“Jack, you’ve been looking at the Russians. What do you think?” the President asked Ryan.
“Mr. President, the main force we’re going against here is the Soviet fixation on defending their country—and I mean actually defending it against attack. They’ve invested thirty years of work and quite a pile of money in this field because they think it’s something worth doing. Back in the Johnson administration, Kosygin said, ‘Defense is moral, offense is immoral.’ That’s a Russian talking, sir, not just a communist. To be honest, I find that a hard argument to disagree with. If we do enter a new phase of competition, at least it would be defensive instead of offensive. Kind of hard to kill a million civilians with a laser,” Jack noted.
“But it will change the whole balance of power,” Ernest Allen objected.
“The current balance of power may be fairly stable, but it’s still fundamentally crazy,” Ryan said.
“It works. It keeps the peace.”
“Mr. Allen, the peace we have is one continuous crisis. You say we can reduce inventories by half—again, so what? You could cut Soviet inventories by two thirds and still leave them with enough warheads to turn America into a crematorium. The same thing is true of our inventory. As I said coming back from Moscow, the reduction agreement now on the table is cosmetic only. It does not provide any degree of additional safety. It is a symbol—maybe an important one, but only a symbol with very little substance.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” General Parks observed. “If you reduce my target load by half, I wouldn’t mind all that much.” That earned him a nasty look from Allen.
“If we can find out what the Russians are doing different, where does that leave us?” the President asked.
“If the CIA gives us data that we can use? Major?” Parks turned his head.
“Then we’ll have a weapons system that we can demonstrate in three years, and deploy over the five to ten years after that,” Gregory said.
“You’re sure,” the President said.
“As sure as I can be, sir. Like with the Apollo Program, sir, it’s not so much a question of inventing a new science as learning how to engineer technology we already have. It’s just working out the nuts and bolts.”
“You’re a very confident young man, Major,” Allen said professorially.
“Yes, sir, I am. I think we can do it. Mr. Allen, our objective isn’t all that different from yours. You want to get rid of the nukes, and so do we. Maybe we can help you, sir.”
Zing! Ryan thought with a hastily concealed smile. A discreet knock came at the door. The President checked his watch.
“I have to cut this one short. I have to go over some antidrug programs over lunch with the Attorney General. Thank you for your time.” He took one last look at the Dushanbe photo and stood. Everyone else did the same. They filed out by the side door, the one concealed in the white plaster walls.
“Nice going, kid,” Ryan observed quietly to Gregory.
Candi Long caught the car outside her house. It was driven by a friend from Columbia, Dr. Beatrice Taussig, another optical physicist. Their friendship went back to undergraduate days. She was flashier than Candi. Taussig drove a Nissan 300Z sports car, and had the traffic citations to prove it. The car fitted well with her clothes, however, and the Clairoled hairstyle, and the brash personality that turned men off like a light switch.
” ‘Morning, Bea.” Candi Long slipped into the car and buckled the seat belt before she closed the door. Driving with Bea, you always buckled up—though she never seemed to bother.
“Tough night, Candi?” This morning it was a severe, not quite mannish wool suit, topped by a silk scarf at the neck. Long could never see the point. When you spent your day covered in a cheap white lab coat, who gave a damn what was under it—except Al, of course, but he was interested in what was under what was under, she thought to herself, smiling.
“I sleep better when he’s here.”
“Where’d he go?” Taussig asked.
“Washington.” She yawned. The rising sun cast shadows on the road ahead.
“How come?” Bea downshifted as she accelerated the car up the freeway on-ramp. Candi felt herself pressed sideways against the seat belt. Why did her friend have to drive this way? This wasn’t the Grand Prix of Monaco.
“He said that somebody ran a test, and he has to explain it to somebody or other.”
“Hmph.” Beatrice looked at her mirror and left the car in third as she selected a slot in the rush-hour traffic. She matched velocities expertly and slid into a space only ten feet longer than her Z-car. That earned her an angry beep from the car behind. She just smiled. The nondriving part of her psyche took note of the fact that whatever test Al was explaining hadn’t been American. And there weren’t too many people doing tests that this particular little geek had to explain. Bea didn’t understand what Candi saw in Al Gregory. Love, she told herself, is blind, not to mention deaf and dumb—especially dumb. Poor, plain Candi Long, she could have done so much better. If only she’d been able to room with Candi at school . . . if only there were a way to let her know . . . “When’s Al going to be back?”
“Maybe tonight. He’s going to call. I’ll take his car. He left it at the lab.”
“Put a towel over the seat before you sit in it.” She chuckled. Gregory drove a Chevy Citation. The perfect car for a geek, Bea Taussig thought. It was filled with the cellophane wrappers from Hostess Twinkies, and he washed it once a year whether the car needed it or not. She wondered what he was like in bed, but stifled the thought. Not in the morning, not after you just woke up. The thought of her friend . . . involved with that made her skin crawl. Candi was just so naive, so innocent—so dumb! about some things. Well, maybe she’d come around. There was still hope. “How’s the work on your diamond mirror coming?”
“ADAMANT? Give us another year and we’ll know. I wish you were still working with my team,” Dr. Long said.
“I can see more on the administrative side,” Bea answered with remarkable honesty. “Besides, I know I’m not as smart as you.”
“Just prettier,” Candi noted wistfully.
Bea turned to look at her friend. Yes, there was still hope.
Misha had the finished report by four. It was delayed, Bondarenko explained, because all the most-secret-cleared secretaries were busy with other material. It was forty-one pages long, including the diagrams. The young Colonel was as good as his word, Filitov saw. He’d translated all of the engineering gobbledygook into plain, clear language. Misha had spent the previous week reading everything he could find in the files on lasers. While he didn’t really understand the principles of their operation all that clearly, he had the engineering details committed to his trained memory. It made him feel like a parrot. He could repeat the words without comprehending their significance. Well, that was enough.
He read slowly, memorizing as he went. For all his peasant voice and gruff words, his mind was an even sharper razor than Colonel Bondarenko believed. And as things turned out, it didn’t have to be. The important part of the breakthrough appeared simple enough, not a matter of increasing the size of the lasing cavity, but of adapting its shape to the magnetic field. With the proper shape, size could be increased almost at will . . . and the new limiting factor became a part of the superconducting magnetic-pulse-control assembly. Misha sighed. The West had done it yet again. The Soviet Union did not have the proper materials. So, as usual, the KGB had secured them in the West, this time shipped through Czechoslovakia via Sweden. Wouldn’t they ever learn?
The report concluded that the other remaining problem was in the optical and computer systems. I’ll have to see what our intelligence organs are doing about that, Filitov told himself. Finally, he spent twenty minutes going over the diagram of the new laser. When he got to the point at which he could close his eyes and recall every single detail, he put the report back in its folder. He checked his watch and punched the button for his secretary. The warrant officer appeared at the door in a few seconds.
“Yes, Comrade Colonel?”
“Take this down to Central Files—Section 5, maximum security. Oh, and where’s today’s burn-bag?”
“I have it, Comrade.”
“Get it for me.” The man went back to the anteroom and returned a moment later with the canvas bag that went daily to the document-destruction room. Misha took it and started putting papers into it. “Dismissed. I’ll drop this off on the way out.”