by John Barnes
For reasons obscure even to herself, Heather had chosen to be out among the crowd. She’d told Graham, “it’s so I can shout ‘louder’ if you start to mumble like a dotty old college professor,” but she just had a feeling that she should be out among the crowd.
The Federal District Court judge who swore Graham Weisbrod in used a family Bible to do it, which he would be taking home as a souvenir; as Graham said, it was more dignified than tipping him a hundred. They weren’t sure whether the oath administered by the traffic court judge of Pale Bluff was enough, so to make sure, they were re-doing it with the first available Federal judge. After that, with the whole Supreme Court dead in DC three weeks ago, this would have to do.
They had managed to put together enough musicians proficient on band instruments for a respectable rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and found a local singer with the range; Graham had told her, “Make this the plainest one you’ve ever done; hit every pitch and every emotion, but don’t make a show out of it.” She had glared at him, but she complied, and everyone cheered at the end.
Weisbrod’s inaugural address was as brief as he could make it, which meant it was “still six times as long as Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” as Weisbrod himself pointed out. “It’s a garrulous, bureaucratic age, you know.” He called for provisional elections in 2026, leading to a “restart” in 2027, to be modeled on the 1788/9 startup of the Federal government, thus de facto agreeing to Cameron’s publicly announced plan; he called for “immediate and thorough investigation to determine whether the recent tragedies suffered by our nation, our planet, and our species were the acts of deliberate enemies, and to find a course of action.”
For most of the speech, he outlined a plan for ongoing reconstruction and redevelopment, including research into curing, reversing, or neutralizing the effects of the nanoswarm and biotes. Arnie had pleaded with him to include a line about just learning to live with them, because, Arnie said, the odds were overwhelming that that would be what they would have to do, for decades or centuries. Graham had said he didn’t think anyone was ready for that thought yet.
There was a carefully drafted paragraph that the judge and General McIntyre had worked over, in which Graham unambiguously claimed his Constitutional role as commander in chief, but thanked Cameron for his prior execution of his duties as NCCC, and stipulated that troops who had obeyed their commanding officers had committed no offenses. As Graham said, it was difficult to express the idea of amnesty, pardon, and complete forgiveness without using any of those words, but they had managed to do it, and that was what the country needed.
The speech ended with a rousing closing about enduring the tough days ahead and emerging as a great nation.
The woman standing beside Heather in the crowd said, “Oh, well, I suppose he has a lot on his mind.”
Something in the woman’s tone of disappointment made Heather take a closer look. The woman was tall, only an inch or two shorter than Heather; slim, rangy, and muscular; perhaps thirty years old; with the sort of sharply etched, squared-off features that Heather’s father had always described as “skipped the pretty stage and went straight to handsome.” Her companion was a short, powerfully built man of around fifty, in baggy, worn clothes that suggested he’d lost some weight lately; he wore a thick wool jacket over a couple of shirts and sweaters, thick steel-framed glasses, and a ski band around his ears that exposed the pink and peeling skin of his bald scalp. Both of them had on well-worn leather boots resoled with thick rawhide, and looked so tired and discouraged that Heather blurted out, “What did you think Weisbrod missed, or should have talked about?”
The woman assessed Heather with an expression that held no expectations; just a simple Who are you and how do you fit into my life? The short man said, “Well, Leslie and I—uh, I’m James—uh, we walked all the way from Pueblo to get here, they don’t have a train running yet, and we thought since it’s one of the biggest government dealies in Colorado, you know, the president might have at least mentioned us, or invited us to write to him, or something, so we’d know what he wanted and needed from us.”
“I—uh, I work for him,” Heather said, “and the Federal government is… well, even now it’s huge, and of course he was only the head of a small department till recently, so he’s not necessarily up on everything…” She was afraid that she might be talking to a couple of petty bureaucrats administering a program that was gone forever, worried about their pensions and perks; she didn’t want to fend off inquiries from the Federal Poultry Inspection Corps or the Regional Authorized Paper Rearrangement Facility, and she especially didn’t want to make any promises to them. “How far was it from Pueblo?” she asked, lamely, and feeling how lame that was.
