Chapter 14

	The screen and its associated electronics had been salvaged from a basement room of the Institute that had become the final resting place for a bewildering assortment of dust-covered hardware left over from one-time projects whose purpose was long forgotten. The minicomputer that provided local control for the screen and in addition linked it into the Institute’s main computing complex had originally formed part of a body scanner at Marlboro General Hospital; it had been scheduled for the scrap heap when the hospital made a decision to replace the scanner with a more up-to-date system, but had found its way to Sudbury on the back seat of Aub’s car. The control console had been built mainly from panels of roughly cut aluminum sheeting, and included in its list of unlikely component parts: pieces of domestic Infonet terminals, microprocessors from household environmental-control units, Army-reject bubble memory modules, a frequency synthesizer from a sale of surplus stocks by a marine radar manufacturer in Boston, and a selection of items from various do-ityourself hobby kits. The whole assemblage was housed in a small room adjoining the GRASER and connected by a multitude of cables to the clutter of cabinets and racks that formed the main body of the detector situ-
ated out on the large floor, in a space cleared immediately beside the reactor sphere itself.
	Professor Heinrich Zimmermann stood back a few paces from the screen, a faint smile of amusement playing on his lips as he contemplated the image being displayed, and accepted good-naturedly the challenge that it implied. Most of the screen’s area was taken up by a plain circular disk of dull orange, showing no internal detail or pattern but lightening slightly to become just a shade more yellow toward the center. The background to the disk was at first sight completely dark, but closer inspection revealed the merest hint of a tenuous blood-red mist to relieve the blackness. At length Zimmermann shook his head and looked back at Aub, who was sitting on a metal-frame stool in front of the console and watching him with mischievous, twinkling eyes that failed to conceal his suppressed mirth.
	“I thought that you had shown me everything. Now it appears that you have saved some sort of mystery until the very end. I am afraid I shall have to acknowledge defeat. What is it?”
	Aub’s face split into a wide grin. From behind the professor, Clifford and Morelli stepped forward to complete the semicircle around the display.
	“Well, since you’re an astronomer, we thought we’d better lay on something that would have the right kind of appeal,” Clifford replied. “As we said earlier, Aub’s been spending quite a lot of time modifying the detector to give an improved response to cosmic hi-radiation. Okay?” Zimmermann nodded. Clifford continued, “The most intense sources of naturally occurring hi-waves are the concentrated annihilations produced in large masses. Now, what’s the biggest mass you can think of very near where we’re all standing?”
	Zimmermann frowned to himself for a moment.
	“Near here . . . ? I suppose it would have to be foundation and base supporting the reactor sph out there . . .“ He caught the look on Clifford’s f~ “No . . . ?“
	“Much bigger ‘n that. Try again.”
	“Bigger by lots of orders of magnitude,” Mor hinted, joining in the game.
	“You don’t mean . . .“ Zimmermann pointed do at the floor while the others nodded encouragin~ “Not Earth?” He looked from one to another, ast~ ished.
	“That’s what you’re looking at, all right,” Cliff confirmed. “That image is produced from data p cessed out of hi-radiation being generated ri through this whole planet.”
	Zimmermann stared again at the screen while mind raced to comprehend fully the thing he was s ing. He knew that the hi-waves received by the tector did not arrive through normal space and co not be associated with any property of direction. also knew that the everyday notion of distance had direct counterpart in hi-space and that the informat arriving at the detector was a summation of hi-wa originating from every part of the cosmos. How, th could a representation of Earth be extracted from that, and just what viewpoint did the image on screen signify?
	As if he could read the questions forming in professor’s mind, Clifford picked up his explanati “Distance does play a part in the k-equations, but in the sense of determining any propagation time. comes in as an amplitude-modulating coefficient.”
	“How do you mean, Dr. Clifford?” Zimmerm~ asked.
	“The total signal that’s picked up by the detec is made up of components that originate all over
universe,” Clifford replied. “The distance of a given source from the detector does not affect the time at which the hi-waves generated by it are received. In other words, all the components that are being picked up now are being generated now; whether the source is the GRASER or a star at the other end of the galaxy makes no difference.”
	“Extraordinary,” Zimmermann mused. “So if somebody made a GRASER a thousand light-years from here and switched it on, information from that event would be buried in the signal that you detect here— at the same instant.”
	“Yes, indeed,” Clifford confirmed. “But you’d have to be very clever to see it. You see, although components in the signal do exist from sources all over the universe, their strength falls off rapidly with distance. It’s the nearer and larger sources—big masses—that dominate in the equations. So it’s not impossible to single out the components that originate in Earth’s mass and use them as starting data to construct an image. The strength of the signals from other places falls off rapidly as they get farther away, and you can soon ignore them for all practical purposes. In theory, in the signal that produced the image on the screen there were components that originated, say, in the Andromeda Galaxy, but in practice they existed only as mathematical terms with values approximating to zero. There’s the cosmic background that we talked about, which is the sum of all the things like that, but we get rid of it by tuning in above the backgroundnoise threshold.”
	“Fascinating,” Zimmermann said, staring at the image again. “So presumably, from the information that you select out of the composite signal, you’ve developed some method of projecting directional representations.” He pointed at the screen. “I mean, that
image presumably represents some aspect or other of this planet, seen from some particular direction or other.” His brow creased into an apologetic smile. “I must confess that what it is and where I’m looking at it from are questions that I find myself still unable to answer.”
	“That was a big hassle,” Clifford admitted. “The information carried by a hi-wave contains timelike and spacelike data all scrambled together with other things you can’t really interpret. It took a while to figure out how to extract the spacelike data from all that stuff, but . . .“ he gestured toward the display, “I guess we managed it in the end okay.”
	“So what are we looking at?” Zimmermann inquired. Aub joined in at that point.
	“Here we’re tuned to resolve a perpendicular plane anisotropic to the detector and extending for ten thousand miles. It’s a cross section right through the center of Earth. Doesn’t show a lotta detail but . . .“ he shrugged, “it’s only our first attempt, after all.”
	“Actually, if you look at the numerical data, you’ll see that it’s possible to distinguish the crust, upper and lower mantle, and the core,” Clifford informed him. “It just doesn’t show up too well on the picture.”
	Zimmermann was speechless.
	Aub noted his puzzled expression and began operating keys on his panel, causing the disk on the screen to shrink to a fraction of its previous size, though remaining unchanged in general appearance.
	“Rotating the sectional plane to lie perpendicular to the axis,” he sang in the tones of a fairground showman. “The plane now coincides with the circle of latitude eighty-five degrees north—just below the pole. Hold on to your seats for an instant trip right through the world.” He commenced playing the keys casually. The disk swelled slowly, then stopped at a size that
almost filled the screen. “Now you’re at the ~quator,” Aub announced. The disk shrank once more and finally condensed rapidly to a tiny point of orange. “South Pole.”
	“We can do better than that, too,” Morelli added, encouraged by Aub’s performance. “The dominant hi-wave components received here are naturally the ones that come from the mass of Earth. However, once we’ve computed the matrix that defines that mass, we can negate it and feed it back into the equations to cancel itself out. That leaves only the lesser hi-wave components that come from other places. Once they’re isolated, they can be amplified and used to compute spacelike images in the same way as you’ve seen. Aub...”
	Aub took the cue and conjured up another disk, similar to the previous one but exhibiting a less pronounced variation in color from edge to center.
	“That’s the Moon,” Clifford stated. This was the most impressive item of the demonstration, but out of sheer devilment he forced his voice to remain matterof-fact. “We could do the same thing with other bodies as well, but there’d not be much point with the setup we’ve got at the moment. As you can see, it gives little more than a smudge. Doesn’t tell an awful lot.”
	“With Mark II you’d really see something,” Aub added. “For instance, I reckon we could chart all the black holes in the neighboring parts of the galaxy— directly; you wouldn’t have to rely on their effects on companion bodies to detect them the way you have to now.’,
	“And don’t forget,” Clifford rounded off. “You’d see all those things like they are now . . . no time delay.”
	Zimmermann continued to stare back at them silently. Never before in his life had so many stagger-
ing revelations been compressed into such a short interval of time. His mind reeled before the vision that was unfolding of the unimaginable potential of the things he had just witnessed. Surely the first acquisition of the sense of sight by the early multi-celled organisms in the seas had been no more revolutionary in terms of its impact on the evolution of an awareness of the universe. He was present at the birth of a new era of science.
	The others watched him in silence. They knew full well what he was thinking, but overdramatization and plays of emotion were not their style.
	“This is incredible!” Zimmermann managed at last. His voice was barely more than a whisper. “Incredible . . .“ He looked back again at the image on the screen as if to make sure that he had not dreamed the whole thing. After contemplating it for a while longer, he had another question. “Do you really believe that you could resolve detailed images . . . ones that carry information? We could really gaze down to the core of Earth and for the first time actually see what is happening in the world beneath our feet? We could look inside the planets . . . inside the stars . . . ?“
	“It’s possible,” Clifford nodded. “The only way we’d know for sure, though, would be with Mark II. This system was never meant for that kind of thing.”
	“Incredible,” Zimmermann said again. “I gathered that you were making progress here, but this . . .“ He gestured toward the screen and shook his head, as if still having difficulty believing what he had just seen. “It will change everything.”
	“Those images you just saw weren’t being processed in real time, of course,” Morelli explained. “You’re not seeing something that’s actually being picked up at the detector right this instant. They were simply playbacks of images that had already been computed. That’s the
main problem with the system so far—the amount of computer power needed to generate those outputs is absolutely phenomenal. These two guys have just about monopolized the machines in this place for the past few weeks. We’ve had to offload nearly all of our normal work on to the net.”
	“Extracting the spacelike information that you need out of the k-functions is a tedious business,” Clifford explained. “The equations involved have an infinite number of solutions. Obviously we don’t try to solve for all of them, otherwise we’d never finish, but it’s still a hell of a job just to calculate the sets of limits needed to generate whatever spatial projection you want. Planar cross sections is only one possible category of solutions, yet imagine the number of different sections of, say, Earth that could be specified . . . taking into account all the possible angles and viewpoints. It blows your mind.”
	“I think mine has already been blown sufficiently for one day,” Zimmermann replied, smiling. “May I relax now, or do you three gentlemen have still more surprises up your sleeves?”
	Morelli went on to describe the difficulties that they were experiencing in obtaining the components needed for Mark II. He mentioned the questions that were being asked, the snooping, the general harassment they were being subjected to, and gave his guesses as to the reasons behind it all. Zimmermann already knew much of the earlier part of the story, of course, and the rest quickly fell into place. As he listened, his face grew dark and angry.
	“The damn fools!” he exclaimed when Morelli had finished. “There is more future in what you are doing here than will ever come out of all their budgets put together. God knows, I’m no militarist, but if that’s what they want, this is where they should be putting
their backing. Have they any idea what this could lead to? Have you tried to tell them?”
	Morelli shook his head slowly.
	“We wouldn’t want them muscling in,” he said.
	“They would,” Clifford said, suddenly in a sober voice. “You see, we know what it could lead to.”
	“And we’re outa their line of business,” Aub completed.

Later on that evening, accompanied by Sarah, they all went for dinner to Morelli’s spacious home on the shore of Lake Boone at Stow. Nancy Morelli, Al’s cheerful, homely wife already well known to all the guests, produced a delicious German meal of veal in wine sauce followed by Black Forest cake, with plenty of Moselle Golden Oktober and a selection of liqueurs to finish. Throughout the meal they talked about life at Lunar Farside, Sarah’s work at Marlboro, Nancy’s memories of childhood in New York, and Clifford’s rock-climbing experiences at Yosemite. Zimmermann and Morelli swapped stories of the times they had spent in Europe, Sarah talked about England, and Aub raised roars of laughter with accounts of his hilarious escapades at Berkeley and before. Not once did the men deviate from their dutiful observance of the unwritten rule that declared the earlier events of the day—if the truth were known, still the most pressing topic in the mind of each of them—strictly taboo for this kind of occasion.
	After the dishes had been cleared away and everybody had spent another half-hour chatting and joking over drinks, Nancy took Sarah outside to show her the lake and the surrounding pine woods by sunset. As soon as the back door to the kitchen clicked into place, an entirely different atmosphere descended upon the room before anybody had said anything.
Nobody had to broach the subject; they all felt it. Zimmermann was the first to speak.
	“I suppose you did think of bringing the affair to the attention of 1SF headquarters in Geneva, Al. One way round some of the difficulties might have been to have other 1SF locations place your orders for you, and then have the material shipped to Sudbury as an internal transfer.”
	“Yeah, we thought of that,” Morelli said. “But this is our own matter . . . local. If I’ve gotten into the bad books of the powers that be, I figure we oughta keep it that way. It would do more harm than good in the long run to go dragging the whole of 1SF into it. Besides . . . as Brad said earlier today, if they get wind of what we’re working toward, the place would be swarming with them.” He took a sip of his drink and frowned into his glass. “In fact, from the things that have been happening lately, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve gotten some kind of a sniff already.”
	“I suppose I must agree with you,” Zimmermann said with a sigh. “Were I in your place, I would come to exactly the same conclusions. By and large, 1SF enjoys an extraordinary degree of independence in its activities, which it is naturally very anxious to preserve. We must not do anything that might prejudice relationships between 1SF and government—any government.” The professor reflected upon what he had just said, then shook his head. “No, you are right. We cannot go higher in 1SF.”
	“Then where do we go?” Aub asked.
	“I have been considering that question ever since this afternoon,” Zimmermann replied. “Gentlemen, you have a problem. To solve it, it will be necessary for you to sacrifice at least some of your commendable ideals and come to terms—at least to some degree
—with some of the less appealing realities that sur
round us. I have seen this kind of thing before. lieve me, you will not beat the system. This is on] beginning; it will get worse. Don’t underestimate people you are up against. Many of them are stu but they have power—and that is a fearsome c~ bination. They will destroy you if they can, spiritu if not physically. Destruction is their business.”
	“So, what do we do?”
	“If you continue to refuse to acknowledge that power to make or break your project ultimately outside your own immediate sphere of influence will grow until it overwhelms you. Therefore, must accept that it exists and will not go away being ignored. That is the first step. Only when accept that it exists can you think of using it to y own ends.”
	“Using it?” Clifford was confused. “How d’ mean, ‘using it’?”
	“Quite simple. You are obviously aware of I much the state commands in terms of resources, nance, and sheer weight of influence. Just think the difference it would make to your research i gram if all that were to be harnessed to help it aloi
	“But that would be going backward, Profess Aub protested. “We don’t need their kind of h Brad and I burned all our boats getting out of ti not so long ago. The whole point is, we want to clear of them. We’ve done fine up to now with providing all the resources and stuff.”
	“But that is precisely the point I am makii Zimmermann replied calmly. “Unfortunately, you not have the luxury of a choice any longer. The se ments that you have expressed are fine just as lonl the decision for you and the system to ignore e other and go separate ways is mutual. But when I begin to take notice of you, I am afraid that an
tempt on your part to continue ignoring them will lead only to disaster. You are obliged to react. I am suggesting that, since it appears that you have no choice but to become involved with the government departments anyway, we endeavor to make that involvement constructive to our purpose.” The professor spread his hands in an appealing gesture. “You have to get involved with them. If you don’t, they will just squeeze harder. Use it.”
	Clifford stared out through the window for a few seconds, then turned abruptly to face the room.
	“That’s all very well as a theory,” he said. “But we already know their attitude. It’s totally destructive, probably because they’re worried how it might look if two guys who had told them to screw themselves got the edge on the bunch of whiz-kids they were getting together when we left. I just don’t see any way they’re gonna suddenly like us. I don’t see any reason why they should want to.”
	“That is where I might be able to help,” Zimmermann stated softly. “As you know, my position with 1SF causes me to maintain regular contact with highranking people in the government, many of whom are close personal friends of long standing. Even before I joined 1SF, my work with the federal European Government involved considerable dealings with persons in Washington who are very close to the President.”
	Zimmermann paused to let the gist of what he was saying sink in. Three pairs of eyes watched him intently. “I hope all this does not sound too immodest, but perhaps you can now see my point. Don’t be misled by the people who you have had to put up with. Thankfully, there still are some extremely intelligent and perceptive individuals in charge of this country, where you would expect them to be—at the top, where the real power lies. I’m not talking about
I I I~ ‘.;~I i~~i~ IvIw...u III I~



