Directive 51 d-1

by John Barnes

“Flawless on security issues, Captain Wallace. Not that anyone can prove anything with all the computers down.”

  “True, but good to know.” The captain sat down and gazed straight into his eyes. “And you would not have divulged or published because—?”

  “Because I’m a loyal citizen of this government. I’d be interested as all hell of course and I might have written a book after the war—probably would have—but I wasn’t going to let anything I publish harm us in the struggle, if it comes down to a war between a military-intel-administrative dictatorship and the actual Constitutional government.”

  “You wouldn’t let anything you publish harm our side?”

  “No, I would not. No matter what they show in the movies, not every reporter—”

  The captain grabbed Chris by the lapels and shouted into his face, a long wailing scream, hot breath pouring in through Chris’s gaping mouth and flooding his throat, spittle spraying into his staring eyes. With his nose almost on Chris’s, he bellowed, “And yet you go and publish, and sell it in the marketplace, a book jammed full of lies, that slanders our president and our entire leadership, explains in detail the illegal position of the junta in Athens, directly says the Constitution is at fault, and cannot be called anything but treasonous slander! You run that ridiculous speech that you invented for the president to have given in Pale Bluff, promising to hand over power to the junta! In your own words, this book is exactly intended to harm us in this struggle! What do you have to say for yourself, you lying sack of shit? How much did they pay you to do this, in Athens? ”

  Captain Wallace shook Chris, yanking him back and forth, and repeated the accusations, over and over, screaming and scattering spit over Chris’s face. When he ran out of air he threw Chris back in the chair. “Now, if you really meant that about supporting the legitimate government, you’ll sign these documents!”

  “What if I don’t sign?”

  “What if you don’t sign?” The captain grabbed him by the hair, tilted his face back, and slapped him. “Didn’t you say you were supporting our side? Didn’t you say that?”

  Chris knew he was going to be here for a long time.

  FOUR DAYS LATER. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COL UMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 9:11 A.M. PST. WEDNESDAY. JANUARY 29.

  “So,” Arnie said, turning the page over on the old flip chart, “big windmill with generator here, supplies power to this rotary-quenched spark gap, the high tech of 1915 here today. It’s a big piece of equipment, with a huge capacitance and at high voltage, so we’ll want to keep people far from it. Then we hook it to this oval of old high-tension lines, which will be our antenna. And the result is that we’ve got the biggest, loudest radio transmitter on Earth, by far.

  “Now, in a warehouse, we found four hundred toy telescopes, all metal and glass, which we set up in arrays of fifty, spaced and angled to be looking at space above the antenna. Dark construction paper over the eyepieces like so. We use old surveying transits, sextants, and the almanac to get them aimed perfectly—”

  “Let me guess. It’s a religious ritual,” Graham Weisbrod said. Several Cabinet members chuckled, which made Heather add a few points to their Sycophancy Index, a statistic she’d been making up for some time; Allie, sitting at his elbow, laughed and rubbed Graham’s arm.

  Arnie flushed, and Heather beamed a thought at him: Come on, don’t let the bitch fluster you, she’s trying to fluster you. You’ll have a bucket of beer, and the kid and I will have some milk, and we will joke around about the Sycophancy Index over dinner, and it won’t matter. Arnie seemed to gather himself as if he could hear her. “So this will attract one of the EMP gadgets—whatever they are. From a robot’s-ear view, it’ll be the biggest and most obvious target this side of Jupiter. The toy telescopes that happen to catch the flash will burn holes in their construction paper, so the array will tell us about where the bomb went off, and the recording windup clock here can be coordinated with it.”

  “If you have the telescopes, why do you need the clock?” McIntyre asked.

  “We coordinate them. The EMP will be a huge, unmistakable mark on the disk, but in the few seconds before it, we’ll also be recording the echoes of the radio waves off the object, and with ten accurate chronometers scattered over a few thousand miles, we’ll be able—using graph paper and a lot of hand calculations—to put together what amounts to one good radar image. We’ll have its trajectory, and we’ll be able to solve that trajectory backward and know where it came from.

