“Drumlin, he’s the fellow who figured out that this was the design for a Machine, right?”
“Not exactly, he-”
“I’ll read all the briefing material in time for that Thursday meeting. You got anything else for me?”
“Are you seriously considering letting Hadden build the Machine?”
“Well, it’s not only up to me, as you know. That treaty they’re hammering out in Paris gives us about a one quarter say. The Russians have a quarter, the Chinese and the Japanese together have a quarter, and the rest of the world has a quarter, roughly speaking. A lot of nations want to build the Machine, or at least parts of it. They’re thinking about prestige, and new industries, new knowledge. As long as no one gets a jump on us, that all sounds fine to me. It’s possible Hadden might have a piece of it. What’s the problem? Don’t you think he’s technically competent?”
“He certainly is. It’s just–”
“If there’s nothing more, Ken, I’ll see you Thursday, virus willing.”
As der Heer was shutting the door and entering the adjacent sitting room, there was an explosive presidential sneeze. The Warrant Officer of the Day, sitting stiffly on a couch, was visibly startled. The briefcase at his feet was crammed with authorization codes for nuclear war. Der Heer calmed him with a repetitive gesture of his hand, fingers spread, palm down. The officer gave an apologetic smile.
“That’s Vega? That’s what all the fuss is about?” the President asked with some disappointment. The photo opportunity for the press was now over, and her eyes had become almost dark adapted after the onslaught of flashbulbs and television lighting. The pictures of the President gazing steely-eyed through the Naval Observatory telescope that appeared in all the papers the next day were, of course, a minor sham. She had been unable to see anything at all through the telescope until the photographers had left and darkness returned. “Why does it wiggle?”
“It’s turbulence in the air, Ms. President,” der Heer explained. “Warm bubbles of air go by and distort the image.”
“Like looking at Si across the breakfast table when there’s a toaster between us. I can remember seeing one whole side of his face fall off,” she said affectionately, raising her voice so the presidential consort, standing nearby talking to the uniformed Commandant of the Observatory, could overhear.
“Yeah, no toaster on the breakfast table these days,” he replied amiably.
Seymour Lasker was before his retirement a high official of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. He had met his wife decades before when she was representing the New York Girl Coat Company, and they had fallen in love over a protracted labor settlement. Considering the present novelty of both their positions, the apparent health of their relationship was noteworthy.
“I can do without the toaster, but I’m not getting enough breakfasts with Si.” She inflected her eyebrows in his general direction, and then returned to the monocular eyepiece. “It looks like a blue amoeba, all… squishy.”
After the difficult crew selection meeting, the President was in a lighthearted frame of mind. Her cold was almost gone.
“What if there was no turbulence, Ken? What would I see then?”
“Then it would be just like Space Telescope above the Earth’s atmosphere. You’d see a steady, unflickering point of light.”
“Just the star? Just Vega? No planets, no rings, no laser battle stations?”
“No, Ms. President. All that would be much too small and faint to see even with a very big telescope.”
“Well, I hope your scientists know what they’re doing,” she said in a near whisper. “We’re making an awful lot of commitments on something we’ve never seen.”
Der Heer was a little taken aback. “But we’ve seen thirty-one thousand pages of text–pictures, words, plus a huge primer.”
“In my book, that’s not the same as seeing it. It’s a little too…inferential. Don’t tell me about scientists all over the world getting the same data. I know all that. And don’t tell me about how clear and unambiguous the blueprints for the Machine are. I know that too. And if we back out, someone else is sure to build the Machine. I know all those things. But I’m still nervous.”
The party ambled back through the Naval Observatory compound to the Vice President’s residence.
Tentative agreements on crew selection had been painstakingly worked out in Paris in the last weeks. The United States and the Soviet Union had argued for two crew positions each; on such matters they were reliable allies. But it was hard to sustain this argument with the other nations in the World Message Consortium. These days it was much more difficult for the United States and the Soviet Union–even on issues on which they agreed–to work their way with the other nations of the world than had once been the case.
The enterprise was now widely touted as an activity of the human species. The name “World Message Consortium” was about to be changed to “World Machine Consortium.” Nations with pieces of the Message tried to use this fact as an entree for one of their nationals as a member of the crew. The Chinese had quietly argued that by the middle of the next century there would be one and a half billion of them in the world, but with many born as only children because of the Chinese experiment on state supported birth control. Those children, once grown, would be brighter, they predicted, and more emotionally secure than children of other nations with less stringent rules on family size. Since the Chinese would thus be playing a more prominent role in world affairs in another fifty years, they argued, they deserved at least one of the five seats on the Machine. It was an argument now being discussed in many nations by officials with no responsibility for the Message or the Machine.
Europe and Japan surrendered crew representation in exchange for major responsibility for the construction of Machine components, which they believed would be of major economic benefit. In the end, a seat was reserved for the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and India, with the fifth seat undecided. This represented a long and difficult multilateral negotiation, with population size, economic, industrial, and military power, present political alignments, and even a little of the history of the human species as considerations.
For the fifth seat, Brazil and Indonesia made representations based on population size and geographical balance; Sweden proposed a moderating role in case of political disputes; Egypt, Iraq, Palostan and Saudi Arabia argued on grounds of religious equity. Others suggested that at least this fifth seat should be decided on grounds of individual merit rather than national affiliation. For the moment, the decision was left in limbo, a wild card for later.
In the four selected nations, scientists, national leaders, and others were going through the exercise of choosing their candidates. A kind of national debate ensued in the United States. In surveys and opinion polls, religious leaders, sports heroes, astronauts, Congressional Medal of Honor winners, scientists, movie actors, a former presidential spouse, television talk show hosts and news anchors, members of Congress, millionaires with political ambitions, foundation executives, singers of country-and-western and rock-and-roll music, university presidents, and the current Miss America were all endorsed with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
By long tradition, ever since the Vice President’s residence was moved to the grounds of the Naval Observatory, the house servants had been Filipino petty officers on active duty in the U.S. Navy. Wearing smart blue blazers with a patch embroidered “Vice President of the United States,” they were now serving coffee. Most of the participants in the all day crew selection meeting had not been invited to this informal evening session.
It had been Seymour Lasker’s singular fate to be America’s first First Gentleman. He bore his burden–the editorial cartoons, the smarmy jokes, the witticism that he had gone where no man had gone before–with such directness and good nature that at last America was able to forgive him for marrying a woman with the nerve to imagine that she could lead half the world. Lasker had the Vice President’s wife and teenaged son laughing uproariously as the President guided der Heer into an adjacent library annex.
“All right,” she began. `There’s no official decision to be made today and no public announcement of our deliberations. But let’s see if we can sum up. We don’t know what the goddamn Machine will do, but it’s a reasonable guess that it goes to Vega. Nobody has the slightest idea of how it would work or even how long it would take. Tell me again, how far away is Vega?” `Twenty-six light-years, Ms. President.”
“And so if this Machine were a kind of spaceship and could travel as fast as light–I know it can’t travel as fast as light, only close to it, don’t interrupt–then it would take twenty-six years for it to get there, but only as we measure time here on Earth. Is that right, der Heer?”