The Silicon Dagger

by Jack Williamson

  “I was scairt.” His wife shivered.

  “It’s tough on her.” He put his arm around her. She snuggled against him with a hollow-eyed smile. “We got held up for hours at the line. Had to drive all night, but she has a sister in Columbus. I guess I can leave her there till the baby comes. I’ve got to get home to look after the place.

  “Who the heck knows what to believe?” He patted her shoulder and looked back at me. “We heard Stuart McAdam on KRIF, claiming the Rebs stopped Zeider dead, but now Higgins claims Zeider’s just taking his own sweet time to pacify the county. Things looked peaceful as ever when we left, but we had to take a side road around dozens of tanks stalled on the county line, one of them on fire. I never trusted Stuart, not since he got to be a high-priced lawyer for marijuana dealers, but now I just don’t know.”

  His wife had sagged against him. He paused to croon something in her ear before he turned again to me.

  “Our place is off the Lexington road, just ahead of Zeider’s army. We heard warnings for civilians to get out of his way. I thought I could get Mandy Ann to Columbus and get back to look after things, but now—”

  He blinked unhappily at me.

  “This damn rainbow. You heard about the rainbow?”

  I hadn’t heard.

  “We seen it after sundown yesterday. Behind us in the sky when we looked back. God knows what it is. I asked a state cop. He crossed himself and said we’d better drive on.”

  I asked for more about it.

  “Not much like the one God put in the sky after the flood, that’s for sure. The colors are all squeezed together in a narrow bright streak, with a dark line on one side of it. I thought the sky looked brighter under it. It was over McAdam County. God knows what it is or what it means.”

  I filled the gas tank and drove on. Fifty miles farther, I saw people standing in the parking lot outside a convenience store, gazing up into the west. A small boy ran to the side of the car when I stopped.

  “Mister, there it is!” He pointed. “Easy to see if you just shade your eyes and look high enough.”

  I got out of the car. Shading my eyes and looking high, I soon found a faint dark arch across the cloudless blue, a thin bright streak drawn beside it, the rainbow lines nearly too narrow to see.

  “You know Father Garron?” the excited boy demanded. “He calls it Satan’s seal. His sign that the Rebs are damned to die for all the babies they’ve sent to hell.”

  I used the toilet, bought doughnuts and a plastic cup of coffee to go, drove on again. On the mapper’s little monitor, I found Tex Horn now back in his studio. He had makeup over the patches and the hair piece on his head instead of the bandage or the hat, but he looked as if he should have been back in his hospital bed.

  “Hop to the hype with Washintel One!” His trademark grin seemed to hurt. “A time you’ll never forget, and still the mysteries multiply! Zeider’s tanks are still stalled on the Lexington road. The Pentagon still refuses to admit any military setback. Our Ramona Del Rio is still in rebel territory, sealed off from the world with no chance to air her inside tales of the rebellion. And now—”

  He was silent for a moment, catching breath to boom again.

  “Now we have another phenomenon. Phenomenon! A word I never understood, but I guess this thing’s queer enough to fit the bill.”

  The monitor showed scattered buildings in black silhouette against a fading sunset. A streak of darker darkness with a thin bright line at its edge arched across the sky above the rosy glow where the sun had set.

  “What is it? Maybe the secret weapon that enabled the rebels to defy Zeider and his tanks? For answers, Washintel One has gathered a panel of men who know as much as anybody.”

  They sat across the table: a physicist from MIT, a colonel from the Pentagon, the editor of the Louisville KyNet. The physicist, Victor Gueria, was a lively little man with a neat goatee and an impish smile.

  “This shell over McAdam County?” Horn asked him. “What is it?”

  “A shell? Exactly.” He had a slight French accent. “The term I was seeking. It covers the rebels like an inverted bowl.”

  “Bowl of what?”

  “Does anybody know?” He spread his arms. “Not much.”

  “Give us an educated guess.”

