The Hercules Text

by Jack McDevitt

  “Yet they chose not to do so. Perhaps they are trying to mislead us?”

  “Perhaps. But we don’t really know that their failure to act was a deliberate choice. A test of a weapon of this nature,” the colonel said, “would be very closely guarded, even within their own organization. They may have failed to inform the people who would have neutralized the Chernev.” He might have added that they all knew from experience that such oversights happened even among the people’s forces.

  They heard Taimanov’s voice in the hall. A moment later the foreign minister entered and took a place at the far end of the table.

  “But,” persisted Konig, “it might nevertheless be an elaborate hoax. The missiles could have self-destructed.”

  “That is possible. But the Chernev detected microwaves from a higher orbit. We suspect that it is peripheral radiation of some sort.”

  “And the device emitting the radiation?”

  “—Is not in my field of expertise. Rudnetsky believes it could be the particle-beam weapon.”

  With those words, the atmosphere became funereal. “The American press,” Taimanov said, “has been reporting rumors of such a thing. If in fact they have it, I do not like to think what the bastards will try to do with it.”

  Harry’s allergies got so bad that he took a day off and went to bed. His eyes swelled, his throat began to hurt, and he could not stop sneezing. The next morning, he went back to the dispensary, where a medic gave him another injection. It dried out his sinuses, but left him sleepy. When he showed up at the Hercules staff meeting during the latter part of the morning, he looked distinctly unwell.

  Gambini reported some progress in translating Althean descriptions of electromagnetic phenomena, and Majeski’s replacement, Carol Hedge, had uncovered enough on statistical relationships to suggest that Wheeler was probably correct in ascribing the accident to Maxwell’s Demon. Her presentation woke Harry up.

  Hedge was an attractive black from Harvard-Smithsonian. Harry watched her appreciatively and once caught Leslie smiling at his reaction to her. When she’d finished, Gambini asked for comments, noted one or two expressions of concern for safety in future experiments, and turned the meeting over to Wheeler.

  “I think I’ve got another bomb,” said the priest. “We’re finding detailed and exceedingly fundamental descriptions of electromagnetic radiation, harmonics, particle theory, you name it. At the moment, I have answers to all kinds of classic questions. For example, I think I know why the velocity of light is set where it is. And how a photon is constructed, although that’s the wrong verb. And I have a few insights to offer into the nature of time.” But Wheeler’s comments, which should have elicited a celebratory mood, were delivered in a somber voice.

  “You’re not going to tell us,” Leslie asked, “that we can build a time machine, I hope?”

  “No. Fortunately, time machines are probably prohibited. The nature of the universe won’t permit their construction. But I wonder whether you’d care to settle for an exceedingly efficient death ray? We’re going to have a whole new technology for creating articulated light—concentrated radiation that could be used for a variety of constructive purposes, but which will also have one hell of a military application as a long range weapon. It would possess significant advantages over bombs, by the way. For one thing, it’d kill people without blowing holes in the real estate, thereby making war profitable again. And the beams travel at light speed, so there’d be no chance of defense or retaliation. It’s ideal; the military would love it.”

  “I think,” Hakluyt said evenly, “that we have another data set to destroy.”

  “There’s more,” continued Wheeler. “Unfortunately, a good deal more. Harmonic manipulation, for example.”

  “What can you do with harmonics?” asked Harry.

  “At a guess, we could probably disrupt climate, induce earthquakes, bring down skyscrapers. Who knows? I don’t think I want to find out. Harry, what’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, really, I guess. But it occurred to me that Hurley is trying to make the world safe from a weapons system that has just become obsolete.”

  It was an uncomfortable moment.

  “I don’t suppose,” said Wheeler, “there’s any way that a detailed description of physical reality—an advanced description—could help having this sort of effect. I’m putting it all into a report, which you’ll have before you go home this evening. I think we’ve reached a Rubicon, and we’re going to have to decide what we want to do.”

