Speculative Fusion - Aegis et Veritas

Aegis et Veritas

by Michael Von Korff

The dome shattered and sparkled and fell.

It fell into a hundred million pieces of black that faded to grey and white, glittering in the April sun. It fell without warning; in the time it would have taken to cry out, “Come quick, out of the house! Look at the dome!” the tiny fragments had already disappeared like ashes scattered to the wind.

The New Boston police were the first to reach the site of the fallen dome. They tore across the ruined streets of Cambridge on all-terrain vehicles, wearing polyethylene suits to shield themselves from radiation. Civilians began to arrive soon after. The collapse of the force field had been visible for hundreds of kilometers, and some who saw it suited up and walked or drove toward Cambridge, drawn by the lure of adventure, the opportunity to explore the land beneath the fallen dome.
By then the police had flung up roadblocks and spread across the southern border of the Harvard campus. Where the dome had been, its southern edge grazing the banks of the Charles river, a centuries-old metal fence now stretched for kilometers, encircling the university. At the main gate, officers aimed spray-guns into the restless, growing crowd as people shouted and stared at the buildings through the fence.

Few of them were looking up, then. And none of those who looked saw the helicopter as it flew three hundred feet over their heads, moving toward the western edge of the fence, the old Cambridge city limits. It was a United American Empire CH72 stealth ‘copter bearing special agents Danny Bauer and Theo Martins. As it passed over the restless mass of suited people, Theo glanced down at them from the pilot’s seat.

“I can’t believe it,” he said, shaking his head.

Danny paid no attention to the crowd. Instead, he was tapping his finger against his handheld computer, skimming through pages of data. As a rule, Danny wanted to know what he was doing; he always came prepared. Then the call had come through half an hour ago that the dome had fallen. He had never imagined it would happen in his lifetime, much less that he would be the top agent at base when it happened with the required expertise in particle physics. They had sent him out with a crash briefing, and he was now flying through the ruins of a radioactive city at two hundred feet while giving himself a twenty-minute course in the history of Harvard University.

He wasn’t pleased.

“I can’t believe it,” Theo repeated. “It got hit by eight hydrogen bombs, and it’s still just sitting here. How did this place survive a fucking nuclear holocaust?”

“Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?” Danny replied, eyes scanning a twenty-first century tourist’s guide to Old Boston. (Half the locations in the guide were somewhere below or behind them, charred heaps of radioactive rubble long since overgrown with weeds.) That was the reason Danny and Theo were flying in: find the machine that ran the force field, secure it, and discover what made it tick, all within the next four hours. Then back to the Pentagon before the Martians or the Japanese noticed they’d been there.

“We might meet some Harvard students while we’re at it.”

“I doubt anyone’s alive in there. Look.” Danny handed Theo his computer, which displayed a collage of grainy satellite photographs covering the ten square kilometers of open ground over Harvard. All taken in the past twenty minutes and sent to the Pentagon, none containing signs of human life. “If the place was still occupied, there would be crowds outside in the middle of the afternoon. They’d show up in the photos.”

“Not if everyone’s in class. Ha.”

Now the helicopter passed over the police barricade and on, and suddenly it the land was remade. Two blocks behind them, rubble littered the broken streets, but here was a Cambridge made anew, one that had never known the War. Another few seconds and they passed over Harvard Yard.

“Shit,” Theo said, peering down at the space below them. “This place is a desert.”

Danny looked. Below them, the ground was dead. In over a hundred years, no light had penetrated the dome, and the plants and trees beneath it had long since dissolved into the earth. The entire yard looked devoid of life–– not broken or blasted like the rest of Cambridge, but frozen in time, like a preserved corpse. Blackened grass faced plain, red brick buildings, all empty.

“They didn’t blow up,” said Theo. “And they didn’t die of radiation poisoning. They must have starved to death. Poor bastards.”
Danny frowned. “Drop us here,” he shouted over the whirring of the helicopter blades. He motioned to a patch of flat ground in the center of the yard, what had once been a field. Theo nodded and the ‘copter fell, its color gradually shifting to match the dead grass as it did so.

