WHITE SANDS, DELTA RANGE
Fifteen minutes after leaving the animals tethered on the hill, Dr. Peter Jance and his support team were a quarter mile away on a mass of steel, ceramic and exotic materials that cost the U.S. government and its taxpayers more per ounce than gold. Dubbed The Hammer, the whole apparatus weighed one ton, which was about a hundred tons lighter than anything else that had been cooked up during the ill-fated Star Wars period, and that lightness translated into its supreme feasibility as a military weapon. The Hammer, in essence, was the most advanced Directed HighEnergy Weapon system ever conceived, and singly the product of Peter Jance’s unique vision. That vision, and the knowledge that informed it, had their roots in the Manhattan Project, where Peter had begun his scientific career, in 1943, as a twenty-one-year-old mathematician; Einstein himself had announced that Peter was the only scientist at Los Alamos who had caught an error in his calculations. They had exploded the first thermonuclear device just thirty miles north on this very testing ground, at a site called Trinity, and a month later had seen two Japanese cities atomized by their device.
Then, after the war, there were the years of building the Tevatron Collider, a behemoth at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the TC shot protons against antiprotons at collision energies of 1.8 trillion electron-volts. Peter had proved that atoms were not merely protons and electrons whirling around a nucleus-he had helped throw open the doors of a “particle zoo” of gluons, mesons and mysterious atomic dust particles called quarks, while the rest of science scrambled to catch up. But it was during the Reagan administration that Peter had finally come into his own, without the interference that had dogged him after Hiroshima. He proposed and developed everything from rail guns to ultrasound weapons that could melt the eyes and inner ears of any soldier within their range. The problems now were technical, not bureaucraticquestions of size and power requirements. All of the devices were huge, enormously costly, and consumed electricity like Manhattan in July, One shot from these weapons was all you got-it took six to eight hours before they were ready to fire again. None were useful for actual combat. Until the Hammer.
This weapon prototype promised to be efficient and lethal at the same time. Peter had achieved phenomenal miniaturization by restructuring all of its hardware and algorithms in nanotechnology. There were gears in the weapon that could fit in the gut of a gnat, circuits visible only via electron microscopes, lenses formed from half a dozen atoms. And even more brilliantly, he had arrived at a wonderfully low power consumption by giving it uplink capability to a top secret satellite. It was the satellite that supplied the massive energy stream needed, harvesting it directly from the solar wind by means of huge panels. If it worked there would be twenty-four such satellites in space within four years, all geostationary, at least two accessible by ground control no matter where in the world it was located. With a thousand of these ground units in place, no rogue state or resurgent tyranny could stand up to the weapon’s lethal force and the Army knew it. If it worked. If he could just stabilize the damn thing. A directed energy weapon like this didn’t shoot bullets or shells, it shot particle beams. These were produced by accelerating negative ions to monstrous velocities, then stripping away their extra electron at the last nanosecond-creating a 30million-watt, 5-million-ampere beam of lithium ions that delivered 100 trillion watts per square centimeter directly to the target. Because of all that power, the Hammer was a little temperamental. But it had marvelous potential for clean lethality. Until recently Peter had loved it like a proud father. And if it works, I’ll love it again, he thought ruefully, and stifled a reflexive groan-the pain in his belly seemed to be increasing with every tick of the clock. Peter gave the apparatus one last look, closed the access panel, and turned to Alex Davies, who was eyeing his every move with an unfathomable gaze. Had Alex caught a whiff of his uncertainty? If so, what in the hell was there to do about it? “Let’s go to the bunker,” he said.
Blockhouse A, a full mile from the device and twice as far from the target animals, was a dark concrete pillbox, with firing control room walls ten feet thick. The roof, a full twenty-seven feet of reinforced concrete, had been designed in the 1940s to withstand the impact of a large rocket, such as a V-2, falling from an altitude of one hundred miles at a speed of two thousand miles per hour. The bunker, whose dank air had all the homely assurance of a mausoleum, had been used for the Manhattan Project in 1945. Its flaking concrete was layered with graffiti, most of it written by young physicists who were now household names. If you’re not part of the solution, Feynman had written in the 1960s, you’re part of the precipitate. And a favorite of Peter’s, from Einstein himself, written by some unknown hand, Relatively speaking, when does Munich stop at this train? A klaxon sounded.
