by John Barnes
There were a half dozen more suggestions before Cam said, “All right, that’s it, that will go out on every channel as—”
From the hallway next to the big screen, Roger Pendano came in, standing tall, his eyes dry. He’d combed his hair and straightened his clothes. He still looks like hell, Heather thought.
Graham Weisbrod moved quietly into the room behind him, standing against the wall, with his hands behind his back.
“Mr. Nguyen-Peters, I have something for you,” Pendano said, “that may or may not be helpful, but I think is necessary.” His voice was flat, dull, and emotionless. He held out a piece of paper. “Here.”
Cameron reached out as if he were being handed a live cobra or electric wire. He read. “Mr. President, are you sure that this is what you want to do?”
“No, but I’m quite sure it’s the best thing for the country.” For the first time, Pendano seemed to see the hundred other people in the main ops room. “It’s very simple. I’ve invoked Section Three of Amendment Twenty-five; I’m declaring myself temporarily incapable. I need to get out of the way and let someone who can focus solve the problem. I’m going to go out the back way and return to the White House, and put myself in the care of a doctor. Then, I suppose, we shall see. Thank you all for your patience.”
He shook Cameron’s hand. “Just do your duty; don’t second-guess yourself too much.” To Graham he added, “Dr. Weisbrod, I’m sorry that I’m not quite up to the job you always thought I had the ability for. I thought so, too, but I guess we were both wrong.”
“Roger, please don’t—”
“We’ll talk, some day when there’s time.” He looked around at them as if memorizing their faces. “Everything else can wait. Get this country a President, and then . . . and then . . .”
To Heather’s horror, he began to cry, first just sobbing with tears trickling down his face, still standing upright, trying to wipe his eyes with his sleeve, but then bending forward and breaking down completely, great wracking howls and cries, like a tantruming child, or a wounded ape. Weisbrod and Cam rushed to his side. The Secret Service had him out the door in another moment, but not one of the hundred people in the room could un-see what they had just seen, no matter how much they might wish it.
FOR TWENTY MINUTES AFTER. AROUND THE UNITED STATES (11:45 P.M. EST THROUGH 6:45 P.M. HAWAIIAN STANDARD TIME, MONDAY. OCTOBER 28; IT IS ALREADY 4:45 A.M. GMT (LONDON) AND 1:35 P.M. IN JAYAPURA. OCTOBER 29.)
Del had walked toward the lights of the distant town. With his flashlight also dead, he’d been unable to find his sneakers in the dark truck cab, and he’d had to walk there in his cowboy boots. He found a cop waiting by the main road, and before he’d gotten half his story out, the policeman had introduced him to a chemistry teacher from the local high school, and they were on their way back, in the police cruiser, to take samples from Del’s truck. At least I have one hell of a good excuse, he thought. Also, that hippie asshole that tricked me into taking that black egg? I don’t mind describing him three thousand times if it means they catch his stupid butt. I’m just sorry they can’t hang him.
One particular Daybreaker in Boston had hated noise and rude people and hurry, and so he’d taken the job at Logan International; he’d had a chance to brush biote solution on hundreds of airplane tires that day. The first one happened in Tucson; the tire sensors told the pilot he couldn’t very well land on all flat tires, so after some discussion with the ground, they brought the airliner in on Ford Lake in Lakeside Park; it was a mess, but everyone survived what had to be the shallowest water landing in airline history, and at least there were plenty of cabs and buses there to pick them up in the city.
The next one had also picked up nanoswarm, and had to ditch in the Mississippi near St. Louis, unable to radio to explain what he intended; it would have been all right if he hadn’t collided with a police rescue boat, but still, there were only six deaths.
Then at LAX, the tire sensors were gone and another flight tried to land on the landing gear, not knowing that the tires were rotted and the hydraulic fluid was leaking; there were over fifty deaths. From there on, it became worse; there was still enough television and Internet to make sure everyone heard about it and began to look suspiciously at their neighbors.
