The Genesis Machine

by James P. Hogan

  The result was that the East was left with ample stocks of antimissile missiles, having had no attacking waves to contend with, while the West was not . . . at least, until the West had had time to redeploy its defenses. The implications of the situation slowly dawned on the military staffs present. A worried Carlohm explained to Sherman:

  "Until we've had time to reorganize our defenses, we're wide open. Our antimissile systems have been depleted, and for the time being we've got nothing that would effectively stop a classical attack from subs and ICBMs. The problem is that the other side hasn't had any reason to fire off their antimissile systems, so the chances of success for a counterstrike by us wouldn't be too good. Those guys over there aren't stupid; the message must be obvious to them, too. If I were in their position, I'd hit now and hit hard."

  His concern was soon proved to be well-founded. Reports began pouring in all over the Command Floor:

  "Salvo of sixteen missiles launched from underwater, three hundred miles south of Nova Scotia. Climbing and turning due west."

  "Launchings reported from four positions in the eastern Pacific. First course indications point to western U.S.A."

  "Mass launch profiles in northern Siberia, heading north over the Pole. Launches in central Siberia directed west toward Europe."

  "Missiles climbing over inshore regions of Algeria and Tunisia, heading north toward Mediterranean."

  A peppering of red traces started to appear across the enormous map of the world that was framed by the largest of the mural displays. The apprehension of the watchers rose to a point bordering on panic. The calm and composure that Sherman had exhibited throughout at last broke down. He stared aghast at the thin red lines that were beginning to elongate on the map, his mind refusing to accept what was demanded of him now. The lines began consolidating into irregular arcs that covered the North American continent from three sides, Europe from the south and east, and Australia from the north. The arcs were converging, agonizingly slowly, but relentlessly.

  "Initial computations of trajectories put first missile on target in four-point-five minutes," a voice announced. "Origin, west Atlantic. Impact point, New York area. Impacts in Spain predicted at four-point-nine minutes, Italy, five minutes, British Isles, five-point-three minutes. Further data coming in now."

  Carlohm and Foreshaw faced the President expectantly, but Sherman just stood immobilized, his eyes glazed and his head shaking weakly from side to side.

  "It's an all-out attack," Carlohm said after a few seconds. "You have to order full retaliation . . . now." Sherman slowly sank into a chair. The color had drained from his face; perspiration glistened on his brow.

  "What will that achieve now?" he whispered in a strangled voice. "It can change nothing. Sheer, futile savagery . . . for no purpose . . ."

  "You have to," Foreshaw said grimly. "It's the price."

  Sherman brought his hands up to cover his face. He shook his head mutely and became paralyzed. Suddenly Reyes stepped forward and proclaimed in a firm and decisive voice:

  "I declare the President temporarily incapacitated and unable to carry out his duties. I therefore assume Presidential authority and accept full responsibility for my decisions. General Carlohm, order a full retaliatory offensive to be launched immediately."

  Carlohm hesitated for a second, then nodded to his staff officers. Within thirty seconds the whole strategic missile arsenal of the Western world was thundering skyward. On the map above them, chains of dots of bright green were added to the story that was already there. Both sides had now hurled in everything they had; the difference was that the longer traces in red, now closing in on the frontiers of their target countries, would be almost unopposed.

  "First computed impact now confirmed as New York. Time to impact, thirty-two seconds. Further confirmed targets are Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Montreal, and Ottawa. Los Angeles and San Francisco confirmed on the West Coast. Trajectories of following missiles being computed. We expect they will fractionate into independent warheads."

  "What's the defensive situation?" Reyes asked Carlohm.

  "They're firing what they can. Most emplacements aren't programmed for local interceptions, since that was supposed to be taken care of by the orbital defensive system."

  "Report status now," Reyes called out.

  "Object previously reported homing on New York was a decoy. Full salvo of interceptors expended. Missile following has now altered course toward same target. Area Defense Commander reports insufficient reserves to intercept. Revised time to impact, forty-three seconds."

  "Jesus . . . !" Somebody breathed.

  "Impact will coincide with arrival time of first expected on targets in southern Europe," the report continued. "More decoys causing uncertainties in previous predictions."

  "Never mind them now," Reyes snapped. "Read me that one that's zeroing on New York."

  "Due on target in twenty-two seconds . . . twenty . . . fifteen . . . CONTACT LOST!"

  "What the . . . ? You mean we got it?" Reyes was nonplused.

  "Negative, sir. There were no defensive missiles near. It just seems to have . . . vanished." The voice came again, now sounding utterly at a loss. "Predicted impacts in southern Europe deleted from latest computations. Traces of incoming missiles have been lost . . . Disregard confirmations for Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia . . ." The voice grew totally bewildered. "Disregard confirmations previously given for West Coast . . ."

  All over the map the leading lines in red were stopping as soon as they got anywhere near their targets, as if an invisible eraser were working along the coastlines of North America. The same pattern developed along the approaches to Europe, Australia, and Japan. The attacking waves were being wiped out by the score.

  "Your defenses aren't doing that?" Reyes asked, incredulous.

