The Alejandra Variations (3 page)

"Everything's OK," she went on in sure, confident tones. "We're at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Dr. Massingale's been transferred to Foresee. He's as clean as a baby's breath, as they say."

"Hey," the doctor laughed slightly. "Let's not stretch things." He returned to the console, checking tubes and dials.

Melissa managed a rather professional grin herself, but Nicholas could see that it was difficult for her to achieve with any kind of sincerity. He knew that he didn't
want
answers to some of his questions. One of them was why they were inland at Vandenberg Air Force Base, when they were supposed to be at the Foresee branch in Santa Barbara.

Nicholas looked up at the Director. "How long was I out?"

"You were gone for two days. Nervous collapse. We kept you asleep to let you heal. After what you went through, you certainly needed the rest."

"You make it sound as if you were there," Nicholas said.

"I was," the Director said evenly. "Flew in from Colorado the morning Foresee threw you in-system in Santa Barbara. I came out of a general staff meeting when you got locked into Mnemos Nine. It was supposed to be a routine scenario."

"Locked in?" He didn't like the sound of that.

Melissa Salazar continued. "When you didn't wake out of the system, we enlisted Dr. Massingale here. The computer wouldn't shut down even though you had determined where the nuclear device was about to detonate. When it finally affirmed the success of the extrapolation, it shut itself down. We've been watching you ever since."

As the Director spoke, Nicholas recalled his last, crisp images of Rhoanna staring at him like a dying Madonna, as she leaned against that soiled pillar in a Bombay created by a supercomputer. Then he remembered the submarine bomb lumbering up out of the soiled Arabian Sea. It had only been a few feet away from him as he stood there on the steps. He could still hear the water lapping against the eroded stone stairs—or at least he thought he could.

He shuddered, momentarily closing his eyes. Dreams had always affected him this way. It sometimes took him hours to recover from the force of a night of fitful dreaming, especially when those dreams encompassed the modern horror of nuclear warfare.

"So, tell me what happened—two days ago," Nick asked. Melissa seemed proud of the accomplishment of Mnemos Nine, despite what the computer had nearly done to her Strategic. She said, "We apparently programmed Mnemos Nine too well. The scenario felt so real to you, we couldn't get you properly motivated to find the source of the attack directly. However, given the information as it came into us at Foresee, you were eventually able to locate yourself in the middle of Ganesh Chaturthi. But there were too many diversions—interruptions which either you or Mnemos Nine provided."

"I remember being in a weird cafe," Nicholas said distantly, recalling the peculiar aroma of the bhel puri.

"In real-world time it took you a half a day to get going," the doctor volunteered. "The whole staff was watching you all the way."

"Half a day," Nicholas whispered to himself.

"In any case," Melissa continued, "you did manage to locate the most likely source of the assault with the information we threw at you. We had never imagined that it would come from the sea."

"It was so real," Nicholas said, as he had said each time he'd gone in—and come out—of the system over the past five years.

Mnemos Nine was the most sophisticated computer the Pentagon had yet developed. Nicholas had never actually seen it; his only experience with Mnemos Nine had come through the various system terminals around the country, usually the one in Santa Barbara, near where he lived. He knew from what Melissa and others had told him that the Mnemos computer itself was hidden deep within the Rocky Mountains. The core computer was an extremely complicated device about the size of a beach ball, perpetually immersed in liquid helium. Its storage capacities were measured in gigabytes, and its retrieval system functioned at near to the speed of light.

It had everything there was to know at the tips of its metaphorical fingers. All the nasty facts a modern nation needed to keep up to date in a world of terrorism and advanced technologies were stored in the microcircuits of Mnemos Nine: profiles of political leaders, past revolutions and current revolutions and sites of possible future revolutions, movements of troops, the status of various countries' fluctuating economies, world stock-market patterns—even the price of peanuts in Guatemala City. Mnemos Nine had it all, and assimilated more data every minute.

