The Trigger

by Arthur C. Clarke

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  The drone of the Helio Courier's single engine increased sharply as the plane banked and wheeled around in the sky above the desolate valley. Ahead and to the right, Jeff Horton could see a thin ribbon of two-lane highway meandering northward. But there were no cars on the road, and no other signs of human habitation.

  'Where does that go?' he asked, tapping the pilot on the shoulder.

  'That's Nevada 278,' the pilot shouted back. 'Runs up to I-80 at Carlin, just east of Emigrant Pass. Ninety miles of nothing.'

  By then, the silver-and-red-winged Ely Air Taxi plane had swung west and begun to descend out of the cloudless sky. By the time they flashed over Nevada 278, they were below the level of the enclosing mountains. 'I don't see the airport.'

  The pilot pointed ahead at a dirt road paralleling a dry creekbed. 'Right there,' he said. 'Vinini Creek Road. That's as much airport as there is in Eureka County. But I want to get a close look at it before I put the wheels down. We had a good hard rain last month, and you've always gotta worry about washouts.'

  Clutching his knees tightly, Horton stared in silent disbelief at the rutted, narrow-track road as the pilot buzzed over it at no more than a hundred feet.

  That must be your ride,' the pilot called out. Horton caught a glimpse of a sand-colored Jeep Cherokee and a figure standing beside it before the pilot hauled the nose of the plane skyward. 'Doesn't look too bad. Have you down in just a couple of minutes now.'

  Horton just nodded, tight-lipped.

  'All this used to be government land, you know,' the pilot went on. 'Not that there's been any rush to build out here since the Feds gave it back to the state. About all we get are prospectors of one kind or another, passing through - either looking for UFOs or looking for fossils. The UFO types are the talkers, so I figure you for the other kind.'

  While he was talking, the pilot had carried out a heart-stopping half-loop that brought the Courier skimming back over the road in the other direction, this time even lower. 'There's my spot,' he called out, and throttled back. The plane floated for a moment, then flared and settled, bouncing twice and kicking up a plume of yellow dust. It rolled to a stop a few dozen meters from the Cherokee.

  That anybody you know?'

  Fingers digging at the catches on his restraint, Horton peered out through the thinning dust. The man standing beside the Cherokee was Donovan King, wearing dark sunglasses and a Colorado Rockies baseball hat. Horton and King exchanged brief acknowledging waves.

  'Yeah,' Horton said, unlatching the door. Thanks for the ride.'

  The little cabin of the six-place tail-dragger was warm enough by Horton's standards. But the heat that enveloped him as he clambered out of the plane was almost overwhelming. He hastened to the waiting vehicle, now idling with King at the steering wheel.

  'We have air-conditioning out at the Annex?' Horton asked, turning the fan to high and directing the blast from the nearest vent toward his face.

  'In the accommodation trailers. The lab building'll be another week or so.'

  'Can't be too soon. Dry heat, my ass,' Horton grumbled. 'Chamber of Commerce propaganda.'

  They waited as the Courier taxied eastward past them, the engine winding up for its take-off roll. 'We're going to need to get our own plane and pilot for these runs,' Horton said as King eased the Cherokee back onto the road, heading west. This fellow was too curious.'

  King chuckled. 'That fellow was our pilot,' he said. 'He's garrulous, but he's harmless. We also own a one-plane outfit in Elko and a small trucking company based in Reno. We'll spread the traffic around, Doctor. And the fossil-hunter cover will help us fade into the background.'

  'So that's what that was about,' said Horton, peering out the windshield at the barren landscape. 'How far from here?'

  'About eight miles,' King said. 'And speaking of your ass, there's an extra pillow in the back seat - you may want it under you most of the way.'

  There was no hyperbole in the warning. Before long they left Vinini Creek Road for an unnamed, unmarked track half as wide. Its undulations gave no reassurance that it had ever been graded, and the traffic which had passed that way before them could not be said to have improved it. Even at speeds that never topped fifty klicks per hour, Horton found that part of the trip all too much like an amusement park ride that went on too long.

