He found Leslie glaring at a paper on his desk, listening to his telephone in annoyed silence. When he spoke he sounded like a miserly grouch. “And I’m telling you that you’ve billed us twice and delivered the fracture analysis zero times. Send us a copy of the originals and we’ll talk again.” He listened a few more moments. “Right. Goodbye.” He mashed the telephone into its receiver. With an abrupt change of tone to that of a comic straight man, he asked Nathan, “Okay, guru, where’s our software development team?”
Nathan shook his head. “I’m sorry, Les. I hate giving excuses—and I’m not giving you one now. But I think you’ll find the problem I’ve run into interesting, even though it sounds like I’m making excuses.”
Leslie chuckled. “That’s the best lead-in for an excuse I’ve ever heard. Did they teach you that here at the ZI?”
Nathan made a face. “I’ve found that the software engineers in the United States today fall into three broad categories.” He started ticking them off on his fingers. “First, there are brilliant engineers who refuse to work on military projects. Second, there are brilliant engineers who can and will work on military projects. Unfortunately, as nearly as I can figure from the Jobnet data bases, all of them already are working on military projects. The country has sucked an awful lot of people into this kind of work.” He waved his hand in a frustrated wipe at an imaginary slate.
“Third there are engineers who are not brilliant. I’ve got tabs on several solid pluggers who could do some of our work, but no one who can make the Sling fly on schedule.”
Les brought his hand to his lips. Several years ago, the motion would have ended with a puff from a thin cigarillo. The cigarillo was gone—Jan had made him well—but his hand remembered. “I know the problem. I’ve fought it for years.” He sighed. “Joel Barton, the first man I worked for after getting out of the Air Force, told me the real reason why the Soviet Union would beat us. ‘Les,’ he said, ‘they have three times as many airplanes, four times as many tanks, and five times as many men. But that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is that they Have eight times as many smart minds —physicists and engineers and such— working on their military problems.’ He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Les, for us to keep up with them, you and I and every other engineer in the United States who does defense work will have to be eight times as productive as one of theirs.” He cleared his throat.
Nathan shook his head in mild disappointment. “For shame, Les, do you want me to get up on one of my soapboxes?” he asked. “There’s another alternative. We don’t have to work eight times as hard, if we can harness the strength of the commercial equipment that our non-military engineers build.” He smiled. “That way, we’ll only need to work twice as hard as their engineers.” The smile dropped. “But even working only twice as hard, I fear we need star-quality people to complete the Sling.”
“Unquestionably,” Les agreed. “We’ll need stars. The schedule is tight, and the software will be the most difficult part to develop and test—it’s the only part that we need to develop from scratch. To make schedule we’ll have to keep the software team small and fast. If the team’s too big, we’ll run out of fuel at test time, when we find out how many ways the team members misunderstood each other when they were building their individual pieces.”
Nathan had arrived tense; now the tension subsided as he listened to Leslie’s summation. Les understood the problem as well as he did. “We’ll do it with no more than four people,” Les continued. “We need one sensor expert—a person whose specialty is transforming raw signals into clean images. He shouldn’t just know how to handle visual images, either. This person will need to know the whole electromagnetic spectrum. And he’ll have some hellish signals to process—the Crowbars will need to identify and lock on targets within seconds of hitting terminal velocity, just after coming out from their own little clouds of superheated plasma.”
Nathan plunked into the chair next to Leslie’s desk. “Right. Next, we’ll need an expert systems specialist— someone who can analyze those images to decide what the Hunter should do. For example, the SkyHunter needs to look at a random collection of radar sites, communication sites, and images of tents and vehicles. From that, it’ll have to figure out where the headquarters is. That’s where we need to make the machine think like a human military expert.”
“Our military expert is Kurt, right?” Leslie asked. When Nathan nodded, Leslie continued with a frown. “Jan is still doing a better job of running this project than we are.”
“Yes.” The conversation paused. For the first time since Jan’s death, Nathan took a close look around Leslie’s office.
The little things had changed—the picture frames on his desk contained only images of Kira. The clutter had shifted, too. Antiquated microcomputers that Leslie had collected in the corners of the room had gone away, opening sections of wall that had not seen sunlight for years. Nathan’s nose itched as he thought of the spumes of dust that must have risen from that machine graveyard.
Though the piles of computers had disappeared, the stacks of books had grown, filling a third large bookcase. The pictures on the walls remained the same—pictures of jet fighters, transports, and surveillance aircraft that Leslie had flown and developed before the Air Force had decided to make him a general. The promotion had taken him by surprise; he had not wanted it. He had rushed to get out before they made him a totally political beast, spending his life crafting ways to defeat the internal system rather than ways to meet the external threats.
Nathan continued the count of people they needed. “Third, we need a person who blends robotics and comm expertise—someone who can take the decisions made by the expert and put them into action, moving the vehicle, firing the gun, and so on.”
“Sounds like a complete trio to me,” Les replied. “Of course, it might be nice if they all had compatible personalities while we’re hiring stars. It would certainly make life easier, anyway. But I still only count three. Who’s the fourth person?”
