by Joe Haldeman
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But there’s the clincher. I looked to see if there’s a file on you. There is; it’s Class Five, too.
“This morning my supervisor called me in. There was a woman with him, from Internal Security. She asked me about you and Benny. I gave her a mixture of truth and bullshit. Evidently they don’t yet know we’re married, and I don’t think they know I called in about Benny from Geneva. It must be part of his file, but the thing is almost a hundred thousand words long. It’s not likely she read it all. But she might, now.”
“What will they do to you?”
“I don’t know. What I should do is go back to Vegas and get a dryclean, then go down to the Cape and wait But I don’t have the hush money. That’s what got Benny. A straight dryclean and the Bureau has a file on you in five minutes.”
“How much does it cost?”
“Oh, hell. Twenty-five, thirty thousand.”
“I’ve got it” I picked up my bag and ripped out the bottom lining. I held out a handful of gold coins. “Take it” He hefted them. “I’ve never seen so much gold.”
“They told me it was the best thing I could bring back to New New. Credit per se isn’t worth much, with the embargo on. The gold is valuable as a metal, for electronics.”
“How much is this worth?” I told him, $38,000. He handed back two coins and put the rest in his pocket “Looks like we’re making a hobby out of saving each other’s life.”
“You think the FBI would have you killed?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
The radio chimed. “Ground yourself,” a bored voice said. “Arizona State Police.”
He put his hand on the stick. “I could outrun them…” Instead, he touched this throat. “You guys have vision?”
“Channel Nine.”
Jeff punched something on the dash, took out his wallet and held it open in front of a lens. “FBI business, all right?”
The radar became a flatscreen, a man in uniform peering intently. “You’re coming out of Nevada. Is it that kidnapping?”
He used a voice I’d never heard. “Do you want to have your job tomorrow?”
The man stared for a second. “Understood. I didn’t see you.”
“Four other vehicles without numbers. Some of them may come into your airspace.”
He smiled. “I sure don’t see them on the scope.”
“Thanks. Endit.”
“Good hunting.”
Jeff switched the screen back to radar. “No love lost between Arizona and Nevada.” He punched some more buttons and let go of the wheel. “Game plan. When we get to the garage, we call a cab for you. You go straight to the tube station and take the first one out. Anywhere. Then transfer to Atlanta.”
“I don’t want to desert you.”
“You won’t be. Don’t worry. I’ll get my squad straight, have my second turn in the equipment, and then go back to Vegas. Take me six, maybe eight hours for the dry clean. No surgery, just a wig and a beard. I’ll meet you at Cape Town, sovereign territory, should be safe for both of us.
“You’ve been in the news, so you might be recognized. Play dumb—‘A lot of people say I look like her’-but if you get cornered, say you were rescued by five people who said they’d been hired by the New New York Corporation. I don’t think New New York would deny it.”
“All right. But isn’t it dangerous for you to be going back to Denver? If the FBI’s after your hide in New York, don’t you think the word may have spread?”
“There’s a chance,” he admitted. “But there’s no big staff in Denver, and only one person on night duty. No one in New York knows I’m gone, though I’m supposed to meet with my supervisor in about twelve hours. I’ll be on my way to Cape Town by then.”
“You don’t expect any trouble in Las Vegas?”
“Well, I did kill a man there, which is something they don’t like outsiders to do.”
“He was an outsider himself, if that makes any difference.”
“It might But it’s not really worth worrying about. The only people who could link me to that murder are your bodyguard, who has troubles of his own by now, and my informer, who’s an FBI agent herself.”
“Does the murder bother you?”
He shook his head. “Just a little. I tiptoed down the staircase with a gas grenade in my left hand and laser in my right. When I saw the man in the hall I tossed the gas grenade, but I was never any good with my left hand. It bunced off the wall and fell short The guy jumped out of his chair and drew two guns.
“It was like-the last time. His reflexes versus mine. I won again, but it doesn’t have the feeling of victory. And I never want to do it again.”
