Alia ignored him. Grabbing Kev Jamison’s shoulder, she said urgently, “What military bases are still on-line? Get me one of them now! Any of them!”
“Alia!” Minden’s voice was a hysterical shriek. “Alia, call Tor! Call him now!”
Then the lights went out.
The Ranch House at Shortgrass Steppe Biome,
Lab XJ2197
Niklas woke with a start, panting a little. The fading remnants of a nightmare came to him, one in which he’d been enclosed in a shiny steel box and unable to get out. It hadn’t been a coffin, but that didn’t matter; the claustrophobic feel had been scary enough.
He reached across the bed for Gildan, but found only empty sheets. That’s right, he thought groggily, she’s gone out to the barn to check on her—what was it? Cow? Vulture? Gopher? Whatever. Waste of time and sleep. Then he noticed that he couldn’t see her spot across the bed. He always left a muted light on in the bathroom, which normally lit the bedroom in a pale, bland light during the night. It was off now.The bulb must have burned out. Blasted filaments, only last a few days . . . and my precious chaco—rotten little insects! You’d think they had organized a rebellion! Niklas’s lack of success with formulating the organism as his dreamed-of superconductors was actually what had set him off on this downhill slide of drink and mindless and careless intimacies with such women as Gildan Ives. It made his head ache to think about it.
Groaning, stiff, the nightmare almost forgotten now, he groped his way to the kitchen of the ranch house, barking his shin on the edge of an end table on the way. “Man, this is some for-real dark,” he said aloud. He felt along the wall and pushed the light button near the sofa.Nothing. Niklas cursed and rounded the sofa, this time stubbing his bare toe, causing more, and more passionate, swearing. He found the remote to the Cyclops and by touch and memory pushed “on.”
The Cyclops screen remained blank.
For the first time he realized that the red eye of standby mode wasn’t even glowing.
“What—what’s happening?” Niklas muttered. If the Cyclops was out—something that would never, ever be allowed to happen, food for the masses and all that—then that meant that there was no power. But how could there be no power? The lab had not one but two redundant power generators . . . And besides, what about the Cyclops internal battery?
The pain from his headache, barked shin, and stubbed toe faded away as he struggled to grasp the situation. “It’s not possible!” he said aloud to the blank Cyclops screen. “If there’s no power, even for a few hours . . .”
Suddenly he broke out in a sour sweat beneath his cotton pajamas.He groped his way into the elevator bedroom, his breath hitching in and out almost in hiccups. His eyes had grown adjusted somewhat to the inky blackness, and with a shaking hand he reached out and pushed the button to withdraw the phony wooden wall to reveal the elevator. It didn’t budge. He pushed it again, more insistently, and then he was slamming the palm of his hand against it to no avail.
“This can’t be happening. This is not happening!”
But of course it was.
He thought of the personnel trapped underground in the huge five-story facility. What must they be thinking at this moment? All two hundred of them? He had a good idea of what was going on beneath his feet, hundreds of feet down, and it was a lot worse panic than he felt at this moment.
Niklas stepped forward and pressed his ear to the wall. Suddenly he stiffened. The dream came back to him, his screaming and flailing at the lid of the box, trying to dig his fingernails into the smooth steel.
Niklas Kesteven, brilliant scientist, champion of the power of logic, thought he heard screams coming from the elevator shaft behind the wall. He knew, in the deep recesses of his mind, that this was a physical impossibility. The elevator and all levels below were hermetically sealed from the surface of the earth. Completely airtight. No human ear could possibly pick up any sound waves from that buried titanium-enforced steel canister.
But still he thought he heard faint, muted screams from two hundred doomed people.
Niklas raced through the great room, out into the yard to the woodpile, and snatched up an ax. His heart was pounding so fast and hard that it occurred to him that he might have a heart attack. But the horror of the screaming—it was getting louder, wasn’t it?—pushed aside any thought of himself.
