“Cruise missiles then?” Carlohm suggested. Foreshaw looked at Cleary. Cleary shook his head.
“Not when you think about it,” Cleary said. “Cruise missiles were low-cost, mass-produced weapons designed to be used in large numbers to saturate the defenses. A saturation-attack profile would be easy to identify and the J-bomb would break it up in minutes. If you tried to conceal the pattern by sending them over piecemeal, conventional defenses would be able to pick them off easily. Not feasible.”
“Biological weapons then?” Carlohm tried. “Gas . . . bugs . . . viruses . . . anything . . . ?”
“Too uncontrollable; too unpredictable,” Foreshaw pronounced. “We abandoned that line years ago and so has the other side. There’s nothing to be gained for either of us by wiping out the whole planet. I can’t see that being resurrected—not in a million years.”
As Sherman listened to the exchange going on around him the horizons of his understanding slowly broadened to encompass the full meaning of the thing that Clifford had done. For the first time since he had last seen Clifford earlier that morning, he comprehended the reason for the light of triumph that had burned behind the scientist’s tired eyes. At that time, Sherman had come away still somewhat shaken by the tide of recent events, but at a deeper level excited and exultant, eager to commence at once with the rebuilding of a new and sane world upon the foundations of salvation and opportunity that had been offered. No possibility could have been more remote than that all men could be anything but similarly inspired and exalted.
He saw now that, in spite of his worldliness and his years, he had been naive; only the scientist, as befitted his calling, had seen and understood the true reality. He heard the words that men had uttered for a thousand years and he listened to minds that wallowed in the clay of a lifetime’s conditioning and stereotyping. It was a microcosm of a world that would never learn.
And as he listened and his eyes opened, he marveled at the perfection of the web that the scientist had spun. Every question that was being asked had been anticipated; every twist and turn that the human mind could devise to escape from the maze was blocked; every objection had been forestalled. It was beautiful in its completeness.
Donald Reyes slumped back in his chair and slammed his hand down on the table in a gesture that finally signaled defeat.
Foreshaw then summed up the situation. “The East cannot hope to succeed in any form of offensive action against the West, nuclear or otherwise, because the J-bomb will stop them. We can’t attack them with the J-bomb at all, and we can’t attack them with any kind of missile strike because if we do the bomb will stop that. We can attack with outdated weapons if we like, but we won’t because we’d be sure to come off worst.
“The East can’t break the deadlock in any way at all. We can break the deadlock, but only by trying to switch off the machine; however, we won’t do that either because we’d wipe out practically all of our armed forces if we did—and be left with nothing to attack with anyway. And as long as it stays switched on, nobody can build another J-bomb.”
“And it will stay like that until it self-deactivates . . . one hundred and eleven years from now,” Cleary completed.
A solemn silence descended upon the room.
“It’s just sitting there under those mountains,” Reyes fumed after a while. “It won’t switch off and we can’t switch it off. It’s . . .” he sought for the words, “it’s like one of those movie things . . . a Doomsday Machine . . . only this is the granddaddy of all of them.”
“Hardly, Don,” Sherman remarked affably. “Doomsday Machines are supposed to guarantee the end of the world. I’d say that this does exactly the opposite.”
“Well, I guess the opposite of the end of the world is the beginning of the world,” Foreshaw mused. “What’s it called . . . ? Genesis . . .”