Eater. Part 31

"They've discovered a lot of new stuff."

Arno's certainty was granite-hard, so Kingsley tried a mood-altering diversion. "Well, the cla.s.sic joke about scientists and women is true of me, I'm afraid."

Arno frowned. "Haven't heard it."

"For scientists, it is better for a woman to wear a lot of clothes that take time to take off, you see, because they are always more excited by the search than by the discovery."

This got a hearty laugh that did not appear to be put on. Pressures of the job escaping Pressures of the job escaping, Kingsley surmised. From Arno's lined face he could see that it would be good to keep things going on the good-fellow front. Always a wise idea, but essential in a crisis of any size; and there had never been one larger.

"Timing is crucial, of course," he said quickly-to pry forth some information before Arno's mood shifted.

"We've put down that U.N. negotiation position, too," Arno said. "They wanted to give it everything."

"All the people?"

"And more. You've seen the new list?"

"It wants more?"

"You bet. Raising the ante to over half a million names."

"Extracted from the news media, I imagine."

"No wonder it got so hot about our turning the TV and radio off."

"The moral landscape has turned into a minefield, admittedly. Some voices are arguing that we are likely to incur more than half a million dead if it decides to skate along the atmosphere and give us the jet again."

Something in Arno's smile gave him warning. "Maybe you should be reading the list instead of listening to those 'voices,' my Royal Astronomer."

"I'm on the list?"

"The monster watches a lot of TV."

"And you?"

"Yeah. d.a.m.ned if I know how it got me."

"Benjamin?"

"Sure. Half the people working on this, easy."

"My G.o.d."

"Apparently that's what it thinks it is."

This sobering talk made the alcohol all the more necessary, in Kingsley's opinion. Still, quite enough had been done along the lines of intimidate-the-out-of-it-scientist. Before he left the bar, he decided a gesture of indifference was required. "I'd go like a shot if it would settle this matter," he said.

"You haven't been keeping up on the gusher of transmissions it sends," Arno said comfortably. "It doesn't like the 'harvests' we routed to it, of people recorded using the electromagnetic-induction technique."

"The technique Channing received?"

"Yes, only she got more detailed attention. Lots more. We're having to do all this in a rush, people knocking themselves out, around the clock-"

"Why does the b.a.s.t.a.r.d not like the results?"

"Low definition of some areas of the brain, I hear."

"We knew that. The regions that regulate body function, digestion and motor skills and the like."

"Yeah, it says it wants more of them."

"I gather we impose some body simulation to make up the difference?"

"Not good enough, it says. It prefers the skull-shaving technique some other countries used."

"Ah. Have to rethink my position, then." He kept his tone light and collected the drinks before beating a retreat.

He was on firm ground with Arno when discussing astrophysics, but the man had an uncanny way of getting the stiletto in when the subject shifted. The matter-of-fact horror of it all weighed heavily now. And Arno had a sly relish in unveiling the latest faces of the thing that hung in their sky like a great, glowering eye.

"New drink?" Amy asked, peering at his.

"Pernod and tequila with a dash of lemon. I believe it's called a 'macho.'" This joke went unrecognized, perhaps justifiably, and Benjamin began discussing the Eater's dynamics.

"You've learned a lot from her," Amy said.

"That's the idea, right?" Despite his earlier eyebrow raising, Benjamin slurped down his beer. "Give her a 'friendly interface,' the Operations term was."

"I'm sure you're the crucial element," Kingsley said, believing every word. Certainly fellows like Arno would have driven Channing to suicide by now if they'd been in the loop.

"I wonder why it doesn't like the EM reader method?" Amy mused.

Kingsley said, "I expect it is a connoisseur in such matters."

"How?" Benjamin looked both puzzled and distracted, a difficult combination to fathom.

"It has enforced such orders and used the results perhaps thousands of times before," Kingsley said.

"I wonder what it does with them?" Amy asked, taking a strong pull at her gin and tonic.

"I rather suspect we do not wish to know."

Benjamin looked soberly into Kingsley's eyes. "That bad, huh?"

"Morality is a species-specific concept. The Eater transcends species themselves, since it is an artificial construction left to evolve now for a time longer than the Earth has existed. Outside our experience in a way that does not reward considerations of right and wrong."

Benjamin gave a grim smile. "Sounds like a cla.s.sy way of saying it can do what it d.a.m.n well pleases, so don't think about it."

