Mark studied him. Schubert’s heavy jowls flushed crimson, his small eyes glowed with passion.
“How do you... know this?” Mark asked.
“Well, mainly,” a twinkle returned to his eyes, “because I’m going to start it.”
They passed through a door under a large light shining with a steady green glow. The room they entered was a vast high-ceilinged expanse, a combination of rough walls hewn out of the rock, and banks of sophisticated machinery that hummed and blinked.
In the center of the room, hanging from the ceiling, was a huge lucite projection map of the world. On the oceans were positioned tiny models of various kinds of military ships—submarines, aircraft carriers, missile cruisers—in different colors. A key at the bottom of the map indicated that these colors matched ownership by the various nations.
Scientists and technicians worked at dozens of posts. Every few moments, one of them would step up to the map with a long rod and shift the position of a ship slightly in one direction or another.
Conversation among the workers was brief and businesslike—as elsewhere in the habitat, no pleasantries were exchanged. Voices were low and monotonous. The work was ceaseless and not marked by excitement.
Schubert led Mark to the middle of the room near the map and gestured around at ali the people. “You see, I’ve studied the human animal—not from books, but dose up—and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no hope for him but to start all over again. And this time to add courtesy, good manners, esthetic judgment, and a modicum of discipline. A sane man, not diverted by myth or empty emotion, could arrive at no other conclusion. Mankind must start over, this time with the values he has always espoused and never heeded. Don’t you agree?”
Mark gazed around at the busy scientists and equipment. He didn’t answer.
They began to walk slowly around the room, passing the preoccupied scientists, including the four that Mark had followed in. Those four were scribbling on yellow pads, then tapping on pocket calculators, then scribbling some more.
“Now take these folks,” Schubert said, “outstanding scientists, every one. Best in their fields. By best I don’t mean just in their scientific know-how, but in their attitudes. They are all disillusioned with life upstairs. Every one hates war. Every one was fed up with what they had to do in their own countries, which was primarily to advance the military machines and capabilities of their nations. Call it defense work or corporate research, it was all the same, all work for war. Chemical companies, automobile companies, oil producers, electronics works—all professed peaceful purposes, but all directed to the war machine. Even the food companies. Did you know there is a mustard preparation one cup of which, when properly spiced, has the destructive force of three thousand tons of TNT?”
The British scientist sat at a control board as if hypnotized, his face devoid of expression, his eyes staring at the board, his fingers working the diais mechanically.
“Like this fine gentleman,” Schubert said. “In his former life on that decaying isle—that same isle which spawned your decaying country—he was locked into the development of a particular transistor which could have advanced the human condition but was in fact employed only in missiles. He just wanted a chance to work on pure science—as they all do here. And someday—after this little necessary diversion they are presently involved with—they will.
Schubert patted the scientist on the shoulder, getting no reaction, and they moved on.
“You will notice that all the workers here are wearing the bracelet which you have so far unwisely shunned. My little bracelets make it easy—no stress or strain or searching of souls and so forth. It allows them to concentrate fully on their tasks, without intrusion of unproductive emotions or doubts or fears. In short, these handsome bracelets bring you peace. They would be good for everybody, of course, but it’s hardly a practical notion to try to get them on four billion people, right? They will not always be necessary—you notice that I am not wearing one. Once minds are reoriented toward the positive thinking that is the acme of the human brain, the bracelets can be discarded—like training wheels on a kid’s bike. My mind is so developed.”
Schubert chuckled, and Mark looked at him.
