The Best of Bova Page 6

“Born with a silver spoon in my ear. To the manner born. Rich or poor, it pays to have money. Let ’em eat cake. Or was it coke?”

  “You’re drunk!”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Well, for one thing, your feet are standing in one place, but the rest of you is swaying like a tree in the breeze.”

  “I am drunk with your beauty. . .and a ton and a half of beer.”

  Diane laughed. “I can believe the second one.”

  Looking around for a phone, Kinsman asked, “How do you get a cab around here?”

  “You won’t. Not at this hour. No trains, either.”

  “I’m stuck here?”

  She nodded.

  “A fate worse than death.” Kinsman saw that the room’s furnishings consisted of a bookshelf crammed with sheet music, the waterbed, a Formica-topped table and two battered wooden chairs that didn’t match, the waterbed, a pile of books in one corner of the floor, a few pillows strewn around here and there, and the waterbed.

  “You can share the bed with me,” Diane said.

  He felt his face turning red. “Are your intentions honorable?”

  She grinned at him. “The condition you’re in, we’ll both be safe enough.”

  “Don’t be too sure.”

  But he fell asleep as soon as he sank into the soft warmth of the bed.

  It was sometime during the misty, dreaming light of earliest dawn that he half awoke and felt her body cupped next to his. Still half in sleep, they moved together, slowly, gently, unhurried, alone in a pearly gray fog, feeling without thinking, caressing, making love.

  Kinsman lay on his back, smiling dazedly at the cracked ceiling.

  “Was that your first time?” Diane asked. Her head was resting on his chest.

  He suddenly felt embarrassed. “Well, uh, yeah. . .it was.”

  She stroked the flat of his abdomen.

  Awkwardly, he said, “I guess I was pretty clumsy, wasn’t I?”

  “Oh no. You were fine”

  “You don’t have to humor me.”

  “I’m not. It was marvelous. Terrific.”

  It wasn’t your first time, he knew. But he said nothing.

  “Go to sleep,” Diane said. “Get some rest and we can do it again.”

  It was almost noon by the time Kinsman had showered in the cracked tub and gotten back into his wrinkled uniform. He was looking into the still-steamy bathroom mirror, wondering what to do about his stubby chin, when Diane called through the half-open door: “Tea or coffee?”

  “Coffee.”

  Kinsman came out of the tiny bathroom and saw that she had set up toast and a jar of Smuckers grape jelly on the table by the window. A teakettle was on the two-burner stove, with a pair of chipped mugs and a jar of instant coffee alongside.

  They sat facing each other, washing down the crunchy toast with the hot, strong coffee. Diane watched the people moving along the street below them. Kinsman stared at the clean sky.

  “How long can you stay?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a date with this guy to go flying this afternoon. Then I leave tonight.”

  “Oh.”

  “Got to report back to the Academy tomorrow morning.”

  “You have to.”

  He nodded. “Wish I didn’t.”

  She gave him a so do I look. “But you’re free this afternoon?”

  “I’m supposed to meet this Navy guy; he’s going to take me up with him.”

  “Come down to the campus with me instead,” Diane said, brightening. “The demonstration will be starting around two and you can help us.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure! You’re not going to let them get away with it, are you? They’ll be sending you to Cambodia or someplace to get killed.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but—”

  She reached across the table and took his free hand in both of hers. “Chet. . .please. Not for me. Do it for yourself. I don’t want to think of you being sent out there to fight a war we shouldn’t be fighting. Don’t let them turn you into a robot.”

  “But I’m going into astronaut training.”

  “You don’t believe they’ll give you what you want, do you? They’ll use you for cannon fodder, just like all the others.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “No, you don’t understand!” she said earnestly. Kinsman saw the intensity in her eyes, the devotion. Is she really worried that much about me?

  “We’ve got to stop them, Chet. We’ve got to use every ounce of courage we can muster to stop this war and stop the killing.”

  “Tearing up the campus isn’t going to do it.”

  “I know that. This is going to be a peaceful demonstration. It’s the pigs that start the violence.”

  He shook his head.

  “Come and see, if you don’t believe me! Come with me.”

  “In my uniform? Your friends would trash me.”

  “No they won’t. It’d make a terrific impact for somebody in uniform to show up with us. We’ve been trying to get some of the Vietnam veterans to show themselves in uniform.”

  “I can’t,” Kinsman said. “I’ve got a date with a guy to go flying this afternoon.”

  “That’s more important than freedom? More important than justice?”

  He had no answer.

  “Chet. . .please. For me. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, or for the people, then do it for me. Please.”

  He looked away from her and glanced around the shabby, unkempt room. At the stained, cracked sink. The faded wooden floor. The unframed posters scotch-taped to the walls. The waterbed, with its soiled sheet trailing onto the floor.

  He thought of the Academy. The cold gray mountains and ranks of uniforms marching mechanically across the frozen parade ground. The starkly functional classrooms, the remorsely efficient architecture devoid of all individual expression.

  And then he turned back, looked past the woman across the table from him, and saw the sky once again.

  “I can’t go with you,” he said quietly, finally. “Somebody’s got to make sure you don’t get bombed while you’re out there demonstrating for your rights.”

