The General's President

by John Dalmas

  Frowning, lips pursed, Cromwell opened the report and began to read the frontal summary. His brows unknitted, rose. "Jesus Christ, Mr. President! This is bigger than transistors!" He stared. "And you're going to give this to the Soviets? The Chinese?"

  "The Chinese. The Soviets already have it. That's the part I wasn't ready to talk about to the congressmen."

  Cromwell's mouth opened.

  "And let me correct something," Haugen said. "I don't have complete proof that the Soviets have it, but the evidence is compelling."

  "But—if they have this, why don't we see evidence of it?"

  "The evidence is there. It's just that no one's paid attention. To the Soviets it's an ultra secret part of a weapon system. They haven't used it beyond that because they don't want us to know there is such a thing."

  Cromwell looked warily at the president. "What weapon system? And why don't they know we've got it ready to release? Christ, they knew about the Manhattan Project in World War Two before President Truman did! Let's face it: They've got the best military intelligence system in the world, bar none."

  "To answer your first question, the weapon system is their scalar resonance network." He looked at Gupta. "You told me the transmitters required huge amounts of electric power. And that the Soviet transmitters were more powerful than ours were until superconductors came along." He turned to Cromwell. "So why was that? And remember I asked Jim to check and see if there are nuclear reactors at those locations? He found out there aren't. There isn't even evidence of high capacity transmission lines.

  "They're generating their power on-site, without nuclear reactors; without any visible power generating system at all."

  He looked intensely at Cromwell. "And if you know enough to build and use scalar resonance to manipulate weather and induce earthquakes, then you have the basic concepts that allow you to develop the geogravitic power converter. All it takes from that point is some tangential investigation and enough luck and persistence. Or maybe Tesla's notes."

  Cromwell stared. "Shee-it!"

  "I got into it with sort of a Sherlock Holmes approach," the president went on. "Six years ago, reading on Tesla, I ran across a quote from a 1931 Time Magazine; I can damn near recite it verbatim. Tesla said he was working on a new source of power that, as he put it, would clear up a lot of puzzling phenomena in the universe. That's what he said: the universe. Then he went on that this was a source no previous scientist had turned to, so far as he knew. And that when the concept first hit him, it was a tremendous shock.

  "Of course, Tesla was never a man to understate things, but I always read him with an open mind, considering the things he actually pulled off.

  "Unfortunately he could also be coy. It's a valuable ancillary skill for an inventor.

  "Anyway, he said it was an entirely new and unsuspected power source that would be constant day and night and at all times of the year. The apparatus for converting it into electricity would be simple, with both electrical and mechanical features, and it had nothing to do with the power of the atom."

  Haugen chuckled. "Tesla didn't think atomic energy would ever be practical. He missed on that one.

  "Anyway, I looked at what he'd said from every angle I could think of, and drew nothing but blanks. I tried doodling on paper, idly, waiting for something to appear out of the doodles; that's worked for me a time or three. Nothing. Then, one morning in the shower, this idea hit me: gravity! And I got goose flesh like hell wouldn't have.

  "I never questioned whether I was right or not, just went on the operating assumption that gravity was it. So how had Tesla expected to convert gravity into electricity?" Haugen spread his hands. "Something simple, he'd said. Simple but apparently not easy. If it was easy, he'd have designed and built it, and died rich instead of poor.

  "But I knew he'd been interested in scalar waves and resonance, including resonances transmitted through the Earth."

  He chuckled. "Unlike a lot of people, I don't strain when I'm working on something. If the ideas aren't flowing, I work on something else. But I keep putting my attention back on the problem area, on the target so to speak, especially when I'm ready for bed at night. And every now and then, pop! I'll get an idea on it, most often in the morning, in the shower or on the ceramic throne, or maybe shaving.

  "And that's the way it worked. After a few months I had enough of the concept to start actual research and development."

  Cromwell looked at Haugen in awe. "And this thing really works? Christ on a crutch! It'll change the world!" His eyes went thoughtful. "OPEC isn't going to like it worth a damn, and neither is Standard Oil. Consolidated Edison is going to hate it!"

  "Yeah. But the environmentalists will love it, and so will everyone who pays an electric bill. And world oil reserves will last a helluva lot longer; their main use will be as raw material in synthetics manufacture. That and aircraft fuel for a while. I've even designed and patented a prototype car that'll run on it, with as much power as you'd want."

  He grinned at the general. "Tractors, ships... And cheap, Jumper, cheap! When Tesla's AC transformer made electricity practical, it remade technology within a few decades, with relatively cheap, clean, safe, transmittable energy. This will make at least as big a difference, and a lot more quickly because of the technical base we've got now. And because this is cheaper, a lot cleaner, and you don't need to transmit it if you don't want to; you can even ride around on the generator.

  "And all that without considering what it's going to do to physical theory."

  Cromwell wasn't ready yet to ask what it would do to physical theory. Gupta didn't ask either; he looked as if he was already working on it mentally. "And it's ready to release?" Cromwell said. It was part question, part statement.

  "Jumper, we'll have one powering an entire municipal electric system within a few days. And others are being installed, plus we've got a couple of warehouses full, ready to ship."

