The God Machine Page 5

  7

  I was almost afraid to answer. The whole thing was overwhelming. Tom Smythe and four scientists sat around a huge oak table in a conference room. Through a far window I could see the white spire of the Washington Monument, but I paid it only a brief glance. Smythe, with great deliberation, had just offered me the opportunity to program what was, from his description, the most advanced cybernetics complex ever known. It didn't seem real. Cloud castles never do, I suppose. Smythe offered mine on a silver platter.

  If I took it, of course.

  If I took it?

  Hesitancy stayed my voice. I looked around the room, back to Smythe. His expression remained inscrutable. The four men with him were warm, friendly. So far they hadn't contributed much. There were some pleasant words about the need for a new approach to carry on the work they had originated "some years back." That was all.

  Smythe described the cybernetics program only vaguely. He brushed aside my questions with the brusque comment that at this moment I didn't require further details. I'd never seen him like this before.

  He had made it clear to me that I must decide about accepting a position beyond my wildest dreams—before I left this room.

  That's what nagged at the back of my mind. I wouldn't—I couldn't—refuse such an offer. Smythe knew this. So why the pressure? There wasn't anything definite; a subtle touch. But I could almost sense what felt like maneuvering, and—

  I tried to shake off the feeling. What the devil was wrong with me? These people had accepted me, accepted my qualifications, were paying me an honor and . . . well, I was acting like a clod.

  Dr. Arthur Cartwright—the esteemed Dr. Cartwright—mistook my preoccupation. He leaned forward, speaking softly, convincingly. "Your exposure to cybernetics during the past several years, young man," he said, "has been rather extraordinary. You have been enabled to study, to think, and to reason on this subject in a manner never before available to someone of your years." The man to his right nodded in agreement. "When I consider your capabilities in the mathematics and cybernetics sciences,"

  he went on, "I confess I am delighted. I am delighted with the promise we see in you. We have put our best years into this, ah, this program, Mr. Rand," he said, and again I caught that vague steering away from specifics. Dr. Cartwright chose his words carefully. "It would seem that many things have joined at this particular crossroads, that you will be enabled to utilize, also in a manner unprecedented, the benefits of our labors."

  What Dr. Cartwright said was absolutely true. I knew that, appreciated the words.

  And a great deal hasn't been said. . . . The vague uncertainty gnawed at my thoughts.

  I let my gaze drift from one scientist to the other and returned finally to Tom Smythe. Not a muscle on his face moved as he met and held my eyes.

  "There's an old expression," I said slowly, "that would appear to fit this moment."

  Smythe waited. I extended my right hand to him. "When do I start?"

  Immediately his face creased in a broad smile, and he grasped my hand. "Right now," he said. "Let me tell you about Project 79."

  I never much gave a damn for security. I thought from the viewpoint of a scientist, and as far as I was concerned security was something to avoid like the plague. Now it came home to roost, a beady-eyed vulture digging into my shoulder.

  "Security," Smythe was saying. "From this moment on, it's a part of your life. Twenty-four hours a day."

  I kept my silence. I don't like vultures in any guise.

  "Project 79 is big, Steve," Smythe went on. "So big it makes a piddling little effort out of what we did back in World War II with the Manhattan Project. To create the first atomic bomb this country gambled two billion dollars. We thought we'd never see a single-point effort greater than that. We were wrong. Right across the board this show is costing the taxpayers a cool fourteen billion dollars, and that's for a stretch of only eight years . . ."

  What the devil could involve fourteen billion?

  ". . . and as an employee of the National Security Agency the 'need to know' rule is always in effect. Always," Smythe emphasized. "That goes for you and for everyone else. I'm trying to make it clear that we consider 79 to have implications that, as you of all people should know, may decide the path along which future sociological patterns will move. We believe this to be the single most important effort of its kind in this country. . . ."

