After two days it had been obvious the situation was turning into a siege. The commanders were seeking sanction to use greater force, and the whole thing threatened to become a horrible mess.
They came to a room Maura recognized. It was the physics lab. But much had changed.
It was much bigger than she remembered; evidently two or three of the center’s rooms had been knocked together. And it was brighter; the ceiling was coated with big fluorescent strips that dumped hard flat colorless light over everything, creating a
shadowless, pearly glow.
The room was ringed by soldiers and white-coated staff, monitoring, recording. There was a sharp stink of ozone, and a sour compound of sweat and feces and urine.
And, replacing the high-school type science instruments she had seen in here before, there was now a much more substantial array of gear. There were instruments of all kinds, mostly unrecognizable to her, all over the lab. Ducts and cables ran everywhere over the floor, taped together.
The main item was some kind of torus, a fat ring of metal tightly wrapped with wire coils, maybe fifteen feet across; it sat on a series of wooden trestles. Tubes led off to other assemblies of gear, one of them the crude Tinkerbell containment cage that Maura remembered from her last visit. And there was a new cage, a mass of wire and metal rods, growing out of the middle of the torus.
Suffusing everything was the bright glow of the object in the original wire cage: the Tinkerbell anomaly, still dipping and darting through the air. Its light was unearthly, easily casting shadows that could not be dispersed even by the powerful fluo-rescents above.
And, through the little jungle of equipment, the children moved.
They stepped carefully, carrying bits of gear to and fro, their childish gait uncertain. Three of them sat on the floor, surrounded by white equipment boxes, eating what looked like hamburgers. In a corner, a couple of kids were sleeping, curled up together. One, a dark little girl, had her thumb in her mouth. All the kids were wearing what looked like nightclothes — loose tunics and trousers, no shoes or socks. The pajamas were grubby, sometimes torn, but neatly stitched with blue circles.
The children looked ill to Maura, but maybe that was an artifact of the hard fluorescent light.
She said to Dan, “I take it we gave them what they wanted, what Anna demanded.”
“It was here in twenty-four hours, up and working twelve hours later.”
“Tell me what it’s for.”
“It’s a factory. As we thought. It makes quark nuggets, droplets of quark matter. The children are growing positively charged nuggets through neutron capture.” He pointed to the original cage, the darting Tinkerbell light. “Small nuggets bud off the big mother in there. We don’t know how that happens, incidentally; we thought that to make quark nuggets you would need to slam heavy ions together at near light speed in a particle accelerator.”
“Evidently not,” Maura said. “How small is small?”
“The size of an atomic nucleus. The nuggets come spraying out of the cage and pass through the magnetic spectrometer — that box over there — where a magnetic field separates them out from other products. We have Cerenkov radiation detectors and time-of-flight detectors to identify the nuggets. Then the nuggets pass through that device—” a long boxy tube “ — which is a linear electrostatic decelerator. At least we think it is. The children modified it. The quark nuggets emerge from the cage at relativistic velocities, and the decelerator—”
“Slows them down.”
“Right. Then the nuggets enter the torus, the big doughnut over there. That contains heavy water, which is water laced with deuterium, heavy hydrogen. The quark nuggets are fed protons to make sure they have a positive charge. That’s important because a negatively charged nugget would—”
“Cause a runaway. I remember.”
“The quark nuggets go on to another magnetic bottle, at the end of the line there, and they are allowed to grow by absorbing neutrons. In the process energy is released, as gamma rays.”
“And that’s how a power plant would be built.”
“Maura, this apparatus is already producing power, but not at useful levels yet.”
A taller girl walked through the room, giraffe thin. She turned, unexpectedly, and looked at Maura.
“Anna,” Maura said to Dan.
“Yeah. And there’s Tommy Tybee.” He was one of the three eating.
“We’re feeding them?”
Dan eyed her. “Of course we are. We haven’t yet reached the point where we are prepared to starve out children. Anyhow it’s siege psychology. The trick-cyclist types here are trying to keep up a line of dialogue with the kids; the food, three or four times a day, is one way. And the kids get what they want: junk food, soda, candy.”
“Not so healthy.”
“Not a green vegetable in sight. But I think the consensus is we’ll fix their health later.” He pointed. “The troopers even brought in a Porta-john. The kids don’t wash much, though. And not a damn one of them will clean her teeth.
“Here’s the deal. We don’t get to cross this perimeter.” A blue line, crudely sketched in chalk, ran across the polished floor. It looked to Maura like a complete ring, running all the way around the equipment and the children’s encampment. “We put food and stuff outside the line. Anna, or one of the others, collects it.”
“What happens if we cross the line?”
“We don’t know. The goons haven’t tried yet. They know what happened to that care worker. The bullet from the future.”
“The kids must sleep…”
“In shifts.” He pointed to the little huddle of sleeping forms. “Even now. They always have lookouts. And they move in clusters. It wouldn’t be possible to snatch one without others seeing, being close enough to react.” He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “There are some military-college types analyzing the patterns of the kids’ behavior. Turns out it’s very sophisticated. They work as if they are a single unit, but you don’t hear any of them giving commands or directing the others.”
