Zeteticism had recognized an important truth: the choice between politics and engineering is always an engineering decison. The decision duel technique made its most important contributions on issues that looked and tasted political, but which were actually engineering issues at heart.
Even politics, weak though it was, could fail as a decisionmaking system. In cases where bitter opponents could not achieve consensus, unresolvable decisions went to the last, least accurate, decision-making method: selection by force. Ultimately, any problem could be addressed by warfare. It was inefficient, but it was also effective. All one had to do was pursue the combat fiercely enough. Too often in human history, military leaders had forgotten that the decision to use force must be made politically, just as politicians had forgotten that the decision to use politics must be made through engineering.
Nathan adjusted the sound level of his earphone. As in all well-designed engineering discussions, the primary proponents welcomed good ideas from all sources. Anyone in the Institute could participate in this duel by communicating with the duelists, who were moderators for their respective viewpoints, not stand-alone combatants. Nathan could receive recommendations verbally^ through the earphones, or digitally through the small displays that accompanied his keyboard.
He knew the duel had attracted a large audience. The two rows of observer chairs beneath the dueling stations had filled before his own arrival. Behind him, on an even higher tier, Nathan could sense the neutral moderator’s anxiety as he counted the number of nationwide taps coming into the room. The boy had just received his duelist’s certification, and he was one of the brightest and youngest graduates. Nathan hoped fervently that he would receive many third alternatives from the audience, for Nathan disliked both of the official alternatives. Of course, he disliked the opposing viewpoint even more than the viewpoint he himself defended.
Though the oversize display held his gaze, Nathan caught a movement from the corner of his eye as someone took the right-hand dueling chair. He looked to see who had been chosen to be his opposing partner. Some of the older certified Zetetic duelists had been reluctant to duel with him. On the other hand, some of the younger ones had shown an exuberant enthusiasm to oppose him—the modern equivalent of facing down a famous gunslinger.
With a small shock, Nathan saw that none of the exuberant gunslingers had gotten the chance—his dueling partner was Leslie Evans.
Les gave him a quick laugh. “Boo, Nathan.”
Nathan stared, speechless, and Les continued. “Let accuracy triumph.”
Nathan smiled, and nodded. They turned to the main display and started listing their assumptions, then their opening remarks.
Nathan summarized his position in the opening: The sacrifice of the Zetetic Institute could make sense if the alternative were the sacrifice of the United States. The United States was indeed in danger of sacrificing itself; it was in danger of sacrificing all of Western civilization.
This danger resulted from the rising risk of war. The Soviet Union had, in the past several years, repeatedly used violence as a successful tool in global politics. It had become confident of both its own strength and of the efficacy of war. Meanwhile, the United States had withdrawn psychologically from the world, but it had not withdrawn physically: it still had vast though ineffectual numbers of troops stationed around the world. This combination was explosive. America’s nuclear Sword of Damocles was all that caused aggressive nations to move cautiously in their dealings with it. And many people, notably the Soviets, had started to believe that America dared not use its nuclear weapons: a sword so powerful that it would destroy the wielder as well as the intended victim.
Yet the U.S. had not forsaken that too-powerful sword. It had created the worst possible combination of circumstances. The people of America knew that they would have to resort to nuclear weapons in a military crisis, but no one outside the U.S. really believed the Americans would do so. Any rational analysis suggested that the United States could no longer rely on nuclear threats—it had to achieve a consistent global position without them.
The question of whether America should bring its troops home from all over the world and return to isolationism was interesting but not relevant: the Institute could not force the country to isolationism even if it was a good idea. But the Institute could , through the development of the Sling’s Hunters, guarantee that America remained strong enough to fight a victorious war without nuclear weapons.
Leslie’s response granted most of these points. He made two other observations, however. First, whereas the failure to complete the Sling might be important in saving America’s future, failure to reinvest the Institute’s funds in its own business would certainly destroy the Institute.
They popped open spreadsheets on both sides of the screen and projected the cost of continuing the Sling Project. The directive that had eliminated the FIREFORS program office had fortunately allowed for graduated shutdown. Currently, the Sling Project still proceeded under government funding, but that funding would end in one more week.
Nathan had weaseled the mid-January cutoff from Charles
Somerset in November, during a meeting that had left Nathan feeling sorry for the FIREFORS director. The dismantling of FIREFORS was destroying Somerset; he had seemed disoriented and lost. In semi-coherent sentences, Somerset had revealed that he had no job prospects, either government or private. He could not keep up his mortgage payments; he was selling his house. The woman whom he sometimes dated had left him permanently. Nathan had urged him to enter the Institute, to find a new orientation for his life, but Nathan doubted that Somerset had even heard his words, much less considered them.
Numbers filled the cells of the spreadsheets, and with each entry, the dusky red digits in the bottom line turned more grim. Leslie was right: full-scale development of the Sling would bankrupt the Institute within a year, despite Kira’s and Hilan’s repeal of the ban on telecommuting.
