The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

TURKEY

TROUBLE. KNEW THERE’D BE trouble and plenty of it if we left the reactor too soon.

But do they listen to me? No, not to old Turkey. He’s just a dried-up corn husk of a man now, they think, one of those Bunren men who been on the welfare a generation or two and no damn use to anybody.

Only it’s simple plain farm supports I was drawing all this time, not any kind of horse-ass welfare. So much they know. Can’t blame a man just ’cause he comes up cash-short sometimes. I like to sit and read and think more than some people I could mention, and so I took the money.

Still, Mr. Ackerman and all think I got no sense to take government dole and live without a lick of farming, so when I talk they never listen. Don’t even seem to hear.

It was his idea, getting into the reactor at McIntosh. Now that was a good one, I got to give him that much.

When the fallout started coming down and the skimpy few stations on the radio were saying to get to deep shelter, it was Mr. Ackerman who thought about the big central core at McIntosh. The reactor itself had been shut down automatically when the war started, so there was nobody there. Mr. Ackerman figured a building made to keep radioactivity in will also keep it out. So he got together the families, the Nelsons and Bunrens and Pollacks and all, cousins and aunts and anybody we could reach in the measly hours we had before the fallout arrived.

We got in all right. Brought food and such. A reactor’s set up self-contained and got huge air filters and water flow from the river. The water was clean, too, filtered enough to take out the fallout. The generators were still running good. We waited it out there. Crowded and sweaty but O.K. for ten days. That’s how long it took for the count to go down. Then we spilled out into a world laid to gray and yet circumscribed waste, the old world seen behind a screen of memories.

That was bad enough, finding the bodies—people, cattle, and dogs asprawl across roads and fields. Trees and bushes looked the same, but there was a yawning silence everywhere. Without men, the pine stands and muddy riverbanks had fallen dumb, hardly a swish of breeze moving through them, like everything was waiting to start up again but didn’t know how.

ANGEL

We thought we were O.K. then, and the counters said so, too—all the gammas gone, one of the kids said. Only the sky didn’t look the same when we came out, all mottled and shot through with drifting blue-belly clouds.

Then the strangest thing. July, and there’s sleet falling. Big wind blowing up from the Gulf, only it’s not the sticky hot one we’re used to in summer, it’s moaning in the trees of a sudden and a prickly chill.

“Goddamn. I don’t think we can get far in this,” Turkey says, rolling his old rheumy eyes around like he never saw weather before.

“It will pass,” Mr. Ackerman says, like he is in real tight with God.

“Lookit that moving in from the south,” I say, and there’s a big mass all purple and forking lightning swarming over the hills, like a tide flowing, swallowing everything.

“Gulf storm. We’ll wait it out,” Mr. Ackerman says to the crowd of us, a few hundred left out of what was a moderate town with real promise.

Nobody talks about the dead folks. We see them everywhere, worms working in them. A lot smashed up in car accidents, died trying to drive away from something they couldn’t see. But we got most of our families in with us, so it’s not so bad. Me, I just pushed it away for a while, too much to think about with the storm closing in.

Only it wasn’t a storm. It was somethin’ else, with thick clouds packed with hail and snow one day and the next sunshine, only sun with bite in it. One of the men says it’s got more UV in it, meaning the ultraviolet that usually doesn’t come through the air. But it’s getting down to us now.

So we don’t go out in it much. Just to the market for what’s left of the canned food and supplies, only a few of us going out at a time, says Mr. Ackerman.

We thought maybe a week it would last.

Turned out to be more than two months.

I’m a patient woman, but jammed up in those corridors and stinking offices and control room of the reactor—

Well, I don’t want to go on.

It’s like my Bud says, worst way to die is to be bored to death.

That’s damn near the way it was.

Not that Old Man Turkey minded. You ever notice how the kind of man that hates moving, he will talk up other people doing just the opposite?

Mr. Ackerman was leader at first, because of getting us into the reactor. He’s from Chicago but you’d think it was England sometimes, the way he acts. He was on the school board and vice president of the big AmCo plant outside town. But he just started to assume his word was it, y’know, and that didn’t sit with us too well.

Some people started to saying Turkey was smarter. And was from around here, too. Mr. Ackerman heard about it.

Any fool could see Mr. Ackerman was the better man. But Turkey talked the way he does, reminding people he’d studied engineering at Auburn way back in the twencen and learned languages for a hobby and all. Letting on that when we came out, we’d need him instead of Mr. Ackerman.

He said an imp had caused the electrical things to go dead, and I said that was funny, saying an imp done it. He let on it was a special name they had for it. That’s the way he is. He sat and ruminated and fooled with his radios—that he never could make work—and told all the other men to go out and do this and that. Some did, too. The old man does know a lot of useless stuff and can convince the dumb ones that he’s wise.

So he’d send them to explore. Out into cold that’d snatch the breath out of you, bite your fingers, numb your toes. While old Turkey sat and fooled.

TURKEY

Nothing but sputtering on the radio. Nobody had a really good one that could pick up stations in Europe or far off.

Phones dead, of course.

But up in the night sky the first night out we saw dots moving—the pearly gleam of the Arcapel colony, the ruddy speck called Russworld.

So that’s when Mr. Ackerman gets this idea.

We got to reach those specks. Find out what’s the damage. Get help.

Only the power’s out everywhere, and we got no way to radio to them. We tried a couple of the local radio stations, brought some of their equipment back to the reactor where there was electricity working.

Every damn bit of it was shot. Couldn’t pick up a thing. Like the whole damn planet was dead, only of course it was the radios that were gone, fried in the EMP—ElectroMagnetic Pulse—that Angel made a joke out of.

All this time it’s colder than a whore’s tit outside. And we’re sweating and dirty and grumbling, rubbing up against ourselves inside.

Bud and the others, they’d bring in what they found in the stores. Had to drive to Sims Chapel or Toon to get anything, what with people looting. And gas was getting hard to find by then, too. They’d come back, and the women would cook up whatever was still O.K., though most of the time you’d eat it real quick so’s you didn’t have to spend time looking at it.

Me, I passed the time. Stayed warm.

Tried lots of things. Bud wanted to fire the reactor up, and five of the men, they read through the manuals and thought that they could do it. I helped a li’l.

So we pulled some rods and opened valves and did manage to get some heat out of the thing. Enough to keep us warm. But when they fired her up more, the steam hoots out and bells clang and automatic recordings go on saying loud as hell:

“EMERGENCY CLASS 3

ALL PERSONNEL TO STATIONS”

and we all get scared as shit.

So we don’t try to rev her up more. Just get heat.

To keep the generators going, we go out, fetch oil for them. Or Bud and his crew do. I’m too old to help much.

But at night we can still see those dots of light up there, scuttling across the sky same as before.

They’re the ones know what’s happening. People go through this much, they want to know what it meant.

So Mr. Ackerman says we got to get to that big DataComm center south of Mobile. Near Fairhope. At first I thought he’d looked it up in a book from the library or something.

When he says that, I pipe up, even if I am just an old fart according to some, and say, “No good to you even if you could. They got codes on the entrances, guards prob’ly. We’ll just pound on the door till our fists are all bloody and then have to slunk around and come on back.”

“I’m afraid you have forgotten our cousin Arthur,” Mr. Ackerman says all superior. He married into the family, but you’d think he invented it.

“You mean the one works over in Citronelle?”

“Yes. He has access to DataComm.”

So that’s how we got shanghaied into going to Citronelle, six of us, and breaking in there. Which caused the trouble. Just like I said.

