David's Sling Page 3

  SLIDE. Another nod comes from the engineer. “Of course, if the Power Commission handles the waste properly, the property values should not be affected. So to encourage them, we recommend that the Commission be required to pay the owner of a property the difference between the value of the land considering the presence of the site, and the value of the land if the site weren’t here, when he sells. Weve subcontracted with a real estate assessor to establish a set of baseline values.” He glanced sideways at the Commission men with a hint of amusement. “This was not the recommendation that the Commission liked most.”

  PAN. An elderly lady rasps from the. front, “What if they don’t handle the wastes properly? What if they make a mistake?”

  ZOOM. Sorrow masks the Zetetic’s face for a moment. “That’s what we must prevent. As I’ve shown, there are a wide variety of mistakes that the system can tolerate because the base rock of the area is fundamentally safe. And the shipping containers are also safe from a wide variety of human errors and natural calamities. But ultimately, even this system must rely on human beings to not invent new kinds of errors. So we asked ourselves the following question: What mechanism could we use to inspire the operators of the site to seek out and correct unforeseen problems before they become critical?”

  The young man smiles as he contemplates the probing analysis he has done on this problem. “Do you know how the Romans guaranteed the quality of their bridges? In the opening ceremony, the man who designed the bridge floated on a raft underneath while the first carts passed over. If the bridge collapsed, the builder of the bridge went with it. This ritual guaranteed the construction of many good bridges.”

  CUT. This story gets a short, murmured chuckle from the audience, as if against their own will, they appreciate the justice of the system.

  SLIDE. The Zetetic engineer waves an open hand. “We have a similar plan here, involving both a carrot and a stick. For the stick, we recommend that the chief operating engineer and the plant manager for the waste site be required to live within twenty miles of the site during their tenure.

  “We also recommend protection for the chief operating engineer. If he finds grave hazards with the plant that he cannot fix because of expense or politics, then he can blow the whistle with security: The Power Commission will be required to pay him five years’ salary. Thus, the man in the best position to know about new dangers has a ‘para-chute’ to protect him from the people who have the most to lose in fixing the problem.”

  PAUSE. The audience seems struck by this approach to guaranteeing safety. They don’t know if it will work or not, but it is at least different. Even Bill feels a stab of surprise. He clenches his teeth with resolve, remembering that even this novel idea does not change the basic truth.

  FLASH. A woman in the back, with two children squirming beside her, speaks. “Are you telling us that the danger from these radioactive wastes is zero?”

  PAN. “Of course not,” the engineer replies, leaving Bill with a wave of relief. He can certainly use that reply for some mileage. “What I’m telling you is that the danger from the radioactive dump is less than the danger of driving your car home tonight.”

  CUT. The discussion goes on, but to no purpose in Bill’s value system. Most of the people leave with the same opinions they held upon arrival. But Bill knows that the engineer, with his facts, has swayed some of those people away from the truth. Herein Bill sees the significance of his own life: He must bring those people back to the fold, and convert others—enough others to defeat the damned Zetetic Institute.

  Indeed, the Institute, and its emphasis on facts represent a grave danger to more issues other than the Hanford waste storage debate. Bill sees a task of greater scope feeing him. Perhaps part of his purpose is to destroy the purveyors of such facts, facts” that by denying truth become a travesty of truth.

  CUT. CUT. CUT. CUT. The size of the editing job he faces with this video shakes him; the Zetetic engineer has been smooth indeed. The engineer qualifies as a politician, despite his early recitations on ground water, earthquakes, and mining costs. However, that smoothness does not worry Bill unduly: after all, whoever gets the last word wins the argument. And in news reporting, the editing reporter always gets the last word. WRAP.

  Yuri Klimov decided that it was the ivory figurines that lent the cold formality to the room. The shiny figurines glared at him from their perches in the shiny black bookcases. Despite their carefully kept luster, however, they were old. Age had worn them to soft curves in a thousand litde places meant for sharply carved angles. Age had worn them as age had worn the General Secretary himself, seated across the mahogany table from Yurii.

