The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  CHAPTER 27

  “… no solution to the problem at all. The biological hazards are completely unknown, and all I can say is that the whole, ill-conceived project represents an irresponsible misuse of resources and a reckless gamble with the health and safety of the public. Thank you.” Marcus Chissek, a bald-headed man with a white beard and thick-rimmed spectacles, professor of current affairs from the Colorado State University, sat back in his chair and inclined his head to acknowledge the applause from the audience. The three men and two women seated with him at the green-felt-covered table on the stage beneath the arc lamps that had been set up for the TV cameras nodded to show their agreement. At the other table, facing the audience from the opposite side of the stage, Ed Gilman scanned over the notes he had been taking and turned to a pile of reports and reference data that he had brought with him.

  Alongside him were two scientists from GPD and a health physicist from Pennsylvania whom he had persuaded to fly out to join them. The utilities had declined to send a spokesman, stating that it was not their policy to get involved in controversial topics; the various people that he had contacted in the academic world, while expressing sympathy, had elected to stay out, too, apparently fearing for their career prospects and unwilling to attract professional disapproval. The days had apparently gone when the unfettered search for the truth—and nothing else—dictated the mores of science.

  Another storm had blown up in the Denver area over safety-related aspects of GPD’s fission-fusion project, and as usual a garbled version had found its way into the media. As a rule, Gilman tried to avoid personal publicity. He wasn’t in show business, he said. Ample information was available for that part of the populace who had minds of their own and were willing to take the trouble to find out, while the rest were beyond reach, anyway. On this occasion, however, with a camera team sent from one of the major networks, he had agreed to meet the critics at a public debate in the hope of putting the record straight once and for all before the nation.

  “Well, this is quite a long, and if I may say so, rather confused list of allegations to have to straighten out,” Gilman began. “However, taking the question of radioactive waste, which is the one that seems to produce the most misunderstanding—”

  The production manager who had come with the camera team interrupted from one side below the stage. “Before you go on, since we are on a tight time schedule, could we get in a few summary lines?” Gilman stopped, momentarily taken aback. There had been no mention of time pressure all the while that Chissek and his crew had been waffling on. Before Gilman could respond, the production manager addressed the man sitting to Gilman’s right. “Dr. Murray, regarding the claims made about radiation emissions.”

  “Something that very much needs clearing up,” Murray agreed. “First, we should cover some basics that were apparently not understood. It’s simply a fact of life that—”

  “Specifically with regard to the GPD project, can you say for certain that no radiation will ever be released into the local environment?”

  “No, and I wouldn’t attempt to. In fact there will be releases. But—”

  “Can you prove that even a low dose is completely safe?”

  “Nobody can prove that. It’s the kind of thing that can never be proved, purely on a philosophic basis. You can only draw conclusions from what you observe. But what we can say is that no ill effect of any kind has ever been observed—”

  “Dr. Bailey, is a serious accident absolutely impossible?”

  “Well, no…”

  “In other words, one could happen?”

  “Yes, the probability is not zero. But neither is—”

  “Thank you.” Bailey looked at Gilman and shook his head in helpless bewilderment. One of the cameras rolled in on its dolly to catch it in close-up. “And one from Mr. Gilman, please. Mr. Gilman, it’s true, is it not, that the federal government has decided to withdraw funding support of the project?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “And is it true that the private investors you’ve approached have received negative appraisals from independent technical authorities on the grounds of economic and practical unfeasibility?”

  Gilman colored visibly. That information was confidential. Not even he knew who had authored that report. Suddenly his patience with the whole atmosphere of cross-examination evaporated. “Look, would you please let me answer in my own way? I had started to talk about the eternal what-do-you-do-with-the-waste? thing, which was brought up earlier. Now this issue is a fraud that’s been going on for years and it’s about time we got some facts straight. Nuclear processes give thousands of times the energy yield of any kind of conventional combustion. That’s why they require thousands of times less fuel. And for the same reason, despite what people are told, they produce thousands of times less waste. And what you do with that is put it through reactors and process it into new fuel, which is what Europe does, what Japan does, what the Soviets do. You see, spent fuel and waste are entirely different things, but the public is never told that. Ninety-five percent of what comes out of reactors can go straight back in, and what’s left at the end of a year’s operation of a big plant if you do that will fit under your kitchen table.”

  He waited, but nobody asked. Finally Murray, beside him, prompted, “But we’re not doing it?”

  “We were!” Gilman replied. “We had a whole plant ready to go to do just that, back in the seventies—over in South Carolina. The government never let it start up. It’s still there. They were worried about terrorists making bombs, which is nonsense—there’s a dozen ways I could show you right now that are easier, cheaper, and safer than fooling with power-plant waste. So the utilities have had to treat one hundred percent of what comes out of reactors as if it were high-level waste, to store it in ways that were never intended, and that’s what gets all the publicity. It’s a totally unnecessary problem, created by politics…” He broke off as the arc lamps went out and the room seemed suddenly dark. As his eyes readjusted, he saw that the cameras were being dismounted and the lights taken down. Below the stage, the production manager had lost interest in him and was giving directions to a technician who was picking up a microphone cable. Some of the audience were leaving. “What’s going on?” Gilman called down from the table. “We’re not finished.”

