“Make one, very very fast.”
She shook her head emphatically, setting her earrings swinging. “Jim, where is your sense of realism? Whether it could be done even in principle I don’t know. But it absolutely can’t be done in the time available.”
“Hey, that’s my line,” McNally complained. He nudged the joystick forwards and the altimeter needle began to drift slowly down.
“Jim. Just how much weight can you push into interplanetary space?”
“Depends where you’re going and how fast you need to get there. The old Galileo probe weighed about 750 pounds and it had a 2,500-pound spacecraft to push it around. But we used several gravitational slingshots to get it out to Jupiter.”
“Give me a number.”
“At the extreme? Think of four thousand pounds.”
“Six B-61s, each seven hundred pounds, ten feet long and a foot wide. A third of a megaton each if we use the Model Seven version. Could you launch those?”
“Maybe. But it’s not enough.”
Judy fingered her necklace thoughtfully. Suddenly her mind seemed to be elsewhere.
The Sandia Corporation’s newest building, Number 810, took up about 8,000 square metres of the centre of Technical Area One, deep inside Kirtland AFB. With the love of acronyms which characterizes large corporations everywhere, the building was labelled CNSAC: the Center for National Security and Arms Control. Security began with its physical layout, which had been designed so as to guarantee secure communications within and between the four elements of its programme: Systems Analysis, Advanced Concepts, Systems Assessment, and Remote Monitoring/Verification.
Judy loved Advanced Concepts. Its remit was to investigate new technologies whose development might threaten the defence of the USA, and to propose countermeasures in the event such techniques were identified. She loved the Group because of its creativity, the wonderful and wacky ideas which it tossed around, the sheer fun of it, like the vacuum bomb concept which they had been running with, pre-asteroid. There were no fools here.
Not even Advanced Concepts could stop the unstoppable. But at last, depending on answers she got here, Judy thought there might just be a way. An extremely long shot, longer even than Ollie’s deranged story about a manuscript. She turned into the secure building. Her slim fingers were still running over her pearl necklace.
Vincenzo’s Manuscript
We, the undersigned, by the Grace of God, Cardinals of the Holy Roman Empire, Inquisitors General throughout the whole of the Christian Republic, Special Deputies of the Holy Apostolical Chair against heretical depravity.
Whereas this Holy Congregation has found that you, Vincenzo Vincenzi, son of the late Andrea Vincenzi of Florence, aged seventy years, have been found to advocate the proposition that the Sun is at the centre of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth moves and is not at the centre of the universe; which propositions, due to Copernicus and Galileo, are contrary to the authority of the Holy and Divine Scriptures, and are absurd and erroneous in faith; and whereas it has also been found that you embrace the belief of Giordano Bruno that the stars are suns scattered through infinite space, and that living creatures may inhabit planets orbiting these stars, which opinion is also absurd and erroneous in faith; and that you instruct pupils in the same opinions contrary to the Holy Scriptures; we find, pronounce, judge and declare, in the name of Christ and His Most Glorious Virgin Mother Mary, that you have rendered yourself guilty of heresy.
So we the undersigned cardinals pronounce.
Webb thought, plus ça change: I meet little cardinals at every conference. He looked out of the little window. The 747 had now entered the dark hemisphere of the Earth, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.
Ollie darling. Okay so the Holy Roman Inquisition gets a bad press but Vincenzo can’t really complain. If he’d been tried in Germany or the Alps he’d have been tortured and executed, no question. The good Doctor Karpzov of Leipzig, a contemporary of Vincenzo, managed to procure the deaths of twenty thousand witches in the course of his saintly life. Such was his virtue that, in between carbonizing old ladies, he read the Bible fifty-three times.
Was the Holy Office paving the way in this Madness? It was not. On the contrary it was often accused of being soft on witches. An accused witch in the custody of the Holy Office had protection, in the form of the Instructio pro formandis processibus in causis strigum, sortilegiorium, et maleficiorum. This little document puts women in their place: genus est maxime superstitiosum. The silly things are prone to vivid imaginings, false confessions and the like (my vivid imaginings would set your kilt on fire). The Instructio therefore insists on caution in proceeding to an arrest, accepting testimony and so on. Torture was applied only after the suspect had had a chance to mount a defence. Even when maleficio was established, first-time offenders who repented were only banished, or made to abjure on cathedral steps, or put under house arrest or whatever.
There were, however, three classes of felon who risked being barbecued: second offenders (two strikes and you’re out), hard core heretics (e.g. denying the Virgin Birth), and the stubbornly impenitent, like Vincenzo. Policy was to burn the first lot and have a go at last-minute conversion for the other two.
Anyway, what are a few hours or days of pain measured against the everlasting torment of Hell? If those few hours or days will persuade a heretic to recant, and so attain Heaven, then surely true cruelty lies in withholding the services of the torturer? To flinch from applying a little unpleasantness is to fail in one’s duty to the Blessed Virgin, to the Church and to the heretic him/herself. It’s all spelled out in Masini’s Sacro Arsenale 2nd ed., Genoa 1625.
You have to be cruel to be kind, as Miss Whiplash said to the bishop.
So where does that leave our Vincenzo? Read on, sailor.
Remarkably, given the ferocious attack on them by Vincenzo, the cardinals had provided him with an escape clause. Perhaps the Grand Duke had thrown a long shadow, and there had been a nod from His Holiness; who could say? At any rate, on condition that he recanted, cursed and reviled the said opinions, the Inquisitors declared, he would be sentenced only to life imprisonment.
Vincenzo now had a choice. He could die for his beliefs, like Giordano Bruno before him, who had gone to the stake convinced in the plurality of worlds. Along that route lay the rack and the strappado; and beyond that the stake. Or he could adopt Galileo as his role-model, and abjure on his knees, his hand on a Bible held by the Inquisitor.
Vincenzo recanted. The territio realis—showing him the horrific instruments of torture as a prelude to using them — had done the trick. He was duly sentenced to carcere perpetuo. Whether by nudging from the Grand Duke’s emissary was unclear, but the sentence was commuted to confinement, for life, to the estates of the Duke of Tuscany. Since the Duke owned much of northern Italy the sentence was, finally, nominal. Vincenzo and his mistress had spent the remainder of their days in obscurity, under the Duke’s protection.