Nathan laughed. “The fourth person is the vicious one, the one whose purpose is to ruin your group dynamics. He’s the tester—by virtue of his creation of the simulations. We can’t smash up 10,000 hovercraft and airplanes trying to test the software. Long before we ever put any of this stuff in a real Hunter, we’ll have to work out the bugs by plugging into simulations. The sims will look, feel, and taste like real Hunters, as far as the software is concerned.”
Leslie wrinkled his nose. “Of course.” He looked Nathan in the eye. “So we need four people. How many of them do we have now? Besides Kurt, that is.”
Nathan sighed. “None of them. Though I do have a couple of leads.”
“So you found some candidates on the Jobnet after all.”
“Not in the usual way.” Nathan laughed. “I looked through listings of people who used to be looking for jobs. Out of those people, I looked for people who had found short-term jobs. Hence, instead of a list of available people, I have a list of people who will be available soon. I doubt that anyone else has searched Jobnet looking for people this way.”
Les snorted. He looked stern, and Nathan knew the Air Force had taken a grievous loss when this man had refused his promotion to general. “No one searches Jobnet with the techniques you use, except the ones who take your own classes on data manipulation and information filtering. You, my friend, are creating a huge collection of competitors for yourself. The Zetetic Institute is bound and determined to destroy its own advantage.”
Nathan chuckled. “I wish that were the biggest problem we faced.”
“If you already have a list of prospects lined up, why’d you come here to bother me?” Leslie asked.
Nathan leaned across Leslie’s desk. “I’m bothering you because one of my prospects is an old friend of yours. Currently, he has a job that’s barely more than a hobby. He’s networking the cash registers for a group of knitting and stitchery shops. He’s our comm and robotics man, if you can win him over.”<
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“If I can win him over, huh? Who is this guy?”
Nathan removed a microfloppy from his inner suit pocket and handed it to Leslie. “Amos Leung.”
Leslie blinked. “Amos? Jesus, I haven’t seen Amos in over a decade. How did you know he worked for me?”
Nathan clapped his hands. “I didn’t, actually. But I suspected. He worked on the Version G modifications to the E-3 comm system while you were program manager. I just guessed you might know him.”
“Hmph. Well, Nathan, if you wanted a star, you’ll get one in Amos.”
“If we can get him.”
“Yeah.” Leslie pursed his lips. “He’s a great software developer. But Jesus, he ll be a hard sell.”
Nathan patted him on the shoulder. “I have great faith in your powers of persuasion.”
Leslie scowled.
“Is there anything else we should discuss before I go in search of my next crisis?” Nathan asked.
“No—though you should know about FIREFORS’s latest attempt on our lives.”
The grim humor of Leslie’s voice told Nathan they’d had a close call. “What was it?”
Leslie told him about the backchannel message that General Curtis had intended to send to General Hicks. Fortunately, Curtis had mentioned the message to an old friend of Leslie’s, who had tipped Leslie off. Leslie had discreetly arranged for other old friends to dissuade Curtis from sending the message.
“Was that really all that dangerous—just a message from one general to another?” Nathan asked in puzzlement.
“Well, it would have been a whole lot harder for us to stop if it had been sent, that’s for sure. Nathan, we’re gonna have to watch those guys like hawks. And we’d better keep our noses clean. If FIREFORS gets a whiff that something’s going wrong, they’ll be on us in a minute.”
“Like a bad cost overrun or something?”
“Yeah. That, or a bad schedule delay.” He pulled a miniature copy of the corridor PERT chart from deep inside the paper clutter of his desk, and stabbed the small dot of reef amongst the greens and pinks. Nathan felt
another shiver up his spine as he considered the possible consequences.
Ivan leaned forward in his seat—the unpadded wooden back hurt his spine—then realized how nervous he must look in that pose. He sank back in the chair, only to lean forward again.
As he fidgeted, he occasionally looked out the window to watch children playing in the warmth of the summer sun. Once in a while he yielded to the need to look back at his commander, who now had to double as his executioner.
He could no longer hope that Colonel Savchenko, the man who had given him the promotion and the project on the consequences of nuclear war, had come here for any other purpose.
He chided himself for ever hoping for anything else. He remembered the gunmetal gray of the weather the day this project had started, the unremitting clarity with which he had known that his plans would lead to disaster. Yet over the months, as the grays of Siberia yielded to white-specked blues, Ivan too had yielded to brighter visions. He had come to believe that his superiors would believe him; he had deceived himself with hope that they would be happy to have him disrupt their dangerous self-deceptions. His hope had peaked as he had framed the summation of the report.
It was the summation that Colonel Savchenko now reread with weary gray eyes. Ivan could almost read it more easily in his own mind than the colonel could read it in wide bold type:
Thus we see that, despite the uncertainties, the best available analyses of the effects of nuclear war all drive to the same conclusion. Five gigatons of explosions would cause a global disaster that would challenge the lives of even the luckiest war survivors. Avoidance of such a nuclear exchange must be a primary goal of the Soviet Union, even if it means concessions to foreign powers. Only if our country faced certain extinction could we justify a strategic battle that pressed the limits of global catastrophe.
