Aftermath a-1 Page 6

  “I don’t know. The usual place, the Treasure Inn, where we stay for our group sessions? If it’s open.”

  “When?”

  “You’ll probably need three days. Any of the others we reach, we tell ’em the same thing, the Treasure Inn three days from now. But what about your sore rear end? There’s no cars, and you can’t ride all that way.”

  “Let me worry about that. How are you going to travel? You’ve got farther than me to go, and you have that bad knee.”

  “I’ll get there. Try and reach some of the others. I’ll see you in three days.”

  “Cross your fingers. Good luck, Art.”

  “Good luck, Dana.” Art closed the connection, and found Joe staring at him calmly. He had been listening to Art’s end of the conversation with obvious interest.

  “Well,” he said, “that was a new one. Who is she?”

  “Dana Berlitz. Part of my treatment group.”

  “And I’ll bet I know which part of you she’s treating.” Joe Vanetti did not smile. He was a big man, tall and broad and slow-moving. It was hard for Art to imagine him as he had been in his thirties. According to Ed O’Donnell, in Joe’s Air Force days he had been a heartbreaker who cut a broad swath through the Washington female population.

  “But what are these telly things of yours that need fixing?” Joe went on.

  “Telomeres are the end pieces of chromosomes. In ordinary people, they shorten as you get older. In cancer cells, they don’t. Dana and I had a treatment to shrink our cancer cell telomeres, but we don’t want our other telomeres shortened too much or we’ll get old real fast. It’s like a tricky balancing act, and we need to keep checking that nothing’s going haywire. Our interest in each other is purely professional.”

  “Sure it is. I’m not deaf, I heard how you spoke to her. You’re soft on her. Just remember to keep your pants up.”

  “It’s nothing to do with sex. But I’m going back to Washington.”

  “I know that. Ed and I were talking about it this morning, before you got here.”

  “How could you? I only just made up my mind I had to go.”

  “All the same, we knew it. We’ve seen it before.” And now Joe did smile, the slow, self-satisfied grin of a man who has seen his predictions come to pass. “You arrive up here, see, and you tell us the world has gone to hell. First it was the Lascelles virus, that airborne thing that would kill the lot of us.”

  “It would have, if they hadn’t come up with the viral phage and released it.”

  “Maybe. Point is, they did and nothing happened. I bet your neighbors in Olney gave you hell when you got back, sending them running for the hills the way you did. Then there was Scarlatti, going to vaporize Washington.”

  “He tried.”

  “Sure he tried. Lots of people try things. Point is, he failed. And now there’s this Supernova Alpha thing, and from what I hear that’s fading away, too.”

  “This is different.”

  “So what me and Ed figure,” Joe went on, as though Art had not spoken, “we figure this. Every couple of years the craziness down there in Washington gets too much for you, and you head up here for a jolt of sanity. You ought to stay, and when you get a few more years on you, you probably will. But you’re young, you still got this feather up your ass to save the world — not that most of it’s worth saving. So you’re going back, one more time. But tell me this. The cars don’t run, and the buses don’t run, and the trains don’t run. So how do you think you’ll go? Your knee’s near as bad as mine.”

  The question of the hour. He couldn’t ride a bike such a distance, even if he had one. If he walked, Joe was right, his knee made it close to impossible and the journey would take weeks.

  “Damned if I know. Got any ideas?”

  “Nothing special.” Joe sat down, rubbed at his scar, and stared into space. “But here’s a thought, for what it’s worth. Did you know that Annie keeps three horses on her place?”

  3

  March 23, 2026.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

  Saul Steinmetz raised weary eyes from the daily briefing package and stared at the cloth text hanging on his wall. His mother had embroidered it for him when he was nine years old.

  There ought to be more, an addition that read: “But sometimes it lands you at a raw sewage outlet.”

  Like now.

  During the past eight hours he had met with twenty-three senior officials of the executive branch, with six Senators, and with the heads of the nation’s three biggest conglomerates. He had made decisions on how to finance the federal debt; how to pay the military when electronic transfers had ceased to exist and the public was suspicious of paper money; how much to draw down the government grain and dairy stockpiles; and where and how to send food supplies. He had discussed protocol for U.S. embassies overseas and foreign embassies here, approved Army manpower allocation to preserve and in some cases reestablish the inland waterways, and ordered a red-alert status at the Mexican border.

  Saul had done all this, yet felt that he had done too little and usually too late. Decisions based on incomplete information were one thing, a fact of political life. Decisions made with no information were another. How could you manage the world’s largest and most complex economy, when everything was interlocked and you had no idea of the status of key components? It was blindfold chess, played with imperfect knowledge of the initial position.

  For the thousandth time in the past weeks, he turned toward the holographic projection unit in the corner of the office. For the thousandth time, the volume sat empty. How long before information services got the Persona back in operation? Or would they never do it, given the general collapse of data services?

  A movement outside the window caught his eye. He stared, stabbed at the interoffice controller, then realized that he had tried it twice already today. In spite of optimistic promises it too was still not repaired. He raised his voice. “Auden!”

