“I don’t know if it’s a barracks or a cuckoo clock,” said Broben.
“Where’d they hide the head?” said Farley.
“Down the hall,” said Broben. “Wait’ll you get a load of that.”
Farley frowned. “Is it afternoon?”
“It’s next morning,” said Broben. “We let you sleep in. You were pretty loopy when they brought you back yesterday.”
“Where are the men?”
“Outside playing catch, if you can believe that.”
Farley snorted. “I can.”
“Your girlfriend came by already. Said she’ll be back later.” Broben pulled on his Lucky, flicked ash into his empty cup. “So you got the third degree from the CO yesterday. Yone says he’s a hardass.”
“He is that.” Farley stretched. “The girl’s his daughter.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Well. You got some hurdles there, pal.”
“Me and Jesse Owens.”
Broben snorted. “So what’s the skinny?” he asked. “They gonna help us get our ride back?”
Farley glanced at Yone.
Broben waved his cigarette. “Yone’s on the level, Joe. He’s been filling me in on this joint. You need to listen to this.”
Yone finished putting away the room’s ingenious slide-outs and collapsibles and foldables and joined them at the little table, smiling nervously.
“Thanks for the coffee,” said Farley.
Yone ducked his head. “It is synthetic, I’m afraid,” he said. “They don’t have coffee beans here. But it is not so bad.”
Farley sniffed his cup again. It smelled like coffee to him. He took a last deep drag from his cigarette and dropped the butt into the cup Broben was using as an ashtray. Time to clock in. Captain Midnight is on the air. “They have them where you come from?” Farley asked.
Yone nodded. “It’s quite a luxury, though. There is little room for growing nonessential crops.”
“What’s nonessential about coffee?” Broben asked.
Yone smiled. “I certainly prefer to live in a world that has it,” he said.
“You came from there?” Farley asked. “From the Redoubt?”
“Two years ago,” Yone said, and shrugged. “But I will always be a stranger here.”
“Because your city and this one are, what? Rivals?”
“One could put it that way.”
“How would you put it? Competitors? Resources must be pretty scarce around here.”
“The cities are almost entirely self-contained. They don’t rely on their surroundings for resources, because there are none, other than power.”
“Where does the power come from?”
“For the Redoubt it is mostly solar. Here it is geothermal.”
“You don’t say.”
Yone smiled. “I don’t really understand them either.”
“So what’s the beef?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Why are they shooting at each other?”
Yone considered him for a moment. “No one here would ever ask that question,” he finally said, “because they have known the answer all their lives. The hatred between the Redoubt and the Dome is as much a part of their world as the air, the calorie ration, the conservation laws. It is a heritage.” He smiled thinly. “A birthright.”
“Well,” said Farley. “I’m not from around here.”
“But that is my point.” Yone poured Farley more coffee. “No one is not from around here.”
Farley waved at the room. “You mean no one in these bubbles ever sees anyone else.”
Yone glanced at Broben, who nodded for him to go on. “I mean,” Yone said, “there is no one else. The Dome and the Redoubt are the only two cities in the world.”
Farley studied him. “How is that possible?” he asked.
“War.”
“That’s a hell of a war.”
“Yes. It happened centuries ago.”
“Centuries. As in hundreds of years.”
Yone nodded. “The war lasted for decades, and it grew until it involved most of the world. At first it was fought with bullets and bombs, but as the stakes grew higher they used chemicals and diseases created in laboratories. They built machines that worked without operators, war machines that thought for themselves and adapted to their environments. That fought without fear or hesitation. Without mercy. Battalions of living machines that swarmed the cities and darkened the skies.”
“That’s hard to imagine.”
“You have seen an example already. Fought with it.”
Farley glanced at Broben. “That thing that attacked my bomber?” he asked.
“The Typhon is a remnant of that war,” said Yone. “Blindly following commands given to it by men dead for two hundred years.”
“To do what?”
“There is a powerful energy source still functioning beneath the ground. In the shaft at the center of the crater. The Typhon seems to be protecting it.”
“From what?”
“Anything it thinks is trying to gain access. Anything it thinks is a threat.”
“Then whatever’s down there must be a pretty big deal.”
Yone nodded. “It may be some kind of power generator. Or a weapon. No one knows, because no one who has tried to find out has returned. Whatever it is, it is powerful enough to disrupt the air for miles above the well. Now that you have come here in your aircraft, some people are wondering if that disruption is more … fundamental. A kind of breach in the universe. A tear in the world that you managed to find your way through. Commander Vanden’s daughter, Wennda, has come to believe this.”
“I’d say it’s a load of crap, but—” Farley waved to indicate the barracks, the Dome outside, the devastation beyond “—here we are.”
“I would not discount the possibility,” said Yone. “The energies they were manipulating by the end of the war were beyond our understanding. Weapons that took apart the very building blocks of matter. That destroyed entire cities in seconds. The scale of butchery is unimaginable. Millions killed in a single flash. Until finally they developed weapons that could destroy entire worlds.”
“Who in his right mind would use them?” Farley demanded. “It’d be suicide.”
“It was suicide,” Yone agreed. “As you have seen.”
Farley stared. “The crater?”
Yone’s quick nod encompassed inconceivable destruction. “An explosion so powerful it cracked the planet’s crust. Earthquakes and oceans of lava that destroyed entire nations. Much of the life that survived was killed in the ice age that came because the planet was covered by a cloud of ash. The world was in twilight for decades. Without sunlight the plants and trees began to die. The oceans died. Without these, everything else began to die.”
“From one explosion.”
“As far as anyone can determine, yes.”
“And we thought the Nazis were assholes,” said Broben.
Yone spread his hands. “Perhaps they didn’t realize the power of what they had made,” he said. “So much has been lost that no one is certain.”
Farley rubbed his stubbled jaw. “And you’ve all been waiting two hundred years for things to recover?”
“Oh, no.” Yone shook his head. “There will be no recovery. The explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere. So that when the cloud of ash finally began to disperse, the sun itself began to kill what had managed to remain alive. Beyond a certain point life could not recover. Too many links in the chain were broken. What remains is mosses, molds, lichens, many insects, some plants, perhaps a few small mammals such as rats. The atmosphere on the surface will no longer support human life. It is too thin. Too cold.”