  "They've fired everything they had left," Carlohm answered, equally bemused. "I doubt if there's more than a handful of serviceable missiles left in the whole of the West."

  "They're being J-bombed!" Foreshaw exclaimed abruptly. "Can't you see what those guys are doing? They've lured the whole damn Commie missile force up into the sky at once; now they're J-bombing it out of existence."

  "Not their whole missile force," Carlohm reminded him. "Only their attack force. Don't forget they still haven't used their antimissile missiles."

  Soon the whole of the network of red lines had frozen into immobility, marking the limit of penetration that had been reached before the last warhead was vaporized. Not one had made it past the frontier of any territory of a Western Alliance nation. Only the green traces were left in motion now, crawling inexorably onward toward their own destinations. By now the leading ones, fired from patrolling allied and U.S. submarines, were getting close.

  Sherman had by this time recovered from his despair and had gotten involved in the proceedings again. "Nothing will threaten our security for a long time to come now." He turned toward Carlohm. "That attack that's going on there no longer has any purpose. It must be stopped. Order immediate remote disarming of all warheads."

  Carlohm looked amazed for a second, then started to protest. "But there's nothing to lose now. There'll never be another chance like . . ."

  "Those weapons were conceived and built only as a deterrent. Now there's nothing left to deter anybody from using. Do it."

  Carlohm gave the order. From a score of command centers around the world, the transmissions were broadcast to transform the most sophisticated instrument of total destruction that the world had ever seen into just so many free-falling chunks of harmless metal.

  The green tentacles continued stretching their way forward to condense into a thorny girdle around the Eastern world. It was the picture of a little while earlier all over again, but in reverse. A speckled haze of red pinpoints began to appear, adorning the enemy coastlines and borders.

  "Antimissile interceptors coming up," Carlohm observed, now just a relaxed and passive spectator, as were the
rest of them. "They've got no way of knowing that those warheads have been deactivated."

  The display produced by the defensive-missile screen put up by the other side was truly spectacular. The amused observers at Brunnermont lounged back in their seats and pictured the alarm that must have been rife on the other side of the world. The whole of the Eastern bloc was becoming outlined by vivid streaks of blood red as thousands of individual tracks merged together; everything that could move was, it seemed, being fired into the sky.

  And then the J-bomb went into action again.

  The swarms of interceptors were methodically cut to shreds and then obliterated. The attacking salvos from the West were allowed to penetrate just far enough—far enough to act as bait to draw up the last of the defending missiles; then they too were destroyed. The destruction of the West's own attack force did not produce any reactions of surprise or anger now; the watchers around the Operational Command Floor had already resigned themselves to being merely puppets in the design that Clifford and Aub were revealing. They had all played out their assigned roles on cue as unerringly and as surely as if they had been manipulated on physical strings.

  Carlohm watched as the last scattered defenders were mopped up and the green attack pattern ground to a final halt.

  "I wonder what they'll make of that," he commented. "They'll know that none of their interceptors were getting through. It sure as hell wasn't them that stopped it."

  Then it was all over. The entire war machine, which had required forty years and the lion's share of the world's finance, industry, and talents to conceive and put together, had been wiped from the face of Earth in less than an hour. Not a single manned target on either side had been attacked successfully and, as far as anybody could tell, there had not been a single casualty.

  Sherman stood for a long time gazing up at the now inanimate display, faithfully preserving its record of the things that had happened through every agonizing second of that hour. There was an expression of wonder on his face, a mixture of awe and almost reverence, as if he alone could divine a deeper meaning to it all. The rest of the room remained silent, still savoring the relief and the sweet taste of the reprieve that none had dreamed possible.

  Suddenly the operator at the communications console sat forward as words began appearing on the screen before him. He read for a moment, then looked towards Carlohm.

  "It's a reply to the ultimatum," he announced.

  Carlohm strode over and looked over his shoulder. Then the general turned. "Beijing has ordered immediate cease-fires in India and Russia," he informed the room. "Also, they agree unconditionally to all the demands that we have put to them." Forgetting his formal duties for a moment he added wryly: "Boy—we sure must have scared the shit outa those bastards!"

  Chapter 24

  The atmosphere at the meeting, called on the afternoon of the following day at the White House, was still one of dazed bewilderment. To make matters worse, a completely new and unexpected complication had been added to the already unprecedented situation that confronted the men sitting around the table in the President's private conference room.

  Vice President Donald Reyes leaned forward in his chair and looked at William Foreshaw with a mixture of noncomprehension and plain disbelief.

  "Sorry, Bill, I'm not quite with you," he said. "Just say that again, will you?"

  "I said," the Defense Secretary replied, "that they haven't just taken out the whole of the world's capacity to wage global nuclear war; they have totally and completely paralyzed the possibility of any kind of strategic military operations for at least the next hundred years! They've demolished the whole structure of the East-West political balance of power."

  "That's what I thought you said. Now could you explain it?"

  Foreshaw passed his hand wearily across a brow that had been creased with concentration for most of the previous twenty-four hours.

  "Aw, hell, this all gets a bit technical. Pat, go through it again, would you?"

