Aspiring writers often ask me if they should begin with short stories and work up from there toward full-length novels. I think this is the wrong question to ask. How long a work needs to be depends on what the writer wants to say. Some crushingly tedious books have resulted from padding out to hundreds of pages the single idea that ought to have been a short story; and many shorter works have suffered from jumbling together too many interesting thoughts which deserved the space to be developed. Hence I don’t care very much what lengths are supposed to constitute a short story, a novella, a short novel, and so on. Whatever best expresses what I have to say is the length it needs to be, and others can worry about what category it belongs to. Writing shouldn’t be a Procrustean bed that ideas are cut or stretched to fit.
Assassin was the first thing I wrote that came out as a short story (or novella, or whatever). That was in late 1977, after I’d written three novels—which answers the question about having to write short fiction first. Judy-Lynn Del Rey called from New York soon after we’d arrived in the U.S. to say that she was putting together the fourth in her Stellar series of anthologies, and had reserved a slot in it for me. “So write something, Hogan,” she ordered. Reflecting back, I don’t doubt that this was her way of making sure I kept up the writing habit, before excuses about having just arrived in a new country and started a new job had any time to take root. One of the things that made Judy-Lynn such a good editor was that she never allowed authors to get lazy by deciding to take breaks between books—which can easily turn into those “blocks” you hear about that last for years. As soon as she received the manuscript for that latest novel, she’d be on the phone demanding an outline for the next. It didn’t matter if the outline was half-baked and full of unresolved problems, or even if we ended up abandoning it completely—the wheels that would eventually produce the next story had been kept turning.
The problem with Assassin, though, was that I had just moved to a new country and begun a new and very demanding job with Digital Equipment—and on top of that had blown all my spare time by getting involved in restoring the house. So I wrote it by going to the office three hours early every morning and using my secretary’s typewriter. As with many first attempts at shorter fiction, it was too wordy and rambling. The version included here—reread eight years later—has been pruned mercilessly.
I think this tells us something about writing technique. The purpose of a first draft is to capture every thought and get it down on paper before it evaporates. The art of developing it from there is knowing what to cut—and in my opinion, the more ruthless the process, the better the end product tends to be. “When in doubt, leave it out” is a good maxim to follow.
Even before the conscious parts of his mind realized that he was awake, his reflexes had taken control. The slow and even rhythm of his breathing remained unbroken; not a muscle of his body stirred. To all appearances he was still sound asleep, but already his brain, now fully alert, was sifting the information streaming in through his senses.
There were no alarm bells ringing in his head—no half-remembered echo of perhaps the creak of a shoe, the rustle of a sleeve, or the barely audible catching of breath that would have betrayed the presence of somebody in the room. He could detect no change in the background pattern of sound and smell that he had registered and filed away in his memory before falling asleep.
Nothing abnormal then. Just the routine beginning of another day.
He opened his eyes, allowed them to sweep around the darkness of his hotel room probing for anything irregular, then rolled over and switched on the bedside light. He yawned, drawing the first clean breath of the new day deep into his lungs, and then stretched, long and luxuriously, allowing the energy that accumulates through eight hours of complete rest to charge every nerve and fiber of his body. After holding the position for perhaps ten seconds, the man who currently called himself Hadley Krassen relaxed, and returned fully to wakefulness.
His watch told him it was 6:35 A.M. He leaned across to the bedside console and flipped a switch to activate a voice channel to the hotel computer.
“Good morning.” A synthetic bass-baritone voice issued from the grille near the top of the console panel. “Can I help you?”
“Room service,” Krassen replied.
“Room service.” The machine was now speaking in a rich, New England, female voice.
“Cancel my call for seven hundred hours. Also, I’d like a room breakfast at seven-thirty—two eggs, bacon, tomatoes, toast, coffee. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Pause.
“That’s all.”
“Thank you.” Click.
Krassen flipped off the switch and interlaced his fingers behind his head as he settled back to reflect on the events of the past ten days. Experience had taught him that this was the time to catch any danger signals that might have been thrown up by his subconscious data processing during the night. Once whatever the new day had in store had begun to unfold, they would be lost forever.
His voyage from Mars—as a regular fare-paying passenger aboard the Sirius-class photon-drive ship Percival Lowell—had passed without incident. Upon his arrival at the Earth-orbiting transfer satellite, the passport and papers identifying him as Paul Langley, structural design engineer, citizen of the Federation of Martian City-States, visiting Earth for two weeks’ vacation, had passed the scrutiny of the immigration officials. Nothing to worry about there—everything had gone smoothly.
The shuttle from the transfer satellite had brought him down thirty miles north of Oklahoma City limits at Roosevelt Spaceport, where, as prearranged, he had collected a package from the information desk at the east end of the arrivals terminal. The package had contained the key to a baggage locker, and inside the locker he had found a black briefcase. The briefcase had provided the items that he would need for the assignment, including a complete set of personal documents relating to one Dr. Hadley B. Krassen, in whose affairs he had already been thoroughly schooled. Also, there were the keys to Krassen’s personal airmobile, located three hundred miles away in the public parking area at Kansas City International Airport.
Who the “real” Hadley Krassen was the Assassin didn’t know and probably never would. Hadley Krassen was a sleeper—an agent quietly injected into an ordinary, everyday position in American society, possibly years previously, since which time he had maintained banking and credit accounts, acquired ground driver’s and airmobile pilot’s licenses, and generally performed all the functions expected of a statistical unit in the federal data banks. Whoever had been Hadley Krassen would already have been spirited away to some low-profile existence elsewhere. If, by some inspired piece of detective work, the authorities managed to trace anything that happened subsequently back to Hadley Krassen, it wouldn’t matter very much; by that time, “Hadley Krassen” would have ceased to exist.
After arriving at Roosevelt and collecting the briefcase, the Assassin had rented an airmobile, still as Paul Langley, and flown it to Kansas City Airport. On arrival there he had confirmed his reservation on a suborbital flight to London in fourteen days’ time. Then he had switched identities.
He had locked all of Langley’s papers, including the ticket to London, inside the rented airmobile and secured the keys out of sight up inside the undercarriage recess. Then, carrying only Krassen’s papers and with nothing on him to link him with Paul Langley in any way, he had walked down two levels of the airmobile park, located Krassen’s vehicle, and departed on a ten-day hotel-hopping tour of the North American continent. Thereafter he had faithfully acted out the part of a holidaymaker with a surplus of money and time and a shortage of ideas as to how to spend both of them. So far as “his” employers—the Fellerman Chemical Company of Long Island—were concerned, Dr. Krassen had left on two weeks’ vacation and was strictly incommunicado. Anybody calling his apartment would have discovered that before leaving he had not programmed his infonet terminal to forward incoming calls.
During those ten days he had detected nothing suspicious. His tortuous meanderings about nearly a dozen cities, back and forth among the ramps, terraces, and walkways of the pedestrian precincts, on and off the autocabs, had failed to reveal any sign of a tail. There had been no unlikely coincidences, such as the same face appearing in two different restaurants a mile apart, or a fellow hotel guest “happening” to choose the same bar as he for an evening drink of the far side of town. His comings and goings had not been watched by curious eyes shielded by newspapers in hotel lobbies; no room that he stayed in had been searched; his vehicle had not been opened during his absence. He allowed himself to arrive at the conclusion therefore that he was, with a high degree of certainty, “clean.”
He rose, took a shower, and shaved, moving with the unhurried ease of one conditioned to the notion that haste and disaster go hand in hand. That done, he selected his clothing from piles arranged the night before on top of the room’s second, unused bed. The lightweight undervest, made from a foam-filled honeycomb of toughened nylon mesh, would stop a .38 bullet fired from anywhere beyond twenty feet. The trousers were of a strong but flexible material, loose-fitting around the hips and narrowing at the ankles to afford maximum freedom of movement; to go with them he chose a short-sleeved shirt, plain necktie, and conventional jacket. His shoes were soft, light, and nonslip, and would enable a suitably skilled wearer to move noiselessly over almost any surface.
With his single suitcase open on the bed, he sat down at the writing desk alongside and emptied his pockets and his wallet. First he checked Krassen’s personal documents, transferring them into the wallet as he did so. The last item among them was a high-security pass folder, about half the size of a postcard, which contained his own photograph and thumbprint, and which, according to the wording carried on its face, had been issued by the Defense Department (NORAM) of the United Western Democracies and signed by James S. Vorner, Secretary to the Director of Military Intelligence. Then he put the wallet in one of his inside jacket pockets and his airmobile keys and a handkerchief in the side pockets, leaving his trousers empty for better mobility. Everything else went into the suitcase along with his spare clothing.
Next he checked the technical papers and research journals that provided legitimate contents for the briefcase, arranged them inside, and finally closed the case and positioned it on the desk in front of him, together with two other items—an ordinary-looking gray ballpoint pen, and a small transparent plastic box containing what appeared to be a common brand of tranquilizer capsules.
The pen came apart rapidly under his practiced fingers, the writing head, ink tube, and tapering portion coming away at one end and the rounded cap at the other, to leave just a plain cylinder of toughened, high-density plastic.
Turning his attention to the briefcase, he located the concealed catch beneath the lock and pressed it, allowing the handle to come away in his hand. The grip was bound with decorative hoops of leather thong. When he took the handle between both hands and flexed it, the grip broke like a shotgun, parting between two of the leather hoops and pivoting about a hinge on the inner edge of the grip; at the same time, a trigger clicked out from a point near the hinge. The handle had hinged into two parts of unequal length: The larger section formed the butt and body of the pistol, while the smaller section, hinged back to curve below his index finger, provided the trigger guard. The gray plastic tube screwed quickly into place to become the barrel.
The weapon fitted snugly in his hand. It was small, lightweight, and smoothly angled, easily concealed in an inside jacket pocket. Formed from plastic components that resembled everyday objects, it could be carried with impunity through the most stringent X-ray and visual security checks.
He squeezed the trigger a few times and felt the mechanism trip smoothly. Then he opened the pillbox and took out one of the yellow-and-blue capsules. What made these capsules different from those that looked the same and could be obtained in any drugstore was that the yellow end was soft and concealed a needle-sharp projectile formed from a fast-acting neurotoxin designed to fragment almost immediately after impact and cause death in under five seconds. The propellant was a charge of highly compressed gas contained in the blue end.
The Assassin drew the magazine slide out from the butt, carefully pressed the capsule into one of the five positions provided, and pushed the slide back in until he felt its restraining spring click into place. Pistol in hand, he rose from the chair, selected a large Florida orange from the bowl of fruit provided by the management, and lodged it firmly in the ashtray standing on the desk. He backed off ten paces, raised his arm, aimed, and fired.
A dull phutt from the pistol, a sharper splatt from the orange, and the briefest suggestion of a hiss from nowhere in particular sounded all at the same time. He walked back to the waiting desk to inspect his handiwork.
About an inch off center, the skin of the orange was punctured by a quarter-inch diameter hole surrounded by a thin halo of pulped peel and flesh. The juice oozing out was discolored a greenish yellow. He peeled the skin back and inspected the damage, checking the depth of penetration and looking especially for signs of incomplete fragmentation. If the bullet were from a bad batch, with the center of mass not lying precisely on the spin axis, the ensuing in-flight wobble would cause too much energy to be dissipated in tearing through layers of clothing, preventing effective penetration of the target.
Satisfied, he removed the spent propellant cartridge from the magazine and tossed it down the disposal unit, to be incinerated, along with the orange.
He dismantled the pistol, refitted the briefcase handle, and put the reassembled pen and pillbox away in zip-protected pockets in his jacket. The chime of the console panel sounded just as he was finishing.
“Krassen,” he said, touching a button to accept the call.
“Seven-thirty breakfast, sir. Would it be convenient now?”
“Okay.”
“Thank you.”
Half a minute later the light above the room’s dispensing unit indicated that the tray had arrived.
As he ate his breakfast he made his final mental run-through of the day’s planned operation. Normally he preferred to work alone; on this occasion, however, too many specialized skills had been called for, so that had not been possible. But he had satisfied himself that those chosen to make up the rest of the team were all first class in their jobs.
His meal over, he swiveled the console around to face the desk and activated the keyboard. A swift sequence of commands connected him to the continental infonet service and activated an inquiry program already residing in a file established in the system. The program accessed a virtual address in the net and relayed its contents back to the screen on his console. The process was the electronic equivalent of the traditional dead-letter box: messages could be deposited in and retrieved from the virtual address with neither sender nor recipient being known to, or traceable by, the other.
The message read:
JOHN
VISIT PROFESSOR AS ARRANGED.
MARY (7:00)
So—everything was go up until seven that morning; no last-minute hitches. He finished his coffee, then operated the console once more to access the hotel computer and call up the checkout routine. A record of the transaction appeared from the console’s hard-copy unit, accompanied by a message thanking him for his business, expressing the hope that he would choose Holiday Inn again next time, and inviting him to call for manual assistance from the duty clerk if everything had not been to his complete satisfaction.
He loaded his suitcase into the receptacle of the baggage-handling system and left instructions to deliver it to the hotel airmobile park, Level 2, Bay 26. After a final check of the room, he put on his jacket and hat and walked down the hallway to the elevator.
Five minutes later, he settled himself into the pilot’s seat of the airmobile, switched on the control console, and flipped the Manual/Auto flight mode setting to Auto. The display screen came to life:
ALL SYSTEMS CHECKED AND FUNCTIONING NORMALLY.
FLIGHT MODE AUTO SELECTED.
KEY FOR DESTINATION:
N NEW
P PREPROGRAMMED
X AUXILIARY SERVICES
He pressed the N key.
AUTO FLIGHT LOG-IN.
SPECIFY DESTINATION REQUIRED.
He bit his lower lip as the first trace of tension began building up inside him. If disaster was going to strike, it would surely be within the next sixty seconds. He keyed:
JOINT SERVICES ARMAMENTS RESEARCH ESTABLISHMENT
ANDERSCLIFF
LINCOLN
NEBRASKA
Almost certainly, the destination that he had specified would trigger a response from a surveillance program somewhere in the system. Sure enough:
QUERY
DESTINATION REQUESTED IS TOP-SECURITY LOCATION.
ACCESS PERMITTED TO AUTHORIZED PASS-HOLDERS ONLY.
STATE
NAME, POSITION HELD, PASS CODE/VISITOR CLEARANCE REFERENCE.
He responded:
DR. HADLEY B. KRASSEN
SECTION A.8, DEPARTMENT 39, PLASMA PHYSICS
7x8H/927380.BB
An eternity passed while the characters remained frozen on the screen. This was the moment of truth.
No Krassen had ever been employed at Anderscliff.
