This was their final day in the city, and all the participants in the Congo expedition described a similar reaction: the city, which had been so mysterious before, was somehow stripped of its mystery. On this morning, they saw the city for what it was: a cluster of crumbling old buildings in a hot stinking uncomfortable jungle.
They all found it tedious, except for Munro. Munro was worried.
Elliot was bored, talking about verbalizations and why he wanted tape recordings, and whether it was possible to preserve a brain from one of the apes to take back with them. It seemed there was some academic debate about where language came from; people used to think language was a development of animal cries, but now they knew that animal barks and cries were controlled by the limbic system of the brain, and that real language came from some other part of the brain called Broca’s area. . . . Munro couldn’t pay attention. He kept listening to the distant rumbling of Mukenko.
Munro had firsthand experience with volcanoes; he had been in the Congo in 1968, when Mbuti, another of the Virunga volcanoes, erupted. When he had heard the sharp explosions the day before, he had recognized them as bromides, the unexplained accompaniments of coming earthquakes. Munro had assumed that Mukenko would soon erupt, and when he had seen the flickering laser beam the night before, he had known there was new rumbling activity on the upper slopes of the volcano.
Munro knew that volcanoes were unpredictable—as witnessed by the fact that this ruined city at the base of an active volcano had been untouched after more than five hundred years. There were recent lava fields on the mountain slopes above, and others a few miles to the south, but the city itself was spared. This in itself was not so remarkable—the configuration of Mukenko was such that most eruptions occurred on the gentle south slopes. But it did not mean that they were now in any less danger. The unpredictability of volcanic eruptions meant that they could become life-threatening in a matter of minutes. The danger was not from lava, which rarely flowed faster than a man could walk; it would take hours for lava to flow down from Mukenko’s summit. The real danger from volcanic eruptions was ash and gas.
Just as most people killed by fires actually died from smoke inhalation, most deaths from volcanoes were caused by asphyxiation from dust and carbon monoxide. Volcanic gases were heavier than air, the Lost City of Zinj, located in a valley, could be filled in minutes with a heavy, poisonous atmosphere, should Mukenko discharge a large quantity of gas.
The question was how rapidly Mukenko was building toward a major eruptive phase. That was why Munro was so interested in Amy’s reactions: it was well known that primates could anticipate geological events such as earthquakes and eruptions. Munro was surprised that Elliot, babbling away about freezing gorilla brains, didn’t know about that. And he was even more surprised that Ross, with her extensive geological knowledge, did not regard the morning ash-fall as the start of a major volcanic eruption.
Ross knew a major eruption was building. That morning, she had routinely tried to establish contact with Houston; to her surprise, the transmission keys immediately locked through. After the scrambler notations registered, she began typing in field updates, but the screen went blank, and flashed:
HUSTN STAIN OVRIDE CLR BANX.
This was an emergency signal; she had never seen it before on a field expedition. She cleared the memory banks and pushed the transmit button. There was a burst transmission delay, then the screen printed:
COMPUTR DESIGNATN MAJR ERUPIN SIGNATR MU-KENKO ADVIS LEAV SITE NOW EXPEDN JEPRDY DANGR REPET ALL LEAV SITE NOW.
Ross glanced across the campsite. Kahega was making breakfast; Amy squatted by the fire, eating a roasted banana (she had got Kahega to make special treats for her); Munro and Elliot were having coffee. Except for the black ashfall, it was a perfectly normal morning at the camp. She looked back at the screen.
MAJR ERUPTN SIGNATR MUKENKO ADVIS LEAV SITE NOW.
Ross glanced up at the smoking cone of Mukenko. The hell with it, she thought. She wanted the diamonds, and she had gone too far to quit now.
The screen blinked: PLS SIGNL REPLY.
Ross turned the transmitter off.
As the morning progressed they felt several sharp jolting earth tremors, which released clouds of dust from the crumbling buildings. The rumblings of Mukenko became more frequent. Ross paid no attention. “It just means this is elephant country,” she said. That was an old geological adage: “If you’re looking for elephants, go to elephant country.” Elephant country meant a likely spot to find whatever minerals you were looking for. “And if you want diamonds,” Ross said, shrugging, “you go to volcanoes.”
The association of diamonds with volcanoes had been recognized for more than a century, but it was still poorly understood. Most theories postulated that diamonds, crystals of pure carbon, were formed in the intense heat and pressure of the upper mantle one thousand miles beneath the earth’s surface. The diamonds remained inaccessible at this depth except in volcanic areas where rivers of molten magma carried them to the surface.
