Missile Gap Read online

  The colonel whistles tunelessly through his teeth: he's finally worked out the scale. It looks like a flying boat with clipped wings, jet engines clustered by the sides of its cockpit — but no flying boat ever carried a runway with a brace of MiG-21s on its back. "It's bigger than a cruiser! Is it nuclear powered?"

  "Of course." The chairman's grin slips. "It cost as much as those moon rockets of Sergei's, colonel-general. Try not to drop it."

  Gagarin glances up, surprise and awe visible on his face. "Sir, I'm honored, but—"

  "Don't be." The chairman cuts him off. "The promotion was coming your way anyway. The posting that comes with it will earn you as much honor as that first orbit. A second chance at space, if you like. But you can't fail: the cost is unthinkable. It's not your skin that will pay the toll, it's our entire rationalist civilization." Kosygin leans forward intently.

  "Somewhere out there are beings so advanced that they skinned the earth like a grape and plated it onto this disk — or worse, copied us all right down to the atomic level and duplicated us like one of those American Xerox machines. It's not just us, though. You are aware of the other continents in the oceans. We think some of them may be inhabited, too — nothing else makes sense. Your task is to take the Sergei Korolev, the first ship of its class, on an historic five-year cruise. You will boldly go where no Soviet man has gone before, explore new worlds and look for new peoples, and to establish fraternal socialist relations with them. But your primary objective is to discover who built this giant mousetrap of a world, and why they brought us to it, and to report back to us — before the Americans find out.

  Chapter Four: Committee Process

  The cherry trees are in bloom in Washington DC, and Gregor perspires in the summer heat. He has grown used to the relative cool of London and this unaccustomed change of climate has disoriented him. Jet lag is a thing of the past — a small mercy — but there are still adjustments to make. Because the disk is flat, the daylight source — polar flares from an accretion disk inside the axial hole, the scientists call it, which signifies nothing to most people — grows and shrinks the same wherever you stand.

  There's a concrete sixties-vintage office block with a conference suite furnished in burnt umber and orange, chromed chairs and Kandinsky prints on the walls: all very seventies. Gregor waits outside the suite until the buzzer sounds and the receptionist looks up from behind her IBM typewriter and says, "You can go in now, they're expecting you."

  Gregor goes in. It's an occupational hazard, but by no means the worst, in his line of work.

  "Have a seat." It's Seth Brundle, Gregor's divisional head — a grey-looking functionary, more adept at office back-stabbing than field-expedient assassinations. His cover, like Gregor's, is an innocuous-sounding post in the Office of Technology Assessment. In fact, both he and Gregor work for a different government agency, although the notional task is the same: identify technological threats and stamp on them before they emerge.

  Brundle is not alone in the room. He proceeds with the introductions: "Greg Samsa is our London station chief and specialist in scientific intelligence. Greg, this is Marcus." The bald, thin-faced German in the smart suit bobs his head and smiles behind his horn-rimmed glasses. "Civilian consultant." Gregor mistrusts him on sight. Marcus is a defector — a former Stasi spook, from back before the Brezhnev purges of the mid-sixties. Which puts an interesting complexion on this meeting.

  "Murray Fox, from Langley."

  "Hi," says Gregor, wondering just what kind of insane political critical mass Stone is trying to assemble: Langley and Brundle's parent outfit aren't even on speaking terms, to say the least.

  "And another civilian specialist, Dr. Sagan." Greg nods at the doctor, a thin guy with sparkling brown eyes and hippyish long hair. "Greg's got something to tell us in person," says Brundle. "Something very interesting he picked up in London. No sources please, Greg."

  "No sources," Gregor echoes. He pulls out a chair and sits down. Now he's here he supposes he'll just have to play the role Brundle assigned to him in the confidential briefing he read on the long flight home. "We have word from an unimpeachable HUMINT resource that the Russians have—" he coughs into his fist. "Excuse me." He glances at Brundle. "Okay to talk about COLLECTION RUBY?"

  "They're all cleared," Brundle says dryly. "That's why it says 'joint committee' on the letterhead."