Leslie, the tall, rangy woman, said, “It’s about 135 miles. It wasn’t really bad because we could break the trip at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, where they let us stay a night, and the town of Castle Rock is in okay shape now, so we could get some food and shelter there. So we only actually had to camp every other day.”
Heather was wracking her brains; what’s in Pueblo? Anything? Or are these two postal clerks with delusions of grandeur?
She could tell they were about to turn away. She imagined them walking back, defeated, for the long week or so it might take, and perhaps getting stuck in a blizzard; she couldn’t stand it. “I can’t remember what Federal facility is in Pueblo,” she finally admitted. “I used to be in law enforcement so I know it’s not a prison or an agency regional office.”
James surprised her by clapping his hands together and laughing. “Leslie, what did I say to everyone about it not being like the old days?”
She rolled her eyes and looked like she’d eaten something sour. “Great, now he’s been right about something and I’ll have to hear about it the whole walk back. Well, we’re the people you used to hear about on television, as in ‘Pueblo, Colorado, 81009.’ The Government Printing Office and the Federal Consumer Information Center. For the past couple decades we mostly maintained a homepage that gave access to around two hundred thousand Federal web sites, so that if people wanted HUD’s information about removing lead paint or the Department of Agriculture’s procedure for collecting soybean subsidies, they could find it online. But we’re still the Government Printing Office and we have a few billion pamphlets, books, maps, everything that the Feds put together that consumers might want, including a lot of stuff on paper that goes back a few decades, everything from home gardening and canning to building your own pottery kiln to safe field sanitation, and especially with the Library of Congress gone, and the damage they say that the big libraries in the East have been taking, with us having all this practical stuff, we just thought—”
“Especially,” the short, heavy man put in, “because we do still have a lot of the old printing machinery, I don’t know which parts can be put back in service but some of the people who used to run it retired to Pueblo—”
Heather felt like she might just stare for an hour, but oh my dear god don’t let them get away! “You mean, we’ve got a whole library of all those practical skills—”
James’s head was pumping up and down violently. “And lots of impractical too. ‘Greek Word Roots Used in Scientific Vocabulary.’ ‘Chemistry Sets for School Instruction from Materials Purchased in Drug, Hardware, and Feed Stores.’ ‘Fundamentals of Amateur Astronomy.’ Stuff going back ninety years to the 1930s and before.” For the guy in the cynic role, he wasn’t doing much of a job. “I mean, we don’t know what will be useful, but it’s all there in the warehouses, and Pueblo’s kind of lucky; Fort Carson held down the Springs and blocked the main road from Denver, so we didn’t have much of a refugee problem or a civil disorder problem, and we still have plenty of food and clean water, and we do have those presses, so, really, if the president is serious about getting civilization restarted, and if he meant that line about ‘relearning all the old arts of peace’—”
“Oh, he meant it,” Heather said. She stuck
out her hand. “My name is Heather O’Grainne. I can walk you straight to President Weisbrod. Might even be able to get you a meal or two, and some supplies for your trip home. And there’s a couple people—Dr. Arnold Yang, maybe General McIntyre—that I want you to meet too. In fact, I think maybe we should have you talk to Arnie, then to the president. Can you come along now? And where were you staying?”
“We’re in the bedroll crowd at the Oxford,” Leslie admitted, looking a little embarrassed. “The GPO didn’t exactly have a budget for us to do this, so—”
“Then you’re staying in the same hotel with the president anyway,” Heather said, enjoying the irony. “And I’ve just shared a major national security secret with you. Hope you don’t mind climbing stairs.”
But on the top floor, Arnie and McIntyre were “the two most unavailable people you could have asked for,” Allie explained to Heather.
“Do you know what it’s about?”
