The Trigger Page 27

  'Oh - I'm sure we could find someone. People get nostalgic for the oddest times - there are weekend medievalists. Civil War reenactors -'

  'But most people think the present is a better place to be,' she said, looking out the window at the bright bustle of Las Vegas. 'And I think most people still will, fifty years from now.'

  Fifty, I'll grant you, Horton thought. It's the next five I have doubts about. But he said nothing, leaving her optimism hovering over them like a pleasant scent on the night air.

  It was not in Jeffrey Horton's nature to let himself enjoy a demonstration of stagecraft for its own sake. He took his rewards from matching wits with the professional tricksters, and in piercing their illusions to discover the reality beneath them. Long before he had entertained any thought of a career in science, his two great curiosities were special effects and stage magic - two domains where deception is the highest art, and reality becomes elusive.

  When Horton's parents had taken him to see David Copperfield in Cincinnati as a present for his ninth birthday, they had taken his rapt attention for youthful wonder. In fact, he had spent the entire performance trying to penetrate Copperfield's bold, stage-filling illusions. On the drive home, Horton had done his best to spoil them for the rest of the family by telling them everything he had discerned or deduced. When many of the same illusions appeared on one of Copperfield's network specials, Horton had recorded it on CD-R and studied it until he could narrate a thorough dissection.

  At thirteen, his favorite film was The Stunt Man, which aud-aciously manipulated reality not only for the audience but for the protagonist - a desperate Steve Railsback dancing at the end of a godlike Peter O'Toole's string. Horton's favorite book was ILM: The Art of Special Effects, an expensive Christmas gift from his mother's brother, in which the secrets of virtually every popular film of Horton's youth were revealed. He watched every behind-the-scenes documentary he could, to the point that his brother Tom claimed Horton's favorite show was The Making Of.

  But it proved to be an obsession with diminishing returns. The more Horton knew, the harder it was to fool him, or even surprise him - the workaday tools of magicians and effects technicians alike changed slowly, and true innovations were rare.

  Pixar mattes were better than bluescreen mattes, which were better than rear-projection mattes, which were better than knowing that a scene in The Wizard of Oz had to end when it did because Dorothy was about to dance face-first into a giant matte painting. But they were all tricks designed to place real actors in unreal surroundings - and they were all equally unbelievable once detected.

  So it was with every tool in the standard repertoire of magician and technician alike. And since Horton was uninterested in using what he knew to fool others, there had come a point where he needed a new set of puzzles to test himself against. He had found them in Mr Tompkins's sophomore honors physics, where he was first introduced to the notion that science was an ongoing inquiry with unanswered questions, and not merely a catalog of things already discovered. The latter had hardly engaged his interest; the former came to consume him.

  Reality itself proved the grandest and most fascinating illusion of all - solid matter was largely empty space, stationary objects were in constant motion, straight lines were actually curved, most of the Universe was invisible, matter created itself spontaneously from vacuum, time was a variable, and every answer led to more questions.

  With those and even more paradoxical mysteries to occupy him, he had never been bored since - not one day in twenty years. A holiday church service, a long line at a state office, a charity telethon, a garrulous grandaunt, a cross-country car trip, the proceedings of any legislature, a round of golf - Mr Tompkins had effectively immunized him against all such tedium. His thoughts were unfettered even when duty or etiquette held his body in thrall, and there was always someplace more interesting for his mind to go.

  So Horton had let Lee choose their entertainments for the night, because it mattered more to her than to him what the choices were. But because Las Vegas was at its heart a mirage in the desert, illusions were its stock in trade, and all of Lee's choices had been working to reawaken the thirteen-year-old inside him.

  The shows at the Luxor and Treasure Island had shown him that he now was able to appreciate artistry in execution, and not just creativity in design. Putting a hundred-thousand-gallon flood and a set-destroying conflagration on the same stage half an hour apart was no small accomplishment - doing it twice a night and a dozen times a week was stagecraft of a very high order. Placing an audience smack in the middle of a sea battle - Lee had sworn she had heard the cannonballs flying overhead, and Horton had seen that she was not the only spectator to duck reflexively - was as bold as the demolition of the Britannia was complete.

