“Oh.”
“But you see, we’ve given the EEG a reverse twist. Instead of using a machine that makes a recording of the brain’s electrical wave output, we’ve developed a device that will take the computer’s readout tapes, and turn them into electrical patterns that are put into your brain!”
“I don’t get it.”
General LeRoy took over. “You sit at the machine’s control console. A helmet is placed over your head. You set the machine in operation. You see the results.”
“Yes,” Ford went on. “Instead of reading rows of figures from the computer’s printer…you actually see the war being fought. Complete visual and auditory hallucinations. You can watch the progress of the battles, and as you change strategy and tactics you can see the results before your eyes.”
“The idea, originally, was to make it easier for the General Staff to visualize strategic situations,” General LeRoy said.
“But every one who’s used the machine has either resigned his commission or gone insane,” Ford added.
The CIA man cocked an eye at LeRoy. “You’ve used the computer.”
“Correct.”
“And you have neither resigned nor cracked up.”
General LeRoy nodded. “I called you in.”
Before the CIA man could comment, Ford said, “The computer’s right inside this doorway. Let’s get this over with while the building is still empty.”
They stepped in. The physicist and the general showed the CIA man through the room-filling rows of massive consoles.
“It’s all transistorized and subminiaturized, of course,” Ford explained. “That’s the only way we could build so much detail into the machine and still have it small enough to fit inside a single building.”
“A single building?”
“Oh yes; this is only the control section. Most of this building is taken up by the circuits, the memory banks, and the rest of it.”
“Hm-m-m.”
They showed him finally to a small desk, studded with control buttons and dials. The single spotlight above the desk lit it brilliantly, in harsh contrast to the semidarkness of the rest of the room.
“Since you’ve never run the computer before,” Ford said, “General LeRoy will do the controlling. You just sit and watch what happens.”
The general sat in one of the well-padded chairs and donned a grotesque headgear that was connected to the desk by a half-dozen wires. The CIA man took his chair slowly.
When they put one of the bulky helmets on him, he looked up at them, squinting a little in the bright light. “This…this isn’t going to…well, do me any damage, is it?”
“My goodness, no,” Ford said. “You mean mentally? No, of course not. You’re not on the General Staff, so it shouldn’t…it won’t…affect you the way it did the others. Their reaction had nothing to do with the computer per se…”
“Several civilians have used the computer with no ill effects,” General LeRoy said. “Ford has used it many times.”
The CIA man nodded, and they closed the transparent visor over his face. He sat there and watched General LeRoy press a series of buttons, then turn a dial.
“Can you hear me?” The general’s voice came muffled through the helmet.
“Yes,” he said.
“All right. Here we go. You’re familiar with Situation One-Two-One? That’s what we’re going to be seeing.”
Situation One-Two-One was a standard war game. The CIA man was well acquainted with it. He watched the general flip a switch, then sit back and fold his arms over his chest. A row of lights on the desk console began blinking on and off, one, two, three…down to the end of the row, then back to the beginning again, on and off, on and off…
And then, somehow, he could see it!
He was poised incredibly somewhere in space, and he could see it all in a funny, blurry-double-sighted, dream-like way. He seemed to be seeing several pictures and hearing many voices, all at once. It was all mixed up, and yet it made a weird kind of sense.
For a panicked instant he wanted to rip the helmet off his head. It’s only an illusion, he told himself, forcing calm on his unwilling nerves. Only an illusion.
But it seemed strangely real.
He was watching the Gulf of Mexico. He could see Florida off to his right, and the arching coast of the southeastern United States. He could even make out the Rio Grande River.
Situation One-Two-One started, he remembered, with the discovery of missile-bearing Enemy submarines in the Gulf. Even as he watched the whole area—as though perched on a satellite—he could see, underwater and close-up, the menacing shadowy figure of a submarine gliding through the crystal blue sea.
He saw, too, a patrol plane as it spotted the submarine and sent an urgent radio warning.