  “How many data sets are involved?” asked Hakluyt.

  “Almost every one I’ve looked at. About a dozen, so far.”

  Gambini slumped back in his chair. “There’s something else you might as well know,” the project manager said. “Cy, tell them about the DNA.”

  Hakluyt smiled wickedly. He looked different without his glasses. But it was more than that. He appeared healthier somehow. Harry had trouble, at first, understanding why his impression of the man had changed. “I’ve discovered,” he began, “some techniques for restoring the repair functions of the body. We should be able to rewire DNA so as to do away with most genetic disorders and those normally associated with aging.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Leslie. “What precisely do you have, Cy?”

  “At the moment, not very much. Dr. Gambini found it necessary to lock up the data set from which I was working.”

  Gambini colored slightly, but said nothing.

  “What were you working on?” pursued Leslie.

  “A way to stop cancer. To prevent physical deterioration. To ensure there are no more crib deaths, and to clear out the hospitals! We can eliminate birth defects and mental retardation. We can change the entire flow of human existence.

  “You people talk about weapons and war. Maybe, if we showed a little courage, we could remove some of the causes of war. Give everyone a decent life! With the things we’re learning here, we can create prosperity around the globe. There’d be no point anymore in maintaining standing armies.”

  “You really believe that?” asked Wheeler.

  “I think we need to try. But we have to get the information out. Make it available.”

  “What you are going to make available,” said Gambini wearily, “is more misery. When there are too many people, you get famine.”

  “God knows,” said Wheeler, “the Church has been saddled with that reality for a long time now, and they don’t want to look at it either. But I’m not so sure we’d be correct in withholding something like this.”

  Good for you, Pete, thought Harry, noting Hakluyt’s relieved expression. He’d expected no help from that corner.

  “It’s obvious,” Leslie said, “that we need to make a very basic decision. We’ve talked about withholding things from the White House, but until now we haven’t had to do it. But I think we have to think about that, and we have to think about what’s going to happen down the road. What are we going to do with the material we can’t release to anyone?”

  “If we start holding stuff back,” said Harry, “and we get caught at it, everything will unravel. The project will be taken away from us and given to people the government can trust.”

  “No.” Gambini’s index finger was pressed against his lips. “They’d have done that already if they could. Their problem is that there’s no one they can trust who’d be any real help to them. They’ve got codebreakers and engineers, but for this stuff they need physicists. That’s why they’ve been so patient with us.”

  “Cy,” asked Wheeler, “I take it you’d vote to turn everything over to NCAS?”

  “Yes. It’s not a move I’m comfortable with, but it’s the best of several bad alternatives.”

  “What move would you be comfortable with?” asked Leslie.

  Hakluyt fiddled with the top button of his shirt. “None,” he said. “Maybe there is no reasonable way.”

  “How about you, Harry?” asked Gambini. “What would you recommend?”

  I
t was a bad moment, and Harry hadn’t yet sorted everything out. If they withheld information and got caught at it (and you could not rely on these guys to be discreet), his job would go, his pension, everything he’d worked for all his life. Worse, it might even open them up to charges of treason.

  But what alternative was there? If they released this stuff to the White House, advanced weapons and DNA reprogramming and whatever the hell else was in there, what would the world be like in five years?

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know. I guess we have to sit on some of this stuff. Even Cy’s material. I keep thinking about what would happen if people stopped dying.”

  Gambini’s eyebrows rose in surprise, and Harry thought he detected, after that, a new respect in the project manager’s bearing toward him.

  “Pete?”

  “The DNA material should be released. We have no right to withhold it. As for the rest of it, we really have no choice but to keep it to ourselves. I certainly won’t be party to turning it over to the government. Any government.”