MR. ACKERMAN

I didn’t want to take the old coot they called Turkey, a big dumb Bunren like all the rest of them. But the Bunrens want in to everything, and I was facing a lot of opposition in my plan to get Arthur’s help, so I went along with them.

Secretly, I believe the Bunrens wanted to get rid of the pestering old fool. He had been starting rumors behind my back among the three hundred souls I had saved. The Bunrens insisted on Turkey’s going along just to nip at me.

We were all volunteers, tired of living in musk and sour sweat inside that cramped reactor. Bud and Angel, the boy Johnny (whom we were returning to the Fairhope area), Turkey, and me.

We left the reactor under a gray sky with angry little clouds racing across it. We got to Citronelle in good time, Bud floor-boarding the Pontiac. As we went south we could see the spotty clouds were coming out of big purple ones that sat, not moving, just churning and spitting lightning on the horizon. I’d seen them before, hanging in the distance, never blowing inland. Ugly.

When we came up on the Center, there was a big hole in the side of it.

“Like somebody stove in a box with one swipe,” Bud said.

Angel, who was never more than two feet from Bud any time of day, said, “They bombed it.”

“No,” I decided. “Very likely it was a small explosion. Then the weather worked its way in.”

Which turned out to be true. There’d been some disagreement amongst the people holed up in the Center. Or maybe it was grief and the rage that comes of that. Susan wasn’t too clear about it ever.

The front doors were barred, though. We pounded on them. Nothing. So we broke in. No sign of Arthur or anyone.

We found one woman in a back room, scrunched into a bed with cans of food all around and a tiny little oil-burner heater. Looked awful, with big dark circles around her eyes and scraggly uncut hair.

She wouldn’t answer me at first. But we got her calmed and cleaned and to talking. That was the worst symptom, the not talking at first. Something back in the past two months had done her deep damage, and she couldn’t get it out.

Of course, living in a building half-filled with corpses was no help. The idiots hadn’t protected against radiation well enough, I guess. And the Center didn’t have good heating. So those who had some radiation sickness died later in the cold snap.

SUSAN

You can’t know what it’s like when all the people you’ve worked with, intelligent people who were nice as pie before, they turn mean and angry and filled up with grief for who was lost. Even then I could see Gene was the best of them.

They start to argue, and it runs on for days, nobody knowing what to do because we all can see the walls of the Center aren’t thick enough, the gamma radiation comes right through this government prefab-issue composition stuff. We take turns in the computer room because that’s the farthest in and the filters still work there, all hoping we can keep our count rate down, but the radiation comes in gusts for some reason, riding in on a storm front and coming down in the rain, only being washed away, too. It was impossible to tell when you’d get a strong dose and when there’d be just random clicks on the counters, plenty of clear air that you’d suck in like sweet vapors ’cause you knew it was good and could taste its purity.

So I was just lucky, that’s all.

I got less than the others. Later some said that me being a nurse, I’d given myself some shots to save myself. I knew that was the grief talking, is all. That Arthur was the worst. Gene told him off.

I was in the computer room when the really bad gamma radiation came. Three times the counter rose up, and three times I was there by accident of the rotation.

The men who were armed enforced the rotation, said it was the only fair way. And for a while everybody went along.

We all knew that the radiation exposure was building up and some already had too much, would die a month or a year later no matter what they did.

I was head nurse by then, not so much because I knew more but because the others were dead. When it got cold, they went fast.

So it fell to me to deal with these men and women who had their exposure already. Their symptoms had started. I couldn’t do anything. There was some who went out and got gummy fungus growing in the corners of their eyes—pterygium it was, I looked it up. From the ultraviolet. Grew quick over the lens and blinded them. I put them in darkness, and after a week the film was just a dab back in the corners of their eyes. My one big success.

The rest I couldn’t do much for. There was the T-Isolate box, of course, but that was for keeping sick people slowed down until real medical help could get to them. These men and women, with their eyes reaching out at you like you were the angel of light coming to them in their hour of need, they couldn’t get any help from that. Nobody could cure the dose rates they’d got. They were dead but still walking around and knowing it, which was the worst part.

So every day I had plenty to examine, staff from the Center itself who’d holed up here, and worse, people coming straggling in from cubbyholes they’d found. People looking for help once the fevers and sores came on them. Hoping their enemy was the pneumonia and not the gammas they’d picked up weeks back, which was sitting in them now like a curse. People I couldn’t help except maybe by a little kind lying.

So much like children they were. So much leaning on their hope.

It was all you could do to look at them and smile that stiff professional smile.

And Gene McKenzie. All through it he was a tower of a man.

Trying to talk some sense to them.

Sharing out the food.

Arranging the rotation schedules so we’d all get a chance to shelter in the computer room.

Gene had been boss of a whole Command Group before. He was on duty station when it happened, and knew lots about the war but wouldn’t say much. I guess he was sorrowing.

Even though once in a while he’d laugh.

And then talk about how the big computers would have fun with what he knew. Only the lines to DataComm had gone dead right when things got interesting, he said. He’d wonder what’d happened to MC355, the master one down in DataComm.

Wonder and then laugh.

And go get drunk with the others.

I’d loved him before, loved and waited because I knew he had three kids and a wife, a tall woman with auburn hair that he loved dearly. Only they were in California visiting her relatives in Sonoma when it happened, and he knew in his heart that he’d never see them again, probably.

Leastwise that’s what he told me—not out loud, of course, ’cause a man like that doesn’t talk much about what he feels. But in the night when we laid together, I knew what it meant. He whispered things, words I couldn’t piece together, but then he’d hold me and roll gentle like a small boat rocking on the Gulf—and when he went in me firm and long, I knew it was the same for him, too.

If there was to come any good of this war, then it was that I was to get Gene.

We were together all warm and dreamy when it happened.

I was asleep. Shouts and anger, and quick as anything the crump of hand grenades and shots hammered away in the night, and there was running everywhere.

Gene jumped up and went outside and had almost got them calmed down, despite the breach in the walls. Then one of the men who’d already got lots of radiation—Arthur, who knew he had maybe one or two weeks to go, from the count rate on his badge—Arthur started yelling about making the world a fit place to live after all this and how God would want the land set right again, and then he shot Gene and two others.

I broke down then, and they couldn’t get me to treat the others. I let Arthur die. Which he deserved.

I had to drag Gene back into the hospital unit myself.

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 channel: 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.

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.

ANGEL

I hadn’t seen an old lantern like that since I was a li’l girl. Mr. Ackerman came to wake us before dawn even, sayin’ we had to make a good long distance that day. We didn’t really want to go on down near Mobile, none of us, but the word we’d got from stragglers to the east was that that way was impossible, the whole area where the bomb went off was still sure death, prob’ly from the radioactivity.

The lantern cast a burnt-orange light over us as we ate breakfast. Corned beef hash, ’cause it was all that was left in the cans there; no eggs, of course.

The lantern was all busted, fouled with grease, its chimney cracked and smeared to one side with soot. Shed a wan and sultry glare over us, Bud and Mr. Ackerman and that old Turkey and Susan, sitting close to her box, up on the truck. Took Bud a whole day to get the truck right. And Johnny the boy—he’d been quiet this whole trip, not sayin’ anything much even if you asked him. We’d agreed to take him along down toward Fairhope, where his folks had lived, the Bishops. We’d thought it was going to be a simple journey then.

