The Trigger

by Arthur C. Clarke

  By then, there was more news. It came out of a long afternoon devoted to a low-tech but effective method of mapping the reach of the double-barreled Trigger. 'Dowelsing,' Thayer called it, and Horton thought the appellation an apt one. The mapping exercise involved scattering as many warm bodies as could be dragooned into helping around the periphery of the test range. Each volunteer had a short dowel with a piece of puff-cap material wedged into a slit in one end.

  The dipole Trigger was activated at a given mix and amplitude, and the 'dowelsers' started walking toward the test pedestal, hold-ing the dowel out in front of them. As each staffer's test strip started smoking, they stopped walking. Eventually, they formed a human map of the boundary of the field in that configuration. A photo was taken, the Trigger shut down, the dowels reloaded, the Trigger reset, and the process repeated. Over the course of the afternoon, a complete picture of the capabilities of The Twins' emerged.

  The hot zone ranged in size from five to eight meters, depending on the angle of deflection. That angle was limited to about nine degrees in either direction - past that point, and the interference between the units seemed to collapse, and The Twins acted like a standard monopole Mark I.

  They also discovered a second hot zone, one hundred eighty degrees removed from the one over the test range. 'Someone compared the dipole to a bazooka that fires in both directions at once,' Horton explained to Brohier over Belgian waffles and strawberries. 'You have to be real careful where you point it -which I think will limit its usefulness.'

  'Not appreciably. Point it up,' Brohier said at once. Tut it in an underground turret, twenty meters down, and you can forget about the hot zone behind you. Or put it in a plane and point it down. They'll find ways, Jeffrey. Be sure of that. Have you determined the range yet?'

  'No,' Horton said. 'But it's going to be a big jump over a Mark I.'

  'Let's see if we can't get at least an approximation by the end of the day.'

  'If we do, we probably won't get anything else done today.'

  'I'm not sure there's anything more important. I want those numbers, and the Joint Chiefs want every bit of improved performance that we can give them.'

  'How long do you think we can hold back before we give them anything?'

  Brohier looked at Horton with surprise. 'I had assumed that you'd already reported. Why do you want to hold this back?'

  'To give the rest of the world some time to start catching up,' Horton said, confounded by Brohier's surprise. 'Even with the plans, it's going to take months for anyone else to start producing Triggers.'

  'I see. You're talking about our friend - the insurance policy.'

  'Of course I am. Karl, I thought we'd already settled this. With this Mark n, the Pentagon gets the best of both worlds. They can keep the weapons they have, and take everyone else's away. Which is why I assumed that you'd already given our friend the go-ahead.'

  'What? No - oh, no. I really don't think that's necessary,' Brohier said. 'Look at the progress they're making on demining -tremendous progress, in just weeks, with only a handful of units out there, and more coming all the time. I don't think we're going to need that disaster insurance, Jeffrey. I think we're right where we hoped we'd be.'

  Then you and I must have been hoping for different things,' Horton said. I wasn't planning on giving the government a way of taking everyone else's guns and keeping their own.'

  'Jeffrey, what do we gain if we disarm the police, the armed forces - handcuff the President - chaos, son, nothing but chaos. This needs to be handled carefully - deliberately. It needs to be coordinated - orderly -'

  'All under one roof.'

  'Exactly. I trust Mark Breland,' Brohier said. 'I trust Roland Stepak. They're good men, Jeffrey. They want what we want.'

  'What about Grover Wilman?'

  Brohier shrugged with his hands. 'He's an extremist - an ideologue. What he wants is unrealistic. Global disarmament would just mean chaos - kindergarten without a teacher.'

  'Someone needs to be able to enforce order.'

  'Yes. Because human beings want that. We need limits. We respond to authority. Humane discipline -'

  'And if one kid is hurting another kid with a toy -'

  'You take the toy away. You do understand, then.'

