“I don’t know.” Juan pointed inside the van, where Florence had already disappeared. “Flo’s patching through to Cameron Corporation right now.”
Long minutes later, Flo announced they would have an improved Hopper the next day. General Kelvin called them back, to discuss the importance of the Hopper to the nation, and the urgency of getting it today. But altering a fundamental feature of the design was not something that could be hastened by forceful orders from a high authority; they could no more deliver a new machine today than they could repeal the law of gravity.
They continued to test for the rest of the afternoon, but the enthusiasm dropped as low as the safe speed for the last Hopper. No other problems appeared, but it was a pathetic group of developers that slumped in the Tieton Room that evening. No hint of hopefulness could be seen in the orange light of sunset.
Into this gloom Leslie Evans strode—and stopped, as though hitting a wall. “Good God,” he exclaimed, “whose funeral is this?”
Juan answered with a pale smile, despite the dark tan of his face. “Yes, it’s a funeral all right. Marigold’s. And Hyacinth’s.”
“Yeah, I heard there was some trouble,” Les said. “I happened to be at Cameron while General Kelvin was chewing them out.” He smiled. “They were agitated by the importance of the problem, but they didn’t know what to do about it. So I calmed them down and we held an engineering discussion. We figured out some short cuts for putting together a single quicky prototype.” He shrugged. “So they gave me an improved Hopper to bring with me. Anyone interested in a little after-dinner testing?”
The gloom yielded to a few cautious gleams of hope. Juan stood up and stretched. “You know, I’ve always been a night person.”
“Me, too,” Lila agreed.
Kurt shook his head. “The firing range is a treacherous place at night. I’d better come along, too, in case we need to drive around once we get there.”
“And I can drive a second jeep, if we need it,” Kelvin offered with a smile. “I know my way around here, too.”
By nine in the evening they had the new Hopper, Morning Glory, flying a pitch-black course. The Oriole, with new sensors in place, joined it. One by one, they ran the whole series of tests, with only the glimmer of the Yakima stars to fight by. By eleven, they had tried and passed all the tests save one. “This last one is a real cruncher,” Juan explained, a mischievous glow in his eyes. “I’ve got magnesium strobes all over the place. If the Hunters can figure out what they’re doing while getting zapped by light like that , they may work on a real battlefield.”
Kurt objected. “There’s nothing like that on a battlefield.”
Juan shrugged. “True. But there are many things on a real battlefield that we can’t try here. If the Hunters can deal with this unanticipated problem, perhaps they can deal with others.”
Lila leered at Kurt. “What’s wrong, Kurt? Afraid?” She nodded to Juan. “Run it. We’ll pass.” .
She radiated such certainty that Juan coughed back a chuckle. “We shall see.”
Across the velvet darkness, the starlight’s twinkle retreated from shafts of seering white flashes. The flashes burst against the hillsides, splintering in blinding reflections. Stepping outside, Nathan could dimly hear the whir of Morning Glory, rising and felling in pitch with the busy variations in speed and direction. Lila stepped out to join him. “No effect,” she said. “Morning Glory soaks up the data when the lights flash, and flies blind between-times.” She laughed with exultation. “It works.”
One by one the others joined them in the cold of a desert midnight. The flashes made one last effort to confuse the Hopper with a violent outpouring of light, then sank into the blackness.
General Kelvin looked around the group. In the faint glow from the Refrigerator’s windows, Nathan could see the heady excitement on everyone’s faces. Everyone was wide-eyed, despite the long day and longer night: indeed, the success tasted so sweet because of that long night.
Kelvin raised an eyebrow at Juan. “Well, mister, are we ready?”
Nathan watched Juan’s eyelids droop into the shadows. “No, General, we’re not ready.” A smile twitched his lips, and his eyes popped open with furious energy—a fury directed not at the general, but rather at the universe that found so many ways to twist and destroy human endeavor. “But we shouldn’t let that stop us. Tell somebody to build us a couple thousand of these things.”
