David's Sling (11 page)
His glasses had slid down his nose during the morning's toil. He pushed them back into place with a sigh.
Charles and his projects had met threats like the Sling before. For over two decades, he had maintained a string of perfect scores in political combat. No one had ever canceled one of his projects.
Why not
? his opponents often asked. For one thing, the projects were too important, he explained. For another, the Defense Department already had too much money invested in them to just throw them away. This case was no different: hundreds of important people had staked their reputations on FIREFORS by putting money into it; no one wanted a handful of Zetetic fanatics, funded with peanuts, to beat them.
Fortunately, enemies like the Sling Project had many vulnerabilities. Charles had merely to pick one and apply the right formula. The Sling's dependence on commerical hardware and software was such a vulnerability. Commercial stuff might be cheaper, but it did not match the military requirement. It could not be rugged enough, for example. It could not survive an EMP blast, or a salt fog. And cheaply built hodgepodges of commercial stuff were not systems: they did not consider the logistics, the training, or the maintenance that a full-scale development project had to consider.
All these other considerations made military equipment cost tens and hundreds of times as much as commercial equipment. Ruggedization, logistics, training—these problems were responsible for the one little mar in the FIREFORS record: in two decades of effort, not one FIREFORS project had been completed. And of course none had been canceled. So all continued on course to their ever-more-distant deliveries, a fleet of juggernauts on an endless but important voyage.
His desk remained neat throughout the voyage. A single folder of papers to one side suggested to visitors that Charles had concentrated all his efforts on a single important task, excommunicating all else to his filing cabinets, and to his conference table.
Charles did not keep the conference table nearly so clean. Too often, unfriendly visitors came with the intention of spreading their accusatory documents across its surface. So Charles kept a carefully disarrayed assortment of materials there, organized to seem important, slightly skewed to suggest that a disturbance would damage the arrangement. Charles had plenty of space on his desk for displays, if the displays showed favorable results.
A single sheet of paper now rested on the single folder on his desk. It was the draft of a backchannel message from General Curtis to General Hicks, explaining why the Sling Project represented a dangerous duplication of effort. It suggested that control of the Sling Project should move to the FIREFORS program office, where FIREFORS could manage it more effectively.
The backchannel suggested funneling the Sling Project money into the common pool of FIREFORS funds. Then FIREFORS could build a system that included all the good features of both the Sling and the FIREFORS systems—though frankly, General Curtis felt confident that FIREFORS projects already incorporated all the key features of the Sling system. After all, FIREFORS had been working on these problems for twenty years; they had experience. General Curtis recommended to General Hicks that he look at the latest revision of the requirements document describing the FIREFORS products—Version 14.7. Thus General Hicks could see for himself that FIREFORS had indeed covered all critical Sling elements.
Charles smiled, reading about Version 14.7. It had just come off the presses that morning, thicker than Version 14.6 because of a new chapter describing additional variants of FIREFORS systems. The variants looked astonishingly like the Sling Hunters. The only parts of the Sling specifications omitted from the FIREFORS plan were the parts on low cost and quick delivery.
Though the backchannel was from General Curtis, Curtis had not written it; indeed, he had not yet seen it. But Charles had spent the whole week warming him up to the idea of such a message. The general would sign with only a glance at the wording.
With a small hum of pleasure, Charles edited a few fine points in the message. His sharpened pencil stabbed against the paper, slashing streaks of red across the words. It seemed like a modern form of voodoo, wherein the slashes could appear upon the spirits of the men working on the Sling.
Charles hummed more loudly as he considered the devastating potency of this form of black magic.
President Mayfield looked at his watch with eager anticipation. The next step along the path to the next election had been sealed. His heart skipped once in a while, but only when he watched Nell Carson s puzzled expression for too long.
She strode across the room, from the conference table to the bookcase. Her eyes wandered aimlessly across the rows of volumes. It seemed as though she believed the answers to all her questions could be found here, but for some reason she could not read.
Disdainful, Mayfield glanced at the books himself. First he saw only a few books. With a mental step back, he saw more: he saw all the shelves filled with books. Then he remembered that this tiny collection represented a window into the main room of the Library of Congress; he saw walls filled with shelves.
In a moment of grander vision, he saw the rooms filled with walls of shelves, beyond the main room in the Library of Congress. Then he saw the buildings filled with rooms of shelves of books, beyond the main building. And he saw how tiny a single human mind seemed, compared to this enormous swirl of knowledge.
He lurched mentally to a horrible realization. In some desperately important sense, both he and Nell were
illiterate
. The answers to their questions might well lie within the behemoth of human experience. Yet those answers might as well not exist. For though both he and Nell could read, they could not read fast enough.
