Cyber Rogues (26 page)

“Okay, okay.” Laura raised a hand as if to ward him off. “Our beautiful friendship only began again five minutes ago and I’m not going to argue, at least not for the rest of today. It looks as if we’re going to have plenty of time for all that fun later. Let’s call it a tie.”

Dyer’s mood evaporated abruptly. He grinned.

“Okay. You’re obviously intelligent enough to know deep down that I’m right anyway, so I’ll go along with a tie so you won’t lose face.” His body swayed back and easily evaded the short jab that she aimed at his ribs.

“The problem with all you scientists is that you’re always too proud to admit when you’ve goofed,” she retorted. “That’s bad. Pride always comes before a fall. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that?”

“And so does walking around with your eyes shut,” he answered.

Later that evening Laura joined the scientists for dinner. By a unanimous vote they decided to forego work for once and to get together for a social evening in the bar of the Officers’ Mess. Kim was very quiet and withdrawn and Dyer steeled himself inwardly to the thought that where women were concerned anything could happen. To his relief, however, Laura made no attempt to monopolize his company or to pin him down with conversation. In fact she spent most of her time joking with Chris and talking to people she hadn’t met previously, especially Frank Wescott and Fred Hayes. Either she was being discreet, Dyer decided, or her uncanny radar had sensed the situation within the first half-hour. By the end of the evening Kim was back to her normal self and joining in the fun; Dyer began feeling at ease again.

Afterward they went outside to watch the contingents departing for Janus lining up to board the transports that had been shuttling back and forth all day between Fort Vokes and Kennedy. Janus was already a functioning world and week by week its population was growing.

In less than a month it would be the scientists’ turn to go.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The five men who sat facing one another in the Oval Office of the White House were grim and unsmiling. President Vaughan Nash kept his eyes fixed on the desk in front of him while he allowed time for the full effect of the news to sink in. CIM Secretary Irwin Schroder and ISA Director-General John Belford exchanged heavy glances while Krantz and Linsay remained silent and expressionless. Belford had just announced that a security-coded signal, decipherable only by him personally, had been received one hour previously from Janus. It had been sent by the commander of the small team of handpicked Air Force technical specialists who had gone up to Janus a month earlier posing as an ISA support group. The signal was brief—in fact it decoded into just one word: springbok. This was the code word that meant
Omega
had been successfully installed and checked without complications.

Omega—
a fifty-megaton thermonuclear bomb concealed at a strategic point in a virtually inaccessible part of Janus’s structure and wired for remote detonation by a command beamed from Earth.
Omega—
the final letter of the Greek alphabet; the final resort should all else fail.

Only a handful of people apart from the five men gathered in the Oval Office were aware that precautions this extreme had been taken. Three coded keys, each generated separately by a randomizing computer, were needed in combination to unlock the device before it could detonate. Nash alone knew one of those commands; only Schroder knew the second, and Belford the third. Should any one of them be unable to participate for any reason, his deputy could, in precisely defined circumstances, obtain the code and learn of its purpose by opening an electronically sealed order.
Omega
could be activated only if and when all three accepted that an emergency of sufficient seriousness had arisen and that all other means of dealing with it had proved ineffective. Nobody knew what form such an emergency might conceivably take, but Janus was full of unknowns. The possibility that
Omega
might be necessary had to be faced. Should a situation arise for which
Omega
was the only solution, the consequences of not having
Omega
to fall back on would be incalculably worse than the world outrage that would almost certainly follow its being used. Were that not so,
Omega
would never have been devised in the first place.

At length Nash looked up and read the faces around him.

“I know it’s sick,” he said in a quiet but firm voice. “But it has to be. If it’s never used, then no harm can come of it. If it has to be used, then the whole experiment will have avoided something happening worldwide one day that we wouldn’t have been able to stop. Sometimes a few lives have to be gambled to protect many. At least these people are going through their own choice and they know it’s not intended as a picnic. A lot of others in history didn’t have the choice.”

