Above and below the crew area, in the tapering part of the dodecahedron, were the organics, with their intricate and puzzling architecture. Placed throughout the interior of this part of the dodecahedron, apparently at random, were the dowels of erbium. And surrounding the dodecahedron were the three concentric spherical shells, each in a way representing one of the three physical dimensions. The shells were apparently magnetically suspended–at least the instructions included a powerful magnetic field generator,’ and the space between the spherical shells and the dodecahedron was to be a high vacuum.
The Message did not name any Machine component. Erbium was identified as the atom with sixty-eight protons and ninety-nine neutrons. The various parts of the Machine were also described numerically– Component 31, for example. So the rotating concentric spherical shells were named benzels by a Czech technician who knew something of the history of technology; Gustav Benzel had, in 1870, invented the merry-go-round.
The design and function of the Machine were unfathomed, it required whole new technologies to construct, but it was made of matter, the structure could be diagrammed–indeed cutaway engineering drawings had appeared in mass media all over the world–and its finished form was readily visualized. There was a continuing mood of technological optimism.
Drumlin, Valerian, and Arroway went through the usual identification sequence, involving credentials, thumbprint and voiceprint, and were then admitted to the vast assembly bay. Three story overhead cranes were positioning erbium dowels in the organic matrix. Several pentagonal panels for the exterior of the dodecahedron were hanging from an elevated railroad track. While the Soviets had had some problems, the U.S. subsystems had finally passed all their tests, and the overall architecture of the Machine was gradually emerging. It’s all coming together, Ellie thought. She looked to where the benzels would be assembled. When completed, the Machine would look from the outside like one of those armillary spheres of the Renaissance astronomers. What would Johannes Kepler have made of all this?
The floor and the circumferential tracks at various altitudes in the assembly building were crowded with technicians, government officials, and representatives of the World Machine Consortium. As they watched. Valerian mentioned that the President had established an occasional correspondence with his wife, who would not tell Peter even what it was about. She had pleaded the right of privacy.
The positioning of the dowels was almost completed, and a major systems integration test was about to be attempted for the first time. Some thought the prescribed monitoring device was a gravity wave telescope. Just as the test was to begin, they walked around a stanchion to get a better view.
Suddenly Drumlin was in the air, flying. Everything else seemed to be flying, too. It reminded her of the tornado that had carried Dorothy to Oz. As in a slow motion film, Drumlin careened toward her, arms outstretched, and knocked her roughly to the ground. After all these years, she thought, was this his notion of a sexual overture? He had a lot to learn.
It was never determined who did it. Organizations publicly claiming responsibility included the Earth Firsters, the Red Army Faction, the Islamic Jihad, the now underground Fusion Energy Foundation, the Sikh Separatists, Shining Path, the Khmer Vert, the Afghan Renaissance, the radical wing of Mothers Against the Machine, the Reunified Reunification Church, Omega Seven, the Doomsday Chiliasts (although Billy Jo Rankin denied any connection and claimed that the confessions were called in by the impious, in a doomed attempt to discredit God), the Broederbond, El Catorce de Febrero, the Secret Army of the Kuomintang, the Zionist League, the Party of God, and the newly resuscitated Symbionese Liberation Front. Most of these organizations did not have the wherewithal to execute the sabotage; the length of the list was merely an index of how widespread opposition to the Machine had become.
The Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, the Democratic National Socialist Party, and a few like-minded organizations restrained themselves and did not claim responsibility. An influential minority of their membership believed that the Message had been dispatched by Hitler himself. According to one version, he had been spirited off the Earth by German rocket technology in May 1945, and quite some progress had been made by the Nazis in the intervening years.
“I don’t know where the Machine was going,” the President said some months later, “but if it was half as whacked out as this planet is, it probably wasn’t worth the trip anyway.”
As reconstructed by the Commission of Inquiry, one of the erbium dowels was sundered by an explosion; the two pillbox shaped fragments careened downward from a height of twenty meters, and were also propelled laterally with considerable velocity. A weight bearing interior wall was struck and collapsed under the impact. Eleven people were killed and forty-eight injured. A number of major Machine components were destroyed; and, since an explosion was not among the testing protocols prescribed by the Message, the explosion might have ruined apparently unaffected components. When you had no idea at all about how the thing worked, you had to be very careful about building it.
Despite the profusion of organizations that craved credit, suspicion in the United States focused immediately on two of the few groups that had not claimed responsibility: the extraterrestrials and the Russians. Talk about Doomsday Machines filled the air once again. The extraterrestrials had designed the Machine to explode catastrophically when assembled, but fortunately, some said, we were careless in assembling it and only a small charge–perhaps the trigger for the Doomsday Machine–blew up. They urged halting construction before it was too late and burying the surviving components in widely dispersed salt mines.
But the Commission of Inquiry found evidence that the Machine Disaster, as it came to be known, was of more Earthly origin. The dowels had a central ellipsoidal cavity of unknown purpose, and its interior wall was lined with an intricate network of fine gadolinium wires. This cavity had been packed with plastic explosive and a timer, materials not on the Message’s Inventory of Parts. The dowel had been machined, the cavity lined, and the finished product tested and sealed in a Hadden Cybernetics facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. The gadolinium wiring had been too intricate to do by hand; robot servomechanisms were required, and they in turn had required a major factory to be constructed. The cost of building the factory was defrayed entirely by Hadden Cybernetics, but there would be other, more profitable, applications for its wares.
The other three erbium dowels in the same lot were inspected and revealed no plastic explosive. (Soviet and Japanese crews had performed a range of remote sensing experiments before daring to split their dowels open.) Somebody had carefully packed a tamped charge and timer into the cavity near the end of the construction process in Terre Haute. Once out of the factory this dowel–and those from other batches–had been transported by special train and under armed guard to Wyoming. The timing of the explosion and the nature of the sabotage suggested someone with knowledge of the Machine construction; it was an inside job.
But the investigation made little progress. There were several dozen people–technicians, quality control analysts, inspectors who sealed the component for transshipment–who had the opportunity to commit the sabotage, if not the means and the motivation. Those who failed polygraph tests had ironclad alibis. None of the suspects let drop a confession in an unguarded moment at the neighborhood bar. None began to spend more than their means allowed. No one “broke” under interrogation. Despite what were said to be vigorous efforts by law-enforcement agencies, the mystery remained unsolved.
Those who believed the Soviets responsible argued that their motive was to prevent the United States from activating its Machine first. The Russians had the technical capability for the sabotage, and, of course, detailed knowledge of Machine construction protocols and practice on both sides of the Atlantic. As soon as the disaster occurred, Anatoly Goldmann, a former student of Lunacharsky’s, who was working as Soviet liaison in Wyoming, urgently called Moscow and told them to take down all their dowels. At face value, this conversation–which had been routinely monitored by the NSA–seemed to show no Russian involvement, but some argued that the phone call was a sham to deflect suspicion, or that Goidmann had not been told of the sabotage beforehand. The argument was picked up by those in the United States made uneasy by the late reduction of tensions between the two nuclear superpowers. Understandably, Moscow was outraged at the suggestion.
In fact, the Soviets were having more difficulties in constructing their Machine than was generally known. Using the decrypted Message, the Ministry of Medium Heavy Industry made considerable progress in ore extraction, metallurgy, machine tools, and the like. The new microelectronics and cybernetics were more difficult, and most of those components for the Soviet Machine were produced under contract elsewhere in Europe and in Japan. Even more difficult for Soviet domestic industry was the organic chemistry, much of which required techniques developed in molecular biology.