The Trigger

by Arthur C. Clarke

'He's my experimental engineer,' Horton said hotly. 'But if you think he'd deliberately endanger -'

  'It's all right, Jeff,' Brohier interrupted. 'We're all just looking for answers. Mr King, release the lockdown and ask Dr Greene to come here. Let's see if he knows any more than we do.'

  'Boss,' said Greene, nodding in Horton's direction. 'Dr Brohier. What's going on?'

  'We have some security video of the incident earlier this morning,' said King. 'We'd like you to take a look at it and tell us what you can.'

  Greene shrugged his assent and slipped into a seat to the left of the monitor. 'Isn't this Lot B? I thought the shooting was at the gate.'

  This is Lot B,' said King, releasing the freeze-frame.

  'Yeah, it has to be - that's my car, there. The white one.'

  'Keep your eye on it,' Horton said quietly.

  'What do you mean? I - oh - oh, no - oh, sweet mother of -' His eyes widened in surprise as the first flash of light and billow of smoke appeared inside the passenger compartment. Then his expression turned to one of mournful disbelief. 'Oh, hell - Boss, look at it! I still have two years of payments left -'

  No one spoke, or even smiled. Fists clenched and resting on the table before him, Greene stared wordlessly through the rest of the recording. Then, when the playback ended in another freeze-frame, he dropped his forehead to his fists in an expressive display of grief.

  'Do you have any idea what happened?' King asked.

  Raising his head, Greene slumped back in his chair and blew a deep breath into one closed hand. 'Yeah. Tennessee.'

  'What?'

  'I drove through Tennessee on my way to see my brother Brandon and his new baby girl at Christmas,' Greene explained with a sigh. 'You know how they have fireworks shops at every exit along the highway, each one bigger, brighter and claiming to be cheaper than the last? I weakened on the way back north.' He shook his head. 'I had twenty dollars' worth of firecrackers in the glove compartment and fifty dollars' worth of skyrockets under the passenger seat.'

  King raised an eyebrow. 'At Christmas? Why were they still in the car?'

  'Because I hadn't figured out yet where I could use 'em. They're all highly illegal here in Ohio, if you didn't know. Oh, damn - illegal fireworks,' he moaned. 'My insurance company will probably use that as an excuse to deny my claim -'

  'Do you have any idea why these fireworks would go off?'

  Greene shook his head wordlessly.

  'How were they stored? Might they have gotten damp?'

  They were still in the plastic wrap. I hadn't even broken them open.' He added apologetically, 'My neighbors live too close, and they're not particularly tolerant of loud noises. I was saving the fireworks for when Jillian and I go up to her parents' cabin on Black Lake, on Memorial Day weekend.' Greene looked to the security chief. 'Did my fireworks injure the guard?'

  Lips pressed together in a line, King shook his head. 'No. It seems not.'

  'Can I tell my insurance company that?' Greene asked, rising to his feet.

  Brohier answered. 'Dr Greene, as a personal favor, I'd appreciate it if you'd put off reporting your loss for the time being. I don't think we need third parties asking questions when we can't answer our own.'

  'Aren't the local police already involved - or about to be?' asked Horton. 'I thought hospitals had to report all firearms-related injuries.'

  'Yes,' said Brohier. 'Fortunately, I have a personal relationship with Dr Giova at Olentangy, and he has accepted my assurances that the firearm was peripheral to this accident. There will be no police investigation at this time.'

  King nodded approvingly. 'Excellent.'

  'Well - if everyone else is fudging the facts, I guess I can do that,' Greene said. 'Wait, that is. For a little while, anyway.'

  Thank you, Dr Greene. Check in with Mr King tomorrow, please,' said Brohier. 'For now, stop by the facilities office on your way out - the manager will provide you with the keys to one of the lab's vehicles, as a temporary loan.'

  Greene looked surprised. 'Thanks,' he said, as he backed toward the door. 'Boss, are we going to reset for tomorrow?'

  'I don't know,' said Horton.

  'I do,' said Brohier. 'No one's working here until we understand this.'

  'Boss?'

  Horton nodded. 'What he said.'

  'Okay. I'll collect my lunch box and go home.'

