The Trigger Read online

  'No matter what, though, you're not going to touch them. I'll handle the preparation, transportation, set-up and cleanup - the last two wearing my Kevlar gorilla suit,' McGhan said, looking around the table. 'Dr Brohier was very specific and painfully blunt about this. I'm replaceable, and you're not. So I won't be coming into the lab anymore - I'll load the test chamber from outside, and you'll keep that access door closed and secured.

  'The safety procedures we've been using, the radio calls, the blackouts, have been a drill for this,' he added as he stood and gathered up his props. 'Chances are I'd survive if you triggered a rifle cartridge in my trunk. Chances are I wouldn't if you triggered a sample of Torpex. And while I may be expendable, I'm fairly certain it would hinder the research program if you blew up your courier in the middle of Shanahan Road.'

  Then he popped the putty-colored cylinder into his mouth and began to chew it. 'Peppermint, sugar-free,' he said. 'I'll be back with the real thing in half an hour.'

  McGhan lost his bet by lunchtime. A one-centimeter-square cube of something called EDNA blasted the water muffler dry and cracked the test chamber's plexiglas port.

  That was way above the standard yield,' McGhan said grimly, studying the damage with the helmet of his high-collared bomb suit tucked under one arm. 'I'm going to have to trim all the samples by a quarter to a third to get back our safety margin.'

  A shaken Horton agreed that that was an idea which recommended itself.

  At the end of that week, Karl Brohier returned.

  His reappearance was as low-key as his departure, and came with even less advance notice. The first that Horton knew of it was when the senior director poked his head into Davisson Lab, captured Lee's attention with a wave, and called out, 'Jeff? Come and see me when you have a minute.' His tone and demeanor were as casual as if he'd never left, as if only utterly mundane administrative matters were occupying his thoughts.

  Horton was momentarily struck dumb, but managed to squeeze out a few words before Brohier vanished again. 'I'll be right there.'

  'No hurry,' said Brohier cheerfully. 'My assistant tells me there are five hundred fourteen priority messages waiting in my mailbox.'

  Despite that reassurance, Horton only waited as long as it took to call Greene in from the prototyping shop to follow Brohier across the campus to Edison Center, the administrative building.

  'Ah, Jeffrey,' Brohier said brightly when Horton walked into his office. 'How is the work going? Everyone still has ten fingers, I trust?'

  'Yes. Pete was a good addition,' Horton said, settling on the couch. 'He's meticulous, punctual, and only nosy about the parts that affect his job, which he does very well. Where did you find him?'

  'I have a grandson, Louis, in the Marines,' said Brohier, dividing his attention between Horton and the display in front of him. 'He is not allowed to tell me his unit, but I believe it is the one trained to operate behind enemy lines for purposes of sabotage and terrorism. McGhan was an instructor for this unit until he made the mistake of sleeping with the wife of a higher-ranking officer. McGhan was charged with rape and accepted a general discharge.'

  'Rape? How -'

  'Apparently the higher-ranking officer provided his wife with corroborating bruises, and the incentive to lie.' Brohier smiled wryly. 'I thought the fact that that officer is still alive recommended Mr McGhan as a man of self-discipline and principle.'

  'I'll say. One little booby-trap -' Horton shook his head. 'You asked how the work is going. Mostly it's going boom. It's beginning to seem as though if it has a nitrate compound in it, the Trigger sets it off.'

  'Fascinating,' Brohier said, looking up. 'What about nitrate compounds that aren't explosives?'

  'We haven't gotten to them yet.'

  'And explosives that aren't nitrates?'

  'No effect. But there aren't many of those. All of the most-used explosives - military and civil - use nitrates. All standard ammunition uses nitrates.'

  'So do most farmers,' said Brohier. 'So do many people with diarrhoea - I myself had a prescription once for bismuth subnitrate, after a trip to Brazil. Did you give any thought to that?'

  'Farmers?'

  'Fertilizer. One farm bureau semi-trailer passing by at the wrong moment, and we'd be Breaking News on CNN.'

  'Oh, god,' said Horton, his face suddenly ashen. 'Nitroglycerin. Nitroglycerin. I never thought about medicine -'

  Brohier answered with a cheerful smile. 'I did. My doctor assures me that nitro tablets do not explode. As for the rest of the pharmacopia, well, we will look at everything in its turn before loosing this on the world.

