“We cant stand around as if we were helplessl” May-field fumbled at his inner jacket pocket, brought out the Gold Codes card. “Get Johnson.” Johnson carried the “football”—the device used to select among the many nuclear options.
Nell sat rooted in her chair. Semmens twitched several times, then froze in numb paralysis. Nell spoke with the overly calm voice of a nurse talking a suicidal patient back from a seventh-story window ledge. “Jim. Jim, think about what you’re doing.”
“No!” Mayfield leaped from his chair. “Don’t you see that that’s what they’re counting on? They expect us to think so long and hard about all the possible consequences that we’ll be paralyzed with fear.”
((x. >7
Jim—
“Shut up! We can’t let them scare us now! We have to—” As he swept across the room, the floor slipped suddenly out from beneath him. His head thumped dully against the shiny tiled floor.
“Jim!” Nell jumped from her chair, then knelt beside the gasping president; Earl followed. “What’s wrong?”
His only answer was a pair of explosive gasps as his eyes bulged from their sockets.
Through the shock, Nell realized that Mayfield had a more serious problem than a bump on the head. She remembered his periodic wince, his occasional clutch at his chest, his fear of doctors. She flew toward the door. “I’ll get the doctor.”
Earl rubbed Jim’s head helplessly. “Jim!”
Another gasp. “Kill the mothers,” Jim coughed.
Nell stopped in mid-flight. Images flashed in her mind, each too brief to capture fully—a series of flashbulbs popping with stroboscopic speed.
She remembered her first trip to Washington—a trip by bus from Bennettsville, South Carolina. It was her senior year; this was the senior-class trip. She remembered her friends’ laughter as they danced through the traffic. They formed a terrifying, uncontrolled weave of high-speed cars and teenagers, running to reach the Tidal Basin amidst the monuments. She remembered how she, too, had laughed with her friends, walking beneath the trees clad in white and pink blossoms, till they reached the bottom of the white marble steps of the Jefferson Memorial. She remembered her moment’s pause there, and the hallowed stillness that grew deep within her.
She remembered her sober walk to the top of those steps. She remembered standing by the statue of Jefferson himself in the center of the dome. She remembered looking up. High overhead, Jefferson’s words encircled her, suffusing through her as she read.
With a nudge at her best friend, Lisa, she had pointed to the beginning of the inscription. “Isn’t that a great thought?”
Lisa turned away from John, giggling. “What? Oh, yeah. But ya know, I heard he owned slaves. I’ll bet he didn’t even believe it when he said it.”
“I’ll bet he did believe it. I know I believe it,” Nell replied simply.
But Lisa had already rushed off after John. Nell stood alone, turning slowly as her lips moved in a silent affirmation of Jefferson’s vow: I have sworn, upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man . She had felt a bond across the centuries to the man whose purpose she now shared.
The flashbulbs skipped across the years to her last conversation with a man she had once admired, a man who had been her employer for many years.
Philip had told her about the contract for the National Person Identification System for Egypt. Philip had just won the contract, the biggest job in his company’s history. The success was doubly important because of a slight kink in the company’s current situation: they had just lost their two other largest contracts. Egypt’s ID system had saved them from bankruptcy.
Nell had studied the happy, almost carefree lines of her superior’s face with resignation. “I will not work on this job,” she had told him.
“What?” Philip had continued to smile, still reveling in the salvation of his company.
“I will not work on this job.”
He had snapped his chair upright. “Why not?”
“Philip, it is immoral to build an ID card system for the Egyptian government. If we help them track the movements of all their citizens, you know what they’ll use it for—to clamp down on every person they don’t like.”
Philip had been an engineer; he had an engineer’s honesty. “Granted. But it will also be used for good purposes, like maintaining people’s medical records so that in an emergency, they can get proper treatment, no matter where they are.”
Nell shook her head. “With every invention, there are both good and bad results. But the occasional good use of this system comes nowhere near to compensating for the thousands of abuses it will allow the government to commit against its own citizens.”
