“The blue suit?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” the soldier said.
“I hate that fucking suit,” Dixon said, “but it’ll do in this darkness, I suppose.”
“Yes, Mr. President. I’m sorry, Mr. President.”
“All right.” Dixon grabbed Brent Carter’s flashlight and disappeared in the restroom.
When the president reemerged properly dressed, the members of the National Security Council were gathered around a secret service agent in a hazmat suit. His helmet was resting on the conference table. In his hand he was holding a Geiger counter.
“Ah, Mr. President,” the agent said, “I was just saying, I’ve been monitoring the conditions on the surface. Radiation levels are almost back to normal now.”
Dixon raised an eyebrow. “Almost?”
“Yes, Mr. President. Only about ten percent above natural levels. Mostly gamma rays. However, radiation levels were much higher when I started my measurements about five minutes after the burst, which suggests that at the time of the burst itself, they were extremely high. Lethally high, in fact. There are a few guards up there who were standing outside when the burst hit. Not only were they blinded by the intense light, they’re suffering from acute radiation syndrome now. They’re vomiting and bleeding out of their anuses, and I’m afraid they will not survive the next forty-eight hours.”
“My God,” Dixon said.
“The good news, however, is that if you were not outside and directly exposed to the burst, you’re most likely going to be fine. I’ve talked to a few staff up there who were working in their offices at the time. Some who were close to the windows are complaining about headaches and light nausea, but this is probably as bad as it gets for them. We will have to keep monitoring their condition of course. Anyway, the one thing I can say for sure right now is that it’s safe to be up there, and that whatever hit us was not a nuke.”
“Is it still there?” Dixon asked.
“The fireball in the sky? Oh yes, sir, still there. Getting smaller and dimmer, but still the biggest and brightest thing I’ve ever seen in the sky, apart from the sun and moon of course.”
Dixon nodded. “Thank you, agent.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. President.”
“All right then,” Dixon said and looked around. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”
He walked towards the door.
“Mr. President,” Roger McDugan said. “Where are you going?”
Dixon scowled. “Where do you think I’m going, Roger? I’m going to the surface to have a look at that motherfucker.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mr. President,” McDugan said. “As long as we don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with I must insist we exercise caution.”
“Well, Roger,” Dixon said, “I think it’s an excellent idea to go up there, and I’m the president so my opinion trumps yours.”
“But Mr. President …”
“Don’t ‘but Mr. President’ me, Roger. What are we supposed to do down here with not even a single phone line working? Suck our thumbs and pray the damned thing away? Well, good luck with that, Roger. If you want to hide under ground like a mole, be my guest and feel free to treat yourself to some cold brew coffee. I’m going up there. Now somebody open that goddamn door!”
The steel door hissed open, and the president left the room, followed by the members of the National Security Council and half a dozen soldiers lighting the way and pointlessly pointing their weapons in all directions. As soon as they reached the ground level of the White House and made their way outside, they were able to turn off their flashlights. The strange object in the sky created a diffuse ambient light that resembled the lighting conditions of a late afternoon on an overcast day in the middle of January. As the group gathered on the lawn in the Rose Garden, quietly mumbling to one another and trying to make sense of the situation, Dixon suddenly raised his hand.
“Quiet!” he said. “Anybody hear that?”
Everyone stopped to listen. A faint and distant sound filled the air, a whooshing sound like the splashing of a small subterranean stream echoing from the walls of a cave.
“What is that?” Dixon asked.
They listened more closely, and the longer they listened, the more they were able to identify individual sounds that occasionally rose above the distant cacophony. They were hearing the screams and shouts of terrified humans. Feet running; hundreds if not thousands of them. The sound of breaking glass.
“It’s people,” Ellie finally said. “Thousands of them. In the streets, panicking.”
The general nodded. “Probably a lot of looting going on as well. With alarms and phones not working and the police being unable to respond …”
“Oh my God, look!” Brent Carter exclaimed. “It’s going to hit the moon!”
