But in Pasadena nobody was fighting anybody, and little Tashy Subramanian was delighting her parents. What other infant so precociously tried to turn herself over in her crib at such an early age? Or even more precociously, at that same early age, slept nearly halfway through the night, on many nights, sometimes? Natasha Subramanian was bound to be a person of high intelligence, Myra and Ranjit agreed, no matter that Jingting Jian, the baby doctor the office’s advisory service had helped them find, swore that you could tell nothing about a child’s intelligence until it was at least four or five months old.
Though weak in that area, Dr. Jian was a very comforting pediatrician to have, full of tips on the diagnosis of infant crying. Some crying meant you had to do something right away; some could be ignored until the baby had cried itself out. Dr. Jian even had recordings of many of the possible crying styles to help them figure which was which. In fact, the advisers had done nearly everything that had had to be done for Myra and Ranjit. They had located for them the pretty little apartment in a gated development—four rooms, washer-dryer installed, access to the community swimming pool, its own plant-bedecked balcony that looked down on the city of Los Angeles from above, and, maybe most important of all in these times, its twenty-four-hour guard service to check every last person going in or out. The advisers had done more than that, too, helping them choose the best dry cleaners, pizza deliverers, banks, and car rental services (until the time when they might choose to buy a couple of cars for themselves, which time had not yet arrived).
They had even provided Myra with the names of three separate maid services, but Myra chose to decline them all. “The apartment’s not that big,” she told Ranjit. “What kind of housework is there to do? Vacuuming, cooking, laundry, dishes—just for the two of us there’s not that much work involved.”
Ranjit strongly agreed. “I’m sure you can handle it,” he said, which got him a slightly frosty look.
“I’m sure we can,” she corrected him. “Let’s see. I’d better be the cook, because I’m better at it than you are, so you can clean up afterward? That would be good. Laundry—you can operate a washer and dryer, can’t you? They’ve got all the instructions written out in their manuals, anyway. Changing the baby, feeding the baby—when you’re home we can take turns. When you’re not, I can do it myself.”
Item by item they ran through the list of domestic jobs, from replacing used lightbulbs and toilet paper rolls to paying the bills. It wasn’t a problem. Neither one of them wanted the other stuck at some chore that would keep him or her away from the other for a minute longer than necessary, because neither wanted to be so deprived of the other’s talk and company.
At this point the armada of One Point Fives was cruising at its maximum speed of .94c. By the time scale of most non-Earth beings, it would reach its destination in a mere blink of time. Of course, no human being knew this, so all nine billion went right on with their usual daily concerns.
Then one evening, as the Subramanians were finishing the dinner cleanup, the voice from their intercom spoke up. “Dr. Subramanian? This is Henry, down at the gate. There’s a man here who’d like to see you. He says he doesn’t want to give his name but you’ll know him because he’s Maggie’s ex-boyfriend. All right to let him in?”
Ranjit jumped to his feet. “Gamini!” he shouted. “Sure, let the bastard come in, and ask him what he’d like to drink!”
But when the man arrived, he wasn’t Gamini Bandara at all. He was a much older man, carrying a locked case that was chained to his right arm. When he opened it, he took out a chip and handed it to Ranjit. “Please play this,” he said. “I’m not authorized to see it, so I’ll have to wait outside, but Mrs. Subramanian is specifically permitted, and”—he offered them a polite smile—“I’m sure the baby won’t tell any secrets.”
When the courier was safely stowed in the hallway, Myra fed the chip into their player, and a grinning Gamini appeared on the screen. “Sorry to put you through all this cloak-and-dagger stuff, but we’re walking a tightrope here. We’re answering to five different national governments, plus the UN’s own security staff, and—well, I’ll tell you all about that another time. The thing is, that other job we’ve been talking about for you is all cleared now, if you want it. You will. You’d be crazy if you didn’t. However, before I answer all those questions, there is one little thing—No, to tell the truth, there’s one extremely big thing that has to happen first. I can’t say what it is, but you’ll know it when you see it on the news, and then you can say good-bye to Pasadena. So stay loose, Ranj. That’s all those intelligence agencies will let me say now—except love to you all!”
The chip ended and the screen went blank.
Ten minutes later, when the courier had retrieved his chip and departed, Myra pulled down from the top of the cupboard the bottle of wine they saved for special occasions. She filled two glasses, cocked an ear to where Natasha was sleeping, and, when satisfied about that, said, “Do you know what’s going on?”
Ranjit clinked her glass and took a sip from his own before he said, “No.” He sat silently for a moment, and then grinned. “All the same, if I can’t trust Gamini, who can I trust? So we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Myra nodded, finished her glass, got up to check on Natasha, and said, “At least it doesn’t sound like the waiting will be much longer.”
