Government Men

by Gary J. Davies

CHAPTER 7

  DATA BY SLUDGOMATIC AND VIP BY VISICOM

  Lose no time; be always employed in something useful.

  - Benjamin Franklin

  It was Thursday, and Bates was bored, depressed, and again hung over. His date with Margaret the previous night had been simply disastrous, what little he could remember of it. When she found that he really neither knew nor cared anything about the counter-Earth cultural movement, she simply lost all interest in him. At least he theorized that was it; he wasn't altogether sure, since during the course of the evening he apparently had a few too many drinks, and he couldn't remember much about what happened after that.

  Based on her manner towards him this morning, he was convinced that at least he hadn't behaved too outrageously towards her the night before. She didn't seem mad at him, simply disinterested. She was wearing a longer skirt today too, he noticed, on the brief occasions that he actually saw her. He hoped that the long skirt situation wasn’t permanent. Maybe colder weather was the cause, though he certainly didn't want to wait until Spring to see her legs again.

  So, he had been disappointed again. So, what else was new? Thinking about it now, Bates concluded, as he had so many times before, that he didn't really care. Not that much, anyway. Sure, he was attracted to Margaret physically, who wouldn't be? But Margaret wasn't really the cause or answer to his woman problems. As he had done countless times before, he thought again of HER. Not about Margaret, or about any of the others, but only about Janet, the one real love in his life from his college days.

  He hadn't seen her in nearly two decades, and would never see her again. On the intellectual side, he knew that his continuing fixation on Janet was stupid and self-destructive; but he had found over the years that there wasn't much that he could do about it. With the exception of the times when he was totally immersed in his work, or when he was temporarily distracted by another woman as he had been by Margaret, Janet was still very much on his mind.

  He immediately needed some new form of escapism, now that fantasizing about a date with Margaret was out, so he decided to read the news. Hopefully a few murders and financial disasters would temporarily get his mind off truly disturbing topics such as his love life or lack thereof.

  While scrolling through the VISICOM news index, suddenly there SHE was! Janet! Her photo appeared in conjunction with a back page news story with a “Maverick Astronomer Attempts to Cause Panic” title. He recognized her immediately. She looked older, but still wonderful. His hands trembled as he keyed in a request for the full story.

  The story was both disappointing and disturbing. It was disappointing because there were no more photos of Janet, and because the brief article was nearly totally devoid of personal information about her. The only notable snippet of personal information he garnered was that she was using her maiden name, though the reason wasn't disclosed. The video version of the news story first flashed a view of an observatory somewhere out West, and then a news commentator was shown. Who the hells wanted to see a news commentator, where the hells was Janet?

  The commentator stated that Dr. Janet Garb had entered fabricated data into an astronomical data system and sent sensationalist messages to several people in an apparent attempt to cause a world-wide panic. The unlikely story concluded by stating that authorities were currently determining if formal changes would be brought against her. Bates ran the story a second and third time to make sure that he hadn't missed anything. But that was it; end of story.

  The 'fabricated data' allegation in the news report was itself false, Bates was certain. Janet's capabilities and integrity as a person had been impeccable, at least when she was an undergraduate. Even though that was almost twenty years ago, he couldn't believe that she could have changed so radically. So the charges had to be false. The likelihood that serious false accusations were being made against her was very disturbing.

  Even more disturbing to Bates was the remote possibility that the accusations were actually true. If she had truly done the things that she was accused of, it could only have been in response to some situation in her life too terrible to contemplate.

  There were still other aspects of the story that didn't make sense. Just what was the 'world panic-causing data' she was accused of providing? The report gave no specifics. Obviously, that part of the story should have been the most interesting part to many readers, so why wasn't it in the news report if the data was false anyway?

  Bates seriously considered VISICOMing Janet; but then every single day for nearly twenty years he had considered contacting Janet, and he had never once called her. He promised her long ago that he would never see or call her again, and painful though it was, he kept to that promise. He still wouldn't contact Janet, he decided; he could never break a solemn promise made to Janet. And he had long since given up any hope of her contacting him.

