David's Sling (30 page)

He might once have been a gentle human being.

Kurt asked the question. "Okay, what's wrong with the Hopper? Why hasn't it finished him off?"

Lila shivered. Her body turned from the violence, then her shoulders, and finally her eyes. Her attention focused on the program monitor. The computer went through its steps in slow motion—logical deductions skipping from certainty to certainty, all the certainties adding up to totaj uncertainty. She hissed. "It's caught in an action loop," she said in a tone as pale as the man on the screen. Her voice strengthened as she studied the problem. "I gave the concept of being 'dead' pretty broad definition in the Hopper's software. This man fits the definition most of the time, but every once in a while he moves, and that shifts the equations to conclude that he's alive. The Hopper can't decide." Her jawline tightened as she turned to look at Kurt. "I don't think we need to kill that man any more than we already have, do you?"

Kurt, still on the tightrope, thought out loud. "Can we break the action loop
without
killing him—and without broadening the definition of death even further?"

Lila coursed through the program again. "I'm doing it now."

"Good." His voice rang with cold clarity. "You're right. We don't need to kill him any more."

Lila trembled as she moved through the text on her screen, cutting, pasting, rewriting. In a minute, the boxes of text closed, and everyone turned back to the view of the pale Soviet face. The pain in his face had receded; he now looked back at the Hopper as if he could see through it—through its satellite link—to Lila and Kurt. An expression of concentration masked his pain. He, too, felt horror and hatred and a need to diagnose what had happened. It struck Nathan that the Russian's face now mirrored Kurt's.

Tomorrow, these two men would hate the things they had done. But today, they hated each other. Nathan vowed silently that some day the Institute would find a way to prevent this twist of behavior, the twist that allowed and perhaps even forced Premiers and Presidents to use human beings as weapons.

Lila whispered, "It's fixed." The picture whirled. With its new definitions, the Hopper turned in search of another leader to kill.

"I can't believe we're doing this!" Lila screamed.

"What can't you believe—that we're killing them? Or that we're letting that man on the screen live?" Kurt mocked her. "Personally, I'd like to finish off the guy who ordered that artillery barrage out there, and the soldier we just saw was probably the one who did it. " He turned from her and spoke more to himself than to Lila. "But that soldier's more useful to us alive. He's too incapacitated to lead anymore, so he's not dangerous. And since he's dying, it'll cost the Russians a tremendous effort to try to save him. Better yet, if he dies despite their efforts, his death will demoralize them, because he'll have died in
their
hands."

Lila sat speechless, listening to this last blast of inhumanly cold, brutal logic. She ran from the room.

Kurt blinked his eyes slowly. "I spent some time in Stuttgart when I was in the Army." His voice softened. Abruptly, he grasped the dial and flicked through the images from the Hoppers. He released the knob when the picture focused on the ruins of a farmhouse and the charred ruins of human beings. "I used to pass that farmhouse every day. The man would frown—he didn't like Americans— but his daughter waved at me. She waved at all the people who went by, smiling . . ." Fury and pain congealed in the lines of his neck and mouth as he marched stiffly from the room.

Ivan continued to watch his murderer as it watched him. For no apparent reason, the machine whirled again— how delightfully nimble it was! So graceful and precise a destroyer!—and sped toward the troops who had moved halfway over the ridge toward the woodland. Again, the machine proved its precision. A spit of flame came from it, a short burst of fire. Lieutenant Katsobashvili spun to the ground, very dead.

Ivan rolled over and crawled toward the jeep. "Goga," he whispered to his driver, "help me into the jeep. We must get a report on this back to the general. "

Goga poked his head around, then ran to assist him. He looked like he was about to throw up. Ivan almost laughed. Here was a man who had looked upon the burnt bodies of helpless children without flinching, yet couldn't stomach the sight of a one-armed comrade covered with blood.

One-armed! The thought made Ivan want to throw up, too. He refused to think about it. He rationalized that he would soon bleed to death, so the loss of his arm would not be important.