Viewing the buildings from ground level for the first time, Danny finally gained some appreciation for the architecture of the place. The buildings they had looked down at in the helicopter loomed over them now. Elaborate carvings and inscriptions marked each building. The air smelled of dust and cold. Danny thought: we’re walking through history right now. Walking through History. What’s left on the Earth so old and still so well preserved?

Two vast, white-columned structures rose up on either side of the field. Danny recognized one of them, pointed.

“That’s the Widener Library. We might as well start there as anywhere. Bring the scanner.”

The entrance lay at the top of a stone staircase, and the library roof stood six stories above that, with as many more levels belowground storing endless stacks of books. According to Danny’s guide, Widener had once been humanity’s third largest library, falling behind only the Library of Congress in the United States and the Olympus Library on Mars. Now, if its contents had survived, it would be the largest collection anywhere of books written before the twenty-second century.

There had been a library in Harrisburg where Danny had grown up, and as a boy he had read a few of the books there. He remembered shelves thick with dust and dark rooms smelling of old paper. There had been a section of picture books, with stories of pirates, and steam-powered trains climbing hills, and poems about animals whose names he hadn’t recognized. Later, in high school, the only books he’d been given were military and scientific texts, but he’d known that more existed. He stepped up the bone-white steps quietly, reverently. Theo caught up to him as he stepped between two of the great columns atop the stairs and through the library doors.

Danny had expected security cameras, catalog computers, magnetic scanners, but the entrance hall was nearly empty. A coffee-colored marble desk stood in one corner, but other than that, the room was one long strip of rotting wooden floor. A few doors lined the walls, and fifty feet across the room Danny saw a marble stairway spiraling down into the dark of the building’s lower levels.

Theo pulled the Pelner scanner out of his satchel. It made a few soft beeps at him, then fell silent. “I’m willing to wager that it’s not anywhere in this building,” he said.

Danny shrugged. It wouldn’t take them long to search the grounds for an energy source large enough to power the dome. His watch read 04:28. Three and a half hours left. He turned to go.

“But––” Theo’s voice rose a few notes. “––something’s putting out a bit of power–– maybe a couple of kilowatts. Could it be an old computer?” He pressed a few buttons on the scanner. “Hey–– it’s moving...”

A figure stepped out of the shadows under the stairs and said: “Hi there!”

It stepped forward into the light. Danny recognized it as a short, stocky, middle-aged man wearing a backpack. As a whole, the man’s appearance was nothing short of comical: he was dressed like a character in an old movie, in blue denim pants and a cotton shirt with short sleeves. Theo stared at the man, eyebrows raised. Apparently, he’d expected the sort of Harvard professor he’d seen in history books–– a wizened, cane-carrying figure in a classy suit.

In his left hand the man clutched an old battery-powered flashlight. A pencil stuck out over his left ear. He wasn’t what Danny would have expected, either. Danny relaxed his grip on the wasp gun hidden under his jacket, feeling slightly foolish.
The man grinned as he moved over to them, extending a hand. “Sterling Cooper. I run security here on the upper levels. Would you folks like a tour?”

The discovery of life at Harvard had immeasurably complicated their mission. Danny had hoped to enter and exit the university without a trace, but he had little prospect now of obtaining the field generator’s technology without at least the Harvardians being aware of it.
Sterling Cooper did nothing to ease Danny’s concerns. He chattered at the two agents as he led them down the stairway. Dim electric lights lit the passages under the library, but Sterling kept his flashlight in hand, gesturing with it as they walked. “You’ll be the first Americans anyone here has ever seen! They’ll all be so excited! Of course, since the dome is down we’ll be seeing more of you. But for now it’s amazing just to see new faces.”

“The first Americans?” Danny asked. “The first other Americans, you mean. From the outside.”
Sterling twisted around to look at Danny; he blinked at Danny as though staring into his own flashlight bulb. “Well, yes. From the outside.”

As Danny was flying out of Washington, they had briefed him on the possibility that Harvard might not be friendly, that it might have some deep-seated racial hatred against the country that had abandoned it a century ago to seemingly inevitable destruction at the hands of the Martians. In that case Harvard might turn its technology over to the Japanese, only power that hadn’t betrayed its people. They’d painted him a picture of a Japanese warbot armed with force field tech rampaging invincible through New York City, blasting the buildings with terror and heat from behind flickering black shields. Be on the lookout, they had said, for signs of disloyalty to the United Empire. Sterling seemed friendly enough, but still––

“How have you people kept alive for so long down here?” Theo asked suddenly. Danny forced his mind away from suspicion and followed Sterling as they began to walk again.

