After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

  We walked down the gangway and up to Nike’s cabin, next to the bridge. It was funny, I thought. All the time I’d been on the blimp, I’d never been in his cabin. We knocked; he told us to come in. His cabin was basic captain chic, gray bulkheads, one more port than Lucy’s cabin, a small desk, a chair, a sink, a bunk, and a framed picture of an airship—not the Wonderblimp, but bigger, with swastikas on the tail—on the wall. Nike grinned when he saw me carrying the gray book.

  “You read it?” he asked. I nodded. “The whole thing?”

  “The good parts,” I said. “There’s a lot of technical stuff I skipped over.”

  “Good,” he said. “And?”

  “It’s the manual,” Lucy said.

  He smiled. “Nice. Tell me about it, Holmes.”

  “Not a lot to tell,” I said. “It’s a manual for the Zap bomb. The last chapter is the crucial one. It tells how to arm the EMP bomb, how to set the timing, stuff like that.”

  “Spare me the details,” he said. “If you had an EMP bomb, do you think you could use that manual to fire it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s written for a damn twelve-year-old.” I stopped, thinking. “Well, I mean, for twelve-year-olds before the Zap.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Nike. “But you could teach someone how to fire a Zap bomb?”

  “No problem. You just take the igniters—that’s the hard part—and put them around the fusion core, then you arm them, of course, and—”

  “Not now, Professor,” he said. “Save it.” He walked over to me, wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “You’ve done well, Holmes, you’ve done well. Why don’t you go with Lucy and discuss philosophy or something?” He winked.

  “Nike . . .” I looked over at Lucy, the light from a porthole catching her hair in a blue corona. “Um, why do you need to know all this? You don’t have a Zap bomb on board, do you?”

  “Us?” He looked shocked. “Horrors, no.” Nike turned, walked to the window, stared across the frozen lake at Denali, the great mountain glowing blazing white in the early morning sun. “No, there’s not a Zap bomb anywhere on this Wonderblimp.”

  I followed his gaze. “The mountain?” I remembered that line in the operating manual: an EMP bomb could be fired from as low as 20,000 feet and wipe out an area for a radius of 500 miles. Twenty-thousand three-hundred and twenty feet. Denali was just over 20,000 feet high. “There’s an EMP bomb on Denali?”

  Nike smiled. “I had an English teacher in high school, this real hard-ass Jesuit priest. If you asked him a particularly tough question like, ‘We going to have a quiz tomorrow?’ his favorite response was, ‘I ain’t a sayin’ yes and I ain’t a sayin’ no, I just ain’t a sayin’.’ So: I ain’t a sayin’.” He grinned. “But you’ll find out sooner or later.”

  “Better later.” But I knew the answer. I’d known someone like that, too. Whenever they said they “weren’t a sayin’,” they meant “yes.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Two days later the dawn broke bright and clear over Che Lake, and Denali beckoned to us like a platinum blond goddess. Her peaks and flanks had a new dusting of snow, and her ridges had been sculpted into clean lines of bare rock. She was fresh and new and clean, and not a cloud hovered around her.

  “We climb Denali today,” Nike announced at breakfast, and a great whoop went up from the crew.

  Even I was psyched for the assault, I who knew that evil things perhaps waited for me up on the mountain, even I who knew that what the mountain had in store for me could not be pleasant. But I was ready. If this was death, I’d take it now, on a day like that day.

  We had spent the last two days preparing for the assault. Bron had crawled over every inch of the Wonderblimp, inspected every acre of the bag, patched holes that didn’t even look like holes, repaired wear that probably didn’t need repair for years. Nike had pumped hydrogen into all the upper bags, put helium into the lower bags, with natural gas saved to vent when we went down. The hydrogen mixture had been increased a bit, too much for normal flying but exactly right for the high altitude we would attempt that day.

  Anything we would need on the catwalk had to be moved down into the nacelle, because the catwalk wouldn’t be pressurized. Everyone on board was issued Arctic gear, heavy parkas and expedition boots that Nike had scrounged from somewhere. If any of us had to go out of the nacelle, there were oxygen bottles and masks hanging by the air locks.