  General Secretary Sipyagin closed his eyes. Yurii feared he might have dozed off, but his eyes opened again, in a slow, blinking motion. His pallid skin folded into a smile. “Delightful, Yurii. I am pleased you have found the Americans easy to deal with.”

  Yurii shrugged. “Mayfield has little choice but to yield. His people practically advertise their need for paper assurances. All we need do is squeeze,” he closed his fist ever so gently, “and concessions flow forth.” He smiled. “May-field got into office by promising to relax worldwide tensions. He must sign, and sign, and sign again to maintain his position.”

  “Nevertheless, you handle him like a master. Now, a few years ago when we tried negotiating with Keefer and his henchmen, things were very different.”

  “The secret is to be able to think as the Americans think—without losing our Soviet pragmatism.” He shook his head, and spoke with just a hint of puzzlement. “They do not think like us, you know.”

  Sipyagin coughed in a sound of disgust. “Yes. They think like weak children.”

  Yurii opened his mouth to object, then closed it. “Yes, often like children.”

  “We’ll start a new missile program immediately. When those crazy Americans were toying with space defenses it was a bad investment to build missiles—who knew what kind of countermeasures we might have to retrofit? At last, we’ve been relieved of this burden of uncertainty.”

  Yurii smiled. “Yes, now we can sharpen our strategic edge.”

  Sipyagin gurgled with laughter. “As if we needed to sharpen it any more.”

  Yurii joined the laughter. It was wonderful, sharing a joke with the General Secretary, despite his infirmities. Or perhaps because of them. “With this treaty, it will be easy to maintain our strategic advantage. It might make more sense at this point to start undermining their tactical forces. I’ll see what my men can do in the next round of discussions.”

  Sipyagin nodded. “A marvelous idea.” He turned away to look at a stack of wrinkled papers by his side.

  Clearly the General Secretary had dismissed him, but Yurii had one more request. “Sir, there is one last thing I would like to investigate in the strategic realm.”

  ;;Yes?”

  “I question this whole concept of global consequences for a nuclear war. I know that our modellers agree with their modellers: you can set off just so many megatons before the radiation releases and the climate effects are so massive that they span the planet, no matter where they get set off. But many of those modellers are soft civilians, who want us to avoid nuclear warfare for their own reasons. I can’t help wondering if the threshold might be higher than these people think. Simulation is a soft science, as I’m sure you know. Its results should not be left in the hands of biased civilians. If we knew that the threshold were higher, we would have an enormous edge over the Americans: we could continue barraging them with nuclear weapons even after they had ceased fire. Living in their fantasy world of nuclear danger, they would fear killing their own survivors.”

  The General Secretary chuckled. “Control of a nuclear war would belong completely to us then, wouldn’t it? Very well.” He waved his hand—was it shaking?—toward the door. Yurii felt Sipyagin’s weary eyes follow him as he swept through it.

  Yurii breathed deeply. The air in the hall was stale, but he felt refreshed nonetheles
s. Interviews with the General Secretary always reminded him how wonderful it was to be young and healthy.

  May 26

  In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information; extract the knowledge.

  —Zetetic Commentaries, Kira Evans

  They held an early ceremony—early enough to discourage people from coming, early enough to complete quickly, early enough to catch the morning dew before it evaporated. Dampness still shimmered on the rocks and markers that dotted the cemetery.

  “I am the resurrection and the life, saieth the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live …” the ministers voice droned on.

  Leslie felt disconnected from the service, as though watching through a telescope the odd behavior of an alien culture. It left him calm—perhaps too calm. He had lost too many people to be overwhelmed by the loss of one more. He would not be overwhelmed this time, though this time he had lost the most wonderful woman he had ever known: his wife, Jan Evans.

