The Day After Judgement

by James Blish

  ‘Do you call atomizing Denver “restrained”?’ the General demanded.

  ‘Maybe. They could have done for Denver with one warhead, but instead they saturated it. That means they were shooting for us, not for the city proper. Our counterstrike couldn’t be preventive, so it was one rung lower, which I hope to God they noticed.’

  ‘They took Washington out,’ Šatvje said, clasping his fat hands piously. He had been lean once, but becoming first a consultant on the Cabinet level, next a spokesman for massive retaliation, and finally a publicity saint had appended a beer belly to his brain-puffed forehead, so that he now looked like a caricature of a nineteenth-century German philologist. Buelg himself was stocky and tended to run to lard, but a terrible susceptibility to kidney stones had kept him on a reasonable diet.

  ‘The Washington strike almost surely wasn’t directed against civilians,’ Buelg said. ‘Naturally the leadership of the enemy is a prime military target. But, General, all this happened so quickly that I doubt that anybody in government had a chance to reach prepared shelters. You may now be effectively the president of whatever is left of the United States, which means that you could make new policies.’

  ‘True,’ McKnight said. ‘True, true.’

  ‘In which case we’ve got to know the facts the minute our lines to outside are restored. Among other things, if the escalation’s gone all the way to spasm, in which case the planet will be uninhabitable. There’ll be nobody and nothing left alive but people in hardened sites, like us, and the only policy we’ll need for that will be a count of the canned beans.’

  ‘I think that needlessly pessimistic,’ Šatvje said, at last heaving himself up out of the chair into which he had struggled after getting up off the floor. It was not a very comfortable chair, but the computer room – where they had all been when the strike had come – had not been designed for comfort. He put his thumbs under the lapels of his insignia-less adviser’s uniform and frowned down upon them. ‘The Earth is a large planet, of its class; if we cannot reoccupy it, our descendants will be able to do so.’

  ‘After five thousand years?’

  ‘You are assuming that carbon bombs were used. Dirty bombs of that kind are obsolescent. That is why I so strongly advocated the sulphur-decay chain; the selenium isotopes are chemically all strongly poisonous, but they have very short half lives. A selenium bomb is essentially a humane bomb.’

  Šatvje was physically unable to pace, but he was beginning to stump back and forth. He was again playing back one of his popular magazine articles. Buelg began to twiddle his thumbs, as ostentatiously as possible.

  ‘It has sometimes occurred to me,’ Šatvje said, ‘that our discovery of how to release the nuclear energies was providential. Consider: Natural selection stopped for Man when he achieved control over his environment, and furthermore began to save the lives of all his weaklings, and preserve their bad genes. Once natural selection has been halted, then the only remaining pressure upon the race to evolve is mutation. Artificial radio-activity, and indeed even fallout itself, maybe God’s way of resuming the process of evolution for Man … perhaps towards some ultimate organism we cannot foresee, perhaps even towards some unitary mind which we will share with God, as Teilhardt de Chardin envisioned –’

  At this point, the General noticed the twiddling of Buelg’s thumbs.

  ‘Facts are what we need.’ he said. ‘I agree with you there, Buelg. But a good many of our lines to outside were cut, and there may have been some damage to the computer circuitry, too.’ He jerked his head towards the technicians who were scurrying around and up and down the face of RANDOMAC. ‘I’ve got them working on it. Naturally.’

  ‘I see that, but we’ll need some sort of rational schedule of questions. Is the escalation still going on, presuming we haven’t reached the insensate stage already? If it’s over, or at least suspended somehow, is the enemy sane enough not to start it again? And then, what’s the extent of the exterior damage? For that, we’ll need a visual readout – I assume there are still some satellites up, but we’ll want a closer look, if any local television survived.

  ‘And if you’re now the president, General, are you prepared to negotiate, if you’ve got any opposite numbers in the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic?’

