Zoe said she would be on Earth within two days. Therefore Zoe would, beyond a doubt, be on Earth within two days.
12
Sometimes you didn’t know when you were well off. Saul Steinmetz stared at the list in disbelief. For twelve days he had cursed the lack of telecommunications and satellite systems. Now they were creeping back to life, and his problems were worse than ever.
He was being swamped. According to the log in his hand, he had received — over an ailing and imperfect communications system — eighteen hundred and forty-seven calls in the past six hours. They had come from every state and almost every country. Each one requested, begged for, or demanded the urgent personal attention of the President of the United States.
Saul hit the intercom, and Auden Travis popped in with his usual promptitude.
“Auden.” Saul waved the typed list, all eight feet of it. “Doesn’t anybody in this place know the meaning of the word priorities? What am I supposed to do, answer these goddammed calls in order, first called, first served? I need a cut on urgency and importance. Take the fucking thing away and organize it.”
Auden Travis was a handsome young man with clean features, a strong Roman nose, and curly brown hair. His sensitive mouth twisted with a look of pained embarrassment. Saul knew why. It wasn’t the chewing-out, it was the cussing. Auden never swore, and he disapproved of it. Saul did not normally swear, either. But there were times when you had to do it to get the message across hard enough. This was one.
“Take this amorphous piece of shit out of my sight.” He shook the list. “I never want to see it again.”
Travis took the paper and vanished without a word. Saul turned back to his desk and stared out of the window. People thought he was the boss and they asked him for help. They were wrong. Nature was the boss. You could plot and plan and scheme and schedule all the things you were going to do when the communications system came back on-line, and when service finally returned you couldn’t do a damned thing.
Saul looked out onto a world of white. For the third day in a row, snow blanketed the East Coast from Maine to Norfolk and as far west as Indiana. The food convoys were stalled in eastern Kansas. Steam locomotives, equipped with snowplows, stood helpless in twelve-foot drifts. High winds had brought down more trees and power lines, closing roads that had only just been opened.
When would the snow end?
God knows, Saul thought. But God’s not telling.
The Defense Department had at last managed to bring up a ground station and communicate with one of their own orbiting metsats. The succession of images proved one thing beyond debate: predictions made by the numerical weather models were garbage. A three-year-old could do as well drawing patterns with colored crayons.
The intercom buzzed, and Saul turned to it. “Yes?”
“Two things, Mr. President.” It was Auden Travis again, speaking in an unnaturally low voice. “DOD has a working feed from one of their high-resolution birds. They don’t have the use of the maximum data rate antenna, so the nature and number of images is limited. We only have Australia so far, but General Mackay feels that these images really deserve your attention.”
“Fine. Can you pipe the pictures into this office?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll do that at once. And one other thing, sir. The House Minority Leader and Senator Lopez are waiting in the outer office.”
“Christ. You’ve made my day.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I was given no notice of this. They just arrived. Together.”
“I’m not blaming you, Auden. I’m sure you don’t want them cluttering up your work area. Send the rabble in. If they want to talk to me they’ll have to watch some pictures first.”
“Yes, sir.”
Saul turned to the big display that formed one wall of his office. The lights dimmed, the windows with their polarizing filters became opaque, and the first image blinked into existence. It was in simple false color rather than the derived hyperspectral presentation that Saul preferred. He could guess the reason. Three-band color could be done with a lower data rate. The people controlling the satellite had decided — rightly, in Saul’s opinion — to opt for maximum coverage area. Anything really interesting would be caught in more detail on a later orbit.
The image had no vocal tags. Latitude and longitude tick marks were shown on the outer boundaries, and the words Sydney, Australia appeared in small letters in the bottom left-hand corner.
Saul leaned forward. He had not visited Sydney for twenty years, but he had seen plenty of satellite coverage during the Queensland Secession War. What he was looking at was nothing like Sydney.
The great drowned valley that had created and framed Sydney Harbor no longer existed. In its place stood a deep brown smear, miles across, as though a giant ball had rolled over the land from west to east.
Saul heard the door behind him open and close. He ignored it and called for a zoom of the center part of the image. The effect was of flying in closer and closer, a small area viewed in exquisite detail. He should see individual roads and houses and cars, even people.
He saw nothing but an endless wasteland of mud.
Sydney was gone. What had replaced it bore no more signs of human influence than the satellites of Neptune.
Brisbane, Australia. An open expanse of water and, miles to the west, a new coastline. The satellites used absolute latitude and longitude to pinpoint their images. Brisbane now lay beneath the Pacific Ocean.
Had any of the models predicted tidal waves, earthquakes, and massive sea-level changes? If they had, no one had presented those results to Saul. Perhaps they had been discarded, on the grounds that they were “implausible.”
He stayed with it for a few more scenes. The whole southeast of Australia, judging from the images of Adelaide and Melbourne, had shared the same fate as Sydney and Brisbane.
Saul asked for an image of Canberra, which lay inland and on high ground. It should have escaped damage from the sea. Perhaps it had. It was impossible to tell, because the area was covered by impenetrable clouds. Their sinister tinge of dull red suggested that the surface beneath had been blown high into the atmosphere.
In his scan of the list of incoming calls, Saul had noticed nothing from Australia and New Zealand. Now he knew why.
He heard the creak of chairs behind him. Someone was increasingly excited or impatient. For the moment, he had seen enough. Saul killed the display, watched as a snowy vista gradually reappeared outside the window, and finally turned around.
“Good morning. Excuse me if I did not greet you earlier. I felt that I — and you — ought to examine firsthand what is happening around the world.”
Saul knew that the smiles greeting him were as hollow as his own words. The two visitors made a splendid study in contrasts, proving once again that politics was flexible enough to accommodate every human strength and weakness.
Sarah Mander had an unlined, guileless face. Yet she was probably the most secretive person in Washington, man or woman. She was also cultured, witty, well educated, vengeful, racist, and anti-Semitic. It depressed Saul that conversations with such a witch could be so enjoyable.
Senator Nick Lopez was round-faced and brown-complexioned. The hair above his broad brow was set in a high, old-fashioned pompadour that resembled a frizzy black hat. Saul wondered where Lopez found a hairdresser willing to perpetrate such a monstrosity. Lopez had degrees in mathematics and law, but openly disdained “book learning.” He was fast-talking, confident, and supernaturally bright, and after a meeting with him Saul always came away feeling that he had somehow been tricked, in a way that he didn’t quite understand. Nick Lopez also had his darker side, one that would not be revealed in public.