SWIMMING
POOL
“Mr. Jourgensen, at
what point did you become aware that the Iranian government was
threatening to violate UN Resolution 216 and the Non-Proliferation
Protocol to the 1956 Geneva Accords?”
Roger sweats under
the hot lights: his heartbeat accelerates. “I’m not sure I
understand the question, sir.”
“I asked you a direct
question. Which part don’t you understand? I’m going to repeat
myself slowly: when did you realize that the Iranian government was
threatening to violate Resolution 216 and the 1956 Geneva Accords
on nuclear proliferation?”
Roger shakes his
head. It’s like a bad dream, unseen insects buzzing furiously
around him. “Sir, I had no direct dealings with the Iranian
government. All I know is that I was asked to carry messages to and
from a guy called Mehmet, who, I was told, knew something about our
hostages in Beirut. My understanding is that the colonel has been
conducting secret negotiations with this gentleman or his backers
for some time—a couple of years—now. Mehmet made allusions to
parties in the Iranian administration, but I have no way of knowing
if he was telling the truth, and I never saw any diplomatic
credentials.”
There’s an
inquisition of dark-suited congressmen opposite him, like a jury of
teachers sitting in judgment over an errant pupil. The trouble is,
these teachers can put him in front of a judge and send him to
prison for many years, so that Jason really will grow up with a father who’s a voice on the
telephone, a father who isn’t around to take him to air shows or
ball games or any of the other rituals of growing up. They’re
talking to each other quietly, deciding on another line of
questioning: Roger shifts uneasily in his chair. This is a closed
hearing, the television camera a gesture in the direction of the
congressional archives: a pack of hungry Democrats have scented
Republican blood in the water.
The congressman in
the middle looks toward Roger. “Stop right there. Where did you
know about this guy Mehmet from? Who told you to go see him, and
who told you what he was?”
Roger swallows. “I
got a memo from Fawn, like always. Admiral Poindexter wanted a man
on the spot to talk to this guy, a messenger, basically, who was
already in the loop. Colonel North signed off on it and told me to
charge the trip to his discretionary fund.” That must have been the
wrong thing to say, because two of the congressmen are leaning
together and whispering in each other’s ears, and an aide
obligingly sidles up to accept a note, then dashes away. “I was
told that Mehmet was a mediator,” Roger adds. “In trying to resolve
the Beirut hostage thing.”
“A mediator.” The guy
asking the questions looks at him in disbelief.
The man to his
left—who looks as old as the moon, thin white hair, liver spots on
his hooked nose, eyelids like sacks—chuckles appreciatively. “Yeah.
Like Hitler was a diplomat. ‘One more
territorial demand’—” He glances round. “Nobody else remember
that?” he asks plaintively.
“No, sir,” Roger says
very seriously.
The prime
interrogator snorts. “What did Mehmet tell you Iran was going to
do, exactly?”
Roger thinks for a
moment. “He said they were going to buy something from a factory at
Dimona. I understood this to be the Israeli Defense Ministry’s
nuclear-weapons research institute, and the only logical item—in
the context of our discussion—was a nuclear weapon. Or weapons. He
said the Ayatollah had decreed that a suicide bomber who took out
the temple of Yog-Sothoth in Basra would achieve paradise, and that
they also had hard evidence that the Soviets have deployed certain
illegal weapons systems in Afghanistan. This was in the context of
discussing illegal weapons proliferation; he was very insistent
about the Iraq thing.”
“What exactly are
these weapons systems?” demands the third inquisitor, a quiet,
hawk-faced man sitting on the left of the panel.
“The shoggot’im, they
call them: servitors. There are several kinds of advanced robotic
systems made out of molecular components: they can change shape,
restructure material at the atomic level—act like corrosive acid,
or secrete diamonds. Some of them are like a tenuous mist—what Dr.
Drexler at MIT calls a utility fog—while others are more like an
oily globule. Apparently they may be able to manufacture more of
themselves, but they’re not really alive in any meaning of the term
we’re familiar with. They’re programmable, like robots, using a
command language deduced from recovered records of the forerunners
who left them here. The Molotov Raid of 1930 brought back a large
consignment of them; all we have to go on are the scraps they
missed and reports by the Antarctic Survey. Professor Liebkunst’s
files in particular are most frustrating—”
“Stop. So you’re
saying the Russians have these, uh, shoggoths, but we don’t have
any. And even those dumb Arab bastards in Baghdad are working on
them. So you’re saying we’ve got a, a shoggoth gap? A strategic
chink in our armor? And now the Iranians say the Russians are using
them in Afghanistan?”
Roger speaks rapidly.
