When I look back now, I see how foolishly we both behaved — how mindlessly, even. I still do not know what ought to have been done, but that conspiratorial activity — there is no other way to say it — served only to preserve the illusion that our hands were clean. We got in deeper and deeper. We could neither hide our progress nor — in the face of the pointlessness of keeping the secret — suddenly one day announce it. The announcing had to be done either immediately after the discovery of TX — or never. Both of these ways out, logical though they were, were closed to us. The awareness that the biophysicists, in another quarter, would be moving onto that “hot” ground made us hurry. Our fear for the fate of the world — because nothing less, after all, was at stake — caused, truly by reflex, our concealment of the research. To come out of hiding now would be to invite such shocked questions as “Well, fine, but why do you come to us with this now!” “You have, of course, the final results?,” and “But what was your reason for not telling us at the beginning?” I would not have known what to reply.
Donald harbored the vague hope that on the large scale the effect might manifest a kind of “recoil” — the initial theory had pointed to that. But, first of all, the initial theory turned out to be useless, and, second, it opened a door to the acceptance of certain assumptions, which further down the road led to undesirable probabilities.
Baloyne I avoided during this period as much as possible, because my conscience was not clean regarding him. But he had other problems. Besides Lerner, we now were expecting a second “outsider”; both were to enlighten us with their presentations at the end of the month. This clear admission by Washington that it possessed its own experts on His Master’s Voice, and men, moreover, who had been working without any connection with us, put Baloyne in an extremely unpleasant and difficult position before all the research groups. Dill, Donald, and Rappaport (and I as well) felt, however, that he ought to carry his cross (that was the sort of language he used) to the end. Anyway, both of these visitors announced to us were minds of the first order.
There was no talk, now, of budget cuts for the Project. It appeared that if our uninvited consultants could not give the work a forward shove with their ideas (which seemed to me unlikely), the Project would go on by sheer inertia, because no one on high would dare to change the least thing in it — let alone talk of liquidating it.
Personal tensions developed in the Council: between Baloyne and Nye, first, since the latter must have known, we were convinced, of this spectral, second Project — His Master’s Ghost — yet, for all the man’s volubility, he had not once mentioned it. (But to Baloyne Nye was still the soul of politeness.) And there was tension between our “conspiracy of two” and, again, Baloyne, for he had got wind of something after all: sometimes I saw him following me with his eyes, as if waiting for an explanation or at least some hint. But I dodged the best I could — not too skillfully, I am sure, because playing such games had never been my strong point. Meanwhile, Rappaport held it against Rush that even he, the first discoverer, had not been informed of His Master’s Ghost. Thus the sessions of the Council became more than unpleasant, in an atmosphere of short tempers, suspicions, and low spirits. I slaved away at the programs for the machine, a waste of my time and strength since any programmer could have done them, but consideration for the “conspiracy” won out.
At last, I finished the calculations that Donald needed, but still he was not ready with the apparatus. Finding myself idle, for the first time since my arrival at the Project I tried watching television, but everything on it seemed to me unutterably phony and devoid of sense, the news programs included. I went to the bar, but could not stay there, either. Nervous, unable to sit still, I finally went to the computer center, shut myself up carefully, and began doing calculations that no one, this time, had required of me.
I employed, once more, the defiled (so to speak) formula of Einstein for the equivalence of mass and energy. I worked out the power available to the inverters and transmitters of the explosions at a distance equal to Earth’s diameter; some minor technical difficulties that cropped up with this occupied me — but not for long. An attack carried out with the TX effect made advance warning impossible. What would happen was simply that the ground under people’s feet would turn to solar lava. One also could produce an explosion not on Earth’s surface but beneath it, and at any depth, whereby shields of steel plate as well as the whole massif of the Rocky Mountains, which was supposed to protect the chiefs of staff in their great underground bunkers, would become meaningless. There could no longer be even the hope that the generals — those most valuable members of our society, if personal worth was to be measured according to the means invested in the preservation of one’s life and limb — would emerge, the only people left, on the radioactive, scorched surface of the planet, in order to begin the work (after removing their momentarily unnecessary uniforms) of rebuilding civilization from the bottom up. The most wretched denizen of the slums would be exposed equally now with the supreme commander of the nuclear forces.
I had brought about a truly democratic leveling of all who lived on Earth. The machine warmed my feet with a gentle flow of heated air that came from the slits in its metal register, and it tapped out rows of digits on the tapes, because it did not care whether they referred to megatons and body counts or to the number of grains of sand on the beaches of the Atlantic. The despair of the last weeks, which had gradually turned into a kind of stifling weight, suddenly lifted. I worked quickly and with satisfaction, no longer acting contrary to myself. No, now I was doing what was expected of me. I was a patriot. Now I put myself in the position of the attacker, and now of the defender, with perfect loyalty.
The problem, however, was without a winning strategy. If the focal point of the explosion could be moved to any place one chose on the globe — and from any equally arbitrary location — then it was possible to destroy life in an area of absolutely any size. The classical atomic blast was, from the standpoint of energy efficiency, a waste of resources, because at “ground zero” you had extreme “overkill.” The molecules of buildings and bodies underwent a demolition that exceeded a thousandfold what was militarily necessary; while the force of the blow, attenuated over distance, permitted survival in fairly simple shelters a few or even several dozen miles away.
This uneconomical state of affairs became — under my fingers, as I programmed — a prehistoric mummy. TX was a totally efficient device. The fireballs of the classical explosions could be flattened, rolled out, as it were, into a death-dealing tinfoil, and one could spread that foil under human feet over all of Asia or the United States. The three-dimensionally fixed layer, chosen out of the continental shelf, in a fraction of a second could turn into a bog of flame. There would be released, for each man, just the energy required to kill him. But the command posts, perishing, would have ten seconds to send a signal to the submarines that carried the missiles. The dying side still could slay its enemy. And if it could, it would have to do so. And thus, finally, the technological trap snapped shut on us.
I kept looking for a way out, putting myself in the position of global strategist, but computation defeated each search in turn. I worked skillfully, but felt my hands shaking, and when I bent over the tapes that snaked slowly out of the machine, to read the results, my heart started pounding, and at the same time I felt a burning dryness in my mouth and bowels, as if someone had wrapped a cutting wire around my intestines. I observed these symptoms of visceral panic with a strangely cold irony, as if the terror affected only my muscles and gut, while a voiceless giggle quivered inside me, the same as half a century ago, unchanged and unaged. I felt no hunger or thirst, as if fed by the columns of numbers, for nearly five hours, programming the computer over and over again. The tapes I tore from their cassettes and stuffed into my pocket. But all this labor, ultimately, turned out to be unnecessary.