  'Not in the least,' said Horton. 'I didn't hear any of this before you went to Washington with Aron. I didn't hear anything like this when you came out here and told me about your contingency plans.'

  That was a mistake on my part. But it'll be corrected.'

  '"Corrected"? Who's been talking to you, Karl? Whose words are these?'

  'Now, Jeffrey -'

  'You say you trust Breland and Stepak - fine. What if, in two years from now, it's another Nixon and Haldeman instead? Or one of the rabid dogs from the Hill? Do you really think it can't happen here? We weren't supposed to rig the game for our side, Karl - we were supposed to referee it. Same rules for everyone, remember? What happened?'

  'I've been made aware of - certain issues we overlooked in our enthusiasm.'

  'What do you mean?'

  The kinds of enemies we face. The real evil that threatens us. People you've never heard of. Stories that don't make the newswires.' Grimacing, he shook his head. 'Things I wish I didn't know.'

  'Made aware by whom?'

  'I had visitors in Princeton. General Stepak came up to talk to me, along with a colonel from Army Research.'

  'Why did he do that?'

  'I - they were interested in my progress. And Stepak wanted to introduce me to Colonel Weiss, because he'd just assigned him as a liaison to the project.'

  They didn't say anything about security?'

  'Well - the General did ask for some reassurance about how much I was sharing with my peers at the Institute.'

  'Because they've been worried about Wilman. They probably figured that they could get you to think you were doing the right thing by telling them what you knew about his intentions.'

  'Now, I'm certain they have better sources of information on the Senator and his activities than me,' Brohier demurred.

  'But you did talk about him.'

  Brohier was beginning to lose his equanimity, and his tone became defensive. 'It ended up being rather a long conversation. We went through two pots of coffee.'

  'Come on, Karl - think it through. They wondered about the research archive. They wanted to know how many there really were, who had them. Am I right?'

  'No - no. The colonel gave me a number I could use if I discovered a breach of security,' Brohier said slowly. 'It was an afterthought - they were ready to leave -'

  'Until you told them Wilman has one. You did, didn't you? That was your "correction".'

  'If you had heard what I heard -'

  'Did they ask about Gordie?'

  'No,' Brohier said. 'God help me, Jeffrey, I told them about him on my own.'

  Horton slammed the table sharply with his open hand, startling diners at several other tables. For a painfully long moment, his anger would not allow him to even look at Brohier.

  'Jeffrey - you have to understand -'

  'Don't ask me for that now,' Horton said curtly. 'When was this "conversation"?'

  'Perhaps a week ago - let me see, it was a Tuesday -'

  'Son of a bitch.' Horton rubbed his eyes vigorously, then threw back his chair and stood up.

  'Where are you going?'

  'Maybe they haven't grabbed him yet. Maybe they're holding off until they're sure they can grab every copy of the archive at the same time.'

  'You're going to contact him?'

  'I'm going to try. If you have a problem with that, I guess you'd better call Colonel Weiss and turn me in, too.'

  'No - no. Go. Do it now. Jeffrey, I'm sorry -'

  The older man's distress was so naked and palpable that Horton's hard feelings toward him unexpectedly softened. They've studied us pretty well, it seems,' Horton said gruffly. 'I guess I'm about to find out just how well.'

  Neither Jeffrey
Horton's personal data carrier nor the Annex's corporate carrier would complete a call to Gordon Greene's number. The former reported that Greene was off net, and volunteered to forward a voicemail message when he reactivated his service. The latter reported that Greene's number was not a valid account.

  Horton did not believe either story, and tried two a la carte gypsy carriers - and heard two other variations. One baldly pretended to be Greene's answering machine, though the voice wasn't even close.