  An hour before noon, just as the sun began to hit its peak, we all stood by our stations. I was by the map table, staring at the compass and a map titled, “McKinley (Denali) Massif.” Lucy was by the engine controls, Bron at the wheel, Ruby aft with Doc North in the hangar bay, and Nike in his great captain’s chair.

  “Haul in cables,” Nike said into the intercom.

  “Hauling in cables,” Ruby said from the hangar bay.

  “Prepare to start props.”

  “Props ready,” Lucy said.

  “Cables in,” Ruby reported. “Closing hangar doors. Hangar doors shut.”

  “Pressurize nacelle.”

  “Pressurizing nacelle,” Ruby said over the intercom. I could hear a faint hiss coming from the ports, then I felt my ears pop. “Nacelle pressurized,” Ruby said.

  “Props on, quarter speed, reverse.”

  “Props on, quarter speed, reverse,” Lucy said. She moved four levers, and the engines started: a ka-wheer, ka-wheer sound as the pistons fired, and then a gentle thrumming as the motors roared on.

  “Release nose drogue.”

  “Releasing nose drogue,” Bron said. He pulled a lever, and there was a loud clicking sound from the bow as the nose came free from the pylon we’d rigged up. “Nose released and running free.”

  “Okay,” said Nike, a broad smile on his face. “Lucy, full props, forward.”

  “Full props forward.”

  “Now,” Nike said, turning to Bron. “Up ship!”

  “Aye,” he replied. “Up ship.”

  Bron pressed the elevator foot pedals, and the nose of the Wonderblimp rose about ten degrees. After about ten minutes of climbing, we leveled off at 5,000 feet, our cruising altitude for then. I looked out the porthole and could see the great massif of Denali dead ahead of us. I took compass and protractor, took a reading, charted a course on the map.

  “Holmes, what’s our heading?” Nike asked.

  “Twenty-two degrees north-northeast,” I said.

  “Keep on this heading,” Nike said. “How soon until we hit the glacier?”

  Nike meant the Kahiltna Glacier, no erasure of names on that one, a broad, long glacier that went up almost to the peak of Denali. “Ten minutes to the base of it,” I said. “Then we just follow that sucker up until it forks.”

  “Okay,” said Nike. “Bron, stay on course until we get to the base. Holmes, come with me. Bring the map.” He looked at Max. “You too, Hammer. Might need your help.”

  I grabbed the map, and followed Nike aft and into the lab. Nike closed the port shut behind us, then motioned to a chair before a bank of dials and screens. Nike tapped the steel top of a big gunmetal-gray box.

  “This thing is EMP-hardened,” he said. “It’s about the only solid-state electronics that survived the Zap.”

  “What’s it do?” I asked.

  “You read that section on the Zap bomb about locating it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The fusion bomb puts out a low-frequency ping detectable within fifty miles.”

  “Look up the frequency.” He tapped the big gray book. I flipped through the pages, found the frequency: 1341 megahertz.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?” Nike said. “Find the nuke.”

  “Find it?”

  “Turn the machine on, Holmes,” Max said.

  I shrugged, examined the board. On/off switches aren’t hard to find; usually, they’re in the lower right hand corner of the board, and this one was. I flicked it on, and a videoscreen—hadn’t seen one of those in years—glowed to life. Red numbers li
t up above the screen. I twirled a knob, and the numbers changed. With a little adjustment I got the numbers to 1341.

  “Put the headphones on,” Max said. I looked at him, squinted. He smiled. “I used to run radios when I was a little younger.”

  I put the headphones on, got a loud hiss. I tore them off, then looked until I found a knob marked volume, turned the volume down. I put the headphones back on. On the screen were thin grid lines radiating to a bull’s-eye target in the center. The bull’s-eye was the blimp, I figured. I twirled a big black dial next to the screen, and a line started radiating out from the center. Numbers flickered at the end of the line; when I stopped turning the dial, the line stopped, and the numbers stopped changing.

  “A compass,” I said. “I mean, this gives readings like a compass.”

  “Very good, Holmes,” Nike said. “That’s why it’s called a locator. Spin the dial, kid. Here’s a hint: what we’re looking for is supposed to be on Denali.”

