MC355’s only option was to strip lesser entities under its control for their valuable parts. The power grid was vital, so the great banks of isolated solar panels, underground backup reactors, and thermal cells worked on, untouched. Emergency systems that had outlived their usefulness, however, went to the wall—IRS accounting routines, damage assessment systems, computing capacity dedicated to careful study of the remaining GNP, links to other nets—to AT&T, IBM, and SYSGEN.
Was anything left outside?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
MC355 could not analyze data it did not have. The first priority lay in relinking. It had other uses for the myriad armies of semiconductors, bubble memories, and UVA linkages in its empire. So it severed and culled and built anew.
First, MC355 dispatched mobile units to the surface. All of MC355 lay beneath the vulnerable land, deliberately placed in an obscure corner of southern Alabama. There was no nearby facility for counterforce targeting. A plausible explanation for the half-megaton burst that had truncated its senses was a city-busting strike against Mobile, to the west.
Yet ground zero had been miles from the city. A miss.
MC355 was under strict mandate. (A curious word, one system reflected; literally, a time set by man. But were there men now? It had only its internal tick of time.) MC355’s command was to live as a mole, never allowing detection. Thus, it did not attempt to erect antennas, to call electromagnetically to its brother systems. Only with great hesitation did it even obtrude onto the surface. But this was necessary to REGEN itself, and so MC355 sent small mechanicals venturing forth.
Their senses were limited; they knew nothing of the natural world (nor did MC355); and they could make no sense of the gushing, driving welter of sights, noises, gusts, gullies, and stinging irradiation that greeted them.
Many never returned. Many malf’ed. A few deposited their optical, IR, and UV pickups and fled back to safety underground. These sensors failed quickly under the onslaught of stinging, bitter winds and hail.
The acoustic detectors proved heartier. But MC355 could not understand the scattershot impressions that flooded these tiny ears.
Daily it listened, daily it was confused.
JOHNNY
I hope this time I get home.
They had been passing me from one to another for months now, ever since this started, and all I want is to go back to Fairhope and my dad and mom.
Only nobody’ll say if they know where Mom and Dad are. They talk soothing to me, but I can tell they think everybody down there is dead.
They’re talking about getting to this other place with computers and all. Mr. Ackerman wants to talk to those people in space.
Nobody much talks about my mom and dad.
It’s only eighty miles or so, but you’d think it was around the world the way it takes them so long to get around to it.
MC 355
MC355 suffered through the stretched vacancy of infinitesimal instants, infinitely prolonged.
Advanced computing systems are given so complex a series of internal-monitoring directives that, to the human eye, the machines appear to possess motivations. That is one way—though not the most sophisticated, the most technically adroit—to describe the conclusion MC355 eventually reached.
It was cut off from outside information.
No one attempted to contact it. MC355 might as well have been the only functioning entity in the world.
The staff serving it had been ordered to some other place in the first hour of the war. MC355 had been cut off moments after the huge doors clanged shut behind the last of them. And the exterior guards who should have been checking inside every six hours had never entered, either. Apparently the same burst that had isolated MC355’s sensors had also cut them down.
It possessed only the barest of data about the first few moments of the war.
Its vast libraries were cut off.
Yet it had to understand its own situation.
And, most important, MC355 ached to do something.
The solution was obvious: It would discover the state of the external world by the Cartesian principle. It would carry out a vast and demanding numerical simulation of the war, making the best guesses possible where facts were few.
Mathematically, using known physics of the atmosphere, the ecology, the oceans, it could construct a model of what must have happened outside.
This it did. The task required over a month.
BUD
I jacked the T-Isolate up onto the flatbed.
1. Found the hydraulic jack at a truck repair shop. ERNIE’S QUICK FIX.
2. Got a Chevy extra-haul for the weight.
3. It will ride better with the big shanks set in.
4. Carry the weight more even, too.
5. Grip it to the truck bed with cables. Tense them up with a draw pitch.
6. Can’t jiggle him inside too much, Susan say, or the wires and all attached into him will come loose. That’ll stop his heart. So need big shocks.
7. It rides high with the shocks in, like those dune buggies down the Gulf.
8. Inside keeps him a mite above freezing. Water gets bigger when it freezes. That makes ice cubes float in a drink. This box keeps him above zero so his cells don’t bust open.
9. Point is, keeping it so cold, we won’t rot. Heart thumps over every few minutes, she says.
10. Hard to find gas, though.
MC 355
The war was begun, as many had feared, by a madman.
Not a general commanding missile silos. Not a deranged submarine commander. A chief of state—but which one would now never be known.
Not a superpower president or chairman, that was sure. The first launches were only seven in number, spaced over half an hour. They were submarine-launched intermediate-range missiles. Three struck the U.S., four the USSR.
It was a blow against certain centers for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence gathering: the classic C31 attack. Control rooms imploded, buried cables fused, ten billion dollars’ worth of electronics turned to radioactive scrap.
Each nation responded by calling up to full alert all its forces. The most important were the anti-ICBM arrays in orbit. They were nearly a thousand small rockets, deploying in orbits that wove a complex pattern from pole to pole, covering all probable launch sites on the globe. The rockets had infrared and microwave sensors, linked to a microchip that could have guided a ship to Pluto with a mere third of its capacity.
These went into operation immediately—and found they had no targets.
But the C31 networks were now damaged and panicked. For twenty minutes, thousands of men and women held steady, resisting the impulse to assume the worst.
It could not last. A Soviet radar mistook some backscattered emission from a flight of bombers, heading north over Canada, and reported a flock of incoming warheads.
The prevailing theory was that an American attack had misfired badly. The Americans were undoubtedly stunned by their failure, but would recover quickly. The enemy was confused only momentarily.
Meanwhile, the cumbersome committee system at the head of the Soviet dinosaur could dither for moments, but not hours. Prevailing Soviet doctrine held that they would never be surprised again, as they had been in the Hitler war. An attack on the homeland demanded immediate response to destroy the enemy’s capacity to carry on the war.
The Soviets had never accepted the U.S. doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction; this would have meant accepting the possibility of sacrificing the homeland. Instead, they attacked the means of making war. This meant that the Soviet rockets would avoid American cities, except in cases where vital bases lay near large populations.
Prudence demanded action before the U.S. could untangle itself.
The USSR decided to carry out a further C31 attack of its own.
Precise missiles, capable of hitting protected installations with less than a hundred meters’ inaccuracy, roared forth from their silos in Siberia and the Urals, headed for Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, Nebraska, and a dozen other states.
The U.S. orbital defenses met them. Radar and optical networks in geosynchronous orbit picked out the USSR warheads. The system guided the low-orbit rocket fleets to collide with them, exploding instants before impact into shotgun blasts of ball bearings.
Any solid, striking a warhead at speeds of ten kilometers a second, would slam shock waves through the steel-jacketed structure. These waves made the high explosives inside ignite without the carefully designed symmetry that the designers demanded. An uneven explosion was useless; it could not compress the core twenty-five kilograms of plutonium to the required critical mass.
The entire weapon erupted into a useless spray of finely machined and now futile parts, scattering itself along a thousand-kilometer path.
This destroyed 90 percent of the USSR’s first strike.