The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  In the course of his work, Mel had occasionally interviewed victims of burglary, who had all told him that the worst part was not so much the material loss, but the feeling of indignation and impotence that came with the thought of having their homes, their belongings, things that related to their most private thoughts exposed and laid bare to the scrutiny of strangers. He now knew exactly what they’d meant.

  He was still smarting when he told Winthram and Evron about it at the firm the next morning.

  “Was there anything that might have been useful to them?” Winthram asked across his desk. Evron was by the window, watching the muffled figures on the frozen sidewalks below, scurrying to catch up on all the things they’d put off until the last week before the holiday.

  Mel, in the wingback armchair below the bookshelves, shook his head. “Not really. It was all regular case work. I collected it all and brought it in with me this morning.”

  “Good.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Evron asked over his shoulder.

  “What?” Winthram said.

  “You can’t be sure it was the Opposition that did it. Mel wasn’t just a former boyfriend of Eva’s. He was also a friend of Stephanie, who was supposed to have been murdered, and a close buddy of Brett, whom we know the FBI are investigating.”

  “You think it might have been them—the FBI?” Mel said.

  Evron turned away from the window and shrugged. “Stranger things have happened. Anyhow, there’s nothing we can do to change it. But I do have something for you that I dug up while you were in California. Let’s go into my office.”

  “Yes, and I’ve got a client due any minute now, so you’ll have to excuse me,” Winthram said, drawing a case file across his desk. “I suppose we’re working as unofficial allies of the Constitutional party now. Are they aware of it, I wonder?”

  “Oh yes,” Mel assured him, getting up from the chair. “And they appreciate it, believe me.”

  “Hmm.” Winthram rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Perhaps we should try billing them after it’s all over. After all, have to pay the rent, what? Worth a try, maybe, don’t you think?… Oh, and Melvin, it is good to see you back and all in one piece. Do take care of yourself, my boy. I think that what you’re doing is splendid, I really do.”

  Mel followed Evron to his office two doors along the corridor. Inside, Evron unlocked his desk drawer and took out a file of notes and clippings. Mel took it and began thumbing through casually. There was an article from Time magazine entitled give! give! give!—the billion dollar fundraisers… Tables of statistics that looked like breakdowns of mailing lists… Samples of religious direct-mail letters and literature… Brochure—sober and dignified, evidently intended for a few selected clients rather than a mass market, describing the services of what appeared to be a promotional agency called Carlowe-Merton Consultants, Inc., located in Kansas City.

  “What’s this?” Mel asked.

  “Remember that guy Sheldon Quintz—the one you thought was Oberwald’s informant back in Florida? Well, he wasn’t among the alumni who vanished into obscurity.” Evron nodded toward the file. “That’s the outfit he’s with now. It’s one of the agencies that works behind the scenes to design the big fund-raising media campaigns. In fact he’s all set to fly high—buying a lot of stock in the business. I’d give him another five years to make the board.”

  Mel stared at a picture of a lean, sandy-haired man in a business suit, laughing and looking casual and happy, with a row of computers and printers in the background. “This is him?” Mel asked—needlessly, because the caption said so. He peered more closely. The features were familiar in a vague kind of way. “I know this guy from somewhere…”

  “You were at the same university. Probably saw him around.”

  “So now he’s putting campaigns together, eh? What kind of campaigns?”

  “That’s what interesting. Some of their big clients are from the far conservative Right. One of them, for instance, is the Reverend Jessias Greaves.”

  Mel stared at the picture curiously. Greaves was one of the better-known TV evangelists. His New World Gospel Brotherhood electronic church was reputed to take in over a hundred million dollars a year in contributions. “It seems strange… Half of what you hear from those people is tirades about godless communists and how Russia is the big evil empire that the Bible talks about ” It seemed an odd business for somebody to be in who was supposed to be connected with a Soviet spy operation.

  “Well, at least we know where to find him,” Evron said. “But not until after the holiday. I did some checking. He’s away until the new year.”

  • • •

  A pattern was there, but tantalizing in its incompleteness. It connected the new political regime in America, and its covert intelligence operations, via the Israelis, to this base in Syria that also seemed to be the focal point of a systematic purloining of high-performance Soviet military hardware. But why? The pieces belonged together, Lieutenant Colonel Chelenko was certain as he sat staring up at the situation board, with the latest decoded transmission from the KGB’s American residency still resting loosely between his fingers. But no matter how he tried to fit them together, the pieces still didn’t tell a coherent story.

  Perhaps this mysterious lawyer from Boston wasn’t as innocent as he had first appeared to be. Chelenko traced over the web of connections again with his eye. It now seemed inarguable that the organization that was collecting the weapon components was linked to whatever was going on at the camp in Syria, where the Israelis had a contact; the Israeli controller of that contact communicates covertly to the U.S. through the American couple, who are also associated with the girl, the agent, Fenner, and the lawyer; the girl will shortly be visiting Israel, ostensibly as part of a political deputation; ; nuclear shells were missing, and the lawyer visits a nuclear facility in Colorado.

