“I suppose not. He’s old enough to make up his own mind on things like that. So you’ve been using your O-CLIP to run some of the programs he’s written?”
“He already knows a thousand times more about computers and programming than I do. I’m glad to help him. Maybe someday he’ll be helpful to me in return.”
“Maybe. If there is a someday.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“These are ominous times. The Federation really wants us to ratify this Constitution of theirs. I’ve been getting phoned death threats from people in ski masks, both deskphone and wristphone. So have all the other senators on our side of the filibuster. And so have my family. I—”
“Your family? Including… Emily?”
“Emily, too. As well as Bruce and Marianna. They’re all under FBI protection, but who knows what that means against crazies—or a worldwide government convinced that the ends justify the means.”
Once again Bantry’s gaze moved off-screen. “Sam, you know that with Emily it wasn’t how things seemed. I—”
“I know, Roderick, or at least I know what you think things were like. But all that was four years ago. Right now I want to know if there’s any evidence of the Federation, particularly the Office of Planetary Security, messing about with you and Linda the way—”
“Linda? My darling spouse who’s already spent half the Nobel money in advance?” The bitterness in Bantry’s voice was palpable. “I haven’t seen the bitch in six weeks.”
Sam briefly averted his own eyes. He had never liked the woman who had forced herself onto Roderick Bantry as his second wife, but it was painfully embarrassing to be confronted by such naked hatred.
“But she’s all right as far as you know?”
“The bills are still coming in from Europe, so she must be all right. What is this, Sam?”
Sam sighed. Just how good at eavesdropping was the OPS? Right now, with every indiscreet word they uttered they might well be putting their necks on the line. But short of flying to Hawaii, he’d have to say something to Bantry. “Bruce tells me that he thinks you’re about to go public.”
“He does, does he?” Bantry’s mouth tightened. “Is that what this call is about?”
“Yes. I think we’re running out of time, Roderick. The Federation and the OPS have already got their hands on all the weapons of mass destruction throughout the world and are busy shutting down the plants that made them. You know what their charter is: to prevent war by any means necessary. No more Khyber Holocausts, Roderick, but by the same token, no more technologies of any kind that might ever be used to disturb the peaceful sleep of Federation bureaucrats.”
“But that’s crazy, Sam! The sea—the—this is the greatest preventive of war that’s ever been invented! Give this to the OPS and no one would ever be able to prepare for war without the entire world knowing about it!”
“And no one could ever again commit a crime and get away with it. Yes, I know, Roderick. But I don’t think the Federation is going to see it that way. At least not to the point of letting every local police force in the world have one to play around with. When you think about it, no matter how fancy their new Constitution may be, at bottom the Federation is composed of nothing but thousands and thousands of bureaucrats and politicians. And you know how much any politician or bureaucrat anywhere in the world likes the idea of having every one of his private little deals and secrets being absolutely open to the public eye.”
“I know all this, Sam! Why do you think I’ve been hiding over here in Hawaii for the last four—”
Sam passed a weary hand across his face, then across the shiny scalp from which the last remaining wisps of white hair had finally disappeared. “Sorry, Roderick, I guess it’s too early in the morning for me to be thinking clearly.” Or, he groused to himself, maybe it’s just that at sixty-six I’m finally getting old.
Stop letting your mind wander like this! “What I really mean to say is this: the Federation already has its fingers stuck in most of our domestic pies. And as soon as their Constitution is ratified—and it will be, Roderick, it will be—then they’ll have their fingers in the rest of them. And that means that you personally can kiss your Nobel goodbye—you’ll never have a chance in hell of introducing it. And I just happen to think, Roderick, that the only thing that is going to keep us from turning ourselves over to a worldwide dictatorship is the sea—that thing we’ve been talking about. So it comes down to this: Just how close are you to introducing it?”
It was, Sam knew, in some ways an utterly unfair question. Bantry had been more than ready to introduce it four years ago, almost since the moment of its inadvertent discovery at Emily’s clinic on the shores of Eagle Nest Lake in northern New Mexico. There had, however, been… circumstances.
Sam still didn’t have the faintest idea how the scanner worked, or why. All he really understood was that one night Roderick Bantry had sneaked into the tightly sealed computer room of his wife’s clinic to surreptitiously—and in full defiance of federal law—use its superpowerful three-dimensional O-CLIP computer to construct a theoretical model of one of his subatomic hypotheses. Instead, he had unexpectedly created on the computer’s monitor a two-dimensional, black-and-white snapshot of a scene that was identifiable as an image of the recent past.
Bantry at the time had been designing graviton readers for the physics department of the University of New Mexico at Santa Fe. Further investigation had shown that certain types of data taken from a graviton reader had to be input into an O-CLIP computer; in some inexplicable way this was the mechanism that created what the few people who knew of it had come to call the time scanner.
But three-dimensional O-CLIP computers had been deemed by the federal authorities too powerful to be let loose on the world. By secretly using Emily’s O-CLIP to create his time scanner, Roderick had put himself and Sam’s entire family at risk of federal prosecution.
To keep themselves out of jail, Sam had been forced to work a deal with Bantry: the astrophysicist would go to live somewhere far away; and Sam would do what he could to help him find a way of introducing the scanner to the world without putting all of them at risk, from either the federal authorities, or, even more ominously, the Federation’s recently created Office of Planetary Security.
“Even the Federation isn’t all-powerful,” Sam had muttered to his wife, “at least not yet. Maybe they can suppress a college professor like Bantry, or even a United States Senator like yours truly. But they’ll think twice about going after Harvard or Oxford or the Sorbonne or Apple-IBM. If we do it right. Somehow I’ll have to fix it so that someone in that league shares the credit with Roderick—and the blame.”
So far the bargain appeared to have worked. Even before Emily and Bantry had been formally divorced, Sam, as a member of the Science Appropriations Subcomittee, had come across an interesting item concerning the SETI Corporation.
Seticorp was a semi-public company partially funded by government appropriations to search for extraterrestrial signals; for thirty years now it had leased facilities from the University of Hawaii in the observatories on Mauna Kea, the gigantic volcano that comprised the so-called Big Island of Hawaii. Now, it seemed, Seticorp had applied to the government for a license for an O-CLIP computer…
Three months later Seticorp had its new computer. It also had a new researcher on Mauna Kea, one with a solid pedigree in gravitons—and with officially approved access to the newly installed O-CLIP computer.