But this did not mean that you went to erupting volcanoes to catch diamonds being spewed out, Most diamond mines were at the site of extinct volcanoes, in fossilized cones called kimberlite pipes, named for the geological formations in Kimberley, South Africa. Virunga, near the geologically unstable Rift Valley, showed evidence of continuous volcanic activity for more than fifty million years. They were now looking for the same fossil volcanoes which the earlier inhabitants of Zinj had found.
Shortly before noon they found them, halfway up the hills east of the city—a series of excavated tunnels running into the mountain slopes of Mukenko.
Elliot felt disappointed. “I don’t know what I was expecting,” he said later, “but it was just a brown-colored tunnel in the earth, with occasional bits of dull brown rock sticking out. I couldn’t understand why Ross got so excited.” Those bits of dull brown rock were diamonds; when cleaned, they had the transparency of dirty glass.
“They thought I was crazy,” Ross said, “because I began jumping up and down. But they didn’t know what they were looking at.”
In an ordinary kimberilte pipe, diamonds were distributed sparsely in the rock matrix. The average mine recovered only thirty-two karats—a fifth of an ounce—for every hundred tons of rock removed. When you looked down a diamond mine-shaft, you saw no diamonds at all. But the Zinj mines were lumpy with protruding stones. Using his machete, Munro dug out six hundred karats. And Ross saw six or seven stones protruding from the wall, each as large as the one Munro had removed. “Just looking,” she said later, “I could see easily four or five thousand karats. With no further digging, no separation, nothing. Just sitting there. It was a richer mine than the Premier in South Africa. It was unbelievable.”
Elliot asked the question that had already formed in Ross’s own mind. “If this mine is so damn rich,” he said, “why was it abandoned?”
“The gorillas got out of control,” Munro said. “They staged a coup.” He was laughing, plucking diamonds out of the rock.
Ross had considered that, as she had considered Elliot’s earlier suggestion that the city had been wiped out by disease. She thought a less exotic explanation was likely. “I think,” she said, “that as far as they were concerned, the diamond mines had dried up.” Because as gemstones, these crystals were very poor indeed—blue, streaked with impurities.
The people of Zinj could not have imagined that five hundred years in the future these same worthless stones would be more scarce and desirable than any other mineral resources on the planet.
“What makes these blue diamonds so valuable?”
“They are going to change the world,” Ross said, in a soft voice. “They are going to end the nuclear age.”
2. War at the Speed of Light
IN JANUARY, 1979, TESTIFYING BEFORE THE Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, General Franklin F. Martin of the Pentagon Advanced Research Project Agency said, “In 1939, at the start of World War II, the most important country in the world to the American military effort was the Belgian Congo.” Martin explained that as a kind of “accident of geography” the Congo, now Zaire, has for forty years remained vital to American interests—and will assume even more importance in the future. (Martin said bluntly that “this country will go to war over Zaire before we go to war over any Arab oil state.”)
During World War II, in three highly secret shipments, the Congo supplied the United States with uranium used to build the atomic bombs exploded over Japan. By 1960 the U.S. no longer needed uranium, but copper and cobalt were strategically important. In the 1970s the emphasis shifted to Zaire’s reserves of tantalum, wolframite, germanium— substances vital to semi conducting electronics. And in the 1980s, “so-called Type IIb blue diamonds will constitute the most important military resource in the world”—and the presumption was that Zaire had such diamonds. In General Martin’s view, blue diamonds were essential because “we are entering a time when the brute destructive power of a weapon will be less important than its speed and intelligence.”
For thirty years, military thinkers had been awed by intercontinental ballistic missiles. But Martin said that “ICBMs are crude weapons. They do not begin to approach the theoretical limits imposed by physical laws. According to Einsteinian physics, nothing can happen faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second. We are now developing high-energy pulsed lasers and particle beam weapons systems which operate at the speed of light. In the face of such weapons, ballistic missiles traveling a mere 17,000 miles an hour are slow-moving dinosaurs from a previous era, as inappropriate as cavalry in World War I, and as easily eliminated.”
Speed-of-light weapons were best suited to space, and would first appear in satellites. Martin noted that the Russians had made a “kill” of the American spy satellite VV/ 02 as early as 1973; in 1975, Hughes Aircraft developed a rapid aiming and firing system which locked onto multiple targets, firing eight high-energy pulses in less than one second. By 1978, the Hughes team had reduced response time to fifty nanoseconds—fifty billionths of a second—and increased beam accuracy to five hundred missile knockdowns in less than one minute. Such developments presaged the end of the ICBM as a weapon.
“Without the gigantic missiles, miniature, high-speed computers will be vastly more important in future conflicts than nuclear bombs, and their speed of computation will be the single most important factor determining the outcome of World War III. Computer speed now stands at the center of the armament race, as megaton power once held the center twenty years ago.
