The Trigger

by Arthur C. Clarke

  'Gets my blood moving better than any amount of coffee,' he explained when questioned why he took the trouble to answer messages that others would ignore. 'And it surprises them so much when they get something back from me personally that sometimes they actually stop to reconsider. Besides, I have an irrational belief in the power of reason.'

  Early morning was also a good time to teleconference with his allies in Europe. Mind Over Madness had chapters in forty-one countries, and legislative partners - like Wilman, signees of MOM's Common Sense Declarations - in almost half of them. Of course, that alliance made Wilman a favorite target of the Christian ultra-nationalists and the internationalist-conspiracy fringe.

  Somehow, Wilman took it all in stride. On one level, it was only noise. On another, it was confirmation that the message was getting out. That, plus the parallel stream of supportive letters and the occasional conversion of an opponent, was enough to confirm him on his course. His crusade was no poll-driven, short-horizon, media-savvy re-election ploy. It was a principled long-term commitment to changing how people thought about conflict. He knew better than to judge the progress of that effort by the 'mad dog' mail.

  Wilman's office was as unconventional as his politics and as doggedly confrontational as his Senate floor persona. The standard desk accessory for senators was a large American flag, positioned where visitors could not ignore it and cameras could not miss it. In Wilman's office, that prime space was occupied by a framed blowup of his favorite Mind Over Madness print ad - the controversial 'corpse collage' of morgue and crime-scene photos with the bold caption GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE above, and a sardonic (THINK ANYONE'S STILL BUYING THIS?) below.

  Elsewhere in the room, the usual honorary degrees and personal photo gallery were likewise absent, their spaces taken over by the words and images of heroes and pioneers of the peace and disarmament movements. It was Wilman's private hall of fame, a shrine to a philosophical ideal which, for more than a century and a half, had been running a poor second to the reigning Zeitgeist - Man as killer ape, and evolution red in tooth and claw.

  The only images of Wilman himself were the caricatures in two framed political cartoons and a glass-covered photograph of Wilman with his tank crew on the sands outside An-Najaf, Iraq. Framed beside the photograph were his captain's bars, service medals, and honorable discharge certificate.

  I have the moral right, the photograph insisted. You cannot invoke cowardice, or disloyalty, or fear, and then dismiss me - you must engage the moral issue in our challenge. And a year earlier, that photograph had spoken loudly enough from campaign ads to give Wilman a razor-thin victory and another six years as Oregon's senior senator.

  'No other state in this Union would have sent you to Washington,' his Democratic opponent had said in his private concession call. 'And no other state would have sent you back there once they realized what they'd done. Still and all, for the trouble you cause the Republican leadership, and for the good you try to do by rubbing our noses in the shit, I almost don't mind losing to you. And if you tell my party chairman I said so, I'll see to it that your incestuous little nest of morally bankrupt technocrat pansies never gets another hundred bucks in dues from my wife.'

  It was the essential Wilman paradox, encapsulating not only the campaign, but his entire career in politics. His friends and allies resented him and his enemies admired him for exactly the same traits: his stubborn singlemindedness, the characteristic bluntness in the service of a penetratingly insightful mind, and his uncompromising commitment to principle over practicality. In the words of the leading news magazine In Touch, he was the prototype anti-politician.

  'He breaks rules considered sacrosanct, but knowingly, out of necessity rather than defiance,' the magazine's political editor had written in introducing Wilman's profile. 'He makes mistakes considered fatal, yet survives, because passion is something rare and therefore treasured in this usually bloodless city.

  'Grover Wilman makes us at once proud and uncomfortable, as though we know the truth of his words but despair of living up to his ideals. At no time in my thirty-year memory of these halls has there been such a grand iconoclast or an intellectual of comparable consequence in Congress. Patently unelectable as

  President, he is now at the peak of his power - and when the masses tire of his somewhat preachy message, as they inevitably must, L'Enfant's city, this writer's beat, and our national dialogue will be the poorer for his absence.'

  Indifferent to the praise, Wilman sent the editor a copy of the piece with 'as they inevitably must' circled in red and a handwritten note scrawled across the bottom:

  If civility is a fad, civilization is a fantasy. Is that really the best you can offer your children?

