Arthur C. Clarke - The Trigger

536 Pages·2016·1.18 MB·English

by  Clarke Arthur C

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THE TRIGGER
by
Arthur C. Clarke & Michael Kube-McDowell
Contents

Prologue: The Chosen

I: Trigger

1: Anomaly
2: Mystery
3: Secrecy
4: Inquiry
5: Chemistry
6: Journey
7: Strategy
8: Amity
9: Colloquy
10: Exigency
11: Military
12: Apostasy
13: Enginery
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14: Opportunity
15: Trickery
16: Perplexity
17: Festivity
18: Equity
19: Guaranty
20: Publicity
21: Piracy
22: Alchemy

II: Jammer

23: So Much Madness
24: Weapons to Kill
25: The Progress of Reason
26: Forever Our Destiny
27: Summons to Greatness
28: Not Made for Defeat
29: To Promote Peace
30: Harder than War
31: From Savage to Scholar
32: Never a Bad Peace

III: Killer
THE TRIGGER
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Arthur C. Clarke was born in Somerset in 1917. He is a graduate of
King's College, London (where he obtained a First Class Honours in
Physics and Mathematics), a past Chairman of the British
Interplanetary Society, and a member of the Academy of
Astronautics, the Royal Astronomical Society, and may other
scientific organizations. He served in the RAF during the Second
World War and was in charge of the first radar talk-down equipment
during its experimental trials. He wrote a monograph for Wireless
World in 1945 predicting satellite communications, and did it so well
that when the first commercial satellites were launched twenty years
later they could not be patented. Arthur C. Clarke has for many years
made his home in Sri Lanka. He is chancellor of a university there
and founder of the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Advanced
Technology. He was awarded the CBE in 1989 and knighted in 1998.
Michael Kube-McDowell was born in 1954 and grew up in southern
New Jersey. He holds a master's degree in science education from
Indiana University and was honoured for teaching excellence by the
1985 White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. Novelist,
teacher, photographer, musician, screenwriter, Kube-McDowell is a
father of three and a 'spaceflight geek'. He has written scripts for the
tv series Tales From the Darkside. His novels include the thousand-
year Trigon Disunity future history and the Star Wars trilogy The
Black Fleet Crisis. His novel The Quiet Pools was nominated for the
Hugo Award.
Also by Arthur C. Clarke

2001 A Space Odyssey
2010 Odyssey Two
2061 Odyssey Three
3001 The Final Odyssey
Islands in the Sky
Prelude to Space
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Against the Fall of Night
The Sands of Mars
Childhood's End
Expeditions to Earth
Earthlight
Reach for Tomorrow
The City and the Stars
The Deep Range
The Other Side of the Sky
A Fall of Moondust
Tales of Ten Worlds
Dolphin Island
Glide Path
The Lion of Comarre
The Nine Billion Names of God
The Lost Worlds of 2001
The Wind From the Sun
Rendezvous with Rama
Imperial Earth
The Fountains of Paradise
1984: Spring
The Sentinel
The Songs of Distant Earth

Also by Michael Kube-McDowell

The Trigon Disunity future history
Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis trilogy
Alternities
The Quiet Pools
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Exile
Voyager

ARTHUR C. CLARKE
and
MICHAEL KUBE-McDOWELL

THE TRIGGER

HarperCollinsPublishers
Voyager
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www. voyager-books.com
Special overseas edition 2000 This paperback edition 2000
987654321
First published in Great Britain by Voyager 1999
Copyright © Arthur C. Clarke and Michael Kube-McDowell 1999
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of
this work
ISBN 0 00 648383 6 Set in Meridien
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
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without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.
Dedication

To the memory of
The children of Dunblane, Scotland
And Jonesboro, Arkansas
Acknowledgements
Any project of this size and scope owes much to people whose names
do not appear on the cover. At the top of the list is an indispensable
team of publishing pros including agents Russell Galen and Danny
Baror, Bantam Spectra editors Tom Dupree and Pat Lobrutto, and
HarperCollins editors Jane Johnson and Joy Chamberlain. Without
their contributions, we would never have been able to start this
journey, much less hold on to see our journey's end.
With the principals scattered across twelve time zones, the Internet
was an essential tool for keeping in touch and staying on the same
page. It also proved to be a superb research tool. The Web provided
round-the-clock access to an amazing wealth of information and
opinion (a partial bibliography of Web sites is available at
http://www.sff.net/people/K-Mac/trigger.htm). At the same time, a
variety of Internet newsgroups (from rec.aviation.military to
talk.politics.guns) offered both an international cast of volunteer
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experts and a rich tapestry of passions and philosophies in conflict.
Among the many individuals who extended themselves as a courtesy
to the authors were Georgia Whidden at the Institute for Advanced
Study; Dr Rick Langolf; Daniel K. Jarrell; Commander Cole Pierce,
USN (retired); Dr Graham P. Collins; Major Billy Harvey, USAF
(retired); Jeff Crowell; Lieutenant Colonel Les Matheson, USAF;
Paul J. Adam; Robert Brown; Todd Elmer; Scott Rosenthal; and
Urban Fredriksson. They are not at all responsible, of course, for any
abuse of their kindness and expertise, nor for advice not taken.
Finally, the most heartfelt thanks go to those closest to hand, to the
dear friends and family who provided aid and comfort throughout the
long gestation of The Trigger. Their contributions to our endeavors
have been - and continue to be - innumerable and inestimable.
Michael P. Kube-McDowell, May 1999
Dramatis Personae