  But it was during their final stop that everything came together for Horton, that the past and the present, work and play, intersected and merged. EFX had been the MGM Grand's showpiece for two generations, its several incarnations the fulfillment of a solemn promise that inside the doors of the Grand Theater awaited something that could not be seen anywhere else - not on any other stage, in any studio theme park, on any screen. You must come here, it whispered, and come they did, expecting not merely the best show on The Strip, but on the planet.

  Perhaps it was because Horton did not bring those expectations with him to his seat, or because the wizards of illusion had had fifteen years to further polish their craft. All he knew was that for the first hour, he watched with the edge-of-the-seat joy he had never quite mustered as a child. Like the grand finale of a fireworks show, the stunts and tricks came so closely spaced that there was scarcely time to appreciate them, much less to analyze them.

  It was an ostentatious display of technical virtuosity, a continu-ous parade of sights and sounds seamlessly bound together by grand music and the theme - it did not deserve to be called a plot - of a time-traveler skipping through the highlights of five billion years of Earth history.

  But midway through the show - shortly after the Yucatan asteroid had fallen from the sky and struck beyond the horizon with a blinding flash - Horton was suddenly yanked out of his suspension of disbelief. It was not the shaking of the ground underfoot or the blast of hot wind in his face, or the jungle being flattened before him, or the massive smoldering tree trunk that toppled out over the first dozen rows that did it.

  It was, rather, the lone pteranodon circling mournfully overhead, looking down on a devastated landscape, on the twilight of its era. Horton saw at once that the pteranodon wasn't an animatronic prop hanging from a wire, or a radio-controlled model, or a film projection, or any other trick of stagecraft that he recognized. The creature was flying above the ceiling, and was as real to Horton's eyes as any bird on the wing had ever been.

  Hologram, he thought as the pteranodon flew off, vanishing into the gathering darkness of the great cloud that foreshadowed the end of the age of dinosaurs. But Horton had never seen synthetic holoanimation with such detail or on such a scale. What's more, there had been no sign of a laser or other illumination in the darkened auditorium.

  Transmission holograms, mounted in the ceiling and lit from above -

  Horton spent the rest of the show watching for the effect to be repeated. He was rewarded for his diligence at the start of the finale, which depicted a techno-utopian future in the spirit of Popular Science of the 1950s - complete with flying cars overhead and a horizon-to-horizon architectural showcase of a megalopolis.

  Both effects were, if anything, more convincing than the pteranodon, if only because the shapes were simpler and the scale more familiar. Horton hardly noticed as the finale built to its cli-max. He was pondering the difficulties of creating those images -the incredible calculating power required, first to model the images in sufficient detail, then to derive the interference patterns for the digital holographic writer. Making a photorealistic hologram of an imaginary object taxed the most powerful graphical workstation. Making a photorealistic animation was
several orders of magnitude more demanding. The complexity of the diffraction grating -

  'Interference,' Horton said aloud, then clapped a hand over his mouth as Lee stared at him. He offered no explanation, ignoring her questioning look. But as the audience rose for a standing ovation and the cast began taking their bows, he edged toward the aisle. 'I have to make a call,' he said, and headed for the exit. I'll come back and find you.'

  The secure comset in his back pocket could have handled the task from Horton's seat. What he was seeking was privacy. He had to go all the way back to the limousine to find it, chasing Ruby out to the sidewalk.

  'General Stepak - yes, here, too. Moon and dark and all,' he said. 'General, I want the last two Mark Is that came out of the plant diverted to the Annex. At the gate at oh-eight-hundred, if possible. Yes, I know there are some located closer to me. But I need two that are as nearly identical as possible.'

  When Horton rejoined Lee in the casino, she demanded an explanation. He demurred, saying, 'I'll tell you when we're back in the suite.'

  'Are you trying to avoid spoiling my night out?'

