David's Sling Read online

  He had entered politics, believing that better solutions to the problems of mankind would require the accurate application of power. He did not yet know how to apply that power. Probably no one did. But for the moment, he would work to consolidate the power, in preparation for the day when he, or someone, learned how to use it.

  Jan led him down the slopes to a shallow depression. Short ridges ringed it on three sides, protecting them from a bitter wind as they made camp. She borrowed his swiss army knife to slice open their freeze-dried food pouches, then started pacing between the packs and the stove to prepare dinner. Her cheeks glowed with an energy that struck Hilan again as somehow too fierce, too burning for a healthy woman. “Believe me, it’s much easier going down,” she promised him. “If this hadn’t been such a great campsite, we could have gone all the way down the mountain today with no problem.”

  Hilan groaned softly and lay on his sleeping bag. Only his eyes moved, watching Jan pace.

  “So, are you happy you came along? I am.” Jan turned away in a fit of coughing. When she turned back, the flush of her cheeks had faded. She handed him back his knife.

  Holding it, Hilan remembered his earlier desperate thoughts to save Jan if he could not make it. “When I stepped into that crevasse, I almost killed you. I wonder whether it makes sense to rope people together—whether it wouldn’t be smarter to sacrifice the one who falls to guarantee that someone survives.”

  “Nonsense. Falls like that remind us why we wear ropes and why we make everyone on the climbing team interdependent in the first place. I’m just glad we responded effectively to the crisis.”

  “Did we?” Hilan stared at the rips in his gloves, cut during his climb up the rope. “You know, I was so tired before we even reached that crevasse that I hardly noticed the fall.” Thinking about it, he was there again. “It was really strange, just staring down at the rocks that would kill me.” His eyes unfocused. “I didn’t react correctly at all.”

  Jan laughed. “Hilan, you had the perfect reaction— no reaction at all. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Hilan grunted. “You’re probably right. I’ll miss the switchback over and over, each time reinforcing the lesson that I learned. In fact, I’ll learn the lesson far better than if I’d simply gotten scared when I fell. It’ll make a great reinforced revelation. Sounds like a good example for you to teach at your beloved Institute.”

  “Yes,” Jan said softly, “an excellent example.”

  Hilan exhaled. The air rushed from his lungs with the easy freedom that reminded him how high, up they were. He had never thought of breathing as an effort, or of the friction of the air upon his throat; now, in their absence, he knew them.

  “Jan.” His muscles still hung in limp exhaustion, but his thoughts raced. “Thank you for bringing me here. In my role at home, I’ve welded myself so deeply to my senatorial image that sometimes I wonder whether I’m still here, or whether I’m only an image. Now I know.”

  “I thought you’d like my mountain.” She coughed. Hilan studied her for a moment. Her flush from the climb had faded. Now she seemed pale—as much too pale as she had earlier seemed too flush. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

  He sighed. “You know how to exploit even a moment’s weakness. What do you want me to do—help you save the world?”

  Jan gave him an expression of surprised pleasure that would have fit well on an American in the Orient who rounded a corner and ran headlong into an old high school chum.

  That reaction pleased Hilan immensely. Jan did not understand him as well as he understood her.

  Even among his old friends, Hilan had been surprised by how rare and how out of place the people who personally sought ways to save the world were. Even Hilan’s wife did not understand this fixation of his on the problems of huge scale—questions of famine, of economic collapse, of nuclear war. Jan, like himself, was one of those very few who thought in such terms on a daily basis.

  But Jan was an even rarer breed of human being than those who sought answers to the big questions—she had found some answers.

  She had not yet solved any of the big problems, but she had begun to heal at least one medium-size one—she had synthesized a therapy that could usually cure the most common American addiction: cigarette smoking.

  Jan continued. “I don’t know whether the favor fm asking you will help save the world or not. Perhaps it will. I wish I knew.” Another cough punctuated the sentence. “What I want you to do is talk with Nathan about the Sling.”