“You won’t have to. There aren’t any guns in New New York.”
“Wonderful.” He stretched. “We’re almost an hour from Denver. Long night ahead of us both; we ought to nap.”
I had one of those strange Klonexine dreams. A small glass dinosaur was in the floater with us, jumping around, clacking its jaws. Finally Jeff caught it, pulled back the canopy, and threw it out. I woke up when that happened.
“Denver,” Jeff said. It was beautiful at night, the golden lights in graceful geometry spreading out to the horizon.
While I was gazing, the lights went out, every one.
42
What happened behind their backs (1)
O’Hara didn’t cause it. It happened because of a defiant credit transfer, and because of unusual industry on the part of the Third Revolution, and because of a multitude of minor factors, one of which was a difference of opinion as to who should ransom O’Hara. But initially it was the credit transfer.
In their first payment since New New demanded the rate increase, New York State defiantly paid at the old rate. At the same time they sent to New New York, both in orbit and at the Cape, a seven-page brief defending their right to do so. Coordinators Markus and Berrigan turned the brief over to the one person in New New who was an expert in American contract law. Then they announced that the solar power satellite needed maintenance, and they switched it off, at exactly five o’clock in the afternoon, Eastern time.
New York State had not been quite honest when they claimed that New New’s powersat supplied only ten percent of their electricity. The real figure fluctuated between forty and fifty percent. When the satellite was turned off, everything went out of kilter.
It was a bad time for a blackout. People who left work a little early were stuck in darkened subways; others, in frozen elevators or abruptly inert office buildings—some facing an hour-long descent down lightless fire stairs. A few dozen died of heart attacks.
There was an interstate power net that kept the Eastern Seaboard operating smoothly. New York tried to suck power out of it, but it was too great a demand, all at once. There were blackouts and brownouts and crippling power surges from Boston to Norfolk.
Under the best of conditions it would have been the next morning before everything got straightened out. But conditions could hardly have been worse.
In an office building in Washington, the man who had requested that O’Hara be kidnapped considered the chaos around him. He went to a very private telephone and called three people. Then he went upstairs and discreetly murdered his boss, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By midnight he was sitting in a well-appointed bunker under the hills of West Virginia.
Exactly at midnight, several hundred thousand acts of sabotage were carried out. They ranged in magnitude from the snipping of a cable in Des Moines to the detonation of nuclear weapons in Washington and Chicago.
The Third Revolution began at midnight and was effectively over by 12:01, though the fighting would go on until it was no longer relevant. It happened a month early. The original plans called for April 13th, Good Friday, but the confusion over the power loss was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Their slogan, “Power to the People,” was not original but it did have a certain ironic force: in the
sense of being able to turn on a switch or plug something into the wall, most of the people would never have power, ever again.
43
The beginning of the end
“What the hell is going on?” Jeff said quietly. On the dash of the floater a red light blinked several times and then glowed constantly: EMERGENCY POWER.
Jeff brought the floater down to treetop level, searched, and drifted down onto a baseball diamond. “It’s not just Denver,” he said. “The carrier wave this thing runs on is federally maintained.”
We tried all the civilian channels on the flatscreen and got nothing but a white square, until we found a Canadian station. It was from a French province, but a simultaneous translation in English slid along the bottom of the picture:
… OF A SCALE UNPARALLELED IN THE COUNTRY’S HISTORY AT LEAST TWO ATOM BOMBS HAVE EXPLODED, IN WASHINGTON AND CHICAGO THE SABOTAGE APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN DIRECTED MAINLY TOWARD POWER GENERATION AND TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS, AND COMMUNICATION THE GROUP RESPONSIBLE HAS-IDENTIFIED ITSELF AS LA TROISIEME REVOLUTION *CORRECTION* THE THIRD REVOLUTION AND CLAIMS TO HAVE OVER A MILLION MEMBERS UNDER ARMS THE REVOLUTION’S LEADER, WHO CALLS HIMSELF PROVISIONAL PRESIDENT, IS RICHARD CONKLIN—
“My God!” Jeff said.