  “I’ve no basis for a guess. Here’s the little I can say, based on media reports and sheer speculation. It’s an arc of a perfect circle, cut off where it touches the Earth. It appears to refract transmitted light into a very narrow band of spectral color. It ignites explosives, perhaps through some electronic effect yet to be explained. It can be made opaque to selected radio frequencies, interrupting communication. Beyond that—” He shrugged, his smile ironic. “I think it’s startling enough to refute the notion that science is done.” “Done what?”

  “Done exploring our infinite universe.” He bent forward, happy to have an audience. “You find cynics who claim we’ve already laid out all the big principles of the ordered universe. Left us nothing but chinks to fill in. Right now, I’m rather happy to say that I don’t see any chink wide enough to admit this effect—whatever it is. Future science, I believe, will continue to astonish us with dazzling paradigm shifts—and new chances to dazzle the world with such unexpected and exciting forward leaps into an endless unknown.” “Thank you sir, and good luck to you!” Horn turned to the editor. “You’re the media. What can you add?”

  “Not much.” The editor shrugged. “People are puzzled by this rebel weapon, sometimes terrified. One fanatic has called it the sign of Armageddon and warned the world to pray. Myself, if Dr. Gueria will forgive me, I'm pretty confident that the science already has the answer. I think, in fact, that I know who to ask.”

  They looked at him, waiting.

  “A man named Rob Roy Me Adam. I’ve tried to interview him, but somebody at his company said he was not available. Not to anybody. He’s a native of the county and founder of a failed firm called CyberSoft. He and his colleagues have a habit of asking hard questions and keeping the answers to themselves. One example is a device for communication security he calls a cryptophone, which I believe has resisted federal efforts at reverse engineering. True, sir?”

  He looked inquiringly at the colonel, a beefy man with ribbons on his uniform, who merely scowled.

  “Comment, sir?” Horn asked him. “Your security wizards have really failed to break his encryption algorithm?”

  “No comment!” the colonel turned pink. “I’ve never met this McAdam.”

  “Not many have.” The editor nodded. “He dislikes publicity.” “I’ve seen his cryptophone,” Gueria said. “It baffles my computer friends, but I can offer one comment on his works.” He looked at Horn, “When we tried to identify the source of this barrier effect, it appeared to be centered in McAdam City. As nearly we can determine, in the precise location of the CyberSoft building.”

  “ ‘Barrier effect.’ ” Horn grinned stiffly at the colonel. “An effective barrier, would you agree, sir? If it has halted the advance of General Zeider’s tank corps?”

  “Poppycock!” The colonel grew redder. “General Zeider’s mission was simply to probe the rebel defenses. He did so, and returned with his report for President Higgins.” He looked at his watch. “I can tell you that the President will be on the air within the hour, reporting to the nation.”

  “To the nation?” The editor fumbled a laplink out of his pocket and turned to the colonel. “What will he say?”

  “What do you expect?” The colonel stiffened. “No big surprises. None that I expect. The rebels have left him no alternative. He says he was not elected to preside over the disintegration of the Union.”

  Higgins was a tiny figure on the tiny mapper screen when I caught him shuffling to the lectern in the White House press room, his pale jaw grimly set.

  “Fellow Americans—” His voice was hoarse and husky. “We’re all Americans, even those misguided insurgents who are trying now to deny their own precious birthright.
Twice I have sent Senator Finn to Kentucky with my own urgent appeal to them. They refused to let his airplane land.

  “They puzzle me.” He shook his haggard head. “Somehow, they have willingly cut themselves off from rail service and mail service, from telephone and telegraph service, even from the infonet. I don’t know whether these remarks can reach them, but I am speaking now to inform them—if they are listening—and to inform the whole American nation, that we have made our last best effort at peaceful reconciliation. All in vain. We have been rejected and ignored.

  “I had hoped—” He paused, leaning on the lectern, his thin old voice quavering with emotion. “I would have given what life may be left to me to avoid this tragic moment. In spite of every appeal, however, and only after desperate discussion with my cabinet, the leaders of congress, and the chiefs of staff, our decision has been made. The rebellion—”

  He stopped, hollowed eyes blankly staring, and took a long gasp for breath.

