He wasn’t feeling well after so many failures on a single day. He just could not ignore what had happened. Actually, that was why he wanted to drive out to Hartford, alone without a chauffeur and without security staff, to put some distance between himself and the daily grind; to try and get a clear view of things again. But there was anger boiling inside him … a bad day indeed.
Dark clouds moved in, which he thought fitting for his mood. It would rain this evening, maybe even a thunderstorm. There was an ominous dark violet shadow within the cloud cover.
And still that traffic jam! Even out here, even though he had left London behind him. He tightened his grip on the Jaguar’s steering wheel as he inched forward one car length at a time, all of them crawling along like a line of turtles. Aha … up ahead somebody thought it would be a good idea to do some serious road repairs on a Friday during rush hour. What a bunch of idiots, he thought angrily.
The two-lane highway funneled down a single-lane just before the construction. McCaine watched the cars, one by one, merge into a single lane, like the teeth of a zipper. He let an old worn-out VW with a granny behind the wheel pass and was about to follow her when a dirty-brown car shot out from the left and forced its way in front of him. He gave the driver an angry glare and saw a blond-haired, broad-shouldered ape behind the wheel grinning stupidly at him. He was clearly pleased with himself for squeezing in front of the Jag. Sitting beside the ape was a female primate dressed like a hooker grinning brainlessly.
McCaine stared after them speechlessly. As he slowly drove past the construction site, inhabited by a whole two unenthusiastic and tired-looking workers, the hooker female primate kept looking over at him grinning and laughing, obviously proud of what her brainless orangutan had done. They were talking about him, mocking him, as if they were the greatest things to walk the Earth. McCaine felt sick just looking at them. But the guy did have muscles, and even if there was only sawdust between his ears it probably wasn’t a good idea to ram his car then get out and try to strangle him … and of course the little female primate hooker too.
For endless minutes he crawled after them wondering why the hell he was working his ass off to save humanity. Humanity? Weren’t most people like those two fools ahead? Brainless cattle. That's whose future he was trying to save? Evolution, or just a coincidence, might have brought forth a couple of people who might be worth the effort but most were just a waste of space.
McCaine was in a bad mood, and he was beginning to think that maybe extinction was what this pair and the rest of their stupid species deserved.
$37,000,000,000,000
A HALF HOUR before reaching Leipzig the train made a stop at the small town of Naumburg an der Saale. On impulse, they decided to get out and to take a cab the rest of the way to Leipzig.
The driver was happy to get such a long-distance fare. When Ursula was discussing with him where he should let them out John said anywhere but the train station. He had an uncanny feeling that Marco and the others might be there waiting for them.
They got out in the center of the city, by a large, open square with a fountain and impressive looking facades all around. John paid the taxi driver, who thanked him in awkward English and gave them a friendly wave as he drove off. John joined Ursula, who was standing with her bag at her feet and her hands deep in her jacket pockets. She had become quieter and more withdrawn the closer they got to Leipzig. Now she seemed tense, almost as if she was expecting something bad to happen.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Here we are,” she said, looking around, as if to make sure that everything was still the same. “This is Augustusplatz, it used to be called Karl-Marx-Platz. This is where it all kicked off.” She pointed at the imposing building behind the fountain. “That is the opera house and across from it the Gewandhaus … it’s a concert hall.” Behind it stood a tall building that looked like a giant half-opened book. “That is part of the university, just like the building up ahead …”
“Kicked off?” John interjected. “What kicked off here?”
She turned her eyes away from the buildings and looked at him. “The demonstrations. Eight years ago this was still the German Democratic Republic — East Germany, part of the Warsaw Pact. We used to live behind the Iron Curtain, and you Americans were our enemies.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” John remembered. Eight years ago? Back then his relationship with Sarah had come to a painful and unavoidable end. “I remember, vaguely. That’s when the Berlin Wall came down, isn’t it?”
Ursula smiled wanly. “It didn’t come down, we tore it down.” She looked past him, as if she was staring into the past. “It all began right here — the demonstrations, back in September of 1989 — here in Leipzig. By November the whole country was out on the streets. Hungary opened its borders to the west, and on November 9 the border was opened to West Germany. A year later East Germany no longer existed.” She shuddered imperceptibly. “It is so easy to say this, but it feels different when you’ve participated in it.” She pointed at a fairly modern looking building diagonally across from them, with lots of white and lots of glass, and with a very large dark relief above the entryway. “That was where I studied … the university.” A pained smile crossed her face. “The head above the door is supposed to be Karl Marx. It is made of metal and is so integrated with the structure that you’d need to tear down the building to remove it. That’s why it is still there.” She turned around and pointed at a long horizontal building complex on the other side. “Over there is where I worked. It is the main post office. I did administrative stuff, accounting, and other boring things. Back then I thought it was coincidence that I could see the university from work. During my break I mingled with the students and pretended I was one of them.”
“Why weren’t you?” John asked cautiously.