“Then how? Telepathy?”
Dan shrugged. “They are all supersmart. Maybe they can all figure out the solution to this dynamic tactical problem. Maybe they just know.” He paused. “But it’s eerie to watch, Ms. Della. You can see the collective way they move. Like a pack.”
“Not human.”
“I guess not.”
The atmosphere here was one of tension and suspicion. An image came into her mind of Homo sapi children sitting around a fire, talking fast and fluidly, making fine tools and bows and arrows, surrounded by a circle of baffled and wary Neanderthal adults.
There was a sudden commotion on the other side of the lab: a brief scuffle, voices raised.
Somebody, an adult civilian, had stepped inside the blue chalk perimeter of the children’s domain. A couple of soldiers were reaching for him, weapons at their waist, but the intruder was out of reach.
“Oh, Christ,” Maura said.
It was Bill Tybee.
Little Torn came running out of the group of burger-munching kids, thin legs flashing. He ran straight to his father and clung to his legs, as if that were all that mattered, as if he were just some ordinary kid, and here was his father home from a day’s work.
Bill kneeled down. “You’ve got to come with me now, Tom. It’s over now. We’ll go back home, and wait for Mommy.”
As his father gently coaxed, Tom, clinging, was weeping loudly.
All around the room, Maura saw, weapons were being primed.
The girl Anna came forward now. Bill tensed, but let her approach the boy. Anna laid her own thin hand on Tom’s head. “Tom? You can go with your father if you want. You know that.”
Tom’s eyes were brimming pools of tears. His head tipped up; he looked from Anna to his father and back again. “I don’t want you to go, Dad.”
“But we both have to go.” Maura heard the effort Bill was making to keep his voice level. “Don’t you see?
Everything will be fine. Your room is still there, just the way you left it.”
“No. Stay here.”
“I can’t.” Bill’s voice was breaking. “They are sending me away. The soldiers. I have to go now. And you have to come with me.”
“No—”
The girl stepped back. “Let him go, Mr. Tybee.”
Maura knew what was coming. Dread gathering blackly, she pushed forward; she got to the perimeter chalk line before she was stopped by a burly trooper. She called, “Bill. Come out of there.”
Bill grabbed the boy and straightened up, clutching Tom against his chest. “He’s my son. I can’t stand any more of this. Jesus, don’t any of you understand that?”
Maura said, as harshly as she could, “You have to let him go, Bill”
“No!” It was barely a word, more a roar of anger and pain. Holding Tom, Bill pulled away from Anna and tried to step out of the circle.
There was a flash.
Bill fell, screaming, grabbing at his leg.
Tom, released, tumbled; two children caught him and hauled him back to the center of the lab, out of reach.
Bill was on the ground, his lower right leg reduced to a mass of smashed flesh, shards of bone, a few tatters of cloth. A burly trooper in heavy body armor took a step forward, over the chalk line. He grabbed Bill around the waist — Maura heard the whir of hydraulics — and he hauled Bill bodily out of the blue circle, out of the room.
A trooper jumped on a table — a sergeant, Maura realized. “Let’s clear the room now, people. Let’s keep it orderly.”
“My God,” Dan Ystebo said.
Maura said, “Another bullet from the future?”
“The flash came from the bottle.” He pointed at the magnetic bottle at the end of the quark-nugget production line. “They shot him with a quark nugget.” He laughed, his voice strained. “They don’t need help from downstream any more.”
A trooper approached; they were hustled out of the room. But as she left, Maura couldn’t shut out of her head the sound of two people screaming: Bill Tybee, in the care of the paramedics, fighting to stay conscious; and his son, Tom, torn between warm past and chill future, a future he already knew his father couldn’t share.
And she knew, now, there were few options left.
Maura and Dan were restricted to a bunker a couple of miles from the center itself.
It was comfortable here: air-conditioned, clean, orderlies to serve coffee to the representative and her companion. But in the big central command, control, and communications room — C Cubed, as the military types called it — there was an air of tension.
Even though the target, monitored from a hundred angles, was just a group of eleven children, still confined to their blue-chalk circle. Just children: working, sleeping, eating, even playing. Eleven spindly, unwashed kids.
The first countermeasure was invisible.
When it was initiated some of the children — Maura counted them, four, five, six — fell down immediately. Maura could see them vomiting, and one little girl had a dark stain spreading over her backside as her bowels loosened. They were clutching their stomachs and crying — zoom in on twisted faces.
. Anna hauled the little ones into the big new cage they had built at the center of the heavy-water torus. As soon as they were inside the cage the children’s retching seemed to stop, and they immediately calmed. Anna sat the smallest girl on her lap and stroked her sweat-tangled hair.
Soon all the children were inside the cage, sitting or standing or lying. Anna led them in singing what sounded like a nursery rhyme.
“So much for that,” Dan said.
“What was it?”
“Deer savers,” he said. “Like on the hood of your car. Infrasound — very low frequency stuff. If you tune it right you can cause disorientation, nausea, even diarrhea. The FBI have been using it for years.”