  Horton could not understand why the director was being so casual about what to Horton seemed an inexcusable oversight. 'Dr Brohier, we've been playing Russian roulette. We have to suspend testing right away, today,' he said, still agitated. 'We can't do this work at this site anymore. We're going to need to go somewhere more isolated and work out the control issues - range, directionality. Maybe then we can come back.'

  'As it happens, I've already begun negotiating for a piece of property in the West,' said Brohier. 'But, please, Jeffrey - let's not aggravate ourselves over a disaster that didn't happen.'

  'It could have, and it would have been my responsibility.'

  'We needed data,' Brohier said, gesturing. 'Even if we'd known at the outset, it was an acceptable risk. Now the picture is clearer, and we can adjust accordingly. Tell me how the theoretical side is progressing.'

  Loosing a sigh, Horton settled into a chair. 'It isn't,' he said. The Trigger doesn't fit the CERN model of the atom. It doesn't fit the quantum model, or the Bohr model. As near as I can tell, it doesn't even fit conventional chemical thermodynamics - the yields are above book value.'

  'Is that so?' said Brohier. 'Well -I will shortly be able to devote more time to this, and I confess I'm pleased you've left something for me to do.' He smiled wryly. 'I suppose I could have worded that more diplomatically.'

  'No, that's all right - my ego won't kick in until it's time to haggle over the by-line. Right now the problem is everything. I'll be glad to have someone to bounce ideas off,' Horton said.

  'The by-line will not be a problem,' Brohier said with grim humor. 'By that time, we may be more interested in dodging the blame than claiming the credit - and "Anonymous" will cover any number of us.'

  Nodding thoughtfully, Horton said, 'I want to bring in a chemist, someone who can analyze the residue from our test samples and tell us what's happening on the molecular level - how the Trigger reaction is different from ordinary spark- or shock-initiated detonation. There may be someone on staff already, in one of the other research units. If not, I know someone at Ohio State who could handle it.'

  'We need not bring them all the way in,' said Brohier. 'In fact, we could spread the samples out among any number of contract labs -'

  'I don't want to have to take a crash course in physical chemistry. I'd rather have one experienced person who understood the context - someone who might be able to help the two of us lay a foundation under the theory.'

  'And a frail enough edifice it is, eh? Very well, let me think on it for a day. Give me the name of the fellow at Ohio State, and I'll make some inquiries.'

  Horton handed over a folded piece of paper. 'Everything you'll need's right there,' he said, and jerked his head toward the door. 'I'd better get back to the lab and pull the plug.'

  'Of course,' said Brohier. 'And since you have nothing to do for the rest of the day, you'll be able to come to my place for dinner.' Seeing Horton's startled look, he added, 'I have a house guest who's looking forward to meeting you.'

  There was a black coupe at the end of Karl Brohier's driveway, and two men in black suits standing behind it. They eyed Horton carefully, but made no move as he drove past except to turn and watch "him.

  Not lab security, Horton thought, stealing a glance back in his rear-view mirror. Private security - bodyguards. For Karl - or his guest?

  A silver Mercedes sedan was park
ed on the cobblestone half-circle by the house, and a slender woman in a smart chauffeur's uniform was coming down the walk from the front door. She stopped at the driver's door of the Mercedes as Horton pulled up behind it, then slid behind the wheel and pulled away as he climbed out. He peered into the sedan as it made the big turn and headed down the drive, but saw only the driver.

  The presence of guards in the driveway tempered the surprise when the front door was opened by someone other than Brohier - in point of fact, by another broad-shouldered man in a tailored suit. Again there was the steady gaze, the snap appraisal, the calm alertness. 'Come in,' the man said, ushering Horton inside. 'You'll find them on the sky porch.'

  Taller than it was wide or deep, the north-facing two-story space Brohier called the sky porch looked out on the upslope forest and the sky through great sloping panels of permaglass. A pair of avocado trees and a giant dieffenbachia brought the forest inside and separated a sunken tile hot tub from a casual seating area.