  I nodded, turned the dial to our heading, twenty-two degrees north-northeast. Hiss. Silence. I turned the dial to twenty-one, twenty-three, back and forth. Nothing. A thought occurred to me. I paged back through the Zap bomb book to the chapter on locating the bomb. A note said that “to save energy, the transmitter emits a signal every fifteen minutes.” I wondered how long the transmitter wanted to save energy; another note said the transmitter was powered by a small nuclear battery, which meant the transmitter could save energy for a long, long time.

  “We’re at the glacier,” Bron said over the intercom.

  Nike tapped the intercom switch. “Okay, hover there for a moment.” He looked at me. “Well?”

  “Nothing. But we have to wait. If the Zap’s transmitting, it does it every fifteen minutes.” I looked at my watch. “We could be between cycles. In which case”—I heard a faint ping and smiled—“we won’t have long to wait at all.” The headphones went ping again, and the line pointing twenty-two degrees north-northeast glowed red. I pointed at the screen.

  “Hoo-hah!” Nike yelled. “It’s there.”

  “Something’s there,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “What else could it be?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “We’ll have to triangulate.”

  “How’s that?” Nike asked.

  “Move to another location.” I spread map, compass, and protractor before me. “Head, um, fifty-two degrees northeast to here—” I pointed at another glacier, its name intact, too. “The Ruth. That’s about twenty-five miles away. We can take another reading then.”

  “Okay. Can you get up the mountain from the Ruth?”

  I looked at the map. “No problem, I guess. All the glaciers feed off the mountain.”

  “How do you triangulate?” Nike asked.

  “We know we’re here”—I pointed to our position east of Che Lake, at the base of the Kahiltna Glacier—“and we got a signal twenty-two degrees north-northeast.” I drew a line from that point. “We take another reading at the Ruth Glacier, figure our position, see if we can pick up another signal, then draw that line and see where it intersects with the previous reading. Bingo: the source.”

  Nike grinned. “The Zap bomb.”

  I shrugged. “Or something.”

  * * *

  At full props we arrived at the Ruth Glacier in forty minutes. Nike gave the order to hover over a point where the glacier melted into a river. The Ruth stopped in a great mass of rubble at the frozen river. Though both were ice, the glacier was a tumbled mass of rubble, rows of peaks like a moose’s molar, and the river was smooth and flat.

  I went to the porthole, looked out, got my bearings. I should have taken a compass reading off a few more points— Denali would have been perfect—but I wasn’t being fancy. I sat down at the console, turned the machine back on, began turning the dials. Denali was more or less north of us, so I stuck to the north end of the dial. I glanced at my watch. It was time for another signal. The line on the screen fanned out from zero degrees north over to 340 degrees northwest. Back and forth. Back. Forth. At 331 degrees northwest the headphones went ping again.

  “Got it,” I said. I pointed at the line, copied the coordinates, traced it on the map from the head of the Ruth Glacier. The line met my other line right at—

  “Denali,” Nike said.

  “Yup, Denali. There’s something there all right.”

  “Okay,” said Nike. “What’s that reading?”

  “Three-hundred thirty-one degrees northwest.”

  “Come up and show Bron,” he said. “New course: up the Ruth Glacier.”

  “Up the glacier?” I asked. “All the way up?”

  “Yeah,” Nike said. “That will take us to the top, won’t it?”

  “Sort of,” I said. I pointed at the map. “The glacier goes almost due north for about twenty miles. Then it stops here— I tapped a left fork off the main glacier. “You’d have to go up that.”

  Nike and Max squinted at the map. “So?” Nike asked.

  I shook my head. “Look at the contour lines? Doesn’t mean anything to you?” They shook their heads. “That sucker’s a canyon,” I said, “A canyon maybe a thousand feet high above the glacier.”

  “Damn,” Nike said.

  “Ought to be fun, though,” I said. “We can go up it.” I could barely read the name; someone had started to erase the ink away. “Up the Great Gorge.”

  “And then?”

  “And then you just take the blimp up to the top, that’s what then.”