They couldn't read fast enoughl His heart skipped a beat. He needed to look away and think of something else, but Nell's expression held him. He felt sure that Nell had seen the rooms of walls of shelves as clearly as he had, yet the vision did not frighten her. Only sorrow, and longing, and puzzlement touched her expression as her reaching fingers touched the books at random. The gesture seemed so hopeless, yet the mind behind the gesture seemed so hopeful.
She paced back to the table, her dress swishing gracefully as she moved. She paused at the table, reluctant to sit. Yet she had no other purpose in this room; she returned to her chair.
Elated, Mayfield saw that Nell Carson, the woman of neverending surety, was uncertain about their new treaty. Mayfield shifted his gaze to Secretary of State Earl Semmens, seated across the table from Nell. Earl's posture suggested that he expected Nell to strike him physically; he evidently did not recognize Nell's uncertainty.
Unable to resist this opportunity to gloat, Mayfield prodded his vice president. "So, Ms. Carson, what do you think of our new agreement?"
Hard nails clicked against smooth table top. She looked up abruptly, straight into Mayfield's eyes. "I don't know." Even now, though she was filled with doubts, she was annoyingly certain of her uncertainty. "Normally, when the Soviets sign a treaty, we already have indications of their next plans. Of course, we always refuse to understand those indications, but they're there nonetheless." She paused. "This time, I can't see any indications."
"I can see that you can't see." Mayfield's ironic tone showed his enjoyment of this moment. "It couldn't be that we've finally penetrated that impenetrable Soviet suspicion, could it? It couldn't be that they've learned that treaties are better than wars, could it?"
Nell sat frozen, unable to accept this view, yet unable to refute it. Finally, she confessed, "It's possible, Jim. I can't prove you're wrong, though I can show that it's highly unlikely. They may have learned that treaties are better than wars, but that is not the lesson we've been teaching. We've been teaching them that having treaties and having wars, when convenient, is the best of both worlds." Her head tilted, as if listening for a clue. "My best guess is that they have some ulterior motive for withdrawing troops from Eastern Europe, though I have no idea what it might be."
Mayfield glanced back at his watch again; it was almost time.
Earl swiveled out of his defensive posture to confront Nell for the first time. ''Ulterior motive? I'll give you an ulterior motive. The Soviet economy is creaking like an old maid's vertebrae! They desperately need to put those men back to work in the factories and the fields. They have to become more productive—that's their motive! This arms race is hurting them even more than it's hurting us, and it's
killing
us! What more motive do you need?"
Nell looked ready to respond, but Mayfield interrupted hurriedly. "Let's see what the rest of the country has to say about my—our—new treaty." His finger stabbed the squishy plastic button on his remote. The dull glow of a television lit up amidst the bookshelves.
For a moment Mayfield thought he had turned on an old movie—one about the gods of ancient Greece. The man who smiled out at them from the TV screen could easily pass as Apollo.
Nell whistled. "Whew! Who is that guy?"
Mayfield shrugged. "He's a new reporter for ABN. Some of my constituents tell me he'll be the newscasting star of the decade. They asked me to watch his spots. They say he knows the nation's pulse better than anybody." Actually, Mayfield himself knew the nation's pulse best. That had been proven repeatedly. Jim had an uncanny knack for positioning himself within the public spotlight.
Nell asked, "What's this guy's name?"
"Uh, Bill Hardin, or something like that. He looks like Apollo, doesn't he?"
"I've never seen a more perfect Neanderthal animal in my life."
ZOOM. The Neanderthal Apollo wears a suit and tie and speaks with the bland accent of the Midwest. "Tonight's top story, of course, is President Mayfield's latest treaty with the Soviet Union. The new treaty, a remarkable American coup at the negotiation table, is known as the Mutual Force Reduction Agreement. It leads immediately to the withdrawal of several divisions of troops, both American and Soviet, from the European theater. This will mean an immediate relaxation of tensions, and may lead to even more impressive longterm troop withdrawals."
Nell commented drily, "At least no one can accuse him of pessimism."
"Shush, " Mayfield chided.
FOCUS. "America may be witnessing the most significant transition in world history: the transition from a world of tense, sometimes violent conflict, to a world of peace. President Mayfield has singlehandedly propelled this transition with his clockworklike invention of new ways to lower tensions, while maintaining the security of both the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, rumors have started circulating that President Mayfield could become the next Nobel Peace Prize winner."
What an incredible idea! The Nobel Peace Prize! Again he looked over at Nell, who stared fixedly at the screen. He felt a certain compassion for her, thinking how difficult it must be for her to acknowledge the rightness of his long, determined drive to peace. He felt flush with warm belief in himself.
