing the whole culture that used to shape our lives. So subtly that most of us never know we’re being had.

  “Or what do you think?”

  With a shrug at the intensity of his own emotion, he sat back in his chair, poured coffee in plastic cups, and looked inquiringly at me. I accepted a cup and waited till he went on. “Alden Kirk listened to me. He made notes.”

  “On this silicon dagger?” I tried to veil my interest. “Did it kill him?”

  “A figure of speech.” He shrugged dismissively. “He asked what it had to do with our problems here. I tried to tell him. We’re a poor county in a poor state, with a long history of stubborn individuals inclined to violent action. Most of our former leader class moved away long ago, to bigger cities, wider avenues of power. We’re the underclass left behind: confused and bitter people blaming one another for problems we seldom understand.

  “Kirk said he was working on another book, about how we’re trapped. I’m trying to do the same thing right here in my own small way, with a column I call ‘Cassandra Says.’ You know what happened to Cassandra. I’m more cautious than Kirk was. The Freeman, after all, is a pretty feeble reed. I don’t want to get my own letter bomb.”

  “Nor do I.” This looked like an opening. “Do you know what other people Kirk talked to while he was down here?”

  “I know who he was asking about.” He pushed up his glasses

  to squint at me, shaking his head. “A gallery of local rogues, and a few better men. The Feds believe the bomb was mailed from here. I’ve wondered, naturally, who could have mailed it.”

  “Do you have suspects in mind?”

  “Frankly, I’d be afraid to guess.”

  I tried another angle.

  “If I get this job—”

  “The internship? It’s yours if we get on.”

  “I think we will,” I said. “Though I have to think of my own skin. Could you give me any pointers on people I ought to avoid?” “Maybe.” He squinted again, weighing me. “If you’ll keep my comments to yourself?”

  I nodded.

  “Let’s begin with the courthouse ring. Kentucky has a hundred and twenty counties. Each has always been a little kingdom, with its own little king and his cronies. Sheriff Bull Burleigh is the reigning king of McAdam County—or at least he tries to play the role. The man who made him king is Saul Hunn, the acting county attorney—the city and county governments were merged when they both went bankrupt. They run the county, or think they do. They can be nasty about it, yet they’re puppets themselves, running things for Gottler—Rocky Gottler, who owns the bank and half the county.

  “They all belong to Senator Finn’s statewide machine, if you want to look one step higher in our master class. And they’re all at odds with the McAdams, the founders of the town and kings of the county for the first hundred years. Old Colin McAdam is a dethroned patriarch. Recently he retired as a history prof at the college. He was something of a firebrand when he was younger, hoping to restore the McAdams to their old position in the county, but he’s harmless now.

  “Stuart, his older son, is another story. Bitter about nearly everything. About his own hard luck. About the misfortunes of the family and the loss of all he’d hoped to inherit. He was a lawyer, at war with Hunn and Burleigh over his clients in the marijuana trade. He’s recently back from a year in prison and sick of the law that put him there. Don’t cross him.

  “There’s a younger son and a daughter. Rob Roy is in computer software with a little firm he calls CyberSoft. It could elevate him into the master class if he can keep it alive, but the federal courts are trying to put him out of business.”

  As innocently as I could, I asked about the daughter.

  “Elizabeth,” he said. “A college teacher but better looking than you might expect.” He grinned at me. “You ought to meet her.”

  “I did. She’s my new professor. I’d like to know her better, but she doesn’t want me digging into McAdam history.”

  “She wouldn’t.” His grin was gone. “We’ve never liked nosy outsiders.”

  Trying to push her violet-eyed image out of my mind, I asked if there was anybody else I ought to know. He squinted, reflecting.

  “There’s Kit Moorhawk. A local kid. He rode for his father as a jockey before he had a bad fall and quit the track to get his law degree. He’s had his share of ups and downs. With a college friend, he got patents on a process for clean-burning coal. They set up Coal Combustion Corporation and flew high for a time. Kit married his high school sweetheart, funded the tech school out at the college, served in the state legislature. Defeated when he ran for governor as a Libertarian.