  “That’s okay, you carry on,” the production manager told him. “We’ve got all we need for the tape. It’s no good on the air when you get into long explanations. You lose people, and they switch off. They just want to hear it in one line.”

  Gilman stared down at the notes that he’d taken days to prepare—all to be reduced to a series of defensive one-liners spliced into the footage on an editor’s whim. That was what the world would see, and anything he had to say from here on would be just to a small-town meeting. Somehow his heart had gone out of it now.

  CHAPTER 28

  Eva had worked officially as a public-relations specialist at the Constitutionals’ West Coast office, which had been a cover for her real job with the party’s intelligence arm. Louis Seybelman and his people, however, believed—so it was hoped—that she had changed loyalties to become a double agent working for them. The fact was that she had not, which put her in the notoriously perilous position of being a triple. The Opposition could hardly be expected to be blind to such a possibility, and it was not a time to aggravate their suspicions by prolonging her disappearance more than was absolutely necessary.

  To protect the supposed secrecy of her connection with Seybelman, she had been given a procedure for maintaining contact covertly. Using the pseudonym Annabel, she would deposit messages for him at a certain address in one of the public data networks, while ones for her would appear in the same place, signed “Simon.” The system thus functioned as a two-way electronic drop box, in which either party could leave information which the other could access remotely, with neither the source nor the destination being traceable. Eva’s last message to Seybelman had been a precoded phrase ad
vising that, as anticipated, she had received confirmation that she would be substituting for Josef Kirkelmayer in the party accompanying McCormick to the Middle East. Since then, five messages of progressively increasing urgency had accumulated from “Simon,” requesting Annabel to get in touch. The first thing Warren Landis had done after Stephanie’s agreement to cooperate was to buy more time by depositing a reply from Annabel, saying that she had personal complications that would keep her out of circulation until after the end of the month.

  The plan was that Stephanie, as Eva, would resume contact in the first week of December, rehearsed in a story that would accord with actual events as far as was practicable: A sister in Denver had committed suicide while depressed, following her boyfriend’s untimely death—as checking would verify—and in the course of attending the funeral in California, she had met up with a former lover from university days. It turned out that their feelings for each other were still very much alive, and the relationship was blossoming again. This, of course, was where Mel came into the picture, the intention being to keep Arnold Hoffenach at a distance. There was little time and a lot to get through. They remained out of sight at the Pinewood Hills resort, working to assimilate their roles.

  • • •

  Leaden clouds were piling up over the ridge across the lake, and rain had been sputtering intermittently all day. After taking a late-afternoon walk to stretch their legs and get some air after a morning of reading and memorizing, Mel and Stephanie approached the resort buildings along a path that meandered among birch and pine trees near the water’s edge. There were only two days left now until the end of November. Stephanie, wearing a red ski jacket and white woollen hat, seemed at ease for the first time since her arrival in Boston. The stay here was doing a lot to help her get over the trauma of Brett and Eva, and her confidence seemed to be growing as she absorbed more of the personality whose part she would be taking. Perhaps that had been the intention.

  “Entrepreneurs are one of the most valuable assets that our society possesses,” she said. “People who can recognize an opportunity, who know how to set up a business, and who are willing to take the risks. They create the jobs that provide income and security for everyone else. You’d think they’d be appreciated, wouldn’t you? But instead, we treat them as criminals to be punished. Nature rewards achievement and ability, and punishes nonachievement. We try to create a system that does precisely the opposite, by levying a progressively more savage tax on success, and rewarding inability with cash prizes. So, of course that system is falling apart. It was judged by the promises it preached, instead of by the results it produced.”

  Mel kicked a stone off the path as they walked. “Did you ever think of you and your sister as complementary sides of the same person?” he asked curiously.

  “In what kind of way?”

  “Oh, in being pro-people… but in different ways. You talk about their individual rights, their freedom. Stephanie used to see technology as the means to realizing those ideals. As long as it’s impossible to create enough wealth for everyone to be well off, the defense of privilege by force is inevitable.”

  “Sure. The only real way for people to be better off is by increasing their productivity—the value of the work they do. And that’s what technology does. Everything else turns out to be an illusion in the longer term. You can manipulate numbers and cook the books to look as if you’re making more dollars, but the currency will devalue and each dollar won’t buy as much. You can’t take out more than you put in.”

  Mel turned his head to stare at her. She was looking out at the lake at that instant and didn’t notice. It was uncanny. She was turning into Eva—talking like Eva, and now starting to think like Eva. They played this game all the time now. At first they had felt self-conscious and slightly foolish; now it came more easily and naturally. That was the idea.