“Don’t misunderstand me, dear man. This is not humorous. Just happy excitement. Look at all this.” He thrust out his palm in several directions toward the scientific equipment, as if pushing each piece into place against the wall. “Know where I got it? Aha. No, no, I didn’t sneak into the world’s laboratories and abscond with these marvelous and expensive machines. I am a scavenger, my friend. And so it was with this. These items are what’s left of Russian spy ships, CIA aircraft, French super-subs—all manner of the world’s military craft that met their fates over the seas and went to the bottom filled to the brim with the most up-to-date hardware. Remember the submarine Thresher that sank in the Atlantic with all hands? The B-52 hydrogen bomber that crashed through the ice off Greenland? The Russian cruiser Menshevik that sprang a leak in the Sea of Okhotsk? Ho. All carrying millions and millions of dollars’ worth of fine electronic gear, lost and useless to the surface dwellers. But not to me. I found it all, fixed it up, and put it back to work, right here. So I’m the original recycle king.”
He took Mark’s shoulders and slowly turned him around to face the giant map dangling from the ceiling.
“See that? That’s not your run-of-the-mill atlas, my dear boy. With this map we’re keeping track of every nuclear-missile-carrying ship and submarine in the world. Hundreds of them, carrying thousands of warheads, each one aimed at a preselected target in somebody else’s backyard, ready to be fired in case of war. We know their precise location, the exact status of their missiles, just where each is aimed.”
Schubert puffed out his chest and spread his arms grandly. “Can you imagine what could be accomplished if one man could get control of all that power for thirty seconds. Huh? Well, my friend, I’ve done it!”
He brought Mark closer to the map. “Look how many of those ships the warmongers have distributed over our globe. Insane. And they fali all over themselves just trying to keep track of each other. Well, we do that with ease. We here have developed signals that are much more accurate and immediate, than they have up there. No simple sonar Ping-Pong. And with a bit more canny rewiring and reprogramming, we reach not only the ships, but within them to the very missile-control systems themselves. If you were a scientist, I could explain it to you. But I’ll give you a simplified quickie.”
Mark tumed to study him, his breath growing hoarse. Schubert, in his proud discourse, seemed oblivious to Mark’s growing discomfort.
“You see, we make use of their own technology. We don’t even need to have missiles of our own. We use theirs. Their missiles are already targeted—everybody’s to shoot at everybody else. Arming them is no big deal. Simple push of some buttons on the ships—zip-zap-zup—and they’re armed. What takes time on shipboard is that they have to get permission from higher-ups, and the higher-ups have to get permission from higher-ups. We don’t. Nothing to firing them—zip, zap, zup. Everything is ready, up there, for pushing buttons. Now, how do we, down here, get those buttons, up there, pushed? All we do is have our systems designed to override all their systems. Their systems do the rest. Our systems send a signal to their systems, bypassing the human idiots, and the job is done. A-B-C, if you know what you’re doing.”
At that moment, Mark gave a start. He had been watching a man working at a console. Something about the man drew his attention. When the man turned to the side to read a gauge, Mark recognized him.
It was Commander Hendricks, the man who accompanied Commander Roth on the ill-fated mission of the Sea Quest.
“... And we know what we’re doing.”
Just then Commander Hendricks leaned forward and moved a lever. A whoomp echoed in the room, and a finger of flame shot out briefly, knocking Commander Hendricks backward off his chair and onto the floor. He lay still.
A few
heads turned toward Hendricks, then turned back to their work.
Mark started forward, but Schubert held him back with an arm.
“Switch to your backup system, Kumkov,” Schubert barked to the Russian scientist. Then he smiled at Mark. “A curable problem, my boy. You see we are prepared for human error.”
One scientist climbed slowly down from a ladder where he had been tending a second-level console and approached the fallen man. It was Philip Roth, moving stiffly as if sleepwalking. He knelt unsteadily beside Hendricks.
Two guards with rubber nightsticks came briskly through the door and stomped over toward Roth. Mark brushed aside Schubert’s arm and took a couple of steps toward the two commanders. The guards whirled around and swung their clubs, grazing Mark and sending him stumbling back against Schubert. Schubert stepped in front of him as the guards pulled Roth erect and left him standing, though wavering a bit.
“Go back to your station, Philip,” Schubert ordered.