  The other - the Libertarian-owned ComFree - straightforwardly advised Horton that 'a state or Federal law-enforcement agency has issued an Article 209 block-and-trace order for this subscriber's account.' Horton vaguely remembered that Article 209 had been added to FCC rules as a tool for rooting out digital pornography. 'We at ComFree believe that Article 209 is unconstitutional. We object to this oppressive intrusion on free and private communication, and urge you to add your voice to the Free Speech campaign. To download an intelligent mailing list, press the Yes key -'

  'I guess you won't need to give 'em my name after all, Karl,' Horton muttered to himself as he broke the connection.

  There was one other option, though it did not offer Horton the certainty of knowing that he had been successful. Anticipating the possibility of being cut off, Greene had provided Brohier with a short list of aliases, a code phrase, a verification key, and a short primer on sending anonymous mail.

  'If I have to vanish myself, these are the accounts I'll be checking - all international, so they should be untouchable.'

  It did not take long to get the messages ready to go - Horton had set up a secure file in his personal communicator the same night Brohier had given him the information. But when the moment came, Horton hesitated. If Gordie was already in custody, if Army Intelligence had already gone through his files and records, all Horton would be doing by sending the activation was implicating himself. Trying to call Greene was a completely innocent act. Issuing him marching orders, however -

  "The hell with it,' Horton said aloud, pressing a key. 'Come on and arrest me. It's my patent, goddammit - and I'll give it away if I want to.'

  The isolation of Dr Gordon Greene from his net resources was nearly complete at the moment Horton sent his alert. Three of Greene's five alias accounts had been discovered through a search of payment records, and a fourth had been found through a National Security Agency penetration of a poorly-protected server in Santiago. Every outgoing message was being monitored; every incoming message was being filtered or spoofed in real time by an NSA traffic simulator.

  Greene was aware of none of this, any more than he was aware that he was also being watched from the apartment above and followed when he left the complex.

  For the moment, he still had his freedom, and his weekly routine took him all over the city. Regular stops included the Ohio State University library with its digital stacks and netlinked carrels and a by-the-hour virtual teleconferencing service whose private booths attracted the business of clients who appreciated the discreet billing. He was also a familiar sight at more than a dozen other well-connected but less reputable enterprises. They ranged from an Undemet nightclub with wide-open links to uncensored offshore shock sites to a CD-publishing kiosk in Worthington that was agreeably casual about the copyright status of the data it was burning.

  All of those could be explained either by Greene's lifestyle or the contract consultancy work he had been doing since leaving Terabyte. But each of them also gave him an opportunity to poll his aliases via a third-party account, an opportunity he made sure to avail himself of once a day.

  Gordon picked up the message from Jeffrey Horton at a coffee-and-crullers franchise cafe called Hot Bytes, where every tabletop had a large supertwist LCD built into it - an old technology, but one that made it difficult for anyone to read over your shoulder as you sipped and surfed. He did not know who had actually sent the message, or that it was the sole survivor of five that had started the journey together.

  But the names it bore - names he himself had chosen - foreshadowed its contents. The sender's name was Pandora. And it was addressed to one Michael Armstrong - the name of a character in an ancient spy movie, that of an American physicist who was both a defector and a double agent.

  The body of the message consisted of two words, both the title of that film and an assessment of where things stood.

  It read, Torn Curtain.

  It meant. Publish the archive without delay.

  His face offering no hint of the turmoil in his gut, Greene did so without hesitation or wasted motion. Linking his personal com-municator to the cafe's open ports, he used the Armstrong account to activate his failsafes and rogue publishing agents. When some of the expected acknowledgements did not appear, he weighed his options, then re-sent the activation commands through another alias account. Insurance, Greene thought, though he knew the price for it might be high.

  Then he headed toward home, which was barely ten minutes away, to collect an already-packed bag and then vanish from Columbus.

  It was a mistake, though he realized that too late. He should have left without the bag, or taken it on his errands with him, and to hell with appearances. But he did not, and they were waiting for him. He was intercepted on the sidewalk outside his apartment by four men in civilian clothes but with Army Intelligence identification cards. Moments later an olive-drab van pulled up at the curb beside them.