The last observers were crowding in, including Peter’s Army shadow, Colonel Henderson-Heartless Henderson to his friends as well as to his enemies, in which latter category Peter found himself almost by default. Henderson was a large-muscled, close-shaven man in his fifties. His teeth were invariably clamped around an unlit H. Upmann Corona Major, and he had humorless dark eyes that were perpetually narrowed, as though scanning a column of figures that didn’t add up. Right now, he was gesturing at the monitor that showed the hillside of target animals, spinning out a scenario for a half dozen visiting brass. Peter sat biding his time. “What we have here,” Henderson intoned, “is an assault line of three hundred enemy troops-for argument’s sake, Iraqis. They’re about to sweep down and engulf an American outpost cut off from all support. Isn’t that right, Dr. Jance?” “It’s your movie,” said Peter, without enthusiasm. Where the devil was Beatrice? “And over here,” continued Henderson, moving to the next monitor, where the weapon glowed darkly in the blazing desert light. “Here we have the Hammer. Cast of thousands, cost in billions- which oughta buy us a feel-good ending, don’t you think, Doctor?” Peter avoided Henderson’s look of baleful skepticism and shot a glance at the door-someone was entering. At the sight of Frederick Wolfe, Peter’s heart did a little dance of disappointment. “Glad you could make it, Freddy,” he said. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” said Wolfe magisterially, lowering his long frame into a chair that had been reserved for him. He nodded toward Alex, who at his grandfather’s entrance had shifted casually to a corner of the bunker. “You sure you want Alex here, though? I’ve seen keyboards blow up at his touch.” Wolfe laughed alone, drawing pained looks from the other crew members. His habit of teasing Alex was unsettling to the rest of the crew, who universally liked the kid. Peter watched Wolfe give Alex a pat on the head, and then forgot about them as the door opened again and he saw the face he’d been longing to see-for years, it seemed suddenly, though in fact he and Beatrice had only been apart for a month. He held out his hand, and Beatrice squeezed it, tilting her face up to his for the lightest of kisses. “Thought I’d have to go without you,” he said. “Never,” she said, instantly appraising his anxiety and giving him the look she’d given him so many times before: You’re wonderful no matter what happens. His heart soared, and the pain in his stomach subsided. “We had a pleasant surprise at the Fountain Compound,” she said with a smile. “A little breakthrough.” “And it’s good?” he asked politely. Over the last year or so, consumed with his own experiments and occasional misgivings, he had lost track of the direction his wife’s research was taking. “It’s not bad. How are you feeling?”
“Better,” he lied. “Much better.”
“Peter?”
“I am. Not a spasm all day.” He kissed her again. Every good marriage, he was fond of saying, was based on fear. In his case, not the fear of losing Beatrice’s love, which was unthinkable, but the fear of causing her worry or pain. “What did you see?” he asked. “One of the sheep?” “A pig.”
“And it was promising?”
“Very. Listen, we’ll talk later. I don’t want to upstage you,” she said. As if I could, was the sweet unstated message in her clear gray eyes. He felt a lump in his throat. If ever the phrase “for better or worse had concrete representation, it was in Beatrice’s unflinching devotion to him and to his work. Fifty years they’d been married. As Peter sometimes quipped, for a couple who were both intensely engaged in scientific research, that alone should have rated them a plaque at the foot of their street. And whereas Peter’s achievements had already been granted four pages in the Britannica, Beatrice’s brilliance in neurobiology was known only to the inner circles of her own specialty. Peter ran his own project; Beatrice worked in anonymity for Frederick Wolfe. Not once-it never ceased to amaze him-had she ever complained. “Break a leg,” she said, and kissed him again. “All right, cut it out, you two,” said Wolfe from behind them. He flashed a jagged smile. “Time to save the world for democracy,” Peter gave his crew the once-over. They were ready and focused. “Uplink with the bird is achieved and locked,” said Cap Chu, his Peter-like lilt echoing dully off the concrete. “We are zero minus thirty seconds and counting.” The place fell silent.