Philip had looked away to collect his arguments. “Nell, you’ve worked with us on fundamentally evil things before. You’ve worked on weapons of tremendous destructive power. Why are you having this sudden attack of morality?”
Nell had paused. “You know, I would not object to developing weapons for the Egyptians. Weapons can be used in two different ways: they can be used to harm a nation’s citizens, but they can also be used to ward off enemies. Philip, this ID card system can really only be used for harm.” She had sighed. “I’m not even sure we should have a system like this in the United States. And the Egyptian government is far more dangerous to its citizens than our government is to us.”
Phil had sat quietly. Nell could see that many words came to him, but none of them quite fit.
“Philip, I’m sorry. But I took a vow many years ago.” Slowly, succinctly, Nell repeated the words of Jefferson. “Philip, you’re asking me to create the kind of system that I swore to destroy. You’re asking me to increase the weight of the burden I’m striving to throw down. I will not do it.”
The flashbulbs in Nell’s mind winked out. She remembered the man dying on the floor—the man who could destroy the world; the man who now refused to think of consequences.
Nell understood that you could pay too high a price in the fight against tyranny. Why fight against tyranny, if the people you vowed to free died in the process?
Slowly, with the syrupy grace of underwater ballet, Nell turned back to the Secretary of State. “Let’s get him some water first.” She spoke so slowly, it felt as though she was in a movie shown from a projector that needed the speed reset.
Earl looked up at her with pale horror. He opened his mouth, but no words came as his expression transformed with understanding. A single short gasp punctuated the silence, then died. “Yes, water,” he choked out.
With robotic precision, Nell stepped to the desk, retrieved the water pitcher, and went to the president’s side. His face and hands had turned a purplish gray. She paused a moment, then said, “I don’t think the water will help. He needs a doctor.”
“I think you’re right.”
Nell turned slowly, then picked up speed as she ran to the door. “The president’s having a heart attack! Get the doctor!”
A dozen men hurried into action. Nell crossed quietly to the place where the Gold Codes card lay on the tiled floor. She picked it up.
Pale blue skies, deep blue seas, and an occasional crest of white foam greeted Admiral Billingham as he gazed through his binoculars. The waters were as calm as they ever got in the north Atlantic.
He turned slowly, observing the proper placement of each ship in his fleet: the frigates in the lead, the cruisers port and starboard. Behind him, he knew, a similar pattern held, though he could not see the ships from his battle management center.
The binoculars themselves were anachronisms. He could see his forces—not only the ships fore and aft, but the aircraft as well—arrayed on the wall-sized, computerized battle board. But the battle board only gave him facts; it could not give him the feel of his fleet.
He glimpsed the fire and smoke of an F-26 Cheetah catapulting from the deck below before he returned to his battle analysis. His ship, the Nimitz , jerked ever so slightly as she hurled th
e Cheetah into the light blue sky. A chill ran through him. It was a beautiful day for a war.
The admiral still couldn’t quite believe they were at war with Russia, even though his fleet had struck one of the first naval blows. An Alfa-class submarine had come clipping across SOSUS IV on a direct intercept course with his flagship. It was a foolish thing to do: the Alfas were so noisy you could track them halfway across the ocean. Clearly, the sub’s commander had counted on driving so deep and fast that the American torpedoes could go neither deep enough nor fast enough to hurt him.
So Billingham had sent a pair of ancient, battered P3 patrol planes out, with half a dozen of the fast, new deep-diving Mark II homing torpedoes. The submarine became permanently quiet.
A soft bell sounded. Ensign Fletcher turned to him. “Sir, the Brits have identified a regiment of Backfire bombers coming across the gap south of the Faeroe Islands. It looks like they’re coming toward us.”
The admiral nodded. “Are the Brits going to take care of them?”
“They don’t know if they can, sir. They’re scrambling against a bomber attack on Heathrow right now.”