  Before he said another word, pieces began to fall into shape, shadows assumed substance, and I found conclusions assembling within my head. You can extrapolate certain points. If you're familiar with the science, with the engineering and the working elements, and most of all the potential, then you need only a few pieces to clarify the picture. Tom had just done that for me.

  The potential of bio-cybernetics in the Soviet Union had been recognized to an extent greater than I'd ever realized. Once recognized, it had been evaluated.

  But security was a patchwork. It couldn't hold back the floodwaters of original thought. No matter what nation was involved.

  Tom Smythe studied my reaction to his words. He gestured impatiently, obviously displeased with my lack of fervent attention to his security dissertation. "You really aren't taking all this to heart, are you, Steve?"

  I shrugged. "You know I'm not," I admitted. "That's hardly the most original or exciting plot you're spelling out, you know."

  "Go on."

  "I've never yet known of a security wall," I said, "that could keep out ideas, or that would prevent two men in different parts of the world, working on the same problem, from coming up with the same answers."

  He waved a hand wearily to turn me off. "Hold it, hold it," he said with the first touch of exasperation I had ever seen in him. "If I've heard that bleating of the sacred cow once, I've heard it a thousand times. I've heard it from the young pups and I've heard it from the old and experienced scientific minds, and you all prattle the same blindness."

  I felt the heat rising to my face. "Meaning exactly what?" I snapped.

  "Meaning, my young Horatio guarding the bridge of science, you don't see the full picture."

  "Don't patronize me, damn it," I said angrily.

  "Oh, I'm not," Smythe said with a cutting tone to his voice. "But if you'll listen to yourself for just a moment, you'll see that you approach this from the viewpoint of classical science. And empirical conclusions are distressingly useless in my business." He shifted in his seat and, damn him, he was patronizing me! But there was no stopping him now.

  "You ignore reality," he said coldly. "You ignore the fact that science is something developed by man and that it's a product of man and, also, that man is a very curious creature. Not simply curious in terms of seeking out the meaning of things, but curiouser and curiouser, like Alice in Wonderland, in respect to the way his fellowman behaves. And why."

  He sucked on a pipe gone cold, and wiped his mouth. "I don't know where these fairy tales come from," he said with a grimace. "Today's scientific achievements aren't the product of someone piddling around in a laboratory. A half-million people are working for ten years so that two men can stumble about on that lifeless cinder we call the moon. That adds up to thirty billion dollars and fifteen hundred industries. But it's not your precious laboratory science—it's engineering, management, a chunk of the Gross National Product, and above all, it's competition between—"

  He broke off his own words and looked at me carefully. "To you the atomic bomb is a matter of history, isn't it?" He didn't wait for an answer to a rhetorical question. "To you and your generation," he said slowly, "it all boils down to that moment in 1942 when we started the first chain reaction in a uranium pile." He scratched his cheek, again studying me. "It was a scientific effort, a great moment in history, eh?

  A shining pinnacle to what science can do. Isn't that it?"

  I was furious with him. Smythe was at it again, patronage in his voice. "You're playing games," I said, fighting to keep my voice down. "Of course it was—"


  His fist crashed against the table, overturning an ashtray and scattering ashes and butts all about him. He paid it no heed.

  "Science, my eye!" he said. "The program to build the atomic bomb came about because some people got scared that Germany was going to build the damned thing first. European scientists who were scared out of their pants ran to Albert Einstein with the news that Germany had started to build a nuclear weapon. Einstein threw the weight of his reputation behind the group, and they kicked off a letter to Roosevelt. Science didn't have a triple-damned thing to do with it!

  "Germany and the atom bomb added up to a Nazi world. Period. So we pulled out the plug and wrote a check for two billion dollars, and we whipped up the greatest technical and engineering package the world had ever seen. The gaseous-diffusion plants at Oak Ridge were thirty years ahead of their time, and there was the real miracle. The rest of it"—he gestured with disdain—"was so much fancy carpentry and machine-shop work. And if you want a capper to it, Horatio-at-the-Bridge, it's that the German scientists, as good as any, never even came close to perfecting the bomb. The way they were going, it would have taken them a hundred years even to approach what they wanted."

