by John Barnes
Hardshaw looks at the sheet in front of her and sighs. Nominally everything is going well—but this is only because absolutely no information is coming out of Hawaii. The major storm surge that has rolled out of Clem, after this change of direction, will probably roll along the south coast of Mexico, but that’s mostly high rocky coast, with just a scattering of resorts, and the Mexican government should be able to get it evacuated. The surge that was on its way before is nearing the coasts of Washington and British Columbia, and low-lying areas are being evacuated there, hampered by the heavy rain.
And none of that answers the question “What has happened to Hawaii?” The major islands dropped off the communication links in neat order, Kauai going first, the Big Island last, hours ago—in fact, one bright boy at FEMA has arrived at what he calls the Silence Number—Beaufort 28. That is, when the winds reach Beaufort force 28, no regular communication can be expected from that site.
Oahu seems to have held on up to 29, and Nihau went out at 25, but as rules go it seems to hold true.
But right now, the peak wind force has just passed Oahu, with its majority of the state’s population. There is little question that many people must have been trapped on the highways, and the peak wind force was around Beaufort 35, more than enough to pick up and hurl automobiles, so there are unquestionably tens of thousands dead. In many places, roads ran near the coast; very likely some whole traffic jams were swept out to sea and are now on the bottom.
Radar seems to show ten- and twenty-meter waves forming in a circular pattern following Clem’s winds, in which case the sheltered shores have been battered to flinders. Rainfall—but again, all there is to go from is satellite radar—is so dense that it’s possible that people outside would drown, and there’s little question that there must be huge floods pouring off the central volcanoes of each island.
So there are immense numbers of dead, and many more will die of exposure, treatable injuries, and water-bome bacterial disease before adequate help can be gotten there. No structure on Earth, except those few underground military facilities supposed to be nuke-proof, was ever designed for winds like that, so although there are undoubtedly freak survivors, every bridge and building must be assumed down. All this they can know without being able to see.
Beaufort on Kauai is already down to 18—merely a very big hurricane—but nothing is back on the air and there’s no evidence that anything is moving down there except for the waters and winds. A couple of hotshot Army staticopter pilots, trained and accustomed to rough landing conditions, will try to set down in Lihue, the first big town where it’s even remotely feasible—by the time they get there the wind should be down to Beaufort 12, making it merely very difficult rather than impossible. Theoretically, with their hundreds of electrostatically charged blades, and ten replacements per blade available, staticopters are all but impossible to bring down as long as the power source holds out—or the air doesn’t move faster than the staticopter.
She wishes them all the best of luck. She has nightmare visions of conditions suddenly ripping out all the blades, and then ten generations of replacements, within a second or so, and of air crews falling into the black storm. She knows staticopters have been out in Beaufort 13 and 14 winds, and the pilots are good—but right now it’s easier to worry about ten young men who might die than to think about tens of thousands of people who must already be dead.
In the dark and storm of Clem’s passing, a thousand possibilities have crossed Hardshaw’s desk. There may be immense waves confined to the super-hurricane radius, so that the whole coast of each island might have been scraped by hours of roaring water, high enough to erase Honolulu and most of the other cities; there’s even a suggestion from a couple of fuzzy radar images that such a wave might have torn across the low part of Oahu, ripping through Pearl Harbor and across Wheeler AFB at the crest, eventually flowing out through Waialua in the northwest.
Anything could be happening in there, but nothing good.
Hardshaw gets up from her chair and groans. She has been awake too long, sitting still too long. She’s had too much coffee and she’s going for more. This isn’t the first time she’s felt like President Grandma—hell, the job will make anyone feel like an old lady, it probably made Kennedy feel like an old lady.
All right, old woman, quit the griping, you could have been turning over burger or helping ranchers sue each other. She stretches and turns to see Harris Diem coming in. His face is a sort of sick gray, and she’s not sure she’s ever seen him without a necktie before. Certainly never with his hair so uncombed and such bags under his eyes.
“UN,” he says. “Rivera wants to talk to you. We’ve given him a ten-minute stall in case you want to get presentable.”
“That’ll take more than ten but let’s see what I can do.” She gets into the bathroom, thinks a moment, decides that Rivera can get used to waiting for the President, and strips out of her suit, yanks on a shower cap, and turns on the shower. She has only a glorious minute or so under the furious blast of hot water, barely time to rub a little soap here and there and to shake her head vigorously before she has to step out into the sauna, grab the big fluffy towels, and get herself dry, but she makes sure she enjoys every moment of it. At the end of the process she still feels like an old lady, but she feels like a clean old lady, and she grabs one of the spare suits from its hanger with almost a sense of victory.
She has kept Rivera waiting three whole extra minutes. That’s about what you can manage as the most powerful nation on Earth these days, she supposes. Let’s stretch him clear out to fifteen, five more than he planned on. Make him see his power is limited… she checks makeup, redoes a point here and there, hits the hair once again with a brush….
It’s really just a sign of tiredness to have her sense of humor kicking in like this, but she imagines a special slot in the “careers” section of the XV magazine shows that are aimed at teenage women—“Your career as Head of State of a major world power. As always, good grooming and sensible fashion choices are a MUST!!!!”