  “The rebellion will be crushed.”

  That arch of shadow with its narrow rainbow lining climbed above the sinking sun, as far beyond my own understanding as it had been for the man from MIT. What did it mean for the nation? The world? If one county could drop out of the union, another might. If Rob Roy revealed his secret—or the secrets of his AIs—might America dissolve? Was the age of nationhood doomed to end. What then?

  These were larger issues than I wanted to think about. I felt a sharper anxiety for Marion and the kids. They had gone to the county to help me. Were they trapped there now, faced with dangers I didn’t know how to explore? If the county was really sealed away from all contact, how could I hope to reach them?

  And Beth? Though Lydia was still a dark and painful riddle to me, Beth’s image haunted my dreams. She had seemed half in love with me, but her baby brother was probably still closer to her heart. Did she know how I had been escorted out of the county? If she did, how did she feel about it? I longed to see her.

  I met increasing traffic for a time. Cars with baggage or bicycles or now and then a mattress tied on top. Pickups loaded with house—

  hold goods. The stream slowed and ceased. I came at last to a wooden barrier and a boldly painted sign planted in the middle of the pavement:

  DANGER!

  MILITARY ZONE KEEP OUT!

  I turned the car and used the mapper to locate a farm road that ran east, almost parallel to the county line. A dozen miles along it, another road took me south again, around the end of the county and finally to a similar splash of bold black ink:

  DANGER!

  EVACUATION ZONE KEEP OUT!

  The land looked empty beyond it: naked rock and scrub timber on hills strip-mined long ago and never restored. Wondering if anybody had still lived here to be evacuated, I pulled around the sign and drove on till the car stopped and refused to start again. The mapper was dead. So was my watch. When I tried the cryptophone, all I heard was silence.

  I left the car and walked a few miles down the empty road toward the county line till something stopped me. Nothing I could see. Nothing I felt, except a sudden resistance like the feel of water to a wader. I pushed against it till a flash of heat and a wave of weakness forced me back.

  Experimenting when I had breath again, I found a broken branch and probed with that. It met the same resistance. I pushed with all my strength till I felt heat on my arm. A splinter at the tip was charred and smoking when I drew it back. Gunpowder would have exploded.

  I climbed a little hill that gave me a view of a bluegrass pasture in a shallow valley beyond the barrier. A few horses were grazing across it. Beyond them a yellow pickup was turning off a road. It stopped in front of a white-painted farmhouse. A little girl ran out to meet the driver. He picked her up to hug her, set her down to get a bag out of the cab. She followed him into the house. Not half a mile away, they seemed as distant as the moon.

  I felt helpless. Defeated at least for the moment, I walked back to the dead car, ate my last doughnut, drank the last of the cold coffee, and crawled into the back seat to sleep.

  Toward midnight, something like thunder woke me.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  STILL HALF ASLEEP, I stumbled out of the car and stood clinging to the open door. I had taken off my shoes, and sharp rocks hurt my feet. It took me a moment to remember where I was, but the rumble in the sky was aircraft engines, no normal thunder. The moonless sky was black. I saw no lights anywhere till something flashed high above me.

  Not normal lightning. It lit no clouds, but something flashed again, and yet again. Listening dazedly for thunder, I heard a crash that seemed to jolt the ground, another and another, a roar in the sky that grew louder than the engine drone. The night was suddenly blazing with a Niagara of fire pouring down the curve of the barrier all across the north and east.

  I knew in a moment that Zeider’s assault had begun. His aircraft and missiles were exploding against the rebel shield, whatever it was that had made the rainbow that was no rainbow, baffled Gueria’s science, stopped me with that flash of heat, charred my probing stick—and detonated anything explosive.

  Blazing debris was sliding down, tracing the shape of that invisible bowl inverted over the county. I stood there shivering, staring up at the terrible splendor of it, till a nearer blast almost overhead scattered flaming stuff that seemed to fall straight toward me.

