Alternate Empires

by Gregory Benford

  Vusilov chuckled delightedly at the expression on Halloran’s face. “Ah-hah! But why the so-surprised look, Edmund Halloran? You think you could get rid of me so easy, surely not? It has been some years now, yes? It’s often I am wondering how they figure out what to do with you, Halloran… . So, to Mars, welcome I say to you, and to Moscow-Manhattan.”

  They shook hands firmly. It was the first time they had done so, even though they had met on numerous occasions as adversaries. “I wondered if it was you, Sergei … from the name,” Halloran said.

  “As I knew you would.”

  “You knew who I was, of course.”

  “Of course. I’ve seen your file. It wouldn’t have been customary for them to show you mine.”

  “Who’d have guessed we’d wind up like this?” Halloran said. “Times sure change. It all seems such a long time ago, now. But then, I guess, it was literally another world.”

  “The axes are buried under the bridge,” Vusilov pronounced. “And now, as the first thing, we must drink some toast. Come.” He took Halloran’s elbow lightly and steered him across to the bar. The bartender, young, swarthy, with dark eyes and flat-combed hair, looked up inquiringly. “This is Alfredo,” Vusilov said, gesturing with a sweep of his hand. “The best bartender on Mars.”

  “The only one, too,” Alfredo said.

  “Well, what of it? That also makes you the best.”

  “I thought there was a bar down in the main surface base,” Halloran said.

  “Pah!” Vusilov waved a hand. “That is just a workman’s club. Dishwashing beer from serve-yourself machines. This is the only bar. Alfredo is the source of all that’s worth knowing up here. If you want to know what goes on, ask Alfredo. Alfredo, I want you to meet Ed Halloran, a good friend of mine who is very old. He has now come here to work with us.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Ed,” Alfredo said.

  “Hi,” Halloran responded.

  “Now, you see, from the old days I remember the files we keep on everybody. Your favorite choice to be poisoned with is a scotch, yes?”

  “That would do fine.”

  “I refuse absolutely. Today you are joining us here, so it must first be vodka. We have the best.”

  “Okay. Make it on ice, with a splash of lime.”

  “And my usual, Alfredo,” Vusilov said. “Put them on MCM’s account.”

  Alfredo turned away and began pouring the drinks. After a few seconds, Halloran asked Vusilov idly, “When was the last time?”

  Vusilov’s beady bright eyes darted restlessly as he thought back. “In 2015, wasn’t it? Vienna. Hah-hah! Yes, I remember.” The Russian guffawed loudly and slapped the bar with the palm of his hand. “You paid a hundred thousand dollars to buy back the coding cartridge. But the truth, you never knew! It was worthless to us, anyway. We didn’t have the key.”

  Halloran raised a restraining hand. “Now wait a minute. You may be the boss here, but I’m not gonna let you get away with that. We knew about the code. It was worth about as much as those hundred-dollar bills I passed you. Didn’t your people ever check them out?”

  “Hmph.” The smile left Vusilov’s face abruptly. “I know nothing about that. My department, it was not.” Halloran got the impression that it was more a slight detail that Vusilov had conveniently forgotten. Alfredo placed two glasses on the bar. Vusilov picked them up.

  “Come,” he said. “There are two quiet chairs over there, by the window. Never before do you see so many stars, and so flammable, yes?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” Halloran said as they began crossing the lounge. “You have to admit that we undid your whole operation in Bonn. When we exposed Skater and he got sent back to Moscow, it pulled the linchpin out of it.”

  Vusilov stopped and threw his head back to roar with mirth, causing heads to look up all around the room. “What, you still believe that? He was the decoy you were supposed to find out about. We were intercepting your communications.”

  “Hell, we knew that. We were feeding you garbage through that channel. That was how we kept Reuthen’s cover. He was the one you should have been worrying about.”

  Vusilov blanched and stopped in midstride. “Reuthen? The interpreter? He was with you?”

  “Sure. He was our key man. You never suspected?”

  “You are being serious, I suppose?”