  ‘There ought to be whole sets of such courses of action already programmed into the computer,’ McKnight said, ‘according to what the actual situation is. Is the machine going to be useless to us for anything but gaming, now that we really need it? Or have you been misleading me again?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t been misleading you. I wouldn’t play games with my own life as stakes. And there are indeed such alternative courses; I wrote most of them myself, though I didn’t do the actual programming. But no programme can encompass what a specific leader might decide to do, War gaming actual past battles – for example, rerunning Waterloo without allowing for Napoleon’s piles, or the heroism of the British squares – has produced “predicted” outcomes completely at variance with history. Computers are rational; people aren’t. Look at Agnew. That’s why I asked you my question – which, by the way, you haven’t yet answered.’

  McKnight pulled himself up and put his glasses back on.

  ‘I’ he said, ‘am prepared to negotiate. With anybody. Even Chinks.’

  2

  Rome was no more, nor was Milan. Neither were London, Paris, Berlin, Bonn, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Riyadh, Stockholm and a score of lesser cities. But these were of no immediate concern. As the satellites showed, their deaths had expectably laid out long, cigar-shaped, overlapping paths of fallout to the east - the direction in which, thanks to the rotation of the Earth, the weather inevitably moved – and though these unfortunately lay across once friendly terrain, they ended in enemy country. Similarly, the heavy toll in the USSR had sown its seed across Siberia and China; that in China across Japan, Korea and Taiwan; and the death of Tokyo was poisoning only a swath of the Pacific (although, later, some worry would have to be devoted to the fish). Honolulu somehow had been spared, so that no burden of direct heavy nuclear fallout would reach the West Coast of the United States.

  This was fortunate, for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle amd Spokane had all been hit, as had Denver, St Louis, Minneapolis, Chicago, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit and Dallas. Under the circumstances, it really hardly mattered that Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Syracuse, Boston, Toronto, Baltimore and Washington had all also got it, for even without bombs the Eastern third of the continental United States would have been uninhabitable in its entirety for at least fifteen years to come. At the moment, in any event, it consisted of a single vast forest fire through which, from the satellites, the slag pits of the bombed cities were invisible except as high spots in the radiation contours. The Northwest was in much the same shape, although the West Coast in general had taken far fewer missiles. Indeed, the sky all over the world was black with smoke, for the forests of Europe and northern Asia were burning too. Out of the pall, more death fell, gently, invisibly, inexorably.

  All this, of course, came from the computer analysis. Though there were television cameras in the satellites, even on a clear day you could hardly have told from visual sightings, from that height-nor from photographs, for that matter-even whether or not there was intelligent life on Earth. The view over Africa, South America, Australia and the American Southwest was better, but of no strategic or logistic interest, and never had been.

  Of the television cameras on the Earth’s surface, most of the surviving ones were in areas where nothing seemed to have happened at all, although in towns the streets were deserted, and the very few people glimpsed briefly on the screen looked haunted. The views from near the bombed areas were fragmentary, travelling, scarred by rasters, aflicker with electronic snow – a procession of unconnected images, like scenes from an early surrealist film, where one could not tell whether the director was trying to portray a story or only a state of mind.

  Here sto
od a single telephone pole, completely charred; here was a whole row of them, snapped off the ground level but still linked in death by their wires. Here was a desert of collapsed masonry, in the midst of which stood a reinforced-concrete smokestack, undamaged except that its surface was etched by heat and by the sand blasting of debris carried by a high wind. Here buildings all leaned sharply in a single direction, as if struck like the chimney by some hurricane of terrific proportions; here was what had been a group of manufacturing buildings, denuded of roofing and siding, nothing but twisted frames. Here a row of wrecked automobiles, neatly parked, burned in unison; here a gas holder, ruptured and collapsed, had burned out hours ago.

  Here was a side of a reinforced concrete building, windowless, cracked and buckled slightly inward where a shock wave had struck it. Once it had been painted grey or some dark colour, but all the paint had blistered and scaled and blown away in a second, except where a man had been standing nearby, there the paint remained, a shadow with no one to cast it.