They arrived back at the Thunderbird at two in the morning. It was Monday, though it did not feel like the beginning of the week to anyone. No one was tired. Lila, Juan, and Kurt dragged Ronnie and Florence off to find some dancing music. Nathan, Leslie, and Kelvin turned to the next problem.
Leslie was tapping on the chair arm in Nathan’s room, obviously pleased with himself.
Kelvin almost glowered as he asked, “How many days will it take to get Hunters into Europe?”
“About one,” Leslie replied. His tapping fingers stopped. “You know, historically, the United States has always won its wars by use of a distinctively American form of brute force: we have won, not because of the hi-tech of our weapons, or the brilliance of our generals—with all due respect, General. We have won because of the hi-tech of our commercial industry—our ability to create huge quantities of equipment in a short time, to drown the enemy in planes and guns and tanks. How can you beat the Americans, who build things faster than you can shoot them?”
Nathan didn’t know the punch line yet, but he knew the lead-in. “To beat the Americans, you have to start and finish the war so fast that they don’t have time to build anything.”
Leslie nodded his thanks. “Right. Stomp ‘em before they can move.” He looked back at Kelvin. “And that strategy would have worked back in the ‘80’s or the ‘90’s. There was no way we could’ve mobilized our industry in time to respond to a surprise attack.” He leaped up from his seat, no longer able to control himself. “And today, we still can’t mobilize very fast to produce the specialized, custom-built machines our Department of Defense calls weapons. There are only two foundries in the nation that can cast a tank hull. The rest were closed down by the Environmental Protection Agency ages ago, because big foundries were dirty foundries. The whole American economy developed new techniques and new products that didn’t need those kinds of foundries—everyone but the military.”
Leslie paced faster as he spoke; the room seemed too small to contain him. With his wide, alert eyes, his silver hair, and his tone of authority, he looked like a renowned scientist desperately trying to impart some fraction of his wisdom to slow students. “But the Sling Project and the last ten years of automation have revolutionized our ability to respond to surprise attacks. In the past decade, America has groped its way to a new form of industry. We made the change just in time.”
Nathan saw the double meaning; he could see by Leslie’s expression that it was intended. Nathan spoke. “Leslie’s referring to just-in-time inventorying. In fully automated manufacturing, the manufacturer keeps a minimum of stock in-house. Instead, he links up through a computer network— StockNet, for most companies, another one of the networks run by the Institute—to his customers and to the companies who supply him his raw materials. As his customers’ orders increase, his own orders for more parts automatically go out to his own suppliers. The whole sequence can ripple through an industrial network literally at the speed of light.”
Leslie nodded. “It allows dynamic reallocation of resources on a scale that astounds even me, and I’ve been working with it ever since retiring from the Air Force.” His eyes focused on the distance. “In about fifteen minutes, you will watch the most massive reallocation of resources in the history of the world.” He strode to Nathan’s room terminal. “And thanks to Nathan and the Zetetic StockNet, we will have front-row seats.”
General Kelvin sat in quiet disbelief. Nathan felt some sympathy, though he had a dim idea of what would happen now. He had faith in Leslie’s analysis: Garrett Technology, the tiny company that Lesli
e operated and that was nominally in charge of systems integration for the Sling, made most of its money by solving automated manufacturing problems.
Leslie turned from the terminal. “General, we’ll need your authorization to hook into MAC.” MAC, Nathan knew, was the Military Airlift Command.
Kelvin grunted. “Very well—but it’ll be hard to get enough military aircraft to fly all our Hunters over there.”
Leslie raised an eyebrow. “Fortunately, we don’t need military aircraft. Even though commercial planes can’t carry heavy military equipment, they can carry Hunters. We wouldn’t normally involve MAC—except that MAC has commandeered every plane in the country, whether the military can use it or not.”
“I see.” General Kelvin sat down at the terminal and worked at it for several minutes. “What next?” he asked.
“Now we watch,” Leslie replied. “Nathan rattles on from time to time about turning our plowshares into swords. We’ll see it as it happens.”