CUT. The scene shifts to a picture of angry civilians and equally angry police, facing each other on a wide swath of concrete. "What incredible methods of persuasion did the president use to make the Soviets agree to the Mutual Force Reduction Agreement? He was able to arrange this withdrawal of troops despite the ongoing unrest in East Germany." Huddled groups of East Germans suddenly break into motion. A few bricks fly, then the sound of machine guns fills the air. The viewer can almost smell the gunpowder. "The only place in the world today where the Soviets face worse trouble than here in East Germany is in the city of Ashkhabad, near the Iranian border. Here militant Muslim extremists press for religious and other freedoms. The violence grows as Iranian smugglers continue supplying guns and training to militant protesters."
CUT. A diplomatic delegation comes into view. "Even this conflict seems on the verge of resolution, however. After years of reticence, the Iranian government has agreed to work out a plan with the Soviet Union for controlling these smugglers. We have reason to believe this negotiation may have been arranged by President Mayfield as well. We believe he used his influence with Saudi Arabia, which persuaded the King of Jordan to press the Ayatollah of Iran for resolution of the issue."
Mayfield started to shake his head in denial of this last twist in Hardie's analysis, then stopped. The rumor wasn't true, of course; he had had no involvement with the SovietIran talks whatsoever. And though he would never suggest that he
had
had something to do with it, such rumors could thrust him even closer to the Peace Prize. For now, it seemed silly to deny them.
He saw Nell contemplating him with her toowide, solemn blue eyes. Something about her demanded a reaction. He thrust his chin forward, proud of the events he had initiated. He wondered why she made him feel so uncomfortable, why she made his heart speed up like a rabbits.
Nell rose to leave, having heard as much president-worship as she could stand. "Congratulations," she offered with apparent sincerity. She nodded at the news reporter on the screen, then at Mayfield. "I hope you're both right. I hope we don't regret this a month from now."
"Don't worry," Mayfield said as she left the White House library room. "Next month we'll do something even better."
July 29
Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance.
These filters protect against advertising.
—Zetetic Commentaries
A long corridor connected the receptionist hub of the Institute's main building to Leslie Evans's office. Nathan walked that corridor often, but he never walked it without a moment's pause near the beginning of the hall. Nathan paused there now. He stood in the heart of the Sling Project.
A tapestry of colorful lines and boxes filled the walls of the corridor. For a child's eye the pattern would hold little beauty, and less meaning. But to an engineer, this corridorfilling PERT chart held as much truth as a man could bear in a single encounter. And for an engineer, truth always appeared intricately meshed with beauty. In some engineering sense, the chart was beautiful.
Every task in the Sling Project had a box on the wall. Lines of interdependency jagged across the spaces between the boxes—from boxes that could be completed early, to boxes that could not be started until those early boxes yielded completed products. For example, they had to design the prototype SkyHunter before they could build it. They had to build it before they could test it.
No single human mind could understand all the complexities of all the components of the Sling Project. But in this hall a person could at least grasp the outline of the system as he walked from the accomplished past into the dreamedof future. The colors of the chart which described the relation between accomplishment and dream, rippled in an elastic dance with the passage of time.
Greenmarked tasks were already completed. Nathan had entered the hall from the past, from the beginning of the project. He walked through a forest of greens for a long time, and his confidence grew. The Sling team had already accomplished so much. He reached out and touched a green box at random: SELECT BASE VEHICLE FOR THE HOPPERHUNTER. There had been three alternatives for the hopper—a commercial hovercraft and two experimental walking platforms. The hovercraft had won out in the selection because of its speed, despite its inferior stability.
Pink marked the tasks now falling behind schedule. A pink box was not necessarily a catastrophe. Pink tasks still had slack time before they were needed for the next step in the dance of interdependencies, but they were warnings of potential trouble.
Nathan proceeded down the hall. Soon a light scattering of pink mingled with the green. As Nathan walked closer to the present, the pinks clustered more thickly, but they did not yet dominate any part of the wall.
Simple black marked the tasks not yet started, not yet needed. These tasks were the future—challenging, but nevertheless achievable. Nathan stopped where the black boxes collided with the pinks and greens. He stood in the present. Reaching forward, he touched a tiny part of the near future, when they would complete the design for the Crowbar control surfaces. The Crowbar was the projectile dispensed from the HighHunter, a deceptively simple metal bar that would simply fall to Earth from orbit and hit the ground—or an enemy tank—with all the speed and energy it gained in its meteoric flight. Black boxes such as this one covered the rest of the corridor.