  He decided to again try to forget about HER by immersing himself in his job. After all, this strategy had been at least partially effective for nearly two decades. But just what was his job now anyway, he asked himself for the thousandth time? So far, there was virtually nothing to do. What the hells had Barns done when he was here? He asked his friends what they thought he should be doing, but nobody seemed to know; none of them had ever been an administrator, nor did any of them ever want to be one.

  He even tried to reach Melberg, only to find that the man had taken a sudden vacation. Melberg wasn't the vacation sort; perhaps he was more upset about the Bates promotion then he had let on. He couldn’t contact Barns either, as the former DOD Head had neglected to give him a VISICOM number where he could be reached, as he had promised that he would do. Barns was probably living it up like a king someplace right now, leaving his bored replacement to slave on in his old office on his own.

  Bates looked at his watch for the 23rd time that morning. Fortunately, he had won a temporary reprieve from having to figure out what work to do, for it was lunchtime at last. For lunch he sent out again for a Pizza, an extra-large one with everything on it. He wasn't that wild about the anchovies, but they were Milo's favorite topping, and Bates could put up with a few dead fish on his food for his buddy Milo. The pizza should help him forget Janet, the disastrous date with Margaret, and everything else that was depressing. It wasn't as effective as a few beers would have been, but it would do for now. He would do away with the Base no-alcohol directive next he decided, but not today. Possibly tomorrow. He needed some reason to come into work tomorrow, and that could be it.

  As he sat back in his lounge chair, munching on Pizza with Milo and sipping a Pepsi, but still terribly bored and anxious to do something, both the mysterious safe to be sent to Twig and his MX-84 were sitting side by side in plain sight.

  The safe bothered him. Why would Twig be sorting data from that safe? She wasn't even professional science staff, after all. And why had Barns freaked out when he saw the safe on Monday? What was inside it, anyway? State secrets? Diamonds the size of grapefruit? The Holy Grail? Jimmy Hoffa? As Head of DOD, didn't he have the right to know? More, didn't he have the duty to know? He tried the 1-2-3-4 combination that worked with the other safes, but it didn't work with this one.

  He also thought about his work with the MX-84. After ten years, he had recently perfected the ability of the device to 'read' information media in practically any format. It could read information printed in books. It could read binary formatted magnetic tapes, disks, and cubes. It could read optically recorded data. Of course, other devices could do those things. But the MX-84 could read them all without direct physical access to the media. It could read stacks of books without opening them. It could scan and read file cabinets containing magnetic and optical media without even touching the cabinets. Access was achieved through applying a complex assortment of radiation, mostly electromagnetic, to the objects, and through tremendously complex post-processing of the three dimensional imaging data measured after it passed through the objects.

  It suddenly occurred to Bates that he didn
't have to open the mysterious safe that troubled Barns in order to find out what was inside it. With the MX-84, he could 'see' what was inside. Reading data inside a safe was definitely the next logical step in his MX-84 research anyway. The original inventors of the MX-84 had long since left DOD, taking with them precise knowledge of its intended use. Perhaps, Bates now realized, reading data in locked safes was exactly what the device was designed to do in the first place!

  First though, as Barns had suggested, he had to solve a little power problem. Depending on the task, the MX-84 could draw over 200 Amps of 240 volt electric power. Fortunately, and for no reason that he could think of except that the building had been designed by the Government and was therefore not subject to normal rules of logic, he found that there was a suitable power receptacle in the lobby right outside his new office. The power receptacle was exactly where Renson used to usually stand, as a matter of fact. In minutes, Bates installed a super heavy gage power cord between the lobby and the MX-84.

  In another half hour, he positioned the MX-84 radiating and measurement apparatus around the safe. Finally, he applied lead shielding to himself, the MX-84 post processing units, and Milo. As long as Bates arranged the lead foil so that Milo could continue eating his Pizza, the dog didn't seem to mind.

  At last Bates was ready to go, and he powered up the MX-84. Milo, wrapped in lead foil, immediately abandoned his Pizza and started to bark, whine, and shuffle awkwardly around the room! Other than the dog barking and rummaging about, a low humming sound, and the fluctuating read-outs on the MX-84's control monitor, there were no indications that anything was happening.