the petty tyranny that is reveled in by the riffraff exalted office clerks whom you have had the fortune of running up against. Now, suppose th could open the right eyes to what you are d here. . .“ Zimmermann left the sentence unfinished.
	Morelli looked at him with a new respect. Cert~ if some kind of involvement was the only alterm to wrapping the whole thing up, then that wouli the kind to have. Even if some form of commitr to more mundane objectives were called for, at I their basic research would have to continue be such could be realized. That meant they would be to carry on unhindered, and in the long term what the hell?
	“What do you plan on doing then?” Morelli a Zimmermann.
	“First thing in the morning I will rearrange schedule,” Zimmermann answered. “Then I will n some appointments and fly to Washington—I I straight away. That part you must leave to me. A~ you . . .“ his gaze swept the room to take in all t of them. “You will need to take off your scien hats for a short while. I want you all to get use the idea of becoming salesmen.”
	Clifford and Aub looked at each other mysti They both shrugged together.
	Zimmermann grinned. “It is very simple,” he “What we have to arrange is . . .“ The noise of kitchen door closing interrupted him. Feminine la ter flooded the room. He glanced over his shou “Oh dear me. It would appear, gentlemen, that busi for today is over. I will explain everything in morning. Ah, there you both are at last. We ha most run out of things to talk about. What do think of the lake?”
Late that night, while Clifford and Sarah were ~driving Aub home, the two scientists explained to her the gist of what Zimmermann had said.
	“Sounds as if he’s offering to wheel in some big guns for you,” she commented after they had finished. “Things could get interesting. Do you really think he could pull off something like that?”
	“Well, Al reckons he knows all the right guys, all right,” Aub answered from the back seat. “And it didn’t take him any time at all to get us into 1SF when we had the whole world on our backs. I’d give him my vote. What do you think, Brad?”
	“I remember a long time ago—that first time we called him—he said he’d never make promises he couldn’t be sure of keeping,” Clifford replied. “I don’t think he would, either; he doesn’t seem to be that kind of person. That’s what this world needs more of— more credibility in high places. He’s got it, and that’s why he is where he is and knows who he knows, and the rest are a load of bums.” He became quiet for a while and then his face broadened into a smile of gleeful anticipation in the darkness of the car. “Boy,” he said over his shoulder. “I can’t wait to see the carnage when Zim’s big guns start blasting. If this all works out the way I’m beginning to think it might work out, I think I’m gonna enjoy it.”
	“Yes,” Sarah agreed. “Minions and office boys have been a pain in my life lately. I think I might enjoy it too.”
Chapter 15

	The world of 2005 had polarized itself virtually a lineup of the white versus the non’ races, a situation that had been developing foi best part of a century.
	The buildup toward a final showdown had i begun to gather momentum in the early 1980s ‘.‘ after a spasmodic series of clashes and coups ai the emerging African nation-states, the white re~ in the South were finally overwhelmed and the c nent began welding itself together into a closely alliance of anti-West, antiwhite African power 1985, the Treaty of Khartoum cemented relation between this bloc and the Federation of Arab tions, popularly known as the Afrab Alliance, marked the intensification of a joint economic paign against the Western world. In the second of that decade, Israel was overrun by Afrab ar during the course of which tactical nuclear we~ were employed in the Sinai by both sides anc U.S. Mediterranean Fleet went into action. As rect consequence of the war, forces from the Ame mainland invaded and occupied Cuba.
	China had allied herself firmly with the Afrab ers; a major East-West confrontation at that timc averted only by an unexpected attitude of moder from Moscow. By 1990, the Persian Gulf states
sided with the China-Afrab consortium and 1rpm that time onward a never-ending series of border skirmishes and local wars continued along India’s eastern and western frontiers, ostensibly over disputed territories that were claimed by her neighbors on both sides. In the Far East, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia concluded mutual defense pacts to counter the relentless spread of Chinese influence southward and eastward.
	During all this time, the split in the Russian ranks that had first showed itself during the final Middle East War had widened progressively. European Russia, following the lead set by the Moscow government, embarked on a policy of a growing understanding with the West, while the Eastern Siberian Provinces retained a hard-line Marxist posture, aligned with that of China. By 1996, the Eastern Revolt had spread to Central Siberia, and regular Chinese forces were fighting alongside the rebels against the Moscow Army. The war reached its peak in 1999 and after that died down to a succession of skirmishes roughly along the line of the Urals. Siberia declared Vladivostok its new capital and moved rapidly from there toward full integration with the Afrab-China consortium, the conclusion of which process was proclaimed as The Grand Alliance of Progressive Peoples Republics in Canton in
2002.
	European Russia, encouraged by the fruitful results of operating manned orbiting laboratories and lunar bases, developing nuclear-powered spacecraft, and staging a manned mission to Mars, all as joint ventures with the West, finally merged into the Federation of Europe that had been established in 1996. In 2004, an integrated command structure was established for the armed forces of America, the Australian Federa
tion, and the new, Greater Europe. Thus the Alliance of Western Democracies formally came into being.
	The stage was thus set. Both sides possessed nuclear spacecraft, had achieved permanent lunar bases, and were deploying the latest in a long list of strategic deterrents—the Orbital Bombardment System, ORBS, consisting of swarms of orbiting fractional nuclear bombs that could be brought down at any point on Earth’s surface in minutes.
	And then the news flashed round a tense world that Act One was beginning.
	The unrest that had been smouldering in South Korea burst into flame spontaneously all over the country, like the reappearance of a forest fire that had been festering in the roots. Within the space of a few weeks a fiendishly planned epidemic of riots, strikes, ambushes, and guerilla operations consolidated into a nationwide orchestration that left the Army with no coherent strategy to implement, no secure place for regrouping, and no way to turn. The Seoul government was deposed and replaced by the so-called People’s Democratic Assembly, whose first task in office was to appeal for aid to defend the populace against the continued oppressions of the regular forces that were still fighting. The Chinese divisions massed along the thirty-eighth parallel were quick to respond, and inside a matter of a few more days the takeover was complete.
	Powerless to act in the face of such a widespread popular movement and left at a complete standstill by the speed at which these events had unfolded, the Australian and Japanese forces stationed in the country had played no active role. Ignominiously, under the stony stares of lines of heavily armed Communist combat troops, they queued up in front of the waiting air transports that would fly them to Japan.
Morelli, Clifford, Aub, and a group of other scientists and senior personnel from Sudbury stood in front of a reserved landing pad in the Institute’s airmobile parking area and watched the steadily enlarging dot that was descending from the sky above them. Zimmermann was not with them, having returned to Luna the previous week after spending a month with them. Three medium-size skybuses, painted white and carrying the words MASSACHUSETTS STATE POLICE DEPARTMENT, were lined up together along one side of the parking area. Their occupants had taken up positions around but at a respectable distance from the landing pad, at various strategic points around the grounds of the Institute and at doors inside some of its buildings.
	The dot gradually resolved itself into the snubnosed shape of a Veetol Executive jet bearing the colors and insignia of the U.S. Air Force Transport Command. It slowed to a halt and hovered a hundred feet above the pad while the flight-control processors obtained final clearance from the landing radar and the pilot made his routine visual check to see that the site was unobstructed. Then the jet sank smoothly downward to come to rest amid the falling whine of dying engine noise. The door swung open and a short stairway telescoped down to the ground.
	After a few seconds two men dressed in civilian suits, presumably FBI, emerged and stood on either side of the foot of the steps. They were followed by a powerfully built individual wearing the bemedaled uniform of an Army major general; it belonged to Gerald Straker, a Presidential adviser on strategic planning and an authority on advanced weapons systems. Behind Straker came General Arwin Dalby, U.S. Representative to the Coordination Committee of the Integrated Strike Command of the Allied Western
Democracies; General Robert Fuller, of the Stra Planning Commission; and General Howard Perl ski, second in command of the North American g] surveillance, early-warning, and countermeasures tern. Next came two civilians, both from the tagon; one was Professor Franz Mueller, resi consultant on security of military communications tems, the other, Dr. Harry Sultzinger, the archite~
ORBS.
	General Harvey Miller, USAF, Deputy Chief of bital Bombardment Command, was followed by a of Air Force aides and then by a navy contir headed by Admiral Joseph Kaine, chairman of a p dential advisory committee charged with investig~ methods to improve submarine detection from s lites. Three more civilian technical advisers came on the heels of the Navy: Patrick Cleary, comi technology; Dr. Samuel Hatton, military lasers; Professor Warren Keele, nuclear sciences. Fi:
there emerged the instantly recognizable, lean, I ing but vigorous figure of William S. Foreshaw, S tary for Defense of the United States.
	When introductions had been completed, the groups merged and made their way over to the ministration Building of the Institute where, in Large Conference Theater, Morelli started off the gram for the day with a presentation of the thing team had achieved to date.
	“We’ve invited you here today to bring to you tention some new discoveries in science that can be described as astounding,” he told them. “In opinion, the work that we have done over the couple of years represents a breakthrough in hr knowledge that is possibly without parallel in hist
	He waited for the air of expectancy to rise t appropriate level and then continued: “All of
gentlemen are, I’m sure, conversant with the notion that the universe in which we live exists within a framework of space and time. Everything that we know, everything that we see, even the most distant object that can be resolved by our most powerful telescopes or the tiniest event observable inside the atom
—all these things exist within the same universal framework.” The rows of faces watched him expressionlessly.
	“We now have not only a working theoretical model but also firm experimental evidence that this universe is only a tiny part of something far vaster . . . not merely vaster in size, but far, far vaster in terms of the conceptual entities that inhabit it and the totally new range of physical laws that govern the processes taking place inside it.” Sudden interest began creeping into some of the faces in front of him as a few of the individuals present got their first inkling of where he was about to take them. Morelli nodded slowly.
	“Yes, gentlemen. I am talking about a completely new domain of the universe that lies beyond the dimensions of space and time—a domain so strange that we are only beginning to glimpse some of the possibilities that are waiting to be uncovered. But even this first glimpse has revealed facts so staggering as to fundamentally change and in many cases dispose of practically every currently accepted law of physics. The whole universe that has been revealed up until now by all our instruments turns out to be nothing more than a pale shadow of an infinitely more exciting and infinitely vaster superuniverse. Let me tell you about some of the workings of this superuniverse.”
	Morefli went on to describe in nontechnical terms the theory behind particle extinctions and creations, and the interpretation of these events as transitions of basic entities between the various dimensions of
k-space. He described the generation of k-waves and explained how all the known forces and forms of energy of physics could be interpreted in terms of them, and led from there to the notion of gravity as a discontinuous, dynamic phenomenon that resulted from the slow decay of matter particles.
	“But gravity waves are just projections into our universe of a more complex k-wave,” he told them. “In the superuniverse there exists a form of superwave that defies all powers of imagination and has the property of being able to pervade all the points of our ordinary space simultaneously. These superwaves are produced continuously in every piece of matter in the universe—in the planets, the stars, and even in the voids between—and every tiny particle-event taking place at any point in the cosmos makes itself known instantly at each and every other point.” Surprised mutterings ran through the audience. Morelli chose that moment to make his first announcement concerning the practical relevance of it all.
	“Here at Sudbury, we have constructed an instrument that not only responds to these superwaves coming from everywhere in the universe, but in addition enables them to be processed into meaningful visual images.” He paused to allow time for the impact of that statement to take effect, and then gestured toward the large screen behind him, which he had used earlier to present diagrams illustrating the basic concepts of k-theory. He operated the controls below the edge of the lectern in front of him and immediately the screen came to life to show a bright orange-yellow disk.
	“That, gentlemen, is a cross-section view right through the center of Earth,” he informed them. Gasps of astonishment erupted.
	Warren Keele, the nuclear sciences expert, was un
able to contain his amazement. “You’re saying that’s a real, live view through the Earth?” he said, his voice straining with disbelief. “You mean your instrument can actually pick up these waves coming from all through Earth and make pictures out of them?”
	The comments from around the room had risen to a steady murmur. Morelli seized the chance to capitalize on the mood of the moment. “Yes, we can do exactly that. We can do much better than that, too.” He changed the view to that of another, similar-looking disk. “And that is another sectional view, but this time one of our Moon!” He repeated the procedure with a flourish to show a third disk, this time one that became noticeably brighter towards its center. “And that’s the Sun!” His voice rose above the ensuing clamor to drive home his point. “Every one of these images was obtained from within a hundred yards of where you are sitting, and every one of them shows the object as it was at the instant the information was received. Later on today, we will take you into another building and show you the screen from which these pictures were taken. You will be able to sit in front of it and gaze into the heart of the Sun!”
	Morelli then kept them at fever pitch by going on to describe the operation of the GRASER and dropped his second bombshell when he announced that gravity could be produced and controlled artificially.
	“At any other time this would be a stupendous achievement in itself,” he said. “It’s something that men have dreamed about for a hundred years. As things are, it comes as a mere by-product of something that’s bigger and even more stupendous by far.”
	When Morelli had finished, excitement and enthusiasm bubbled on every side. Some of the generals were still looking bemused and a miniature instant
I I I~~# ~.A’_,I I~~CI~ IVItA~I III fl.#



