Sam looked toward the big windows that overlooked Fifth. You could not see across the street, there was so much snow out there.
Brian reached toward him, briefly touched his hand. The two friends were silent together for a moment. “I don’t think your dad’s gonna make it,” Brian said quietly.
That was not true, it could not be true, and Sam felt his face get hot. He didn’t want even to hear words like that. His dad could handle the antarctic winter, thirty below, seventy-mile-an-hour winds. Sam could not face the idea that his dad might not make it. Because, if his dad didn’t make it, his heart would be broken and he could not afford that now, no way. “He’ll make it,” he said, measuring his words.
Brian looked away.
What had he really heard on that radio? Was it even worse that the nightmare he’d described? “He’ll make it!”
Brian just nodded. Sam understood that Brian was only doing it so his friend wouldn’t feel bad. And that went deep. Sam saw the reality of the situation: out there it was going to go below minus 130. It was going to get so cold that nobody could live through it without shelter and heat, no matter how expert they were.
Nobody.
He wanted to burst out crying. Until this second, he had not realized just how focused he really was on his dad getting through to them. He had to.
Laura came over, dropped some books, and dropped down into one of the luxurious director’s chairs that had once supported the fannies of New York’s richest. “Any news?”
She was limping, Sam could see it. Her face was pale, too. But she didn’t appear to be in any pain. Maybe her injury was healing up. Sometimes they hurt the most when they healed.
She looked from Sam to Brian, her eyebrows raised. “On the radio,” she said.
Sam glanced over at Brian. Better not to let this get out, not even to her. They could not give up, they could not panic, not now. He shook his head. “No. Nothing.”
The Blazer is a fine vehicle for a tough situation, but this was beyond tough. No automobile designer alive or dead had ever considered that his car might end up pushing across snowdrifts and dealing with cold that was already down around minus fifty. This was right around the minimum for the antifreeze, and the hoses under the hood were already drum tight and covered with frost. One of them, or a belt, or any number of other parts, was liable to just shatter from the cold at any moment.
Inside the car, though, the heater was still producing enough warmth to make it a livable thirty degrees above zero. If you touched a window, though, with naked skin, you were going to get frostbitten in seconds, and you just might stick to a doorpost, should you lean your head against it.
At the wheel, it was all Frank could do to keep the vehicle pointed in the direction Jason said they ought to be traveling. Worse, he was now sometimes losing the satellite for minutes at a time. When that happened, they had only a pocket compass to rely on, that and dead reckoning. But how do you dead reckon in a blinding whiteout?
“Where are we?” Jack asked nervously. He was not convinced by Jason’s navigation, not at all. His worst fear was that they would leave the road and plunge into a drift or down an unseen embankment, or off a bridge. Anything could happen at any second.
Jason stared at the GPS. “Ah … south of Philly,” he said at last.
“How good is that fix?”
“Two satellites.”
That was not good. Jason could be off by a mile or more.
Frank drove on, keeping to a steady fifteen miles an hour. Jack knew that he really needed to put a walker out front, but that would be asking one of them to really take his life in his hands. If he so much as stumbled, the Blazer was liable to run right Over him. Plus, some of that supercold air could come down and freeze the guy solid long before he could return to the relative safety of the vehicle.
“You guys okay?” Jack asked. From long experience, he knew to ask that question a lot. Cold, especially, ate at people’s critical facilities. Without realizing it, a person who was cold—truly cold—slowly lost his judgment.
They crashed into something. Jack reached forward, pushed frost off the interior of the windshield. It was a snowdrift.
“Sorry, boss,” Frank said.
Frank tried a little burst of gas, stopped immediately when he got nothing but wheel spin.
They were both professionals, they knew everything there was to know about how to control a vehicle in snow and ice—which was why Jack was thinking that this was the end of the Blazer. He cracked his door. It was cold, but survivable. He stepped out, and the others followed suit.
The truck was in deep.
“Should I unpack the shovels?” Jason asked.
That wasn’t going to work. Even if they got it out of this mess, it was going to get into another one in ten feet. No, the Blazer had done what it could, and it was time for it to go to sleep. Its ruins probably wouldn’t get coughed up by this glacier-in-the-making around her for another fifty thousand years.
“Unpack the snowshoes. From here, we walk.”
They’d done a hundred miles and more in the antarctic. They’d crossed plenty of treacherous ground, too, glaciers full of cracks that snow cover made appear as smooth as silk. Step on one, though, and down you went, to die of cold and broken bones at the bottom of an ice shaft. Not a fun death.
