"Why don't I just quit?"
"If you like."
He scratched his head for a moment and pulled a face.
"Well . . . I suppose I don't really have much of a choice any more. When I signed the papers to join Jericho, they said it was for the duration. Even if I decided I didn't want to work on the project any longer, I can't see my being let out to walk the streets, not knowing what I know now. So . . ." he shrugged, "might as well press on. At least I'm busy. Guess I'd go nuts otherwise."
They stopped again outside the clubhouse. Dance music from Brunnermont's own Marine combo was coming through the open window.
"Is that really the only reason?" she asked. Aub reflected for a while.
"Not really," he admitted. "There is something else . . . kinda difficult to put into words, you know. It's just that I still feel the old Brad down there underneath somewhere. I just can't see him letting Jericho be used for real. Somehow there has to be a big bluff behind all his bravado . . . something he's figured out that he hasn't told even me about. All the time I was feeding him the dope on what was happening at Berkeley, he never once let me get implicated . . . and we didn't really know each other then. But he came across right from the start as the kinda guy you can trust—know what I mean? I felt I could trust him then, and I was right. It may sound crazy, but I still feel I can now."
"If you knew how much I needed to hear you say that." A shadow of her old smile brightened her face a fraction. "Come on—let's go inside. I'll allow you to buy me a drink and, if you're very good, to have the honor of a dance."
Chapter 21
One year and one month had gone by since Jericho was conceived. Deep in its rocky womb the fetus was now fully formed, its nuclear heart beating strongly. A miniature flying armada from Washington converged on Brunnermont, bringing the fathers to witness the birth.
In fact, a number of test firings of the J-bomb had already been successfully made; this was to be the first to be at all public.
As a prelude, Morelli conducted the deputation of Pentagon officials and Army, Navy, and Air Force senior officers on a guided tour of the restricted, lowermost levels of the complex. He showed them the duplicated system of fusion reactors and generating equipment, capable of sustaining all the machines in Brunnermont independently of outside sources of power for years, although under normal circumstances demands could be met from the national distribution grid. He explained that the amount of matter that was actually fed via the beam into the annihilation chamber of the J-reactor was really quite small; it was the technique employed for modulating, controlling, and focusing the delivery of the return energy through hi-space—in order to achieve adequate accuracy of aiming the weapon—that required such enormous amounts of power.
The visitors inspected the battery of accelerators and massive electromagnets inside which the beam originated and followed the transmission tube, wreathed in its elaborate sheath of coils and coolant pipes, that conveyed it into the sphere of the J-reactor itself—there to be somehow squeezed by forces they were unable to comprehend out of the very universe. The party's mood grew somber. Hardened as these men were by daily exposure to the harsh realities of systematically engineered methods of mass destruction, they found themselves daunted and apprehensive as the full meaning of the things they saw on every side percolated through to their understanding.
Finally they saw the "brain" by which the entire operation of this awesome ensemble was coordinated and directed—the computer room where the three mighty BIACs ( mighty in performance, that is; each machine occupied just two six-foot-high cabinets) presided over several hundred assorted slave processors and cubicle after cubicle of attendant electronics.
The operation of every component and subsystem that went to make up this aggregate was controlled ultimately from a single nerve center designated simply CONTROL ROOM. This was where all the data and control channels from every part of the vast machine were finally brought together in tiers of instrument panels and monitor screens, and where the command interface with the BIACs was situated. From here, every facet of system operation—control of the reactors and generator banks, beam modulation, target identification and location, direction of the fire-control computers—was orchestrated by just two human operators. The Control Room could, in an emergency, be sealed off from the inside, and with it the critical sections of the weapons system. Thus, regardless of what went on in other parts of the Brunnermont complex, unimpaired operation of Jericho could be guaranteed at any time.
The raised gallery that gave access to the Control Room looked down over the panorama of the Operational Command Floor—the new war room of the Western Democratic Alliance. In this brightly illuminated setting of communications consoles and thickly carpeted surgical cleanliness, enormous mural displays presented the global picture that was revealed from the combined inputs of a network of orbital and ground-based surveillance systems, the interconnected radar and early-warning chains of a score of nations, high-flying robot drones above the Siberian tundra and the Gobi Desert, and ships dotted all the way from Spitsbergen to the Ross Sea. From these surroundings of superficial calm and tranquillity, the integrated war machine of the Western powers could be unleashed in minutes. This was where the men from Washington and the observers sent by the governments of Europe, Russia, Australia, and Japan eventually assembled to see the end-product of Jericho in action.
Clifford and Aub had taken up their positions inside the Control Room, leaving Morelli to attend to the guests. While Morelli was describing the various facilities that were available on the Operational Command Floor, they put the system through a routine checkout drill. Everything was working fine.
The first item on the agenda was a demonstration of the resolving power of the Mark III detector to show how it was used for target registration; also it would give the spectators an insight to the meaning of dynamic real-time control via BIAC interaction between the operator and the machine.