  “And here’s the kicker. The AM modulator will work off a mechanical-disk recording device—”

  “A record player, Arnie,” Heather said. Even she couldn’t help grinning at that one.

  “Well, yes, it works just like an old-fashioned phonograph, and we’ll be broadcasting that we are using this gadget to identify the source of the EMPs, over and over, and nothing else.”

  McIntyre nodded. “So if it’s a real thinking enemy, or even a medium-good artificial intelligence, it won’t target our big transmitter—it’ll hit something with more value, or hold its fire.”

  “Exactly,” Arnie said. “But if it’s just a machine, no smarter than a bug, as we think it is—well, then it’ll go for the brightest light on the porch. And if it’s just a machine, with no enemy in control of it anymore, then basically there’s no war and we’re just dealing with a leftover mine. No war.”

  Graham nodded. “Thankyou for yourclarity. So if yourexperiment works, we’re facing a system artifact, not an enemy nation or organization—”

  “Well, the experiment works either way. The result will either be consistent with a system artifact or with enemy action—”

  Allie said, “We already know it’s a system artifact, Arnie, your research on that was brilliant and you did it back when you had real computers to work with. What we need is an experiment that proves it.”

  “Proving it is impossible,” Arnie said. “All we can do is marshall more and better evidence. Even if results are completely consistent with a system artifact, it could be an enemy laying low by pretending to be a system artifact. And for that matter something that looks like conscious enemy action might be a system artifact getting lucky. So—”

  “And you want to launch a project this big, and involve the illegal junta in it, when it doesn’t prove anything?” Allie asked. She was sitting very close to Graham, who was looking down at the table. Heather thought, I hope that means he’s at least a little ashamed.

  Heather had tried to steer Graham into approving it without seeing the politics behind it, but that wasn’t going to happen, so she waded in. “What Arnie is proposing is that we try an experiment, predict the results, and see what happens—and because the EMP will happen where we’ll be watching, we’ll see more. It’s not expensive, it mostly uses resources that were just going to crumble in the next few years anyway, and besides if the government in Athens goes in on it with us, and sends observers and scientists, then whether or not we get anything scientifically out of it, it ought to kind of get the ball rolling toward reconciliation.”

  “There’s already been too many gestures of reconciliation,” Allie put in. “If you ask me. Especially with Manckiewicz publishing that so-called Pale Bluff Address that—”

  “That you and I both heard Graham actually say,” Heather said. “Don’t forget that detail. Are you going to put me in jail for remembering it? Whether you approve of it or not, he said it, and it was a door to reconciliation, which—”

  “Door to surrender,” Allie said, looking at McIntyre.

  Weisbrod made a tent with his hands and stared into space. God, I hope that means you’re actually thinking and not trying to impress your aggressive little minion with what a thinker you are, Heather thought, and I wish I didn’t have to worry about that. It just seems so unfair. I never had to worry about that before.

  “Well,” he said, “if you could float the idea past Cameron Nguyen-Peters, through a back channel, then I’d say we wouldn’t want to be the si
de that said no.”

  “But we’re not quite saying we’re going to do it, for sure.”

  “No, I guess we’re not.”

  “Then what if they say the same thing?”

  Weisbrod shrugged. “We’ll consider that situation if it comes up. Right now we can just probe each other about it. My guess is that they won’t want to run the risk of an experiment that is apt to bolster the system-artifact hypothesis.” He smiled at her, and it was a moment where she saw the old Graham. “So I’m saying go ahead because I think we’ll get some cheap propaganda points, and if they agree, we’ll get some slightly more expensive propaganda points. Either way, we come out ahead, and I don’t really think there’s any risk of our being embarrassed.” He glanced around the room and said, “Any dissent?”

  He’s not including Allie’s pouting expression as dissent, Heather thought, that’s something.

