“Things are pretty bad,” Delanty said.
“Sure.”
“So where?”
“California. High farming country in California. There won’t be glaciers there for a long time.”
Leonilla said nothing. Pieter said, “Earthquakes.”
“You know it, but they’ll be over before we can land. The shock waves must have triggered every fault there is. There won’t be another earthquake in California for a hundred years.”
“Whatever we do, it must be quickly,” Pieter said. He pointed to the status board. “We are losing air and we are losing power. If we do not act quickly we will be unable to act at all. You say California. Will two Communists be welcome there?”
Leonilla looked at him strangely, as if she were about to say something, but she didn’t.
“Better there than other places,” Baker said. “We wouldn’t want the South or the Midwest—”
“Johnny, there’s going to be people down there who think this was all a Russki plot,” Rick Delanty said.
“Yes. Again, more in the Midwest and South than in California. And the East is gone. What else is left? Besides, look, we’re heroes, all of us. The last men in space.” If he was trying to convince himself, it wasn’t working.
Leonilla and Pieter exchanged glances. They spoke softly in Russian. “Can you imagine what the KGB would do if we came down in an American space capsule?” Leonilla asked. “Are the Americans such fools as well?”
Rick Delanty’s reply was a soft, sad chuckle. “We’re not in quite the same boat,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry about the FBI. It’s the righteous patriotic citizens…”
Leonilla frowned the question.
“Well,” Rick said, “what’s to worry? We’re coming down in a Soviet spacecraft plainly marked with a hammer and sickle and that big CCCP…”
“Better that than a Mars symbol,” Johnny Baker said.
No one laughed.
“Hell,” Rick said. “If we had any choice, that wouldn’t be the world we’d land on. You’d think people would get together after this. But I doubt they will.”
“Some will,” Baker said.
“Sure. Look, Johnny, half the people are dead, and the rest will be fighting over what’s left of the food. Strange weather ruins crops. You know that. A lot of the survivors won’t get through another winter.”
Leonilla shivered. She had known people who lived — barely — through the great famine in the Ukraine that followed Stalin’s ascension to the throne of the czars.
“But if there’s any civilization left down there, anybody who cares about what we’ve done, it’ll be in California,” Rick Delanty said. “We’ve got the records from HamnerBrown. Last space mission for—”
“For a long time,” Pieter said.
“Yeah. And we’ve got to save the records. So it will mean something.”
Pieter Jakov seemed relieved, now that there were no more difficult choices. “Very well. There are atomic power plants in California? Yes. Perhaps they will survive. Civilization will form around electrical power. That is where we should go.”
SAC communications are designed to survive. They are intended to operate even after an atomic attack. They were not designed for planetwide disaster, but they contain so much redundancy and so many parallel systems that even under the impact of the Hammer, messages got through.
Major Bennet Rosten listened to the chatter on his speaker. Most of it was not intended for him, but he got it anyway, if communications ever stopped, Major Rosten would own his missiles, and, after the timers ran out, could launch them. It was better that he knew too much than too little.
“EWO EWO, EMERGENCY WAR ORDERS. ALL SAC COMMANDERS, THIS IS CINC SAC.”
General Bambridge’s voice came through heavy static. Rosten could barely understand him.
“THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD. HELICOPTER ACCIDENT; I SAY AGAIN, THE PRESIDENT IS DEAD IN A HELICOPTER ACCIDENT. WE HAVE NO EVIDENCE OF HOSTILE ATTACK ON THE UNITED STATES. WE HAVE NO COMMUNICATION WITH HIGHER AUTHORITY.”
“Christ on a crutch,” Captain Luce muttered. “Now what do we do?”
“What we’re paid for,” Rosten said.
Static overlay the speaker’s voice. “…NO REPORT FROM B-MEWS… HURRICANE WINDS OVER… SAY AGAIN… TORNADOES…”
“Jesus,” Luce muttered. He wondered about his family up at ground level. There were shelters at the base. Millie would have sense enough to get to them. Wouldn’t she? She was an Air Force wife, but she was young, too young and—
“…CONDITION REMAINS RED; SAY AGAIN, CONDITION REMAINS RED. SAC OUT.”
“We will unlock the target cards,” Rosten said.
Harold Luce nodded. “Guess that’s best, Skipper.” Then, as he’d been trained to do, Luce noted the time in the log: “On orders of the CO the targeting cards and interpretations were removed at 1841 ZULU.” Luce used his keys, then turned the combination panel. He took out a deck of IBM cards and laid them on the console. They gave no indication of what they were, but there was a code book that could interpret them. Under normal circumstances neither Luce nor Rosten knew where their missiles were aimed. Now, though, with good prospects that they’d own the birds, it seemed better to know.
Time went by. The speaker blared again. “APOLLO REPORTS SOVIET MISSILE LAUNCH… SAY AGAIN… MASSIVE… FIVE HUNDRED… TYARA TAM…”
“The bastards!” Rosten shouted. “Lousy red sons of bitches!”
“Calm, Skipper.” Captain Luce fingered the cards and code book. He looked up at his status board. Their missiles were still sealed; they couldn’t launch anything if they wanted to, not without orders from Looking Glass.
“LOOKING GLASS, THIS IS DROPKICK. LOOKING GLASS, THIS IS DROPKICK. WE HAVE MESSAGES FROM SOVIET PREMIER. SOVIETS CLAIM CHINESE ATTACK ON SOVIET UNION HAS BEEN MET BY MISSILE LAUNCHES. SOVIETS REQUEST U.S. ASSISTANCE AGAINST CHINESE UNPROVOKED ATTACK.”
“ALL UNITS, THIS IS SAC. APOLLO REPORTS SOVIET MISSILES HEADED EAST; REPEAT… NO… AS FAR AS WE KNOW…”
“SQUADRON COMMANDERS, THIS IS LOOKING GLASS. NO SOVIET ATTACK ON UNITED STATES; I SAY AGAIN, SOVIET ATTACK ON CHINA ONLY, NOT ON UNITED STATES…”
The speakers went dead. Luce and Rosten looked at each other. Then they looked at their target cards.
Red flags dropped over lights on their status board, and a new digital timer began ticking off seconds.
In four hours they would own their birds.
A handful of glowing coals scattered across Mexico and the eastern United States: the land strikes of the Hammer. Columns of superheated air stream up into the stratosphere, carrying millions of tons of dust and vaporized soil. Winds rush inward toward the rising air; as they cross the turning world their paths are deflected into half a dozen counterclockwise spirals. Eddies form in the spirals and are thrown off as hurricanes.
A mother hurricane forms over Mexico and moves eastward across the Gulf, gaining heat energy from the boiling seawater that covers the Gulf Strike. The hurricane moves north, from sea to land, and spawns tornadoes as it goes. Hurricane winds drive floodwaters further up the Mississippi valley.
As heated wet air rises above the oceans, cold winds pour down from the Arctic. An enormous front forms along the Ohio valley. Tornadoes bud and break free and scatter. When the front moves past, another forms, and another behind it, spewing out a hundred, then a thousand tornadoes to dance out their fury on the graves of the ruined cities. The fronts move east. More form in the Atlantic, above Europe, across Africa. Rain clouds cover the Earth.
3
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD