The Soviets had never accepted the U.S. doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction; this would have meant accepting the pos sibility 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 net works 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 com press the core twenty-five kilograms of plutonium to the re quired critical mass.
The entire weapon erupted into a useless spray of finely machined and now futile parts, scattering itself along a thou sand-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 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 break fast. 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 OK, 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 it in a paper bag, and tucked it under the seat. Handy.
Might as well see the world. What's left of it.
MC355
The American orbital defenses had eliminated all but 10 percent of the Soviet strike.
MC355 reconstructed this within a root-means-square devia tion 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 arse nal. This was the military value percentage, and it stood for the usefulness of a given weapon. The USSR placed 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 protec tion lost.
This led to gradual reductions. Purely defensive weapons did not enter into the thousand-point count, so there were no restraints in building them.
The confidence engendered by this slow, evolutionary ap proach 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.
MC355
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, appa rently due to unexpected American defenses of its surveillance satellites—retractable sensors, multiband shielding, advanced hardening.
Neither superpower struck against the inhabited space col onies. They were unimportant in the larger context of a nuclear war.
Communications between Washington and Moscow con tinued. Each side thought the other had attacked first.
But more than 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.
MC355
From collateral data, MC355 constructed a probable scenario: The U.S. chose to stand fast. It launched no warheads.
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 buidings 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.
MC355
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 build ing?
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 base ment. 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 shoul der 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 End Of The World Page 14
