by John Barnes
“Sometimes he has a pretty human touch,” Allie said.
That seemed odd but Heather was sleepy. “Okay, you can go. Really. Turn out the light. I’ll try to sleep.”
“’Night, Heather. I’ll check in on you tomorrow.”
She didn’t even hear the door close.
THE NEXT DAY. NEWBERRY. SOUTH CAROLINA. 7:30 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 3.
Manckiewicz had originally thought he would follow the interstates and skirt Atlanta as he had done Richmond, on his way down to Fort Benning. But he’d found that away from the big concrete ribbons, people were friendlier and barriers easier to pass, so he’d gone higher than and west of his original plan. Whenever he met a traveler headed back to Washington, he gave the traveler a hand copy of his writing so far on the trip, and told them to present it to George Parwin for a bath, bed, and meals. The endless hand-copying seemed to improve his style. I sure skip the clichés when I know I’ll be hand-copying them four or five times.
In Spartanburg, he’d heard that the refugee pulse from Atlanta had been far larger and more violent than anything he’d encountered before, probably because it was the biggest city he’d passed so far and its position next to the mountains narrowed the way out. He heard the fires to his west had been worse as well, so he had decided to go south through the space between Columbia and Augusta; both towns were apparently keeping it together, so there shouldn’t be more than occasional bandits—or the petty fortified houses that their right-wing-nut owners called Castles, which could make you just as dead if you walked into their territory before you knew where you were. Once he was well south of Atlanta, he’d cut west toward Fort Benning again.
He’d been pretty tired and his pack had been almost empty three days ago when he found work, helping to build a solar-hot-water setup for a businessman in Newberry, South Carolina. The guy was rigging up an abandoned hotel that had had water-radiator heating and cooling, not for travelers since there weren’t many yet, but figuring he’d be able to offer comfortable shelter once his water-driven machine shop was up and running, and that would be how he’d secure employees. “Sort of a company dorm,” he explained. “Got a guy talking with me about maybe building a little coal-gas or Brown-gas project to supply that hotel kitchen. I got a lot of belt-driven stuff out of two old closed factories, and I’m planning on waterwheels for small hydro.”
Newberry, Chris had written in his diary the night before, is one of a thousand small towns aiming to become one of the industrial centers for a new America. Collum Duquesne does not look at what is lost, but at what can be gained. He wants Newberry to have a newspaper because it would increase its influence in the region, and wants to help me find financing. Reluctantly, I told him I had decided to push on to Fort Benning; I’d rather be the paper, or at least a paper, for the capital of the United States.
Yet the spirit of the smaller cities that are seeing their chance…
When he had finished his entry, he’d carefully made three hand copies of it in case he ran into a traveler headed in the right direction. He’d been gratified, in North Carolina, when he’d found a week-old Advertiser-Gazette with his story about his passage around Richmond. He’d fantasized that when he arrived at Fort Benning, they’d have a complete run of the A-G, and he’d find all his stories there, along with a letter addressed to him demanding more.
Then he’d laughed at himself, packed what he had, including a big load of tradable canned food, blown out the candle, and gone to sleep. Now he was on his way out of Newberry, on the road to Fort Benning, aiming to cross the Savannah on the Thurmond Dam.
Houses and shops were getting fewer and meaner when something caught his eye on a side street. Weeds had already grown up around it, and the door hanging at a broken angle from the store was hardly unusual, but something—he approached more closely and saw what should have been impossible, unopened cans strewn around.
He trotted up the street and solved the mystery: the cans were labeled only in an alphabet that he thought must be Hangul. If the store was too far away from any Korean community, probably the people who looted it had only taken cans labeled in English, or with pictures of what they contained. He set to work stacking cans by matching characters; when each pile had a few of each different kind, he opened a can in each pile. The lychees were wonderfully refreshing, more for their liquid than the fruit itself; the second pile turned out to be a ferocious kimchi that he could only take one bite of before needing more lychees. The third held small, tightly-packed meat and vegetable rolls that were pretty palatable. When he was sure he understood what all the cans contained, he decided to take all the lychees, half the tinned fish, and some of those rolls; now his pack was well and truly topped up.