The underwater picture dissolved in a bewildering burst of bubbles. A missile had been launched. Within seconds, another burst—this time a nuclear depth charge—utterly destroyed the submarine.
It was confusing. He was everyplace at once. The details were overpowering, but the total picture was agonizingly clear.
Six submarines fired missiles from the Gulf of Mexico. Four were immediately sunk, but too late. New Orleans, St. Louis and three Air Force bases were obliterated by hydrogen-fusion warheads.
The CIA man was familiar with the opening stages of the war. The first missile fired at the United States was the signal for whole fleets of missiles and bombers to launch themselves at the Enemy. It was confusing to see the world at once; at times he could not tell if the fireball and mushroom cloud was over Chicago or Shanghai, New York or Novosibirsk, Baltimore or Budapest.
It did not make much difference, really. They all got it in the first few hours of the war; as did London and Moscow, Washington and Peking, Detroit and Delhi, and many, many more.
The defensive systems on all sides seemed to operate well, except that there were never enough anti-missiles. Defensive systems were expensive compared to attack rockets. It was cheaper to build a deterrent than to defend against it.
The missiles flashed up from submarines and railway cars, from underground silos and stratospheric jets; secret ones fired off automatically when a certain airbase command post ceased beaming out a restraining radio signal. The defensive systems were simply overloaded. And when the bombs ran out, the missiles carried dust and germs and gas. On and on. For six days and six firelit nights. Launch, boost, coast, re-enter, death.
* * * *
And now it was over, the CIA man thought. The missiles were all gone. The airplanes were exhausted. The nations that had built the weapons no longer existed. By all the rules he knew of, the war should have been ended.
Yet the fighting did not end. The machine knew better. There were still many ways to kill an enemy. Time-tested ways. There were armies fighting in four continents, armies that had marched overland, or splashed ashore from the sea, or dropped out of the skies.
Incredibly, the war went on. When the tanks ran out of gas, and the flame throwers became useless, and even the prosaic artillery pieces had no more rounds to fire, there were still simple guns and even simpler bayonets and swords.
The proud armies, the descendents of the Alexanders and Caesars and Temujins and Wellingtons and Grants and Rommels, relived their evolution in reverse.
The war went on. Slowly, inevitably, the armies split apart into smaller and smaller units, until the tortured countryside that so recently had felt the impact of nuclear war once again knew the tread of bands of armed marauders. The tiny savage groups, stranded in alien lands, far from the homes and families that they knew to be destroyed, carried on a mockery of war, lived off the land, fought their own countrymen if the occasion suited, and revived the ancient terror of hand-wielded, personal, one-head-at-a-time killing.
The C
IA man watched the world disintegrate. Death was an individual business now, and none the better for no longer being mass-produced. In agonized fascination he saw the myriad ways in which a man might die. Murder was only one of them. Radiation, disease, toxic gases that lingered and drifted on the once-innocent winds, and—finally—the most efficient destroyer of them all: starvation.
Three billion people (give or take a meaningless hundred million) lived on the planet Earth when the war began. Now, with the tenuous thread of civilization burned away, most of those who were not killed by the fighting itself succumbed inexorably to starvation.
Not everyone died, of course. Life went on. Some were lucky.
A long darkness settled on the world. Life went on for a few, a pitiful few, a bitter, hateful, suspicious, savage few. Cities became pestholes. Books became fuel. Knowledge died. Civilization was completely gone from the planet Earth.
* * * *
The helmet was lifted slowly off his head. The CIA man found that he was too weak to raise his arms and help. He was shivering and damp with perspiration.
“Now you see,” Ford said quietly, “why the military men cracked up when they used the computer.”
General LeRoy, even, was pale. “How can a man with any conscience at all direct a military operation when he knows that that will be the consequence?”
The CIA man struck up a cigarette and pulled hard on it. He exhaled sharply. “Are all the war games…like that? Every plan?”
