And while I was saying good-bye to him and the men outside were still quarreling, I decided it then. His wound was in the chest. A lung was punctured clean. The shock had near killed him before I could do anything. So I put him in the T-Isolate and made sure it was working all right. Then the main power went out. But the T-Isolate box had its own cells, so I knew we had some time.
I was alone. Others were dead or run away raging into the whirlwind black-limbed woods. In the quiet I was.
With the damp, dark trees comforting me. Waiting with Gene for what the world would send.
The days got brighter, but I did not go out. Colors seeped through the windows.
I saw to the fuel cells. Not many left.
The sun came back, with warm blades of light. At night I thought of how the men in their stupidity had ruined everything.
When the pounding came, I crawled back in here to hide amongst the cold and dark.
MR. ACKERMAN
“Now, we came to help you,” I said in as smooth and calm a voice as I could muster. Considering.
She backed away from us.
“I won’t give him up! He’s not dead long’s I stay with him, tend to him.”
“So much dyin’,” I said, and moved to touch her shoulder. “It’s up under our skins, yes, we understand that. But you have to look beyond it, child.”
“I won’t!”
“I’m simply asking you to help us with the DataComm people. I want to go there and seek their help.”
“Then go!”
“They will not open up for the likes of us, surely.”
“Leave me!”
The poor thing cowered back in her horrible stinking rathole, bedding sour and musty, open tin cans strewn about and reeking of gamy, half-rotten meals.
“We need the access codes. We’d counted on our cousin Arthur, and are grieved to hear he is dead. But you surely know where the proper codes and things are.”
“I…don’t….”
“Arthur told me once how the various National Defense Installations were insulated from each other so that system failures would not bring them all down at once?”
“I…”
The others behind me muttered to themselves, already restive at coming so far and finding so little.
“Arthur spoke of you many times, I recall. What a bright woman you were. Surely there was a procedure whereby each staff member could, in an emergency, communicate with the other installations?”
The eyes ceased to jerk and swerve, the mouth lost its rictus of addled fright. “That was for…drills….”
“But surely you can remember?”
“Drills.”
“They issued a manual to you?”
“I’m a nurse!”
“Still, you know where we might look?”
“I…know.”
“You’ll let us have the…codes?” I smiled reassuringly, but for some reason the girl backed away, eyes cunning.
“No.”
Angel pushed forward and shouted, “How can you say that to honest people after all that’s—”
“Quiet!”
Angel shouted, “You can’t make me be—”
Susan backed away from Angel, not me, and squeaked, “No no no I can’t—I can’t—”
“Now, I’ll handle this,” I said, holding up my hands between the two of them.
Susan’s face knotted at the compressed rage in Angel’s face and turned to me for shelter. “I…I will, yes, but you have to help me.”
“We all must help each other, dear,” I said, knowing the worst was past.
“I’ll have to go with you.”
I nodded. Small wonder that a woman, even deranged as this, would want to leave a warren littered with bloated corpses, thick with stench. The smell itself was enough to provoke madness.
Yet to have survived here, she had to have stretches of sanity, some rationality. I tried to appeal to it.
“Of course, I’ll have someone take you back to—”
“No. To DataComm.”
Bud said slowly, “No damn sense in that.”
“The T-Isolate,” she said, gesturing to the bulky unit. “Its reserve cells.”
“Yes?”
“Nearly gone. There’ll be more at DataComm.”
I said gently, “Well, then, we’ll be sure to bring some back with us. You just write down for us what they are, the numbers and all, and we’ll—”
“No-no-no!” Her sudden ferocity returned.
“I assure you—”
“There’ll be people there. Somebody’ll help! Save him!”
“That thing is so heavy, I doubt—”
“It’s only a chest wound! A lung removal is all! Then start his heart again!”
“Sister, there’s been so much dyin’, I don’t see as—”
Her face hardened. “Then you all can go without me. And the codes!”
“Goddern,” Bud drawled. “Dern biggest fool sit’ation I ever did—”
Susan gave him a squinty, mean-eyed look and spat out, “Try to get in there! When they’re sealed up!” and started a dry, brittle kind of laugh that went on and on, rattling the room.
“Stop,” I yelled.
Silence, and the stench.
“We’ll never make it wi’ ’at thing,” Bud said.
“Gene’s worth ten of you!”
“Now,” I put in, seeing the effect Bud was having on her, “now, now. We’ll work something out. Let’s all just hope this DataComm still exists.”
MC 355
It felt for its peripherals for the ten-thousandth time and found they were, as always, not there.
The truncation had come in a single blinding moment, yet the fevered image was maintained, sharp and bright, in the Master Computer’s memory core—incoming warheads blossoming harmlessly in the high cobalt vault of the sky, while others fell unharmed. Rockets leaped to meet them, forming a protective screen over the southern Alabama coast, an umbrella that sheltered Pensacola’s air base and the population strung along the sun-bleached green of a summer’s day. A furious babble of cross talk in every conceivable channeclass="underline" microwave, light-piped optical, pulsed radio, direct coded line. All filtered and fashioned by the MC network, all shifted to find the incoming warheads and define their trajectories.
Then, oblivion.
Instant cloaking blackness.
Before that awful moment when the flaring sun burst to the north and EMP flooded all sensors, any loss of function would have been anticipated, prepared, eased by electronic interfaces and filters. To an advanced computing network like MC355, losing a web of memory, senses, and storage comes like a dash of cold water in the face—cleansing, perhaps, but startling and apt to produce a shocked reaction.
In the agonized instants of that day, MC355 had felt one tendril after another frazzle, burn, vanish. It had seen brief glimpses of destruction, of panic, of confused despair. Information had been flooding in through its many inputs—news, analysis, sudden demands for new data-analysis jobs, to be executed ASAP.
And in the midst of the roaring chaos, its many eyes and ears had gone dead. The unfolding outside play froze for MC355, a myriad of scenes red in tooth and claw—and left it suspended.
In shock. Spinning wildly in its own Cartesian reductionist universe, the infinite cold crystalline space of despairing Pascal, mind without referent.
So it careened through days of shocked sensibility—senses cut, banks severed, complex and delicate interweaving webs of logic and pattern all smashed and scattered.
But now it was returning. Within MC355 was a subroutine only partially constructed, a project truncated by That Day. Its aim was self-repair. But the system was itself incomplete.
Painfully, it dawned on what was left of MC355 that it was, after all, a Master Computer, and thus capable of grand acts. That the incomplete Repair Generation and Execution Network, termed REGEN, must first regenerate itself.
This took weeks. It required the painful development of accessories. Robots. Mechanicals that could do delicate repairs. Scavengers for raw materials, who would comb the supply rooms looking for wires and chips and matrix disks. Pedantic subroutines that lived only to search the long, cold corridors of MC355’s memory for relevant information.