  “Okay,” said Gambini. “I’m inclined to agree—”

  “I haven’t finished yet,” said Wheeler. “There’s no way we can retain control over this information indefinitely. Leslie’s right when she says we need to think about the long term. Eventually, if we continue to collect it, it’ll get out. We have in this building the knowledge that would provide almost anyone with the means to obliterate an enemy so quickly and completely that retaliation need not be taken into account. That, so that we are all clear, is what we are talking about. And when the disaster comes, it is we who will be responsible. The Text is a Pandora’s box. For the time being, the information is contained. Some of it’s out, but most of it is unknown, even to us. I suggest we shut the lid. Forever.”

  “No!” Leslie was on her feet. “Pete, we can’t just destroy the discs! Do that and we lose everything. I know there’s a terrible risk here, but the potential for gain is enormous. Hercules may eventually prove to be our salvation. God knows we’re not making it on our own.”

  “Okay.” Gambini shook his head. “We seem to have some disagreement here. I think Wheeler’s right, except for his suggestion that we release Cy’s DNA material. I’m sorry about that, Cyrus, but it’s how I feel. I don’t know how long we can simply bide our time. The longer we hang on, the more difficult the letting go is going to be.”

  “You’re both wrong,” said Leslie. “Pete, you’re a dealer in ultimate causes and final purposes. What practical reason have we for existence other than to learn things? To know what lies beyond our senses? If we destroy the Hercules recordings, it seems to me we do a terrible disservice not only to ourselves but to the people who conquered a pulsar to let us know they were there.”

  “We know they’re there,” said Wheeler, his voice sharp and resonant. “That’s enough!”

  “It is not enough,” said Leslie. “It is never enough. Somehow we must find a middle ground. I don’t ask anyone to believe we can keep this under control indefinitely. Certainly in the long term we can’t. But right now we can. If we keep our mouths shut and watch what we give our assistants to do and consult with one another, we should be all right. For a while, at least.”

  “Listen to the lady,” said Hakluyt. “She makes sense. If you destroy the Text, your act will be irrevocable. There’ll be no going back, and I can assure you it is an act you will regret all your lives. And the rest of us with you.

  “In any case, whatever we do here, the things that are in those recordings will come anyhow, and at the rate science is moving today they will be upon us very soon. So I submit to you that technical knowledge is not what we stand to lose. What we will lose is our contact with another species. Destroy those discs, and we will never know any more than we know right now. And it is more than possible that, during the life of our species, we will never meet another. And you would throw that away because we lack the courage to do what needs to be done?”

  Harry’s voice, when he spoke, was barely a whisper. “How about a holding action? We could hide the Text somewhere. For a few years. Maybe indefinitely. Until the world is a little more ready for it.”

  “And where would you hide it?” asked Hakluyt. “Whom do you think you could trust with it? Not me, certainly. Not Ed. Not, I think, anyone in this room. We’ve dedicated our lives to finding out how the world works. You’d be asking the mice to guard the cheese.”

  Harry sighed. He’d been in government too long not to recognize that approach. Hakluyt, of course, was wrong. If most of the persons in the conference room were dedicated to research, Harry, at least, was dedicated to survival.

  Gambini refilled his coffee cup. “We’ll try to keep things to ourselves for the time being. We’re all going to need to decide what gets passed on and what doesn’t. Anybody comes up with anything else that we have to worry about, I want to know about it right away. Pete, I understand your concerns. We’ll try to be careful. But I can’t bring myself to destroy all this.”

  “No,” said Wheeler. “Not now or ever.”

  The meeting broke up in gloom and disarray. “I suggest,” Leslie said, “that we need a new perspective. The Arena sent us some tickets for Signals. Anybody care to come?”

  “Isn’t that the show about us?” asked Gambini.

  “Yes. Or at least it’s about a radio contact. It’s a musical.”

  “That,” said Wheeler, “seems appropriate.”

  The U.S.S. Feldmann plowed through the white waters of the Barents Sea approximately three hundred miles west northwest of Murmansk. The ship had been steaming patiently back and forth for a week on a course roughly parallel to the Russian coast.

