Every major city on both coasts was now entangled in a desperate flight. Police forces disintegrated as officers scrambled to rescue their own families. Hospitals and other emergency services broke down for the same reason. Those who gave up trying to get out of town and sought refuge in local churches and community centers often found them locked. Military and National Guard units could move quickly only by air.
So far there had been no tsunamis on the West Coast. Experts were cautiously optimistic.
The media was perhaps enjoying its finest hour. Mobile news teams were everywhere, dropping out of the sky to record and interview the terror-stricken and the desperate.
"Where are you headed, Mrs. Martinik?"
"Anywhere…"
People living in Denver, Kansas City, Indianapolis experienced a different kind of agony. There was hardly anyone who didn't have kids, friends, relatives in the path of the waves. But phone lines were down throughout the stricken areas.
Conditions elsewhere in the world were mixed. East Africa, the Middle East, and Asia had so far suffered less severely because they had not been directly exposed to the event. But debris was still falling, and the Earth's rotation was pushing them into the line of fire. Europe was being hit hard. Thousands were believed dead from Rome to the Gulf of Riga. Kiev in the Ukraine had, like Carlisle, been decimated by a meteor shower. Porto Alegre and Valparaiso had been inundated.
There was some good news: A tidal wave reported approaching Vancouver failed to arrive. At Pearl Harbor, the navy evacuated thousands of dependents onto warships in the face of approaching tsunamis. In Glasgow, city officials used trains, buses, and good planning to perform a similar feat.
Nations had already begun to assist one another with little regard to national borders. Russian military forces had arrived with food and medical aid at Kiev. While Poles rescued Latvians at Riga, Germans rescued Poles along the Pomeranian Coast. Italian relief agencies showed up in eastern France. Canadians were reported en route to New York.
There were some that night who were concluding, whatever else might happen, the human race would never be the same. Skyport Orbital Lab. 3:18 A.M.
Skyport was a geostationary satellite, orbiting permanently above the Galapagos Islands. The sky over the eastern Pacific was alight with the fine webwork of meteor showers. Tory knew what was happening on the ground. Along the Gulf Coast and in Mexico, giant storms had been generated by abrupt changes in temperature and air pressure. Hurricane-velocity winds and driving rain struck Mobile, New Orleans, Tampico, and Veracruz. The TV carried images of crushed bodies and broken wheelchairs, of soggy teddies and overturned buses. At Virginia Beach a desperate father tried unsuccessfully to save his kids from a wave by tying them to trees; at Wilmington a hospital attempted to ride out the rising sea, and lost its patients and virtually its entire professional staff. A Coast Guard helicopter off Atlantic City ran into wind shear at the wrong moment and went down in mountainous seas. Heroism and tragedy were everywhere.
Tory watched with eyes swollen from fighting back tears. Her own family lived in the area around St. Louis, so they at least were safe from the general devastation. But the POSIMs continued to go down, and she provided as much warning as she could. Usually it was thirty to forty minutes. It wasn't much, but it was a hell of a lot better than zero. And she was a big part of it, the woman they'd wanted to send home, at a time when they should have been beefing up.
She watched POSIM-27 sizzle into the atmosphere and disappear somewhere off Brazil. The cities of the Americas were usually ablaze with light, even at this hour. But tonight substantial sections of both continents had gone dark. Even the river of illumination that ran from Boston to Miami was at best patchy.
From here, from her perch thirty-six thousand kilometers over the Pacific, she sensed a rhythm to the strikes, a pattern of light and intensity and timing. Despite all that was happening below, this cosmic symphony was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. White House, Oval Office. 3:20 A.M.
Henry was staring at the papers scattered across his teak-wood desk, and at the images coming in on his notebook screen from Miami. His eyes were blurred, his head was warm, his hands were trembling. Emily had pleaded with him to call his personal physician, to get something to calm him down. But the last thing he needed now was a tranquilizer.
How many had died tonight?
They'd never know; and if there'd been a revolver handy, Henry Kolladner would have done the right thing and put a bullet in his head.
