"My acute perceptiveness tells me we have problems," Aub said as they sat down.
"They want the project run their way—formal schedule of timetabled objectives, regular progress reports, resident liaison man from Washington. The works. Just what I knew would happen."
"Well . . ." Aub tried to sound philosophical. "I guess they figure that they've made the down-payment and ought to be seeing some deliveries . . . delivery estimates anyway."
"I'll deliver everything I said I would, but I won't jump through hoops too. I can't work that way."
"You have to see it from their point of view, Brad," Sarah tried. "It's a lot of money to put down with no guarantees at all. Perhaps you're making it look a bit like they owe it to you to fund anything that interests you. Surely you can trade off somewhere with them."
Clifford grew irritable again.
"See it from their point of view . . . Why do I always to have to see it from their point of view? Why can't they try seeing it from mine? Their so-called management science is going to everybody's heads. When will they realize they can't manage human thinking like production lines for plastic ducks? I already said—I'll deliver. That should be enough."
Aub was beginning to lose his patience. "You know that, I know that, Al knows that, and Sarah knows that," he pointed out. "But maybe they don't know that, or at least, they don't believe it enough. Maybe we have to persuade them a bit harder, that's all. Like Zim always said—remember—it needs selling."
Clifford wasn't buying. "We've been through all that and look where it's led. Anyhow, I'm not a salesman and I'm not interested in becoming one. I'm a scientist. It's just another hoop to jump through. Why should we have to?"
After a short silence Aub asked: "So what happens if you end up telling them to get lost? After all, it's not really like last time. We're working for ISF now when all's said and done. There wouldn't be any question of the job going down the pan."
"True," Clifford answered. "But they could still pull the BIAC out . . . plus all the other stuff they've bought."
Aub stopped chewing and looked hard at Clifford with a stare of disbelief.
"You're joking, man. They'd do that?"
"They're already threatening to. That's what held me up. They've got Peter Hughes over a barrel—he plays ball or they pick up their marbles. They've been getting at Geneva too, so things won't look good for Peter if he decides he doesn't want to play. That puts Al on the spot. He's on our side, but his hands are tied now. He's just having to hand it down the line."
Aub thought the problem over.
"So we play ball," he offered at last. "That way we've still got a project. The other way we haven't got a project." He looked from one to the other. "End of problem. There's nothing to decide."
Sarah said nothing. She knew better how Clifford's mind worked.
"It's not the way," Clifford replied slowly, shaking his head. A strange light had crept into his eyes. "It'll always be the same for as long as we knuckle under. I don't mean just here—everywhere. The whole damn world's gone crazy. The very people who are capable of finding out the ways of solving the real problems are all being muscled into making the problems worse. And the people who are doing the muscling don't even understand what the problems are." He looked at Aub appealingly. "Did you ever see films of what went on in Nazi Germany in World War II? Some of the best scientific brains in Europe being herded around like slave labor by a bunch of thugs. Well, it hasn't gotten that bad yet, but that's the direction it's going. I won't do anything to help it along, and that's what you're asking me to do."
"So you walk out," Aub tossed back. "What the hell? Who cares? The world goes on anyway. Nothing changes. Only you lose out."
"Something has to change." Clifford sounded far away. He looked straight through Aub as if he were not there. "Once and for all there has to be a stop to it . . . the whole lousy situation . . . permanently . . ."
"You're gonna change it?" Aub laughed. "What'll you do—run for President? I think you'd be disappointed even if you made it. He, too, seems a bit stuck for answers right now."
Aub stopped smiling when he saw that Clifford was not reacting. Clifford's mind seemed to be a million miles away.
"I don't know . . ." he said after what seemed a long time. And that strange light was still burning in his eyes.
* * *
Late that evening when they were relaxing over coffee to the background of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, Clifford, who had hardly spoken a word since dinner, turned suddenly toward Aub. "Do you remember when we were talking to Al about a week ago . . . about the technique that's used in the GRASER to induce annihilations? You said that you thought it might be possible to use the same principle to control the coordinates in normal space of where the return energy is delivered."
"I remember. What about it?"
"In other words, you figure that you could focus the return energy at a point . . . instead of having it spread out all the way to infinity."
"Maybe. Why?" Aub put down the magazine he had been browsing through and looked puzzled. Clifford ignored the questions.
"What would be involved to do it?"
"How d'you mean—as a sorta lab test?"
"Yes."
Aub thought for a moment. "Well, I suppose all the hardware you'd really need is already there. . . . It would just have to function in a different way. I guess you'd need to reprogram the modulator-control computers and the supervisory processor . . . plus a few bits of rewiring in the front-end electrics. That should do it."
"How long do you reckon it'd take?"
Aub suddenly looked alarmed. "Hey—you're not thinking of trying it, are you? That could be dangerous; nobody knows what to expect. You might end up blowing a hole in the middle of Sudbury."
"Not if the beam was wound right down to minimum power. All I want to do is prove the point. We should be able to get the annihilation rate down to a few kilowatts."