He pointed at the fireball that had been making progress across the night sky. It had now almost completely closed the gap between itself and the full moon. Mesmerized and holding their breaths, everyone looked on as the two celestial objects eventually seemed to touch, and there was a universal sigh of relief when there was no discernible impact. No parts of the moon were hurled into space, and its structural integrity remained perfectly intact.
The president scowled at Brent. “Talk about a panic.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President, but it looked as though …”
“We know what it looked like, Brent. We were standing right here looking at it!”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
They kept staring at the celestial spectacle for another couple of minutes until the moon had completely eclipsed the fireball and the night was once again as reassuringly dark as it was supposed to be.
“All right then,” Dixon finally said. “Show is over, at least for now. I guess we can safely say we’re not under attack. Now what?”
“Attack or not,” Nelson Rodriguez, the Secretary of Homeland Security said, “we’re clearly at a time of crisis. The country needs strong leadership. You need to address the public as soon as possible, Mr. President.”
“Sure, sure,” Dixon said. “Just give me a bullhorn and I’m gonna to climb onto the roof of the White House. And then what? What do I tell them? ‘Good evening, my fellow Americans. I’m your president and I have no fucking clue what’s going on. I’ve been convening with the National Security Council, and they have no fucking clue either. Keep calm and carry on. God bless you, and God bless the United fucking States of America!’” He looked around. When nobody volunteered a response, he removed the sarcasm from his voice and continued. “What the country needs at a time of crisis, Nelson, is a president who knows what the hell he’s talking about. I need more information. We all do. The first thing we need to do is put our infrastructure back in place. Electricity, communication, all that crap. And then I want to speak to every fucking scientist that can shed some light on what the hell is going on here.”
“Mr. President,” Ellie said, “the director of NASA is in town.”
Dixon raised his eyebrows. “The crazy one? That Tyson guy?”
“Yes, sir. Attending some nerd conference. Something about neutralinos or galaxies or whatever, I can’t remember. Anyway, my husband met him for lunch the other day. They met at the Four Seasons, so my guess is that’s where he’s staying, although I can’t be entirely sure on that, obviously.”
“Right,” Dixon said. “Well, there’s only one way to find out.”
As he walked back towards the White House, McDugan called after him, “Mr. President! Where are you going?”
“Where do you think I’m going, Roger? You’ve heard Ellie. The director of NASA is in town, and if there’s one person in the world I’d like to talk to right now, apart from my wife, then it’s him. So come on, let’s go!”
“But Mr. President, surely you’re not going to walk to the Four Seasons, are you?”
Dixon turned around. “I don’t know, Roger, am I? You tell me. Do you have a car I can use? One that didn
’t have its electronics fried and is actually still … you know, able to move? No? Well, then yes, Roger, I guess I will have to walk to the Four Seasons because I’m sure as hell not gonna sit here and do nothing when a man who can actually shed some light on that celestial motherfucker is sitting in a hotel room a mile from here and probably also doing nothing!”
“But Mr. President,” McDugan said, “no sitting president has actually walked down Pennsylvania Avenue in decades!”
“And isn’t that an incredibly sad thing to say, Roger? I’ve been living in this golden cage for six years now, and never once have I taken a stroll down to the neighbors. I don’t even know if the building next door houses a coffee shop or a funeral home. Anyway, the point is, the director of NASA is sitting on his ass just a fifteen-minute walk from here, and I really do need to talk with him, all right? All right then, let’s go!”
“Mr. President, just listen to this!” Mc Dugan pointed over his shoulder in the general direction of where the sound of panic-stricken people in the streets came from. “It’s too dangerous. I cannot guarantee your safety out there, not of you’re on foot. I must urge you to stay at the White House for the time being.”
“Sir,” Brent said, “I have to agree that walking all the way to the Four Seasons under these circumstances is reckless and dangerous. But maybe we could take the carriage?”
Dixon frowned. “The what?”
“The presidential carriage, sir.”
“I have a carriage? What, with horses and everything?”
Brent nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Since when?”
