"In fact, when you think about it, the whole thing is very subtle," Foreshaw came in. "There can be no question now of keeping a security blanket over our k-technology. If anyone anywhere in the world—maybe in some research lab somewhere or in a university in the middle of a city—quite innocently stumbles on the same thing and makes himself a piece of equipment similar to the GRASER that they built at Sudbury, Brunnermont will fire on it. We have to publish full details of all the facts—and fast."
"We're already working on a preliminary statement for communication through diplomatic channels and for all the news media," the Secretary of State informed them from his seat next to Sherman. "It should be going out any time now."
Reyes sighed with exasperation as he turned it all over again in his mind. The West had the world's one and only J-bomb, it was true, but it had no value as a tool for exerting international leverage or for extracting concessions, for it would only respond to deliberate commands if the West were physically attacked . . . or at least inside prescribed geographic limits, which amounted to the same thing. As long as Brunnermont remained functioning, there was no way out of it.
"Tell me again why we don't just turn it off," he said at last.
"Because we can't," Cleary told him simply.
"But, hell—it can't stay sealed off all the time. Every machine ever built has to be maintained. Somebody has to be able to get in sooner or later, if only to do routine maintenance on . . ." He caught the look on Cleary's face. "No . . . ? Why? Don't tell me it'll never need it."
"Oh, you're right enough about that. It's just that it isn't sealed off . . . for that very reason. You could walk right into any part of it now if you wanted to."
"Really?"
"Really."
"So why couldn't I just do that and pull out all the right wires while I'm in there?"
"Because . . ." Cleary's voice became very sober, "if you did that, you would completely eliminate the United States from the world scene as a viable military power."
"I . . . don't understand. What d'you mean?"
Cleary took a deep breath and placed his hands firmly palms-down on the table in front of him.
"All the critical components of the system have power regulators that will keep the voltages on the power lines high enough for the circuits to carry on functioning for a couple of seconds after the power supplies are cut. They are also equipped with sensor circuits that will detect the falling supply-line voltages and automatically transfer control of the computers to a power-down routine. The first function that that routine will perform will be to activate a special fire-control sequence for the J-bomb; its effect would be to blow up the White House, the Pentagon, and just about every major military base and installation in the country. In short, you don't tamper with it."
Reyes stared at him, openly appalled.
"That's insane."
"Those are the facts."
Reyes turned toward Sherman as if pleading for a note of reason to be reinjected into the conversation. "Alex, you can't let them get away with that. They're both mad."
Sherman shrugged.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Well, damn it, you're the President. Use your Presidential authority. Order them to disarm it."
"There'd be no point, Don. I wouldn't expose the Presidential image to the public indignity of being told to go to hell. They wouldn't do it."
"Then you could shoot the bastards."
"They'd let me, too. I'm telling you—they just wouldn't do it and nobody else knows how to. Forget it."
Reyes looked wildly from one end of the table to the other.
"How the hell am I supposed to forget it?" he shouted. "If anything goes wrong with that psycho machine we could all be zapped right here in this room any moment. I could forget it like I could forget a cobra in my bed . . . ." He looked back at Cleary. "What's to stop its power-supply system from going faulty? How's it supposed to be able to tell the difference between a line just failing and somebody pulling it out?"
"Actually the risk of anything like that is so near zero that you can forget it," Cleary said in a voice that was calm and unperturbed. "Everything in Brunnermont was designed and constructed to the strictest military standards. The technology throughout features the most advanced concepts of reliability engineering, triple redundancy, and self-checking known. Every subsystem works on triple voting and has at least one backup that switches on automatically if a fault is detected. Even if outside power is cut off for any reason, its own generating complex will keep it running for years if need be. Any combination of component failures, right up to impossibly unlikely levels, can be tolerated for way beyond the worst-case repair times." He paused for everyone to digest these remarks, then went on.
"What it does mean is that if and when faults do develop, and common sense dictates that we have to assume they will, those faults will have to be fixed and fixed good . . . without any messing around."
"That's one of the other things we've also begun working on already," Foreshaw told them. "We're talking to the manufacturers and outside contractors that were involved in all aspects of the system so that we can get together a permanent team of highly trained maintenance engineers to be permanently resident on the Brunnermont site. A first-aid team has already been put in to cover in the meantime."
"To summarize, the system is as near fail-proof as makes no difference, and it's tamper-proof," Cleary rounded off.
General Carlohm spoke next. "So we still haven't solved the problem of our attack arm. But why are we assuming all the time that it has to be based on the J-bomb at all? After all, we got along okay before we had it. There's nothing to stop us building up our conventional ORBS and missile deterrents again. It'll cost us an arm and a leg, but . . . if that's what we have to do, it's what we have to do."