  But something vital was missing from it all, yet.

  To delve further, he would need to put somebody in, somebody good, closer to where the action was happening—or at least, where all the arrows were indicating that it soon would be. And that was in the Middle East, not here in Moscow.

  Chelenko turned to his desk, picked up a telephone, and called the secretary of the section in her office along the corridor.

  “Yes sir?” she answered.

  “Find Major Brazhnikov and get him here, would you? Tell him I have a job for him. A challenging one. The kind he likes.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Stephanie flew north to Boston early on Christmas Eve to avoid the rush that would be clogging airports everywhere by evening, and Mel met her before noon. They had lunch in a waterfront wine bar in Quincy market, and afterward toured the rows of small shops and stalls, crowded with last-minute shoppers heavily muffled against the New England cold, which had settled in with an icy grip that would last until April. Then they went back to Mel’s flat. By early evening they were sitting in the living room, she in the leather armchair by the wood-fired stove built into the fireplace, he on the couch, with the lights working this time, but the kerosene lamp near at hand as a precaution.

  They exchanged accounts of their experiences since parting in Washington after their return together from Los Angeles. Mel had brought in a bottle of Gordon’s gin and some tonics for Stephanie, a half liter of Whyte and Mackay scotch for himself, and a twelve-pack of Coors for them to share. It was difficult to believe that only a little over six weeks had passed since they had last sat together in that same room, the night Stephanie had arrived from Denver. So much had happened, and there was so much more to burden their minds. As the room warmed and they grew more mellow, the setting brought back memories of that previous occasion, and their thoughts turned again to Eva.

  “She was always so positive about everything,” Stephanie said distantly, leaning back in the chair with her elbows propped on the arms and her legs stretched straight, watching her glass while she swirled the liquid in it first one way around the ice c
ubes, then the other. “About people. She had faith in humanity and the power of human reason to solve its problems. I wanted to be like her when we were younger, but politics seemed so boring. I think that had a lot to do with why I went into physics.”

  “Why nuclear in particular?” Mel asked. He was alternating sips of whiskey with a beer chaser and starting to feel pleasantly hazy.

  “Because nuclear processes will be the key to the new technologies that will dominate the next century.” She waved a hand before he could reply. “Oh, I know there’s been a lot of bad press. But we’ve seen that kind of thing before with lots of things, such as antiseptics, anesthetics, inoculation, railroads, electricity in the home… Eventually it goes away. People talk about ‘alternatives,’ but there isn’t an alternative. There can’t be, from basic principles.”

  “How come?” Mel asked.

  “What matters if you really want to do things better and cheaper is not so much the amount of energy you can get from this source or that source—there’s a lot of energy in all the chicken dung dropped on Oklahoma in a year, but you can’t do much with it—however the energy density: how concentrated it is. You could never build a wood-burning airliner, for example—the mountain of logs would never get itself off the ground.”

  “You need jet fuel.”

  “Exactly. And the energy densities associated with nuclear processes are thousands of times greater than anything you get from rearranging the outer electron shells of atoms, which is the basis of all chemical combustion. Hence you need thousands of times less fuel. And despite the things you hear, you generate thousands of times less waste. In the end it’s the only way to go. You can fool people and you can fool yourself—for a while. But in the end, facts always win through. You can’t fool the laws of physics and economics.”

  “I remember Ed Gilman saying something like that,” Mel said, nodding. “So is that what the fission-fusion project there’s all about?”

  “Yes—eventually.” Stephanie sighed. “But Ed’s so much of a romantic in some ways… taking it on and getting funding for it the way he did, when none of the big energy companies would even look at it. That’s what enthusiasm can do for you, I guess.”

  “How did you come to get involved in it?”

  “I saw science as coming to be the same as everything else: turning into a Big-Govemment-dominated monopoly that can hand out favors to the people it likes and bury anyone it doesn’t like. It was degenerating into a competition for bigger handouts at the public trough.” Stephanie sipped her drink and shrugged. “In my naivete of youth, I thought I could escape back to what I imagined science used to be.”

  “So how does the program at GPD fit in?” Mel sipped his drink while he thought back. “From what I recall, Ed told me that the main project is pioneering a fission-fusion hybrid system. Basically it’s a way of getting an economically worthwhile energy gain from a low-grade fusion process, isn’t it? It multiplies the energy output somehow, which means you can operate with less strenuous criteria than pure fusion would require.”

  Stephanie nodded approvingly. “You’ve got it. And that gives you a stepping-stone to a pure fusion economy one day.”

  “A fusion economy? You mean not just generating electricity?”

  Stephanie pulled in her legs and sat up to pour a splash of gin into her glass and top it up with tonic. “No. That’s the whole point. What we’re talking about is something that will obsolete just about all of today’s industries as totally as steam and electricity obsoleted the technologies of the Middle Ages.”

  “Ed said practically the same thing, but he never went into details. What would be some examples?”