  I tried to run. Dazzled by the fire in the sky, I tripped over something I didn’t see. I fell and lay there aching and gasping for breath till another blast shook the ground and nerved me to my feet. Limping back to the dead car, I saw flames licking high where the falling stuff had come down, not a hundred yards away.

  Relieved to be alive, I got back in the car and sat watching the flicker of those thundering concussions and the burning debris that kept raining down, sometimes so close I had to flinch. Remnants of missiles and shells, of bombs and bombers; the funeral pyres of unlucky airmen.

  Pity for them took hold of me, and a deeper dread. Was this what Alden had foreseen when he wrote Terror in America? If a single county could defy a superpower, what new shocks might now shake the world? How many more brave men would be ordered to death by officers trying to win another war with the weapons and tactics of the last?

  The assault must have lasted an hour. New explosions boomed and echoed from the dark hills behind me. The sky flashed and dimmed, burned and flickered and dimmed again as Higgins and Zeider did their desperate best to wipe the stubborn rebels off the map.

  That dreadful half-dome of fire darkened and died at last, though smoky fires still burned all along the curve where the shell touched the earth. Silence fell. The night was black again. I sat there in the car, cold and achingly alone, wondering what might come now to Marion and the children, to Beth. They seemed to matter more than the rebels and the world.

  I knew no answers and had nowhere to look for them unless I could somehow get inside the shell. I was thirsty and hungry. At last I must have slept. What roused me was the drone of small aircraft far off in the north, and later the thump-thump-thump of helicopters. Searchlights stabbed out of them, scanning the smoldering wreckage. Zeider was counting his losses.

  The aircraft departed, at least from anywhere near me. Still I sat there, waiting for dawn, for hope, for anything, till something jarred me wide awake. Sunlight flooded the car. Something rapped the glass. I sat up and opened the door to a man with a pitchfork.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  I stared at him, too startled to speak. He was bareheaded, naked to the waist, chewing on a straw. His face and torso were blistered, his eyes inflamed and rimmed with grime. Blood had soaked through a crude bandage on his hand. Stepping warily back from the car, he leveled the pitchfork at me and snarled again:

  “Who the hell—”

  Without thinking, I gave him my name.

  “Damn firebug!” He spat out the straw and jabbed the pitchfork toward me. “You torched my place last night.”

  “Not me.” I s
hrank from the shining tines.

  “Somebody did.” His red eyes narrowed. “Blew7 up my propane tank.”

  “It must have been the rebel’s weapon.” I gestured toward the barrier. “It makes some kind of wall around the county. I don’t know how, but it sets off explosions. It stopped General Zeider. It stopped my car. Stopped me when I tried to walk through it. It must have hit your propane tank. I’m no firebug.”

  “Just a federal agent!” He turned savagely sardonic. “Setting fires as you go, to clear the way for Zeider?”

  “Didn’t you see the sky last night?” He backed away when I climbed out of the car, but still clutched the pitchfork. “Missiles and bombs and airplanes blew up when they hit the barrier. Everything they threw against it.”

  “Bombs?” He shook his head in dazed disbelief. “I did see one hell of a storm, but I was trying to save my bam.”

  “The barrier explodes things,” I said. “Ammunition. Fumes in gas tanks—”

  “Ammunition in a gun?” He frowned at the red-stained bandage. “I ran out with a pistol when I heard the noise. It misfired. I was trying to tie my hand up when the propane exploded and I saw the barn on fire.”

  He dropped the pitchfork and grimaced at the bandage.

  “A hell of a night!” he muttered. “Burnt my house. Burnt my bam. Like to got me when the roof fell in. “Hell of a night!”

  He sat down on the hood of the car and wiped at his face with a grimy rag. His harsh hostility had melted away, and his forlorn face gave me a pang of sympathy.

  “Lost everything I had,” he muttered again. “Even my wife.” His voice caught. “She’s caught inside—inside whatever it is.” He spread his arms in desperate appeal. “Will I ever see her again?” “I’ve got relatives trapped there,” I told him. “I was trying to get through to them, but who knows?”