  'I'm going to recommend that we buy someone a helicopter,' Horton said, bracing himself against the dash.

  'We're already planning to bring your equipment in on the Skycrane we're using for construction material. Don't want to do that more often than necessary, though. For a state with hardly any people, there are a lot of eyes watching the skies out here.'

  The ride finally ended in front of a scattering of structures on the floor of a narrow, steep-walled box canyon. The largest of them was a windowless one-story cinderblock sprawl that reminded Horton of his elementary school. Half a dozen boxy mobile homes were lined up to the west, and the steel frame of a barn-sized prefabricated building was taking shape to the east. A small bulldozer, a backhoe, and three other Cherokees were nestled against the east wall of the main structure, in the narrow band of afternoon shade. A cacophony of construction noises greeted Horton as he climbed gingerly out into the heat.

  'Did Dr B. really have to find a place this remote?' he asked, shaking his head as he surveyed the site.

  I guess the difference between few neighbors and none mattered,' said King. 'The director said he wanted a five-mile secure radius and a ten-mile safe radius. Do you want to go to your trailer or the lab first?'

  'After that ride, my bladder votes for "trailer".'

  King smiled, a rare sight, and pointed. 'You're in number Three.'

  When Horton emerged again. King handed him a site map and a hard hat. 'Meals and recreation are in the double-wide. Trailer number Two is reserved for Dr Brohier and guests. The temporary communications shack is in Five, and the temporary security office is in Six. The construction crew is in pop-ups on the north side - we'll take over that space for staff when they've moved out.'

  Horton studied his map, then squinted out into the bright haze to the north. 'What are these things?'

  'Don't know. Outhouses, some here call them. There are six of them, each about the size of a walk-in closet, cinderblock construction, empty as this place was,' King said, gesturing toward the main building.

  'So what was this place?'

  'Don't know that either,' said King. 'When the last residents packed up, they took everything but the walls with them. We took photos of all the floor scars and mounting bolts we found, if you'd care to join the guessing game we've been playing.'

  'What's your guess?'

  'My guess is they weren't herding sheep.' King shook his head. There's no obvious answer, Dr Horton, which is why the game is fun. Tomorrow I'll take you out to see the concrete trenches that connect the outhouses,' he said, waving a hand northward. 'Nevada has kept a lot of secrets over the years, from Plumbbob to Area 51. With luck, it'll keep ours, too.'

  As Aron Goldstein's black Dassault Falcon 55 descended into the choppy air three hundred meters above the Potomac River, Karl

  Brohier turned his recliner toward the nearest oval window and searched the sprawling cityscape for its familiar landmarks.

  Having no great fondness for politics or for bustling, traffic-choked cities, Brohier had only been to Washington, D.C. three previous times. The last, eight years ago, had been for a friend's funeral. The time before that had been to be paraded in public by politicians and then have to beg for funding of basic science research in front of half a dozen review committees - for Brohier, an experience hardly more pleasant than a funeral. But the first and most enjoyable of his visits had changed the course of his life.

  At a time when wealthier school districts were sending planeloads to Europe, chartering Caribbean windjammers, and white-water rafting in Canada, it was all that Champlain Valley Union High School's graduating class could do to ma
nage a fifteen-hour bus ride down from buttoned-down Chittended County for three days of sightseeing in the nation's capital. The chaperones made up for that indignity with a light schedule and liberal curfew.

  'We're not going to decide for you what you want to see,' Mr Freebright, the class advisor, had said. 'Every one of you has a guidebook, a Metropass, a trip buddy, and a mind. If you don't lose any of them, you'll go home having had a trip to remember.'

  Brohier and his best friend Tom lange had passed up the out-of-boundaries expeditions to various Maryland sin spots, where drinking, gambling, and topless dancers could be pursued. Instead, they had divided their free-exploration time among the Smithsonian, the Museum of Natural History, and the US Naval Observatory.

  The attraction of the last was the chance to look through the thirty-two-inch reflector at Jupiter's moons or a solar prominence, but gray clouds and a summer drizzle had stolen the opportunity.

