Cyber Rogues (16 page)

“I’d need more details than that,” Dyer replied. “What kind of thing have they got in mind?”

“Oh, a little time outside whatever your usual hours are—helping get the outlines right in the early stages, maybe being on hand to advise in some sets . . . things like that. It could be fun and I know they’d make it more than worth your while. That sound like a good deal?”

“Well, you’re selling it fine,” Dyer said with a grin; “Have they put you on commission or something?”

“I wish they would. No, I’m just doing my job.”

“When do you want answers?”

“I’m not looking for a yes-no here and now. I just want to know how you think you might feel about it in principle. If it sounds okay we’ll think about it some more and give you something more detailed in writing later. How does that grab you?”

“Oh hey, in that case go right ahead,” Dyer told her. “Sure, I’ll look at it, but I can’t say anything definite until I’ve seen it. Fair enough?”

“Good. That’s all I needed to know for now.” Laura looked away for a moment and exchanged a brief dialogue of signs with somebody offscreen. “Sorry about that,” she said, looking back again. “We’ve got a meeting due to start in a couple of minutes. That was why I needed to get your reaction to this idea.”

“Meetings at this time?” Dyer made a face. “What’s the matter with you people? Can’t you sleep at night or something?”

“Well, that’s the way it is,” she said with a shrug. “There’s always something going on in this business.”

“Staying on late in town then, huh?”

“Oh, we won’t make an all-night thing out of it,” she replied automatically. “An hour maybe . . . two at the most. It happens a lot.”

“I’ll buy you a dinner when you get through.” The words had somehow said themselves even before he’d thought about them. They came out as a blunt statement of fact rather than as a request. Laura’s expression registered surprise, compelling him to look for something additional to defend his stance. “We owe you one,” he explained. “Zeegram treated us last week. Now it’s our turn.”

Chris, Ron, Kim and Betty were milling around and putting on coats just outside his office. He stretched out a leg to kick the door shut and returned his eyes to the screen. Laura was looking at him in a mischievous and knowing kind of way but her mouth was smiling.

“Okay, why not?” she said simply. “Thank you, kind sir. I—” She glanced away again for a second and nodded. “Gee, I’ve really got to go. Do you know Delaney’s?”

“Small bar off one side of West Thirty-Four High Precinct?”

“That’s it. How about there at, say, eight? Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Over and out.” The screen went blank.

He was still asking himself what the hell he thought he was playing at when he came out of the office to find Chris and Ron frowning suspiciously at him

“What’s going on?” Ron demanded, nodding toward Dyer’s door. “You putting out feelers for jobs or something?”

“It’s his past catching up with him at last,” Chris declared solemnly. “They’ve all got wicked pasts, these project leaders. Right, Chief?”

“Personal,” Dyer said simply. Betty’s smirk from the doorway leading into the corridor said that she at least had a fairly good idea of what was going on. Dyer’s steely glare in the reverse direction told her she’d better make sure she kept it to herself.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A week passed by. Apart from occasional assurances from Richter to the effect that things were still bubbling somewhere deep inside Washington, Dyer heard nothing further about the microplanet proposal. He thought about it constantly and spent hours discussing the idea with Chris and Ron, who were every bit as enthusiastic as he. Between them they evolved an elaborate plan for putting such a scheme into practice once it made its way through the Sargasso Sea of official channels.

Also during that time, he and Laura continued to see more of each other than duty demanded. As always, they seemed to disagree about virtually everything, which made it all the more remarkable that he found himself forced to admit that her company made him more relaxed than he had felt for a long time. With her agile and inquisitive mind and lack of scientific training, she had a tendency to zoom into the heart of an argument from a totally unexpected and often fascinatingly ingenious direction. And the verbal dueling that inevitably followed was fun, doubly so because she was adept with words and seemed to enjoy throwing up clay pigeons as much as he enjoyed shooting them down. He didn’t really know whether or not he liked Laura yet, but he knew he liked having her around.