  'For me, this is the one that rocks,' said Toni Barnes. The graphics designer touched the controller and brought a different ad dummy to the conference room video wall: a monochrome photograph of eight adults standing in a circle, each holding a revolver to the head of the person to his left. 'We can use something like "Feel Safe Now?" as the hook line, and "The Killing Stops When We Stop It" as the sell line.'

  'I still like the first one,' said Evan Stolta, Mind Over Madness's senior strategic consultant. He reached out and returned a photo of a three-year-old in tiny fatigues, holding an assault rifle, to the screen. 'Hook and sell in four words - "Now he's a man". Simple, strong.'

  'Stop thinking like a Yalie lib,' said Barnes. There are a lot of people out there who won't catch the tone - they'll think that's cute.'

  'There's nothing we can do to help the irony-impaired,' Stolta said, annoyed by the dig. 'What do you want - smoke coming from the barrel and a second kid lying in a puddle of blood?'

  'Let me see it,' said Senator Wilman, who had been sitting back in his chair listening to the brainstorming.

  Frowning, Barnes turned to her digitizing easel. In a few moments the black-and-white image acquired color. Not long after, it acquired a corpse.

  Wilman was already shaking his head when Barnes turned to him for his opinion. 'No, no, no. We've never faked a victim in any of our material, and that's not nearly strong enough to make an exception. But I like the color. Why are we falling into this Wiesenthal-Bergman high-art rut lately? These people we're trying to reach don't live in a monochrome world, and we have to connect with them where they live.'

  'We -' Stolta began, but couldn't find an opening.

  'Toni, your circle-of-insecurity would work just as well in color,' Wilman went on. 'Better, because the people will look like family and neighbors, instead of characters from a film noir murder mystery. You can move the light source around if you want to play with the emotional subtext. Show me something by the end of the day.'

  Barnes nodded, and began closing up her easel. With barely a beat, Wilman turned his attention to Stolta. 'Evan, what happened to what we talked about last week - going after the content providers? We can't possibly buy or beg enough bandwidth for these spots to compete with the program libraries at Turner and Sony and Bertelsmann. They're going to have to do something to help us.'

  They don't want to talk to us,' Stolta said, shrugging his shoulders.

  'Of course they don't,' said Wilman, standing. 'They're sitting on hundreds of thousands of hours of program material that's based on the premise that men maiming, torturing, and killing other men is entertainment. But it's your job to figure out how to get them to talk to us.'

  Stolta was shaking his head. They have an enormous investment in inventory -'

  'An inventory of poison. We need them to start looking at those libraries as liabilities, not assets,' Wilman said sharply. 'We need to help them see that there's an ethical dimension in what they're doing that goes beyond supply and demand. And if that means beating on closed doors and closed minds until they open, that's what we're going to have to do. Now, if you're too burned out for that kind of fight -'

  'Put me on your schedule for Friday,' said Stolta. 'I'll try to have some ideas for you by then.'

  'Good
.' Wilman checked his watch. 'Late for my meeting. System?'

  'Ready,' said the conference room controller's synthesized voice.

  'End meeting log.'

  'Verified,' said the room. 'Do you wish me to abstract and distribute minutes?'

  'No. Archive only.' Then Wilman looked up and flashed a sympathetic smile at the others. This road is uphill all the way,' he said. 'And that's hard. Sometimes when I get discouraged, I think about renaming the coalition the Sisyphus Society. So far I've managed to get over it before having papers drawn up, thank goodness -it's a name only a Yalie lib could appreciate.' He winked in Stolta's direction, and his smile brightened enough to put a twinkle of puckish humor in his eyes.

  'A lost opportunity,' said Stolta. 'Just think of the jazzy animated logo we could have had for our Web sites.'

  Wilman laughed as he picked up his portfolio. I'll be back in the office in an hour. If something urgent comes up before then, Marina knows how to get in touch with me.'

