Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 2

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  And of course Drexler had had no intention of sharing the profits with his labor force, in the spirit of Covenant's founding principles. What a jerk.

  "So," she said, smiling up from her pillow. "Do I get a medal? Or are you just going to shut the whole place down and send the personnel to work camps on Mars?"

  Of all things, the liaison blushed, glancing away even as he pulled a hand terminal out of his attaché case.

  "Well you see, Ms. Hart, this is the odd thing. We have this little bit of policy--which the Guild would like to keep secret, so if you wouldn't mind keeping this conversation between ourselves I'd appreciate it."

  He paused; she waited. "Well?" he said finally.

  "Okay. I won't tell anyone."

  He nodded once. "Good. You see, Ms. Hart, the Trade Guild wants a non-Guild colony here on Covenant Station. Most worlds where the Guild operates, we prefer there to be at least a couple of independent operations running. It provides a place to collect and control non-Guild spacers, and a point through which we can import resources without paying planetary government tariffs." He presented her the handheld, the screen of which was covered with dense, legalist type. "The Guild is prepared to extend Covenant's original charter to the remaining residents, assuming said residents can establish a provisional Control to manage it properly.

  "My next question for you, Ms. Hart: would you like Drexler's job?"

  * * *

  Murphy's War

  Written by James P. Hogan

  Illustrated by Laura Givens

  The hillbilly with the bathtub was what finally did it. A prominent Beijing morning newspaper ran a cartoon showing the United States President in Appalachian garb and setting, aided by caricatures of his administration, gleefully ladling from a vat labeled "Moonshine" to an eager throng of bearded, toothy, cup- and bucket-proffering yokels tagged with the collective label, "Gullible American Public." The rest of the Asian press took it up with chortles and gusto, and by evening it was being reproduced worldwide and had spread all over the Internet.

  That in itself would probably have been insufficient to precipitate the crisis, had it not been for the changes that had been evident in President Byrne's demeanor and manner ever since he attended a White House showing of the movie High Noon. The presidential staff should have been alerted when he began cultivating a hands-on-hips gait, talking about "facing down" villains on the global Main Street, and was caught several times practicing narrow-eyed, squared-jaw stares in front of the hallway mirrors, but their attention at the time was focused on scheduling spontaneous photo ops with the media and rehearsing the press corps for Question Time.

  Even so, the matter of this new personal peculiarity would likely never have spread beyond the bounds of Washington cocktail-party-circuit gossip if the secretary of state hadn't alluded to it in an interview with a fashion magazine as a concession to the distaff side of the first family's early frontier origins. Although the remark came as a reflex feminine tactic of opportunity directed at a social rival, it was received among members of the predatory sex as intimating the unforgivable transgression on the part of the of the First Lady, of snaring a catch that was worthy of better talent. Retaliation was clearly called for, but since the First Lady's image did not permit descent to the level of personal involvement, a leak contrived via one of the tabloids disclosed the secretary of state as having changed her name from one Samantha Ramsbottom, born in Cleveland and a one-time croupier in Las Vegas known as "Ditzy Mitzi." Her rise to sudden eminence and an honorary degree from Vassar had apparently followed rumors that a weekend political strategy planning conference by the party currently controlling the Senate had been held in what a Nevada tour guide described as an exclusive "gentlemen's club."

  Even then, such an eruption of feline infighting over pedigrees would not normally have led to repercussions of international dimensions. However, the subject of ancestry happened to be one of extreme sensitivity to the Chinese Premier, Hao-Li Neng, who was acutely conscious of having risen to power via sleazy capitalist dealings involving Mongolian real estate and price-fixing cartels, at a time when popular reactions against Western cultural invasion were avalanching into demands for a return to more traditional values and ways. Somehow, in the logical acrobatics that bedevil East-West communication, the insinuations and innuendo being relayed around the Western media became linked to foreign affairs commentaries. The results were interpreted in Beijing as questioning Neng's ancestral lineage, and hence a calculated challenge to the basis of his political authority at a time when his position was precarious, which in Chinese eyes amounted to a personal insult before the world. A directive from the Chinese Foreign Ministry called upon the state-managed press for a riposte in kind, and the notorious hillbilly cartoon was the result. Thereupon, supporters and opponents, new political contenders, and uncommitted opportunists who never let any chance for visibility go by, piled in from all sides.

  The U.S. Defense secretary, who had gained fame and fortune as a TV evangelist, "Elias Maude, Sword of the Lord," made a fiery speech in which he implied affinity between Asiatics and monkeys—which was his standard form of gibe to infuriate Darwinists. The escalation to religious proportions drew in the Chinese minister of culture, a closet hard-line communist who had been engineering groundwork for a revolution along Maoist revival lines, and Maude in return declared China's a godless society, war against which would fulfill the prophecy of "yellow hordes from the east," bringing on Armageddon as the prerequisite for the Rapture. Corporate America backed any prospect of ending foreign competition now that Chinese labor rates were comparable, while the unions welcomed the prospect of an across-the-board boost to wages and employment. The Pentagon's analysts and simulations predicted that the conflict would be a cakewalk, as they had for every war that had been lost in the previous half century, citing intelligence reports that everyone had forgotten were manufactured on order to justify increased military funding in the first place. President Byrne appeared in a rousing address to the nation, which he ended narrow-eyed and square-jawed, buckling on a pair of ivory-handled, Patton-style six shooters and declaring, "It's time for men to walk tall!"