  SIX DAYS LATER. OLYMPIA. NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 7:15 P.M. PST. TUESDAY. FEBRUARY 4.

  Because they did not dare use radio anymore, the fastest secure communication these days was via the Bubble Drop: letters written in pencil and wetted with disinfectant were sealed in a glass jar with a nail tied to a piece of copper wire. The jar was degaussed in the Big Ripper, as the Evergreen State physicist who had devised it had dubbed it—a generator-magnet-coil system, driven by a weight descending on a line from a six-story building. Whatever was inside the coil received enough strong, shifting electric and magnetic fields to kill most nanoswarm, and if any of them survived, the field and current surges were enough to cause them to start breeding at the junction of copper and iron. So if an hour after degaussing, no white fuzz was growing where the nail joined the wire, the bottle was pronounced sterile.

  Then Bambi Castro, taking the Stearman on the down-coast mail run to the nine Castles that were aligned with Olympia, would fly the jar a hundred miles or so out into the Pacific, loft a brightly colored paper kite on a five-hundred-foot cotton kite string, and work downward until the plane was just skimming the waves. At that point, she’d toss the jar, tied to the kite string, over the side, where it would drop into the water and act as a sea-anchor to the kite.

  The Stearman would head for land, and a Pacific Fleet Navy helicopter, which had been watching from a safe distance upwind, would swing in at low speed and, using a grapnel on a long rope, grab the kite and begin hauling up, eventually bringing the jar to within a hundred feet of the helicopter, where it would hang until it could be set down on a ship’s deck—not one of the precious nuclear vessels, of course, but one of their still-functioning oil-fueled escorts.

  On shipboard, they’d dip the jar in boiling water and pass it to the carrier in a zipline package. From the carrier it went into a parachute package in an F-35, to be dropped on the golf course at Athens; the F-35 would go on to land on a carrier with the Atlantic Fleet. The whole process was awkward, but it emitted no radio waves, included a reconnaissance of the country, and posed relatively little risk of contaminating the Navy’s precious few remaining ships, planes, and helicopters.

  The return process involved a jar launched on a hot-air balloon from the Georgia coast, snagged by a helicopter, and walked through the same process, with one package of mail eventually being dropped by parachute onto Gray Field at Fort Lewis.

  “And that’s what’s amazing about this,” Arnie explained. “Cam must have written back within an hour or two of getting the message, which means he must have put everything together in that time. He’s gotta be pretty serious about this.”

  Hello, everyone,

  After discussion with the scientific staff, we’ve agreed that the experimental attempt to attract and study an EMP weapon (which we believe to be directed enemy fire, and you believe to be a sort of massive leftover Daybreak booby trap) would be thoroughly worthwhile. Given the damage certain to be sustained by remaining electrical systems in any location where this happens, we propose the former NREL experimental wind turbine development area at Mota Eliptica, about 150 miles east of Lubbock, would be a relatively harmless site that has adequate power generation and high-tension-line capacity; the construction and observation could be supervised from a main office in Pueblo, Colorado, where, as you note, there is already appropriate Federal office space, and it can be another joint activity under the Federal Reconstruction Information Service (or whatever we end up calling it) that we have already agreed to share.

  Hopefully in the process we’ll be able to locate and attract some surviving engineers and scientists from the many pre-Daybreak Rocky Mountain defense and scientific facilities.

  We’ll go halves with you on project cost and equipment; we’re assembling a team of half a dozen scientists and engineers who will take the train overland to Pueblo as soon as we know you’re coming as well. We’ll be glad to have Dr. Arnold Yang as project leader; I trust his integrity completely.

  Naturally we understand that you believe that the experiment will turn up evidence indicating that the device producing EMPs is wholly robotic. Obviously, we think something different will be the result. It seems to me that would be all the more reason to run the experiment.

  A target date of June 30 for starting up the attraction device would give everyone time to install as much anti-EMP protection as we reasonably can and to alert the Castles and the independent cities.