  For a moment Diane said nothing. Then, “You’re trying to make a joke out of something that’s deadly serious.”

  “I’m being serious,” he said. “You’ll have plenty of demonstrators out there. Somebody’s got to protect and defend you while you’re exercising your freedoms.”

  “It’s our own government we need protection from!”

  “You’ve got it. You just have to exercise it a little better. I’d rather be flying. There aren’t so many of us up there.”

  Diane shook her head. “You’re hopeless.”

  He shrugged.

  “I was going to offer to let you stay here. . .if you wanted to quit the Air Force.”

  “Resign?”

  “If you needed a place to hide. . .or you just wanted to stay here, with me.”

  He started to answer, but his mouth was dry. He swallowed, then in a voice that almost cracked, “I can’t. I. . .I’m sorry, Diane, but I just can’t.” He pushed his chair back and got to his feet.

  At the door, he turned back toward her. She was at the table still. “Sorry I disappointed you. And, well, thanks. . .for everything.”

  She got up, walked swiftly across the tiny room to him, and kissed him lightly on the lips.

  “It was my pleasure, General.”

  “Lieutenant,” he quickly corrected. “I’ll be a lieutenant when I graduate.”

  “You’ll be a general someday.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You could have been a hero today,” she said.

  “I’m not very heroic.”

  “Yes you are.” She was smiling at him now. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  That afternoon, forty thousand feet over the Sacramento Valley, feeling clean and free and swift, Kinsman wondered briefly if he had made the right choice.

  “Sir?�
�� he asked into his helmet microphone. “Do you really think astronaut training turns men into robots?”

  The man’s chuckle told him the answer. “Son, any kind of training is aimed at turning you into a robot. Just don’t let ’em get away with it. The main thing is to get up and fly. Up here they can’t really touch us. Up here we’re free.”

  “They’re pretty strict over at the Academy,” Kinsman said. “They like things done their way.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m an Annapolis man, myself. You can still hold onto your own soul, boy. You have to do things their way on the outside, but you be your own man inside. Isn’t easy, but it can be done.”

  Nodding to himself, Kinsman looked up and through the plane’s clear plastic canopy. He caught sight of a pale ghost of the Moon, riding high in the afternoon sky.

  I can do it, he said to himself. I can do it.

  THE NEXT LOGICAL STEP

  Since the 1950s computer experts have been producing ever-more sophisticated models of the world’s economic, ecological and geopolitical systems to help Washington’s decision-makers to forecast what the world will be like over the next few decades. Of course, there are many problems with such computer world models. “The Next Logical Step,” which was written more than fifty years ago, examines one such problem—and its solution.

  “I don’t really see where this problem has anything to do with me,” the CIA man said. “And, frankly, there are a lot of more important things I could be doing.”

  Ford, the physicist, glanced at General LeRoy. The general had that quizzical expression on his face, the look that meant he was about to do something decisive.

  “Would you like to see the problem firsthand?” the general asked, innocently.

  The CIA man took a quick look at his wrist watch. “Okay, if it doesn’t take too long. It’s late enough already.”

  “It won’t take very long, will it, Ford?” the general said, getting out of his chair.

  “Not very long,” Ford agreed. “Only a lifetime.”

  The CIA man grunted as they went to the doorway and left the general’s office. Going down the dark, deserted hallway, their footsteps echoed hollowly.

  “I can’t overemphasize the seriousness of the problem,” General LeRoy said to the CIA man. “Eight ranking members of the General Staff have either resigned their commissions or gone straight to the violent ward after just one session with the computer.”

  The CIA man scowled. “Is this area secure?”

  General LeRoy’s face turned red. “This entire building is as Secure as any edifice in the Free World, mister. And it’s empty. We’re the only living people inside here at this hour. I’m not taking any chances.”

  “Just want to be sure.”

  “Perhaps if I explain the computer a little more,” Ford said, changing the subject, “you’ll know what to expect.”

  “Good idea,” said the man from CIA.

  “We told you that this is the most modern, most complex and delicate computer in the world. . .nothing like it has ever been attempted before—anywhere.”

  “I know that they don’t have anything like it,” the CIA man agreed.

  “And you also know, I suppose, that it was built to simulate actual war situations. We fight wars in this computer. . .wars with missiles and bombs and gas. Real wars, complete down to the tiniest detail. The computer tells us what will actually happen to every missile, every city, every man. . .who dies, how many planes are lost, how many trucks will fail to start on a cold morning, whether a battle is won or lost—”

  General LeRoy interrupted. “The computer runs these analyses for both sides, so we can see what’s happening to them, too.”

  The CIA man gestured impatiently “Wargames simulations aren’t new. You’ve been doing them for years.”

  “Yes, but this machine is different,” Ford pointed out. “It not only gives a much more detailed war game. It’s the next logical step in the development of machine-simulated war games.” He hesitated dramatically.

  “Well, what is it?”

  Ford said, “We’ve added a variation of the electroencephalograph.”

  The CIA man stopped walking. “The electro-what?”

  “Electroencephalograph. You know, a recording device that reads the electrical patterns of your brain. Like the electrocardiograph.”