The little laugh still makes her feel better, and when she emerges she feels ready for whatever is to come next. Rivera will have something he wants to wring out of the situation, and he will be unfailingly polite about doing so. “Always leave them their dignity; after all, it has no resale value,” her father used to say, after skinning some poor tourist in some bit of shade-tree auto mechanicking.
When she sits down at the screen, Harris is doodling on a pad beside her; she glances at the pad and reads “He’s spent the last five minutes making stale jokes about women who can’t get dressed on time.” She checks to see that their video is muted, then scrawls on Harris’s pad “Nobody would bother getting dressed for him. What Dorothy Parker Said.”
Diem grins and winks and they bring the video up to talk to Rivera.
He begins without preamble. “Ms. President, I’ve been working on getting an aid package put together for your disaster.”
“We accept,” Hardshaw says.
“You—er, would you care to hear what’s in the aid package?”
“Food, medicine, help of all kinds, whatever you could get the Rim countries to kick in, I should imagine. And I know perfectly well that UN disaster relief is always offered without strings. Normally of course we turn it down because it’s needed more urgently elsewhere in the world and we know your resources are scarce; it makes more sense for us to take care of our own. But right now we need all the help we can get.”
Rivera nods slowly. “I see. And will you—er, that is, do you have any information for us on the scope of the disaster?”
Hardshaw nods at Diem, who says, “We can have a report on as much as we know within a half hour if you need it. But the short answer is that we’re completely out of communication with the islands. We’re getting a little bit from hams but all they can tell us is that it’s raining like mad, the wind is blowing the rain almost horizontal, and they’re cut off where they are. In about three h
ours an Army team will try to touch down on Kauai. But until somebody who’s able to move around picks up the phone at the other end, we really don’t know anything.”
“I’ll see what we can get the Japanese and Chinese to share. I’d bet that you haven’t had any significant data from either nation, but UNSOO assures me they’ve both made a couple of satellite passes. And naturally we’ll give you what UNSOO has, but that’s very little.”
“We realize that,” Harris Diem says, “and we’re grateful for your help.”
Rivera says, “After all, finally, it is all one planet. I am glad we can be of service to you. I’ll be in touch.” He nods to them and raises the tips of his fingers off the table in an almost-wave that could be read either as a salute or a dismissal. The screen goes dark before Hardshaw says goodbye.
She leans back in the chair. “Whoa, a shower, a change of clothes, and a bastard to deal with, and now I feel fresh as a daisy. Order us up coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches, Harris, and then let’s have a talk about what’s going on here.”
She goes back to her desk to look through the fresh piles of printout. A ham radio operator has been raised on Oahu, but he’s a sixteen-year-old Eagle Scout at Pupukea; he has a forty-year-old Ford pickup truck and two fourteen-year-olds at his disposal, the road is too washed out for any hope of getting down off the mountain soon, and anyway he’s just about as far as it’s possible to be from anywhere that they really need to know about. But he has managed to rig an antenna that will probably not blow down, so they do have continuous contact with him, and there were some unbroken weather instruments there at the camp, so he’s able to confirm for them that pressure fell below 700 mb for three straight hours.
“What’s that mean in English?” Hardshaw mutters, before she sees the scrawled note—it’s that NOAA weatherman, Callare; as soon as this current uproar is over and they’ve given Pauliss the shaft, they will have to let Callare in on what’s going on—to the effect that if the barometric pressure was that low at a distance of 220 km from the center of the eye, then the eye wall—the innermost ring of the hurricane before the still air of the eye itself, currently about 140 km across—must have winds of around Beaufort force 46, or 146 meters per second, about 330 mph (Hardshaw is grateful for that last number, since she’s never really learned to think in metric terms), “in good accord with other observations and with theory.”
“What a relief,” Hardshaw says out loud. “I’d hate to see a theory collapse for one lousy Eagle Scout.”
Diem sets a plate of sandwiches and a pot of fresh coffee down on the President’s desk, takes a seat himself without asking, and says, “All right, what are we going to make of the SecGen?”
“Well, he probably intended to dangle a big aid package as bait and then get us to agree to coordinate—which is to say, surrender—our scientific agencies. But since I accepted before he could mention the rest of the deal, and since that call wasn’t even remotely secure, now he’s stuck and may have to do us some good. And we managed to get it logged that as a matter of general principle we don’t have to have this. That should keep him frustrated for a bit—but at the same time make it impossible for him to take revenge on us by slowing things up. Does UNSOO have anything of any value?”
“Not them, but if Rivera really has some leverage with Japan then we are sure as hell in luck, because Di Callare and Henry Pauliss assure me the Japanese have some kind of multiple scanning system that would let them look down through the storm in slices, so they could tell us how high the water got and how fast the air and water were moving any time a satellite of theirs went over. Assuming the satellite was equipped with groundscanning multiple-frequency radar, of course.”