  * * *

  Alexander Sullivan had begun his nefarious career as a software hacker at an early age in high school by breaking into game-hosting servers and rigging the results. It wasn't so much from any need or desire to see himself high on the lists of tournament winners. In fact, in a gesture toward what he supposed would count as observing a higher moral principle, he seldom intervened to favor his own playing interests at all—although others whom he judged deserving or otherwise would often find their luck and fortunes affected in mysterious ways, as if by strange, inexplicable forces. He did it purely for the satisfaction that comes from beating challenges that require diligence, skill, and tenacity. In addition, it played to the exuberance of youth at finding ways into forbidden territory and crossing any bounds set by authority—especially the kinds of authority that operate through force and intimidation. By its nature, the business of mastering computer software means accepting and conforming to a world prescribed by rules that others have devised. Breaking the rules at a higher level provided that freedom for creativity which to any innovative spirit was as essential as air.

  Later in life, when he was developing a political awareness, Alex became incensed by revelations, passed around his circle of computing cognoscenti intimates, of remotely accessible tampering mechanisms written into the programming of voting machines. However, as befitted his emerging style, rather than add to the babble of accusations and denials that were achieving nothing in the public domain, he staged his own rebellion by leading a small, trusted group in exploiting that same vulnerability to reverse the intended result at the next election, with repercussions that sent heads rolling throughout the more sordid reaches of the IT underworld for months afterward. Endeavors of that nature are seldom without risk, however, and some enterprising investigative work commissioned on open budget resu
lted in the culprits being tracked down, and the commencement of charges being prepared against them. But the case had to be dropped when the material it was founded on inexplicably vanished from the records of the agency in charge of the proceedings, and the backups were found to be corrupted.

  News of such a feat does not take long to get around in the modern world, and regardless of superficial reactions voiced for form's sake, the bids to recruit such potentially invaluable talent quickly followed. The next few years saw Alex Sullivan's spectacular rise through the ranks of the industry's technically gifted, leading to a senior appointment with the prestigious but low-profile firm of Multimex Systems Developments and Integration Inc., headquartered in Maryland. A busy schedule of international travel brought a quality to the social side of his life commensurate with its professional advancement, all of it culminating in an announcement to delighted friends and colleagues of his engagement to be married the coming fall.

  However, despite having much to be pleased with in his all-round situation, and the ordinarily buoyant and imperturbable disposition that came with his nature, he was in a somber mood today as he sat in the work cubicle at one end of the System Test Area on the third floor of the Development Wing. Although he had been assigned one of the executive offices on the penthouse floor of the main office building as befitted his position of Technical Development Director, he was still young enough to prefer working in the coffee-and-shirtsleeves environment among the programmers and engineers, down where the action was. And just at this time, quite a lot of action appeared to be in the immediate offing indeed.

  The screen above the litter of charts and manuals covering the desk was displaying the response Abel 15, that had come in minutes before to a query Alex had sent out earlier, denoted by the one-time code word Cain. Although his otherwise hard-set mouth conceded slight upturns at the corners, they were not due to any cryptic humor hidden in the message. He was thinking of Joe Koler, the person who had sent the response—known among the group who had scammed the election scammers and who still kept in touch as "Tapperware"—and the time Joe had taken a job with a cleaning company to get inside the offices of the software contractor retained by the then-incumbent administration and install a keystroke capturing device to obtain the passwords for getting through their encryption software. Joe was on the West Coast now, with one of the prime contractors responsible for maintenance of the Air Force's Ground-Based Strategic Launch System. His response to Alex's query meant that the missiles had been primed with their target codes fifteen minutes previously.

  The return from Maeve Ingleman came in while Alex was still staring at the screen, wondering just how far this was likely to go. Maeve had devised the trapdoor code that made their tampering with the vote-tampering routine invisible to regular software checking procedures. These days she headed a section concerned with cryptological security in the Defense Department. Her input, responding to Alex's prompt, Mutt, was Jeff-4: "Arm Authorization code transmitted from the War Room four minutes ago."

  One space remained unfilled in the format displayed on the screen, opposite the final query code that he had sent out: Laurel. That had been to his one-time drinking buddy and rock-climbing partner, Mike Welby, who could change the microcode to get a computer to do anything but make toast. Mike was now a team supervisor with the War Room Close System Support Office. A response from him would indicate that final Launch Enable had been issued. Alex bit his lip apprehensively. At the bottom of the screen, the sequence initiation command Murphy glowed red and primed. Time had run out to let the risk run any longer. The moment had come that would decide between years of work yielding dividends beyond calculation, or coming to nothing in an instant's premature panic. He took a long breath and steeled himself, yet was unable to suppress a tremor as he extended a hand. The last thought to flash through his mind before he pressed the key to activate the command was that maybe there wouldn't be any wedding day at all. The link changed from red to gray; at the same time, the confirmation Issued and Acknowledged appeared alongside.