  “The Sling?”

  “Yes. It’s a military research project.”

  Despite the exhaustion, and the stiffness of his skin from cold and exposure, Hilan managed to grimace. “God, I hate the military.” Again, the air left his lungs too fast. “I wish we didn’t need it.”

  Jan smothered a laugh. “Our mammoth military-industrial complex isn’t very American, is it? You know, the first act of the American government after the Revolutionary War was to disband its standing army. They sold the navy’s ships. America’s forces were reduced to 80 men, none above the rank of captain.”

  She stretched out on the sleeping bag beside him. “Even today you can see the strength of the anti-military roots of our country. How else could America engage in fierce public debates over permission for advisers to carry side-arms? Even at the heights of our military adventurism, an astute observer can see that it’s unnatural for us: we do it so badly. We make far better businessmen than soldiers.”

  Hilan had never thought of it in quite this light before. “Yet America wound up as the principal adversary of the most powerful military force in human history.” He thought about the absurdity of the situation. “How did we get ourselves into this position?” He shook his head. “Even more important, how have we managed to pull it off for such a long time?”

  “For decades, we succeeded as a superpower by holding the ultimate club. We succeeded because we had more, and better, nuclear weapons.” She shook her head. “But that doesn’t work anymore. How could we convince a cold-eyed political pragmatist like Sipyagin that America would use nuclear arms, knowing that the Soviets would destroy us in turn? The nuclear threat served us well for a long time, but its time has come to an end. No one believes we can use it anymore.”

  Hilan shifted on his bag, trying to burrow into it. The chilled air made the goose down warmth precious. “It’s impossible for anyone to believe that we’d use nukes as long as Mayfield is the decision maker. Some people have trouble believing he can use a letter opener, much less a nuke.” Hilan tried to say it without passion. President Mayfield was a member of his own party, after all.

  Jan nodded. “You know, both the Soviets and the Americans go through cycles of confrontational behavior. You might think the greatest danger looms when both countries reach the peak of their aggression cycles at the same time. But that’s not true. The greatest danger occurs when the cycles go out of phase—when the United States reaches one of its lowest lows and the Soviet Union reaches one of its highest highs.”

  The cold of the glacial air reached Hilan’s heart. “And we’ve come to that moment in the cycle.”

  Jan didn’t answer.

  “So what’s the Sling Project?”

  Jan laughed at the compound of despair and hope in his voice. “We make better businessmen than soldiers. We must fight, then, as businessmen.”

  Hilan tried to snort, but it took too much effort. “A division of businessmen wouldn’t last very long against a division of soldiers.”

  “No, of course not. We’d still need soldiers. But we can do with a lot fewer soldiers than some countries because we have another strength: we have crossed the threshold from one form of society to another. Our opponents live in the Industrial Age. We stand on the brink of the Information Age. We must build an Information Age system to defend ourselves.”

  “And just how do we do that?”

  Jan smiled at his limp form. “You look so exhausted— and so curious at the
same time. I think I’ll leave you in this state and let Nathan tell you the rest of the story.”

  Hilan groaned. “Very well. When would you like to introduce us?”

  Jan closed her eyes. “That may not work,” she said. She coughed again, and this time it racked her whole body. Blood spattered the soft snow, a dark obscenity in the evening sunlight. “Dammit,” she muttered, “I better at least get off the mountain.”

  Hilan rose unsteadily to his knees. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

  “I’m really sorry, Hilan. The climb down may be harder than I’d hoped.”

  “What!?”

  Jan rose to her feet and put her hands on his shoulders. “Hilan, you’re a born crusader. In some ways you remind me of Nathan.” She looked away for a moment. “But I haven’t always marched to a crusader’s rhythm. I was quite content as a chain-smoking psychotherapist, until three years ago. Then I had my reinforced revelation.” She coughed again. “I found out I had lung cancer.”