  Something was happening! First, a measurement calibration mode determined the exact position of the measurement devices through use of multiple, variable frequency signals. Then signals with various source points, frequencies, and strengths began to focus on the safe itself. Though metal, the safe was fortunately not an infinitely good conductor, nor was it grounded; if it were, the electromagnetic signals could not have penetrated. Finally, exquisitely calibrated resonance modes were established for the walls and inside areas of the safe. Eventually, tiny variations in signals and resulting signal returns allowed the MX-84 to form a 3-D mapping of the entire insides of the safe.

  The strategy was similar to the pealing an onion. A mathematical model was formulated for the properties of the outer-most layer, the safe, allowing the next layer to be more properly measured and modeled. Safe shelves and books, reports, data cubes, and data tapes were identified, modeled, and strategies for further modeling and mapping their insides were determined automatically. It was an exceedingly delicate operation, requiring extremely small signal amplitudes, particularly with regard to magnetic media, and extremely massive and adaptive signal processing.

  After several minutes the control monitor showed that two things were happening. First, tremendous amounts of signal data were being recorded. Second, power consumption was becoming unusually high. Bates attributed this to the heavy steel construction of the safe; the MX-84 was automatically compensating for this by greatly increasing its normal radiation signal strength.

  The actual data measurement portion of the experiment was soon over. According to the MX-84, its data cubes now held hundreds of trillions of bytes of fairly raw data. This had to be structured into text. Over the next few minutes, this data would continue to be post-processed by the supercomputing assets of the MX-84, which was made up of multiple INTEL 999986 PC super-computing components that Bates had bought and paid for himself as a mail order from Intel, since there had been virtually no budget for the Government to buy such equipment for many years.

  With the possible exception of the recording strategy, post-processing was the most complex part of the operation. A couple of decades earlier, this stage would have required rooms full of super computers and mobs of programmers; now it could be done by Bates and a hodgepodge of commercially available hardware components and free shareware utilities.

  When the MX-84 control read-outs indicated that about 20 billion bytes of useful information were prepared, he had the MX-84 computer artificial intelligence (AI) utilities sort and group the information and develop an index and table of contents for it. He spot-checked the information by glancing at a few random pages. Much to his relief it seemed to be OK; at least it wasn't gibberish.

  Though it was a massive amount of information, enough to fill several large bookshelves in old-fashioned hard copy form, all the information easily fit onto a single modern optical data cube. Bates removed the cube from the MX-84 and popped it into his pocket. He could read the cube using any standard VISICOM device. He decided to take the cube home with him to review its contents. Over the next few weeks, he planned to assess how well the MX-84 had performed its task of reading and arranging the data. The fact that the data was highly classified never even crossed his mind.

  Curious as he was about the contents of the safe, he decided to 'clean up' the office a little bit before taking the data cube home and reviewing it, starting with the emancipation of his foil wrapped self. When Bates removed the MX-84 apparatus positioned around the safe, he happened to back up against the safe with his backside. "YOOOOW" he shouted, hopping around the room! The damned thing was hot as blazes! His pants were smoking! Milo, quick to join in on new games, though stuffed with pizza and hampered by the lead lined outfit that he still wore, shuffled over to Bates, barking, and playfully nipped his leg. This had the desired effect of leading to several more rounds of yelling and barking.

  After finally calming and settling Milo down for another snooze, Bates measured the outside temperature of the safe and did a few quick mental calculations. He deduced that the contents of the safe must be super-heated sludge and gas! Oops.

  “Damn,” Bates cursed. He should have anticipated something like this, and proceeded more cautiously. There had been similar results in some of his earlier experiments, in which the MX-84 completely destroyed what it was reading. He thought he had solved that problem, but apparently reading data enclosed in a safe required further research. Analysis was perhaps successful, but it was destructive analysis. The MX-84 had transformed the safe into a super-powered microwave oven that converted its contents into super-heated sludge.

  Someone was probably going to be really pissed off.

