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.