conference began around William Foreshaw. Morelli waited patiently.
	Then, as the hubbub of voices began dying away, Patrick Cleary turned back to face the stage. “Professor Morelli, what you’ve described to us is obviously a much-extended extrapolation of Maesanger’s Field Theory.”
	“That’s correct,” Morelli agreed.
	“What is incredible is not only the extension of the theoretical concepts, but also the experimental support that you’ve been able to demonstrate.”
	“Never mind all that,” Samuel Hatton threw in. “They’re already turning out solid applications. That’s what blows my mind.”
	“Sure,” Cleary acknowledged. “I didn’t mean to play that down.” He turned to face Morelli again. “What I was about to ask, Professor, was: Is this by chance the famous hyperspace of science fiction that we’ve all been waiting for?”
	Morelli grinned briefly.
	“Better ask our theoretical king about that,” he said, then called toward the back of the room, where Clifford was sitting with the Sudbury contingent. “Brad, what would you say to that one?”
	“Depends on which of the many varieties of hyperspace you have in mind,” Clifford replied. “In the sense of dimensions existing beyond the accepted ones, I guess, yes, it could be. If you’re thinking of instant star-travel or something, I think you’ll be disappointed. Certainly we’ve not got that on today’s schedule.”
	Dr. Harry Sultzinger spoke next.
	“This business about instant propagation intrigues me,” he said. “Are you saying that Special Relativity’s gone out the window. . . or what?”
	“Actually, it doesn’t really go against Special Rela
tivity,” Morelli said. “Relativistic physics cuts an upper limit on the velocity of energy through ordinary Einsteinian spacetime. Hi-waves exist in another domain entirely—one to which the laws of conventional spacetime don’t apply. I guess you could say that Einstein’s traffic cops patrol the public highways only, but hi-waves travel cross-country.”
	“But what about information?” Sultzinger insisted. “If a hi-wave goes from here to there in zero time, it’s carried information in zero time. Relativity says you can’t do that.”
	“Only because all methods for moving information that have been known up to now invariably involve moving through classical spacetime,” Morelli said. “But with hi-waves we’re effectively bypassing that, so the problem doesn’t arise.”
	“Actually, it does get slightly more involved than that,” Clifford called again from the back. “Some people have put together all kinds of complicated causeand-effect arguments to show that instant information transfer gives rise to all kinds of logical paradoxes. My own view is that the difficulties lie in the logic and the conceptual limitations rather than in anything factual. We’re working on that at the moment, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of old ideas about simultaneity end up having to be re-examined.”
	“How detailed could the information be that could be carried on these waves?” Admiral Kaine asked.
	“The pictures you’ve just seen are pretty crude because we’ve only got a first-attempt lab lash-up instrument that was never designed for that job in the first place,” Morelli answered. “How far we could push it, we don’t know yet. That’s one of the main things we mean to find out.”
	“The whole thing reminds me of the first crude spark-gap experiments of Hertz,” Cleary declared,
I II~ ~ IVI~L~IIlII~


sounding impressed. “And that led to the whole science of radio, radar, TV, and electronic communications. Have you got any ideas what kind of technology might grow out of what you’re doing here?”
	Morelli launched into a vivid account of the possibilities of gravitic engineering that he never tired of discussing, especially with Aub. The questions poured out incessantly all through lunch, all of them positive, imaginative, and obviously prompted by genuine desires to learn more.
	“Could there be a way of focusing artificial gravity into some kind of beam that could be directed remotely,” General Perkoffski asked Clifford at one point, “so that you could direct it at a target?”
	“It’s too early yet to say,” Clifford replied. “What did you have in mind?”
	“I was wondering if you could use it to disorientate a missile’s inertial guidance system,” Perkoffski said. “It wouldn’t need to be too powerful.”
	“Say, I never thought of that angle,” said Arwin Dalby, who had been following from the opposite side of the table. “A localized gravity beam . . . if it was possible, I wonder how strong you could make it and how localized.”
	Clifford was about to reply when Robert Fuller broke in: “To hell with screwing its guidance system. If you can make the beam strong enough, why not simply pull the whole damn missile down?”
	“Or even stop it from getting off the ground in the first place?” Dalby suggested. “You know . . . the more I think about this, the more I like it.”
	“Perhaps we could even bring down an ORBS satellite,” General Straker joined in. “That would really be something to shout about.” He reflected on the idea for a moment, then had another thought. “Or
maybe bend spacetime to divert it away into space permanently. How about that?”

For the first hour after lunch the visitors saw the GRASER running and crowded four at a time into the monitor room to sit spellbound in front of the display screen of the detector. The image did not tell them much, but the very thought of what it meant was enough to keep them speechless for many minutes.
	After the demonstrations, they returned to the Conference Theater to listen to Aub. Morelli had devoted most of his time to recounting the history of events and developments that had culminated in the then current state of the art. Aub allowed himself to plunge ahead and speculate on some of the things that might follow.
	“The GRASER that you have all just seen produces
a strong output of hi-waves,” he said. “In other words,
it’s a transmitter. The detector that you’ve looked at is
a receiver.” He gazed around the room, inviting them
to fill the rest in for themselves.
	“We’ve got both ends of a communications system,” someone observed after a second or two. The visitors were joining in and interacting—a good sign.
	“Yes indeed,” Aub agreed, nodding with satisfaction. “But this communication system is unlike anything that’s ever been dreamed of before. It uses a transmission medium that is utterly undetectable by any means known to contemporary science. Also, there is no means known to contemporary science by which any disturbance can be impressed upon that transmission medium.” He dropped the formal language that he had been using up to that point and put it another way: “Nobody else in the world has a way of listening in on it or a way of talking through it.”
	“Completely espionage-proof,” Franz Mueller corn-
mented, nodding vigorously. “The perfect military communications vehicle . . . absolute security.”
	“And jam-proof,” Perkoffski added. “That’s what you were getting at, isn’t it, Dr. Philipsz? There’d be no way anybody could jam it . . . or even interfere with it?”
	“Just that,” Aub confirmed.
	“That’s all I need to hear,” Perkoffski remarked with a smile. “Just tell me where to sign for a system like that. I’m sold.”
	“But more than that,” Aub resumed. “It also has zero transmission delay, remember. Now imagine what we could do if we could add control functions—feedback, that is—to the data-communications capability that we’ve been talking about. Now, I’m sure you can all see immediate possibilities for a feedback control technique that has zero time delay in the loop
	over any distance!” He paused again to let them think about it. After a second or two, low whistles of surprise came from the audience. Excited muttering broke out on one side.
	“Long-range space probes!” a voice exclaimed suddenly. “Holy cow, we could monitor them and control them in real time from right here on Earth—interactively.”
	“That means that Earth-based computers could be used for all kinds of things involving fast-response processing in remote places,” a second came in. “How about a Mars-Rover being driven directly by a PDP64 sitting right here? I don’t believe it!”
	“Yes, that’s the kind of thing I had in mind,” Aub said when the buzzing had died down. “But why shouldn’t we look a little further ahead than that as well . . . just for a second? Suppose I were to suggest that one day the arrival of the first robot starship might be witnessed and controlled from a mission-
supervision center here on Earth . . . second by second, as it was actually happening, light-year~ away!” He surveyed the wide eyes around him. “Why not? The basic techniques to do it are already with us. You’ve seen them today.”
	Before they could recover, Aub used the large screen to bring up again the hi-wave image of Earth that they had seen that morning.
	“And finally, think about this,” he said. “That image was generated from a kind of wave that emanates from every object in the universe, large or small, to a greater or lesser degree. Visualize then what it might look like if we were to develop ways to refine the image, to resolve more detail—details of the surface, for instance. Suppose we could select any part of the surface and zoom in instantly on any place we chose
or any place above the surface . . . or below it or maybe on the Moon. . . .“ Aub reeled off the
possibilities slowly, one at a time, dangling each for a few seconds tantalizingly before the mind’s eye of his listeners. The expressions on their faces told him they were with him all the way.
	“All that and more, from a single point somewhere, say, in the U.S.A.,” he concluded. “What kind of impact would that have on the global strategic balance . . . ? Just imagine, gentlemen, a radar—if you wish to think of it that way—that can ‘see’ below the horizon, through a mountain . . . even right through a whole planet!”
	When Aub was finished, Peter Hughes spent ten minutes summing up the major items of the day, then ended with a flash. “As you are all aware, the International Scientific Foundation chooses to conduct its affairs independent of government backing and involvement. In view of the extremely important nature of the things that my colleagues have described today,
it is our considered opinion that an exception to this general rule is clearly called for. The potential that we have heard explained impinges directly on the future not only of this nation but of the whole of the Western world. To realize this potential, however, it is clear that a great amount of further development will be necessary. Time is not on our side, and to use effectively what little there is, it is imperative for this field of research to be supported and furthered vigorously and without delay. To progress we need backing on a scale that only the nation can provide.”
	After a brief muttered conversation with his aides, William Foreshaw, the Defense Secretary, looked up at where Hughes was still standing. “Thank you, gentlemen. I don’t think we have any further questions at this point.” He cast an inquiring eye round the faces from Washington just to be sure. “Before we commit ourselves to any kind of formal reply, we’d appreciate a half-hour or so to talk a few things over among ourselves. I wonder if your people would be kind enough to leave us alone in here for a while, please?”
	“Certainly,” Hughes replied. He gazed toward the Sudbury personnel at the back of the room and inclined his head in the direction of the door. They ified out and Hughes followed. Outside in the corridor they all found they had the same thought in mind and made their way toward the coffee lounge a few doors farther along for some badly needed refreshment. Fortyfive minutes later, they were still sitting there, the conversation having degenerated to a few spasmodic syllables as their impatience began to make itself felt.
	At last Aub got up and ambled over to join Clifford, who was staring morosely out of the window and who had not spoken since entering the room. “Cheer up, Brad. It all went pretty well. Don’t you think so?”
	“It went okay.” Clifford’s voice was neutral.
	“So what’s eating you, man? You look kinda bugged.”
	Clifford turned his back to the window and braced his arms along the sill, at the same time emitting an exasperated sigh.
	“Just remind me, Aub, why are we doing all this? What are those people doing here anyway? Christ .
didn’t it cause us enough trouble trying to get ourselves away from all that? Now we’re tying ourselves in knots trying to set it all up again the way it was. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
	“But it’s not like it was, is it?” Aub answered. He obviously harbored few doubts. “Like Zim said, we’re talking to the right people now. We couldn’t have left things the way they were going—they weren’t going anywhere at all. This way we look like we might end up back in business again. That can’t be all bad.”
	“I just don’t like it. I don’t trust them, and I don’t like being mixed up with people I don’t trust. I’ve seen too much of how they work.”
	Aub clapped him encouragingly on the shoulder.
	“Maybe you’re looking at it the wrong way. We got out before, sure, but they weren’t on our side then. Since then, we’ve come a long way all on our own. Now we’ve still got all that, but we’ve got them on our side too. That changes everything. That bunch next door could fund Mark II by pooling their salaries. That’s what this is all about, don’t forget.”
	“You’re right, but I still don’t like it. . . .“ Clifford didn’t seem cheered.
	At that moment one of the police guards who had been posted outside the door of the Conference Theater came into the lounge and exchanged a few words quietly with Peter Hughes. Hughes nodded, stood up from the chair in which he had been sitting, fidgeting nervously, and spoke in a raised voice.
	“Well, it looks as if this is it. The jury seems to have reached a verdict. I don’t think it would be appropriate for all of us to go crowding in, so if you don’t mind, I’ll just take Al, Brad, and Aub. No doubt we’ll see you all here when we come back out.”
	“Do you think they’ll buy it?” Hughes muttered under his breath as they followed the burly figure of the guard back along the corridor.
	“If they do, I’ll know to apply to IBM for my next job,” Aub replied cheerfully.
	They went back into the Conference Theater and sat down facing the august gathering. William Foreshaw waited until the door had been closed before addressing them.
	“First of all, I would like to express our appreciation for the efforts that you have made today. Any words I might choose to attempt to describe our impressions would be an understatement. Therefore I’ll just settle for ‘thank you all.’” A murmur of assent rippled round the rest of the delegation. Foreshaw continued. “Second, we’d like Mr. Hughes to convey our appreciation back to 1SF headquarters in Geneva. We are gratified by this demonstration that an independent scientific organization will rise to meet its national obligations. And now, to business. First, I have one or two questions I’d like to ask. . . .“ He paused and looked slowly from one to another of the four people sitting in front of him. There was a curious look in his eyes.
	“Would it come as a surprise to you gentlemen,” he said at last, “to learn that the same line of theoretical work is also being pursued elsewhere in this country? I should add that it has not progressed to anything near the things you have showed us today, but the basics are there.”
	Nobody spoke. The Sudbury group looked slightly uncomfortable.
	“They ran into a problem,” Warren Keele supplied, more to ease the silence. “Some bum who was key to the whole thing walked out on them. They’re still trying to ungum the mess he left them with.”
	“You mean at ACRE,” Clifford said quietly. He never could stand pretense in any form.
	Foreshaw looked disturbed. “How do you know about ACRE?” he asked. Puzzled looks from around him punctuated the question.
	“I used to work there. I was that bum.”
	In the next fifteen minutes the story came out. Clifford and his colleagues had not intended to raise this issue, having determined to let the water that had flowed under the bridge go its way and to concentrate on the future. But the questions were insistent. As it became apparent just how much a key to the whole thing Clifford had been, and exactly how the mess had come about, the Defense Secretary’s eyes hardened and his mouth compressed into a thin, humorless line.