“Some are worse,” Ford said. “We picked an average one for you. Even some of the ‘brushfire’ games get out of hand and end up like that.”
“So…what do you intend to do? Why did you call me in? What can I do?”
“You’re with CIA,” the general said. “Don’t you handle espionage?”
“Yes, but what’s that got to do with it?”
The general looked at him. “It seems to me that the next logical step is to make damned certain that They get the plans to this computer…and fast!”
YEAR OF THE BIG THAW, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
You say that Matthew is your own son, Mr. Emmett?
Yes, Rev’rend Doane, and a better boy never stepped, if I do say it as shouldn’t. I’ve trusted him to drive team for me since he was eleven, and you can’t say more than that for a farm boy. Way back when he was a little shaver so high, when the war came on, he was bounden he was going to sail with this Admiral Farragut. You know boys that age—like runaway colts. I couldn’t see no good in his being cabin boy on some tarnation Navy ship and I told him so. If he’d wanted to sail out on a whaling ship, I ’low I’d have let him go. But Marthy—that’s the boy’s Ma—took on so that Matt stayed home. Yes, he’s a good boy and a good son.
We’ll miss him a powerful lot if he gets this scholarship thing. But I ’low it’ll be good for the boy to get some learnin’ besides what he gets in the school here. It’s right kind of you, Rev’rend, to look over this application thing for me.
Well, if he is your own son, Mr. Emmett, why did you write ‘birthplace unknown’ on the line here?
Rev’rend Doane, I’m glad you asked me that question. I’ve been turnin’ it over in my mind and I’ve jest about come to the conclusion it wouldn’t be nohow fair to hold it back. I didn’t lie when I said Matt was my son, because he’s been a good son to me and Marthy. But I’m not his Pa and Marthy ain’t his Ma, so could be I stretched the truth jest a mite. Rev’rend Doane, it’s a tarnal funny yarn but I’ll walk into the meetin’ house and swear to it on a stack o’Bibles as thick as a cord of wood.
You know I’ve been farming the old Corning place these past seven year? It’s good flat Connecticut bottom-land, but it isn’t like our land up in Hampshire where I was born and raised. My Pa called it the Hampshire Grants and all that was King’s land when his Pa came in there and started farming at the foot of Scuttock Mountain. That’s Injun for fires, folks say, because the Injuns used to build fires up there in the spring for some of their heathen doodads. Anyhow, up there in the mountains we see a tarnal power of quare things.
You call to mind the year we had the big thaw, about twelve years before the war? You mind the blizzard that year? I heard tell it spread down most to York. And at Fort Orange, the place they call Albany now, the Hudson froze right over, so they say. But those York folks do a sight of exaggerating, I’m told.
Anyhow, when the ice went out there was an almighty good thaw all over, and when the snow run off Scuttock mountain there was a good-sized hunk of farmland in our valley went under water. The crick on my farm flowed over the bank and there was a foot of water in the cowshed, and down in the swimmin’ hole in the back pasture wasn’t nothing but a big gully fifty foot and more across, rushing through the pasture, deep as a lake and brown as the old cow. You know freshet-floods? Full up with sticks and stones and old dead trees and somebody’s old shed floatin’ down the middle. And I swear to goodness, Parson, that stream was running along so fast I saw four-inch cobblestones floating and bumping along.
I tied the cow and the calf and Kate—she was our white mare; you mind she went lame last year and I had to shoot her, but she was just a young mare then and skittish as all get-out—but she was a good little mare.
Anyhow, I tied the whole kit and caboodle of them in the woodshed up behind the house, where they’d be dry, then I started to get the milkpail. Right then I heard the gosh-awfullest screech I ever heard in my life. Sounded like thunder and a freshet and a forest-fire all at once. I dropped the milkpail as I heard Marthy scream inside the house, and I run outside. Marthy was already there in the yard and she points up in the sky and yelled, “Look up yander!”