  When he was gone, King and Brohier exchanged glances. 'Two guns, a gardening shed, a gun safe, and a case of fireworks,' Brohier recited. 'Can you connect them, Mr King? Can you link any person or group of persons to all five incidents?'

  'No. I don't like to say it, but it would be hard for anyone not on my staff to have ready access to the weapons or the safe,' King said, standing. 'Maybe I'd better talk to Eric and Charlie myself.'

  'Let me know if anything comes of it.' When the security chief was gone, Brohier turned to Horton. 'Well - what do you think?'

  'I haven't a glimmer of a hint of a suggestion of a clue,' said Horton.

  Brohier chuckled deeply as he closed his binder. 'Send all your people home, Jeff. And then follow them out the door. I'm closing the lab until tomorrow morning to let Donovan's people do their work. You and I and Donovan will meet at seven a.m. to decide what to do next.'

  'All right,' said Horton. 'Be strange to be home before dark on a weekday. Won't know what to do with myself.'

  'I don't believe that,' said Brohier. 'Oh, and, Jeff?'

  'What?'

  'Yours was the only experiment running when all hell broke loose. Think on that a bit while you're catching up on your sleep.'

  It being the middle of the day in the middle of the week, the 100-meter outdoor range at Buckeye Sportsmen's Club was uncommonly quiet. Only three of the shooting stations were occupied - two by women practicing with 9mm automatics, and one by a gray-haired gentleman risking his classic Winchester 94 lever-action rifle.

  Jeff Horton picked the station furthest away from the other shooters, placed the black hard-shelled case he was carrying on the counter, and began unpacking his competition pistol. The exotic-looking Hammerli-Walther Olympia had a way of attracting more attention than Horton wanted, but it was the only gun he owned - and more gun than he probably would ever have bought for himself.

  Twenty years ago, Horton's father, after gauging his children's enthusiasm for the shooting gallery at Minnesota county fairs, had decided to channel that enthusiasm into a family activity. So he purchased a second-hand Marlin carbine, an inexpensive Browning automatic, and a gun club membership - and the Horton family became recreational target shooters, or 'plinkers'.

  Everyone had taken part - even Mom, who preferred the rifle and long distances, and Jeff's younger brother Tom, who became surprisingly good at speed-shooting before he was ten. But Jeff's older sister Pamela had shown a talent with a greater talent and higher aspirations. Steady, sharp-eyed, and unflappable in competition, Pamela had won a junior championship at seventeen, and earned her way onto the last two US Olympic shooting teams. The Olympia was a gun she had outgrown, and passed on to Jeff as a present four years ago.

  By his own admission, Horton was not a very good shot. But the rituals of shooting had a comforting, even nostalgic familiarity, and the concentration demanded by the deceptively simple task had a calming, even clarifying effect on his restless mind. And it was, at times, Horton's escape valve for frustration. That afternoon, Horton was at the range for both reasons, and he stayed there longer than was usual for him. Only when all sixty of the cartridges his pistol case held were gone did he let the morning's events back into his thoughts.

  What were you trying to say, Dr Brohier? How could it have been us?

  On his way out, Horton stopped at the club's shop and cornered its ex-Marine manager. 'Bobby,' said Horton. 'Can I get a minute?'

  'Hey, Dr H. Still carrying that peashooter, I see. You know, I'd love to help you spend some of your money on a real gun someday.'

  'Someday,' Horton promised agreeably. 'I've got k
ind of a weird question for you. Say you wanted to booby-trap an automatic -a Clock, maybe - so the entire clip went off at once. Could it be done?'

  The question brought a questioning look. 'Why would you want to do it?'

  'I don't, actually. But I heard a story at a party about it happening to someone, and I couldn't figure out what might do that.'

  'I can't imagine,' said the manager. 'Using a Clock as a lightning rod, maybe. Though you'd be better off trying it with a Colt ACP - more metal. Are you sure you heard this story straight?'

  'I'm sure,' said Horton. 'Couldn't you do something to the clip, put some little hammer or pin mechanism in it -'

  The manager was frowning and shaking his head. 'There's no room in there. And the weight would be off, even if you could. Wouldn't fool anybody who knew their weapon. Someone must have been telling tall tales at that party. Punch-drunk, I'd say -pardon the pun.'

  'I'll try,' said Horton, frowning. 'Well, thanks anyway.' Distracted, he started to turn away.

