Flying over the magnets in the soundless, vibrationless calm of the tube train, McPherson can’t help but feel a little glow of accomplishment. He ignores the printouts in his lap and looks around the plush car of the train. Businessmen in the big seats are hidden behind opened copies of The Wall Street Journal. With no windows and no vibration and no noise, it’s difficult to believe that they are moving at Mach 2. The world has become an incredible place.…
When he returns it’ll be time for the painful task of writing up the description of the system, in proposal form. Several hundred pages it will run to, not as much as a bid proposal, it’s true, but still, it will be his job to oversee and edit the ungodly number of descriptions, charts, diagrams and such. Not fun.
Still. Being at that stage means a lot; it means they have a working system, within the size and power specs given. It’s more than a lot of LSR’s programs can say, at the moment. McPherson thinks of Ball Lightning briefly, shoves the thought away. This is one of the rare times that a program director can say, The work is done, and it’s a success. He hasn’t been given all that many commands like this one, and it means a lot.
The image of the test comes back to him. That inhumanly swift stoop, attack, disappearance; the quick, precise, and total destruction of the six lumbering tanks; it really was quite extraordinary, both physically and intellectually.
And remembering it, McPherson suddenly sees the larger picture, the meaning of the event. It’s as if he just stood back from a video screen, after months of examining each dot. Now the image is revealed. This system, this RPV with its Stormbee eyes, its armament of smart missiles, its speed, its radar invisibility, its cheapness and lack of a human pilot put at risk—this system is the kind of pinpoint weapon that can really and truly change the nature of warfare. If the Soviets roll out of Eastern Europe with their giant Warsaw Pact army—for that matter, if any army starts an invasion anywhere—then these pilotless drones can drop out of space and fire their missiles before any defensive system can find them or respond, and for each run a half dozen tanks or vehicles are gone. And quick as you can say wow the invading force is gone with it.
The net result of that, given that this technology is pretty much out there for anyone to develop—LSR is not a superinventor after all, nobody is—the net result is that when every country has systems like this one, then no one will be able to invade another country. It just won’t be possible.
Oh, of course there will still be wars—he is not so idealistic as to think that pinpoint weapons systems will end war as an institution—but any major invasion force is doomed to a swift surgical destruction. So really, large-scale invasions become out of the question, which severely curtails how big a war can get.
And all this without having to use the threat of nuclear weapons. For a hundred years now, almost, NATO has used nuclear weapons as the ultimate stopper to any Warsaw Pact invasion. Battlefield nukes in artillery shells, nuclear submarines in the Baltic and Med, the illegal intermediate-range “messenger missiles” hidden in West Germany, ready to make a demonstration pop if the tanks roll.… It’s one of the most dangerous situations in the world, because if one nuke goes off, there’s no telling where it will stop. Most likely it won’t stop until everyone’s dead. And even if it does stop, Europe’s cities will be wiped out. And all to resist tanks!
But now, now, with Stormbee… They can take the nuclear weapons out of there, and still have a completely secure defense against a conventional invasion. The cities and their populations won’t have to go up with the invaders; nothing will be needed but a precise, limited, one could even say humane, response. If you invade us, your invading force will be picked off, by unstoppable robot snipers. Swift, surgical destruction for any invading force; and the war wiped out with it. War—major wars of invasion, anyway—made impossible! My God! It’s quite a thought! A weapon that will make antagonists talk—without the horrific threat of mutual assured destruction. In fact, with weapons like these, it really makes perfect sense to dismantle all the megatonnage, to get rid of the nuclear horror.… Can it really be true? Have we reached that point in history where technology finally will make war obsolete, and nuclear weapons unnecessary?
Yes, it seems it can be true: he has seen the leading edge of that truth, just barely seen it as it swooped down over the white sands of the desert like a Mach 7 mirage, a peripheral vision, that very day. It actually looks as if his work, the sweat of his brow, might help to lift from the world the hundred-year-long nightmare threat of nuclear annihilation. Might even help to lift the thousand-year-long threat of major, catastrophic war. It’s… well, it’s work you can take pride in.
And hurtling back over the surface of the desert, McPherson suddenly feels that pride more strongly than he ever has in his entire life, something like a radiant glow, a sun in his chest. It really is something.
11
In his dream Jim walks over a hillside covered with ruins. Below the hill spreads a black lake. The ruins are nothing but low stone walls, and the land is empty. Jim wanders among the walls searching for something, but as always he can’t quite remember what it is he seeks. He comes across a piece of violet glass from a stained-glass window, but he knows that isn’t what he is after. Something like a ghost bulges out of the top of the hill to tell him everything—
He wakes in his little apartment in Foothill, the sun beaming through the window. He groans, rolls onto the floor. Hangover here. What were they lidding last night? Groggily he looks around. His room is a mess, bedding and clothing scattered everywhere, as if a rainbow collapsed and landed in his bedroom.
Three walls of the room are covered with big Thomas Brothers maps of Orange County: one from the 1930s (faint tracing of roads), one from 1990 (north half of county gridded with interlocking towns, southern half, the hills and the Irvine and O’Neill ranches, still almost empty), one the very latest edition (the whole county gridded and overgridded). Kind of like keeping X-rays of a cancer on your walls, Jim has thought more than once. Surrealty tumor.
Stagger to the bathroom. Standing at the toilet he stares at a badly framed print of an old orange crate label. The bathroom walls are covered by these:
Three friars, taste-testing oranges by the white mission.
Behind them green groves, and blue snow-topped mountains in the distance.
Portola, standing with Spanish flag unfurled, silent, on a peak in Placentia.
Two peacocks in front of a Disneyland castle: “California Dream.”
Little bungalow in the neat green rows of a grove in bloom.
Beautiful Mexican woman, holding a basket of oranges.
Behind her green groves, and blue mountains in the distance.
You have never lived here.
The labels, from the first half of the twentieth century, are the work of printer Max Schmidt and artists Archie Vazques and Othello Michetti, among others. The intensely rich, exotic colors are the result of a process called zincography. Taken together, Jim believes, these labels make up Orange County’s first and only utopia, a collective vision of Mediterranean warmth and ease astonishing in its art deco vividness. Ah, what a life! Jim tries to imagine the effect on the poor farmers of the Midwest, coming in to the general store from the isolated wheat farm, the Depression, the subzero temperatures, the dustbowls—and there among the necessary goods in their drab boxes and tins, these fantasies in stunning orange, cobalt, green, white! No wonder OC is so crowded. These labels must have given those farmers a powerful urge to Go West. And in those days they really could move to the land pictured on the boxes (sort of). For Jim it’s out of reach. He lives here, but is infinitely further away.