“That news was followed, a few minutes later, by an announcement that a tsunami had struck Washington and continued all the way to Front Royal before exhausting itself against the Blue Ridge. The whereabouts of the president, as of this moment, are unknown. This is Judy Gunworthy with the Transglobal News Service, at the National Weather Service Office in El Paso.”
Micro Passenger Cabin. 5:43 A.M.
“Charlie.” It was Kerr again. But his voice sounded strange.
“Yes, Al. What’s wrong?”
“Charlie, we’ve lost the president.”
Charlie Haskell’s heart began to speed up. What had Harry Truman said on hearing of FDR’s death? It was like a load of bullshit got dropped on me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BELL-RINGER
Sunday, April 14
1.
Manhattan. 5:45 A.M.
The effort to loot the local grocery store failed. Marvin and one of the accountants tore down a double-sized door to use as a raft, but their combined weight was too much and it capsized several times, dumping them into the flood. The accountant lost heart, and everybody else, including Larry, decided the smart thing would be to wait for the Guard. Finally Marvin set off alone. He came back an hour later, complaining that the store Louise had described was completely underwater. But he’d gotten off the raft, forced his way inside, and nearly drowned. He looked as if the story were true. He now joined those recommending they simply wait until help arrived. An unaccustomed whine had come into his voice, and Marilyn decided he didn’t look as good this morning as he had last night. Never start a romance with somebody, she thought, until you’ve seen him in a flood.
Louise’s refrigerator emptied out in a hurry, and the bottled water disappeared, despite all efforts at rationing. Her guests began to suggest that maybe they should make another effort to get canned goods out of the submerged store. “You can’t tell how long we might be here,” one of them said. Marv said he would not try it again under any circumstances.
A stock analyst who’d done a year at medical school pointed out that anybody going into the water, which was choked with corpses, risked typhus or some other ungodly disease. “Marv’s right,” she said. “We should wait.”
They were cut off from the rest of the world. The batteries in the TV had died, and there was nothing to do now but gaze out over the city, gray and forlorn in the morning light. A stench had begun to creep into the air.
Larry tried to play the role of defender and provider that he must have felt was expected of him. He assured Marilyn everything would be okay, asked whether she was all right, and gathered her into his arms when she got teary. He didn’t quite fit the part: Larry looked more at home in an office than in a crisis. But she felt it was nice of him to try.
She knew her husband would never have gone inside a submerged grocery store. But she also knew that, if he had, he wouldn’t have come back and whined about it.
There was sudden commotion behind her: people pointing to the northwest. A helicopter, several helicopters, were coming in from over the Hudson, flying in formation, staying low. They penetrated the concrete valleys and divided into pairs as they approached the Central Park area.
There were other people atop other buildings, and everybody was waving. One of the choppers came in close and hovered directly overhead. It was olive-drab. Military. A voice spoke through a loudspeaker: “Folks, please clear the roof.” Backwash from the rotors tore at her hair.
A soldier leaned out and gazed down at her. “How many of you are there?”
Quick estimate. “Thirty,” Marilyn said, but the words were blown away. She spread both hands three times. Somebody behind her was saying, “Tell them fifty, get as much as you can.”
The soldier signaled okay. The man who’d wanted to claim fifty, muttered, “Dumb bitch.” He was a little fat man with tufts of hair over his ears, framing a bald head. Larry heard the remark and went after him. The fat man started swinging wildly, and punched a woman who didn’t get clear quickly enough. Then the circle of bystanders closed in to separate the two.
Marilyn felt proud of Larry at that moment. Not only because he’d defended her; but because the fat man was a department manager or some such thing at Bradley & Boone. Larry’s job had just disappeared. For him, it had been a more courageous act than braving the flood to find his wife.
She hadn’t felt this good about her marriage since the day she’d walked up the aisle.
The chopper came down until it was only a few feet overhead. Four cartons tumbled out. “Anybody need medical help?” asked the loudspeaker.
