A trooper jumped on a table — a sergeant, Maura realized. “Let’s clear the room now, people. Let’s keep it orderly.”
“My God,” Dan Ystebo said.
Maura said, “Another bullet from the future?”
“The flash came from the bottle.” He pointed at the magnetic bottle at the end of the quark-nugget production line. “They shot him with a quark nugget.” He laughed, his voice strained. “They don’t need help from downstream any more.”
A trooper approached; they were hustled out of the room. But as she left, Maura couldn’t shut out of her head the sound of two people screaming: Bill Tybee, in the care of the paramedics, fighting to stay conscious; and his son, Tom, torn between warm past and chill future, a future he already knew his father couldn’t share.
And she knew, now, there were few options left.
Maura and Dan were restricted to a bunker a couple of miles from the center itself.
It was comfortable here: air-conditioned, clean, orderlies to serve coffee to the representative and her companion. But in the big central command, control, and communications room — C Cubed, as the military types called it — there was an air of tension.
Even though the target, monitored from a hundred angles, was just a group of eleven children, still confined to their blue-chalk circle. Just children: working, sleeping, eating, even playing. Eleven spindly, unwashed kids.
The first countermeasure was invisible.
When it was initiated some of the children — Maura counted them, four, five, six — fell down immediately. Maura could see them vomiting, and one little girl had a dark stain spreading over her backside as her bowels loosened. They were clutching their stomachs and crying — zoom in on twisted faces.
. Anna hauled the little ones into the big new cage they had built at the center of the heavy-water torus. As soon as they were inside the cage the children’s retching seemed to stop, and they immediately calmed. Anna sat the smallest girl on her lap and stroked her sweat-tangled hair.
Soon all the children were inside the cage, sitting or standing or lying. Anna led them in singing what sounded like a nursery rhyme.
“So much for that,” Dan said.
“What was it?”
“Deer savers,” he said. “Like on the hood of your car. Infrasound — very low frequency stuff. If you tune it right you can cause disorientation, nausea, even diarrhea. The FBI have been using it for years.”
“Good God almighty.”
“Every conspiracy nut knows about it. It was the best hope, in my opinion.”
“Hope of what?”
“Of a peaceful conclusion to this mess. But it didn’t work. Look at them. As soon as they got inside that cage of theirs they were immune. The cage is a barrier against infrasound.”
“Yes, and what else does it do?”
“I have a feeling we’ll find out. So… what next?”
Next turned out to be an invasion.
They kept the infrasound turned on for twelve hours. At least that kept the children trapped in their cage of steel and wire. Some of the kids managed to sleep, but there was no food in there, no water, no sanitation.
Then the troopers went in, eleven of them in their exo-suits: strictly SIPEs, for Soldier Integrated Protective Ensemble. They walked with a stiff, unnatural precision. Over each trooper’s head was a complex, insectile mask: a totally contained respiratory system, night-vision goggles, a heads-up display, even cute little sensors that would aim weapons the way the soldier happened to be looking.
Eleven supersoldiers, one for each superkid, stomping through grade-school corridors. Maura wondered what the troopers were feeling, how they had been briefed — how they were supposed to deal with this personally, even supposing they were successful.
In the event they didn’t even reach the lab.
Maura actually saw the quark nugget bullets come flying out through the walls of the compound, then falling into the body of the Earth.
Then the retreat began.
Three troopers had died. Two more were injured and had to be carried out by their companions. One came out with her SIPE half disabled, one leg dragging crazily.
The children, fragile-looking stick figures in their tent of wire, didn’t seem to have moved.
Dan Ystebo grunted. “One option left, then.”
It took another ten hours for the final approval to be obtained.
Far beyond her jurisdiction, Maura Della was nevertheless consulted by administration officials. She was invited to take part by e-presence at security meetings in the White House family theater. The attention was flattering, the weight of the decision overwhelming.
Before she made her final recommendation she took time out, went and sought out a shower room, stood in the jet for long minutes with the dial turned to its hottest, and the air filled up with sauna steam.
She hadn’t slept for maybe thirty-six hours. She couldn’t remember the last time she had sat down to eat. She had no idea how well her mind was functioning.
But this was, it seemed, a battlefield. The front line. And you don’t get much sleep on the battlefield…
Open journal. March 8,2012.
It’s clear that whether she meant it or not, Anna’s briefly sketched prospectus — a new social order devised by the Blue children — has finally crystallized hostility to them, even more than the physical threat they represent. Nobody is about to submit to an ideology drawn up by a bunch of swivel-eyed kids. And underlying that is an inchoate fear that even considering the proposals will somehow lead to a transfer of actual control to the children.
After all, what were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but triumphs of a centralized, planning, “scientific” elite? It seems to me that the human race simply isn’t advanced enough yet to be able to trust any subset of itself with the power to run the lives of the rest.
That isn’t to say that in all parts of the planet the response will be the same. Maybe some deranged totalitarian asshole is trying to recruit local Blue kids to prop up his lousy regime even now. And even some politically advanced parts of the world might not find the children’s proposals quite as instinctively repelling as Americans. The French, for example, have an instinct for centralization that dates back to Colbert in the seventeenth century. As a visiting American I have been bemused to observe how their senior people work, top managers trained in the grandes ecoles gliding between positions as ministerial advisers and captains of industry.
Not in America, though. America was after all built on the belief that centralized control is in principle a bad thing. And what about democracy? In fact I would be deeply suspicious of anybody, any stern Utopian, who advocated handing over power to any elite, however benevolent.
But I suspect there is a still deeper fear, even an instinct, that lies buried under the layers of rationalization. Even in my own heart.
It may be that these children are in some sense superior to the Homo sapiens stock from which they emerged. Maybe they could run the world better than any human; maybe a world full of Blues would be an infinitely better place, a step up.
Maybe. But as I was elected to serve the interests of a large number of Hsap — and as a proud Hsap myself — I’m not about to sit around and let these Blues take my planet away.
If this final solution is turned down now, presumably further military options will be discussed, rehearsed, tried out, in escalating severity. Maybe we will, in the end, come back to this point again, the unleashing of the fire. But by then it could be too late.
Time is the key.