Allie glanced at Leslie and James, and Heather said, “They’re Federal employees I just found, and they’re the guardians of something we really want to keep.”
“How about we feed them while I tell you the classified stuff?”
“Deal,” Heather said, and steered the GPO employees down the hall. To the Oxford cooks, she said, “These are Federal employees, part of the party till I tell you different, and feed them, okay? They’ve come here over a hard road.”
In a room alone with Allie, she asked, “All right, what is it?”
“Radiogram from Cam. There’s been another EMP, this time over the South China Sea. Nailed the Canton/Macau/Hong Kong area, Manila, most of Taiwan, and the Western Pacific Fleet. They’re going to have to scuttle one carrier and two subs—all the reactor control stuff fried and the reactors failsafed into shutdown—and they’re towing all of them, hoping to get them into a deep trench like they did the Reagan. And just like before, no identified launch site.”
“So what’s the huddle about?”
“Cam’s radiogram was making the point that we’re getting hit with targeted attacks, don’t we see there’s a war on? That area was the best-equipped remaining base for rebuilding civilization in Asia, plus they also destroyed the protection and resources that area was borrowing from us; they could hardly have hit the human race harder. I don’t know if Cam knows yet about those stupid things Graham said in Pale Bluff, but he’s acting as if he did—practically inviting Graham to just hand over the presidency. Makes me furious!”
“Well, it definitely looks like a targeted attack.”
“It looks like an attack targeted by a robot, not by a living, thinking being. Arnie’s already pointed out that so far the pattern is that the EMP weapon hits the brightest radio source. He wants to do some serious study before anyone goes into a decision blind.”
“I thought you usually didn’t like it when Arnie wanted to study everything to death.”
“If one of Arnie’s studies can keep Graham Weisbrod from kicking away everything he ought to claim, then as far as I’m concerned, Arnie can study everything and everybody till doomsday. His idea for a test is really simple: He just wants everyone worldwide to go dead on the radio as much as possible, or at least keep signals to very low energy, and he wants to do some kind of experiment, I don’t get what, to see if whatever it is knows what it’s shooting at, or just shoots at the brightest radio signal.
“Meanwhile, McIntyre just wants his old job back so he can be put in charge of knocking out the launch site, assuming we ever manage to find it. And Graham keeps scribbling on his damned pad and muttering ‘Hmmm,’ and he’s just not speaking up and asserting himself, which is what he needs to do!” Allison Sok Banh was normally one of those reserved women who must endure the ice-princess label, but that didn’t seem to be her problem today. “Anyway,” she said, calming a little, “they told me to brief you, so I decided I’d just save time and tell you the truth.”
“Shit. You want to be careful with that stuff, people get hurt playing with it. Before we go into any more detail, I’ve got two people who walked six days to get here, with access to a resource that might help save the whole country across the next century, and it sounds like I won’t be able to set them up with anyone to talk to.”
“Well,” Allie said, “there’s me. How about I go out there, make all sorts of nice apologies for everyone, turn on the charm, and generally win them over to the cause?”
“Well, you can certainly do it—I’ve seen you—”
“I’m pretty sure I can speak for Graham and make it sound convincing. And if they need a presidential decision on something, I’ll sweet-talk Graham to go along with whatever deal I need to cut or arrangement I need to make. He listens to me a lot these days.” Something about Allie’s smile bothered Heather, and she hoped she didn’t know what it was. “Better fill me in on what your two new friends do and why you think it’s vital; we want them to feel valued, and nothing creates the impression of neglect like being asked the same questions over and over.”
THE NEXT DAY. EAST OF GRAND JUNCTION. COLORADO. 1:45 P.M. MST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 24.
Heather and Allie sat at a newly-bolted-in picnic table in the observation car that was attached ahead of Amtrak One, as the presidential car was being called, much to Graham’s annoyance. Spectacular scenery rolled by; they had time to review Allie’s notes about what was available at Pueblo.