  “You’re saying that capitalism is defensible, then?” Mel said. All afternoon he had been talking her through the things that he and Eva had talked about, prompting her until she could respond as Eva would have.

  She nodded lightly. “Genuine free-enterprise capitalism, based on voluntary exchange. It’s not only defensible. It’s morally superior to anything else you can name.”

  “How can you justify some people living on interest from investments and doing nothing, while others have to work?” Mel challenged.

  “Well, if I’ve built a building that I don’t have a use for right now, but which you could run your business in, would there be anything wrong with me renting it out to you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So if using my building enables you to make profits for yourself, I should be entitled to a share of the proceeds.”

  “I guess you’d have to be. If not, why would you let me use the building?”

  “Right. Now suppose I’ve developed a machine that will enable you to produce ten times the output from that business. You’d hardly expect me to hand it over free, without any benefit to myself, would you?”

  “Nope.”

  Stephanie tossed out a hand briefly. “And now suppose I provide the capital for you to buy the machine. Is there any difference? Interest is the rate that spare capital is rented out at. If it’s fair for you to pay me a share of the profits you make through using my building and my machine, then it’s just as fair to have to pay a share of what you make through using my money. If I hadn’t lent it to you, I could have used it to make something for myself.”

  “What about ordinary wage earners, who don’t own any capital? How do you let them get in on the act?”

  “By allowing them to keep what they make, for a start. Get rid of the union mentality that keeps them there. Let everyone be self-employed. How many strikes would you get then? People shouldn’t be bought and sold along with the company like feudal serfs tied to the land.”

  Mel nodded that he was satisfied. “Okay, you’ve convinced me.”

  They emerged from the trees and crossed a strip of lawn to reenter the resort through the outside pool area. As they came to the empty sun lounges and tables with furled shades, they slowed their pace, both, seemingly, wanting to put off the moment of going back in after the peace and solitude outside. Mel halted and lifted a foot up onto one of the chairs, propping an elbow on his knee.

  “When did it finish between us?” he asked, staring out across the lake.

  “I’d have said when you went off to Chapel Hill to become a lawyer. I moved out to LA not long afterward.”

  “Haven’t we seen each other since?”

  “You came out to the West Coast a few times.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “Last fall. We drove out through Death Valley and went to Nevada.”

  “You were writing for a living then,” Mel said. The statement wasn’t quite accurate—a try at catching her out.

  “That was over a year earlier, before I went to work full-time with the Constitutionals. And it was more of an editorial job.”

  “Oh, that’s right. With that magazine, what was it called?…”

  “The Free Rationalist. They had offices on Figueroa, opposite the Meath Tower.”

  “We stayed at Las Vegas. There were those two guys losing hundreds of thousands, and they thought it was hilarious. You figured they were laundering drug money through the casino.”

  “We had fun,” she agreed. “But it wasn’t the same.”

  The sound of a chain saw came distantly from somewhere in the forest. Mel leaned forward to pick up a piece of twig from the tabletop and toyed with it absently. “Do you know why I went to Chapel Hill?” he asked.

  Stephanie shrugged. “To get away for a while, think it out… You wanted to own me, and I wouldn’t be owned. You had a problem dealing with that.”

  “But you didn’t let it be just for a while. You moved away to LA.”

  “At the time, I thought I was doing you a favor… doing us both a favor.”

  Mel turned his head toward her. “And
the irony is that now, after all this time, I think I finally understand what you were trying to say. I could love you all the more now for what you are, but I can’t because you’re…” He stopped and licked his lips, unable to form the word, and the twig snapped in his fingers. He threw the pieces down, realizing that he had been getting out of line.

  “You know,” Stephanie said, “one thing I never did understand was why law? What made you switch to that?”

  Mel grinned thankfully and accepted the out that she was giving him. “There were several things. You had something to do with it.”

  “Did I? You’d better remind me.”

  “It was a short time after we met, back at UWF, I stopped by Economics when I was thinking of enrolling in one of Brodstein’s classes. You were helping out in the office because a secretary hadn’t shown up.”

  “Was she the one who’d gotten a job offer, but her counselor told her not to take it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So, where do lawyers come into it?”

  “I’d been talking to Brett about who’d play the biggest part in making a free society happen. We didn’t think it would be computer people. I asked you what you thought, and you said lawyers.”

  Stephanie laughed. It was a haunting echo of the way Eva used to laugh. “And just because of one word you went off and changed careers?”

  Mel smiled back. At that time, he couldn’t take being laughed at by Eva. Now he could laugh along too. “That was six years ago. A lot of other things happened too. But maybe it was a part of it. Who knows what goes on in our subconsciouses?” Around them an evening breeze was coming up, blowing leaves onto the tarpaulin stretched over the pool for winter. Mel took his foot down off the chair. “Anyhow, it’s starting to get chilly. Let’s go in.”