He was just crouching down to make sure his bag was properly balanced before tying it up, when a brilliant double flash of light, as if lightning had hit in the street just outside, froze him. He ran outside to look.
One giant sun rose in the north-northeast, and another in the northwest. Two great blinding balls of light, five times the width of the full moon, climbed up from the horizon. They were too bright to look at, and Chris covered his eyes belatedly, but though the fireballs had left his vision temporarily a red blur, he could tell as he blinked and the view of his palms slowly came back that he had been blessed, by being far enough away not to be blinded. The sense of heat from the fireball was like a very hot sun-lamp, but things were not bursting into flames, and his skin felt warmed, not burned.
Belatedly, through the fog of shock, his training from his days as a cam jock in Iran asserted itself. Nuke. Get away from windows and people. Slowed by his pack, he had covered four blocks when something slammed against his feet and made him stumble to his hands and knees; he’d lived in California long enough to think earthquake, and then to realize it was a big wave moving through the ground. Less than ten seconds later, another shock wave rolled under his feet. He was surrounded by cracking and crumbling sounds as walls broke, chimneys fell, window glass snapped in distorting frames, and utility poles tipped, cracked, and leaned crazily.
He turned and looked back. Where the fireballs had been there were now distinct mushroom clouds; I was right, it was two nukes. Wow, this is like video from Iran in 2018. The mushroom clouds looked funny, though, cut off at the tops, as if some god of the sky had simply dragged an eraser in a straight line over the tops of the clouds. Let’s see, the rule they gave me, the shock waves in the ground should travel at about ten miles every three seconds, so… but that makes no sense. It was at least three minutes, that would put the bombs… six hundred miles away. I shouldn’t be able to see the mushroom clouds or the light, let alone feel the shock waves in my feet! There are no bombs that big!
He’d been told, not for attribution, that Daybreak or il’Alb might have a new kind of nuke, but he’d had the impression it might be smaller, not bigger.
He had still not heard the sound. Sound travels at five seconds per mile; every Boy Scout learns to count one, Mississippi, two Mississippi, and divide by five to find out how far away the sound is. Figure three or four minutes had gone by and he had yet to hear the sound; and the sound should carry farther but slower than the ground shock, he thought, so he could not have missed it. Say four minutes. That was around fifty miles. More than fifty miles away… six hundred miles? That should take three thousand seconds, which would be fifty minutes, most of an hour. Well, if he heard a really big boom around forty-five minutes from now, he’d have to believe it. He looked down at the windup watch he’d found in a jewelry store and made a mental note.
The mushroom clouds looked odder still, distorting and stretching out to the east in a shape like a bucket-topped boot, with the toe sliding eastward. Normally they stay in the troposphere, he thought, where winds aren’t much more than a hundred miles an hour at most, but in the stratosphere and higher…
He bent, opened his pack, and pulled out his big map of the United States. Assume that he was only seeing the top parts of th
e mushroom clouds. Assume the bomb was so big you could feel the ground wave six hundred miles away. Orient the map with the compass…
Washington. And Chicago. I’m almost at the apex of an isosceles triangle of them.
Hit with bombs so big that the top of each mushroom cloud flew right into space.
By the time he had refolded the map, the morning sky was streaked, everywhere, with millions of shooting stars, bits of the mushroom cloud re-entering. Some of those shooting stars were still falling later on, when he had put a couple of miles behind him, stopped to enjoy a can of lychees and listen, and finally heard, right on schedule, the two terrible booms.
Whoever my readers are going to be, how the hell am I going to explain even the idea of bombs that big to them? He chewed that over as his feet put him on the road that would lead through McKinley and Lincolnsburg tomorrow; he preferred betting that the concrete-pier bridge would still be standing, rather than take his chances on a dam after shock waves like that. By the time he camped that night, in an east-facing clearing, he had several good analogies and was seeing diagrams in his head. Gotta find a printer, a graphic artist, and the capital of the United States, he added to his mental do-list, as he fell asleep in the cool, wet forest, a light rain just spattering on his tent. Nothing to it, really, if I just keep moving.