  Auden Travis appeared so quickly that Saul wondered if the aide spent his days and nights lying outside the door of the Oval Office, although his elegant clothing denied that.

  “Yes, Mr. President? Sir, it is working now, actually.”

  “Outside?”

  “Just a few lines. But we can patch you to anywhere in the country.”

  “Good. That’s not what I need at the moment, though. Is General Mackay in the building?”

  He hardly needed Travis’s nod. With external systems down, the only way to get access to the President was by staying close. Auden wasn’t the only one willing to spend his nights and days on the threshold. Did they realize, any of them, how little real power he had now?

  “Shall I get her, Mr. President?” Travis was studying and perplexed by the changing expressions on Steinmetz’s face.

  “If you please.”

  When Auden was gone Saul turned his attention again to the briefing documents — handwritten, most of them, though one or two had been hammered out on an ancient typewriter. Somebody must have been rifling the Smithsonian collections for anything that worked.

  Last night he had asked for a summary of the situation around the world. What he had received was patchy, even with the best available sources, but he could see enough to extrapolate a pattern. The places where technology was the newest and most advanced had been hit the worst. Total system breakdown there had caused the loss of food, water, and power. Deaths in the hundreds of millions to billions were reported for the Golden Ring countries, the Sino Consortium, and the Federation of Indian States.

  Reported, how? Probably through the ham radio net. Some of the amateurs had held on to their old equipment, and been back on the air within days.

  South America and the southern part of Africa had a different problem. They did not have so complex a technological infrastructure to lose, but the vast weather changes produced by Supernova Alpha more than made up for that. They were tottering on the brink of
government collapse.

  Countries with new technology built on top of an older one had managed the best. Europe and North America still had the skeletons of despised and ignored old communications, power, and transportation systems, sitting underneath the slick and glossy fabric of today’s — or yesterday’s — advances. It was depressing, to sit in the middle of chaos and be told that you were one of the lucky ones.

  The report said nothing about Australia, where a recent craze for everything new must have combined with the most severe storm systems; but the absence of news from Australia told its own story.

  Of course, the weather patterns in both hemispheres were not based on observation. They were based on computer predictions, and the computer models relied on historical weather data. God knows how good or bad they might be today. Saul turned in irritation to the unit where the global weather was normally updated every half hour from metsat data. The display was dark — and even dusty. Nobody had mentioned it to him, but the cleaning services must be in as much chaos as everything else.

  He turned as a perfunctory knock on the door preceded General Grace Mackay, hurrying along ahead of Auden Travis. The Secretary of Defense — intense, dark-haired, and skeleton-thin — had a cadaver’s smile on her tired face.

  “I think we have some good news, Mr. President.”

  “About time. Tell me something I want to hear.” Steinmetz gestured to dismiss Travis. The young aide went reluctantly.

  “We thought we had lost the comsats, the metsats, and the micro-positioning system,” Mackay said. “Now we are convinced that they are still alive and functioning.”

  “You could sure as hell have fooled me.” Steinmetz waved to the blank displays. “Where are they, General?”

  “The problems are in the receiving stations. We hope to have a couple back on-line in the next forty-eight hours. You’ll have your weather pictures again, and if anyone can do ground-based transmission the comsats will give us global communications.”

  “Can anyone?”

  “Not for a while yet.”

  “Then I won’t hold my breath waiting for incoming calls. Anything else?”

  “A confirmation that’s not so good.” Grace Mackay had been in military and government a long time, much longer than Saul. She knew that a boss didn’t like to be told only of problems or setbacks. Saul suspected she would save some good news for the end.

  “The former Vice President’s body has finally been located in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We have an updated number for cabinet-level deaths and casualties in Congress.”

  Saul made the customary mutterings of regret. He had known that the Vice President was doomed only minutes after that ominous blue sky flash nine days ago, when he had stood at the window in his darkened office and watched planes in approach patterns for National Airport drop from the sky like heavy fruit.

  Vice President Janet Kloos had been riding a six-passenger suborbital, in transit from California, where a new trade deal with Sulawesi called for official presence. Saul had intended to go himself until the last few minutes. It could so easily have been him. The selection and swearing-in of the new Vice President, Brewster Callaghan, now on the West Coast, made one thing very clear: no one was irreplaceable. Everyone was expendable. But Janet had been a terrible loss.

  Saul wasn’t nearly as sorry to lose thirty-odd people from Congress. Half of them hated his guts, and the rest hated Brewster Callaghan. A thousand friends have less weight than a single enemy.

  General Mackay was standing, quietly waiting. He had noticed it in his first few days in office. Other people’s time was his, while his time was his own. If he was late getting to an event, that event wouldn’t start until he arrived. It must be especially hard on someone like Grace Mackay, because a four-star general had her own powers to keep most people waiting.

  “That’s not why I told Travis to go look for you.” Saul pointed to the window. “Do you know what I saw out there?”

  “No, Mr. President.”