Eighty-seven miles away, a computer deep below the administration building of the Joint Services Armaments Research Establishment scanned the information that he had entered and compared it against the stored records. It located a record pertaining to a Krassen, Hadley B., as described, and verified the pass code. Its verdict was composed into a message and flashed back through the infonet system. In the airmobile, the display changed at last:
AUTHORIZATION POSITIVE
DESIRED TAKEOFF TIME:
The Assassin felt a surge of jubilation as he replied:
IMMEDIATE.
The rest of the preflight dialogue took only a few seconds.
ESTIMATED FLIGHT TIME IS 18 MINUTES. DETAILED FLIGHT PLAN REQUIRED?
NO.
FUEL ADEQUATE. ESTIMATED RANGE REMAINING ON ARRIVAL WILL BE 328 MILES. OKAY?
YES.
VEHICLE SYSTEM SLAVING TO TRAFFIC CONTROL. CLEARED FOR IMMEDIATE TAKEOFF.
Five minutes later, the man who currently called himself Hadley Krassen was gazing down from one of the speeding dots in the westbound traffic corridor at ten thousand feet, Route 305, of the Omaha Traffic Area.
* * *
Over fourteen hundred miles away, in an office block in the center of San Francisco, the plaque on the door of one of the suites proclaimed it to be the registered business premises of J.J. MARSHALL, INDUSTRIAL FINANCIAL ANALYST. Inside, the offices all looked normal enough One room at the rear of the suite, however, was different. Inside it, four people—three men and a woman, all in their late twenties to late thirties—sat surrounded by an array of consoles, keyboards, and display screens amid a confusion of banks of electronic and computing equipment. Working in these cramped conditions over the previous five months, this team had penetrated the “hyper-safe” integrated communications and database network of the NORAM Defense Department. That, of course, included the computers at Anderscliff.
From their room in San Francisco, the Martian Federation scientists could extract and alter any data in the Anderscliff system and monitor the operation of its most highly protected programs. Also, if they wished, they could insert into the system, and run, programs of their own devising—the personnel record for Krassen, Hadley B., had not found its way into the Anderscliff file system through the normal channels.
The woman noted a change in the pattern of symbols on one of the screens and keyed a command string into her console. Groups of numbers appeared in columns on another display.
“The call code and flight-profile data for his airmobile have just been received from air traffic control, along with detail of a bunch of other vehicles,” she announced.
One of the men behind her consulted another readout. “They’ll all be incoming flights,” he said. “Morning commuters into Anderscliff. Area control is programming the local ground processors and approach radars at Anderscliff to handle the landing sequences.”
“He must be nearly there, then,” somebody commented.
* * *
The Assassin gazed down at the expanding sprawl of office blocks, laboratory buildings, domes, storage tanks, and girder lattices, all tied together loosely by a triangle of roadways and pipelines, that made up the Joint Services Armaments Research Establishment. His vehicle was sinking toward a rooftop parking area, which he recognized as one of the staff parking zones from ground plans taken from satellite pictures; he had memorized it all thoroughly before leaving Mars.
The vehicle slowed as it descended, finally coming to hover thirty feet above the next available space along one of the partially filled rows. The optical scanner presented a view of the landing spot, and he satisfied himself that the area was clear before okaying the computer to proceed with the final phase of landing.
Three minutes later, briefcase in hand, he was walking toward the rooftop entry gate and checkpoint, through which he would have to pass to enter the Establishment itself. He had timed his arrival to coincide with the morning rush. Ahead of him, a half dozen or so persons, some shouting morning greetings back and forth, were converging on the door that led in to the checkpoint. Nobody took any notice of him as he tagged along behind two men talking shop in loud voices, and followed them through the doorway between two steel-helmeted guards.
Inside, the pair in front passed their hand-baggage to an attendant behind a counter, who in turn passed it through the hatch in the wall behind her for checking. The Assassin followed suit. There was no sign of the spot body-searches for which he had been told to be prepared.
Following the still-chattering duo, he found himself in a short queue shuffling slowly forward toward a desk where passes were being checked. Almost immediately, others lined up behind him. He watched the procedure being followed at the desk, searching for any subtle differences from what he had been briefed to expect. There were none. Whoever had been responsible for research for the assignment had done a thorough job.
Avoiding eye contact with the security officer seated at the check-in desk, he stepped forward, extracted the magnetically coded name-tag from his pass folder, pushed it into the slot provided, and keyed the memorized check digits into the keyboard below. He then pressed his right thumb against the glass plate located next to the slot and recited aloud into the microphone above:
“Krassen, Hadley B. 7x8H/927380.BB.”
Elsewhere in the Establishment, a computer located the record and compared the check digits stored with the pass code against the sequence that had just been keyed in at the gate. They matched. The thumbprint and voiceprint profiles held in the record also matched those that had just been input.
“I don’t know you, do I?” The security officer at the desk regarded him through narrowed eyes.
“Only started working here a coupla days ago.” The Assassin’s reply was in a matter-of-fact drawl. His face retained the deadpan stare of the early-morning riser not quite awake yet.
“Your pass folder, please.”
The Assassin passed the folder across and stood impassively while the officer ran his eye rapidly down the card, pausing to compare the photograph inside it with the features confronting him.
“Who’s your boss?”
“Professor Henderson, Department 39, Plasma Physics.”
The security officer surveyed the column of illuminated signs on his console panel, all glowing POSITIVE for the computer checks, then nodded and passed the folder back together with a plastic lapel badge.
“Okay. Hope you enjoy working at Anderscliff, Dr. Krassen.”
“Thank you.”
The Assassin removed the magnetic name-tag from the slot in front of him, moved a few paces forward, and paused to insert it in the window of the lapel badge and fasten the badge to his jacket. Then he moved on to the counter beyond and retrieved his briefcase, checked and cleared.
For the first time in several minutes he allowed himself to relax a little, drawing in a long, slow breath and exhaling with it the worst of the tension that had built up inside him. He was in. He had penetrated the impenetrable. He knew of course that the real work had been done long before, and represented something like ten man-years of effort.
He took an elevator down to ground level and emerged from the building through a set of glass doors surmounting a flight of shallow steps, where he stopped for a while to study the geography of this part of the Establishment, especially the approaches to the building he had just come out of. Then, guided by his predeparture briefing and the direction signs about the Establishment, he made his way through the maze of buildings and up to the cafeteria on the third floor of the domestic block.
As he progressed from one area to another, detectors above the doorways through which he passed picked up the signal being transmitted by the microcircuit in the lapel badge. The signal was unique to his pass code, controlled by the magnetic name-tag that he had inserted from his pass folder. Everybody in Anderscliff carried such a badge. All the signals picked up by all the detectors all over the Establishment were monitored by a surveillance computer which continuously compared them against stored tables of which pass codes authorized entry to any particular building, floor, section, or room. An attempt to violate the system of limited access would trigger an immediate alert. The surveillance system thus provided an automatic check of who was entering restricted areas and enabled reports to be printed out, if required, of who had been in any particular place on any given day and at what time.
The surveillance computer was not programmed to track the movements of an individual through the Anderscliff complex, although the data from the detectors would have enabled such a task to be accomplished quite easily. The designers of the system had not seen any purpose in such a function. But the Martian Federation scientists in San Francisco had. Accordingly, they had developed a program of their own that enabled them, from fourteen hundred miles away, to monitor the precise movements of both the Assassin and his victim. They thus possessed all the information needed to guide him to his target.
He settled himself at an empty table by one wall of the cafeteria and consumed a leisurely cup of coffee, allowing the people who were still arriving time to disperse about the Establishment and settle down to their daily routines. After twenty minutes or so had passed, he rose and walked back to the lobby to enter one of the three public infonet booths located near the door. The message waiting for him in the electronic dead-letter box read:
JOHN
PROFESSOR WILL SEE YOU ALONE AT HOME
MARY (9:32)
So—Brozlan was alone in his private apartment suite in the residential sector of Anderscliff, as expected. Weeks of analysis of the data patterns extracted from the surveillance computer had revealed that the professor never left his private quarters before ten-thirty in the morning. Perhaps he was in the habit of working alone for the first part of the morning before going over to the biophysics labs, where he spent most of his time; maybe he was simply a late riser. The reason really didn’t matter. The Assassin knew all he needed to know.
He left the booth, returned to ground level, and waited for one of the Establishment’s auto-shuttles to take him to the residential sector. Eight minutes later, a porter seated at a desk just inside the entrance door of Residential Block 3 looked up in surprise as a tall, lean, hatted figure carrying a black briefcase marched straight past him, tossing back a curt “Good morning” over his shoulder. The porter just had time to check the ENTRY AUTHORIZATION POSITIVE display on his panel before the figure disappeared into the elevator at the far end of the hall.
The residential sector was a high-security zone, accessible to only a handful of privileged people apart from the scientists and other special-category personnel who resided within the perimeter of Anderscliff. The tables stored in the memory subsystem of the surveillance computer, however, told it that the holder of the pass code assigned to Krassen, Hadley B., could move freely anywhere within the Establishment.
When he came out of the elevator on the second floor, he was carrying the briefcase under his left arm and holding the pistol, assembled and loaded, in his right-hand jacket pocket. He moved slowly along the corridor, walking straight past the door that bore the nameplate BROZLAN without checking his stride or turning his head. At the end of the corridor he stopped, turned, and just as slowly walked back again, scanning the walls and ceiling for any sign of TV cameras. Finding none, he stopped when he came back to the door, listened for perhaps ten seconds, then pressed the ball of his right thumb against the printlock plate set into the doorframe. A click sounded as the lock disengaged.
Records of which prints were authorized to operate which of the thousands of printlocks around Anderscliff were also stored in the surveillance computer. Officially, only four prints had been specified to open the lock of Brozlan’s private suite: those of the professor himself, the domestic attendant for Residential Block 3, the manager of domestic services, and the duty medical supervisor. Somehow a fifth print had been added to that set; it was identical to the one stored in the personnel record headed KRASSEN, HADLEY B.
He paused inside the door and closed it softly behind him. One of the other doors leading off from the small entrance hall was ajar, and from behind it came the sound of movement and the rustle of papers. The Assassin moved forward and brought his eye close to the crack at the edge of the door.
The room was a litter of books, papers, and scientific journals, and its far wall consisted entirely of shelves. Sitting at a desk in front of the shelves, a white-haired man, probably in his late fifties, and wearing a plain gray suit, was sorting piles of documents into something approaching order. The Assassin recognized him at once. He stepped quickly and silently around the door. Three catlike paces brought him facing the desk, pistol leveled.
“Keep your hands on the desk. Don’t move. Don’t make a noise.”
The white head jerked up sharply in surprise. Eyes open wide with alarm and disbelief took in the menacing figure confronting them.
“You—you are from the Federation . . .” He had detected the slight Martian accent in the other’s voice.
The Assassin nodded expressionlessly. “And you are Professor Malleborg Brozlan—defector from Mars and traitor to the Federation.”
Brozlan saw the coldness behind the unblinking gray eyes and knew then that he had no hope. He tried the only gambit open to him.
“Did they tell you why I defected to Earth? Haven’t you wondered?”
“Those things do not concern me.” The Assassin’s tone was final.
“But they concern everybody. Did you realize that—“
A dull phutt, a muffled thud, and the briefest suggestion of a hiss sounded all at the same time. The professor recoiled back in the chair, his eyes wide with shock. His fists clenched as his body stiffened. Then his eyes glazed over and stared sightlessly at infinity. The rim of the small hole that had appeared in his shirtfront, an inch to the left of the breastbone, began to turn red.
The Assassin waited a few seconds longer, then stepped around the desk and lifted the professor’s chin with his finger. The head lolled limply to one side. He reached out and felt the temple for a pulse. There was none. He raised the pistol again, rested the tip of the barrel against the pad of muscle over the carotid artery at the side of the neck, and gently squeezed the trigger again.
Five minutes later he emerged from Residential Block 3 and boarded the next passing shuttle. As the shuttle was pulling away from the pickup point, the wail of a siren heralded the approach of an ambulance moving at high speed. The ambulance screeched to a halt outside the residential block and disgorged three white-clad medical orderlies, who raced in through the door before the last moans of the siren had died away.
The planners of the Assassin’s mission could not have known that six weeks before to the day, the professor had suffered a heart attack, and that during the ensuing surgery a microelectronic cardiac monitor had been implanted in his chest. The signals transmitted by the monitor were picked up continuously by detectors similar to those that read the lapel badges, and routed to measuring instruments in the Establishment’s medical center. The instruments were programmed to sound an alarm the instant that any irregularity appeared in Brozlan’s cardiac waveforms.
The Assassin almost made it. The alarm reached the rooftop checkpoint seconds after he had passed through without incident. As the guards came rushing out of the door behind him, shouting after him to stop, he broke into a run toward the airmobile. The tranquilizer dart hit him squarely in the back of the neck. The dose on it would have stunned an ox.
* * *
“Doctor, I think he’s coming ‘round now.” The voice, a woman’s, sounded blurred and far away. Coherent thoughts refused to form in his mind. Bright lights and meaningless patches of color swam before his eyes. Two faces seemed to be peering down at him from a million miles away. He passed out again.
* * *
He was in bed in what could have been a hospital room. Apart from the uniformed guard standing by the door, there were two other men in the room, seated on chairs flanking his bed. The one to his left was aged maybe forty-five and dressed in a navy-blue three-piece suit, white shirt, and silver tie. His hair was graying and his upper lip adorned by a clipped, military-style mustache that seemed to enhance his generally debonair image. His eyes were twinkling, and he seemed to be waiting for the Assassin to fully regain his faculties. The other was younger, dark-haired, swarthy-skinned and unsmiling.
“Allow me to offer my congratulations,” the older of the two said after a few seconds. “Another minute and you’d have got clean away.” He was obviously English, probably an army officer, possibly high-ranking. The Assassin said nothing, allowing his thoughts time to coalesce into something approaching organized. The most important thing was that the mission had been successful: He had penetrated one of the most closely guarded places on Earth and carried out his assignment. What happened now was of secondary importance.
He hauled himself up for a better view of his visitors, and the Englishman moved the pillows behind him to prop him up. Silence persisted for what seemed a long time.
“What went wrong?” the Assassin asked at last. His voice was monotonous and resigned . . . but curious.
“Wrong? Actually, nothing, old chap. That is, you didn’t do anything wrong. We picked you up through something that you couldn’t possibly have known about. Call it an accident. The details of that can wait until later. Right at this moment there are a lot of other things that we’d very much like to know about you.”
The Assassin slumped back against the pillows and raised his eyes to the ceiling in feigned boredom. His expression said the rest.