  Halloran smiled in a satisfied kind of way. “Well, I guess you’ll never know, will you?” It was a pretty tactless way to begin a relationship with his future boss, he admitted to himself, but he hadn’t been able to resist it. Anyhow, what did career prospects matter at his age? Hell, it had been worth it.

  Vusilov resumed walking, and after a few paces stopped by a chair where a lean, balding man with spectacles and a clipped mustache was reading what looked like a technical report of some kind, in French. “This is Leon, who you should know.” Vusilov spoke stiffly, his joviality of a moment ago now gone. “Leon is with the European group here, who will build the launch base and make spaceships here.”

  “’Allo?” Leon said, looking up.

  “Please meet Ed Halloran,” Vusilov said. “He comes here to work with us at MCM.”

  “A pleasure, Monsieur ’alloran.” Leon half-rose from his chair to shake hands.

  “Mine, too,” Halloran said.

  “They work very hard on the race for the nuclear pulse drive back home,” Vusilov went on. He seemed to have smoothed his feathers, and lowered his voice in a tone of mock confidentiality. “They think they will be first, and when they get it, they are already out here at Mars ahead of us all to go deep-space. Isn’t it so, Leon, yes?”

  The Frenchman shrugged. “Anything is possible. Who knows? I think we ’ave a good chance. Who else is there? Your prototype has problems. Rockwell and Kazak-Dynamik both admit it.”

  “Well, there is always the Chinese,” Vusilov said, resuming his normal voice. He evidently meant it as a joke. For the past six months the Chinese had been constructing something large in lunar orbit, the purpose of which had not been revealed. It had provoked some speculation and a lot of unflattering satire and cartoons about their late-in-the-day start at imitating everyone else. “After all, what year is it of theirs? Isn’t it the Year of the Monkey, yes?”

  Vusilov started to laugh, but Leon cut him off with a warning shake of his head, and nodded to indicate an Oriental whom Halloran hadn’t noticed before, sitting alone in an alcove on the far side of the room. He had a thin, droopy mustache and pointed beard, and was the only person in the room who was dressed formally, in a dark suit with necktie, which he wore with a black silk skullcap. He sat erect, reading from a book held high in front of his face, and showed no sign of having overheard.

  Vusilov made a silent Oh with his mouth, in the manner of someone guilty of a faux pas, but at the same time raised his eyebrows in a way that said it didn’t matter that much.

  “Who’s he?” Halloran murmured.

  “The Chinese representative,” Leon replied quietly.

  “What are they doing here?”

  “Who knows what they do anywhere?” Vusilov said. “We have many countries with persons at MARSMOS, whose reasons are a mystery. They do it for getting the prestige.”

  “That’s why this is called the Diplomatic Lounge,” Leon added. “Anyway, we shall talk with you later, Leon,” Vusilov said.

  “I ’ope you enjoy your stay ’ere, Monsieur ’alloran.”

  Vusilov led the way over to the chairs that he had indicated from the bar, set one of the glasses down on the small table between them, and sat down with the other. Halloran took the other chair and picked up his drink. “So, here’s to … ?” He looked at the Russian invitingly.

  “Oh, a prosperous business future for us, I suppose… .” Vusilov’s mood became troubled again. He eyed Halloran uncertainly as their glasses clinked.

  But, just for the moment, Halloran was oblivious as he sipped his drink and savored the feeling of a new future beginning and old dif
ferences being forgotten. A portent of the new age dawning…

  Until Vusilov said, “What else did Reuthen do for you?”

  “Hell, why get into this?”

  “A matter of professional pride. You forget that the KGB was the number-one, ace, properly run operation—not sloppy-dash slipshoe outfit like yours.”

  “Oh, is that so? Then what about the general who defected in 2012, in Berlin? We snatched him from right under your noses. That was a classic.”

  “You mean Obarin?”

  “Of course, Obarin.”

  Vusilov tried to muster a laugh, but it wasn’t convincing. “That old fart! We gave him to you. He knew nothing. He was more use to us on your side than on ours.”