“We will shift from electronic circuit computers to light circuit computers simply because of speed—the Fabry-Perot Interferometer, the optical equivalent of a transistor, can respond in 1 picosecond (10 12 seconds), at least 1,000 times faster than the fastest Josephson junctions.” The new generation of optical computers, Martin said, would be dependent on the availability of Type IIb boron-coated diamonds.
Elliot recognized at once the most serious consequence of the speed-of-light weapons—they were much too fast for human comprehension. Men were accustomed to mechanized
warfare, but a future war would be a war of machines in a
startlingly new sense: machines would actually govern the moment-to-moment course of a conflict which lasted only minutes from start to finish.
In 1956, in the waning years of the strategic bomber, military thinkers imagined an all-out nuclear exchange lasting 12 hours. By 1963, ICBMs had shrunk the time course to 3 hours. By 1974, military theorists were predicting a war that lasted just 30 minutes, yet this “half-hour war” was vastly more complex than any earlier war in human history.
In the 1950s, if the Americans and the Russians launched all the bombers and rockets at the same moment, there would still be no more than 10,000 weapons in the air, attacking and counterattacking. Total weapons interaction events would peak at 15,000 in the second hour. This represented the impressive figure of 4 weapons interactions every second around the world.
But given diversified tactical warfare, the number of weapons and “systems elements” increased astronomically. Modern estimates imagined 400 million computers in the field, with total weapons interactions at more than 15 billion in the first half hour of war. This meant there would be 8 million weapons interactions every second, in a bewildering ultrafast conflict of aircraft, missiles; tanks, and ground troops.
Such a war was only manageable by machines; human response times were simply too slow. World War HI would not be a push-button war because as General Martin said, “It takes too long for a man to push the button—at least 1.8 seconds, which is an eternity in modem warfare.”
This fact created what Martin called the “rock problem.” Human responses were geologically slow, compared to a high-speed computer. “A modern computer performs 2,000,000 calculations in the time it takes a man to blink. Therefore, from the point of view of computers fighting the next war, human beings will be essentially fixed and unchanging elements, like rocks. Human wars have never lasted long enough to take into account the rate of geological change. In the future, computer wars will not last long enough to take into account the rate of human change.”
Since human beings responded too slowly, it was necessary for them to relinquish decision-making control of the war to the faster intelligence of computers. “In the coming war, we must abandon any hope of regulating the course of the conflict. If we decide to ‘run’ the war at human speed, we will almost surely lose, Our only hope is to put our trust in machines. This makes human judgment, human values, human thinking utterly superfluous. World War III will be war by proxy: a pure war of machines, over which we dare exert no influence for fear of so slowing the decision-making mechanism as to cause our defeat.” And the final, crucial transition—the transition from computers working at nanoseconds to computers working at picoseconds—was dependent on Type IIb diamonds.
Elliot was appalled by this prospect of turning control over to the creations of men.
Ross shrugged. “It’s inevitable,” she said. “In Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, there are traces of a house two million years old. The hominid creature wasn’t satisfied with caves and other natural shelters; he created his own accommodations. Men have always altered the natural world to suit their purposes.”
“But you can’t give up control,” Elliot said.
“We’ve been doing it for centuries,” Ross said. “What’s a domesticated animal—or a pocket calculator—except an attempt to give up control? We don’t want to plow fields or do square roots so we turn the job over to some other intelligence, which we’ve trained or bred or created.”
“But you can’t let your creations take over.”
“We’ve been doing it for centuries,” Ross repeated. “Look: even if we refused to develop faster computers, the Russians would. They’d be in Zaire right now looking for diamonds, if the Chinese weren’t keeping them out. You can’t stop technological advances. As soon as we know something is possible, we have to carry it out.”
“No,” Elliot said. “We can make our own decisions. I won’t be a part of this.”
“Then leave,” she said. “The Congo’s no place for academics, anyway.”
She began unpacking her rucksack, taking out a series of white ceramic cones, and a number of small boxes with antennae. She attached a box to each ceramic cone, then entered the first tunnel, placed the cones flat against the walls, moving deeper into darkness.
Peter not happy Peter.
“No,” Elliot said. Why not happy’
“It’s hard to explain, Amy,” he said.
Peter tell Amy good gorilla.
“I know, Amy.”
Karen Ross emerged from one tunnel, and disappeared into the second. Elliot saw the glow of her flashlight as she placed the cones, and then she was hidden from view.
Munro came out into the sunlight, his pockets bulging with diamonds. “Where’s Ross?”
“In the tunnels.”
