“It would be. Up until now, the Chilean Earthquake is the only one on record to exceed an eight. The Great Kanto Earthquake was a seven point nine.”
“I wonder what the damage will be like …” murmured Admiral Conway.
“The buildings on the surface—including the most sturdy ones—will be mostly destroyed. Most of the underground structures too,” Yoshizumi said. “I say that there’s never been an earthquake this big before, but the history of earthquake observations is still quite a short one. When it comes to shifts in the earth’s crust, the one or two thousand years that humans have been making records is barely an instant. Even the legendary earthquakes said to have sent continents like Atlantis and Mu to the bottom of the sea in almost no time can’t be entirely ruled out as impossible.”
Continents torn apart, the sea swallowing up the fragments of shredded land, mountains melting like wax. Something seemed achingly humorous to Yoshizumi as he looked at the faces of the council members facing him. They had gone pale, and the tension was such that it almost looked like their faces had just turned into masks.
Damage to buildings on the surface?
But the only things that would be crumbling and falling over were empty, uninhabited shells—graveyard cities. There would be no one trembling in fear, no hell on earth for the women and children, no roaring shouts of men protecting their families from disaster; instead, the sudden rumbling of the land would come upon silent, uninhabited cities and towns. The buildings would fall in an instant, and the cities would be reduced to mountains of rubble. Whether it happened gradually or suddenly, vacant buildings left in the state of their former use would eventually return to the dust someday. In time, not a trace would be left of the homes of those two-legged life-forms. This was the second death that would befall slain humanity.
Oh, the irony!
Yoshizumi had been born and raised in a land of earthquakes, and having witnessed them in Fukui and Niigata prefectures, had devoted his life to the study of predicting them. Earnestly, he had risen to the challenge of the last type of natural disaster that humans had been unable to predict, hoping to reduce these tragedies that befell people to their bare minimums. Now that battle was seventy percent won. However, by the time this immeasurably beneficial research was finally completed, the people who were to have benefited from it had all been killed off by another apocalypse.
Yoshizumi felt so overcome with anger and pain that he couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “Everyone …” he said sarcastically, “don’t look so serious. This disturbance will happen on the other side of the globe. We may feel a little of it here in Antarctica, but we won’t be affected at all. There won’t be any tsunami either. If this had happened a few years ago, it would have been a horrifying disaster for Alaska, but there’s nobody there now. The ultimate disaster already happened four years ago. When I was putting together this report, I did get a little upset myself. But at the same time, I had to ask myself, ‘So what?’ A huge disturbance at sixty degrees north has nothing to do with Antarctica.”
However …
No trace of ease had crept into any of the expressions. Rather, they seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into gloomy introspection.
“Is something wrong?” said Yoshizumi. “As I was saying, Alaska is a no man’s land, and this won’t affect Antarctica.”
“Actually … we can’t say this won’t affect us,” Admiral Conway said in a husky voice. “Even if the North American continent is uninhabited, something there still lives.”
“What do you mean?” Yoshizumi ventured reflexively. “What survived?”
“Humanity’s hatred,” replied the admiral. “The germ of hatred has survived the destruction of humanity in an uninhabited land, and it is what is tying together Antarctica and this great earthquake in Alaska.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Yoshizumi said, looking around the council chamber. “Why would Alaska—”
“Ridiculous!” The usually calm Admiral Conway had stood up and struck the table. “It’s utterly ridiculous. It’s as if someone’s playing pool with us as the balls. I won’t say that it’s God who’s hitting the cue though. The God I know—well, he may exist, but not for humanity’s sake. He may administer the laws of nature, but he pays no attention to the cares of human beings at all. And it was human beings who turned nature’s laws into calamity.”
“What do you mean by ‘pool’?” Yoshizumi asked, taken aback.
“Someone who’s good at pool doesn’t aim directly at the ball on the other side of the table. He hits a ball that’s closer to him, which hits another ball, which bounces off the side of the table, and finally hits the last ball.”
“I really don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Because we’ve told you nothing. There are some things we haven’t even revealed in their entirety to everyone on the council.” Admiral Conway looked around the room. He looked like he was holding back anger. “It’s so utterly preposterous. And the cause of this idiocy is something created by America’s first idiot president—Silverland.”
“The former president?” Yoshizumi said.
“Exactly. He was practically a madman—a reactionary extremist so far to the right it was almost unthinkable. As the minion of a southern gang that referred to themselves as big capitalists, he was the Attila the Hun of twentieth century America. He was a man who believed that hatred, isolation, bigotry, ignorance, arrogance, and greed—bestial emotions worthy of a medieval Inquisitor—were ‘bravery’ and ‘justice.’ He didn’t understand world history in the slightest, and six years ago, he intended to start another world war, this time against the ‘red’ countries. I still don’t understand why the American people chose such a man. I’m a soldier myself, but in those days America’s backwardness drove me to despair.”
“So … what did this President Silverland do?”
“ ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay,’ ” Admiral Conway quoted in a voice suffused with loathing. “That was his favorite catchphrase. What he did was make the ARS.”
