Cyber Rogues Read online

  The problem was solved for him by the words that blasted in suddenly from beyond the doorway. “I’m not as dumb as you seem to think I am. The real problem is you think you’re too goddam smart! You’ve had it? That’s okay by me too!” An instant later the slam of the outer door echoed through the apartment.

  Dyer emerged from the kitchen, still drinking casually from his glass, and looked around him in surprise. Christ, was that all there was going to be to it? He felt mildly insulted. So, after all his thought and gentlemanly concern, he wasn’t worth even a few heartfelt insults and choice obscenities, eh? Shaking his head sadly at the fickleness of human nature, he moved over to the room’s wall panel, killed the incessant pounding rhythm that Sharon had selected and replaced it with the Brahms violin concerto. A sense of airy lightness gradually permeated his being. Humming softly to the music, he poured himself a large brandy, lit a cigar and strolled over by the window to watch the sun dissolving away into the Hudson.

  An hour or more later, after he had keyed his orders for the weekend shopping into the viscreen touchboard and primed the apartment’s computer to handle his intended schedule, he called Laura. He didn’t really know why he was calling although he had thought of a number of excuses, managing to convince himself finally that he wanted somebody stimulating to talk to. Anyhow, it didn’t make any difference; her number returned a brief message advising that she would be out of town until Monday morning.

  He rose early on Saturday and caught a cab into the city to spend the morning at the Lexington Uncomme College just north of Central Park, which he usually frequented once or twice a week. Uncomme—Unified Combat Method—was a technique that combined aspects of karate, the atemi waza branch of judo and a number of other martial arts including military unarmed combat into a fearsomely effective technique well suited to the Western physique and cultural conditioning. It had been developed by the armed forces of the U.S. and Western Europe toward the end of the previous century and had gone on to attract a large following of enthusiasts among the general public of all nations. Dyer had been introduced to Uncomme when he was in his late teens and studying psychology and neurosciences as an undergraduate student at the University of California. He had found it to be one of the few sporting activities that appealed to him, persevered at it, become quite proficient by rising over the years to the third master grade (ninth was the highest that had ever been awarded to anybody) and had kept in regular practice ever since.

  After three strenuous hours and a hot shower, all of the week’s tensions had been flushed away down the drain along with the water and he went upstairs to the members’ bar to enjoy a couple of well-earned beers. There he met Chuck and Tom, two of the other regulars at the Lexington who were also rounding off a hard morning. Chuck’s wife was in Mexico, Tom was single, and neither of them had any particular plans for the rest of the day and so, a little over an hour later, the three of them found themselves eating a burger lunch while they debated what to do next.

  Tom divided his life between working as a musician and an aeromechanic. He played moog and guitar in various clubs around the city, classical cello when he was in a different frame of mind, and modified production domestic aircars to racing specifications when he wanted to change from both. He ran the latter business in a workshop that he owned in Newark, he told them, but the premises were getting to be somewhat cramped for the amount of business that he was attracting. Apparently a firm in Queens was expanding and moving out to Connecticut, and the place that they were about to vacate sounded ideal. In fact Tom had been thinking about going over and taking a look at it later that day; how would Dyer and Chuck like to tag along? The vote was unanimous and that took care of the afternoon.

  By early evening they were back on the Manhattan side of the river and heading for the bar that Chuck co-owned with a cousin, near Rockefeller Center. Chuck had spent a lot of his life as a mining engineer and had returned from Nepal only six months previously. He had taken the partnership in the bar to give himself a break for a year or two while he waited for chance, luck or inspiration to decide where he would go next. His pet thought at the moment was to apply to ISA for a post at one of the lunar extraction plants.

  By midnight the place was filled to capacity, the small dance floor was overflowing and the three of them had been joined by a party of Chuck’s friends at a table in one of the quieter corners. Tom had latched onto a blonde who had appeared a couple of hours before with another girl, and was engaged in an earnest private conversation which showed every sign of having much to do with preparing the way for her eventual decline and fall. Chuck was supplying recipes for Indian curries to a man who managed a nearby restaurant while Dyer had gotten into a conversation with somebody called Pete, who turned out to be a communications officer from ISA. The subject of Dyer’s birthplace came up and very soon the conversation had turned to space matters.

  “I just turned twenty when I went up for the first time,” Pete said in answer to one of Dyer’s questions. “Must have been almost exactly ten years ago. It was on the P2Q Project. Ever hear of that?”

  “P2Q?” Dyer frowned at his drink while he swirled it back and forth in his glass. He’d heard something about that, he was sure. “Wasn’t it some kind of controversial research thing?” he said slowly. “Ah yes . . . wait a minute. Something to do with viruses, wasn’t it?” Pete nodded.

  “The aim was to manufacture a virus strain that would attack cancer cells selectively. The problem was that it only had to come out a little bit wrong and you’d wind up with something really lethal. If it wasn’t selective enough for some reason and it got out . . .”

