The Genesis Machine

by James P. Hogan

  Foreshaw returned the look and drummed his fingers on the table for a long time before replying.

  "I think you have to, Dr. Clifford," he said quietly at last.

  "This had better be good," breathed a glowering, ruddy-faced Air Force general seated three places farther along to his right.

  Clifford stepped forward and drew from a folder, lying on the table, a set of glossy, color computer prints, each measuring about a foot square. He held the top one up so that everybody could see the pattern of dull orange, from which a series of fuzzy, irregularly sized rectangles protruded upward against a background of black.

  "The New York City skyline," he informed them simply. He handed the plate to Aub and indicated that it was to be passed around the table. It was followed by a whole series of familiar landmarks, geographic features and other oddments whose names he announced one by one before passing them on. They included the Rock of Gibraltar, Table Mountain, a cross section of the Dardanelles Strait, city profiles of London, Paris, Beijing, Bombay, and Sydney; a picture of the eighty-mile-thick slab of oceanic crust of Earth's Pacific Plate plunging at the rate of seven centimeters per year down into the mantle beneath the Mariana Islands; a large iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean and a blob that represented the Americano-Russian Cosmos V space station, two thousand miles up.

  Excitement and awe began to mount.

  "Every one of those images was obtained at Sudbury, using the new Mark II system," Clifford stated. "And we should be able to improve on these examples. Once the correct coordinates have been computed, they can be stored and recalled instantly at any time. So much for target identification and fire control. Now for the weapon itself."

  Clifford scanned the faces assembled before him, then continued. "You may remember that the principles by which these pictures are formed involve a new kind of wave that is generated inside any piece of matter and which propagates instantly throughout ordinary space. In recent experiments, we have succeeded in transporting energy from one place to another, using those same principles . . . at least, you can think of it that way. And in the same way that we can select information from any point we choose to construct those images, so we can select precisely where in space that energy will be delivered.

  "Think what that means. In a thermonuclear explosion, the amount of nuclear material actually converted into energy is tiny—in the order of a fraction of 1 percent—and yet the results are devastating. In the process I am talking about, the effective conversion efficiency approaches 100 percent. From one central reactor capable of producing the power required, destructive forces of unprecedented strength can be instantaneously directed and focused on to any part of Earth's surface or beyond."

  The stares that fixed him had by now frozen into wide-eyed masks of incredulity. The silence, when he paused, was absolute.

  "Furthermore, the means by which the target was being assailed would be completely undetectable by any surveillance or defensive system that exists in the world today. There is no method by which the weapons system I am describing could be interfered with or countered. Interception is impossible. As weapons of attack, the ICBM and the orbiting bomb are as outmoded as the battering ram."

  A chorus of murmurings erupted from all around. Foreshaw waved for silence. "You're saying that from one single center, you could bomb any point on Earth's surface . . . without the enemy even knowing how you were doing it . . . without any way of anybody being able to stop you . . . ?" His face registered incredulity. "A superbomb that just comes from nowhere . . . ?"

  Hughes stared aghast at Morelli as the words came home to him. "What are we getting into?" he asked above the rising hubbub of excited voices. "Has Brad gone mad?"

  "First I knew about this," Morelli said, shaking his head, bemused. "I knew those two had something big . . . but this . . ."

  "That's exactly what I'm saying," Clifford thundered above the clamor. "It'll not simply 'bomb' any point on Earth out of nowhere. . . . It'll annihilate it! And above Earth, too . . . It'll wipe out anything that comes inside a thousand miles of this country . . . and the other side will have no way of even knowing how we're doing it, let alone of stopping it. All their weapons and their numbers count for nothing now. That's how you can smash this deadlock. That's how you can smash it once and for all!"

  When a semblance of order had returned to the room, Foreshaw had a question. "Dr. Clifford, what you've just told us sounds incredible. You are certain that a device of this nature could become a reality?"

  "Quite certain."

  "You can see no fundamental reason why it couldn't be built?"

  "None." Clifford stood with his arms folded, composed and confident.

  "What do you envisage it would take to do it?" Foreshaw asked.

  "It would require a large power source to provide focusing energy—ideally a fusion reactor. There would be a matter-beam generating system feeding a black hole sustained in a more powerful and modified version of the Sudbury GRASER. For specific target location and fire control we'd need a detector arrangement bigger and better than the Mark II. I envisage that the Mark III detector system would require three BIACs running in parallel for adequate data processing and control."

  "How long?" Foreshaw inquired.

  Clifford had evidently come prepared. Without any hesitation, he replied, "If nothing was spared in making the requisite resources available, I estimate that the system could be operational in one year."

  * * *

  The four scientists from Sudbury stayed overnight in Washington and went back to the Pentagon next morning to answer further questions. Then they returned to Massachusetts while an advisory committee, specially convened by the President, examined the proposal and studied the report that Clifford had prepared. Ten days later they were summoned back to Washington to face the committee, restate the case, and answer more questions. In the afternoon they met the President.

