Reyes looked at him aghast.
“You mean here . . . in our own country? If we built one here and turned it on, we’d get zapped off the planet?”
“That is exactly what I mean.”
Reyes thought for a moment; his face slowly formed into a frown. He looked up again. “But that’s crazy. It leaves us wide open. What happens if the other side hits on the same technology? Their system wouldn’t have any of these lunatic programs. They’d be able to blow us all to hell over here, and we wouldn’t be in a position to even turn on anything to hit back with.”
Cleary was shaking his head again before Reyes had finished.
“Not so. Brunnermont would fire on any black hole that they tried to turn on as well. If they did make one, they’d never be able to use it.”
“But . . .” Reyes was getting confused again. “But I thought you said Brunnermont wouldn’t fire outside the West. You don’t expect that Beijing would set up their J-bomb in the Nevada desert or somewhere, do you . . . just to make it easy for us to wipe it out?”
“They’ve been rather cunning,” Cleary replied. “Or rather, Clifford has. You see, the limitations on the range of the target coordinates that the system will accept only apply to fire commands issued through the operator interface programs; they don’t apply to fire commands issued by the watchdog programs. So if the operator tries to hit a target, say, in Mongolia, the system simply won’t work. But if somebody puts a J-bomb in Mongolia and switches it on, it’ll get blasted automatically. It’s neat. We can’t build another one and they can’t build another one.”
“In fact, when you think about it, the whole thing is very subtle,” Foreshaw came in. “There can be no question now of keeping a security blanket over our k-technology. If anyone anywhere in the world—maybe in some research lab somewhere or in a university in the middle of a city—quite innocently stumbles on the same thing and makes himself a piece of equipment similar to the GRASER that they built at Sudbury, Brunnermont will fire on it. We have to publish full details of all the facts—and fast.”
“We’re already working on a preliminary statement for communication through diplomatic channels and for all the news media,” the Secretary of State informed them from his seat next to Sherman. “It should be going out any time now.”
Reyes sighed with exasperation as he turned it all over again in his mind. The West had the world’s one and only J-bomb, it was true, but it had no value as a tool for exerting international leverage or for extracting concessions, for it would only respond to deliberate commands if the West were physically attacked . . . or at least inside prescribed geographic limits, which amounted to the same thing. As long as Brunnermont remained functioning, there was no way out of it.
“Tell me again why we don’t just turn it off,” he said at last.
“Because we can’t,” Cleary told him simply.
“But, hell—it can’t stay sealed off all the time. Every machine ever built has to be maintained. Somebody has to be able to get in sooner or later, if only to do routine maintenance on . . .” He caught the look on Cleary’s face. “No . . . ? Why? Don’t tell me it’ll never need it.”
“Oh, you’re right enough about that. It’s just that it isn’t sealed off . . . for that very reason. You could walk right into any part of it now if you wanted to.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“So why couldn’t I just do that and pull out all the right wires while I’m in there?”
“Because . . .” Cleary’s voice became very sober, “if you did that, you would completely eliminate the United States from the world scene as a viable military power.”
“I . . . don’t understand. What d’you mean?”
Cleary took a deep breath and placed his hands firmly palms-down on the table in front of him.
“All the critical components of the system have power regulators that will keep the voltages on the power lines high enough for the circuits to carry on functioning for a couple of seconds after the power supplies are cut. They are also equipped with sensor circuits that will detect the falling supply-line voltages and automatically transfer control of the computers to a power-down routine. The first function that that routine will perform will be to activate a special fire-control sequence for the J-bomb; its effect would be to blow up the White House, the Pentagon, and just about every major military base and installation in the country. In short, you don’t tamper with it.”