"I'm not quite with you there, Professor," one of the listeners came in. "Could you clarify that please?"
"Think of it as heat," Morelli suggested. "A red-hot needle is at a high temperature, but doesn't hold much heat. The water in the boilers of a power station is not as hot, but it contains a far larger amount of heat. Using that analogy, the energy in the vicinity of the reactor is more intense . . . 'hotter,' but when you add up all the 'colder' energy that's distributed all through billions of cubic light-years of space, you find that the amount is greater. In other words, forget the 'temperature'; most of the energy—most by far—that the reactor produces is spread out thinly across space . . . when you add it all up. Is that clearer?"
"Thank you, yes."
"Fine." Morelli took a long breath. "The situation I've just described applies when the reactor is running with the focusing system switched off. By bringing the focusing system in, we can force all of that energy to materialize not all through space, but concentrated inside one tiny volume. One way of visualizing it is to imagine the mass consumed in the reactor as being converted into its energy equivalent and instantly appearing elsewhere. The effect is the same as that of a hydrogen bomb that suddenly appears out of nowhere. A big difference is that the mass conversion can be a lot higher than in an H-bomb, so we can produce effects far more devastating . . . not that there'd be a lot of point in that."
Morelli turned and gazed expectantly up at the main display. Scores of pairs of eyes followed his, tense . . . waiting.
This time the screen showed a normal TV transmission. It was a view from the air, looking down from high altitude on a desolate Arctic waste of snow, bleak rocky shorelines, inlets of sea and ice floes, with a range of broken, jagged mountains visible in the middle distance. An unfamiliar voice came over the loudspeaker.
"This is Foxtrot Five to Bluebird Control. Altitude fifty thousand feet, on course, target range two-two miles, bearing one-six-zero degrees. All systems checking positive."
Another voice replied:
"Bluebird Control. Dead on time Foxtrot Five. Maintain course and follow Plan Baker Two. Repeat—Baker Two. Redsox reports you're on the air now. Reception good. Countdown on schedule. Acknowledge."
"Foxtrot Five acknowledging. Wilco—Baker Two."
"You are looking at an area reserved as a military testing ground on Somerset Island, in the far north of Canada," Clifford's voice informed them. "The view is being sent back from an Air Force RB6 flying clear of the target area. The target is the high peak located near the center of the group now in the center of the picture. You might just be able to see a small patch of red against the background just above and slightly to the right of the target peak. That's a large marker balloon for visual identification.
"Back here, we have been starting up the reactor's beam energizers. I am about to switch on the beam into the J-reactor. . . ." A pause of a few seconds followed. "Not far below where you are standing, the beam is now on—pouring energy out across the universe. I have already preset the space coordinates of the target into the programs that are running in the fire-control computers. All I have to do now is activate the focusing modulators to direct the return energy on to some specific point. As soon as I do that, the fire-control programs will take over, and direct the concentrated energy to the coordinates supplied."
He waited for a moment, allowing time for the suspense to build up. "I am priming the focusing system to self-activate automatically and slave to the fire control programs ten seconds from . . . now." A numerical display, superimposed upon the target picture, appeared and began reeling off the seconds.
Nine . . . Eight . . . seven . . .
"Note that from now on I play no further part. All operations are automatic."
Three . . . two . . . one . . .
The whole room gasped in unison. The entire central portion of the mountain range vanished in a blaze of pure whiteness. The familiar, sinister shape of a slowly swelling and rising fireball rose up out of the maelstrom that erupted where the whiteness had been. A writhing column of fire and vapors climbed up through the clouds and began spreading outward to form a boiling canopy that blotted out the surrounding landscape.
"Holy Moses, what was that?" yelled the voice of Foxtrot Five.
"Search me," came another voice on the circuit. "Musta been a ground burst. There was nothing coming in on radar."
"Cut the cackle, Foxtrot Five. You're still alive."
"Wilco."
In the next half-hour, Clifford repeated the performance on a series of other preprepared targets, including the burned-out shell of a shuttle booster that had been orbiting high above Earth for over ten years. In each case the results were as spectacular as the first. The shuttle booster demonstration showed that Jericho could be controlled right down to destructive levels that were far lower than the minimum unleashed by a thermonuclear explosion; it was vaporized in the equivalent of less than one hundred tons of TNT.
For his finale, Clifford brought up views of five different targets on separate screens, the locations being scattered across hundreds of miles of Arctic wilderness. Then he announced that, as already prearranged, ten dummy warheads would be launched toward various parts of the North American continent from orbiting space vehicles simulating ORBS satellites. As the mock attack was set in motion, the trajectories of the warheads were reported on an additional screen hooked into the regular tracking network.
"The fire-control computers have been fed the coordinates of the ground targets," he announced. "They are also being updated continually with the instant-to-instant positions of the incoming missiles, which are now being tracked automatically by the surveillance system. What I am about to do is activate the focusing system and set the fire-control routine to direct the weapon on to each of the targets in turn. It will fire on each target for exactly one millionth of a second. Focus will activate ten seconds from . . . now."