Roth, in a daze, advanced closer.
“Philip!”
He continued to plod forward.
Schubert nodded calmly to the two guards, who quickly seized Roth and pummeled him with their clubs and hauled him away.
“No.” Mark pushed Schubert away. “No.”
Two other guards raced in and pinned Mark’s arms. He faced Schubert. “I now understand... your world.” The two locked eyes. “You are... wrong.”
Mark tried to pull free from the guards, but he staggered and gasped for breath. One guard swung his right fist a single time into Mark’s jaw, and Mark dropped to the floor.
“The human animal,” Schubert shook his head sadly, “continues to amaze me.”
Throughout all this, the other workers continued to concentrate on their machinery, never once distracted by the violence.
“You see, Mark?” Schubert looked down at his still form, his voice soft and pleasant. “Wouldn’t it be better if everyone were like my staff here? Fully at peace?”
Rain pelted the deck of the Moon River. Elizabeth and Ernie, in yellow slickers, stood together at the rail and looked out into the night, across the empty surface of the ocean.
“I never felt so useless,” Elizabeth said softly. “Never felt so absolutely powerless and inept.”
“I lost a guy last year, back near home, not far off Catalina.” Ernie wiped water off his eyes with his hand. “My co-diver. I didn’t know him well. He seemed to know what he was doing. It wasn’t a difacult dive. We were down about one-thirty-five checking out an old tanker hulk that was a menace to navigation, to guide the welders in to cut up the superstructure. Things seemed to be going fine. Then it was time to get back up. I signaled to the guy, and he just looked at me. There was a big old grouper that had been nosing around for a while—you know how curious they are. And suddenly my co-diver just slips out of his airpack and takes his regulator and hands it out to this grouper, like he wanted him to breathe through it, you know?”
He shook his head. “Right away I knew he had the rapture. I grabbed him and tried to shove my regulator in his mouth, share my air while I dragged him up. But he just pushed me away. And all at once he kicked and took off straight down. Went right out of sight. All I could see was his air bubbles coming right pass me. He was breathing, right? Breathing his last breath. I wanted to go down after him. But I was just about out of air. Nothing I could do. Nothing.”
He fell silent. They looked out into the rain.
He cleared his throat. “You were asking me what I felt, when Mark took off down from the platform. Well, for a couple of minutes, that’s what I felt. Like maybe he had the rapture and was gone and there was nothing I could do. But then in my earphones I heard you say he was okay. If you hadn’t said that...”
She waited. “What, Ernie?”
“I think maybe I woulda gone after him, this time.”
The rain whipped their faces and drowned out the rumble of the shipboard generators.
chapter 8
Green lights began flashing on the rows of monitors and control boards and reflecting off the Lucite map and model ships. The scientists glanced up at the lights, then fixed their attention on the monitors without emotion.
Schubert’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker.
“Fellow scientists. What we have been laboring on for so long is about to come to pass. Exactly fifteen minutes from the time I start the countdown, a signal will be generated from this undersea mountain to every missile-carrying vessel on the world’s oceans. That signal will penetrate every electronic defense, override every fail-safe system, and activate the mechanisms that will launch every missile atop the sea toward its prearranged target. Then we will sit back and wait for the mess to clear.”
The scientists and technicians sat stiffly on their chairs, showing no reactions.
Schubert went on. “Already our preliminary exploratory signal is probing these shipboard systems throughout the world, confirming ali our concepts and calculations. In moments, that signal will be withdrawn, and the way will be cleared for the terminal activating signal that will bring a swift end to all that nationalistic nonsense adrift above us. The holocaust will be the final fire. I mean, it will be a beaut. We’re going to shake this planet down to the roots and then we’re going to fix it up and get it back to speed again—our way. With fewer, but considerably higher quality, people. Just like yourselves. Think about it now as you go back to your quarters. Go.”