“Looks like somebody goofed,” General Fuller mused when the meeting was finally over. The menace in his voice hinted strongly that the somebody wouldn’t do very much more goofing in future. Foreshaw completed the copious notes he had been making throughout, capped his pen, replaced it in his pocket, and closed the pad. He straightened up in his chair and regarded the scientists again, his change of posture signaling an end to that part of the proceedings.
	“I think we’ve heard all we need to for now on that topic,” he said. “What we do from here on is not a matter for this meeting. Let’s get back to the point.” He leaned forward and placed his elbows on the edge of the table.
	“Gentlemen, you have asked for our support and backing. We are unanimous in voting our total commit-
ment to expediting your work in any way we can. You tell us what needs to be done to get you moving at maximum possible speed. What is your biggest problem area right now?”
	Morelli answered that one. “The main bottleneck with the system as it stands at present is computer power. As I mentioned when I spoke this morning, the amount of processing you have to do to get just one of those images is fantastic. Until we can come up with a better way of extracting meaningful information from the raw data, we’re not going to move any faster than a snail’s pace. The rate of progress of the past six months isn’t the thing to go by; we’re up against different requirements now. That’s our biggest single problem.”
	“We had already gathered that,” Foreshaw nodded. “It was one of the things we discussed while you were outside. We think we can help. For instance, what would you say if I were to offer to make a BIAC available?”
	Morelli looked incredulous. Clifford and Aub gaped. Even Peter Hughes suffered a visible momentary loss of composure.
	“A BIAC!” Morelli blinked as if trying to convince himself that he wasn’t dreaming. “I guess that would be . . . just fine. . . .“ His voice trailed away for lack of an appropriate continuation. Foreshaw’s expression remained businesslike, but his eyes were twinkling.
	“Very well,” he said. “That’s settled. It will be done. Now, Professor Morelli, are there any other things that look as if they could slow you down?”
	“Well . . . there are one or two suppliers we seem to be experiencing difficulty with. I’ve got a hunch that one or two people whom you might have some
I I I~ ‘..A~I ~ IVI~.I.,I III I~




influence over aren’t being as cooperative toward us as they could be.”
	“Do you have details?”
	Morelli slipped a wad of handwritten sheets of paper out of the folder he had brought in with him and began reciting the items in a monotone. He had gotten to number seven when Foreshaw stopped him, his face dark with anger.
	“Wait,” he said, taking his pen out again and opening his pad. “Now go back and start again would you please. I want the facts.”

“There’s a Mr. Johnson on the line from WestonCarter Magnetic,” Morelli’s secretary called through from the outer office. “What d’you want me to do?”
	“Put him through,” Morelli shouted back. He turned away from the window through which he had been admiring the lake and, still humming softly to himself, returned to his desk and sat down facing the Infonet screen. Within seconds the features of Cliff Johnson, Sales Director of WCM, had materialized.
	“Al,” he said at once, beaming. “How are you? Hope I’m not calling at an awkward time. I’ve got some good news.”
	“I’ll always listen to good news,” Morelli said. “Shoot.”
	“Those special transformers you wanted wound— we can do ‘em inside two weeks.” He waited, looking slightly apprehensive as if he expected some embarrassing questions, but Morelli replied simply, “That’s great. I’ll have one of the guys get an order out today.”
	“No need, Al,” Johnson said. “I’ll get a salesman from our Boston office to call in and collect it. That way he can check over the technical specs too. I wouldn’t want there to be any mistakes.”
I lie (~enesIs Macnine

	“As you say then,” Morelli shrugged. “That’s by me.”
	“Fine. If there are any problems at all, call personally. Okay?”
	“Okay. See ya around.”
	Morelli cleared down the call, got up, walked ac to the window and resumed admiring the lake. 1 had been the third such call he had taken that m ing and it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. Amazing, thought.

“I got a letter from Sheila Massey today,” Sarah marked one evening about a week later as Clif~ was eating his dinner.
	“Sheila with the legs.. . how’s she getting on?”
	“Trust you to remember the legs. She’s fim thought you’d be interested in what she had to s~
	“Me?” Clifford stopped chewing for a second looked puzzled. “Why should I be interested?”
	“Listen to this,” Sarah told him, unfolding the sh of notepaper in her hand. She read aloud from pai the letter: “‘Walter has gotten himself a good pro tion at last . . .‘
	“Good for Walter,” Clifford threw in.
	“Shut up and listen. Where was I . . . ? ‘Walter gotten himself a good promotion at last. In fact, ev body seems to be moving around in ACRE bec~ there has been the most almighty shakeup there ever did see . . .‘“ Sarah glanced up and noticed Clifford was looking at her with evident interest. read on. “‘Walter isn’t too sure what’s behind it but he says there are all kinds of rumors about r big trouble behind the scenes. He thinks a lot of top guys are getting hell from Washington about way they’ve been handling something or otherthe usual secret stuff Tarrit—he was the hi~ hnss t
if you remember—has gone, but nobody is su~re where. Prof Edwards has been moved up to take his job. That smart-aleck guy, Corrigan I think it was, has gone too. Walter thinks that Edwards got to Washington and demanded that they throw him out. Rumor has it he’s been shifted to a missile test range or some such thing
—somewhere on Baffin Island.’” Sarah lowered the letter and looked across at Clifford. He threw back his head and roared with laughter.
	“That’s all I needed to make this a perfect week,” he managed at last. “Well, how about that? Wait till I tell Aub.” He began laughing again.
	“Zimmermann certainly wasn’t kidding when he said he’d wheel in a few big guns,” Sarah chuckled. “I think he’s done rather well, don’t you?”
	“Big guns?” Clifford laughed. “Them minions haven’t been gunned, baby. Zim’s pals have carpetbombed the bastards!”
Chapter 16

	Voice recognition by computer had begur a crude way during the early 1970s. Not long af ward, experiments conducted at the Stanford Rese~ Institute demonstrated that parts of the electrical bi waves associated with the faculty of speech could decoded and used to input information directly ft the human brain to the machine. The method utili mental concentration on a particular word to tril the word’s characteristic pattern of neural activit3 the brain, without the word’s actually being voic once a pattern had been detected, it could be matc against those stored in the computer’s memory—e human operator having his own unique prerecor set—and translated into machine language. The o~ ation of the computer or whatever it was control was then determined by the machine-language ci mand. By the early eighties, a sizable list of exp mental machines of this type had appeared in rese~ laboratories around the world, initially each with own very restricted command vocabulary, typica On, Off, Up, Down, Left, Right, and so on. But vocabularies were growing....
	These early beginnings broke the trail for the velopments that began appearing over the next th years. Other centers of the brain, such as those rc ing to visual perception, volition, and abstract imag
tion, were also harnessed as direct sources of data and command information for computer pr6cessing. Later on, techniques for accomplishing the reverse process—of enabling the brain to absorb data from the machine independent of the normal sensory channels—were added.
	The result of all this was the Bio-Inter-Active Computer—the latest word in computer technology, offering perhaps the ultimate in man-machine communication. The BIAC eliminated the agonizingly slow traffic bottleneck that had always plagued the interface between the superfast human brain on the one hand, and the hyper-superfast electronics on the other. For example, a straightforward mathematical calculation could be formulated in the mind in seconds, and its execution, once inside the machine, would occupy microseconds; but the time needed to set the problem up by laboriously keying it in character by character and to read back the result off a display screen was, in relative terms, astronomical. It was rather like playing a game of chess by mail.
	But the BIAC did much more than simply enable data and instructions to be fed into the machine more quickly; it enabled the machine to accept input material of a completely new type. Whereas classical computers had required every item of input information to be explicitly specified in numerical or encoded form, the BIAC, incorporating the most up-to-date advances in adaptive learning techniques, could respond to generalized concepts—concepts visualized in the operator’s mind—and automatically convert them into forms suitable for internal manipulation.
	It thus functioned more as a supercomputing extension of the operator’s own natural abilities, its feedback facilities evoking in him a direct perceptual insight to complex phenomena in a way that could
never have been rivaled by mere symbols written on pieces of paper. The dynamics of riding a bicycle can be represented as a complicated string of differential equations, the solutions of which will infallibly tell the rider what he should do to avoid falling off when confronted by a given set of conditions—speed, curve of road, weight of rider, etc. The young child, however, does not concern himself with any of this; he simply feels the right thing to do—given some practice—and does it. In an analogous fashion, the BIAC operator could feel and steer his way through his problem. It was the perfect tool for handling Clifford’s k-function solutions.
	Only a handful of BIACs had been built, and all of them were undergoing government evaluation trials under conditions of strictest security. The offer to make available to Sudbury one of the next three scheduled to be built provided, therefore, as convincing a measure as anyone could ask for of the significance attached to the Institute’s work. Even so, it would take three months or so for the machine to become available.
	Security of the BIAC posed a problem that had to be solved during that period. Dismantling the GRASER and the detector and shipping them elsewhere would have been possible as a last resort, but the magnitude of the task promised to be horrendous. Eventually Peter Hughes suggested an arrangement that, although falling below the requirements usually stipulated for that type of situation, was granted a special dispensation. Structural alterations were made to the GRASER building to seal off all entry points apart from the main door and a fire exit at the rear, which was operable from the inside only. Everything and everybody not directly involved with the project were moved into other accommodations elsewhere at
the Institute. Then, finally, access to the buik~ing was severely limited to a few specially designated people, and two officers of the State Police were to be stationed at the door around the clock to insure that the rules were observed.
	Clifford saw these developments as portents of things to come, and his misgivings intensified. Life took an unexpected turn, however, and soon he was too preoccupied with other things to brood about such matters. He was sent away for six weeks to undergo an intensive course in BIAC operation on a machine already installed at the Navy’s equipment evaluation laboratories in Baltimore. Aub remained at Sudbury, being too immersed in the design details and preparations for Mark II to afford any time away. He would follow later.

For the first couple of days after his arrival in Baltimore, Clifford sat through a series of lectures and tutorials aimed at imparting some essential concepts of BIAC operation and at giving the class some preliminary benefits from the techniques that others had developed.
	“The BIAC becomes an efficient tool when you’ve learned to forget that it’s there,” one of the instructors told them. “Treat it as if you were learning to play the piano—concentrate on accuracy and let speed come in its own time. Once you can play a piano well, you let your hands do all the work and just sit back and enjoy the music. The same thing happens with a
BIAC.”
	Eventually Clifford found himself sitting before the operator’s console in one of the cubicles adjacent to the machine room while an instructor adjusted the lightweight skull-harness around his head for the first time. For about a half-hour they went through the
routine of calibrating the machine to Clifford’s brain patterns, and then the instructor keyed in a command string and sat back in his chair.
	“Okay,” the instructor pronounced. “It’s live now. All yours, Brad.”
	An eerie sensation instantly seemed to take possession of his mind, as if a bottomless chasm had suddenly opened up beside it to leave it perched precariously on the brink. He had once stood in the center of the parabolic dish of a large radio telescope and had never forgotten the experience of being able to shout at the top of his voice and hear only a whisper as the sound was reflected away. Now he was experiencing the same kind of feeling, but this time it was his thoughts that were being snatched away.
	And then chaos came tumbling back in the opposite direction—numbers, shapes, patterns, colors .
twisting, bending, whirling, merging . . . growing, shrinking. . . lines, curves. . . . His mind plunged into the whirlpool of thought kaleidoscoping inside his head. And suddenly it was gone.
	He looked around and blinked. Bob, the Navy instructor, was watching him and grinning.
	“It’s okay; I just switched it off,” he said. “That blow your mind?”
	“You knew that would happen,” Clifford said after he had collected himself again. “What was it all about?”
	“Everybody gets that the first time,” Bob told him. “It was only a couple of seconds. . . gives you an idea of the way it works, though. See, the BIAC acts like a gigantic feedback system for mental processes, only it amplifies them round the loop. It will pick up vague ideas that are flickering around in your head, extrapolate them into precisely defined and quantitive interpretations, and throw them straight back at you.
If you’re not ready for it and you give it some junk, you get back superjunk; before you know it, the BIAC’s picked that up out of your head too, processed it the same way, and come back with super-superjunk. You get a huge positive feedback effect that builds up in no time at all. BIAC people call it a ‘garbage loop.’”
	“That’s all very well,” Clifford said. “But what the hell do I do about it?”
	“Learn to concentrate and to continue concentrating,” Bob told him. “It’s the stray, undisciplined thoughts that trigger it . . . the kinds of thing that run around in your head when you’ve got nothing in particular to focus on. Those are the things you have to learn to suppress.”
	“That’s easy to say,” Clifford muttered, then shrugged helplessly. “But how do I start?” Bob grinned good-humoredly.
	“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start by giving you some easy exercises for practice. Try ordinary simple arithmetic. Visualize the numbers you want to operate on, concentrate hard on them and also on the operation you want to perform, and exclude everything else. Get it fixed in your mind before I switch you in again. Okay?”
	“Just anything?” Clifford shrugged. “Okay.” He mentally selected the digits 4 and 5 and elected to multiply them together, just to see what happened. The torrent of chaos hit him again before he realized Bob had hit the key.
	“That was a bit sneaky of me,” Bob confessed. “The best time to slot in is often when the problem is clear in your mind. Try again?”
	“Sure.”
	After three more excursions round the garbage loop, Clifford sensed something different. Just for a
I I I’~~ W~~I Il~I~ IVI~4~I III



20 seemed to explode in his brain, impressing itself with a clarity and. a forcefulness that excluded everything else from his perceptions. Never before in his life had he experienced anything so vividly as that one simple number for that one brief moment. Then the garbage came at him again and swallowed it up. For a while he just sat there dumbstruck.
	“Got it that time, huh?” Bob’s voice brought him back to reality.
	“I think so, at least for a second.”
	“That’s good,” Bob stated, encouraging his pupil. “You’ll find for a while that the shock of realizing it’s working distracts you enough to blow it. You’ll get over that though. Don’t try and fight it—just ride it easy. Try again?”
	An hour later Bob posed the problem, “Two hundred seventy-three point five six multiplied by one hundred ninety-eight point seven one?”
	Clifford gazed hard at the console, visualized the numbers, and almost immediately recited, “Fifty-four thousand, three hundred fifty-nine point one zero seven six.”
	“Great stuff, Brad. I reckon that’ll do for a first session. Let’s break off for lunch and go have a beer.”