“Good God almighty.”
“Every conspiracy nut knows about it. It was the best hope, in my opinion.”
“Hope of what?”
“Of a peaceful conclusion to this mess. But it didn’t work. Look at them. As soon as they got inside that cage of theirs they were immune. The cage is a barrier against infrasound.”
“Yes, and what else does it do?”
“I have a feeling we’ll find out. So… what next?”
Next turned out to be an invasion.
They kept the infrasound turned on for twelve hours. At least that kept the children trapped in their cage of steel and wire. Some of the kids managed to sleep, but there was no food in there, no water, no sanitation.
Then the troopers went in, eleven of them in their exo-suits: strictly SIPEs, for Soldier Integrated Protective Ensemble. They walked with a stiff, unnatural precision. Over each trooper’s head was a complex, insectile mask: a totally contained respiratory system, night-vision goggles, a heads-up display, even cute little sensors that would aim weapons the way the soldier happened to be looking.
Eleven supersoldiers, one for each superkid, stomping through grade-school corridors. Maura wondered what the troopers were feeling, how they had been briefed — how they were supposed to deal with this personally, even supposing they were successful.
In the event they didn’t even reach the lab.
Maura actually saw the quark nugget bullets come flying out through the walls of the compound, then falling into the body of the Earth.
Then the retreat began.
Three troopers had died. Two more were injured and had to be carried out by their companions. One came out with her SIPE half disabled, one leg dragging crazily.
The children, fragile-looking stick figures in their tent of wire, didn’t seem to have moved.
Dan Ystebo grunted. “One option left, then.”
It took another ten hours for the final approval to be obtained.
Far beyond her jurisdiction, Maura Della was nevertheless consulted by administration officials. She was invited to take part by e-presence at security meetings in the White House family theater. The attention was flattering, the weight of the decision overwhelming.
Before she made her final recommendation she took time out, went and sought out a shower room, stood in the jet for long minutes with the dial turned to its hottest, and the air filled up with sauna steam.
She hadn’t slept for maybe thirty-six hours. She couldn’t remember the last time she had sat down to eat. She had no idea how well her mind was functioning.
But this was, it seemed, a battlefield. The front line. And you don’t get much sleep on the battlefield…
Open journal. March 8,2012.
It’s clear that whether she meant it or not, Anna’s briefly sketched prospectus — a new social order devised by the Blue children — has finally crystallized hostility to them, even more than the physical threat they represent. Nobody is about to submit to an ideology drawn up by a bunch of swivel-eyed kids. And underlying that is an inchoate fear that even considering the proposals will somehow lead to a transfer of actual control to the children.
After all, what were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but triumphs of a centralized, planning, “scientific” elite? It seems to me that the human race simply isn’t advanced enough yet to be able to trust any subset of itself with the power to run the lives of the rest.
That isn’t to say that in all parts of the planet the response will be the same. Maybe some deranged totalitarian asshole is trying to recruit local Blue kids to prop up his lousy regime even now. And even some politically advanced parts of the world might not find the children’s proposals quite as instinctively repelling as Americans. The French, for example, have an instinct for centralization that dates back to Colbert in the seventeenth century. As a visiting American I have been bemused to observe how their senior people work, top managers trained in the grandes ecoles gliding between positions as ministerial advisers and captains of industry.
Not in America, though. America was after all built on the belief that cen
tralized control is in principle a bad thing. And what about democracy? In fact I would be deeply suspicious of anybody, any stern Utopian, who advocated handing over power to any elite, however benevolent.
But I suspect there is a still deeper fear, even an instinct, that lies buried under the layers of rationalization. Even in my own heart.
It may be that these children are in some sense superior to the Homo sapiens stock from which they emerged. Maybe they could run the world better than any human; maybe a world full of Blues would be an infinitely better place, a step up.
Maybe. But as I was elected to serve the interests of a large number of Hsap — and as a proud Hsap myself — I’m not about to sit around and let these Blues take my planet away.
If this final solution is turned down now, presumably further military options will be discussed, rehearsed, tried out, in escalating severity. Maybe we will, in the end, come back to this point again, the unleashing of the fire. But by then it could be too late.
Time is the key.
But all this is rationalization. I have to decide whether to destroy eleven American children. That is the bottom line.
I did not enter politics to be involved in this kind of operation. But who did? And I have learned that leadership is, more often than not, the art of choosing the least worst among evils.
Always assuming we still have a choice.
Learning to live with myself after this is going to be interesting.
She turned off her shower. The steam dispersed, the air cleared, and she was instantly cold.
Once again she stood with Dan Ystebo in the C Cubed center. But the place was silent now save for the soft hiss of the air-conditioning, the whirr of the cooling fans of the equipment.
The various instruments monitoring the children’s physical state, their heartbeat and respiration and temperature, and measuring the temperature and air composition, and the electromagnetic fields and particles crisscrossing the rebuilt physics lab — all of this was ignored. Everybody was watching the softscreens, the visual images of the center’s exterior, the children in their cage.
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