“I can’t believe how many obsolete-tech people came out of the woodwork,” Heather said, after a while. “Steam railroad buffs. Hobby printers. Guys who build their own tubes for tube amps. Steam car collectors, and that guy with all those nineteenth-century machine guns, and of course guys like Quattro with his old airplanes. I suppose it’s not that shocking that there’s a whole nest of them with printing presses and warehouses full of pamphlets down in Pueblo.”
Allie shrugged. “People spent their working lives learning a technology, and that’s a pretty deep commitment. That nice lady in Pale Bluff was a Gregg shorthand expert, probably one of the youngest and last I would guess.”
“Steam trains, though? Too far in the past; no one nowadays grew up around them.”
“Oh, well, as far as I can tell, steam trains are a religion. We think that the United States might have as many as two hundred working steam locomotives, eighty-four of them narrow-gauge. Anyway, the bottom line is this: If James and Leslie are giving me an accurate picture, in their warehouses, they have all, or almost all, the information we need to get people at least back to a 1940s or 1950s level of comfort—much of it on reserve printing plates, which means with some materials and training, enough to paper the country with it. GPO is a huge repository of how to do everything, and we just need to get a train running down to them, find them the paper and ink and maybe some spare parts, and feed them regularly.”
Heather smiled, thinking how happy Leslie and James must have been after their meeting with Allie. “So I did good putting them in touch with you? This is about as excited as I’ve seen you get about anything since Daybreak.”
“You did brilliantly. And of course I’m jacked about this, Heather, if I’d been smart enough I’d’ve been praying for Pueblo or something like it to turn up—they have so much potential for knitting the country together. Back when distances were bigger and travel wasn’t common, that used to be one of the things that reminded people they were Americans, not just Nebraskans or whatever—that little pamphlet from the Federal government about how to keep milk from spoiling, or how to build a tower for your windmill. Hah, now there’s a view!”
The land fell away to the south and west as they descended the long curve, and below them a deep lake, surrounded by redrock, reflected the sky back. “I’ve driven through here but never seen what it looked like—my eyes were always on the road ahead, too much to worry about,” Heather said. “Speaking of which… you think we’ll find a way to bring Cam and Graham back together?”
“I think Graham still hopes so, but as for me—”
“We’re
coming up on Glenwood Springs,” Sherry said, sticking her head up from the stairway below. “Nobody’s told me if that’s Colorado or Utah.”
“Colorado,” Heather said. “Two more stops before Utah. I should splash some water on my face; it’s my turn to be standing near Graham, looking attentive and visibly holding a gun.”
As Heather heard the speech for the fourth time and ostentatiously looked over the crowd, hoping to seem intimidating, Allie was standing pretty close to Graham Weisbrod and shining Nancy-Reagan-style adoration at him.
Crap. Innocent or not, this is gonna weird out Arnie, and I need him not crazy. And I don’t really think it’s innocent.
Furthermore… Graham had been a media darling for a long time and knew how to work a crowd. But had he always enjoyed it quite this much? Maybe we need a politician for this job, but I’m not sure I wanted the politician to be Graham. This is the guy who used to tell me that I knew better; I wonder, nowadays, if he does?
THE NEXT DAY. ATHENS. TNG DISTRICT. (ATHENS. GEORGIA.) 10:30 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 25.
It wasn’t the worst prison in the world; they fed him the same as they did the guards, and he was allowed notebooks and paper, and the time to sit and write.
When the summons came, the guard said, “While you’re meeting with the NCCC, we’re supposed to pack all your things. He said to ask you if the notebooks go in a special order, and if you’d rather have them any particular place in this.”
The man held up a canvas/steel rucksack that was probably an antique, since there was no whiff of rotting plastic or nylon about it.
“If this one goes in this outside pocket,” Chris said, “with a few pens, so I can whip it out and write fast, that would be great. The older ones over there on the bench should all go in on top of my spare boots and clothes, so they won’t get damp from just setting the pack down, but not too close to the top in case rain leaks in.”