And then things started happening in a sudden and unexpected way. Late one evening when he was at home alone, he received a person-to-person call from Washington. Schroder appeared on the screen looking brisk and businesslike, and wasted no time in coming straight to the point.

“Your proposal is getting a lot of attention,” he said. “It’s started quite a stir in high places.”

“Glad to hear it,” Dyer answered. He was still somewhat puzzled as to why Schroder should have chosen to come back to him directly rather than communicating through the hierarchy that Dyer’s idea had already climbed.

“The Vice-President and the President both like it,” Schroder went on. “The whole thing has become an international issue and a high-priority one at that. It’s been submitted to the Advisory Committee for Information Processing.”

Dyer stared at him in sudden astonishment. “Where . . . Geneva?”

Schroder nodded. “The Supreme Council. We’ve had some first reactions and we’d like to discuss them with you. Can you get down to CIM Washington tomorrow morning?” Although the words were couched as a question, it was obvious from Schroder’s tone and manner that this was only for reasons of politeness. In reality he wasn’t giving Dyer very much choice in the matter. Still puzzled, Dyer merely nodded his head.

“Sure. I can be there.” He sensed that the time for questions would come later.

“Good,” Schroder said. “The meeting’s set for ten o’clock.” He paused for a second. Then his expression became graver. “From now on this whole thing is to be treated as a top-security matter. I don’t want you to mention where you’re going tomorrow or why you’re going there; The subject of the microplanet project is not, repeat
not,
for public discussion. Do I make myself clear?”

“Very clear.” Dyer was rapidly becoming more mystified. Military affairs had ceased to dominate international politics years before and “top security” was a phrase that seldom occurred any more outside of movies and historical drama.

“Have you discussed it with anybody apart from Lewis and his people?” Schroder inquired.

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact . . . I’ve talked about it with some of the members of my staff. But there wasn’t any reason not to.”

Schroder frowned for a moment, then nodded.

“Only to be expected, I guess,” he muttered. “Anyhow, that can’t be helped now.” He looked up and spoke directly at Dyer again. “If they bring it up again, play it down. Tell ’em it was just a thought and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Then get off the subject as quickly as possible. If anybody else happens to mention it, you don’t know anything about it. Okay?” Again there was no choice but for Dyer to agree.

“Okay,” he said shaking his head to show his bemusement. “I get the message but I don’t pretend to understand it. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Excellent. Ten o’clock sharp.” With that, Schroder cut off the screen and vanished.

It was a very curious Raymond Dyer who rose early next morning, lodged a vague message under Betty’s call code that he wouldn’t be in that day, and a little while later departed in a cab bound for the New York-Washington tube.

“Actually I didn’t really give you the full picture when we spoke yesterday,” Schroder said from behind his desk. “We’ve got more than simply first reactions back from Geneva. We’ve got a firm go-ahead. The message is: It sounds good. Do it. Since a lot of U.S. know-how has gone into the net, we—CIM that is—have been given the job of driving it. All the Council governments will be involved but we’ll be running the show. I can tell you that things are going to move fast, starting right now.”

Dyer would never have believed that official channels at those levels could operate as swiftly as Schroder’s words implied. His disbelief must have registered on his face, but before he could frame any question Schroder raised a hand slightly and continued:

“Naturally the Council knows about the things we discussed here last week. They’re even more anxious about it than we are since managing the global system is first and foremost their responsibility. If they’ve been putting a potential lunatic in charge of the planet, they want to know about it and quick. That’s why it’s top-priority.”

“What about all this security and stuff?” Dyer asked.

“It has to be that way,” Schroder informed him bluntly. “It would cause too much trouble if we made public the fact that the experts are getting worried about the system. At this stage there’s no point in spreading unnecessary alarm, especially since we don’t even know for sure yet if there’s anything to get alarmed about. We feel it would be best to keep the whole thing out of the public eye until we’ve got something factual to talk about. I’m sure you’ll agree that makes sense.”