"Al would never okay it," Aub protested. "The theory's still got too many unknowns in it. Suppose there's some imbalance that you and Zim's guys haven't figured out yet, and the space integral isn't unity. You might find that a lot more comes out than you put in." Aub was looking worried. "Anyhow, where were you thinking of focusing the return energy?"
"Right there in the lab. I'm happy the integral is unity."
"In the lab! Christ! Al will never buy that in a million years. Peter'd have the mother and father of all heart attacks."
"So we don't tell them about it. We set it up nice and quiet and run it late one night like a routine piece of overtime. What's the matter—don't you trust me any more?" Clifford was grinning in a crooked kind of way. "I thought you were supposed to be the adventurous one. Have a ball."
Aub stared as if Clifford had taken leave of his senses. He looked imploringly at Sarah, who was following the conversation, and threw out his hands.
"It must be all these English females," he said. "He's finally flipped. Brad, get this straight. There is absolutely no way I'm gonna come into the lab with you, late one night like some kinda crook or something, and run that kind of experiment."
* * *
Four weeks later at about an hour before midnight Clifford's car eased to a halt outside the GRASER building of the Sudbury Institute. Two figures got out, presented their credentials to the police guards at the main door, and disappeared inside. By three in the morning the huge generators that supplied the GRASER were humming and the banks of equipment racks stacked around the reactor sphere were alive with patterns of winking lights. An array of heat sensors, radiation detectors, ionization counters and photomultiplier tubes had been positioned around a ten-foot-diameter circle that had been cleared near one of the walls, about thirty feet away from the sphere. Clifford and Aub were sitting at a control panel, facing the circle from behind the battery of instruments.
Aub adjusted the parameters of the GRASER to produce just the faintest trickle of particles through the beam tube and into th
e reactor. Then he switched on the annihilation modulators. The readings on the display screens on either side of the panel confirmed that a microscopic reaction was taking place inside the sphere. The particles were disappearing out of space to be transformed into hi-waves that propagated instantly to every point in the universe, where they subsequently reappeared as energy through secondary reactions. So far, it was an everyday GRASER run.
Clifford nodded. Working together, they started up the sequence of specially written programs that they had loaded into the system earlier that day. One by one the additional modified modulators were switched in and brought up to operating power, compressing the return energy into an ever-decreasing radius centered on the middle of the empty circle. The energy that would normally have been distributed infinitesimally sparsely throughout the whole of space was now being focused within a volume no bigger than a beach ball.
The screens showed that the instruments were detecting radiation. Counters registered the ionization of molecules of air. The infrared scanners indicated a rise in temperature. As Aub increased the beam power a fraction, dust particles began scurrying across the floor of the lab toward the center of the circle, drawn inward by the convection of the rising, heated air. A cool breeze made itself felt on their skin.
At higher power an incandescent glow appeared, elongated upward into a shimmering column of fiery radiance by the rising currents. It burned dull red at the outside, changing through brighter shades of orange to a core of brilliant yellow. Clifford and Aub watched spellbound. They were witnessing something that no men in history had seen before; energy was materializing in space out of nothing, from a source that lay thirty feet away—and it was traversing the distance in between through a realm of existence that lay beyond the dimensions of space and time.
After a few minutes Clifford, having satisfied himself that the recording instruments had captured everything, nodded and raised a hand. "That'll do. Don't take it any higher."
"Okay to cut?"
"Yep. That just about does it."
Aub took the system through its shutdown sequence. The glow died from the center of the circle and silence gradually descended as one by one the huge machines became quiet and the last row of lights went out. Aub sat back and wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
"Phew," he said. "Okay, I'll buy it—the space integral is unity. And you tried to tell me you weren't a salesman. Jeez." He shook his head.
"C'mon, it wasn't that risky and you know it," Clifford taunted. "If it wasn't unity, the detectors would have spotted an excess long before we wound the power up. There was no hazard really."
"Okay, you've made your point. We've proved we can focus the return energy. Now what?"
At once Clifford's grin snapped off and his mood became serious. "Tomorrow we talk to Al and Peter and put them in the picture," he said. "It doesn't matter now if there's hell to pay because this is rapidly going to become a lot bigger than both of them. What Peter has to do is get in touch with Washington and fix us an appointment for as soon as he can with Foreshaw and his merry men." He leaned across and slapped Aub on the shoulder. "You keep telling me I have to be a salesman, my friend. Okay—I, or, rather, we, are going to make the most mind-blowing sale ever. No salesman ever walked into the Pentagon with anything like what we've got. They want bombs? We are going to give them a bigger damn bomb than they ever dreamed of!"
Chapter 19
Clifford stood at the head of the large oval conference table and gazed along the line of unsmiling attentive faces. The Defense Secretary was seated at the far end with the rest—service chiefs, technical advisers, presidential aides, and defense planners—seated around on either side. Aub was at the end near Clifford, flanked by Morelli and Peter Hughes.