  “Oh.”

  “But you see, we’ve given the EEG a reverse twist. Instead of using a machine that makes a recording of the brain’s electrical wave output, we’ve developed a device that will take the computer’s readout tapes and turn them into electrical patterns that are put into your brain!”

  “I don’t get it.”

  General LeRoy took over. “You sit at the machine’s control console. A helmet is placed over your head. You set the machine in operation. You see the results.”

  “Yes,” Ford went on. “Instead of reading rows of figures from the computer’s printer. . .you actually see the war being fought. Complete visual and auditory hallucinations. You can watch the progress of the battles, and as you change strategy and tactics you can see the results before your eyes.”

  “The idea, originally, was to make it easier for the General Staff to visualize strategic situations,” General LeRoy said.

  “But everyone who’s used the machine has either resigned his commission or gone insane,” Ford added.

  The CIA man cocked an eye at LeRoy. “You’ve used the computer.”

  “Correct.”

  “And you have neither resigned nor cracked up.”

  General LeRoy nodded. “I called you in.”

  Before the CIA man could comment, Ford said, “The computer’s right inside this doorway. Let’s get this over with while the building is still empty.”

  They stepped in. The physicist and the general showed the CIA man through the room-filling rows of massive consoles.

  “It’s all transistorized and sub-miniaturized, of course,” Ford explained. “That’s the only way we could build so much detail into the machine and still have it small enough to fit inside a single building.”

  “A single building?”

  “Oh yes: this is only the control section. Most of this building is taken up by the circuits, the memory banks and the rest of it.”

  “Hmmmn.”

  They showed him finally to a small desk, studded with control buttons and dials. The single spotlight above the desk lit it brilliantly, in harsh contrast to the semidarkness of the rest of the room.

  “Since you’ve never run the computer before,” Ford said, “General LeRoy will do the controlling. You just sit and watch what happens.”

  The general sat in one of the well-padded chairs and donned a grotesque headgear that was connected to the desk by a half-dozen wires. The CIA man took his chair, slowly. When they put one of the bulky helmets on him, he looked up at them, squinting a little in the bright light. “This. . .this isn’t going to. . .well, do me any damage, is it?”

  “My goodness no,” Ford said. “You mean mentally? No, of course not. You’re not on the General Staff, so it shouldn’t. . .it won’t. . .affect you the way it did the others. Their reaction had nothing to do with the computer per se.”

  “Several civilians have used the computer with no ill effects,” General LeRoy said. “Ford has used it many times.”

  The CIA man nodded, and they closed the transparent visor over his face. He sat there and watched General LeRoy press a series of buttons, then turn a dial.

  “Can you hear me?” The general’s voice came muffled through the helmet.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “All right. Here we go. You’re familiar with Situation One-Two-One? That’s what we’re going to be seeing.”

  Situation One-Two-One was a standard war game. The CIA man was well-acquainted with it. He watched the general flip a switch, then sit back and fold his arms over his chest. A row of lights on the desk console began blinking on and off, one, two, three. . .down to the end of t
he row, then back to the beginning again, on and off, on and off.

  And then, somehow, he could see it!

  He was poised, incredibly, somewhere in space, and he could see it all in a funny, blurry, double-sighted, dreamlike way. He seemed to be seeing several pictures and hearing many voices, all at once. It was all mixed up, and yet it made a weird kind of sense.

  For a panicked instant he wanted to rip the helmet off his head. It’s only an illusion, he told himself, forcing calm on his unwilling nerves. Only an illusion.

  But it seemed strangely real.

  He was watching the Gulf of Mexico. He could see Florida off to his right, and the arching coast of the southeastern United States. He could even make out the Rio Grande River.

  Situation One-Two-One started, he remembered, with the discovery of missile-bearing enemy submarines in the Gulf. Even as he watched the whole area—as though perched on a satellite—he could see, underwater and close-up, the menacing shadowy figure of a submarine gliding through the crystal-blue sea.

  He saw, too, a patrol plane as it spotted the submarine and sent an urgent radio warning.

  The underwater picture dissolved in a bewildering burst of bubbles. A missile had been launched. Within seconds, another burst—this time a nuclear depth charge—utterly destroyed the submarine.

  It was confusing. He was everyplace at once. The details were overpowering, but the total picture was agonizingly clear.

  Six submarines fired missiles from the Gulf of Mexico. Four were immediately sunk, but too late. New Orleans, St. Louis and three Air Force bases were obliterated by hydrogen-fusion warheads.

  The CIA man was familiar with the opening stages of the war. The first missile fired at the United States was the signal for whole fleets of American missiles and bombers to launch themselves at the enemy. It was confusing to see all the world at once; at times he could not tell if the fireball and mushroom cloud was over Chicago or Shanghai, New York or Novosibirsk, Baltimore or Budapest.

  It did not make much difference, really. They all got it in the first few hours of the war; as did London and Moscow, Washington and Peking, Detroit and Delhi, and many, many more.

  The defensive systems on all sides seemed to operate well, except that there were never enough antimissiles. Defensive systems were expensive compared to attack rockets. It was cheaper to build a deterrent than to defend against it.