  An uncomfortable silence rose between us. Smythe deliberately let the silence continue, while he puffed his pipe into life.

  "Let me bring you up to date," he said finally, his voice softened, under complete control again.

  "The Russians were decades behind us in 1945. Yet four years later they had built their first atomic bomb. They had a neat combination going for them—victory, a brilliant espionage system, and a mortal terror of the future. Being brutalized by Germany established that last attitude. So they ignored their backwardness. We had already proved the bomb could be built. Science could be put aside. Four years later they had the bomb. Because they knew they were starting out on the right track."

  He brushed ashes from his jacket. "That's precisely the situation we face right now."

  That caught me unawares. "How do you mean that?" I asked.

  "We both know a great deal about the status of mathematics and cybernetics in the Soviet Union.

  Agreed?"

  I nodded.

  "I also know one hell of a lot more than do you about their history and their overall scientific structure and their rate of progress. I am impressed," he stressed. "What's more, I'm frightened by their potential. When I add up their political system and that potential, I get very frightened.

  "That's why I reject your patent nonsense about separate investigations in different parts of the world leading inevitably to the same conclusion. We do not live in an empirical world. As a scientist you appear to forget the indispensable element in your picture that's so neatly tied up in red ribbons."

  I didn't bother to ask him for an explanation. It was coming. I knew I was being read off, and Tom Smythe was doing it his own way and in his own sweet time. . . .

  You're forgetting the causative factor," he said. "You're forgetting the compulsion, the motivation, the urgency. Before any scientist can discover new worlds and new truths, someone must foot the bill.

  Do you understand that?

  "It's a political decision. It has damned little to do with science! Someone must convince the people in charge of the purse strings to let loose of a few billion dollars or rubles or whatever it is you use this week to pay the grocery bill."

  He took a deep breath.

  "We don't want to give the Soviets a really compelling reason to throw everything they have behind the kind of program we call Project 79."

  He studied my expression. "That's where security comes in, why it's so vital to Project 79."

  "But I've seen what they're doing in cybernetics!" I protested. "They're going full out—"

  Smythe's hand gestured to cut me off. "No, they aren't," he broke in. "We don't believe they're even close to 79."

  I stared at him.

  "If the Russians had any idea," he continued, "despite everything they've done to date, that we have plunged on a maximum bio-cybernetics effort, a single program that costs more than what both countries have spent in this field over the past thirty years, well, that could tear it. They'd pick up the scent and go after this with everything in their power.

  "We have an advantage—slight, perhaps even temporary— but still a real advantage. They don't know what we're doing, and we know as well as do they, perhaps better, just how frightening is their potential through a truly advanced cybernetics system. They're doing a great deal. But they're not doing everything they could do and they don't know just what we're up to.

  "We want to keep it that way.

  "Because this could just possibly be the deadliest weapon ever to hit the human race."

  And I was going to be right in the middle of it all.

  8

  even through a high-reaching late-afternoon haze, from ninety miles away I first saw the great mountain ridges of mid-Colorado, an imposing chain with peaks soaring twelve thousand feet high.

  I looked down at a large lake just forward of the wing. Almost at the same moment the horizon tilted as the pilot altered course. "Lake Meredith," he said without waiting for the question. "We'll hold about 290 degrees for a while now." He glanced at the instrument panel before him and grunted in satisfaction. I watched the great peaks gaining substance as our speed sliced away distance. I couldn't remain still. I kept looking ahead of us, to the sides, down at the huge expanse of earth thousands of feet below.

  I knew we were flying to Colorado Springs. But our specific destination remained clouded within a shrug and an enigmatic smile. Finally I quit pushing Tom Smythe for answers; after all, the government had provided us a beautiful twin-engine executive airplane, and it was a great trip. When the pilot, Derek Rathman, invited me into the right seat in the cockpit, I scrambled forward.