We stood looking up at the sky over Shattuck mountain where there was a great big—shoot now, I d’no as I can call its name but it was like a trail of fire in the sky, and it was makin’ the dangdest racket you ever heard, Rev’rend. Looked kind of like one of them Fourth-of-July skyrockets, but it was big as a house. Marthy was screaming and she grabbed me and hollered, “Hez! Hez, what in tunket is it?” And when Marthy cusses like that, Rev’rend, she don’t know what she’s saying, she’s so scared.
I was plumb scared myself. I heard Liza—that’s our young-un, Liza Grace, that got married to the Taylor boy. I heard her crying on the stoop, and she came flying out with her pinny all black and hollered to Marthy that the pea soup was burning. Marthy let out another screech and ran for the house. That’s a woman for you. So I quietened Liza down some and I went in and told Marthy it weren’t no more than one of them shooting stars. Then I went and did the milking.
But you know, while we were sitting down to supper there came the most awful grinding, screeching, pounding crash I ever heard. Sounded if it were in the back pasture but the house shook as if somethin’ had hit it.
Marthy jumped a mile and I never saw such a look on her face.
“Hez, what was that?” she asked.
“Shoot, now, nothing but the freshet,” I told her.
But she kept on about it. “You reckon that shooting star fell in our back pasture, Hez?”
“Well, now, I don’t ’low it did nothing like that,” I told her. But she was jittery as an old hen and it weren’t like her nohow. She said it sounded like trouble and I finally quietened her down by saying I’d saddle Kate up and go have a look. I kind of thought, though I didn’t tell Marthy, that somebody’s house had floated away in the freshet and run aground in our back pasture.
So I saddled up Kate and told Marthy to get some hot rum ready in case there was some poor soul run aground back there. And I rode Kate back to the back pasture.
It was mostly uphill because the top of the pasture is on high ground, and it sloped down to the crick on the other side of the rise.
Well, I reached the top of the hill and looked down. The crick were a regular river now, rushing along like Niagary. On t
he other side of it was a stand of timber, then the slope of Shattuck mountain. And I saw right away the long streak where all the timber had been cut out in a big scoop with roots standing up in the air and a big slide of rocks down to the water.
It was still raining a mite and the ground was sloshy and squanchy under foot. Kate scrunched her hooves and got real balky, not likin’ it a bit. When we got to the top of the pasture she started to whine and whicker and stamp, and no matter how loud I whoa-ed she kept on a-stamping and I was plumb scared she’d pitch me off in the mud. Then I started to smell a funny smell, like somethin’ burning. Now, don’t ask me how anything could burn in all that water, because I don’t know.
When we came up on the rise I saw the contraption.
Rev’rend, it was the most tarnal crazy contraption I ever saw in my life. It was bigger nor my cowshed and it was long and thin and as shiny as Marthy’s old pewter pitcher her Ma brought from England. It had a pair of red rods sticking out behind and a crazy globe fitted up where the top ought to be. It was stuck in the mud, turned halfway over on the little slide of roots and rocks, and I could see what had happened, all right.
The thing must have been—now, Rev’rend, you can say what you like but that thing must have flew across Shattuck and landed on the slope in the trees, then turned over and slid down the hill. That must have been the crash we heard. The rods weren’t just red, they were red-hot. I could hear them sizzle as the rain hit ’em.
In the middle of the infernal contraption there was a door, and it hung all to-other as if every hinge on it had been wrenched halfway off. As I pushed old Kate alongside it I heared somebody hollering alongside the contraption. I didn’t nohow get the words but it must have been for help, because I looked down and there was a man a-flopping along in the water.
He was a big fellow and he wasn’t swimming, just thrashin’ and hollering. So I pulled off my coat and boots and hove in after him. The stream was running fast but he was near the edge and I managed to catch on to an old tree-root and hang on, keeping his head out of the water till I got my feet aground. Then I hauled him onto the bank. Up above me Kate was still whinnying and raising Ned and I shouted at her as I bent over the man.
The First Science Fiction Megapack Page 30