Tomorrow and Tomorrow

“The problem is one that we never anticipated.” Was that the ship speaking, or Drake’s own thoughts? The dividing line became blurred when they shared common storage and processing power. “We had always assumed that superluminal signal capability would be accompanied by a working technology. Now we find abundant S-wave capacity and nothing else. Do we wish to visit a galaxy that seems dead of organic life?”

“Is it safe to do so?”

The last thought was surely Drake’s alone. His thoughts were moving again to old memories and offering an uneasy

synthesis.

In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen.

He had been talking to himself, but his thoughts were no longer private.

“The universe is not infinite,” the ship said. “It is finite in time both past and future, and it is finite but unbounded in space.”

“All right. Change that to things that you never expected to happen, when you were long ago on a world far away, can happen if you wait long enough and go far enough.”

He not only hadn’t expected to see this — when he was young he had hardly taken notice of it. His interests revolved around music and Ana, and anything as dull as military policy or political strategy tended to be ignored. It was Ana, the social activist, who had educated him. He remembered one lazy October afternoon when they lay side by side in his little one-room apartment, with the Venetian blinds partly drawn and late sunlight casting elongated and distorted leaf shadows on the wall. Drake lay flat on his back. He didn’t want to talk or think about anything and would have quite liked a nap. He found it easier to say nothing and pretend to listen, but he had got away with that for only a few minutes.

“You don’t care, do you?” Ana punched him on the left shoulder and propped herself up on her elbow so that she could see his face and make sure that he wasn’t going to sleep. “I’m telling you, it could happen again.”

“Nah. Mutual Assured Destruction is a dead idea. And a dumb idea, too.”

“It’s worse than dumb, but I’m not sure it’s dead. Brains and resources were wasted on it for two generations. Do you want to know why?”

Not really. But Drake said only, “Uh-huh.”

“It kept on going because it was a big fat money tree, where corruption could thrive and contractors could get very rich. And because no matter what you do, for paranoid people more is never enough. If they build more weapons, or even if you just think that they might, you have to build more. They’re as crazy as you are, so they have to build more, too; so you have to build more, so they have to build more, so you have to build more, so they have to build more, so you have to build more…”

She paused, rather to Drake’s disappointment. The cadence of the repeated phrase was relaxing, and he would happily have nodded off listening to it. Instead he said, “I don’t know why you’re still worrying about all this. It’s ancient history. MAD went away over twenty years ago, along with the Soviet Union.”

She snuggled up against him and put her hand flat on his bare belly. “That proves how little you understand the military. I drank this stuff in with my mother’s milk. Four of my uncles and five of my cousins are regular army or air force. You should hear the talk at family reunions. You did me a big favor. They can’t stand your politics.”

“I don’t have any.”

“That’s almost worse. But they don’t want you around, and that gives me an excuse to stay away. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

“You can thank me by letting me rest. Anyway, you shouldn’t be thanking me. Thank Professor Bonvissuto. He got you the scholarship.”

“I’ll thank both of you. You know what Uncle Dan said? He’s the air force colonel, the one from Baltimore who told you that the finest vocal group in the world was the Singing Sergeants, and that Wagner was a boring old weirdo.”

“I remember him. Rossini said much the same — about Wagner, I mean, not the Singing Sergeants. He said Wagner had beautiful moments, but awful quarter hours. He also said that he couldn’t judge Wagner’s Lohengrin from a single hearing, and he certainly didn’t intend hearing it a second time.”

“Ideas in the military don’t go away, ever, Uncle Dan says.” Ana wasn’t going to let Drake distract her with musical anecdotes. “Old ideas get put on the shelf, and when the right funding cycle comes around they’re dusted off and proposed again as new. I don’t believe a lot of what he tells me, but I believe that. Balance of terror didn’t start with Mutual Assured Destruction. And it won’t end with it. Bad ideas are still sitting there on the shelf.”

And sometimes they sit on that shelf for an awfully long time before they finally achieve their potential.

“I do not think that I am following you,” the ship said.

It was hardly surprising — Drake’s private thoughts had not been intended for anyone else. They had hopped randomly between past and present, and they included personal references that were surely not in any general database.

Drake addressed his remarks directly to the ship’s interface. “Mutual Assured Destruction is a very simple idea: I build huge weapons systems. So do you. Then you daren’t attack me, because if you do, I’ll attack you in return and you’ll die, too.” (He had killed Ana, and he had died, too. He had thought of his actions as Mutual Assured Survival. Did that make him any different from the Mutual Assured Destruction lunatics?) “So neither one of us dares to attack the other. It sounds as though it might work, but MAD has one fatal flaw. It produces an equilibrium between two groups, but it’s an unstable equilibrium. One accident, or even a misunderstanding, and both sides will use their weapons. They have to hit as hard as they can immediately, to neutralize as much of the other’s firepower as they can. Just as bad, a third group with very few weapons can force a misunderstanding and make the two big powers fight each other, by faking an attack of one on the other. I think we are looking at the results when MAD is applied on a huge scale. I think it killed that whole galaxy.”

“That ca

“Intelligence of a sort. Sometimes if an idea is old enough, it can seem brand new. I ought to have known what was going on ages ago, as soon as you told me that there were two distinct types of signals coming from this galaxy, and that you were unable to interpret either of them. You said that any signal at all should be intelligible to you. But suppose it was designed not to be understood by anyone without a suitable key? Suppose both sides were employing ciphers, codes that the other could not break.”

“Intentional obscurity. That is certainly possible. But what makes you so sure that the galaxy is dead? How can that be true, and the technology still be working?”

Drake realized that he could explain even that. His mind had thrown at him an image of a long-ago performance of Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, of a conductor facing a group of players. In front of each stood a lighted candle. One by one, each musician finished his or her own orchestral part, snuffed out the candle, and left the stage. Finally the whole orchestra was gone. The conductor stood alone in darkness.

The ship was unlikely to benefit much from that thought. “Let me tell you what happened on Earth,” Drake said, “in the years just after I was born. Two great powers had been busy building up their nuclear weapons. The chance of all-out war seemed very high. That war, if it happened, would be short. A couple of hours and it would be all over. Missiles over the pole could be launched to reach any target within thirty minutes. The military on one side — our side, people would say, though I never thought of it as my side — decided that they must keep some kind of communications system working, even after the main war was over. They imagined a space-based command post, a whole constellation of special satellites in orbit around the Earth. The spacecraft would be completely operated by computers, and they would form a kind of central nervous system for all fighting, no matter when it happened. The system was called MILSTAR, for Military Strategic, Tactical, and Relay system, and it was supposed to be able to function even after the main spasm of war was over. The military pla