The Berlin crisis had revealed to Ezra a bitter and indispensable lesson. His atomic monopoly, the best weapon that he and his people had toiled so long and so hard to create and hone, was a crown of flame too terrifying to use in anything less than Armageddon. It caused a deadlock, a paralysing peace, but was ineffective in winning a conventional battle. It was a shield and not a sword.
Faced with the paucity of his atomic arsenal and the corrosive personal cost of his own ambition, he did what came most naturally to him: he turned. He would not compromise his nuclear advantage, but he would fabricate a new kind of arsenal from it, one for deterrence as well as for dominance. He would win the Cold War not with a single stroke of outrage, but with an unremitting, ongoing barrage of technological superiority.
He assembled a secret, top-level gathering in a protected Prentice Applied Science facility in New Jersey. The visitors were the constructors of his future empire. In attendance was David Sterling, the master aircraft designer; the directors of his new computer and semiconductor projects; and some of his most veteran German researchers, including a rejuvenated Werner Heisenberg.
"Gentlemen," Ezra declared, facing the crowd from behind a huge blackboard, "we wage a new kind of war. An ideological war, an economic war, a war of proxies. The atomic bomb has given us a shield. It ensures our home soil will not be invaded. But a shield will not win us a war. It will only prevent us from being wiped out."
He injected the room with fresh enthusiasm, revolutionary fervor that hadn't existed on the dark, terminal days of the atomic bomb. "The next fifty years, the entire Cold War, will be determined not by the nation with the biggest bomb but the nation that gets things done and maintains absolute, unchallengeable technological superiority. And we're going to build its motor. Here. Now."
He turned to his first front in his new war: space. He grasped a piece of chalk and sketched out a basic multi-stage rocket. He paced the intelligence reports his agents retrieved from Peenemünde.
"The Soviets have taken the majority of the German rocket engineers who didn't follow us. They most definitely will pursue the research on long-range ballistic missiles to take an atomic warhead over the ocean. That's an existential threat that we need to not only answer but to surpass in such a way that it awakens the attention of the whole world and proves our superiority beyond all doubt."
He looked directly at Heisenberg and Sterling. "We will not just build missiles. We will build exploration vehicles. I am green-lighting a brand-new top-secret project within the aeronautics division. Its goal," the words in the year 1947 sounded like raw science fiction, "is to develop a multi-stage rocket to put a satellite of a ton weight in a stable orbit about the Earth. And then a manned capsule. We shall place a man into space."
He was beginning the Space Race a decade before the world would be shaken by the beep-beep-beep of Sputnik. He was pioneering a new frontier, a new battlefield on which he knew the Soviets, with their ponderous state-planned economy, would not be able to keep pace with his lean, efficient private enterprise.
He then spoke to his leaders of the electronic divisions. "The second battlefield," he declared, "cannot be seen. That is the information battlefield. The country that processes information most rapidly, that deciphers information most swiftly, that makes smarter weapons and guides the missiles most precisely, will be the dominant nation."
He authorized a massive new injection of financing for his solid-state physics group, the team responsible for the invention of the transistor. "I don't care what it will cost," he told them. "I want to have a working model in twenty-four months."
He then addressed the leader of his growing computer company. "Your 'business machine' work is in suspension. Your new assignment is the design and building of a machine for the military, the Atomic Energy Commission. A 'supercomputer,' for want of a better name. A machine that will be capable of making millions of calculations per second, in deciphering codes, in nuclear simulations, in calculating the trajectories of ballistic missiles."
He was building the two pillars of the digital revolution well before anyone else caught sight of the potential. He was laying the foundation for Silicon Valley in a New Jersey research facility funded with Rockefeller dollars and guided by his own visionary insight.
He personally re-deployed his brilliant but unemployed German researchers. The men who hadn't been able to assemble a bomb for Hitler would now be the thinkers of a new technological epoch for Ezra. Werner Heisenberg, whose spirit had been bruised by his defeat and subsequent internment, was put in charge of the theoretical branch of physics in the new rocketry program. The project—the naked, unpolluted science of space exploration—seemed to re-capture a spark in the master physicist's eyes. Other German experts were put to work on exotic materials science, on navigation systems, on propulsion.
Ezra was re-building his brain trust. The former bomb-builders. Now they would be the parents of the space era and the computer revolution, all on the flag of his private kingdom.
The episode wrapped weeks later, and Ezra found himself in a debrief with his captive devil, Baron von Hauser. The Baron's role had also quietly grown beyond being just a raw intelligence asset to something more complex: sparring partner, strategic thinker, the sole person Ezra was permitted to confide in regarding the true scope of his ambition.
Ezra, in his rare necessity to articulate his vast plan, unveiled the whole extent of his newest vision for his empire: the privately funded exploration of the cosmos, monopoly dominance over the coming computer revolution, a globe networked together through his communications satellites, powered by his nuclear reactors. World domination not achieved through the sword, but through absolute and total technological domination.
He listened, his face being a mask of extreme intellectual concentration. When Ezra finished speaking, von Hauser kept still for a long time with an appearance of pure professional awe in his eyes.
"Extraordinary," von Hauser exclaimed out loud, the word a sigh. "Simply extraordinary. You are not content to live and preside over the world as it is, Mr. Prentice. You actually insist on building an entirely new world to the specifications of your own design.
He urged on, the predator's smile coming to his lips for the first time in much too long. "However, a project on this scale... a machine so massive... it will have flaws. Logistical points of failure. Political leverage. Personal resentments." His eyes gleamed afresh with passion. "It's a master design. But even the greatest machines can be shattered. Or taken."
Their final photo was a close-up of the two men, separated by a table in a holding room, but intellectually closer than two humans on planet earth. The American god-king building the future, and his captive devil, the master tactician who'd just been given a newly intriguing puzzle to solve.
Ezra just revealed his next giant play, his plan to capture the next fifty years of human history. But he'd also just called in his best tactician, his most ruthless foe. The next chapter of their strange and dangerous dating life had begun.