“We never grew anything aboveground. The field caused temperature fluctuations aboveground that would have killed plant life, and anyway, we already had the Greenhouse. We’re actually going to the Greenhouse now— I was going to meet my physics professor there until our sensors noticed your helicopter.”

Danny said quickly: “You’re a physics student? Does that mean you understand the machine that made the dome?”

“Oh, you’re wondering about the Goodman Field Generator. I don’t know much about how it actually works— that’s graduate-level physics, pretty complicated stuff.”

It would have been too much to ask for that the first person they met would have the answers to all of their questions. Danny turned away to examine the crumbling plaster walls, hiding his disappointment, while Theo chimed in, “What I want to know is, why did you guys leave the damn thing on for— what— a hundred and twenty years? There hasn’t been a nuke dropped within two hundred klicks of this place in our lifetimes.”

“That wasn’t really intentional,” Sterling answered. He sounded apologetic. “When the Founders first constructed the field, I think they planned to wait for a few months or so until the war had ended, then lower the field and go back to business as usual. But there was something wrong with the field.” The passage widened as they turned a corner. Danny noticed that the air was warming gradually as they walked.

“You see, the Founders were worried that the field would run out of energy in one explosion, that if the Martians dropped two bombs on us, the second one would get through. So the field was built to run on radiation energy supplied by the initial bomb itself–– a sort of self-sustaining mechanism where each new attack powers the field so that it can defend against additional attacks. Unfortunately, we hadn’t counted on Martian persistence–– ah, here we are.”

Sterling stopped them at a wooden door on one side of the hallway. He opened the door, and Danny felt a blast of heat.
Green covered the chamber’s walls, ceilings, floors. And more: hundreds of massive pillars of green and yellow stood spaced evenly across the room, so that the whole of the Greenhouse seemed ablaze with emerald fire. Fruits of all kinds hung from tall, thin trees in a line down the center of the room. Lamps peered through the holes in the greenery and glared down at the three men like searchlights.
In front of the door through which they had entered, a pillar of fruit towered over them, rising thirty feet and blending into the wild of the ceiling. They looked like huge tomatoes to Danny, though from their size and the orderly way they climbed up the pillars in crimson vines, he guessed that tomatoes would consider these plants merely distant cousins. In the distance, he saw small moving specks: Harvard-folk harvesting their crop, he supposed. And closer, stepping out from among the tomato vines along a narrow path, one figure who wasn’t harvesting. A woman in a blue dress.

“Professor Sylvia!” Sterling called as she approached. “I’ve brought some new friends. Danny and Theo, from America.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you boys,” she said, walking toward them down a thin dirt path through the foliage. “Sylvia Jackson. ” She was old, and beautiful in the way of an old woman, with dark, softly wrinkled skin and short white hair. Danny thought: Here’s the stereotypical Harvard professor, a wise old lady, brilliant and refined. They shook hands, and Danny murmured a few nervous pleasantries.

She smiled at the three men. “I’m glad that your first good look at our school is this place, rather than one of our musty old libraries. Isn’t this a wonderful place to work?” she asked, gesturing to the color that surrounded them. “I come here often to study or write. At the moment I’m tying up some loose ends on my math thesis.”

“Wait,” Danny started. “You’re a student, too?”

Sylvia nodded. “I’m a twenty-sixth-year graduate student.”

“It’s taken you twenty-six years to write a thesis?”

“Oh, no!” She laughed; her voice, smooth and harmonic, echoed across the greenhouse. “No, I’m writing my fifth thesis now. I have professorships in physics and philosophy and doctorates in literature and political science, and now I’m finishing up my thesis in mathematics. I’ve been investigating new ways to calculate the Ramsey Numbers using the mooring techniques pioneered by Hailes–– oh, but you wouldn’t know about Hailes, would you? He was one of ours.”
Theo grinned, leaned against an the trunk of a young apple tree growing beside the path. “I don’t think I’d know about him either way, Miz— Professor—”

“Sylvia, please.”

