The President’s face went white. It took her a moment to gather the wits to say, “And what do you propose to offer in exchange for these . . . concessions?”
“In exchange?” Kolgoroff laughed. “Why, we will allow you to live. We will refrain from bombing your cities.”
“You’re insane!” snapped the President.
Still grinning, Kolgoroff replied, “We will see who is sane and who is mad. One minute before this conversation began, I ordered a limited nuclear attack against every NATO base in Europe, and a counterforce attack against the ballistic missiles still remaining in your silos in the American Midwest.”
The red panic light on the President’s communications console began flashing frantically.
“But that’s impossible!” burst the science advisor. He leaped from his chair and pointed at Kolgoroff’s image in the big display screen. “An attack of that size will bring on Nuclear Winter! You’ll be killing yourselves as well as us!”
Kolgoroff smiled pityingly at the scientist. “We have computers also, Professor. We know how to count. The attack we have launched is just below the threshold for Nuclear Winter. It will not blot out the sun everywhere on Earth. Believe me, we are not such fools as you think.”
“But . . .”
“But,” the Soviet leader went on, smile vanished and voice iron-hard, “should you be foolish enough to launch a counterstrike with your remaining missiles or bombers, that will break the camel’s back, so to speak. The additional explosions of your counterstrike will bring on Nuclear Winter.”
“You can’t be serious!”
“I am deadly serious,” Kolgoroff replied. Then a faint hint of his smile returned. “But do not be afraid. We have not targeted Washington. Or any of your cities, for that matter. You will live—under Soviet governance.”
The President turned to the science advisor. “What should I do?”
The science advisor shook his head.
“What should I do?” she asked the others seated around her.
They said nothing. Not a word.
She turned to the general. “What should I do?”
He got to his feet and headed for the door. Over his shoulder he answered, “Learn Russian.”
LOWER THE RIVER
I worked for a dozen years at Avco Everett Research Laboratory, in Massachusetts. In many ways, it was the best experience of my life. I was living a science-fiction writer’s dream, surrounded by brilliant scientists, engineers, and technicians working on cutting-edge research in everything from high-power lasers to artificial hearts.
We got involved in developing superconducting magnets in the early 1960s. Superconductors can generate enormously intense magnetic fields, and once energized they do not need to be continuously fed electrical power, as ordinary electromagnets do.
But they only remain magnetized if they are kept below a certain critical temperature. For the superconductors of the 1960s, the necessary temperature was a decidedly frosty —423.04 Fahrenheit, only a few degrees above absolute zero. The coolant we used was liquified helium.
In the 1980s, “high-temperature” superconductors were discovered: they work at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, -320.8T. Whoopee.
The search for a room-temperature superconductor, one that will remain superconducting at a comfortable 70 F and therefore would not need cryogenic coolants, is being pushed in many labs.
In the meantime, business colleges have sent their graduates into all sorts of industries. What would happen, I wondered, if one of these MB As tried to use the management techniques of goal-setting and negative incentives on a physicist who is laboring to produce a room temperature superconductor?
“Lower the River” is the result.
Jackson Klondike did not look like a world-class physicist. He was a shaggy bear of a man with a gruff manner and a ferocious sense of humor. Yet he was the unchallenged leader of the Rockledge Research Laboratory’s bright and quirky scientific staff.
William Ratner did not look like a research lab director. He was astonishingly young, astoundingly handsome, and incredibly vapid. Yet he held a master’s degree in business administration, and the Rockledge corporate officers (including his uncle Sylvester) had handed him the directorship of the lab.
With one single demand: Get results!
Klondike was smolderingly unhappy as he sat in front of Ratner’s desk. It was obvious that he felt the time spent in the director’s office was wasted; he wanted to be back in his own rat’s nest of a lab where he could do some creative work.
Ratner had peeked into Klondike’s lab only once. It looked like a chaotic mess, wires dangling from the ceiling, insulated tubing snaking everywhere, and vats of some mysterious stuff boiling and filling the chamber with steam that somehow felt cold instead of hot.
Klondike was the resident genius, though. His specialty was solid-state physics. For years he had been experimenting on superconducting magnets.
“I have a directive here from corporate headquarters in New York,” Ratner said, as sternly as he could manage, rattling the single sheet of paper in one hand.
Across his desk Klondike sat straddling a chair he had turned backward, leaning his beefy arms on the chair’s back, his chin half-buried in their hair, his eyes glowering at Ratner.
“A directive, huh?” Klondike vouchsafed.
Sitting up as straight as he could, Ratner said, “I know you don’t think much of me, but I’ve been studying this superconductivity business for several weeks now.”
“Have you?” Klondike’s voice rumbled from somewhere deep in his chest, like distant thunder.
“Yes I have,” Ratner said. “Superconducting magnets could be a major product line for this corporation, if it weren’t for the fact that you need to keep them cold with liquid oxygen.”
“Liquid nitrogen,” reverberated Klondike.
“Nitrogen. That’s what I meant.”
“Used to be worse. When I first started in this game, we hadda use mother-lovin’ liquid helium for cooling the coils. Liquid nitrogen’s easy.”
“But it’s still a problem, as far as practicality is concerned, isn’t it?”
“Nah. The real problem’s the ductility of—”
“Never mind!” Ratner snapped, unwilling to allow Klondike to snow him with a lot of technical jargon.
Klondike glared at him, but shut up.