Almost half of the Lookout Pass truck train, which hit a patch of failed IBIS on a downgrade, went off a cliff, and that was the most spectacular loss of its kind. But the worst was actually in western Kansas, near Hays, when over four hundred trucks cyber-linked in a train, including seven gasoline trucks, a truckload of liquid ammonia, and a double trailer of liquid oxygen, had picked up enough biotes to weaken most of the tires. When deer wandered onto the highway in front of the lead truck, the four hundred trucks were moving at almost one hundred miles per hour, and the IBIS station nearest the front truck relayed correct braking instructions as the first driver hit his brakes. The third truck, however, lost eleven tires and rolled; forty trucks piled into it, and a failed IBIS station didn’t allow for quick-enough braking for the next hundred or so trucks. An oxygen-gasoline mixture in the tangled wreckage ignited, setting off an explosion from the ammonia-gasoline mix behind it, and the flame front swept down the line and caught the rest of the gasoline trucks. Two more failed IBIS stations and uncountable burst tires completed the process; all but the last nine trucks were caught up in the vast wreck before anyone had time to react.
Power had already begun to fail in the small towns in that area, so there was nothing to hide the brilliant flames towering up into the sky. The best guess was that about 350 truckers died, along with about twenty State Troopers, firefighters from Hays and Goodland, and citizen volunteers trying to rescue people from the wreckage. It was never really possible to determine an exact number; in some areas near the center of the wreck, steel and aluminum ran and puddled onto the pavement.
A local reporter with video of the event, unable to access the Internet, tried to drive to Wichita with his video; at four A.M., walking away from his no-longer-running car on his rapidly decaying tennis shoes, he was run over by a headlightless van that was trying to get home before anything else stopped working.
Across the United States, the first incidents were scattered and few, and local people took care of it. The fear and anger over the Samuelson hijacking/ murder found an outlet in bringing in motorists stranded as their engines stopped running or their tires exploded; in making up lists of canned goods to buy the next day; in putting together groups to go relieve the hard-hit towns. The last night in which nearly every broadcast station was up, and nearly everyone had a working receiver, was a time of hope and of heart-warming stories of people pulling together; many of those still awake at midnight only needed to hear that the people in charge were on the job and that everyone would be pulling together to sleep soundly.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. MIDNIGHT. EST. OCTOBER 28/29.
As the head of Working Group Daybreak, Heather was on the list for a brief caucus with Peter Shaunsen, before or after the swearing in, so she and the others, plus Mark Garren, had to wait patiently in the small video studio in the St. Elizabeth’s complex. Everyone had assumed that when Pendano declared himself unfit, the Speaker of the House would become the Acting President, but Kowalski had firmly reminded them that his parents had not yet been U.S. citizens when he was born, and he’d been born in Gdansk. Kowalski was likeable, smart, knew his way around, and had been mayor of Knoxville and Tennessee Attorney General before running for the House; he’d have been fine. Instead, since the Succession Act of 1947 barred Acting Presidents who were not eligible to be President, and the Constitution barred naturalized foreign-born citizens from the presidency, there was nothing for it; the next one in line was Senate President Pro Tempore Shaunsen.
Because Vice President Samuelson had spent so much of his time managing the President’s agenda for his party in the Senate, it had not mattered that Peter Shaunsen was a querulous, almost-senile old party hack who had first arrived in Congre
ss in the Ford Administration, entitled to his position by seniority but nothing else. Nobody wanted to quarrel with the mean old fool, so they let him stay in.
She knew it might be indiscreet, but Heather quietly asked, “You couldn’t do anything?”
Cam shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I did point out that he could decline and let Secretary of State Randolph take the job. He shook his finger at me and said I was very clever, but he wasn’t giving up the greatest opportunity of his career.”
“Couldn’t the Senate convene and elect another President Pro Tempore?”
“Already checked, and the 1947 Act specifically prohibits that. We’re not allowed to adjust the line of succession once it’s invoked—that’s to prevent a coup.” Cameron shook his head, sadly. “I admit I’m less than crazy about a guy who talks about opportunity—and not duty or responsibility—in the middle of a mess like this. But like it or not, he’s who we’ve got.”