But only by the input of emotional responses to all that vital data could Mnemos Nine come alive. Years ago Nicholas Tejada had interviewed with CIA and Pentagon officials at the University of California at San Diego, at their request. Then a test dream-extrapolation with the then-current Mnemos Eight computer at the Project Foresee's recruitment center got him out of the university's philosophy department and into the world of nonreality. It was a much better place.

But that was all a long time ago. His latest little excursion into a computer-created world had almost cost him his sanity, and now he was worried about his future with the Project. He'd never collapsed emotionally before, either in-system or out.

Melissa Salazar had pulled a newspaper from a drawer in the bedside table. She handed it to him.

Nicholas unfolded the previous day's paper. The headlines told it all: "TERRORIST ATTACK FOILED—INDIAN PRIME MINISTER SAVED."

As Nick scanned the article, the nightmare started coming true all over again, only this time there was an important difference in the facts.

In the real world there had been no panic at the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi. No sirens went off. Chowpatty Beach did not give birth to a superbomb nosing out of the surf on rubberized treads. There hadn't been an explosion of any kind.

But there could've been.

The Prime Minister of India and his entire cabinet were scheduled to be in the area that day, but information provided by an unnamed source—which Nicholas knew was Project Foresee, through the State Department—suggested that a terrorist attack of unknown proportions might come from the direction of the sea should the Prime Minister choose to attend the festivities. Local authorities had rushed the Indian leader out of the vicinity at about the same time they had discovered that a small, barely seaworthy boat several hundred yards offshore was bringing in a Libyan-made atomic bomb.

Only Mnemos Nine and Nicholas Tejada had figured that the attack might come from the sea, and not from the air—or the land, as had been attempted only the previous month in Milan by the infamous Red Brigade.

What came as a genuine surprise to Nicholas was the disclosure in the newspaper that it had been a "dirty" bomb. The American naval authorities who dismantled it discovered that, had it exploded, whole chunks of radioactive plutonium would have scattered into the sea and onto the land—making the area uninhabitable for hundreds of years.

Naturally, Libya denied any role in the incident, saying that the disruption of any kind of religious ceremony was a sacrilege and a slur upon the sacred name of God. But the article pointed out that a few miles to the north of Chowpatty Beach were docked three American destroyers. Several months earlier they had seized a Libyan freighter that was ferrying reactor waste material from Russia—presumably for the clandestine construction of nuclear weapons.

Nicholas put the paper down and stared at the Director of Project Foresee. A pall of sorts fell about Melissa Salazar.

She rubbed her hands together nervously. Dr. Massingale was at the door, speaking with a nurse.

"Unfortunately, some other complications have arisen while you were out," Salazar said.

"Like what?"

"Our Santa Barbara center has been destroyed. Completely."

"What?"

Melissa nodded.

Nicholas's stomach heaved. The West Coast was littered with hundreds of tiny electronic firms and computer businesses. Some of them were connected with the government, some not. Project Foresee had been concealed in a series of innocuous buildings in downtown Santa Barbara that seemed to be nothing more than warehouses owned by one of the larger southern California aerospace concerns.

Industrial sabotage, or military sabotage, was considered a virtual inevitability. But Foresee, at least the S.B. branch, was hidden very well. Or so Nicholas had thought.

"How did it happen?" he asked.

"It was bombed."

"Bombed? You mean from an airplane?" The idea sounded preposterous.

Dr. Massingale stepped out into the corridor with the nurse.

Melissa continued, "They found the plane that did it. It was a drone. Made locally, too. The CIA doesn't think anyone's onto us specifically, since a number of other plants further north in Silicon Valley have also been struck with the same method. Aias Electronics and TonTec Systems were hit only a few months ago. It could be a coincidence."

"I don't like coincidences, Sal. I never have."

"Neither do I," she said. "But we got a little warning, so we pulled up stakes and hightailed it here to Vandenberg.

"We have Mnemos looking into who might have done it, but we don't expect to learn anything soon. There are so many fringe groups who deplore our high-tech surge."

"It could have been someone else," he remarked.

"Yes, someone else," the Director affirmed grimly.

There seemed to be electricity in the air; Nicholas felt Melissa's suppressed uneasiness.

