Arthur C. Clarke - The Trigger

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THE TRIGGER

Arthur C. Clarke & Michael Kube-McDowell

Contents

Prologue: The Chosen

I: Trigger

1: Anomaly

2: Mystery

3: Secrecy

4: Inquiry

5: Chemistry

6: Journey

7: Strategy

8: Amity

9: Colloquy

10: Exigency

11: Military

12: Apostasy

13: Enginery

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Opportunity
Trickery
Perplexity
Festivity
Equity
Guaranty
Publicity
Piracy
Alchemy 
 
II: Jammer
 
So Much Madness
Weapons to Kill
The Progress of Reason 
Forever Our Destiny
Summons to Greatness
Not Made for Defeat
To Promote Peace
Harder than War
From Savage to Scholar
Never a Bad Peace
 
III: Killer
THE TRIGGER
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Arthur C. Clarke was born in Somerset in 1917. He is a graduate of

King's College, London (where he obtained a First Class Honours in

Physics and Mathematics), a past Chairman of the British

Interplanetary Society, and a member of the Academy of

Astronautics, the Royal Astronomical Society, and may other

scientific organizations. He served in the RAF during the Second

World War and was in charge of the first radar talk-down equipment

during its experimental trials. He wrote a monograph for Wireless

World in 1945 predicting satellite communications, and did it so well

that when the first commercial satellites were launched twenty years

later they could not be patented. Arthur C. Clarke has for many years

made his home in Sri Lanka. He is chancellor of a university there

and founder of the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Advanced

Technology. He was awarded the CBE in 1989 and knighted in 1998.

Michael Kube-McDowell was born in 1954 and grew up in southern

New Jersey. He holds a master's degree in science education from

Indiana University and was honoured for teaching excellence by the

1985 White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. Novelist,

teacher, photographer, musician, screenwriter, Kube-McDowell is a

father of three and a 'spaceflight geek'. He has written scripts for the

tv series Tales From the Darkside. His novels include the thousand-

year Trigon Disunity future history and the Star Wars trilogy The

Black Fleet Crisis. His novel The Quiet Pools was nominated for the

Hugo Award.

Also by Arthur C. Clarke

2001 A Space Odyssey

2010 Odyssey Two

2061 Odyssey Three

3001 The Final Odyssey

Islands in the Sky

Prelude to Space

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Against the Fall of Night

The Sands of Mars

Childhood's End

Expeditions to Earth

Earthlight

Reach for Tomorrow

The City and the Stars

The Deep Range

The Other Side of the Sky

A Fall of Moondust

Tales of Ten Worlds

Dolphin Island

Glide Path

The Lion of Comarre

The Nine Billion Names of God

The Lost Worlds of 2001

The Wind From the Sun

Rendezvous with Rama

Imperial Earth

The Fountains of Paradise

1984: Spring

The Sentinel

The Songs of Distant Earth

Also by Michael Kube-McDowell

The Trigon Disunity future history

Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis trilogy

Alternities

The Quiet Pools

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Exile

Voyager

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

and

MICHAEL KUBE-McDOWELL

THE TRIGGER

HarperCollinsPublishers

Voyager

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www. voyager-books.com

Special overseas edition 2000 This paperback edition 2000

987654321

First published in Great Britain by Voyager 1999

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of

this work

ISBN 0 00 648383 6 Set in Meridien

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,

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without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of

trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated

without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover

other than that in which it is published and without a similar

condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent

purchaser.

Dedication

To the memory of

The children of Dunblane, Scotland

And Jonesboro, Arkansas

Acknowledgements

Any project of this size and scope owes much to people whose names

do not appear on the cover. At the top of the list is an indispensable

team of publishing pros including agents Russell Galen and Danny

Baror, Bantam Spectra editors Tom Dupree and Pat Lobrutto, and

HarperCollins editors Jane Johnson and Joy Chamberlain. Without

their contributions, we would never have been able to start this

journey, much less hold on to see our journey's end.

With the principals scattered across twelve time zones, the Internet

was an essential tool for keeping in touch and staying on the same

page. It also proved to be a superb research tool. The Web provided

round-the-clock access to an amazing wealth of information and

opinion (a partial bibliography of Web sites is available at

http://www.sff.net/people/K-Mac/trigger.htm). At the same time, a

variety of Internet newsgroups (from rec.aviation.military to

talk.politics.guns) offered both an international cast of volunteer

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experts and a rich tapestry of passions and philosophies in conflict.

Among the many individuals who extended themselves as a courtesy

to the authors were Georgia Whidden at the Institute for Advanced

Study; Dr Rick Langolf; Daniel K. Jarrell; Commander Cole Pierce,

USN (retired); Dr Graham P. Collins; Major Billy Harvey, USAF

(retired); Jeff Crowell; Lieutenant Colonel Les Matheson, USAF;

Paul J. Adam; Robert Brown; Todd Elmer; Scott Rosenthal; and

Urban Fredriksson. They are not at all responsible, of course, for any

abuse of their kindness and expertise, nor for advice not taken.

Finally, the most heartfelt thanks go to those closest to hand, to the

dear friends and family who provided aid and comfort throughout the

long gestation of The Trigger. Their contributions to our endeavors

have been - and continue to be - innumerable and inestimable.