“You’re the NCCC; aren’t you supposed to find us a good president? I mean, if he was eating imaginary bugs and insisted that he was actually Carmen Miranda—”
“Directive 51 says I’m to locate the qualified and competent person highest in the line of succession,” Cam said. “If Shaunsen were obviously mad, in a coma, or in jail in Beijing, or maybe even just hopelessly drunk all the time, it would be my job to pass over him and go to the first competent person in the line of succession. But the job of the NCCC is to hand over the White House to the correct President or Acting President, and then get out of the way, and ‘correct’ doesn’t mean ‘the one I’d prefer,’ as I understand it; it means ‘the first one in line who conceivably could do the job,’ and I think I have to define ‘conceivably’ in a pretty broad, liberal way. Anyway, the Cabinet will be here in a few minutes—I’ve got Secretary Weisbrod and Secretary Ferein up there to greet them and bring them down as they come in; the Chief Justice should be here any minute, she’s scaring the hell out of everyone by driving herself like she always does; and Shaunsen will be along as soon as the barber shaves him and he figures out what suit he’s wearing. It was harder to find a barber on such short notice than it was to get the Secretary of Defense or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, by the way.”
“Must be a pretty fine shave. I didn’t even know that we swore in Acting Presidents. Isn’t the Vice President the Acting President whenever the President has surgery with anesthesia? Have they all been taking oaths all these years?”
“We’ve never done it before,” Cameron admitted. “But I had to promise it to Shaunsen so he’d come down here and go on the air.”
“Shit.”
“Unofficially, that’s my opinion too. But we’ve had an oath ready for decades, in case there was a need for swearing in. It’s the Presidential oath except that there’s a bit about handing the job back when he’s told to, and it has ‘temporary’ and ‘acting’ all through it. And it’s not all downside; sure, it’s stroking Shaunsen’s oversized ego, and that’s probably just going to make a bad situation worse, but the PR consultants do seem to think that it will help reassure Americans, now that they’ve been completely freaked by not hearing from their president all night.”
“I never thought I’d say this,” Heather said, “but this almost makes me wish Norcross was in office.”
Cam smirked, just a little. “After today, who knows? He might be. But this isn’t the way I wanted it to happen.”
“No—”
Chief Justice Lopez came in, her motorcycle helmet still under her arm, with her two “wingmen,” the Secret Service who rode with her. They discreetly steered her to Cam, who handed her a copy of the Acting President’s Oath of Office. She pulled out a pen and began marking changes.
“That was vetted by the Attorney General,” Cam said.
“Unhhunh. He knows the law. I decide if he’s right. There’s three spots in here that Shaunsen could use to stay in power when he ought to go, and I’m fixing those. Plus two misspellings and I guess they just don’t teach them how to use semicolons in law school anymore. We’ll have it ready before I have to swear in His Nibs, and you know as well as I do that he won’t look at it first—that would involve work.” She bent to her task, unzipping her leather jacket and shrugging it off. “And don’t sweat the clothes, I’ve got a spare robe from my saddlebag—one of your interns is pressing it right now. Another lost skill. Thank god you have some back-country girls working here.”
As they drifted away from Lopez, Heather said, “There’s never been any idea of putting the Chief Justice in the line of succession, has there?”
“No, not really. And it would have been a mixed bag. Taft had been president, Earl Warren or John Marshall would have been fine, Roger Taney would’ve been a disaster. Besides, it sort of violates the separation of powers.”
“Doesn’t bringing a president over from Congress do that?”
“Shh. One of a lot of problems with the ’47 Act. In a better situation, I might have asked Lopez for a ruling about it. But I think we’ve got to have a President, any president, inside the next hour, so . . . let’s hope he grows.”
Graham Weisbrod brought in Secretary of State Randolph, who looked very tired and old—he’d already been planning to go back to Oxford, Mississippi, as soon as Pendano was re-elected. Weisbrod got him coffee and squatted to chat with him in a friendly way.
