The Trigger

by Arthur C. Clarke

  'Greene's been adding to it. More than three hundred pages of ideas about how to modify the Mark I design - what to do to make it more powerful, more efficient, more compact,' Stepak said, his voice conveying his alarm. 'He's provided complete CADCAM drawings for a medium-power unit that would fit in the trunk of this car. He talks about avenues of research that he thinks might lead to a suitcase-sized mass-production version. All of this could be extremely destabilizing.'

  'It probably will be, General. And sooner rather than later. The veil is getting a bit tattered. We're going to have to go public soon. I think it's time to start deciding how we want to handle that.'

  'And in the meantime -'

  'Let the NSA pull as many weeds as it can.' He sighed. 'Is there solid law to support Greene's detention?'

  The Espionage Act of 1917 is still in force, and clearly pertains.'

  'How long can you hold him without charging him?'

  'Ah - I'll have to confirm this with the Attorney General, but I believe it's thirty days. Why does it matter, sir? There's more than enough evidence to not only indict, but convict.'

  'I'm not going to let someone face the death penalty for trying to reveal a secret that I'm going to turn around and reveal myself a few weeks later. That's an awfully high price for simply beating me to the punch,' Breland said as the limousine turned into the UN's west entrance.

  'But, Mr President -'

  'Besides,' Breland went on, 'from the sound of it, what we really want is to have this man back on the team, working for us. So here it is, General - the FBI has thirty days to use Greene as a stick to beat the bushes - what will that be, March 19? I'll schedule an address to Congress for that morning - and that afternoon, Greene goes free. Tell him that, and see that he's treated civilly in the interim. No, don't argue with me about this - just see it done.'

  'Yes, sir. What do you want to do about the Terabyte people?'

  'I'll take care of it when we're done here.'

  They have to be involved,' Stepak said. 'Brohier was vague to the point of deception about how Greene got his copy of the project archive, and Horton sent Greene a coded warning that apparently precipitated the release. It's clearly a conspiracy to commit treason.'

  'You'd like to see all three of them charged.'

  Stepak nodded. 'Absolutely. Sir, it doesn't matter if what a traitor gives the enemy is something the enemy could have eventually gotten on his own. They should be removed from the project at once and put away where they can't do any further damage.'

  The limousine eased to a stop at the curb, and Breland raised a hand to prevent the Secret Service agent on the sidewalk from opening the door. 'That isn't going to happen, General. Let me be absolutely clear about this - the Trigger is no longer a secret. We will deal with that reality. I never intended for it to be a secret forever.'

  'But allowing these people to give it away willy-nilly -'

  'Try to understand: I don't need, we don't want, and you can't sustain a technological hegemony. It's completely proper for us to share what we know. It's necessary, if the Trigger is to fulfill its potential. And there's precedent. You may not be aware - I wasn't, before some recent reading - that our government went public with a detailed report on atomic weapons just days after the Japanese surrender.'

  The situations are hardly analogous, Mr President.'

  'No, they aren't,' Breland agreed. 'The Trigger is a defensive weapon that only threatens armed attackers. General, the interests of our people and the world's peoples are best served by allowing the Trigger's proliferation - not by seeking its suppression. It's inhumane and immoral to continue to withhold it.'

  'As an ideal, in an ideal world, yes, but we have to be practical -'

  'Now, General - we've had nearly a year to try to make certain that we're not surprised by this nor placed at a disadvantage. How many people who might have been saved were sacrificed as the price of our caution? It's not only that we can't help Chechnya protect itself against Russia, or India against Kashmir - keeping this a secret means we can't do half of what's possible to protect our own people.

  'So who are we serving by holding back? Obviously, ourselves. Our jobs, our reputations, our attachment to our ability to project force anywhere at any time.' Breland shook his head. 'General, the fact is, I feel like a fraud, coming here today to accept their praise, knowing that what we've done is only the hundredth part of what we could have done. Have you read Gil Elliot - The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead? A hundred and ten million killed by the machinery and the privations of war. We can do better. We will do better, if I have any say in it.'

