“Admiral?” she said, having a sudden idea. “How difficult would it be to use the nuclear reactors aboard your aircraft carriers and submarines to power a new industrial center?”
Longbottom sat forward, casting a surprised glance at Hadrian. “What sort of industrial center?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s for you and your engineers to work out. I’ve already said many times that I don’t believe for a single moment there aren’t enough resources among these islands for us to sustain ourselves without the sun, but we need men of vision. There are civilian engineers here, but yours are the best and the brightest, and I’m convinced that if we’re to be saved by new technologies, your engineers will be the people who develop them. We still need the Navy, Admiral, but we need them to perform an entirely different mission now.”
Longbottom drew another breath and sat looking at the table. “Madam President,” he said at length, “I’m getting old and I’m afraid I haven’t a great deal of faith in new technology.”
“I was reading about Golda Meir last night,” Ester remarked. “For obvious reasons.”
Everyone chuckled, however dutifully.
“And she once said something that I find applicable to our situation. She said, ‘Ability hits the mark where presumption overshoots… and diffidence falls short.’ Now, we all know that I don’t make a pimple on Golda’s backside, but I’m smart enough to know that she was right. Your men and women have an abundance of ability, Admiral, and they’ll work to solve our problems… but I need you on board.”
Longbottom sat thinking for a long moment, realizing that fighting against the tide would serve no one’s interest.
“Perhaps I’ve grown too fatalistic about the future,” he said slowly. “Perhaps there is a way. I don’t know. But I’ll put together a committee and—”
“No committees!” Ester said. “Committees are the old way of doing business and we don’t have the time. Gather your engineers and your mechanics, your avionics experts and every other expert you’ve got. Gather them in the hangar of one those floating airports you command out there and tell them I want them—what we want them to think about! And to start thinking right now! To work to save the life of the human race. And forget about bloody goddamn pirates!”
Hadrian sat smiling in his chair, happy to see that Ester had at last found her way with the Navy. “Does that sound like a great enough challenge for you, Admiral?”
The admiral looked at him, a slight grin coming to him. “Yes, sir, Mr. Vice President. But to be honest, I think I’d rather have to fight the cold war all over again.”
“This is a cold war,” Hadrian replied, “as cold as any of us can imagine. It snowed right here in Honolulu last week.”
“I know,” Longbottom said, looking grim. “Dirty, gray snow.”
“It’s a worthy fight,” Ester said. “And we owe it to our progeny to make it.”
“I’ll do my best, Madam President. You have my word.”
“That’s all anyone can ask for,” Ester said. “Thank you for being here today. I know that meeting with me was the last thing you felt like doing.”
“There’s something else that Golda Meir once said, Madam President.”
“Let me have it,” she said glumly.
“She said, ‘Being seventy is not a sin.’”
Ester allowed herself to smile at the man for the first time since meeting him. “So then you see, Admiral, why I trust her judgment.”
After the meeting adjourned, Ester sat alone in her office with Hadrian. “You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”
“Not at all,” Hadrian replied. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you knew what I was trying to accomplish in there even before I did… and yet you let me twist.”
“You needed to find your own way with him, Ester. You gained some of his respect in there today. Had I done all your talking for you, he’d still be paying us lip service. Whereas now, I think he may actually be with us.”
“In other words, you weren’t entirely on board before this meeting either.”
“This was your sink or swim moment, Ester,” he said with a smile. “Every politician has one. Congratulations. You’ve made it to the edge.”
Ester shook her head. “Me a politician. I swear if I ever see that Chittenden boy again, I’ll crack him over the head with this cane.”
“Who’s Chittenden?”
“The astronomer who got me into this unholy mess,” she said. “If it weren’t for that boy, I’d be rocking in the bosom of my Lord right now instead of having chess matches with admirals.”
Hadrian smiled. “It may well be that the human race will one day owe this Chittenden a great debt of gratitude.”
“That hope lies with the Navy,” she said. “The Navy and a favorable wind.”
Twenty-Nine
The last three months had not been kind to Private Shannon Emory, who was now the property of a man the bikers called Brutus. He possessed her in virtually every sense that one human being could possess another. She fought savagely every time he came to take her, which was at least once a day, and he always laughed as he pinned her down and forced himself upon her. She had bitten him once on the neck early in her captivity, and he had beaten her for it, promising to bust out her teeth if she ever did it again. So Emory did not try to bite him after that, though she had vowed to bite off anything he put into her mouth, and he must have believed her because so far he had not yet attempted to do so.
She spent most of her days now locked in a motel room in Mesa, Arizona, where the temperature fluctuated between twenty and thirty degrees. There was no heat in the building, so she spent most of her time sitting on the bed wrapped in blankets. She was allowed to keep her uniform and boots, and had so far been fed decent food, but the selection grew poorer over the weeks, and for the past few days now she had been given nothing to eat but cans of creamed corn and lima beans.
She knew the Mongols had recruited more biker types to their cause and that their numbers were now close to a hundred. They were also taking prisoners for food, literally feeding upon the weak. In the early days, from her balcony on the tenth floor, she had watched the flammable parts of the city burned and the populace fleeing south. Few police remained behind, and those who did were quickly killed off by lawless mobs of men looking to rape and plunder away their final days on earth.
Civilized people had banded together and done rather well for the first month or so after the impact, until their food supplies gave out and they grew too weak to fight, either taking their own lives or being overrun by those willing to eat human flesh in order to survive. The males had been killed and eaten straight away, the females abducted and raped and finally eaten as well. Twice, even the biker motel had been attacked. But the Mongols were violent, Vikinglike warriors. They fought with everything from pistols and machine guns to axes and machetes, teaching even the local sociopaths to stay away.
A few small convoys of military vehicles had passed through town headed south, and the Mongols ambushed a couple of them, taking the ammunition and food. By the end of the second month, Mesa City had grown bitter cold and become more or less a ghost town, people only emerging at night to scavenge for food. Many of these people fell victim to Mongol traps and became food themselves. The Mongols too had begun to forage, sending groups of well-armed men into the suburbs each day to scavenge anything of use. They went systematically through each neighborhood, moving from house to house, discovering many families who had found ways to survive.