  Moments later, the empty space a few lines higher up filled suddenly to deliver the response Hardy-2:30 from Mike.

  * * *

  Professor Orstein Orvington Orst, senior scientific advisor to the White House, was noted among other things for his theoretical studies developing the concept of the neutrino bomb. While providing an image and terminology capable of terrifying the public, the potential to absorb unlimited funding, and novel strategic implications that would keep planners occupied and pundits talking for years, it suffered from none of the drawbacks of threatening to kill anybody or damage property, thus making it in the eyes of many the ideal advanced weapons system. Orst had also authored the interesting theory that the decrease of entropy brought about by living things was due to local time reversals on a molecular scale, and shown statistically why statistics can never prove anything.

  But such things were far from his mind as he stood with Oskar Eissensatt, a computation director with one of the Pentagon's task groups, just outside the flurry of aides and officials surrounding the President in the underground War Room twenty-five miles in an undisclosed direction from the center of Washington D.C. Not that Orst had given any great amount of detailed thought to the likely effects on tomorrow of the events resolved upon today and about to be unleashed. But there was a distinct probability of the world's weather patterns being disrupted, which would invalidate the computer models that he had obtained generous funding to advise on, which would cause no end of demands for explanations and budget allocation reviews. It was all very inconvenient.

  President Byrne emerged ahead of his coterie, effecting a swagger, still wearing the Patton-style revolvers. "That's right, we're going to do it!" he told the array of uniforms and suits. "Who do they think they're calling a cowboy? Those slopes have gone too far. It's time to stand tall and deliver the reckonin'. Where's muh hat?"

  General Elmer Craig, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, heavy with medals and braid, was close beside him. Orst had little time for Craig. If it hadn't been for military mentalities and their obsession with megatons and pyrotechnics, a viral or other biological solution could have been far more efficient, without all the messiness and disruption. Besides that, Craig was a mathematical Neanderthal, who had once instructed an adjutant to look up General Relativity in the staff lists. "Just let us at 'em, sir," Craig enthused to the President. "With the new ECMs and decoys, our birds will be hitting them before they even know anything's left the roost."

  "Smiting God's enemies with death, vengeance, and destruction," Elias Maude boomed from Byrne's other side. "Laying waste the land. Bringing tears, anguish, and grief. All as the Good Books say. Good Christian values. He will reserve us a special place in Heaven for today."

  "I know," the President replied. "He talked to me this morning." On the edge of the group, Eissensatt wrinkled his nose in response to Orst's frown. Orst had always harbored reservations about this kind of thing as a guide to shaping national policy. He didn't trust prophecies and assertions that couldn't be expressed in numbers. There was no better way of carrying an argument than showing it as the necessary outcome of manipulating symbols that nobody else could understand.

  "Teamwork," Eissensatt murmured. Orst nodded sourly, causing wisps of thinning hair to wave about his birdlike head. They were always being reminded of the importance of keeping up a unified public image.

  Byrne turned and drew himself up to a dramatic pose in the center of the floor, hands resting on the butts of the pistols, head high, chin thrust forward, legs apart and loosely bent. "Gentlemen, today we're about to become history. Nobody here knows better than all of you how I've busted my... that is, how hard I've tried in these days of trial and error to do an intelligent thing and act like a statesman. But we are left with no choice other than the course I have decided. An evil power thinks it can bring our great country to its knees by aggressive, unrestrained, military power. Well, we'll show the world that we
can do it better."

  "Damn right!" Craig agreed darkly.

  "Hallelujah!" Maude intoned.

  President Byrne paused a moment to let the ripple of approving nods and murmurs subside. "They brought this on themselves when they elected a tyrant who doesn't let them have democracy. Let it be a lesson to all the others who hate us for our tolerant and peaceful way of life.... General, issue the order to commence the attack."

  Craig turned imperiously toward his second-in-command, General Filbert, one star down, who was waiting several paces back. "Order General Launch, Fire Plan A, Phase One."

  Filbert relayed to the Fire Control Commander, seated at a supervisory desk in the center of a row of consoles on a raised dais at one end of the room. "Immediate, to all sector flight controllers. General Launch, Fire Plan A, Phase One."

  Despite the President's stirring words of a few moments before, a solemn hush fell as the commander entered the codes into his console and validated the requests for confirmation, broken only by the voice of Burton Halle, the Vice President, muttering into a cell phone somewhere in the rear. "...and schedule a meeting for tomorrow morning to discuss assigning the reconstruction contracts." All eyes turned expectantly toward the large Situation Display dominating the room.