Ivan stared at the colonel. A sunbeam of light through the window threw his trenchantly wrinkled features into sharp relief. He gave Ivan a millimeter shake of his head. “The wording in this summation is too strong. Indeed, you overstep the bounds of analysis when you presume to discuss global politics. Neither you nor I is in a position to declare what the State must and must not do.”
“Unfortunately, sir, the facts drive one to these conclusions. Only a madman could decide that it’s in the State’s best interest to destroy the entire human race. No matter where you were, a major nuclear assault would be a disaster of unprecedented proportions.”
The colonel sighed. “This entire report is a disaster of unprecedented proportions.”
Ivan’s fidgeting stopped. He sat very straight, very still. “There is not a single false word in this report, sir. Every page, every sentence, every word, contains as much truth as science can currently produce.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure. It’s a disaster nonetheless.”
“I deeply regret that the truth contradicts the preconceived notions some people may have had.”
Savchenko looked up swiftly from the paper, to puzzle over Ivan’s expressionless face. “Do you regret it?” His voice acquired the hard evenness of glare ice. “It makes no difference. We have neither the time nor the money to redo this effort from scratch without explaining what happened. And I’m sure you’re right about the rigor of the research. We would find it impossible to explain away this verification of the current forecasts.
“However, the summation is neither factual nor even logical. It must be rewritten. In fact, this whole document needs to be interpreted carefully, as regards its impact on global strategy. Your brief summation will be replaced by an entire additional chapter.” Ivan opened his mouth to speak, but the colonel raised his hand for silence. “But you will not write this last chapter, major. The final chapter needs a more senior hand—someone with not only a keen eye for the facts of the physical world, but with a sensitivity for the intangibles of international relations as well.”
Ivan’s mouth drew in a thin line.
“You, major, have a new assignment. An assignment in Czechoslovakia.” The colonel rolled his lips; his brow darkened in a moment of melancholy. “We have a cell of tactical nuclear weapons effects analysts in the city of Plzen. You will take charge of them. Your first task is to develop a plan for the nuclear decapitation of the American VII Corps in the event of a drive to Stuttgart from Cheb.”
“Yes, sir.” What a delicately molded axe they used on him! Many officers would have fought for the chance to serve in a foreign country. But those officers fought for the prestigious command of combat troops. For an officer whose greatest contributions lay in research, reassignment to the borderlands spelled intellectual death. Ivan faced the horror of his own mortality—he could not live long enough to erase this blackness from his record. He was young, yet his career was already quite doomed.
The last moments of the meeting blurred in irrelevance. He found himself outside, walking alone in the sunny warmth. He walked slowly, keeping careful control over the mix of emotions jangling in his mind.
The emotions separated out as he walked. Some floated to the top; others sank away, perhaps to return later, but gone for now. The emotion that rose to domination was a feeling of deep happiness.
Happiness! His career had been destroyed. Still he felt light—the lightness that comes with feeling your own power when you know you are right. Had he protected his career by producing something politically astute, but scientifically wrong, he would have regretted it forever. Instead, he had done what was right. He had done his best. He refused to apologize for it.
A second emotion floated there and increased the sensation of lightness. This was a feeling of relief—relief in knowing he would not have to fight another political battle. They would never try to use him this way again. And they would never again make him walk this treacherous tightrope, trying to squeeze half-truths from the system. He walked a broad avenue where honesty counted more.
As the last glimmers of horror dissolved in the warmth of his happiness, Ivan realized how lucky he was. Most men go through their whole lives uncertain of their own strength, never knowing whether they are cowards or heroes. Ivan knew.
Two children sailed past on bright red bicycles, laughing into the wind. Ivan laughed too, a curiously mixed laughter, both triumphant and defiant. The triumph was internal—his personal victory in choosing to give his best. The defiance was external, directed at those who disdained his best, claiming it was not sufficient. His defiance was anchored firmly in his unfounded belief that, ultimately, the people who gave their best would prevail.
He suddenly saw how his superiors had made their mistake in choosing him. Bright, ambitious Ivan seemed like the perfect tool for twisting the truth. How could they have known that cool, aloof Ivan, the loner with no family and few friends, cared so much about children? In his mind, he watched Anna and her three girls running.
There was a great irony in the freedom he gained from his lack of family. Had he had children of his own, he would have had to worry about preserving his career so that he could give them a good home.
Instead, he had been the worst choice they could have made for their purposes. He laughed again, this time with pure defiance. The laughter, and the lightness of his own power, sustained him all the way home.
Kurt straightened from his console. This desk work challenged even his powers of discipline. He ran a hand through his thick blond hair and realized it needed cutting.
Meanwhile, outside the window of his office in the Institute, a gentle summer day confronted him. The bright, dry terrain reminded him that he should not be inside this building. He should be outside, fighting the enemy in the open. Dammit, this was no way to conduct a war.
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