"I'm afraid there is something to stop you." Cleary was beginning to sound apologetic. "You see, the Brunnermont surveillance programs are very sophisticated. They can identify the characteristics and trajectories of an attack profile and distinguish an offensive missile from, say, a regular suborbital aircraft, space shot, or satellite orbit. You could set up another deterrent system, sure, just as the other side can, but the moment either of you tried to use it, you'd trigger off the watchdog. You saw what happened yesterday; nothing would get through if either side launched any kind of offensive missile strike against the other."
"It's back to the last century again then," Carlohm growled. "We'll have to start building B-52s again."
"Now, you know that would be crazy," Foreshaw responded. "For one thing, today's forms of conventional defense would leave any kind of classical attack like that with no chance; it would be like attacking machine guns with cavalry. And for another, the sheer numerical superiority of the East means we could never think of taking them on in any kind of unlimited war along the lines of 1939-45. Doing so would be suicide."
"Cruise missiles then?" Carlohm suggested. Foreshaw looked at Cleary. Cleary shook his head.
"Not when you think about it," Cleary said. "Cruise missiles were low-cost, mass-produced weapons designed to be used in large numbers to saturate the defenses. A saturation-attack profile would be easy to identify and the J-bomb would break it up in minutes. If you tried to conceal the pattern by sending them over piecemeal, conventional defenses would be able to pick them off easily. Not feasible."
"Biological weapons then?" Carlohm tried. "Gas . . . bugs . . . viruses . . . anything . . . ?"
"Too uncontrollable; too unpredictable," Foreshaw pronounced. "We abandoned that line years ago and so has the other side. There's nothing to be gained for either of us by wiping out the whole planet. I can't see that being resurrected—not in a million years."
As Sherman listened to the exchange going on around him the horizons of his understanding slowly broadened to encompass the full meaning of the thing that Clifford had done. For the first time since he had last seen Clifford earlier that morning, he comprehended t
he reason for the light of triumph that had burned behind the scientist's tired eyes. At that time, Sherman had come away still somewhat shaken by the tide of recent events, but at a deeper level excited and exultant, eager to commence at once with the rebuilding of a new and sane world upon the foundations of salvation and opportunity that had been offered. No possibility could have been more remote than that all men could be anything but similarly inspired and exalted.
He saw now that, in spite of his worldliness and his years, he had been naive; only the scientist, as befitted his calling, had seen and understood the true reality. He heard the words that men had uttered for a thousand years and he listened to minds that wallowed in the clay of a lifetime's conditioning and stereotyping. It was a microcosm of a world that would never learn.
And as he listened and his eyes opened, he marveled at the perfection of the web that the scientist had spun. Every question that was being asked had been anticipated; every twist and turn that the human mind could devise to escape from the maze was blocked; every objection had been forestalled. It was beautiful in its completeness.
Donald Reyes slumped back in his chair and slammed his hand down on the table in a gesture that finally signaled defeat.
Foreshaw then summed up the situation. "The East cannot hope to succeed in any form of offensive action against the West, nuclear or otherwise, because the J-bomb will stop them. We can't attack them with the J-bomb at all, and we can't attack them with any kind of missile strike because if we do the bomb will stop that. We can attack with outdated weapons if we like, but we won't because we'd be sure to come off worst.
"The East can't break the deadlock in any way at all. We can break the deadlock, but only by trying to switch off the machine; however, we won't do that either because we'd wipe out practically all of our armed forces if we did—and be left with nothing to attack with anyway. And as long as it stays switched on, nobody can build another J-bomb."
"And it will stay like that until it self-deactivates . . . one hundred and eleven years from now," Cleary completed.
A solemn silence descended upon the room.
"It's just sitting there under those mountains," Reyes fumed after a while. "It won't switch off and we can't switch it off. It's . . ." he sought for the words, "it's like one of those movie things . . . a Doomsday Machine . . . only this is the granddaddy of all of them."
"Hardly, Don," Sherman remarked affably. "Doomsday Machines are supposed to guarantee the end of the world. I'd say that this does exactly the opposite."
"Well, I guess the opposite of the end of the world is the beginning of the world," Foreshaw mused. "What's it called . . . ? Genesis . . ."
"Then that's what it is," Sherman declared. "A Genesis Machine." He looked slowly around the circle of faces. "Don't you think you're all missing the point? There's one obvious alternative strategy that nobody's asked about yet. After what nearly happened yesterday, it's the only thing that we ought to be talking about."
Perplexed looks greeted his imploring gaze.
"You've all been living under the threat for so long that you can't wake up to the fact that it isn't there any more," he said. "You've been hooked on missiles and bombs for as long as you can remember, and the idea of getting along without them just doesn't get through. It's over. Can't you get that into your heads? We don't need it any more—any of it. Everything that the West has publicly claimed to want for the last fifty years has happened. Doesn't it occur to you that we might be able to do something constructive with all those armaments budgets now?"
He stood up and made it plain that his part in the meeting was finished. Before turning toward the door, he concluded: "I am going out to take a long, quiet walk. You are going to stay here and start talking about how the people in this world are going to find ways of getting along with one another. It might be new to you, but you're just gonna damn well have to figure out how it's done. You haven't been left with any choice now."