  Hilan had met Jan just a year ago, through another of his rare crusader friends, who had just discovered the Institute. He’d wondered briefly about her past, about why she molded the Institute into a national resource that did all the things it was famous for—from seminars on mass media, to job matching, to weapon systems development—but he hadn’t thought about it enough. Now it was obvious.

  “The chemotherapy they have these days is quite terrific. They can keep you alive and active, even while the cancer is eating you up inside. Then the end comes quite suddenly.” She closed her eyes. “Leslie and Nathan both insisted I shouldn’t challenge the mountain this last time. I guess they were right.”

  Hilan stared with helpless horror.

  “We’ll find a hospital in the morning. Better get some sleep—we’ll start early.”

  The ache deep within his bones allowed him no other response. He slept, but his sleep roiled with odd images: images of Soviets, and cigarettes, and nuclear missiles. Woven through them all were images of a man, dangling in a crevasse, with only the strength of the rope and the taut determination of his partner’s straining muscles to save him.

  SNAP. In games of ball and racket, such as tennis, the racket must cease to be a separate external object. It must become one with the player—an extension of his arm. The arm and the eye must also meld through the mediation of the mind. And though the mind controls this connection, it too must submerge its separateness, its awareness of self, into the union. Only the racket connected directly to the eye plays outstanding tennis.

  CLICK. With the acquisition of the flatcam video recorder, the news reporter develops a similar relationship with his camera. With the tape riding quietly on his hip, and the flat camera lens pinned on his lapel, individual virtuosos can replace the old-style news teams. The camera is almost invisible; the reporter is quite inconspicuous. As he becomes less conspicuous, he becomes less inhibiting to the people who are his targets. The reporters eye and the reporters camera become a single device with which to capture the images he will later clean and craft in the lab. The lab supplies the magic. It is a place where background noise and foreground lighting can be toned to highlight the message, all by using powerful techniques of Information Age filtering.

  WHIR. Bill Hardie knows that he has been born in the right moment of history—the beginning of the era of flatcam journalism. He can see from the camera lens in his lapel— not merely the lighting and the people, but the action, the emotions, the sensations. He can zero in on those elements with the skill of an astronomer picking out galaxies on the edge of the universe. Sometimes he can sense the critical moment, allowing him to shift his attention before the event, to capture it s very beginnings, rather than its concluding passage.

  JUMP. The only flaw in Bill’s coverage is an occasional jerkiness to the image, a reflection of a certain anxious impatience with real life. His analysis is too important to wait on the sluggish motions of other men. Fortunately, the jitter of his camera, like the noise of murmured voices in the background, can be removed in the laboratory.

  FOCUS. Bill recognizes the heavy burden his talent places on him. He understands his mission in life. He must broadcast truth in a pure form to all people. Just as his computer filters the background noise that blurs the conversation, he must filter out the foreground noise that blurs the fundamental reality.

  BREAK. Bill frowns at the young geological engineer from the Zetetic Institute up on the stage ^The engineer poses a serious problem for Bill. This engineer introduces blaring noise into the foreground, drowning out the truth. The truth is: The people of the State of Washington must not let the United States dump its radioactive wastes there. Nuclear power plants and radioactive wastes are bad; this is the truth. Bill focuses his attention on the nuances of the situation, to wring victory from every tiny image as it happens.

  SHADE. Three men sit spotlighted on the stage facing a dimly lit auditorium. Cigarette smoke forms miniature weather inversions here and there in the audience. A puff of acrid blue haze blows across Bill’s face; he shifts locations.

  FOCUS. The spotlights create the mood of an interrogation, with unseen prosecutors and accusers contemplating the three men nearly blinded by the light. The Zetetic engineer sits in the middle of the three, flanked by two older men—directors from the Power Commission. These directors are the ones who had hired the Zetetic Institute to act as an impartial consultant, to assess the safety of a radioactive waste storage facility near Hanford, Washington.

  Why had they hired the Institute? They had known that the Institute had a reputation for doing good engineering. Equally important, the Institute had a reputation for presenting that engineering smoothly in public.

