The clocks ticked past 2038.
“Why?” the President asked. “Why did they do it? Scared—?”
Alice suddenly flared in uncontrollable anger and hurt. “Scared? You're damned right they were scared! Just like I'm scared! Just like you're scared, the Premier's scared, the whole fucking world is scared out of its wits! You want me to say they were cowards? Cowards, sir? Heroes, sir? Mad, sir? Sane, sir? How the hell do I know?!” Alice broke it off just as suddenly. “They gave us a glimmer of hope, Mr. President,” he added softly.
“That's why I wanted to know, general.” The President sighed. “They gave us, for whatever reason, more than I gave. That's a heavy one to carry, too.”
Alice paused. Suddenly he felt as if he had no time and all the time in the world. “Mr. President?”
“Yes, general.”
“I saw General Moreau a month ago. I thought he was growing senile. He said we were losing.”
The President bristled slightly. He had built every weapon the military wanted. He drew a deep breath. Every weapon you wanted, too, buster, he said to himself. “Losing,” he said quietly. “To the Soviets?”
“To the system, sir.”
At 2039 Zulu a series of explosions occurred almost unnoticed in the wastelands of eastern Kazaklistan. The world's sensing devices did not record them, and their relevance would have been puzzling in any case. The ground-burst explosions carved craters nearly a kilometer wide and more than fifty meters deep in the place known as Zhangiztobe. Of the crews of the two Backfire bombers flying over the isolated region, one intentionally failed to pull up and out. The other flew home.
Condor and the Librarian calmly supervised the methodical tap-tap-a-tap of authenticator codes soaring upward toward two Soviet satellites orbiting over the earth and back downward toward two American aircraft orbiting over the oceans. The clock read 2039 Zulu, the codes more than half delivered, when they looked at each other in confusion. They felt the sharp lurch of their command plane as it banked hard left.
At 2039 Zulu, Alice withdrew the cigarette from the cranny above his ear. The general's reach was subconscious, so mesmerized was he by the marvelous aircraft racing untouchably ahead of him. In some deep and entrenched way, he admired the pilot who was beating him. The man was so good, trained to be entrusted with the President of the United States, trained to lose an eye to a man-made sun and blithely take the protective patch off his good eye, exposing it so he could fly onward, the President secure.
Behind the two aircraft, in the late afternoon, the winter sun was setting again now, casting fiery beams across the white plateau of clouds through which the fruitless chase continued. The E-4's wing sliced gracefully through a pink cotton-candy cloud bubble, cut majestically through the ebbing blue of a fading day, dashed easily toward the darkness of a last night.
To Alice, buried now in dreary thought, the hopeless race seemed to be taking them both beyond the clouds, beyond the sun, and over the very edge of their earth. He snapped a match to light the cigarette. In the flare, he lost the first move. Smitty lost it too, so suddenly had the hunted made himself vulnerable.
In front of them, the giant aircraft turned broadside to the Looking Glass. Alice dropped the match and the cigarette, tightening his grip on the phone. Smitty froze, ever so briefly, in puzzlement. The E-4's wings tipped slightly one way and then the other in an invitation and also in one man's acknowledgment that he understood. It would happen very quickly now.
Smitty nudged the Looking Glass into a shallow, banking dive to the left. Alice's eyes flooded. His knuckles turned rigid on the phone. “Mr. President,” he said quickly. “Do better next time, sir.” He did not hear a reply.
In the windshield, the blue letters spelling “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” swelled instantly. Without pause or thought, Smitty veered his prow into the loop of the U just forward of the E-4's wings, just aft of the presidential plane's pilot.
In that final microsecond, the one that turns infinite for each being, Alice was certain he saw a vision from the left-hand seat of the other aircraft's flight deck. In the side window he saw a man in a black eyepatch snap a perfect, academy-taught salute. Alice was equally certain that, from the cockpit of the Looking Glass, the salute was returned with proper flair and suitable honor.
The explosion, high over the black and rich earth near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, was small by the standards of the day. It was measured in neither kilos nor megas but merely in tons. It emitted no rays harmful to man's programming, mechanical or otherwise.
Six hundred miles to the east and north, in a hole in the ground, the President of the United States said “Alice” once, but not twice, into the huzz.
V
Eternal Vigilance
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything but our way of thinking.
—Albert Einstein
Epilogue
2100 ZULU
At 2040 Zulu, Sedgwick's transmission reached the two TACAMO aircraft through the Volna satellites.
At 2044, the codes were completed, followed by the encrypted instructions: “CEASE ALL HOSTILITIES IMMEDIATELY.”
At 2046, Olney received a message requesting further codes because of the confusion over the interrupted transmission from the E-4 command plane.
At 2049, the second message was completed.
At 2052, Olney's telegraph clattered with the beginning of the incoming message: “CONFIRM CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES.” Sedgwick watched expectantly as the machine hummed in a brief pause, as if to interject its own emphasis. Then it clattered its conclusion: “ALERT STATUS MAINTAINED.”
The young naval officer stared at the last words. Suddenly and overwhelmingly, his relief dissolved into a great and unexpected wave of depression. He shuddered involuntarily, his eyes riveted on the system's final statement. Then he shook his head slightly, tore the message off the telegraph, and read it to the President.
At 2054, the leaders of the two nuclear superpowers spoke one last time.
