“Then that’s what it is,” Sherman declared. “A Genesis Machine.” He looked slowly around the circle of faces. “Don’t you think you’re all missing the point? There’s one obvious alternative strategy that nobody’s asked about yet. After what nearly happened yesterday, it’s the only thing that we ought to be talking about.”
Perplexed looks greeted his imploring gaze.
“You’ve all been living under the threat for so long that you can’t wake up to the fact that it isn’t there any more,” he said. “You’ve been hooked on missiles and bombs for as long as you can remember, and the idea of getting along without them just doesn’t get through. It’s over. Can’t you get that into your heads? We don’t need it any more—any of it. Everything that the West has publicly claimed to want for the last fifty years has happened. Doesn’t it occur to you that we might be able to do something constructive with all those armaments budgets now?”
He stood up and made it plain that his part in the meeting was finished. Before turning toward the door, he concluded: “I am going out to take a long, quiet walk. You are going to stay here and start talking about how the people in this world are going to find ways of getting along with one another. It might be new to you, but you’re just gonna damn well have to figure out how it’s done. You haven’t been left with any choice now.”
Chapter 25
As with a man who awakens from the terrors of a bad dream to find only the serenity of sunrise and the joys of birdsong, so the realization slowly dawned on the world that the nightmare was over. And from a world that could now breathe free emerged a new understanding.
Delegations of politicians, generals, and scientists from Beijing, Vladivostok, Beirut, Cairo, and Cape Town came to Brunnermont to gaze in wonder at the embodiment of the final triumph of reason. U.S. Army BIAC operators demonstrated for them the truth of the prophesies that had been pronounced. Unerringly they could direct cataclysmic bolts of destruction upon any point they chose in the domain of the West or to guard its approaches; they proved it with a selection of prepared targets in the northern wastes of Arctic Canada, the deserts of Australia, and the offshore waters of Europe and the U.S.A. But when they attempted to extend the range of the weapon to reach certain locations in the Sahara, the Gobi, and the far north of Siberia that the East had agreed could be used for the tests, the computers refused to obey. That was as much proof as anybody was prepared to ask for; neither side seemed immediately disposed to embark on the billions of dollar expenditure that testing out the rest of the system would require. Some of the predictions, without any shadow of a doubt, would never be risked anyway. And besides that, as time went by, the need to find out if the system could be outwitted somehow subsided. It didn’t seem really important any more as the world began finding more pressing problems to turn its attention to.
Full details of the new physics that had made Brunnermont possible had, of course, been published throughout the world, and Clifford spent a busy period delivering a series of lectures on the subject to gatherings of scientists from all nations, in these he revealed a final piece of information about the Brunnermont watchdog, something he had neglected to mention previously.
The automatic surveillance system, programmed to fire immediately upon any strong source of hi-radiation that it detected in the nearby regions of space, would function only against targets located inside a distance of two hundred thousand miles. Beyond that radius k-technology could be developed and used safely.
He explained that it would not be feasible for a would-be aggressor to mount a J-bomb in a spacecraft with the intention of firing on or threatening terrestrial targets from outside Brunnermont’s effective range. The target-location system aboard such a craft would be capable of “seeing” clearly from that distance only sources of intense hi-radiation, which in practice meant the solitary “beacon” of Brunnermont itself since no other source would be permitted to survive. But this beacon would be detected merely as a mathematical figment in the complexity of k-space, without yielding of itself the solutions of the equations that would be needed to mark its associated target coordinates in ordinary three-dimensional space. In other words, Brunnermont would not be vulnerable to destruction by these means. Before a J-bomb fire-control system could be accurately registered on selected targets in normal space, it was necessary to calibrate it with a reference framework of known locations derived from previously resolved sets of space-like images. But these images depended on the system being able to distinguish ordinary objects by virtue of the low level of radiation that was generated by the spontaneous particle annihilations taking place inside them; this was not practicable from distances outside two hundred thousand miles, and it followed that a hypothetical space-borne J-bomb would not constitute a workable threat to either Brunnermont or any other potential target anywhere else on the surface of Earth.