  * * *

  Alexander George Sherman, President of the United States, rose from his chair at the table in the White House Cabinet Room and walked across to stand by the window. He stayed there for a long time, contemplating the scene outside, while he recapitulated again in his mind the things he had learned during the previous ten days. Behind him, still seated around the table, the four visitors from Sudbury, Vice President Donald Reyes, Defense Secretary William Foreshaw, and Secretary of State Melvin Chambers remained silent. At last the President pivoted on his heel and spoke to the room from where he was standing, addressing his words primarily to the four from ISF.

  "Our latest intelligence reports and strategic forecasts do not paint a cheerful picture. The initiative is slowly but surely passing to the East, and once a critical point is reached, a major outbreak of hostilities will be inevitable. The only thing that would avert a full global war would be the granting of a long list of diplomatic, territorial, and political concessions by the West."

  "That would be just the beginning," Chambers remarked. "Once you set any precedents like that, you simply get squeezed harder. The West would either be slowly reduced to complete impotence, or forced to fight it out later anyway, but on less favorable terms."

  "Hardly a long-term answer, then," Peter Hughes commented.

  "Precisely," Chambers nodded. "Appeasement is out."

  "I must make a decision now," Sherman said to them. "I have three choices open to me. First—strike now, strike first, and strike hard while the balance is more or less even. The consequences of that would be catastrophic for the world whatever the final outcome, and I'm sure I don't have to spell them out. Second—I can do nothing. I can allow things to continue on their present course, in which case the end of free democracy as we understand it will be almost certain." He moved a pace back toward the table. "The third thing I can do is stake everything on this new weapon that will require a year to become a reality. But the world will not stop turning for our convenience. If I stake my bet that way, I naturally wouldn't want to run any risk of anything getting out of c
ontrol during that year, before it was time to collect the winnings. In other words I'd be obliged to make whatever concessions the other side demanded. At the end of that year, if the bet didn't pay and the weapon turned out to be a dud, I'd have allowed the whole world situation to tip against us, irreversibly, and I'd have nothing to show for it. If that happened, things could only snowball for the worse after that." He walked back to his chair, sat down and regarded the others soberly.

  "The third choice sounds like a big gamble," he said. "What evidence can you offer me to justify my taking it?"

  Silence reigned for a while. The circle of faces stared grimly at the table. At last, Clifford quietly supplied the answer. "You have nothing whatsoever to lose by it."

  "How so, Dr. Clifford?" Sherman asked.

  "The weapon can either work or not work," Clifford replied. "If it works, it can either be used or not used. If it's used, it can either succeed or fail." He swept his eyes round the table. "The logical consequences of those statements are that there is nothing to lose. If it doesn't work or isn't used, the result is no different from that of choice two. If it's used but fails, the result is no worse than the worst-case of choice one. Either way, the West loses in the long term. . . . The only alternative to that is if the weapon is used and succeeds, and the only way of making that a possibility is to select choice three."

  * * *

  Clifford and his colleagues stayed that night in Washington while the President and his staff conferred. The next day they returned to the White House to meet Sherman, Reyes, Foreshaw, and Chambers in the Cabinet Room again.

  "The decision is Go," Sherman informed them. "You have first priority for whatever equipment, materials, personnel, funds, or other resources you need. Code name for the project is Jericho. It will commence at once. As I mentioned yesterday, we may be forced to make unpalatable decisions in the course of the next year or so; therefore our Western allies will have to be informed of the reasons."

  Even before the ISF scientists had left the White House, some of the presidential advisers had already dubbed the new weapon the J-bomb.

  On the plane back to Boston that night, Clifford's mood was one of grim satisfaction. Aub, for once, seemed subdued and withdrawn.

  "What's the matter?" Clifford asked him. "It's what you've always said you wanted, isn't it—unlimited government funds and resources. Why doesn't it taste so good now?"

  Chapter 20

  Once it had received official approval and been accorded highest priority, Jericho swung into motion with frightening speed. Home of the project was to be a place called Brunnermont, a complex of concrete and steel levels that went down for over a mile into solid rock beneath the Appalachians and which had originally been designed and built as a self-sufficient, bombproof survival center for VIPs and as a communications and command headquarters.

  Here the thermonuclear power plant that had been designed to keep Brunnermont functioning for decades if need be was modified and pressed into service to feed the fearsome beam of concentrated matter into the new reactor. A level above the generators and the reactor, in a specially redesigned and sealed off top-security zone, the Mark III fire-control and direction system slowly began to take shape. Above that was installed a full-scale strategic command nerve center linked into the network of global surveillance, defense, strike and counterstrike systems, integrated command centers and war rooms of all the Western allied nations.