  Cromwell sat still, awed. "Gravity! When do we get antigravity?"

  Haugen laughed. "Hard to tell. Me, I'm just a jackleg engineer. Wait till the theoretical physicists start playing with this; antigravity might not take all that long."

  Some jackleg engineer, Cromwell thought. Then a question occurred to him. "How come..." he said slowly, "How come this hasn't leaked?" And with the question, he felt a twinge of doubt. If this was real, then without the constraints of a government security apparatus, surely it would have leaked. Maybe Haugen was nuts, had dreamed all this.

  "If the government had developed it," Haugen replied, "or some big university, it would have leaked. Almost surely. The GRU monitors them constantly; you don't need me to tell you about that. Companies like mine though, not connected with the arms industry, they apparently don't pay much attention to. And I've been calling it a geopetroleum sounder; no big deal. Told my people, those who didn't need to know the truth, that we were making them for the Arabs."

  He chuckled. "As for the Patent Office—I patented it as part of something else that's not very interesting: as the power component of a track layer for heavy transport on swamplands."

  Cromwell nodded. "Another thing's come up," he said. "There's a fuss over at Foggy Bottom."

  "Right. The congressmen asked about that too. It seems to have started with my firing Ambassador Tyler. The man was an utter fuckup; ignorant, insolent and arrogant. An example of someone who can parrot back course material on an exam without having any idea of what it means or how to use it.

  "And Coulter sponsored him. Good old Coulter, who also sponsored Blackburn. I'm offloading him, Jumper. I don't trust his competence and I don't trust his purposes. Grosberg and Kreiner are helping Milstead sort out three or four candidates for the job. Then Charles will get dossiers prepared on them."

  Cromwell nodded. The president's comments had reminded him that Trenary had been sponsored for Air Force Chief of Staff by Campbell, and Campbell was Coulter's buddy. And now Trenary seemed to be.

  "Sounds good to me," he said, the
n told the president about Trenary's upset, and the Trenary-Campbell-Coulter connection. Haugen looked interested but didn't comment.

  As Jumper Cromwell came out of the president's office, his bodyguards fell in beside him. "Guys," Cromwell said, "you people better take damn good care of that guy in there. We sure as hell can't afford to lose him."

  ***

  The general had hardly closed the Oval Office door behind him when the president's phone buzzed. He answered it.

  "Mr. President, Director Dirksma is on line one."

  "Thanks, Jeanne, I'll take it."

  Dirksma's face popped onto the screen. "Mr. President, a man and woman have been arrested in Virginia. The man claimed they were the ones who dropped the A-bomb in Delaware. Of course, several others have confessed to the same thing; you expect that sort of thing after a spectacular crime. But the woman agreed with him, and they knew right where the plane was parked. They're the McCoy.

  "The woman named three other people who were involved as accessories, and where they could be found; we've got two of them now, a husband and wife, and they've confessed too. The third one, a man, had blown."

  The president eyed Dirksma thoughtfully. "So far, so good. You people do excellent work.

  "Now I've got another job for you. It's not a criminal investigation; a lot of it can probably be done without anyone having to leave the Justice Building." He gazed levelly at the FBI director. "I want you to put together the background of Secretary Coulter."

  "The Secretary of State?"

  "Right. I want his full professional history, people and organizations he's been associated with, that sort of thing. Especially any history he has with Blackburn and Defense Secretary Campbell. And Air Force General Ewell Trenary. And I want to be informed as you go; don't wait till you've got the whole thing put together before you call me. Any questions?"

  "No questions, sir. If any occur to me, I'll call, but that seems to be pretty straightforward."

  "Good. I'll let you go now; I know you're busy."

  The president disconnected, got up and started for the coffee machine; then changed his mind; he'd been pouring too much gunk in his stomach. Instead he walked to the pool-gymnasium area. He'd been exercising again, spasmodically, but not enough and not often enough. It was time to correct that; he'd promised Lois he'd take better care of himself.

  TWENTY-NINE

  On his second morning back, the president got a full report on the nuking. The bomb had landed in a plant parking lot; there were living witnesses to that. It had looked like an artillery shell. A guy in the lot had thrown it in the back of a pickup truck and sped away with it, horn blaring, as if realizing what it was. It had blown almost a mile away, and damage to the nuclear generating plant was not massive. There were no radiation leaks from the plant; the radioactivity released was entirely from the bomb.

  A northwest breeze had carried the radioactive cloud across Chesapeake Bay and the southern Delmar Peninsula. Panic had been widespread there, where many people thought Washington had been nuked and nuclear war begun.

  After the briefing, the president boarded an army helicopter and overflew the site, an action of no obvious functional but considerable political value. Afterward he met the press at the army's nuclear cleanup camp near Prince Frederick, where he delivered a two-minute address and dealt with a few questions. Then, with the first lady, he visited the refugee center near Washington, and the injured at Walter Reed Medical Center.

  They were back at the White House for supper. And while he'd gotten no "work" done that day, it occurred to Arne Haugen that what he had done was as important in the functioning of a president as anything else would have been.

  After supper he worked on his "new technology" speech.