  His mind skipped briefly across the toll death had taken around him during the years. Leslie Evans had flown as an Air Force fighter pilot. Even in peacetime, one fourth of all fighter pilots never reached retirement age. How odd for him to be attending Jan’s funeral, rather than the other way around. There had certainly been moments during the last agonizing days of her life that he wished he could have reversed their positions, if only to give her a few hours without pain.

  Perhaps the crowning irony was that her impending death had caused her to save his life. He too had been a cigarette smoker, until Jan contracted lung cancer. Jan had used him as her first guinea pig in her efforts to develop better cures for smoking. His fingers twitched at the thought of the cigarettes he had not touched for two years.

  . . and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die …”

  He could not have thanked her or loved her enough, had she lived a thousand years.

  He heard a sniffle to his right. From the corner of his eye he watched his daughter, Kira, as she stared off to the horizon. Despite her sniffle, she seemed more angry than sad. Leslie knew the focus of her anger. He had watched her carefully during these last few days. Her attitudes reminded him of Jan in her youth. Kira had graduated from Virginia Tech just in time to witness the last throes of Jans battle; now her graduation ceremony would seem stale and pointless. Leslie reached out and took her hand in his. She did not look at him, but her grip held surprising strength. Her nails dug into his hand. The pain seemed more real, more in tune with the grief battering his mind, than the words of the minister.

  . . Death will be swallowed up in victory …”

  He saw Kira’s face tighten with renewed anger. She was not a person to sit on her emotions without acting; Leslie worried about what she might do. She had engaged in long sessions with the Zetetic computers since coming home, searching for something. She had not tried to alter any of the data bases, but two days ago, she had mentioned that she had accepted a job with a small advertising firm. When Leslie did his own data base search, he found that this particular firm had just won a big contract with the largest tobacco company in the country. Leslie felt tired every time he thought about what that might mean. And of course, it wouldn’t do him any good to confront her about it.

  . . When I consider thy Heaven, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained …”

  Nathan might be able to talk to her about it. Kira and her uncle had always had a special understanding. Leslie shifted his head to look at Nathan Pilstrom.

  Nathan gazed at the preacher with calm, clear eyes. Nathan had not seen so many deaths as Leslie; he did not share Leslie’s numbness to human mortality. But Nathan had his own sort of protection, a way of accepting the immediate reality as the starting point for his thoughts. He never dwelled on might-have-beens.

  Nathan himself seemed surprised at times by his own stolid acceptance of events gone by. Even more surprising, his acceptance did not dull his enthusiasm for changing things as they might be tomorrow—things over which he could still exercise control. He had a pragmatic, Zetetic way of thinking. Nathan himself attribute^ his perspective to Jan’s influence, but Leslie knew that the seeds had always been there. It seemed natural for Nathan to devise new ways of viewing the world.

  But it didn’t seem quite as natural for him to run a world-famous Institute. Jan had thrust him into that position, her last and greatest effort. Leslie wondered if Nathan might not harbor a mild irritation with Jan for sticking him with that responsibility. Because of Jan, he now had to deal with politics, and with politicians.

  “… Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, in whose hands are the living and the dead: we give these thanks for all Thy servants who have laid down their lives in the service of our country …”

  Leslie looked far to his right to see Senator Hilan Forstil. Forstil was the only politician he had met whom he hadn’t disliked on sight. He didn’t understand his own lack of hostility; Forstil seemed as phony as any of them. Jan had assured him that Forstil was a straight shooter. Leslie took her word for it as long as he didn’t have to bet money.

  In this moment, however, Leslie thought he saw what Jan had meant. Of all the people at this funeral, Forstil seemed most grief-stricken. He stood apart from the others, speaking to no one, grappling with some deep personal loss.

  And another person he didn’t know—a young, serious, clean-shaven man—also stood separate from the others. Leslie was pretty sure he was Kurt McKenna, a kid just out of Special Forces, recruited for the Institute by Jan. He wondered how the gung-ho attitude of a ranger would mesh with Zetetic philosophy; the Institute fought fanaticism with a zeal that itself bordered on the fanatical. Kurt would no doubt set off new kinds of fireworks within the ZI realm; Leslie hoped they would be healthy.