They glanced around at one another. “I’ve got a back problem,” shouted a thin, weak-eyed man Marilyn didn’t know. He didn’t look like the type who would readily consent to ride in a helicopter.
“Can you walk, sir?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Stay off your feet. The rest of you stay put. We’ll be back.”
The chopper lifted away. Larry made another lunge at the little fat man, and somebody told him to calm down. Marilyn could see that, under the indignant mask, her husband was quite pleased with himself.
TRANSGLOBAL SPECIAL REPORT. 5:47 A.M.
“This is Angela Shepard at Camp David, Maryland. An army helicopter carrying President Henry Kolladner was reported down minutes ago outside Washington. The president had been evacuated moments before a sea wave swept over the capital, and was en route here, where a command post had been set up to coordinate the government’s response to the ongoing lunar crisis. The helicopter was apparently struck by lightning. Official sources are telling us that rescue units have been sent in, and that they still hold out hope.
“I talked to a member of the president’s staff who was on board an accompanying aircraft, and who asked not to be named. She was in tears, Don. She said the president’s helicopter caught fire and, in her words, ’fell like a rock.’ She added that she doesn’t believe anyone could have lived through it.”
Micro Passenger Cabin. 5:48 A.M.
“Charlie, it’s confirmed,” said the voice on his cell phone. “They found the wreckage.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Emily. What about Emily?”
“She was with him when it happened.”
“My God….”
Micro Flight Deck. 5:49 A.M.
“What is your status, Micro?”
“We are still here, Skyport. Life support looks good. The cargo deck has been penetrated again, but otherwise we’re okay.”
“We copy, Micro.”
“Fuel is almost gone.”
“Roger that. Continue to try to conserve. We’ll get to you as quickly as we can.”
They were currently moving at 8.1 kilometers per second, gaining speed as they fell toward Earth. Consequently, no rescue vehicle could be sent out to rendezvous until after they’d passed Skyport, which would happen around one-thirty P.M.
“Are you in any danger at the present moment?”
“Negative.”
There was a hesitation at the other end. Then the bad news: “Micro, we project a solar orbit.”
“Roger.” Saber would have no fuel available for braking. So they would roar past the Earth satellite at present velocity plus whatever they picked up firing the engine and falling down the gravity well. “Skyport, I make it that we’ll be moving too fast for a ferry to rendezvous.”
“Keep the faith, Micro. You have a VIP on board. Two of them, in fact.”
Saber ran the numbers through her computer. After they passed the planet, a ferry could chase them down, but the effort would require too much fuel. There wouldn’t be enough left after the rescue, not nearly enough, to brake into earth-orbit. The ferry and the Micro would both sail out into deep space. To add to her worries, they would start running out of air again around six P.M. That was a long way off, but this time there’d be no on board fix. Fortunately, however, there was an easy solution, and if Skyport didn’t thi
nk of it, she’d suggest it herself.
She signed off, rubbed her eyes, and looked at the radar screen, which was mercifully quiet again. She’d recovered Tony’s body and stored it below with Bigfoot. That had been a sad business. But at least his sacrifice hadn’t been to no purpose. Unless something took a wicked turn on her, the Micro would bring in Charlie Haskell and the other volunteers.
She’d tried to get through to St. Petersburg, to see how her family was. The Russian city had been struck by a series of withering electrical storms and subsequent flooding. But telephone communications were impossible. So, since there was nothing else she could do, she put it out of her mind.
The Micro still had to burn fuel occasionally, to move out of harm’s way. She wasn’t seeing the storms of pebbles and sand anymore. The debris now tended to be limited to boulders and slabs. But they were relatively infrequent, and no longer racing past the Micro. The microbus was moving far more quickly than it had been during the early minutes of the event, and the rocks were traveling more slowly.