  Pete shrugged and allowed Dyer to complete the rest for himself. He took a swallow of his drink and went on, “Anyhow there was a big fight about it that went on for years. What it boiled down to was that nobody could guarantee a failproof way of making sure it could never get out into the atmosphere with a lot of worst-case ‘what-if?’s . . . not one that would keep everybody happy anyway. So the whole thing was vetoed . . . until somebody had the bright idea of doing it away from Earth completely—right outside the atmosphere. So they shipped the scientists and all the equipment up to a purpose-built satellite and did it all there. That was what P2Q was. In fact the satellite is still there but it’s running different projects these days . . . I don’t know what they call it now. I think it’s just got some general name . . . Isolab or something like that.”

  A tiny bomb exploded somewhere in the back of Dyer’s mind as he listened. There was something important in what Pete had just said . . . something that was shrieking to make itself heard through the pounding music coming from the dance floor and the hubbub of voices around the table. He tried, but his brain was too heavy with alcoholic glue to rise to the task of unscrambling the message. And then another party of Chuck’s friends descended upon the table and swept the thought all away.

  Sunday was already into the afternoon when he eventually hauled himself out of bed and began thinking about doing something to rejoin the human race. After breakfast he went upstairs to the rooftop pool and garden, fell asleep in the sun and returned three hours later to find a message in his mail file from his neighbors Jack and Sheila inviting him to come over for dinner and make up a foursome for bridge.

  It was getting onto midnight when he got back. As he showered and got ready for bed, his mind began turning once again to the things that would be awaiting him at CUNY the following morning. He fell asleep thinking about TITAN and FISE, about Chris’s remark that what they needed was a simulated world to try it all out on, and about the impossible complexity of the existing global system. If only there were some way of setting up a world that was more representative of the real thing than Hector’s, but without the horrendous complications of a whole planet . . . Something like an isolated subset of Earth itself that could be allowed to evolve without the risk of unforeseen developments interacting with the real system upon which Earth depended totally . . . A test-tube microwor
ld . . .

  The pieces fell together somewhere around four o’clock in the morning. He was suddenly wide awake with Pete’s words about P2Q ringing in his mind. “. . . what it boiled down to was that nobody could guarantee a failproof way of making sure it could never get out . . . until somebody had the bright idea of doing it away from Earth completely . . .”

  The solution was so obvious!

  He sat up, suddenly excited, cleared the last shreds of sleep from his head and went through it again slowly. He could see no hitches in it. He’d never get back to sleep now, he knew, so he got up, dressed, put on a pot of coffee and spent a restless hour pacing back and forth waiting for the sun to come up. He was in his office by seven o’clock. By nine he was calling Hoestler’s number every five minutes and cursing everything to do with yachts, most especially long yachting weekends.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “We could take over one of the giant space stations being built for colonies.” Dyer sat forward eagerly in the chair while Hoestler listened from the other side of his desk. For once Hoestler’s eyes were active and alert. He had said little but it was obvious that Dyer’s words were setting all kinds of wheels in motion inside his head.

  “The residential portions of some of the colonies are miles across,” Dyer went on. “They’ve got everything—complete towns, landscapes, rivers, farms and lakes . . . everything as near natural as it’s possible to get. You could have agriculture, industry, an economy to manage, an ecology to look after, energy programs to schedule, transportation, communications. Pretty well every aspect of Earth’s society that matters, duplicated on a miniature scale. Only it would be small enough to handle. All the problems that come about as a result of the scale of the real thing simply go away. We set it up as a lab-scale experiment.”

  Hoestler’s eyes widened slowly as the vision took shape inside his head.

  “So exactly what are you saying we do?” he checked. “We put in a total FISE-based system to run the whole thing. A totally computer-managed micro-planet, that it? A system at least as advanced functionally as anything that exists on Earth . . . Then we wait to see what it does . . . Hmm . . . Interesting . . .” He leaned back from the desk and nodded slowly to himself.

  “More advanced than anything on Earth,” Dyer said. “FISE wouldn’t be suitable as it stands because it’s been adapting to Hector’s world, which is too simple. But the basic techniques that we’ve developed with FISE could be used to program the microplanet system to give it capabilities way ahead of TITAN. That’s the whole point. If you want a preview of what TITAN might grow into in a hundred years’ time, this would be just the way to do it. If it does start doing things you didn’t bargain for, at least you know about it before it happens for real down here. Also nothing that happened up there could have any effect on the system down here. It’s perfect.”

  Hoestler fell silent for a long time. As he turned the suggestion over, a slow frown spread across his fleshly features.

  “I see a problem with it,” he said at last. “So we set this system up the way you say and we wait. So what? There’s no guarantee that it will evolve any survival drive at all. We might wait years. And even if it didn’t, that wouldn’t prove that it could never happen with TITAN, would it?” He shook his head glumly and made a tossing-away motion with his hand. “Anyway, the question isn’t, Could TITAN evolve a survival drive?; our worst-case assumptions already presuppose that it could. The question is, What could it do about it?.” Hoestler sighed heavily and looked dubious. “I’m sorry, Ray, but I can’t see it. How would what you’re proposing get us any nearer answering questions like that?”

  “We don’t have to wait and see if it develops a survival instinct,” Dyer replied at once. “We make sure it does. We build the instinct in to start with!”

