Wargames

by David Bischoff

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Wigan. “I’m gonna take that Atari away from my kid!”

  Chapter Eight

  David Lightman tried to sit still. He tried to use his fear to keep him in place on the chair in the infirmary behind the locked door. After all, there was nothing more he could do; chances were, if he made one more squeak, those FBI agents would order that MP airman to draw his .38 and put a few permanent bugs in Mr. and Mrs. Lightman’s troublesome program.

  He tried to breathe steadily, to put a hold on his frustration. After all, the men here at NORAD, in the Crystal Palace, were the experts. Surely they knew what they were doing. Maybe they even realized that, if necessary, and if Stephen Falken were indeed still alive and at that Oregon address, they could always call in the Prime Programmer.

  But then, what if they didn’t...

  David sprang up from the chair and began pacing furiously, frustration tying him up in knots.

  What if they didn’t call Falken? What if they had too much pride to check into the matter, to realize that somehow Falken’s brilliant machine, programmed to learn, had almost come alive and was determined to play out the insane game that David had begun? The thing was, these authority goons were just like most of the rest: his father, “Kaiser” Kessler, Mr. Ligget, his pastor—incomplete beings who thought they had control of their little sections of reality; stubborn, prideful men who thought they had the rules in their pockets.

  Maybe even if he did get to speak to the man, Dr. McKittrick wouldn’t believe him. He had that element to him, the way he had spoken about Dr. Falken, the disrespect. The world was just a bunch of hungry egos, it seemed, scrabbling and biting for power.

  Screw ’em! Screw ’em all, thought David Lightman. We’re doomed anyway. Even if we get through this mess, who knows what might happen. The President might go off his rocker and fancy himself the town sheriff in a shootout with black-hat Andropov. “Take that, ya varmint!” And kazoom, there go the Titan IIs and the Poseidons and Lances and Minutemen and kaboom, kaboom, kaboom! A Russian might dump a bottle of vodka on a control panel and shoot off SS-17s and -18s toward Hackensack, New Jersey.

  With these clowns it was inevitable. Eventually there would be a thermonuclear war. And the funny thing about it was that David Lightman was now in the safest place of all—he’d survive.

  Of course, he realized he’d have to live with the knowledge that he had been the one who started the ball rolling, the one who had gummed up the machinery, the one who had pushed the first domino. And what kind of world would be left? He’d always figured that if there were a nuke war, he’d be one of the first to go, and he didn’t think of it much anyway.

  Then he thought of Jennifer Mack. Something went funny inside of him. A pang, an ache. She would be gone, then, and a world without her didn’t seem like much of a world at all

  Dammit, he thought. Lightman, you’re the one who started all this! Take the rap, the finger of responsibility is on your nose, boy.

  It’s your fault. Your never-never-land of computers is attached to a world of flesh and blood and death and you are not Peter Pan!

  It was his fault, and he alone knew what was wrong. Also, he alone knew that unless Stephen Falken was brought into this, things really could go wrong. But they thought he was a spy, and they sure as hell weren’t going to listen to him....

  David stopped pacing.

  He knew he had to do something... or die trying. Somehow, he had to get in touch with Anderson Island, Oregon.

  Somehow, he had to contact Dr. Stephen Falken. Only Falken could convince these people that it was Joshua that was doing this, that it wasn’t the Russians, futzing with their computers.

  Well, that was decided. Now, how could he get out of here? He surveyed the room for the umpteenth time, but this time with a clear intent: escape. Wait a minute. That metal panel over there—measuring approximately two feet by two feet—that probably controlled the electronic mechanism that locked the door. David examined it closely. It was screwed tightly into the wall. David broke a fingernail testing just how tightly it was fastened. A Phillips screwdriver was needed.

  Under the room’s sink was a line of drawers. David tried them. Bottom, locked. Second, locked. Third, locked. But the top one slid open and David stared hopefully into it. Nothing but the usual disposable doctor’s supplies: a roll of Bounty paper towels, spools of gauze and adhesive tape, tongue depressors (open wide and say ahh, door!). Absolutely nothing, of use. Just his luck.

