“Please sit down, Mrs Drinkwater,” Galen Cheney directed, not rising from his chair.
Martha Drinkwater did as she was bade, placing the coffee tray she was holding with unsteady hands on the low table in the middle of the room and joining her husband on the sofa.
“We live in a Godless age,” the Drinkwaters’ visitor intoned, mimicking the distant tolling of a dull bell.
“I was brought up a Lutheran,” Martha replied, fighting the coldness invading her soul. “But I lapsed when I was college.”
Her husband cleared his throat.
“Martha knows nothing about my work, Mr Cheney.”
The other man pondered this for perhaps half-a-minute.
“Time is short. Your wife has a right to know the reason why what is happening tonight is happening,” he decided, finishing his pronouncement with a flick of the eyes towards the screen of the TV.
Carl Drinkwater felt his soul turn to ice.
There was nothing he could say to this man; no argument to which he would listen or could possibly sway him because in his bleak blue grey eyes there was only implacable certainty.
Carl reached for and grasped his wife’s left hand.
“I started working for the SAGE project two years before we were married,” he said, his mouth dry with fear. He looked to the coffee cups on the table.
Galen Cheney nodded.
Carl leaned forwards and took a cup, sipped coffee to wet his lips and throat before he continued.
“Semi Automatic Ground Environment. SAGE. The term describes an interlinked system comprising hundreds of radar stations and a dozen regional Air Defense Centers providing for the air Defense of continental North America. The system also includes real time inputs for radar and monitoring stations all over the World. Or at least, it did, before the war. The overseas radar stations in Japan, Great Britain, Western Europe and Turkey were all destroyed in the war.” He paused to take another drink of coffee. “SAGE was almost fully operation by the time of the war. Most of the ADCs, like the one at Ent Air Force Base were operational or coming on line. Each of the ADCs was constructed and equipped like the one at Ent; four storey concrete reinforced bunkers hardened against anything but a near miss by a big bomb, each one running a pair of one hundred and thirty-five ton IBM-Burroughs mainframe computers. Because of SAGE America is five, ten, perhaps twenty years technologically ahead of anybody else in the world in the application of computer and other scientific military and commercial applications. If the President is really serious about putting a man on the Moon this decade it will only be possible because the discoveries and the wholly new technologies which exist only because of the SAGE Project.”
This last was said with something akin to defiance.
Every time Carl Drinkwater had walked into the NORAD control room at Ent Air Force Base he had felt like a character out of a science fiction novel transported in the blink of an eye by some magical time machine into the far distant future. Every output from all the other ADCs fed back into the control room at Ent Air Force Base via a hardened network of AT&T — American Telephone & Telegraph — dedicated lines and modems in real time. The air defense controllers manning their rows and semi-circles of gun metal consuls stared constantly at their big flickering cathode ray tubes. At any time individual displays could be projected singly, or in combination onto the big, backlit wall projections of the North American continent. At the touch of a button interceptors and missiles could be brought to readiness, launched, and vectored via Buck Rogers’s type electronic uplinks directly to aircraft or formations in the field. Air raid warnings could be ordered or cancelled, and the vast aerial battlefield intricately managed at ranges of hundreds and thousands of miles. SAGE had been designed to enable Americans to sleep in peace at night.
Carl Drinkwater looked at Galen Cheney.
“Who are you?”
“I am a man who has been so sorely tried by his Government that I have been forced to exercise my constitutional right to take up arms to resist the tyranny of the over-mighty rulers who still believe they rule over those whom they oppress.”
Carl nodded at the television.
“Are you are a part of that?”
Galen Cheney stared at him.
“You should confess your sins, brother.”
“What sins?”
“My family should have been safe. You and people like you made it possible for the Government to pretend that we were all safe. By your lies shall ye be condemned.”
“What’s he talking about?” Martha Drinkwater asked her husband. Notwithstanding her fear she was deeply offended that a stranger should come into her house and abuse her husband so unfairly.
“SAGE is the technological marvel of the age in which we live,” Carl said, beginning to ask himself whether there was mileage in going along with the madman sitting in his armchair. The man might have some really peculiar ideas but he seemed rational enough in other ways, albeit immovable in championing of whatever outlandish theology or belief system to which he subscribed. “But as soon as the Russians developed the ability to launch satellites into low earth orbit, SAGE was compromised. After the launch of Sputnik 1 six years ago the whole game changed. On the night of the war NORAD detected and shot down every Soviet bomber that pressed home its attack and most of the ones that turned tail and tried to run away, too. That part of the system worked — if not perfectly — then it at least it stopped the bombers getting through to America. There was nothing SAGE could do about the incoming ICBMs except to accurately predict and track their sub-orbital trajectories and calculate their ground fall with sufficient accuracy to provide the civil defense authorities with a few minutes pre-warning. SAGE was never designed to defend American airspace in the space age and nobody pretended it was!”
This of course, was a white lie of the worst kind.
Nobody had specifically informed the man, or woman or child on the street in Buffalo, or Seattle or Chicago that there was nothing which could stop a thermonuclear-tipped rocket launched from Soviet soil hitting America.
This dreadful truth had dawned on most Americans as the Cuban Missile Crisis had dragged on without resolution; until then the Soviet nuclear threat had seemed to be a long way away, somebody else’s problem.
Galen Cheney sighed and stood up.
The gun in his right hand seemed huge.
Carl found himself on his feet, his arm extended to shepherd his wife behind him, even though the scientist in him knew full well that a single human body would be no kind of shield in the face of a weapon like the one in the madman’s hand. He guessed he was looking down the barrel of a .44 long-barrelled Smith and Wesson; at this range a couple of rounds would probably cut him in half and he would be dead before the remaining contiguous parts of his torso hit the floor. Nevertheless, he tried to edge in front of his wife.