"Just to recap for a moment on some of the things I said earlier, every piece of matter in the universe gives rise to hi-radiation that appears instantly at every point in space." Morelli spoke in a loud voice to make sure that his words carried to the back of the crowd of attentive faces arrayed before him. "Right at this moment, hi-radiation is pervading this room—radiation that is being generated in the mass of Earth, on the Sun, in Jupiter, in every star in our galaxy and every galaxy in the universe." He turned slowly to take in the fascinated expressions all around.
"This hi-radiation that originates from objects large and small, near and far, can be made to produce a measurable response by means of the instrument that you have just seen. The intensity of this radiation falls off rapidly with distance from its source, in spite of its traveling instantly between points in ordinary space, but it does carry information from which certain characteristics of the source object can be reconstructed. The amount of information that comes from each source also becomes less the farther away the source is.
"This means that although the detector in theory receives hi-wave information from every object in the universe at the same time, in practice the amount that is contributed from beyond comparatively small distances . . . at our present state of the art, a couple of hundred thousand miles or so . . . is so small that you can neglect it. There are exceptions to that—for instance the Sun and some other bodies appear abnormally 'bright' for their distance—but by and large what I've said is true. Any questions so far?"
"Just one." The speaker was a tall, swarthy man wearing the uniform of a Vice Marshal of the United States of Europe Air Force. "If I remember correctly, you said earlier that this hi-radiation that exists everywhere gives rise to conventional background energy by a process which, I believe, you called 'secondary interactions.' This background is immeasurably small even on Earth, because by astronomical standards Earth is really very tiny."
"Yes. That's correct."
"Fine. Does this mean then that near other, much more massive astrono
mical bodies, you would see greater amounts of background radiation . . . ones that were readily measurable?"
"Precisely so, and it does happen," Morelli responded. "In fact, the black holes in space have very intense radiation halos. This could never be explained by classical physics, and was one of the things that led to k-theory being recognized in the first place."
"I see. Thank you."
There were no further questions, so Morelli resumed his lecture. "The detector, then, responds to hi-waves that originate, to all intents and purposes exclusively, from objects situated in the nearby regions of space. Now, by some sophisticated processing techniques, we are able to extract from the information they carry, sufficient data to single out one portion of the composite hi-wave signal . . . we can zoom in, if you will, on any region that we care to select out of the whole volume in space that the total signal is coming from. Within limits, that region can be as large or as small as we like. Moreover, from the information that we have extracted, we can derive spacelike solutions to the equations involved, which enable internal and external visual representations of the selected object to be constructed."
"Another question, Professor Morelli," a voice called from the back.
"Yes?"
"What are the limits that you mentioned? What range of sizes of object can you resolve?"
"At the small end it gets worse the farther away the object is . . . also, don't forget, what we're really seeing is a measure of the difference in mass-density between the object and its surroundings. We're not looking at any kind of optically generated image, so you won't see normal visual contrasts and details. What you will see are contrasts in density.
"But to answer your question—if you swallowed a .22 caliber lead bullet, we could pick it up if you were standing a mile away. For an object sitting on the other side of the world—somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean, say—if it were solid steel standing up in air, we could go down to a size of, aw, twenty, twenty-five feet. So, you see, we could identify a tank.
"At the big end, well, we're only limited by the effective range of the detector itself . . . in other words, its sensitivity, since the signals from places that are farther away get smaller. But as I said earlier, there are some quite strong radiators a long way away. Up until about a year ago we did start to make pictures of things such as the Sun—nothing detailed, all you saw were smudges—but that was with an earlier model of the detector. The one we've got here would do a lot better, but I guess we've been too tied up with other things to bother much about taking it further."
A muttering of interest arose as some of the listeners realized for the first time the full potency of the system, if only as a means of surveillance, never mind as a weapon.
"Let's now have a look at some of the things I've been talking about," Morelli said. He gestured upward toward one of the huge screens above the floor. "This screen is coupled to slave off of the main BIAC monitor display in the Control Room. On it you will see an enlarged copy of what the BIAC operator can project on to his own console. Ready, Brad?" He addressed his last words to Clifford, who was following events on one of the monitor screens in the Control Room.
"Ready." Clifford's voice came over the speaker system above the Command Floor. An auxiliary screen, set below and to one side of the main display, showed the two operators in the room above.
"I'll hand the demonstration over to Bradley Clifford at this point, then," Morelli informed the group. "Brad, over to you. I'll leave you to do your own commentating. Okay?"
"Okay." The main display came to life to show the hazy but unmistakable outline of a ship. It was positioned roughly halfway up the screen and was shown broadside; its bulk could be seen clearly floating in the ghostly haze produced by the water. "I've been tracking this ship for the past few minutes now, while Al was talking," Clifford's voice announced. "It's in the eastern part of the North Atlantic, between the Azores and the Bay of Biscay. If you want the exact position it is fifteen degrees thirty-six minutes west, forty-two degrees ten minutes north, course two hundred sixty-one degrees, speed thirty-five knots. From the general outline it's obviously a fairly large carrier, almost certainly one that's involved in the exercises being held in that area this week. If you watch closely, you will see a small dot rise from the left-hand end from time to time. These are aircraft being launched at this instant . . . there goes one now."