  He slammed the door shut and sighed.

  Hold your horses, he thought. Was that a glint of metal?

  Rapidly, David tugged the door open again and tossed away the paper and other stuff. Sure enough, bingo! A batch of disposable syringes was there—no good. Some Ace bandages—no good; a small cassette recorder—no good; a stethoscope—no good; a pair of tweezers...

  Cassette recorder!

  His memory replayed the sounds that had come from the door when the guard had opened it to allow McKittrick entrance. He’d heard about doors like that. In fact, come to think of it, he had read a few articles about them in Popular Mechanics.

  David took out the recorder. A hand-held Sony job. Expensive. Only the best foreign stuff for our country! He took the earphone and plugged it into his ear. He turned on the “play” button.

  “Patient’s pupils are dilated... consistent with recent use of marijuana,” a doctor’s voice pronounced.

  David turned it off, picked up the tweezers, then went to the door. There was a chance this might work! If it did, old Sting would certainly be proud of him.

  With the tweezers, and a good deal of sweat, he managed to unscrew the panel. Carefully, so as to not make a sound, he unfastened it and stared into the multicolored spaghetti of wiring.

  It took him a good five minutes to connect the recorder and get the panel back in place, but it was good work. The problem was, there was no way to test it.

  He went to the door again, and put his ear against it.

  Outside, he could hear the guard talking to that pretty nurse at her desk.

  “No, thanks, Corporal, tonight I have to do my laundry,” the nurse was saying.

  The guard was being insistent. “Well, I’m off tomorrow night too. Maybe we can go to the smorgasbord. It’s all you can eat, Nancy.”

  David took a breath, then pounded as hard as he could on the door. Then he took the recorder and placed the built-in microphone next to the metal panel.

  He heard the guard’s footsteps approaching. “What do you want?” the man asked.

  “There’s no toilet in here, and I have to go to the bathroom. It’s a long ride to Denver!” David said.

  The guard hesitated.

  “Look, I gotta go bad. You want me to smell up your nice clean sanitary infirmary?” David said, not having to affect the strain in his voice.

  Come on! Open the door or I’m cooked!

  The guard took his sweet time to decide, but finally he began to punch out the code on the dial next to the door.

  Beep... beeep... bip... beeep... bip... blip.

  The door swung open, and the young corporal stood, eyes wary, his hand on his pistol.

  David said quickly, “Please let me talk to Dr. McKittrick. I have to tell him—”

  A pained expression crossed the corporal’s blandly regular features. “Look, kid. No one is supposed to talk to you. The FBI guys are gonna be here any minute. Now, do you have to take a leak or don’t you?”

  “No,” said David.

  “Sheesh,” the guard said. “I’ll tell ya kid, I’ll be glad when you’re gone.”

  “So willI,” said David.

  The guard shrugged contemptuously and closed the door.

  David waited for the guard’s footsteps to fade, then pulled the panel back off the wall. It slipped from his sweat-slick hands. He caught it just before it clattered to the floor.

  C’mon, klutz, he told himself. Get with it!

  Cautiously he p
laced the panel on the floor, then rose up and peered into the control wiring and retrieved the cassette recorder, wired into the mechanism with the earphone cord.

  He rewound the tape and moved the jack from “input” to “output.” This was it!

  His forefinger hit the “play” button.

  Faint tones sounded—an exact repetition of the unlocking sequence. The door lock hummed quietly and clicked. Then, with malicious glee in his eye, he pulled a very important wire.

  How about that, Jim Sting! David thought with satisfaction, as he carefully opened the door and peeked out. Down the corridor, the nurse was laughing. The guard had his back to David, leaning over and listening to her heart with a stethoscope.

  “Your mouth says, ‘No.. no... no,’ “ the corporal was saying. “But your heart says, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’”

  Time to get out!

  David slipped through the door into the hallway, quietly closing the door behind him, making sure it locked. This should keep them occupied for a while. Probably they’d think it had stuck!

