They stopped and stared out across the pool to which the path had led them. On the porch of a chalet on the opposite side somebody was bobbing gently back and forth in a rocking chair. The strains of pop music came floating across the water.
“He’s doing the only thing he can to preserve the way of life he believes in, I suppose,” Aub said. “At least, that’s how he sees it.”
“But it’s not what he believes in. He’s never wanted any part of all this before. He’d have died first. He always said that one human life was too much to pay for all the causes in the world put together. That was the Brad I knew. And now . . .” she cast an arm about her to take in their whole surroundings, “this. Everything you can see is part of one huge, horrible machine that’s being built for the sole purpose of slaughtering people by the millions. And Brad has done it all.” She raised a hand to her lips and bit her knuckle.
“Yeah, I know,” Aub said quietly. “C’mon, let’s move on. It’s getting chilly.”
They walked on, taking a fork in the path that led toward the glow among the shrubbery that marked the position of the bar and social club.
“What about you?” she asked. “You don’t seem happy about the whole thing either, and yet you still play a big part in it. Why, Aub? Why do you choose to stay mixed up in it?”
“Why don’t I just quit?”
“If you like.”
He scratched his head for a moment and pulled a face.
“Well . . . I suppose I don’t really have much of a choice any more. When I signed the papers to join Jericho, they said it was for the duration. Even if I decided I didn’t want to work on the project any longer, I can’t see my being let out to walk the streets, not knowing what I know now. So . . .” he shrugged, “might as well press on. At least I’m busy. Guess I’d go nuts otherwise.”
They stopped again outside the clubhouse. Dance music from Brunnermont’s own Marine combo was coming through the open window.
“Is that really the only reason?” she asked. Aub reflected for a while.
“Not really,” he admitted. “There is something else . . . kinda difficult to put into words, you know. It’s just that I still feel the old Brad down there underneath somewhere. I just can’t see him letting Jericho be used for real. Somehow there has to be a big bluff behind all his bravado . . . something he’s figured out that he hasn’t told even me about. All the time I was feeding him the dope on what was happening at Berkeley, he never once let me get implicated . . . and we didn’t really know each other then. But he came across right from the start as the kinda guy you can trust—know what I mean? I felt I could trust him then, and I was right. It may sound crazy, but I still feel I can now.”
“If you knew how much I needed to hear you say that.” A shadow of her old smile brightened her face a fraction. “Come on—let’s go inside. I’ll allow you to buy me a drink and, if you’re very good, to have the honor of a dance.”
Chapter 21
One year and one month had gone by since Jericho was conceived. Deep in its rocky womb the fetus was now fully formed, its nuclear heart beating strongly. A miniature flying armada from Washington converged on Brunnermont, bringing the fathers to witness the birth.
In fact, a number of test firings of the J-bomb had already been successfully made; this was to be the first to be at all public.
As a prelude, Morelli conducted the deputation of Pentagon officials and Army, Navy, and Air Force senior officers on a guided tour of the restricted, lowermost levels of the complex. He showed them the duplicated system of fusion reactors and generating equipment, capable of sustaining all the machines in Brunnermont independently of outside sources of power for years, although under normal circumstances demands could be met from the national distribution grid. He explained that the amount of matter that was actually fed via the beam into the annihilation chamber of the J-reactor was really quite small; it was the technique employed for modulating, controlling, and focusing the delivery of the return energy through hi-space—in order to achieve adequate accuracy of aiming the weapon—that required such enormous amounts of power.