Bob Shaw: The Peace Machine

“Do you know me, Hutchman?” he said, without preamble. “I’m Sir Morton Baptiste, Her Majesty’s Minister of Defence.”

“I know you.”

“Good. Then you understand I have the authority to have you executed right now, this instant , if you don’t move away from that machine.”

Hutchman looked down at his watch. Two minutes . “There’s no need to have me killed, Minister. I’ll move away from it now if you want.”

“Then do so.”

“Don’t you want to know, first, why the two men who got here before you didn’t kill me?”

“I…” Baptiste looked at Hutchman’s finger on the button, and his brown eyes died. “You mean—?”

“Yes.” Hutchman was impressed with the speed at which Baptiste’s mind had assessed the situation. “It’s a dead man’s hand device. It will work when I take my finger off the button.”

“The power supplies,” Baptiste snapped, glancing around the room. One of the men who had come in with him shook his head slightly.

“Self-contained,” Hutchman said. “About the only thing which could stop me now is if another country can drop a nuclear bomb on Hastings within the next ninety seconds.”

The nameless man who had shaken his head in answer to Baptiste’s previous question about the power supplies came forward and whispered something in the Minister’s ear. Baptiste nodded and made a signal which prompted someone to open the door.

“If you have just received some scientific advice about shifting the machine’s position, say with machine-gun fire, don’t try to follow it,” Hutchman said. “It’s good advice — shifting the machine would cause the output ray to miss the moon — but if anybody tries to leave the room or to get out of the line of fire, I take my finger off the button.”

He checked the time again. One minute .

Baptiste approached him. “Is there any point in appealing to your loyalty?”

“Loyalty to what?”

“To your…” Baptiste hesitated. “You didn’t give us enough time, you know. At this moment your own countrymen are working on nuclear warheads, trying to dismantle them in time. And if you activate that machine…”

“Tough,” Hutchman commented. Vicky is already dead .

“You fool !” Baptiste struck Hutchman across the mouth. “You’re an academic , Hutchman. A theoretician perched on an ivory tower. Don’t you see you’re achieving precisely nothing? Don’t you see—?”

“It’s too late,” Hutchman said, raising his hand in absolution. “I’ve done it.”

Happiness, like many other things, is a question of relativity — of a reasonable compromise between ambition and ability. And in a way the three of us have achieved contentment.

I have just finished bathing Vicky and putting her to bed. No, she wasn’t killed that day in Hastings, although her neck was broken and the doctors tell me it is a miracle she survived. The paralysis is permanent, they say, but we are making progress in other directions — with drugs for example — and her incontinence is being brought under control. I don’t mind feeding her and attending to small matters of hygiene, and — although Vicky won’t admit it — she finds an odd fulfilment in being able, legitimately, to occupy virtually every moment of my every day. In this mood of honesty, I should admit that, while I would give the earth to see her walk again, part of me rests easier in the long cool nights beside this new Vicky who is so tractable. We no longer have those ghastly attritive arguments on subjects which only the old Vicky could have conceived, subjects such as the underlying psychological reasons for my referring to a dress which zips up the back as a dress which zips down the back.

The authorities have been kind. This “establishment” is just the sort of place I had been expecting. It is right in the heart of “The Avengers” country, but there is a village not very far away where David goes to school. His progress is much better than at Crymchurch, although Vicky swears it is because I devote much more time to him now. Possibly this is true. The authorities have provided me with a certain amount of work in my own field, but it seems to be as much an occupational therapy as anything else, and I’m never forced to burn the midnight oil.

For my own part, I cannot describe myself as unhappy. I have my small fire-lit room, and only occasionally am I disturbed by thoughts of the events of that October and November. It was a near-miracle that only a handful of tactical nuclear weapons still had their warheads intact when neutrons began to dance, and that nobody was killed when they detonated. Nobody I know of, that is. The biggest question hanging over that period is: Would I still have released the button if Baptiste had advanced his last argument first?

There is no doubt that I was everything he said — a fool, an academic, a theoretician. And, as he explained to me afterward (when it was too late), the outcome of my efforts had been a temporary but incredibly expensive check in the arms race. Nuclear weapons were not discarded, as I had so myopically expected. They were simply redesigned to allow for the possibility of a Hutchman Trigger being in existence. The classical nuclear device with two fissionable masses, one of them very close to critical, has had to be abandoned in favour of a new arrangement of up to a dozen sub-critical masses which are brought together by servomechanisms when the missile is over its target. If these new weapons are ever used, and if one of my beloved machines is in operation somewhere in the world, the warheads will detonate perhaps a tenth of a second too early. But with the megaton ranges which are popular these days, a tenth of a second is neither here nor there.

This, then, was the sum total of my achievement — that I diverted many billions of any currency unit you care to mention into an unnecessary detour in the arms race. How many human lives does that represent in terms of hospitals not built, of aid programs canceled, of food and medical supplies never shipped? How many withered babies have been buried in shoe boxes because of me?

I don’t know.

Furthermore, I never try to work it out — as I would have done in the old days. You see, I learned many things during my visit to ground zero, and one of them was that Vicky had been right all along. Nature never designed a nervous system which could withstand the burden of guilt we can apply to ourselves by feeling responsible for the actions of others. A successful species is numerous — for the precise reason that the premature death of a proportion of its members will not materially affect the welfare of the greater number. It is in obedience to a cosmic principle that a quail flying south to the sun still enjoys its little life to the full, in spite of the fact that some migrants have been snared by peasants’ nets.

As Vicky might have put it: “What sin is there in living the life you would have lived before communications within the global village became too good?”

At times a small, obdurate part of my soul whispers an uncomfortable answer to that question, but I am not disturbed. Having been to ground zero and back I can counter that one easily and finally.

What’s the use? I ask the walls of my small fire-lit room. What is the use of trying?