The countdown ticked by in a way that was by now familiar.
As zero flashed up, all five targets exploded together; at the same instant all traces of the attacking missile salvo were lost. The action had been effortless.
A stunned silence had taken over the room. Ashen faces registered the dawning of the first full realizations of what all this meant. The five menacing mushrooms were still spreading across the screens when Clifford's voice sounded again, still cool and dispassionate.
"Allow me to put what you have just seen into perspective. In the last demonstration, the J-reactor was operating at low power only, and the exposure time per target was one microsecond. With moderate power and a longer exposure, it would be perfectly feasible to wipe out a large city. Simple calculations show that, without taxing the system, one hundred selected enemy cities could, once the relevant coordinates had been fed into the fire-control programs, be totally destroyed in just over one hundredth of a second."
Hardly a word was spoken as one by one the screens went blank and the machines were shut down. Clifford emerged from the Control Room and looked down from the raised gallery over the silent upturned faces. His cheeks were hollow from the strain of more than a year of unbroken work, his eyes dark-rimmed from lack of sleep.
"You demanded my knowledge and my skills to be harnessed for the ends of war," he said. "You have them."
He said no more. There was nothing more to say.
Chapter 22
After testing the intentions of the West with nearly twelve months of escalating provocation, the Eastern Alliance nations had satisfied themselves that no serious attempts would be forthcoming to frustrate their designs in India. The Afrab and Chinese forces fighting on the frontiers, committed originally to defend the so-called People's Uprising, gradually assumed the role of regular armies of invasion. The internecine squabbles within the Indian nation were forgotten as rival civil factions united and turned to face the common threat, but by that time the country's cohesive power was draining fast.
Afrab armies took over all of the no
rthwest plains and advanced southward to occupy the Kathiawar Peninsula, little more than two hundred miles from Bombay. In the east, the Chinese reached the delta of the Mahanadi River, and pushed along the basin of the Ganges to take Lucknow and Kanpur. Delhi was thus left precariously between the closing jaws of the pincer with both of its main arteries of communication severed, all the time becoming more isolated as the potential source of relief was compressed into the southern half of the subcontinent.
By then every armed satellite deployed by the West was being marked by at least two hostile shadowers. The strategic calculations of the Eastern bloc showed a tip in the balance that would preclude the West from so much as contemplating an all-out conflict, and developments in India seemed to confirm it.
The Vladivostok government declared its commitment to a crusade for the reunification of Siberia and Russia, denouncing the Moscow regime as unrepresentative. A mood of defeatism swept across Europe as Euro-Russian and Siberian armies clashed with renewed ferocity west of the Urals. The Afrabs struck northward from Iraq into the Caucasus; Americans and Europeans counterattacked from eastern Turkey.
The world braced itself.
* * *
Alexander George Sherman, President of the United States and cosignatory to the Alliance of Western Democracies, sipped approvingly at his whiskey and allowed his head to sink back into the leather padding of one of the armchairs facing the fireplace in the sitting room that adjoined the presidential study. The eyes that looked over the rim of his glass at the guest sitting opposite bore the marks of the burden of Atlas. And yet the expression in those eyes was calm and composed, mellowed by the compassion that comes with maturity and the wisdom of a thousand years.
"The provocations to which we are being subjected might seem to constitute a clear-cut justification for using the J-bomb without restriction," he said. "I am satisfied that were I to give the word, our enemies would be completely crushed within an hour. However, I must consider not only the heat of the moment today, but also the cool that will come when the world looks back from tomorrow."
Bradley Clifford tasted his own drink and looked back without speaking.
"The emotions that tempt us toward acting impulsively, however real they might be now, will soon be forgotten," Sherman continued. "History would never condone the indiscriminate use of a weapon of this kind, whatever the circumstances. If the West is to survive as the defender of all the things it has always claimed to stand for, it must uphold its principles even in war. It cannot and must not permit itself to precipitate the wholesale slaughter of civilians by this means, or to embark on an orgy of mass destruction by methods against which there can be no defense."
"But the deadlock has to be broken," Clifford replied at last. "Without an imbalance, it must remain a deadlock permanently."
"Yes, I agree with you. Clearly it would be absurd for us to concede any form of parity with the East now; your weapon should enable us to dictate any terms we choose. What I'm really saying is that the message is so obvious that there should be no need for us to let loose a worldwide holocaust to spell it out. I have conferred with our allies on this, and they agree. Europe, Australia, and Japan feel the same way; the Russians are all for going straight in with the bomb, but they're outvoted."
"I understand, of course," Clifford said. "But what did you have in mind as an alternative—some kind of token demonstration?"
