“Rest?” he struggled. “Rest of the colonists?”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet? I’m not going back with all of you, Dinty, and I don’t think Roger is either. We’re going to be Martians!”
And meanwhile, in the Oval Room of the White House, the President of the United States was confronting Vern Scanyon and a young, coffee-colored man with tinted glasses and the build of a football player. “So you’re the one,” he said, appraising him. “You think we don’t know how to run a computer study.”
“No, Mr. President,” the young man said steadily. “I don’t think that’s the problem.”
Scanyon coughed. “Byrne here,” he said, “is a graduate student on work-study from M.I.T. His thesis is on sampling methodology, and we gave him access to some of the, ah, classified material. Especially public-opinion studies about attitudes on the project.”
“But not to a computer,” Byrne said.
“Not to a big one,” Scanyon corrected. “You had your own desk dataplex.”
The President said mildly, “Get on with it, Scanyon.”
“Well, his results came out different. According to his interpretations, the public opinion on the whole question of colonizing Mars was, well, apathy. You remember, Mr. President, there was some question about the results at the time? The raw results weren’t encouraging at all? But when we played them through analysis they came out positive to — what do you call it? — two sigmas. I never knew why.”
“Did you check?”
“Certainly, Mr. President! Not me,” Scanyon added quickly. “That wasn’t my responsibility. But I’m satisfied that the studies were verified.”
Byrne put in, “Three different times, with three different programs. There were minor variations, of course. But they all came out significant and reliable. Only when I repeated them on my desk machine they didn’t. And that’s the way it is, Mr. President. If you work up the figures on any big computer in the net you get one result. If you work them up on a small isolated machine you get another.”
The President drummed the balls of his thumbs on the desk. “What’s your conclusion?”
Byrne shrugged. He was twenty-three years old, and his surroundings intimidated him. He looked to Scanyon for help and found none; he said, “You’ll have to ask somebody else that one, Mr. President. I can only give you my own conjecture. Somebody’s buggering our computer network.”
The President rubbed the left lobe of his nose reflectively, nodding slowly. He looked at Byrne for a moment and then said, without raising his voice, “Carousso, come on in here. Mr. Byrne, what you see and hear in this room is top secret. When you leave, Mr. Carousso will see that you are informed as to what that means to you in detail; basically, you are not to talk about it. To anyone. Ever.”
The door to the President’s anteroom opened and a tall, solid man with a self-effacing air walked in. Byrne stared at him wonderingly: Charles Carousso, the head of the CIA! “What about it, Chuck?” the President asked. “What about him?”
“We’ve checked Mr. Byrne, of course,” said the Agency man. His words were precise and uninflected. “There isn’t anything significantly adverse to him — you’ll be glad to know, I suppose, Mr. Byrne. And what he says checks out. It isn’t only the public-opinion surveys. The war-risk projections, the cost/effectiveness studies — run on the net they come out one way, run on independent calculating machines they come out another. I agree with Mr. Byrne. Our computer net has been compromised.”
The President’s lips were pressed together as though he were holding back what he wanted to say. All he allowed to come out was, “I want you to find out how this happened, Chuck. But the question now is, who? The Asians?”
“No, sir! We checked that out. It’s impossible.”
“Bullshit it’s impossible!” roared the President. “We know they already did tap our lines once, on the simulation of Roger Torraway’s systems!”
“Mr. President, that’s an entirely different case. We found that tap and neutralized it. It was in the groundlines cable on a nonsensitive linkage. The comm circuits on our major machines are absolutely leakproof.” He glanced at Byrne. “You have a report on the techniques involved, Mr. President; I’ll be glad to go over it with you at another time.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” said Byrne, smiling for the first time. “Everybody knows the links are multiply scrambled. If you’ve checked me out, I’m sure you found out that a lot of us graduate students fool around trying to tap in, and none of us make it.”
The agency man nodded. “As a matter of fact, Mr. President, we tolerate that; it’s good field-testing for our security. If people like Mr. Byrne can’t think up a way past the blocks, I doubt the Asians can. And the blocks are leakproof. They have to be. They control circuits that go to the War Machine in Butte, the Census Bureau, UNESCO—”
“Wait a minute!” barked the President. “You mean our machines tie in with both UNESCO, which the Asians use, and the War Machine?”
“There is absolutely no possibility of a leak.”
“There’s been a leak, Carousso!”
“Not to the Asians, Mr. President.”
“You just finished telling me there’s one wire that goes out of our machine to the War Machine and another that goes straight to the Asians, with a detour through UNESCO!”
“Even so, Mr. President, I absolutely guarantee it’s not the Asians. We would know that. All major computers are crosslinked to some extent. That’s like saying there’s a road from everywhere to everywhere else. Right, there is. But there are roadblocks. There is no way the NPA can get access to the War Machine, or to most of these studies. Even so, if they had done it, we would know from covert sources. They haven’t. And,” he went on, “in any case, Mr. President, can you think of any reason why the NPA would distort results in order to compel us to colonize Mars?”
The President drummed his thumbs, looking around the room. At last he sighed. “I’m willing to go along with your logic, Chuck. But if it wasn’t the Asians that buggered our computers, then who?”
The agency man was morosely silent.
“And,” Dash snarled, “for Christ’s sake, why?”
Seventeen
A Day in the Life of a Martian
Roger could not see the gentle shower of microwave energy coming down from Deimos, but he could feel it as a luxury of warmth. When he was nearby he preened his wings in it, soaking up strength. Outside the beam he carried part of it with him in his accumulators. There was no reason for him to hoard his strength now. More strength poured down from the sky whenever Deimos was above the horizon. There were only a few hours in each day when neither the sun nor the farther moon were in the sky, and his storage capacity was multiply adequate for those brief periods of drought.
Inside the domes, of course, the metal-foil antennae stole the energy before it reached him, so he limited his time with Brad and Kayman. He didn’t mind. It was what he preferred. Every day the gap between them widened anyway. They were going back to their own planet. Roger was going to stay on his. He had not told them that yet, but he had made up his mind. Earth had begun to seem like a pleasant, quaint foreign place he had visited once and hadn’t much liked. The pains and perils of terrestrial humanity were no longer his. Not even when they had been his own personal pains, and his own fears.