  “Take metals,” Stephanie said. “Every shovelful of dirt from your back yard contains trace amounts of iron, copper, molybdenum, manganese, chromium, titanium… you name it. With such low concentrations it would be hopelessly uneconomic to try to extract them—by conventional methods. But at the temperatures of nuclear plasmas, all atoms are stripped of their electrons and become raw nuclei. Raw nuclei are highly charged. Electrically charged particles can be manipulated and separated very easily and cheaply by magnetic fields. Now all that useless material—even seawater—becomes a valuable resource. You don’t need geologically concentrated ores to make it worthwhile any more. You see—we’ve just obsoleted all of our primary metals extraction industries. And we’ve got a total recycling method for all forms of waste.

  “Or take chemicals. The typical way to produce a chemical compound is by putting the ingredients into some kind of vat, supplying heat, and letting them react together for hours, days, or even weeks. The heat provides the energy to drive the reactions in which the molecules you want are formed. But heat is a broadband source—it provides energy over a wide range of wavelengths. Hence it generates lots of different kinds of molecules. So only a fraction of the ingredients turn into the product you wanted—which makes it expensive—and the rest is sludge that you hope your marketing people can find a use for.

  “But on a lab scale, tuned lasers are already being used to energize reactions that are a hundred percent efficient, and in milliseconds. So imagine that we scale it up to industrial dimensions, with the reactants combining from the plasma state, and the plasma radiation tuned to the appropriate wavelength…”

  “You mean you’ve just wiped out the chemicals industry, too, now?”

  “Right. Plastics, fertilizers, all the funny smells and pollution along the Gulf coast. You can make your own gasoline…”

  “Make gasoline?”

  “Sure. It’s only carbon and hydrogen after all, which are both abundant elements, put together in the right way to lock in a lot of energy. All you need to make it economic is a sufficiently concentrated energy source. Well, we’ve got one. It won’t be worth anyone’s while to drill the natural stuff up out of the ground any more… And while we re at it, we can desalinate seawater cheaply and pump it anywhere it’s needed. So we revolutionize agriculture too. We can turn millions of square miles of deserts into farms and gardens and cities.

  “Or take space transportation. How about anywhere in the solar system and back in a couple of weeks? Never mind spinning ships around like wheels to simulate gravity, the way you always read about in stories. The smart way, given the right propulsion system, is simply to accelerate the ship at one gee for half the voyage, then turn it around and decelerate for the other half. That’s in sight now. We’re already talking about voyages on the same time scales as ocean crossings. That’s why all this talk about the planet being overpopulated is garbage. It’s growing human populations that make investments in new technologies worthwhile. If we want to get out and become a space-going civilization, we need at least ten billion people. And we can easily support that. It’s all… What are you staring at?”

  “Was I? Sorry. It’s just that you look kind of wonderful when you get intense like that.”

  “I do get carried away, don’t I? It’s just that… well, it’s something that I think is important.”

  Mel could feel the alcohol releasing his inhibitions. “It all sounds too good,” he said, blinking in an effort to break the fascination that was taking hold of him. “So why aren’t we doing it?”

  Stephanie sighed and slumped back into the armchair. “You know that as well as I do: there’s too much invested in conventional technologies that haven’t yielded an optimum return yet. You saw the report that Eva found.”

  “Yes, I know. It’s not just the environmentalists.”

  “They’re just the dupes in the middle. They’re being used as a front, because their aims happen to coincide for the time being with the policies of the people who really decide, and it provides an acceptable public image. The top levels of the social order always stand to lose the most from from change. And the changes we’re talking about will dwarf any previous revolution in history.”

  “It will happen, then?”

  “Oh, sure, You won’t stop it. It’s evolution. Nothing’s be
en able to stop it for fifteen billion years. Nothing will.”

  Mel was becoming more spellbound as he listened. The incongruous thing about it all was that she should have called Eva’s attitude positive. Their two philosophies complemented each other. Neither vision—the individual liberty that Eva had espoused, nor the freedom from poverty that Stephanie was describing now—could become a reality without the other. The only meaningful safeguard against domination by others was economic independence. But only technology could create the abundance that would mean economic independence for all. Eva’s individualism could exist only in Stephanie’s world; but that world could be created only by free individualists. Like Escher’s picture of two hands drawing each other, the two ideals could only coevolve. Neither could stand without the other.

  “What are you thinking about?” Stephanie asked.

  “Oh… Eva and you. You and Eva… Did you know you were both flip sides of the same coin?”

  Stephanie smiled faintly and stared into the distance over her glass. “One thing that Eva never had any time for was people who wouldn’t try to help themselves. Maybe that was something that rubbed off on me from her. But she’d do anything to help the ones who would. I remember once—not long before Eva went to university in Florida—there were a couple of little girls from farther along the block where we lived, who went to the same school as Andrew. One was about twelve, the other ten. They were there in the house one morning, and we had a Mozart concerto or something playing in the kitchen while we were talking over breakfast. Then we realized that the twelve-year-old—Nancy, her name was—had gone very quiet. And when we looked at her, she was enthralled. Eva asked what was the matter, and she said, ‘What’s that music?’ Eva told her, ‘Mozart,’ and Nancy asked, ‘What group is that?’ ”