At Terabyte Laboratories:

Karl Brohier, senior director
Jeffrey Alan Horton, associate director
Gordon Greene, electrical and mechanical engineer
Leigh Thayer, experimental information systems specialist
Donovan King, director of site security
Eric Fleet, security officer
Val Bowden, engineering physicist at the Annex

In Washington, D.C.:

Senator Grover Wilman, founder of Mind Over Madness
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President Mark Breland
Richard Nolby, Chief of Staff
Roland Stepak, Secretary of Defense
Devon Carrero, Secretary of State
Attorney General Doran Douglas
Aimee Rochet, director of public relations
Edgar Mills, FBI Director
Jacob Hilger, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency

Elsewhere:

Aron Goldstein, owner of Aurum Industries and principal investor in
Terabyte Laboratories John Samuel Trent, president of the NAR Jules
Merchant, president of military contractor Allied
General
Philby Lancaster, attorney for the NAR Robert Wilkins, regional
commander of the People's Army of Righteous Justice
PROLOGUE: The Chosen
With resignation, Jeffrey Horton surveyed the clutter in the hardware-
filled second bedroom he and his roommate self-mockingly called
The Black Hole.
Data disks and tapes were scattered under and across the several
tables, and a mortally wounded CD-ROM was pinned under the
caster of one of the chairs. Assorted first-generation computer
components and test gear formed precarious mounds of metal and
plastic in the corners. There was a jumble of cables on the seat of
Horton's chair, and a sagging, badly overloaded shelf of books and
manuals loomed over the large monitor like a sword of Damocles.
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The normal level of chaos in The Black Hole was one that only
another gearhead could love - most of Horton's friends had at least
one room like it. But it was obvious from the overflowing cardboard
boxes in the middle of the floor that Hal had been hitting the Silicon
Valley electronics swap meets in the weeks Horton had been away.
'If it's broken, I can fix it. If it works, I can use it,' was Hal's self-
proclaimed motto. It was hard for him to say no to any flea-market
bargain, whether it was a $50 refractometer, a $100 argon laser, or a
complete Windows-era computer for $25. Somehow, the Black Hole
absorbed them all.
Resisting the temptation to paw through the boxes to appraise Hal's
latest finds, Horton retreated from the room and firmly closed the
door after him. The mound of dirty clothes on his bed and the
accumulation of recyclables on the apartment balcony deserved
higher priority than beating back entropy in what their landlord
grumpily called 'an unlicensed salvage yard'.
It was then that Horton heard someone knocking on the apartment
door. The knocking was sharp and impatient, as though it had been
going on for a while - which it might have been, since it was
competing with the white noise of the elderly dishwasher whooshing
and rumbling away in the tiny kitchen.
Hastening to respond, Horton only glanced at the corridor monitor
long enough to see that the caller was a silver-haired man in a long
cloth coat. Releasing both locks, he opened the door to the floor stop.
'Hello - I'm looking for -' the caller began. Then he straightened his
shoulders and smiled broadly. 'Well, and here you are.'
Horton was staring dumbly at a face that had no business appearing at
his door. 'You're Karl Brohier,' he said, blinking and shaking his
head. He had no precedent for how he should act when a Nobel
Laureate appeared at his door like a campus missionary, and fell back
on repeating himself. 'You're Karl Brohier.'
'I know,' said the older man, his head cocked at a slight angle. 'And
you're Jeffrey Alan Horton.' He gestured with the bottle of wine he
was carrying. 'May I come in?'
'Uh - of course, Dr Brohier,' Horton said, retreating a step and
allowing the door to open fully.
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'Karl,' the visitor corrected.
Horton could not allow himself such presumptuous familiarity, and
so simply nodded acknowledgement. 'I have to apologize for the
mess. I just got back from being away for most of three months -'
'Yes, I know,' said Brohier as he brushed past. 'How did you like it in
the Midwest?'
'Uh -I wasn't ready for snow in the spring.'
Brohier grunted in amusement as he searched for a place to sit down.
'And Marsh Tolliver - how did you find him?'
Tolliver was the director of the National Superconducting Cyclotron
Laboratory at Michigan State University, where Horton had gone to
trade months of service as a volunteer intern for sixty minutes of
cyclotron time in support of his doctoral thesis. 'He has high
expectations,' Horton said.
'You are too polite,' said Brohier, settling on the one kitchen chair not
piled high with mail. The student disease. You will get over it.'
'I-'
Tolliver is a tin-god bureaucrat masquerading as a scientist -
unfortunately, all too common for the top post at government sites.
All of the good work that comes out of the NSCL nowadays is due to
Ginger Frantala, the assistant director. I'm sure that she's the one
Professor Huang spoke to to arrange your visit. Did you get what you
needed out of your time there?'
There seemed to be nothing about him that Brohier did not already
know. 'The results supported my thesis.'
'Excellent. I look forward to seeing them. Are you going to publish?'
'In a refereed journal? I'm not sure it merits -'
'Oh, I think it does. From what the old tiger told me - the old tiger. He
loves that nickname, you know. It would do you no harm at all to
arrange to let him overhear you calling him that.' Brohier chuckled to
himself. 'Send your paper to Physical Letters B. I'm on the referee list
there. I'd give it a fair reading.'
'Dr Brohier -'
'Karl,' the visitor insisted.
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