Jack Chalker: Downtiming the Night Side

Ron Moosic hadn’t started out to be a cop, not even the kind of high-tech one he wound up being. His greatgrandfather had come to the eastern Pennsylvania coal mines when that area was flourishing. The family name then was thirty-seven letters long and pure Georgian—the one south of Russia, not the one south of South Carolina. The old boy had heard that if you didn’t Americanize your name, the immigration boys would, so he looked at a map of where the Immigration Society had written he’d be living and saw, near Scranton, a little town that sounded reasonable to him, and he’d written in the name Moosic with no understanding of the jokes his descendants would have to bear because of it.

Ron’s father had also worked in the mines, and the boy had grown up in the small town of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a town whose biggest claim to fame was the largest slag heap in North America. It towered over the town, and it was on fire all the time. Still, it was a nice town in which to grow up, large enough for all the civilized amenities and small enough not to have many of civilization’s biggest penalties. One penalty for a miner was always injury, though, and his father had been hauled out of the mine when Ron was still small. A loader had backed into him, crushing him between it and the wall of coal. He’d lived a few more years, a permanent invalid with a strong spirit and sense of life, but complications finally took him when Ron was just eleven.

Vic Moosic had been a big bear of a man, with bright eyes and walrus moustache. He looked a little like all those pictures of another Georgian, Joe Stalin, and always had claimed to be related to the Soviet dictator. “Old Joe got all the meanness,” he often said. Later, when Vic’s son needed an exhaustive security check, it was found that the Moosic family was not even originally Georgian, but rather Uzbeck. Young Ron had always rather liked the idea of being an Uzbeck. Nobody else he’d ever met could make that claim.

Insurance and the union helped out a little—his mother had needed it, with six kids ranging from ages seven to fourteen—but they were not a wealthy family. His older brothers had gone into the mines, but he had not. He’d always been more intellectual and reclusive than his brothers and sisters, but he’d worshipped his father and his father had understood his peculiarities. “You’re not like them,” Vic kept telling him. “You got the family brains, boy. Don’t go into the mines. Find a way out. You’ll be the first one.”

And he had found the way. It was called the U.S. Air Force, and it offered a smart, young high school graduate free college for a set number of years of service. He’d majored in geography at Penn State, with a minor in computer science, and done pretty well. The Air Force, at least, thought highly of him, and after graduation they assigned him to intelligence work.

It sounded romantic, but it wasn’t. Nuts-and-bolts stuff, mostly—cryptography, aerial photo interpretation, that sort of thing. Still, at the end of twelve years he was thirty, a major, and on the right career track. He also, along the way, met and married Barbara.

He never quite came to grips with splitting up. At the start, she’d been pretty and sexy and had a desire to see the world. She was a college graduate, but was never really on his intellectual level, something he knew from the start. Well, maybe that was unfair, but she read very little and watched a lot of TV, and she seemed to have not the slightest curiosity about his work, although he really couldn’t have told her anything specific anyway. She wanted kids, and he did, too, but after three miscarriages, the last of which almost killed her, the doctors told them that she could never have them. She’d changed after that, although he’d told her that it didn’t make any difference to him. Somehow, she seemed to blame him for her enforced barrenness, although it was clearly the fault of no one. Her irrationality became progressively worse and painful to him. It was his fault she could not bear children, yet somehow this made her, in her own eyes, less a woman, and she dreamed up all sorts of paranoid fantasies that he was having affairs all over the place. She became increasingly bitter, and frigid.

Ultimately, he’d given up, inventing excuses not to be home, and, eventually, he’d had an affair. She never knew for sure, but when you’re accused of something incessantly, you don’t incur a penalty for really doing it. Ultimately, they’d had a final blow-up, and that had been that. The temporary alimony she’d been awarded had stopped three years ago, with the last check going to an address in San Francisco, and he had no idea where she was or what she was doing now.

The funny thing was, he still loved her—or, rather, he loved the woman he’d married and hated what she’d become. He’d been faithful to her through all the good years, and if she’d accepted things, he’d have remained so, or at least he liked to believe he would have. He’d certainly had a series of strictly physical affairs since, but he found it impossible to get really close to another woman. He wanted some permanence, perhaps even a kid or two before he was too old to see them grow up, but he couldn’t take the plunge again. He was, he knew, just too afraid that it might all happen again, and that would be more than he could stand.

Shortly after the divorce, he’d been posted to the NSA. He owed the Air Force no more service, and it didn’t take much genius to realize that he could take on the same sort of jobs permanently at a much higher pay level than the Air Force would give him, with all his service time counting towards government seniority and retirement. Despite a lot of pleading, he resigned from the service and took on a permanent job as a civilian. Within a year he did the usual, joining a reserve unit at Andrews, hiking pay and benefits still further. It was the way the government game was played, and he played it pretty well.

Not that things were any more romantic at the National Security Agency. The massive complex, about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, was the real nerve center of U.S. Intelligence, happy to let the CIA take the publicity and the heat. Still, what it was was mostly dull, plodding, boring work, the biggest challenge being to sift through the enormous amounts of information pouring in at all times for things that seemed important or worth following up. Computers made it possible, but it still came down to the human element at the end. The tens of thousands of NSA agents employed there were, in fact, a highly paid infantry forever trying to take the paperwork hill—and losing.

And now, thanks to some boredom and the ability to solve complex topological puzzles that were security problems, here he was, staring down at somebody else’s failure.

“One of them’s calling for negotiations,” the woman at the control panel called out. “What do you want to do? Mr. Riggs is topside now, talking to the National Security Advisor.’’

“Put it on here, if you can,” Moosic instructed her. “I’ll talk to him.”

It was Sandoval, his handsome face and large, dark eyes telling the world how he got so many women to commit treason for him.

Somebody came over and showed Moosic how to work the intercom. “Ron Moosic here, Sandoval. Let’s hear it.”

The revolutionary could not repress a snicker. “Moosic?” He turned to Cline, the traitor within. “Who’s he?”

She shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

“All right. Who are you, Moo -sic?”

A little edge. Not much, but something. “I’m the Security Director for this station.”

“That’s Riggs.”

“I’m his boss. I’m the man who decides if we can evacuate this place and I’m the man who can push the button that will make it a big blob of bubbling goo.”