  'I'm trying to avoid ending it prematurely. It's bad enough that one of us is still thinking about work.'

  'Why - who did you call?'

  'Management,' he said. Trust me - this will keep until you've had your fill of Las Vegas.'

  She acquiesced, but contented herself with only one more stop - at New York, New York, where the recreation of the Coney Island amusement park was scheduled to be demolished in the spring. Coaxing Ruby to accompany them, they rode the roller coaster three times in succession, spun madly on the Tilt-A-Whirl, laughed their way through a mirror maze, and rode the Ferris wheel for the panoramic view from on high. Still thinking them a couple, Ruby insisted they go on the Ferris wheel alone.

  'The ultimate carnival midway,' Horton said, leaning out over the side of the swaying car and looking out along The Strip.

  'Are you going to tell me now why we're going back early?'

  He told her. She did not argue. Their last view of the city that night was from the company helicopter as it wheeled about over McCarran International and headed home to the Annex.

  The Triggers arrived a few minutes after nine, delivered by a five-vehicle caravan and a platoon of uniformed men who looked decidedly unhappy about releasing the units to Horton's custody.

  By midafternoon, Val Bowden had the units carefully aligned and securely mounted side by side on the test pedestal at the south end of the test range. Thayer finished installing her hastily improvised controller synchronizer under floodlights.

  Two controls, amplitude and mix,' she explained to Horton. 'I've calibrated the two units as closely as I can without being able to directly measure the field strengths.'

  'We can refine it as we go, by trial and error if need be. Do you have enough puff caps?'

  'What sort of grid do you want?'

  'Fine. One per square meter.'

  'Well - I've had three people working on caps all day. Triple our usual batch. I don't know if they're dry yet, though.'

  'Find out, would you?'

  'You want to run a test now? I thought we'd have to wait till morning.'

  'I can't wait,' Horton confessed.

  'Are you that confident?'

  'No - I'm that insecure.'

  It was nearly midnight before the grid was ready. By then, word had spread, and a crowd had gathered. It seemed to Horton that everyone who was not working on the test was waiting and watching - the entire Annex staff gathered by the test range, their anticipation as palpable as the chill of the desert night.

  At 12.20 a.m., Thayer reported to Horton that the test grid was ready - fifteen hundred puff caps laid out in a thirty-by-fifty array fifty meters from the test pedestal. Horton turned to the manager of the test site.

  'Do we have enough light for the recorders? We're not going to get any other data off most of those placements.'

  'There's enough light,' he promised. The low-angle floods should give us ideal coverage - better than daytime.'

  'Okay,' he said. 'Clear the test range.' As the five-minute-warning horn began to sound across the compound, he turned back to Thayer. 'Any reason not to do this?'

  'None that I know of.'

  At one minute, a second, more urgent siren sounded - the signal that all Triggerable material should by then be beyond the safety radius of 500 meters. At thirty seconds, the test range's audio, video, and infrared recorders began receiving data.

  'Take it up slowly, now,' Horton said to Thayer, who was standing at the synchronizer, her hands on the controls.

  'I know the test profile. Boss,' she said. 'Honest, I do.'

  Horton retreated, joining Val Bowden at the plexiglas-shielded observation rail a few meters away.

  'Are you a betting man, Dr Horton?' the engineer asked.

  'Not even in Las Vegas,' was Horton's answer. 'But this isn't gambling - it's guessing. And your guess is as good as mine.'

  A sharp electronic chime counted down the last ten seconds. Then Thayer counted off the power setting, one percent at a time.

  The many tests done at that site had conditioned everyone's expectations - the front edge of the fifty-meter grid reached reaction threshold at fifteen percent, the back edge at forty percent, with fifty percent observed as the redline for test purposes.

  So there was an audible gasp of surprise from the previously hushed onlookers when the center of the first rank of the grid erupted in smoke just after Thayer called out, 'Six percent.'

  She hastily added, 'Holding,' and lifted her hand from the amplitude control. 'Boss?'