  Indeed, the opening of the discussion is dry and crisp, almost too civilized; the Zetetic engineer simply presents facts about the geological properties of the proposed waste site. With careful clarity, he shows why it is a safe place to put radioactives. Bill realizes the Power Commission has taken a risk in hiring the Institute: Zetetics search diligently for facts, and facts could go against the Power Commission as easily as they could go in its favor.

  The men of the Power Commission, in their dark blue suits, with their tight, closed faces, mirror the audience’s hostility. They perform as perfect Establishment objects of disdain. Had the engineer sat to the side rather than in the middle of the trio, Bill would zoom on them and construct a crisp image of Good versus Evil—the audience versus the Power Commission.

  But the engineer sits in the middle, looking gentle, even friendly, in his light blue suit and solid red tie. He maintains an open smile and equally open eyes, apparently oblivious to the emotional tension that stews amidst the combatants. Only the careful precision of his words hints that his understanding of the situation goes deep. Bill will have to perform magic with the lighting and the shading of the stage to make him look sinister. Even then, Bill’s success will be incomplete.

  PAN. Ovals of pale white float in the darkness of the auditorium: the faces of the concerned citizens who live near Hanford. From here the questions spring, randomly, in sharp tones of frustration and anger. One oval bobs twice, then rises. It is a young woman with spiked hair and mottled jeans. She asks, “How can we make them shut those plants down if we let them dump their waste products on our land?”

  When the engineer responds to the woman’s question, his voice warms the room with its honesty. “The best way to eliminate nuclear power is, of course, to find a better form of power, such as fusion or solar power satellites. Remember, if you just tell the Power Commission that they can’t build nuclear power plants, without telling them what would be better, they’ll probably build a coal-burning plant. Is that really better?” The engineer shrugs. “That’s a separate study, of course.”

  ZOOM. For just a moment, the young man frowns. Bill catches that expression, savoring it, knowing it will be useful. “This is the safest place we can find to put the wastes that already exist. In other words, if we put them somep
lace else, it’s more dangerous. Many of you are concerned about how dangerous nuclear reactors are. Don’t you see that if you won’t let the power companies use the safest methods they can find, then you are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? Do you believe that you should sabotage the reactors to show how dangerous they are? That is exactly what a person does when he prevents others from using safety precautions.”

  WHIR, WHIR, WHIR. This is beautiful! Bill can use that bit about sabotage: it will make the engineer sound hostile, despite the soft cheer of his voice.

  PAN. A middle-aged man with a beard and a faded flannel shirt speaks, arms crossed, from a slouched position in his seat. “We have the right to decide what to put outside our town.”

  SLIDE. The engineer nods. “That’s true.” His smile freezes in position as he looks into the speaker’s eyes. “You have the right to decide. But living in a democracy is not just a matter of rights and freedoms; it is also a matter of responsibilities and duties. You have the right to shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater. You have a duty to not exercise that freedom.

  “Similarly, here you have the right to decide. But you have a duty to make that decision based on the most careful, rational analysis of the facts that you can. You have a duty not to decide based on a general hatred for the Power Commission, as some people might. And you have a duty not to decide on the basis of a love of high technology, as other people might.”

  CLIP. A voice from the darkness shouts, “It’s not fair that it all goes in our backyards.”

  ROLL. The engineer sighs. “Our society carries with it a number of undesirable features. The only fairness we can approach is to spread the unfairness as fairly as we can. Let them put the radioactives here; it’s the best place. But make them put the missile silos and the strip mines elsewhere. If someone figures out another arrangement that’s as safe as putting the radioactives here, but that’s more fair, and that doesn’t have any other even more serious consequences, let’s do that instead.”

  ZOOM. Another middle-aged man stands. This one wears a suit that might have done justice to a member of the Power Commission. “What about our property values? When they put that radioactive dump in our backyards, we’ll be destroyed.”