She looked at Eric to see if he wanted to go closer; he nodded.
Secretary of Defense Peter Muilenburg studied the giant display in the windowless room. The aircraft carriers were on station, or right on schedule to reach their stations. As he watched, the red digital timer changed from “1 day 0 hours 0 minutes” to “0 days 23 hours 59 minutes.” There was no seconds display, but his pulse, which he was feeling with a finger on his left radial artery, served well enough: he was the conductor for this orchestra, and his heartbeat the metronome.
It was hard to take his eyes off the destruction in front of him, but Eric Redekop turned to look at Janis. She was just thirty-two, for God’s sake—by the time she was his age, what crazy weapons would the world be facing? How small would they be? How much damage would they be able to do? It was almost inconceivable the amount of destructive power that would be in the hands of individuals by then.
The part of him that was anchored in the here and now had been worried about where this relationship might eventually lead—about whether he’d leave her a widow in her sixties.
The part of him that half—but only half—believed all the stuff he read in science magazines and medical journals had thought that surely they’d pass the tipping point sometime in the next couple of decades and the average human life span would increase by more than a year for every year that passed, meaning that he and Jan would both have much, much longer lives than their parents or grandparents, and that, as the decades, and maybe even centuries, rolled by, an eighteen-year age difference would seem utterly trivial.
But the part of him that came to the fore now was the one that had been lurking at the back of his mind since 9/11, and had been reinforced so many times since, including when the Sears Tower went down. Now that Jerrison was safe, and Eric finally had time to take it all in, he realized it didn’t matter what miracles future medical science might hold; the planet was fucked. The world had transitioned from a place where wars were fought between nations, declared in legislative assemblies and concluded with negotiated treaties, to a place where small cabals and even individuals could wreak havoc on a massive scale. And scale was indeed the issue: the weapons kept getting smaller, and the damage they were capable of kept getting larger.
And that meant that the age difference between him and Jan didn’t matter; none of it mattered. The world wasn’t going to last long enough for him to get really old or for Jan to collect a pension. It was over; they were done—it was only a matter of time before someone wrecked everything for everyone.
He looked at her lovely, youthful face—horrified though it was right now as it studied the caved-in ruins of what had been the home of the most powerful man in the world.
“Do you know who the Great Gazoo is?” he said.
She looked at him, tilting her head slightly in a way that made him think she was sifting memories, but whether the answer came from her own childhood or from Josh Latimer’s he had no way to tell. “A cartoon character,” she said. “From The Flintstones.”
He nodded. “He was from the planet Zetox,” he said, pleased, despite the circumstances, for knowing that bit of trivia. “Do you know why he was exiled to primitive Earth?”
She tilted her head again; he rather suspected that hardly anyone besides him remembered the answer to that—but he did; it had chilled him when it had first been explained in the episode in which Gazoo was introduced, and he’d never forgotten it.
The Great Gazoo—the smug little flying green guy whose introduction for so many indicated the point at which The Flintstones had jumped the shark—had been precisely the kind of terrorist Eric now feared the world would soon face. “He’d invented the ultimate weapon,” he said to Jan. “A button that if pressed would destroy the entire universe. So his people sent him somewhere with primitive technology so he could never build anything like that again.”
She looked at him, getting it. “But it doesn’t have to turn out that way,” she said.
He gestured at the White House: the central mansion reduced to blackened ruins, the east and west wings gutted by fire. “How else can it turn out?”
She let out a sigh. “I don’t know. But that can’t be the only way.”
Others had tarried here to look at the wreckage. A small knot of Japanese tourists was standing a short distance away, listening to a guide; Eric didn’t understand anything she was saying, but she sounded sad.
At least it hadn’t been a nuclear weapon, Eric thought. But those were easy enough to ferret out with Geiger counters and other techniques; these new bombs were hard to detect.
More memories came to him—his own, from his childhood. The doomsday device going off at the end of Dr. Strangelove, and his mother always making him call her for the ending whenever it was on TV, because, despite the horrific succession of nuclear explosions, she loved hearing Vera Lynn sing “We’ll Meet Again.”
And Colonel Taylor—Charlton Heston himself—pushing down on the crystalline control panel at the end of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, setting off the Alpha-Omega bomb: one man destroying an entire world, so that it cracked like an egg in space.
And the end of the novel 2001, which he’d struggled to read after seeing the film for the first time when he was ten, with the Star Child detonating all the nuclear bombs in orbit around Earth, bringing a false dawn to the planet below.
And on and on and on, the collective memory of humanity, the pop culture created by people of his parents’ generation, a generation—he looked over at the Japanese tourists—who remembered Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And the horrors of his own generation, oh so terribly reaclass="underline" 9/11 and everything since.
And, now, in front of them, yet another echo, another aftershock, another flashback, the latest example of the ongoing, never-ending wave, the sick inversion of the old adage: the wants of the evil few outweighing the desires, the hopes, the dreams, the lives, of the many.
“It can’t go on like this,” Eric said, as much to himself as to Jan.
“It won’t,” Jan said, and he marveled for a moment at the notion of her—the young one—comforting him about the future.
They walked closer to the White House, making their way around the snow-covered Ellipse to stand by the brown metal fence at the south end. Lots of workers were scurrying about the spacious grounds, looking through rubble, collecting the countless scraps of paper, trying, Eric supposed, to make sure no fragment of a classified document could be recovered by souvenir-seekers. It was such an odd view: the ruins of the White House framed by picture-perfect trees with beautiful snow on their boughs.
Eric was startled by a rough voice. “Guess I’m not the only one.”
A man in tattered clothes, a filthy blanket around his shoulders, and a worn parka beneath that, had sidled up to stand next to Jan. He was rubbing his hands together for warmth.
She looked at him. “Pardon?”
The man indicated the White House with a movement of his head. His hair was long and might have been white if it were clean. “The only homeless one,” he said. He wasn’t making a joke, it seemed; he sounded genuinely sad.
Jan nodded, and so did Eric. On a normal day, he might have ignored the man, or briskly walked away. But this was not a normal day.