  Hopefully he had at least preserved all the information that had been in the safe. He decided that instead of waiting until he got home he would spend the rest of the afternoon studying just what that information was.

  However, before he could even retrieve the data cube from his pocket, Margaret informed him via intercom that he had a call from the White House! It was a shocked Bates that switched on the office VISICOM to receive the call. Bates stared at a man he knew that he had seen many times in the news, though he couldn't quite recall his name or position for a few moments.

  It was an equally shocked and surprised John Ryan, White House Chief of Staff, that stared back at Bates. Ryan had expected to see Dr. Barns, an old and trusted friend, sitting in a dignified office setting. Instead, he saw an unkempt stranger in a disorderly room what couldn't possibly be the office of the Head of DOD. Instead of the stern, imposing, immaculate Barns, Ryan observed an extremely scruffy looking, balding, middle aged, slightly pudgy man who wore wrinkled clashing shirt and pants, no socks, old sneakers, and a Christmas novelty tie, as he sat back in a beat up lounge chair. The stranger was staring back at him with a shocked, blank expression on his face.

  On the desk next to the man were old pizza boxes and empty Pepsi cans, scattered papers, and, sleeping on its back with its legs straight up in the air was a squat, nondescript dog wrapped in some sort of metal foil. He could hear the dog snoring. On the wall in the background was a poster sized photo of the man, holding a mug of beer in one hand, while with the other he shook the hand of a seedy looking Santa Claus that appeared to be carrying an assault rifle.

  Ryan opened the dialogue, using a tone of voice that was clearl
y used to wielding authority: "I'm John Ryan, White House Chief of Staff. Who are you?" Ryan demanded. "I wanted Barns, the Head of DOD!”

  "Well," replied Bates, shrugging, “instead you got Dr. Narbando T. Bates, new Head of DOD. Barns retired Monday. You should have recently received a memo from Barns to that effect. What can I do for you, sir?” Bates sat up straighter and tried to look professional, despite the unfortunate pizza sauce stains on his shirt.

  If it wasn't for the current crisis Ryan would never have bothered to try to call Barns. The DOD and Barns were ancient history, but with the Dannos crisis at hand, every avenue had to be explored, no matter how futile. He had intended to level with Barns, as he had known him for many years. He quickly decided to tell this stranger as little as possible.

  "Congratulations then, Dr. Bates, and please excuse the outburst. I have some, ah, routine questions to ask you. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes.”

  "DOD, what's left of it, is at your service," Bates responded, smiling.

  "What's left of it? Yes, that's the very question Dr. Bates. You don't have any operational units, do you?”

  Bates considered the question. Was this guy for real? "Do you mean military units?”

  "Well, yes," said Ryan.

  "No, Mr. Ryan, we're strictly civilian scientists and engineers here, though a few of us are ex-military.”

  "Of course," said Ryan. "Now what about equipment?”

  "What sort of equipment?”

  Ryan paused a moment. How could he phrase this one delicately? He couldn't. "Oh, things like guided missiles and nuclear bombs, for instance.”

  Bates had to think about that one a little more. There were plenty of odds and ends all over the Base, true enough, such as his MX-84, but as far as he knew, it was all research equipment, not weapons. "I really don't think so, Mr. Ryan. This Base has always been sort of a think tank, not an operational base or even a weapons development or test center. We tended to focus on basic research and its applications to weapons system components, and not so much on complete weapons systems. In the past we constructed working prototypes of some items, but certainly not operational prototypes of complete strategic weapons. That would break lots of treaties nowadays anyway, wouldn't it?”

  "No space ships either?”

  Bates struggled to keep a straight face. "No, sorry, not that I know of. Maybe you have us confused with NASA?"

  Ryan and others had already called NASA. Even NASA didn't have a suitable weapons delivery system. Nobody on Earth did. And if they could find a delivery system, they didn't have a hydrogen bomb anyway. Nobody did. The last nuclear bomb had been dismantled with tremendous public fan-fare over ten years ago. The day was celebrated internationally as a legal holiday. Every school kid knew that! ”OK then, Dr. Bates, just checking."

