The Time Surgeons

The world still swayed on the edge of the gulf, but now it did not fall. The fate Harlington had feared did not eventuate. Slowly, slowly, heads cooled, until at last the crisis was over.

The men of the carrier group went home to their families. The world continued on its way. Cities did not burn; radioactive clouds did not sweep across the land; the millions of dead lived on, not knowing. Beyond a few people in Russia, nobody knew how near disaster had come.

The American President was assassinated, victim of the same clash of ideologies, only this time manifested in a more personal madness. But on that scale people always died, and most of life went on. The decade that began in fear became a decade of love and flowers, though cynics may have thought it more lust and dirt. Many died in other wars, but these were regular wars; worse than many in the past, perhaps: but not ones to destroy the Earth.

The world did not know how close it came, and did not learn its lesson. The Russians learned a lesson, but it was how poorly armed they were compared to the Americans. All they wanted was to catch up. The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction would not work if the other side’s destruction wasn’t assured. And while it looked like madness, surely it was safe, because who would be so mad as to risk it? After all, had not the world teetered on the brink, and survived?

So the years went by, as the missiles and bombs became better and more numerous, each side too afraid of the other to dare do otherwise. Wise heads knew this was foolish and small steps were taken backwards, with hotline communications and treaties; but never enough to truly reduce the threat. It was never enough, because too many feared that it was only the threat that kept them all safe.

The man sat at his desk, watching the displays on the electronic panels arrayed before him. He sipped his coffee, bitter and black, its black bitterness alleviated only by the two spoons of somewhat gritty sugar dissolved in its depths.

Had he been asked to name the defining aspect of his personality, and had he cared to answer, he would have said ‘phlegmatic’. Someone less inclined to be charitable may have said ‘unimaginative’.

Neither trait had been obstacles in the path his career had taken to its current heights. As heights they were not spectacularly lofty, but he did not mind. He was as phlegmatic about his own career as he was about life in general. As long as he had some degree of respect and sufficient pay for an adequate lifestyle and a supply of vodka – for those occasions when he was allowed to drink it – he was content. Had he been more ambitious or imaginative, more fired by a desire for heights, perhaps he would have reached them, but they would have been on different peaks entirely.

For one prime requirement of this job was to be phlegmatic, bordering on the comatose. A man of more average humors would not have survived it. No man who felt its weight on his shoulders could bear its pressures for long, and worse, nobody watching him could tell when the resulting fissures would crack into an implosion of ruin. Only a man with a personality off which the pressures ran like water could stand under them. If ever he should feel that he needed to bear those pressures, by definition he could not bear them. Only someone who could look at the screens and dials with clarity and detachment, then go home to his family as cheerfully as any office worker, could do it. No Titan, no Atlas, could do it, no matter how strong or grimly determined he was to bear his load: only a man who stood calmly at watch, heedless of the rain and pain running off his skin.

Even less desirable was imagination. A calm evaluation of evidence was critical. Seeing more in the evidence than was there could be disastrous. Imagining the possible consequences of his decisions, even more so.

The man took another sip of coffee, less than a minute after the previous one. Such an acceleration of his usual rate of imbibing was the only outward sign of the added levels of stress in the last week. The man noticed it himself, and sat back to ponder the source of his alarm; his watchful eyes never leaving his displays.

Hundreds of people had died in the flaming wreckage of a passenger jet only three weeks before. Some man like him had made the call that had then rippled upward through the layers of responsibility, then rippled back down, ending in a finger that had pushed a button that had launched the missiles. The West, of course, protested: all those innocents lost, for no reason. The man smiled cynically. They would say that whether it was true or the jet had been crammed full of spies. He shrugged. A tragedy, yes. But nobody, least of all him, would ever know the truth of it: whether the ultimate cause was the West probing the Motherland’s systems and resolve and being bloodied for it, or the same cause as so much other tragedy, human error. Perhaps some good would come of it. Perhaps those hundreds of lives were the price of the West learning that his country’s systems and resolve were not to be challenged, whether the probe had been deliberate or not. Maybe in the long term the result would be greater peace and fewer deaths.

But in the short term, tensions were higher than normal. They had already been high due to the anti-Soviet chest-beating engaged in by the American President, and now they were worse. Other than his slightly elevated rate of coffee consumption, this did not affect his attitude or his job. It remained what it always was, whether it was a time of peace and rapprochement or under the clouds of threatening war. The enemy could attack in either, whether hoping to exploit a drop in alertness, or out of their own dark fears or ambitions.

In any case he would be ready. Then he would go home and live his life until the next day. As he had done in the last weeks of tension and the years before that.

Those thoughts rippled over the surface of his mind, then the disturbance vanished into his habit of smoothly calm watchfulness.

He would not have been human, however, nor capable of doing his job, if he was immune to all alarm. And so he sat up straight and frowned at a flashing alarm from the panel. This is what he had been trained for. He bent forward to examine the data.

His eyes widened. The early warning system was reporting the launch of a single intercontinental ballistic missile from the USA. Surely this was a false alarm? Would they really think one downed jet justified a pre-emptive attack? If they did, why launch only one? A lesson? One base or city for one jet? Then the system reported a second launch.

His brain went into overdrive. If one false alarm was possible, so were two. Or perhaps the loss of one jet was not enough for the West to launch all-out war; but if downing that jet was Mother Russia showing her resolve, the West would show its disapproval and its own resolve by hurting its enemy with a limited strike?

He knew he had less than a minute to decide, and drummed his fingers on the desk. Overall, he felt that it was probably a false alarm, some glitch in the satellites or systems. If he was right, no harm done. If he was wrong, two missiles were bad but there would be plenty of retaliatory strike capability remaining, and the USA would learn an even more painful lesson.

But then the system reported more launches, perhaps as many as five additional missiles beginning their short trajectories into space before plunging down his throat. The launches were still few, but escalating, and he had already delayed. Perhaps that was the plan: uncertainty, leading to delay, so by the time a response to the escalating attack was mounted, their response would already be blunted. His duty was clear. He would have to report his conclusions and leave it to the politicians to decide on an appropriately measured response. He punched in his codes and sent his message: up to seven nuclear missiles had been launched toward the USSR.

The generals who received this message knew that so few missiles would not cripple them and wondered what it meant. They feared that it meant the start: a probe, followed by more. They knew the doctrine of mutually assured destruction; the only thing worse, in their view, was one-sided destruction. They decided to show the West a lesson of their own. They would not respond with all-out war, but with their own measured response.

On the tail of a strongly-worded diplomatic response to the USA, NATO and the United Nations, the Soviet Union launched their own missiles: ten to strategic targets in NATO, another ten toward the USA.

Both sides had their own phlegmatic, unimaginative officers analyzing the output of similar systems. Both were shocked by something that could not be a false alarm but made no sense. But nor had the downing of a civilian airliner made any sense.

The one thought echoed in many heads.

May God forgive us.

Then the West launched its own attacks.

The seven launches had not been real. These were, and soon after nuclear fireballs began to blossom over bases and cities in the West, an even fiercer hail fell on the Soviet Union.

The Soviet leadership and command structure fell into disarray. But they had launched their doomsday weapon. Not a super bomb, but a missile designed as a fallback if the leadership was put out of commission.

After all, how else could Mutually Assured Destruction be assured?

The doomsday weapon was designed for one task and, not receiving any coded messages to desist, it duly sent out its own commands. The entire remaining Soviet nuclear arsenal was launched at the West.