The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

by Harry Turtledove

  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.