“ARS?”
“Major Carter!” said Admiral Conway. A slender man that Yoshizumi had never seen before stood up.
“Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce Major Carter. He originally belonged to the Defense Department, and in Silverland’s time played a critical role in the ARS project. During the next president’s administration, he was demoted and reassigned here. His mission … was to perform intelligence activities in Antarctica, and to keep an eye on me. However, that’s already been five, six years ago, so it doesn’t really matter now. We’re going to hear from the major now about ARS. There are very few men in the US military who know about this system in detail.”
Major Carter began to speak in a level monotone. “ARS,” he said, “was created around eight years ago by then-President Silverland and Lieutenant General Garland, who at the time was said to be a capable man at Joint Chiefs of Staff HQ. It stands for Automatic Reaction System, though you might call it the Automatic Revenge System.”
3. Grand Slam
“In the late 1950s, America’s preparations for fending off a nuclear attack entered the stage of so-called push-button warfare, beginning with BMEWS—the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. At the same time, our ICBM bases, Strategic Air Command, and global radar network formed an organic system for going to war at any instant, and that gave birth to an inevitable internal crisis. This system had been assembled to run automatically, but the problem was that there were some extremely unstable elements inside it. That is to say, at key points in the process, decisions had to be made by easily upset human beings.”
Major Carter spoke in a level, if rather cynical-sounding, tone.
“I believe there are a number present here who remember this themselves, but from the close of the 1950s through the early 1960s, there was an ‘atomic neurosis’ plaguing military personnel involved in America’s national defense mechanisms. In 1957, there was an incident in which a B-47 on a training fligh
t mistakenly dropped a hydrogen bomb over eastern New Jersey. At that time, its safety devices were engaged, so the bomb didn’t detonate, but when they investigated it afterward they learned that five of its six safety devices had been broken, and only the last one had prevented an explosion. There were unofficial discussions at the time about what would have happened if, heaven forbid, that nuclear warhead had exploded on American soil. There were two possible dangers: one was that the national defense system would fly into a panic and order a full-scale nuclear strike without confirming which country the bomber had come from. In the other scenario, it’s confirmed that one of our own bombers dropped it, but even so someone in the bomber’s chain of command—most likely someone secretly harboring militant feelings—gives the order for a nuclear attack in order to paper over his team’s responsibility. Ever since that time, the human element has been the problem in our strategic nuclear framework.”
Something bitter rose up in the chests of the assembled. The age of nuclear terror, of wars of extinction, of saturation weapons, incredible networks of machinery created for the mutual destruction of one another. The long nightmare, back when “the world” had existed. Only four years had passed since the world had been destroyed, yet even so, when people heard talk of such things now, they could only think of such “defense” systems as the work of madmen. In the end, the world and its civilization had not been destroyed by the purging flames of Heaven; instead it rotted away from the ground up, consumed and killed by life-forms so tiny that the eye couldn’t even see them. Humanity had died a simple beggar’s death.
“In 1961, there was an incident in which an NCO working in a nuclear weapons storage facility suffered a mental breakdown and tried to fire his pistol at a nuclear weapon. There were also frequent cases in which soldiers working in this nuclear defense system tendered their resignations because of neuroses that they felt would compel them to push the button ordering an attack. Military surveys discovered that one percent of the workers involved in defense were experiencing precarious mental states and should be removed from their positions. Also, another ten percent were determined to be in need of detailed aptitude testing due to emotional instability and other reasons. At Greenland Radar Base, the moon coming out from behind a cloud was mistaken for an approaching missile, and they went on full alert. Because they’d lost contact with Alaska Base due to mechanical failure, they scrambled their jets. Although the multistep failsafe system was able to somehow reduce the danger of accidentally starting a war because of mechanical problems or misunderstandings, the danger from the human element only became greater and greater.”
Everyone held their breath as they watched the sallow-faced man named Carter, wondering what in the world it was he was trying to say.
“During the Kennedy years, they tried all kinds of things. They made it so you couldn’t launch a missile without keys held by five people. They made it so that SAC’s ultimate attack required a direct presidential order. But Kennedy was the first one to see that no matter what they tried to secure safety, in the end there were only two choices. Would we continue walking down a path with the danger of accidental warfare and eventually fall into the abyss? Or would we completely dismantle the system?”
Everyone in the room felt as though they were hearing about the decision that Caesar had made in ancient Rome. To cross the Rubicon or to stop at its bank? Now that the politicians of the world, their anguished choices, and the world in which their nobility and their torment had existed were all lost, the question not only seemed moot but foolish.
“The path Kennedy chose is the one that Silverland reversed by force. He tried to take us as far down the other road as possible. From the time he was elected, he was publicly declaring that we would crush the Soviet Union, and while he was in the White House—and the whole world and every American with a conscience was petrified with fear—the danger of an accidental war increased automatically.
