by Joe Haldeman
The room was dominated by a heavy ornate round table of some gorgeous rare wood. There were about twenty overstuffed swivel chairs with twenty different colors of paisley upholstery. The latest thing, I supposed.
There were five of us “space travelers” and our two hangers-on, facing seven people who were presumably politicians.
An impressive back-lit Mercator projection of the world filled one wall. Namir gestured at it as we sat down. “Please bring us up to date . . . next week, that whole map is going to be of only academic interest. What are we doing to make people adjust to thinking and acting on a small scale? Local government and industry?”
“Right now we’re still dealing with panic. Rioting and wholesale looting.” That was Dali Spendor, who had been President Gold’s press secretary. “That requires local response, but it’s military and police work.”
“National Guard?” Paul said. Some of the others looked bewildered.
“There’s no such thing anymore,” General Ballard said. “It seemed obsolete, and was absorbed by the regular military before I was ever a soldier.”
“Regionalism in general has been on the wane.” A white-bearded man who introduced himself as Julian Remnick, president of Harvard University. “That’s been true for centuries. But facing a common enemy as terrifying as the Others, who represent the same danger to everyone from Nome to Key West, from London to Beijing, has unified the world more effectively than millennia of idealism.” He was obviously quoting himself. “That has its bad side now.”
“People will naturally expect a top-down response,” Spendor said. “Here, that would be Washington stepping in to deal with the problem. But as Namir says, that stops on Wednesday.”
“Or sooner,” I said. “There’s no reason to trust the Others’ word on anything.”
“Nothing we can do about that,” the president huffed. Except try to be flexible, I thought, which probably wasn’t his strong suit.
“We’ve started to make a little progress,” a tall plain woman said. “I’m Lorena Monel, governor of Maryland. Or former governor. As you say, units as large as a state will probably have little meaning.
“My committee on localization has gotten in touch with regional leaders in both major parties, and two other groups that represent significant numbers. Through them, we’ve made contact with thousands of community leaders and put them together in an information net—useless after the power goes off, but meanwhile they’re talking with people who will be within walking distance. Leaders with the same regional resources and problems.”
“In Wyoming,” a slender tanned fellow drawled, “ain’t nobody in walking distance of nobody else. Except in the cities, and they’re pretty well lost.”
“There won’t be anyone in Wyoming by the end of the week,” the president said. “No one but hermits. You going back?”
The man stared back at him. “Good a place to die as any.”
“Let’s get back on track,” the Maryland governor said. “We have this network for five days. How can we best use it?”
“Turn it into a cell system,” the Harvard president said. “Have each community establish a line of communication with every adjacent one, through Lorena’s committee. Have each of them figure out a way to stay in contact with their immediate neighbors without high technology.”
“Smoke signals,” the Wyoming man said.
“Possibly. Signal fires, anyhow. The ancient Greeks did that.”
“Horses and riders?” I said. “Are there enough people who still do that?”
“Wouldn’t work if they did,” a short black man said. “Jerry Fenene, deputy secretary of commerce. In a couple of weeks, a horse isn’t going to be transportation. It’s going to be a million calories on the hoof. You don’t want to ride it anywhere near a hungry person with a gun.”
“Bicycles are a near equivalent,” the president said (giving me a vision of someone eating a bicycle), “and we’re churning them out. Twenty-four-hour production in, I don’t know, a couple of hundred factories.”
“A hundred eighty-two registered,” Fenene said. “Some of them very small. They might turn out a hundred thousand bikes before the power goes.” He shook his head. “It’s not of much practical significance. There must be a hundred million bikes out there already.” He looked vaguely in our direction.
I wondered what they expected us to do, to help. We were public figures in a way, but most of the public associated us with getting into this disaster, not getting out.
We did have more experience with the Others, but in terms of actual contact, that was a matter of minutes, not much of it constructive. Lab rats probably knew more about humans than we knew about the Others. And had more in common with their captors.
“No matter what we do,” the president said, “it’s just a drop in a mighty big bucket. They give us a week, now less than six days.” He looked at me. “If that. Once we have your cell system, Lorena, what do we do with it?”
“I guess the next step would be to organize groups of cells. Into regions. How big would a region be?”
“Smaller than Wyoming,” I said, “if you want meetings.”
“You can bike across Wyoming,” the thin man said, “but you wouldn’t want to.”
“I don’t like this assumption that everybody’s going to cooperate,” Namir said. “Line up and form into counties and states. With no central authority, I’d put my money behind mob rule. Gangs, with the biggest bully at the top.”
“You’re always such a crazy optimist,” Paul said.
“So what would you bet on?”
He scratched his head. “Same.”