  “Come on, let’s get real. He’d been a frontline man ever since he was a major in Afghanistan back in the eighties. He was a gold mine of information on weapons and tactics.”

  “All of it out of date. He was an incompetent in Afghanistan. It saved us having to pay his pension.”

  “Let’s face it. You were all incompetents when it came to Afghanistan.”

  “Is that so, now? And are you so quickly forgetting a little place called Vietnam? It was we who sucked you into that mess, you know, like the speedsands.”

  “Baloney. It was our own delusion in the early fifties over a global Communist conspiracy being masterminded from the Kremlin.”

  “Precisely! And where did the delusion come from, do you think? The misinformation-spreading was always one of our masterpiece arts, yes?”

  They raised their glasses belligerently, looking at each other over the rims as they drank. Vusilov’s mouth contorted irascibly. Clearly he was unwilling to let it go at that, yet at the same time he seemed to be having a problem over whether or not to voice what was going through his mind.

  “It didn’t do you a hell of a lot of good with China,” Halloran said.

  That did it. “But our greatest secret weapon of all, you never discovered.” Halloran raised his eyebrows. Vusilov wagged a finger. “Oh, yes. Even today, you don’t even suspect what it was. The Russian leaders we have today, they are young now, and even most of them forget.”

  “What are you talking about?” Halloran asked.

  Vusilov gave a satisfied nod. “Ah, so, now I have got you curious, eh?” He paused to extract the most from the moment. Halloran waited. The Russian waved a hand suddenly. His voice took on a stronger note. “Look around you today, Ed Halloran, and tell me what do you see? Back on Earth, the Soviet space enterprises are supreme, and we are started already to colonize the Moon. And out here, you see we are the major presence in the nations who come to Mars… . Yet, now look back at the way the world was when it ends the Great Patriotic War in 1945, and you see it is America that holds the oyster in its hand, yes?” Vusilov shrugged. “So where does it all go down the pipes? You had it made, guys. What happened?”

  Halloran could only shake his head and sigh. “These things happen. What do you want me to say, Sergei? Okay, I agree that we blew it somehow, somewhere along the line. We’ve got a saying that every dog has its day—and so do nations. Look at history. We had ours, and now it’s your turn. Congratulations.”

  Vusilov looked at him reproachfully. “You think that’s all there is to it, that the power plant which the USA had become all just goes away, like the dog who had a lousy day? You do us a disservice. Wouldn’t you grant us that perhaps, maybe, we might just have a little piece to do with what happens?”

  Now it was Halloran’s turn to laugh. “You’re not trying to tell me it was your doing?”

  “But that is exactly what I am telling you.” Vusilov stared back at him unblinkingly.

  Halloran’s grin faded as he saw that the Russian was being quite serious. “What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded. “How?”

  Vusilov snorted. “While for years your experts in universities are busy preaching our system and idolizing Marx, we are studying yours. In Wall Street you have the yo-yo economy that goes up, then it comes down again like a flat face in what you call the depressions. Well, what is it that makes the depressions, do you think?”

  Halloran shrugged. “They’re part of the boom-bust cycle. It’s an inevitable part of the price you pay with a market economy.”

  Vusilov shook his head, and his humor returned as he chuckled in the way of someone who had been suppressing a long-kept secret. “That’s what most Americans say. But the joke is that most Americans don’t understand how market economies work. A depression, you see, is what happens when malinvestments liquidate. A malinvestment is when capital and resources are poured into adventures for which there is no real demand. When the bubble goes bust, all the capital and labor and factory machinery and know-how that went in, nothing has any use for anymore, and so we have the depression.”

  Halloran nodded stonily. “Okay. So?”