  'No problem. You need a reload today?'

  'What?'

  'You left a pretty good pile of brass out there,' the manager said with a jerk of his thumb. 'I was just wondering if you needed to restock.'

  'No,' said Horton. 'Wait - yes. Do you have any .22 blanks?' The manager looked surprised. 'Sure. Starter pistol stuff. But you don't want to put that in your Olympia. It'll just crud up the barrel.'

  'I know,' Horton said. 'Let me have a box.'

  Karl Brohier's three-story house in the 'executive community' draped across Claremont Hills had enough manicured lawn in front to host a croquet tournament, and enough woods in back to conceal a herd of deer. But Brohier usually seemed more embarrassed than proud when hosting visitors. More than once Horton had heard him explain how his parents' Vermont property - farm, woods and a thousand meters of lake frontage - had sold for such an outrageous sum that he'd had no choice. It was either buy a 'pauper's mansion' in Columbus or pay half its value to the government in Social Security Stabilization assessments - the new tax which reimbursed the fund out of the recipient's estate.

  'My father was an old-fashioned New England conservative -he would never have stood for that,' Brohier had explained. 'He would never have forgiven me if I'd divided his legacy with our friends in Washington.'

  That evening, Brohier greeted his unexpected visitor in tennis shoes, faded yellow shorts, and a oversized't-shirt bearing one _of Sidney Harris's 'Dr Quark' cartoons. The director expressed no surprise at Horton's presence on his doorstep.

  'Let's walk,' he said, gesturing past his protege at the expanse of lawn. 'My doctor says I'm eight pounds overweight, and insists I break a sweat four times a week.'

  'Your doctor is a tyrant,' said Horton, falling in beside Brohier. 'I know people thirty years your junior who'd kill to be as fit as you are.'

  'My doctor is thirty years my junior,' Brohier said with a gentle laugh.

  'Isn't that a little unsettling?'

  'Chances are that any MD my age who hasn't retired to New Mexico to spend a fat retirement account isn't a very good doctor,' said Brohier. 'Besides - do you want to be cared for by someone who received their primary training in the twentieth century?'

  It was Horton's turn to laugh. 'Since you put it that way -'

  'Exactly,' said Brohier. The recipe for a long, happy life - consult with old philosophers and young doctors, consort with old friends and young women. And since I am none of these, what brings you to me tonight?'

  The accident this morning, and your little poke in the ribs afterward,' said Horton. 'I think it's possible that my experiment might have caused the accident.'

  'Do you have a theoretical foundation for that thought?'

  'None whatever,' Horton confessed. 'Just a compound coincidence piled atop an anomaly. Both Gordie's fireworks and Eric's gun misbehaved at the exact same second. I don't care what Mr King thinks - neither one caused the other. Two effects, which means we're looking for a third factor, the cause of both. And the only thing out of the ordinary that morning was our experiment. We'd just gone to forty percent, the first time we've been at that level -' Horton stopped suddenly. 'You're not saying anything.'

  Panting slightly, Brohier stopped and turned toward Horton. 'You were doing fine without me.'

  'Is there something here worth looking at?'

  'We dare not overlook an anomaly,' said Brohier. 'Do you know the story of Auguste de Tocquard?'

  Frowning, Horton shook his head. 'Must have missed that class.'

  'A French scientist of the late nineteenth century,' said Brohier. 'He was building and experimenting with high-voltage discharge tubes. One day he noticed that unexposed photographic plates were ruined when they were stored near the tubes. So he moved them further away, for protection. Then he returned to his experiments.'

  'And missed out on discovering X-rays,' said Horton, wearing an amazed grin.

  'Which would have revolutionized the science of his day,' said Brohier. 'I do not know what is happening here, Jeffrey - and from what you have said, neither do you. But perhaps we, too, have stumbled on something new. The question we must answer now is, what next?'

  Horton nodded eagerly. The theoretical work is a dead end

  - too many missing pieces. I'm not sure but that the context is missing, too. I want you to unlock the lab. I want to call in my team and see if we can do it again.'

  'Yes. We need to know that, before anything else,' said Brohier. 'But do you think that perhaps we can do it alone, without your team? Tonight, in private.'

  'Why?'

