“You’re joking, man. They’d do that?”
“They’re already threatening to. That’s what held me up. They’ve got Peter Hughes over a barrel—he plays ball or they pick up their marbles. They’ve been getting at Geneva too, so things won’t look good for Peter if he decides he doesn’t want to play. That puts Al on the spot. He’s on our side, but his hands are tied now. He’s just having to hand it down the line.”
Aub thought the problem over.
“So we play ball,” he offered at last. “That way we’ve still got a project. The other way we haven’t got a project.” He looked from one to the other. “End of problem. There’s nothing to decide.”
Sarah said nothing. She knew better how Clifford’s mind worked.
“It’s not the way,” Clifford replied slowly, shaking his head. A strange light had crept into his eyes. “It’ll always be the same for as long as we knuckle under. I don’t mean just here—everywhere. The whole damn world’s gone crazy. The very people who are capable of finding out the ways of solving the real problems are all being muscled into making the problems worse. And the people who are doing the muscling don’t even understand what the problems are.” He looked at Aub appealingly. “Did you ever see films of what went on in Nazi Germany in World War II? Some of the best scientific brains in Europe being herded around like slave labor by a bunch of thugs. Well, it hasn’t gotten that bad yet, but that’s the direction it’s going. I won’t do anything to help it along, and that’s what you’re asking me to do.”
“So you walk out,” Aub tossed back. “What the hell? Who cares? The world goes on anyway. Nothing changes. Only you lose out.”
“Something has to change.” Clifford sounded far away. He looked straight through Aub as if he were not there. “Once and for all there has to be a stop to it . . . the whole lousy situation . . . permanently . . .”
“You’re gonna change it?” Aub laughed. “What’ll you do—run for President? I think you’d be disappointed even if you made it. He, too, seems a bit stuck for answers right now.”
Aub stopped smiling when he saw that Clifford was not reacting. Clifford’s mind seemed to be a million miles away.
“I don’t know . . .” he said after what seemed a long time. And that strange light was still burning in his eyes.
* * *
Late that evening when they were relaxing over coffee to the background of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, Clifford, who had hardly spoken a word since dinner, turned suddenly toward Aub. “Do you remember when we were talking to Al about a week ago . . . about the technique that’s used in the GRASER to induce annihilations? You said that you thought it might be possible to use the same principle to control the coordinates in normal space of where the return energy is delivered.”
“I remember. What about it?”
“In other words, you figure that you could focus the return energy at a point . . . instead of having it spread out all the way to infinity.”
“Maybe. Why?” Aub put down the magazine he had been browsing through and looked puzzled. Clifford ignored the questions.
“What would be involved to do it?”
“How d’you mean—as a sorta lab test?”
“Yes.”
Aub thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose all the hardware you’d really need is already there. . . . It would just have to function in a different way. I guess you’d need to reprogram the modulator-control computers and the supervisory processor . . . plus a few bits of rewiring in the front-end electrics. That should do it.”
“How long do you reckon it’d take?”
Aub suddenly looked alarmed. “Hey—you’re not thinking of trying it, are you? That could be dangerous; nobody knows what to expect. You might end up blowing a hole in the middle of Sudbury.”
“Not if the beam was wound right down to minimum power. All I want to do is prove the point. We should be able to get the annihilation rate down to a few kilowatts.”