Judith came into the Trustee’s Room. She’d been combing for children’s books and had actually found a few, a couple even in French. She had done this largely because of the fear that never, ever left little Binata’s pretty eyes. The poor little thing spoke no English, so could understand practically nothing of what was being said around her. She clung to a loving mother, but a little girl needs more than love, she needs it to be delivered in an atmosphere of stability and security, a warm home, friends, a school to go to.
This little thing was thousands of miles from the world that she knew, bereft of all friends, maybe missing her daddy … and, well, Judith just thought maybe a librarian had a role to play here.
She went to Binata and showed her the colorful cover of Le chat au Chapeau by Dr. Seuss, and she instantly lit up and shouted and slapped her little hands to her cheeks. The librarian had won one. This little girl had found an old friend. Obviously, she was a Dr. Seuss fan. Smiling happily, thanking Judith in French, Jama began to read to her daughter.
Amid the piles of books, Jeremy was holding something close to his chest. It wasn’t huge, but it looked really, really old.
“What are you hanging on to there?” Elsa asked.
“A Gutenberg Bible. From the Rare Books Room.”
Sam was surprised. He hadn’t even been aware that they had one.
“You think God’s going to save you?” Elsa said, an edge of scorn in her voice, scorn and bitterness. Maybe she had prayed over this situation, Sam thought. If so, God had said no.
“I don’t believe in God,” Jeremy replied.
“Then how come you’re holding that Bible so tight?”
Jeremy glanced at their fire. “I’m protecting it.” As if to illustrate why that was necessary, J.D. dumped in a pile of books without even glancing at them. “This Bible is the first book ever printed. It represents the dawn of the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment. As far as I’m concerned, the written word is mankind’s greatest achievement.” Jeremy glanced from face to face, his eyes full of defiance and, Sam thought, rage. Not at them, though, Sam hoped. His rage should be directed toward the storm and the morons who’d let it show up with no proper warning.
“Laugh all you want,” Jeremy continued, “but if Western civilization is finished, I’m going to save at least one little piece of it.”
Was Elsa going to argue? Was she going to say it wasn’t worth saving? Her eyes flickered, her mind seemed to be turning over. Then a smile blossomed in a face that was completely transformed by happiness. An Elsa suddenly full of sunshine said, “I like your spirit.”
Maybe Jeremy had rejected prayer and Elsa had been disappointed with he
r results, but Lucy felt something she had sensed many times in her career, which was the awesome presence that seemed to draw close to a dying child. Holding his sweaty little hand, she sat close beside him, and she prayed over and over the ancient prayer that asks that the will of God be done.
“Our Father, who art in heaven,” she said softly, “hallowed be thy name …”
Then she stopped. Had she heard something? She looked toward the door, suddenly apprehensive. This was probably the only building in Washington showing any lights. Anybody might be out there roaming those halls.
Yes, she heard footsteps. No question, heavy ones. They were coming this way, too, moving fast. She thought to get up, to somehow conceal Peter.
And then a flashlight was burning into her eyes. She raised an arm to protect them, to enable herself to see—and she saw a fireman so covered with snow that he looked as if a joke had been played on him.
“We heard somebody was left behind,” he said. “We got an ambulance.”
She looked at his black face, the kindness in the eyes under that old-fashioned fireman’s hat. He was a small, stocky man with big fireman’s gloves on his hands, gloves better suited to keeping heat out than keeping it in.
She found herself crying. But she couldn’t do that, not right now, and she choked back the sobs. “Thank you, thank you for coming.”
Together, they prepared Peter’s IVs, getting him ready to travel. Maybe, somewhere down the road, she’d be able to reconnect him with his parents. She’d received two frantic phone calls. They had not been able to reach the hospital. She’d told them, basically, to save themselves, that she would be responsible for their little boy.
She had thought that she was going to die at his side, and she’d reconciled herself to it. Sam was a strong kid, he’d find his way. And as for Jack—well, maybe they’d meet again in another life, if such things happened. She’d love to make it work with Jack, truth be told.
As they rolled Peter along the hallway toward that ambulance, she remembered what she’d been doing when that fireman had walked in on her. She thought to herself, He must be working overtime tonight. He sure delivered fast on that one.
Contrary to Lucy’s belief, her hospital was not the only building in Washington that remained lit. There were also lights in the Pentagon, in the offices of the planners and administrators who could not leave, not if everybody else was going to be able to. The Commerce Department was also still functioning, because NOAA had left a skeleton crew of coordinators on staff, men and women who had chosen to take their chances here so that they could be certain of providing every bit of information that could possibly be obtained. Likewise, out at Langley, Virginia, CIA headquarters was bustling. The eyes of the country could not be blinded nor its ears deafened, not at this moment of great weakness and great need.
In addition, at communications centers both public and private, and in a surprisingly large number of other locations, such as pipeline pumping stations and nuclear power plants, people had chosen to stay behind and take their chances, so that others could have a better chance to escape.