Every one of us looked haggard and worn-down and not minding much the chill still in the air, even though things was warming up for weeks now. The lantern pushed back the seeping darkness and made me sure there were millions and millions of people doing this same thing, all across the nation, eating by a dim oil light and thinking about what they’d had and how to get it again and was it possible.

Then old Turkey lays back and looks like he’s going to take a snooze. Yet on the journey here, he’d been the one wanted to get on with it soon’s we had gas. It’s the same always with a lazy man like that. He hates moving so much that once he gets set on it, he will keep on and not stop—like it isn’t the moving he hates so much at all, but the starting and stopping. And once moving, he is so proud he’ll do whatever to make it look easy for him but hard on the others, so he can lord it over them later.

So I wasn’t surprised at all when we went out and got in the car, and Bud starts the truck and drives off real careful, and Turkey, he sits in the back of the Pontiac and gives directions like he knows the way. Which riles Mr. Ackerman, and the two of them have words.

JOHNNY

I’m tired of these people. Relatives, sure, but I was to visit them for a week only, not forever. It’s the Mr. Ackerman I can’t stand. Turkey said to me, “Nothing but gold drops out of his mouth, but you can tell there’s stone inside.” That’s right.

They figure a kid nine years old can’t tell, but I can.

Tell they don’t know what they’re doing.

Tell they all thought we were going to die. Only we didn’t.

Tell Angel is scared. She thinks Bud can save us.

Maybe he can, only how could you say? He never lets on about anything.

Guess he can’t. Just puts his head down and frowns like he was mad at a problem, and when he stops frowning, you know he’s beat it. I like him.

Sometimes I think Turkey just don’t care. Seems like he give up. But other times it looks like he’s understanding and laughing at it all. He argued with Mr. Ackerman and then laughed with his eyes when he lost.

They’re all O.K., I guess. Least they’re taking me home.

Except that Susan. Eyes jump around like she was seeing ghosts. She’s scary-crazy. I don’t like to look at her.

TURKEY

Trouble comes looking for you if you’re a fool.

Once we found Ackerman’s idea wasn’t going to work real well, we should have turned back. I said that, and they all nodded their heads, yes, yes, but they went ahead and listened to him anyway.

So I went along.

I lived a lot already, and this is as good a time to check out as any.

I had my old .32 revolver in my suitcase, but it wouldn’t do me a squat of good back there. So I fished it out, wrapped in a paper bag, and tucked it under the seat. Handy.

Might as well see the world. What’s left of it.

MC 355

The American orbital defenses had eliminated all but ten percent of the Soviet strike.

MC355 reconstructed this within a root-means-square deviation of a few percent. It had witnessed only a third of the actual engagement, but it had running indices of performance for the MC net, and could extrapolate from that.

The warheads that got through were aimed for the landbased silos and C31 sites, as expected.

If the total armament of the two superpowers had been that of the old days, ten thousand warheads or more on each side, a ten-percent leakage would have been catastrophic. But gradual disarmament had been proceeding for decades now, and only a few thousand highly secure ICBMs existed. There were no quick-fire submarine short-range rockets at all, since they were deemed destabilizing. They had been negotiated away in earlier decades.

The submarines loaded with ICBMs were still waiting, in reserve.

All this had been achieved because of two principles: Mutual Assured Survival and I Cut, You Choose. The first half hour of the battle illustrated how essential these were.

The U.S. had ridden out the first assault. Its C31 networks were nearly intact. This was due to building defensive weapons that confined the first stage of any conflict to space.

The smallness of the arsenals arose from a philosophy adopted in the 1900s. It was based on a simple notion from childhood. In dividing a pie, one person cut slices, but then the other got to choose which one he wanted. Self-interest naturally led to cutting the slices as nearly equal as possible.

Both the antagonists agreed to a thousand-point system whereby each would value the components of its nuclear arsenal. This was the Military Value Percentage, and stood for the usefulness of a given weapon. The USSR place a high value on its accurate land-based missiles, giving them twenty-five percent of its total points. The U.S. chose to stress its submarine missiles.

Arms reduction then revolved about only what percentage to cut, not which weapons. The first cut was five percent, or fifty points. The U.S. chose which Soviet weapons were publicly destroyed, and vice versa: I Cut, You Choose. Each side thus reduced the weapons it most feared in the opponent’s arsenal.

Technically, the advantage came because each side thought it benefitted from the exchange, by an amount depending on the ration of perceived threat removed to the perceived protection lost.

This led to gradual reductions. Purely defensive weapons did not enter into the thousand-point count, so there was no restraints in building them.

The confidence engendered by this slow, evolutionary approach had done much to calm international waters. The U.S. and the USSR had settled into a begrudging equilibrium.

MC355 puzzled over these facts for a long while, trying to match this view of the world with the onset of the war. It seemed impossible that either superpower would start a conflict when they were so evenly matched.

But someone had.

SUSAN

I had to go with Gene, and they said I could ride up in the cab, but I yelled at them—I yelled, no, I had to be with the T-Isolate all the time, check it to see it’s workin’ right, be sure, I got to be sure.

I climbed on and rode with it, the fields rippling by us ’cause Bud was going too fast, so I shouted to him, and he swore back and kept on. Heading south. The trees whipping by us—fierce sycamore, pine, all swishing, hitting me sometimes—but it was fine to be out and free again and going to save Gene.

I talked to Gene when we were going fast, the tires humming under us, big tires making music swarming up into my feet so strong I was sure Gene could feel it and know I was there watching his heart jump every few minutes, moving the blood through him like mud but still carrying oxygen enough so’s the tissue could sponge it up and digest the sugar I bled into him.

He was good and cold, just a half a degree high of freezing. I read the sensors while the road rushed up at us, the white lines coming over the horizon and darting under the hood, seams in the highway going stupp, stupp, stupp, the air clean and with a snap in it still.

Nobody beside the road we moving all free, nobody but us, some buds on the trees brimming with burnt-orange tinkling songs, whistling to me in the feather-light brush of blue breezes blowing back my hair, all streaming behind joyous and loud strong liquid-loud.

BUD

Flooding was bad. Worse than upstream.

Must have been lots snow this far down. Fat clouds, I saw them when it was worst, fat and purple and coming off the Gulf. Dumping snow down here.

Now it run off and taken every bridge.

I have to work my way around.

Only way to go clear is due south. Toward Mobile.

I don’t like that. Too many people maybe there.

I don’t tell the others following behind, just wait for them at the intersections and then peel out.

Got to keep moving.

Saves talk.

People around here must be hungry.

Somebody see us could be bad.

I got the gun on a rack behind my head. Big .30-30. You never know.

MC 355

From collateral data, MC355 constructed a probable scenario: The U.S. chose to stand fast. It launched no warheads.

The USSR observed its own attack and was dismayed to find that the U.S. orbital defense system worked more than twice as well as the Soviet experts had anticipated. It ceased its attack on U.S. satellites. These had proved equally ineffective, apparently due to unexpected American defenses of its surveillance satellites—retractable sensors, multiband shielding, advanced hardening.

Neither superpower struck against the inhabited space colonies. They were unimportant in the larger context of a nuclear war.

Communications between Washington and Moscow continued. Each side thought the other had attacked first.

But over a hundred megatons had exploded on U.S. soil, and no matter how the superpowers acted thereafter, some form of nuclear winter was inevitable.

And by a fluke of the defenses, most of the warheads that leaked through fell in a broad strip across Texas to the tip of Florida.

MC355 lay buried in the middle of this belt.

TURKEY

We went through the pine forests at full clip, barely able to keep Bud in sight, I took over driving from Ackerman. The man couldn’t keep up, we all saw that.