“Because I would have had to have gone through senior high school, and I wasn’t allowed to. Not because I wasn’t smart enough, but because I belonged to the wrong family … political reasons.” She lifted her bag and shouldered it undecided. “Politics … it was all politics. I kept away from the demonstrations for a long time. I didn’t want to draw more attention — and I was afraid. It was common knowledge that the Stasi took pictures of everyone who attended services in the Nikolaikirche. But still, more and more people went, even after there was no room in the church for the all the people. After church services they marched out, onto Karl-Marx-Platz, and then went on to the train station, going along the central ring road, holding candles, of course. What the government really hated was the fact that everyone remained peaceful. They had no reason to interfere. Do you get it? That was the key … They walked past the Runde Eck, where the Stasi had its headquarters, singing songs and placed candles on the steps. What could the authorities do? It was all so harmless. But in reality it was the beginning of the end.”
John was fascinated as he listened to her, and tried to imagine how this mundane-looking square had been back then, but he couldn’t even guess.
“The climax was October 9. It was a Monday, the demonstrations had always taken place on Mondays. There were rumors that the ZK, the central committee of the SED, the East German Communist Party, had decided to crush the demonstrations in Leipzig that particular Monday. They called it ‘clamping down on counter-revolutionary elements,’ but in reality they were planning to just go out and shoot people. That was what everyone had been scared of all along — the Chinese solution. In June of that year there had been student demonstrations in Beijing, do you remember? Tiananmen Square. The government sent in tanks and killed protesters. Many people in Leipzig thought the same could happen here, but they still demonstrated.” She looked over to the long sandy-brown colored building that was still the main post office. “I was in my office on that evening. I had to stay late, because there was lots to do, but especially because … I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to see what would happen. I still remember standing by the windows, up there on the fifth floor. We had the lig
hts off, stood by the open windows, and then they came … thousands of people, the entire square here filled with people, people everywhere. The fountain wasn’t here then. They all shouted, Wir sind das Volk, which means 'We Are the People,' over, and over, and over again beneath the black sky, illuminated only by the street lanterns and the thousands of candles — they all shouted with one voice … wir sind das Volk — wir sind das Volk. It gave me goose bumps. I just couldn’t stay in there any longer. I went downstairs and joined them. I didn’t care what would happen any more. If they want to shoot then let them shoot. From that day on, I attended the demonstrations, every Monday, until the end. If I hadn’t been there from the start, at least I wanted to be there at the end to help carry the dictatorship to its grave, I guess.”
He marveled at her. Life around them, with the traffic, the people with their shopping bags from world famous fashion chains, or with their mobile phones pressed against their ears as they waited for the next streetcar, it all seemed surreal, like thin coat of paint over a dark reality.
“Are you even interested in any of this?” she asked him. He was startled by the look in her eyes. He managed to nod silently and was happy that seemed a good enough answer for her. She wiped her eyes, the bag still hanging from her shoulder. “It’s like a trip into the past; I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad that you didn’t get shot,” he told her and took the bag from her. “That it was only rumors about sending in the troops.”
She shook her head. “They were not only rumors. We found out later on that the decision had indeed been made. The Feliks Dzierzynski regiment had been mobilized, ordered to Leipzig and the soldiers had orders to shoot. But they didn’t … they just didn’t They had discussed it in the ranks and decided to disobey the order.”
The institute was south of Hartford and looked like a military base from afar. There were three large, flat-roofed barracks-like structures with rows of greenish colored insulated windows that stood around a heat and power station, an old brick building with a shiny new metal chimney.
The guard at the gate wanted to see McCaine’s ID and called the institute to check, not in the least impressed by this supposedly important visitor and the Doberman-like expression on the face of this surly man he kept a steady eye on.
McCaine looked at the fence surrounding the place. It was about ten feet high and had rolls of barbed wire on top. There were tall poles with floodlights all around the compound. The lawns were manicured. The place looked just as he had ordered.
“Welcome, sir,” the beefy guard said to McCaine as he handed him back his ID, with an expression like a mean dog. He put the semi-automatic rifle, which he had slung over his shoulder before checking McCaine’s ID, back in its rack, and pressed the button to open the white metal gate.
McCaine parked the car in a lot that was still fairly empty for this time of day. A reserved parking spot had been made available for him right by the entrance, but he only noticed it as he walked to the front door. The sky was overcast with clouds even here in Hartford. Another guard behind a bulletproof glass window allowed McCaine to pass through a revolving door.
Professor Collins was waiting inside and greeted him surprisingly reverentially. He immediately took McCaine on a tour of the facility.
McCaine saw hallways and offices, large and small rooms, computers everywhere. There were whole collections of monitors with rows and columns of numbers or diagrams, or graphic images of all sorts flickering and changing all the time. The cooling fans of all those computers combined to create a strange background noise interrupted occasionally by the sound of a printer. The documents were gathered up by employees and tacked to a large pin board, joining other papers already there, or were neatly filed in binders. Other boards had cryptic looking words like, Strategy EN-1, or Complex RES/POP. Empty pizza cartons were stacked on a couple of tables, along with empty coffee cups full of cigarette butts. Just below the ceilings were rows of vents and ducts for the powerful air-conditioning system, but there was still the odor of unwashed shirts and cold cigarette smoke. McCaine saw a young unshaven man in a room lying on a cot sleeping with his mouth open and a pen still in one hand.