  THIRTY

  Barron Tallmon reached for his buzzing intercom and touched the pulsing button. "This is Barron," he said. The screen remained blank. By contrast, the television in the corner of his darkened living-dining room was alive with motion and color, though he'd keyed down the sound to take the call.

  "Barron, this is Massey. I'm in my office, about to watch the speech. Come down here. I may have thoughts for you to take notes on."

  "Yes Mr. Massey." As he said it, Tallmon glanced at the digital clock built into the face of his set, and touched the countdown key on his remote; one minute and fifty-three seconds before nine.

  "I'll be there momentarily."

  "Do so."

  Tallmon took the barely-touched TV dinner into his kitchenette and put it on the drainboard. I shouldn't have waited so long to eat, he told himself. From a stand by his apartment door, he grabbed an ever-ready clipboard, pen attached, then hurried out. A minute later he knocked at the door of Massey's sitting room/office.

  "Come."

  He entered. The room was lit only by the television and a small glow panel turned low beside a window. Massey spoke without taking his eyes from the screen. "There is scotch and seltzer on the sideboard if you'd care for some."

  Massey had repeated the invitation innumerable times over eighteen years; the answer had always been the same.

  "No thank you, sir." It occurred to Tallmon to wonder what Massey's reaction would have been if he'd said "yes sir." There would be no reaction, he decided as he took a chair a half dozen feet to Massey's left. Then, clipboard on his knee, he turned his own attention to the set.

  "...and perhaps some comment on the reported coup attempt in the Far East Command of the Soviet army." The familiar, resonant voice of CBS's Weldon Germaine paused, and dropped to an undertone. "The president has just come into the room."

  The picture switched to Arne Haugen as he walked across the room and sat down at a desk. His gaze went to the camera facing him and seemed to look out at Tallmon.

  "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans. I have several important things to talk to you about this evening. My press secretary, Mr. Okada, tells me it's preferable to talk about only one subject in a talk like this, and I can see the logic in that. But at the rate things have been happening, tonight I need to talk about more than one."

  He chuckled then, seemingly not aware of it, as he looked down at the ruled yellow sheets on the desk. Then he looked back up at the camera, his gaze and attention focusing.

  "I'm going to talk to you briefly about foreign trade and a foreign affairs action I'm taking. And after that I'm going to tell you about the new technology I mentioned in my Warsaw speech; I understand there's been a lot of curiosity about that.

  "But before I talk about any of those things, I need to talk to you briefly about the goal I have as your president. It's a goal I take so much for granted that I had to be away from America before it occurred to me that I needed to tell you about it."

  He seemed to gaze out at Tallmon for a pair of seconds before continuing, seemed to catch and hold his eyes, and for a moment it took the man by surprise. "I have a vision of America," the president said. "Nothing magical, nothing Utopian, it doesn't have heavenly choirs. But I want to tell you about it, tell you what it seems to me that America might become. If you agree with me on it; if you decide to make it that way or let others make it that way."

  The president paused. Tallmon glanced surreptitiously at Massey. Massey's expression was detached interest—no stranger to his pale, aristocratic face.

  "I visualize an America," Haugen was saying, "where the law defends the rights of its people, and at the same time enables them to grow and evolve individually and as a nation. Where education—" He paused for emphasis. "Where effective education functions freely and creatively to help them grow and evolve as a continuingly unique and special part of the community of Planet Earth." Another pause. "An America where the individual has more freedom than ever to shape his or her life according to his or her own developing purposes. And..." He slowed, enunciating the words one after the other. "Where that individual growth and development is not threatened by arbitrary bureaucratic regulations, but is constrained only to the degree nece
ssary to protect the reasonable rights of others."

  Again the president paused, eyes intent on the camera, as if looking through it at his audience. Intent but not intense, calm instead of zealous.

  "An America active, rich in ideas, where new things are tried, and new ways of doing things, with no more than essential regulation. Where personal and group experimentation is respected or at least tolerated. Where the future takes form by persons and groups choosing from many alternatives or creating new ones. Where government planning agencies have no power to dictate the future. Where government's role is to ensure freedom and reasonable opportunity to grow. Where the board rooms of giant corporations cannot play big games with the economy and dictate people's choices to suit corporate ambitions." He paused again for emphasis. "Where arrogant elites do not undertake to program the nation, and through it the world, into a machine which they intend to drive."

  Once more Tallmon slid a rightward glance from the corner of his eye and saw no response. Or had the expression hardened a little?

  "All of these," Haugen was saying, "government agencies, corporations, self-appointed elites—all of these should be free to propose, experiment and expound, but not to coerce and dictate to the people.

  "And I see the key to this future as reduced restrictions, greater individual responsibility before the law, and greater tolerance of differences, even greater respect for differences. Which is to say, the conditions which the founders of this nation intended and which a self-interested establishment has degraded.

  "In about a month I will announce reforms of our legal system to move us in that direction.

  "That's enough about that for now though. Let's look at foreign trade next: I've had a lot of urging to put tighter restrictions on foreign imports and even to cut off most of them entirely; cut off almost all but the importation of oil and strategic minerals.