The display reflected traffic on StockNet, filtered through a query that eliminated every activity not directly related to the production of parts for the Sling Project. The first hit was with Cameron Corporation, for ten thousand Hopper Hunters. A similar order went to Lightcraft for ten thousand SkyHunters. Another order went to Space Platforms, Inc., for a thousand HighHunters.
From there, a two-way funnel opened ever wider. Cameron ordered fans, engines, and guns. LightCraft ordered motors, optical fibers, and solar cells. Space Platforms, Inc., ordered nose cones, ceramic tail fins, and liquid oxygen tanks. Everyone ordered microprocessors and optical sensor clusters.
The funnel reached farther and wider. To build those parts, the suppliers for Cameron, LightCraft, and Space Platforms needed other things: wiring, connectors, spark plugs, tubing.
The funnel opened on a flood: Those suppliers, in turn, needed raw plastics, structural metal shapes, glass, rubber, titanium, silicon putty.
By morning light, orders for ore had been issued by refineries, to supply the foundries, to supply the small-parts manufacturers, to supply the large-parts manufacturers, to supply the subassemblers, to supply the assemblers as the originally stockpiled assemblies were consumed.
Hiccups appeared. A cutting tool company fell behind, and sent out orders for replacement parts for its lathes and milling machines. Meanwhile, the operators of the Sling network—men and women of Garrett Technologies whom Leslie has gotten out of bed to help—intervened to spill the overload onto other cutting tool plants.
A graphite-epoxy chemical stream broke down. Another laminate-mixing facility was reprogrammed; the stream continued.
As money and orders had flowed down through the nerve system of the nation, now equipment and materials— thousands of tons of it—flowed upward. This upward flow convulsed the continent in a manner that the money and orders, flying with the speed of electricity through the humming networks of cable and satellite link, had not.
The material flow required more than mere communication. This convulsion required trucks, vans, aircraft, and railroad cars, for anything that could transport an engine mount or a load of ball bearings from, a factory. Another spasm of orders shot across the nation, for truck drivers and switch operators and pilots, to pump the blood back through the nation’s arteries.
And the convulsion of the transport system had its own spinoffs—new requirements for fuel, for oil filters, for turbine rotors. And this had yet more spinoffs—so numerous, so pervasive, that even the StockNet computers could not track them in real time.
By lunch time, over half a billion dollars had passed through the Sling Project—from the tip of the funnel down, to touch over five million people. And tons of materials pushed upwards to the tip of the funnel—to Cameron, to LightCraft, to Space Platforms. The first dozen production Hoppers spun off the line, into a grueling—but short—quality assurance test. One was rejected.
By evening, the routes of hundreds of airplanes had been bent into an arc that soared from continent to continent. Much of this arc already stood prepared to carry men and machines of the regular Army, but now the routes changed subtly; the cargoes changed drastically.
By midnight, the first SkyHunters lifted into the skies of Germany. The first HopperHunters floated from their crates, to whir on the edge of the battle zone. By midnight, the greatest engine of creative production in human history— the American economy—had transformed itself into an instrument of war.
Of course, midnight is relative. By the time midnight swept softly into Yakima, the gray skies of Germany had already passed through the gunpowder-stained birth pains of dawn, into morning.
May 1
The purpose in conflict is not to destroy your opponent but to disarm him.
—Zetetic Commentaries
Ivan stared stonily at the torn bodies of a farmer, his wife, and his two children, without thinking. They were Germans, he reminded himself.
Germans. All his life he had read about and heard about the Germans. Germans were monsters—the builders of Auschwitz and Dachau—murderers on a massive scale. Occasionally, during the lessons and the lectures and the broadcasts, he considered the anomaly that most of Germany’s crimes—and all their true atrocities—had occurred over half a century earlier. But the thought always faded quickly, a delicate snowflake in the burning horror of the slaughter they had committed. Usually, Ivan wondered why the Allies hadn’t simply exterminated all the Germans right after the war. It seemed justifiable to annihilate creatures that showed such a thirst for annihilation themselves.