  A light breeze was blowing across Arlington National Cemetery, taking the edge off what was warming up to be a quintessential oppressively-humid Washington summer day. Even so, Wilman was perspiring freely by the time he walked from the Sheridan Gate to the gentle hill where the remains of Dayton Charles Arthur Deich rested in the shade of a hundred-year-old maple tree. The tree interrupted a line of white marble headstones, and its spreading roots had pushed Dayton's headstone a few degrees askew.

  Over the last year, the sole visitor to Dayton's grave had been a private of the 3rd US Infantry, who paused there briefly to place a small American flag in front of the headstone in preparation for Memorial Day. Through this annual tradition, The Old Guard remembered and honored his service and sacrifice. But the chances were that no one else did.

  Dayton had died half a world away and more than half a century ago, a draftee corporal who fell during a bitter Korean winter and an even more bitter defeat - the bloody retreat to Hngnam-ni. Dying at twenty-one, he had left no descendants. The closest of his living cousins was three generations and five states removed.

  But Dayton was not alone in fading from sight. As Korea's youngest veterans passed from the stage, Dayton's war had crossed the line from memory to history. Now distilled down to a Cold War skirmish which boasted no patriotic songs or triumphant images, it had lost all its pain and passion.

  Even the most basic facts had left the collective consciousness. Rare was the civilian who knew more about Korea than could be gleaned from the classic television comedy set there. Ridgway and MacArthur, Pusan, Inchon and the Yalu - their emotional resonance was gone.

  But it was the same for all of Dayton's neighbors in the old graves on the hill in Section 20. Even those who fought in a Good War could not count on visitors to break the settled solitude.

  We give you this little piece of the earth, Wilman thought as he neared the two men waiting for him at the maple tree, allow you this little claim in a realm you no longer inhabit - to what end? An exercise in propaganda, sanitizing the truth. The honored dead in their final rest, with no hint of what they did, what they endured, to earn that dubious honor. No blood, no torn and broken bodies, not a weapon anywhere in sight -just row after row of sterile white stones, lying by their silence. I hate this place more than any other I know -

  Karl Brohier frowned. 'Is that him?'

  'That's him,' said Aron Goldstein, nodding.

  'He doesn't look happy.'

  'I don't expect he is.'

  'Maybe we should have just picked him up in your car and gone for a ride around the Beltway,' said Brohier. 'That would have been private enough, wouldn't it? More private than this. One cheap audio telescope, and -'

  'I know how he feels about Arlington,' said Goldstein. This is a better way.' He moved toward Wilman with a smile and a hand offered in greeting. 'Grover! Thank you for meeting us.'

  'You said it was urgent that we talk,' Wilman said, looking past Goldstein. 'I know you. Where do I know you from?'

  'That's not important,' said Goldstein. 'Come, let's sit. Karl, the blanket.'

  They settled in the shade on a red-and-black stadium warmer, looking for all the world like three brothers lingering a time at a family gravesite. 'What do you have for me, Aron?'

  'Would it brighten your day any if I could offer you the prospect that there would never be another grave dug in this cemetery except to bury an old man like me?'

  'I don't quite know what you mean,' said Wilman, frowning. 'But the casualty rate in the US armed forces is the lowest it's ever been - even when we put forces in the field, the machines do most of the fighting, and combat deaths are so rare that they all make the news. That half of the battle's nearly won, Aron. Casualties are no longer acceptable.' He nodded in the direction of the Pentagon, hidden from them by distant trees. 'Now if only we could get them to care that much about the Hutus, or the Brazilians.'

  That's expecting too much,' said Brohier.

  'Why?' Wilman demanded.

  'Men have willingly killed other men's children for ten thousand years. Makes more room on the planet for their own.'

  'Oh, Christ, don't invoke Darwin to me,' Wilman said in disgust. 'I've heard a lot of sociological drivel about The Other, and I'm telling you that the only thing it means is that sometimes we can't hear the wives and mothers crying.'

  'Explain what you mean.'

  'Happily. Tell me what you remember about Desert Storm.'

  'Desert Storm? Gracious, that was - you know, there are great gaps in my awareness of current events over the last sixty years. I was having my crisis at Bell Labs, I think.'