  Disappointed and looking to salvage the time spent waiting in line for the tour, the young Brohier had become fascinated by the Master Clock of the United States and the scientific magic behind it. Cesium oscillators, hydrogen masers, satellites, and synchronizers opened an unlikely door to wonder - one which led him to relativity, radioactivity, and nuclear science. After a summer of testing the waters through heavy reading, Brohier had reported to the University of Vermont and promptly changed his major from the safe career path of computer science to the uncertain one of physics.

  He had managed to keep the news from his parents for a year and a half, and then to resist their intense pressure to correct his 'error'. After distinguishing himself in an undistinguished program, he won a graduate fellowship at MIT, where both the competition and the intellectual stimulation were of a higher order. But it was the right time - his mind never quicker, his hunger never sharper than in those days - and by the end of his two-and-a-half years there he stood out in that company as well.

  It had gotten harder after that: the disaster at the University of Texas, where a clash of personalities with the department chairman and the distracting complexities of first love and first loss combined to make him a doctoral dropout. The five years as a lab drone in TRW's materials science lab, a gift from Tom Lange but a prison for Brohier's curiosity. Then the second try at a Ph.D., at Stanford, where every other candidate was younger and seemed quicker, and Brohier felt like he was running uphill trying to catch up. The first shot in the CERN revolution was still five years away, and Amy Susan a few more beyond that, and zero-phase solid-state information storage nearly two decades down the road.

  But he had started on that road here, and now - against his better instincts - he had followed it here again.

  The cabin of the Falcon 55 shuddered as the landing gear extended and locked in place. There was nothing but water beneath them, and the water seemed very close. Then suddenly there were rocks, a patch of brown grass, and the runway threshold. Tires kissed the concrete gently, then again more firmly. When the nose wheel settled, the cabin began to vibrate with the roar of the Falcon's three engines as the thrust reversers were applied.

  Brohier looked across the cabin at Goldstein, who was still napping peacefully, his slight frame almost swallowed up in the ultracushioned chair. I hope you're right about this, my friend, he thought. Neither Brohier nor Horton had anticipated involving anyone from the Federal government this early, and both had profound reservations about involving the military at all. Just the knowledge that the Pentagon was less than three kilometers away gave him chills.

  It was what Horton called the 'Hangar 57 scenario' that haunted him - the fear that with one wrong word to the wrong person, a convoy of black vans filled with Special Operations troops would swoop down on the Terabyte campus and cart away everything. It had taken Goldstein hours to convince them that 'friends in high places' did not belong to the same class of imaginary creatures as unicorns and mermaids.

  'There are people at every level of this society who can and will help us,' Goldstein had insisted. 'And we'll need as many of them as possible with us when those who will oppose us realize the danger.'

  'We'd better be damned sure which kind we're talking to,' Horton had said.

  The man I want to bring in will not betray us. As elected officials go, he's an oak among reeds -'

  'Faint praise, in my book.'

  Goldstein had grown irritated at the carping. 'You scientists are such naifs about politics. You only know these people from CNN, and barely even that,' he had snapped. 'I've known this man as a man for twenty years, and I've never known him to act rashly or compromise his principles. What's more, his power base is not threatened by this - very much the reverse, in fact. And if he does come aboard, I expect his contacts to be of inestimable value to us.'

  Then why not tell us his name?'

  To protect him in the event that he chooses not to involve himself - because he is my friend.'

  In the end, Brohier's presence on the plane, and at the meeting to come, was the price of consensus. Horton would not agree to let Goldstein make a private approach to an unnamed unknown without the reassurance of knowing Horton's interests would be represented there - and Horton did not know Goldstein well enough yet to take that reassurance from him.

  It was, on some level, an unreasonable, even an irrational demand, since Goldstein could easily have had hundreds of secret meetings with anyone he chose in the weeks since Brohier had brought him the news. But so much was at stake that even Brohier's trust wavered at times, and he was glad to have a reason to insinuate himself into the process.