A week later Clifford was learning to cope with problems in elementary mechanics—situations involving concepts of shape, space, and motion as well as numerical relationships. He found, as his skills improved, that he could create a dynamic conceptual model of a multibody collision and instantly evaluate any of the variables involved. Not only that, he could, by simply willing it, replay the abstract experiment as many times as he liked from any perspective and in any variation that he pleased. He could “feel” the changing stress pattern in a mechanical structure
split-second it was there; the concept of the, number subjected to moving loads, “see” the flow of currents in an electrical circuit as plainly as that of liquid in a network of glass tubes. By the end of the fourth week he could guide himself through to the solution of a tensor analysis as unerringly as he could guide his finger out of a maze in a child’s coloring book.
	The BIAC’s adaptive learning system grew steadily more attuned to his particular methods of working and automatically remembered the routines that it had flagged as yielding desired results. As time went on it proceeded to string these routines together into complete procedures that could be invoked instantly without their having to be assembled all over again. In this way the machine automated progressively more of the mundane mechanics of solving a whole variety of problems, leaving him ever more free to concentrate on the more creative activity of evolving the problemsolving strategy. It therefore built up its own programs as it went along; and it was all the time expanding and refining its collection. Programming in the classical sense, even with respect to the parallel programming used in the distributed computing systems of the 1980s and ‘90s, no longer meant very much.

Clifford imagined a single cube. He imagined that he was looking at it from the direction of one of the corners and down on to it. Having fixed the picture in his mind, he opened his eyes and found a fair representation of it staring back at him from the BIAC graphic screen. It was not bad—a bit ragged at one of the corners and the lines were a little wavy here and there, but. . . not bad. Even as he thought about it, the subconscious part of his mind took its cue from his visual perceptions and the imperfections in the displayed image subtly dissolved away.
I I I~ ‘.4~I t~iOIC IVII.fl.# 11111



	“Try adding some color,” Aggie suggested. She was the graphics instructor taking Clifford through the final part of the course. He mentally selected opposite faces red, blue, and green, consolidated the thought, then used the knack that he had developed and projected it at the view in front of him. The hollow cube promptly became solid—and colored.
	“Good,” Aggie pronounced. “Now try rotating it.” Clifford hesitated for a second, felt the first surge that forewarned the bio-link was beginning to become unstable, and caught it deftly before it could run away into positive feedback. The reaction was by now purely reflex. He settled down again and tried lifting one corner of the cube, but instead of pivoting about its opposite corner as if it were a rigid body, the shape deformed and flowed like a piece of plasticene. He emitted a short involuntary laugh, reformed the smear of colors back into a cube, fired a command at the BIAC to lock the display, relaxed and sat back in his seat.
	“Went off the rails there somewhere,” he remarked. “What should I do?”
	“You let the idea that it was rigid slip,” Aggie told him. “But even if you hadn’t, trying to rotate it by stimulating external forces is a pretty difficult thing to get right at first. That’s what you were trying to do, isn’t it?”
	“Yes.” Clifford was impressed. “How could you tell?”
	“Oh . . .“ She smiled and gestured as if throwing something away. “You learn to spot such things. Now, when you try it again, don’t think of actually moving the cube. Imagine it’s fixed and you’re walking around it . . . as if it were a building and you’re in a hoverjet, okay? You’ll find that if you do it that way, rigidity and all the other implied concepts take care of them-
selves subconsciously. Right. So, unlock it and, give it another whirl.”

Three days later, early in the evening and after their serious business for the day was over, Aggie showed Clifford some games based on animated cartoons that she had produced to amuse herself during her spare time. The difference with these cartoons was that the sequence of events unfolding on the screen could be modified interactively from second to second by the players.
	Clifford’s mouse scurried along the floor by the baseboard with Aggie’s black-and-white cat pursuing close behind. He instinctively read the speeds and distances and sensed via the BIAC’s responses that his mouse would just make it with two point three seven seconds to spare. He slowed the mouse slightly to take the corner at the bottom of the stairs and then raced it flat out along the last straight to where its hole, and safety, lay.
	Suddenly he screeched the mouse to a halt. The entrance to the mouse hole was barred by a tiny door bristling with solid-looking padlocks.
	“Hey, that’s cheating!” Clifford roared indignantly. “You can’t do that!”
	“Who says?” Aggie laughed. “There’s no rules that say I can’t.”
	“Christ!” Clifford accelerated the mouse away as the cat pounced on the spot it had just vacated. He ran it round behind the cat, who immediately began turning after it. For an agonizing second he stared helplessly searching for a way out, and then, seized by sudden inspiration, he created a second mouse hole in the baseboard and promptly shot the mouse through it.
I ii~ i~eiie~i~ ivi~i.iiiIi~


	“That’s not fair!” Aggie shrieked. “You can’t change the house!”
	“There’s no rule that says I can’t,” Clifford threw back. “I win.”
	“Like hell. That was a tie.”
	They were still laughing as they removed the skullharnesses and shut off the operator station to finish the day.
	“You know, Aggie,” he said, shaking his head. “This really is an incredible machine. I’d never have dreamed this kind of thing could work.”
	“It’s primitive yet,” she replied. “I think all kinds of applications that even we can’t imagine will grow out of this some day. . . .“ She gestured vaguely in the direction of the screen. “For example, I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole new art form developed from little things like that. Why hire actors to try and interpret what’s in the scriptwriter’s mind if you can get straight into his mind?” She shrugged and looked sideways at Clifford. “See the kind of thing I mean?”
	“Make movies out of peoples’ heads?” He gaped at her.
	“Why not?” she said simply.
	Why not? Somewhere, he remembered, he had heard that said before.

The final thing they showed him in Baltimore was the way in which the BIAC could function as a communications intermediary between man and man. Two or more human operators interacting simultaneously with the machine were able to exchange thought patterns among themselves in a way that was uncanny, using the computer as a common translator and message exchange. Even more remarkable was the fact that there was no particular reason why these operators had to be in close proximity to one another,
and a number of experiments of this kind had been conducted in which the machine in Baltimore was linked to another BIAC, owned by the Air Force and located in California, thus coupling operators three thousand miles apart. Clifford found this the most astounding thing he had seen since coming to Baltimore. He thought about it all the way back to Boston.

Clifford returned to Sudbury to find that installation of the Institute’s own BIAC was well under way and that construction of the Mark II had commenced. The latter operation would require far more time to complete, however, and as an intermediate measure to gain some preliminary experience in using BIAC techniques to interpret k-functions, the new computer was connected on-line to the Mark I prototype.
	He slowly learned to steer his way through the masses of data to ferret out and manipulate the spacelike solutions of the equations and to project them as visual displays. To his astonishment he found that he could “move” his vantage point at will throughout the body of Earth and about its surface. The resolving power of the Mark I was still poor, preventing him from distinguishing much in the way of meaningful detail, but he did succeed in producing recognizable images of some prominent geographic features such as mountain ranges, continental margins, and ocean trenches. He managed to obtain some surface views of the Moon too, in which the ghostly outlines of the larger craters and ring-walled plains could just about be discerned. It was somewhat like viewing the transmission from a remote-TV space probe that could be moved instantly from place to place—a tantalizing foretaste of what might be possible with Mark II.

One evening, while they were out for a few drinks at
I I I~ %fliI I.~OIO IYItA~#I III I’.’



their favorite bar in Marlboro, Clifford was describing his experiences in Baltimore to Aub and Morelli. Aub had at last reached the point of being able to leave the immediate work on Mark II in the hands of the rest of the team and had made arrangements to go on a BIAC training course himself, starting the following week. Naturally, he was interested to learn about what the Navy had in store for him.
	“You mean there’s this guy in Baltimore and there’s this other guy out in California someplace, both plugged into BIACs that are hooked together, and they can exchange thoughts?” Aub stared over his beer in astonishment. “Man, that’s crazy.”
	“You’ve gotta be joking, Brad,” Morelli said.
	“Really.” Clifford nodded emphatically. “I’ve seen them doing it. One of them can read a list of numbers off a piece of paper and the other one will tell you what they are. . . . They can send pictures—one guy imagines a face that they both know and the other guy identifies it. . . all kinds of things.”
	“Sorta like telepathy by the sound of it,” Morelli remarked. “I never had much time for that kinda stuff.”
	“It’s not really, though, is it,” Clifford pointed out. “Not in the way that people usually mean the word.”
	“How d’you mean?” Morelli asked.
	“Well, usually they’re talking about paranormal phenomena . . . things outside known science. But this isn’t like that—it’s all based on things we know about and understand.”
	“It achieves the same sort of effect, though,” Aub broke in.
	“Which is my whole point,” Clifford declared. “It’s just another example of the kind of thing that’s happened over and over again through history.” Two pairs of eyes looked back at him blankly. “Every day,” he
I Il~ ‘.~II~OI~ IVIQI..,IIIII~


explained, “we take it for granted that we ‘can do things that people five hundred years ago dreamed about, but could only think of in terms of magic. We can fly through the air, stare into magic mirrors, and watch things going on in other places. . . . We can even talk to people all over the world. . . .“ Clifford opened his hands expressively. “We’ve made all those things happen, but we’ve used methods of doing it that people from way back could never have imagined.”
	“Yeah, I’m with you,” Aub said, nodding. “Because they had no idea about electronics and the like.”
	“Yes, that’s what I’m getting at,” Clifford told him. “They imagined flying and talked about levitation, because they couldn’t see in advance the kind of engineering needed to make the idea work.”
	“Okay, I’ll go along with that,” Morelli agreed. “You’re saying that people made the mistake of imagining telepathy, thinking it had to be some kind of magic. Now that the effects they talked about are actually starting to happen, it turns out you don’t need anything magic to do it—just a couple of BIACs.”
	~‘That’s exactly it, Al,” Clifford confirmed. “Talking about something paranormal is just a way of discussing something you don’t properly understand . . . yet. The operative word is ‘yet.’ In the end, the idea all becomes part of what’s normal. Nobody thinks now that there’s anything mysterious about talking across country by Intonet. And effectively, this is no different, except that the talking uses a BIAC instead of a regular Intonet terminal.”

	“Well . . . I guess that doesn’t leave much over outside orthodox science,” Aub mused after reflecting for

a while. “I guess maybe that’s what everything we do is about—turning paradox into orthodox.”
Chapter 17

	Through Zimmermann, the 1SF astronomers at Joliot-Curie had been kept updated on developments at Sudbury. Excited by the way in which k-theory had accounted successfully for the observed distribution of the three-degree cosmic background radiation, a group of them had begun reappraising other outstanding problems in the light of the new theory. This led to their formulating a new system of k-conservation principles and enabled them to explaiii at last, among other things, why the amount of conventional radiation produced in the vicinity of the Cygnus X-1 black hole was larger than classical quantum theory predicted it should be.
	Essentially, the new conservation principles stated that when matter/energy ‘vanished’ out of normal space to exist totally in hi-space, as happened when a particle annihilated or matter fell into a black hole, then an equivalent amount of energy had to reappear in normal space somewhere. Calculation showed that this ‘return energy’ would appear in a distribution pattern that gave the greatest intensity in the immediate vicinity of the point at which the original annihilation had taken place, but which fell away exponentially all the way to infinity. This led to the remarkable conclusion that when matter annihilated, say in Cvc~nus X-L or in Morelli’s (IRASPR enerav rean
peared instantaneously at every point in the i,iniverse as a direct consequence of the event. The amount of return energy that would appear, for example, somewhere in the middle of the Andromeda Galaxy as a result of one gram of matter being consumed in the GRASER in Massachusetts would thus be immeasurably and unimaginably small; nevertheless, mathematically at least, it would be there.
	All this was really another way of stating Clifford’s laws of hi-wave propagation, which showed that the hi-radiation produced by any event of creation or annihilation would manifest itself instantaneously all through space, the intensity decreasing sharply with distance. Indeed, the equations describing the two processes were soon shown to be mathematically identical. What the astronomers had done was to compute the amount of conventional radiation that would be produced at every point in space by the process of hiparticle interactions. When this quantity was integrated across the whole volume of the universe, the result showed that the total amount of energy produced throughout this volume equaled the amount originally destroyed. Hence the new conservation laws followed.
	It was just as well that it worked out this way. The rate of destruction of mass sustained in the GRASER was far higher than that attained in the largest H-bomb. Only a tiny proportion of its energy equivalent was delivered back into normal space within the reactor sphere however, the rest b~ing distributed across billions of cubic light-years of space. Had it been otherwise, they would easily have blown Massachusetts off the map the instant they switched on.
	The pattern of return energy therefore explained the observed radiation from Cygnus X-1. When Clifford examined the forms of the equations derived by the scientists on Luna, he discovered that they in-
eluded terms which made allowance for the distribution of matter in the surrounding volume of the universe—terms which he had neglected in his own treatment of the problem. Using the more comprehensive equations, he recalculated the radiation that should be expected from an artificial black hole in the GRASER—the quantity that had previously contradicted both his own predictions and those based on classical quantum theory and the Hawking Effect. This time it came out right. K-theory, it appeared, was well on its way to being fully validated.
	In the course of all this experimentation, Clifford developed a regular working relationship with the astronomers and cosmologists at Joliot-Curie, and together they began to explore some of the deeper implications of the theory that Clifford had not thought very much more about since his days at ACRE. From the Japanese model of quasars, it was evident that these objects were the scenes of mass annihilation on a truly phenomenal scale. According to the new conservation principles, the energy equivalent of the mass being destroyed ought to be returned into normal space, most of it being concentrated around the quasars and the rest of it diffusely scattered everywhere else. Throughout the ‘everywhere else,’ therefore, there ought to exist a steady background flux of particle creations attributable to distant quasars. But all the annihilations taking place inside the ordinary masses and black holes scattered throughout the universe would, by the conservation principles, contribute to this background flux as well. Thus there were three known mechanisms for destroying mass: quasars, black holes, and spontaneous annihilations, most of which took place inside masses. Also, there was one known mechanism for creating it: the universal background
I jie ~ IVI~UIIIII~


