The armistice had been signed in a gloomy wooden hut at a place called Panmunjom. A world away, America breathed as one, hoarsely, with relief. The bloody, savage, and highly unpopular war in Korea was over, ending not in glory, but in a weary, embittered standstill. The parades were being planned, and the families were going to welcome home sons from a war they never fully understood.
In Ezra Prentice's underground war room in New Jersey, it was not a jubilant scene. The brilliant lighted chart of the Korean peninsula, once for three years an evolving, shifting tapestry of fronts and supply lines, was immobile. The red and blue flags were still on the 38th parallel, an enduring wound cleaving a nation in two. The brilliant war machine honed to perfection by Ezra—the seamless marriage of private inventiveness and national military might—the brilliant war machine had abruptly, roughly ended.
The silence was uncomfortable. His project managers, his division heads, the army general of ARPA familiar faces in the room, all gazed at him with the same unspoken question lurking on the air: "What now?"
Ezra was facing a brand-new, strange kind of crisis. It was the crisis of peace. The war had made his industrial empire into quite another kind of organization. His aero division had grown tenfold and turned out A-1 Guardians and prototype recon jets. His electron labs had perfected the transistor and were now delivering the military top-shelf guidance systems. His supercomputer, Typhon, was logisticians' prayed-for piece of equipment at the Pentagon. His entire business was an magnificent all-pure-bred war machine, with bottomless government contracts as fuel.
And now, the war was over.
The first tremors of the peacetime issue arrived as memos on his desktop. The Air Force was cancelling its order of the next crop of Guardian production. The Army was reducing spending on advanced munitions. The politicians on Capitol Hill who had feted his efforts during the war were now bluffing about having to cut the fat off of the defense budget and provide the American taxpayer with a "peace dividend." The best and brightest of the old guard of business, men like steel magnate Blevins, were feasting on hopes of the implosion of the "Prentice wartime wonder."
He discussed impending crisis with Baron von Hauser. The Baron, as always, sees things with cold, immorally clear eyes. Peace did not appear desirable at all in the eyes of the Baron, but as some fleeting and annoying state of the market.
"A war-making machine is going to need war with which to struggle," said the Baron, gentle, rational. He indicated a world map on the wall, once empty but now circumscribed with new regions of tension. "That is the nature of the machine. If there is no war? Then one must be... pressed upon."
He walked over to the map, tracing on it with his finger across a route from China south through Southeast Asia. "Look at it. French Indochina. A septic wound. The French are weak, their colonial ideals on the decline. The communists under this man, Ho Chi Minh, are building their strength. A spark, an annoying political incident, a small subsidization of the French, a little prodding of the communists... and you can have yourself a brand-new long-term war that would require an entirely fresh generation of your technologies."
His finger moved across the chart. "Or there. Iran. A nationalistic premier threatening our oil interests. Guatemala, where an American land is being seized by a socialist government. The world is a garden of future conflagration, Mr. Prentice. All it lacks is a gardener to nurture it."
It was the cold, hard rationality of the military-industrial establishment, still anonymous but whose macabre philosophy the Baron all too recognized. Peace was bad business. Continuing, low-key war was the ideal circumstance for maximizing gain and power.
A year earlier, Ezra would have understood the savage genius of the Baron's offer. He would have given it some consideration, balanced the danger with the gain. But he was a different man nowadays. The haunted face of the marionette Sheikh he had created, the subdued, accusing eyes of Sarah Prentice in an hotel corridor—these apparitions were familiar tenants of his mind.
He gazed at the Baron, at this being of cold, implacable reason, and felt for the first time deep loathing.
"No," stated Ezra. The tone was hushed, yet it was definitive.
The Baron shifted away from the map, a flash of genuine astonishment in his eyes. "No? It is the rational thing to do. It protects your empire."
"We did not construct this," Ezra said, his voice gaining a depth not of might, but of belief born of a moment of enlightenment, "in order to be merchants of mortality. We are not arms traffickers hawking conflict for profit. We need to have some greater goal. If we do not, then we are as bad as the men with whom we fought in the prior war."
It was a radical shift in direction, a rebellion of sorts against the very justification he had made in order to sustain himself. He was defying the cynical endgame of the power he had accumulated. He was, at long last, defying the Baron's counsel.
Von Hauser leaned back and looked at him intently, his face unchanging, a glimmer of something—disdain? mockery?—in his eye. "A noble sentiment," he whispered. "Let's see how long it endures exposure to contact with your balance sheets."
Ezra left the discussion with racing ideas. He had refused the dark path of the Baron, but he still had a problem. How do you deal with the world's strongest sword in an era of peace?
He called together, not politicians and spies, but the creators of his empire. David Sterling, the engineers who had designed Typhon, the physicists who had perfected the transistor. They were called into the main auditorium of the New Jersey plant.
He stood before them not as CEO, but as a visionary trying to outline a radical and new future.
"Our wartime effort is completed," he began, his voice echoing through the great hall. "And for that, the nation, and the globe, will be grateful. But our real work now begins."
He explained it to them, a world of the future recreated not by war, but by the very technologies they had created for it.
"The rocketry we've pioneered to launch weapons into the stratosphere," he declared, voice rising with passion, "will now lift scientific instruments, then satellites, and eventually, humanity itself, to the moon and beyond. The computers we've built to fire artillery trajectories will now revolutionize business, medicine, and science. The transistors that guide our bombs will now power pocket radios and eventually, machines that'll hold the totality of human knowledge in every home. The nuclear inferno we've released for war will now be employed by us in our reactors to provide unlimited, pure energy with which to power the cities of the future."
He looked out at the tired faces of his talented team. "We've had years of designing the world's best sword and shield. Now we're going to take that very same skill, that very same fervor, and we're going to transform it into a plowshare. We're not only defense contractors. We're going to be the engine of human progress. We're going to create a new industrial revolution, an industrial revolution of peace and prosperity, right here within these research facilities."
It was a radical, very dangerous move. He was proposing that he would re-create his entire war establishment, direct its purpose away from destruction and towards building. He was betting his kingdom, and the world's fragile peace, on the hope that weapons of war would be used yet to build a better world.