“Let me be clear, the soldiers who were working in the nuclear defense organization—most of them, anyway—even though they believed that they had to do their jobs, they wanted strongly to avoid a war. But as soon as we headed into the Silverland years, the fear that a war was going to start right over their heads grew so strong that it created huge mental strains within the armed forces. Silverland decided to take General Garland—the most far-right man in the military and a fervent worshipper of Silverland himself—and make him his partner in creating a nuclear defense strategy that was all his own. ARS was the ultimate, top-secret piece of that strategy.”
Silverland. That infamous man was already dead. But Yoshizumi realized that his palms were now wet with sweat.
“Silverland held two oddly misplaced fears,” continued Carter. “He always acted like he was the cheerful sort who never sweated the details, but like any bully who gets the bully pulpit, his focus on the big picture was just a mask meant to hide what a scared little boy he was. He was a lot like a Southern gambler. In the end, a gambler places more value on a reckless, fearless, all-or-nothing bet than he does on reason. Silverland had reckless courage, but his intellect was just pretense, and in extreme situations, he couldn’t stop himself from making childish decisions. In other words, it was his own despotic creed that no matter what contemptible thing he might do, the person who held the highest position was unconditionally the greatest person, and it followed that the highest level decisions must always be made only by the person in the highest position of authority.”
“Enough with the psychological theorizing about Silverland!” Conway spat. “Hurry up and tell us about ARS.”
“But, sir, his personality is an important point when it comes to explaining the nature of this system,” Carter said, his tone quiet. “So, his misplaced fears were these: the first was not the danger of accidental war—after all, he himself had been seriously considering starting a war under the pretext of an accident if it became necessary in the face of world opinion. Rather, he feared that the top brass would defy his command were he to declare all-out war. As is the case with every tyrant, he was unable to trust anyone. His other fear was of an attack by chemical or biological weapons without warning.”
“I see …” murmured Barnes. “When you’re in a gang, everyone in the world looks like a gangster.”
“Because of that, the new nuclear framework that he and Garland came up with included a system by which missile launch control could be switched over to the White House, allowing the president to launch the missiles with his own hands directly. ‘And now, behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thee … ’ That was another of his favorite phrases. And then there was one other thing. In the second year of his presidency, the ARS was installed: the complete Automatic Reaction System.”
“Automatic Reaction,” Yoshizumi repeated, without thinking. “You mean …”
“Yes, exactly. In the event of either a mutiny in the armed forces or an accident of some sort, or even if the nuclear framework were paralyzed by human incompetence, all he’d have to do is switch over to this system, and the instant enemy missiles hit the US, a retaliatory strike would be launched. Silverland hunted the Reds and the spies with several times the intensity of Senator McCarthy, and just because of that, he truly believed that right before the enemy launched a missile attack they would use spies or spy planes to deliver gas attacks or biological attacks and paralyze our defense organization. He used to call this thing ‘my patriotism, crystallized.’ Even if America was on the receiving end of the first strike, we would strike back automatically. ‘Even if I am killed, the arrow of vengeance will fly from my cold, dead hands,’ he once said. You must think his ways were those of a madman, but to the very end, the Nero of the White House never trusted his subordinates. He, along with the far-right military authorities, had considered a coup d’état had he lost the presidential election, so once he became president he was terrified of revolts from within the military. While he said he was doing his duty to defend the country, his state of mind was in fact that
of someone rolling the dice. I remember him saying, ‘Look here. This is my last trump card. My grand slam.’ ”
“And so, this system … is still operational?”
“The whole system is powered by an unmanned, underground nuclear power station. All you’d have to do is throw a hidden switch in the White House’s special underground command chamber … and the whole command system is taken out of the hands of the defense personnel and put under ARS control—and ARS doesn’t even have any hands.”
“Still …” Colonel Lopez put in gloomily, “Silverland was voted out in the next election, and the final president took up Kennedy’s mantle again. During the summer of the Year of the Calamity, President Richardson was trying to realize a treaty that would have abolished all nuclear weapons in one fell swoop. It’s unthinkable that he would have thrown that switch, isn’t it?”
“There’s a fifty-fifty chance that it’s active,” said Major Carter. “Silverland’s influence persisted beyond his administration. Garland continued in his position as general. When I was sent to Antarctica the winter before the Year of the Calamity, the system still hadn’t been deactivated. If someone in the Silverland faction were to have used the confusion just before the end to infiltrate the White House …”
“That is a possibility,” said Admiral Conway. “I remember talking to President Richardson. He was at the White House—probably just before he died. He was indignant because the Silverland gang was trying to put pressure on him in the middle of all that great confusion.”
“But even if that thing is still … alive,” said Yoshizumi, “what does that have to do with an earthquake in Alaska?”
“You haven’t figured it out yet?” said Carter. “The geographical point you showed us—it’s relatively near the Distant Early Warning line. If the US radar stations in Alaska are destroyed by a major earthquake, the ARS Command Center will transmit a six-minute warning, and if the base doesn’t answer, intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads will be automatically fired at the Soviet Union.”
Virus: The Day of Resurrection Page 33