Chapter 25
As with a man who awakens from the terrors of a bad dream to find only the serenity of sunrise and the joys of birdsong, so the realization slowly dawned on the world that the nightmare was over. And from a world that could now breathe free emerged a new understanding.
Delegations of politicians, generals, and scientists from Beijing, Vladivostok, Beirut, Cairo, and Cape Town came to Brunnermont to gaze in wonder at the embodiment of the final triumph of reason. U.S. Army BIAC operators demonstrated for them the truth of the prophesies that had been pronounced. Unerringly they could direct cataclysmic bolts of destruction upon any point they chose in the domain of the West or to guard its approaches; they proved it with a selection of prepared targets in the northern wastes of Arctic Canada, the deserts of Australia, and the offshore waters of Europe and the U.S.A. But when they attempted to extend the range of the weapon to reach certain locations in the Sahara, the Gobi, and the far north of Siberia that the East had agreed could be used for the tests, the computers refused to obey. That was as much proof as anybody was prepared to ask for; neither side seemed immediately disposed to embark on the billions of dollar expenditure that testing out the rest of the system would require. Some of the predictions, without any shadow of a doubt, would never be risked anyway. And besides that, as time went by, the need to find out if the system could be outwitted somehow subsided. It didn't seem really important any more as the world began finding more pressing problems to turn its attention to.
Full details of the new physics that had made Brunnermont possible had, of course, been published throughout the world, and Clifford spent a busy period delivering a series of lectures on the subject to gatherings of scientists from all nations, in these he revealed a final piece of information about the Brunnermont watchdog, something he had neglected to mention previously.
The automatic surveillance system, programmed to fire immediately upon any strong source of hi-radiation that it detected in the nearby regions of space, would function only against targets located inside a distance of two hundred thousand miles. Beyond that radius k-technology could be developed and used safely.
He explained that it would not be feasible for a would-be aggressor to mount a J-bomb in a spacecraft with the intention of firing on or threatening terrestrial targets from outside Brunnermont's effective range. The target-location system aboard such a craft would be capable of "seeing" clearly from that distance only sources of intense hi-radiation, which in practice meant the solitary "beacon" of Brunnermont itself since no other source would be permitted to survive. But this beacon would be detected merely as a mathematical figment in the complexity of k-space, without yielding of itself the solutions of the equations that would be needed to mark its associated target coordinates in ordinary three-dimensional space. In other words, Brunnermont would not be vulnerable to destruction by these means. Before a J-bomb fire-control system could be accurately registered on selected targets in normal space, it was necessary to calibrate it with a reference framework of known locations derived from previously resolved sets of space-like images. But these images depended on the system being able to distinguish ordinary objects by virtue of the low level of radiation that was generated by the spontaneous particle annihilations taking place inside them; this was not practicable from distances outside two hundred thousand miles, and it followed that a hypothetical space-borne J-bomb would not constitute a workable threat to either Brunnermont or any other potential target anywhere else on the surface of Earth.
Clifford was of the opinion that technology would one day progress to a point where these restrictions could be overcome, but by that time the reasons for their having been imposed in the first place would long have gone away. In the meantime, scientists would be able to continue their researches into the new physics in laboratories on the Moon, anywhere else in the Solar System, and perhaps, one day, beyond. For the next one hundred and eleven years, however, as far as this kind of activity went Earth itself was quarantined. That was regrettable, but it seemed a smal
l price to pay.
Chapter 26
The squat-nosed, ungainly surface-transport ship from Tycho Base slowed to a halt and hung amid the star-strewn black velvet of the sky over the observatory complex at Joliot-Curie, on Lunar Farside. Among the huddle of domes and receiver dishes that stood in the middle of the wilderness below, the massive steel shutters over the underground landing bay had already been rolled aside to uncover a splash of yellow light and relieve the monotony of ash-gray dust. Its flight-control processors concluded their dialogue with the ground computers and the ship sank gently out of sight of the surface.
Inside the landing bay, after the shutters had closed and the bay had filled with air, an access ramp telescoped out to mate with the ship's entry lock as the last moans of its engines died away in the new world of sound that had come into being. The lock slid open and the small procession of new arrivals made its way down the ramp to the reception antechamber.
Professor Heinrich Zimmermann, his face wreathed in a smile, stepped forward to greet the three young people as they approached him.
"How was your journey?" he asked as he shook each one warmly by the hand. "No unpleasant complications, I trust?"
"Very relaxing," Clifford told him. His face had filled out again and regained its healthy color. His eyes were shining brightly, just like old times.
"Starting to feel at home on this ol' dust ball already," Aub said.
"And what about you, my dear?" Zimmermann asked, turning toward Sarah. "Do you think you will enjoy living here on the Moon?"
"Who cares?" she smiled, snuggling nearer to Clifford. "I'm still getting used to the idea of having my husband back again."
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