  Hoestler stared at him as if he had suddenly taken leave of his senses.

  “Why not?” Dyer demanded. “Kim’s already developing exactly the techniques we need to do it We don’t have to wait and see if it ever gets around to equating Man to a threat. We attack it!”

  “Attack it?” Hoestler gasped incredulously. Dyer nodded his head rapidly.

  “Exactly! We set up a situation in which all the worst-case ‘maybes’ have already come true because we made them come true. Then we take it on in a battle of wits to see just who can outwit whom if it ever came to the point of us versus it. We can act out all the what-if-this and what-if-that scenarios everybody has been talking about and get some real data once and for all to answer them. As with everything else, the only way to find out what a complex of smart machines is capable of is to try it and see. The problem up until now has been that the only complex we’ve had to try it on happens to be the one that manages our planet and if things screw up there won’t be any second chance. What I’m saying is, it doesn’t have to be that way.”

  Hoestler stared back at Dyer in open amazement as he listened. Every objection that his mind could devise crumbled away almost as soon as he thought of it.

  “I think you’ve got something, Ray,” he breathed at last. “I really think you’ve got something.”

  Within the hour Hoestler had endorsed the idea to Richter. Richter rushed off in excitement to put it to Lewis and by lunchtime Lewis had involved Schroder from Washington. Schroder was at once captivated and promised to raise the matter with his advisers, that same day he hoped. The message found its way back to Dyer that things were moving on it. What happened next was something he could only wait for to shape itself in its own way and in its own time.

  Nothing further had developed by the end of the day, which was not really surprising. Just as Dyer was in the process of tidying up to leave, Betty stuck her head in through the door and announced that Laura was on the line asking for him. As he told her to put the call through he caught a momentary expression of mild surprise flickering across Betty’s face, and then realized that it was because he had failed to display any of his usual reactions to such news. It was probably, he told himself as he settled back to take the call, because for once the world in general seemed to be spinning smoothly.

  “Hi there,” Laura greeted from the screen. “How’s my exception that proves the rule today?”

  “Hi. What rule?”

  “About scientists. You’re the one who’s different from the way they’re all supposed to be.”

  “Point one, I’m fine,” he said. “Point two, I thought you were supposed to be forgetting what we’re supposed to be like and finding out what we’re really like. Point three, exceptions don’t prove rules. It’s an idiotic popular saying. Now, what can I do for you?”

  “I’ve got a proposition to put to you,” Laura told him. Dyer eyed her suspiciously.

  “What kind of proposition?”

  “You remember Sam Gallenheim who was at the dinner the other night?”

  “Producer from Summit, wasn’t he? Yes, I remember him. What about him?”

  “He’s been talking to my boss today,” Laura said. “He was pretty impressed by some of the things you said and he’s been suggesting we ought to make more use of outside professional consultants. Not just to vet the technical stuff, but to advise on the things I’ve been working on too—you know, getting the people to come out right and all that. He recommended you especially. Anyhow, they asked me to mention it and find out if you might be interested. What d’you think?”

  “I’d need more details than that,” Dyer replied. “What kind of thing have they got in mind?”

  “Oh, a little time outside whatever your usual hours are—helping get the outlines right in the early stages, maybe being on hand to advise in some sets . . . things like that. It could be fun and I know they’d make it more than worth your while. That sound like a good deal?”

  “Well, you’re selling it fine,” Dyer said with a grin; “Have they put you on commission or something?”

  “I wish they would. No, I’m just doing my job.”

  “When do you want answers?”<
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  “I’m not looking for a yes-no here and now. I just want to know how you think you might feel about it in principle. If it sounds okay we’ll think about it some more and give you something more detailed in writing later. How does that grab you?”

  “Oh hey, in that case go right ahead,” Dyer told her. “Sure, I’ll look at it, but I can’t say anything definite until I’ve seen it. Fair enough?”

  “Good. That’s all I needed to know for now.” Laura looked away for a moment and exchanged a brief dialogue of signs with somebody offscreen. “Sorry about that,” she said, looking back again. “We’ve got a meeting due to start in a couple of minutes. That was why I needed to get your reaction to this idea.”

  “Meetings at this time?” Dyer made a face. “What’s the matter with you people? Can’t you sleep at night or something?”

  “Well, that’s the way it is,” she said with a shrug. “There’s always something going on in this business.”

  “Staying on late in town then, huh?”

  “Oh, we won’t make an all-night thing out of it,” she replied automatically. “An hour maybe . . . two at the most. It happens a lot.”

  “I’ll buy you a dinner when you get through.” The words had somehow said themselves even before he’d thought about them. They came out as a blunt statement of fact rather than as a request. Laura’s expression registered surprise, compelling him to look for something additional to defend his stance. “We owe you one,” he explained. “Zeegram treated us last week. Now it’s our turn.”

  Chris, Ron, Kim and Betty were milling around and putting on coats just outside his office. He stretched out a leg to kick the door shut and returned his eyes to the screen. Laura was looking at him in a mischievous and knowing kind of way but her mouth was smiling.