Rumors of war.

The Chinese had slaughtered the skeleton staffs manning the last two Western Alliance embassies in Asia.  One was in what had once been called Korea, the other on the home islands of Japan.  The Japanese denied any responsibility for the massacre on their own soil.  The story was that citizens of Japan and Chinese ancestry had forced their way past the police detailed to protect the Western delegates, had run wild in an orgy of destruction.  The Japanese press pointed out that the West, perhaps, should have been expecting this for years, their own silly trade practices - from which China had always been excluded - drawing the wrath of a poverty-stricken people who felt cast aside from the main commerce of the world.  Other reports from eyewitnesse in Japan, said that the Japanese police did not resist the mob at alland actually seemed to be directing its bloodthirsty attack on the foreign consulate offices.

The Tri-D screen showed headless bodies for the benefit of those with shallow imaginations.  In the streets of Tokyo masses marched, holding those heads speared speared on the ends of sharpened aluminum poles.  Dead eyes of our countrymen looked back at us from the other side of the screen....

The Pentagon, the same morning, announced the discovery of the Bensor Beam, which was capable of shorting out all synapses in the nervous system of the human body, leaving the brain imprisoned in a mindless hulk.  Named after its creator, a Dr. Harold Bensor, the beam was already being referred to (by Pentagon officials and their cronies in the War Bureau of Moscow) as "the turning from point in the cold war."  I knew the idea had come from Child; I recognized it the way one recognizes a bad dream that someone has made into a movie.  But the censors had learned from the mistakes they had made with me in the past; the public would never hear of Child.

I wondered, for the briefest of moments, what sort of inhuman fiend this Benson must be to want his name attached to such an inglorious device.  Then I lost my façade of superiority when I considered that the weapon might just as likely have been called the Simeon Kelly Beam, for I had been the middleman who had brought it into existence.  I was more responsible than anyone, even Child, for whatever might be done with this damn thing.

Pictures on the screen showed two Chinese prisoners on whom the weapon had been used.  Spastic, they flopped about on the gray floor of their cell, eyes sightless, ears unhearing, bodies pulled by strings that none of us could really understand.

I turned it off.

I pushed my unfinished breakfast away from me, and got my coat from the closet.  I was to meet Melinda at her apartment for another session with the tapes, and I did not want to miss that.  Besides, seeing her might somehow purge the strain of guilt running through me.