“You’d be surprised how much we know about you already,” the Englishman went on, unperturbed. “We know that you’re from the Martian Federation, that you came in via Roosevelt Spaceport ten days before Anderscliff, posing as a structural engineer called Paul Langley, and that after assuming the role of Hadley Krassen you spent some time touring around the continent to test your cover. I can give you a list of the places you stayed at if you want.”
The Assassin’s face remained blank, but inwardly he felt uneasiness. If they had known this much all along, he would never have gotten within a hundred miles of Anderscliff. On the other hand, how could they have worked it out since his capture? He could think of no obvious flaw in his getaway arrangements.
“But let’s start with introductions to prove that we are all civilized people,” the Englishman continued. “I am Colonel Arthur Barling—this is Carl May. Our precise functions need not concern us for now. You are . . . ?” He let the question hang. The Assassin remained silent.
“Never mind. We’ll call you Hadley for the time being. Any objections?” He paused but there was no response. “Very well, Hadley, now let’s get down to business. It’s obvious that you were sent here after the most meticulous preparations in order to eliminate Brozlan. Equally obviously, you are just one member of a team that includes some extraordinary talents.” Silence. “Just think of it—all that effort, all that distance . . . just for one man. A man of your undoubtedly high intelligence must have wondered what made him so important. I know that people like you are never told that kind of thing.”
The colonel regarded him silently for a few seconds. Carl May continued to sit frowning, saying nothing. The Assassin guessed that he was the observer, there to study his reactions while Barling did the talking. No doubt a camera was concealed somewhere as well.
The colonel carried on with what the Assassin had already decided was an outwardly nonchalant probing for weak spots.
“It’s the old, old problem that separates you and us, isn’t it, Hadley—the breakaway pressures of the New World pulling against the restraining influences of the Old. On the one hand there’s the progressive new ideology of the former colonial city-states, and on the other the conservative and tradition-bound regimes of Earth.” Barling made an empty-handed gesture and pulled a face. “And so we hear the old song about an oppressed people yearning to be free and go its own way. But in reality it’s an old story of another kind—a bunch of opportunists who’ve spotted something that’s up for grabs, only this time it’s a whole planet. So they feed out the same claptrap that we’ve been hearing for a thousand years . . . liberty, justice, that kind of thing . . . and the incredible thing is that people like you still swallow it.” An expression of disbelief spread across the Englishman’s face. “Do you really believe that you’d be a penny’s worth of anything better off if Mars did go its own way? I mean . . . Take that bunch that sent you off on your little errand. You can see the kind of methods that they don’t think twice about using . . . the sort of scruples that they have. What kind of society do you think they’d make for you if they didn’t have to answer to anybody? Is that the great ‘cause’ that you’re all so dedicated to fighting for?”
The Englishman paused and considered the Martian quizzically, but was rewarded only by a stare of indifference. This was the kind of thing that the Assassin had expected. He knew that the mild taunts were intended to be provocative—to lure him into making the mistake of responding before he could think clearly.
Barling tried another angle. “Anyway, it couldn’t possibly work, could it? Mars depends on the industrial capacity and resources of Earth. As long as that remains fact, any talk about Martian independence can be nothing more than an illusion. Without us you couldn’t last a month.”
The Assassin’s jaw tightened as he fought to repress the indignation welling up inside him. The statement the colonel had just uttered was outrageous. Mars had no natural resources worth talking about. With no biosphere, no hydrosphere, and virtually no atmosphere, the planet had never experienced the processes of erosion, biological activity, and marine deposition that had laid down the treasures of Earth. But the pioneers had not expected to find any. What they had expected to find was freedom—freedom from stifling bureaucracy and legislation, and the freedom to tackle their problems in their own ways. Their first problem had been the horrendous cost of importing every ton of needed material from Earth.
In answer, the scientists of Mars had realized a dream that was centuries old, but on a scale that no alchemist had ever imagined. They perfected techniques for transmuting elements on an industrial scale. The Martian wilderness was no longer a waste. Not only that. Scientists eventually learned how to use the elements that they had created to synthesize increasingly more complex compounds, until virtually anything they required could be derived from a few common, locally available raw materials. Fusion reactors had satisfied the demand for the enormous amounts of energy required by these processes.
The new technology from Mars had transformed the industries of Earth in a few decades; indeed, all the nations of Earth rose to levels of affluence that would have been inconceivable, even to the most optimistic, only fifty years previously. The costs of synthetic compounds from Earth’s own processing plants had plummeted so far that it became uneconomical for Mars to develop its pilot installations into full-blown industries and it continued to rely on imports.
And now Barling was turning that fact around and using it to imply that Mars could never survive alone. But it was Earth that would never have survived without Mars! Mars had paid its debt. It had earned the right to decide its own destiny, alone and without interference. The Assassin continued to say nothing, but his eyes glared his defiance.
“Oh dear. This really isn’t getting us anywhere at all,” the colonel conceded. “If we carry on in this fashion, the conversation is going to be very dull and one-sided. Although I’m sure you’d find the story of why Brozlan came to Earth a fascinating one, I’ve a feeling I might be wasting my breath if I tried to tell it to you. Therefore, I won’t attempt it. Instead, I’ll get someone else to tell it to you—someone who, I’m sure you will agree, will be able to make it far more interesting.” The colonel nodded briefly to the guard, who turned and left the room. Silence descended, to be broken after a few seconds by the colonel whistling tunelessly to himself through his teeth. The Assassin remained expressionless, but deep inside he was becoming troubled.
Something was wrong. An alarm was sounding somewhere deep in his brain. There was something about the Englishman’s tone and manner that didn’t fit. The Assassin hadn’t expected moral reproaches or accusations of criminal outrage; he had already assessed Barling as a professional at this kind of business. But the Englishman’s nonchalance was coming through too sincerely to be contrived. If Brozlan’s removal had been so important to the Federation, it followed that it should also have constituted a major disaster to the Western Democracies of Earth. The seriousness of the situation should have been detectable in the way that Barling spoke and acted. It wasn’t.
The guard returned, ushering in before him somebody who had presumably been waiting outside. For the first time, the Assassin’s iron self-control broke down. His eyes bulged, and he gaped across the room as if he had seen a ghost . . . which was not surprising.
“Good morning,” said Professor Malleborg Brozlan.
Time seemed to stand still. For once, the wheels in the Assassin’s mind ground to a complete halt. No coherent thought formed in his head; no words came to his lips. This was definitely no illusion . . . but there was no doubt that the man he had left at Anderscliff had been totally, absolutely, unquestionably . . . dead.
“Surprised?” The dryness in the colonel’s voice did not conceal a faint trace of amusement.
The Assassin closed his eyes and slumped back against the pillows. “How?” he managed, in a voice that was barely more than a whisper. “How is this possible?”
“So—you’re hooked, eh? You’ve got to know, haven’t you? You’ll listen to what we have to say?”
The Assassin nodded numbly without opening his eyes.
“Good.” A pause. “Professor?”
The guard placed a spare chair at the foot of the bed. Brozlan sat down and began speaking. Clearly he had been following the conversation on a monitor outside the room.
“Maybe there were some hotheads among us.” He nodded his snowy head slowly. “But the thought of a truly independent Martian civilization . . . free to benefit from all the lessons and mistakes that are written through the history of Earth . . . without having to inherit any of the consequences . . . a chance to begin again, in a way, but this time to get it right. It was a dream that fired the imagination and raised the passions of practically every young man of my generation.” The professor shifted his eyes and regarded the figure lying in the bed. “I’m sure you know the kind of thing I mean.” Despite himself the Assassin found his gaze drawn irresistibly to the apparition sitting a few feet away from him. Brozlan was real; he was warm; he was alive . . . and talking matter-of-factly to the man who, without a moment’s thought or hesitation, had killed him.
“How can this be?” the Assassin whispered again.
Brozlan looked at him coldly, but without overt malevolence. When he spoke again, his voice was sad. “You know nothing of the power that exists on Mars today. You allow yourself to be manipulated by people who are interested only in serving their own ends . . . as I myself was once manipulated.”
“I . . . don’t understand.” In spite of his resolve not to be drawn into conversation, the Assassin was unable to restrain the question. “What power are you talking about?”
“Science!” Brozlan replied, his voice trembling slightly with sudden emotion. “The power of science. The domes of Mars contain some of the finest brains that the human race has ever produced. Think back over the last twenty or thirty years. Think of the discoveries and developments that have come from the laboratories of Mars . . . the whole science of gravitics and the first practicable gravitic drive; economical transmutation of elements on a bulk scale; bulk synthesis of molecular compounds; computer biocommunications; genetic programming . . . the list is long. But do you think for one moment that all the knowledge acquired in those laboratories is public knowledge? Things have happened there, and are still happening, that people have never dreamed of.”
The Assassin stared at him incredulously for a few seconds. “Are you saying that you are a reincarnation?” he gasped. “Something like that is really possible?”
Brozlan shook his head briefly. “No, nothing like that. Let me begin at the beginning.” He paused to collect his thoughts. “I am a physicist. I specialize in molecular structures. Practically all of the raw materials used in industry today are synthesized from artificially transmuted elements—using techniques originally perfected on Mars.” The Assassin nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on the professor. Brozlan did not continue at once, but gestured toward the flask of water that stood on the bedside locker. Carl May filled a glass and passed it to him, while Barling rose from his chair and began pacing to and fro between the bed and the window, his hands clasped loosely behind his back.
“To produce a full range of materials needed on Mars, it was not sufficient to just synthesize unstructured molecules in bulk,” Brozlan resumed. “We needed to be able to duplicate, say, the crystal lattice structures of many metal-base compounds, or the polymer chains of organic substances—things that are abundant on Earth but totally lacking back there.”
“I’d have thought that that’s where you’d use traditional processing methods,” the Assassin muttered. He didn’t mind talking as long as it was he who was asking the questions. It could only be to his ultimate advantage to know more about what was going on.
“We could have done that.” Brozlan nodded. His face creased into a frown. “But we were not satisfied with that idea. We had a virgin planet with no set ways or traditions to uphold. It seemed unsatisfactory simply to follow slavishly the methods that had evolved on Earth. We could have spent fortunes copying all of Earth’s industrial complexes on Mars only to find them obsolete before they went into production. We were convinced that there had to be a better way.”
The Assassin thought for a moment and looked puzzled. “How?” he asked at last. Brozlan’s eyes glinted. He replied:
“Consider any form of component that is used in the construction of a larger assembly . . . the parts of a machine, for example. How is the component made? We take a lump of whatever material we need and cut away from it all the excess to leave the shape that we require. That forms the basis of just about every machining process that is used traditionally.”
The Assassin shrugged. “What other way is there?”
“Deposition!” Brozlan peered at him intently. “Instead of cutting material away to leave the part, we deposited material to build the part up!”
“You mean like electrolytic forming? That’s not new.”
“The idea isn’t,” Brozlan agreed. “But the way we were doing it was. You see, electrolytic forming works only with certain metals. We were working with every kind of molecule.”
“You mean you could build up something out of anything—any substance at all?”
“Exactly! And it didn’t have to be all the same kind of molecule. We could mix them together any way we chose. We could produce a solid block that was phophor-bronze at one end and polythene at the other, with a smooth transition from one to the other in between. It opened up a whole new dimension in engineering design possibilities. The whole process was computer-controlled. A designer could develop a program to create any part he wanted out of any material he chose or any combination of materials—molecule by molecule if he really wanted to go down to that level of detail.”
“Molecule by molecule . . .” The Assassin’s face registered disbelief.
“Nevertheless, it worked,” Brozlan told him. “There have been experimental plants on Mars operating for years now, turning out goods that are higher in quality and cheaper to produce than anything that could ever come out of the factories of Earth—even things normally processed from organically derived substances, such as paper, oils, fats, sugars . . .”
“Oil . . . food . . . paper . . . synthesized from transmuted elements? Why have we never heard of such things?”
“Politics.” Brozlan sighed. “By that time there was a different brand of thinking among the higher echelons of the Federation government. Ambitious and unscrupulous men were taking over. They did not see these discoveries as potential benefits for all mankind, but only as a means of securing full economic autonomy. They began to see themselves as undisputed rulers over a self-sufficient world. That purpose would be served better if Earth were allowed to lag behind. The Federation authorities assumed tight control over our work and placed a strict security blanket over everything. That was why few people knew about what we were doing. That was also where the movement for Martian independence had it origins. Only a handful of individuals stand to gain, and not in the ways that are popularly believed.”
“Interesting, isn’t it, Hadley?” the colonel came in, spinning on his heel to face the bed. “But if you think that’s hard to swallow, wait until you hear the next bit.” He nodded at Brozlan, who continued:
“That was just one aspect of the research going on at that time. Another aspect was Dr. Franz Scheeman’s work on structural scanning with neutrino beams. Scheeman developed a method for scanning a material object, inside and out, and for extracting from the transmitted beams a complete encoding of its arrangement of atoms and molecules. It was analogous to the way in which an old TV camera encoded the information contained in a visual scene.” Brozlan took a deep breath. “The real breakthrough came when we combined Scheeman’s technique with the molecular-deposition process that we have just been talking about.”
Silence reigned for a long time while the Assassin digested the professor’s words. Then his eyes widened slowly and transfixed Brozlan with a dumbfounded stare. “You’re joking . . .” the Assassin breathed at last.
“A solid-object camera!” the colonel confirmed for him. “Yes, Hadley, you’ve got it. They could scan an object and derive a complete structural code for it. From that code they could generate a computer program to control the deposition process. Result—a perfect analog, a molecule-by-molecule copy of the original. And, of course, if they could make one they could just as easily make as many as they liked. Think of it, Hadley . . . but think of some of the deeper implications, too. What would happen if somebody suddenly introduced that kind of technology into a complex and established economy like Earth’s? Suppose that once you’d built the prototype of, say, a domestic infonet terminal”—he pointed to the bedside console—“you could churn out a million of them, all for peanuts. What would happen to the conventional electronics industry then? What about the components industry that supplies it? What would happen to the industries that supply all the parts—the plugs, sockets, metalwork, moldings, and all that kind of thing? And then, what about the service industries that depend on all those in turn . . . office equipment, furnishings, data processing, real estate, and so on through the list? How could they survive if half their customers and half their business went to the wall?” The colonel spread his arms wide in the air. “All finished, Hadley. Total collapse. How could you cope with ninety-five percent of a planet’s population being suddenly redundant? How could a global economy, with its roots buried in centuries of steady evolution, survive an upheaval like that?”