The crazy woman was waving and laughing, sitting on top of the coffin-shaped gizmo with the shiny tubes all over it.

The clay was giving way now to sandy stretches, there were poplars and gum trees and nobody around. That’s what scared me. I’d thought people in Mobile would be spreading out this way, but we seen nobody.

Mobile had shelters. Food reserves. The Lekin administration started all that right at the turn of the century, and there was s’posed to be enough food stored to hold out a month, maybe more, for every man jack and child.

S’posed to be.

MC 355

It calculated the environmental impact of the warheads it knew had exploded. The expected fires yielded considerable dust and burnt carbon.

But MC355 needed more information. It took one of its electric service cars, used for ferrying components through the corridors, and dispatched it with a mobile camera fixed to the back platform. The car reached a hill overlooking Mobile Bay and gave a panoramic view.

The effects of a severe freezing were evident. Grass lay dead, gray. Brown, withered trees had limbs snapped off.

But Mobile appeared intact. The skyline—

MC355 froze the frame and replayed it. One of the buildings was shaking.

ANGEL

We were getting all worried when Bud headed for Mobile, but we could see the bridges were washed out, no way to head east. A big wind was blowing off the Gulf, pretty bad, making the car slip around on the road. Nearly blew that girl off the back of Bud’s truck. A storm coming, maybe, right up the bay.

Be better to be inland, to the east.

Not that I wanted to go there, though. The bomb had blowed off everythin’ for twenty, thirty mile around, people said who came through last week.

Bud had thought he’d carve a way between Mobile and the bomb area. Mobile, he thought, would be full of people.

Well, not so we could see. We came down State 34 and through some small towns and turned to skirt along toward the causeway, and there was nobody.

No bodies, either.

Which meant prob’ly the radiation got them. Or else they’d moved on out. Taken out by ship, through Mobile harbor, maybe.

Bud did the right thing, didn’t slow down to find out. Mr. Ackerman wanted to look around, but there was no chance, we had to keep up with Bud. I sure wasn’t going to be separated from him.

We cut down along the river, fighting the wind. I could see the skyscrapers of downtown, and then I saw something funny and yelled, and Turkey, who was driving right then—the only thing anybody’s got him to do on this whole trip, him just loose as a goose behind the wheel—Turkey looked sour but slowed down. Bud seen us in his rearview and stopped, and I pointed and we all got out. Except for that Susan, who didn’t seem to notice. She was mumbling.

MC 355

Quickly it simulated the aging and weathering of such a building. Halfway up, something had punched a large hole, letting in weather. Had a falling, inert warhead struck the building?

The winter storms might well have flooded the basement; such towers of steel and glass, perched near the tidal basin, had to be regularly pumped out. Without power, the basement would fill in weeks.

Winds had blown out windows.

Standing gap-toothed, with steel columns partly rusted, even a small breeze could put stress on the steel. Others would take the load, but if one buckled, the tower would shudder like a notched tree. Concrete would explode off columns in the basement. Moss-covered furniture in the lobby would slide as the gound floor dipped. The structure would slowly bend before nature.

BUD

Sounded like gunfire. Rattling. Sharp and hard.

I figure it was the bolts connecting the steel wall panels—they’d shear off.

I could hear the concrete floor panels rumble and crack, and spandrel beams tear in half like giant gears clashing with no clutch.

Came down slow, leaving an arc of debris seeming to hang in the air behind it.

Met the ground hard.

Slocum Towers was the name on her.

JOHNNY

Against the smashing building, I saw something standing still in the air, getting bigger. I wondered how it could do that. It was bigger and bigger and shiny turning in the air. Then it jumped out of the sky at me. Hit my shoulder. I was looking up at the sky. Angel cried out and touched me and held up her hand. It was all red. But I couldn’t feel anything.

BUD

Damn one-in-a-million shot, piece of steel thrown clear. Hit the boy.

You wouldn’t think a skycraper falling two miles away could do that.

Other pieces come down pretty close, too. You wouldn’t think.

Nothing broke, Susan said, but plenty bleeding.

Little guy don’t cry or nothing.

The women got him bandaged and all fixed up. Ackerman and Turkey argue like always. I stay to the side.

Johnny wouldn’t take the painkiller Susan offers. Says he doesn’t want to sleep. Wants to look when we get across the bay. Getting hurt don’t faze him much as it do us.

So we go on.

JOHNNY

I can hold up like any of them, I’ll show them. It didn’t scare me. I can do it.

Susan is nice to me, but except for the aspirin, I don’t think my mom would want me to take a pill.

I knew we were getting near home when we got to the causeway and started across. I jumped up real happy, my shoulder made my breath catch some. I looked ahead. Bud was slowing down.

He stopped. Got out.

’Cause ahead was a big hole scooped out of the causeway like a giant done it when he got mad.

BUD

Around the shallows there was scrap metal, all fused and burnt and broken.

Funny metal, though. Hard and light.

Turkey found a piece had writing on it. Not any kind of writing I ever saw.

So I start to thinking how to get across.

TURKEY

The tidal flats were a-churn, murmuring ceaseless and sullen like some big animal, the yellow surface dimpled with lunging splotches that would burst through now and then to reveal themselves as trees or broken hunks of wood, silent dead things bobbing along beside them that I didn’t want to look at too closely. Like under there was something huge and alive, and it waked for a moment and stuck itself out to see what the world of air was like.

Bud showed me the metal piece all twisted, and I say, “That’s Russian,” right away ’cause it was.

“You never knew no Russian,” Angel says right up.

“I studied it once,” I say, and it be the truth even if I didn’t study it long.

“Goddamn,” Bud says.

“No concern of ours,” Mr. Ackerman says, mostly because all this time riding back with the women and child and old me, he figures he doesn’t look like much of a leader anymore. Bud wouldn’t have him ride up there in the cabin with him.

Angel looks at it, turns it over in her hands, and Johnny pipes up, “It might be radioactive!”

Angel drops it like a shot. “What!”

I ask Bud, “You got that counter?”

And it was. Not a lot, but some.

“God a’mighty,” Angel says.

“We got to tell somebody!” Johnny cries, all excited.

“You figure some Rooshin thing blew up the causeway?” Bud says to me.

“One of their rockets fell on it, musta been,” I say.

“A bomb?” Angel’s voice is a bird screech.

“One that didn’t go off. Headed for Mobile, but the space boys, they scragged it up there—” I pointed straight up.

“Set to go off in the bay?” Angel says wonderingly.

“Musta.”

“We got to tell somebody!” Johnny cries.

“Never you mind that,” Bud says. “We got to keep movin’.”

“How?” Angel wants to know.

SUSAN

I tell Gene how the water clucks and moans through the trough cut in the causeway. Yellow. Scummed with awful brown froth and growling green with thick soiled gouts jutting up where the road was. It laps against the wheels as Bud guns the engine and creeps forward, me clutching to Gene and watching the reeds to the side stuck out of the foam like metal blades stabbing up from the water, teeth to eat the tires, but we crush them as we grind forward across the shallow yellow flatness. Bud weaves among the stubs of warped metal—from Roosha, Johnny calls up to me—sticking up like trees all rootless, suspended above the streaming, empty, stupid waste and desolating flow.

TURKEY

The water slams into the truck like it was an animal hitting with a paw. Bud fights to keep the wheels on the mud under it and not topple over onto its side with that damn casket sitting there shiny and the loony girl shouting to him from on top of that.