  There Horton found Brohier and his guest, a slender man with a short-cropped full white beard and a wealth of smile lines around dark, deep-set eyes. He was casually dressed in golf shorts, polo shirt, and well-worn sandals, and had his feet propped up on the rounded edge of a low stone table.

  '- I have never micromanaged your budget, Karl, and I won't start now,' the guest was saying as Horton approached. 'Ah, here he is.'

  Brohier twisted in his chair to look back over his shoulder, then stood. 'Jeffrey - I want you to meet Aron Goldstein.'

  Horton had already guessed the identity of the visitor. He had never met Terabyte's principal investor and majority owner, but there was a photo of Goldstein and Brohier in the director's office, and Horton had searched the hyperweb for information on Goldstein shortly after arriving in Columbus.

  The most useful information had come from the Fortune site, which mapped Goldstein's extensive holdings - thirty-one companies in eleven industry groups, with the cash cow among them being Advanced Storage Devices, Inc., the exclusive licensee of Brohier's solid-state memory patents. The most interesting information had come from the gossipy Microscope pages, which had named him America's 'most ineligible bachelor', snidely commenting 'never before in our memory has anyone with so much managed to enjoy it so little'.

  Goldstein stood to shake hands, then settled back in his chair. 'Do you like Chinese food, Jeffrey?' he asked.

  'Urn - sure. Some,' he answered, nonplussed.

  'Good. Sit down, please.' Goldstein waited only for Horton to start moving before he went on. 'I want to congratulate you on your discovery. It's stunning. I've scarcely been able to think or talk about anything else since Karl told me. Which has been quite a burden on him, since I haven't had anyone else I can talk to.

  'Of course, now I have you, too. And the first thing I want to say is, "Well done". This is revolutionary, in the same way the

  Watt engine, the Marconi wireless telegraph, and the Hollerith tabulator were revolutionary.' He chuckled. 'I like those examples because every one of those men managed to make money while they were changing the world.'

  'I confess I haven't been able to see any way of making money from this,' Horton said.

  'That's all right - I have,' Goldstein said with a wave of his hand. 'Change always creates opportunities. I've acquired three companies and two hundred patents in the last ten days.' Then the twinkle of self-satisfied glee left his eyes as he sat forward in his chair. 'But that's completely irrelevant. Do you know why I created Terabyte Laboratories, Jeffrey?'

  'From what Dr Brohier told me when he hired me, I assumed it was for more or less the same reason farmers plant seeds and investors buy futures,' said Horton.

  'You're only partly correct,' said Goldstein. 'What I wanted was to create the Bell Labs of the twenty-first century.'

  'Bell Labs -'

  'Yes - the research arm of the one-time Bell Telephone monopoly. One of the overlooked benefits of that monopoly was that it paid the bills for a peerless basic research enterprise. And the twentieth century was invented there.'

  'The transistor,' Brohier said. 'The laser. Cellular radio. Solar cells. Radio astronomy. CCDs and LEDs. Big Bang radiation -'

  Nodding, Goldstein took over. 'Eight Nobel laureates. Thirty thousand patents - an average of one a day. And all of it the product of enlightened capitalism. In its heyday, Bell Labs was the equal and more of any university department, any government research center, and any quarterly-profit-and-loss corporate lab anywhere in the world.'

  'I'm afraid we've fallen a bit short,' said Horton.

  'Not at all,' Goldstein said as a distant door chime sounded. 'I could not be more pleased. Jeffrey, I long ago reached the point where I'd made more than enough money to satisfy a lifetime's ordinary desires. At which point there arises the burdensome ques-tion of what to do with the excess. Ostentatious consumption has no appeal for me. Neither does charity in the usual sense - there is no Goldstein Foundation bestowing grants on Jewish MBAs or slow-footed midfielders or the children of city bureaucrats. I do not give to save the whales or feed the birds or sponsor music in the park -'

  At that point, the chauffeur reappeared, and Goldstein fell silent while she placed the blue and white picnic cooler she was carrying in the middle of the stone table. She started to remove the lid, but Goldstein raised a hand and stopped her.

  'We can see to it,' he said. Thank you, Barbara. I expect that'll be all for tonight.'

  'Yes, sir. I'm going to stay in, though, so if you change your mind -'

  'We'll look in Karl's game room first,' he said, smiling tolerantly. When she had left them, Goldstein looked to the others and asked absently, 'Where was I?'

