The Hercules Text

by Jack McDevitt

  “Good,” said the agent. “You can ride with us.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Harry.

  “It will, Mr. Carmichael. Please hurry.”

  Harry’s first thought was that Hakluyt had made good on his threat and gone to the President. But no, he wouldn’t have done that. He knew the dangers, and he was scared to death that, after the spadework was done, the politicians would move in.

  He rode uneasily downtown. A second vehicle, preceding them around Executive Avenue, carried Hakluyt and Gambini. Leslie and Wheeler were waiting inside the White House.

  They seated themselves at a table laden with pastries and coffee. Chilton came in to inform them that the President was on his way, but he was barely out of the room when Hurley entered. He had a surprise: Baines Rimford was with him.

  The serving staff passed among them with bacon, eggs, and fried potatoes, and then withdrew. Hurley wasted no time. “Dr. Davies,” he said, “gentlemen, we have a problem.” He recounted the sinking of the Feldmann and the ultimatum by Taimanov in terms sufficiently stark as to leave no doubt of his fears. “None of our choices,” he summed up, “is very palatable.”

  “Don’t the Soviets understand what an attack on us will do to the atmosphere?” roared Gambini. “Even if we didn’t respond, they can’t live! How in hell can they be so dumb?”

  “The Soviet military does not officially subscribe to the nuclear winter theory, Ed. Neither, I’m sorry to say, does ours.”

  Harry watched Pete Wheeler slowly collapsing, the head sagging, the shoulders dwindling, until he seemed little more than a ragged puppet set against the table. Who was responsible, if Pete Wheeler wasn’t?

  “Give them what they want,” said Gambini. “If you really believe they’re bent on war if you refuse, you have no choice.”

  “No,” said Rimford. “That’s no solution. Deal with them for the particle-beam weapon. Get some concessions, if you can, and then let them have it.”

  “That’s not what they’re asking for,” said Hurley.

  “At least,” said Harry, “they’ve been smart enough not to make their demands publicly.”

  The President nodded. “It’s taken them a long time, but they’ve finally learned something about how the American political system works.”

  “Why have you asked us here?” rasped Wheeler.

  “Because you gave us ORION. As you can see, we need something else.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Is there anything more, in theory or in fact, that could be used to get us out of this situation?”

  “ORION,” said Leslie, “hardly turned out to be a blessing.”

  “It would have been,” said Hurley, “if Parkman Randall had kept his mouth shut. That dumb son of a bitch caused a lot of this so that he could get his seat back in November. And by God, if we’re still here in November, I can tell you where that son of a bitch is going to be.” The President inhaled and threw up his hands. “Well, anyhow, I don’t want you to think this is your fault, Pete. It isn’t. The weapon you gave us can change everything if we can get it operating.”

  “Mr. President,” said Rimford, “I accepted your invitation to come here this morning because I think you need to know that the members of the Hercules team do not want to be thought of as weapons developers. Nevertheless, that is how we can expect to be remembered! I left the project for that reason. And if you want the truth, yes, the Text contains concepts that could be converted into weapons of unimaginable power.”

  “For God’s sake, Rimford, the survival of the country’s at stake. What do you have?”

  “No, Mr. President,” said Rimford. “I have nothing to give you. And I urge my old friends to give you nothing.”

  “Come on, Baines,” Hurley said angrily. “Christ, they’re at our throats.”

  “So they are. And you’ll have to solve the problem. Talk to them. Deal. Work things out. You can do it. It’s always possible to work something out.”

  Hurley choked down his anger and turned to Gambini. “Ed, we need to concentrate on the materials Baines was working on.”

  “I destroyed them,” said Rimford.

  The President flared at Harry. “And you didn’t see fit to report it?”

  Harry looked up at the President of the United States, whose eyes had filled, not with rage, but with disapproval.

  “I take it,” Hurley said, “that you are all in agreement with Baines?”

  “Yes,” said Harry. “I think we are.”