"Well put," Kingsley said as an aide tugged at his elbow. The man whispered, "You're needed immediately in Conference B."

Kingsley shot back, "I'm bringing these two with me."

"Sir, they weren't included-"

"Then I'm not coming."

"Well, I don't know, I'll have to-"

"Come along." He ushered Amy and Benjamin forward.

When they reached the inevitable battalion of Security personnel, there was the usual orchestration of knitted foreheads and worried doubts. He got through that with a combination of bl.u.s.ter and can't-tolerate-this-oversight fast talk.

"No matter," he said to Amy as they walked down a hall with a phalanx of guards. "This is just the usual confusion. The U Agency is acting in this crisis like what the world plainly needs-a multinational government by default. Yet it will share all the irksome traits of the old style nation-state, princ.i.p.ally rust in the gears."

"Your wife is still undercover?" Amy asked.

"Comfortably so, I gather."

She had caught on. Rather than skulk around, it was better to quite obviously flout their rules. Doing so earned a certain measure of grudging bureaucratic respect. Such strategies had served well in these days.

He had learned a lot. To avoid getting entangled in interference-blocking, running errands, and other lubricating distractions, he had to step lively. There were nations to soothe and endless anxieties issuing from the ever-intruding snout of the media pig. And with exquisite irony, the reward for many, including himself, was to make the Eater's list.

Straightaway he gathered the intent of the meeting. Arno was running it. His mouth twisted at the sight of Amy and Benjamin, but something kept him from objecting-quite possibly, time pressure. Each figure around the long table had a little sign detailing their positions, chimpanzee hierarchy again, but the discussion was the least formal of any Kingsley had yet seen.

Everyone was in a barely controlled panic. The magnetic attack had placed one rim of the loop upon the Center and another upon installations of "strategic value" elsewhere in the Hawaiian Islands, one woman from Defense said. A similar loop had landed about an hour later upon the area outside Washington, quite neatly destroying communications. No one had heard from the President since. "Whereabouts and fate unknown," Arno summed up.

For a world that routinely looked to the United States to pull together alliances, this was a trauma. It did not help that as the meeting proceeded news came of a third loop on its way. Some men rushed out to get details.

"It is now obvious that we had better carry on independently," Arno said. "We can't rely on anyone else."

"We can still reach Channing from here?" Benjamin asked.

The entire table looked at him as though he had shouted in church. He was not a policy maven, but they knew who he was. Their gaze said that his role was to be a gallant warrior, bravely talking his sim-wife through it all, and leave the actual thinking to them.

"I believe so, yes," Arno answered after a two-beat pause. "We have DoD antennae positioned offsh.o.r.e in case these here-the replacement ones, after our losses-get knocked out again."

"Where is our fallback installation?" Kingsley asked.

"We want to keep that information closely guarded," a severe woman in a black pants suit said. She was new, like most of the faces here. Probably from Washington. Crisp, narrow-eyed, the usual.

"Just how are we to flee there, then?"

Arno snorted testily, "All right, it's up at the 'scopes."

"The top of Mauna Kea?" Benjamin said disbelievingly. "But that's so exposed."

"Everything is," Arno shot back. "We're living at the bottom of a well."

"And we can line-of-sight to the fleet," the DoD woman added. "Gives us a big effective platform for operations."

Apparently both U.S. Pacific fleets had been drawn secretly into a perimeter around the Hawaiian Islands. Kingsley had not heard of this, but there did seem a lot of military aircraft in the sky lately, many of them heavy helicopters suitable for carrying substantial equipment up the slopes to 14,000 feet. That they had constructed a redoubt atop the mountain without even Center personnel noting the fact was a tribute, probably to someone in this room.

"We are counting on another attack, once our a.s.sault begins," Arno said. "Maybe even the jet."

This sobered everyone. "It's out near geosynchronous...o...b..t now, finishing off the rest of our satellites," a man nearby said. "Cracks 'em open like nuts. That jet can't reach this far, I heard."

Kingsley came in smoothly, "I believe Dr. Knowlton is the expert on this."

It was best to build Benjamin's position here on technical grounds, not let him be seen as distraught-husband-off-the-rails. Benjamin seemed to get this point without even a glance at Kingsley. He deftly led them through a discussion of the jet, highlighting what his astrophysics team had learned by observing it incinerate Washington. "The magnetic focusing will work at just about any distance," Benjamin concluded. "The Eater sets up a circuit effectively. Beautiful physics. The current in the jet self-pinches itself, and the return route for the circuit flows through the coc.o.o.n of plasma the jet generates outside it."