“What I’m saying is we’re not actually well-versed in mathematics, Professor Sylvia.”

She laughed again, softly. “Just Sylvia. I mean it. Sterling calls me ‘Professor’ because he’s in one of my classes; but neither of us is teaching one another, Theodore, so we can refer to one another by our first names.”

The conversation was getting to far off-topic for Danny’s liking. “We do know a bit of physics, though,” he broke in. “We were discussing your Goodman Field Generator with Sterling on the walk over–– what were you saying, Sterling?”

“Oh, right.” The little man nodded seriously. “I was saying that we had underestimated Martian persistence. After the Founders deflected that first bomb, the Martians sent about twenty more at them. Of course, Earth Defense had abandoned them by that point, so they had to rely on the field generator for protection. It absorbed the main force of the bombs, but in the process the Cambridge area picked up so much radioactivity that the generator’s auto-response just didn’t shut off. So–– there they were, camped out in fallout shelters underneath their own force field, where our people have lived ever since. We could have destroyed the field generator and escaped, of course, but that would have left the university at the mercy of stray radioactivity. It wasn’t until a few hours ago that radiation levels dropped enough that we could bring the field down.

“But we’ve managed. The Founders had already built a smaller version of the Greenhouse, and we had a rudimentary waste recycling system, but over the past few generations we’ve really improved on our life support systems. The dome kept us trapped in here, but it also provided us with energy– not too much, but enough to light our homes and run the few manufacturing processes we needed to stay comfortable. So as you can see, we’re doing quite well down here.”

“Looks like you’re doing better than we are out in the rest of United America,” Danny said.

“What do you mean?” Sterling asked. Sylvia looked curiously at Danny. Behind her, Theo picked an apple and bit into it.

“I hate to tell you this,” Danny said, “but the War your people left behind a hundred years ago is still running. Mars Colony has become the Kingdom of Mars, and I’m guessing a few countries in your old maps have been destroyed or annexed by one Power or another, but for the most part nothing has changed. The War is still on.”

“Does that mean we’re going to get bombed again?” Sterling looked up nervously as if trying to gaze through the wilderness above them.

“I doubt it.” When the shield had fallen, Earth defense had aimed a fifth of its defensive resources at Cambridge. No stray Martian nuke getting through this time, Danny thought. “But that’s just the problem. You here at Harvard have no fear of nuclear attack because of your shield, but the rest of the Solar System has been locked in an arms race since the 2130s. Only the threat of mutually assured destruction has prevented all-out war––”

Sterling squinted at Danny. “You mean to say that nobody but Harvard has discovered how to construct the Goodman Field?”
“Exactly.”

“Hasn’t anyone attempted to follow our research?”

“We’ve tried–– but with what infrastructure? The First War destroyed everything, including the data we needed to really understand the physics of force fields. The only copies of your research were at CERN when the Martians bombed it, so we would have had to start from scratch. But Mars and Luna never had a particle accelerator big enough to do the job, and if any of the three Powers had tried to build another Very Large Hadron Collider, the other two would have blasted it before it was half finished. No, your shield is our only hope now to end the war forever.”

Finally, Sylvia’s eyes locked with Danny’s, and she spoke. “You want us to show you how to build the Goodman Field.”

“Yes.”

“You would use it to conquer your enemies–– the Japanese, the Martians.”

“We would use it for the good of Earth Defense, of course.” Sylvia’s eyes bore into him. He suddenly felt trapped by the heat. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He wiped it off with the back of his hand. “We’d use it to defend ourselves from attack––”

“I am sorry, Danny–– Theo–– but this matter concerns all of the College, and I cannot assist or refuse you without the involvement of the Congress. They’re meeting in an hour to discuss the lowering of the shield– you can make your request to them directly at that time.”

Danny glanced at his watch: 05:21. Two and a half hours to go.

“Listen!” Danny snapped. “You have a technology here that means life or death to us here on Earth. If the Martians get it before we do, they’ll be able to blast us into oblivion without fear of retaliation.”

