The deputy director raised his hand. “You two get together,” he ordered the opponents. “Don’t tell me what you can’t do — I’m telling you what we have to do. Now you, Brad. What about that vision cutoff?”
Alex Bradley said cheerily, “Under control. I can fix. But listen, Will, I’m sorry, but it means another implant. I see what’s wrong. It’s in the retinal mediation system; it’s filtering the extra frequencies. The system’s all right, but—”
“Then make it work,” said the deputy director, glancing at the clock. “How about the communications foul-up?”
“Talk to respiration,” said the hardware man. “If they give us a little more retained air, Hartnett can get some voice. The electronics systems are fine, there’s just nothing for them to carry.”
“Impossible!” shouted the lung man. “You’ve only left us five hundred cc’s of space now! He uses that in ten minutes. I’ve gone over the drill with him a hundred times to practice conserving it—”
“Can’t he just whisper?” asked the deputy director. Then, as the communications man began hauling out frequency-response curves, he added, “Work it out, will you? All the rest of you, looks good. But don’t let up.” He closed the notes into their plastic folder and handed it to his assistant. “That’s that,” he said. “Now let me get to the important part.”
He waited for them to settle down. “The reason the President was here last night is that a launch target has been approved. Friends, we are now on real time.”
“When?” cried a voice.
The deputy went on: “A.S.A.P. We’ve got to complete this job — and by that, friends, I mean complete it: get Hartnett up to optimum performance so that he can actually live on Mars — no back to the workshops if something goes wrong — in time for the launch window next month. Launch time is set for oh eight hundred hours on twelve November. That gives us forty-three days, twenty-two hours and some odd minutes. No more.”
There was a second’s pause, then a rush of voices. Even the cyborg’s expression visibly changed, though no one could have said in what direction.
The deputy director continued: “That’s only part of it. The date is fixed, it can’t be changed, we have to meet it; now I want to tell you why. Lights, please.”
The chamber lights dimmed down, and the deputy’s deputy, without waiting for a signal, projected a slide on the end wall of the room where all could see it, even the cyborg in his distant cell. It displayed a crosshatched chart, with a broad black line growing diagonally upward toward a red bar. In bright orange letters at the top it was marked MOST SECRET. EYES ONLY.
“Let me explain what you’re looking at,” said the deputy director. “The black diagonal is a composite of twenty-two trends and indices, ranging from the international credit balance to the incidence of harassment of American tourists by government officials abroad. The measure is of probability of war. The red bar at the top is marked ‘O.H.,’ which I can tell you stands for ‘Outbreak of Hostilities.’ It is not certainty. But the statistics people tell us that when the upper limit is reached there is a point-nine probability of war within six hours, and as you can see, we are moving toward it.”
The noise had stopped. The room was crypt-still. Finally one voice inquired, “What’s the time scale?”
“The back data covers thirty-five years,” said the deputy director. There was some easing — at least the white space at the top would have to be some months, not minutes.
Then Kathleen Doughty asked, “Does it say anywhere in there who it is we’re going to be at war with?”
The deputy director hesitated, then said carefully, “No, that is not included in the chart, but I think we can all form our own guesses. I don’t mind giving you mine. If you’ve been reading the papers you know that the Chicoms have been talking about the wonders of increased food production they could bring the world by applying Sinkiang Province farming techniques to the Australian outback. Well, no matter what that quisling bunch in Canberra are willing to agree to, I feel pretty sure that this administration is not going to let the Chinks move in. Not if they want to keep my vote, anyway.” After a moment, he added, “That’s just personal opinion, off the record; do not include it in the minutes of this meeting. I don’t know any official answer, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. All I know is what you know now. The trendline forecasts look pretty sour. Now they show nuclear escalation probabilities peaking pretty fast. We’ve got a date for it. The curve continued shows the point-nine probability in less than seven years.
“Which means,” he added, “that if we don’t have a viable Mars colony by then, we may not live to have it ever.”
Alexander Bradley, B.Sc., E.E., M.D., D.Sc., Lt. Col. USMCR (Ret.). While Bradley was leaving the conference and changing from the expression of concern he had worn for the briefing to the more natural open-faced jollity he showed the world, the cyborg was down-pressuring for the Mars-normal tank. His monitors were somewhat concerned. Although they could not read emotion from his face, they could from his heart, breath and vital signs, as telemetered constantly to them, and it appeared to them that he was in some sort of up-tight state. They proposed delaying the test, but he refused angrily. “Don’t you know there’sss a war on, almosssst?” he demanded in shrill tones, and would not answer when they spoke to him again. They decided to continue with the tests, but to recheck his psych profile as soon as they were completed.
When Alexander Bradley was ten years old he lost his father and his left eye. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, the family was driving back from church. It had turned cold. The morning dew had frozen, impalpably thin and slick, in a film on the road. Brad’s father was driving with great care, but there were cars in front of him, cars behind him, cars in the other half of the two-lane road going in the other direction; he was constrained to keep to a certain speed, and he was short in his answers when the rest of the family said anything to him. He was concerned, but he was not concerned enough. When the disaster came he could do nothing to avert it. To Brad, sitting beside his father in the front seat, it looked as though a station wagon coming toward them a hundred yards away turned out, slowly and calmly, as though it were making a left turn. But there was no road there for it to turn into. Brad’s father stepped on the brake and held it. Their car slowed and slid. And for some seconds the boy sat watching the other car sliding sidewise toward them, themselves skidding gently and inevitably toward it. It was stately and deliberate, and inevitable. No one said anything, not Brad, not his father, not Brad’s mother in the back seat. No one did anything, except to hold their rigid poses as though they were actors in a National Traffic Council tableau. The father sat silent and erect at the wheel, staring concentratedly at the other car. The driver of the other vehicle looked wide-eyed and inquiringly toward them over his shoulder. Neither moved until they hit. Even on the ice the friction was slowing them, and they could not have been moving at a combined velocity of much more than twenty-five miles an hour. It was enough. Both drivers were killed — Brad’s father impaled, the other man decapitated. Brad and his mother, though they were wearing their safety belts, suffered fractures, cuts and bruises as well as internal injuries; and she lost the flexure of her left wrist forever, while her son lost his eye.
Twenty-three years later Brad still dreamed about it as though it had just happened. In his sleep it scared him witless, and he awakened sweaty and crying and gasping for breath.
It was not all loss. He had discovered that considerable advantages had been bought at the cost of an eye. Item, there was the insurance, on the life of his father and on the maiming of everyone concerned. Item, the injury had kept him out of the Army, and had permitted him to join the Marine Corps in an essentially civilian capacity when he wanted field experience in his specialty. Item, it had given him an acceptable excuse for avoiding the stupider risks and more tiresome obligations of adolescence. He never had to prove his courage in violent sports and always was excused from whatever parts of gym he most detested.