“For one thing, the destruction of much of the Soviet Union’s war potential has induced among us the apathy common to Americans after a victorious war: we disband our armies, destroy our superb war machine, cut up our carriers for scrap, sell off valuable equipment as surplus. But there is another menace far more insidious and dangerous: the Soviet Union’s infrastructure has been destroyed. What does this mean? Weakness? My superiors think not, and I believe you will agree.
“The Soviet system has, until now, dominated the Russian people by an extremely well-organized monolithic power, brutally exercised. It has stifled dissent, killed initiative, and suppressed invention. It has stolen most of its ‘innovations’ and built the most formidable war machine in the history of the world by dint of forced labor, low wages, paucity of consumer goods, and a single-minded objective: to conquer the world, even if it takes two hundred years. Until last year it had been very successful, occupying every one of the two-hundred-odd nations of the world save the Benipic countries, and Canada, the United States, Japan, Australia, and South Africa. These five remaining bastions of democracy the Russians cleverly weakened for eventual conquest by depending on American political naivete to follow its traditional course: allowing soft-hearted America to impoverish itself by feeding, clothing, and arming the Benipic countries-Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and China-on the foolish assumption that they would ‘fight for liberty.’
“But, you will say, everything has changed. The Soviet Union is now hanging on the ropes, waiting for the knockout punch. On the contrary. Remember what Moscow was. It was the heart and soul of the communist world. It was the establishment, the conformers, the apparatchiki, the conservatives. The activists, the original thinkers and artists, were exiled to the provinces, where they couldn’t rock the boat.
“Those exiles are the people who rule Russia today. They have come to power by accident. And who are they? They’re original thinkers, experimenters, people who are tired of traditional ways of doing things. But their objectives are the same: destroy the United States, so that the Soviet Union may rule the world.
“This fermenting subsociety has taken over. They will abandon the military sledgehammer method of conquest. Why? Because the last two tries-against the Republic of Texas in 1998 and again last fall-didn’t work, and because their conventional war machine has been severely weakened by the Moscow blast. So they will experiment with new methods, new materials, new strategies, while we, the Americans, are asleep in the trenches, clutching the weapons of the wars of yesteryear, dreaming the dream of peace everlasting. When the Soviet Union launches its new-style offensives, it will come as complete a surprise to us as Pearl Harbor. We won’t be prepared. And they’ll win.”
John Ionescu, the molecular biologist from Berkeley, interjected: “What you’re getting at, I suppose, is that you expect us to evolve counterstrategies.”
“Counter to what?” said Edwards.
“Well,-ah-”
“You see, Mr. Ionescu, that’s our problem. We don’t know what sort of deviltry the Russians might come up with. We could depend on the old regime to plod along traditional lines of research and development-particle weapons, lasers, V/STOLs, hypersonic aircraft, smart missiles. But the new rulers of the Soviet Union, having no respect for the ideas of a regime that made them outcasts, will devise new strategies, and I think we must expect them to be highly original, stealthy-to avoid nuclear retaliation by the United States-and enormously effective.”
“But if we don’t know what those strategies are, how the hell can we counter them?” asked mathematician Lee Tung Park.
Dr. Edwards smiled, and said nothing. It sometimes amazed him how long it took the superbright to arrive at obvious conclusions. He surveyed the three rows of the bright young scholars he had brought together at El Centro, three women and fourteen men, each among the most promising in their field, each capable of the most arcane and involved speculations, and yet each not able to see the red flag of elementary reason waving in their faces.
“Of course, of course,” said Ionescu, finally, with shamefaced chagrin. “We are to put ourselves in the place of the new-wave Russians, ponder the weaknesses of the United States, and design stratagems to wage unconventional and successful war against it.”
“Whereupon,” said Livia dos Santos, “you will turn our researches over to the Defense Department think tanks to work out counterstrategies, so that the United States, for once, will be prepared beforehand.”