“So I should be the biggest bully?” the president said. “I probably have the biggest gang.”
“The only one with nukes and hellbombs,” Wyoming said, and some people laughed nervously. “You could just wait it out,” he continued. “Let the rest of the world go to hell first, and then come out when the smoke clears.”
“Give up on America?” the president said. “There’s no way I could do that.”
“That’s not America out there anymore.” Wyoming made a sweeping gesture. “When the power goes off again, it’s gonna be one big nut house, with the inmates armed and desperate—and in charge. Let them take care of each other.”
Namir spoke quietly into the silence: “How many troops do you have? I mean here at Camp David.”
The president looked at General Ballard. “The Secret Service right here, that might be sixty-some agents?” Ballard said. “The First Brigade of the 101st is attached to them, but I don’t think there were a hundred on duty in and around the White House when we . . . evacuated. My adjunct, Brigadier Akers, would have the exact number. Under two hundred total.”
“So we’re spread out pretty thin,” Namir said, “if a group of any size decides to attack us.”
The general laughed, a hoarse syllable. “We’re armed to the teeth, and those troops are the cream. No bunch of civilian rabble is going to breach our perimeter.”
“Armed to the teeth with modern weapons.” Namir shook his head. “You even have combat aircraft and tanks. Which all will be useless scrap after Wednesday. And we’ll have a ring of a hundred-some soldiers with rifle-clubs and knives. If they do have knives. Excuse me if I want to be someplace less conspicuous.”
“This is what it boils down to,” Wyoming said. “Eight billion people had enough to eat last week, but about seven billion need agribusiness and large-scale aquaculture to stay alive. Nothing you do is going to change those seven billion into small-scale farmers and fishers. Even if you could, the Earth wouldn’t support them. Long before winter comes, there won’t be any food on the shelves. No grain in the silos.”
“There’s no way around it,” Namir said, “if the Others pull the plug on agribusiness. So most of those seven billion have to die.”
“Some’ll be food themselves,” Wyoming said. “One adult has what, forty or fifty pounds of meat on him? Keep you goin’ f
or a month and a half.”
“If you had refrigeration,” Paul said.
“Or know how to make jerky,” Wyoming said, giving Paul a measuring stare. Probably two months’ worth.
“But it’s not like a lifeboat situation,” I said, “where you draw straws, or the strong eat the weak. At least in America, there’s plenty of room to hole up and wait.”
“We can impose order for a certain length of time,” the president said. “In most cities, food warehouses and supermarkets are under armed guard.”
“Unless the mobs have overpowered them,” Lorena said. “I know that it hasn’t worked in Baltimore, where my office is. The guard evaporated everywhere, and every crumb of food was gone by noon yesterday. When the power came back on, some people were ready. They used trucks to smash into stores and loot them wholesale. In a couple of cases, military units themselves did the looting, or at least joined the looters.”
“We should assume the worst,” Namir said, “and plan in terms of rebuilding from whatever ruins are left. Some countries have more experience in that than others.” There was always the echo of Gehenna in his voice, in his accent. All his family dead in minutes. Cities paved with instant corpses. Israel had rebuilt, after a fashion, but never recovered.
“A basic question,” Paul said to the president. “Are there federal reserves of food? Something that will still be there after the smoke clears?”
“In fact, there is.” He pursed his lips and paused, and then continued. “Not too far from here, in a natural limestone cave in West Virginia. The Congress is holed up there, along with I don’t know how many tons of cheese and freeze-dried milk and fruit and meat. Bought up in secret from individual states’ surpluses, back in the Marlowe administration. The soldiers who are guarding it don’t know what’s there; they think it’s a secret missile site. It can feed tens of thousands of people for decades—or could. With trucks to move it out.”
“That’s where you’ll go after Camp David dries up?” Namir asked. The president reddened and looked away.
“Won’t do much for the country in general,” Paul said, “or the world.”
“We’re still six months away from winter,” Namir said. Most of those billions will be dead by then. Unless they all move to Wyoming and start eating each other.
“The ones who survive the winter will provide the core for rebuilding the countries in the northern hemisphere. We should be working on what to do then. How to keep civilization going with those millions.”
“Civilization is what got us here,” Dustin said. “Maybe we should try something else.”
“This isn’t a philosophy problem, Professor.”
“Except that everything is. In the long run, we might find that civilization is incompatible with survival.”
“In the long run, that’ll take care of itself,” Wyoming said.
“It will not,” Dustin pressed on. “Look, I grew up in a small, isolated, agrarian community that was founded in opposition to commercialism. I do know what I’m talking about; I was perfectly happy, absent most of civilization’s overrated virtues.