  “Did it occur to you that you were betraying a trust? And the defenses of your country? I can understand your concerns, and I can even sympathize with your refusal to contribute to the development of weapons. But for God’s sake, you had an obligation to say so, to be honest with me.”

  “We could not!” interjected Gambini. “The nature of what we had did not permit our turning it over to you, or to anyone. You may be assured—”

  “Doctor, I’m not assured of anything right now other than that we have a very serious problem and you are not being much help. It is, unfortunately, desperately late, and I’m not sure whether, if we survive this, I won’t have you all hanged.”

  “That’s it,” said Harry, when they’d reconvened at the lab. “We’ll be out of business by tomorrow. Or Friday at the latest. Depends on how long it takes Hurley to get his people together. Either way, the Hercules Project will be moved to Fort Meade.”

  Gambini sat wrapped in gloom. “He must know he can’t get results out of a bunch of codebreakers and party physicists.”

  “He knows he can’t get results out of us,” said Leslie. “What do we do now?”

  “Make everything public,” said Hakluyt. “Turn it all loose. That’ll change the equation.”

  “It sure as hell will,” Wheeler said frostily. “What about the new weapons?”

  “We’ve already got doomsday weapons, Pete,” said Hakluyt. “Don’t you think a hydrogen bomb can be transported by suitcase? There’s nothing in the Text that can make things any more dangerous than they already are. The human race has shown a remarkable restraint over the last half-century. The stuff in the text may be what’s needed to force us, finally, to confront the issues and do what needs to be done.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” asked the priest.

  “Then we’re no worse off. Listen, Rimford was excited because he’d found the Grand Unified Theories in there somewhere; but he’d already been working on that. In fact, in one of his books, he predicted that we’d have it ourselves by the end of the century. The same thing is probably true of most of the technical material; it’s certainly true of the genetic data. All we’re doing is moving the timetable up a few years. Well, what the hell, let’s do it! Let’s make the most of what we’ve got!”

  “I think,” said Wheeler, “that we need to disengage our personal involvement with the project and stop being investigators for a few moments. We tend to assume that knowledge, in and of itself, is good. That the truth will somehow make us free. But the fact may well be that the truth is too terrible to behold. It seems to me there is only one consideration before us this morning, and that is the welfare of the species. What are we really talking about here? I’ll tell you what it is: we’re trying to balance Cy Hakluyt’s curiosity about the structure of the double helix with human survival.”

  Wheeler looked from one to the other, much as the President had done earlier at the emotional height of the breakfast conference, but the priest’s eyes were much more disturbing. And Harry realized why: Hurley had supreme confidence in his ultimate ability, however desperate the situation had become, to stave off the crisis; but Wheeler feared that events had already gotten beyond control.

  “I vote with Baines,” Harry said. “Destroy the goddam thing. If we can save the DNA disc, do it. Otherwise, destroy everything. And hope that none of it ever comes our way again.”

  “No.” Leslie was near tears. “You can’t do that. God help me, I don’t have an answer to this, but I know that just
chucking everything and hiding under a rock isn’t the way to go.”

  “I agree,” said Gambini. “Destroying the transmission would be criminal.”

  “The survivors, if there are any, may be deciding what’s criminal,” Wheeler said bitterly. “Whatever you decide to do, you’d better be quick about it. I think Harry’s right; we won’t have control of the project much longer.”

  “I’m damned if I can see who they could turn the project over to,” continued Gambini. “Everyone I can think of has been alienated. Even some of the government investigators have walked off in a huff. Who’s Hurley got?”

  “He’ll find someone,” said Harry.

  Through the long morning, they covered the ground again and again. Harry, the administrator, knew that Wheeler was right, that the Hercules Text was far too dangerous to release. And while the increasingly angry conversation swirled around him, he thought about the Altheans under their starless skies: a species with no literature, no history (did time, somehow, stand still under Altheis Gamma?), no art; with devices that seemingly lacked a power source. Their dead were somehow not really dead. They transmitted principles that could be used to make terrifying weapons. And they indulged in Platonic philosophy.

