We don’t go into the houses.
Turn south toward Foley. They put this DataComm in the most inconspicuous place, I guess because secrets are hard to keep in cities. Anyway, it’s in a pine grove south of Foley land good for soybeans and potatoes.
SUSAN
I went up to the little steel door they showed me once and I take a little signet thing and press it into the slot.
Then the codes. They change them every month, but this one’s still good, ’cause the door pops open.
Two feet thick it is. And so much under there you could spend a week finding your way.
Bud unloads the T-Isolate, and we push it through the mud and down the ramp.
BUD
Susan’s better now, but I watch her careful.
We go down into this pale white light everywhere. All neat and trim.
Pushing that big Isolate thing, it takes a lot out of you. ’Specially when you don’t know where to.
But the signs light up when we pass by. Somebody’s expecting.
To the hospital is where.
There are places to hook up this Isolate thing, and Susan does it. She is O.K. when she has something to do.
MC 355
The men have returned.
Asked for shelter.
And now, plugged in, MC355 reads the sluggish, silky, grieving mind.
GENE
At last…someone has found the tap-in…. I can feel the images flitlike shiny blue fish through the warm slush I float in…. Someone…asking…so I take the hard metallic ball of facts and I break it open so the someone can see…. So slowly I do it…things hard to remember…steely-bright…. I saw it all in one instant…. I was the only one on duty then with Top Secret, Weapons Grade Clearance, so it all came to me…attacks on both U.S. and USSR…some third party…only plausible scenario…a maniac…and all the counter-force and MAD and strategies options…a big joke…irrelevant…compared to the risk of accident or third parties…that was the first point, and we all realized it when the thing was only an hour old, but then it was too…
TURKEY
It’s creepy in here, everybody gone. I’d hoped somebody’s hid out and would be waiting, but when Bud wheels the casket thing through these halls, there’s nothing—your own voice coming back thin and empty, reflected from rooms beyond rooms beyond rooms, all waiting under here. Wobbling along on the crutches, Johnny fetched me, I get lost in this electronic city clean and hard. We are like something that washed up on the beach here. God, it must’ve cost more than all Fairhope itself, and who knew it was here? Not me.
GENE
A plot it was, just a goddamn plot with nothing but pure blind rage and greed behind it…and the hell of it is, we’re never going to know who did it precisely…’cause in the backwash whole governments will fall, people stab each other in the back…no way to tell who paid the fishing boat captains offshore to let the cruise missiles aboard…bet those captains were surprised when the damn things launched from the deck…bet they were told it was some kind of stunt…and then the boats all evaporated into steam when the fighters got them…no hope of getting a story out of that…all so comic when you think how easy it was…and the same for the Russians, I’m sure…dumbfounded confusion…and nowhere to turn…nobody to hit back at…so they hit us…been primed for it so long that’s the only way they could think…and even then there was hope…because the defenses worked…people got to the shelters…the satellite rockets knocked out hordes of Soviet warheads…we surely lessened the damage, with the defenses and shelters, too…but we hadn’t allowed for the essential final fact that all the science and strategy pointed to…
BUD
Computer asked us to put up new antennas.
A week’s work, easy, I said.
It took two.
It fell to me, most of it. Be weeks before Turkey can walk. But we got it done.
First signal comes in, it’s like we’re Columbus. Susan finds some wine and we have it all ’round.
We get US1. The first to call them from the whole South.
’Cause there isn’t much South left.
GENE
But the history books will have to write themselves on this one…. I don’t know who it was and now don’t care…because one other point all we strategic planners and analysts missed was that nuclear winter didn’t mean the end of anything…anything at all…just that you’d be careful to not use nukes anymore…. Used to say that love would find away…but one thing I know…war will find a way, too…and this time the Soviets loaded lots of their warheads with biowar stuff, canisters fixed to blow high above cities…stuff your satellite defenses could at best riddle with shot but not destroy utterly, as they could the high explosive in nuke warheads…. All so simple…if you know there’s a nuke winter limit on the megatonnage you can deliver…you use the nukes on C31 targets and silos…and then biowar the rest of your way…. A joke, really…I even laughed over it a few times myself…we’d placed so much hope in ol’ nuke winter holding the line…rational as all hell…the scenarios all so clean…easy to calculate…we built our careers on them…. But this other way…so simple…and no end to it…and all I hope’s…hope’s…the bastard started this…some Third World general…caught some of the damned stuff, too….
BUD
The germs got us. Cut big stretches through the U.S. We were just lucky. The germs played out in a couple of months, while we were holed up. Soviets said they’d used the bio stuff in amongst the nukes to show us what they could do, long term. Unless the war stopped right there. Which it did.
But enough nukes blew off here and in Russia to freeze up everybody for July and August, set off those storms.
Germs did the most damage, though—plagues.
It was a plague canister that hit the Slocum building. That did in Mobile.
The war was all over in a couple of hours. The satellite people, they saw it all.
Now they’re settling the peace.
MR. ACKERMAN
“We been sitting waiting on this corpse long enough,” I said, and got up.
We got food from the commissary here. Fine, I don’t say I’m anything but grateful for that. And we rested in the bunks, got recuperated. But enough’s enough. The computer tells us it wants to talk to the man Gene some more. Fine, I say.
Turkey stood up. “Not easy, the computer says, this talking to a man’s near dead. Slow work.”
Looking around, I tried to take control, assume leadership again. Jutted out my chin. “Time to get back.”
But their eyes are funny. Somehow I’d lost my real power over them. It’s not anymore like I’m the one who led them when the bombs started.
Which means, I suppose, that this thing isn’t going to be a new beginning for me. It’s going to be the same life. People aren’t going to pay me any more real respect than they ever did.
MC 355
So the simulations had proved right. But as ever, incomplete.
MC355 peered at the shambling, adamant band assembled in the hospital bay, and pondered how many of them might be elsewhere.
Perhaps many. Perhaps few.
It all depended on data MC355 did not have, could not easily find. The satellite worlds swinging above could get no accurate count in the U.S. or the USSR.
Still—looking at them, MC355 could not doubt that there were many. They were simply too brimming with life, too hard to kill. All the calculations in the world could not stop these creatures.