“You see,” Brozlan added, “that is exactly what the Federation government wanted to do. They wanted to rush into setting up a huge Martian industrial conglomerate based on the new technology, flooding Earth’s markets with goods at giveaway prices.”
“Earth would have been ruined,” Barling interjected. “Or at best would have faced the prospect of existing as a very second-rate entity, dependent on a new rising star.”
The Assassin, however, was not satisfied. “People can always adjust to innovations,” he said. “You can’t stop progress. What about the Industrial Revolution in England in the nineteenth century, or the way that three quarters of the world jumped straight out of feudal economies into the atomic age in the fifty years after World War Two? Or the Communications Revolution across the West? They all caused problems in their time, but people learned to live with the changes, and ended up better off as a result.”
“But those things take time, Hadley,” Barling answered. “You’re right—people can adjust to anything, given time.” He made an imploring gesture in the air again. “But that was the one thing the Federation hotheads weren’t prepared to allow. They didn’t need it. Martian society was small and flexible. Mars could have absorbed the new technology and thrived within a generation; Earth couldn’t. Relatively speaking, Earth would have been thrown back into the Dark Ages overnight.
“Fortunately, some of the more levelheaded scientists around at the time, including Brozlan here, talked them out of it. They argued that Earth would have gone all the way to unleashing an all-out interplanetary war rather than let it happen. With the balance of things as it was then, Mars wouldn’t have lasted a week.” The colonel scowled. “We would have, too,” he added with a growl.
Brozlan went on. “For a long time we developed the duplication process in secret, striving to improve its resolution further. After ten years or so, we reached a point where we could consider seriously an experiment that we had conceived right at the beginning—to produce an analog of a living organism!”
“How about that, Hadley?” the colonel inquired quietly. “Interesting?”
The Assassin stared back at the scientists in mute incredulity. Nobody spoke for a long time.
“That’s preposterous . . .” the Assassin whispered, but the expression on Brozlan’s face stifled any further words.
The professor nodded his head solemnly. “We refined the process so much, you see, that we could duplicate not only the spatial arrangement of the molecules in an organism, but also the patterns of electrical activity in its nervous system. We could reproduce, in the copy, all the behavioral habits and memorized information that had been acquired in the lifetime of the original—in other words, all those phenomena which in higher forms of life we term ‘intelligence’ and ‘memory.’ We could create an analog of a living organism,” Brozlan continued, “that was itself living! The analogs that we created were indistinguishable from the originals by any test that we could devise. We produced analog rats that could readily negotiate a maze that their originals had needed weeks of effort to learn . . . analog dogs that exhibited the same reflexes that we had conditioned into their originals. From the data collected in such experiments, it soon became obvious that there was no reason why the same thing would not work with a human being.”
Impossible thoughts that were already forming in the Assassin’s head focused suddenly into clarity. His eyes had frozen into a stunned stare directed straight at the figure seated at the foot of his bed. Before he could form any words, the colonel spoke again.
“Think about that, Hadley! You can put a person through a harmless scanning process and derive a code that specifies everything about him uniquely—physically and mentally. You can store that code away in a computer, and then use it to generate an identical analog of him. But why stop at one? You could make as many as you like! If what we talked about before was alarming, then what about this?”
He allowed a few seconds for his words to sink in, then went on. “They had some brilliant brains on Mars all right. But suddenly there was no reason why they should have to be content with just some; now they could mass-produce them!” Barling rested his hands on the back of his chair and leaned forward to peer at the Assassin intently. “What could have been achieved in the twentieth century with a thousand Albert Einsteins?
“How would you fight a war with an enemy that can store his army away in a data bank and simply re-create it every time you wipe it out? Come to that, why should he wait until you’d wiped it out at all? He could make sure you didn’t by making his army twice as big to start with . . . or ten times as big . . . or any number you like. What sort of strategy would make sense any more? It all gets crazy.
“Or what about life-insurance companies? Instead of paying out a cash benefit to compensate the bereaved for losing somebody, they could offer an analog to replace him. What kind of premium would they charge for that service?”
The Assassin gaped from Barling to Brozlan and back again as he shrugged to keep pace with it all. This was too much.
“I don’t believe all this,” he protested. “It’s some kind of trick.”
“It most certainly is not, I assure you,” Barling replied evenly. He pointed toward Brozlan. “Isn’t that enough proof for you?”
The Assassin followed the colonel’s finger with his eyes and subsided back into silence.
“The things that Colonel Barling has just mentioned are just examples,” Brozlan said. “It takes little imagination to realize what chaos could be let loose. The whole of civilized living as we know it would be turned upside down.”
“Yes, exactly,” Barling agreed.
“And consider this, Hadley—the code that controls the duplication process can be transmitted from anywhere to anywhere by ordinary telecommunications methods. Hence, the part of the machine that scans the original and the part that manufactures the analog don’t have to be in the same place. You could send anybody anywhere, instantly! It would be the old science-fiction dream come true, but with a difference—you’d still be left with the original at the sending end.” He paused and took in the Assassin’s amazement.
“I assure you I’m not joking, Hadley. Never mind economic problems now. How would you cope with the social, moral, and administrative anarchy that would follow if this kind of thing ever got loose? How could anybody stay sane in a world that was proliferating dozens of everybody? That’s not technical progress, it’s an explosion!” He paused and looked down.
The other, still stupefied, shook his head weakly. “I am a Martian,” he said. “You can’t stop things like that, explosion or not. Man will always find answers. It’s his nature.”
“Oh, we can think of answers,” the Englishman returned breezily. “Take that instant travel thing I just mentioned, for example. It would be an ideal way to send somebody to Mars or somewhere in a couple of seconds flat . . . if it weren’t for the fact that you’d be stuck with two of him afterward—one here and one there. And things would get even worse if the one there decided to come back again the same way. So, why not simply arrange for the transmitting end to destroy the original? After all, the effect as far as the rest of the universe was concerned would be that he just ‘went’ from here to there, wouldn’t it?”
The Assassin shrugged. “Perhaps.”
The colonel rubbed the palms of his hands together and smiled faintly. “Ah . . . But that would surely be murder, Hadley,” he replied. “Our legal and moral system wouldn’t allow it. Let me illustrate the point by asking a simple question. Suppose I were to say that we were going to send you through a system like that, and that in the very near future you were going to walk out of the receiving end in, say, Paris. Now, how would you feel about the idea? Would you be happy about it?” He paused and watched the change in expression on the Assassin’s face. “Mmm . . . no . . . I thought not. The fact that another individual who happened to look and think like you had come into existence somewhere else wouldn’t really be of interest, would it? You would still be dead. You can’t really accept that there’d be any sense of continuity with your analog, can you? It just feels wrong—true?”
Again the Assassin did not reply, but the look in his eyes was enough. Barling nodded but still took the point further. “See, it wouldn’t work. But suppose I were to argue that all we would have done would be to speed up slightly something that happens naturally anyway. Every molecule in your body will be replaced eventually by the normal processes of cell regeneration; the Hadley that will exist in six months’ time won’t contain one atom of the person lying in that bed right now. So why should you feel any less of a sense of continuity with your synthetic analog than you feel with the ‘natural analog’ that will be you six months from now? Logically there is no difference. The two processes are the same, but one takes a little longer than the other.” The colonel allowed the proposition time to register, then suggested: “But nevertheless something’s wrong. The argument wouldn’t convince you—right?”
“But one day maybe—“ the Assassin began, but Barling cut him off.
“Ah—one day, Hadley, perhaps . . . but that’s another matter. As you say, man will always find answers. Maybe some day things like that might be accepted as perfectly normal—as normal as embryonic genetic adjustments or artificially grown limbs seem to us today. Maybe someday we’ll populate another star system by simply beaming the information to generate a few thousand analogs out to receiving equipment that has already been sent on ahead. Maybe someday we’ll send people around the world as easily as we send messages through the infonet. It might become standard practice to back everybody up in data banks so that nobody need be permanently lost at all.” Barling spread his arms appealingly. “But not today, Hadley—not in our lifetime. Good God, man, it will take fifty years at least just to plan how to use that kind of thing intelligently. We couldn’t just let it loose overnight without any preparation at all.”
“You see, that is precisely what the Federation was proposing to do,” Brozlan supplied, sitting forward in his chair. “We managed to talk them out of doing anything rash the first time, but after this there was no way of making them listen. Mars was about to break free and find its own destiny. They saw themselves as potential gods—able to create at will and, in a sense, immortal. None of Earth’s traditional advantages mattered any more: its military superiority, economic strength, huge population, and abundance of resources . . . all of them counted for nothing. Mars would begin a new era of civilization, and Earth would pale into insignificance in its shadow.”
“And you—a Martian—didn’t want this?” The Assassin seemed unable to comprehend.
Brozlan shook his head slowly. “I was older by then. I saw the future not in terms of Earth or Mars, but of mankind. I and many of my colleagues decided that if, by this new knowledge that we had discovered, man was to elevate himself to godliness, then he would do so united as one race. This new power would not be used for something that would have amounted to war. We agreed, therefore, that, before the imbalance became any greater, we would bring the new sciences to Earth.”
“And so you defected,” the Assassin completed for him, nodding.
Brozlan hesitated for an unnaturally long time before replying. “Yes and no,” he said at last. The Assassin looked puzzled.
“By that time I was forced to work under conditions of intense and constant surveillance by Federation security. Straightforward defection would have been impossible. So . . .” He took a deep breath. “. . . One of me remained on Mars as a decoy; the other one of me came to Earth.”
“Brozlan created an analog of himself,” Barling confirmed. “Two years ago one came here while the other stayed there. For reasons he won’t go into, he’s never told us which was which. Because there was still a Brozlan working on Mars, it took the Federation over a year to find out what had happened.”
The Assassin was still confused. He had concluded already that the analog-generation process described by Brozlan was the explanation for the scientist’s “reincarnation.” But the account that he had just heard went nowhere toward answering the immediate question. One Brozlan was surely dead. The other Brozlan was just as surely still on Mars. So who was the figure sitting at the foot of the bed? He looked from Brozlan to Barling, but before he could utter any words the Englishman told him:
“As insurance, whichever of the two it was that came to Earth brought with him a copy of the program that had been used to generate the analog. Thus, once we had built the equipment at Anderscliff, we would be able to regenerate Brozlan if anything happened to him. Once a week he went through the scanning process to update the program with his latest memory patterns and so on. Hence, if we ever had to use the program, it would only be a week out of date at the most. He must have guessed that once the Federation had figured out the situation they’d stop at nothing to get rid of him . . . as you, Hadley my friend, very well know.”
Brozlan lifted his chin and hooked his collar down with his finger to reveal the side of his neck. “No scar, you see,” he said. “Yes—I am an analog, generated from the stored program at Anderscliff after you got to the Brozlan who arrived from Mars.”
“Don’t worry about losing control of your senses or anything like that, old chap,” the colonel advised reassuringly. “The Brozlan that you left behind was very dead all right.” He smiled wryly and added, “But it wouldn’t do you any good to have a crack at this one, too. We’d simply make another one.”
The Assassin sank back and closed his eyes as the full meaning of it all seeped slowly into his mind. Futile. The whole mission had been futile. The greatest piece of computer espionage in history—all for nothing.
He lay in silence for a long time. And then his mouth contorted into a faint smile. His chest began to heave with suppressed laughter. He opened his eyes and looked up at the Englishman. “But you’ve lost, Arthur, old chap,” he mimicked in barely more than a whisper. “Don’t you see—the Federation knows now that the mission has failed. They’ll deduce that Brozlan is still working for Earth and that very soon Earth will catch up in technology. That means that the Federation will be forced to make its move now—while the gap is widest and in their favor—just the opposite of what you want. Earth needs time, Arthur—time to develop the ways of applying Brozlan’s know-how. Once Earth has closed the gap, its traditional advantages will tilt the balance and count for something again. Given technical equality, Mars would have to stay in line and stay friendly. Earth could blow it out of the solar system if it had to, and lose nothing.” The Assassin laughed again, this time out loud.
“Know what you should have done? You shouldn’t have told me any of this. You should have let me escape somehow, still thinking that my mission had succeeded . . . I’d have gone back to Mars and given them a wrong report. Then, afterward, you could have quietly regenerated Brozlan and carried on. That way the Federation would have believed that they had a monopoly and as much time as they liked to set things up. By the time they found out differently, it would have been too late: Earth would have had the time it needed to make itself invincible.” The Assassin shook his head in mock sympathy. “That, Arthur, is what you should have done.”
The colonel looked down at him and stroked his mustache pensively. When he spoke, his tone was soft and mildly reproaching. “But, my dear Hadley, that’s precisely what we did do.”
The Assassin’s face registered confusion and non-comprehension.
“I must apologize,” the colonel said. “I haven’t quite told you everything yet.” He swiveled the bedside infonet terminal around so that the screen was facing the Assassin, and keyed in a sequence of commands. “Here are some movie records from our files that I think you’ll find answer your questions.” The screen came to life to show a row of airmobiles in a parking area.
“Recognize it?” the colonel asked casually. “It’s at Kansas City International Airport. We found out you were going there by interrogating the traffic control net to see what designation you’d logged in. We simply had one of our agents waiting on every level to see where you went after you landed. Here you come now—there—in the gray coat. Telephoto shot from five rows back.”
The Assassin’s bewilderment increased as he watched the image of himself walk along to one of the vehicles, which he recognized, retrieve the keys from up inside the undercarriage recess, climb in, and depart.
“It didn’t take long, of course, for us to trace that that vehicle had been hired out by a Paul Langley at Roosevelt Spaceport,” the colonel commented. “From there on it was just routine to establish how Langley arrived from Mars and that he was booked on a flight to London and from there back to Mars via Anglia Spaceport, England.
“British security agents watched you check through the boarding gate for the shuttle up from Anglia—just to make sure there were no hitches. We even had somebody up on the transfer satellite to make sure you didn’t miss your ship out to Mars. There . . .” Barling touched another button, and the picture changed to show a short line of people standing at a check-in gate. “Passengers embarking for Flight 927 to Mars. There you are again—fourth from the front. The ship left on schedule, and that was the last we saw of you, or should I say of Paul Langley.” He snapped off the screen and regarded the Assassin challengingly.
The Assassin shook his head wildly from side to side. “But—those pictures—I never did those things. I’m here!”
The Englishman frowned and made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Oh dear, you disappoint me, Hadley. Hasn’t it dawned on you yet? Don’t you realize? When you were captured, you were knocked out cold, weren’t you? You’ve been out for quite some time now. I’m afraid that during that time we took something of a liberty. . . .”
A look of horror spread across the Assassin’s face.