  * * *

  The Great Gorge curved northeast-north parallel to a ridge on the west. Due north of us a jagged mountain poked above the glacier like a rotten tooth over dead gum. A mile wide, the gorge ran five times its width. Back on the bridge, Nike told Lucy to cut props to quarter power; he wanted to take this slowly, not so much for safety, I think, as for the beauty of it.

  A wind blew down the gorge, blowing the snow off the black granite sides of the mountains, polishing the faces to scratched gray. Nike pushed our speed up to half props, and raised our altitude another thousand feet, to get out of the worst of the winds. We flew parallel to unnamed peaks to the west and northwest; the map said these peaks were 12,000 and 14,000 feet high.

  The walls of the nacelle and the portholes were chilled, almost cold enough that skin would stick to them. We all had our parkas on, unzipped; it was probably forty-five degrees inside. The exhaust from the props was vented well away from the blades, but still Nike worried about moisture from the exhaust condensing and freezing on the bottom of the blimp bag—something that had happened to a guy named Nobile years ago when he’d taken a blimp over the pole. Nike worried, too, about ice freezing on the blades, then being thrown off and rupturing the bag.

  I kept looking out the port for some sign of life down there, perhaps Nivakti and Rindi climbing up the Ruth to the top, running dogs. But we’d only been out of Sue City a week; they couldn’t be that high by now. And they may have taken a different route. Nothing moved down on the glacier but dust devils of snow whipping across the great frozen river.

  Bron stood straight before the wheel, parka off, muscles bulging through his wool sweater. The wind kept trying to whip the blimp around, and Bron had to fight to keep her into the wind and going through the gorge. The Wonderblimp swung due north, to the end of the gorge. Tongues of mountain slid down from the jagged mountain on our right, and a wall like a great gate stood to our left. We swung around that wall and the gorge opened up into a great bowl of ice and snow.

  “My God,” said Max.

  If Denali had been a goddess and she had reached down a hand to hold a small child, that hand would have been the bowl spread out before us. If Denali had been a singer and she had wanted the world, or at least what was left of the world, to sit and tremble at the power of her voice, that bowl would have been her theater. The bowl spread out for maybe a mile long, a half-a-mile wide, and an arc of peaks circled the bowl, pillars to hold a roof long crumbled into ice.

  �
�Now,” Nike said. “Now we go up.” He pointed, and all of us followed his finger as Bron spun the blimp around almost due west. Denali. The mountain rose above the bowl, a beacon, a tower. “Blow all gas into the bags,” Nike said into the intercom.

  “Blowing gas,” Ruby said from the hangar bay, and I imagined those tanks being sucked dry.

  “Twenty degree rise, full props.”

  “Rising twenty degrees,” Bron said.

  “Full props,” Lucy said.

  The Wonderblimp rose, rose not like a hawk, but like dust motes on an updraft, lazily, slowly, the turboprops roaring like crazed wolverines, the land falling below us. I looked at the altimeter, watched the needle climb and climb, air pressure lessening, blimp rising.

  “Jettison tanks,” Nike said on the intercom back to Ruby. I looked up at him, puzzled. “We’re not coming down until this is over,” he said.

  And they couldn’t. To come down, the blimp would have to vent gas, and unless they pumped the gas back into the tanks, the gas was gone; they couldn’t rise again unless they jettisoned more ballast.

  “Holmes,” he said. “Go aft and start tracking.”

  I waved a thumb at Max, and he followed me aft.

  The mountain loomed larger as I watched through the port. I turned the locator on, waited for the video screen to glow into life, waited for the signal to come on. I’d set my watch by the last signal, and it was five minutes to another quarter hour. While I waited, I read through the big gray book again.

  In the back of the book, buried in the section on using the locator, was a paragraph about recognition signals. The long-range transmission was designed only to find the EMP bomb within a few hundred miles. Once the locator got close, some fine tuning was needed. A minute after the quarter hour I could send a recognition signal back, and the bomb would start transmitting constantly. And then it would do something that I was tempted not to try: the bomb would start glowing, the transmitter’s nuclear batteries would heat the skin of the bomb, and the heat would burn, or melt, anything around it. A minute later, I got the ping.