The twelve members of the Model Congress sat with him around a small circular table in the Government Room of University Hall, fifty feet below ground level. All were old, but beyond that they shared little in dress or manner. Sylvia wore her formal blue dress, while one of the younger Congressman wore a coffee-stained cotton shirt with mathematical formulae emblazoned across the front. Each had a placard in front of his seat stating name, position, degrees earned; the cards in front of the eldest ones used smaller type in order to fit all of the text. Dusty books and stacks of partially graded papers and homework assignments lay strewn across the table. The room smelled of chalk.

“And if you obtain the field generator?” growled a wizened man with a stick-shaped nose at Danny’s left. Danny read his card: Sydney Bass: Folklore, Engineering, English Literature, Applied Mathematics, Music. “You will do the same to them?”

“Of course not! If we have it, we can force them to surrender. Without any way to harm us, they’ll have no other choice.”
From across the table, a stout, light-skinned woman twice Danny’s age, wrinkled her nose and glared at him. Sandu Dennis: Romance Languages, Social Anthropology, Biophysics, Government. “And if they learn that you are constructing field generators— before they are finished? You will force them to attack you simply to prevent you from completing your defenses.”

The badly dressed man shuffled a paper out of the stack in front of him, waved it at the group, and exclaimed something in Japanese.
Another professor responded with a similar flow of gibberish. Panicked and confused, Danny wondered why he didn’t recognize their dialect. Then Sylvia leaned over to him and placed her frail black hand on his. “Apologies, Daniel,” she whispered. “Professor Bass speaks only Neo-English.”

“Neo-English?” he whispered back. The professors ignored him, engaged now in their own conversation. He suddenly recognized some of the words they were using– English, not Japanese, but interspersed with foreign-sounding words and odd clicking noises.
“It’s the local language– developed by our linguists many years ago. Some of our younger scientists use it exclusively. It’s built on certain concepts of unambiguous transfer of information that appeal to the more mathematically minded.”

The professors were still talking, but none of them seemed to be paying any attention to Danny. He had the feeling that they had dismissed him and moved on to some physics problem. Suddenly frustration coursed through him. He stood up, leaned across the table, and snatched the paper from the hands of the ill-dressed professor. The title stared at him across the page: it looked to Danny like most of the words were formed by both letters and numbers. He only recognized one word in the title: Goodman.

He said, “This is it, isn’t it? This is the information we’re looking for?” Professor Bass turned on him, eyes wide. “Don’t worry,” Danny told him. “I can’t read it.”

Undeterred, the professor rose from his seat, still reaching for the paper. Danny had a sudden, wild impulse to flee the room with it. Just one shot with the wasp gun, he thought. Just one shot, and I could waltz out of here with the entire stack of papers, deliver the plans for the field generator to the Pentagon, save the whole fucking world. We could find someone to translate them– somehow–

Calm down, he told himself. He handed the papers to the furious professor.

“Look, it’s very simple. The future of the Earth, of the entire Solar System, depends on your decision.” Danny scanned the round table, searching for support. He received twelve inscrutable stares in return. “If you do not assist us, the Martians will come next. For the glory of their genetically enhanced Overkings, they’ll tear you all to shreds unless you give them what they want. You’ll have Japanese skybots swarming in off the Atlantic ready to eat you alive. You have no choice–”

From the other end of the table came a wispy cough. Professor Bass cleared his throat.

“We are a peaceful people,” he said. “We have lived under these tunnels for generations, making art, music, and mathematics—not war. We don’t share the United Empire’s goals of conquest. I am sorry, Mr. Bauer, but until we have considered further, we cannot accede to your requests for information. That is all.”

In the ensuing silence, Danny’s watch beeped seven o’clock.

“They won’t go for it,” he told Theo.

“Shit. Okay, bug check.”

They stood in a waiting room just outside the Congress chamber. The Council had led Danny there to confer privately with Theo after making its decision. The room was small and, other than a long wooden bench along the wall, empty; it took them only a minute to scan for listening devices and find the room clean.

