The Hercules Text Read online

  The President looked grave. His features, which were in no way striking in ordinary light, had taken on a hard, flinty appearance in the glow cast by the table lamp. “Harry, I was sorry to hear about the trouble today.”

  Harry cleared his throat. They were alone in the Oval Office. “I’m not sure yet how it happened,” he said. “But Freeman didn’t help.”

  “So I heard. Why did you give him the opportunity to speak?” There was a tired sort of bitterness in his voice. “Schenken, anyway, should have known better.” He peered at Harry, and his assessment was visibly unfavorable. “Never mind,” he said. “It’s not your fault. Did you know we had a fatality?”

  “The little boy?”

  “A third grader visiting here from Macon.” Hurley picked up a pack of cigarettes from his desktop, offered them to Harry, and lit one. “Judging by the tapes, I suspect we’re lucky we didn’t have a full-scale catastrophe out there. I understand Freeman is planning a memorial service tomorrow. I’d ask him not to, but he’s already aware that it’ll embarrass me. If there’s one thing he can’t resist, it’s a chance to appear on national television. He’ll take advantage of TV tomorrow to berate the godless elements in this country that are responsible for the tragedy, by which he usually means the universities, and sometimes the Democrats. But we’re the ones who’ll look foolish. Now, I hope what you’re bringing me tonight is worth the price we’re paying.”

  Harry was seated under a rarity: a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt in a thoughtful mood. Teddy had always seemed to be the most remote of Presidents. Unlike, say, Jefferson and McKinley, who belonged to distant epochs, the Roughrider embodied an age that had never really existed. Who stood for reality today? John W. Hurley? Or Ed Gambini? “Pete Wheeler thinks he’s found a way to extract energy from the magnetic belts around the earth.”

  “Oh?” The President’s expression did not change. The tip of his cigarette glowed and then faded. “How much energy?” He leaned toward Harry. “How complicated a process?”

  “Pete thinks it will provide global supplies. The source is damned near limitless. We don’t have the practical details yet. That’s going to take some time, but Wheeler says the mechanics won’t be difficult.”

  “By God!” Hurley erupted from his seat, clenching both fists over his head in a triumphant gesture recognizable from his campaigns. “Harry, if it’s true, if it’s true.” His eyes locked on Harry. “When will I have something on paper?”

  “By the end of the week.”

  “Make it tomorrow. By noon. Give me what you have. I don’t care if it’s handwritten. I don’t care about theory. I want to know how much power is available and what it will take to get the system operational. You got that, Harry?”

  “Mr. President, I don’t think we can put together anything useful in so short a time.”

  “Just do what I ask. Okay?”

  Harry nodded.

  The President stood beside his desk. “Your jaw is swollen. Is that from this afternoon?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Be more careful, Harry. I need you. Gambini and the others over there, they’re good men, but they don’t have any responsibilities, really, except to themselves. I understand that. They live in a world where men are reasonable and where there are no enemies but ignorance.

  “I need your good judgment, Harry.” Hurley gazed with immense satisfaction at his visitor. “If I were to ask Gambini what to do about the arms race, he would advise me to stop making arms. A beautifully logical response, and yet utterly wrongheaded, of course, since it ignores the fact that the arms race has long since taken on a life of its own. No single nation can stop it. I’m no longer even certain that we and the Soviets working in collusion could stop it.

  “But maybe Father Wheeler has provided an answer. Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?”

  “No, sir,” said Harry, rising. He felt, somehow, as if he had gained weight during the interview.

  Baines Rimford did not drive back to his quarters after leaving the inn on Good Luck Road. Instead, he wandered for hours along bleak highways, between walls of dark forest. The rain that had cleared off in midafternoon had begun again. It was beginning to freeze on his windshield.

  God help him, he did not know what to do.

  He soared over the crest of a hill, descended too swiftly down its far side, and entered a long curve that took him across a bridge. He could not see whether there was water below, or railroad tracks, or only a gully; but it was, in a sense, a bridge across time: Oppenheimer waited on the other side. And Fermi and Bohr. And the others who had unleashed the cosmic fire.

  There must have come a moment, he thought, at Los Alamos, or Oak Ridge, or the University of Chicago, during which they grasped, really understood, the consequences of their work. Had they ever met and talked it over? Had there been a conscious decision, after it became clear during the winter of 1943-44 that the Nazis were not close to building a bomb, to go ahead anyway? Or had they simply been caught up in momentum? In the exhilaration of penetrating the secret of the sun?

  Rimford had spoken once with Eric Christopher, the only one of the Manhattan Project physicists he’d ever met. Christopher was an old man at the time of the meeting, and Rimford had mercilessly put the question to him. It was the only occasion he could recall on which he had been deliberately cruel. And Christopher had said, yes, it’s easy enough for you, fifty years later, to know what we should have done. But there were Nazis in our world. And a brutal Pacific war and projections of a million American dead if we could not make the bomb work.

  But there must have been an hour, an instant, when they doubted themselves, when they could have acted for the future, when history might have been turned into a different channel. The choice had existed, for however short a time: they could have refused.

  The Manhattan Option.

