Warren Murphy: Lords of the Earth

"Because then they'll delay attacking. But it'll still happen eventually and we have to prevent that," Smith said.

"Are you going to use those people?" the President asked, referring to the two men who seemed to be able to penetrate anything at will, including the White House. He had seen them operate once and immediately wanted to know if America could get more of them. He had looked sad when Smith said there were only two in the world like that.

Smith nodded and the President said, "Do you know what will happen if someone else is killed and it comes out that I ordered the defenses away?"

"I think so," Smith said.

"I've got a press that would love to hang me. This time they wouldn't have to make up anything."

"I know that."

"How sure are you that your plan will work?" the President asked.

"I know this. If we go on the way we're going, they'll strike again. They're incredibly clever and seem to be able to penetrate anything when they want. How they got into Russia, I'll never know."

"So you want me to stick my neck out?"

"Yes, sir," said Smith. "Only your direct orders can get the FBI out of the way."

"How bad is this bug business?" the President wanted to know.

"It could be all the marbles; Mr. President. Right now, the problem areas are in the Third World but it could spread." Harold W. Smith clipped another twig of the rosebush, absentmindedly trying to remember whether he was supposed to clip above or below a main stem. It didn't matter. He would be gone by nightfall.

"Why don't we just put our own scientists on the damned thing and forget the IHAEO?" the President asked.

"They have most of the good entomologists," Smith said.

The President thought for a moment while Smith mutilated another rosebush. Then the President slowly nodded.

"Don't let me down," he said. His voice was low and he moved off along the fence as if out for an afternoon stroll. Three hours later, the new assistant gardener was gone for good.

Smith remembered the afternoon. He felt an obligation to a man who had done the right thing. It would work. More and more through the years, he had understood Remo less and less and he had never understood Chiun. But this was the sort of thing they were good at, and now Remo had reported that things were under control. Dr. Ravits was safe.

And to make matters better in the St. Martin sun, he had solved the computer problems forever. He felt good. He rubbed in the suntan cream to protect his pale skin from the sun's intense heat. He could even believe now that he was lucky. He had never believed in luck before, but now he had to say, after so many years of grinding calculation, that yes, he was quite lucky.

Suddenly, someone was tapping him on the shoulder and Smith looked up to see the black bellbottoms of a gendarme. The policeman wore a pistol in a black holster. His blue shirt bore the insignia of the French national police.

"Are you Harold W. Smith?" he asked with a thick accent.

"Yes," said Smith.

"Would you come with me, sir?" the gendarme said. The tone of his voice told Smith nothing but Smith knew that the gendarmes were quite polite because of the island's tourist business. They would rarely ticket a car no matter how it was parked, and they had their own special sort of justice.

Recently, when a tourist's wife had been raped, they brought the suspect to the woman's husband, an American policeman, and left them alone for five minutes. They then deported what remained of the suspect to another island. There was no long, drawnout trial.

Many things were done like that, and that gave CURE exactly what it needed most: a place without a very inquisitive local police force. Justice and law enforcement were rather basic in St. Martin and, since computers never threatened anyone, the organization could be sure to be left alone on a quiet island in a rolling sea.

"May I ask why I must go with you?" Smith said.

"You must accompany me to Marigot," the gendarme said.

Smith reasoned he was being taken to police headquarters since Marigot was the capital of the French half of the island. "May I put on something more than a bathing suit?"

"But of course," said the gendarme.

Ordinarily Smith might have been concerned at this point, but with the computers now safe from any invasions, he actually whistled as he went into the apartment facing the beach. He rented the apartment from the man who supplied the entire island with gasoline, a franchise the man's family had owned for several generations.

Smith wriggled out of his bathing suit while the policeman waited politely outside the apartment. He took a short shower to get rid of the sand, and then put on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and sandals. He also took the key to the solution of all the organization's computer programs.

It was the size of an attache case and it held more memory capability than all the computers the Strategic Air Command had secreted in the Rocky Mountains. The truth was that CURE no longer needed its offices at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, just as it no longer needed the offices which were carved out of the coral hills behind the salt flats in Grand Case. All it needed was the briefcase in Smith's hand. For what Smith had finally done was to find one genius who had discovered a source of memory almost as infinite as space.

It went beyond bubble technology. It used the cosmic relationships between stars. The very energy that would attract light now stored the information from throughout the world in a single access disk.

"You see," the computer genius had said, "you don't need to store memory, you only need to access it, to reach it. Well, that means you can use anything to store it if you want, even light refraction. Do you understand?"

"Frankly, no," Smith had said.

"You don't have to. It works," Barry Schweid had said. And it did.

Schweid was twenty-five, lived at home with his mother, and spent eighteen hours a day over a small personal computer which he said he had "juiced up." He didn't really care that much after salary. His mother did, however, and she also worried about him meeting nice girls, eating properly and getting sun. She wouldn't let Barry out of the house unless nice Mr. Smith, his new employer, promised he would get at least two hours of fresh air a day and that Barry would eat at least one good healthy meal a day.

Those promises given, Schweid had come to work for Smith, who sent him to St. Martin, where CURE kept up a big bank of computers that duplicated all the information in the computers at CURE's main headquarters in Folcroft Sanitarium.

"I want you to make our computer files entry-proof," Smith had said.

And Schweid had.

Basically what he had done was to take all CURE's information and devise a new way to make it available through the equipment that fit into the attache case.

"How does that help?" Smith had asked. "Now I've got three sets of files that can be entered instead of two."

"No," Schweid had said. "You don't understand."

"No, I don't."

"Here it is. What this allows us to do is to put a trap net on the other computers, the ones at Folcroft and here."

"What will that do?"

"It will allow us to jigger those other computers so that if anybody breaks into them, in any way, the computers will simply erase themselves. Totally."

"Everything will be gone?"

"Right. Before anybody can steal it. And because you've got the master file in that attache case, you can always refill the main computers at some later date if you want."

The only problem was getting access through the attache-case computer. Schweid was still needed for that because of its intricacy, but he had promised Smith that he would soon deliver a modified access system which would allow Smith to get into the files himself without Schweid's help.