“New orders from on high,” Theo said finally. “I got a transmission from the ‘copter. Japanese cruiser coming in from low Earth orbit, and we’re out of time. In case of diplomatic failure, we’re to use all means necessary to obtain a technical readout of the field generator, including the threat or actual use of force. If that fails, an Earth Defense legion shows up in thirty minutes, to hell with secrecy, and takes the place over, finds the field generator tech. After it leaves, we nuke the place, its shields go up, and nobody can get in. In which case the Marts and the Japs know exactly what the fuck we’re up to, and we might well have a nuclear war on our hands. So we’d better find that readout.”

Danny shook his head. “Thirty minutes? We can’t find a readout in thirty minutes. There are no readouts, except the ones written in Harvardese. . . can’t we just take a hostage?”

“No good. Even if we found someone who knows how the physics behind the field generator, we have no guarantee that they’ll talk-- and we’ll only get one chance at secrecy here. But don’t worry. We can still get a readout. If you run over to the field generator with the Pelner scanner, I’ll head topside to the ‘copter. You radio the results to me, and I’ll send them on to the Pentagon.”

“Beautiful plan,” Danny snapped. “Except for the fact that we have no idea where to find the field generator.”

Theo grinned. “Maybe you don’t. I’ve known where it is for the past hour.”

Danny stared at him.

“While you were playing ambassador, I was out here fiddling with the Pelner scanner. Guess what happened when I aimed it directly over my head? Bingo! It registered a power source up there like you wouldn’t believe, somewhere near ground level in this building.”

“The field generator.”

“That or the world’s largest popcorn maker. The readings were fluctuating like crazy.” Theo proffered the scanner to Danny. “I’ll go up to the ‘copter and start talking to headquarters. You find the generator.”

Danny took the last flight three steps at a time, skidding to a halt across the white marble floor when he found himself in an open space at the top of the stairs. He was in the entry corridor of University Hall. Sunlight peered through the thin window above a set of double doors at one end of the hallway. The air was thick with dust. Near Danny, several passageways cut across the main hall, but all were dark and appeared unused. Danny wondered for a moment whether the scanner had led him to the wrong building.

Then he saw four figures fifty feet down the hallway, standing in front of a second set of double doors. They were young men, all of them tall and heavyset, wearing scarlet uniforms. They stared at Danny in alarm. Guards. One of them reached for a device, maybe a gun, at his belt. Another stepped forward and called out, “Hey, you shouldn’t be–”

At that moment, Danny fired his wasp gun. He didn’t shoot to kill: the bullet struck the floor ten feet in front of the nearest of the student guards, scarring the marble as it detonated. All four collapsed instantly to the ground. Danny felt a sharp pain, like a migraine coursing through his entire body, as the wasp virus entered his mouth and eyes. His artificially enhanced immune system kept the virus in check, and the pain quickly subsided.

Danny ran the length of the hallway and scanned the unconscious bodies. As he’d suspected, they carried only twenty-first century handguns, nothing his armorsuit couldn’t have handled. On the other hand, it looked like one of the guards had drawn some sort of radio transmitter. With secrecy so essential, the latter was an even more dangerous weapon as far as Danny was concerned. He flicked on his headset. “Theo,” he murmured. “Could you look around for any radio signals originating from sources on campus? I just ran into a security detail, and I think they might have sent out a distress signal ”

“Copy that,” Theo crackled back. “I’m going up to get a better view of any incoming Japanese bots, but I’ll stay within radio range.
You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

Danny thought: Plenty of time. With the wasp gun in one hand and the scanner in the other, he pushed open one of the doors at the end of the hall.

The room was a maze of machinery. Four huge metal boxes, connected to each other by wires and cables, took up the four corners of the room. In the center of the room, twenty feet from Danny, an old computer stood on a round table. Hooked up to it were various dials, panels, and keyboards, all of which were strung together by dozens of tangled wires, and what looked to be the main apparatus, a four-foot-tall silver sphere on the center of the table. Above the field generator, the ceiling of the room was made of clear glass, giving Danny a view of the evening sky.

Danny started pressing buttons on the Pelner scanner, attempting to generate a readout of the machine’s inner workings. Theo had been right, he found; it was producing all sorts of mysterious signals. With a few minutes and a bit of luck, though, he hoped to be able to gather enough data to give headquarters something to work with–

“How did you get in here?”

