Lyman Scott felt his lips trembling and fought to still them. “What exactly would be needed to generate such a beam?”
“Two things, essentially. One, the discovery of a subatomic particle that disrupts the carbon chain. Two, a power source capable of focusing those particles into a beam on the level that wiped out Hope Valley. Without the second discovery, the first is useless in terms of a large-scale weapon.”
“The ultimate weapon,” Lyman Scott muttered. “Quick and absolute destruction.”
“Not as absolute as it might have been,” continued Sundowner. “The death ray traveled across Hope Valley from west to east in a beam three miles across, starting roughly at one border of the town and finishing at the other.”
“Are you saying, Mr. Sundowner,” raised Secretary of State Mercheson, “that the beam could just as easily have drawn a line of destruction straight across the entire country?”
“Theoretically, yes.”
“Satellite delivery, then,” from Kappel.
“Whose satellite?” the President demanded. “Whose weapon? Somebody has it, and for some reason they wanted to demonstrate its potency to us without letting us know who they are.”
CIA chief Stamp leaned forward, almost reluctantly. “I may have a lead, sir. Just past midnight Saturday, six hours before the destruction of Hope Valley, our Turkish station received a message on a closed channel warning that an American town was going to be … destroyed.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this yesterday?”
“The message was only just relayed to me. Our Turkish station delayed transmission because, as I said, the channel was closed. Should have been inactive and had been for months. Our security had been penetrated, forcing us to reroute.”
“Get to the point.”
“It was a Soviet penetration.”
A few long moments of silence passed before Secretary of Defense Kappel’s voice sliced through the Tomb’s heavy air. “Wait a minute,” he shot out, “are you telling me that the Russians have a weapon that can melt people where they stand?”
“Not at all,” said the man from the CIA. “But the fact remains they were the only ones who knew about the Turkish channel.”
“Mr. President,” began Edmund Mercheson in a typically droll, Kissinger-like tone, “a single instance of penetration of a single channel is hardly sufficient basis to adopt an accusatory posture. My feeling is we are more likely facing an enemy seeking to utilize this penetration to make us think the Soviets are behind everything, so as to severely limit our field of responses.”
“We’re severely limited in any case,” noted the President grimly.
“But we have one option clearly open to us,” Kappel followed almost before Lyman Scott had finished speaking. “I’d advise bumping DEF-CON status up to two, three at the very least. We’ve been attacked.”
“But,” argued Mercheson, “DEF-CON functions as a signal to no one else but the Soviets. It insinuates escalation, a tough atmosphere in which to initiate dialogue.”
“I’d submit we’re already past that.”
“Which may well be exactly what the true wielder of this particle beam wants,” said the man from State.
“I’m inclined to see Ed’s side of things,” broke in Lyman Scott. “No offense, George,” he added, as if afraid of offending one of the last men whose trust he enjoyed. “But I can’t see the point of the Soviets advertising the existence of such a superweapon and warning us in advance through such roundabout means. Even stranger, utilizing a weapon in this manner would seem to me to negate its ultimate purpose. If they’ve got and plan to use it, why not just draw the line all the way across the country? Why stop at Hope Valley?”
“Your point’s well taken, sir,” agreed Sundowner. “And the answer may lie in the reasons why we abandoned research aimed at developing this sort of weapon. The scientific limitations presented us were insurmountable….”
“But apparently overcome by somebody,” shot out Kappel.
“Maybe not,” Sundowner continued. “There might be a very good reason why their deployment didn’t extend beyond Hope Valley and why they bothered to warn us in the first place. The power source required to generate a beam of this nature is immense. Maybe they’re only capable of effecting it on a small scale, so they risked a contained open demonstration complete with warning to make us think otherwise.”
“Yes,” echoed Mercheson. “We’ve heard from them once. Under that scenario they’ve set us up to hear from them again, fully convinced of the efficacy of their threat.”
“Blackmail,” realized Lyman Scott. “Hope Valley employed to hold us hostage to some sort of demands.”
“And, Soviet or not,” began Stamp, “they would certainly be well aware of the problems facing Washington at present. We’re vulnerable, and our response is limited by that vulnerability.”
“Words well chosen,” said the President, “but too minced. A nice gesture, Willie, but we’re all friends here. This administration isn’t just vulnerable, it’s under siege from all sides. We’re not just lame ducks, we’re sitting ducks for our enemies at home as well as abroad. Might be some, a few who once occupied these empty chairs, who’d welcome the whole business to finish the job of bringing us down.”
“The Soviets would like nothing better,” reminded George Kappel. “It’s possible they’ve used this means to manufacture a crisis, destroy us from the inside without ever having to use their weapon again. Screens and inconsistencies thrown up in our path to force us to go in circles. They know our grip is tenuous. If we handle this situation poorly, we could face collapse.”
“Gentlemen,” said the President strongly, “if this government is out of control, I’ll accept responsibility. But I won’t, can’t, sit here and admit we’ve lost.”
“That’s not what I was saying, sir,” insisted Kappel.
“But it comes down to that, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe we should hope it does,” put forth Sundowner suddenly, “because under that scenario we would at least be granted time to formulate a response. If we could negate the weapon, we can negate the threat.”
“Ever so simple, assuming we had such a response.”
“I believe we do, potentially anyway: Bugzapper.”
“I thought we had determined its activation to be technologically infeasible,” said Kappel after a brief pause.
“Not anymore,” the scientist told him.
Upon taking over as head of the Toy Factory four years before, Sundowner had inherited the remains of the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as the Star Wars system. Problems both financial and technological had already stripped the program bare. What had originally been envisioned as a seven-layer defensive shield against all incoming missile attacks had been peeled away one layer at a time until all that remained was a ground-based laser system which utilized mirrors in space and had tested out as being woefully inadequate against anything but a small-scale strike — hardly a layer at all.
For years Sundowner had maintained his own theories and finally had the chance to set them to work. He called his program “Bugzapper” after those deadly bright lights that fry any insect that wanders too close. His system functioned on the same general basis. Sundowner envisioned a fleet of three or four dozen satellites poised in geosynchronistic orbits over the United States, attached to each other by invisible energy fields. Any object that attempted to penetrate such a field would suffer the same fate that awaited the nagging mosquito on a summer evening. In effect, an impenetrable shield would be erected over the nation, rendering it invincible to any major attack — a shield without the complexities of Star Wars.