As they bounced away to the nearest hospital, Ivan looked back to see the first American soldiers come over the hill. Ivan's battalion was frozen with indecision. Most of them, like his driver, had never been in combat before. A few of them would fight and die. The rest would surrender.

The pain and the shock slammed against his rationality one more time. As Ivan slipped into unconsciousness, he had one last insight—a thrilling insight that
relaxed
him, and almost made him feel peaceful, despite his condition.

He realized that this new American weapon would not hurt any children.

The SkyHunter floated on the breeze.

Floating on the breeze meant goodness. Not floating meant endness. Not floating meant endness.

Recognition of a SAM-27 site meant more recognitions of SAM-27s. It meant float in an out-spiraling helix with radar detectors in full blossom. Recognition of three SAM-27s meant conform a template to match them and see the conformed location of the comsite. Finding the conformed location of the comsite meant match the conformation to the best nearby hill. Best and nearby meant look up pattern definitions and calculate weighted value averages.

Finding the best hill match meant float over the hill with radio detectors in full blossom. No contact meant circle float. No contact meant circle float.

No contact for many minutes meant float over the second-best hill with radio detectors in lull blossom. No contact meant circle float.

Contact meant comsite positively identified. Comsite positively identified meant find the best nearby valley for a division headquarters. Best and nearby meant pattern matching with weighted averages. Finding the nearby valley meant float over the valley with infrared and optical detectors in full blossom.

Infrared patterns of human beings in frenzied action, concealed from optical vision by camouflage, meant division headquarters. Division headquarters meant float over target. Float over target meant—

Downdraft meant no float. No float meant endness. Floating on the breeze meant goodness. No float meant endness.

Safety meant altitude greater than 10,000 feet. Safety meant continue to float. No safety meant point to error block. Error block meant touch the satellite with radio transmitter in full blossom. Error block meant connect to the Thunderbird Motel in Yakima. Error block meant dump all status checkpoints to Ronnie.

Nathan's eyes jerked at the sound of the alerter beep. It took a few moments of reorientation to remember what the beep meant: another malfunction had occurred in another Hunter.

A shadow moved in the room's gloomy twilight. Ronnie stumbled out of his chair and crossed the room to lean over a glowing display of the image that Nathan recognized: an image of the ground as seen from a SkyHunter.

Nathan walked softly up behind the boy and the computer. Ronnie sighed and drooped his hand over the keyboard. The SkyHunter image slid to the side as chunks of texts, lists of definitions in Modulog style, popped out. Each Modulog definition held the meaning of another definition, of an event, or of a pattern. Nathan recognized all the words, and all the definitions. Each definition of itself seemed quite reasonable, but Nathan had no idea how reasonably they worked as a collection.

The problem with blocks of software resembled the problem with teams of people. Like the people in the team, the definitions in the program had to be molded into an organic whole. The organic whole had to make sense beyond the disparate merits of the individuals. He clenched his teeth as he thought about what this week, and this day, had done to his team of individuals.

They now played a high-speed race—the race of his team and their Hunters against the enemy killers. Creating organic wholeness took time, but they had no time. Instead, they were
transferring
organic wholeness, from the team to the programs. Every repair they made in response to a Hunter failure expended some part of the integrity of the team. As the team disintegrated, the Hunters became more complete.

Did the team have enough cohesion left to correct the Hunters? Were the Hunters still so raw and error-ridden that they would take more than Nathan's people had to give?

His voice barked as he asked Ronnie, "What is it?"

Ronnie jumped. "I don't know," he said shrilly.

Nathan shook his head. "Sorry. I didn't mean to shout like that." He dragged his chair over and sat down. The picture from the SkyHunter zigged again, a purposeful motion rattled by random twists of air currents. The craft continuously tweaked its control surfaces to capture every wisp of available lift.

Looking below the image, Nathan saw the status indicators. Despite its cleverness in using every twist of air, this SkyHunter had dropped below the safe altitude of 10,000 feet. Flying that low, the glider might well be seen from the ground, if someone looked in the right direction at the right time, despite the coloration of the Hunter's lower surfaces.