  That vaporized man had been one of the lucky. Here stood another who had been in a cooler circle; evidently he had looked up at a fireball, for his eyes were only holes; he stood in a half crouch, holding his arms out from his sides like a penguin, and instead of skin, his naked body was covered with a charred fell which was cracked in places, oozing blood and pus. Here a filthy, tattered mob clambered along a road almost completely covered with rubble, howling with horror – though there was no sound with this scene – led by a hairless woman pushing a flaming baby carriage. Here a man who seemed to have had his back flayed by flying glass worked patiently with a bent snow shovel at the edge of an immense mound of broken brick; by the shape of its margins, it might once have been a large house…

  There was more.

  Šatvje uttered a long, complex, growling sentence of hatred. It was entirely in Czech, but its content was nevertheless not beyond, all conjecture. Buelg shrugged again and turned away from the TV screen.

  ‘Pretty fearful,’ he said. ‘But on the whole, not nearly as much destruction as we might have expected. It’s certainly gone no higher than Rung thirty-four. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to fit any of the escalation frames at all well. Maybe it makes some sort of military or strategic sense, but if it does, I’m at a loss to know what it is. General?’

  ‘Senseless,’ McKnight said. ‘Outsight senseless. Nobody’s been hurt in any decisive way. And yet the action seems to be over.’

  That was my impression.’ Buelg agreed. ‘There seems to be some missing factor. We’re going to have to ask the computer to scan for an anomaly. Luckily it’s likely to be a big one – but since I can’t tell the machine what kind of anomaly to look for, it’s going to cost us some time.’

  ‘How much time?’ McKnight said, running a finger around the inside of his collar. ‘If the Chinks start upon us again – ’

  ‘It may be as much as an hour, after I formulate the question and Chief Hay programmes it, which will take, oh, say two hours at a minimum. But I don’t think we need to worry about the Chinese; according to our data, that opening Taiwan bomb was the biggest one they used, so it was probably the biggest one they had. As for anyone else, well, you just finished saying yourself that somehow everything’s now stopped short. We badly need to find out why.’

  ‘All right. Get on it, then.’

  The two hours for programming, however, stretched to four; and then the computer ran for ninety minutes without producing anything at all, Chief Hay had thoughtfully forbidden the machine to reply DATA INSUFFICENT since new data were coming in at an increasing rate as communications with the outside improved; as a result, the computer was recycling the problem once every three or four seconds.

  McKnight used the time to issue orders that repairs to the keep be made, stores assessed, order restored, and then settled down to a telecommunications search – again via the computer, but requiring only about 2 per cent of its capacity – for any superiors who might have survived him. Buelg suspected that he really wanted to find some; he had the capacity to be a general officer, but would find it most uncomfortable to be a president, even over so abruptly simplified a population and economy – and foreign policy, for that matter – as the TV screen had shown now existed outside. Ordering junior officers to order noncommissioned officers to order rankers to replace broken fluorescent bulbs was the type of thing he didn’t mind doing on his own, but for ordering them to arm missiles and aim them, or put a state under martial law, he much preferred to be acting upon higher authority.

  As for Buelg’s own preference, he rather hoped that McKnight wouldn’t be able to find any such person. The United States under a McKnight regime wouldn’t be run very imaginatively or even flexibly, but on the other hand it would be unlikely to be a tyranny. Besides, McKnight was very dependent upon his civilian experts, and hence would be easy to manage. Of course, that meant that something would have to be done about Šatvje –

  Then the computer rang its bell and began to print out its analysis. Buelg read it with intense concentration, and after the first fold, utter incredulity. When it was all out of the printer, he tore it off, tossed it on to the desk and beckoned to Chief Hay.

  ‘Run the question again.’

  Hay turned to the input keyboard. It took him ten minutes to retype the programme; the question had been in the normal order of things too specialized to tape. Two and a half seconds after he had finished, the machine chimed and the long thin slabs of metal began to rise against the paper. The printing out process never failed to remind Buelg of a player piano running in reverse, converting notes into punches instead of the other way around, except, of course, that what one got here was not punches but lines of type. But he saw almost at once that the analysis itself was going to be the same as before, word for word.

