What was terrifying was that nobody knew if it was some kind of coup d’état, a revolutionary uprising or simply some monstrous primal upwelling of medieval violence and wrath.
“Who is it, Carl?” His wife asked timidly from behind his shoulder. They had both been watching the television, drinking coffee and periodically checking that the kids were still all right. Their world had turned upside down several times since that dreadful night in October 1962 and now it seemed as if it was about to be upset again.
The man in the doorway tipped his hat — not the Homburg every other FBI man either Carl or his wife had ever encountered before had worn — but a moderately battered brown Sedona. Special Agent Cheney was a tall man, over six feet high before he pulled on his boots. He wore blue jeans, a dark shirt and a black Bolo tie with what looked like a small Navajo medallion. His jacket was brown leather, well-worn.
Carl Drinkwater glimpsed the shoulder strap of the visitor’s holstered gun and knew — he just knew — that whatever type of weapon the big man was packing under his arm it would not be any kind of peashooter.
Cheney took off his Sedona as he stepped into the house.
He was a handsome man in his fifties with the bearing of a stern-faced sheriff from the movies; High Noon, perhaps, and the flintiest grey blue eyes that either Carl or his wife had ever had the misfortune to meet.
“We’ve been watching the TV,” Carl blurted, so unnerved and having drunk so much coffee that evening he very nearly wet himself in his anxiety.
“Washington, yeah,” the tall man murmured. “Not good.”
Carl and his wife looked at each other, they could not help it. There was something in the visitor’s demeanour that indicated the goings on in faraway Washington were no business of his, even had he cared overmuch, which clearly, he did not.
“I’d have waited to call until the morning but I saw your light was on,” Galen Cheney went on with a distinctly Southern courtesy. Had he wanted he might have panicked the Drinkwater’s with a single arching of an eyebrow but that was not yet his intention. He spoke lowly, as if not wanting to awaken the household’s two young children although his boots sounded heavily on the bare boards of the lobby of the modest two-storey wood-frame house in the middle of the anonymous estate attached to Ent United States Air Force Base. “We should all sit down. This isn’t the time of day to stand on ceremony.”
The Drinkwater’s living room was exactly as Cheney had anticipated. A sofa, an armchair, a rocking chair which probably nobody ever used, rugs on the floor and flowery drapes on the windows, with everything arranged around this year’s model twenty-two inch TV. There was a wooden playpen in one corner of the room for the Drinkwater’s two year old daughter, and a big walnut radiogram in another.
“Can I offer you a coffee, Agent Cheney?” Mrs Drinkwater inquired timidly.
“That would be an act of mercy, Ma’am,” the tall man half-smiled for a moment.
Carl Drinkwater shifted uneasily on his feet as he watched his wife skitter out of the room.
“I’ve tried to shelter Martha from things,” he muttered.
The TV screen flickered; the sound was turned off. On the screen the darkness was punctuated with eruptions of light, flashes in the night, and the spears of tracer curving across a burning city at incredible speeds.
“Forgive me,” Carl Drinkwater prefaced, finding a packet of courage, “but you don’t look like any of the FBI men I’ve met in the last year, Agent Cheney.”
The other man lowered his weary bones into the armchair, indicating for his host to sit on the sofa.
“That’s because I’m not like any of the G-men I know either,” he guffawed softly, allowing a suggestion of a Texan drawl to curl away from his lips. What he had had said was no lie; but he made no attempt to elaborate upon it or to embellish the subterfuge. Instead he fell silent and viewed the balding, bespectacled forty year old Burroughs Corporation man — Burroughs had not completely cut him off even though he had been effectively under house arrest for most of the last year — with inscrutable intensity.
Carl Drinkwater squirmed under the scrutiny.
“Is it right,” Cheney inquired mildly, “that you computer guys knew SAGE wasn’t worth a barrel of piss in a real shooting war?”
Semi Automatic Ground Environment; the multi-billion dollar cutting edge computerised radar Defense system that had been designed to allow Americans to sleep safe in their beds at night.
The blood seemed to freeze in Carl’s face.
“I don’t understand…”
After serving as a radar man on a cruiser in the latter stages of the Pacific War Carl Drinkwater had gone to Caltech — the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena under the auspices of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, more generally known as the ‘GI Bill’ — and studied mathematics and physics. On graduation he had been head-hunted by Burroughs and swept unknowingly into the biggest, cost no object, military-scientific jamboree of the 1950s; the headlong quest to shield the North American Continent behind an impenetrable super-advanced computerized air defense umbrella.
Of course, back in 1949 Carl Drinkwater had had no idea what he was actually working on, and nobody at Burroughs with the necessary security clearance had gone out of his way to explain. However, Carl had known the company was working on ‘something big’ and he had not spent three years at to Caltech discovering the ‘God’ of the natural universe just to spend the rest of his working life designing and building better and bigger ‘adding machines’. What he had not known and what he would not — at the time — have believed had he been told it back in 1949 was the mind-boggling scope and ambition of SAGE.
“You were in NORAD on the night of the war,” Galen Cheney stated. “What did you feel like when you saw those ICBMs tracking down towards Seattle, Chicago and Buffalo?”
“I don’t…”
“Did you get down on your knees and pray?”
“No, I’m not religious.”
Because of the SAGE Project so much money had been thrown — literally thrown — at the American computer industry that by the late 1950s there had been nine US computing powerhouses: IBM was the largest by a distance but the other eight were all world players, bigger than any foreign competitor and market leaders at home and abroad; Burroughs, Honeywell, NCR (National Cash Register), General Electric, CDC (Control Data Corporation), RCA (Radio Corporation of America), Sperry, and DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation). By the dawn of the 1960s IBM’s market position had seemed so dominant that computer industry insiders — who knew well enough to leave Burroughs out of the equation — had begun to refer to ‘IBM and the seven dwarves’ to describe the unquestioned ascendancy of International Business Machines in global computing.
However, what the man in the street did not know, but what many in corporate America and elsewhere in the West suspected, was that IBM’s and the rest of the US computer industry cartel’s research, development and core advanced technology production had been wholly underwritten by the US Department of Defense ever since the end of the 1945 war. The mammoth scale of that support in the form of open-ended hugely lucrative contacts — year after year — coming out of the Pentagon had been so vast, and the political gerrymandering behind the subsidies priced, often double-priced, into those contracts so complex and so gross, that not even IBM’s numerous special projects departments could think of ways to spend all tax dollars that had flooded into its coffers in those years; hence the Burroughs Corporation, and every one of the other ‘seven dwarves’ had grown fat and complacent on the Government paycheck.