“That is minimally correct, sir, although countervailing weapons
have been developed to reduce the risk of a unilateral preemption
escalating to an exchange of weakly godlike agencies.” The
congressman in the middle nods encouragingly. “For the past three
decades, the B-39 Peacemaker force has been tasked by SIOP with
maintaining an XK-PLUTO capability directed at ablating the ability
of the Russians to activate Project Koschei, the dormant alien
entity they captured from the Nazis at the end of the last war. We
have twelve PLUTO-class atomic-powered cruise missiles pointed at
that thing, day and night, as many megatons as the entire Minuteman
force. In principle, we will be able to blast it to pieces before
it can be brought to full wakefulness and eat the minds of everyone
within two hundred miles.”
He warms to his
subject. “Secondly, we believe the Soviet con trol of shoggoth
technology is rudimentary at best. They know how to tell them to
roll over an Afghan hill-farmer village, but they can’t manufacture
more of them. Their utility as weapons is limited—but
terrifying—but they’re not much of a problem. A greater issue is
the temple in Basra. This contains an operational gateway, and
according to Mehmet the Iraqi political secret police, the
Mukhabarat, are trying to figure out how to manipulate it; they’re
trying to summon something through it. He seemed to be mostly
afraid that they—and the Russians—would lose control of whatever it
was; presumably another weakly godlike creature like the K-Thulu
entity at the core of Project Koschei.”
The old guy speaks.
“This foo-loo thing, boy—you can drop those stupid K prefixes
around me—is it one of a kind?”
Roger shakes his
head. “I don’t know, sir. We know the gateways link to at least
three other planets. There may be many that we don’t know of. We
don’t know how to create them or close them; all we can do is send
people through, or pile bricks in the opening.” He nearly bites his
tongue, because there are more than
three worlds out there, and he’s been to at least one of them: the
bolt-hole on XK-Masada, built by the NRO from their secret budget.
He’s seen the mile-high dome Buckminster Fuller spent his last
decade designing for them, the rings of Patriot air-defense
missiles. A squadron of black diamond-shaped fighters from the
Skunk Works, said to be invisible to radar, patrols the empty skies
of XK-Masada. Hydroponic farms and empty barracks and apartment
blocks await the senators and congressmen and their families and
thousands of support personnel. In event of war they’ll be
evacuated through the small gate that has been moved to the
Executive Office Building basement, in a room beneath the swimming
pool where Jack used to go skinny-dipping with
Marilyn.
“Off the record now.”
The old congressman waves his hand in a chopping gesture. “I say
off, boy.” The cameraman switches off
his machine and leaves. He leans forward, toward Roger. “What
you’re telling me is, we’ve been waging a secret war since, when?
The end of the Second World War? Earlier, the Pabodie Antarctic
expedition in the twenties, whose survivors brought back the first
of these alien relics? And now the Eye-ranians have gotten into the
game and figure it’s part of their fight with Saddam?”
“Sir.” Roger barely
trusts himself to do more than nod.
“Well.” The
congressman eyes his neighbor sharply. “Let me put it to you that
you have heard the phrase, ‘the great filter.’ What does it mean to
you?”
“The great—” Roger
stops. Professor Gould, he thinks. “We
had a professor of paleontology lecture us,” he explains. “I think
he mentioned it. Something about why there aren’t any aliens in
flying saucers buzzing us the whole time.”
The congressman
snorts. His neighbor starts and sits up. “Thanks to Pabodie and his
followers, Liebkunst and the like, we know there’s a lot of life in
the universe. The great filter, boy, is
whatever force stops most of it developing intelligence and coming
to visit. Something, somehow, kills intelligent species before they
develop this kind of technology for themselves. How about meddling
with relics of the Elder Ones? What do you think of
that?”
Roger licks his lips
nervously. “That sounds like a good possibility, sir,” he says. His
unease is building.
The congressman’s
expression is intense. “These weapons your colonel is dicking
around with make all our nukes look like a toy bow and arrow, and
all you can say is It’s a good possibility,
sir? Seems to me like someone in the Oval Office has been
asleep at the switch.”
“Sir, Executive Order
2047, issued January 1980, directed the armed forces to standardize
on nuclear weapons to fill the mass destruction role. All other
items were to be developmentally suspended, with surplus stocks
allocated to the supervision of Admiral Poindexter’s joint
munitions expenditure committee. Which Colonel North was detached
to by the USMC high command, with the full cognizance of the White
House—”
The door opens. The
congressman looks round angrily. “I thought I said we weren’t to be
disturbed!”
The aide standing
there looks uncertain. “Sir, there’s been an, uh, major security
incident, and we need to evacuate—”
“Where? What
happened?” Demands the congressman. But Roger, with a sinking
feeling, realizes that the aide isn’t watching the house committee
members: and the guy behind him is Secret Service.
“Basra. There’s been
an attack, sir.” A furtive glance at Roger, as his brain freezes in
denial: “If you’d all please come this way . . .”