“It makes sense in theory,” Dyer agreed. “But how are you going to keep a thing like this quiet in practice? Unless you’ve changed the original idea drastically, we’re talking about a miniature society of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people. And besides them, all kinds of other people would have to get involved in different angles of it. How can you run an operation on that scale without it getting out? It just doesn’t sound possible.”

“We put people in charge who are used to dealing with problems like that,” Schroder replied. “The military. We run the whole thing as a military operation. In years gone by they handled bigger jobs when there were wars going on. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be able to do equally well with this kind of job today.”

Dyer sat back to absorb this new information while Schroder subsided into silence. That explained the presence of the other two people in the room, to whom Dyer had already been introduced. One was General Mark Linsay from the Army—a smaller but more professional organization than that of days gone by, retained partly for reasons of tradition and partly because of its usefulness as a pacifier and deterrent in the localized skirmishes that still tended to erupt from time to time in various parts of the world. The other was Dr. Melvin Krantz from the International Space Administration’s offices in Washington, a project director involved with the Icarus Program for constructing enormous space colonies in synchronous orbit above Earth which would pay their way collecting solar energy and beaming it down in the form of ten-centimeter microwaves. Construction of the first small-scale experimental station, Icarus A, had commenced in 2004 and been done the hard way—by shipping all the needed materials up from the surface of Earth. It was completed in 2013 and the successful demonstrations that followed were sufficient for Congress to pass proposals for building the lunar mass-driver at Maskelyne and for the construction of two more Icarus stations, this time from lunar materials. The mass-driver went into operation five years later and shortly afterward the first girders were being welded for Icarus B, completed in 2027, and Icarus C, which still had some way to go.

General Linsay straightened up from the window ledge on which he had been resting with his back to the Potomac, and unfolded his arms.

“Besides what Irwin has just said, there’s an even bigger reason for making it a military operation,” he said. “Obviously there could be no question of our using ordinary unsuspecting colonists as guinea pigs for the kind of experiment you’ve proposed. We’ve no way of knowing what might happen. Too risky. Even if nothing bad did happen to them, the world would have to know what we did sooner or later and the world would never condone it.” The general shook his head emphatically. “No. Whoever goes there will have to know why they’re going and what the risks are. We have to use selected volunteers for the population, and volunteers who are trained in security matters and understand the necessary disciplines. That means military people.”

“We’ve selected Icarus C as the nearest we can get to an ideal within a short timescale,” Krantz said from an armchair opposite Dyer. “The residential sector of Icarus C is nearing completion and is designed to accommodate ten thousand people at maximum capacity. The power section hasn’t really got started yet but that doesn’t really matter because we can do without it for this kind of experiment. In fact it’s to our advantage that Icarus C is still under construction because we’ll be making a lot of modifications to the original design. Our plan, you see, is to assemble a team of military and scientific experts to study possible strategies that the system might employ against us when the confrontation takes place. We want to build in as many safety devices as we can think of in case things take an unexpected turn.” He shrugged matter-of-factly. “The object of the exercise is, after all, to obtain information, not to get people killed.”

Dyer stared at him aghast.

“Killed? Why should anybody get killed?”

Schroder shrugged and spread his hands.

“Who knows?” he said. “I thought that was precisely the purpose of the whole experiment—to keep it out of the way in case we get nasty surprises.”

Dyer turned the statement over in his mind and slowly nodded his acceptance. The logic was irrefutable and there was nothing to debate. He looked from one to another of the three other men present in the room, making no attempt to disguise the fact that he was impressed.

“Well, once you decide to move, you sure don’t waste any time about it,” he told them. “What can I say?” He transferred his gaze back to Schroder. “So . . . I’m glad you all liked the idea. If I thought you’d asked me all the way down here just to tell me everything’s in hand I’d say it was a nice thing to do; but I don’t think that’s what you asked me down here for. You have to have some reason for telling me all this.”