  Rimford hurried through the night, pursued over the dark country roads by something he could not name. And he wondered fiercely whether the world would not be safer if he died out here tonight.

  Leslie had picked up a swollen eye at the Visitor Center. It was beginning to discolor, and she’d also acquired some bruised ribs. “Stay clear of revivals,” she said, measuring the extent of the swelling with her fingertips.

  “You look like a lady boxer,” said Harry.

  “And not a very competent one. What did Freeman have to say for himself?”

  They were in an Italian restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, just off Dupont Circle. “He accepted responsibility. I was surprised.”

  “It must have been difficult for him. I don’t think he’s seen much adversity in his life. At least not the kind that he has to share the guilt for. He knows a child died, and he knows it wouldn’t have happened if he’d stayed away. And I suspect that’ll be hard on him. Freeman is much better at being the victim.”

  “I asked him why he did it,” said Harry. “I knew the answer: it was an easy opportunity to make the evening news.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “But it doesn’t go far enough. I don’t think he does it for exclusively selfish reasons. Other than the inner satisfaction he gets from being the Lord’s right-hand man, of course. Freeman is no hypocrite, Harry. He’s a believer. And when he talks about a world ringed by the Jordan, and directed by a Deity who cares about His creatures, when he quotes Psalms that are so lovely one wonders whether they did indeed come out of a human brain, it is very easy to want things to be that way. I mean, it’s a better arrangement than you folks have. Gambini tried to explain to me once why the universe has no real edge, despite the fact that it began in an eruption of some sort, and I didn’t have the vaguest idea what he was talking about. Your world is cold and dark and very big. Freeman’s is—or was—a garden. The truth is, Harry, that I find God more comprehensible than a fourth spatial dimension.”

  Her luminous eyes had grown distant again, as they had been on the first night he’d seen her. “Gambini wouldn’t want to live in
a garden,” he said.

  “No, I don’t suppose he would. His telescopes would be useless in Eden. Still, all these years he’s been a driven man, Harry. And what is it that’s driving him? He wants the answers to the big questions. I think, in his own way, Ed Gambini is a kind of twentieth-century Augustine. It’s probably no coincidence that there’s a priest among his closest colleagues.” She touched a handkerchief gently to the injured eye and winced. “I won’t be able to see out of it tomorrow,” she said. “How do you feel?”

  Everything ached. “Not real good,” he confessed.

  They were silent after that. Their dinners came, spaghetti for Harry and linguine for Leslie. “You miss them quite lot, don’t you?” she asked suddenly.

  Harry’s expression didn’t change. “They’ve been a big chunk of my life. Julie said in effect that I didn’t really care whether they lived or died. And I know she meant it, believed it. But it isn’t true. It was never true. I’m going through the most exciting period of my career now. God knows where all this will lead. But the truth is that I get no pleasure out of it. I’d trade it all.” Harry pushed at his food with a piece of bread. “I’m sorry. This is what you do for a living, isn’t it? Listen to people talk about how they’ve made a mess of their lives.”

  She reached across the table and took his hand. “I’m not your doctor, Harry. I’m a friend. I know this is a difficult time for you. And I know it must seem as if you’ll never really come out of it. You’re at bottom right now. But you’re not alone, and things will get better.”

  “Thanks,” he said. And, after a moment: “She’s hard to replace.” He smiled at her. “For a moment, I thought you were going to say you’d been through something like this yourself.” Leslie in the flickering candlelight: she grew thoughtful. Her rich eyes got lost somewhere, and there were shadows in the soft hollows of her cheeks. It struck Harry, quite suddenly, that she was achingly lovely. How had that simple fact eluded him until tonight? “You’re right,” she said, “in recognizing she’s unique. You won’t find another to her measurements. But that doesn’t mean you won’t find a better set of measurements.”

  She did not smile, but something mischievous watched him from her eyes. “And no,” she continued, “I was not going to tell you I’ve been through a similar experience. I’m one of the lucky ones who’ve never been touched by a great passion. I can say, perhaps to my shame, that I’ve never known a man who wasn’t easy to give up.”

  “You don’t sound as if you think very highly of us,” said Harry, not as aloof as he tried to sound.

  “I love men,” she said, squeezing Harry’s palm. “They just…well, why don’t we let it go at that?”

  They went to the Red Limit for a nightcap. It was late, and they didn’t talk much at first. Leslie sat stirring a drink, staring down into it, until Harry asked her if she was still playing the riot over in her mind.

  “No,” she said, “nothing like that.” Their eyes met, and she shrugged. “I’ve been spending most of my time translating. And I’ve been getting an impression from the text that’s, well, shaken me a bit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her breathing had changed. She opened her purse, groped momentarily until she found a wrinkled envelope bearing the logo of a Philadelphia bank, and began to write. Upside down, it looked to Harry like verse. “This is a liberal translation,” she said. “But I think it captures the spirit of the thing.” She slid it across to him.

  I speak with the generations

  Of those whose bones are in the barrow.

  We are restless, they and I.

  Harry read it several times. “It doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  She wrote again on the envelope:

  Having passed through the force that drives

  the world flower,

  I know the pulse of the galaxies.