The door opened and Kerr looked in. "Henry?" he said.
The only light in the room, aside from the notebook, came from his desk lamp. He looked at it, a memento from the president of France. "I made the wrong call, Al." He felt drained, empty. "We should've started evacuating the cities as soon as we knew." He'd learned his lesson. Minutes before the eleven forty-five address, he'd committed the resources of the government to a complete evacuation of coastal cities throughout the nation. Too late, of course. Far too late.
"Sir, we did what we thought was right."
He shrugged. "It doesn't matter, Al. We've got a lot of dead people out there. It didn't have to happen."
For a long time neither man spoke. Then Kerr said, "Feinberg's been on the line again."
The despair in his voice was evident. Henry swung the chair around slowly and looked at his chief of staff, transfixing him.
"What is it this time?"
"POSIM-38. The one we got the NASA report about."
The president took a long breath. POSIM-38 would pass through the skies over China later that morning. It was big, but it was going to miss. "It is still going to miss, right?"
"Yeah. I just got off the line with him. The problem is that he says it'll be back."
"What?"
"He says it'll slow down during its passage through the atmosphere, and it'll start looping around the Earth. He can't say for sure, but he thinks it'll come down. Maybe pretty quick."
"My God. That son of a bitch is, what, ten blocks long?" Henry, for the first time, felt his disease. Like a living thing, it crept into his intestines and his lungs and curled around his spine. He found it hard to breathe.
"He says it's the trigger. If it lands, it's lights out everywhere. Ice age, famine, you name it."
"When?"
"He doesn't know. Depends on what happens to it as it passes through the atmosphere."
"Worst-case scenario?"
"Could be a couple of days."
Henry wiped perspiration from his brow and dug through the papers on his desk until he found the one he was looking for. "NASA says no immediate threat." His stomach felt as if it were wrapped in steel bands. "This Feinberg, is he-?"
"Our people think he's the best there is."
"Okay. Well, we're not going to sit here and take it. We'll nuke the son of a bitch." He tapped his finger on the NASA document. "It says here, closest approach at eight forty-seven. We'll take it out this morning and be done with it."
"I agree, Henry."
"Have NASA check Feinberg's numbers. See if they come up with the same results. Meantime, get Wilson on the line." Wilson was the air force chief of staff. "If NASA concurs with Feinberg, we'll do it."
Kerr violated his usual procedure by making a couple of quick calls while Henry waited, setting the process in motion. Then he turned again to the president. "There's something else we need to talk about, Henry. The District is vulnerable. I think we need to move inland ourselves. Just in case. I've taken the liberty of setting up an alternate command center at Peterson AFB."
Henry wanted to laugh, but his throat was dry. "Peterson? You want me to go to Colorado and sit on a mountain?"
"Peterson's not on a mountain, Henry."
"People hear Colorado, they think mountains. How's it going to look if the president, who told everybody to stay home, don't worry about the waves, everything's under control-if the goddam president clears out and heads for the mountains?"
"People are g
oing to be too busy to think about how it looks, Henry. Afterward, they'll be glad the government still has a head."
"Like hell they will. Not this head."
"Henry, we've got aircraft out there, and satellites, more spotters than we know what to do with, but the waves are hard to see. Until they get close. They're coming, some of them, at three hundred miles an hour." His eyes got round and hard. "You've got a lot of people working with you, Henry. If you want to expose yourself, it's one thing, but you have your staff to think about."
And Emily. But Emily had recognized the dilemma, had refused to leave when he'd suggested it earlier that evening.
The president could hear voices outside. "Al," he said, "the country's hanging by a thread tonight. If we've got any nonessential people left here, get them out. That includes the agents. But I just don't have time to be running around the country. The operations team is mostly military. Their job's here. With me. We stay."
7.
BBC BULLETIN. 8:21 A.M. BRITISH SUMMER TIME (3:21 A.M. EDT).