  As the Falcon 55 came to a stop at the VIP gate, Goldstein opened his eyes and stood. 'Made good time,' he said, glancing at his watch. 'Did you get any rest?'

  'I can't sleep in planes,' Brohier confessed.

  'My job would kill you, then,' Goldstein said with a cheerful smile.

  In a remarkably few minutes, they were in the back seat of a silver Mercedes that was humming north along Washington Memorial Parkway. Almost before Brohier realized it, the Pentagon loomed up on the left. Goldstein caught him looking out at its bland, imposing, implacable face as they drove past.

  'Are you still worried?' Goldstein asked.

  'Not about you, Aron. I never was worried about you. I'm worried about losing control of this,' Brohier said. 'I don't want the responsibility -I don't want to have to make these decisions. But I'd rather it be me - us - than a lot of people I can think of. And a lot of them live and work in this city.'

  Goldstein nodded. 'I'll tell you something I learned a long time ago about the Washington gang. The good news is, away from the cameras, they're just like the people back home who sent them here. The bad news is, away from the cameras, they're just like the people back home who sent them here. No better, no worse - just a great deal more visible, and their mistakes have a longer reach.'

  Smiling wryly, Brohier said, That's kind of funny. This friend of yours - to keep my thoughts in the green zone, I've been trying to imagine that someone I know and respected went and got themselves elected - someone like my father, say.'

  'Mr Smith Goes to Washington,' said Goldstein. 'Karl, let me say something I didn't want to say in front of Jeffrey, given his state of mind at the time. This meeting tomorrow - this man - we need him badly. At this moment, this is a frail conspiracy.'

  'I've thought about that,' Brohier said. 'Our secrecy works against us. We could be swept up in an afternoon, and it would all be over.'

  'Ah, but unlike you, and even me, my friend has too much stature to be easily silenced,' Goldstein said. 'Unlike Jeffrey and his people, he's too visible to just be made to disappear. He can't be intimidated, and he won't let himself be compromised.' He turned away toward the window and gazed out across the Potomac toward the Lincoln Memorial. 'And he'll ask the right questions, loudly and in the right places, if we disappear.'

  That's very comforting,' said Brohier. 'Aron - your friend - it's Senator Wilman, isn't it?'

  Goldstein nodded silently,
and the gesture was reflected in the tinted glass. 'How do you feel about that?'

  'I think I feel all right about it.'

  'Good. Still,' he added absently, 'I think we will not tell him about the Annex. That will be our insurance policy.' Goldstein turned to face Brohier's questioning look. 'In case I am wrong about him, or about how far our adversaries would go.'

  * * *

  7: Strategy

  Hong Kong, China - In a last-ditch attempt to end sixteen days of anti-Beijing demonstrations, the new military governor of the Hong Kong Special District today declared a twenty-hour daytime curfew that permits travel only between home and work. Governor Han Lo announced that Chinese army commanders are now authorized to shoot to kill if 'treasonous disrupters' defy the order. At least a dozen demonstrators and five police officers have died in earlier confrontations in the city's Botanical Gardens and along the Victoria waterfront in the University area.

  Complete Story Hong Kong Since Unification

  Han Lo Bio Stay On the Story with Sky-Scan

  Grover Andrew Wilman's suite in the Humphrey Senate Office Building was typically the first on that floor to come alive each morning, and the last to close down each evening. The official work days of his top administrative aide and top legislative aide began at seven a.m., which was early enough by Congressional standards. But they often found that their boss had beaten them there by an hour or more, and with terrifying efficiency had already done a morning's work before their arrival.

  On most mornings, Wilman's self-assigned first task was answer-ing what he called the 'mad dog' mail. The educational and lobbying efforts of his disarmament advocacy coalition. Mind Over Madness, generated a steady stream of critical, often hos-tile mail - video, audio, and text. Even after the anonymous, unanswerable screeds were filtered out, there were hundreds of messages a day from people who felt compelled to tell Wilman exactly how deluded, misguided, ignorant, disloyal, and just plain wrong he was.