  Greene did not try to flee or resist - there was no point. All of his personal ambitions, already barely sustained against his pessimism, had vanished the moment he received Pandora's message. He asked but one question as they took him into custody - 'How did I do?'

  'Not so good,' one of the intelligence officers said with cheerful arrogance.

  After that, Greene had nothing to say. There was no point in arguing with the drones. If and when he found himself face to face with their masters, then he would speak his mind.

  In the back of a black limousine headed uptown to the United Nations, President Mark Breland asked much the same question of General Stepak. But Breland received a more thorough - and honest - answer.

  'Eleven minutes and change from the time Greene issues his marching orders to the time our counterattack begins. In that eleven minutes, he managed to spawn more than six thousand copies of the archive - pretty good work, given the size of it. He apparently thought ahead and found big pipes and fast pumps. The distribution was scattershot - e-mail, preprint servers, news servers, FTP. A little of everything.' 'How many of the six thousand have been purged?' Stepak glanced down at the screen of his communicator. 'Not quite all of them,' he said. 'Cancels took out all the public ones, and the NS A is sitting hard on the afterchatter - there won't be any

  "Please repost" and "What happened to -" messages. But they're still working on a few dozen hard-to-reach traceables - I think all of the copies still outstanding went to dial-up mail accounts, most of them offshore.' He saw Breland's frown, and added, The rest of the world doesn't live online quite as much as this country does. An inconvenience.'

  'So the NSA has to wait for the next time those people connect to make a try at burning that file.'

  'Yes. And we really should make a personal visit to each of them to make sure those copies don't have copies. That'll take a National Security Directive from your desk.'

  'Draw it up,' Breland said. 'Is that the extent of the damage?'

  'No. There were about thirty hits on the preprint server at Physics Today before we closed it down -'

  Thirty? In eleven minutes? Is it always that hot a site?'

  'No. It looks like Greene passed the word in advance to some friends that they should keep an eye on that server. He may have done the same with all of the public copies.' He shook his head. 'Mr President, the section chief is telling me that even when they get finished going through the transaction logs of every machine along the line, they can't guarantee that there aren't thousands of private copies, off net, out of reach.'

  'How is that po
ssible?'

  Stepak shrugged. The information-wants-to-be-free generation hasn't quite died off yet. Some anonymous servers really are - they throw away the transaction data. Greene used several of them. But the section chief promises me that they can keep this thing from moving over the net from now on - proactive is more efficient than reactive.'

  Breland reached for his glass. 'Of course, the longer we do that, the more obvious it'll be that we're doing it - people are going to notice that their messages don't show up, that their mail doesn't get through.'

  'Yes,' Stepak admitted. 'And anything we try to do about that just makes it all snowball even faster. Besides which, it can still move hand-to-hand, and we won't see that at all.'

  'Perils of a free society,' Breland said. 'All we can do is what we can do. Let's make sure everyone remembers where the line is, and which side of it we work on. Send the section chief a copy of the Bill of Rights.'

  'Mr President, this is an extremely serious situation -'

  'General, I hope you don't expect me to start locking people up over this.'

  'Not even Dr Greene?'

  'What does it accomplish?'

  'If we make an example of him, we might not need to detain very many others. A knock at the door - two FBI agents explain that certain classified material has been stolen and placed on the net in a virus by a man now under arrest, facing serious charges - and would they cooperate by allowing our technician to search their computers for this virus -'

  'You're talking about knocking on tens of thousands of doors. Do we have the manpower? Is it even worth the effort?'

  'I think I can give you a reason why it is. The archive Greene put out isn't the same as the original we got from Brohier.'

  'What do you mean? How was it different?'

  The distinctive architecture of the United Nations was now visible ahead of the limousine. Somewhere inside it, the Secretary General was preparing to present Breland with a humanitarian award for his spectacularly successful demining campaign.