Systemic Shock

key minerals if someone could synthesize them? Even a rumor like that could damage relations with them.'

Eve fumed, invoked a name in White House Deseret. Mills, undaunted, countered with optimal control theory and the awe in which it was held by the Secretary of State — not to mention the White House Press Secretary. The message optimization program, he said, had shown that no rumor about matter synthesizers should be offered to credulous Americans. Mills did not add that he controlled the numerical biases of that computer program.

'Anyhow,' said Eve, her formidable curiosity abubble, 'what makes you so sure matter synthesis isn't possible?'

'It is possible,' he said; 'it's been done. But at incredible cost, using big experimental facilities. The clincher lies in the idea that any government as rigidly controlled as China would mass-produce a small gadget like that, even if it could. Give a few million Chinese their own personal synthesizers, and the government's control would vanish overnight. Think about it.'

While she sipped and thought, Mills wondered whether any girl Eve's age could possibly juggle the subtleties of the problem. It had never occurred to him that her intellect might rival his own.

'Seems to me that would be true everywhere. Chinese, us, the RUS, the Canadians, — any government that thrives on central control,' she reflected.

He said, 'Uh — to some degree you may be right.' She was precisely, preternaturally right, he thought, elevating his opinion of this morsel — no, this banquet!

But Mills was a patient man, and managed to avoid figuratively licking his chops. He had already been tempted by dizzying offers for his civilian services; knew the day would come soon when he could pick his banquets, even without the synthesizer. But with it? He could rule a country as Rothschilds and Rockefellers never had. As Eve dallied with the scenario he had suggested, Mills was wondering if the Chinese had scaled up the device, and whether copies still existed other than his own. He must set up a research team and somehow compel their loyalties — but all in good time. Sooner or later, scaled up or merely mass-produced as it was, the synthesizer could make an economy dependent on Mills.

Because, of course, Boren Mills did not intend ever to sell, lease, or license it. He would only sell its products, and grow rich beyond imagining. His eyes refocused on the face of Eve Simpson.

'So the rumor is a problem in domestic policy as well as foreign policy,' she was saying as though he were not there. 'The Chinese would've been crazy to produce such a thing; and whether it exists or not, Americans would be howling for one in every garage.'

Mills, startled: 'Not in the kitchen?'

'I was thinking of fuel,' she said.

'Might as well think of beef or heroin,' he said, to channel her thinking toward the bizarre.

Judiciously: 'Very complex molecules.'

'Jesus Christ; what don't you know?'

Titillated by the power she sensed in him, Eve gazed at him through lowered lashes. 'I don't know if you fool around.'

It was one way to deflect this brilliant wanton from pursuing a secret that Mills had thus far protected. It was also the exact question he had been pondering about Eve Simpson; and her question was his answer. “I should probably play coy,' he said, seeking cues to her appetites.

'I didn't know men with clout knew how,' she lied, watching the advance of his manicured forefinger on her thigh.

'Men with clout are kinky,' he purred, his tongue showing through the smile, deliberate in his choice of feminine nuance.

'It's a small world,' she said huskily, undressing him, ' — but I see that some things are larger than others.'

He laughed, letting her set the pace. Later he could study the holotape of this first encounter, the better to consolidate this essential alliance. But it was to be weeks before he focused on something she said while nodding, nodding, nodding above him. 'Even with,' she said dreamily, 'free synthesis, — there should be — ways to — make them — sweat.'

There were: superstition, media, implanted fears both emotional and physical. Mills was expert with emotional implants, and had learned a few things about the physical kind. There was that bunch of brutes attached to Army Intelligence, for instance…

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Once she had tooled up to produce the oral vaccine for keratophagic staph, Canada knew she had won her war. The vaccine was processed from polysaccharide components of the dried S. rosacea organism in factories isolated by permafrost and wilderness. While firmly denying her breakthrough, Canada managed to distribute the vaccine in her antiradiation chelate doses to virtually her entire population.

Soon, more of the vaccine was secretly dispensed in military rations to Canadian and US troops in Asia. An infantry man who traded every chocolate bar away was trading his immunity, though he could not know it; a confirmed chocoholic who ate too much of it suffered from something similar to influenza. Some Canadian chocolate was distributed to RUS troops, too — but if the wrapper said shukulaht in Cyrillic, it provided no immunity.

Sooner or later, there would be enough oral vaccine to eradicate Chinese Plague throughout Asia, but Canada took the long view. The RUS would get it later, rather than sooner.

By the second week in August, 1997, Allied forces in Asia celebrated the war's anniversary in defensive consolidations — their weasel-phrase for a brisk retreat. ANZUS forces in India no longer sought the spearhead that would have met our Fifth Army on the western edge of SinoInd territory; for one thing, the US First and Fifth Armies had largely completed their redeployment north of Manchuria, into Siberia. RUS strategists growled as the Americans moved ever eastward, ever farther from defense of Russian population centers and nearer to the Bering Strait. The RUS were pulling their own armies back, intending to wall off European Russia using the Urals as a buffer, and still had the US Third Army to help.

Konieff, who still chaired the anxiety-ridden Supreme Council, argued that it was better to have the rest of the Americans in Siberia, for however short a time, than to let the region be overrun immediately by surviving SinoInds. Besides, the Americans had left an entire army, with English and Canadian assault brigades, in Central Asia. Some members of the Council warned of duplicity here. Fearing that the foreign army might turn hostile on the banks of the Volga, the RUS worked out an accommodation. The Americans and their English-speaking friends could retreat through a corridor south of the Caspian Sea toward Turkey. Only the Iranians would protest this, and Iran had long since bled herself powerless with childish purges.

Konieff did not know that the US Joint Chiefs had placed our Third Army at such risk only after top-level meetings with the Canadians. Canada pledged to protect the escape corridor for our armies in Siberia, if we would lend our battle-wise Third Army to the Turks — who had a bit of a problem.

Turkey's problem began in 1992 when she contracted with Israel for desalinization plants on the shores of the Tuz Golu, a huge brackish lake in Turkey's central Anatolian plateau. The Israelis had tapped geothermal energy in nearby volcanic highlands by 1994, and knew better than the Turks that the central plateau offered an excellent, if not quite ideal, staging area for a project that would take a decade to complete. Israel envisioned nothing less than a fabrication and launch complex by which Israelis could begin their escape from Earth.

Not that this scheme had the blessings of every member of the Knesset. The premise had stuck like raw pork in the gullet of many a traditional Zionist. But the odds against Israel's tomorrows mounted every year, and the only thing more unthinkable than an orbital New Israel was an Israel that could survive its present neighbors where it was.

With the Turkish connection, Israel would gain freedom of movement to build and launch the seed ships to harvest asteroids to build vast habitats in Lagrangian orbits. Turkey would gain a newly fertile highland near Ankara, and rapid industrialization using Israeli and Canadian engineering. Canada would gain from favorable trade with New Israel's space faring factories, and harbored the conviction that this solution would rinse away, once and for