Very nice. Here comes the fondler.
'Dr Horton, would you rather win a Nobel Peace Prize or the Nobel Prize for Physics?'
'I don't think about it,' Horton said. 'My business is science, not awards.'
Ohh, the fondler won't have anything nice to say about you tonight, you took away his moment. Let's have one from the college press -
'Who are your idols, Dr Horton?'
'I don't think people in my line of work can allow themselves to have idols. But I owe a debt to every teacher who taught me, and every pioneer who worked out a piece of the puzzle and passed on that knowledge to us.'
Oh, I could kiss you. Let's see, let's see, the giggler should be safe -
'Would you describe yourself as a genius?'
'No. I just work hard.'
Just a few more and we're out of here. All right, Monsieur -
'Dr Horton, what do you know about a net document concerning something called "Trigger Mark I"? It purports to be a complete set of instructions for building what sounds very much like the LifeShield. Can you tell us whether that's authentic or a hoax? Did you have anything to do with it?'
While Horton gaped, Rochet smoothly stepped in. 'I'll remind you that Dr Horton simply can't comment on the specifics of his research until restrictions related to national security are lifted. That includes confirming or denying rumors from the net.' Quick, who - oh, Lady Flowerhat - 'Eleanor.'
'Dr Horton, what would you like to say to Loretta Welch and the Morgenstern children?'
Shit - see if you ever get called on again, bitch - 'Dr Horton joins the President in expressing his condolences -' she began.
'No, it's all right, Aimee - I'd like to answer,' Horton said. I'm sorry it happened. I wish it hadn't. It was a bad day in the lab when we heard. I hope the people who are handling the LifeShield in the field learn from it. But when I lost a friend in a plane crash a long time ago, I didn't blame the Wright brothers. When those Challenger astronauts died, I don't think anyone thought it was Robert Goddard's fault. Every new technology brings both risks and benefits. I don't think we can ask for guarantees.'
Stop talking, stop talking already. I need a graceful exit - 'Last question to Tania, up here.'
'Dr Horton, have you talked to your sister? I understand she's an Olympic shooting medalist.'
'She is,' he said. 'I'm very proud of her. No, I haven't had a chance to talk to Pamela.'
'Do you think she'll approve or disapprove of what you're involved in?'
Horton looked surprised. 'We've always supported each other. That's the kind of family we are. I don't see why that should change.'
Good enough - With that, Rochet hustled him away into the White House, told him he'd done splendidly, turned him over to a supernumerary, and then hurried away to the press wing to try to knock off the rough edges. By the time she came back, she knew enough to steer him to some of the best of a mixed but mostly favorable set of notices. They channel-surfed together in a White House media center for a short time, until Horton stood up, shuddering, and pronounced, 'I can't take any more. I hate my voice.'
She smiled and said, 'By tomorrow you won't have one - you'll just be a video clip under someone's voiceover.'
He laughed at that.
'You know, you really did all right,' Rochet said, and hugged him. She had seen a lot of post-press conference meltdowns, and not only among beginners. 'In fact, if you made yourself available for a few more days, you could do a lot of good for our side. Let me know, Doctor.'
He agreed on the spot, and bore up well during a whirlwind week of carefully staged high-profile appearances. So Rochet was as surprised as anyone when, nine days after returning to Nevada, Dr Jeffrey Horton wrote himself approval for an indefinite, unpaid leave of absence, drove out of the Annex in a Terabyte vehicle, and vanished.
Alerted by the gate guards that Senator Grover Wilman was on the plant grounds, Jules Merchant met his old friend in the reception lobby of the Allied General administrative center.
War had thrown them together three decades ago, and shared memories of roaring through a desert night in a sixty-ton Abrams tank had bound them together. But they had taken different paths after the war, and politics had kept them separated for more than a decade. The chairman of what was both the world's largest arms manufacturer and the country's top military contractor could not be allowed a personal relationship with a man who was both the Senate's most outspoken maverick and the planet's best-known disarmament advocate.