  “Well, nor do I. It was an aircraft and it was heading for a landing at Andrews; but it looked like it came out of Noah’s Ark. Fixed wing, fixed engines, and no vertical takeoff boosters.” He waved to an armchair. “Let’s sit down, General, they’re not playing the National Anthem. Was that thing the Air Force One substitute you’ve been promising me for the past few days?”

  Grace Mackay sat down very carefully on the edge of the seat. Steinmetz watched her hands. He had seen the reports based on her secret monitors as recently as two weeks ago, just before the EMP hit. Saul was assured by his intelligence office that the cabinet members had no idea they were being observed, but he had his doubts about that. In any case, what did it matter if Saul knew that his Secretary of Defense ground her teeth every night as she slept? That she was married, but had engaged in sex only once in the past four months? She needed doses of powerful prescription drugs just to keep going. Grace Mackay wouldn’t die in office — she wouldn’t be allowed to — but three years after that she could well be a goner.

  Yet she would fight like the devil to keep a job that was killing her.

  So how much would President Steinmetz endure, to achieve and hold on to his position? And how worn and exhausted did he seem to others? Saul thought he knew, but chances were he put the estimate for himself way too low.

  It was the worst time in history to be President. If you had an enemy and started a war, you had a fair chance to make heroic decisions and big speeches and come out looking a hero. But what sort of credit did a man receive for dealing with a natural disaster? None at all. You couldn’t win. People who lost possessions or family would blame you no matter what you did. They’d say you had offered too little and too late. Nobody would remember the good work.

  General Mackay was ready and waiting, examining Saul’s face. Sick or well, drunk or dry, she had the instincts and techniques of a great briefer and communicator. She spent as much time establishing what her audience knew and didn’t know as on providing information.

  “What you saw was a C-5A,” she said when she was sure that she again had Saul’s attention. “It’s half a century old, and it looks primitive. But it can be flown without computer support or smart sensors or pilot neural meshing. For the time being, that plane, or another like it, is likely to be Air Force One.”

  What Grace didn’t add, because Saul already knew it, was what happened when you tried to fly a modern plane without the help of its PIP — Pilot Interaction Package — and other goodies. Five top test pilots, each confident of being able to fly anything that could get off the ground, had died proving they were wrong. Others were still clamoring for their chance when General Mackay ended the effort. Test pilots were a breed unlike any other — but so were politicians and generals.

  “Do you have a cutoff date?” Saul asked.

  “About 1980. With any big aircraft later than that it’s going to be marginal. We are still looking at the low-cost end of commercial planes, we may be able to use some of them. And it’s not just stability and control. By the end of the last century the microchips were handling fuel injection and stall protection and everything else.”

  Everything else. And everything meant every thing.

  Grace Mackay was head of a department whose guns and lasers could not fire — the chips in their targeting and range-finding and loading and release circuits had become in an instant brainless dots of fused gallium arsenide. The planes would not fly without the help of superhuman data reduction speeds and reaction times. The ships, bristling with dead weapons for both defense and offense, sat in port or floated out of control on the oceans of the world. The manned platforms in low Earth orbit, so far as anyone could tell without direct communications, had become chilly sarcophagi.

  They had been designed, all of these, with the luxury of triple redundancy. If one microchip, by some rare misfortune, were to fail, then two others remained to accept sensory data and provide control commands. As for the idea that all three might fail, at the
same moment — that was unthinkable.

  Saul reminded himself that as Commander in Chief of the same organization, he had swallowed that official line of logic. How many Titanics did it take before the lesson sank in permanently? Probably, it never did. Every generation had to learn for itself.

  Saul knew how tired he was. At fifty-six, he was sure he had less energy than his ninety-two-year-old mother. He pulled himself back with an effort to Mackay, silently waiting and watching.

  “I’m sorry, General. I rely on your judgment completely. What you feel is safe for me to fly, I fly.”

  “Yes, sir. Give us several more days, if you please. I’m working with the civilian agencies to define a network of suitable landing fields and en route handoffs. Of course, for the time being everything will be on visual flight rules.”

  “Fuel?”

  “Not a problem. More diesel oil and kerosene than we know what to do with.”

  “Unless we have more break-in problems.”

  Grace Mackay had finally heard something to put surprise on her drawn gray face. “Seriously? People are stealing aircraft fuel?”

  “It looks like it. You can’t really blame them. Diesel fuel and heating oil are the same thing. The power grid is still down, and in the north-central states the emergency distribution system of heating oil isn’t working as it’s supposed to. No, that’s the wrong way to put it. The distribution system isn’t working at all. We’re operating under martial law. Looters are in danger of being shot. But before the blackout North Dakota was reporting fifty below. People are stealing because if they don’t take what they need they’ll freeze to death — and we don’t have a broadcast system to warn them they may be shot.”

  Saul paused. He was doing what a good communicator never did. Unless there was a secondary reason, maybe to reassure someone or to drive home a point extra hard, you didn’t tell somebody what they already knew. With the head of civil law enforcement vanished in Florida and presumed dead, Grace Mackay had been a key player in justifying martial law.