  “I’m sorry,” said Harry, frowning. “I’m lost.”

  “It’s out of context,” she said. “But the ‘world flower’ is, I believe, evolution; and the mechanism that drives it is death!”

  She looked sufficiently unnerved that Harry ordered another round of drinks. “The material I have is filled with things like that, suggesting a very casual acquaintance with mortality. There are also references to a Designer. God.”

  “We got a world full of Presbyterians?” Harry said.

  “Funny.” She closed her eyes and began to quote the Hercules Text:

  I have touched the living chain.

  Have known the storm within the proton.

  I speak with the dead.

  Almost, I know the Designer.

  “They’re only poems,” said Harry.

  “Yes,” she said. “I know. But I don’t understand any of it: Harry, the composers of these verses tell us time and again, in a variety of ways, that they have died, that theirs is a community of the living and the dead.” She crumpled a napkin and flipped it across the table. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not simply a few odd quatrains. There’s a sense throughout the material of a race that somehow transcends mortality.”

  “I’d like to read some of it,” Harry said.

  “I wish you would,” she replied. “I’d feel better.”

  Harry reached for her; her hand was cold.

  After Carmichael had gone, John Hurley stood a long time near the curtains, watching the traffic on Executive Avenue. He’d come to the White House three years before, convinced that accommodation with the Soviets was possible, that in the end common sense could prevail. That happy notion had become the undisclosed cornerstone of his presidency. And the measure of his failure.

  He suspected that other men, on other nights, had stood brooding beside these windows: other men in the shadow of the nuclear hammer, Kennedy and Nixon and Reagan and Sedgwick. They, too, would have yearned for the easier times of a Cleveland or a Coolidge. They, too, must have wished desperately for a world free of nuclear weapons, and in the end they must have grown to hate their antagonists in Moscow.

  The frightened, angry men of the Kremlin had never responded to reason. During his own administration, he’d watched his chances and, when the moment seemed right, had made his offers. The Soviets had reacted by increasing pressure in Central America and the Philippines. Reagan had been right, of course: the Soviet rulers were bastards, but it was no longer politic to point that out in public. Certainly if there was a way of dealing with them, he had not yet found it. And the Hurley strategy had become one with the American position since 1945: wait for the leavening effect of time to soften the Soviet posture. And so the waves of weapons mounted, year after dreary year, generation after generation, until hardly anyone now lived who could remember when it was not so. And, perhaps most disquieting of all, the walk along the precipice had come to seem like the natural order of things.

  The terrible truth was that a tiger was loose in the world. And the real danger from the tiger, perhaps, was not that it might, in some irrational spasm, launch an attack: rather, its disruptive policies encouraged nations to play one superpower off against the other. With the result that the planet bled constantly.

  Harry Carmichael’s news might have changed all that.

  At a stroke, particle-beam weapons would become feasible. The technology was there, had been there, for a decade. But the enormous power needed to operate the projectors had never been available. Hurley had in his hands the key to realizing Reagan’s dream of a planetary shield against nuclear war. Possibly the United States would be able to guarantee everyone, even the goddam silly Soviets, a safer existence.

  It occurred to the President that Carmichael had brought him immortality.

  Goddard’s library was located in a specially constructed facility just west of Building 5, the Experimental Engineering and Fabrication Shop. Rimford had stopped home first to get his green ID badge. Now, the badge dangling from a chain around his neck, he mounted the library steps and entered the building.

  He desc
ended to the lower level and identified himself to a guard. Had the guard concentrated less on the photo on the plastic card and looked more closely at the subject’s eyes, he might have hesitated. As it was, he only entered a routine query into the computer, which came back negative. Rimford signed in on the log and proceeded into the secure area. Halfway down a polished hall, still within sight of the guard, he stopped before an unmarked door and inserted his ID

  The total Hercules transmission consisted of approximately 23.3 million characters divided into 108 data sets, recorded on 178 laserdiscs. Only two complete sets existed: one in the operations center in the laboratory building, and the other here.

  The discs themselves occupied a small corner of the middle shelf at the back wall. They were stored in individual plastic sleeves, labeled, and maintained in slots in a cabinet designed originally for the library’s word-processing records. Briefly, the text had also been stored in Goddard’s central computer system, but Schenken had raised security considerations and it had been erased.

  Two computer stations had been placed along the south wall of the storage room. The only other pieces of furniture were a couple of chairs, an old conference table, and, at the far end, a battered credenza. Rimford was so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he was at first unaware that he was not alone.

  “Can’t decide which one you want, Dr. Rimford?”

  Gordie Hopkins, one of the technicians, was seated before a console.

  “Hello, Gordie,” Rimford said, selecting the two discs that constituted DS 41, the cosmology section. He took his place beside Hopkins without turning the other computer on. Instead, he thumbed through his notebook, pausing occasionally to give the impression he was contemplating its contents. But his attention was riveted on Hopkins.

  Rimford had heard that some of Gambini’s people had got into the habit of working in the library, where it was quieter. But it was unfortunate running into someone just now. He glanced at his watch: almost ten. The library would close at midnight, and he estimated he’d need at least an hour.