"This is Sidney Cain reporting from London." (His voice sounds unsteady.) "You're looking at the old financial district from a point close to where Waterloo Bridge used to be. Eyewitnesses say the crest of the wave was higher than Charing Cross Station. The downtown area is currently under about ten feet of water. Casualties are believed to number upward of a hundred thousand. And that may be a very conservative estimate. Emergency teams have begun to arrive, but they are going to have a very difficult time.
"Many-" (Voice breaks momentarily.) "Many of the landmarks have been destroyed. St. Paul's, as you can see, has collapsed. The roof is gone from the House of Parliament. The bridges are all down. Nelson seems to have survived. And Cleopatra's Needle. But not much else." (Another pause.) "Boats and supplies are already coming in from all over the British Isles. We've heard reports of a French flotilla en route across the Channel." (Struggles to say more. Gives up.) "Back to you, Clyde." Micro Flight Deck. 3:22 A.M.
Evelyn had insisted on staying with her. Saber had been too numb to object. They'd sat silently for a time and then begun to talk. About how she felt, and later about Tony, and Saber's ambitions, and finally about life support.
There was still a lot of rock out there. Saber reacted automatically to the occasional warnings on the scopes, shutting down the engine when necessary, changing the angle of propulsion, doing a creditably good job of steering clear of hazards. Of course, it was getting easier. The outer edge of the blast had blown past them so quickly that it had been sheer luck they'd survived. Now the debris was moving far more slowly relative to the bus. The result was that a human pilot could hope to react in a timely fashion.
Whenever she had to accelerate, Tony's body fell aft, out of sight, but after they'd been running without thrust for a while he'd drift back, as if he were trying to stay close to the flight deck. To her.
It was eerie, and she was grateful for Evelyn's presence.
Tony's death was hard to accept. He'd been endlessly competent, the man who believed he could do anything. A wasteland had opened inside her. She had not realized until she'd seen him out there, trailing at the end of the tether, how much she needed his support.
Now she was left in a bus with its life support shut off, no hope of rescue, and no way to repair the damage. There was one piece of good news: She had her communications back with Skyport. She'd described her situation, described it a second time for a supervisor.
They insisted she check the flight deck storage cabinets on the possibility there'd be an extra suit. When there was none, they told her they would stay with her and that their best people were working on a solution. She knew what that meant.
"No chance of a rescue mission?" asked Evelyn.
She shook her head. "No way anybody can reach us in time to do any good. Fact is, they'd be hard-pressed to get to us before we achieve Earth-orbit."
"When'll that be?"
"About twelve hours."
"We'll be breathing vacuum long before then," Evelyn said. "We need an idea."
Saber had never stopped trying to devise one. And she kept coming back to the moment when Tony had looked through the puncture into C deck and seen one of Bigfoot's plastic bags. "We might have a long shot," she said. Micro Passenger Cabin. 3:29 A.M.
The mood in the passenger cabin had become bleak. There had been talk of trying to go below without a p-suit, of using one of the air tanks and just gutting it out, of ripping off the hatch and recovering a suit from the lower deck and getting back with it. How long would all that take?
Five minutes? Ten? Surely, one of them could stand anything for five minutes.
Depends how long it takes to get the hatch open.
And there was the roadblock: getting past the hatch. But they really didn't have much choice except to try it. Either try it, or just get ready to open the airlock in a little while and accept death gracefully.
Charlie was easily the most physically endowed of the persons on board, so he agreed to try, thinking that if no solution was possible he'd just as soon get it over. The happy camaraderie of the dinner party now seemed light-years away.
So it happened that when Evelyn and Saber climbed down the ladder from the flight deck, they found Charlie, with his oxygen tank shoved into his belt, standing at the airlock.
"You have the right idea," said Saber. She was carrying a rumpled gray jumpsuit. "But you'll freeze pretty quick."
"It's better than just sitting here."
"I think you'll also be holding your breath. I doubt you could breathe, even with the mask."
"Who's driving the bus?" asked Charlie.