All across the Northeast, in fact, at every operational nuclear plant, engineers kept them running and went through their long emergency checklists, preparing for the moment when shutdown would have to begin. Not one plant had been abandoned. Not one needed worker had left. Nobody had any intention of adding nuclear waste from a runaway reactor to the miseries of the suffering world.
Courage is one of mankind’s most precious possessions. It is easy, perhaps, to think that the other man doesn’t have it—that I would do my duty when others fled. But, when something truly terrible happens, it turns out that it is an abundant human resource, like love, like intelligence.
They got us through the last ice age, after all.
The president had realized the extraordinary scope of his mistake. He had seen that he had wasted many crucial years debating with the environmentalists about global warming—who was responsible, what needed to be done, who should pay. In truth, he should have been planning for this inevitable situation. Earth is in a period of climactic variability. It was certain to change, sooner or later. No matter who was right about the degree to which human activity was affecting global warming, this was still going to happen.
Even if not one single human being had been alive on earth, it would have happened anyway.
So, where was the planning? Lost in politics, and he was heartsick about it. He had telephoned his mother. In Florida, she was relatively safe. But, as she’d said to him, “Baby, at ninety-six, nobody is safe.” He had wanted to hear her voice, though, to take with him wherever he might be going.
General Pierce sat on the edge of a chair, his big hands folded in his lap. He had been asked to leave, of course, but as it had not been stated as an order, he had chosen instead what he regarded as a duty higher than his own life, which was staying close to his president in time of national crisis.
As soon as the president put the phone down, though, Pierce came to his feet. Two Secret Service boys entered the office. “Mr. President,” the general said, “we can’t delay any longer. It’s time to go.”
“Who’s left?”
“Here in the White House? It’s just us, sir. We’re the only ones left.”
This was the end, then. If Hall was right, this building was going to disappear now into memory, then legend, then myth, and finally be gone altogether from the life of man.
The president was under no illusions. He knew his history. This little house—and it was astonishingly small, considering all that transpired within its walls—had been the headquarters of the greatest engine of human prosperity and happiness that mankind had ever devised, which was the presidency of the United States.
From here, Harry Truman had probably saved the lives of millions by snuffing out the lives of thousands with two nuclear bombs. From here, JFK had claimed the moon for the genius of man. Here, Abraham Lincoln had asked Ulysses S. Grant to win a war for him. Here, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had declared that the United States would not become a nation of the starving, but that a compassionate government would reach out and rescue its people from a depression that nobody even understood. And here, Ronald Reagan had made the hard, dangerous, and unpopular decisions that had caused the Soviet Union to bankrupt itself in pursuit of an arms race communism was too inefficient to win.
This was the cradle of human happiness, and the devil take the mistakes that had also been made here.
His mistake, for example. A bad one. Real bad.
He went out into the snow.
Patrolman Campbell knew, now, that he’d made a mistake. Here he was out here in this with all these people trusting him, and he was rapidly reaching his wit’s end.
If only there had been some planning, some kind of explanation of what to expect from a storm like this, he might have been able to save lives instead of snuffing them out like this, just because his guess about what to do had been wrong.
It had sure seemed right. The radio was saying to move south. Everybody was walking down Fifth toward the tunnels. It was an ordered evacuation, for God’s sake, and he’d followed the damn presidential order just like any cop in his place would have done. Who was he supposed to believe, anyway, the president of the United States or some high school kid? Come on, there was no contest.
Evacuate. So okay, we’re doing it, Mr. President. So now what?
He and his folks were under an archway of the Brooklyn Bridge, and damn lucky to have that much shelter. The tunnels were way underwater and they hadn’t dared to cross the Hudson with its wobbling, treacherous ice floes and the killing wind that was like a wall. It was probably frozen solid now, but now the snow was so bad you couldn’t go ten feet without losing your bearings. Worse, the drifts had big air pockets under them, and you could hear people screaming out there when they fell through. The Lord is my shepherd, he whispered in his mind, and though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no
evil…
He watched silently as folks woke up, pulling themselves out from under the snow, jimmy Preston, the cabbie, said, “Maybe we should just turn back.”
Where to? How? Ollie Starnes, who had been the library security guard, echoed Tom Campbell’s own thoughts. “What for? Half the city is frozen underwater. There’s nothing to go back to.”
“We shoulda stayed in the library,” Jimmy grumbled.
There it was, the ugly, killing truth. Tom had set out in life to bring justice and help people. And here he was, helping them to walk the damn plank.
Well, there was nothing else to do but get up and keep trying, even if it was hopeless. There was always the chance of some damn miracle. Fat chance, but it was there.
Day After Tomorrow Page 16