  At the same time he became aware that Šatvje was standing just behind him.

  ‘About time,’ the Czech said. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  ‘There’s nothing to see yet.’

  ‘What do you mean, there’s nothing to see? It’s printing isn’t it? And you’ve already got another copy out on the bench. The General should have been notified immediately.’

  He picked up the long, wide accordion fold of paper with its sprocket-punched edges and began to read it. There was nothing Buelg could do to prevent him.

  ‘The machine’s printing nonsense, that’s what I mean, and I didn’t propose to distract the General with a lot of garbage. The bombing must have jarred something loose.’

  Hay turned from the keyboard. ‘I ran a test programme through promptly after the attack, Doctor Buelg. The computer was functioning perfectly then.’

  ‘Well, clearly it isn’t now. Run your test programme again, find out where the trouble lies, and let us know how long it will take to repair it. If we can’t trust the computer, we’re out of business for sure.’

  Hay got to work. Šatvje put the readout down.

  ‘What’s nonsense about this?’ he said.

  ‘It’s utterly impossible, that’s all. There hasn’t been time. With any sort of engineering training, you’d know that yourself. And it makes no military or political sense, either.

  ‘I think we should let the General be the judge of that.’

  Picking up the bulky strip again, Šatvje carried it off towards the General’s office, a certain subtle triumph in his gait, like the school trusty bearing the evidence of petty theft to the head master. Buelg followed, inwardly raging, and not only at the waste motion. Šatvje would of course tell McKnight that Buelg had been holding back on reporting the analysis; all Buelg could do now, until the machine was repaired, was to be sure to be there to explain why, and the posture was much too purely defensive for his liking. It was a damn shame that he had ever taught Šatvje to read a printout, but once they had been thrown together on this job, he had had no choice in the matter. McKnight had been as suspicious as a Sealyham of both of them, anyhow, at the beginning. Šatvje, after all had come
from a country which had long been Communist, and had had to explain that his ancestry was French, his name only a Serbo-Croat transliteration back from the Cyrillic of Chatvieux;’ while Security had unfortunately confused Buelg with Johann Gottfried Jülg, a forgotten nineteenth-century translator of Ardshi Bordschi Khan, the Siddhi Kur, the Skaskas and other Russian folk tales, so that Buelg, even more demeaningly, had had to admit that his name was actually a Yiddish version of a German word for a leather bucket. Under McKnight’s eye, the two still possibly suspect civilians had to cooperate or be downgraded into some unremunerative university post. Buelg supposed that Šatvje had enjoyed it as little as he had, but he didn’t care an iota about what Šatvje did or didn’t enjoy, Damn the man.

  As for the document itself, it was no masterpiece of analysis. The machine had simply at last recognized an anomaly in a late-coming piece of new data. It was the interpretation that made Buelg suspect that the gadget had malfunctioned; unlike Šatvje, he had had enough experience of computers at RAND to know that if they were not allowed enough warm-up time, or had been improperly cleared of a previous programme, they could produce remarkably paranoid fantsies.

  Translated from the Fortran, the document said that the United States had not only been hit by missiles, but also deeply invaded. This conclusion had been drawn from a satellite sighting of something in Death Valley, not there yesterday, which was not natural, and whose size, shape and energy output suggested an enormous fortress.

  ‘Which is just plain idiotic,’ Buelg added, after the political backing and filling in McKnight’s office had been gone through to nobody’s final advantage. ‘On any count you care to name. The air drops required to get the materials in there, or the sea landings plus overland movements, couldn’t have gone undetected. Then, strategically it’s insane: the building of targets like fortresses should have become obsolete with the invention of the cannon, and the airplane made them absurd. Locating such a thing in Death Valley means that it dominates nothing but utterly worthless territory, at the price of insuperable supply problems – right from the start it’s in a state of siege, by Nature alone. And as for running it up overnight – I ask you, General, could we have done that, even in peacetime and in the most favourable imaginable location? I say we couldn’t, and that if we couldn’t, no human agency could.’