BEFORE. DURING. AND AFTER. EARTH. 12:30 P.M. GMT. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 3.
Each of the five flashes would have appeared as a tiny round dot—not a point, but a circle—to the naked eye of an observer standing on the moon, and though the flashes on the night side of the Earth, darker than it had been in more than a century, would have been more dramatic, the circular flares would have been visible even on Washington and Chicago, both in bright daylight.
From low Earth orbit, where the weather satellites orbited, the five mushroom clouds would have looked far more impressive; they were the five biggest nuclear bombs ever set off on Earth, each of them five times the power of the gigantic Russian test shot that had terrified the world sixty years before. The tops dispersed strangely, for they were literally in space—more than a hundred kilometers high. From orbit one could see the boundary where the particles of debris and smoke ceased to billow and separated into trillions of lines of fire, outlining a parabolic funnel like the top of a vase, cooling into invisible grit and pebbles that re-entered as bright streaks in all directions around the pillar of fire. Out to about 150 miles altitude, weather and communication satellites ran into the debris and were pounded apart by their own high velocity.
The maintenance vehicle shed for the East Potomac Golf Course, far down in the southwest corner, had long been superseded by a newer one on the north edge of the course, and so it had been unused for a long time; months before Daybreak, a succession of semi trailers, all with papers perfectly in order, had arrived and delivered a large number of crates into the unused shed. If anyone had looked at the papers seriously, they might have muttered, “Hunh, guess they’re finally doing something with that old tractor and truck shed.”
A few days later, an apparent group of joggers had noted a signal from a man with binoculars down a long fairway from themselves. Abruptly they had turned as one and sprinted through the side door on the shed, where the padlock had been cut and reattached so that it locked nothing. The “joggers” had not emerged for eight days, and when they did, they had slipped out at about six in the morning, running back the way they had come as if just finishing a morning run. Inside the shed, painted matte black to blend into the dark interior, a sphere nine meters in diameter sat with its top between the rafters of the old shed.
Beneath the black paint was steel three centimeters thick, covered on its inner surface with a tungsten-thorium foil, a special order made by a Chinese firm that didn’t ask what it was for (tungsten-thorium alloys are common in, among other things, jet engines and expensive specialty light bulbs; obviously someone wanted a super-dense conductor that was strong in thin sheets at high temperatures. Must be some new product, maybe we’ll see some of them in the store next year, the factory manager had thought).
Inside the steel sphere, resting on dozens of steel legs, there was a second sphere of thin plastic; no Daybreak biotes had penetrated because the outer sphere had no openings. The space between the two spheres was about a half meter, and in that space were 131 pure fusion devices, each identical to the device that had been destroyed in Air Force Two, and that had detonated inside Mad Caprice, weeks before. They were just about a meter apart, from center to center, and each one talked to its six nearest neighbors via a laser relay; the messages they sent each other were simply comparing their clocks, keeping each of them synchronized to the tenth of a nanosecond, such a small interval of time that each bomb, in its quiet every-second calculation, had to measure and compensate for the travel time of the light from all its neighbors a meter away.
Inside the thin plastic sphere was about 220 tons of lithium deuteride, the basic fuel for the H-bomb.
The programmed moment arrived. The sphere of 131 small fusion bombs—each only a twentieth of a kiloton—detonated, so nearly simultaneously that if anyone had been able to observe the gamma rays from each bomb, they would have been seen to meet at the centers of all the equilateral triangles between the bombs.
Radiation exerts pressure; the gamma rays from the fusion, moving at the speed of light, squeezed the lithium deuteride sphere to the density at the core of the sun. Arriving an instant later, the relativistic protons—hydrogen nuclei moving at close to the speed of light—held the immense ball of fusion fuel together, and compressed it even further.