And the rest of us riding in the back, too, scrunched up against the cab. If she gets stuck, we can jump free fast, wade or swim back. We’re reeling out rope as we go, tied to the stump of a telephone pole, for a grab line if we have to go back.

He is holding it pretty fine against the slick yellow current dragging at him, when this log juts sudden out of the foam like it was coming from God himself, dead at the truck. A rag caught on the end of it like a man’s shirt, and the huge log is like a whale that ate the man long ago and has come back for another.

“No! No!” Angel cries. “Back up!” But there’s no time.

The log is two hands across, easy, and slams into the truck at the side panel just behind the driver, and Bud sees it just as it stove in the steel. He wrestles the truck around to set off the weight, but the wheels lift and the water goes gushing up under the truck bed, pushing it over more.

We all grab onto the Isolate thing or the truck and hang there, Mr. Ackerman giving out a burst of swearing.

The truck lurches again.

The angle steepens.

I was against taking the casket thing ’cause it just pressed the truck down in the mud more, made it more likely Bud’d get stuck, but now it is the only thing holding the truck against the current.

The yellow froths around the bumpers at each end, and we’re shouting—to surely no effect, of course.

SUSAN

The animal is trying to eat us, it has seen Gene and wants him. I lean over and strike at the yellow animal that is everywhere swirling around us, but it just takes my hand and takes the smack of my palm like it was no matter at all, and I start to cry, I don’t know what to do.

JOHNNY

My throat filled up, I was so afraid.

Bud, I can hear him grunting as he twists at the steering wheel.

His jaw is clenched, and the woman Susan calls to us, “Catch him! Catch Gene!”

I hold on, and the waters suck at me.

TURKEY

I can tell Bud is afraid to gun it and start the wheels to spinning ’cause he’ll lose traction and that’ll tip us over for sure.

Susan jumps out and stands in the wash downstream and pushes against the truck to keep it from going over. The pressure is shoving it off the ford, and the casket, it slides down a foot or so, the cables have worked loose. Now she pays because the weight is worse, and she jams herself like a stick to wedge between the truck and the mud.

It if goes over, she’s finished. It is a fine thing to do, crazy but fine, and I jump down and start wading to reach her.

No time.

There is an eddy. The log turns broadside. It backs off a second and then heads forward again, this time poking up from a surge. I can see Bud duck, he has got the window up and the log hits it, the glass going all to smash and scatteration.

BUD

All over my lap it falls like snow. Twinkling glass.

But the pressure of the log is off, and I gun the sumbitch.

We root out of the hollow we was in, and the truck thunks down solid on somethin’.

The log is ramming against me. I slam on the brake.

Take both hands and shove it out. With every particle of force I got.

It backs off and then heads around and slips in front of the hood, bumping the grill just once.

ANGEL

Like it had come to do its job and was finished and now went off to do something else.

SUSAN

Muddy, my arms hurting. I scramble back in the truck with the murmur of the water all around us. Angry with us now. Wanting us.

Bud makes the truck roar, and we lurch into a hole and out of it and up. The water gurgles at us in its fuming, stinking rage.

I check Gene and the power cells, they are dead.

He is heating up.

Not fast, but it will wake him. They say even in the solution he’s floating in, they can come out of dreams and start to feel again. To hurt.

I yell at Bud that we got to find power cells.

“Those’re not just ordinary batteries, y’know,” he says.

“There’re some at DataComm,” I tell him.

We come wallowing up from the gum-yellow water and onto the highway.

GENE

Sleeping…slowly…I can still feel…only in sluggish…moments…moments…not true sleep but a drifting, aimless dreaming…faint tugs and ripples…hollow sounds…. I am underwater and drowning…but don’t care…don’t breathe…. Spongy stuff fills my lungs…easier to rest them…floating in snowflakes…a watery winter…but knocking comes…goes…jolts…slips away before I can remember what it means…. Hardest…yes…hardest thing is to remember the secret…so when I am in touch again…DataComm will know…what I learned…when the C31 crashed…when I learned…. It is hard to clutch onto the slippery, shiny fact…in a marsh of slick, soft bubbles…silvery as air…winking ruby-red behind my eyelids…. Must snag the secret…a hard fact like shiny steel in the spongy moist warmness…. Hold it to me…. Something knocks my side…a thumping…. I am sick…. Hold the steel secret…keep….

MC 355

The megatonnage in the Soviet assault exploded low—ground-pounders, in the jargon. This caused huge fires, MC355’s simulation showed. A pall of soot rose, blanketing Texas and the South, then diffusing outward on global circulation patterns.

Within a few days, temperatures dropped from balmy summer to near-freezing. In the Gulf region where MC355 lay, the warm ocean continued to feed heat and moisture into the marine boundary layer near the shore. Cold winds rammed into this water-laden air, spawning great roiling storms and deep snows. Thick stratus clouds shrouded the land for at least a hundred kilometers inland.

All this explained why MC355’s extended feelers had met chaos and destruction. And why there were no local radio broadcasts. What the ElectroMagnetic Pulse did not destroy, the storms did.

The remaining large questions were whether the war had gone on, and if any humans survived in the area at all.

MR. ACKERMAN

I’d had more than enough of this time. The girl Susan had gone mad right in front of us, and we’d damn near all drowned getting across.

“I think we ought to get back as soon’s we can,” I said to Bud when we stopped to rest on the other side.

“We got to deliver the boy.”

“It’s too disrupted down this way. I figured on people here, some civilization.”

“Somethin’ got ’em.”

“The bomb.”

“Got to find cells for the man in the box.”

“He’s near dead.”

“Too many gone already. Should save one if we can.”

“We got to look after our own.”

Bud shrugged, and I could see I wasn’t going to get far with him. So I said to Angel, “The boy’s not worth running such risks. Or this corpse.”

ANGEL

I didn’t like Ackerman before the war, and even less afterward, so when he started hinting that maybe we should shoot back up north and ditch the boy and Susan and the man in there, I let him have it. From the look on Bud’s face, I knew he felt the same way. I spat out a real choice set of words I’d heard my father use once on a grain buyer who’d weaseled out of a deal, stuff I’d been saving for years, and I do say it felt good.

TURKEY

So we run down the east side of the bay, feeling released to be quit of the city and the water, and heading down into some of the finest country in all the South. Through Daphne and Montrose and into Fairhope, the moss hanging on the trees and now and then actual sunshine slanting golden through the green of huge old mimosas.

We’re jammed into the truck bed, hunkered down because the wind whipping by has some sting to it. The big purple clouds are blowing south now.

Still no people. Not that Bud slows down to search good.

Bones of cattle in the fields, though. I been seeing them so much now I hardly take notice anymore.

There’s a silence here so deep that the wind streaming through the pines seems loud. I don’t like it, to come so far and see nobody. I keep my paper bag close.

Fairhope’s a pretty town, big oaks leaning out over the streets and a long pier down at the bay with a park where you can go cast fishing. I’ve always liked it here, intended to move down until the prices shot up so much.

We went by some stores with windows smashed in, and that’s when we saw the man.

ANGEL

He was waiting for us. Standing beside the street, in jeans and a floppy yellow shirt all grimy and not tucked in. I waved at him the instant I saw him, and he waved back. I yelled, excited, but he didn’t say anything.

Bud screeched on the brakes. I jumped down and went around the tail of the truck. Johnny followed me.

The man was skinny as a rail and leaning against a telephone pole. A long, scraggly beard hid his face, but the eyes beamed out at us, seeming to pick up the sunlight.

“Hello!” I said again.