The emotionless workers rose stiffly from their seats, turned, and began filing out of the vast room. They stayed separated from each other by about a yard, almost in lock step. The big map past which they paced remained lit, the tiny model ships stuck motionless to their stations like files on fiypaper. None of the departing scientists said a word.
Aboard the newly christened, nuclear-powered American aircraft carrier Patience, cruising in the North Atlantic, several officers sat around the table in their club room sipping after-dinner Grand Marnier.
“What do you make of that strange signal we were picking up, Captain?” the lieutenant commander asked.
“Not much to make of it. Not your normal signal. Couldn’t trace it. No harm done. Russkies playing with some new electronic toy, trying to figure out how it works.”
“What makes you think it was the Russians?” Heads turned toward Lt. Maggie McCurdy, the first woman to serve on board.
“Well, heh-heh,” the captain said, cocking his head to look at her, “when you’ve served out here as long as we have, you get to know the Russkies pretty good. You’ll get used to it. If they’re serious we’re ready for ’em. They know we got bombers on board. But they don’t know we got multiheaded Cruise nukes.”
“In any case, Captain,” said the lieutenant commander, “the signa! disappeared a while ago, as quick as it came, and nothing’s been heard since.”
“So that’s that,” the captain said.
Aboard the nuclear-powered Chinese submarine Yamaha deep in the Sea of Japan, the radio officer turned to the first mate, who was peering over his shoulder.
“It’s gone,” he said in a heavy Szechwan accent.
“Very strange indeed,” said the mate in the lighter inflections of Hunan.
“It was very faint, and not like sonar.”
“Hmm.”
“And quite distant, not as if from Japanese waters. And it has been reported to me that there was a brief buzzing in the torpedo room.”
“So? Perhaps it is in the nature of our new hydrogen warheads to buzz a bit.”
“In any event, I haven’t been able to pick it up again. Should I keep looking for it?”
“No, no. We’ll wait. If the signal returns quickly, we’ll know it was the Americans. They are in such a hurry.”
“Do you suppose they know we’re here?”
“Probably. But they do not know why.”
“Why are we here, sir?”
“Ah, my son, to that there are as many answers as there are junks on the Yangtze—none
of them known to us. But if the signal returns bearing threat to us, we are prepared to respond in kind.”
* * *
Aboard the guided-missile cruiser Lev in the eastem Mediterranean, the Israeli officer of the deck trained his binoculars on shore near Beirut.
“Think it was the Egyptians, sir?” asked the young ensign.
“Who knows? We’ve got lots of friends and lots of enemies. Our friends are just as interested in penetrating our electronics systems as our enemies are.”
“You think it could even have been the Americans?”
“Americans, French, Russians, Syrians, Japanese, Ugandans—the list of possibilities is endless. The signal won’t come again.”
“Why not?”
“Because whoever sent it would not risk its being traced. Everybody wants to spy on us, but nobody wants us to know they’re doing it, friend or foe alike. So they sent a feeble signal and learned nothing. Or they learned everything. It makes no difference. They won’t do anything. We won’t do anything. Nobody wants the Middle East to explode just now—not while they need the oil.”
Schubert sat alone in a small, brightly lit room, in front of the master control panei. “Ah, yes,” he said softly, “time is money. And now’s the time.”
He flipped a small metal cover to his left, exposing a lock. He inserted a key frito the lock and turned it.
“And so, my pretties above, I have just withdrawn our preliminary signal. Did your delicate hulls feel the pulse of our initial probe? Did your awesome launch mechanisms sense our first electronic tickle? No matter. It was nothing. We were just saying hello. We were saying hello and how are you. And we have our answer. You are all fine and right at home. Enjoy yourselves, my floating babes of warfare. Your time is almost up. Our next signal will be saying good-bye.”
He inserted the key in another lock to his right and turned it. A digital readout appeared in the center of the screen in front of him: “15:00.”
Man From Atlantis Page 14