  'Because I fear that we have both been seized by wishful thinking,' said Brohier, 'and are about to embarrass ourselves as only old fools and young dreamers can. If so, I would rather it be our secret. And if not - well, we may want that to be our secret, too, at least for a time.'

  It had taken Horton just five minutes to design the sensor array for the second test, and just fifteen minutes to construct it. The sensor had started life as a fence post left over from the construction of Horton's screen porch, and made its way to the lab hanging out the passenger window of his car like a dog pointing its nose at the wind.

  With Brohier seeing to the doors and the security checkpoints, Horton carried the timber into the lab on his shoulder. The two men dragged a heavy table into the emitter's output radius, then secured the post to it with bar clamps. Then, as Brohier watched, Horton placed a .22 caliber blank into each of the holes he had drilled every twenty-five centimeters along the length of the post. Most of the cartridges fit loosely in the holes, dropping down till only the flanged disc of the primer end was visible. The last one had to be force-fit, and at that would only go in half-way.

  'Did you bring a flak jacket for me, too?' Brohier asked, eyeing Horton's handiwork. '"Nobel Prize Winner Found Dead With Wooden Stake in Heart"

  Horton frowned. 'Maybe I should take that one out.'

  'Maybe you should,' said Brohier. 'And while you do, I will take the rest of that box of shrapnel out to the guards and explain that I want it, their own guns, and them at the foot of the main drive for the next half-hour. Will that be enough time?'

  'Should be,' Horton said. 'We don't have to do any of the fussy calibrations for this trial - thumbs up or thumbs down is all we need.'

  By the time Brohier returned, the displays on both consoles were active, and the test apparatus' power stage was humming audibly. Horton was making final adjustments on the compact digital camcorder he had set up on a tripod in a corner.

  'Ah,' said Brohier. That nagging business of proof. Or were you thinking to document our demise?'

  'I'm thinking that if what I expect is going to happen happens, I'm going to need to sit down and watch the recording a few dozen times before I believe it,' said Horton. He straightened up and stepped back from the camcorder. 'I think we're all ready.'

  'Almost,' said Brohier, and handed Horton a pair of safety glasses and a packet of foam earplugs. 'And I think I shall stand the
re, behind Lee's station. I'm not nearly as eager to lose that weight as I would have to be to stand any closer.'

  Horton chuckled uncomfortably, then settled in his chair. He pointed a tiny remote at the camcorder, and a red light began blinking above its lens. 'May 19, 2.19 a.m., Davisson Lab, Planck Center, Terabyte Corporation campus, Columbus, Ohio. Present are Dr Karl Brohier, director, and Dr Jeffrey Horton, associate director. This is a test of a trigger hypothesis regarding the accidents on May 18 -'

  'Oh, for crying out loud,' said Brohier. 'You're not on CNN, and I'm not going to live forever. Get on with it - push the damn button.'

  Blushing slightly, Horton turned toward his console. 'Beginning at ten percent, low band -'

  The ensuing fusillade made Horton jump in his seat. Heart racing and ears ringing, he whirled in his chair to see tendrils of white smoke climbing from four splintered holes. Two of the bright brass shells were still dancing and skittering along the hard floor - plink plink plink. A third could be seen buried in the soft ceiling tile.

  Brohier was staring with complete disbelief. 'What the devil,' he said to himself. 'What the devil.'

  Trembling, Horton reached out, grabbed the package of earplugs from the counter, and tore it open. The plugs tumbled out into his hand, and he worked them into his ear canals with the feverish eagerness of hindsight. His throat was bone dry, and for long moments he was as incapable of speech as if his tongue had been cut out.

  'Ing -' He swallowed and tried again. 'Ink - increasing power, one-tenth of a percent per second.' He dialed in the changes, then turned toward the experiment before executing them.

  This time he saw it - the yellow-red flash, the bright brass shell hurled against the ceiling, the tiny gray-white mushroom cloud of propellant gases, the shell tumbling back down. Blam! Plink plink plink…

  A few seconds later it happened again. Blam! Plink plink…

  In the grip of wonder, Brohier and Horton momentarily found each other's eyes, seeking confirmation, affirmation, celebration. Can this really be? Horton's demanded. Brohier's were soft with awe, as though he had long ago given up hope of the universe surprising him.