“Was there war? Was there ever a shot fired against the West in all the years since 1945?”
Garishenko knocked the bottle off his desk onto the soft carpet of the floor. The room was soundless except for the hum of a generator that penetrated the air-conditioning ducts. Garishenko had not been outside these rooms for thirteen days; had spring come to Moscow?
“A last spring,” he said slowly, like a man awaking from a nightmare.
“What are you talking about?”
“This dreadful game.” He glanced up. “Do they believe it, Warnov? Are they celebrating their victory now in the lounge? Are they speaking of how easy it was to invade Europe and make it a Soviet sphere? Do they believe that the English surrendered or that the French were so easily bluffed or that the West Germans were so defenseless?”
“They celebrate their little victories,” Warnov said slowly. “You have done well, Alexei. They think that to defeat you is to defeat reality; they think that you are the world of the West, contained in your person, contained in all you have placed inside Naya. Naya is the West standing against us, threatening us; Naya has been defeated and you have been defeated, and because of your ego you cannot believe this has happened.”
“It will not be so easy for you.”
“What?”
“When you send the tanks across Germany. When it is flesh against flesh and machine against machine. It will not be so easy.”
“No struggle is easy, but the prize of our ideal…”
“No. Not ideals. In twenty years, we will have bound the rest of Europe to us as surely as the East is bound. In twenty years, they will be ours; they will burn our gas and our oil and they will be grateful for it. The American day passes in Europe. But we must be so impatient, we must have war.”
“Perhaps not. Perhaps it is only preparation,” Warnov said.
“No. The Kabul game was not preparation; the Paris game is not preparation. The war has already begun, and you know it and so do I.”
“General Garishenko,” Warnov said, again with softness. But the voice of the other man was broken with pain, a sense of grief and bitterness.
But Garishenko could not be consoled. He was a soldier and could not cry; he was a man of reason, of intellect; what he saw clearly he could not deny.
It was too late.
The generals had chosen to believe the computer and to see the game as reality.
The war had begun but the shots were silent for a little time, while the thought of inevitable victory settled into their minds. Tomorrow or in June or the next month, it would begin. And then, Garishenko thought, in the noise of death, no one would be able to admit they had been wrong.
21
Mrs. Neumann had guarded the thought all day, telling no one in computer analysis, not even Marge, who had become her best friend there in the past two years. The secret thrilled her because it was so unexpected.
Hanley had been dour as always, and they had gone over the same dreary ground at the morning conference on The Problem. It was now referred to in capital letters.
“Why do I keep feeding Tinkertoy this garbage? Garbage in and garbage out, you’ve been told that enough times.”
She had been given two new names and new links.
“Yes, Mrs. Neumann, you and everyone in CompAn have told me the same things,” Hanley said testily.
“Who are these people? More information from Quizon culled from the French newspapers?”
“No. Quizon is not the source.”
“Then who is?”
“I can’t say.”
“Oh, damn and double damn,” she said, realizing her own nerves were on edge. The months since Tinkertoy began fouling had cost her tranquility; she had fretted over the machine as she might worry about a child slow to learn to read.
“Mrs. Neumann.” Hanley had leaned forward over his desk gravely, folding his colorless fingers together in vague imitation of sincerity and frankness. All of his gestures seemed acquired, as though he had studied them for a long time and picked them up step by step and used them frequently, but without confidence and without certainty that their purpose was served.
“There are no coincidences,” he had begun “We always assume that. Why has Tinkertoy made these links over the last six months? Why do your geniuses — I beg your pardon, your people — make these rash conclusions from Tinkertoy’s ideas? Are the Warsaw Pact countries about to erupt again? Will there be a new Poland? Or will there be war in the West? All the scenarios are provided from what Tinkertoy tells us. ‘Garbage in and garbage out.’ Yes. But what was the garbage? Or is it garbage at all? Are you right in your assumptions? Can we go to the National Security Council with your conclusions, based on calculations made by Tinkertoy? Obviously, we have told them some things but we cannot tell them all.”
“They’re on alert; what more can we do?”
“Find the truth,” Hanley had said.
“But what is the source of this new data? I need sources.”
“Why, Mrs. Neumann?”
“Because we always have a source code for the data.”
Hanley had stared at her. “I don’t understand that.”
“There are access codes to Tinkertoy and source codes. Access shows point of origin of computer information — from me, from Marge, from National Computer Center in Roanoke, wherever. And access leads to source — access and source meet and…”
And then she had stopped speaking and she had stared at Hanley with her mouth open. She had gone into a reverie in which she was no longer in the small, cold room deep in the bowels of the Agriculture building explaining elements of Tinkertoy to a man who did not understand. She was in Tinkertoy in that moment; she thought finally she understood everything that had gone wrong.
If anything had gone wrong.
“Mrs. Neumann? Are you all right?”
“It couldn’t be that simple,” she had said at last, still entranced by her vision.
“What couldn’t be?”
“Of course, we never went back over the data for source after it was established. Marge punched the garbage in. It was from Quizon, part of it.…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you see?”
“Mrs. Neumann…”
“It doesn’t matter, Hanley,” she had said, snapping into the present again. She got up from the single straight chair in front of the metal desk and pulled the loose sweater around her. So damned cold in here, she thought again; he’s crazy.
“Everything matters. What’s this about access and source?”
She had smiled then. It was so rare an event that Hanley was startled by it and leaned back in his chair as though she had struck him. “I’m going to put Tinkertoy through a few paces this evening,” she had said. “After the others are gone. I want to be absolutely certain about this.”
“This is about The Problem then?”
“Oh course,” she had said. “What the hell do you think we’re talking about?”
“I hadn’t the faintest idea for the last five minutes.”
“You see, we checked the sources and we double-checked. Everything. Marge even ran an access check once. But what about source and access together? You see, I’ll have to get the logs together.” She had rubbed her hands in anticipation of the task; she was not a person to enjoy idleness or frustration in her work. This would be satisfying. “It’s just dreary work, Hanley, and there’s no point in explaining it to you. But it will work. It will.”
“But what are you going to find out?”
“If there’s garbage in Tinkertoy.”
“And if there isn’t?”
“Then you’re a damned fool not to go ahead and give the Security Council everything. I mean everything. If everything computes and we’re sure of the information and the sources and the access and everything checks with the log, then…”