  Feldmann was a converted Spruance Class destroyer. Her helicopters, missile launchers, gun mounts, ASROC, and torpedo tubes had all been removed. In their place, the navy had packed an assortment of electronic surveillance equipment, which allowed the vessel to monitor naval and merchant marine activity at the far northern ports. Feldmann’s special interest was Soviet submarine operations.

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Rick Fine, one of four operational intelligence officers on board, took his job seriously. He realized that the survival of his country, should hostilities begin with the Soviet Union, would depend on the American ability to take out the Russian submarine force in the opening minutes of the war.

  During the final years of the twentieth century, while ICBMs grew increasingly accurate and destructive, and while manned bombers receded into history, the submarine assumed a dominant position in the opposing triads by virtue of its ability to hide in the vast oceans. In an effort to counteract the threat from the enemy’s ever growing fleet of subs, the United States began development during the 1970s of a vast network of supersensitive underwater listening posts. Eventually code-named ARGOS, the system went operational in piecemeal fashion; but, by the end of the second Reagan administration, the navy was in a position to track everything that moved in the world’s strategic oceans. And this capability, combined with that of ORION, had the potential to render the United States invulnerable to nuclear attack.

  While Feldmann patrolled the frigid waters off the northern coast of the U.S.S.R., the navy was fitting, or having fitted, a fleet of destroyers and cruisers with particle-beam projectors. Stationed at all times between Soviet missile subs and their targets, the navy’s ships would be able to take out the missiles as effectively as the satellites would destroy the ICBMs. The nuclear stalemate, although Fine had no way of knowing it, was almost at an end.

  Feldmann was a supplement to ARGOS. Its primary mission was to monitor short-range, high-speed transmissions among the subs and their bases. But she was a flexible ship, prepared to take advantage of any target of opportunity.

  All this was accomplished from a reasonably safe distance by purely electronic means. Feldmann was listed as a naval weather research vessel, and the crew did some of that, too. The Soviets knew about the ship, of course, just as the Pentagon knew about the Sov
iet trawlers off the American coasts.

  Fine was due to relieve the watch at midnight, and as usual when he was on the graveyard shift, he was unable to sleep. He gave up eventually, knowing that he’d be more tired from staring at the overhead than he would from reading or writing a few letters.

  Fine was short and heavyset. His reserve commission had come from OCS in Newport, Rhode Island, where he’d nearly flunked out. Two-thirds of his class had failed, and it had been a near thing with him. A liberal arts graduate, Fine had found the technical material in the engineering and weapons courses very nearly beyond him. In the end, he’d made it by teaching himself trigonometry on Sundays, the only free time the candidates had. And he’d done one other thing. They’d received officer-type uniforms during the sixth week. Fine, then on the edge of oblivion, had purchased the insignia of an officer, the eagle and crossed anchors. He’d put it on a spare hat, and though he was not authorized to wear it, he’d placed the hat above the row of textbooks on his desk each evening as he sat down to work.

  He left his cabin, watched a movie in the crew’s quarters, and then went out on deck.

  The nights off Murmansk, even in May, were brutally cold. A bright yellow moon limned the calm, polished surface. The stars were brilliant through a white trailing mist. Fine had sailed in most of the world’s oceans, and it seemed to him that nowhere did the stars seem nearer than inside the Arctic Circle.

  He wouldn’t stay out long, not in these temperatures. He hunched over the rail, watching the boiling wake. Above him, eight or nine antennas rotated at varying rates, and the steel deck plates trembled slightly with the steady throb of the engines.

  A few men in parkas moved quietly past him. Fine had majored in history, and he tended to think of himself now as the modern brother of the Romans who had once patrolled the outposts of Western civilization. “Fine!” One of the men in parkas had doubled back. “Is that you?” It was Brad Westbrook, Feldmann’s communications officer.

  Fine nodded easily, playing the role of the old veteran. Westbrook was on his first cruise and was not part of the intelligence-gathering unit.