  'I understand, Mr President.'

  'I sincerely hope so, General.' He signaled, and the limousine's door was opened from outside. Before he climbed out, he leaned closer to Stepak and added, 'Because if men like you aren't ready for the twenty-first century, it may not get here until the twenty-second.'

  There were no happy faces among the quartet squeezed into the paint trailer. Brohier looked positively dyspeptic; Horton still wore hard lines of anger around his mouth. Thayer's features conveyed a far-away sadness, while Val Bowden's face had not yet lost the wide-eyed pole-axed surprise that had settled there as he learned the unsuspected secrets of his employment.

  It had not been a long argument, but it had been a draining one all the same. Horton had spoken first, and set out his unwavering position: 'We can't give the government the Mark II - not today, not ever. We have to tear down the test unit and destroy every record of yesterday's tests - and quickly. If we don't move fast enough, we'll lose the opportunity. And anyone and everyone who knows enough about the operating principle of the Two to recreate it - most especially the four of us - has to swear to whatever god they fear most that they'll never hand it over to these people.'

  To his surprise, it was Lee who had opposed him most strongly. There are too many people on site who know pieces of the puzzle

  - there were five hundred witnesses the other night,' she had said. 'What we should be doing instead is backing up Gordie. The Annex must have a thousand different links to the outside. We should use them while we have them, and keep using them until we're completely frozen out. We need more weight, not more secrets

  - we need Senator Wilman on the late news, and Dr Brohier on the early news.'

  But no one else thought they could mount such a campaign quickly enough to make a difference. Horton eventually won over Thayer with the indisputable fact that his plan required none of the outside cooperation that hers did.

  'We can see this through on our own,' he said. 'It's all right here on our turf, within our reach.' When he added a promise that her proposal would be his second priority, she acquiesced.

  But when they emerged from the trailer, they were hailed almost immediately. 'Dr Brohier! Dr Horton! Stay right there, please.' It was The Tailor, one of the signal shack's out-of-uniform Army officers, running across the Annex's west lot toward them. 'Call off the hounds, Lieutenant - I've found them all,' he said into a collar mic as he closed with them.

  'What's all the excitement, son?' Brohier asked, stepping forward to meet him.

  'We've been paging you and looking everywhere for you for the better part of an hour, sir,' said The Tailor, panting and perspiring freely. 'You have a call, at the signal shack.'

  'Who does?'

  He pointed at three of them in turn. 'Dr Brohier, Dr Horton, and Dr Thayer. Sorry, Dr Bowman - the President didn't mention you.'

  'The President?' asked Horton.

  'Yes, sir. He's been holding while we look for you. If I could ask you to come quickly -'

  The glances that the quartet exchanged among themselves ranged from skeptical to apprehensive. 'Pass the word that we'll be right along,' Brohier said, manufacturing a polite smile. 'All four of us.'

  Four was more of a crowd in the booth than it had been in the paint trailer, and the back row was still jockeying for a comfortable position when the signal unscrambled and Mark Breland appeare
d in front of them, seated at his Oval Office desk.

  'Good afternoon. Doctors -'

  Before Breland could complete the greeting, Brohier interrupted him. 'Where is Dr Greene? Is he in Federal custody?'

  Breland blinked in surprise, then laughed lightly and shook his head. 'Very well,' he said. 'First things first.' He looked up, past the camera, and said, 'Doctor?' before vacating his chair.

  A few moments later, Gordon Greene sat down in his place.

  He was wearing his familiar bemused grin, and looking off to the right. 'Say - what's the going rate for a chance to plant cheek behind the big desk? Five-thousand-dollar donation to the party?' Then he looked into the camera lens. 'Would somebody please screen-capture this? My parents will want to hang it on the dining-room wall.' He looked off to the right again. 'Can I get the Prez in this shot?'

  In the distance, Breland laughed.

  Lee fought through her surprise first. 'Gordie, are you all right?'