of spontaneous creations. The crucial question was, did the two balance?
	It was important to know this because the very fabric of spacetime itself—the b-domain aspects of Clifford’s k-functions—came into the equations. It was possible for one of these two quantities to exceed the other without violating the conservation principles provided that the volume of the universe adjusted to compensate and maintain a constant average density. In other words, in a universe heavily populated by quasars, the rate of mass annihilation implied would be too large for return energy alone to provide the balancing mechanism, and space itself would grow to accommodate the excess. The expansion of the universe followed directly from k-theory, and came about as a consequence of an earlier cosmic epoch of quasar formation.
	So, was the universe still expanding? Nobody knew because all the data that told of the fact—red shifts of distant galaxies, for example—came from millions of years in the past. Were there quasars still there now? Again, nobody knew, for the same reason. Could the balance be tested? How many black holes were there in sample volumes of the universe? Nobody knew. But the new science of k-astronomy enthusiastically anticipated by Aub and Morelli promised a means of answering all these questions.
	What fascinated the cosmologists—and began to infect Clifford as well the more he talked with them— was the prospect of a new and revolutionary cosmological model. It was purely hypothetical at that stage, but somebody on Luna had suggested that if the quasars had ceased to exist now, and if the expansion had stopped as a consequence, and if creations turned out to predominate in the balance, a new epoch of quasar formation might be induced. This gave rise to
I ne uenesis ~acnine

a new picture of cosmology in which phases of quasar formation and expansion alternated with phases of galaxy manufacture . . . for ever. Thus the notion of a continuous “Wave Model” of the universe was born, superseding, if it could be proved, both the Steady State and the Big Bang models. It required neither the singularity in the laws of physics that characterized Big Bang and about which a number of leading physicists still felt a trifle uneasy, nor for the universe to appear the same at all times, as was required by Steady State but which observation had shown to be manifestly untrue.
	All in all, there was a lot of exciting work already lined up waiting for Mark II.
	But as Mark II neared completion and the first tests of its subsystems commenced, world events cast a deepening shadow over the project. Anti-West policies intensified in South America, threatening closure of the Panama Canal, and the Urals border war escalated to include the use of massed tanks and ground-attack aircraft as regular features. The long-drawn-out civil war in Burma finally died out as the revolutionary factions effected a shaky compromise and took over the country, while the exhausted remnants of the rightwing government forces retreated to seek sanction in neighboring India. Soon India itself became the object of renewed border pressures from both east and west as Chinese and Afrabs resurrected long-standing grievances. Hong Kong, having been reduced to a state of economic impotence and famine by a systematic stranglehold of sanctions and blockade, was taken over uncontested. Within three days, China announced its claim for Taiwan.

“Yeah, I know it’s a pain, Brad, but that’s the way it is,” Morelli said across his desk. “It’ll only take, say,
a day at most. Get a couple of the team to give you a hand with it.”
	“But . . .“ Clifford waved the wad of forms that Morelli had given him in front of him. “What is all this crap? I haven’t got a spare day. . . .“ He glanced down at the schedule sheet attached to the front. “Inventory of Capital Equipment Advanced. . . Projected Purchase Breakdown . . . A ccu~nulated Maintenance Debits . . .“ Clifford looked up imploringly. “We’ve never had anything like this before. What’s going on all of a sudden?”
	Morelli sighed and scratched the side of his nose.
	“I suppose Washington is trying to bring it to our attention that they’ve poured a lot of hardware into this place and it’s costing them a lot of bucks,” he said. “I think maybe it’s a little reminder that they haven’t seen much in the way of results yet . . . you know how they work—subtly.”
	“This won’t help get results,” Clifford fumed. “It’ll just soak up time.” He halted for a second, then continued. “Who says we’re not getting results, anyway? We’ve solved the secondary-radiation problem . .
untangled the cosmic background problem . . . postulated new k-conservation principles. That’s what I call results.”
	“I know,” Morelli agreed, holding up a hand. “But it’s not what they call results. “Remember, we sold them on supercommunications and superradar and all kinds of other superstuff? That’s what they’re waiting to see.”
	“Aw, but hell . . .“
	“I know what you’re gonna say, Brad, but don’t say it.” Morelli placed his hands down in a gesture of finality. “They’re paying for the tunes, and I guess we have to play. Fill it in as they ask and keep it
i ne ~..~eiiesis iviautiiiie

short, okay? Like I said, get some people to help you and I bet you can clear it up in half a day.”
	“Bureaucrats!” Clifford snorted to himself as he closed the door behind him and began walking down the corridor. Washington, it appeared, was not wildly excited about quasar distributions or Wave Models of the universe.

	“Next Thursday, I’m afraid,” Peter Hughes said to Morelli as they were walking across the grounds of the Institute away from the GRASER building. “They really didn’t leave me any choice.”
	“Thursday?” Morelli looked dubious. “Brad will be pretty mad about that. He was planning to devote the whole of Thursday to checking out the BIAC interface to Mark II.”
	“He’ll have to postpone that, then,” Hughes said. “Sorry, Al, but our friends in Washington were adamant.”
	“But hell . . .“ Morelli protested. “Why a progress review meeting . . . and all day at that? The team is perfectly capable of reviewing its own progress, and they can do it in half an hour. Brad and Aub spent four hours last week preparing that progress report for Washington. Wasn’t it good enough for them or something?”
	Hughes threw his arms wide open in front of him as he walked and sighed heavily. “I don’t know, Al. They said it wasn’t detailed enough. They say they need to send some of their people here to go right through the whole project . . . from top to bottom. As I said—I didn’t have much choice about it.”
	Morelli shook his head apprehensively.
	“Brad’ll be pretty mad,” he repeated.

“Aub’s not bothered about it,” Clifford told Sarah later
I I I~ ‘.A~I I~OIO IVIQI.,I III I~


on that night. “He’s only interested in getting his Mark II up and running and keeping the funds flowing in to do it. He said we shouldn’t waste time on any of that nonsense but should just keep feeding back whatever fiction’s needed to shut them up.”
	“That’s not your way though, is it,” Sarah said, stating the fact rather than asking the question. He shook his head slowly, looking deeply worried for the first time in months.
	“No, it’s not,” he said. “I don’t like deception. But there’s something more than that. It’s ACRE closing in all over again. . . I can feel it.”
Chapter lB

	“No, I’m serious, Aub. One of the doct~ the hospital was telling me yesterday—first aid. ualty evacuation, and precautions against falbou radiation hazards. They’re working out the deta the courses now. Within three months they’ll be pulsory in every school in the state and in every pany that employs more than twenty people ii place. You wait and see.” Sarah spoke as she set places on the dining-room table. Aub, perched pi ously on a stool at the breakfast counter and si from a can of Coke, watched her from the id
	“Back to the Boy Scouts, eh,” he said. “R we’ll get badges to put on our shirts too?”
	“I don’t think it’s funny. It proves things m~ getting bad. I heard on the news this afternoo! somebody exploded a tactical nuke in an arms ft somewhere just outside Calcutta. Nearly two tho dead. What kind of people do things like that?”
	“Yeah, I heard about it. Head cases. Seems the in-thing.”
	Sarah placed the napkins and glanced at the “Six twenty-five. I’d have thought Brad would be by now. What was it you said he was doing?”
	“He got tied up with Al and a coupla guys Washington who are trying to hustle things. I ma to duck out of it.”
“flh dear That nrnhahlv me.an~ he’fl he in
mood again.” She stepped back to survey hei handiwork, then walked round into the kitchen to inspect the bubbling pan of beef stroganoff. “He seems to get awfully moody these days, Aub. Are things really getting so bad?”
	Aub pivoted round on the stool to face her, his mouth jerking momentarily downward at the corners beneath his beard.
	“Yeah, he gets pretty upset about it, I guess. He’s into some theoretical thing with Zim’s eggheads that he wants to spend all of his time on, especially now we’ve got the Mark II machine running. Trouble is, the brass is getting impatient for its ironmongery. They figure that since they paid the check for most of it, they oughta be getting a bigger slice of the action.”
	“And that doesn’t bother you?”
	“Me?” Aub shrugged. “I guess I can just ride along with it. If I have to come up with a few ideas here and there to keep things smooth, that’s okay. I’ll get in enough of my own thing too. Brad’s problem is he’s too much of a purist. He has to have it all his own way or nothing. Y’see, he’s got these principles he feels strongly about . . . whether science dictates politics or the other way round. If it looks like things are going in what he figures is the wrong way, he won’t have any part of it.” Aub shrugged again and sighed. “He oughta remember the ice ball.”
	“You don’t think he’ll get restless again, do you?” Sarah asked apprehensively.
	“Restless? You mean take another walk?”
	“Yes.”
	Aub pursed his lips for a few seconds. “Well . . . to be honest about it, if things get much worse . . . maybe.”
	“That’s my Brad” Sarah sounded resigned but with
I I I~ ~ I’~CIO IVILA~I III I~




no hint of bitterness. “I’d just grown to like this too. Oh, well, what does it say in the book oi
Whither thou goest 1 will go ..
	“Huh?”
	“Doesn’t matter. Here—I’ll take that can.”
	“Thanks. You know something. . .“
	The house shook and a noise like thunder
up the stairs as the front door slammed. Elepi footsteps pounded in the entrance level below.
	“Oh, jeez,” murmured Aub.
“Is that you, sweetness?” Sarah called. No rep] A minute later Clifford appeared in the d
the dining room, glowering. He mumbled perfr greetings, stamped across to the bar and began ing himself a large measure of Scotch. Sarah ei from the kitchen and walked over to stand ji hind him. He turned, glass in hand, to find hc fronting him with hands on hips and lips
expectantly. He scowled back at her for a fe conds, then emitted a sigh of exasperation, gi and kissed her lightly.
‘‘Iii.’’
	“Should think so too,” she said, and marche into the kitchen.
	Aub smirked through the serving hatch.
	wait till I tell the guys about this.”
	“You shut up if you don’t want to end up ea McDonald’s.” Clifford inclined his head in the tion of the bar. “Want a drink?”
	“Cheers. Rye and dry.”
	Clifford turned to the bar once more as plates appearing. Aub ambled round into the dining and transferred them from the counter to the A few seconds later Sarah followed.
	“My acute perceptiveness tells me we have lems,” Aub said as they sat down.
	“They want the project run their way—formal schedule of timetabled objectives, regular progress reports, resident liaison man from Washington. The works. Just what I knew would happen.”
	“Well . . .“ Aub tried to sound philosophical. “I guess they figure that they’ve made the down-payment and ought to be seeing some deliveries . . . delivery estimates anyway.”
	“I’ll deliver everything I said I would, but I won’t jump through hoops too. I can’t work that way.”
	“You have to see it from their point of view, Brad,” Sarah tried. “It’s a lot of money to put down with no guarantees at all. Perhaps you’re making it look a bit like they owe it to you to fund anything that interests you. Surely you can trade off somewhere with them.”
	Clifford grew irritable again.
	“See it from their point of view . . . Why do I always to have to see it from their point of view? Why can’t they try seeing it from mine? Their so-called management science is going to everybody’s heads. When will they realize they can’t manage human thinking like production lines for plastic ducks? I already said—I’ll deliver. That should be enough.”
	Aub was beginning to lose his patience. “You know that, I know that, Al knows that, and Sarah knows that,” he pointed out. “But maybe they don’t know that, or at least, they don’t believe it enough. Maybe we have to persuade them a bit harder, that’s all. Like Zim always said—remember—it needs selling.”
	Clifford wasn’t buying. “We’ve been through all that and look where it’s led. Anyhow, I’m not a salesman and I’m not interested in becoming one. I’m a scientist. It’s just another hoop to jump through. Why should we have to?”
	After a short silence Aub asked: “So what happens if you end up telling them to get lost? After all, it’s
not really like last time. We’re working for 1SF now when all’s said and done. There wouldn’t be any question of the job going down the pan.”
	“True,” Clifford answered. “But they could still pull the BIAC out . . . plus all the other stuff they’ve bought.”
	Aub stopped chewing and looked hard at Clifford with a stare of disbelief.
	“You’re joking, man. They’d do that?”
	“They’re already threatening to. That’s what held me up. They’ve got Peter Hughes over a barrel—he plays ball or they pick up their marbles. They’ve been ~. getting at Geneva too, so things won’t look good for pal Peter if he decides he doesn’t want to play. That puts Al on the spot. He’s on our side, but his hands are tied now. He’s just having to hand it down the line.”
Aub thought the problem over.
	“So we play ball,” he offered at last. “That way we’ve still got a project. The other way we haven’t got a project.” He looked from one to the other. “End of problem. There’s nothing to decide.”
	Sarah said nothing. She knew better how Clifford’s mind worked.
	“It’s not the way,” Clifford replied slowly, shaking his head. A strange light had crept into his eyes. “It’ll always be the same for as long as we knuckle under. 3 I don’t mean just here—everywhere. The whole damn world’s gone crazy. The very people who are capable of finding out the ways of solving the real problems are all being muscled into making the problems worse. And the people who are doing the muscling don’t even understand what the problems are.” He looked at Aub appealingly. “Did you ever see films of what went on in Nazi Germany in World War II? Some of the best scientific brains in Europe being herded around like slave labor by a bunch of thugs.
Well, it hasn’t gotten that bad yet, but that2s the direction it’s going. I won’t do anything to help it along, and that’s what you’re asking me to do.”
	“So you walk out,” Aub tossed back lightly. “What the hell? Who cares? The world goes on anyway. Nothing changes. Only you lose out.”
	“Something has to change.” Clifford sounded far away. He looked straight through Aub as if he were not there. “Once and for all there has to be a stop to it . . . the whole lousy situation . . . permanently . . .“
	“You’re gonna change it?” Aub laughed. “What’ll you do—run for President? I think you’d be disappointed even if you made it. He, too, seems a bit stuck for answers right now.”
	Aub stopped smiling when he saw that Clifford was not reacting. Clifford’s mind seemed to be a million miles away.
	“I don’t know. . .“ he said after what seemed a long time. And that strange light was still burning in his eyes.