“Well, since always, really,” Brent said. “All presidents since George Washington have had carriages. We just haven’t used them much in the last hundred and eighty years or so.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Dixon said, slapping his thigh. “How long to get the carriage ready, Brent?”
“I don’t know, sir. Fifteen minutes?”
“I can make it to the Four Seasons on foot in fifteen minutes, but all right. I’ll wait. If it was good enough for McKinley, it’s good enough for me. Brent, go and get my carriage ready.”
“Right away, Mr. President.”
“Meanwhile, I shall go and find my top hat.”
* * *
Dixon could see that Jamal Tyson was excited—maybe a little too excited given the circumstances. The NASA director with the afro the size of Rhode Island was pacing his candlelit suite at the Four Seasons, flailing his arms about as he brought Dixon, Brent, Nelson, and Ellie up to speed. Of course, none of them had a clue what the man was talking about.
“Dr. Tyson,” Dixon finally said. “First of all you have to stop running in circles, because you’re making my head spin.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President, tehehe,” Tyson replied. He sat down on the sofa opposite the President, but he kept fidgeting, rubbing his hands, and wriggling his fingers. “I’m sorry for getting a little excited at the scientific event of the century if not the millennium, tehehe.”
“Secondly,” Dixon continued, “you need to dumb things down for me, because all that scientific gobbledygook is making my head spin. Explain it to me as if I was six years old. Tell me again about that hyper … thingy.”
“Hypernova, tehehe,” Tyson said. “A hypernova is like a supernova, the violent death of a star, only with a substantially bigger energy output. Now when a star like WR 104—I think that’s the culprit here, hehehe—when a star like WR 104 explodes in a hypernova, it creates a jet of energy. Mostly gamma rays. That jet emanates along the rotational axis of the star, from its poles if you will, in a very narrow beam. We call it a gamma ray burst, and in just a few seconds it can release up to half the amount of energy produced by our sun in its entire ten-billion-year lifetime.”
“And this is what just hit us?” Dixon asked.
“That’s my best guess at this point.”
“And how did we not see this coming?”
“Well, hehehe, the short answer to that is because we couldn’t get funding from congress for that type of thing.”
“Right,” Dixon said. “Give me the long answer.”
“Tehehe, all right, Mr. President,” Tyson said. “The long answer is that such events are extremely rare. A gamma ray burst like that happens only a handful of times per million years in our galaxy, and most of the time they pose no threat to us because as I said, a gamma ray burst is a very narrow beam that usually misses us unless the rotational axis of the star is pointing directly at us. The other thing is that we simply don’t know enough about them. We knew that it would happen to WR 104 at some point, but at our current state of technology it was impossible for us to predict whether it was going to happen today or a thousand years from now.”
“So,” Dixon said, “you’re saying we just got unlucky, is that it?”
“Yes, Mr. President. Tehehe.”
“And there would have been no way to predict this.”
“No, Mr. President. You see, WR 104 is a binary star system. It’s two stars orbiting around a common center of mass. Simply put, it was wobbling, and the angle of its axis relative to Earth was constantly changing.”
“Are you saying that if that star would have exploded last week or next week rather than today, we would have been safe?”
“Hehehe.” Tyson shook his bushy head. “Technically, WR 104 didn’t explode today. It exploded when we were still in the middle of figuring out how to domesticate cattle and crops, when mankind was just beginning to learn how to do pottery, hehe. We only didn’t see it explode until today because it’s eight thousand light-years away from us. That may sound like a lot, but in cosmic terms it’s really in our backyard. But to address your point, a week or even a few months or years wouldn’t have made much of a difference, because WR 104 wasn’t wobbling that fast. However, had it exploded a few decades earlier or later, which is a mere blink of an eye in cosmic terms, that gamma ray burst would have missed us. So yes, I guess you could say that we got a little bit unlucky there, tehe.”
“A little bit unlucky!” Dixon snorted. “Are you fucking kidding me? On the short ride over here, I have seen dozens of dead bodies piling up in the street. And that’s just Pennsylvania Avenue. If that damned thing hit the entire country …”
“It certainly did, hehe.”