  'I'm fine now,' he said. 'Missed you.'

  'What are you doing there?'

  Greene sent an inquiring glance off to the right, and they heard Breland's voice answer it. 'Go ahead - tell them.'

  'Okay,' he said. 'Consulting. Going to want to get you in on it, too. The Trigger goes public in a month, and the folks here seem pretty serious about wanting to show it off properly.' He leaned back in the big chair, hands folded over his abdomen. 'I think everything's going to be all right, gang. Even if I can't quite believe I said that.'

  * * *

  19: Guaranty

  Bonn, Germany - Investigators are still searching for explanations in the wake of Tuesday's suicide bombing aboard a Berlin-Bonn high-speed monorail train. Chilling security camera images showed a young man in a business suit shouting hate slogans to the half-filled carriage moments before the blast, which killed twenty-two commuters and destroyed a thirty-meter section of the southbound track. This is not supposed to happen here,' said a DeutschRail official. Complete Story Casualty List Blast Video

  Getting There: Trains Rolling, But Schedule Cut

  Given that the well-connected could choose among more than a thousand licensed feeds of round-the-clock news, commerce and entertainment, plus a cornucopia of nearly 60,000 unregulated Undemet channels, it was a challenge for anyone, even the President of the United States, to get the simultaneous attention of more than a few percent of the populace.

  To be sure, not everyone who could call themselves American qualified as 'well-connected'.

  A few percent simply did not care to be. Some of that number actively campaigned against what they called 'netmind', which Pull The Plug founder Michael Adamson defined as 'that state of electrode-in-the-monkey-brain masturbatory overstimulation which elevates amusement over all else - in particular, ambition and achievement.' But most of the dissenters simply withdrew to one of the small wireless villages of the Welcomer movement. There, only analogue communications technology was allowed -and that principally to maintain contact between the scattered villages, and to see that Earth continued broadcasting to the stars.

  For one family in seven, the elementary net services included with a basic household telecommunications account were either all they could afford or all they cared to master. News 1, News 2, Talk 1, Talk 2, Arts 1, FedFacts, NetSearch, NetTeach, NetAgent, and MultiMail put the basic elements of interactivity in the living rooms of the two flavors of underclass that had resisted eradication - one economic, the other intellectual. Ironically, it was the very paucity of their options which made these people the easiest to reach. They were the principal receivers of cablecasting, passive sponges for the advertiser-supported feeds.

  But premium connectivity was an investment middle class families budgeted for, upper class families took for granted, and every model of enlightened education depended on. Net literacy made them participants rather than spectators, and opened the doors of digital and virtual libraries around the globe. It also fragmented the audience into a billion pieces, leaving very few of them passively taking an unaltered feed in real time.

  No media event of the new millennium had yet commanded as much as a fifty percent share of the connected audience. The last event to attract even a ten percent share of the online audience was the World Cup final between Scotland and the United States, three years ago - a thirty share, the Santa Rosa earthquake that dropped the north span of the Golden Gate eight years earlier.

  Even knowing the difficulties, Mark Breland wanted better than that for his address to the nation, and he pressed his staff hard to make it happen.

  'This is something people should hear first-hand, unedited -families listening together, the whole sports bar watching, every screen in the electronics emporium carrying the same feed. Like Roosevelt's fireside chats and the landing on the moon,' Breland said. 'I want a chance to talk to everyone directly, so they first hear about this from my lips, and not from some predigested and regurgitated second-hand abstract.'

  'You can't change people's habits,' Chief of Staff Richard Nolby said dismissively. 'People won't put their lives on hold to sit and watch a talking head. Even a three-dimensional talking head in a virtual one-on-one. As soon as they try to ask a question, they'll know it's a lecture, not a conversation. No, I think we'll be doing well to get a fourteen share - getting the four top entertainment licensees to agree to carry the speech was a breakthrough. And I think we can still get Financial Newswire and WorldMarket to window your speech on the ticker feed, which would push us up over sixteen.'

  'It's not enough,' Breland said.