Back in the bedroom, he began swinging the ax into the wall with clumsy but powerful strokes. Sweat stung his eyes, but he didn’t care.He couldn’t hear the screaming over his own desperate gasps and the sound of the blade biting into the wood, but he knew the awful sounds were still there. The wall began to come apart, and he attacked with even more vigor. Once the ax head exploded through to strike the elevator door itself with a fearsome shower of sparks.
Finally Niklas dropped the ax and began tearing at the splintered paneling until he’d created an opening large enough for him to step through. He placed his ear against the cold, dense door and listened through his ragged breathing.
Still there. Faint, very faint, but still he heard desperate screams.Cries for help from his fellow scientists and coworkers. Some of them he called friends. Some of them he had even loved.
Niklas sat down heavily amid the litter of splintered wood on the cold floor and stared into the unforgiving darkness.
TWENTY
Considering that there were almost five thousand commercial airplanes in the sky, and that all of America went dark in less than two hours, there were very few accidents. Those that were in the process of landing when they lost runway lights and communication were actually in the most danger, for by now the ohm-bug was fully airborne and started hungrily attacking the great electrical monsters as soon as they touched down. Most of the jets were starting to lose their systems by the time they were parked. Others never got to their designated terminals, and it didn’t take long before the pilots started just heading off the runways anywhere they saw a hole as soon as they landed and slowed.
The air traffic controllers, in their tense and dark rooms, were always walking the thin edge of nervous breakdown anyway. When their screens went dark and their lights went out and their telephones went dead, most of the male controllers started sweating and shouting, while many of the women went into wailing hysterics. The ones in between were sort of catatonic, walking around with blank looks on their faces, pushing buttons and picking up dead Cyclops transceivers and humming little tunes.
The only thing that saved the thousands of people on the planes were the pilots and, of all things, the baggage handlers. The pilots, whose planes were functioning perfectly even if the ground was going nuts, went into automatic emergency mode, and stayed cool.
The baggage handlers, better than anyone, understood immediately how important it was going to be to keep all runways clear, all the side runs clear, and even the fields surrounding the airports clear. By the thousands, they formed into crews to get the planes that were still landing bunched up as close to the terminals as possible while they were still running. They were the ones who figured out that the cheap little flashlights worked when the big lanterns didn’t. They were the ones who knew where the luminous signal lanterns were stashed in the cavernous storage spaces—now dark— under the miles of terminals. They were the ones who quickly formed into teams to get people away from the runways as they deplaned from the emergency chutes.
Still, there were terrible tragedies. At Chicago’s O’Hare, a jumbo 810 landed and the pilot, who was nervous, jogged just a bit to the left. His wing barely tapped another 810 that had landed and only had time to pull off the runway onto the bordering field before it died. The moving 810 ricocheted like a wild bullet, spun around, then wheeled into the tightly packed row of stranded planes at the side of the long strip. The explosions that followed killed everyone on board the 810, eighty-nine others who were still evacuating a 787, and sixty-three people—mostly baggage handlers and airline crews—who were working around the planes. Fourteen other people who were standing
almost half a mile away on another runway received second-degree heat burns from the fireball.
Twyla Lee Halston was piloting a GlobeNet 787 into John F. Kennedy Airport—or trying to. She had been in a holding pattern at 42,000 feet for six hours. The pilots of all the jumbos had immediately logged on to the emergency band as soon as they’d lost ground communication, so they were talking to one another. Soon an authoritative-sounding pilot for GlobeNet by the name of John Smithson had taken over the air traffic control, and so far he’d done pretty well. The smaller planes had all diverted to the private airfields so the seventy-nine jumbos circling the dark airport had managed to stay out of one another’s way without getting swatted by, or barreling into, the little guys. Smithson had managed to get thirty-two of the jumbos landed so far.