  “High times till his Coal Combustion Corporation lost the patent suits and went bankrupt. Kit’s hard up now, in tax trouble with the IRS. Hunn and Burleigh spread rumors that killed him in politics and broke up his marriage. The ex-wife’s gone to Hollywood. But he’s still a friend. Kirk wanted to meet him, but he was out of town, appealing a case for Rob Roy’s CyberSoft.

  “ ‘Father’ Joel Garron is a very different customer, a firebreathing infonet evangelist. He calls his church the Temple of the Sword, and now he’s spurring his followers to draw the sword of God against the abortionists. He has them sniping at our local clinic. Bullets through the windows. A Molotov cocktail tossed at the doctor’s car. There are suspects enough, but Burleigh and Hunn have made no arrests.”

  He sat scowling unhappily till I asked about others.

  “There’s a woman Kirk inquired about. A local girl who once worked here on the Freeman. Stuart McAdam picked her up in a Louisville night club and brought her back home with a promise to marry her. They lived together till he beat her up. She’s at the TV station now.”

  He was draining his coffee when his phone rang. Listening, he clucked sympathetically and finally grinned.

  “A rural correspondent,” he said when he hung up. “Sheriff Burleigh jugged her husband on a marijuana charge. Stuart McAdam has him out on bond, but she’s going to be late with her copy.”

  I asked for more about the internship.

  “It will run though the semester. The contract calls for twenty hours a week. You’ll be working twice that, for six hours of graduate credit. I wish we could pay in coin of the realm, but we’re literally a nonprofit enterprise.”

  He stood up to see me out.

  “You’ll be meeting the rest of the staff. Tom Hobbs, our ad man, works on commission. Cal Hazard sells real estate and works half days for us, handling circulation—which keeps dwindling in spite of everything we do. We go to press on Thursday afternoons. Be here Wednesday morning at eight.”

  I shook his hand and thanked him for the opportunity.

  Elizabeth McAdam had an advisee in her office when I got there next morning. The trim tan sweater had been replaced by a snug green jacket. Waiting at the door, I stood admiring her for her brisk professional concern for the student’s problem and the warmth of her sympathetic chuckle when they had it solved. Desire thrilled through me, but faded fast as she dismissed the student and turned more coldly to me.

  “Mr. Barstow?”

  She listened while I told her about the internship and laid the contract on her desk.

  “Not yet, Mr. Barstow.” Lips tight, she shook her head at it. “Not till I sign.”
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br />   “It’s all set up,” I insisted. “Mr. Pepperlake made the offer. It’s approved by Professor Atwood in Communication Science. All I need is your signature.”

  “Sit down, Mr. Barstow.” Sternly frowning, she nodded at the chair. “We need to talk.”

  I sat down and waited uneasily.

  “Yesterday I thought I recognized you.” Fixed on me, her eyes were glacial. “Your close resemblance to Alden Kirk struck me after you were gone—I’d seen him on TV when that book came out. I emailed an inquiry to a colleague at Georgetown. He confirms that Kirk had a half-brother named Clayton Barstow. That’s you?”

  “True,” I had to say. “May I explain?”

  “I don’t see how you can.” Her straight bright hair was short and pushed back, bound with a band the color of gold. Her fair face was flushed, the violet eyes defiant. Anger became her. “You’ve come sneaking here on false pretenses. To spy on my own family. Can you invent an excuse for that?”

  “Please,” I begged her. “You know my brother’s dead. That postmark seems to show the bomb was mailed from here. The authorities haven’t been able to do much about it. I want to find out anything I can.”

  “I regret the tragedy.” She nodded soberly. “I believe he left a family?”

  “A wife and two kids.”

  “I’m sorry.” She seemed to mean it, yet her face set hard again. “He should have known he was intruding where he wasn’t wanted. And you—” Her voice flattened. “Do you really expect to break a case the FBI can’t?”

  “I have to try. And there’s something bigger.”

  That caught at least a flash of interest.

  “It isn’t just McAdam County.” I borrowed again from Alden’s notes. “My brother was troubled by what he called a national breakdown. A loss of social order. A return to tribal mores. Suspicion of government, business, science. Hatred of every other country and every other faith and race. A national sickness that he thought could kill us unless we found a cure.”