  We actually already have constructed a few crude recording-radar sets (ones that make a paper record) very similar to what Dr. Yang proposes, and we will dedicate as many of them as we can spare to this project. I sincerely hope we will be able to cooperate on this issue, and on many other issues in the future.

  Warm regards,

  Cameron Nguyen-Peters

  Coordinator, Temporary National Government

  “We know it has to be a trick,” Allie said, glancing at Graham, “so the question is what kind of trick. It looks to me like they’re turning it into military intelligence gathering, which means implicitly we’re agreeing to get involved in their war against the Unfindable Enemy. I don’t know how we’ll back out of this—”

  Arnie said, “This is exactly what we wanted, and I don’t see why we don’t just accept it.”

  The room felt freezing cold, despite the big fire built against the February damp.

  Softly, Heather said, “Graham, you said you didn’t want to be the one who said no.”

  “And I don’t,” he said. “And I won’t be. Make it happen. Arnie, you’re the project leader—you’ll be in the field; you’ll report to Heather, since she was already going to set up the reconstruction research offices in Pueblo. Allie, this is one where I’m not taking your advice. General McIntyre, find a smart intelligence officer to send along so that whatever they learn by working with us, we know that they learned it. Don’t stop them and for god’s sake don’t sabotage the project, but I want to know what they’re getting out of this.” He looked around the room with the face of a man who not only can’t please everyone, but can’t please anyone. “That’s a decision, people; make it happen or show me why it’s wrong.”

  When he left, a couple of minutes later, he was talking intently with McIntyre; Allie was on his arm, working it pretty hard, Heather thought. Meow, she reminded herself. But I’m glad to see her lose one, and if I’m a cat, she’s still a bitch.

  She felt something flutter as she stood, and instinctively reached down to touch her belly.

  “Kick?” Arnie asked.

  “Big one.”

  “He’s trying to tell us,” Arnie said, “to get things in order before he gets here.”

  She gave Arnie the raspberry, and the two of them went to a gossipy lunch; at least he seemed to be recovering from the whole Allie mess nowadays, and a year or two down in Texas playing with the physicists would probably mend whatever was left of the crack in his heart.

  But walking home, trying to get her mind on the little bit of packing she needed to do, she couldn’t help thinking that Arnie had a point about putting things
in order. The little kicker gave her another feathery touch, and she thought, Kid, Mommy had better move you someplace before I get too big and off-balance for the running, jumping, and fighting end of things. Hang on tight; I think this ride might get a little wild.

  THE NEXT DAY. OLYMPIA. NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON.) ABOUT 8:00 P.M. PST. WEDNESDAY. FEBRUARY 5.

  Graham Weisbrod looked tired and old in the flaring light of the oil lamp; a Renaissance painter might have loved the way the gold-yellow light flickered and played on his face, but Heather was saddened by every wrinkle and sag. This job is eating him alive.

  Graham smiled as if it took an effort, but he seemed to mean it. “Heather. God, thanks for coming. I need someone to tell me I’m full of shit.”

  “At least some things haven’t changed.”

  “Like a beer?”

  “Um, I know I’m not showing yet, but—”

  “Not showing and not European, either,” he said. “How about pineapple juice in a can?”

  “Oh, that’s better anyway.”

  “I know—I’m hoarding it—that’s why I offered you beer first!” He grinned, handed her a can from a cooler beside him, and poured himself a glass of beer.

  Maybe he’s his old self again. Maybe he called me here to talk about getting his act together.

  The pineapple juice was wonderful; she hadn’t tasted any in months and really hadn’t expected to taste any ever again. Graham looked pretty blissed at the taste of cold beer, as well. Finally, he said, “All right, I’m being a coward here, Heather. I have something difficult and painful to discuss, and I seem to have acquired several roomfuls of sycophants, not least the First-Lady-To-Be.”

  “You’re marrying her?”

  His nod was curt and challenging.

  “Congratulations.” It seemed the best thing to say. “You’ve been alone way too long.”