Nathan paused a moment and smiled at the way the Institute and the networking community had flexed their political muscles for the first time. They had held their million-person conference two days before the Congressional elections. In those last two days, the pollsters and the politicians fell, flattened by the steamroller of votes that shifted across party lines, all in districts where stubborn proponents of the ban held seats. The networking community overthrew two sure-to-win incumbents, and after the elections, the entire American political machine understood a new force had arrived. Some politicians bowed with horror, some bowed with pleasure, but all bowed.
Had that political power play failed, the Sling Project would have bankrupted the Institute in three months. It was a sobering vision.
Now Nathan described his plan for salvation of both the Sling and the Institute: they would sell the Sling System to the government after they had completed development.
Here Leslie drew up a scathing collection of counterexamples, drawing reams of data from the nationwide data bases cross-connected to the duelists’ network.
In peacetime, the American military almost never accepted advanced technology from outside the DODs own bureaucracies. His most devastating example came from the 1980s. During that decade, the Northrop Corporation had spent millions of dollars to build the F-20. The concept was that the F-20 should be operationally comparable to the F-16, yet far cheaper. Northrop had succeeded.
But Northrop had failed. For years thereafter, the Air Force had successfully fought off all arguments to buy even a handful of F-20s. Northrop, and the rest of the industrial world, had learned the lesson: never try to develop a product for the DOD unless the DOD paid for it up front.
This was a lesson the Zetetic Institute could not ignore. The United States government simply could not be trusted to buy a better idea; indeed, it could be trusted to reject a better idea.
The debate continued, but Nathan could not circumvent Leslie’s objections. They explored the reasons why particular projects and ideas died while waiting for t
he bureaucracies to recognize them. They developed part of a theory of institutional blindness. But Leslie forced Nathan to reject all strategies based on victory through bureaucratic manipulation: the lesson of Northrop struck too deeply. Nathan returned to the spreadsheet windows, developing scaled-down rates of Sling development that allowed the Institute to hold steady in the face of the tobacco companies’ continued guerrilla warfare. The most reasonable Sling Project plan slashed the software development team in half and left no money for ongoing hardware prototyping. It would take years, perhaps a decade, to complete the project.
Nathan felt feverish. Though he had no engineering explanation for his suspicions, he feared that the final clash between the United States and the Soviet Union would occur before the Sling could be ready. He tried to resign himself to living with that fear.
The thick gray band running like a seam down the center of the dueling screen split, as though the seam itself had a seam. The split opened into a window of reasonable size. The neutral moderator, who entered third alternatives onto the display when he received them, must have gotten a good idea from the audience.
The third alternative read, “Though the president has banned all development of smart weapons, he has not banned all regular research and development throughout the Defense Department. Many key men know how important it is to develop better methods of defending ourselves.”
Nathan heard Leslie chortle with delight as the names of some of those key men rolled down the window. Following each name came a synopsis of the person’s official charters, and of his private agendas. “We can sell parts of the Sky Hunter development as research for recon planes. We can sell parts of the HopperHunter as studies of advanced personnel carriers. We can sell most of the HighHunter as a new pop-up satellite launch vehicle.”
The third alternative continued: “Most of the men who fund these efforts will know our purpose. But they will, through every act of omission possible, conceal the real purpose from others. And even if enemies of the project find out about our activities, they will be powerless to stop us—every one of these small contracts will be perfectly legitimate in its own terms.”
Nathan raised a last objection, though he was confident the creator of this third alternative could address it. “We have no one who knows how to maneuver through these political circles with the needed dexterity.” Leslie made the same point on the right half of the screen.
“Of course the Institute has the right person.” The response appeared on the center section.
Nathan shifted his attention to the front row of the audience, where a balding man rose suddenly. He turned to Nathan with a maniacal smile pasted across his face—a smile of defiance, of vengeance. Seeing him, Nathan returned the defiance with a smile of his own.
The man stepped around the audience, and Nathan and Leslie both rose to greet him. Nathan offered a nod of gratitude—a salute of sorts—to this newest member of the Zetetic Institute: “Welcome,” he said. “Welcome to the team.”
“Thank you,” Charles Somerset replied with a quick, surprised laugh.
THE WARRIORS
April 18
To win a war takes billions; to lose a war takes all you’ve got
—Military aphorism
Nell studied President Mayfield with the professional calm and human horror of a psychologist listening to the confessions of a rapist. President Mayfield sat surrounded by the most advanced array of image projectors, monitors, and displays in the world. She could see that he refused to believe any of them. He refused.
CUT. Bright orange flames flare across the screen as jet fighters shriek from tree-top height in the background. Exploding ammunition supplies pound in the foreground. Through occasional gaps in the twisting smoke, the roofs of a small German town appear, oddly solid and squat in the red light of Hell.
Other cameras, computers, and panels sputtered terse messages throughout the room, communicating both the stupendous scale and meticulous detail of the slaughter. Mayfield never glanced at them. The tiny yet terrifying television screen hypnotized the president, as similar screens hypnotized millions of other men, women, and children throughout the country.