Late that evening when they were relaxing over coffee to the background of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, Clifford, who had hardly spoken a word since dinner, turned suddenly toward Aub. “Do you remember when we were talking to Al about a week ago .
about the technique that’s used in the GRASER to induce annihilations? You said that you thought it might be possible to use the same principle to control the coordinates in normal space of where the return energy is delivered.”
	“I remember. What about it?”
	“In other words, you figure that you could focus the return energy at a point . . . instead of having it spread out all the way to infinity.”
	“Maybe. Why?” Aub put down the magazine he had
I II~ ~~II~OI~ IVIQ’.,IIIII~


been browsing through and looked puzzled. Clii ignored the questions.
	“What would be involved to do it?”
	“How d’you mean—as a sorta lab test?”
	“Yes.”
	Aub thought for a moment. “Well, I suppos the hardware you’d really need is already there. It would just have to function in a different w~ guess you’d need to reprogram the modulator-co computers and the supervisory processor . . . p1 few bits of rewiring in the front-end electrics. should do it.”
	“How long do you reckon it’d take?”
	Aub suddenly looked alarmed. “Hey—you’re thinking of trying it, are you? That could be dai ous; nobody knows what to expect. You might en blowing a hole in the middle of Sudbury.”
	“Not if the beam was wound right dowi
minimum power. All I want to do is prove the p
We should be able to get the annihilation rate c
to a few kilowatts.”
	“Al would never okay it,” Aub protested. theory’s still got too many unknowns in it. SuF there’s some imbalance that you and Zim’s haven’t figured out yet, and the space integral unity. You might find that a lot more comes out you put in.” Aub was looking worried. “Any where were you thinking of focusing the r energy?”
	“Right there in the lab. I’m happy the integr unity.”
	“In the lab! Christ! Al will never buy that million years. Peter’d have the mother and fath all heart attacks.”
	“So we don’t tell them about it. We set it up and quiet and run it late one night like a ro
piece of overtime. What’s the matter—don’t you trust me any more?” Clifford was grinning in a crooked kind of way. “I thought you were supposed to be the adventurous one. Have a ball.”
	Aub stared as if Clifford had taken leave of his senses. He looked imploringly at Sarah, who was following the conversation, and threw out his hands.
	“It must be all these English females,” he said.
“He’s finally flipped. Brad, get this straight. There is absolutely no way I’m gonna come into the lab with you, late one night like some kinda crook or something, and run that kind of experiment.”

Four weeks later at about an hour before midnight, Clifford’s car eased to a halt outside the GRASER building of the Sudbury Institute. Two figures got out, presented their credentials to the police guards at the main door, and disappeared inside. By three in the morning the huge generators that supplied the GRASER were humming and the banks of equipment racks stacked around the reactor sphere were alive with patterns of winking lights. An array of heat sensors, radiation detectors, ionization counters and photomultiplier tubes had been positioned around a ten-foot-diameter circle that had been cleared near one of the walls, about thirty feet away from the sphere. Clifford and Aub were sitting at a control panel, facing the circle from behind the battery of instruments.
	Aub adjusted the parameters of the GRASER to produce just the faintest trickle of particles through the beam tube and into the reactor. Then he switched on the annihilation modulators. The readings on the display screens on either side of the panel confirmed that a microscopic reaction was taking place inside the sphere. The particles were disappearing out of
space to be transformed into hi-waves that propag instantly to every point in the universe, where subsequently reappeared as energy through secon reactions. So far, it was an everyday GRASER
	Clifford nodded. Working together, they started the sequence of specially written programs that had loaded into the system earlier that day. On one the additional modified modulators were swit in and brought up to operating power, compre~ the return energy into an ever-decreasing radius tered on the middle of the empty circle. The eu that would normally have been distributed infin:
mally sparsely throughout the whole of space was being focused within a volume no bigger than a b ball.
	The screens showed that the instruments were tecting radiation. Counters registered the ionizatic molecules of air. The infrared scanners indicated a in temperature. As Aub increased the beam p a fraction, dust particles began scurrying across floor of the lab toward the center of the circle, d] inward by the convection of the rising, heated ai cool breeze made itself felt on their skin.
	At higher power an incandescent glow appe~ elongated upward into a shimmering column of radiance by the rising currents. It burned dull rc the outside, changing through brighter shade~ orange to a core of brilliant yellow. Clifford and watched spellbound. They were witnessing somel that no men in history had seen before; energy materializing in space out of nothing, from a sc that lay thirty feet away—and it was traversing distance in between through a realm of existence lay beyond the dimensions of space and time.
	After a few minutes Clifford, having satisfied self that the recording instruments had capturec
erything, nodded and raised a hand. “That’ll do. Don’t take it any higher.”
	“Okay to cut?”
	“Yep. That just about does it.”
	Aub took the system through its shutdown sequence. The glow died from the center of the circle and silence gradually descended as one by one the huge machines became quiet and the last row of lights went out. Aub sat back and wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
	“Phew,” he said. “Okay, I’ll buy it—the space integral is unity. And you tried to tell me you weren’t a salesman. Jeez.” He shook his head.
	“C’mon, it wasn’t that risky and you know it,” Clifford taunted. “If it wasn’t unity, the detectors would have spotted an excess long before we wound the power up. There was no hazard really.”
	“Okay, you’ve made your point. We’ve proved we can focus the return energy. Now what?”
	At once Clifford’s grin snapped off and his mood became serious. “Tomorrow we talk to Al and Peter and put them in the picture,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now if there’s hell to pay because this is rapidly going to become a lot bigger than both of them. What Peter has to do is get in touch with Washington and fix us an appointment for as soon as he can with Foreshaw and his merry men.” He leaned across and slapped Aub on the shoulder. “You keep telling me I have to be a salesman, my friend. Okay—I, or, rather, we, are going to make the most mindblowing sale ever. No salesman ever walked into the Pentagon with anything like what we’ve got. They want bombs? We are going to give them a bigger damn bomb than they ever dreamed of!”
Chapter 19

	Clifford stood at the head of the large oval conference table and gazed along the line of unsmiling attentive faces. The Defense Secretary was seated at the far end with the rest—service chiefs, technical advisers, presidential aides, and defense planners—seated around on either side. Aub was at the end near Clifford, flanked by Morelli and Peter Hughes.
	“Long speeches are not my line,” Clifford began. His manner was unusually blunt and forthright. “The reason I’m standing here today is essentially to protest
—to protest at a society that perpetuates a system of values that are becoming insane. Throughout history man’s greatest enemies—from which practically all our other problems follow—have been two: ignorance and superstition. The most powerful weapon that man has developed to combat these enemies is science— the acquisition and harnessing of knowledge. And yet with every day that goes by, we see more and more science being used not to solve the problems of mankind but to aggravate them. Science is being progressively subordinated to the service of our lowest instincts.”
	He paused and looked around the room, half-. expecting to be interrupted. But although a few aghast stares were in evidence, everybody seemed too taken aback to voice any comment, so he continued. “I am
a scientist. I live in a world that is being torn apart by hatred and mistrust that I’ve had no part in making, and the reasons for them don’t interest me. The situation is the making of people I don’t know but who claim to act in my name. Those same people now presume the right to expect me to give up my own life in order to meet obligations that they feel I owe them. Just to make my position clear, I’ve never acknowledged any such obligations.”
	At the table, in front of where Clifford was standing, Morelli was massaging palms that were becoming moist. Next to him, Peter Hughes flinched and swallowed hard. A few sharp intakes of breath from around the room greeted Clifford’s opening remarks. The gathering was not accustomed to being formally addressed so bluntly, and yet there was something about Clifford’s compelling calm and poise—an assuredness of purpose that stemmed from somewhere deep inside him—that made them bite their tongues and hear him out. They sensed that the buildup was leading to something big.
	After a pause that had its desired effect, Clifford continued. “During the scientific Renaissance in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, men found out for the first time how to distinguish fact from fancy, truth from falsity, and reality from dreams. From genuine knowledge came inventiveness . . . industry
	intellectual freedom . . . affluence. Europe was unique among civilizations. This country was founded on that same tradition and our society was to be based on those same principles.” He paused again and made no attempt to hide the accusing light in his eyes as he took in the faces before him.
	Morelli hissed out of the corner of his mouth at Aub. “What’s he trying to do—get us all deported?”
	“He knows what he’s doing . . . I think,” Aub muttered.
	Clifford carried on, refusing to be distracted. “But the tradition has not been followed. The promise of the Renaissance has not been kept. The same ignorance and prejudices that were there before are still with us today, but disguised; they still have the same power to inspire fear and suspicion in men’s minds. First it was religious terror; today it’s political terror. Nothing’s changed. The knowledge that was gained and which should have become the birthright of all men has been perverted to more sinister ends, and the rest of the world has not been permitted to follow the path that Europe laid.”
	Nobody spoke while Clifford paused to drink from the water glass on the table in front of him. Foreshaw was regarding him through narrowed eyes, but had apparently elected to defer any verdict until he knew what this extraordinary address was leading up to. Clifford set the glass down and faced them once more.
	“The lesson of history is that what you don’t give, somebody will sooner or later take. Never mind the morality of it—those are the facts. The lesson is about to be repeated. The world is again all set to match brute force with brute force in an attempt to solve a problem that can’t be solved that way. Only wisdom and understanding can solve it.
	“I appreciate that nobody in this room made things turn out that way; neither did the government you represent. You’ve inherited the results of centuries of mismanagement, and you can’t go back in time and change what’s been done. Now it’s too late to worry about how it might have been different anyway. We’re stuck with it.
	“I am convinced that as things are, mankind has run itself into a blind alley. The world is paralyzed by
I I I~ ~ I~OIO IVIQ’.,I III I~


a military-technological deadlock that has existed on and off for over a hundred years. History has shown the futility of hoping that this deadlock will ever be dissolved by rational and civilized means, but while it continues to exist, there can be no meaningful progress for the world.”
	Clifford began pacing himself, getting ready to make his final point. “In other words it’s too late now to avoid the deadlock, because it’s happened, and it’s painfully obvious that it’s not going to go away. Even World War III won’t solve anything. All that’ll happen is that each side will wear the other to a standstill just as in 19 14—1918, and within fifty years the same situation will emerge all over again.”
	Clifford took a long pause to let his words sink in, and then drew a deep breath.
	“The only alternative then is that this deadlock must be smashed—smashed totally, finally, irrevocably and for all time! That’s what I am here to offer.”

A murmur of surprise ran around the room. Puzzled but intrigued frowns spread across their faces.
	“Up until now, the very fact that the deadlock has persisted has ruled out any such alternative. But today I can offer you a weapon more potent than anything previously dreamed possible—a weapon that will pale your missiles and your hydrogen bombs into insignificance and enable this deadlock to be ended once and for all.”
	He paused to allow his words time to take effect, and then resumed:
	“Make no mistake, I am not doing this for any reasons of loyalty, duty, ideology, or creed, or for any other such delusions. I am doing it because it is the only way left to restore science to a position of freedom and dignity, and to allow the human race a chance to
i	ne ~ienesis ~acnine

cast off finally the yoke that is driving it toward spiritual destruction. It seems to me ironically that the cure for mass insanity should be the ult insanity.
	“Gentlemen, you have repeatedly reaffirmed obligations to counter the threat to the Western that is posed by the alliance of nations and pledged to destroy it. By powers vested in you have sought to compel my involvement in this. well—so be it. I will place at your disposal the i of eliminating that threat permanently. This tin will finish it. If I am to be involved, it will be U nothing.” He looked around the audience and I let his eyes come to rest on Foreshaw. “That deal. Do you want me to go on?”
	Foreshaw returned the look and drummed hi gers on the table for a long time before replying.
	“I think you have to, Dr. Clifford,” he said q at last.
	“This had better be good,” breathed a glow ruddy-faced Air Force general seated three
farther along to his right.
	Clifford stepped forward and drew from a f lying on the table, a set of glossy, color computer i each measuring about a foot square. He held tli one up so that everybody could see the pattern o orange, from which a series of fuzzy, irregularly rectangles protruded upward against a backgrou black.
	“The New York City skyline,” he informed simply. He handed the plate to Aub and indicate it was to be passed around the table. It was fol by a whole series of familiar landmarks, geogi features and other oddments whose names h nounced one by one before passing them on. included the Rock of Gibraltar. Table Mount~
cross section of the Dardanelles Strait, city profiles of London, Paris, Peking, Bombay, and Sydney; a picture of the eighty-mile-thick slab of oceanic crust of Earth’s Pacific Plate plunging at the rate of seven centimeters per year down into the mantle beneath the Mariana Islands; a large iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean and a blob that represented the Americano-Russian Cosmos V space station, two thousand miles up.
	Excitement and awe began to mount.
	“Every one of those images was obtained at Sudbury, using the new Mark II system,” Clifford stated. “And we should be able to improve on these examples. Once the correct coordinates have been computed, they can be stored and recalled instantly at any time. So much for target identification and fire control. Now for the weapon itself.”
	Clifford scanned the faces assembled before him, then continued. “You may remember that the principles by which these pictures are formed involve a new kind of wave that is generated inside any piece of matter and which propagates instantly throughout ordinary space. In recent experiments, we have succeeded in transporting energy from one place to another, using those same principles . . . at least, you can think of it that way. And in the same way that we can select information from any point we choose to construct those images, so we can select precisely where in space that energy will be delivered.
	“Think what that means. In a thermonuclear explosion, the amount of nuclear material actually converted into energy is tiny—in the order of a fraction of 1 percent—and yet the results are devastating. In the process I am talking about, the effective conversion efficiency approaches 100 percent. From one central reactor capable of producing the power required, destructive forces of unprecedented strength can be
I II~ ~ I~~IO IVIW..,IIII I~



instantaneously directed and focused on to any ~ Earth’s surface or beyond.”
	The stares that fixed him had by now frozer wide-eyed masks of stunned incredulity. The Si when he paused, was absolute.
	“Furthermore, the means by which the targe being assailed would be completely undetectab any surveillance or defensive system that exists i world today. There is no method by which the we~ system I am describing could be interfered wi countered. Interception is impossible. As weape attack, the ICBM and the orbiting bomb are a~ moded as the battering ram.”
	A chorus of murmurings erupted from all ar Foreshaw waved for silence. “You’re saying that one single center, you could bomb any point on E surface . . . without the enemy even knowing you were doing it . . . without any way of an~ being able to stop you . . . ?“ His face register credulity. “A superbomb that just comes Iron where. . .
	Hughes stared aghast at Morelli as the words home to him. “What are we getting into?” he above the rising hubbub of excited voices. “Has gone mad?”
	“First I knew about this,” Morelli said, shakii head, bemused. “I knew those two had somethir
	but this. . .“
	“That’s exactly what i’m saying,” Clifford thun above the clamor. “It’ll not simply ‘bomb’ any poi Earth out of nowhere. .. . It’ll annihilate it! And. Earth, too . . . It’ll wipe out anything that corn side a thousand miles of this country. . . and the side will have no way of even knowing how doing it, let alone of stopping it. All their weapor their numbers count for nothing now. That’s ho’s
can smash this deadlock. That’s how you can~smash it once and for all!”
	When a semblance of order had returned to the room, Foreshaw had a question. “Dr. Clifford, what you’ve just told us sounds incredible. You are certain that a device of this nature could become a reality?”
	“Quite certain.”
	“You can see no fundamental reason why it couldn’t be built?”
	“None.” Clifford stood with his arms folded, composed and confident.
	“What do you envisage it would take to do it?” Foreshaw asked.
	“It would require a large power source to provide focusing energy—ideally a fusion reactor. There would be a matter-beam generating system feeding a black hole sustained in a more powerful and modified version of the Sudbury GRASER. For specific target location and fire control we’d need a detector arrangement bigger and better than the Mark II. I envisage that the Mark III detector system would require three BIACs running in parallel for adequate data processing and control.”
	“How long?” Foreshaw inquired.
	Clifford had evidently come prepared. Without any hesitation, he replied, “If nothing was spared in making the requisite resources available, I estimate that the system could be operational in one year.”