The President lay in his hospital bed in the radio room at Olney, the short telegraphic message resting on his stomach. He could not see it, but Sedgwick's reading still rang in his ears. As he spoke into the phone, he found his voice extraordinarily weary and desolate. “There may be aftershocks, Mr. Premier. Are you prepared for them?”
“Another lost city, Mr. President?” The President could hear his own despondence reflected in the tired Russian voice. “Two cities? Three?” The President knew the Premier had the same message in front of him, its Cyrillic lettering glaring at the Soviet leader with the same haunt. “We will cope,” the Premier continued somberly. “As will you.”
“Yes, we will cope with lost cities,” the President said. He shifted uneasily in his bed. “Those are not the aftershocks that concern me, Mr. Premier.”
Labored breathing undulated across the distance between them. “No . . .” the Premier continued slowly. “The world will awaken tomorrow with one hundred million people dead and still more dying. It also will awaken with the same differences it had yesterday. Will we cope with them?”
The President peered into the empty whiteness. He felt tears forming in eyes that would forever see the sun. “It also will awaken with forty thousand unused nuclear weapons, Mr. Premier,” he said. “Will we cope with them?”
“We will cope with one or we will cope with the other, Mr. President. We were blessed with great luck today.”
“Luck. . . .“
A long silence followed, as both men burrowed far within themselves, dwelling, as they so rarely had before, on the same thought.
“Do you believe”—the President finally broke the quiet—”that we will draw any benefit from this, Mr. Premier?”
The Premier said nothing.
“Do you think that our one hundred million dead will become the symbols that will bring the world to its senses?” the President continued. “That would be luck, Mr. Premier. We will need much more of th
at precious commodity.”
The Premier sighed. He spoke in the same fatalistic voice the President had heard in their only personal meeting, and he uttered the same fatalistic words. “We now return to our world of men, Mr. President.”
The memory of their one meeting filled the President's mind.
“Yes, we now return to our world of men, Mr. Premier,” the President repeated quietly into a phone linking two mole holes a planet apart. “Do you think we can control such a place?”
The President heard nothing for a moment, and he shifted uncomfortably, sending the short message relayed by Volna fluttering toward the floor. Near him, Sedgwick watched tears streaming from his Commander-in-Chiefs eyes. He averted his gaze, even from the sightless man, and followed the paper as it wafted to the floor between their beds.
“I do not know, Mr. President,” the Premier finally answered.
Sedgwick leaned out of his bed, tugging against the umbilical system of the intravenous tubing.
“Nor do I, Mr. Premier,” the President said.
Sedgwick leaned farther, pulling against the system. His hand stretched toward the paper—his fingers hovering for a moment just inches away from “ALERT STATUS MAINTAINED”—and then he fell back into his bed, the system holding him, and he closed his eyes.
At 2058 Zulu, the commander of the Rocket Forces ordered the closing of the silo doors throughout the Soviet Union. He then completed the unbuttoning of his holster, withdrew his service revolver, and shot himself. In the concrete wombs beneath two dozen fields stretched across Asia, the young pink-cheeked men waited patiently. A shift change was long overdue, but the flickering green lights could not be left unmanned.
At 2100 Zulu, the American submarines emerged from the depths of many seas. They lingered briefly, protected just below the surface, and listened. A moment later they returned to their safe haunts and waited, eternally vigilant.
In the mid-Pacific, the storm's fury gradually ebbed. The grayness gave way to the distant streaks of yellow, and the yellow began to fill with growing patches of blue. Kazaklis relaxed slightly as the tumult eased and left Polar Bear One flying in a precarious but steady washboard bump.
“So now what?” Moreau asked.
Kazaklis squinted into the bright sunlight. The storm was disappearing in the void behind them. The ocean emerged in the void ahead.
“Rarotonga?” he said.
He looked out the side window at the battered swept-wing remnant of his old world. A gouged scar remained where the turmoil had torn away the engines, two of man's useful tools. Next to the scar's emptiness another of man's tools, the sleek white missile he couldn't shake, filled the vacuum. It held itself snug, a survivor like them.
“Bora Bora?”
The remaining engines held them precariously several hundred feet above the sea. He strained to look over the side, watching the past rush to the rear. He turned to look ahead at a horizon too low, the future unseen somewhere beyond its edge.
“Hiva Oa?”
He glanced at his watch. It read 2100 Zulu by a time that no longer had meaning. He ran his eyes across gauges and dials and switches that told him nothing.
“Papeete for the lady?”
“Kazaklis!”
“Two in a canoe?”
“Kazaklis!”
He squinted again into the sun, trying to relate it to the time he was abandoning and relate both to the gauges that had abandoned him. He knew only that they were somewhere near the equator and somewhere near the 180th meridian, the artificial line civilization used as its dateline, the artificial intersection man had marked as the very center of his earth. It was the place where yesterday became tomorrow and tomorrow became yesterday and today didn't exist. As far as Kazaklis could see, nothing was there.
He reached for the first switch that had failed, as if something should change as they entered a new day. He flicked it aimlessly' and felt a slight shudder. But the missile stayed with them.
So now what?
“I don't know, Moreau.”
He reached toward Moreau's thigh and took her hand instead. It shuddered but stayed with him, settling into his. Quietly they absorbed each other's shuddering as they also absorbed the shuddering of the fragile craft that held them so precariously above the void.
“Welcome to tomorrow,” Kazaklis said.
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