  “What you have been seeing ever since the one giant step for mankind is the depression in the American space program. It comes from the same reasons of which I have been telling you.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “It is nothing to do with any boom-bust bicycle that comes with capitalism. That was a fiction that we invented, and your ‘experts’ believed. In a truly free market, some decision makers might guess the wrong way, but they go out of business. It only takes a few who are smart to get it right, and the others will soon follow. If it is not interfered with, the natural mechanism of prices to telegraph information adjusts supplies and demands to give the best bodyguards against malinvestments that you can get. The depression happens when all the businesspeoples make the same mistakes at the same time, which can only be because they all get the same wrong information. And there is only one way that can happen to the whole economy at once.” Vusilov paused and looked at Halloran expectantly. Halloran shook his head. “Government!” Vusilov exclaimed. “They’re the only ones who have the power. Only government interference can distort the whole picture to make the same mistakes happen everywhere.”

  Halloran didn’t look convinced. “What about the big crash of 1929? Wasn’t that a classic case of the free market going belly-up?”

  “You see, I told you that Americans don’t understand their own economics. No, it was nothing of the kind. The boom busted directly because of the inflation of the money supply through the late twenties by the Federal Reserve because they thought that easy credit would stimulate business, but what it really does is encourage reckless investments. Also, they made huge, soundless loans to Europe, to make Germany into a roadblock for Russia.”

  Halloran didn’t want to get into all that. “So what does that have to do with our space program fifty years later?” he asked.

  Vusilov shrugged. “Think what I have been saying. What happened to your space program was a depression, which is when wrong investments liquidate. And the only force that can cause it is when government meddles into the business of people who know what they’re doing.” He left it to Halloran to make the connection.

  Halloran frowned. “What, exactly, are you saying?”

  “Well, you tell me. What was the biggest case of where your government went muscling in and took over directing the space program?”

  “Do you mean Kennedy and Apollo?”

  Vusilov nodded emphatically and brought his palm down on the arm of his chair. “Da! Apollo! You’ve got it!”

  Halloran was taken aback. “But … that was a success. It was magnificent.”

  “Yes, it was a success. And I give you, it was magnificent. It did what Kennedy said. But what was that? You stuck a flag in the Moon—fine, very good. And you concentrated your whole industry for years on producing the Saturn V behemoth engine, which ever since has no other use than to be a lawn ornament at the Johnson Space Center. An expensive gnome for the garden, yes?”

  “Hey, there was more than that.”

  “Oh, really?” Vusilov looked interested. “What? You tell me.”

  “Well…”

&
nbsp; “Yes?”

  “There was the spinoff … all kind of technologies. Big scientific discoveries, surely…”

  “But what about the other things that didn’t happen because of it?” Vusilov persisted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think of all the other things that would have come true if Apollo had never happened. In the late fifties, the U.S. Air Force wanted to go for a spaceplane—a two-man vehicle that would have pushed the explored frontier to the fringes of space, the natural step from the rocket aircraft you had been flying. We were terrified of it. It would have led to a whole line of evolution that would have seen commercially viable hypersonic vehicles by the end of the sixties—New York to Tokyo in two or three hours, say, with the same payload and turnaround time of an old 747. That would have led to a low-cost, reusable surface-to-low-orbit shuttle in the seventies, permanently manned orbiting platforms in the eighties, with all the potential that would attract private capital, which gives us a natural jump-off point for the Moon, say, maybe in the mid-nineties, yes—all lightning-years ahead of anything we could have done.”

  Halloran raised a hand and nodded glumly. “Okay, okay.” It was all true. What else could he say?

  Vusilov nodded. “Yes, Apollo was magnificent. But the truth was, nobody really needed it then, militarily, commercially, or scientifically. It was all twenty or thirty years too soon. It got you your flag and your lawn pixie. But beyond that, it put government geniuses in charge of your whole space program. And what did that get you? Dead-end after Apollo. Then Skylab fell down. By the eighties you’d sunk everything in the original shuttle, which already had old-age.

  “When that blew up there was nothing, because it was the only one you had. The program was so bankrupt that you’d been reduced to playing a public-relations shell game by switching the same set of flyable insides around between different skins. That was why it took ten thousand technicians three months to prepare for a launch, and why you had to shut the line down for two years to build another. And by then, everything was over. The design was already obsolete, anyway.”