“Kiss.” That was all.

“We came from…” and my voice trailed off because the man pointed at me.

“Kiss.”

MR. ACKERMAN

I followed Angel and could tell right away the man was suffering from malnutrition. The clothes hung off him.

“Can you give us information?” I asked.

“No.”

“Well, why not, friend? We’ve come looking for the parents of—”

“Kiss first.”

I stepped back. “Well, now, you have no right to demand—”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bud had gotten out of the cab and stopped and was going back in now, probably for his gun. I decided to save the situation before somebody got hurt.

“Angel, go over to him and speak nicely to him. We need—”

“Kiss now.”

The man pointed again with a bony finger.

Angel said, “I’m not going to go—” and stopped because the man’s hand went down to his belt. He pulled up the filthy yellow shirt to reveal a pistol tucked in his belt.

“Kiss.”

“Now friend, we can—”

The man’s hand came up with the pistol and reached level, pointing at us.

“Pussy.”

Then his head blew into a halo of blood.

BUD

Damn if the one time I needed it, I left it in the cab.

I was still fetching it out when the shot went off.

Then another.

TURKEY

A man shows you his weapon in his hand, he’s a fool if he doesn’t mean to use it.

I drew out the pistol I’d been carrying in my pocket all this time, wrapped in plastic. I got it out of the damned bag pretty quick while the man was looking crazy-eyed at Angel and bringing his piece up.

It was no trouble at all to fix him in the notch. Couldn’t have been more than thirty feet.

But going down he gets one off, and I feel like somebody pushed at my left calf. Then I’m rolling. Drop my pistol, too. I end up smack facedown on the hardtop, not feeling anything yet.

ANGEL

I like to died when the man flopped down, so sudden I thought he’d slipped, until then the bang registered.

I rushed over, but Turkey shouted, “Don’t touch him.”

Mr. Ackerman said, “You idiot! That man could’ve told us—”

“Told nothing,” Turkey said. “He’s crazy.”

Then I notice Turkey’s down, too. Susan is working on him, rolling up his jeans. It’s gone clean through his big muscle there.

Bud went to get a stick. Poked the man from a safe distance. Managed to pull his shirt aside. We could see the sores all over his chest. Something terrible it looked.

Mr. Ackerman was swearing and calling us idiots until we saw that. Then he shut up.

TURKEY

Must admit it felt good. First time in years anybody ever admitted I was right.

Paid back for the pain. Dull, heavy ache it was, spreading. Susan gives me a shot and a pill and has me bandaged up tight. Blood stopped easy, she says. I clot good.

We decided to get out of there, not stopping to look for Johnny’s parents.

We got three blocks before the way was blocked.

It was a big metal cylinder, fractured on all sides. Glass glittering around it.

Right in the street. You can see where it hit the roof of a clothing store, Bedsole’s, caved in the front of it and rolled into the street.

They all get out and have a look, me sitting in the cab. I see the Russian writing again on the end of it.

I don’t know much, but I can make out at the top CeKPeT and a lot of words that look like warning, including σO’πeH, which is sick, and some more I didn’t know, and then II O OΓO’H, which is weather.

“What’s it say?” Mr. Ackerman asks.

“That word at the top there’s secret, and then something about biology and sickness and rain and weather.”

“I thought you knew this writing,” he says.

I shook my head. “I know enough.”

“Enough to what?”

“To know this was some kind of targeted capsule. It fell right smack in the middle of Fairhope, biggest town this side of the bay.”

“Like the other one?” Johnny says, which surprised me. The boy is smart.

“The one hit the causeway? Right.”

“One what?” Mr. Ackerman asks.

I don’t want to say it with the boy there and all, but it has to come out sometime. “Some disease. Biological warfare.”

They stand there in the middle of Prospect Avenue with open, silent nothingness around us, and nobody says anything for the longest time. There won’t be any prospects here for a long time. Johnny’s parents we aren’t going to find, nobody we’ll find, because whatever came spurting out of this capsule when it busted open—up high, no doubt, so the wind could take it—had done its work.

Angel sees it right off. “Must’ve been time for them to get inside,” is all she says, but she’s thinking the same as me.

It got them into such a state that they went home and holed up to die, like an animal will. Maybe it would be different in the North or the West—people are funny out there, they might just as soon sprawl across the sidewalk—but down here people’s first thought is home, the family, the only thing that might pull them through. So they went there and they didn’t come out again.

Mr. Ackerman says, “But there’s no smell,” which was stupid because that made it all real to the boy, and he starts to cry. I pick him up.

JOHNNY

’Cause that means they’re all gone, what I been fearing ever since we crossed the causeway, and nobody’s there, it’s true, Mom Dad nobody at all anywhere just emptiness all gone.

MC 355

The success of the portable unit makes MC355 bold.

It extrudes more sensors and finds not the racing blizzard winds of months before but rather warming breezes, the soft sigh of pines, a low drone of reawakening insects.

There was no nuclear winter.

Instead, a kind of nuclear autumn.

The swirling jet streams have damped, the stinging ultraviolet gone. The storms retreat, the cold surge has passed. But the electromagnetic spectrum lies bare, a muted hiss. The EMP silenced man’s signals, yes.

Opticals, fitted with new lenses, scan the night sky. Twinkling dots scoot across the blackness, scurrying on their Newtonian rounds.

The Arcapel Colony.

Russphere.

US1.

All intact. So they at least have survived.

Unless they were riddled by buckshot-slinging antisatellite devices. But, no—the inflated storage sphere hinged beside the US1 is undeflated, unbreached.

So man still lives in space, at least.

MR. ACKERMAN

Crazy, I thought, to go out looking for this DataComm when everybody’s dead. Just the merest step inside one of the houses proved that.

But they wouldn’t listen to me. Those who would respectfully fall silent when I spoke now ride over my words as if I weren’t there.

All because of that stupid incident with the sick one. He must have taken longer to die. I couldn’t have anticipated that. He just seemed hungry to me.

It’s enough to gall a man.

ANGEL

The boy is calm now, just kind of tucked into himself. He knows what’s happened to his mom and dad. Takes his mind off his hurt, anyway. He bows his head down, his long dirty-blond hair hiding his expression. He leans against Turkey and they talk. I can see them through the back cab window.

In amongst all we’ve seen, I suspect it doesn’t come through to him full yet. It will take a while. We’ll all take a while.

We head out from Fairhope quick as we can. Not that anyplace else is different. The germs must’ve spread twenty, thirty mile inland from here. Which is why we seen nobody before who’d heard of it. Anybody close enough to know is gone.

Susan’s the only one it doesn’t seem to bother. She keeps crooning to that box.

Through Silverhill and on to Robertsdale. Same everywhere—no dogs bark, cattle bones drying in the fields.

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.

The humans shuffled out, leaving the T-Isolate with the woman who had never left its side. They were going.

MC355 called after them. They nodded, understanding, but did not stop.

MC355 let them go.

There was much to do.

New antennas, new sensors, new worlds.

TURKEY

Belly full and eye quick, we came out into the pines. Wind blowed through with a scent of the Gulf on it, fresh and salty with rich moistness.

The dark clouds are gone. I think maybe I’ll get Bud to drive south some more. I’d like to go swimming one more time in those breakers that come booming in, taller than I am, down near Fort Morgan. Man never knows when he’ll get to do it again.

Bud’s ready to travel. He’s taking a radio so’s we can talk to MC, find out about the help that’s coming. For now, we got to get back and look after our own.