But now three of them were in trouble, because they had been international flights and were low on fuel. Twyla Lee’s bird was one of these, as she had just completed what was to be her last Paris run. Smithson hadn’t tried to change everyone’s altitude; he’d barely been able to compute who was where and get the bottom-most ones down first. Trying to land the jets according to any other priorities was just impossible.
“GlobeNet 555, this is Smithson. How you holding out?”
“Captain Smithson, I’m holding my breath so as not to use so much fuel. Is it our turn yet? I mean, I’m not too worried, but my copilot’s in the john losing her dinner. For the fourth time.” Twyla Lee tried to speak lightly, but she was still afraid that she sounded whiny. In the eerie green glow of her instruments, her plain features drew down into a deep frown.
John Smithson’s even tones grew deeper. “555, you out of a copilot?”
Twyla Lee sighed, then cleared her throat before answering in a bloodless tone, “Yes, sir. My copilot is—unable to assist at this time.” The silly girl had gone off the deep end in about thirty minutes. Twyla Lee had decided that her screeching and crying had been worse than facing this all by herself, and had sent the panic-stricken woman back to the cabin.
A long silence ensued, and it took all the self-control Twyla Lee had not to key in the mike and beg Smithson to talk to her.
Finally he came back and calmly said, “Twyla Lee, we’ve still got four heavies under you that we’ve got to get down and out of the way. That’s about another hour. What do you think?”
Bleakly she answered, “I have about twenty minutes left, Captain.”
Another long silence. Twyla bit her lip so hard that she tasted salty blood on her tongue.
“Okay, here’s what we’ve got, Twyla Lee,” Smithson said in a businesslike voice. “You could try Cannery Airfield in east Jersey. It’s the only old military field that’s got a runway long enough. But that’s one of the old ones that some of the smaller planes were going to divert to—twelve that I know of. And you know we haven’t had any communication from any of them after touchdown.”
“Yes, sir, I know. Is that my only option?”
“That’s the only airfield that might be possible. Your only other options are the interstates.”
Twyla Lee swallowed hard, but when she answered her voice was as composed as John Smithson’s. “Sir, do we have any idea at all about the auto traffic? Are the roads cleared, are they congested— can anyone even see anything on them?”
“Sorry, 555. No word on them, except that a couple of the landed flights have reported that even the interstates are blacked out.”
“But—what about car lights?” Twyla shot back.
“They—it would seem that either there aren’t any cars on the interstates, or . . .”
“Or they’re stacked up there, dead,” Twyla Lee finished in a dry voice.
No answer.
Finally Twyla Lee keyed in her mike, and said quietly, “Captain Smithson, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you. You’ve been a real hero.”
“No. You’re the hero, Twyla Lee,” he said quietly. “God go with you.”
So quietly she could scarcely be heard, John Smithson heard her say, “Pray for us. 555 signing off.”
Twelve minutes later GlobeNet Flight 555 crashed into a line of cars on 278 on Staten Island. All 273 souls aboard perished, and 18 stranded motorists were killed.
At 28,000 feet above John F. Kennedy Airport, John saw the fireball rise into the sky and whispered, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death . . .”
In the United States of America in the year 2050, a total of 743,989 elevators rode their vertical cables every day. However, only about half of them were ever in use at one time, mostly because of the massive migration to the huge co-op cities. Had the ohm-bug struck during peak business hours, the results would have been much worse, but that was little consolation to the 232,620 souls who became trapped in these elevators, some as high as seventy stories.
Quite a few industrious and athletic individuals climbed out and brought back help for their stranded colleagues. Some of the elevators stopped exactly even with a floor, and the occupants were able to jam open the doors through brute strength and escape. Others were saved by relatives or friends who figured out where they were over the next two days.
Others weren’t so lucky.
Those who had no loved ones and weren’t able to get out numbered 1,236. Eventually they succumbed to exhaustion and thirst. One hundred and twelve people plunged to their deaths trying to climb the grease-slick cables. Sixty-four perished from medical conditions ranging from heart attacks to lack of maintenance drugs for certain illnesses. Not all rescue attempts were successful: 144 people died from panicked attempts at getting them out, some falling down the shafts, some slipping from inadequately secured lines, some simply losing their grips on the last human touch—a rescuer’s grip. Claustrophobic suicides, some ill-disguised as escape attempts, numbered twenty-three. Murders numbered eighteen.