  Bates had the distinct feeling that Ryan was holding something back. This was all public knowledge. Why was a VIP like Ryan asking these dumb questions? And he seemed serious about them too; Bates could see that Ryan was truly disappointed with his answers. Initially Bates thought that the man’s attitude was arrogant. As the conversation went on, he came to believe that Ryan was deeply troubled and desperate. But whatever was going on, Ryan wasn't telling him.

  "Was there anything else Mr. Ryan?"

  "Just one more question Dr. Bates. Do you have a Dr. Frank Melberg working for you?"

  "Yes," replied Bates.

  "Is he in today, do you know?”

  What was going on, thought Bates? Did Ryan want to deal with Melberg instead of him? "No," replied Bates. "As a matter of fact, he's taken a few days of vacation. He doesn't plan on being back until after Christmas."

  For the first time, Ryan smiled, though grimly. "Yes, of course; after Christmas. That's not surprising, I suppose.”

  "Can I leave him a message?" Bates asked.

  The smile faded away as quickly as it had appeared. "No, absolutely not. If you see this man before Christmas, make no mention whatsoever of this conversation. Bates, haven't you been contacted yet by the National Police about Melberg?” Bates could only shake his head no. Ryan continued. "I have some bad news then, I'm afraid. We have reason to believe that this man Melberg is an unstable and dangerous criminal."

  It was the last thing Bates expected to hear. In his own opinion, Melberg was surely no prize, but unstable and dangerous? "What on Earth did he do?”

  Ryan paused before answering evasively. "We don't want to reveal that until we have him securely in hand.”

  "But how dangerous is he? Should we detain him?"

  "No. Absolutely not. But you are to call this office immediately. Or, better yet, call Peter Lund at NP headquarters. Incidentally Dr. Bates, what is that orange stuff in the tank? Some sort of experiment?” Ryan was pointing at something on his VISICOM screen, which of course imparted no useful information to Bates as to the location of the 'orange stuff' in question. Bates looked around at the shelves in back of his desk, and finally located among the odds and ends collected there an old ten-gallon fish tank full of 'orange stuff'. Actually, it was full of thousands of small something's immersed in an orange liquid.

  "Oh! That's nothing important, Mr. Ryan. It's just some Styrofoam packing peanuts."

  "Styrofoam's usually white. Why are these orange?"

  "I'm dying them orange. They are immersed in orange dye. Styrofoam being fairly impervious to dye, it's taking a long time."

  "Why?" asked a baffled Mr. Ryan.

  "I really don't know. Inorganic chemistry is a bit out of my line."

  "No, I mean why are you dying them orange?"

  It seemed rather obvious to Bates. "Why, so they'll look like real cheese corn curls, of course. At some cocktail party, if I ever go to one, I plan to put them in several bowls and place them all around.” Bates was smiling now, in a manner that he hoped was infectious, but Ryan was still staring blankly and morosely out of the VISICOM, as though the whole grand idea of fake corn curls at a party was completely beyond his comprehension. "You know, as a gag!” added Bates.

  He was finally rewarded by two tiny nods of Ryan's head, which apparently signaled that no further explanation was required.

  In the meantime, Milo woke up, and was soon staring at Ryan while attempting to scratch under his left ear through the lead foil.

  Ryan shook his head sadly and sighed. "All right Dr. Bates, I guess that about does it. Sorry to wake your dog. Why is it wrapped up that way? Is it sick?”

  “No, he’s simply wearing lead foil as protection against radiation. Sir, is there anything else?”

  Ryan sighed deeply and shook his head. “Thank you, but no. I’ve learned everything I needed to. Good-bye Dr. Bates.”

  "Oh wait!” exclaimed Bates. "There’s one more thing after all.” Bates didn't know what was bothering this man but he definitely needed cheering up. "Merry Christmas!”

  At the mention of Christmas though, Ryan looked more distraught than ever. He forced a smile, however. "The same to you, Dr. Bates. Oh, and I'd use those fake corn curls right away, if I were you. Before Christmas.” The VISICOM went blank.

  ****