Same as we’ll see to the boy. He’s ours now.

Susan says she’ll stay with Gene till he’s ready, till some surgeons turn up can work on him. That’ll be a long time, say I. But she can stay if she wants. Plenty food and such down there for her.

A lot of trouble we got, coming a mere hundred mile. Not much to show for it when we get back. A bumper crop of bad news, some would say. Not me. It’s better to know than to not, better to go on than to look back.

So we go out into dawn, and there are the same colored dots riding in the high, hard blue. Like camp fires.

The crickets are chirruping, and in the scrub there’s a rustle of things moving about their own business, a clean scent of things starting up. The rest of us, we mount the truck and it surges forward with a muddy growl, Ackerman slumped over, Angel in the cab beside Bud, the boy already asleep on some blankets; and the forlorn sound of us moving among the windswept trees is a long and echoing note of mutual and shared desolation, powerful and pitched forward into whatever must come now, a muted note persisting and undeniable in the soft, sweet air.

EPILOGUE (twenty-three years later) JOHNNY

An older woman in a formless, wrinkled dress and worn shoes sat at the side of the road. I was panting from the fast pace I was keeping along the white strip of sandy, rutted road. She sat, silent and unmoving. I nearly walked by before I saw her.

“You’re resting?” I asked.

“Waiting.” Her voice had a feel of rustling leaves. She sat on the brown cardboard suitcase with big copper latches—the kind made right after the war. It was cracked along the side, and white cotton underwear stuck out.

“For the bus?”

“For Buck.”

“The chopper recording, it said the bus will stop up around the bend.”

“I heard.”

“It won’t come down this side road. There’s not time.”

I was late myself, and I figured she had picked the wrong spot to wait.

“Buck will be along.”

Her voice was high and had the backcountry twang to it. My own voice still had some of the same sound, but I was keeping my vowels flat and right now, and her accent reminded me of how far I had come.

I squinted, looking down the long sandy curve of the road. A pickup truck growled out of a clay side road and onto the hardtop. People rode in the back along with trunks and a 3D. Taking everything they could. Big white eyes shot a glance at me, and then the driver hit the hydrogen and got out of there.

The Confederation wasn’t giving us much time. Since the unification of the Soviet, USA and European/Sino space colonies into one political union, everybody’d come to think of them as the Confeds, period—one entity. I knew better—there were tensions and differences abounding up there—but the shorthand was convenient.

“Who’s Buck?”

“My dog.” She looked at me directly, as though any fool would know who Buck was.

“Look, the bus—”

“You’re one of those Bishop boys, aren’t you?”

I looked off up the road again. That set of words—being eternally a Bishop boy—was like a grain of sand caught between my back teeth. My mother’s friends had used that phrase when they came over for an evening of bridge, before I went away to the university. Not my real mother, of course—she and Dad had died in the war, and I dimly remembered them.

Or anyone else from then. Almost everybody around here had been struck down by the Soviet bioweapons. It was the awful swath of those that cut through whole states, mostly across the South—the horror of it—that had formed the basis of the peace that followed. Nuclear and bioarsenals were reduced to nearly zero now. Defenses in space were thick and reliable. The building of those had fueled the huge boom in Confed cities, made orbital commerce important, provided jobs and horizons for a whole generation—including me. I was a ground-orbit liaison, spending four months every year at US3. But to the people down here, I was eternally that oldest Bishop boy.

Bishops. I was the only one left who’d actually lived here before the war. I’d been away on a visit when it came. Afterward, my Aunt and Uncle Bishop from Birmingham came down to take over the old family property—to save it from being homesteaded on, under the new Federal Reconstruction Acts. They’d taken me in, and I’d thought of them as Mom and Dad. We’d all had the Bishop name, after all. So I was a Bishop, one of the few natives who’d made it through the bombing and nuclear autumn and all. People’d point me out as almost a freak, a real native, wow.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said neutrally.

“Thought so.”

“You’re…?”

“Susan McKenzie.”

“Ah.”

We had done the ritual, so now we could talk. Yet some memory stirred….

“Something ’bout you…” She squinted in the glaring sunlight. She probably wasn’t all that old, in her late fifties, maybe. Anybody who’d caught some radiation looked aged a bit beyond their years. Or maybe it was just the unending weight of hardship and loss they’d carried.

“Seems like I knew you before the war,” she said. “I strictly believe I saw you.”

“I was up north then, a hundred miles from here. Didn’t come back until months later.”

“So’d I.”

“Some relatives brought me down, and we found out what’d happened to Fairhope.”

She squinted at me again, and then a startled look spread across her leathery face. “My Lord! Were they lookin’ for that big computer center, the DataComm it was?”

I frowned. “Well, maybe…I don’t remember too well….”

“Johnny. You’re Johnny!”

“Yes, ma’am, John Bishop.” I didn’t like the little-boy ending on my name, but people around here couldn’t forget it.

“I’m Susan! The one went with you! I had the codes for DataComm, remember?”

“Why…yes….” Slow clearing of ancient, foggy images. “You were hiding in that center…where we found you….”

“Yes! I had Gene in the T-Isolate.”

“Gene…” That awful time had been stamped so strongly in me that I’d blocked off many memories, muting the horror. Now it came flooding back.

“I saved him, all right! Yessir. We got married, I had my children.”

Tentatively, she reached out a weathered hand, and I touched it. A lump suddenly blocked my throat, and my vision blurred. Somehow, all those years had passed and I’d never thought to look up any of those people—Turkey, Angel, Bud, Mr. Ackerman. Just too painful, I guess. And a little boy making his way in a tough world, without his parents, doesn’t look back a whole lot.

We grasped hands. “I think I might’ve seen you once, actu’ly. At a fish fry down at Point Clear. You and some boys was playing with the nets—it was just after the fishing came back real good, those Roussin germs’d wore off. Gene went down to shoo you away from the boats. I was cleaning flounder, and I thought then, maybe you were the one. But somehow when I saw your face at a distance, I couldn’t go up to you and say anything. You was skipping around, so happy, laughing and all. I couldn’t bring those bad times back.”

“I…I understand.”

“Gene died two year ago,” she said simply.

“I’m sorry.”

“We had our time together,” she said, forcing a smile.

“Remember how we—” And then I recalled where I was, what was coming. “Mrs. McKenzie, there’s not long before the last bus.”

“I’m waiting for Buck.”

“Where is he?”

“He run off in the woods, chasing something.”

I worked by backpack straps around my shoulders. They creaked in the quiet.

There wasn’t much time left. Pretty soon now it would start. I knew the sequence, because I did maintenance engineering and retrofit on US3’s modular mirrors.

One of the big reflectors would focus sunlight on a rechargeable tube of gas. That would excite the molecules. A small triggering beam would start the lasing going, the excited molecules cascading down together from one preferentially occupied quantum state to a lower state. A traveling wave swept down the tube, jarring loose more photons. They all added together in phase, so when the light waves hit the far end of the hundred-meter tube, it was a sword, a gouging lance that could cut through air and clouds. And this time, it wouldn’t strike an array of layered solid-state collectors outside New Orleans, providing clean electricity. It would carve a swath twenty meters wide through the trees and fields of southern Alabama. A little demonstration, the Confeds said.

“The bus—look, I’ll carry that suitcase for you.”

“I can manage.” She peered off into the distance, and I saw she was tired, tired beyond knowing it. “I’ll wait for Buck.”

“Leave him, Mrs. McKenzie.”

“I don’t need that blessed bus.”

“Why not?”