  . . grant to them Thy mercy, and the light of Thy presence; and give us such a lively sense of Thy righteous will, that the work which Thou hast begun in them may be perfected …”

  The ceremony ended. Leslie hugged his daughter tightly. Nathan came up beside them, and Leslie and Kira opened their arms to him as well. For a while the three of them stood huddled by the grave. After an immeasurable time they separated, reluctantly, like the fibers of a rope being parted.

  Until now, Leslie had kept his thoughts away from Jan with scrupulous success. But images of her, accumulated for almost twenty-five years, welled up in his mind. And despite all the funerals of friends and pilots he had attended, despite the calloused surface of his mind that should have been inured to the tragic losses, he turned away from everyone and slipped into the cemetery’s groves to walk alone with his grief.

  ROLL. He dashes past the Institute with a flurry of pleasure, confident in his strength. Bill is a runner, a marathoner. He understands the pain that accompanies an effort too great—a pain almost as great as the pleasure of making that effort. For now, there is only pleasure.

  The air melts as he passes, carrying away his perspiration. A wind gusts against him, full in the face, twisting through the curls of his hair. He presses against it, exultant with the knowledge that the gust cannot obstruct his passage. He continues, several laps across the entrance to the Institute.

  Thirty-five minutes. Five miles. A year before, he had made similar runs in 32 minutes. A year before that, he had made them in 30 minutes. The difference, he concludes, is statistically insignificant. He feels as strong as he has ever been. That is the truth, not to be confused with the fact.

  Bill showers and dresses. Invigorated, he returns to the Institute.

  The Institute building shares no architectural theme with the other structures in this industrial park. In the late morning light the building glows a soft salmon color, its gentle contours reaching out warmly to those who pass by. The soft-gray windows contrast with the glaring mirrored portals of other nearby buildings, suggesting that quality can nonetheless be quiet. This building seems somehow friendlier than the others. Bill sha
kes his head and remembers that this building houses his target.

  To the left of the driveway stands a small bronze sign with a curious emblem. An arrow points up at a 45 degree angle, soaring over a pair of embellished steps. After a moment of squinting in the brightness, “Bill realizes the two steps form the letters “ZI” in a script almost completely lost in the design.

  A shadow falls across him. He is not yet psyched up for confrontation; he steps to the side and looks at the man who stopped next to him.

  The man smiles and points at the sign. “The Zetetic Institute invites you to take the next step.”

  Bill stares, his mouth suddenly dry. The man seems familiar. He is tall, though not so tall as Bill. A relaxed alertness sets the lines of his body, similar to the lines of the building itself. The man s smile is sincere; his gray eyes probe the wide-eyed awareness in Bill’s own eyes. The honesty in those eyes strikes a chord of guilt in Bill’s mind.

  The man raises an eyebrow. “Sorry if I surprised you. It’s just that you looked so unhappy, staring at our sign.”

  Bill frowns.

  The man puts out his hand. “I’m Nathan Pilstrom.”

  Nathan Pilstrom—Bill knows the name. He knows he will remember why in a moment. Nathan Pilstrom grips his hand firmly. The man seems disgustingly natural , the caricature that gives the term nice a bad reputation. Bill has never encountered a better fagade.

  Nathan leads him down through the courtyard, where a pair of earth-colored toy robots hum to and fro. They seem silly, hovering among the well-trimmed trees and shrubs. Then he realizes that the robots are doing the trimming.

  “So what’s your interest in the Institute?”

  Bill snaps back to awareness of the man beside him. His throat still feels parched. His cover story resembles his news stories: at its heart lies a vague form of the facts, richly articulated, with statements that are not false. “I saw one of your Zetetic engineers at a meeting near Hanford recently. He really carved the audience to shreds, and so I figured I should come and see if I can learn how he did it.”