It wasn’t. It was only three days before Ranjit—doing his best to find a few more really large prime numbers for the cryptographers to play with, because his conscience wouldn’t let him do nothing at all—heard a huge commotion in the hallway and discovered that half the staff was trying to get into the lounge at the end of the corridor. Everybody was clustered before the news channels. What the channels were displaying was a procession of military vehicles, scores of them, pouring through a gap in an unfamiliar fence. “Korea,” a man near the screen called to quiet the questions. “They’re going into North Korea! Now shut up so we can hear what they’re saying.”
And North Korea was indeed where they were heading, and none of the Adorable Leader’s huge army seemed interested in trying to stop them!
“But that’s crazy!” the man next to Ranjit was saying. “Something must’ve happened!”
He hadn’t been looking to Ranjit for an answer, but Ranjit gave him one anyway. “I’m sure something did happen,” he told the man, grinning. “Something big.”
25
SILENT THUNDER
It had a formal name in the records of the Pentagon, but to the people who invented it, the people who built it, and the people who sent it on its way, it was called Silent Thunder.
In the dark of midnight Silent Thunder took off from its birthplace, which was in the old Boeing field outside of Seattle, Washington, and cruised westward at a leisurely thousand kilometers an hour. The choice of darkness wasn’t to keep it from being seen by some enemy. That would have been impossible. Every conceivable enemy, and everybody else as well, owned a sky full of observation satellites, and those were watching everybody’s every move.
But it was still dark when, several hours later, Silent Thunder completed its great circle crossing of the Pacific Ocean and dropped—“like a rock,” its pilot said later—almost to sea level. There it slid over the waters between the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido and entered the Sea of Japan.
It was then that the darkness became an advantage to the people who ran Silent Thunder. Darkness meant no nosy newscasters on one of the Japanese islands would get a good look at it, and therefore news of it would not be showing up at everybody’s breakfast table. The radars belonging to Japan’s tiny armed forces in Aomori and Hakodate did light up, of course. They didn’t matter. Japan didn’t have enough weaponry to do anything about something like Silent Thunder. Anyway, twelve hours earlier the Japanese generals had been notified, in strict secrecy, that America would be sending an experimental aircraft around there, and it would be courteous of them to look the other way.
Once well into t
he Sea of Japan, Silent Thunder climbed again, leveling off at twelve thousand meters. Of course, the western shores of the sea were Russian, and of course, the radars there were a lot more numerous and powerful than Japan’s. They didn’t matter, either. Russian top brass, too, knew that Silent Thunder was no threat—that is, to them.
When its pilot and navigator agreed they had reached their aiming point, Silent Thunder slowed to just enough velocity to keep it in the air and began to deploy its armaments. Those armaments—a modest-yield nuclear bomb and a hollow copper tube no wider than a man’s body—would have baffled the weapons specialists of even a decade earlier, but they were all Silent Thunder needed to do its job.
Inside the weapon’s guidance system, a map of the Adorable Leader’s North Korea appeared, overlaid by the long, narrow oval that was the footprint of the weapon.
No human being in Silent Thunder looked at that map, because no human being was there. Its captain—all of its crew—was back in Washington state, observing the map on a TV screen. “It looks all right to me,” the pilot, an American, said to the bombardier, who happened to be Russian. “Deploy the masks.”
“Right,” said the bombardier, fingers on his keypad. Black shapes formed around the edges of the oval, tracing the course of the Yalu River on its north and west, the Demarcation Line that was the border with South Korea, and then the Pacific coast to the south and east. Those shapes were nothing tangible, of course. Nothing made of matter could have survived what they needed to mask off, and devising the electronic fields that could do the masks’ job had been one of the trickiest parts of building Silent Thunder. “All set,” the bombardier reported to the pilot.
“Position still okay?” the pilot asked the Chinese navigator, and when the navigator reported that it was, the pilot crossed himself. (He thought of himself as a lapsed Catholic, but there were times when he didn’t feel lapsed at all.) “Fire the weapon,” he ordered the bombardier, and for the first time in the history of the world, a nation lost a war—totally, irrevocably lost it—without anyone getting hurt.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true.
A few heart patients in the Adorable Leader’s domain did die. They were the ones who were unlucky enough to be wearing pacemakers when the electromagnetic blast struck, carrying more energy than a stroke of lightning. (But about the only North Koreans with access to any technology that expensive—that Western—were high-ranking officials. They weren’t missed.) Oh, and there were a handful of unfortunates flying in light planes who did not survive the consequent crashes. (As high-ranking as the others, and no more mourned.) In all, the latest regime change in North Korea came about with far fewer casualties than an average holiday weekend on the Western world’s highways.
In a fraction of a second all the Adorable Leader’s telephone systems were disabled. Most of his power lines were short-circuited. Every weapon his nation owned that was any more complex than a shotgun would fire no more—and the Adorable Leader’s North Korean nation had owned a vast number of weapons of all kinds. Without telephones or radios no one knew what was happening any farther away than a shout could be heard. The nation was no longer a threat to anyone, because no real nation existed anymore on that plot of ground.
There was, it is true, one small actual battle in this nonwar.