  Desperately he looked around. Where to now? Out of that guard’s sight, that was for sure. He raced down the hall, dodging around a cornet He found himself in a foyer complete with elevator doors.

  Ping! One of the lights went out. Oh, geez!

  David ducked into a door under an exit sign.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him,” Wigan was saying as he left the elevator. “The kid’s underage.”

  “If he’s been doing what we think he’s been doing,” said Stockman, “maybe we can get a special act of Congress.”

  Panic took hold of David Lightman and propelled him down the concrete steps.

  Moments blurred into minutes of metal and gray concrete and red exit signs, until David puffed to a halt, realizing that he couldn’t go any farther down.

  Breathless, he looked around to where his flight had deposited him.

  Giant springs connected the ceiling to the floor here—this must be the rockbed upon which the whole complex was perched! Up ahead was a place Where the ceiling sloped down to a dark crawl space. It didn’t look particularly safe or inviting, but it was the only way to go.

  David got down on all fours and began to crawl.

  Wigan and Stockman waited with the guard by the locked infirmary door.

  “What’s up,” asked the technician they had called.

  “This lock.. it must be stuck,” said the corporal, pointing to the locking mechanism with its series of numbered buttons. “Think you can open it?”

  “Sure. Just take a minute,” the technician said, jauntily chewing a wad of gum. He put his tool kit down, selected a couple of pieces, and set to work while Wigan and Stockman waited impatiently.

  It took longer than just a minute, and the FBI agents commented on this quite often and quite vocally.

  “You know,” the technician said finally, looking up from the tangled mess of screws and wiring. “I think it’s jammed from inside.”

  Wigan blew up. He stepped forward and pounded on the door. “Come on, Lightman! You’re just making it harder on yourself!”

  “I got it,” said the technician. “Here it comes.”

  The door swung open. David Lightman was nowhere to be seen.

  “Gee, folks,” said Colonel Conley, rejoining the tour group, a nervous, apologetic smile on his face. “I’ve just been informed that they’re cleaning the floors in the computer center. We don’t want anyone to slip and hurt themselves, so we’re going to end the tour right here. Now, if I can ask you all to board the bus kind of quickly, we’ll have a complimentary beverage waiting for each of you down the hill at the officers’ club.”

  David Lightman peered out at the forest of legs from his hiding place under one of the machines. The crawl up here had been strenuous, and he was just regaining his breath.

  How much longer did he have before they found out he had escaped the infirmary room? Not long, certainly. He’d been on the run a good five minutes, maybe more. Any moment the storm troopers would come screaming out like a bunch of Jack Kirby cartoon characters, cigars dangling impossibly from apelike teeth, machine guns blazing.

  “He’s still alive, Sgt. Fury!”

  “This one’s for the Gipper, Commie!”

  Ker-blam, ker-blam, ker-blam!

  Suddenly, David wished he didn’t have such a comic-booky imagination.

  The pairs of loafers and high-heeled wedgies started moving on, and David rallied his strength. Blending in somehow with this tour group was his only shot. Too bad he wasn’t wearing fancier clothing. He was going to stick out like a sore thumb.

  David scrambled out of his hiding place as the last of the tour group—a slim woman in a tight skirt, her face displaying too much lipstick and mascara—turned a corner.

  He was about to follow her when a hand hooked on to his shoulder and spun him around.

  Oh, geez, this is the end, he thought.

  “Hold it right there,” said a man in khakis with a sergeant’s stripes and bad breath. “Caught you, didn’t I?”

  David couldn’t speak.

  The sergeant wiped a hand over his thin lips, his hawklike eyes seemingly staring into the depths of David Lightman’s soul. “You kids think you can get away with anything. You know you’re not supposed to leave the group. Now get going!”

  David couldn’t believe his luck. “Y-yes.. yes, sir, sorry, sir,” he stammered.

  The sergeant let him go. He hobbled after the tour group, who were being led to their bus. He fully expected another heavy hand to fall on him at any moment. He sat in the back of the transport, trying to look innocuous as the tour guide gave a hurried farewell to the group and then raced away.