  The man in the tower, Leslie had said. Not unlike Father Sunderland rattling around in the priory overlooking Chesapeake Bay, playing preternatural bridge.

  What had Leslie said of the linguistic system employed in the transmission? Not a natural language. Awkward. We could have done better. How could that be?

  The meeting broke up, as all the others had, in indecision and rancor. And when they were filing out, while Harry was still thinking of Father Sunderland, Cyrus Hakluyt whispered to him that he might not have another chance to save his son. “Do it, Harry,” he said. “For God’s sake, do it!”

  Later, Pete Wheeler sat down at his table for lunch. The priest wore a haunted expression. “I need help, Harry,” he said. They were in a corner of the cafeteria, away from anyone who might hear.

  “You want to get rid of it?”

  “Yes, but we have to do it tonight.”

  Harry was shocked at the suddenness with which events had come to a head. He had known all along, of course, that a moment of decision was inevitable. But somehow he had managed not to think about it, had pushed it aside. “I’m still not sure it’s the right thing to do.”

  “There is no ‘right’ thing anymore, Harry. All we’ve got is a least of evils.”

  “How do you suggest we go about it?” Harry’s stomach was fluttering.

  “The cleanest way,” he said, “is to set up a magnetic field. It would scramble the data sufficiently to make further translation impossible.”

  Harry had stopped eating. “How do we arrange that?”

  “A battery-powered electromagnet would do nicely,” Wheeler said. “I already have one. In fact, I bought it the day after they gave me the Oppenheimer Certificate. It fits into my briefcase.

  “I’ve, come close a couple of times to using it,” he went on, “but there was always a chance of getting caught. All I had to do was walk the magnet within a few feet of the discs. But the problem was that the effect would be immediate. And the guy with the briefcase would be awfully visible. But tomorrow, if they descend on us and start moving the project to Fort Meade, the computers will be down—”

  “Yes,” said Harry, “there’ll be a hell of a lot of confusion.”

  “If we set it up right, we should be able to wipe both sets of discs and not get caught.”

  “No.” Harry sounded like a man in pain. “Pete, we can’t just erase the text. There must be a better way.”

  “Find it,” said Wheeler. “I’ll be interested in your solution.”

  An hour later, Harry received a phone call from a friend in the General Services Administration. “NSA has ordered three vans sent to your place, Harry,” she said. “Did you know about it?”

  “No,” said Harry. “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. What’s going on?”

  “We’re moving,” said Harry. “I guess.”

  MONITOR

  YEAST-MADE VACCINE SHOWS POSITIVE RESULTS AGAINST LEUKEMIA

  Early Detection Still Vital

  WARS MAY BE CAUSED BY GROUP SOCIAL DISORDERS

  Social Phobics Show Taste, and Talent, for Power

  Look Out for the Man Who Eats Alone

  POLES SEIZE NUCLEAR BOMB IN WARSAW

  Solidarity Denies Involvement

  MOBS SMASH FOREIGN CARS IN TOLEDO

  1 Dead, 14 Injured in Outbreak

  Victims Claim Cops Stood Aside

  DAMASCUS RIOTING IN FOURTH DAY

  Saudis Urge Truce

  Alam in Hiding

  RUSSIAN PILOTS REPORTED OVER BOLIVIA

  Pentagon Denies U.S. Ground Troops Will Be Used

  EARTHQUAKE KILLS SIX IN MONTANA

  Tremors Continue; More Shocks Expected

  SUPPORT GROWS FOR FILM CENSORSHIP

  New Studies Lend Support to Anti-Violence Group

  LATEST KREMLIN SHAKE-UP KEEPS EXPERTS GUESSING

  ICELAND, BRITAIN ARGUE OVER FISHING RIGHTS

  Castleman Says the Navy is Ready

  HARBISON DENIES ORION RUMORS

  Says Anti-Nuclear Shield Not Yet Feasible

  SOUTH AFRICA TESTS FIRST BOMB

  Ninth Nation Joins Nuclear Club

  19

  DURING THE AFTERNOON, Harry conducted the second meeting of a three-day management seminar on methods of igniting creativity in subordinates. The attendees were from a wide range of government agencies, and after his experiences with Hakluyt, Wheeler, and the rest they constituted a refreshingly prosaic group. But while they talked earnestly of free-rein techniques and abolishing parameters, it occurred to Harry that the Hercules strategy had, from the beginning, been in the hands of investigators; and therein, perhaps, lay the problem. Their one manager had stood passively aside.