  'I was in an Abrams M1-A1,' said Wilman. 'Go on - whatever you remember.'

  'You'd think I'd remember more, since every TV everywhere I went seemed to be tuned to CNN for what seemed like a month straight,' Brohier said with a frown. 'We had the stealth fighters, the smart bombs, and Schwarzkopf. They had Saddam Hussein, Scud missiles, and an air force that ran away to Iran. It wasn't much of a contest, as I recall.'

  'No, it wasn't.'

  'And the Iraqis set the oil fields on fire, didn't they? When they left Saudi Arabia.'

  'Kuwait.'

  'Right. Kuwait. So, how did I do?'

  'You remember what most people remember,' said Wilman offhandedly. 'It was a Good War. Our cause was just, we won handily, and almost everyone came home.' He gestured at the seemingly endless field of headstones surrounding them on every side. 'Not many here who died that winter. And that's too bad -'

  'What?'

  '- Because the Good War is a lie. Desert Storm was a horrible little war. And the most horrible thing about it was how little of the horror made it back to Frogleg, Mississippi. We went to war for Big Oil and the divine right of someone else's king - not for self-defense, not for democratic principles. The press treated it like a video game, and the people treated it like a television miniseries.'

  Wilman shook his head. 'In the span of six weeks, we killed at least twice as many Iraqi soldiers and civilians as the US lost in fifteen years in Vietnam. But we didn't see the mothers crying, so it didn't mean anything to us. The Good War.' He snorted derisively. The Good War means that only strangers with funny names were blown to bits.'

  'Grover - what if it all could have been avoided?' asked Goldstein. 'What if the Kuwaitis had had a border that no Iraqi tank or Iraqi soldier could have crossed without being disarmed?'

  'And what if the Iraqis had known that in advance?' Brohier added.

  Wilman studied their expressions for a long moment before answering, as if trying to gauge their seriousness. The Iraqis had excellent long-range artillery, and a lot of it. A fortified border wouldn't have stopped their army, just altered the tactics. Are you asking me how high the price would have had to be to dissuade Saddam?'

  'No,' said Goldstein. 'I'm asking if the war could have proceeded at all if tank rounds and artillery shells exploded before they reached their targets, if bombs and missiles blew up in mid-air, if rifle and pist
ol magazines caught fire when the infantrymen got within a thousand meters of the border.'

  Frowning quizzically, Wilman said slowly, 'Well, there are still such things as arrows, catapults, and the phalanx. I don't know that the second century was a great deal more peaceful than the twentieth. Still and all, your scenario would certainly have upset a lot of apple carts, Saddam's included. But is it anything more than a fantasy?'

  That's an interesting question,' said Goldstein. 'Let's call it a thought experiment rather than a fantasy and play with it a while longer. Let us suppose there were a technological means by which these results might be achieved. How might you go about introducing it to the world stage, if your goal were to put an end to war? In whose hands would you want to place it?'

  'I don't want to play the game,' said Wilman. 'Do you have this thing, or don't you?'

  'We have it, Senator,' Brohier said quietly. 'We call it the trigger effect. We call the device itself the Trigger.'

  Theoretical or•-'

  'No,' said Goldstein quickly. The prototype is operational.'

  Wilman's whole body shuddered involuntarily. He looked away from the other two men, his gaze unfocused. 'My god,' he said finally. 'An anti-weapon weapon. The essential tool the UN's blue-helmet army has needed for fifty years.'

  'And the tool every tyrant will want to disarm his opposition,' said Goldstein. 'How do we keep it away from the tyrants?'

  'We probably can't. So we'd have to make sure everyone has it,' said Wilman. 'How difficult is the device to make? How small can it be and still have useful range? How expensive are the components?'

  'It's too early to really answer those questions,' Brohier admitted.

  That isn't very useful -'

  'But it's the truth. Listen, the first lasers were big, power-hungry, finicky, and expensive. But after just a few decades of development, twenty dollars bought you one that ran on penlight batteries and fit in a shirt pocket. We don't know how far we can scale up or down from the prototype. We probably won't know that for quite a while.'