  Patrick Cleary, the principal Presidential adviser on computing matters, nodded from the far end and cleared his throat.

  "Before they came out of the Control Room at Brunnermont yesterday, the last thing they did was activate a complicated system of interlocked programs in the supervisory BIAC . . . that's the main computer that controls all the rest. It appears that the only person who knew that these programs even existed in the system at all was Dr. Clifford; he'd begun developing them even before he and his team moved from Sudbury to Brunnermont."

  "You mean they're still running there now . . . that thing is still live?"

  "Absolutely. There's no way anyone can shut it down . . . but I'll come to that in a minute. Let's begin at the beginning."

  Reyes sat back to listen as Cleary continued. "The first thing that they do is limit the operating range of the J-bomb. The bomb is still functional, but it will only accept target coordinates inside North America and allied Western nations, and up to fifty miles beyond their coastlines and frontiers." He noted one or two looks of bafflement and explained hurriedly. "This means that, in effect, it can only be used as a purely defensive weapon. Any form of attack from another part of the world—whether by land, sea, or air . . . using conventional weapons or nuclear ones—can be crushed before it gets anywhere near us. But since the range can't be extended into the homelands of the other side, the weapon has no offensive value whatsoever. We couldn't attack with it."

  "What about space weapons?" General Carlohm asked.

  "The J-bomb will fire inside an umbrella that extends for up to one hundred miles above all friendly territory. So, if the East wants to put itself to all the effort and expense it can build itself up a whole new ORBS system if it wants to . . . but the moment they try to drop anything on us, we can blow it out of the sky. Somehow I don't think they'll bother."

  President Sherman raised a hand to hold Cleary at that point.

  "There's something I'm not clear about here," he said. "You're talking about our being able to fire the bomb in defense if we need to. Who exactly do you mean by 'us'? Clifford and Philipsz are the only two who seem to really understand how the system works, and I've got a feeling they won't be sticking around for much longer. Who else do you figure could operate it?"

  "They've taken care of that," Cleary replied. "Now that the special programs have been integrated into the system, any experienced BIAC operator can be trained to use them. He only has to input data; he doesn't have to know how they are structured or interconnected internally."

  "In fact," Foreshaw supplied, "as I understand it, the two of them are offering to stay on at Brunnermont for a period of eight weeks, solely to train the first team of operators for us. After that, they blow."

  "Where to?" Sherman enquired.

  "They haven't said. Back to get on with whatever they want to do at ISF, I guess."

  To the continuing surprise of most of those present, Sherman merely smiled as if he found the whole thing a huge joke. His evident inclination to treat the affair with something approaching cheerful nonchalance . . . almost amusement . . . had been a source of puzzlement ever since the session began.

  "Okay," Reyes conceded. "It looks as if they've got the Brunnermont machine locked into a defense-only kind of role. But our security policy still requires an effective means of attack." He swept his eyes around the table to invite support. "My suggestion is this: Since Brunnermont is ruled out, we get together another scientific team, probably with the nucleus from ACRE and figure out how to build another one. After all, the design data for Brunnermont itself is all available; it shouldn't be too difficult."

  Cleary pursed his lips and shook his head.

  "I'm afraid it wouldn't work, Don. You see, the essential part of any other machine that's built to work on the same principles would be the artificial black hole that sits inside the J-reactor. The hole constitutes an intense emission source of hi-radiation; it would stand out like a lighthouse in the local regions of space."


  "So?"

  "The Brunnermont surveillance mechanism would detect it straight away. The whole system has been programmed to function as a never-sleeping . . . watchdog, if you like . . . in hi-space. It will fire automatically on any phenomenon of that kind that it identifies. In other words, if we build another J-bomb, Brunnermont will blow it sky-high the first instant we switch it on."

  Reyes looked at him aghast.

  "You mean here . . . in our own country? If we built one here and turned it on, we'd get zapped off the planet?"

  "That is exactly what I mean."

  Reyes thought for a moment; his face slowly formed into a frown. He looked up again. "But that's crazy. It leaves us wide open. What happens if the other side hits on the same technology? Their system wouldn't have any of these lunatic programs. They'd be able to blow us all to hell over here, and we wouldn't be in a position to even turn on anything to hit back with."

  Cleary was shaking his head again before Reyes had finished.

  "Not so. Brunnermont would fire on any black hole that they tried to turn on as well. If they did make one, they'd never be able to use it."

  "But . . ." Reyes was getting confused again. "But I thought you said Brunnermont wouldn't fire outside the West. You don't expect that Beijing would set up their J-bomb in the Nevada desert or somewhere, do you . . . just to make it easy for us to wipe it out?"

  "They've been rather cunning," Cleary replied. "Or rather, Clifford has. You see, the limitations on the range of the target coordinates that the system will accept only apply to fire commands issued through the operator interface programs; they don't apply to fire commands issued by the watchdog programs. So if the operator tries to hit a target, say, in Mongolia, the system simply won't work. But if somebody puts a J-bomb in Mongolia and switches it on, it'll get blasted automatically. It's neat. We can't build another one and they can't build another one."