But a friendship formed in fire lasts forever, and Merchant's greeting and smile were both warm and genuine. 'Grover,' he said, opening his arms to a back-patting clench. 'Do me a favor and don't tell me how long it's been.'
'It's good to see you, Jules,' said Wilman. 'I believe you're the first person I've seen in the last twenty minutes who isn't gaping or glaring at me.'
Merchant laughed easily. 'Ah, you've been getting the what-the-hell-is-he-doing-here look,' he said. 'I've been getting the flip side of it ever since I told my staff you were coming up. But everything changes if you wait long enough, eh? Come on - I've got wheels out front. I want to take you out to the test track and show you something.'
The chairman's wheels were attached to a low, wide five-seat vehicle that despite its neutral brown color had 'battlefield' written all over it - spare fuel cans in a sheltered central well, global positioning system display in the dash, obvious firing positions protected by angled armor on both rear corners, and a roll-bar that incorporated a two-axis mounting ring for a light machine gun.
This is the replacement for the Hummer?' Wilman said, swinging a leg over the high splash-board that passed for a door and pulling himself into the second seat.
'Yeah - this version answers to "Fiver", or Forward Infantry Vehicle, Recon/Patrol. Also for the five-man fire team - driver, stand-up gunner, spotter-loader, and two riflemen watching your back. We started delivering them last May - current contract is for thirteen hundred units in all versions. It'll hit a hundred klicks on the flat, climb a fifty percent grade, ford anything shallower than the turbine's air intake. But you know all that, I suppose - you led the fight to cut back the buy from fifteen hundred to thirteen.'
'It was nothing personal, Jules,' Wilman said. 'And I never said Allied General didn't deliver value for money.'
'I know,' said Merchant, gunning the turbine engine and pointing the vehicle at a driveway that disappeared into the woods to the west of the parking lot.
'First time I've seen one in person, that's all.'
'Well, the Fiver isn't what I want to show you,' he said. 'Have you gotten far enough into the black files to read up on something called Basilisk?'
'No. I've been busy with other things.'
Merchant nodded. 'Well, you being an old tanker, I thought you might appreciate a peek at the prototype. I couldn't have shown this to you before you were moved up onto the black-budget committee, you know.' He slowed for a checkpoint as they passed through a double gate into the high-security test area. 'Have you ever seen one of those crazy events where people compete to see how far they can drive a snowmobile across open water?'
'Sure,' said Wilman. Though you have to wonder who the first guy was who decided to try it, and why he thought it was a good idea.'
'I just figure it was a sixteen-year-old somewhere - drunk or extremely bored. Or both. Anyway, that's Basilisk - named after the lizard that runs across water. Essentially it's a Bradley CFV on diet pills and steroids - synthetics everywhere, plastic armor, a sealed chassis that's close kin to bathtubs and lifting bodies both, and the new GE high-output turbine that's a big brother to the one under the Fiver's hood.'
'You're talking about a light tank that can swim?'
'"Swim" isn't the verb I'd use. But here we are - Shed 7. You can see for yourself.'
With Merchant yielding the wheel to an AG test driver, they followed the Basilisk at high speed to a remote section of the test range that offered hills, brush, a natural river,
and an artificial lake. There the Basilisk's test crew put on a demonstration that brought a wide-eyed elemental joy to Wilman's face - the look of a boy reveling in the noise and power of big machines.
The Basilisk climbed rock walls, bulled down a small tree, flew along a rough road, and then vaulted the river without slowing down, throwing out a jet-plume roostertail of water behind it. To close out the demonstration, the Basilisk crossed the small lake at its widest point, then turned around and started back. Half-way across, it slowed to a stop, dropping deeper into the water but remaining securely afloat. With tracks wheeling in opposite directions, it spun through a full turn clockwise, then counterclockwise. The turret swung round and the 25mm cannon fired at a target off to the west. The recoil barely left the Basilisk rocking as it surged forward, climbing up out of the water as it picked up speed and headed shoreward.