“All right. So we played that one pretty well.” Brittany Hardshaw leans back in her chair and looks hard at Harris Diem. She can remember back when he was just her clerk and intern at the Idaho Attorney General’s office, and she can remember a lot of dark and bright days since then. In the way that’s common with people at the top, she’s rarely wondered much about what he gets out of all this, preferring instead to leave that to him. But she can’t help wondering… if her long-winding path from dirt-road Idaho had not carried her here, or somewhere similar, would he have stayed with her the whole time?
Irrelevant, of course. He’s here whatever the reason. Still… “You look terribly tired,” she says.
“So do you, boss. And if you want to feel tired-er, I’ve got a little note from Carla Tynan that’s kind of a worry too.”
Hardshaw groans quietly, grabs another sandwich, pours another cup of coffee. “This stuff is wonderful.”
“Mom’s recipe. Velveeta and Wonder Bread—hard stuff to get anymore but worth it. You’re stalling, boss.”
“Yeah, well…” Hardshaw grins at him. “How many times have you and I stayed up all night together?”
“Is the Fifth Amendment still in force?”
She gestures for him to eat.
When they have each finished a sandwich she says, “All right, let’s have it. I know you don’t give me small worries just to get them off your desk, so if you mentioned it, it’s important.”
Diem nods, and says, “You want all the science or do you want just the upshot?”
“Upshot, please, with maybe enough science to reassure me that Carla isn’t making it up. Jesus, how’d we ever let her get out of Federal service? She’s worth twenty times what a paper pusher like Henry Pauliss is.”
Diem makes a face, but he has gotten and kept this job mostly by swallowing hard and telling the truth when needed. “Well, to remind you, right after the Global Riot it became very important to make sure nobody at NOAA was going to mouth off to the media in a bad situation, especially not a bad situation that we were trying to keep wrapped up to prevent another Global Riot. So we closed down the Anticipatory Section because that was where the most scare stories were coming out of.”
Hardshaw leans back and says, “Remind me why that wasn’t stupid at the time.”
“It wasn’t stupid at the time, boss, because we’d never had a global weather catastrophe before, and there was no evidence that something a little bigger than previous, or a little more violent, was going to be different in kind. And the long-range forecasters had been crying wolf about droughts and things like that for a long, long time. We had a definite ten million dead to weigh against that.”
She nods. “Well, I hereby officially declare that the decision was a big mistake. Make a note that if anyone asks us that’s what we say.”
“Going with honesty as your basic carrier?”
“Carrier” is media-jock slang for the reason why people will believe what you say. The appearance of blunt honesty is one kind of carrier; wish-fulfillment is another, close fit to known facts is another, and so forth. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, if the truth is even known, and this is why Brittany Lynn Hardshaw, who still remembers the taste of a bar of Irish Spring jammed into her mouth for lying, hates the term. She has never told Diem this and never would. It is part of his job to think about carriers.
She looks up to see the first bare white glow of daylight striking the office window, and to note that several staff are rotating out to be replaced by their daytime equivalents. She nods hellos to everyone, waves, acts the part of the gracious host, sends the unconsumed sandwiches around (enjoying Diem’s wince at the luxury goods going to low-level staffers).
Finally she sits down and says very quietly, “Harris, it’s like this. I think the big mistake is that we let people get away with the Global Riot. There’s got to be some kind of approximation, no matter how rough, to personal responsibility! We could have cracked down a lot of ways—used the regular Army right away in force in the big cities, had all the governors roll the Guard, arrested the execs of the XV networks and held them until they agreed to shut off the damned signal—”
“You’d have faced one hell of a set of court cases—” he begins.
Her hand chops do
wnward fast, as if she’s taking the head off a chicken. It’s a gesture Diem used to see her make in court a lot. “And since when has an old lawyer with nineteen cases of her own in front of the Supreme Court been afraid of that? Would’ve been the first clear-and-present-danger case to come up since XV became commercial—and what a fight that would have made, eh? But this is all still reviewing the past.” She gulps more of the coffee; it’s cooler now, and she takes it like a drug, not the relaxing comfort it was before. “What matters is this: We’ve got to realize that not only can I not be everywhere in this crisis, I can’t even be in touch with everywhere. Right now we don’t even know if the American Army can land an aircraft in an American state, or for that matter if the Navy can even get into Pearl Harbor.
“Harris, the one thing that has kept me awake nights is that if the NSA is right, and if the little ‘secret’ cabal around Callare and the Tynans is right, then there could be a big enough catastrophe to completely take down any government anywhere. Some governments will still be on their feet, somewhere, but no one can say which. Millions of people will have every modern device torn away from them, and have to fend for themselves. And I don’t think people are ready for that. I think after a few centuries of modern government everyone will be waiting for the whistlers to show up with doctors and hot soup and tents. But you see how powerless we already are in Hawaii. And we won’t even begin to get cleanup and rescue underway before Clem comes around again.
“So people are going to have to do what they can do on their own, and that means we’ve got to trust them with the information to do whatever they need to do.”
“And if they misuse that information?”
“Then we slap them down—if we can reach them. And if we can’t reach them they are no longer our problem. But understand, Harris, we have to consider how the American people, and for that matter, the world’s people, will survive if we all perish here. And I can’t see that their chances will be enhanced by leaving them a legacy of misinformation or pure ignorance.