Foreshaw returned the look and drummed his fingers on the table for a long time before replying.
“I think you have to, Dr. Clifford,” he said quietly at last.
“This had better be good,” breathed a glowering, ruddy-faced Air Force general seated three places farther along to his right.
Clifford stepped forward and drew from a folder, lying on the table, a set of glossy, color computer prints, each measuring about a foot square. He held the top one up so that everybody could see the pattern of dull orange, from which a series of fuzzy, irregularly sized rectangles protruded upward against a background of black.
“The New York City skyline,” he informed them simply. He handed the plate to Aub and indicated that it was to be passed around the table. It was followed by a whole series of familiar landmarks, geographic features and other oddments whose names he announced one by one before passing them on. They included the Rock of Gibraltar, Table Mountain, a cross section of the Dardanelles Strait, city profiles of London, Paris, Beijing, Bombay, and Sydney; a picture of the eighty-mile-thick slab of oceanic crust of Earth’s Pacific Plate plunging at the rate of seven centimeters per year down into the mantle beneath the Mariana Islands; a large iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean and a blob that represented the Americano-Russian Cosmos V space station, two thousand miles up.
Excitement and awe began to mount.
“Every one of those images was obtained at Sudbury, using the new Mark II system,” Clifford stated. “And we should be able to improve on these examples. Once the correct coordinates have been computed, they can be stored and recalled instantly at any time. So much for target identification and fire control. Now for the weapon itself.”
Clifford scanned the faces assembled before him, then continued. “You may remember that the principles by which these pictures are formed involve a new kind of wave that is generated inside any piece of matter and which propagates instantly throughout ordinary space. In recent experiments, we have succeeded in transporting energy from one place to another, using those same principles . . . at least, you can think of it that way. And in the same way that we can select information from any point we choose to construct those images, so we can select precisely where in space that energy will be delivered.
“Think what that means. In a thermonuclear explosion, the amount of nuclear material actually converted into energy is tiny—in the order of a fraction of 1 percent—and yet the results are devastating. In the process I am talking about, the effective conversion efficiency approaches 100 percent. From one central reactor capable of producing the power required, destructive forces of unprecedented strength can be instantaneously directed and focused on to any part of Earth’s surface or beyond.”
The stares that fixed him had by now frozen into wide-eyed masks of incredulity. The silence, when he paused, was absolute.
“Furthermore, the means by which the target was being assailed would be completely undetectable by any surveillance or defensive system that exists in the world today. There is no method by which the weapons system I am describing could be interfered with or countered. Interception is impossible. As weapons of attack, the ICBM and the orbiting bomb are as outmoded as the battering ram.”
A chorus of murmurings erupted from all around. Foreshaw waved for silence. “You’re saying that from one single center, you could bomb any point on Earth’s surface . . . without the enemy even knowing how you were doing it . . . without any way of anybody being able to stop you . . . ?” His face registered incredulity. “A superbomb that just comes from nowhere . . . ?”
Hughes stared aghast at Morelli as the words came home to him. “What are we getting into?” he asked above the rising hubbub of excited voices. “Has Brad gone mad?”
“First I knew about this,” Morelli said, shaking his head, bemused. “I knew those two had something big . . . but this . . .”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Clifford thundered above the clamor. “It’ll not simply ‘bomb’ any point on Earth out of nowhere. . . . It’ll annihilate it! And above Earth, too . . . It’ll wipe out anything that comes inside a thousand miles of this country . . . and the other side will have no way of even knowing how we’re doing it, let alone of stopping it. All their weapons and their numbers count for nothing now. That’s how you can smash this deadlock. That’s how you can smash it once and for all!”