—WHO IS ALSO THE ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION A STATEMENT FROM HIM IS FORTHCOMING.
IT IS NOT KNOWN HOW MANY OF THE COUNTRY’S LEADERS SURVIVED THE DESTRUCTION OF DOWNTOWN WASHINGTON THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE HAS DECLARED A COUNTRY-WIDE STATE OF MARTIAL LAW, ORDERING ALL MILITARY PERSONNEL TO REPORT TO THEIR UNITS, INCLUDING THB SEMI-CIVILIAN NATIONAL GUARD.
The message was repeated, and we were urged to stay tuned for further developments. Jeff turned it off.
“I don’t know how far we can get on emergency power. Probably not as far as the Cape. Have to try, though.”
“How long do you think the power will be off?”
“Depends on how thorough they were. Suppose they actually destroyed all of the country’s major generators? A couple of thousand people could do the trick, with moderate training.” He typed out directions for the autopilot and we drifted up off the grass with barely perceptible acceleration.
“We can’t make new generators without energy. We can’t do anything. Get food to cities…”
“I wonder if it’s the group Benny and I were involved with.”
“Probably. And with Conklin at the head of it, going to the Bureau is what got him killed. What I wonder is how much of the Bureau is involved? How much of the police and military?”
For hours we watched the screen, cruising slowly to conserve power. We got an outline of the catastrophe’s dimensions.
New York City was in chaos, a three-way firefight among police, looters, and revolutionaries. From most cities, there was no communication at all. Satellite photos showed that Pittsburgh and Los Angeles were in flames.
Canada, Mexico, and Nevada had all closed their borders. The revolution was condemned by most of Common Europe but cautiously endorsed by the Supreme Socialist Union.
There were more than ten thousand people caught in the interstate tube system. Rescue operations were under way, but most of them would suffocate. Thousands had died because their floaters’ failsafes didn’t work.
New New York denied having anything to do with it, but the timing of their turning off the powersat convinced at least one commentator that they were part of the revolution.
“That’s not possible, is it?” Jeff asked.
“I can’t see it. Nobody’s much interested in Earth politics except as it affects the price we get for steel and electricity. This 3R gang isn’t going to help the market any.
“Besides, the Worlds are all pacifistic. We’re too vulnerable to get involved in revolutions and wars.”
“You’re involved in this one, I’m afraid.” It would be two days before we found out how catastrophically true that was.
44
What happened behind their backs (2)
The U.S. military had game plans for everything, even revolution. They even had plans for what to do in case parts of the military were on the other side.
What they didn’t have a game plan for was the case where the man ultimately in charge of personnel allocation, a four-star general in the Pentagon, happened to be on the other side. Thus whole regiments, even divisions, were composed entirely of 3R members. They were all dispersed—“night maneuvers”—when the revolution started.
There were also game plans, of course, for retaliation. You could push a button and wipe out Cuba, or France, or the entire Supreme Socialist Union. A short-tempered and prejudiced man, who could only have been overruled by people who were vaporized by the Washington bomb, pushed the button for Worlds.
Nearly two hundred missiles leaped from the sea toward forty-one targets in various orbits. It was bloody murder.
The killer missiles were not nuclear. They were in essence giant shotgun shells, each blasting tonnes of metal shrapnel in east-to-west orbits calculated to intercept each World’s orbit as the World rolled west to east, the shrapnel impacting with meteoric velocity.
The missiles were rather old, dating back to the 2035 SALT XI agreement. But they had been scrupulously maintained, and most of them did their job well.
Most of the smaller Worlds, such as Von Braun and the twins Mazeltov/B’ism’illah Ma’sha’llah, were instantly and utterly destroyed. Devon’s World had a huge chunk torn out of its side, and the ninety percent of the population who were not at that time inside the hub or spokes all died of explosive decompression.