“… then we’re talking millions of deaths here, Dr. Tyson. Millions!”
Tyson nodded slowly. “I understand that, Mr. President. Just before you arrived I was down in the lobby. They’re turning it into a morgue. It’s an unspeakable horror. But this is not the end of it, I’m afraid. It’s only the beginning.”
“What are you talking about?” Dixon said. “I thought the radiation exposure was limited to the duration of the burst. We’re no longer getting fried by that thing, are we?”
“Not if this was your typical, run-of-the-mill gamma ray burst,” Tyson said, “and I have no reason to believe that it wasn’t, hehe. But you see, Mr. President, not all the gamma rays that were heading our way tonight hit the surface. In fact, the earth has a natural shield that protects us from deadly radiation. It’s called the ozone layer. Without it, the burst would most likely have killed all of us. So in a way we were lucky indeed. Those of us who survived, that is. But you see, the ozone layer didn’t reflect any radiation back into space as you might think. Rather, it reacted with the gamma rays chemically. I’m going to spare you the dirty details of how exactly that works, but there are two major effects of this: depletion of the ozone layer and an increase in nitrogen oxides—mostly NO2—both of which will have dire consequences for the biosphere, not only in areas that were directly hit by the burst but worldwide.”
“What kind of consequences?” Dixon asked reluctantly. He didn’t really want to know the answer.
“It depends on how energetic that gamma ray burst actually was,” Tyson said. “We have to analyze the data once the power’s back on, hehe. But considering the amount of immediate deaths out there, I daresay
it was pretty strong. My guess is that the ozone layer has been depleted by at least fifty percent, probably more. It will recover, but that will take a while.”
“How long?”
“At least fifteen to twenty years. So for the next two decades we will see increased surface-level ultraviolet radiation coming from the sun. One of the primary effects UV radiation has on us is that it damages our DNA. As a result we’ll see a lot of stillbirths and babies born with birth defects and abnormalities. Children already alive today will experience developmental delay. And many of the people who survived the burst itself, like you and me, will develop cancer in the next ten years.”
“How many?”
“Impossible to tell. Many.”
“Jesus Christ!” Dixon rubbed his eyes.
“That’s not all,” Tyson said. “UV radiation obviously doesn’t only damage human DNA. It affects every single living being on the surface of the earth, and not only on the surface. Oceanic phytoplankton is not only the base of the global food chain, it also produces half of the world’s oxygen. The burst probably hit the entire Atlantic Ocean and half of the Pacific. That is a lot of phytoplankton that is either dead or will see severe effects to its metabolism, its growth rate, and its photosynthetic capability, in other words its ability to produce oxygen.”
“What are you saying, Doctor?” Dixon said. “Are we all going to suffocate?”
Brent Carter cleared his throat. “Surely there must be other ways to extract oxygen from the ocean. If that phyto… whatever it’s called can’t do it, we’re gonna have to do it ourselves, right?”
“Well, hehe,” Tyson said. “In theory, yes. Of course we can extract oxygen from water via electrolysis, but that will require a lot of energy if we want to do it on a scale that will make any difference in the atmosphere.”
For the first time this evening, Dixon smiled as he fondly remembered his father Wolfred who, when he was president a quarter of a century ago, had fought hard against fierce opposition and almost insurmountable adversities to push through the Independent Energy Act of 2055. After America had depleted its own fossil fuel reserves to the point where it had become economical madness to exploit them any further, Wolfred Dixon had finally managed to convince the American people that green was the way to go. With the cheap labor of millions of prisoners, tens of thousands of acres of cornfields in the Great Plains and vast areas of the deserts of the Southwest had been turned into solar farms. Aquatic power stations had been built along every river, wind farms along every coastline. It had been too late to stop climate change, but for twelve years running, America had been the biggest exporter of electric energy in the world, two thirds of which were solar.
Eschaton - Season One Page 4