“I see. So the question is, which attack is a diversion? Let’s see what Batty recommends,” he said. They turned to the battle board.
Batty was the name of the on-board battle management computer, the machine that ran everything in the room.
Over a hundred of the best software and engineering minds in the United States had dedicated years to the task of bringing Batty to life. Dozens of innovative products benefiting both civilian and military projects could have been developed by this unusually bright and energetic team; instead, all efforts had gone to molding the Battle Management System. If Batty proved ineffectual, a tremendous national resource—the minds that had created the system—would have been wasted.
But Batty had entered service as a spectacular success. It had shown itself to be one of the rare miracles of military technology. It was modern, it was efficient, it did everything it was designed to do very well indeed. It was even flexible. The developers had known from the start that no commander would accept the advice or decisions of a computer programmed by landlocked engineers. No commander would agree with any “optimal” strategy chosen by some military board of “experts.”
So the designers wisely avoided that approach. Batty had started operation with a clean slate. It had learned strategy and tactics from Admiral Billingham himself. It might not be as creative as the admiral when faced with unique situations, but for the most part, it used the best ideas the Admiral had ever devised.
When Billingham first met Batty, he had wondered why anyone would bother to build such a perfect mimic. Why not just let the admiral make his own decisions? But after the second fleet exercise, Billingham understood the answer. Batty was fast. Batty made the decisions in seconds that Billingham would have made if he had had several hours to game out the alternatives.
So together, Batty and Billingham had outmaneuvered and outgunned the rest of the navy in exercises again and again, though the competition was getting tougher as the other carriers received Batty’s sibling systems. Together, Batty and Billingham seemed invincible.
And now they had a real enemy to outgun. Enemy bombers swept toward them at the speed of sound. Fortunately, Batty worked at close to the speed of light.
Batty opened a conversation window on the battle board. Recommendations appeared. The plan called for a soft redeployment of the nine patrolling Cheetahs that formed a loose circle around the fleet, shifting six of them eastward far enough to meet the attackers. But this would not be enough of itself. Batty also recommended launching four planes to intercept and chop up the regiment before they reached this standard patrol. Batty listed out the calculations that drove this conclusion, the probabilities of kill, the radius of intercept, the radius of enemy missile launch, the amount of time the patrol would have to fight before the Backfires launched their missiles, the probability of a successful hit on the Nimitz by one of those missiles. Billingham nodded in approval. After scrambling four more fighters, it would take some time to lift additional aircraft against a second threat; but what kind of threat could arise that suddenly? Even a second regiment of Backfires passing by England couldn’t get close enough fast enough to be dangerous.
The four fighters lifted off and headed toward the bombers. They were still well out of range when the Backfires mysteriously turned around and headed home. Pursuit was out of the question; the interceptors were at the edge of their range.
“Ha!” Admiral Billingham muttered. “Now the big question is, were they gun-shy? Or were they a diversion?”
Ensign Fletcher looked over at him. “What was that, sir?”
“Never mind,” the admiral replied.
Another soft bell sounded, this time a warning, rather than an alert. Billingham looked up at the section of the wall Batty now lit with new information. Admiral Billingham, Batty explained, recent satellite photos suggest that a regiment of Blackjack bombers has disappeared from their airfield near Murmansk. These may be the bombers that the Soviet Union recently modified for stealth missions. I recommend sending a second E2 north to search for them.
“Yes!” Billingham yelled. “Ensign, launch that E2 immediately.”
Fletcher looked up. “Yes, sir.”
Billingham shook his head in amazement. The missing Blackjacks were probably not part of a sneak attack on the Nimitz; more likely, they were beating the hell out of some poor Norwegian target. But had they not had Batty watching with a world-girdling hookup to sensors and data, such an attack could have been very dangerous. As it was, Batty was already routing the Cheetahs back to their normal loitering positions. In minutes, the fleet would be fully rearranged to meet such a Blackjack threat.