  "I see. My invitation was somewhat terse." Gregor stifles a sigh that seems to say, all I get is a most urgent recall; how am I meant to know what's going on and who knows what? "So why are we here?"

  "Think of it as another collective analysis board," says Fox, the man from the CIA. He doesn't look enthused.

  "We're here to find out what's going on, with the benefit of some intelligence resources from the other side of the curtain."

  Doctor Sagan, who has been listening silently with his head cocked to one side like a very intelligent blackbird, raises an eyebrow.

  "Yes?" asks Brundle.

  "I, uh, would you mind explaining that to me? I haven't been on one of these committees before."

  No indeed, thinks Gregor. It's a miracle Sagan ever passed his political vetting: he's too friendly by far with some of those Russian astronomer guys who are clearly under the thumb of the KGB's First Department. And he's expressed doubts — muted, of course — about the thrust of current foreign policy, which is a serious no-no under the McNamara administration.

  "A CAB is a joint committee feeding into the Central Office of Information's external bureaux on behalf of a blue-ribbon panel of experts assembled from the intelligence community," Gregor recites in a bored tone of voice. "Stripped of the bullshit, we're a board of wise men who're meant to rise above narrow bureaucratic lines of engagement and prepare a report for the Office of Technology Assessment to pass on to the Director of Central Intelligence. It's not meant to reflect the agenda of any one department, but to be a Delphi board synergizing our lateralities. Set up after the Cuban fiasco to make sure that we never again get backed into that kind of corner by accidental group-think. One of the rules of the CAB process is that it has to include at least one dissident: unlike the commies we know we're not perfect." Gregor glances pointedly at Fox, who has the good sense to stay silent.

  "Oh, I see," Sagan says hesitantly. With more force: "so that's why I'm here? Is that the only reason you've dragged me away from Cornell?"

  "Of course not, Doctor," oozes Brundle, casting Gregor a dirty look. The East German defector, Wolff, maintains a smug silence: I are above all this. "We're here to come up with policy recommendations for dealing with the bigger picture. The much bigger picture."

  "The Builders," says Fox. "We're here to determine what our options look like if and when they show up, and to make recommendations about the appropriate course of action. Your background in, uh, SETI recommended you."

  Sagan looks at him in disbelief. "I'd have thought that was obvious," he says.

  "Eh?"

  "We won't have any choice," the young professor explains with a wry smile. "Does a termite mound negotiate with a nuclear superpower?"

  Brundle leans forward. "That's rather a radical position, isn't it? Surely there'll be some room for maneuver? We know this is an artificial construct, but presumably the builders are still living people. Even if they've got green skin and six eyes."

  "Oh. My. God." Sagan leans forward, his face in his hands. After a moment Gregor realizes that he's laughing.

  "Excuse me." Gregor glances round. It's the German defector, Wolff, or whatever he's called. "Herr Professor, would you care to explain what you find so funny?"

  After a moment Sagan leans back, looks at the ceiling, and sighs. "Imagine a single, a forty-five RPM record with a centre hole punched out. The inner hole is half an astronomical unit — forty-six million miles — in radius. The outer edge is of unknown radius, but probably about two and a half AUs — two hundred and forty five million miles. The disk's thickness is unknown — seismic waves are reflected
off a mirror-like rigid layer eight hundred miles down — but we can estimate it at eight thousand miles, if its density averages out at the same as Earth's. Surface gravity is the same as our original planet, and since we've been transplanted here and survived we have learned that it's a remarkably hospitable environment for our kind of life; only on the large scale does it seem different."

  The astronomer sits up. "Do any of you gentlemen have any idea just how preposterously powerful whoever built this structure is?"

  "How do you mean, preposterously powerful?" asks Brundle, looking more interested than annoyed.

  "A colleague of mine, Dan Alderson, did the first analysis. I think you might have done better to pull him in, frankly. Anyway, let me itemise: item number one is escape velocity." Sagan holds up a bony finger. "Gravity on a disk does not diminish in accordance with the inverse square law, the way it does on a spherical object like the planet we came from. We have roughly earthlike gravity, but to escape, or to reach orbit, takes tremendously more speed. Roughly two hundred times more, in fact. Rockets that from Earth could reach the moon just fall out of the sky after running out of fuel. Next item:" another finger. "The area and mass of the disk. If it's double-sided it has a surface area equal to billions and billions of Earths. We're stuck in the middle of an ocean full of alien continents, but we have no guarantee that this hospitable environment is anything other than a tiny oasis in a world of strangeness."