“But it didn’t just happen, and it certainly can’t happen in the barbaric chaos you’re all accepting as inevitable.”
“You can’t beat the math, boy. Nobody’s gonna lay down and die so you and your pals can get naked and grow vegetables.”
“I know that. That’s why the organization initially has to come from here. We have some idea of where the food is and where the people are. For a few days, we can put that knowledge to use and maximize the number of people who live.”
“Tell everybody where the food is,” Namir said, “so they can loot more efficiently.”
“It’s a choice between triage and random survival,” Paul said. “Only a billion are going to survive, and all you’re really saying is that we might have some choice as to which billion.”
“No, I’m just saying we can maximize the number,” the president said. “There will be something like natural selection going on, but it won’t be a matter of brute force. Quite the opposite, I think. People who cooperate with one another.”
“People who obey the government.” Wyoming said gummint. “Sometimes I think you boys made this whole thing up, Boyer. Mr. President.”
The phone in front of General Ballard buzzed and he snatched it up. “Ballard, go.”
The president set down his knife and fork and looked at Ballard. They both seemed to have gone a little pale. It wouldn’t be a routine call—“How’s supper with the prez?”
Ballard said, “I’m coming,” and stood up. “Sir, there is, um, a disturbance on the east slope.” He tossed his napkin down.
“What kind of ‘disturbance’?”
“I don’t know. Gunfire, on the other side of the fence. A sniper, at least one, silent. If you’ll excuse me.” Two other military guys followed him.
The woman with the sergeant’s stripes and apron came out, armed with a wooden spoon. “Mr. President, shall I show people down to the basement?”
“Yes, thank you. Um . . . military people stay up here, of course, and you space folks?”
“Sure,” Paul said. “Half of us are some sort of military anyhow.”
“I’ll stay, too,” Card said to me. “You’ll need an innocent bystander.”
The cook-sergeant told the civilians to bring their plates and wineglasses if they wanted; they’d be hiding in the wine cellar. They were nervous but animated, a little jovial, as they filed out.
The president nodded and steepled his fingers under his chin. “There is a large safe room underneath the basement. Don’t think we need it yet. Jorge, go where the general’s going and send us a cube.” One of the waiters flung the folded napkin off his arm and hustled toward the door. A pistol appeared in his hand as he was leaving the room. “Uncle Charlie, stand by the dome?” The other waiter nodded and left.
“We’re pretty well protected here,” he said to the dinner table. “If we turn on the pressor dome, a fly couldn’t get in. Nor any missile. But we’d lose communication with outside, and probably fry everyone’s personal electronics.”
“And it would stop working on Wednesday,” Namir said.
“I assume so. I’m not a scientist.” I’m not either, but it did sound like a safe bet. Even if the pressor field wasn’t itself electronic—I didn’t know anything about it, but remembered that it was something like the “weak action force,” as basic as gravity. But it must have some parts that plug into the wall.
“Without the pressor field,” Namir said, “we’d still be safe downstairs?”
He nodded. “It goes back at least to the twenty-first. There was probably a shelter down there in Eisenhower’s day. They had nukes back then, too.”
“A wonder we’ve lasted this long,” Elza said. The president nodded, immune to sarcasm. Or maybe he knew something we didn’t. Some presidential secret, whispered down from one to the next for three-hundred-some years. Except for the assassinations.
“Maybe we ought to go down there,” I said.
“I don’t know.” The president used his napkin to wipe sweat from his forehead. “I’m afraid there are electronic locks on the exits. We couldn’t hide indefinitely.”
“Trapped in the darkness,” Dustin said. “Airless. No, thanks.”
A section of a book-lined wall rotated to reveal a large cube, about six feet square by two feet deep. The picture was bouncing; evidently Jorge was trying to image the scene as he ran toward it. Helmet cam, probably.
The image was pale green, with white flares when a couple of soldiers fired rifles.
“I wonder who they are,” I said. “The people attacking.”
“If they’re the ones we were expecting, it’s a bunch led by the Liberty Bell underground. They were trying to organize something down in Frederick, Maryland. We had a woman planted in their leadership, but we stopped hearing from her yesterday morning.”
“How many?” Namir said.
“
Three hundred, maybe four.”
“Why don’t they wait till after Wednesday?” I asked. “Wouldn’t they know that most of the soldiers have electric guns?”
“Most of them do, too. Civilian hunting rifles. They’re probably holding their gunpowder weapons in reserve until after the power goes off.” There was the thunk-thunk sound of a heavy machine gun, and the cube showed it was on our side. “We should, too.”
“This probably isn’t the real attack,” Namir said thoughtfully. “May just be a probe, to test your reaction.”
“That’s what you’d do?”