  During the early months, Taiwan was invaded and occupied without opposition from the West, apart from routine protests and denunciations. After a series of large-scale battles on the borders of India, appeals for Western support and intervention failed to produce any decisive response. Encouraged by this demonstration of apathy or indifference, political subversion and agitation in that country rose to new heights and found many receptive ears among a people who saw only impotence and betrayal beneath the ideology preached by their own government and its friends. Six months after the commencement of Jericho, the whole of India was engulfed in civil war. Hard-pressed at the front and harassed from the rear, the border armies fell back to the Indus Basin in the west and to Calcutta in the east. Predictably the war had now become a "struggle for the liberation of the oppressed peoples of India," as the slogans of 1992 were once again shouted around the world. Air attacks on Indian cities became everyday news items; Calcutta burned under encircling laser siege-artillery; Bombay, Madras, and a score of other ports were blockaded by mine and submarine; famine and disease claimed hundreds of thousands. The West did nothing.

  * * *

  The time came for those scientists from the Institute who had volunteered for and been accepted to work on Jericho to bid farewell to Sudbury. With their families they were moved into the residential sector of the Brunnermont complex, where schooling, hospital care, recreation, entertainment, and all the other requisites of the modern style of living were provided. They came to accept as normal ingredients in their lives the discipline, the tight security measures and the isolation from society that Brunnermont demanded. They became a self-contained society-in-miniature of their own, charged with the custody of the greatest secret of all time, and sealed off from the world of prying eyes and ears by the electronically guarded three-mile-deep perimeter zone, the Marine Corps and Ranger squads that flitted like phantoms among the greenery of the surrounding hills, the gun pits that covered the approach roads and the silent, probing radar fingers that searched the skies above.

  The roles of Clifford and Aub somehow became interchanged. Aub, once the epitome of enthusiasm and energy, had grown reserved and apprehensive, fearful of this thing that had intruded upon and was now taking over their lives. Clifford became the tireless driving force, dominating the project and sparing nothing and nobody in his relentless determination to meet ever more demanding schedules. Everything he had ever been and everything he had once stood for seemed to have been sacrificed to the voracious and insatiable new god that was taking possession of his being.

  * * *

  Like an immense iceberg, the larger part of the Brunnermont complex lay submerged deep in the Precambrian heart of the Appalachian mountains with just its tip breaking the surface. From the air this tip had much of the appearance of a scenically sculptured ultramodern village, with knife-edge-styled houses, chalets, and communal buildings clustered but secluded amid a setting of trees, shrubs, pathways, and lawns, broken by the occasional ornamental pool or flower bed. All this was intended more to relieve the harshness of the reality that lay below ground for the colony of inhabitants and to make some concession to their need for psychological relaxation than to conceal the nature of the establishment. Even the most amateur photographic interpreters would soon have noticed the impenetrable perimeter defenses, the ramps down which the access roads descended to subterranean destinations protected by steel doors and the disproportionately high volume of aerial and road traffic that constantly arrived and departed—though these things would reveal nothing of the installation's true purpose.

  One evening, some months after their arrival at Brunnermont, Aub and Sarah were strolling among the trees in a shady corner of the so-called village, enjoying the scents and the freshness carried down from the hills on the first cool breezes of autumn. Had it been another time, another place, it would have been a dreamland. As things were, their mood was heavy and strained.

  "Why did it all have to turn out this way, Aub?" Sarah asked, after several minutes of silence.

  "Mmm. What?"

  "You, me, Brad . . . us. This thing that's happened. I mean . . . I know what's happened . . . but I still don't really understand why."

  "Yeah . . . I know what you mean." The ebullient Aub of earlier days was gone.

  "I was thinking about it all earlier today," she said, kicking a stone absently. "How different it all used to be. Do you remember when you first came marching into our house, the one we had in New Mexico . . . the day that Brad quit that job at ACRE? We never laugh now the way we used to la
ugh then. . . . You and Brad used to get drunk every night . . . we all went out together. Remember?"

  "I remember."

  "What happened to those three people?"

  Aub stared at the ground in front of his slowly pacing feet as he sought a reply that would neither hurt nor deceive.

  "I guess . . . they had to grow up sometime."

  "But it's not a question of growing up, is it? We were always grown-up enough; that wasn't so very long ago. It's more of a change. Brad has changed. He isn't the Brad we used to know any more. And his changing is making us change. I thought I knew him, Aub, but I don't. I don't know what made him change so suddenly."

  They stopped and stared out across the pool to which the path had led them. On the porch of a chalet on the opposite side somebody was bobbing gently back and forth in a rocking chair. The strains of pop music came floating across the water.

  "He's doing the only thing he can to preserve the way of life he believes in, I suppose," Aub said. "At least, that's how he sees it."

  "But it's not what he believes in. He's never wanted any part of all this before. He'd have died first. He always said that one human life was too much to pay for all the causes in the world put together. That was the Brad I knew. And now . . ." she cast an arm about her to take in their whole surroundings, "this. Everything you can see is part of one huge, horrible machine that's being built for the sole purpose of slaughtering people by the millions. And Brad has done it all." She raised a hand to her lips and bit her knuckle.

  "Yeah, I know," Aub said quietly. "C'mon, let's move on. It's getting chilly."

  They walked on, taking a fork in the path that led toward the glow among the shrubbery that marked the position of the bar and social club.

  "What about you?" she asked. "You don't seem happy about the whole thing either, and yet you still play a big part in it. Why, Aub? Why do you choose to stay mixed up in it?"