“Ah! I think you’ve cottoned on at last.” The colonel nodded approvingly. “Yes—you’ve got it. You’re not the real Hadley—the one who arrived from Mars. That one you’ve just been looking at on the screen was the real one. You’re an analog of him.
“He woke up remembering exactly the same as you did—everything that happened right up until he was knocked out on the roof at Anderscliff; that, of course, included the successful elimination of Brozlan. Unlike you, however, he managed to escape. Quite extraordinary, that—wouldn’t have thought our security could be so lax. Actually his escape was, shall we say, contrived, but he wasn’t to know that. The rest you know. I think Earth has bought the time it needs.”
The Assassin had been seized by something akin to acute mental shock. His eyes bulged, and his fingers clawed at the sheets. “But why?” he croaked. Perspiration showed on his forehead. “Why all this?”
“I explained it all at the beginning,” the colonel replied in unruffled tones. “You can help us with so many things we’d like to know. We’d like to know a lot more about an organization that can crack one of our top-security computer systems . . . where they got the bogus information from to put in those files . . . how they knew the pass codes . . . you know the kind of thing, Hadley. There’s lots more.”
“No.” The Assassin clenched his teeth grimly. “I am still a Martian. You can expect no help from me.”
“Oh dear, Hadley.” The colonel shook his head and sighed. “Look, how can I put this?” He paused as if considering how to phrase a delicate matter. “There really is no point at all in being obstinate. Everybody has his weakness. Some people crack up when things get unpleasant; others respond to the friendly approach. Every man can be bought for a price of some kind: money, women, a life of luxury without worries. . . . There’s always something. The big problem that interrogators have had to contend with in the past has been that they’ve had only one subject to work with. It was always too easy to ruin any chance of the right approach working by trying the wrong ones first.” The Englishman’s eyes twinkled.
“But we don’t have that problem with you, do we, Hadley? We can go back to the beginning as often as we like by simply generating another of you from the same program that we used to generate you. We’re bound to succeed eventually. Maybe we’ll learn a little bit from one Hadley, a little bit more from another. . . . Sooner or later we’ll know all we need to.”
He paused as if struck by a sudden, amusing thought. “Come to think of it, you’ve no way of knowing if you’re the first Hadley at all, have you . . . or the only one? We could have ten Hadleys in this building right now for all you know. That day at Anderscliff might have been years ago now, mightn’t it?
“Now, as I’m sure you understand, we are very busy people, and we’d much rather spend our time talking constructively to a sensible Hadley than wasting our time with one that chose to be difficult. It’s up to you to decide which you are going to be. It really doesn’t make a lot of difference to us; but, as I’m sure you will already have worked out for yourself, it could make an awful lot of difference to you.”
A moan escaped the Assassin’s lips as he slumped back against the pillows. He had been rigorously trained to understand and counter every situation of interrogation in the book. He knew all the tricks.
But they’d never thought of this . . . nothing like this. . . .
When, in 1979, I finally quit my regular job to write full-time, everyone wanted to know how much more I’d produce in a year. I told them I didn’t think I’d produce any more than I had been. “Why not?” they asked. “How could you not write more with an extra forty hours every week?” I explained that I expected to do other things with the extra time, such as actually be able to sit down and read every now and again, talk to people occasionally, and recover something of a social life. It turned out I was right.
Many of the people at science-fiction conventions would like to be writers (sometimes I get the feeling this is true of every other person in the country). The panels on writing topics always generate lots of questions from the audience on personal working habits and methods, as if there were some kind of “insiders’ secret” to be divulged. There isn’t, of course. My advice is usually to “burn your TV” (I haven’t owned one for years), “live within walking distance of a twenty-four-hour restaurant, and after that, do whatever works best for you.” It does help to have something worthwhile to say and know how to say it, but amazingly few of the questioners seem very concerned about such irrelevancies. I suspect that a lot of people are in love with the thought of writing, not with writing.
As I settled into the U.S., I met people from all sides of the publishing business—editors, agents, writers who were professionals before I was born. When I started mentioning that I was contemplating going full-time, one comment I heard time and time again was that the biggest mistake made by new writers was that after selling one book—frequently without even waiting to see any reactions or sales figures—they’d be off yelling, “I’ve made it! I’ve made it!” quitting their jobs, getting new cars, and checking the real-estate prices in Hawaii. Almost invariably it didn’t work out, and within six months they’d be knocking on the door of their old company, desperate to get back in out of the rain. And more often than not, worse than the financial setback, they had destroyed themselves psychologically.
That was some of the best advice I ever had.
So, I set three conditions that I said would have to be satisfied before I’d consider going full-time. One: I’d have five published books—not signed contracts or manuscripts delivered, but five titles out on shelves in bookstores, and out there long enough for the sales to be evident. Two: Each would have to have done better than the one before. In general, the sales of a book peak in the month or two following its release, and then drop off. What this condition said was that each peak should be higher than the last, indicating a satisfied, growing readership. Three: Enough cash in the bank to last one year—even if all income were to dry up, but expenses continued unabated—and no debts or credit.
People can delude themselves in strange ways when defending their fantasies. I’ve often heard it assumed that once the earnings from part-time writing equal one’s regular salary, then quitting the job won’t make any difference. Wrong. Let’s say, to take a round number, that somebody’s salary is thirty thousand dollars per year. When their part-time writing incomes equals that, their total income is sixty thousand dollars—simple when you think about it, but so few do. When they quit, they’d better be ready for a fifty percent cut.
The third condition was to cushion against life’s “unexpecteds.” Not unexpectedly, there were plenty of those, not the least of which was acquiring a third wife and another three children. Since the survival plan was resilient enough for us to muddle through without my having to abandon writing, I feel I can recommend it.
The message, I suppose, is to make sure that your umbrella isn’t designed for sunny days.
“Artificial fire!? Waddya mean ‘artificial fire’? What the hell is artificial fire?” Ug scowled down from beneath heavy close-knit Neanderthal brows at the tangle-haired, bearskin-clad figure squatting in front of him. Og was leaning forward to peer intently into the pile of sticks and twigs that he had built between two stones in the clearing where the trail from the stream widened on its way up toward the rock terrace fronting the caves. He seemed unperturbed by Ug’s pugnacious tone; Ug was standing with his club still slung across his shoulder, which meant that, for once, he was not in a trouble-making mood that day.
“It’s the same as you get when lightning hits a tree,” Og replied cheerfully as he began rubbing two sticks vigorously together in the handful of moss which he had placed underneath the twigs. “Only this way you don’t need the lightning.”
“You’re crazy,” Ug declared bluntly.
“You’ll see. Just stand there a couple of seconds longer and then tell me again that I’m crazy.”
A wisp of smoke puffed out from the moss and turned into a blossom of flame which quickly leaped up through the twigs and engulfed the pile. Og straightened up with a satisfied grunt while Ug emitted a startled shriek and jumped backwards, at the same time hurriedly unslinging his club.
“Now tell me again that I’m crazy,” Og invited.
Ug’s gasp was a mixture of terror, awe, and incredulity.
“Holy sabre-cats, don’t you know that stuff’s dangerous? It can take out a whole block of the forest in the dry season. Get rid of it for chrissakes, willya!”
“It’s okay between those rocks. Anyhow, I don’t want to get rid of it. I was wondering if we could figure out how to use it for something.”
“Like what?” Ug continued to stare nervously at the crackling pile and kept himself at a safe distance. “What could anybody do with it, besides get hurt?”
“I don’t know. All kinds of things. . . .” Og frowned and scratched his chin. “For instance, maybe we wouldn’t have to kick people out of the caves and make them trek a half mile down to where the hot springs are whenever they start to smell bad.”
“How else are they gonna clean up?”
“Well, I was thinking . . . maybe we could use this to make our own hot water right there in the caves and save all the hassle. Think what a difference that would make to the girls. They wouldn’t—“
“WHAT!” Ug cut him off with a shout that echoed back from the rocks above. “You wanna take that stuff inside the caves? You are crazy! Are you trying to get us all killed? Even the mammoths take off like bats outa hell if they catch so much as a whiff of that stuff. Anyhow, how could you make water hot with it? It’d burn through the skins.”
“So you don’t put it in skins. You put it in something else . . . something that won’t burn.”
“Such as what?”
“Hell, I don’t know yet,” Og yelled, at last losing his patience. “It’s a brand new technology. Maybe some kind of stone stuff . . .”
The sounds of running feet and jabbering voices from just around the bend in the trail above interrupted them. A few moments later Ag, the Vice-Chief, rushed into the clearing, closely followed by about twenty of the tribespeople.
“What’s going on down here?” Ag demanded. “We heard shouting . . . ARGH! FIRE! There’s fire in the valley. FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES! FIRE IN THE VALLEY!” The rest took up the cry and plunged back into the undergrowth in all directions. The trees all around reverberated with the sounds of colliding bodies and muffled curses, while Og continued to stare happily at his creation and Ug watched nervously from a few paces back. Then silence descended. After a while bearded faces began popping one by one out of the greenery on all sides. Ag re-emerged from behind a bush and approached warily.
“What’s this?” he enquired, looking from Ug to Og and back again. “There hasn’t been a storm for weeks. Where did that come from?”
“Og made it,” Ug told him.
“ ‘Made it’? What are you talking about—‘made it’? This some kinda joke or sump’n?”
“He made it,” Ug insisted. “I watched him do it.”
“Why?”
“He’s crazy. He says he wants to take it inside the caves and—“
“INSIDE THE CAVES?” Ag clapped his hand to his brow and rolled a pair of wide-staring eyes toward Og. “Are you outa your mind? What are you trying to do? Haven’t you seen what happens to the animals that get caught when the forest goes up? We’d all get roasted in our beds.”
“Nobody’s saying you have to sleep on top of it,” Og said wearily. “You keep it out of the way someplace. Water pulls up trees when the river floods, but you can still take water inside without having to flood the whole goddamn cave. Well, maybe we can make our own fire and learn to live with it in the same sort of way.”
“What’s the point?” Ag challenged.
“It could be useful to have around,” Og said. “The animals don’t like it. It might stop the bears from trying to muscle into the caves every time the snow comes. Things like that . . . all kinds of things. . . .”
Ag sniffed and remained unimpressed. “All the people would have taken off for the hills, too, so it wouldn’t do much good,” he pointed out.
“What about the smoke?” a voice called out from the circle of figures that had started to form around the edge of the clearing.
“What about it?” Og asked.
“You can’t breathe it. How could people live in a cave full of smoke?”
“You fix it so the smoke goes outside and not inside,” Og shouted in exasperation.
“How?”
“For Pete’s sake, I don’t know yet. It’s a new technology. What do you want—all the angles figured out in one day? I’ll think of something.”
“You’d pollute the air,” another voice objected. “If all the tribes in the valley got into it, there’d be smoke everywhere. It’d black out the sun-god. Then he’d be mad and we’d all get zapped.”
“How do you know it isn’t a she?” a female voice piped up from the back, only to be promptly silenced by a gentle tap on the head from the nearest club.
At that moment the circle of onlookers opened up to make way for Yug-the-Strong, Chief of the tribe, and Yeg-the-Soothsayer, who had come down from the caves to investigate the commotion. Yeg had been a great warrior in his youth and was reputed to have once felled an ox single-handed by talking at it nonstop until it collapsed in the mud from nervous exhaustion; hence Yeg’s nickname of ‘Oxmire.’ For the benefit of the two elders Ag repeated what had been said and Ug confirmed it. Yeg’s face darkened as he listened.
“It’s not safe,” he pronounced when Ag had finished. The tone was final.
“So we learn how to make it safe,” Og insisted.
“That’s ridiculous,” Yeg declared flatly. “If it got loose it would wipe out the whole valley. The kids would fall into it. On top of that, the fallout would foul up the river. Anyhow, you’d need half the tribe to be carrying wood up all the time, and we need the resources for other things. It’s a dumb idea whatever way you look at it.”
“You’ve got no business screwing around with it,” Yug said, to add his official endorsement.
But Og was persistent and the arguing continued for the next hour. Eventually Yeg had had enough. He climbed onto a rock and raised an arm for silence.
“How this could be made safe and why we should bother is still unclear,” he told them. “Everything about it is unclear. Anyone who still wants to mess around with unclear energy has to be soft in the head.” He turned a steely gaze toward Og. “The penalty for that is banishment from the tribe . . . forever. The law makes no exceptions.” Yug and Ag nodded their mute agreement, while a rising murmur of voices from the tribe signaled assent to the decision.
“Throw the bum out!”
“I don’t want no crazy people collecting free rides outa my taxes.”
“Let the Saps down the end of the valley take care of him. They’re all crazy anyway.”
Og lodged a plea with the appeal-court in the form of Ag, who passed it on to Yug.
“Beat it,” was Yug’s verdict.
An hour later Og had drawn his termination pay in the form of two days supply of raw steak and dried fish, and was all packed up and ready to go.
“You’ll be sorry,” he called over his shoulder at the sullen group who had gathered to see him on his way down the trail. “It won’t do you any good to come chasing after me and telling me you’ve changed your minds when winter comes. The price to you will have gone out of sight.”
“Asshole!” Ug shouted back. “I told you you’d blow it.”
Over the months that followed, Og traveled the length and breadth of the valley trying to interest the other tribes in his discovery. The Australopithecines were too busy training kangaroos to retrieve boomerangs as a result of not having got their design calculations quite right yet. The tribe of Homo erectus (famous for their virility) were preoccupied with other matters and didn’t listen seriously, while A. robustus declared that they had no intention of becoming A. combustus by being ignited and becoming extinguished at the same time. And so Og found himself at last in the remote far reaches of the valley where dwelt the H. saps, who were known for their strange ways and whom the other tribes tended to leave to their own devices.
The first Sap that Og found was sitting under a tree, staring thoughtfully at a thin slice of wood sawn from the end of a log that was lying nearby.
“What’s that?” Og asked without preamble. The Sap looked up, still wearing a distant expression on his face.
“Haven’t thought of a name for it yet,” he confessed.
“What is it supposed to do?”
“Not sure of that either. I just had a hunch that it could come in useful . . . maybe for throwing at hyenas.” The Sap returned his gaze to the disk of wood and rolled it absently backward and forward in the dust a couple of times. Then he pushed it away and looked up at Og once more. “Anyhow, you’re not from this end of the valley. What are you doing on our patch?” Og unslung an armful of sticks from his pack for the umpteenth time and squatted down next to the Sap.
“Man, have I got a deal for you,” he said. “You wait till you see this.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon wheeling and dealing and ended up agreeing to joint management of both patents. The Sap had got a good deal, so it followed that Og must have got a wheel—which was what they therefore decided to call it. The chief of the Saps agreed that Og’s trick with the sticks constituted a reasonable share-transfer price, and Og was duly installed as a full member of the tribe. He was content to spend the remainder of his days among the Saps and never again ventured from their end of the valley.