Meanwhile, the protons that had not gone into the fusible mass collided with the tungsten-thorium foil, releasing a shower of hard X-rays, which further compressed the lithium deuteride at its center.
Technically, the material was now so compressed that it was no longer lithium deuteride but a dense soup of lithium and deuterium nuclei, pushed into each other by the terrible force; in a microsecond, a small fraction of the most-compressed fused into beryllium and released enormous energy; the ball of nuclei was further heated by that energy, yet held together by the incoming radiation. The added heat caused more fusion, releasing more heat and bringing on still more fusion.
An instant later, less than the time it would take for light to reach your eyes from a stoplight a mile away, the balance changed; the outward force from the fusion-heating of the sphere was greater than the inward force from the radiation.
The energy released.
The 250-megaton blast scooped out a crater 350 feet deep and nearly four miles across. The fireball was almost twenty-five miles across, and extended into the stratosphere in the first millisecond. President Norcross, his Cabinet, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and every living thing in the city had no time even to sense that anything was amiss; a signal could not cross a single synapse in their brains before they just ceased to be. Washington’s vaporized remains boiled upward so violently that when the cloud of plasma cooled enough for molecules to form again,much of it fell as glassy artificial meteors ranging in size from peaches to BBs, the farthest-flying ones landing in Iceland. The immense ground shock wave in the melted rock created concentric ridges every hundred yards or so for ten miles beyond the crater rim.
The heat radiated by the fireball was effectively far greater than that in a familiar fission-triggered bomb, because the fireball lasted much longer; it charred skin 100 miles away, and set dry treetops on fire as far as 150. The most remote fires it triggered, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in office towers in Richmond, and on some east-facing hillsides in Charles-ton, West Virginia, burned uncontrolled. Weeks after Daybreak, almost nothing and no one was left to fight them; fires spread across that whole vast area.
Blast effects were less than they might have been with an old-school H-Bomb of the same megatonnage, but still, the blast wave toppled office buildings at twenty miles and knocked down houses at sixty.
Every pure fusion weapon is innately a
neutron bomb, creating deadly levels of fast neutrons at distances where people under cover can survive the flash and blast—sixty miles away, anyone sheltered from the terrible burning light and the flying rubble received a payment-due from Death, to be collected at leisure after days or weeks of diarrhea, vomiting, hemorrhage, and lesions.
The bomb that burst in a Chicago warehouse at the same moment did many of the same things; the famous skyline was gone. A four-story-high wall of boiling water rolled north on Lake Michigan, and over the next three hours the towns on the shore drowned, and the big wave still had energy enough to cause flooding around Huron and Superior as well. Immediate deaths were fewer, for the great fires in Chicago and Milwaukee had emptied those cities; most of those vaporized, buried, burned, and irradiated were already corpses. Still, the immense plume of neutron-bathed water, silicon, nitrogen, and carbon rained down across the northeastern United States, fell into the ocean even a hundred miles out, and commingled with the ashes of Washington on the Atlantic floor, and for the first few days, it was intensely radioactive, and many humans and many more creatures, especially the mammals and birds, received the dose that would kill them in the coming weeks.
On October 31st, as the world slipped into chaos, a ship had anchored in the North Sea, four long, strong cables securing it to the bottom, at a point carefully located with the GPS systems that were still working at the time, on a line between London and Antwerp. Now, in the early hours of the evening, the black sphere in the abandoned ship detonated; the mass of water it vaporized and converted into a superheated shock wave was about one-quarter the volume of Lake Erie.
London, Dover, Lille, Calais, and the cities of the southern Netherlands burst into widespread flames, great conflagrations that were to burn on for days. Some fires, where particularly flammable objects were facing the fireball, broke out as far away as York, Amsterdam, and Paris, and the mighty artificial tsunami from the blast topped and breached dikes all along the Dutch coast and carried mountains of debris into all the channels of the Rhine; in that instant every chart became obsolete, and for decades the river would be finding new courses.