  The astronomer pauses to pour himself a glass of water, then glances round the table. "To put it in perspective, gentlemen, this world is so big that, if one in every hundred stars had an earth-like planet, this single structure could support the population of our entire home galaxy. As for the mass — this structure is as massive as fifty thousand suns. It is, quite bluntly, impossible: as-yet unknown physical forces must be at work to keep it from rapidly collapsing in on itself and creating a black hole. The repulsive force, whatever it is, is strong enough to hold the weight of fifty thousand suns: think about that for a moment, gentlemen."

  At that point Sagan looks around and notices the blank stares. He chuckles ruefully.

  "What I mean to say is, this structure is not permitted by the laws of physics as we understand them. Because it clearly does exist, we can draw some conclusions, starting with the fact that our understanding of physics is incomplete. Well, that isn't news: we know we don't have a unified theory of everything. Einstein spent thirty years looking for one, and didn't come up with it.

  But, secondly." He looks tired for a moment, aged beyond his years. "We used to think that any extraterrestrial beings we might communicate with would be fundamentally comprehensible: folks like us, albeit with better technology. I think that's the frame of mind you're still working in. Back in sixty-one we had a brainstorming session at a conference, trying to work out just how big an engineering project a spacefaring civilization might come up with. Freeman Dyson, from Princeton, came up with about the biggest thing any of us could imagine: something that required us to imagine dismantling Jupiter and turning it into habitable real estate.

  "This disk is about a hundred million times bigger than Dyson's sphere. And that's before we take into account the time factor."

  "Time?" Echoes Fox from Langley, sounding confused.

  "Time." Sagan smiles in a vaguely disconnected way. "We're nowhere near our original galactic neighborhood and whoever moved us here, they didn't bend the laws of physics far enough to violate the speed limit. It takes light about 160,000 years to cross the distance between where we used to live, and our new stellar neighborhood, the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Which we have fixed, incidentally, by measuring the distance to known Cepheid variables, once we were able to take into account the measurable red shift of infalling light and the fact that some of them were changing frequency slowly and seem to have changed rather a lot. Our best estimate is eight hundred thousand years, plus or minus two hundred thousand. That's about four times as long as our species has existed, gentlemen. We're fossils, an archaeology experiment or something. Our relevance to our abductors is not as equals, but as subjects in some kind of vast experiment. And what the purpose of the experiment is, I can't tell you. I've got some guesses, but…"

  Sagan shrugs, then lapses into silence. Gregor catches Brundle's eye and Brundle shakes his head, very slightly. Don't spill the beans. Gregor nods. Sagan may realize he's in a room with a CIA spook and an East German defector, but he doesn't need to know about the Alienation Service yet.

  "Well that's as may be," says Fox, dropping words like stones into the hollow silence at the table. "But it begs the question, what are we going to tell the DCI?"

  "I suggest," says Gregor, "that we start by reviewing COLLECTION RUBY." He nods at Sagan. "Then, maybe when we're all up to speed on that, we'll have a better idea of whether there's anything useful we can tell the DCI.

  Chapter Five: Cannon-Fodder

  Madeleine and Robert Holbright are among the last of the immigrants to disembark on the new world. As she glances back at the brilliant white side of the liner, the horizon seems to roll around her head, settling into a strange new stasis that feels unnatural after almost six months at sea.

  New Iowa isn't flat and it isn't new: rampart cliffs loom to either side of the unnaturally deep harbor (gouged out of bedrock courtesy of General Atomics). A cog-driven funicular railway hauls Maddy and Robert and their four shipping trunks up the thousand-foot climb to the plateau and the port city of Fort Eisenhower — and then to the arrival and orientation camp.

  Maddy is quiet and withdrawn, but Bob, oblivious, natters constantly about opportunities and jobs and grabbing a plot of land to build a house on. "It's the new world," he says at one point: "why aren't you excited?"