* * *
The winter turned out to be a long one—over twenty-five thousand years, in fact. When it at last ended and the ice sheets disappeared, only the Saps were left. One day Grog and Throg were exploring far from home near a place where the Neanderthals had once lived, when they came across a large rock standing beside a stream and bearing a row of crudely carved signs.
“What are they?” Grog asked as Throg peered curiously at the signs.
“They’re Neanderthal,” Throg said.
“Must be old. What do they say?”
Throg frowned with concentration as he ran a finger haltingly along the row.
“They’re like the signs you find all over this part of the valley,” he announced at last. “They all say the same thing: OG, COME HOME. NAME YOUR OWN PRICE.”
Grog scratched his head and puzzled over the revelation for a while. “So what the hell was that supposed to mean?” he mused faintly.
“Search me. Must have had something to do with the guys who used to live in the caves behind that terrace up there. Only bears up there now though.” Throg shrugged. “It might have had something to do with beans. They were always counting beans, but they were still lousy traders.”
“Weirdos, huh? It could have meant anything then.”
“Guess so. Anyhow, let’s get moving.
They hoisted their spears back onto their shoulders and resumed picking their way through the rocks to follow the side of the stream onward and downward toward the river that glinted through the distant haze.
Before the 1940’s, the future confronting the human race was bleak. With the global population increasing and becoming ever more dependent on energy-dense technologies to sustain its food supplies and rising living standards, there seemed no escape from the catastrophe that would come eventually when the coal and the oil ran out. But few worried unduly. It was only after an escape from the nightmare presented itself—suddenly and unexpectedly, with the harnessing of nuclear power and the prospect of unlimited energy—that people began to worry. People can be very strange.
My own position on this subject is that nuclear power is cheaper, cleaner, and safer than any other source of energy that the human race has so far come up with. To see why, let’s set to rest some of the myths that it has become fashionable to repeat, and consider the facts.
The first fact is that there cannot be an absolutely safe energy source. By definition, “energy” is the capacity to do physical work. Whether the results are considered beneficial or otherwise involves only a value judgment, hence, no energy technology can be risk-free. Attempting to judge the acceptability of any particular risk in isolation is meaningless. Society must weigh it against the benefits obtained in return, and compare the result with those obtained with the alternatives.
Despite the hysterical media reactions to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, nuclear power remains the least threatening to human life of all the major energy technologies. The energy yields of processes involving the atomic nucleus are orders of magnitude greater than anything attainable from rearrangements of the outer electron shells of atoms, which is the basis of all conventional chemical combustion. This means that nuclear fuels are enormously more concentrated, and far smaller quantities are needed. Over five thousand times as much coal, for example, has to be mined, transported, and processed as uranium to deliver the same amount of energy—two hundred trains per year, each consisting of over a hundred cars, for each one-thousand-megawatt plant, compared to a single carload of uranium oxide—which entails an enormous supporting network of heavy industries with all their attendant risks and hazards. Two to three hundred fatal accidents happen annually among U.S. coal miners alone, but like automobile accidents they occur in one’s and two’s spread through the year in different places, and remain largely invisible. Airplane crashes kill far fewer people than automobiles do, but when they happen they are sensationalized. In the Western world, nuclear power generation has never killed anybody.
Chernobyl didn’t say anything new about nuclear engineering. A plant that is ineptly designed and recklessly operated can be dangerous, as is equally true of bridges, dams, high-rise buildings, or any other kind of heavy engineering. It did say something about a political and economic system run by an incompetent bureaucracy, in which the wishes and safety of the people don’t figure into policy-making. It’s difficult to see how the same kind of thing could occur in Western light-water reactors as some critics claim. The accident at Chernobyl was due to the graphite core of the reactor catching fire after the cooling system failed. Western models don’t possess a graphite core—in fact such a basis for design was expressly rejected by the U.S. in 1950, precisely because of this risk. Furthermore, the cooling water in Western systems is also the “moderator,” needed to keep the chain reaction going. Hence, if the coolant flow fails for any reason, the reaction automatically stops, leaving only the residual fission products in the fuel as sources of heat to be disposed of, which represents typically about 5 percent of the reactor’s normal output. But with the design used at Chernobyl, where the graphite is the moderator, operation continues at full power if the cooling water fails. The two designs are about as comparable to each other as the Hindenburg and the Goodyear blimp. Saying that we should shut down our industry because of what happened at Chernobyl makes as much sense as calling for the dismantling of the U.S. farming system because the Soviets have made a mess of theirs.
The facts of Three Mile Island were that no one was killed, no one was hurt, and no member of the public was ever in the slightest danger. TMI did not bring us to the brink of a major catastrophe. Some bizarre circumstances occurred and there were operator errors in responding to them, which led to loss of coolant and damage to the core that included melting of some fuel. However, the safety systems responded in the way they were supposed to by shutting the system down. The outer layers of containment were never challenged, let alone breached, putting the conditions well within the worst-case design accident that the plant had been built to withstand. For some time there was speculation that an accumulation of hydrogen gas might explode. But this would have been simply a chemical detonation, certainly nothing of a thermonuclear nature as was suggested by the headline H-BLAST IMMINENT that appeared on at least one newspaper. It was established later that the hydrogen couldn’t in fact have exploded since there was no oxygen present; but even if it had, the shock would have been comparable to that imparted by a handheld sledgehammer—hardly enough to damage a reactor-vessel with steel walls twelve inches thick. The engine block of a car absorbs more stress thousands of times per minute. And even if the vessel had cracked, any radioactive material released would still have had to get through a four-foot concrete shield and a steel containment shell outside that to reach the environment. Yes, some radioactive gas did fill the containment building and was subsequently vented to the outside. But the dire warnings of the tens of thousands of cancer deaths that we heard would follow as a consequence are ridiculous. The maximum increase in radiation dose that would have been experienced by somebody immediately above the plant was measured by EPA, HEW, and NRC as eight millirems at most in the course of several days; a routine dental X-ray delivers twenty-five millirems in seconds. When a dam bursts, a drilling platform collapses, or a gas storage tank explodes, you don’t get three days for the luxury of holding press conferences or to talk about evacuating. To me that makes nuclear—properly respected and implemented—a very benign and forgiving technology.
More people seem to be realizing at last that a nuclear power plant can’t explode like an atom bomb. The mechanism that enables a bomb to detonate has to be built with extreme precision to work at all, and a power plant contains nothing comparable. And besides that, the uranium used in each is quite different. Natural uranium contains about 0.7 percent of the fissionable 235 isotope, which is enriched to more than 90 percent for bomb-grade material. For the slow release of energy required in power reactors, by contrast, the fuel is enriched only to 3.5 percent. It’s simply not an explosive. A power plant is about as close to a bomb as a barrel of damp sawdust without a detonator.
So, what about a meltdown? Even if TMI wasn’t one, couldn’t next time be? Yes, it could. The chance has been estimated—using the same methods that have worked well in other areas of engineering, where there have been sufficient actual events to verify the procedures—to be about the same as the chance of a major city being hit by a meteorite one mile across. And even if it were to happen, the result wouldn’t automatically be the major catastrophe that many people think. Computer simulations suggest that if the fuel did melt its way out of the reactor vessel, it would sputter about and solidify around the massive supporting structure rather than continue reacting and burrow its way down through the floor. For over twenty years the British have been testing an experimental reactor in an artificial cave in Scotland and subjecting it to every conceivable failure of the coolant and safety systems. In the end they switched everything off and sat back to see what happened. There was no meltdown, nothing very dramatic. The core quietly cooled itself down, and that was that.
But what if the computer simulations turn out to be flawed, and what if the British experience was a fluke? Then mightn’t the core turn into a molten mass and go down through the floor? Yes, it might. And then what would happen? Nothing much. We’d have a lot of mess down a hole in the ground, which is probably the best place for it. But what if there was a water table near the surface? In that case we’d create a lot of radioactive steam, which would blow back up the hole into the containment building, which again would be the best place for it. But what if some kind of geological or structural failure caused it to come up outside the containment building?
Now we are beginning to see the kinds of improbability chains that have to be constructed to produce disaster scenarios for scaring the public with. Remembering the odds against any major core disintegration in the first place, then if, on top of that, there was a water table below the plant, and if the steam burst through the ground outside the building . . . it would most likely expand high into the sky and dissipate. But beyond that, if there happened to be an atmospheric thermal inversion to hold the cloud down near the ground, and if there was a wind blowing toward an urban area, and if the wind happened to be just strong enough to move the cloud without disrupting the inversion layer, then yes, you could end up killing a lot of people. The statistical predictions worked out at about 400 fatalities per meltdown—perhaps not as bad as you’d guess. And that’s if we’re talking about deaths that couldn’t be attributed to the accident as such, but would materialize only as slight increases in the cancer rate in a large population, over many years, i.e., increasing an individual’s risk from something like 20.5 percent to 21 percent. Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to cause 10,000 deaths per year in the U.S., for nuclear power to be as dangerous would require a meltdown somewhere or other every two weeks.
But if we are talking about directly detectable deaths—from acute radiation sickness within a couple of months—it would take 500 meltdowns to kill one hundred people. On this basis, even having twenty-five meltdowns every year for 10,000 years would cause fewer deaths than automobiles do annually.
Very well, that puts major accidents more in perspective. But what about the hazards associated with normal operation? What about the thing that has become a new fad phobia word: radiation?
Yes, it’s true that even an unmelted-down nuke in proper working order releases some radiation into the environment. In the units used to measure radiation dosage, a person sitting on the boundary fence of a large plant for a year would soak up about a tenth of a millirem above what he’d get from the natural background anyway. An average year’s TV-watching incurs ten times as much as this, and a coast-to-coast jet flight—because of the increased intensity of cosmic rays at altitude—fifty times as much in five or six hours.
In fact there’s hardly anything in the environment that doesn’t emit some radiation. The rocks under our feet, the air we breathe, everything we eat and drink, and even our body tissues all contain traces of radioactive elements, the dose from all of which adds up to several thousand times anything contributed by the nuclear industry. The emission from the granite that Grand Central Station is built from, for example, exceeds the permissible NRC limit for industry. Grand Central Station wouldn’t get a license as a nuclear plant.
This is in no way meant to suggest that massive doses of radiation aren’t dangerous. Napalm bombs and blast furnaces aren’t very healthy, either, but it doesn’t follow that heat in any amount is therefore harmful—you wouldn’t last long at a temperature of absolute zero. The science of toxicology has long recognized the phenomenon of “hormesis”—in which substances that are lethal in high doses turn out to be actually beneficial in small doses, by stimulating the body’s defense and repair mechanisms (all medicines become toxic at high enough doses.) In his book Hormesis With Ionizing Radiation, Professor T.D. Luckey of the University of Missouri, an internationally recognized expert on the subject, lists twelve hundred references to experimental evidence accumulated on organisms of every description, supporting the contention that the effect is true of radiation as well.
Nevertheless, we’re constantly hearing that any level of radiation is harmful, however small. A simple prediction from this hypothesis is that cancer rates in areas with higher backgrounds ought to be greater. But the fact is they’re not. Colorado, for example, with double the average radiation, due mainly to altitude but also because of its soil composition, has a cancer rate only 68 percent the national average. The correlation remains negative (i.e., the higher the radiation background, the lower the cancer rate) across the country as a whole—with a spectacular -39 percent correlation coefficient. (Judging from their previous statistical manipulations, antinuclear groups wouldn’t hesitate to use such a correlation to “prove” that radiation prevents cancer.)
And then, of course, there’s the waste. Well, after the foregoing heresies about accidents and radiation, would it come as a complete surprise if I suggest that the ease of getting rid of the waste is one of nuclear power’s major advantages? This is another consequence of its being so much more concentrated than conventional sources: because the amount of fuel required to release the same amount of energy is so much smaller, so is the amount of waste produced. And the waste that is produced isn’t as hazardous as most people imagine. It’s considerably less dangerous, in fact, than many other substances that are handled routinely in far greater quantities with far less care, which we accept as a matter of course.
Over 90 percent of the spent fuel that comes out of a power reactor can be reprocessed into new fuel and put back in (saving in a plant’s typical forty-year lifetime the equivalent of four billion dollars worth of oil). Burning it up in this way is the most sensible thing to do with it, and the industry was designed on the assumption that this would be the case. What’s left after reprocessing constitutes the “high-level” waste that needs to be disposed of. A large, one-thousand-megawatt power plant produces about one cubic yard of it—small enough to fit under a dining room table—in the course of a year’s operation. A coal plant of equal capacity produced ten tons of waste per minute. (Most of the fuss we read about in the newspapers fails to distinguish between this and low-level waste, consisting of things like used gloves, boots, and tools, which present a negligible hazard.) A facility to reprocess spent fuel in the U.S. was commenced as a joint project by government and industry at Barnwell, South Carolina. But in early 1977 the Carter administration halted further work on Barnwell, essentially for political reasons, and at the same time cut the utilities off from the military reprocessing that had been handling domestic wastes safely for twenty years. Thus 100 percent of what comes out of reactors is having to be treated as if it were high-level waste, to be stored in ways that were never intended, and this is what gets all the publicity—a needlessly manufactured political problem, not a technical one. (The rest of the world is continuing to reprocess its spent fuel, regardless.)
We often hear about the “unsolved” problem of the wastes remaining radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Yes, it’s true that high-level wastes contain fission products that have long half-lives—and then, so does garden soil. But these don’t constitute a problem; they just provide big numbers to frighten people with. For obviously, if the energy release is spread over so long a time, the intensity of it can’t be very great. Rusting iron has a long half-life; gunpowder has a short one. The main danger is from the short-lived isotopes, such as iodine 131 with a half-life of eight days. To allow these to burn up, the spent fuel is put into cooling ponds at the reactor site for six months prior to being shipped away for reprocessing.
What then? Well, the current proposal is to reduce the waste to a powder, fuse it into a high-stability glass, seal the glass in steel canisters, and bury the canisters in a concrete repository two thousand feet underground. And let’s make no bones about the fact that we’re talking about a significant concentration of gamma radiation that would have to be confined and handled with great care. If all the electricity generated in the U.S. were produced by nuclear power, the amount of high-level waste produced each year would be enough to kill ten billion people. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But we also produce enough barium to kill one hundred billion people, enough ammonia and hydrogen cyanide to kill six trillion, enough phosgene to kill twenty trillion, and enough chlorine to kill four hundred trillion. There’s no doubt enough gasoline around, too, to kill us all several times over, and enough pills and drugs in family medicine closets. But we don’t worry unduly, because there’s no way in which the population will be evenly exposed to any of those substances—everyone isn’t suddenly going to sit down and start eating them. And this is far more true of nuclear wastes, sealed deep underground.
