Nathaniel Stoddard nodded, considering the man who sat across from him. Thinner, he thought. And not just in body. Pale as well, with the pallor that comes from long months inside a submarine, or a spaceship.
“I agree, but . . . ” He pressed a spot on the desk screen, and a thin-film rectangle slid up along one wall.
“India hurt us,” he said quietly. “Not so much physically—it was the sinkhole of the Alliance—but in our souls. Our first major brush with the Domination, and we lost. Granted it was the Indians’ own damn fault, that disinformation campaign wouldn’t have produced secession if they hadn’t been completely irrational about it. Granted, but we still lost, and another three hundred million went under the Yoke.”
He rapped the desk with his knuckles. “First, we needed a victory and the asteroid agreement is that. What we have to guard against is not treason, that’s the enemy’s problem. What we have to fear is defeatism; the turning-away from useful work into hedonism, because people don’t think there is a future. That’s the real danger, in the short term.”
“I’d rather have kicked the Snakes out of the belt and everything outward.”
Stoddard shook his head. “Not feasible, Colonel. It was turning into a struggle of attrition, and they outnumber us.” He produced his pipe, took comfort from the ritual of lighting it. “Nor can we fight full-scale near Earth, not anymore. India took us to the brink of that, and it’s only the sheer insanity of Draka ruthlessness that let it get that far.” He puffed. “Now, list for me the positive aspects of these miserable few years.”
Lefarge shrugged. “The Alliance will stand, now.”
Stoddard nodded; the constituent nations had agreed to a full merger of sovereignty. A pity in a way—he had always regretted the increasing uniformity of life in the Alliance—but necessary.
“And not just among the electorate, either.” His expression became wholly blank. “Now, I’m about to tell you something that requires complete commitment. If I’m not satisfied by your reactions from this point on, then the only way you will leave this building is as a corpse.”
Lefarge sat upright, a slow uncoiling motion. His eyes met the other man’s for a long moment.
“You’re serious,” he said flatly.
“Never more so. Want me to continue?”
The moment stretched. “Yes.”
Stoddard cupped the bowl of the pipe. “We—that is, the permanent staff just below the political level—we’ve become convinced that if things go on as they are, we’re headed for the Final War. If only because the limits of the Domination’s ability to adapt to technical progress are on the horizon, and they’ll bring everything down in wreckage rather than see us reduce them to irrelevance.”
Lefarge smiled. “Then the only alternatives are annihilation or surrender?”
“Surrender is annihilation, certainly for freedom, probably for humanity,” he said, nodding agreement. “And the Final War is annihilation, too; it’s the seeping realization of that that’s been paralyzing our leadership echelons.” He touched another spot on the screen, and a starfield lit the rectangle that hung from the ceiling.
“Tell me, Fred, what do you know about fusion power?”
Lefarge blinked narrow-eyed at the older man. “Controlled? Still a ways off. Plasma confinement, we just reached break-even, possibly a workable reactor by the turn of the century. Inertial confinement shows some promise. Solid-state tunneling reactions are tricky and we still don’t understand them: much longer.”
“Look at this, then.” A schematic appeared, a huge sphere with a tube protruding from each end, like a straw through an orange. “Build a big sphere; doesn’t matter much of what, as long as it’s thick enough. Throw fusion bombs in through this magnetic catapult. Set them off; we’ve got an electron-beam system that looks likely to work, but uranium’s cheap off-planet these days. Bomb goes off, vacuum, no blast. Just radiant energy; shell absorbs the energy, you extract the energy, then beam it anywhere you want via microwave. Simple, robust, nearly as cheap as solar past Mars . . . ”
“Useful,” the younger man said without relaxing his lynx stare. “Particularly in the Belt. With that, we could really set up a self-sustaining system, and fast. But that isn’t what you had in mind.”
“No. Incidentally, we think the Draka are using a much cruder form of this to mine ice from Sinope or Himalia, off Jupiter.” Another tap on the screen. The artifact that appeared this time was a simple tube of coils and large-scale industrial magnets floating free in space, contained by the outline of an enormous box. “What’s buried in New Mexico and eats power?”
“Linear accelerator . . . ” His hands gripped the rests of his chair. “Antimatter, by God!”
“Right the first time, give the man a cigar.” The stem of the pipe pointed. “And that’s the first of the secrets you’ll be expected to guard. You think, Fred. Think.”
Slowly. “It can’t be for bombs. We’ve already got bigger weapons than we can use.” A pause. “Spaceship drives?”
A nod. “Paahtly. The ultimate reaction drive. We’ve tested models with the minute amounts we’ve made here Earthside. A great advantage, even over the improved pulsedrive models we’re working on. Even over the fusion models that we’ll have in a decade.”
“But not enough,” Lefarge said. “It’ll never be enough, a better weapon, more weapons, even when we’ve got a lead we’re too gutless to use it.”
The general frowned. “Fred, the price of open war is too high. And getting higher! They can at least copy what we do.” He shook his head, waited for a second, then summoned up another image. “All right, look at this.”
This was a spaceship, with an outline he recognized beside it for comparison; a Hero-class deep-space cruiser, the type he had been operating out of in the Belt. Those had a 7,000-tonne payload . . . and this one was dwarfed by the model beside it. A huge cylinder, basically; a wheel and a ball at one end, at the other a long stalk and a cup.
Awareness struck him. “Judas Priest!” he wheezed. “A starship!” For a moment he was a boy again, watching Bat Markam, Alliance Future Patrol, planting the blue-and-gold on a planet of green-ten-tacled aliens . . . Then his teeth skinned back. “Shit.” A bolthole.
“How do you feel about the idea, Fred?”
“Jesus . . . ” He ran a hand over his face. “General, could we do it?”
A shrug. “Ayuh. Theory’s all right, the engineering is big but nothing radical. Have to test the drive, but the math works. Alpha Centauri in forty years. And, Fred, they’ve been looking that way with the Big Eye.” That was the fifty-kilometer reflector at the L-5 beyond Lunar farside. “There’s a planet there.”
The excitement surged again, mixed sourly with bitterness at the back of his throat. “Inhabitable?”
“Mebbe. Mebbe not. It’s got an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, water vapor, continents and oceans . . . Yes, the definition’s that good. A little smaller than Earth and further out, and the orbit’s funny, what you’d expect.” The Centauri system had three stars, that must be complex. “A Mars-type as well, subjovian gas giants, moons, asteroids we think from the orbital data. A planet by itself isn’t enough these days.” More slowly: “How do you feel about it, Fred?”
Unconscious of the general’s stare, the younger man rose and paced, running a hand through his close-cropped black hair. “Christ. I love it; that’s something I’ve dreamed since I was a kid. When the news flash came through about the Conestoga reaching orbit, I was on my first date, you know? Sheila Washansky. Her folks were away for the afternoon, we were on the couch upstairs, I had my hand up her skirt and the TV on downstairs—and I dumped her on the floor, I got up so fast. Never even noticed her walking out the door. Thirteen, my first chance to score, and I never noticed: that shows you how I feel.”