The tragedies did not discriminate between young and old, rich and poor; all races and religions and political persuasions were included. Forever after, elevators were simply referred to as “death boxes.”
Senator Donald Black of Wyoming had decided to treat some of his aides and good friends to a ski trip as reward for their hard work in getting him reelected to his fourth term. No partners or wives were present, but the senator—ever the accommodating host—had arranged for companions for everyone according to their particular tastes. All were in a fine mood as they rode the ski lifts to the top of the mountain for one last dash down the slope. When the lifts came to a dead halt halfway up, they laughed it off, joked about how the Jackson Hole ski lift system was about as reliable as Congress, and enjoyed the view from their fifteen-hundred-foot height.
Night fell, and with it came the biting wind and a few flakes of snow from an oncoming blizzard they had been warned of, but had not cared about on that bright and silvery morning. Their screams to the operators and people on the ground could be heard, at first, anyway. Of course, there was nothing anyone could do. A healthy, fit Wall Street executive named Banyon fell to his death as he tried to climb back down the cable. In the cruel cold, his strength left him after only a few hundred feet. A few others tried, with the same result. Their screams as they fell echoed magnificently.
Senator Black had never comprehended just how cold his home state could get in the heights of the Rocky Mountains. That night he finally understood. He and his companion, a wispy-faced boy of only twenty, huddled together through the night, trying to keep themselves warm through the blizzard. It worked for about two hours, and then they went to sleep and never woke up.
Ski lift deaths across the icy West totaled 578.
Besides being an island, Manhattan had been a world unto itself for over a century, and in the previous four decades that had changed the face of America forever, Manhattan had remained largely untouched. The only major difference the dictates of the Man and Biosphere Project had
made to the island was the fire that had devastated Central Park in ‘22. The park had been mandated for “re-wilding” in 2010, which meant that the awful, dirty, polluting people had been forbidden to enter the park, except for the wide walks around the perimeter. The interior was soon ruled by brambles and thickets, rats and noisome insects. No one ever knew how the fire started, but after twelve years of human neglect, the wilderness was impenetrable to fire teams and the hydrants were long lost and gone. The park burned for four days, and within a year new spiky MAB high-rise apartments covered the lost paradise.
Apart from that, Manhattan was much the same as it had always been. The population was about four million, and most of them had never been off the island. Many of them had never been to either side of it. Why should they? Seventy-eight percent of them lived in Man and Biosphere housing, working via Cyclops, with everything they needed either under their roof or delivered to their doors. The Upper West Side was a gated Structured Dependence Facility, and certainly they never left their drug-saturated community. So the island was still a world unto itself.
In that world, and even in the real world, the New York Stock Exchange was still a center of interest, and it was one of the few places where most of the employees still physically went to work. In fact, with the seamless and instantaneous Cyclops-linked networking of brokers, dealers, and exchanges around the world, the New York Stock Exchange never closed, and many of the employees almost lived there. Angstrom Klerk was one of these.
He was young, only twenty-eight, and he’d been designing computer models at the NYSE since he was eighteen. He’d quit an MS fellowship at MIT because it was boring him. Thin, with unruly black hair, premature eye wrinkles from squinting at a computer screen, and a kid’s grin, his mathematical genius was almost immeasurable. He began by designing models for financial derivative contracts, and then—as an amusing sideline—he began structuring the contracts themselves. Financial derivatives, highly leveraged, speculative mazes of investments, were incomprehensible to all but a few computer wizards, mathematical prodigies, and financial geniuses. Angstrom Klerk was all of these; he was also incredibly wealthy, and still he was bored.
The Beginning of Sorrows Page 31