  It was marvelous. After hours of floating gently through an ocean of haze and infrequent clouds, I was still captured with the sweeping vista of our flight. Being up front put an entirely new perspective on everything. I didn't realize just how glued I was to the panorama unfolding before us until Rathman chuckled. "Sort of gets you, doesn't it?" He smiled, sharing with me his own feelings.

  "I've never seen anything like it," I admitted.

  He gestured to indicate the approaching mountains. At first the ridges had been only a thin line against the sun's glare. Now I saw not a single skeletal backbone of mountains, but separate ranges and lines of peaks.

  "See that big fellow? Over there?" Rathman pointed. "Pikes Peak."

  I studied the outline of the great shape.

  "Almost as high as the Matterhorn," Rathman added.

  I looked at him in surprise. He laughed. "No one believes it at first," he said. "The ground, I mean, beneath us and up to the foothills of the Rockies. About five to six thousand feet above sea level. Makes these peaks seem smaller than they are. The Matterhorn is, um, only about five hundred feet higher than Pikes Peak."

  I shook my head; I'd always thought of the Matterhorn in Switzerland as a colossal mountain, and—

  "See over there?" Rathman pointed again. "Whole bunch higher than Pikes. There's Crestone, Shavano, Harvard, Elbert, Grays, just to name a few. That can be pretty rough country if you lose an engine."

  He turned back to his instruments. I notched my belt tighter as the airplane rocked sharply. We were only fifty miles or so from the great line of giants. The winds tumbling from those jagged walls slapped at the airplane.

  I glanced at the altimeter—10,500 feet. Rathman said that the ground came up to six thousand feet, which meant we were only a mile above the terrain immediately below. What had been a drab desert surface became an ocean with long stretching swells. Green appeared in a subtle shift of hues.

  Now, swiftly, the earth altered its texture until even the gentle swell of land vanished, replaced with a rich green carpet.

  Clouds streamed from the peaks of the Rockies, spreading great shadows along the earth.

  Abru
ptly the surface changed again; I saw the corrosive action where water had torn down from the ridges. Gullies, beds of streams, buttes, gulches; hand carvings of nature sharp and distinct. Then there appeared the first waves of rich forests along the slopes, crowding the buttes.

  Except for the red and brown of the buttes, all else remained a landscape of kaleidoscopic green.

  Smythe came forward to the cockpit, standing between myself and Rathman, looking over our shoulders.

  "Something, isn't it?" he said quietly.

  I nodded.

  "It gets better," he promised.

  I caught my first sight of the Air Force Academy, a gleam of buildings along the south flanks of the Rampart Range. At this point the turbulence increased sharply. Rathman banked toward the ridges, into the sun, turning the Rampart slopes an opaque wall to the eye. Buffeted wildly, rushing into darkness. I found my hands clutching the seat armrests. Tom saw the involuntary gesture, and laughed.

  Moments later, rolling out of the turn, I saw a small town along a road between high peaks.

  "Manitou Springs," Smythe said, pointing. "Look over there, Steve," he added quickly. "Garden of the Gods. One of the great sights of this country."

  He was right. Rock formations brilliant in color, a surface writhing and twisting. The earth became flecked with gold and spattered with green, revealed tan and brown, blazed gloriously with red pinnacles that loomed obelisk-fashion from a tortured soil. A series of weirdly carved monuments flashed into sight, razored ridges flat along their sides. I stared at spires and angled formations, all rich with color, majestic to the eye.

  "Deke, take her up a bit," Smythe said to Rathman, his words a sudden intrusion. Smythe glanced at me. "I want you to get the general layout of the area."

  I nodded, waiting. "Okay," he said, pointing, "there's Manitou Springs, and Colorado Springs."

  The city slipped from view beneath the wings. "Ahead of us," Smythe gestured again, "Peterson Field.

  Main civil airport hereabouts; services the Academy as well as the local communities."