Try that in any other vehicle,' Merchant said proudly.
'Can it handle sloping banks?'
'Of course. So long as it reaches the water right-side-up, it's not going under.'
'Well - I'm impressed. An amazing machine,' Wilman said. 'We wouldn't have needed them in Iraq, but most anywhere else - you've got the mobility of a hovercraft without the hockey-puck effect.'
Thank you,' Merchant said. 'I thought you should see it before it goes the way of the B-49 - chopped up for scrap or consigned to the Museum of Historical Curiosities.'
'What?'
Merchant inclined his head to the right, and the two men fell into a slow walk along the concrete beach of the artificial lake. 'The Basilisk was intended to replace both versions of the Bradley. But I got word Monday that the order for the next six prototypes is on hold, and the entire production run is in question - the Pentagon is Devaluating all development and procurement of all weapons platforms. Every contract that has brakes in it is squealing to a halt.'
'No great surprise, is that, considering?' Wilman asked.
'No. But it looks like a lot of them will never start up again, including this one. And if we don't get a domestic production run of some size, we'll never get an export license, even for sale to friendlies - which means the end of a new platform that might have put $20 billion on our side of the trade ledger and kept six thousand skilled workers on the job. We don't have anything for them if this falls through.'
'Are you telling me this to make me feel guilty, or are you asking for something? And if you are, are you sure it's something I have to give?'
'I'm asking for a compass reading from a friend - nothing more,' Merchant said. 'Grover, I spent most of last week in Vail, talking privately with some acquaintances who have similar concerns. At the end of it, we couldn't agree on how to respond. We went away - let's say deeply divided, and in a high state of anxiety.'
'If these acquaintances were named Burton, Lightner, and Sullivan, that's understandable,' said Wilman, naming the CEOs of the other three American defense conglomerates. 'You have a lot of responsibility - a lot of influence over people's lives.'
Merchant stepped in front of Wilman and stopped short, facing him. 'Grover, you know I don't care about the politics - I'd just as soon be building Caribbean cruise subs and RVs for Mars if that's what governments wanted to buy. Allied General builds cutting-edge vehicles for any environment - land, sea, air, space. It's our customers who insist on weighing those vehicles down with weaponry.'
'"If wishes were starships…" I know you believe that, Jules. And on the strength of old friendship, I'm willing not to argue it, at least not now.'
Thank you,' Merchant said. 'The hell of it is I've got a hundred and seventy-five thousand people who depend on the theory of armed deterrence to pay their bills and cover their kids' subscriptions to college. So I have to ask - is it too late to derail this train we're on?'
They had the privacy of isolation by then, two hundred meters around the curve of the lake from the vehicles and their crews. Wilman threw a glance in that direction, then said, 'Much too late, Jules.'
It was the answer Merchant had expected, the one that validated the position he had taken during the Vail sessions. Then do you have any ideas about what we do now? We're talking about seventy billion a year in government contracts drying up - twenty-five billion a year in arms exports disappearing.'
'If you're looking for sympathy, Jules, you should have known I'd be a tough audience,' Wilman said. 'You're the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Allied General, Boeing, Lockmar, United Textron. You've done very well for yourselves on the suffering of others. If you're going to be the ones suffering now - well, frankly, it's hard for me to work up much outrage.'
'We won't really be the ones hurting, Grover. We can slash payroll, close plants, write down canceled projects, until we've shrunk to whatever size the rest of our business can support. I'd have a harder time of it than the other three - more than half of AG's business is military. But even we can probably survive in some form.'
'So what is it then, Jules - the value of your stock options? What's the reason for the "high state of anxiety"?'
Merchant shook his head. 'I'm surprised you have to ask that. The "Four Horsemen" have major facilities in sixty-three locations in thirty-two states. It'll be the economic equivalent of a Los Angeles earthquake, a Lower Mississippi flood, and a Florida Coast hurricane all in the same week. You're going to be looking at a hundred thousand layoffs in the first wave alone - most of them high-skill, high-pay jobs that support professional-class families.'