A few were enormous. One in particular measured out at more than eighty kilometers across. A moonlet. She reported it to the Orbital Lab at Skyport, where it turned out they’d already tagged it. The woman she talked to told her it was going into orbit.
“Good,” said Saber. “You wouldn’t want this thing coming down.”
The woman’s name was Tory Clark. And Tory made herself memorable to Saber by passing on a news item: “By the way,” she said, “they’ve confirmed the death of the president. Take care of Charlie Haskell.”
It had been a long night and Saber needed about thirty seconds to realize she was now carrying the president of the United States.
She knew she should simply fly the bus, but she couldn’t resist dropping down through the hatch to wish him well. To be the first to do so, because she was sure no one else in the passenger cabin had the information. Maybe even he didn’t know, although the lamp over his telephone circuit had been burning continuously. Poor son of a bitch, he’s half-dead up here and they still won’t leave him alone.
She approached his chair. He had the phone to his ear, listening, taking notes. She stopped beside him and waited. He glanced up at her, held up his hand, signaling her to wait a moment, and then, when he could, asked the person on the other end to wait.
“Yes, Saber,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
“Mr. President,” she said, pronouncing the word with effect, and drawing the attention of everyone around her, “I wanted to wish you good luck.”
That set off something of an explosion. Was it true? Had they found Henry Kolladner?
It had occurred to Charlie when he’d first gotten the news that Henry might have been fortunate. It was probably the only way he could have saved his reputation. Now he accepted their good wishes, embracing Evelyn and Saber and shaking hands with Keith and the chaplain. Then he went back to the telephone.
Saber tried to find him some privacy, but the only accessible sections on the microbus were the galley and the washroom. The galley wasn’t very private and the washroom lacked ambiance. The new president would have to make do where he sat in the passenger cabin. He asked only that Keith Morley use nothing he overheard without getting specific approval.
Saber returned to the flight deck, and shortly afterward heard the hatch open. The chaplain’s smiling face looked up. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I was wondering if I could see how this thing operates.”
She signaled for him to strap down in the copilot’s seat.
He looked out at the luminous Earth. After a few inconsequential remarks he fell into a contemplative silence. “The universe seems very neutral,” he said at last.
“How do you mean?”
“Not for publication.”
“Of course not.”
“Are you a believer?”
She thought about it. “I don’t know, Chaplain. Probably not.”
He nodded. “I cannot believe Jesus would permit what happened last night. Not the Jesus I know.” Saber didn’t know how to respond, understood that the comment needed no response. “Tell me, Saber,” he said after a moment, “is there life on Mars?”
“Yes,” she said, wondering what he was getting at. “But of a primitive order.”
The chaplain nodded. “Doesn’t matter how primitive. Conditions will allow what they will allow. Elsewhere conditions will be better. Right? Caribbean-style beaches. Cool, moist valleys. Rolling plains. Other Scotlands exist out there somewhere.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’d think that would have to be so. It’s inconceivable that it isn’t.”
“Oh, it’s conceivable that we’re alone. I can conceive of it, and I wish it were so.”
“Why?” she asked. Everyone she’d ever known had wanted the search for alien life-forms, alien civilizations, to succeed. The notion that anybody, anybody, would prefer an empty universe shocked her.
“Because then the story of Jesus would make sense. But in a universe like this, where we suspect there are perhaps millions of other races like our own, his sacrifice hardly seems applicable to the existing nature of things.” The chaplain shook his head. “Either the crucifixion saves them all, or it does not. If it saves them all, we’re asked to believe that out of this plenitude of worlds, He chose ours for His demonstration.”
She could hear the chaplain’s doubts, welling up from some long-blocked inner spring. She could hear the capitalized pronouns, could hear the plea for intervention. “If the crucifixion does not save everyone, then it must be carried out, in one form or another, countless times in countless places. What then becomes of His agonies, of the special sacrifice made for us?”