"Very neat," someone commented. A puzzled silence.

Kingsley understood this remark, however. He wondered for an instant if an appreciation for the aesthetics of physics and engineering could form a better grounds for comprehension between utterly different life-forms than the old routine of serial language.

Such abstractions were swept away, however, by a minor tsunami of moral objection from several around the table. How dare the fellow speak well of the monster, etc.? In the name of decency, and more along those lines.

This gave Benjamin time to think, so that he broke into the pointless jibes with, "It will be under stress-electromagnetic ones, not psychological-when it uses its jet, though. That's the time to hit it."

This got their attention. The DoD woman stalled for time by reviewing their own thinking. Actually, the term was undeserved. They had cooked up a bigger nuclear warhead attack, counting on Channing to deliver the knockout at the end. This she presented in eager-terrier style, looking eagerly back and forth along the table like a girl scout bringing home a prize. Kingsley guessed this strategy's primary a.s.set was that it would allow DoD to claim the victory, should there be one, since Channing would certainly not survive to do so.

Swatting down this notion consumed a full hour. Such trench warfare was interrupted by news that the third loop had landed, again quite neatly, on Beijing.

"Seems our Chinese friends did something nasty, too," Arno said with dry relish.

This shook everyone. Kingsley found Arno's remark chilling, for reasons entirely separate from the China attack.

Those in the room were getting more rattled. They drank coffee, ate some spongy tropical kind of donuts, and murmured like a Greek chorus uncertain of their song. But Arno would not call for a break. Instead, the lady from DoD came forward again and kept saying in various uninstructive ways, "Leave the fighting to those who know." To this, the physicists reb.u.t.ted, "Sorry, you are plainly outgunned and need new ideas."

It was a predictable collision that needed to get worked through. Inst.i.tutional thinking was on the hedgehog model, knowing one solid thing. Kingsley preferred the fox model, as he had leaped over several hedgehogs in his life. Only toward the end of the hour did he manage to get a word in and derail the slow-motion train wreck the meeting was evolving into.

"I recommend using Channing and her Searchers alone," he said. "During the time the jet is on, if it chooses to use it."

This simple suggestion took another hour to thrash through in cla.s.sic committee fashion. Kingsley had to defend the use of antimatter, first carefully defining it and reviewing the decades of research that had led to a packet the size of a wallet containing the explosive power of a hundred hydrogen fusion warheads.

Not that technical arguments carried the day, of course. He was dealing with Americans and so played out the accent bit, using "shedule" and "lehzure." To b.u.t.tress the tactical side, he slid a few recognizable names past at the right speed to be fully caught, yet not so slowly that they would suspect he was trotting them by deliberately. All these he had conferred with-briefly, of course, but no one need know that.

In the policy dust-up that necessarily followed his presentation, he called in Benjamin again, Amy twice. Each time they provided the right scientific detail and fell back to let him drive the point home. Sketches of the Eater interior. Routes into it while avoiding magnetic turbulence, and most importantly, the accretion disk. Old methods he had first learned on Cambridge committees came into play. Knowing that his foes lay in wait, he paused to breathe in the clearly defined middle of his sentences. This let him rush past the period and into the next sentence, allowing no one to make a smooth interruption.

The next hour meandered on until Arno struck. This was lamentably often the best way to settle an issue. Exhaust everyone, then cut through the Gordian verbiage with an Alexandrian sword. He was de facto in charge here, bar word from Washington. Therefore he took command of the military resources and ordered them to stand down, awaiting further orders.

Kingsley was reasonably up on American const.i.tutional law, but this looked doubtful to him. Arno's appointment was through DoD, and the secretary of that ma.s.sive agency could a.s.sume the presidency should the true President be unreachable. Plus the Speaker of the House, president pro tempore of the Senate, Secretary of State, and so on.

This entire argument seemed wobbly, but Arno sold it to the room in short order. The thin veneer of bureaucratic calm had dissolved about an hour before, and now the panic among them made them reach for any seemingly solid solution. Rule by Arno apparently played this emotional function.

Kingsley shook hands with him afterward, murmuring congratulations sincerely meant. He had never seen as deft a maneuver carried out at the airy heights of power. Though of course he did not say so, he ardently hoped that he never would again.