'We've gone through cycles of this sort of thing in the past -contractions in an industry, trade dislocations, technology shifts,'
Wilman said. 'It's temporary. After a year or two, the economy reabsorbs the talent.'
'And loses the special capabilities, the synergy, the technological and intellectual muscle that you get when you concentrate talent in one place. Grover, I'd like to try to keep as many of those people at work as possible. I'd like to keep the teams together and keep them on task.'
Wilman wrinkled his face in distaste. 'You're talking about make-work, corporate welfare. "Let's buy a few more bombers a year to keep the Palmdale plant open, let's build an aircraft carrier we don't need to hold Newport News together." But you do that when you think you'll need that muscle later. And, this time, I don't know that there's ever going to be a "later" like that.'
That's exactly what I want to talk about,' Merchant said. 'About what else we could use that muscle for. About whether we're sure that we're never again going to need to know how to build a fast-attack submarine or a stealth bomber, and about what we might want to do with ourselves while we're waiting to find out.
'But not about welfare, Grover - not about making things we have no use for, or taking twice as long to make things we do need. I'd just like to sit down with the President and talk about the possibilities.' Merchant hesitated, then decided to turn over his hole card. 'I'd like a chance to talk to him about a manned mission to Europa - about putting a spacecraft in orbit, a crawler on the ice and a sub in the ocean. Do you think he'd be willing to listen?'
Wilman's wondering eyes proclaimed that he had finally heard something unexpected - and inviting. Whether it was the idea itself or the prospect of converting one of the Four Horsemen from acts of chaos to acts of creation, Merchant did not know. But Wilman's words opened the door wide enough to give him hope.
'I don't know if the President would be willing to listen,' the senator said slowly. 'But I would. Do they let you have enough space for two chairs and a hatrack somewhere around here?'
Merchant laughed. 'Yeah, Grover - they do. All the coffee I can drink and a key to the men's room, too.'
'If you take them up on the first, you're going to need the second - especially at our age.' He clapped a hand on Merchant's shoulder and turned him back the way they had come. 'Well, gunner - let's go talk about what we're going to do after the war.'
It's out of our hands now.
When Mark Breland had offered those words to John Trent that morning four months
ago, it had been with a purely intellectual understanding of their verity. Now he had all the evidence he needed of his own prescience. There were no longer any 'normal' days - something totally unexpected, and yet at the same time completely understandable, seemed to be happening all the time.
'On good days,' he explained to Stepak, 'being President used to be kind of like trying to steer a rickety minibus down an unfamiliar mountain road at high speed while three aunts and a mother-in-law simultaneously try to give you advice about your driving.'
'And now?'
'It's more like learning to surf,' said Breland. 'And surfing isn't something we do a lot of in Pennsylvania.'
But the metaphor was more than the punchline of a joke to Breland. His control was that tenuous - the forces that powerful and turbulent - and he seemed to spend all of his time falling off, climbing back on, or precariously clinging to his balance.
Sometimes events merely sprang to the top of the news queue, complete and remote, suitable only for expressions of wonder or disgust, celebration or regret. Others demanded a place at the top of the President's daily agenda, and occasionally lingered there demanding continuing attention. Breland placed the two assassination attempts - one domestic, one imported - in the former category. The impeachment attempt - by general agreement, a much closer call - belonged to the latter.
Breland had survived all three attacks, but he had other wounds, and they were not healing. Rising expectations had battered his approval rating. An unlikely coalition of civil libertarians and uncivil Libertarians, patrician industrialists and industrious Patri-ots, was sniping at him from both ends of the political spectrum, with a sophisticated mailing campaign and a coordinated protest campaign the principle weapons.
Even with the election more than two years away, a second term seemed a lost cause, and by Nolby's order was simply not spoken of in the President's presence. The staff's focus, as defined by Vice President Toni Franklin, was 'curing the foundation'.