Every foot of shielding rock reduces gamma radiation by a factor of ten, which means there’s no hazard to anyone above ground from the waste that remains buried. What hazard there is comes from the risk of some of the waste finding its way inside somebody. To do this, it would have to escape from the repository and be ingested or inhaled. And let’s not forget that the toxicity of nuclear wastes decays with time. After ten years of burial nuclear waste would be about as toxic as barium if it were ingested; if it were inhaled, it would be a tenth as toxic as ammonia, and a thousandth as toxic as chlorine. After a hundred years these figures fall to one ten-thousandth, one hundred-thousandth, and one ten-millionth respectively. Nature’s biological waste-disposal program dumps a thousand million tons of ammonia into the atmosphere every year, and we use chlorine liberally to clean our bathtubs and swimming pools.
In a year a one-thousand-megawatt coal-fired plant produces 1.5 million tons of ash—thirty thousand truckloads—that contains large amounts of known carcinogens and toxins, and can be highly acidic or alkaline depending on the sulfur content of the coal burned. Getting rid of it is a stupendous task—a real waste-disposal problem—and it ends up being dumped in shallow landfills that are easily leached out by groundwater, or simply being piled up as mountains on any convenient site. And that’s only the solid waste. In addition there is the waste that’s disposed straight up the smokestack, which includes six hundred pounds of carbon dioxide and ten pounds of sulfur dioxide every second, and the same quantity of nitrogen oxides as 200,000 automobiles. Various studies have concluded that this is enough to cause twenty-five premature deaths and 60,000 cases of respiratory disease annually—per plant!
A one-thousand-megawatt nuke, by contrast, produces nothing in addition to its cubic yard of high-level waste, because there isn’t any chemical combustion—no ash, no gases, no smokestack. Because of the compactness of nuclear processes, nuclear power constitutes the first major technology in history in which it has actually been possible to contain all the wastes produced and isolate them from the environment. The radioactive elements that exist naturally in rocks find their way into water supplies and foodstuffs far more easily than anything from inside the repository ever could. Uranium left to itself releases more radiation into the environment then if it were mined, fissioned inside reactors, and the wastes sealed up deep underground. Thus nuclear energy could be looked upon as a way of cleansing the environment of a lot of potentially harmful radiation, concentrating it in places where it can’t harm anyone, and getting some useful work out of it in the process.
Professor Bernard L. Cohen of the University of Pittsburgh has produced a book, Before It’s Too Late, which covers all aspects of nuclear-related risks in a very comprehensive, yet understandable manner, and compares them to other kinds of risk that we encounter daily. It turns out that if the U.S. were to go to all-nuclear electricity, the total increase in added health risk—covering everything from uranium mining to final disposal of the wastes—would be equivalent to raising the speed limit by six thousandths of one mile per hour. The risks eliminated would, of course, be far greater.
There have been a lot of suggestions that the spread of nuclear power will make available the resources and materials for politically unstable nations or terrorists to make bombs. The fact is, however, that to whatever degree such possibilities might exist in today’s world, domestic nuclear power is irrelevant. Any group that has the determination and funds to make a bomb can do so, and whether or not they have access to civilian generating-technology has nothing to do with it. Expertise is available and can be bought for a price, and with laser separation techniques the materials to produce bomb-grade enriched U-235 exist in the rocks everywhere. There are at least half a dozen ways of producing weapons material that are cheaper, simpler, faster, and less hazardous than going through the enormous complications of trying to make it from new or spent power-plant fuel, which is totally unsuitable. Slowing the introduction of nuclear power among Third World nations does nothing to reduce potential weapons threats. It does, however, retard their economic development and perpetuate the differences in health and living standards which create the tensions that make such threats more likely. (It also delays the appearance of another ten Japans on the planet. Just a thought.)
As alternatives, fossil fuels and natural gas are more expensive—when prices aren’t distorted by politics—and inferior in terms of health and safety. With solar, the big drawback that advocates overlook is its extreme diluteness. To get an idea of how dilute it is, consider a lump of coal needed to make one kilowatt-hour of electricity, which would weigh about a pound, and ask how long would sunlight have to shine on that piece of coal to deposit the same amount of energy. Well, its shadow—which represents the sunlight intercepted—would have an area of about fifteen square inches. In Arizona, the sun would have to shine on that area for one thousand hours to deliver one kilowatt-hour of energy, which at twelve hours of sunshine per day is almost three months. For the average location in the U.S., it would be twice that. But if we wanted to get one kilowatt-hour of electricity out of that sunbeam, then, at the 10 percent conversion efficiency typically attainable today, it would take five years—to get the same useful energy that a small piece of coal will yield in minutes! That’s how concentrated the energy is in coal, and how dilute it is in sunshine.
The sun’s shining for tens or hundreds of years on forests represents an enormous concentration of energy in time, all done by nature for free. And subsequent compaction by geological processes to form coal or oil adds another dimension of concentration in space, which man carries a stage farther by the activities of wood-gathering, mining, and transportation. Hydroelectric power is another example of extreme concentration. Solar energy evaporates billions of tons of water from the oceans, which then fall over huge areas of land and drain through natural systems of streams and rivers to strategic points suitable for dams. Again, most of the work, involving enormous concentrations both in time and space, and stupendous amounts of energy (one hurricane releases as much as one thousand hydrogen bombs) is done by nature for free.
I doubt if the people who talk glibly about attempting to match such feats artificially comprehend the scale of the engineering they’re proposing. (It’s ironic, too, that these tend to be the same people who spread alarm about irresponsible technologies and the risks of their growing beyond control. The engineers and scientists involved in the energy business understand how puny our human efforts really are, and appreciate all the help they can get.) For a one-thousand-megawatt solar-electric conversion plant, for example—the same size as I used to illustrate nuclear—we’re talking about covering fifty to a hundred square miles with 35,000 tons of aluminum, two million tons of concrete, 7,500 tons of copper, 600,000 tons of steel, 75,000 tons of glass, and 1,500 tons of other metals such as chromium and titanium—one thousand times the materials needed to construct a comparable size nuclear plant. These materials are not cheap, and real estate isn’t free. Neither is the labor to keep miles of collector area clean. Moreover, these materials are all products of heavy, energy-hungry industries—to the degree that many studies have concluded that building solar plants would produce a net energy loss—and produce large amounts of waste, roughly 10 percent of which is highly toxic. So much for “free” and “clean” solar power.
When a power engineer talks about a one-thousand-megawatt plant, he means one that can deliver a thousand megawatts on demand, anytime, day or night. A nuclear plant can do this; so can a conventional fossil-fuel plant. But a solar plant can only operate when the sun is shining, which straightaway gives it a maximum availability of 50 percent—low enough for a regular plant to be considered prohibitively uneconomical. And then cloudy weather would reduce it below that optimum (I live in northern California, and counted over ten weeks of continual rain one winter). Hence, a solar plant would require some kind of energy storage system, such as pumping water up to a high reservoir, which would be allowed to flow back down to drive turbine generators in the nonproductive periods. At present there is no really satisfactory way of storing large amounts of electrical energy. Furthermore, if we use the industry’s standard criterion, a practicable system would need to be capable of recharging at five times the plant’s nominal rating. This means that for a “one-thousand-megawatt” solar plant to mean the same as it means for other kinds of plants, it would actually have to have a peak generating capacity of six thousand megawatts, adding vastly more to cost, complexity, and adverse environmental effects.
Decentralizing by putting solar panels on everybody’s roofs wouldn’t reduce the cost or the amount of materials used, either, but simply spread them out more thinly. In fact, it would require more, for the same reason that McDonald’s uses less oil to cook two tons of french fries than eight thousand housewives to who fry half a pound each. The storage problem wouldn’t go away, either, but would become each household’s own responsibility. In a battery just big enough to start a car, gases can accumulate that one spark can cause to explode, sometimes with lethal consequences, as some unfortunates have discovered when using jumper leads carelessly.
Imagine the hazard that a basement full of batteries the size of grand pianos would present, which a genuinely all-solar home would need to get it through a bad spell in, say, Minnesota in January. Who would do the maintenance and keep the acid levels topped up? And then there would be the problem of keeping the panels free from snow and wet leaves—not in the summer months, but when the roofs are slippery and frozen. Even today, the second biggest cause of accidental deaths in the country, after automobiles, is falls. If we build all those houses with skating rinks on the roofs and bombs in the basements, we’d better build a lot more hospitals and emergency rooms, too, while we’re at it.
I’m certainly in favor of developing outer space, but for the right reasons. The idea of solar-power satellites has never struck me as one of them. The intensity of solar radiation outside the atmosphere is about six times greater than on the ground, which isn’t a lot, really. I don’t see how it could justify the huge cost of putting all that technology in orbit (ten thousand shuttle launches to build a satellite capable of powering New York City, by one estimate I’ve seen—and that excludes the ground equipment) to reconcentrate energy diluted by ninety-three millions miles worth of the inverse square law, when we can produce it at the sun’s original density right here.
Now, all this isn’t to say that solar doesn’t have its uses. It does, and it can be beneficial in remote places far from a power grid. And if somebody who happens to live in the right kind of place finds it a worthwhile way to shave a few dollars from his utility bill, there’s nothing wrong with that. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the problem is simply a domestic one of keeping the dining room at 75deg.F and warming the bath water. The real issue is of running the aluminum smelters, steel mills, fertilizer plants, factories, and transportation systems that keep a modern, industrial society functioning. Solar will never make a significant contribution here (which is why people who don’t want a modern, industrial society are so much in favor of it, and would like everything else to be forcibly shut down). This is where nuclear energy really emerges in a class of its own—not just as the best way of meeting energy needs today, but as the pointer toward doing all kinds of things in much better ways tomorrow.
Some people argue that we don’t need nuclear power because we already have other ways to generate electricity. This is rather like somebody in an earlier century telling Faraday that we didn’t need electricity because we already had other ways to heat water. But what made electricity so important, of course, was its ability to do things that were totally unprecedented—things unachievable to any degree by existing technologies. Our entire science of electrical engineering and electronics is the result. A similar relationship holds with the ability to manipulate nuclear processes. Our present use of nuclear energy—as a replacement for conventional heat sources to generate electricity by steam turbines—represents merely a tiny first step into a whole new, qualitatively different realm of capability.
From unaided muscle power through to rocket engines and generating plants, the evolution of civilization has reflected the harnessing of progressively more concentrated energy sources. The true significance of nuclear technology in the twentieth century is that it points to the next step in the process, opening up the prospect of entirely new processing methods that will obsolete most of today’s cumbersome and polluting industries, much in the same way that the introduction of electricity revolutionized the coal-based methods of the nineteenth century. For example, at the hundred-million-degree temperatures of a nuclear plasma, all atoms are stripped of their electrons and become raw, highly charged nuclei, which means they can be manipulated simply and cheaply by magnetic fields. This give us a method for economically extracting the trace elements that exist in all forms of rock, desert sand, seawater, and construction debris, without requiring geologically concentrated ores to make it worthwhile and hence replacing all of our existing primary metals industries. Also, we have a total recycling method for all forms of waste.
Or consider the chemicals industry. The conventional way of combining reactants into new products is to brew them together in big vats, usually under heat to supply the reaction energy. Heat energy, however, is broadband—it exists over a wide range of wavelengths. This means that energy is available at favorable wavelengths for many different reactions among the molecules involved, and therefore a variety of compounds will be formed. The typical result of this is that only a fraction of the reactants actually go to form the product that was desired, which raises its cost, and the marketing department tries to find profitable applications for the sludge left over. But in laboratories, lasers are now being used to drive chemical reactions with narrowband energy, at just the absorption wavelength of the molecule required. The result is that all of the reactants involved form useful products, and processes that conventionally need hours, days, or even weeks now take place in milliseconds. Recombining reactants from a tuned plasma state offers the same possibilities on an industrial scale.
Cheap, high-temperature process heat opens the way to new sources of raw materials, and a means of desalinating seawater inexpensively to irrigate enormous areas of currently useless land. Furthermore, at nuclear plasma temperatures seawater cracks thermally into its constituent atoms, providing a potentially unlimited supply of hydrogen as a base for a whole range of synthetic liquid fuels to replace gasoline. And finally, there’s the prospect of putting a permanent end to all materials-shortage problems by transmuting elements on a bulk scale. All atoms can be broken down into protons, and the protons built up again into whatever we want—a whole new science of structure-building that stands to nuclei as chemistry today stands to molecules. Eventually, we’ll make our materials the way nature does in the stars, with unlimited energy as a by-product. And when we’ve developed such technologies here on Earth we can ship them up into orbit and to the Moon, and that’s how we’ll build our colonies and starships.
And here, I think, we at last touch upon what the controversy is really all about. The opposition movement doesn’t reflect so much an attitude against nuclear power per se, as against the whole notion of continuing worldwide industrial growth and technological progress, and against the energy sources, economic principles, and political institutions that make those things possible. It represents an essentially Malthusian ideology that sees a planet with finite resources straining to support an exponentially increasing population until either nature imposes limits through its traditional agencies of famine, disease, and war, or we impose artificial ones by curtailing growth, and accept simpler lifestyles. Anything else will simply produce more people than we can support comfortably, and hasten the day when everything runs out.
Beneath the camouflage, this really aims at preserving the privileges enjoyed by the world’s “haves.” In any period of history, a society’s total wealth—its economy—depends on the level of technology available to support it. No previous economy has ever been able to support more than a privileged minority at reasonable standards of comfort and affluence: either a few privileged families, later an entire class, and in recent times a minority of privileged nations. When a privileged group entrenches itself, two things tend to happen: one, a rationale is constructed, based on religion or some other belief system, to justify the existing social order and induce the masses to accept their inferior lot, e.g., by promising that they’ll get theirs in some hereafter; and two, good reasons are found why the progress that has enabled the privileged to get where they are has gone far enough and should be halted right now, before any more from lower down the pyramid move up to crowd the limited space at the top. Today we see it as Malthusianism: “finite resources” are the reason why everyone can’t be rich, and the inevitability of “limits to growth” means that global industrialization will have to plateau out at its present level. Imposed worldwide, such an ideology would deny hundreds of millions of human beings any chance to enjoy decent standards of health, education, and comfort, or the opportunity to live rewarding, productive lives. Instead they would be forcibly kept at a subsistence level of existence . . . or worse. It is estimated that holding back the introduction of nuclear technologies to the Third World has already caused more deaths than the Nazis were responsible for during their entire regime—including all the casualties of World War II. Malthus would say it’s just as well, since those people would have lived miserable lives anyway—and besides, we don’t have the resources to change anything, which in any case are getting smaller. I say we do have the resources, and they’re getting bigger.