“It’s okay for us to talk like that,” Schroder reminded him. “But Melvin and Mark are the only two of us who will actually be there. They’ll be the only two people on Janus who know about it. That’s a hell of a lonely position to be in.” He made the remark more from respect for the two who were going despite what they knew, rather than to say something that everybody in the room didn’t already know. Krantz and Linsay, of course, had a choice too. Nash looked at them as if inviting them to reaffirm the views that they had first expressed months before, when the question of
Omega
was first debated.

“It’s a soldier’s job,” Linsay said stiffly. “You can’t pick and choose. You take whatever comes with the job.”

Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton—Cassino, Normandy, the Ardennes—Linsay had studied them all and relived time and time again in the private world of his fantasies the days when generals commanded mighty armies and pitted themselves against worthy opponents. A man could prove himself to himself then. What was there to test the mettle of the warrior today? Endless ceremonial parades and occasional show-the-flag police expeditions to disarm a rabble of undisciplined savages or chase a few bandits away from unheard-of villages in unpronounceable places. And even then, the restrictions imposed by nervous diplomats on initiative and anything that might have called for even the rudiments of true generalship made the whole thing more like a college football match, except that the rules applied to one side only.

But to face an adversary unlike any faced before by any general in history—a real adversary for whom there were no rules. This was the battle for which destiny had shaped Mark Linsay. If
Omega
were ever needed he would have failed. To fail and die locked to the end in mortal combat would at least be more honorable than to return defeated. Either way he would go down in history as the first military commander to fight not for a religious emblem, a national flag or an ideological creed, but for the whole of his race.

Nash nodded and turned his eyes toward Krantz. Krantz shrugged and smiled contemptuously.

“You all know my feelings on the matter,” he said. “There is not the remotest possibility of the situation escalating to the point where something as drastic as
Omega
will ever have to be considered. The whole thing is a gross and ugly exaggeration—a product of the paranoia bred into the military mind or the politician’s compulsive addiction to insecurity.” He clapped the palms of his hands down onto his knees in a gesture of finality. “
Omega
will never be used. Therefore I do not take it into account as a factor in making my decision. After the experiment has been concluded the device will be quietly dismantled and the whole shoddy episode buried somewhere in the classified archives. The only effect it will have had will be to leave a sour taste in all our mouths. That’s all I have to say.”

PART THREE

COMBAT

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Dyer stood on the rock summit of a grassy knoll. On one side the knoll fell away steeply to become one wall of a deep gorge through which a stream flowed toward a lake farther below. Above him the slopes steepened rapidly, merging into jagged outcrops of gray rock silhouetted against the strangely violet hue of the sky. Above them the sky changed color gradually, becoming a normal blue directly overhead then darkening again into violet as it plunged behind the opposite skyline of the valley. The landscape below was more parklike than the rugged, natural-looking slopes and buttresses that formed the valley walls. The valley curved steadily upward in both directions along its length, eventually disappearing up and out of sight behind the two immense semicircular arches of the sky. A fresh, cool breeze rose from the floor of the valley, carrying with it the sounds of birds from the greenery lower down.

Opposite a point not far behind him, a smooth tower two hundred feet in diameter rose from a knot of buildings half hidden by trees on the valley floor, and soared high above the skylines that bordered the valley on either side. A lifetime’s conditioning made his eyes see the sky as continuing uninterrupted way beyond the top of the tower, but he knew that this was an illusion; the spoke met the roof barely more than eight hundred feet above the center of the Rocky Valley sector of Janus.