Sterling’s voice. The little man stepped out from behind one of the metal boxes. Danny was unsurprised to see that he was unarmed, carrying only the old flashlight that he took with him everywhere. Still, he ignored Danny’s gun and planted himself boldly between Danny and the rest of the room.

Danny said, “This is it. Your last chance to give us what we want. Get out of my way and let me do my job, and I won’t have to hurt you." Sterling didn’t move, just looked at him silently. Danny raised the pistol. At such close range, a mis-aimed shot could damage the machinery when it exploded, and would harm Danny as well; he aimed for Sterling’s chest.

Sterling clutched his flashlight in one hand, pointing it at Danny as if ready to blind him with it. “Danny,” he said, “you’re wasting your time. I’m not moving.”

“Why? Do you want to condemn the world to another century of warfare?”

“The wars would happen anyway,” Sterling replied calmly. “With greater defensive technology comes greater offensive technology. Goodman’s own theory suggests methods for building weapons that could break through any force field. If you get this technology, the only result will be a short period of United Empire dictatorship, ending when one of your vassal states builds its first Goodman Cannon.”

“That’s not–”

Sterling shook his head. “I’m sorry, Danny, but we have made our decision. I’m not letting you pass.”

“Then I’m sorry,” Danny said,“but I’ll have to kill you.”

He fired the wasp gun, and at the same time, Sterling turned on his flashlight. But instead of light, the flashlight emitted a beam of darkness. The bullet struck the shadowy cone of the flashlight and exploded. Sterling and the rest of the room had disappeared, hidden by the dark, and all Danny could see was smoke as the cone reflected all the force of the explosion back at him. He felt virus flood into his system, sear its way through his bloodstream. He felt heat–

Cold stone pressed against Danny’s cheek. He was lying on the floor. Blood trickled from his mouth. His eyes began to focus, and he saw that Sterling loomed over him, holding the wasp gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other.

“You didn’t tell me that you had miniature field generators,” Danny rasped.

Sterling’s voice sounded far away. “Just this one. They aren’t self-sustaining, so they take a great deal of energy, and they’re difficult to build when we have so few raw materials. But I hope you’re starting to appreciate my point about the Goodman Field being useful as a weapon.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. You’ll have to hand over the technology whether you like it or not. United Empire soldiers will be landing here within the next five minutes.”

Sterling frowned. “I don’t think so. Do you have a radio receiver? Turn it on.” Danny did. He heard nothing but static as he twisted the dial underneath his earlobe. Then the white noise vanished, and he heard an old woman speaking. Danny recognized her voice, smooth and confident.

“–Empire of the Americas has requested that we provide it with the technology for our force field generator,” Sylvia said.

“In the interest of fairness to the other solar governments, we initially refused them. As newcomers to the politics of this era, we find ourselves unable to support one government over another. We have therefore decided to offer the technology to all humanity.

“Please stand by for a transmission consisting of documentation on the field generator and its design. We will supply copies of our field generator plans in all major twenty-first century languages. Transmission will commence in sixty seconds.” Danny looked at his watch, started a mental timer. If they launched the missiles right now– he counted down silently: fifty-five. Fifty-four. He looked up through the glass: the sky was still bright, though the sun had fallen too low in the west to be visible from inside the generator room. He switched radio frequencies and tried to call Theo, but he picked up nothing but static-- the ‘copter wasn’t anywhere on campus. Searching the blank skies, he hoped that Theo would return in time. Forty-two. Forty-one.

“Why?” he asked suddenly. “Why, why?”

Sterling, who had been fiddling nervously with the dials on one of the field generator machines, turned to him. “We can’t power the dome on our own. I told you that. We’d considered from the start that we might have to– make some kind of threat, force your government to–” and he stopped. He looked tired.

“You’ve killed hundreds of people!” Danny said. “The thrill-seekers if they’re still out there. The policemen. Maybe my pilot.”

“Better that they should die than that. . . I’m sorry.” Danny was silent. He tried to continue his countdown, but he’d lost track. He stared up into the sky.

Sterling pointed. “Did you see something up there– falling?”

There was a bright light overhead– and then, swiftly and silently, dark fell over the campus, and all that Danny could see was the flickering light of the computer monitor.

“So,” Sterling said quietly. “How about that tour?”