To apply the observed population dynamics of animal species to human societies is to deny the qualities that set us apart. Unlike animals, who simply consume resources and react to circumstance with fixed behavior patterns, human beings are capable of creating new resources and adapting their behavior to the new conditions that they bring about. In primitive, labor-intensive, rural societies, with no life insurance, social security, retirement pensions, or machines to do the work, having big families to ensure that at least one or two of the children survive to adulthood to provide for one’s old age makes sound economic sense. When long-established customs like this persist for a while alongside industrialization and rising living standards, of course the population is going to increase. It happened in Europe in the eighteenth century, in America in the nineteenth, and now it’s happening in the developing nations of the Third World. It’s a sign that things are getting better, not worse. Since World War II, improved health and diet had caused a significant increase in the average height of Japanese children. But obviously it would be ridiculous to infer from this by simple extrapolation that a hundred years from now they’ll be as tall as skyscrapers. The average height is adjusting to a new equilibrium with changed conditions. It’s the same with populations. Our experiences with such advanced societies as those of North America and Western Europe show that when human populations reach sufficiently high levels of well-being and security, attitudes, values, and lifestyles change, and they become self-limiting in numbers in ways that Malthus never dreamed of.
Periodically, the process of evolution passes through abrupt phase changes comparable to the ones in physics that given the transitions between solid, liquid, and gas, in which completely new laws come into play and the old limits cease to mean anything. A qualitatively distinct realm opens up, with new resources available suddenly, which are not simple extrapolations of what went before. Usually this results when a revolutionary ability of some kind—a new technology—emerges. Thus, the earliest self-replicating molecules depended on the supply of abiotically produced organic compounds washed down off the land into a few favored environments, and we can imagine some primordial, microscopic Malthus concluding gloomily that life would forever be restricted to thin strips of coastal shallows and tidal pools. But that doomsday prophesy collapsed when the blue-green algae invented the chlorophyll molecule and set up the photosynthesis industry, opening up the entire surface of the oceans as a planet-wide biomass factory. Sexual reproduction and DNA, the patenting of hemoglobin and harnessing of oxygen as a higher-power energy source, all represented breakthroughs into new realms of capability, and eventually the development of the first functioning spacesuit in the form of the amphibian egg paved the way for migration into and colonizing of a completely new, initially hostile environment.
What these examples illustrate is that new technologies create new resources—and always on a scale dwarfing everything that went before. Human civilization is a continuation of the same evolutionary process, operating at the level of applied intelligence. And the same principle applies, in which new technologies create new resources—for a resource is not a resource and can create no wealth until the knowledge and the means exist for using it. The harnessing of steam, the application of electricity, and the exploitation of oil all opened up eras of wealth creation that were as qualitatively distinct from each other as they were from the economies based on wind, water, and muscle power of the Middle Ages. By the yardsticks that matter, the average Englishman of today enjoys a better standard of living than Queen Victoria did, and most Americans are millionaires by the measures of a century ago. And all the world’s peoples want to be living that way a century from now. They could be, too. But when the demand is translated into energy needs—no less than providing a globally stabilized population of, say, ten billion, with energy per person at a rate probably greater than that of the U.S. today—the amount needed is utterly beyond any approaches that are merely variations of what we have. Only a breakthrough into the next realm of energy control could do it. The nuclear-based technologies that we are just glimpsing, with yields and densities orders of magnitude greater than anything attainable from conventional sources, represent such a breakthrough. The so-called alternatives do not.
The tiny pockets of energy that happen to be, fortuitously, trapped around the surface of this planet are merely our starting capital for launching the business. As with any business, it would be silly to suppose that we have to exist on our starting capital forever. The capital must be invested to create the earnings that will enable the business to grow and pay its way as its bills get bigger. Just as the wealth of today’s Western world is the payoff from yesterday’s investments in coal and steam, so a portion of the return must be invested to provide the global payoff that will be tomorrow’s nuclear economy—an economy capable for the first time ever of enabling every child born on the planet to grow up with the expectation of a healthy body and an educated mind, and with the freedom to pursue the opportunity to become the most that he or she is capable.
So, can we make nuclear energy work, safely, cleanly, and efficiently? Sure we can. When we take a long, hard look at the alternatives, we see that we have to. Fortunately for all of us, the Neanderthals who discovered fire saw things the same way.
* * *
Afterword, 1996
Nothing has really changed much since the above was written. The same distortions and misinformation continue to appear, the same responses apply, and the industry marks time because of politics.
I’m beginning to think that the opposing activism and lobbying are secondary effects of causes that run deeper. As a result of the massive concentration of talent and resources on the Manhattan Project under wartime conditions, the nuclear industry—somewhat like the Apollo Program, perhaps, also for political reasons—happened half a century before it ought to have done. The planetary organism of human culture reacted to something which in various ways it simply wasn’t ready for yet.
So the antinuclear phenomenon concerns me less these days than it used to. I have little doubt that it will go away when the time is right, and the industries that will drive the global civilization of the twenty-first century will be powered by energy transitions of the atomic nucleus.
There really is no excuse for some of the nonsense dispensed to the public by the mass media on subjects such as nuclear power. Oscar Wilde once said that, its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism in that “by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”
Perhaps we would have avoided today’s (temporary) hysteria over nuclear power if we had stuck to the precedent that we set when we named the first of the artificial transuranic elements “plutonium.” Instead of being carried away with highfalutin’ names like “californium,” “berkelium,” and “mendelevium” for the ones that came after, we should have continued in the way we’d begun and called them “mickey-mouseium,” “donald-duckium,” and so on. I mean, with that kind of nomenclature, who couldn’t have loved nuclear power?
Does this mean that the Chernobyl reactor was fueled with goofium?
It has always been taught that Sir Isaac Newton was born in the same year that Galileo died, 1642. However, certain documents and diaries recently unearthed in Pisa have revealed not only that the two scientists were contemporaries, but that they actually met. This occurred during a summer vacation that Newton spent touring Italy. The find also shows how Newton’s universal law of gravitation was derived from Galileo’s studies of falling bodies, and explains the legend of the apple. As far as can be reconstructed, it all went something like this.
SCENE
A warm sunny day in Pisa. The Leaning Tower stands midstage, surrounded by the town plaza. The door at the base faces the audience. As the CURTAIN rises, Galileo, dressed in the traditional manner of the medieval Italian professional class, is sitting in the top gallery of the tower, eating his lunch. Beside him on the balustrade is a flagon of Chianti. On his other side is a wooden lunch box and next to it, a bag of apples. Near him on the top story of the tower, is a pile of bricks and rubble left by construction workers. The moon is visible in the sky near the top of the tower. Galileo selects one of the apples, but as he is about to take a bite, he stops and examines it.
* * *
GALILEO Oh-oh. Eesa not so good, this one. (He pulls a face and tosses the apple nonchalantly over his shoulder, but in the same movement inadvertently knocks the lunch box off the balustrade so that both objects fall together out of sight to the rear. A moment later an indignant shout comes from backstage.)
NEWTON Gadzooks!
GALILEO (turning and peering down) Santa Maria! Was accidente. Scusate!
* * *
Newton enters from behind the tower. He is wearing an English gentleman’s outfit of blue velvet coat with lace ruffs, white breeches, and silk stockings, and he is carrying a cane. He appears, smoothing a dent from his three-cornered hat.
* * *
NEWTON (muttering) That travel agent shall hear of this. ‘Tis not safe to walk abroad by day in these parts. (He puts his hat back on his head, looks up, and shouts toward the top of the tower.) And what, sir, is the meaning of this outrage? Thou art a menace to decent, God-fearing citizens. What hast thou to say for thyself?
GALILEO (shouting back) I already said, was accidente. Ees not expected for people to be out there in midday sun. You Engleesh?
NEWTON I do have that distinct honor.
GALILEO You okay?
NEWTON It’s hardly any thanks to you if I am. Had the luncheon box not fallen a matter of mere seconds after the apple was despatched—as was evidently the case—me brains would have been done in as well as me feather. A negligence suit would have been incontestable, and I can assure you that the sum involved would not have been a trifling one.
GALILEO (curiously) Why you so sure that box falla after apple, eh?
NEWTON A matter of observation and simple logic, my good man. Both objects arrived at the same instant. It is common knowledge, is it not, that in falling, a heavier body will acquire a greater velocity than a lighter one. The box was clearly heavier than the apple. Therefore one is obliged to conclude that it commenced its descent later.
GALILEO Well, ees not so, see. Both falla from ‘ere at same time. I am up ‘ere. I see.
NEWTON (sighs) That’s quite absurd. I have no doubt whatsoever that the two trajectories terminated simultaneously, which contradicts your assertion. Obviously your recollection has been distorted by preconceived notions or a subjective error.
GALILEO Ees no so, Engleesh. I know what I see. Maybe itsa your observations that not so wonderful.
NEWTON (to himself) Hrrmph! What an extraordinary suggestion. (He resumes shouting.) Very well. We’ll see about that. Kindly repeat the experiment, and this time watch closely.
GALILEO No, you watch. (He takes another apple and picks a brick from the pile of rubble, then leans out over the parapet.) You ready?
NEWTON (backing to a safe distance) Proceed.
Galileo releases the brick and the apple together. They fall and land at the same time. Newton stares in amazement.
NEWTON ‘Pon me soul, the fellow’s right! This is indeed a more intriguing business than I had given mind to pondering before. (He looks up.) Perforce I must retract my words. It seems I owe you an apology, sir.
GALILEO Grazie.
NEWTON Do it again.
GALILEO Certamente.
Galileo continues dropping pairs of apples and bricks from the top of the tower. While this is going on, various people enter from left and right. Some exit again, shaking their heads, while others stay to watch. Eventually the stage around the foot of the tower is littered with apples and bricks, and a crowd of curious bystanders has gathered behind Newton. Oblivious to them, Newton looks up once more, and as he does so, he sees the moon above the tower. He straightens up slowly, staring at it.
* * *
GALILEO Whatsa matter now down there?
NEWTON (after a pause) I have a conundrum to exercise your wits, sir. Consider as an hypothesis that the tower were constructed as high as the moon itself. That condition satisfied, and given the apple and brick were released without imparted momentum, would they plunge to the ground in the manner we have been observing, or would they remain suspended as does the moon? If the former, then why, pray, does the moon itself fail to obey that same compulsion? And if the latter, what form of agency would preserve them in seeming in defiance of the nature of all objects to fall to the earth? Well, sir, answer me that.
GALILEO You losta me somewhere. Say again.
NEWTON (muttering) Oh, God help us. (In a louder voice) Would they stay up? If so, why? If not, what keeps the moon up?
* * *
Galileo looks up at the sky and scratches his head. After a moment or two he looks down again.
* * *
GALILEO I gotta one for you. Ask question other way round. Moon goes around Earth like stone on string, yes? So, where ees string? Why Moon not go off on straight line?—not, why doesn’t eet fall down?
NEWTON (to himself) Egad, a conundrum for a conundrum. Would not the apple and the brick participate also in the tendency to be propelled tangentially? Methinks we have the elements of a contradiction.
GALILEO One force up, one force down. Both forces same, so notheeng moves—just like moon. Ees okay, no?
NEWTON (thinks, then shakes his head and shouts back) The outward force on the apple and the brick would differ by virtue of their different masses. How, then, assuming equality of angular velocity, could equilibrium be preserved for both?
GALILEO Ees okay eef downward forces different too. Brick ees ‘eavy, apple not so ‘eavy.
NEWTON Hmm, were that true, then the masses would tend to cancel. All objects would describe similar trajectories . . . Aha! And that would imply that all bodies would experience equal acceleration towards the ground.
GALILEO Which ees what I ‘ave been saying. Everytheeng ‘its ground at same time. Makesa no difference. What you theenk we just been looking at?
* * *
Newton stands thinking to himself. For the first time, the sound of the wind becomes audible in the background.
* * *
NEWTON This could be a matter of some considerable import unless I’m mistaken. Does there exist, I wonder, some method of formulation whereby these astounding truths might be reduced to some lawful mathematick? (He calls up again toward the top of the tower.) I say, how view you the possibility that these principles might be committed to some system of orderly symbolic brevity? (aside) I’m damned if I can understand anything written in this wretched olde worlde English meself.
GALILEO Ees getting windy up ‘ere. What you say?
NEWTON (cupping a hand to his mouth) I said, perhaps we should essay the construction of a precise formulation of these discoveries. Might I suggest that we repair forthwith to an alehouse—provided such establishments be not unknown in these latitudes—in search of more congenial surroundings, suitably conducive to discussion. What sayest thou to that?
GALILEO (as the sound of the wind rises) Eh?
NEWTON Oh damnation! (He draws a deep breath and cups both hands to his mouth.) How can we put this into numbers? Are there any pubs near here? . . . Pubs—vino, or whatever? . . . Sit down and talk.
GALILEO (nodding vigorously) Ah, si. (He gestures toward the far side of the plaza) There am one or two over de square. One meenute. I come down. (He disappears from sight.)
* * *
Newton stands frowning to himself while he waits.
* * *
NEWTON What did that fellow say? It sounded like m-one m-two over d squared . . . (He gazes down at the objects strewn around the foot of the tower and rolls one of the apples absently with his foot. Suddenly he gasps.) Good grief, that’s it! Why, the man must truly be a genius!
* * *
Galileo appears from the tower door. He points offstage and begins walking to the right. Newton remains transfixed. After a few paces Galileo stops and looks back.
* * *
GALILEO Why you standa like that, Engleesh? I thought you wanna talk somewhere.
NEWTON (disbelievingly) My dear fellow . . . An insight of sheer brilliance! I am overcome with respect, and I must confess, not a little humbled.
GALILEO What you talkeeng about?
NEWTON You mean . . . (His expression changes at once.) What exactly did you say up there?
GALILEO I said there are a couple of pubs over de square. Ees what you ask, no? (He waits impatiently as Newton produces a notebook and begins scribbling furiously.) What you doeeing now?”
NEWTON (breezily) Oh, merely a few purchases that I was reminded of, which I would not wish to escape my mind. (He stuffs the notebook back in his pocket, straightens his hat, and takes a tighter grip on his cane.) There, that should suffice. Now, where were we? Ah yes, to a tavern. Very good. Lead on, my dear fellow. Lead on.
* * *
Black-out. They exit right.
* * *
CURTAIN