  'Music in the park,' Brohier supplied.

  'Music in the park,' Goldstein repeated, frowning. 'Jeffrey, money whispers to you like a whore, telling you what it can do for you if only you'll open your wallet. And if you have no shame, you can be seduced into almost anything.' Standing and moving to where the cooler sat, he began removing brown paper bags from inside it, and then white boxes from the brown paper bags. 'Karl, we're going to need three plates, and some spoons.'

  'I'll collect them,' Brohier said, rising.

  Cracking the lid of one container, Goldstein took a deep breath of the escaping steam. 'What do you do with a few extra billion?' he asked. 'Collect art, like Hearst? Collect women, like Hughes? Most of the examples at hand are embarrassments. When Bill Gates paid for the Ares mission to Mars, that was a stunt - nothing more than ego gratification. He was seduced into trying to buy immortality for himself and his company logo by hijacking an historic event. I promised myself I would never be that weak - and then fell under the spell of an even more fickle temptress.

  'Jeffrey, I have nearly a hundred thousand people working for me, in eighteen states and seven countries. I invested in them to make money. I invested in you to make a difference. Now you've given me that chance.'

  Goldstein sat on the edge of the table closest to Horton and leaned forward as though about to reveal a secret. 'Guns and bombs have been the vector of power for four hundred years. Some call a gun the great equalizer, and yet more often guns seem to me to be the great unequalizers. In the last century, guns and bombs herded Jews and gays and gypsies into Buchenwald, struck down three American presidents, killed fifty million people in war and nearly that many in peace, exterminated dozens of tribes and hundreds of species. The people with the most guns -the biggest bombs - and the greatest readiest to pull the trigger: those were the beneficiaries of the ingenuity of Nobel and Colt and Winchester.'

  'Of course, that was business, too,' Brohier said, reappearing at that point. He carried a tray of plates and utensils to the table and reclaimed his chair.

  'Yes - and as shameful a business as it was a necessary one,' Goldstein went on. 'You cannot reason with a rifle bullet fired from across the battlefield. You cannot negotiate with an artillery shell lobbed from over the horizon. You cannot compromise with a nuclear warhead sc
reaming in from half a world away. The only answer to the gun, the only defense against the gun, has been more guns. You've given us another answer, Jeffrey. You've given us a way to tear this terrible inhuman tool out of our clenched primate fists -'

  'If we take the power of the gun away from the world, what will come forward to take its place?' Horton asked, troubled.

  'Perhaps chaos,' said Goldstein. 'Perhaps peace. Imagine two armies, now facing each other across the battlefield empty-handed. Will twenty-first-century men throw themselves on bayonets for god and country? Imagine the terrorist, the would-be assassin, unable to deliver his cowardly, anonymous blow from a distance.

  'Now imagine Tel Aviv, Belfast, Sarajevo, Los Angeles as oases of peace, with one of your devices radiating from a tower at the heart of each city. Imagine how many plowshares we could build if we stopped buying swords. Fallen short, you say? Oh, no, Jeffrey, not at all - the Trigger is a gift of incalculable value. And I pledge to my children and yours that I'll see that its promise is fulfilled. I pledge my fortune and my life to that.'

  Then Goldstein straightened up and threw his head back, eyes closed. 'So many words, tumbling over each other to get out,' he said, drawing and releasing a deep breath. 'I warned you, didn't I? Come, let's eat - that will silence me for a while, at least.'

  But the food hardly slowed the torrent of words, for Goldstein was not the only one who had had no audience for thoughts burning to be spoken. And over crystal fish, Hunan lamb, and black tea, they began to hammer together the outline of a revolution.

  * * *

  6: Journey

  Calcutta, India - A would-be good Samaritan lost more than his car and wallet to bandits on the Berhampore road Thursday - he also lost his idealism. British tourist Thomas Sudaranka was on a pilgrimage to the Ganges River when he stopped to help what he believed was an injured girl lying in the road. Shot twice in the back and left for dead, Sudaranka is now hospitalized with partial paralysis of his right leg. Authorities in Murshidabad said the girl was probably a lure for a local highway gang, and warned travelers to be cautious.