"Sal," he said, staring evenly at her. "You're not giving me the full poop on this, are you?"

There was a small chair at the bedside. She pulled it over and wearily lowered herself down into it. As she did, Nicholas heard a large glass object being dropped out in the hallway. But the Director of Foresee showed no interest in what was going on beyond the room.

"Nick," she said, "we're as close today as we've ever been to going to war with the Soviet Union. I mean today. This minute."

Nicholas stared up at the ceiling. He realized it now. He'd been feeling its terrible weight all along. He'd awoken from one nightmare into another, more real and tangible horror.

He knew that the Vandenberg hospital—along with all the other main buildings—was aboveground. But here they were, bunkered under the surface of the earth. There was an oppressive air surrounding them—the kind of clamminess that one finds in caves, or tombs. They were underground for a reason. He knew what it was.

"Minutes before you woke we got word from Derek Mallory, working with Mnemos Nine in Colorado, that the Russians might strike first at Vandenberg," she told him.

"Here? You mean right here? Now?" Nicholas sat up. "Oh, swell!"

"There's a small flotilla of Russian trawlers just beyond our territorial waters. They've been there for days." She fussed unconsciously with her wedding ring, moving it in small turns around her finger. "And there are Russian ships of one sort or another in place all around the United States. In the Caribbean, off Newfoundland. Everywhere there's water."

Nicholas rolled back the covers of the bed and reached for his IV, preparing to disconnect himself from the computer. Melissa quickly stood up and stopped him.

"Hold on, Nick. We haven't gotten a confirmation on Derek's projection just yet; and even if we did, you're in no condition to go rushing off, at least at the moment."

Nicholas pointed to the outer hallway beyond his closed door. There had been some commotion there for the past few minutes. "What's that all about? Somebody knows something."

Neil Massingale came back into the room at that point and nodded unhappily to the Director of Foresee, who immediately rose from her scat.

She said, "Vandenberg was the nearest link to Mnemos where we felt it was safe enough to move you. But now it looks as if there might be a preemptive strike against us here. We're so far underground that we could survive a direct hit, and an electromagnetic pulse probably won't penetrate this far. But I want all the Strategics where they can reach reliable Mnemos systems terminals and are able to stay within the network with relative security. So we're going to move you."

Nicholas sagged back, feeling abjectly helpless for the first time in his life.

Whatever drugs they'd given him to ease the transfer-shock out of Mnemos Nine had wiped out his energy reserves. But something else was demoralizing him as well, a parasitic worm gnawing at him from within. He was the only Strategic to suffer in such a manner. There were dozens of other individuals in Strategics. The system also included tie-ins for experts in intelligence, economics, environment, and politics. There were even extrapolators for things like aeronautics and xenobiology. All of the other specialists came and went without a trace of any kind of suffering, emotional or physical. Not Nicholas.

He knew that all across the nation there were millions of people depending upon individuals such as himself to ensure their security. But the prospect of a thermonuclear war was no small burden for anyone to carry. How did you live with the weight that such knowledge thrust upon you each day? All he had to do was look into Melissa Salazar's eyes to see the answer.

"Out of the frying pan and into the fire," he mumbled.

Massingale walked over to Nick's bed, looking more like a track coach than a physician. A nurse had entered the room behind him. Dr. Massingale spoke in soft but controlled tones. "Nick, we're going to have to evacuate the base hospital, and, while I'd like to let you lie around for another day or two, we're going to have to get moving." The nurse had already begun to unhook him from the IV unit and to switch off the various components of the monitoring computer.

Nick realized that the space he was in might soon be filled with more deserving folk. It was a thought he didn't like.

"Do you think you can make it, Nick?" Melissa asked, standing back to let the nurse and Dr. Massingale help him.

He nodded. Strangely, he felt like laughing as the two medical personnel helped him out of bed. As if it makes much difference, he thought distantly. What's one human life going to matter in an all-out thermonuclear war? He might be safe underground, but he'd be out one set of parents, a brand-new condominium (with a brand-new mortgage), two lazy cats, money in the bank (he'd even be out of a bank), and sunsets on Jalama Beach.