Edwards chuckled. “You will observe that there are no military people among us. The omission is deliberate. We want you to devise, as Mr. Ionescu suggested, stratagems that will require the minimum use of Russian manpower and resources, stratagems that will not set alarm bells ringing in the United States, stratagems that will bring this country to its knees. If the Russians can think of such stratagems-and believe me, given time, they will-the B-team’s seventeen savants in this room can do so, too. The more imaginative your solutions are, the better.
“In fact, you were chosen for your youth and fresh approach to the problem at hand. You are the counterparts of the young Russians who will be, even now, addressing the same problem. Meanwhile our A-team scientists will be brainstorming the same problems from more traditional perspectives. Between the two teams, we believe, no significant solution will be ignored.
“Now, do not think in terms of armies advancing across hostile territory. Think what you would do, if each of you had absolute power, to bring the enemy to heel, without recourse to armed force. Elaborate your ideas in detail. And when you have taken into account every facet of the operations the Soviets will someday devise, and written the plan as the Soviets would write it, then we shall turn it over to higher authority so that counter-measures can be prepared. Never again will we be caught napping.
“Oh, and by the way, so that you can concentrate your formidable talents on the work at hand, I’ve given orders to remove all television and radio sets and to interdict newspapers and magazines. Our work is too important for such mundane distractions, as I’m sure you’ll all agree. Also, to facilitate that work, I have assigned your group five computer technicians who will retrieve any data you may require from the World Data Bank and run whatever programs you desire. Good luck with your assignment. Remember, the fate of the world for the next generation is in your hands.”
10. TUNNEL VISION
20 MAY 2009
Ripley Forte slept most of the way to Iceland station, the farthest point reached on the Houston-Kiev line, and a hundred meters below the ocean floor south of the fog-shrouded island in the North Atlantic.
The windowless maglev train rocketed through the narrow round tunnel with scarcely any movement beyond the monotonous, sleep-inducing vibration of its electric motors. Only as the train finally began to slow eight hours and fifty minutes after they had pulled out of the underground terminal in Houston could Forte tell that they were approaching their destination, a little over four thousand miles from the Texas terminus.
Leslie Schmida, a smallish man with a scholarly air, met Forte at the Iceland Station, within earshot of the shrieking laser drill punching its way through the sedimentary rock just ahead. Schmida would have looked more comfortable in the flute section of a symphony orchestra than in the hard hat he wore.
“How’s it going?” Forte asked, shaking the other’s hand.
Schmida shook his head. His expression was dour.
By rights, the chief engineer should have been content, even happy. Tunnel excavation, lining, and laying of rail and electrical line was averaging twenty-one miles a day, slightly better than their rosiest projections.
“Troubles?”
Schmida grunted. “Not yet, but there’s going to be.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll let you see for yourself.” He led the way down the concrete platform, past mounds of supplies stockpiled on either side. At the far end they boarded the low-slung gondola that transported rail to the welding site. Schmida nodded to the engineman, and the train moved slowly toward the workface two miles ahead.
Forte donned bulbous ear defender/earphones and thick-lensed glasses, then switched on the throat mike that would allow him to communicate with Schmida above the din of the rock being shattered by the laser array. The gondola slowed and stopped, and Forte could discern the powerful machine, more than a hundred yards long, that chewed a path through the soft shale underlying the seabed.
The mechanical mole moved at the pace of an arthritic elder, somewhat less than one mile an hour. Though programmed by an engineer who occupied a cab at the rear and with a bank of instruments monitored the mole’s progress, the machine itself was entirely automatic. At five-second intervals it blasted the rock face with the evenly spaced beams of thirty lasers, generating instantaneous heat of such intensity that the expanding rock fractured. Moving forward on its treads, the mole then deployed its rotary cutting face, 380 centimeters in diameter, which removed the spoil and dumped it on an endless conveyer belt, and transported it to the station behind them for disposal.