Nathan sat quietly, resisting the desire to ask more questions until Ronnie had at least finished his inspection of the situation. To reinforce his resolve, Nathan sidled his chair back and away from the work station, far enough away to remove himself from Ronnie's field of view.

Nathan watched the boy in sympathy, remembering the times when
he
had been the man on the spot—the programmer who had to fix the problem because no one else could. He remembered the annoyance of having people watch him; and smiled in sympathy with the men who had been
his
supervisors. He now understood the exquisite quality of their suffering. He also remembered how, after a few moments of getting inside the problem, he would forget their presence, as long as they were not obnoxious with their questions.

Ronnie started idly tapping on the keyboard. The image of forward motion stopped, then accelerated into reverse. Nathan realized he was running back through the sequence of events that led to the moment when the Hunter had called in its warning. He started the motion forward again.

After a few minutes, Nathan started to see a pattern. The glider seemed to be going through the same sequence of steps, covering nearly the same path, over and over again, each time at a lower altitude.

Ronnie gasped. Nathan opened his mouth, but was afraid to speak. Fortunately, Ronnie broke into a half-muttered explanation, perhaps for himself as much for Nathan. "It keeps coming around for the final overflight of the headquarters, but something distracts it. It's acting as if it has forgotten where it was and what it was doing, then goes back into the standard search pattern. "

"Which part of the code has the problem?" The term "which part" was a euphemism; what Nathan really wanted to know was, is it a problem in the code that Ronnie had written? If it was, then Ronnie was the best person to try to fix it, since he understood it. If not . . .

Ronnie waved his hands helplessly. "I'm not sure whose code it is," he said, answering the real question. "It's not Lila's problem. Something is going wrong between Kurt's understanding of the tactical maneuvers and the plane's execution of those maneuvers. So it could be Kurt's stuff, or hopefully, mine." He pursed his lips. "Or it
could
be a problem with the WeatherWatcher software—the modules supplied with the glider that tell it how to fly."

Nathan nodded. A certain irony colored the hopes of a good software developer: you always hoped that the problem lay in
your own
part of the code, because if it didn't, you'd have to call somebody else to fix it. Here, their only hope of saving the SkyHunter was if the problem was Ronnie's. If it was Kurt's, it would have to wait until morning. Kurt needed sleep before he could solve the problem, no matter how hard or long he might be willing to work.

But the third possibility was most chilling. If there was a bug in the LightCraft built-in software, they could not fix it through their satellite link. The built-in software resided in read-only memory; they could not repair it without physically opening the Hunters up and installing new chips.

A snappy staccato of typing focused Nathan's attention. The green light from the image of German forests bathed Ronnie's face, giving him the look of a man suffering from seasickness. Nathan looked closer, overcome by the suspicion that Ronnie's sickly appearance came from more than just the unnatural light.

"Ha," Ronnie grunted in a wan imitation of joy. "Got it."

"How do you feel?" Nathan asked.

The staccato of the keyboard broke for a moment. "I'll make it. I see the problem. There's a downdraft on the last leg of the approach route to the Hunter's target. The Hunter tracks very nicely until it hits the downdraft. But the downdraft is strong enough to send an interrupt to the flight control system, which needs the highest priority to maintain stability." He rolled his eyes. "By the time the flight control system ends its downdraft countermeasures, everything else has been forgotten. The sensors go back to looking for SAM sites, and it repeats. Of course, it repeats at a lower altitude because it doesn't get to correct entirely for the downdraft."

"But the flight control system must do that fairly frequently. Why haven't we seen this problem before?"

Ronnie shook his head. "It only forgets if it's in the middle of switching contexts from tactical analysis to the attack run. At that time, there are just enough things to remember that it has to forget something. Unfortunately, it forgets the wrong things." The staccato stopped. They watched a quick simulation of the revised software on the programming display, then downloaded to the SkyHunter so far away. "I wonder how many other stupid little problems like that there are," Ronnie murmured.