“Tim Jordan … he’s responsible for gathering the extreme-point-strategy,” Collins explained in a low tone. “He’s been here since Tuesday, working almost twenty-four hours a day.”
“I believe it,” McCaine grumbled, not exactly convinced.
They finally arrived in the professor’s office, which looked no more comfortable than the rest of the institute. But it did have the luxury of one easy chair. The walls, at least the ones not covered by bookshelves or file cabinets, were covered with myriad printouts; even the windows.
“Please, have a seat,” Collins said pointing to the chair. “May I offer you something to drink? Tea, juice, water …?”
McCaine shook his head. “A functional plan would suffice for now.”
The professor’s eyes blinked behind the eyeglasses. “Oh, yes, I understand.” He rubbed his hands nervously. “You wish to know what results we have produced.” He nodded as if he had only just grasped why McCaine was there. He walked back and forth in front of a wall covered in papers. “Perhaps I should first of all take you through the strategies we followed. By May, we had worked out which parameters of the model Fontanelli Enterprises could influence and to what extent. This resulted in a certain amount of what we call ‘parameter jumps,’ which means discrete changes of conditions during certain points in time, starting with January 1998. Since we are dealing with a complex model, differing parameter jumps may influence each other in unforeseen ways, which means we had to employ a brute-force approach, and this meant calculating a combination of all possible parameter jumps with any other combination of parameter jumps, for which there is a common term used in mathematics: permutation. Even small permutations can result in huge numbers and in our case the number is astronomically large. Thus we used different meta-strategies with the goal of excluding unusable combinations from the outset, or at least to keep them in the background so as to be able to concentrate on more promising approaches. One of these strategies was to examine the permutation of the extreme points, which means the largest possible method of interference at the earliest possible period. Another strategy was aimed at studying how we developed our focus to identify sensitive areas — but unfortunately that proved fruitless, so in mid-July we gave up on this to focus all our efforts on more promising combinations of extremes. We have…”
McCaine raised a hand to stop the professor’s flow of gobbledygook. “If I remember correctly,” he said, “we discussed all this in May.”
Collins looked up and then nodded. “That could be, indeed.”
“Then please I would like you to get to the final results, finally.”
“Yes, certainly. As you wish.” He seemed to be fairly nervous, the professor. His arm waved around in a clumsy effort to point out the diagrams on the walls, then dropped back to his side. “Here you see them, the results … all of them.”
“I see only lines,” McCaine said.
“Of course, they need to be interpreted. This one here, for instance, is the development of the economy in Asia, showing the sum in all branches of industry. The dashed line is the positive extreme, marked by the appropriate index number, and the dotted line is the negative extreme, also with reference to the output data. The list beside this is an overview of all sets of data that indicate extreme values. The correlation may be easily seen with the reference…”
“Professor Collins,” McCaine interrupted him again, “I’m not interested in hearing your methodology. I’m here to hear results.”
The scientist nodded pensively, sitting on the edge of his desk. “You mean the plan to guide mankind’s development to a stable and sustainable course.”
“Exactly. To be honest, your long-winded approach makes me suspect that you have not gotten as far as we had agreed upon in May or as far as you assured me you would have gotten between then
and now.”
“Oh yes, we did,” Collins argued. He took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with the end of his white coat. “We have made it even further than we thought we could. But I’m afraid that the plan we hoped to find doesn’t exist.”
“This cannot be.”
The professor took a sheet of paper from the desk. “Our goal was to do a hundred and twenty million simulation runs by the start of October. By then all the extreme-point sets would be complete and the five hundred best approaches fine-tuned. By ten o’clock this morning we had, in reality, accomplished a total of a hundred seventy-four million one hundred thirty-one thousand two hundred and four runs, almost 50 percent more than planned.” He put the paper down. “The reason why we haven’t found a functioning plan was not because we were too slow or did not have enough computers. The reason is that no such plan exists.”
They chose one of the old church benches with flaking white paint and sat there in silence for a while.
John let the atmosphere of the place sink in. It almost seemed impossible that a revolution could have begun here. The Nikolaikirche was small and plain, surrounded by construction sites. Inside it was dimly lit and hardly anyone was in there. The windows were covered-up on the outside, where no dark drapes were closed behind the matte glass. In the corner next to them, beside a billboard and an offertory, stood a large, hand-painted sign, with a circular rainbow and the figure of a man hitting on something with a hammer.
“‘Swords to plowshares,’” Ursula translated the words on the sign in a whisper. “‘Peace prayers in the St. Nikolai, every Monday 17:00.’” So this was how it all began; with a simple invitation to church services.
John tried to sense if the place had preserved memories for the hopeful, desperate, frightened, angry, trembling, and firm people — but there was nothing, or at least nothing he could feel. He saw matte-white wood paneling, lime green painted swirls, mighty columns topped with stylized wreaths that supported the church roof; a very normal looking church. It seemed strange to him that there was not even a commemorative plaque for the memorable events of that autumn in 1989 — that not even the new government would put something up. It is as if the new government wanted to forget how easy it was to topple a government when all the people stood up together and said, “Enough!”
One Trillion Dollars Page 55