She thought about it for several minutes. “I never did understand the logic of the crucifixion,” she said at last. “Maybe the point is supposed to be simply that he came.”
2.
Skyport, Me’s Restaurant. 5:51 A.M.
Rachel Quinn hadn’t slept. Like everyone else at the station, she’d been glued to the television. She recalled with mounting guilt her own anger that the Mars mission had been wiped out. But then, she’d had no idea the arrival of the comet would trigger anything like this.
Nevertheless, buried in the relentless accounts of waves, storms, and earthquakes, there were some encouraging stories; heroes were appearing everywhere. In Fort Lauderdale a man in a motor yacht picked up survivors and rode out several tsunamis. Doctors stayed at their posts in Baltimore, chopper-riding cops scooped people off rooftops in Houston, teenagers hurried toddlers to safety in Savannah. When a wave his Vancouver Island, a man saved a group of his neighbors by piling them into a hydrogen balloon. He got clear with seconds to spare. In St. Augustine, a young woman helped several elderly couples climb an old stone tower to escape.
Even Skyport had been hit. Debris had blown out compartments on two decks, and three people were dead.
Rachel was in Mo’s, having toast and coffee, watching CNN, when her cell phone trilled. The identifier indicated the call was from Operations. “Quinn,” she said.
“Colonel, I’m Howard Chambers, special assistant to Belle Cassidy.” Cassidy was the director of operations. “She’d like to see you if you could come by her office.”
Ten minutes later Rachel was led through Cassidy’s door. The director was standing in a corner of the room, bent over a console with two aides. She smiled at Rachel, dismissed the aides, and invited her to sit down. Belle Cassidy was in her early forties. There was something of the drill instructor in her demeanor. She stood ramrod straight, had short black hair, marble eyes, and wide shoulders. Rachel knew her, had even dined with her once when several of the astronauts had been passing through and the Skyport staff had given a dinner.
“Good to see you again, Rachel,” she said, extending a hand. A gold chain tinkled on her wrist, a subtle flash of femininity in an otherwise masculine personality.
The office was big, as Skyport offices went. On the walls were framed do
cuments detailing its occupant’s services to various federal agencies, to foreign governments, and to the Lunar Transport Authority, her current employer. Belle folded her arms and remained standing. “Rachel,” she said, “we need your help.”
“In what way?”
“Were you aware President Kolladner is dead?”
“Yes,” she said. “I heard about it a little while ago.”
“The new president is stranded out there.” Belle waved her hand in the general direction of the overhead. “In about seven and a half hours he’s going to sail past here, doing forty thousand-plus kilometers an hour. Unless we get something out there that has the juice to catch him, they might as well swear in whoever’s next in line. That idiot Speaker, I guess it would be.”
Rachel’s eyes widened. “You’re asking for the Lowell?”
“It’s all we’ve got. The ferries can’t handle it.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll get the numbers from your people, and we’ll be ready to go.”
“I appreciate it.”
“It’s my pleasure.”
Regret showed in Belle’s face. “I’ll be honest with you. We spent the last couple of hours trying to figure out how to do it with our ferries. I mean, how often does the LTA get a chance to rescue a president?”
“No way, huh?”
“Well…if we had to, we could give it a good run. But it’s too close to take the chance.” She shook Rachel’s hand. “So NASA gets the glory. Again.”
FRANK CRANDALL’S ALL-NIGHTER. 5:57 A.M.
For those of you tuning in late, and those who’ve been flooding our switchboard, let me say again, Frank’s okay. He was slightly injured last night, but he’s otherwise fine. As you know, the show is usually broadcast from Miami. But the storm knocked out our facility there. Frank twisted a knee, but it’s nothing serious and he’ll be back tonight. Meantime, this is Paul DiAngelo sitting in for the Old Trooper. Now we’ve got time for one more caller before we get out of here. And Llewellyn tells me we’ve got a live one. Hello, Margaret in Los Angeles.
Moonfall Page 36