  Maybe, he thought, the hour of the bureaucrat had come.

  He took his son to the Smithsonian that evening. They wandered among dinosaurs and spaceships in the bright galleries, but there was, as always now, a shadow between them. Tommy’s manner, when with his father, became almost mournful. And they seemed most at home in the archaeological sections, walking among water-stained stone blocks from excavated temples whose towers had once gleamed in the sun.

  In the Hall of Technology, beside a model of the Champollion facility, Tommy asked, as he did whenever they went out together, whether things had changed, whether he and his mother might be coming home. He always put it that way: it was Harry and the house on Bolingbrook Road that represented his center of gravity.

  Harry shook his head. Julie had begun to recede in recent weeks. The life they’d had together seemed remote now, and its individual parts were fossils, so many horned skulls in glass cases.

  Only Tommy retained life.

  Harry watched him tracking mesons through an electrical field, quick yellow streaks across a green screen, liberated by a process described in detail on a metal plate. The boy had gotten interested in subatomic physics after a conversation with Ed Gambini, during which the physicist had described particles so small that they had no mass whatever. “That’s small!” Tommy had said, trying to visualize what such a condition meant.

  And Harry had stood by, fingering the packet of sugar cubes he always carried as insurance against hypoglycemia.

  Harry’d been present when his son was learning to administer the insulin. The doctors had explained to Tommy, and to his parents, that it was important to rotate the injection site to prevent skin damage. They’d made a chart; and the shots had gone into the arms and the legs and the abdomen. The boy had accepted the situation more easily than his parents had—probably because Harry and Julie understood the long-term effects of diabetes.

  And the cure lay, perhaps, in Gambini’s file cabinet.

  Perhaps.

  Harry had to put on his glasses to re
ad the plate on meson liberation. He could detect no improvement in his eyesight.

  The President would have been active during the day preparing to secure the Hercules machinery. At this time tomorrow evening, Gambini almost certainly would no longer be in charge. They’d probably offer him a consultancy, and maybe Wheeler as well. And the project itself? Harry had no doubt that it would not survive in any recognizable form at Fort Meade.

  They stayed until closing time. Later, they walked through the warm evening along Constitution Avenue, talking about pterodactyls and computer games. Behind them, at the Smithsonian, they were turning out the lights.

  After taking Tommy home, Harry went back to his office. He phoned Wheeler, but as he expected, no one answered. A second call, to the security station at the library, revealed that two people were logged into the Hercules record room. Neither of them was Wheeler. If the priest hoped to erase both sets of discs, he’d have to begin the way Rimford had begun: arrive at the library somewhat before the midnight closing time and wait for everyone to leave. Then he’d be free to do as he wished. His only constraint was that, once he destroyed the library set, he would have to finish the job before the damage was found. That would give him until 8:00 A.M.

  There was no way he could fail, but there was also no way he could conceal his part in it. In the operations center, everything would be disrupted as he walked through with his electromagnet!

  It was almost eleven when Harry left his office, fearful that he might have delayed too long making up his mind. He went to the library. The two people the guard had mentioned were astronomers who worked in Wheeler’s group. Harry explained to them that the room was going to be used to brief some visiting NASA officials who were between flights. “If it’s not inconvenient,” he said, “we need to be alone.”

  After they left, Harry unlocked the credenza in which he’d concealed the discs that Rimford had erased. If Wheeler kept the schedule he expected, he had about twenty minutes.

  He was seated at one of the terminals when Wheeler walked in at ten minutes to twelve.

  “I didn’t expect to find you here,” said the priest. He was carrying a thick briefcase.