CUT. The screen sweeps to a picture of Bill Hardie, concerned yet calm. “We have an extraordinary bulletin for all our viewers. You just witnessed scenes from the sneak attack launched by the Warsaw Pact against West-ern Europe just minutes ago. It isn’t World War III yet. It isn’t Armageddon. But it could be.”
Nell sat apart from the president, in a part of the room devoid of monitors. An invisible boundary separated the information-gathering area from the decision-making area of the White House Situation Room, like the boundary that separates the audience from the performer, the spectator from the athlete.
ZOOM OUT. A high-altitude picture settles on the screen. Brilliant thin lines overlay the photo, showing the national boundaries of Europe. “We have enhanced this image, taken from the French Spot IV satellite, to highlight the size of the attack. As you can see even from thousands of miles away, virtually the entire Soviet, Czech, and East German armies have mobilized and moved across the border into West Germany
Flashes of terror and calm alternated in Nell’s mind. She dared not panic, she knew. She could bear to see the displays and the images of war; these things were terrible but not mindshattering. But she could not bear to see the empty disbelief on Jim Mayfield’s face. She looked away to regain control of her pounding heart.
ZOOM IN. The image speeds past the viewer, reaching into West Germany, expanding the view of the border area. Now, brilliant pinpoints of light all along the border fight with the artificial overlay as the brightest parts of the display. Bill drones on. “The thousands of small dots you now see in West Germany are the flashes from artillery blasts. Never in history have so many cannons fired so continuously.”
Nell stared at the tiny clots of death, fighting to remember that these blinding explosions came from mere conventional explosives. She shuddered, thinking about how those points of light would blossom if the armies started using nukes.
CUT. “A Soviet spokesman stated that West German agitation had incited the East German riots. Because the Soviet Union could not get any satisfactory action from the West German government, their only recourse was to destroy the so-called ‘infectious agents’ themselves. The spokesman pledged that all Soviet forces would stop at the Rhine River. He further stated that Denmark had been invaded, strictly for limited, tactical purposes, and that those troops would be withdrawn as soon as the German issue was resolved.”
With carefully even breathing, Nell addressed the president. “Jim. Jim, turn off the TV. We have decisions to make.”
Earl Semmens sat next to Nell, as if huddling close to a campfire. The Secretary of Defense had been excluded from this meeting—a situation that might have struck Nell as odd, except that Mayfield showed such active hostility toward the man. She had wondered earlier why she herself had been summoned. Now she understood as May-field followed her orders, clicking the TV off.
What else could she do to help in this situation? Jim surely expected her to recommend drastic measures. Faced with his unyielding platitudes for years, she had found herself trapped in the role of unyielding hawk. She had never succeeded in demonstrating for him the difference between a hawk and a warmonger.
Now she had her opportunity. For once, Jim would be pleasantly surprised to hear her agree with his anti-military, anti-confrontational position. No matter how hideously the Soviet forces scarred Europe, she knew as well as he did that America dared not start a nuclear war.
With a twist of pain, Mayfield whimpered, “They can’t attack us. They can’t.”
Nell paused a moment, having difficulty accepting May-field’s rejection of reality. “Of course they can. They are.”
“We have a treaty.” The president’s face flickered for just a moment, from disbelief to hatred, then back.
“Jim, in the past, the Soviets have attacked Czechoslovakia,
Afghanistan, and Poland—and, Jim, those places were run by their friends.” Nell realized she sounded like the one-note warmonger again. How did Mayfield always do this to her? With a shrug, she offered counterpoint. “Of course, we did similar things in Vietnam. Treaties are political tools. We’ve always known that.” She stressed the ending of her sentence with sudden worry: Mayfield had always known that treaties were tools, hadn’t he?
The soft, curved lines of Mayfield’s mouth straightened. “But we have a—” he stopped on a sob. “All our treaties. They made life better for both of us. Why have they thrown them away?”
Nell shook her head helplessly. “Germany, I guess. Jim, we’re dangerous to the Soviets, even when we don’t do anything. Just by existing, we create a constant threat to their empire and their ideology.”
His eyes wandered. “My God, what will the polls say?” he asked quietly. Sudden anger shattered his smooth face, like a hurtled rock shattering a windshield. “They lied to us.”
Nell sighed. “Of course.”
“We have to teach them not to lie.”
Nell sat forward with new alertness. She had never seen or heard Mayfield quite like this; this was no time for surprising new behavior. Cautiously, she asked, “How, Jim? How should we teach them?”
“We’ll nuke the mothers!”
“All-out nuclear war?” Nell shuddered in disbelief.
Mayfield looked her in the eye, then looked away. “No, of course not. We’ll shoot just one, just to let them know we’re serious. That’ll look good.”
Nell forced herself to breathe. From the corner of her eye she could see that Semmens looked as scared as she felt, “If we shoot just one, what will they do? They’ll nuke us back. At least one, probably more—to show us that they’re serious. You know that, Jim.”
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