“Your old teacher and boss is definitely a people person,” Cam observed.
“Yeah. Hey, am I keeping you from anything you should be doing?”
“Getting everyone to this room is what I should be doing as NCCC, and that’s obviously something I delegate. Other than that, there’s just not that much left of either of my jobs. Most of the emergency operations upstairs are closing down; the disaster relief for stuff like the truck pileups and plane crashes is over at FEMA, catching Daybreakers is up to the FBI domestically, and the military are gearing up to go get as much of il’Alb as they can find, which won’t be much—it never has been. The temp team upstairs has been great, but it’s time for most of them to go back to their regular jobs. I’m going to shut most of it down and send as many of you home as I can. I might even sleep some tonight if I’m lucky.”
Dwight Ferein, Cam’s boss (and a prize stuffed shirt if ever there was one, Heather thought), brought in the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, settling them into chairs next to Randolph.
Peter Shaunsen came in. Cameron hurried over to meet him. Shaunsen looked around, and said, “What do we need to do?”
“You’ll probably want a briefing on the emergency, and you might want a quick meeting with the Cabinet; we’d like you to go on the air with a stock speech we have to reassure the public; and of course we need to do your swearing-in.”
Shaunsen said, “I’ll meet the Cabinet right now, but just to say hello. I don’t need to know details about the emergency, time enough for that tomorrow. Then let’s look at the speech you want me to give. Then swear me in, and I’ll give the speech and go home. Let’s get it done.”
In the small conference room, Shaunsen’s voice quavered. “Only five Cabinet secretaries, and one of them is from Department of the Future?”
“The rest are on their way, sir,” Cameron Nguyen-Peters said, his voice carefully neutral. “I’m sure more will arrive while we—”
“Let’s see that speech.” Silently, Cam handed him the text.
Shaunsen read. “Okay, after the third sentence, add, ‘And I can promise that there will be many opportunities for our many different American communities as the situation develops.’ And then . . . ‘I’ll be reporting on those in a public address, and submitting a proposal to Congress, just as soon as our experts work out the details.’ Then we need to find a way to tell them that if they vote for Pendano, since it’s too late to think about changing the ballots, we’ll get them a good Democrat to take the job by the time the Electoral College meets.”
Weisbrod glanced at the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Homeland S
ecurity, and at the Attorney General. None of them met his gaze, so he said, “Uh, Mr. Acting President—”
“It’s ‘Mr. President,’ according to the protocol,” Shaunsen said, firmly. “I looked up the protocol on my way over here.”
“Mr. President, then, sorry. Mr. President, I think in a national-security emergency like this—we’ve been attacked, massively, by at least two different enemies in coordination, and the country is in the grip of a disaster, and there’s no guarantee that more and worse isn’t coming . . . um, I think campaign rhetoric would be out of place.”
“Will Fucking Norcross didn’t think so, did that little Jesus-weasel? Telling everyone he was going to be above politics. Can’t get more election-hustling than that, can you?”
“You have a point, Mr. President,” Weisbrod said. “But you know much better than I do, when someone high-roads you, pre-emptively, that way, the only way to beat it is to go even higher road. If he campaigned above politics, all you can do is campaign even further above politics.”
Shaunsen peered at Weisbrod with a keen expression that gave Cam a feeling, for the first time since his arrival, that the man was all the way here. “I suggest that when you leave your department, you think pretty seriously about running for county commissioner or maybe state senator someplace. You’ve got the instinct. All right, just the changes I made then; put them in the TelePrompTer, and let’s go.”
The Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Peace arrived during set-up, and the Secretary of the Treasury rushed in just as Shaunsen was in final read-through. Shaunsen looked over his eight Cabinet secretaries with a sour expression that made Weisbrod think, When I was an assistant prof one year out of grad school, if a dean had looked me over like that, I’d’ve quit on the spot; good jobs make cowards of us all.