"Long speeches are not my line," Clifford began. "The reason I'm standing here today is essentially to protest—to protest at a society that perpetuates a system of values that are becoming insane. Throughout history man's greatest enemies—from which practically all our other problems follow—have been two: ignorance and superstition. The most powerful weapon that man has developed to combat these enemies is science—the acquisition and harnessing of knowledge. And yet with every day that goes by, we see more and more science being used not to solve the problems of mankind but to aggravate them. Science is being subordinated to the service of our lowest instincts."
He paused and looked around the room, half-expecting to be interrupted. But although a few aghast stares were in evidence, everybody seemed too taken aback to voice any comment, so he continued. "I am a scientist. I live in a world that is being torn apart by hatred and mistrust that I've had no part in making, and the reasons for them don't interest me. The situation is the making of people I don't know but who claim to act in my name. Those same people now presume the right to expect me to give up my own life in order to meet obligations that they feel I owe them. Just to make my position clear, I've never acknowledged any such obligations."
At the table, in front of where Clifford was standing, Morelli was massaging palms that were becoming moist. Next to him, Peter Hughes flinched and swallowed hard. A few sharp intakes of breath from around the room greeted Clifford's opening remarks. The gathering was not accustomed to being addressed so bluntly, and yet there was something about Clifford's compelling calm and poise—an assuredness of purpose that stemmed from somewhere deep inside him—that made them bite their tongues and hear him out. They sensed that the buildup was leading to something big.
After a pause Clifford continued. "During the scientific Renaissance in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, men found out for the first time how to distinguish fact from fancy, truth from falsity, and reality from dreams. From genuine knowledge came inventiveness . . . industry . . . intellectual freedom . . . affluence. Europe was unique among civilizations. This country was founded on that same tradition and our society was to be based on those same principles." He paused again and made no attempt to hide the accusing light in his eyes as he took in the faces before him.
Morelli hissed out of the corner of his mouth at Aub. "What's he trying to do—get us all deported?"
"He knows what he's doing . . . I think," Aub muttered.
Clifford carried on, refusing to be distracted. "But the tradition has not been followed. The promise of the Renaissance has not been kept. The same ignorance and prejudices that were there before are still with us today, but disguised; they still have the same power to inspire fear and suspicion in men's minds. First it was religious terror; today it's political terror. Nothing's changed. The knowledge that was gained and which should have become the birthright of all men has been perverted to more sinister ends, and the rest of the world has not been permitted to follow the path that Europe laid."
Nobody spoke while Clifford paused to drink from the water glass on the table in front of him. Foreshaw was regarding him through narrowed eyes, but had apparently elected to defer any verdict until he knew what this extraordinary address was leading up to. Clifford set the glass down and faced them once more.
"The lesson of history is that what you don't give, somebody will sooner or later take. Never mind the morality of it—those are the facts. The lesson is about to be repeated. The world is again all set to match brute force with brute force in an attempt to solve a problem that can't be solved that way. Only wisdom and understanding can solve it.
"I appreciate that nobody in this room made things turn out that way; neither did the government you represent. You've inherited the results of centuries of mismanagement, and you can't go back in time and change what's been done. Now it's too late to worry about how it might have been different anyway. We're stuck with it.
"I am convinced that as things are, mankind has run itself into a blind alley. The world is paralyzed by a military-technological deadlock that has existed on and off for over a hundred years. History has shown the futility of hoping that this deadlock will ever be dissolved by rational and civilized means, bu
t while it continues to exist, there can be no meaningful progress for the world."
Clifford began pacing himself, getting ready to make his final point. "In other words it's too late now to avoid the deadlock, because it's happened, and it's painfully obvious that it's not going to go away. Even World War III won't solve anything. All that'll happen is that each side will wear the other to a standstill just as in 1914–1918, and within fifty years the same situation will emerge all over again."
Clifford took a long pause to let his words sink in, and then drew a deep breath.
"The only alternative then is that this deadlock must be smashed—smashed totally, finally, irrevocably and for all time! That's what I am here to offer."
A murmur of surprise ran around the room. Puzzled but intrigued frowns spread across their faces.
"Up until now, the very fact that the deadlock has persisted has ruled out any such alternative. But today I can offer you a weapon more potent than anything previously dreamed possible—a weapon that will pale your missiles and your hydrogen bombs into insignificance and enable this deadlock to be ended once and for all."
He paused to allow his words time to take effect, and then resumed: "Make no mistake, I am not doing this for any reasons of loyalty, duty, ideology, or creed, or for any other such delusions. I am doing it because it is the only way left to restore science to a position of freedom and dignity, and to allow the human race a chance to cast off finally the yoke that is driving it toward total spiritual destruction. It seems to me ironically fitting that the cure for mass insanity should be the ultimate insanity.
"Gentlemen, you have repeatedly reaffirmed your obligations to counter the threat to the Western world that is posed by the alliance of nations and races pledged to destroy it. By powers vested in you, you have sought to compel my involvement in this. Very well—so be it. I will place at your disposal the means of eliminating that threat permanently. This time we will finish it. If I am to be involved, it will be this or nothing." He looked around the audience and finally let his eyes come to rest on Foreshaw. "That is the deal. Do you want me to go on?"
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