That was because of one obdurate colonel stationed outside of Kaesong. He could not, of course, understand what had happened, but at least he recognized that his army was at risk. He did what many colonels would have done. He fell out his command, issued them whatever rifles and pistols would fire, and launched them on an attack across the line.
It didn’t get very far.
It didn’t even get them all the way through the dense minefields that bracketed the Demarcation Line. Half a dozen of his frontline soldiers fell when mines went off, a score more as the South Korean troops on the south side of the line saw them coming and opened fire…and then ceased fire again, when they saw that the North Koreans were still coming forward, but slowly and cautiously now, and with their hands above their heads.
By then, of course, the whole world was beginning to learn what was going on…and not just our own world, either.
The rest of the galaxy heard the electronic roar of that weapon only as it reached them by the sluggish crawl—a mere 300,000 kilometers (old-fashioned people, and Americans, still said 186,000 miles) per second—of the velocity of light.
The One Point Fives’ armada, being fifteen light-years from Earth at the time of the blast, eventually crossed paths with the roar, which they detected had originated from those very beings they were on their way to annihilate.
No one on Earth knew that, of course.
Contrariwise, no one among the Machine-Stored, or any other part of the hegemony of the Grand Galactics, knew what had just occurred in North Korea, either. Therefore, when they heard that raucous electronic belch, they drew some reasonable, but wrong, conclusions.
It took years for that electromagnetic white noise to get to the home planets of any of the races subject to the Grand Galactics. Especially to that wrinkle in dark-matter flows that was home to the nearest cluster of the Grand Galactics themselves. And it had a bad effect. Potentially, indeed, it could have been a tragically, even terminally, bad one.
The difficulty was the nature of the weapon its owners called Silent Thunder.
Most human weapons were not a problem, since they depended either on chemical explosions or nuclear ones for their effect. Such puny events caused no fear in the nonbaryonic Grand Galactics. Silent Thunder, however, was a different kettle of particles. It could endanger parts of the Grand Galactics’ own armorarium. Not, of course, the trivial early version that had just put the Adorable Leader out of business, but the more advanced specimens that these pesky humans were bound to come up with before long—if they were allowed to.
Of course, they weren’t going to be allowed to. Their total annihilation was already on the schedule. When it had taken place, the problem would no longer exist.
Which meant, in the famous old words of William Schwenck Gilbert, as Ko-Ko explains his transgression to the Mikado, When an order is given, it’s as good as done, so actually it is done.
Up until that point the question of the wiping-out of the human race had been, in some sense, not totally resolved. That is, the Grand Galactics themselves, having given the order, had continued checking up on the situation because of the remote possibility that circumstances would change and they might want to cancel the order.
They did that no more. They saw no reason to go on bothering their heads (that is, if they had had heads) with this particular question.
So they erased it from their consciousness (or consciousnesses) in favor of more urgent, and certainly more entertaining, matters. High on that list were, one, a white dwarf star just on the point of stealing enough matter from its red-giant partner to go Type Ia supernova, two, some communications from their opposite numbers in other galaxies that needed at least to be acknowledged, and three, the question of whether to split off another Bill-like fraction of themselves to pay closer attention to the small and fast-moving minor galaxy whose orbit would cause the galaxy to crash into their own at any moment now—well, within the next four or five million years at the latest.
Very low on their list was anything that might remind them of that nasty little planet that its occupants called Earth. Why should they care? All of this was not, after all, an unprecedented experience for the Grand Galactics. In the thousands of millions of years since they had become, willy-nilly, the overlords of that part of the universe, they had encountered some 254 similarly dangerous races, and terminated some 251 of them. (The other three, whose offenses were marginal, were given another chance.)
It was not likely that the humans of Earth would become a fourth.
26
ON THE THRESHOLD OF PEACE
Back on Earth, there was confusion and worry. A mostly joyful confusion, to be sure, because har
dly anybody in the world objected to the fact that the Adorable Leader—with his shyness and winsome apologetic public proclamations and, oh, yes, his million-man-strong army with all its rockets and nukes—was history. But questions were asked. By what right had America destroyed another country? And how the devil had they accomplished it?
No one answered. The American government merely said that the matter was under review and a statement would be issued, but didn’t say when. Military scientists around the world wished they had the wreckage of Silent Thunder to study. They didn’t, though. All that was left of Silent Thunder was a haze of white-hot liquid metal particles, rapidly cooling.
The news services were doing their best. Within an hour of when Silent Thunder had done its snuffing-out of the Adorable Leader’s North Korea, news copters from South Korea and Japan were circling over the now electronically silent land.
There was nothing to hear, but much to see. Their cameras picked up the crowds milling around in the vast, and normally deserted, avenues of Pyongyang, or the smaller groups that stood helplessly beside their unworkable aircraft at now-useless air force bases, or the even tinier groups that, sometimes, could not control their rage and confusion and took it out by firing their impotent arms at the interlopers.
Some of those cameras picked up other things. A few detected other helicopters, for instance, also circling out of range of any persons with hand weapons.