Red marked the results of a pink box that had festered too long. Red marked disaster: a task that should already have been completed—one that had to be completed
immediately
. Every day the red box remained red, every day its schedule slipped, the schedule for the whole wall of tasks slipped. A single red box would ultimately distort the whole wall—all the way out to the box for the completion date, itself so far down the hall it disappeared from Nathan's sight. Red boxes represented the blood and sweat of engineers who would work 24 hours a day to repair the damage. Red boxes marked open wounds on the body of the project.
A single red box glared under Nathan's appraising gaze. This box had triggered his meeting today with Leslie. He touched it. The words inside described his own personal failure. COMPLETE STAFFING OF THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TEAM, the box reminded him. With an abrupt turn, he hurried through the black future of the Sling to Leslie's office.
He found Leslie glaring at a paper on his desk, listening to his telephone in annoyed silence. When he spoke he sounded like a miserly grouch. "And I'm telling you that you've billed us twice and delivered the fracture analysis zero times. Send us a copy of the originals and we'll talk again." He listened a few more moments. "Right. Goodbye." He mashed the telephone into its receiver. With an abrupt change of tone to that of a comic straight man, he asked Nathan, "Okay, guru, where's our software development team?"
Nathan shook his head. "I'm sorry, Les. I hate giving excuses—and I'm not giving you one now. But I think you'll find the problem I've run into interesting, even though it sounds like I'm making excuses."
Leslie chuckled. "That's the best leadin for an excuse I've ever heard. Did they teach you that here at the ZI?"
Nathan made a face. "I've found that the software engineers in the United States today fall into three broad categories." He started ticking them off on his fingers. "First, there are brilliant engineers who refuse to work on military projects. Second, there are brilliant engineers who can and will work on military projects. Unfortunately, as nearly as I can figure from the Jobnet data bases, all of them already are working on military projects. The country has sucked an awful lot of people into this kind of work." He waved his hand in a frustrated wipe at an imaginary slate.
"Third there are engineers who are not brilliant. I've got tabs on several solid pluggers who could do some of our work, but no one who can make the Sling fly on schedule."
Les brought his hand to his lips. Several years ago, the motion would have ended with a puff from a thin cigarillo. The cigarillo was gone—Jan had made him well—but his hand remembered. "I know the problem. I've fought it for years." He sighed. "Joel Barton, the first man I worked for after getting out of the Air Force, told me the real reason why the Soviet Union would beat us. 'Les,' he said, 'they have three times as many airplanes, four times as many tanks, and five times as many men. But that isn't the real problem. The real problem is that they have
eight
times as many
smart minds
—physicists and engineers and such— working on their military problems.' He clapped me on the shoulder. 'Les, for us to keep up with them, you and I and every other engineer in the United States who does defense work will have to be eight times as productive as one of theirs." He cleared his throat.
Nathan shook his head in mild disappointment. "For shame, Les, do you want me to get up on one of my soapboxes?" he asked. "There's another alternative. We don't have to work eight times as hard, if we can harness the strength of the commercial equipment that our nonmilitary engineers build." He smiled. "That way, we'll only need to work twice as hard as their engineers." The smile dropped. "But even working only twice as hard, I fear we need starquality people to complete the Sling."
"Unquestionably," Les agreed. "Well need stars. The schedule is tight, and the software will be the most difficult part to develop and test—it's the only part that we need to develop from scratch. To make schedule we'll have to keep the software team small and fast. If the team's too big, we'll run out of fuel at test time, when we find out how many ways the team members misunderstood each other when they were building their individual pieces."
Nathan had arrived tense; now the tension subsided as he listened to Leslie's summation. Les understood the problem as well as he did. "We'll do it with no more than four people," Les continued. "We need one sensor expert—a person whose specialty is transforming raw signals into clean images. He shouldn't just know how to handle visual images, either. This person will need to know the whole electromagnetic spectrum. And he'll have some hellish signals to process—the Crowbars will need to identify and lock on targets within seconds of hitting terminal velocity, just after coming out from their own little clouds of superheated plasma."
Nathan plunked into the chair next to Leslie's desk. "Right. Next, well need an expert systems specialist—someone who can analyze those images to decide what the Hunter should do. For example, the SkyHunter needs to look at a random collection of radar sites, communication sites, and images of tents and vehicles. From that, it'll have to figure out where the headquarters is. That's where we need to make the machine think like a human military expert."
"Our military expert is Kurt, right?" Leslie asked. When Nathan nodded, Leslie continued with a frown. "Jan is still doing a better job of running this project than we are."
"Yes." The conversation paused. For the first time since Jan's death, Nathan took a close look around Leslie's office.