  'Our saturation advertising doesn't start for another hour, and will build right up to the opening gavel,' said Aimee Rochet, the director of public relations. 'I still think we have a chance at twenty. And the post-event propagation will be very extensive - I'm modeling it with the Accelerated algorithms, which means seventy percent event awareness within three days.'

  'I want seventy percent by the closing gavel,' said Breland. 'By tomorrow, I'm going to be either a hero or a villain to millions of people who haven't given me a second thought since the election. I want a chance to win over as many of them as possible -I want them to remember where they were when they heard about this. It has to be the number one topic of conversation in bedrooms and chat rooms overnight and on the trains in the morning.'

  'You're asking for mass media numbers, and there are no mass media anymore,' protested Rochet. It's all narrow casting and interactivity.'

  'Don't the licensees have any contractual obligations in the area of civic service? Isn't there any way to make them carry the speech?'

  There's the Emergency Broadcast System,' said General Stepak. 'It's never been used to stream real-time multimedia on that scale, though - test announcements are text and audio only. If we flag this for EBS, we might end up choking everything off.'

  'That would be a disaster,' Rochet said quickly. 'Zero share watching, one hundred share annoyed.'

  'Can you do a small-scale test this afternoon?' Breland asked, looking at Tettlebaum, the science advisor.

  Tettlebaum was momentarily startled to find a question directed at him. 'We could, Mr President. But a small-scale test won't tell us anything. The scale is the potential for trouble.'

  Breland grunted his dissatisfaction and turned back to the others. 'Other than this immeasurable possibility, where's the downside of invoking the EBS? Why haven't we talked about this before?'

  'Even a successful BBS broadcast will annoy millions,' said Rochet. The Undernet community hates having its servers frozen for any reason at any time. They barely tolerate thirty-second tests - a twenty-minute speech will have them organizing for impeachment, if not revolution.'

  'Forty-five minutes,' Breland corrected. 'Maybe a little more.'

  Rochet winced. 'Are you serious, sir?'

  'Why shouldn't I be?'

  'Why - Mr President, I can promise you fourteen, maybe sixteen, at the opening. But if you run on for forty-five minutes, you'll be lucky to hold a fi
ve share through to the end. And you will not get the kind of next-day numbers you want. Moreover, if you start in the negative, you will never turn it back to the positive. That's just expecting too much from people.'

  'On the contrary -I don't think you expect enough from them,' Breland answered. 'I also don't think you understand the stakes - and I accept responsibility for that. You're planning to watch tonight?'

  'Of course, Mr President.'

  'Good. Someone tell me this: do we pay licensees for their loss of revenue when they carry the State of the Union address?'

  'No. Which is why you can't get anyone with an entertainment license to carry it,' said Rochet.

  'Are we paying DreamWorks and Sony-Fox and Alliance to carry me tonight?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Then let's pay them all,' Breland said. 'Notify the licensees that we'll be invoking the BBS for one hour beginning at nine-thirty tonight. Advise them that if they keep their systems up and the feed uninterrupted, we'll reimburse them their usual revenues -plus a twenty percent bonus - for technical services. The channels that already agreed get a fifty percent bonus.'

  'Are we dropping the ad campaign, then?' Rochet asked.

  'Absolutely not. All the EBS can do is put me on their screens. You still need to put them in the seats,' said Breland. 'As for the Undernet, start getting the word out now that we're going to need their bandwidth for a while this evening. A properly worded advance warning should mute at least some of the indignation.

  And we need to be sure to invite them to come over to the other side - we can drop some heavy-handed hints about the Trigger and the Greene letter without naming either.'

  The director of public relations was looking nonplussed. Breland had always been a difficult client, but even he rarely rejected her advice this completely. 'Sir - meaning no disrespect, but are you sure that this address can carry the weight of the expectations you're trying to create?' she asked. 'Wouldn't it be better to go at this a little more slowly, target the most sympathetic audiences first, and then use them to pull the bandwagon down Main Street?'