Man-Kzin Wars III

till after breakfast?”
“I’ve got four years on you and I’m going for infinity. So I’m careful,” I told her. It wasn’t quite a lie . . . and she didn’t quite believe me either.
* * *
On Monday Phoebe went off to let her eldest grandson show her the local museums. I went back to work.
In Death Valley a semicircle of twenty lasers points at an axial array of mirrors. Tracks run across the desert to a platform that looks like strands of spun caramel. Every hour or so a spacecraft trundles along the tracks, poses above the mirrors, and rises into the sky on a blinding, searing pillar of light.
Here was where I and three companions and twenty-eight robots worked between emergencies. Emergencies were common enough. From time to time Glenn and Skii and ten or twenty machines had to be shipped off to Outback Field or Baikonur, while I held the fort at Death Valley Field.
All of the equipment was old. The original mirrors had all been slaved to one system, and those had been replaced again and again. Newer mirrors were independently mounted and had their own computers, but even these were up to fifty years old and losing their flexibility. The lasers had to be replaced somewhat more often. Nothing was ready to fall apart, quite.
But the mirrors have to adjust their shapes to match distorting air currents all the way up to vacuum, because the distortions themselves must focus the drive beam. A laser at 99.3% efficiency is keeping too much energy, getting too hot. At 99.1% something would melt, lost power would blow the laser into shrapnel, and a cargo would not reach orbit.
My team had been replacing mirrors and lasers long before I came on the scene. This circuit was nearly complete. We had already reconfigured some robots to begin replacing track.
The robots worked alone while we entertained ourselves in the monitor room. If the robots ran into anything unfamiliar, they stopped and beeped. Then a story or songfest or poker game would stop just as abruptly.
Usually the beep meant that the robot had found an acute angle, an uneven surface, a surface not strong enough to bear a loaded robot, a bend in a pipe, a pipe where it shouldn’t be . . . a geometrical problem. The robots couldn’t navigate just anywhere. Sometimes we’d have to unload it and move the load to a cart, by hand. Sometimes we had to pick it up with a crane and move it or turn it. Lots of it was muscle work.
Phoebe joined me for dinner Thursday evening.
She’d whipped her grandson at laser tag. They’d gone through the museum at Edward AFB. They’d skied . . . he needed to get serious about that, and maybe get some surgery too . . .
I listened and smiled and presently tried to tell her about my work. She nodded; her eyes glazed. I tried to tell her how good it was, how restful, after all those years in the ARM.
The ARM: that got her interest back. Stet. I told her about the Henry Program.
I’d been saving that. It was an embezzling system good enough to ruin the economy. It made Zachariah Henry rich. He might have stayed rich if he’d quit in time . . . and if his system hadn’t been so good, so dangerous, he might have ended in prison. Instead . . . well, let his tongue whisper secrets to the ears in the organ banks.
I could speak of it because they’d changed the system. I didn’t say that it had happened twenty years before I joined the ARM. But I was still running out of declassified stories. I told her, “If a lot of people know something can be done, somebody’ll do it. We can suppress it and suppress it again—”
She pounced. “Like what?”
“Like . . . well, the usual example is the first cold fusion system. They did it with palladium and platinum, but half a dozen other metals work. And organic superconductors: the patents listed a wrong ingredient. Various grad students tried it wrong and still got it. If there’s a way to do it, there’s probably a lot of ways.”
“That was before there was an ARM. Would you have suppressed superconductors?”
“No. What for?”
“Or cold fusion?”
“No.”
“Cold fusion releases neutrons,” she said. “Sheath the generator with spent uranium, what do you get?”
“Plutonium, I think. So?”
“They used to make bombs out of plutonium.”
“Bothers you?”
“Jack, the fission bomb was it in the mass murder department. Like the crossbow. Like the Ayatollah’s Asteroid.” Phoebe’s eyes held mine. Her voice had dropped; we didn’t want to broadcast this all over the restaurant. “Don’t you ever wonder just how much of human knowledge is lost in that . . . black limbo inside the ARM building? Things that could solve problems. Warm the Earth again. Ease us through the lightspeed wall.”
“We don’t suppress inventions unless they’re dangerous,” I said.
I could have backed out of the argument; but that too would have disappointed Phoebe. Phoebe liked a good argument. My problem was that what I gave her wasn’t good enough. Maybe I couldn’t get angry enough . . . maybe my most forceful arguments were classified . . .
Monday morning, Phoebe left for Dallas and a granddaughter. There had been no war, no ultimatum, but it felt final.
* * *
Thursday evening I was back in the Monobloc.
So was Anton. “I’ve played it,” he said. “Can’t talk about it, of course.”
He looked mildly bored. His hands looked like they were trying to break chunks off the edge of the table.
I nodded placidly.
Anton shouldn’t have told me about the broadcast from Angel’s Pencil. But he had; and if the ARM had noticed, he’d better mention it again.
Company joined us, sampled and departed. Anton and I spoke to a pair of ladies who turned out to have other tastes. (Some bends like to bug the straights.) A younger woman joined us for a time. She couldn’t have been over thirty, and was lovely in the modern style . . . but hard, sharply defined muscle isn’t my sole standard of beauty . . .
I remarked to Anton, “Sometimes the vibes just aren’t right.”
“Yeah. Look,