The audience had been well prepared with what to expect, but even so, gasps of astonishment and surprise rose around the floor.
"If I close in a little . . ." the shape enlarged, "you should just be able to make out details of the internal structure. In particular, note the brighter parts midships and toward the stern. These are the densest parts of the structure—the engines and propulsion machinery. You may be able to see also just the faintest hairlines of brightness inside the midships engine room. I'm pretty sure that the vessel is nuclear-powered and that those are fuel rods in its reactor. Note also the pinpoints in several compartments farther forward—probably fissile material contained in nuclear warheads that are parts of weapons included in the ship's armory."
The effect upon the watchers of actually being able to gaze inside a ship sailing on the high seas three thousand miles away was overwhelming. To a man they just stood and stared as coherent speech refused to come to their lips. Clifford's lazy, matter-of-fact drawl seemed only to add somehow to the effect.
"Another aircraft is just taking off. This time we'll follow it." A finger of pale orange, larger than the dots seen previously because of the enlarged view, detached itself from the bow of the carrier. The view closed in on the aircraft, and the ship slid rapidly off the bottom edge of the screen. It seemed to gyrate around in space as the viewpoint altered to project it from all angles, finally zooming in to reveal the finely tapered nose and triangular wings.
"Again, the engines show up more distinctively than the rest of the structure," Clifford commented. "Also, it doesn't show up on the screen but I can see through the BIAC a slightly darker cone extending back from the tail. That is the result of the lower density of the exhaust gases. From the data contained in that pattern, we could compute the running temperature of the engines and make a fair guess as to what kind they are." He allowed them a few more seconds to watch the still-climbing aircraft before speaking again.
"You will have noticed that we are managing to track steadily a target that is now moving quite fast. What may not be apparent is that this is all being done completely automatically, without requiring any kind of continuous participation by either of us in here. When I made the decision to follow this target aircraft, I issued a command to the BIAC to lock on and track, using procedural routines that it has already learned. At this moment neither I nor my colleague here, Aubrey Philipsz, is interacting or communicating with the system in any way whatsoever. But as you can see, the target is being tracked and displayed faithfully."
Clifford began warming to his subject, and his voice took on a measure of excitement. "In fact, the system is capable of automatically following thousands of discrete, independent objects simultaneously, objects distributed anywhere within its range of operation. Moreover, I could instruct the machine to inform me when any of those objects reaches some predetermined point in its course—for example, the aircraft that you see is flying eastward now, toward the French coast; I could deposit an instruction to be informed if and when it gets inside one hundred miles of the shore; until that happens, the machine will do all the necessary work and I can forget about it. Similarly, I could command a general surveillance routine, whereby I would be informed of any aircraft or object entering French airspace . . . not just specific targets that I have previously identified, such as the one on the screen. In both those examples, I could, instead of being simply informed, program for the targets to be destroyed automatically. So too for all the other targets that the system is capable of tracking and detecting.
"You will appreciate therefore, gentlemen, that the surveillance
and weapons-guidance capabilities of this machine are in no way limited to the number of events that one human brain can keep track of at any one time. The machine can make most of its decisions for itself, using generalized criteria that I give it. If you like, its functions include the duties of a whole regiment of staff officers."
Clifford then proceeded to conjure up a series of images of places and events taking place all over Earth, which included several examples of the automated facilities he had described. He finished the session by capturing the image of two U.S. spacecraft carrying out a prearranged docking maneuver while in orbit. While this was being shown on the main display, an adjacent screen provided a conventional view of the same sequence, which was picked up by a TV camera aboard one of the craft and transmitted down through the normal channels. The difference was that the conventional picture required a camera to be up there, on the scene of the event; the J-scope didn't.
Then it was Morelli's turn to speak again.
"So much for how we can guide the weapon. Now let us see exactly what the weapon itself can do.
"Hi-radiation gives rise to a secondary effect—conventional radiant energy that exists as a halo around every object you can name. For most objects this secondary radiation is so tiny that it exists more as a mathematical abstraction than anything you could hope to measure . . . but it's there." The faces were by now tense and expectant as the moment of seeing in action the weapon they had heard about for so long drew nearer.
Morelli continued. "In the J-reactor, we in effect amplify enormously what takes place in ordinary matter. The process causes secondary energy to materialize as a halo, which is most intense in the immediate vicinity of the reactor but extends outward . . . getting thinner all the time . . . throughout all of space. Now, the important thing to bear in mind is this. . . ." He paused for a moment to add emphasis. "Although the secondary energy is denser around the reactor, the amount of it is only a small fraction of the total—"
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