"I guess we're taking our chances now," Evelyn said. "We have a more immediate problem." She looked at Charlie. "But we do need you to go. We talked about it, and Saber wanted to try it, but there's the problem of getting through the hatch."
Charlie surveyed the other males. They were both on the frail side. Two women, and good old Charlie Haskell at six-four. "So we need a little muscle." Ordinarily, Charlie would have made a joke of it, but neither the smile nor the tone would come.
"That's right," said Saber. "We just have to get you some better equipment. But first, let me show you where the spare suit is." She drew a map of C deck, and marked off the middle of three storage cabinets. "Just pull the latch and it'll open. It comes in two pieces: the suit and the helmet. Don't forget the helmet, right?"
Charlie frowned, feeling insulted.
"Charlie," said Evelyn, "Things are going to fog up on you out there. Both your vision and your brain. It's not going to be a milk run."
"Why don't I try getting into the p-suit down there instead of bringing it back?"
"Too complicated and too dangerous," said Evelyn. "Let's keep it simple. Just bring it back."
"Okay, now let's try to give ourselves a chance," said Saber. She reached up, punched the overhead, and shook out one of the two remaining oxygen tanks.
"I've already got one," said Charlie.
"You've got a used one. Everything we have is running on this, Mr. Vice President. Let's get you a fresh tank."
Charlie decided he liked her. She was under more pressure than anybody, she'd just lost her captain, but she was keeping her composure. Tough woman. "Okay," he said.
"The stored suit should be all right. But there's a chance that whatever tore up the compartment also got the suit. If it did, you'll have to try to strip the one Bigfoot's wearing."
"That doesn't sound easy."
"It won't be."
"Better idea," said Evelyn. "If the suit's damaged, forget it. It'll probably be easier just to repair the oxygen line than try to get the suit off Bigfoot."
"That makes sense," said Saber. She handed him a roll of duct tape. "Take it with you."
"Duct tape? I'm going to fix the leak with duct tape?"
"Best thing we've got. Anyway, Mr. Vice President, if it's more complicated than that, we're dead." She held out the gray suit, which wasn't exactly a jump
suit but rather a top and a pair of leggings. Apparently made of Spandex. She measured them against him, adjusted them, and tried again. "This is going to be tight, but maybe that's just as well."
"What is it?" asked Charlie.
"It's a g-suit. It's mine, and it hasn't been washed and I apologize. It's underwear for a p-suit." She must have seen something in his face. "I'm serious," she said. "Look, air and temperature aren't the only problems. Your capillaries are going to burst. They'll go pretty quickly after you get outside. As that happens, you'll develop massive bruising. Enough of that and you're dead."
"How long's it take?"
"Don't know. I didn't pay enough attention because I never expected to go out without a suit. Or to send anyone else out. But not long, okay? The g-suit helps keep blood from pooling in the extremities under high g-forces. It also acts as a coolant. Which you're going to need."
Charlie looked at them doubtfully.
"Do it," said Evelyn.
"Not much respect here for the vice president," he told her. But he retreated to the washroom, climbed into the suit, and zippered up. It was tight. He pulled his clothes back on and returned to the cabin.
Evelyn inspected it. "Not much of a space suit," she said. There were no gloves, so the chaplain contributed a flannel shirt, which they tore up and taped to his hands. Saber produced a uniform jacket, cut it into strips, wrapped them around Charlie's feet, and secured them with tape.
She heard warning beeps from the flight deck and sent them all back to their seats while she hurried back up the ladder. Charlie sat down and buckled in. The engine roared to life and Saber moved them to a new course. Then she came back, carrying a wrench, a torch, and a pair of screwdrivers, which she set down beside the duct tape.
She looked at him and smiled. "Just the g-suit," she said. "You won't need your clothes."
"They'll help me keep warm," he protested.
"Keeping warm won't be a problem, Mr. Vice President. Take my word." Charlie, embarrassed, stripped off his shirt and stepped out of his trousers. Neither he nor Saber wore their oxygen masks during the preparations for the EVA, and the deadness of the air in the cabin spurred him on.
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