John Varley - Red Thunder

A week later he invited the Chinese, too. It didn’t have anything to do with the tremendous diplomatic uproar China’s exclusion had caused. Travis really enjoyed that. He knew going in that you couldn’t exclude one-sixth of the Earth’s population. But you could slap their leaders in the face.

There were plenty of other things to howl about. Seven delegates from each country? Seven from India, and seven from Luxembourg? Does that make sense? “It does to me,” Travis said. “And until Jubal and I stand up and speak our piece and then hand it over to you, it’s our stadium, our ball, and our bat. Stay away if you don’t like it.”

Naturally, it was a zoo. The United States sent the President and the Senate leader from the other party. There had never been such an assembly of presidents, premiers, and prime ministers, and there may never be again. The Orange Bowl was surrounded with tanks and helicopter gunships.

Every imaginable pressure group was there. Some called the Squeezer drive a tool of Satan, or worse, of American Imperialism, Zionism, Racism, International Cartels, the World Trade Organization, Big Oil (which the Squeezer would soon put out of business, but nobody ever said a protester had to make sense), Communism, the United Nations, or those five space aliens who had come from Mars pretending to be human. On the streets, the Red Thunder crew was denounced for “despoiling the natural beauty” of Mars, polluting Earth’s air with radiation on takeoff (a lie, but how do you prove that?), and “encouraging the consumer culture by sweeping Earth’s garbage under the rug.” Guilty on that count, I guess. The Squeezer was a mighty big rug to sweep trash under. In less than ten years every landfill and nuclear [404] waste dump on Earth has been squeezed into a little silvery sphere and used to propel spaceships. This is bad?

They were all opposed to the newly christened International Power Administration and in favor of staying on a polluted and threatened Planet Earth, and many of them threw rocks and Molotov cocktails to prove how passionately they loved the Earth. Three cops died, and two protesters.

It bothered me, but Kelly scoffed at them. “The perpetual two percent of malcontents,” she called them. “Honestly, if God showered manna from heaven on that bunch, they’d want to know if He used pesticides on it, or added any preservatives.” I didn’t point out that Alicia might be one asking those questions.

So they assembled, a thousand official delegates on the field, twenty thousand reporters clustered around the fifty yard line, the rest of the seats taken by people who had lined up since Travis announced the public was invited, first come, first served.

The first day was all Travis’s show.

He brought a large metal suitcase. He opened it to reveal about a hundred dials, switches, and trac-ball controllers. We managed not to giggle when we realized this was the Beta Model of the Squeezer Jubal had built out of scraps lying around his workshop/laboratory. Travis’s aim was to make the Squeezer look a lot more complicated than it really had to be, on the theory that it might get scientists looking in the wrong direction.

He put the Squeezer through its paces for the assembled delegates, expanding the bubbles, contracting them, making them go boom! , which they did with a mighty reverberation in that big arena with its brand new dome. He fitted a bubble into a toy rocket and flew it up to the dome, then brought it back and set it down.

Then he asked Kelly to try her hand at it. We five were the only ones who knew what would happen next. The giant Squeezer melted into slag in a chemical reaction too brilliant to look at.

“It didn’t like the pattern of her retinas,” Travis said. “The machine used a laser scanner to identify an authorized user. I was the only [405] authorized one. If any of you had tried to use it, the same thing would have happened.

“You folks are going to have to figure out something like that. We are going to have to have more than one Squeezer to handle the demand, and we’ll have to have people other than my cousin Jubal who know how to make more of them. But they cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. These bubbles can be made as powerful as thermonuclear bombs, but the thing about H-bombs is that they’re hard to make. The Squeezer is cheap.

“You’ve all got a terrible task ahead of you. I said, ‘the wrong hands.’ But who has the right hands? Who do we trust with that much responsibility? How do we identify someone who can be trusted not to steal the secret, sell the secret, or hand it over to his or her native country? I don’t envy you, but now I gladly hand the burden over to you. Thank you for giving me this opportunity, and please, please, be wise.”

And he walked out. The stunned delegates didn’t know whether to applaud him or tackle him and start pulling out his fingernails.

SO THE IPAproposed and debated and approved and rejected and discussed and shouted at each other and got into fistfights, and in about a year produced a course of action. It didn’t satisfy anybody, but was probably the best they could do. Some problems don’t have easy or obvious solutions. Some have no solution at all.

The IPA could impose levies on its member nations, so it did, and bought the Falkland Islands, which contained 2,945 people, 700,000 sheep, and millions of Rockhopper, Magellanic, Gentoo, King, and Macaroni penguins. They moved the now-wealthy shepherds and their sheep to milder climates. The penguins they let stay. And there they built the most secure facility on Earth, the one place on Earth for the manufacture of the machines that produced Squeezer bubbles.

The manufacturing plants there on the cold, windy Falklands built Squeezer machines that would initiate, expand, or contract Squeezer [406] bubbles. They didn’t build many of them. These machines were sent to governments under strict handling rules, and with what Travis called “a million exploding cigars” built into them. Tamper with them, and you die. Every year some jerk thinks he’s figured them out, and is burned alive.

THE TOUGHEST QUESTIONfacing the assembly in the Orange Bowl was this: Jubal can build machines that will create, expand, contract, and produce thrust from Squeezer bubbles-but not turn them off, that was forbidden-but Jubal won’t live forever. Who will pick up the torch of unlimited power once Jubal is gone?

What the IPA eventually came up with was a lot like a priesthood, and a lot like a guild. The trade secrets or magical arcana of Squeezing would be conserved, used, and passed down by means of an elite scientist class. To be in this elite you had to be capable of understanding the physics and mathematics. This eliminated me, and Dak, and Travis. In fact, it narrowed the field to about one in a hundred million.

So beginning with this small pool, the IPA set up the most rigorous tests and examinations it could conceive, and started sifting. Before they were done, a candidate was pulled apart and put back together again. You could be eliminated for being too chauvinistic or patriotic, too wedded to one political or religious doctrine, too egotistical, or too just plain crazy. It was amazing how many physics Ph.D.’s fell into that category.

The popular press immediately dubbed these seven men and women the High Priests of Squeeze. They served for life, because even if they retired they had to be watched for the rest of their lives. They were not precisely confined to the Falkland Islands, but if they went anywhere they were constantly guarded, both from kidnapping and from passing the Squeezer secrets to somebody else.

These were the people who actually built the Prime Squeezers. These were the self-sacrificing saints who were let in on the whole secret of the Squeezer phenomenon, who agreed not to reveal it to anyone under pain of death, the wise ones who would chance partaking of the [407] fruit of the Tree of Power. These were the poor schmucks who assumed the burden that had fallen on Jubal the day we lifted off in Red Thunder.