Farther away along the valley floor in the opposite direction, almost at the limit of vision defined by the interposed archway of the sky, he could see the base of a second spoke, the one that terminated in the middle of Downtown. As he followed the valley floor with his eyes, the open patchwork of Rocky Valley transformed itself abruptly into a compact terraced sculpture of rainbow walls and gleaming roofs that became progressively higher nearer the curving precipice of the spoke, like an abstract rendering of an ancient ziggurat. The angles of the architecture and the apparent tilt of the spoke toward him before it vanished combined to tell him he was looking down on the metropolis of Janus from a height, while his sense of balance insisted that he was looking up at it. Even after nearly a month on Janus he still had to stare for a long time before his protesting brain managed to produce a consistent interpretation of the conflicting data coming in through different senses.

He turned back to face the boulder upon which Laura, clad in jeans and a tartan shirt, was silently contemplating the far side of Rocky Valley.

“You don’t seem to be saying much today,” he called out as he walked back to join her. “What’s up? Don’t tell me you’re so much of a city girl that a little walk up a hill takes all your breath away.” Laura acknowledged his words with a faraway smile but kept her eyes fixed on the sun-soaked slopes opposite them. Dyer looked down at her suspiciously. “You’re not off into one of those transcendental things again, are you? Or maybe just thinking about something?”

“I still have to work at it to convince myself that it’s all possible,” she said slowly at last. She focused back on where he was standing and shook her head. “Tell me I’m dreaming. Tell me we’re really on Earth and people didn’t make all this.”

Dyer grinned and looked apologetic. “Sorry, but that’s not real sky. There are stars outside it and more under your feet. New York’s a couple of hundred thousand miles from here, two stars down and to your left.”

He sat down next to her and helped himself to hot coffee from the flask in the small knapsack which they had brought with them. They had left Downtown a few hours earlier and followed the north lip of the Rim eastward, through the outskirts of Paris and up onto the low rolling green slopes that bordered Sunnyside. At Vine County they had dropped down to the Rim Boor for a couple of beers at the pseudo-English pub that formed part of the social center surrounding the spoke. From there they had continued on across the Rim to pass through Berlin and on up a winding trail that followed near the crest of the south side of Rocky Valley. They had a little over half a mile to go now to reach the west edge of Downtown to complete their circuit of the Rim.

Laura turned her head away again to take in more of the view below.

“It really works, doesn’t it,” she said thoughtfully after a while.

“What does?”

“Science. It works.”

Dyer stopped drinking and looked at her in mock surprise.

“Are you feeling all right today . . . no headaches or dizzy spells or anything like that?”

“It’s okay. This really is me talking,” Laura said. “It’s just that . . . well, everything I’ve seen since we came here . . . it’s all too incredible to be real, but it is. Whatever people had to learn to build something like this, they had to get it right. Know what I mean, there’s no room to fool yourself when you take on this kind of thing. There are so many other ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’ and all kinds of stuff that people spend their whole lives believing, but they’re all fooling themselves, aren’t they. They never have to prove it by doing something like this . . . something where there’s no getting away from the fact that it either works or it doesn’t.”

“You mean results,” Dyer offered, screwing the cap back on the flask and returning the flask to the knapsack.

“Yes, that’s it I guess. Results. If something doesn’t produce any results outside your own head, there’s no way you’re ever going to know whether what you think about it is right or wrong. You could believe it all you want, but if you’re honest you’d have to admit that you couldn’t
know
.”

“Christ, you are starting to sound like a scientist,” Dyer told her. “Did you figure all that out just now?”

“No,” Laura replied. “It’s crossed my mind on and off for a long time. You ought to know. You’ve already said most of it.”

“Somehow I always had the impression that my utterances of undiluted wisdom were falling on stony ground,” he answered.

Laura gave a short laugh. “You sound like Chris. Okay, I know I sounded a bit mean at times, but don’t forget I had a job to do. I was supposed to find out how you people thought and how you felt about things. Well, I wanted the full picture. I was curious to see how you handle people who were being obstinate as well as nice people who say all the right things.”

Dyer looked up at her as the meaning of what she was saying percolated slowly through. His eyes widened and he slowly raised an accusing finger to point straight at her.