“Doing what?”
“Some kind of explosive test, looks like.” Elliot gestured to the three remaining ceramic cones on the ground near her pack.
Munro picked up one cone, and turned it over. “Do you know what these are?” he asked.
Elliot shook his head.
“They’re RCs,” Munro said, “and she’s out of her mind to place them here. She could blow the whole place apart.”
Resonant conventionals, or RCs, were timed explosives, a potent marriage of microelectronic and explosive technology. “We used RCs two years ago on bridges in Angola,”
Munro explained. “Properly sequenced, six ounces of explosive can bring down fifty tons of braced structural steel. You need one of those sensors”—he gestured to a control box lying near her pack—”which monitors shock waves from the early charges, and detonates the later charges in the timed sequence to set up resonating waves which literally shake the structure to pieces. Very impressive to see it happen.” Munro glanced up at Mukenko, smoking above them.
At that moment, Ross emerged from the tunnel, all smiles. “We’ll soon have our answers,” she said.
“Answers?”
“About the extent of the kimberlite deposits. I’ve set twelve seismic charges, which is enough to give us definitive readings.”
“You’ve set twelve resonant charges,” Munro said.
“Well, they’re all I brought. We’ve got to make do.”
“They’ll do,” Munro said. “Perhaps too well. That volcano”—he pointed upwards—”is in an eruptive phase.”
“I’ve placed a total of eight hundred grams of explosive,” Ross said. “That’s less than a pound and a half. It can’t make the slightest difference.”
“Let’s not find out.”
Elliot listened to their argument with mixed feelings. On the face of it, Munro’s objections seemed absurd—a few trivial explosive charges, however timed, could not possibly
trigger a volcanic eruption. It was ridiculous; Elliot wondered why Munro was so adamant about the dangers. It was almost as if Munro knew something that Elliot and Ross did not—and could not even imagine.
3. DOD/ARPD/VULCAN
7021
IN 1978, MUNRO HAD LED A ZAMBIA EXPEDITION which included Robert Perry, a young geologist from the University of Hawaii. Perry had worked on PROJECT VULCAN, the most advanced program financed under the Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Division.
VULCAN was so controversial that during the 1975 House Armed Services Subcommittee hearings, project DOD/ ARPD/VULCAN 7021 was carefully buried among “miscellaneous long-term findings of national security significance.” But the following year, Congressman David Inaga (D., Hawaii) challenged DOD / AR PD/VULCAN. demanding to know “its exact military purpose, and why it should be funded entirely within the state of Hawaii.”
Pentagon spokesmen explained blandly that VULCAN was a “tsunami warning system” of value to the residents of the Hawaiian islands, as well as to military installations there. Pentagon experts reminded Inaga that in 1948 a tsunami had swept across the Pacific Ocean, first devastating Kauai, but moving so swiftly along the Hawaiian island chain that when it struck Oahu and Pearl Harbor twenty minutes later, no effective warning had been given.
“That tsunami was triggered by an underwater volcanic avalanche off the coast of Japan,” they said. “But Hawaii has its own active volcanoes, and now that Honolulu is a city of half a million, and naval presence is valued at more than thirty-five billion dollars, the ability to predict tsunami activity secondary to eruptions by Hawaiian volcanoes assumes major long-term significance.”
In truth, PROJECT VULCAN was not long-term at all; it was intended to be carried out at the next eruption of Mauna Loa, the largest active volcano in the world, located on the big island of Hawaii. The designated purpose of VULCAN was to control volcanic eruptions as they progressed; Mauna Lea was chosen because its eruptions were relatively mild and gentle.
Although it rose to an altitude of only 13,500 feet, Mauna Lea was the largest mountain in the world. Measured from its origin at the depths of the ocean floor, Mauna Loa had more than twice the cubic volume of Mount Everest; it was a unique and extraordinary geological formation. And Mauna Loa had long since become the most carefully studied volcano in history, having a permanent scientific observation station on its crater since 1928. It was also the most interfered-with volcano in history, since the lava that flowed down its slopes at three-year intervals had been diverted by everything from aerial bombers to local crews with shovels and sandbags.
VULCAN intended to alter the course of a Mauna Loa eruption by “venting” the giant volcano, releasing the enormous quantities of molten magma by a series of timed, non-nuclear explosions detonated along fault lines in the shield. In October, 1978, VULCAN was carried out in secret, using navy helicopter teams experienced in detonating high-explosive resonant conic charges. The VULCAN project lasted two days; on the third day, the civilian Mauna Lea Volcanic Laboratory publicly announced that “the October eruption of Mauna Lea has been milder than anticipated, and no further eruptive episodes are expected.”