  "The new world," Maddy echoes, biting back the urge to say something cutting. She looks out the window as the train climbs the cliff-face and brings them into sight of the city. City is the wrong word: it implies solidity, permanence. Fort Eisenhower is less than five years old, a leukaemic gash inflicted on the landscape by the Corps of Engineers. The tallest building is the governor's mansion, at three stories. Architecturally the town is all Wild West meets the Radar Age, raw pine houses contrasting with big grey concrete boxes full of seaward-pointing Patriot missiles to deter the inevitable encroachment of the communist hordes. "It's so flat."

  "The nearest hills are two hundred miles away, past the coastal plain — didn't you read the map?"

  She ignores his little dig as the train squeals and clanks up the side of the cliff. It wheezes asthmatically to a stop besides a wooden platform, and expires in a belch of saturated steam. An hour later they're weary and sweated-up in the lobby of an unprepossessing barrack-hall made of plywood. There's a large hall and a row of tables and a bunch of bored-looking colonial service types, and people are walking from one position to another with bundles of papers, answering questions in low voices and receiving official stamps. The would-be colonists mill around like disturbed livestock among the piles of luggage at the back of the room. Maddy and Robert queue uneasy in the damp afternoon heat, overhearing snippets of conversation. "Country of origin? Educational qualifications? Yes, but what was your last job?" Religion and race — almost a quarter of the people in the hall are refugees from India or Pakistan or somewhere lost to the mysterious east forever — seem to obsess the officials. "Robert?" she whispers.

  "It'll be alright," he says with false certainty. Taking after his dad already, trying to pretend he's the solid family man. Her sidelong glance at him steals any residual confidence. Then it's their turn.

  "Names, passports, country of origin?" The guy with the moustache is brusque and bored, irritated by the heat.

  Robert smiles at him. "Robert and Madeleine Holbright, from Canada ?" He offers their passports.

  "Uh-huh." The official gives the documents a very American going-over. "What schooling have you done? What was your last job?"

  "I've, uh, I was working part-time in a garage. On my way through college
— I was final year at Toronto, studying structural engineering, but I haven't sat the finals. Maddy — Maddy's a qualified paramedic."

  The officer fixes her with a stare. "Worked at it?"

  "What? Uh, no — I'm freshly qualified." His abrupt questioning flusters her.

  "Huh." He makes a cryptic notation against their names on a long list, a list that spills over the edge of his desk and trails towards the rough floor. "Next." He hands the passports back, and a couple of cards, and points them along to the row of desks.

  Someone is already stepping up behind them when Maddy manages to read the tickets. Hers says TRAINEE NURSE. Robert is staring at his and saying "no, this is wrong."

  "What is it, Bob?" She looks over his shoulder as someone jostles him sideways. His card reads LABORER (unskilled); but she doesn't have time to read the rest.

  Chapter Six: Captain's Log

  Yuri Gagarin kicks his shoes off, loosens his tie, and leans back in his chair. "It's hotter than fucking Cuba !" he complains.

  "You visited Cuba, didn't you, boss?" His companion, still standing, pours a glass of iced tea and passes it to the young colonel-general before drawing one for himself.

  "Yeah, thanks Misha." The former first cosmonaut smiles tiredly. "Back before the invasion. Have a seat."

  Misha Gorodin is the only man on the ship who doesn't have to give a shit whether the captain offers him a seat, but he's grateful all the same: a little respect goes a long way, and Gagarin's sunny disposition and friendly attitude is a far cry from some of the fuckheads Misha's been stuck with in the past. There's a class of officer who thinks that because you're a zampolit you're somehow below them, but Yuri doesn't do that: in some ways he's the ideal New Soviet Man, progress personified. Which makes life a lot easier, because Yuri is one of the very few naval commanders who doesn't have to give a shit what his political officer thinks, and life would be an awful lot stickier without that grease of respect to make the wheels go round. Mind you, Yuri is also commander of the only naval warship operated by the Cosmonaut Corps, which is a branch of the Strategic Rocket Forces, another howling exception to the usual military protocol. Somehow this posting seems to be breaking all the rules…