The four scientists from Sudbury stayed overnight in Washington and went back to the Pentagon next morning to answer further questions. Then they returned to Massachusetts while an advisory committee, specially Convened by the President, examined the proposal and studied the report that Clifford had prepared. Ten days later they were summoned back to Washington
I ne uenesis ivi~riiiie

to face the committee, restate the case, and a~ more questions. In the afternoon they met the dent.

Alexander George Sherman, President of the I. States, rose from his chair at the table in the House Cabinet Room and walked across to stai the window. He stayed there for a long time, co:
plating the scene outside, while he recapitulated in his mind the things he had learned during the] ous ten days. Behind him, still seated around the the four visitors from Sudbury, Vice President D Reyes, Defense Secretary William Foreshaw, anc cretary of State Melvin Chambers remained silet last the President pivoted on his heel and spoke 1 room from where he was standing, addressin words primarily to the four from 1SF.
	“Our latest intelligence reports and strategic casts do not paint a cheerful picture. The initial slowly but surely passing to the East, and once a c point is reached, a major outbreak of hostilitie be inevitable. The only thing that would avert global war would be the granting of a long I diplomatic, territorial, and political concessions I West.”
	“That would be just the beginning,” Chambe marked. “Once you set any precedents like thai simply get squeezed harder. The West would eitl slowly reduced to complete impotence, or forced t it out later anyway, but on less favorable terms.”
	“Hardly a long-term answer, then,” Peter U commented.
	“Precisely,” Chambers nodded. “Appeasem~ out.”
	“I must make a decision now,” Sherman s~ them. “I have three choices open to me. First—
now, strike first, and strike hard while the balance is more or less even. The consequences of that would be catastrophic for the world whatever the final outcome, and I’m sure I don’t have to spell them out. Second— I can do nothing. I can allow things to continue on their present course, in which case the end of free democracy as we understand it will be almost certain.” He moved a pace back toward the table. “The third thing I can do is stake everything on this new weapon that will require a year to become a reality. But the world will not stop turning for our convenience. If I stake my bet that way, I naturally wouldn’t want to run any risk of anything getting out of control during that year, before it was time to collect the winnings. In other words I’d be obliged to make whatever concessions the other side demanded. At the end of that year, if the bet didn’t pay and the weapon turned out to be a dud, I’d have allowed the whole world situation to tip against us, irreversibly, and I’d have nothing to show for it. If that happened, things could only snowball for the worse after that.” He walked back to his chair, sat down and regarded the others soberly.
	“The third choice sounds like a big gamble,” he said. “What evidence can you offer me to justify my taking it?”
	Silence reigned for a while. The circle of faces stared grimly at the table. At last, Clifford quietly supplied the answer. “You have nothing whatsoever to lose by it.”
	“How so, Dr. Clifford?” Sherman asked.
	“The weapon can either work or not work,” Clifford replied. “If it works, it can either be used or not used. If it’s used, it can either succeed or fail.” He swept his eyes round the table. “The logical consequences of those statements are that there is nothing to lose. If it doesn’t work or isn’t used, the result is no different
I Ii~ ~ iVIQ~..,IIIII~


from that of choice two. If it’s used but fails, the result is no worse than the worst-case of choice one. Either way, the West loses in the long term. . . . The only alternative to that is if the weapon is used and succeeds, and the only way of making that a possibility is to select choice three.”

Clifford and his colleagues stayed that night in Washington while the President and his staff conferred. The next day they returned to the White House to meet Sherman, Reyes, Foreshaw, and Chambers in the Cabinet Room again.
	“The decision is Go,” Sherman informed them. “You have first priority for whatever equipment, materials, personnel, funds, or other resources you need. Code name for the project is Jericho. It will commence at once. As I mentioned yesterday, we may be forced to make unpalatable decisions in the course of the next year or so; therefore our Western allies will have to be informed of the reasons.”
	Even before the 1SF scientists had left the White House, some of the presidential advisers had already dubbed the new weapon the J-bomb.
	On the plane back to Boston that night, Clifford’s mood was one of grim satisfaction. Aub, for once, seemed subdued and withdrawn.
	“What’s the matter?” Clifford asked him. “It’s what you’ve always said you wanted, isn’t it—unlimited government funds and resources. Why doesn’t it taste so good now?”
Chapter 20

	Once it had received official approval and been accorded highest priority, Jericho swung into motion with frightening speed. Home of the project was to be a place called Brunnermont, a complex of concrete and steel levels that went down for over a mile into solid rock beneath the Appalachians and which had originally been designed and built as a self-sufficient, bombproof survival center for VIPs and as a communications and command headquarters.
	Here the thermonuclear power plant that had been designed to keep Brunnermont functioning for decades if need be was modified and pressed into service to feed the fearsome beam of concentrated matter into the new reactor. A level above the generators and the reactor, in a specially redesigned and sealed off top-security zone, the Mark III fire-control and direction system slowly began to take shape. Above that was installed a full-scale strategic command nerve center linked into the network of global surveillance, defense, strike and counterstrike systems, integrated command centers and war rooms of all the Western allied nations.
	During the early months, Taiwan was invaded and Occupied without opposition from the West, apart from routine protests and denunciations. After a series of large-scale battles on the borders of India, appeals for Western support and intervention failed to produce any
decisive response. Encouraged by this demonstrat] apathy or indifference, political subversion and tion in that country rose to new heights of activit found many receptive ears among a people wh~ only impotence and betrayal beneath the idc preached by their own government and its fr Six months after the commencement of Jerich whole of India was engulfed in a bitter and s civil war. Hard-pressed at the front and harassed the rear, the border armies fell back to the Indus in the west and to Calcutta in the east. Predictab war had now become a “struggle for the liberati the oppressed peoples of India,” as the slogans of were once again shouted around the world. Air a on Indian cities became everyday news items; C2 burned under encircling laser siege-artillery; Bo Madras, and a score of other ports were blockad mine and submarine; famine and disease claimed dreds of thousands. The West did nothing.

The time came for those scientists from the In who had volunteered for and been accepted to on Jericho to bid farewell to Sudbury. With families they were moved into the residential sec the Brunnermont complex, where schooling, h( care, recreation, entertainment, and all the othe uisites of the modern style of living were pro They came to accept as normal ingredients in thei the discipline, the tight security measures and the lion from society that Brunnermont demanded. became a self-contained society-in-miniature of own, charged with the custody of the greatest sec all time, and sealed off from the world of pryin~ and ears by the electronically guarded three-mib perimeter zone, the Marine Corps and IF squads that flitted like phantoms among the gn
	I I 1.,	A’,fl ~ IVI(A’.#I III 1.i




of the surrounding hills, the gun pits that covered the approach roads and the silent, probing radar fingers that searched the skies above.
	The roles of Clifford and Aub somehow became interchanged. Aub, once the epitome of enthusiasm and energy, had grown reserved and apprehensive, fearful of this thing that had intruded upon and was now taking over their lives. Clifford became the tireless driving force, dominating the project and sparing nothing and nobody in his relentless determination to meet ever more demanding schedules. Everything he had ever been and everything he had once stood for seemed to have been sacrificed to the voracious and insatiable new god that was taking possession of his being.

Like an immense iceberg, the larger part of the Brunnermont complex lay submerged deep in the Precambrian heart of the Appalachian mountains with just its tip breaking the surface. From the air this tip had much of the appearance of a scenically sculptured ultramodern village, with knife-edge-styled houses, chalets, and communal buildings clustered but secluded amid a carefully balanced setting of trees, shrubs, pathways, and lawns, broken by the occasional ornamental pool or flower bed. All this was intended more to relieve the harshness of the reality that lay below ground for the colony of inhabitants and to make some concession to their need for psychological relaxation than to conceal the nature of the establishment. Even the most amateur photographic interpreters would soon have noticed the impenetrable perimeter defenses, the ramps down which the access roads descended to subterranean destinations protected by steel doors and the disproportionately high volume of aerial and road traffic that constantly ar
i ne uenesis iviacn~ne

rived and departed—though these things would reveal nothing of the installation’s true purpose.
	One evening, some months after their arrival at Brunnermont, Aub and Sarah were strolling among the trees in a shady corner of the so-called village, enjoying the scents and the freshness carried down from the hills on the first cool breezes of autumn. Had it been another time, another place, it would have been a dreamland. As things were, their mood was heavy and strained.
	“Why did it all have to turn out this way, Aub?” Sarah asked, after several minutes of silence.
	“Mmm. What?”
	“You, me, Brad. . . us. This thing that’s happened. I mean . . . I know what’s happened . . . but I still don’t really understand why.”
	“Yeah . . . I know what you mean.” The ebullient Aub of earlier days was gone.
	“I was thinking about it all earlier today,” she said, kicking a stone absently. “How different it all used to be. Do you remember when you first came marching into our house, the one we had in New Mexico .
the day that Brad quit that job at ACRE? We never laugh now the way we used to laugh then. . . . You and Brad used to get drunk every night . . . we all went out together. Remember?”
	“I remember.”
	“What happened to those three people?”
	Aub stared at the ground in front of his slowly pacing feet as he sought a reply that would neither hurt nor deceive.
	“I guess. . . they had to grow up sometime.”
	“But it’s not a question of growing up, is it? We were always grown-up enough; that wasn’t so very long ago. It’s more of a change. Brad has changed. He isn’t the Brad we used to know any more. And
his changing is making us change. I thought I knew him, Aub, but I don’t. I don’t know what made him change so suddenly.”
	They stopped and stared out across the pool to which the path had led them. On the porch of a chalet on the opposite side somebody was bobbing gently back and forth in a rocking chair. The strains of pop music came floating across the water.
	“He’s doing the only thing he can to preserve the way of life he believes in, I suppose,” Aub said. “At least, that’s how he sees it.”
	“But it’s not what he believes in. He’s never wanted any part of all this before. He’d have died first. He always said that one human life was too much to pay for all the causes in the world put together. That was the Brad I knew. And now . . .“ she cast an arm about her to take in their whole surroundings, “this. Everything you can see is part of one huge, horrible machine that’s being built for the sole purpose of slaughtering people by the millions. And Brad has done it all.” She raised a hand to her lips and bit her knuckle.
	“Yeah, I know,” Aub said quietly. “C’mon, let’s move on. It’s getting chilly.”
	They walked on, taking a fork in the path that led toward the warm, homely glow among the shrubbery that marked the position of the bar and social club.
	“What about you?” she asked. “You don’t seem happy about the whole thing either, and yet you still play a big part in it. Why, Aub? Why do you choose to stay mixed up in it?”
	“Why don’t I just quit?”
	“If you like.”
	He scratched his head for a moment and pulled a face.
	“Well . . . I suppose I don’t really have much of a
choice any more. When I signed the papers t Jericho, they said it was for the duration. Eve. decided I didn’t want to work on the projec longer, I can’t see my being let out to walk the s not knowing what I know now. So . . .“ he shri “might as well press on. At least I’m busy. Guc go nuts otherwise.”
	They stopped again outside the clubhouse. I music from Brunnermont’s own Marine comb4 coming through the open window.
	“Is that really the only reason?” she asked, reflected for a while.
	“Not really,” he admitted. “There is som else . . . kinda difficult to put into words, you It’s just that I still feel the old Brad down there 1 neath somewhere. I just can’t see him letting J be used for real. Somehow there has to be a bil behind all his bravado . . . something he’s figur that he hasn’t told even me about. All the time feeding him the dope on what was happeni Berkeley, he never once let me get implicated and we didn’t really know each other then. F came across right from the start as the kinda gr can trust—know what I mean? I felt I could tru then, and I was right. It may sound crazy, but feel I can now.”
	“If you knew how much I needed to hear y that.” A shadow of her old smile brightened he a fraction. “Come on—let’s go inside. I’ll allow:
buy me a drink and, if you’re very good, to ha honor of a dance.”
Chapter 21

	One year and one month had gone by since Jericho was conceived. Deep in its rocky womb the fetus was now fully formed, its nuclear heart beating strongly. A miniature flying armada from Washington converged on Brunnermont, bringing the fathers to witness the birth.
	In fact, a number of test firings of the J-bomb had already been successfully made; this was to be the first to be at all public.
	As a prelude, Morelli conducted the deputation of Pentagon officials and Army, Navy, and Air Force senior officers on a guided tour of the restricted, lowermost levels of the complex. He showed them the duplicated system of fusion reactors and generating equipment, capable of sustaining all the machines in Brunnermont independently of outside sources of power for years, although under normal circumstances demands could be met from the national distribution grid. He explained that the amount of matter that was actually fed via the beam into the annihilation chamber of the J-reactor was really quite small; it was the technique employed for modulating, controlling, and focusing the delivery of the return energy through hispace—in order to achieve adequate accuracy of aiming the weapon—that required such enormous amounts of power.