Michael P. Kube-McDowell, May 1999

Dramatis Personae

At Terabyte Laboratories:

Karl Brohier, senior director

Jeffrey Alan Horton, associate director

Gordon Greene, electrical and mechanical engineer

Leigh Thayer, experimental information systems specialist

Donovan King, director of site security

Eric Fleet, security officer

Val Bowden, engineering physicist at the Annex

In Washington, D.C.:

Senator Grover Wilman, founder of Mind Over Madness

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President Mark Breland

Richard Nolby, Chief of Staff

Roland Stepak, Secretary of Defense

Devon Carrero, Secretary of State

Attorney General Doran Douglas

Aimee Rochet, director of public relations

Edgar Mills, FBI Director

Jacob Hilger, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency

Elsewhere:

Aron Goldstein, owner of Aurum Industries and principal investor in

Terabyte Laboratories John Samuel Trent, president of the NAR Jules

Merchant, president of military contractor Allied

General

Philby Lancaster, attorney for the NAR Robert Wilkins, regional

commander of the People's Army of Righteous Justice

PROLOGUE: The Chosen

With resignation, Jeffrey Horton surveyed the clutter in the hardware-

filled second bedroom he and his roommate self-mockingly called

The Black Hole.

Data disks and tapes were scattered under and across the several

tables, and a mortally wounded CD-ROM was pinned under the

caster of one of the chairs. Assorted first-generation computer

components and test gear formed precarious mounds of metal and

plastic in the corners. There was a jumble of cables on the seat of

Horton's chair, and a sagging, badly overloaded shelf of books and

manuals loomed over the large monitor like a sword of Damocles.

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The normal level of chaos in The Black Hole was one that only

another gearhead could love - most of Horton's friends had at least

one room like it. But it was obvious from the overflowing cardboard

boxes in the middle of the floor that Hal had been hitting the Silicon

Valley electronics swap meets in the weeks Horton had been away.

'If it's broken, I can fix it. If it works, I can use it,' was Hal's self-

proclaimed motto. It was hard for him to say no to any flea-market

bargain, whether it was a $50 refractometer, a $100 argon laser, or a

complete Windows-era computer for $25. Somehow, the Black Hole

absorbed them all.

Resisting the temptation to paw through the boxes to appraise Hal's

latest finds, Horton retreated from the room and firmly closed the

door after him. The mound of dirty clothes on his bed and the

accumulation of recyclables on the apartment balcony deserved

higher priority than beating back entropy in what their landlord

grumpily called 'an unlicensed salvage yard'.

It was then that Horton heard someone knocking on the apartment

door. The knocking was sharp and impatient, as though it had been

going on for a while - which it might have been, since it was

competing with the white noise of the elderly dishwasher whooshing

and rumbling away in the tiny kitchen.

Hastening to respond, Horton only glanced at the corridor monitor

long enough to see that the caller was a silver-haired man in a long

cloth coat. Releasing both locks, he opened the door to the floor stop.

'Hello - I'm looking for -' the caller began. Then he straightened his

shoulders and smiled broadly. 'Well, and here you are.'

Horton was staring dumbly at a face that had no business appearing at

his door. 'You're Karl Brohier,' he said, blinking and shaking his

head. He had no precedent for how he should act when a Nobel

Laureate appeared at his door like a campus missionary, and fell back

on repeating himself. 'You're Karl Brohier.'

'I know,' said the older man, his head cocked at a slight angle. 'And

you're Jeffrey Alan Horton.' He gestured with the bottle of wine he

was carrying. 'May I come in?'

'Uh - of course, Dr Brohier,' Horton said, retreating a step and

allowing the door to open fully.

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'Karl,' the visitor corrected.

Horton could not allow himself such presumptuous familiarity, and

so simply nodded acknowledgement. 'I have to apologize for the

mess. I just got back from being away for most of three months -'

'Yes, I know,' said Brohier as he brushed past. 'How did you like it in

the Midwest?'

'Uh -I wasn't ready for snow in the spring.'

Brohier grunted in amusement as he searched for a place to sit down.

'And Marsh Tolliver - how did you find him?'

Tolliver was the director of the National Superconducting Cyclotron

Laboratory at Michigan State University, where Horton had gone to

trade months of service as a volunteer intern for sixty minutes of

cyclotron time in support of his doctoral thesis. 'He has high

expectations,' Horton said.

'You are too polite,' said Brohier, settling on the one kitchen chair not

piled high with mail. The student disease. You will get over it.'

'I-'

Tolliver is a tin-god bureaucrat masquerading as a scientist -

unfortunately, all too common for the top post at government sites.

All of the good work that comes out of the NSCL nowadays is due to

Ginger Frantala, the assistant director. I'm sure that she's the one

Professor Huang spoke to to arrange your visit. Did you get what you

needed out of your time there?'

There seemed to be nothing about him that Brohier did not already

know. 'The results supported my thesis.'

'Excellent. I look forward to seeing them. Are you going to publish?'

'In a refereed journal? I'm not sure it merits -'

'Oh, I think it does. From what the old tiger told me - the old tiger. He

loves that nickname, you know. It would do you no harm at all to

arrange to let him overhear you calling him that.' Brohier chuckled to

himself. 'Send your paper to Physical Letters B. I'm on the referee list

there. I'd give it a fair reading.'

'Dr Brohier -'

'Karl,' the visitor insisted.

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thetriggerTHETRIGGERbyArthurC.Clarke&MichaelKube-McDowellContentsPrologue:TheChosenI:Trigger1:Anomaly2:Mystery3:Secrecy4:Inquiry5:Chemistry6:Journey7:Strategy8:Amity9:Colloquy10:Exigency11:Military12:Apostasy13:Engineryfile:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Clar...,%20Michael%20-%20The%2Trigger...

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Arthur C. Clarke - The Trigger

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