The little things had changed—the picture frames on his desk contained only images of Kira. The clutter had shifted, too. Antiquated microcomputers that Leslie had collected in the corners of the room had gone away, opening sections of wall that had not seen sunlight for years. Nathan's nose itched as he thought of the spumes of dust that must have risen from that machine graveyard.
Though the piles of computers had disappeared, the stacks of books had grown, filling a third large bookcase. The pictures on the walls remained the same—pictures of jet fighters, transports, and surveillance aircraft that Leslie had flown and developed before the Air Force had decided to make him a general. The promotion had taken him by surprise; he had not wanted it. He had rushed to get out before they made him a totally political beast, spending his life crafting ways to defeat the internal system rather than ways to meet the external threats.
Nathan continued the count of people they needed. "Third, we need a person who blends robotics and comm expertise—someone who can take the decisions made by the expert and put them into action, moving the vehicle, firing the gun, and so on."
"Sounds like a complete trio to me," Les replied. "Of course, it might be nice if they all had compatible personalities while we re hiring stars. It would certainly make life easier, anyway. But I still only count three. Who's the fourth person?"
Nathan laughed. "The fourth person is the vicious one, the one whose purpose is to ruin your group dynamics. He's the tester—by virtue of his creation of the simulations. We can't smash up 10,000 hovercraft and airplanes trying to test the software. Long before we ever put any of this stuff in a real Hunter, we ll have to work out the bugs by plugging into simulations. The sims will look, feel, and taste like real Hunters, as far as the software is concerned."
Leslie wrinkled his nose. "Of course." He looked Nathan in the eye. "So we need four people. How many of them do we have now? Besides Kurt, that is."
Nathan sighed. "None of them. Though I do have a couple of leads."
"So you found some candidates on the Jobnet after all."
"Not in the usual way." Nathan laughed. "I looked through listings of people who
used
to be looking for jobs. Out of those people, I looked for people who had found shortterm jobs. Hence, instead of a list of available people, I have a list of people who will be available soon. I doubt that anyone else has searched Jobnet looking for people this way."
Les snorted. He looked stern, and Nathan knew the Air Force had taken a grievous loss when this man had refused his promotion to general. "No one searches Jobnet with the techniques you use, except the ones who take your own classes on data manipulation and information filtering. You, my friend, are creating a huge collection of competitors for yourself. The Zetetic Institute is bound and determined to destroy its own advantage."
Nathan chuckled. "I wish that were the biggest problem we faced."
"If you already have a list of prospects lined up, why'd you come here to bother me?" Leslie asked.
Nathan leaned across Leslie's desk. "I'm bothering you because one of my prospects is an old friend of yours. Currently, he has a job that's barely more than a hobby. He's networking the cash registers for a group of knitting and stitchery shops. He's our comm and robotics man, if you can win him over."
"If I can win him over, huh? Who is this guy?"
Nathan removed a microfloppy from his inner suit pocket and handed it to Leslie. "Amos Leung."
Leslie blinked. "Amos? Jesus, I haven't seen Amos in over a decade. How did you know he worked for me?"
Nathan clapped his hands. "I didn't, actually. But I suspected. He worked on the Version G modifications to the E3 comm system while you were program manager. I just guessed you might know him."
"Hmph. Well, Nathan, if you wanted a star, you'll get one in Amos."
"If we can get him."
"Yeah." Leslie pursed his lips. "He's a great software developer. But Jesus, he'll be a hard sell."
Nathan patted him on the shoulder. "I have great faith in your powers of persuasion."
Leslie scowled.
"Is there anything else we should discuss before I go in search of my next crisis?" Nathan asked.
"No—though you should know about FIREFORS's latest attempt on our lives."
The grim humor of Leslie's voice told Nathan they'd had a close call. "What was it?"
Leslie told him about the backchannel message that General Curtis had intended to send to General Hicks. Fortunately, Curtis had mentioned the message to an old friend of Leslie's, who had tipped Leslie off. Leslie had discreetly arranged for other old friends to dissuade Curtis from sending the message.
"Was that really all that dangerous—just a message from one general to another?" Nathan asked in puzzlement.
"Well, it would have been a whole lot harder for us to stop if it had been sent, that's for sure. Nathan, we're gonna have to watch those guys like hawks. And we'd better keep our noses clean. If FIREFORS gets a whiff that something's going wrong, they'll be on us in a minute."
"Like a bad cost overrun or something?"
"Yeah. That, or a bad schedule delay." He pulled a miniature copy of the corridor PERT chart from deep inside the paper clutter of his desk, and stabbed the small dot of red amongst the greens and pinks. Nathan felt another shiver up his spine as he considered the possible consequences.