  'I counted five cells,' Horton said into his headset mic. 'What did you get?'

  The same,' Bowden said.

  'I didn't see it,' Thayer said with a sigh. 'I wasn't expecting anything yet.'

  'Take it to seven percent, step-wise,' he said, signaling Thayer with a lifted hand.

  'Resuming, step-wise,' Thayer acknowledged.

  It was eerily quiet on the test range, considering the number of people gathered there - so quiet that many of them heard the faint pfffft as the caps in the next three ranks of the grid erupted. It took a moment even for the most observant to realize that only the center of the next three ranks had gone - the rest of the first rank still had not reacted. It took a moment longer for the quickest-thinking observers to realize what it meant - but only a moment. Scattered whoops and cheers erupted in the wake of that realization.

  Horton was not among those cheering. Still withholding judgement, he ordered, 'Eight percent.'

  This time no one could mistake what was happening - the twin Mark Is were slicing a path through the middle of the grid, leaving the cells on either side undisturbed. The Trigger field had become a Trigger beam - and the celebration became more certain of itself, the cheers full-throated, the scattered applause solidifying.

  'Should have made that bet, Dr Horton,' said Bowden, clapping him on the back enthusiastically.

  'Don't jump to conclusions,' Horton said, stubbornly clinging to his fatalism. 'Nine percent, Lee.'

  But a scant few minutes later, even Horton had to accept the evidence of his eyes. At fifteen percent power, the beam cleared the center of the grid all the way to the last rank. The remainder of the cells were still unaffected.

  'Change the mix, now - minus one,' he called. That would reduce the output of the A unit by one percent, while increasing the output of the B a corresponding amount.

  The 'beam' swung to the left, taking out most of two files in the back half of the grid.

  'Minus two.'

  More cells on the left side erupted in smoke, clearing the grid to the edge. The audience had begun to thin by then, the cold driving people inside.

  'Plus two.'

  The right rear quarter of the grid erupted as the Trigger beam swept across it.

  'Boss, I think with a little practice, I could write my name with this thing,' said Lee. 'But I'm going to start building a
better controller first thing tomorrow.'

  Horton stared out at the floodlit test range. The initial euphoria of accomplishment had already faded, replaced by a vague but growing apprehension and the accumulated fatigue of a long day and a longer chase.

  That's enough for now. Shut it down, Lee. Send everyone to bed, with my thanks,' he said. 'Val, put out the word - department heads will meet in Conference C at eleven to review the test data.'

  'Are you going to call the Director now?' Thayer asked.

  Horton nodded. 'He'd expect me to.' He drew a deep breath of cold air and released it as a sigh. 'See you at eleven.'

  'Boss -'

  Her voice stopped him in the middle of turning away. 'Hmm?'

  'This was a good catch. Congratulations.'

  Horton waved a hand dismissively. It was just luck. If you hadn't dragged me away to Vegas -'

  'Newton and the apple. Archimedes and the bath. Luck favors the prepared mind.' She smiled. 'But maybe it favors the relaxed one, too. So I'll take a little of the credit when you talk to the Director.'

  'At least there won't be any trouble about the bill,' Horton said, then laughed. 'I charged everything to the firm, right down to Ruby's tip.'

  * * *

  18: Equity

  Pontiac, Michigan - Eleven-year-old convicted murderer Austin Williams heard himself described as both a 'sociopath' and a 'regular kid' as the sentencing phase of his trial began Monday. The four-foot-six-inch fourth-grader faces a potential life sentence without parole for the shooting deaths of his mother, Bernice Fortune, and two teenaged neighbors last October. Williams' aunt, Helen Battrick, pleaded for leniency, saying that the youth 'just thought he was playing a game' when he used his mother's semiautomatic pistol to fire at students disembarking from a school bus in front of his house.

  Complete story Court transcripts

  Young Perps Trial For Police, Jurors, Parents

  Karl Brohier did not mind being awakened early. He welcomed the news of the breakthrough, and was eager to see the data for himself. He returned to the Annex in time for breakfast the next morning.