Smoke blew past, carrying the stench of charred flesh. The farmhouse and its inhabitants had been in the center of an assault exploitation path. Before sending the tanks and the personnel carriers through, the Soviets had carpeted the route with artillery fire to kill the silly German soldiers with their silly handheld antitank missiles. In the opening days of the battle, many men had cooked to death in the armored confines of their vehicles as German and American soldiers skewered them with a plethora of rockets and missiles.
But the Russian artillerymen grew proficient at tiling the areas of advance with suppressive fires. The German foot soldiers with launchers had died. The problem had disappeared. Of course, the improved effectiveness in killing scattered soldiers had improved their effectiveness in killing formers, too.
Ivan’s jeep drove on, but he could not escape the image of the farmer’s remains. Part of his mind remembered that the farmer and his family were Germans, but another part—the rational part of his mind, he now realized— whispered that they were people little different from the farmers outside of Kursk. And no part of his mind could think of German children as Germans.’German children were just children.
He clenched his teeth. Mother of Russia, they were just children! How could his leaders justify this murder?
The 20th Guards Tank Army had crushed the German IJ Corps several days ago, but rumors said that remnants of the American VH Corps had reorganized here outside Stuttgart.
Baffled admiration shook Ivan when he thought about the Americans. Why did they fight with such ferocity? The Germans he could understand; they fought for survival. But the Americans? Why did they insist on fighting as heroes? He sighed, guilt-ridden at his own thoughts. If he felt horror at the execution of the Germans, whom he hated, how would he feel about killing Americans, whom he merely disliked? Well, they at least were combatants, not children. He shrugged.
The sound of heavy artillery grew loud, then vibrant as the earth shook with its violence. Ivan recognized a nearby ridge as the vantage point he had been told to capture.
His lonely introspection faded, and his thoughts shifted to his mission, to the troops he now commanded. He wrenched the radio handset from its socket. “Lieutenant Svetlanov, deploy your men along the left crest. Katso-bashvili, center. Dig in— the rim is shallow there, and you’ll take the brunt if the Americans try to outflank our armor. Krantz, you’re to the right.” Ivan still wasn’t quite sure how he had wound
up as commander of an infantry battalion. He was a scientist, dammit, not a soldier. But the casualties on the first few days had left a desperate need for officers, and he was an officer.
What he was not was a leader. He lacked the charisma. But as a scholar, he had a strong grasp of the theories of warfare, and he was realistic enough to recognize and be wary of situations where pragmatic experience, not theory, gave the solution.
He nodded to his jeep driver, Goga, and they bounced over the rocks and craters to the left flank of the crest, pulled up next to Svetlanov’s jeep, and stepped out. With a few long strides, Ivan reached the edge of the crest, to peer out into the main battle area. The sound of artillery turned deafening here, beyond the protection of the earthen lip. Down below was a vision of Hell.
Through the gunpowder haze, Ivan could see Major Shulgin’s armor charge through the valley, oblivious to the hail of Soviet shells through which they coursed. To the far, far left, a clutch of American tanks huddled behind whatever cover they could get, while to the right of Shulgin’s formation, a smaller group of tanks—possibly Abrams tanks, he couldn’t tell for sure—were entrenched in massive bunkers. Though the entrenched tanks were few, they would be harder to take out than the tank force at the far left.
None of the Americans paid attention to the artillery, any more than did the Russians. Save for a minuscule chance of a direct hit, neither American nor Soviet artillery posed any threat to armor; its sole purpose was to kill exposed infantrymen—men such as those Ivan now commanded. Ivan thanked the fates that the artillery pounding the battlefield was Russian, not American. He would have already died had those fires been directed at his position.
Ivan could see—and hear, on the jeep radio that his driver now cranked to full volume—Shulgin shifting his forces to crush the more distant enemy first, before sweeping around to encircle the entrenched position. Ivan pulled out his binoculars to search the center of the overall American formation. Oddly, there was no one there.
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