Sherman shook his head slowly, apparently having been expecting the suggestion. "Mmm . . . no. We did discuss such a possibility, but we came to the conclusion that even that would be too risky. You see, Dr. Clifford, the kind of people we are up against are, shall we say, unpredictable. Much of the Eastern world has plunged into the twenty-first century, without having any of the time to adjust in the same way the Western nations did—but even in the case of the West, the transition was far from easy. Many of their leaders still think and react in the manner of tribesmen rather than statesmen; that was why the UN collapsed and why any form of rational negotiation has been impossible for the last twenty years or more.
"But these people now possess enormous arsenals of the most sophisticated weapons systems known—apart from this latest, of course. It took our own experts a long time to realize the full implications of the bomb. The problem with a demonstration is that our adversaries might react first and think afterward; they might see it as a bluff and try to call it. If they did, we could end up taking a lot of casualties on our own side before we convinced them, and that's the one thing I'm here to prevent if I can. I know that it looks as if the J-bomb would neutralize anything they tried to do, but we haven't actually proved that yet. Until we're more sure of that, we have to keep the element of surprise as an added insurance. That's one advantage that it would be foolish to sacrifice prematurely."
Clifford sipped his drink again and nodded slowly. None of this came very much as a surprise. He thought he knew what would follow next, but chose not to interrupt.
The President leaned forward and rested an elbow on the arm of his chair. "What I wanted to ask you about was the feasibility of using the J-bomb for a no-holds-barred surprise strike, but selectively. We want to be able to knock out the offensive capability of the other side in a single, lightning blow, especially the means of delivering any form of retaliation against our own territories. If we could first of all, without warning, eliminate their ORBS system, ICBM sites, and missile subs before they even knew what was happening, then it wouldn't really matter how irrationally they react, since they would no longer be in a position to do anything drastic.
"After that, if they saw sense, the whole thing would be over and only purely military targets would have been attacked. If they still refused to buy it, we'd just keep hammering at their ground forces wherever they're engaged in offensive actions against us until they did. Once again, the targets would be military; there'd be no mass killings of civilians, and we could take all the time in the world since there would be no threat to our own population or to our cities." He sat back and waited for a reply.
"That would be no problem," was all Clifford had to say. He made the destruction of the military might of half the world sound like a simple matter of pest control.
"Easy, huh?" Sherman could not contain a thin smile as he gazed with a strange mixture of fascination and admiration at the young man, barely half his own age, who was casually accepting the challenge to take on virtually single-handed a thousand million fanatics equipped with every device of devilment that the armorers of modern warfare could provide.
"I wasn't meaning to be flippant," Clifford answered with sincerity. "I know what the machine is capable of, and what you ask is well within its limits. Have I ever failed to deliver anything once I've promised it?"
"No, you never have, and I don't think you ever would. You're not the kind of person who would promise something he didn't mean to deliver in the first place. So—I can carry on from here on the assumption that it's feasible?"
"You can."
Sherman caught the curious inflexion of the scientist's voice.
"You agree to being instrumental in the execution of a strategic plan along the lines I've just indicated," he stated, just to be sure.
"I didn't say that," Clifford replied quietly. "I said you could carry on and assume it's feasible."
Sherman looked at him with a suddenly puzzled frown as, for a few seconds, he backtracked mentally over the most recent part of the conversation. He was suddenly a trifle suspicious.
"Let's make certain we understand one another, Dr. Clifford. Exactly what is it that you are promising to deliver?"
"What I've always promised—an end to the power deadlock that is destroying this world."
"And exactly how do you see that being achieved?"
A long time seemed to pass while Clifford returned an unblinking stare. "I can't be any more frank than I am being right now," he said, in barely more than a whisper that seemed to add to its firmness.
The eyes of the two
men met and in a brief moment an indefinable understanding flowed between them that could not have been expressed in a thousand words. Sherman gazed into the unwavering stare of absolute composure, instinctively seeking to divine the purpose that the extraordinary mind behind was unable to disclose. He became acutely conscious that only a quirk of fate gave him the right to question and command a brain that could comprehend and harness the workings of mysterious realms of time and space that no man before had even suspected to exist. Could he presume to be the infallible arbiter of its deepest workings? For a long time his instincts grappled with the objectiveness and caution demanded by his office.
"I could rule that we don't use it at all," he said eventually.
"Then you would have won your gamble of a year ago, without collecting any winnings."
Another long silence ensued. The sound of the clock on the mantle above the fireplace and the subdued hum of the air conditioner became noticeable for the first time. The noise of a low-flying vehicle came from the darkness outside the window.
"Let me ask you a hypothetical question," the President said. "If you had a free hand to use the J-bomb in any way that you pleased and you set out to achieve the objective that you have specified by whatever means you consider it requires, would the situation that you visualize involve any unnecessary loss of life to any citizen of this country or of its allies, or the acceptance of any casualties that could be avoided by other means?"
"No."
"Would it entail any form of indiscriminate use against the civilian populations of hostile belligerents?"
"No."
Sherman took a deep breath and set his glass down on a small side table.
"If the people who elected me could hear what I'm going to say next, they'd probably kick me out of office without a second thought," he said. "I am not going to demand an explanation of what has been implied. I'm going to forget that we even said it."
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