  An alarm blared.

  A long-faced guy about David’s age turned around.

  “Hey, what’s happening here?”

  “Dunno,” said David stiffly.

  “Who are you? I didn’t see you along on the tour.”

  “I’m a Russian spy, and I gotta get out of here, fast, before they catch me,” said David.

  The guy laughed, “Yeah, and I’m John Riggins, and I’m America’s new secret weapon against you Russkies, so ya better watch out.”

  The transport vehicle jerked, then moved swiftly away.

  In the Crystal Palace, Radar Analyst Adler studied his map. Oh, shit, he thought. Not again. What the hell was going on in this world?

  “Twenty-two Typhoon-class subs out of the port at Petropavlovsk, rounding the bend at Nordkapp, heading for deep ocean,” he reported. “Bearing zero nine five degrees.”

  Captain Newt was behind him, obviously impressed. “Boy, it looks like Ivan’s getting ready to tear someone a new asshole.”

  Adler said, “Yeah.. I’m beginning to feel like Custer’s bugler.”

  Inside his office, John McKittrick leaned over his desk with Paul Richter, studying a large spread of wiring diagrams. Pat Healy walked through the door, and he glanced up.

  “Hey, if it isn’t good news, I don’t want to hear it.” he said, seeing her grim expression.

  “They lost the kid,” she said. “He got away.”

  “What?”

  Richter paid no notice, his eyes flicking desperately over the charts.

  Pat said, “They’ve put out an all-state, all-points bulletin and, of course, they’ll get him. But for the moment, he’s loose.”

  McKittrick stared back down at the wiring charts, and thought about the mess the kid and whoever he was working with had made of his programs, his machines.

  He glanced out his window to where the army of analysts and technicians worked frantically at their posts.

  He spoke through gritted teeth: “I hope they blow the little bastard away!”

  On the rig’s radio, a country and western songstress wailed about a cheating lover.

  The grizzled old trucker stared straight ahead onto the black snake of macadam winding up the steep grade. David watched him shift repeatedly.
/>   The tractor-trailer had picked him up on the interstate, and most of the hour’s ride had been spent in silence. The old guy just seemed to be enjoying having somebody on the seat beside him, David Lightman thought. What a job, sitting behind a wheel all day, watching a painted white line progress along the highway!

  The song changed to “Convoy.” How appropriate!

  David had been sitting, thinking about things, aware now that he had irrevocably changed. The world just couldn’t look the same anymore, not after this crazy weekend. It was a lot more complicated than he’d figured.

  Up till now, David Lightman had considered himself a mistake, an outcast, an outsider, dancing on the perimeter of things, making faces at the funny goings-on inside the loony bin. But now he realized that he was one of the inmates—had always been one of the inmates—and the struggle going on was his struggle as well. He was a part of everything, and in his arrogance and stupidity he had set in motion a sequence of events that could not only end his little parade but snuff out the lives of millions of other people.

  Only because he’d wanted to play a stupid war game! Sting had warned him, but he’d felt invulnerable. Why oh why couldn’t he have gone through the usual adolescent-rebellion phase of running away, or throwing up a couple of six packs of beer on his father’s shoes, or doing a lot of drugs? It sure was a lot safer than thumbing his nose at society by fooling around with North America’s defense computer.

  If they made a movie about him, his fame would beat out Mick Jagger and James Dean for sure. Yeah, he could become a teen heartthrob movie star or even a rock star now.

  That is, if he and the world survived.

  The post-holocaust world would have a song dedicated just to David Lightman: “You Dropped the Bomb on Me,” by the Gap Band.

  Ha ha ha, thought David Lightman dourly.

  “How come you ain’t got no bag or nothin’?” the trucker asked him suddenly, after maneuvering his shift and clutch.

  David started. “Oh! Uhm... someone swiped it. Uh... how many gears does this thing have?”

  “Fourteen speeds,” the man said. His eyes squinted suspiciously, deepening the creases in his craggy face. “You ain’t a runaway, are you?”