“My children drove off to Mobile with their families. They’re coming back to get me.”

“My insteted radio”—I gestured at my radio—“says the roads to Mobile are jammed up. You can’t count on them.”

“They said so.”

“The Confed deadline—”

“I tole ’em I’d try to walk to the main road. Got tired, is all. They’ll know I’m back in here.”

“Just the same—”

“I’m all right, don’t you mind. They’re good children, grateful for all I’ve gone and done for them. They’ll be back.”

“Come with me to the bus. It’s not far.”

“Not without Buck. He’s all the company I got these days.” She smiled, blinking.

I wiped sweat from my brow and studied the pines. There were a lot of places for a dog to be. The land here was flat and barely above sea level. I had come to camp and rest, rowing skiffs up the Fish River, looking for places I’d been when I was a teenager and my mom had rented boats from a rambling old fisherman’s house. I had turned off my radio, to get away from things. The big, mysterious island I remembered and called Treasure Island, smack in the middle of the river, was now a soggy stand of trees in a bog. The big storm a year back had swept it away.

I’d been sleeping in the open on the shore near there when the chopper woke me up, blaring. The Confeds had given twelve hours’ warning, the recording said.

They’d picked this sparsely populated area for their little demonstration. People had been moving back in ever since the biothreat was cleaned out, but there still weren’t many. I’d liked that when I was growing up. Open woods. That’s why I came back every chance I got.

I should’ve guessed something was coming. The Confeds were about evenly matched with the whole rest of the planet now, at least in high-tech weaponry. Defense held all the cards. The big mirrors were modular and could fold up fast, making a small target. They could incinerate anything launched against them, too.

But the U.N. kept talking like the Confeds were just another nation-state or something. Nobody down here understood that the people up there thought of Earth itself as the real problem—eaten up with age-old rivalries and hate, still holding onto dirty weapons that murdered whole populations, carrying around in their heads all the rotten baggage of the past. To listen to them, you’d think they’d learned nothing from the war. Already they were forgetting that it was the orbital defenses that had saved the biosphere itself, and the satellite communities that knit together the mammoth rescue efforts of the decade after. Without the antivirals developed and grown in huge zero-g vats, lots of us would’ve caught one of the poxes drifting through the population. People just forget. Nations, too.

“Where’s Buck?” I said decisively.

“He…that way.” A wave of the hand.

I wrestled my backpack down, feeling the stab from my shoulder—and suddenly remembered the thunk of that steel knocking me down, back then. So long ago. And me, still carrying an ache from it that woke whenever a cold snap came on. The past was still alive.

I trotted into the short pines, over creeper grass. Flies jumped where my boots struck. The white sand made a skree sound as my boots skated over it. I remembered how I’d first heard that sound, wearing slick-soled tennis shoes, and how pleased I’d been at university when I learned how the acoustics of it worked.

“Buck!”

A flash of brown over to the left. I ran through a thick stand of pine, and the dog yelped and took off, dodging under a blackleaf bush. I called again. Buck didn’t even slow down. I skirted left. He went into some oak scrub, barking, having a great time of it, and I could hear him getting tangled in it and then shaking free and out of the other side. Long gone.

When I got back to Mrs. McKenzie, she didn’t seem to notice me. “I can’t catch him.”

“Knew you wouldn’t.” She grinned at me, showing brown teeth. “Buck’s a fast one.”

“Call him.”

She did. Nothing. “Must of run off.”

“There isn’t time—”

“I’m not leaving without ole Buck. Times I was alone down on the river after Gene died, and the water would come up under the house. Buck was the only company I had. Only soul I saw for five weeks in that big blow we had.”

A low whine from afar. “I think that’s the bus,” I said.

She cocked her head. “Might be.”

“Come on. I’ll carry your suitcase.”

She crossed her arms. “My children will be by for me. I tole them to look for me along in here.”

“They might not make it.”

“They’re loyal children.”

“Mrs. McKenzie, I can’t wait for you to be reasonable.” I picked up my backpack and brushed some red ants off the straps.

“You Bishops was always reasonable,” she said levelly. “You work up there, don’t you?”

“Ah, sometimes.”

“You goin’ back, after they do what they’re doin’ here?”

“I might.” Even if I owed her something for what she did long ago, damned if I was going to be cowed.

“They’re attacking the United States.”

“And spots in Bavaria, the Urals, South Africa, Brazil—”

“’Cause we don’t trust ’em! They think they can push the United States aroun’ just as they please—” And she went on with all the clichés heard daily from earthbound media. How the Confeds wanted to run the world and they were dupes of the Russians, and how surrendering national sovereignty to a bunch of self-appointed overlords was an affront to our dignity, and so on.

True, some of it—the Confeds weren’t saints. But they were the only power that thought in truly global terms, couldn’t not think that way. They could stop ICBMs and punch through the atmosphere to attack any offensive capability on the ground—that’s what this demonstration was to show. I’d heard Confeds argue that this was the only way to break the diplomatic log-jam—do something. I had my doubts. But times were changing, that was sure, and my generation didn’t think the way the prewar people did.

“—we’ll never be ruled by some outside—”

“Mrs. McKenzie, there’s the bus! Listen!”

The turbo whirred far around the bend, slowing for the stop.

Her face softened as she gazed at me, as if recalling memories. “That’s all right, boy. You go along, now.”

I saw that she wouldn’t be coaxed or even forced down that last bend. She had gone as far as she was going to, and the world would have to come the rest of the distance itself.

Up ahead, the bus driver was probably behind schedule for this last pickup. He was going to be irritated and more than a little scared. The Confeds would be right on time, he knew that.

I ran. My feet plowed through the deep, soft sand. Right away I could tell I was more tired than I’d thought and the heat had taken some strength out of me. I went about two hundred meters along the gradual bend, was nearly within view of the bus, when I heard it start up with a rumble. I tasted salty sweat, and it felt like the whole damned planet was dragging at my feet, holding me down. The driver raced the engine, in a hurry.

He had to come toward me as he swung out onto Route 80 on the way back to Mobile. Maybe I could reach the intersection in time for him to see me. So I put my head down and plunged forward.

But there was the woman back there. To get to her, the driver would have to take the bus down that rutted, sandy road and risk getting stuck. With people on the bus yelling at him. All that to get the old woman with the grateful children. She didn’t seem to understand that there were ungrateful children in the skies now—she didn’t seem to understand much of what was going on—and suddenly I wasn’t sure I did, either.

But I kept on.

Gregory Benford

A professor of physics at the University of California in Irvine, Gregory Benford is regarded as one of science fiction’s “killer Bs” for the award-winning novels and short fiction he has written since 1965. He is considered one of the preeminent modern writers of hard science fiction for such novels as Eater, which works cutting-edge astronomy into its story of mankind’s first contact with aliens in the twenty-first century. However, Benford has also been praised for his explorations of humanist themes, notably in his Galactic Center sextet of novels of human-alien contact and human-machine interface comprised of In the Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, The Stars in Shroud, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, and Furious Gulf. His short fiction has been collected in In Alien Flesh. He is the author of Foundation’s Fear, a novel set in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series; has collaborated on Beyond the Fall of Night, a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night; has written a medical thriller, Chiller, under the pseudonym Sterling Blake; and has written a popular science book, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia. His work as an anthologist includes Nuclear War, the alternate history compilation Hitler Victorious, and four volumes in the What Might Have Been series. The publication of his novel The Martian Race, about the first manned mission to the Red Planet, was timed to coincide with the 1999 touchdown of the Mars polar lander.