Some of the Worlds had up to thirty minutes’ warning. Three quarters of Tsiolkovski’s population survived, since it was made up of a series of airtight compartments: they’d had enough time to calculate the direction from which the brutal salvo would come and move nearly everyone to the other side. Uchūden braced itself for death, but the cloud of metal missed it by hundreds of kilometers. The nimble Worlds Galileo, OAO, and Bellcom Four were able to dodge in time.
Only one person died in New New York: a shotgun can’t do much against a mountain. A few scraps of metal smashed through the observation dome, and one of them killed a janitor. Air loss was insignificant.
But the fifty missiles aimed at New New York hadn’t been intended to penetrate the hollow rock. What they did do was reduce most of the solar panels to ribbons and disable the heat-exchange mechanism. If it couldn’t be repaired, a quarter of a million people would cook.
It took only three days to fix, though, and the loss of the surface solar panels was no problem. The powersat that had serviced the Eastern Seaboard hadn’t been a target, and it was easily pressed into service.
In the Worlds, fourteen thousand people had died in the first hour. Another five thousand would the over the weeks to follow, because New New was the only large World with its life support systems intact Shuttles brought a constant stream of refugees from Tsiolkovski and Devon’s World, but there were only so many shuttles and they could only move so fast.
Nineteen thousand dead is not a large number in historical context Three times that number died in the first hours of the battle of the Somme, for a scant kilometer of worthless mud; fifty times as many in the battle for the possession of Stalingrad; 2500 times as many during World War II. But the Decimation, as it came to be called, would be more important historically than any of these affairs.
It was not a “catalyst,” for a catalyst emerges from reaction unchanged.
It was not a “pivot,” because the forces had already been in motion for a long time.
It was an excuse.
45
Sunshine state
We made it to Florida, barely. A red FAILSAFE ENGAGED light blinked on and we descended rapidly toward a soft-looking pasture. Jeff steered us past a red barn and silo.
“We’re a little north of Gainesville,” he said. “If we can find a vehicle, we can get to the Cape in a day or two.”
We landed hard. Befo
re I could draw a new breath, Jeff had slid the canopy back, grabbed a weapon from behind the seat, and vaulted out “Get out quick,” he said.
It took me a while to untangle myself from the safety net, and then I just sort of dropped over the edge, lacking commando spirit. It was hard to feel too threatened with the dawn reflecting prettily off the dewy grass, birds cooing, clean country smells.
Jeff was peering over the floater’s stern, looking at a farmhouse about fifty meters away. “Wonder if—”
There was a loud gunshot and, at the same time, the fading whine of a bullet that must have bounced off the floater. I cringed down.
“Not smart!” Jeff shouted. Another shot; no ricochet Jeff aimed toward a tree (curious bell-shaped foliage) and a laser blast stabbed out. The middle of the tree burst into flame.
“That happens to your barn in five seconds,” he shouted,
“and then the silo, and then the house. Come out with your hands over your heads.”
“What the hell do you want?” The shout cracked on “hell.”
“Don’t you worry about what I want,” Jeff said. He fired again and a haystack burst into flame. “Worry about what I’ve got!”
A white-haired man came out of the farmhouse door, followed by two younger men and a young woman. They stood on the porch with their hands in the air.
“Come on up to the floater,” Jeff shouted. “We won’t hurt you.” He made a patting motion to me. “Stay down,” he whispered.
They walked up the incline toward us, having a little trouble on the slippery grass. Jeff didn’t move. When they were in front of us, he said, “Put your hands down. Move together, shoulder-to-shoulder. Now shuffle to the left… there.” They formed a human shield between him and the farmhouse.
He stood up and handed the laser rifle over to me. “Stay down, O’Hara. If there’s a shot, burn everything.” I wasn’t even sure which button to push. Jeff stepped around the end of the floater.