But even as they prepped a second E2 early warning airplane, another alert went off—a harsh bell of immediate danger. The E2 circling overhead had just picked up some dim reflections. They were almost certainly reflections from the missing Russian airplanes.
How had they flown so far without being detected? The admiral couldn’t believe it. There were hundreds of sensor systems on Iceland and Greenland that had a shot at them as they came through the Denmark strait. He could see on the map, even without Batty’s new highlighting, that that was their probable course.
The admiral now became a spectator. The enemy was too close to be handled by human decision-making reflexes. Batty ordered more Cheetahs to veer to intercepting paths while she brought the three closest patrol fighters together for a combat run. As the additional interceptors veered, however, Batty and Billingham both knew that additional interceptors were probably wasted. The Blackjacks would be in range to launch their missiles before the extra Cheetahs could arrive.
Furthermore, this detour for the Cheetahs would consume fuel. They could not return to the carrier; they would have to ditch in the ocean. Normally, such a waste of fighters would seem insane.
But the Blackjack’s missiles gained terrific accuracy when launched from closer range. Batty understood that the enemy bombers had to be forced to launch from the greatest possible distance. Otherwise, there would be no carrier for any Cheetahs to return to.
The attacking patrol planes came into firing range. As
the battle had moved out of Billingham’s control a few minutes earlier, it moved out of Batty’s control now.
The Blackjacks would fire their missiles while cruising well beyond the range of the fleet’s surface-to-air missiles. Hence, only the three Cheetahs would be able to shoot at the bombers before they launched their attack. No new strategies or tactics could alter the next series of events. The whole encounter collapsed to a game one could play with dice. With cold precision, Batty printed out the results of the fight before the first shot was fired.
Number of Blackjacks: 24 Kill rate for the Cheetahs; 25% Surviving Blackjacks: 18 Number of missiles per Blackjack: 6 Total missiles: 108
Kill rate for surface-to-air missiles again
st missiles: 7.5% Surviving missiles: 100
Success rate for electronic countermeasures and decoys.40% Missiles on-target: 60
Kill rate for point-defense guns and rockets: 45% Missile hits: 33
Probable number of hits required to incapacitate Nimitz:12 Probable number of hits required to sink Nimitz: 21 Percent overkill used to destroy Nimitz: 57%
Admiral Billingham saw at last a serious defect in the Battle Management System computer. Batty couldn’t summarize the results in human terms; it couldn’t understand its own calculations. Batty didn’t realize that they would all die. Within the hour, over five billion dollars, 40,000 man-years of human labor, and 1,000 valiant American seamen sank forever beneath the gently lapping waves.
April 22
The end of the Industrial Age saw the creation of the largest most effective killing machine in history: the Soviet Army. The individual rationalist would necessarily run to escape. Fortunately, free men of the Industrial Age were not half so rational as they were stubborn
—Industrial Age Societies: A Historical Perspective
Nathan looked at the president. She stood in sunlight, facing him. The bay windows to her left flooded the room with brightness that splintered as it touched her shoulder, that cascaded to the floor and returned, reflected in her hazel eyes. It struck Nathan as unnatural that the President of the United States should be beautiful. Then it struck him that nothing could be more natural.
Finally, he realized that much of her beauty was a creation of his own mind. Her silhouette stretched too long and thin. Her nose hooked just enough to please the nation’s cartoonists. At this moment, as she squinted past the glare of sunlight to gaze back at Nathan, tense lines radiated from the corners of her eyes. She was not, by some objective scrutiny, beautiful.
Yet when she shook her head, loose strands of hair waved gaily, in exuberant contrast to her tightly pulled bun. And her voice, though serious, held confidence—the confidence of a woman who sees a brighter future, for she will make it brighter. “Mr. Pilstrom, the senator tells me you have a bunch of wild ideas. He thinks some of them might save Europe.”
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