Deadline Y2K (29 page)

“Mr. Mayor?”

“Damn. Something's wrong with my arm.”

“Mr. Mayor? Rudy? Jesus Christ.”

*   *   *

At 8:45 Bill Packard was ready to leave the hospital and get drunk. He'd done his bit. Sensible people throughout the hospital had seen the wisdom of doing things right and didn't need him anymore. Nurses were placing yellow stickers on dangerous machines in every ward. He was exhausted and thought two or three drinks would put him under. On the other hand, he mused, he could go over to the 24th Precinct house, surprise his pal Ed and take a gander at the zoo that place must be.

Still wearing his white coat and stethoscope, Packard was standing outside the emergency room doors smoking a cigarette, something he hadn't done in years. Two nurses and an ambulance driver were smoking a few yards away. Off to his right, the drive curved around to First Avenue, but no ambulances had come in for at least an hour. Not even flashing lights and sirens could get through the streets. To his left, the East River sparkled with reflected light. Above the low, rumbling din of night he heard a motor launch close by. A moment later, two paramedics with a stretcher rushed out the doors and headed toward the river where a small pier for police boats served the hospital. Presently, the paramedics, a man on the stretcher, and four bodyguards with headsets returned from the pier.

Packard watched the stretcher wheel past. Lying unconscious on his back with a respirator over the lower half of his face was Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Then the stretcher was through the doors and a guy with a bad suit, tinted glasses, and a headset was standing less than a foot away, eyeballing Dr. Packard as though he were a cockroach.

“Who are you?” the guy demanded.

“Looks like your man was having trouble breathing,” Packard answered mildly.

“That's none of your business.”

“I'm a cardiac surgeon. Do you want me to examine him?”

“No way.”

In no mood to be intimidated by political creeps, Packard blew smoke in the guy's face. The man hesitated, then backed off and said, “Sorry, Doctor. We don't want any publicity right now. You know what I mean? He has his own doctor. He's gonna be okay. Can I get your name?”

Before Packard could answer “No” the man was distracted by a voice in his headset.

“What?” he exclaimed into his tiny microphone. “You're shitting me.”

The other security types were interrogating the nurses and driver. Three police motorcycles roared up the drive, and the cops congregated to one side, radios crackling, the night air condensing in macho puffs as they spoke among themselves.

The bodyguard was responding to his caller with a sense of urgency. “I don't know where the hell the damned doctor is. He was supposed to meet us at the door. No. Wait a minute, I got one right here.” He tapped Packard on the shoulder and said, “You're a heart guy? That's what you said, right? Come with me.”

Streetwise, Packard wasn't about to be drafted without his consent. “Ask me nice and I'll think about it,” he said as a way of opening negotiations.

“Okay, pal. Whaddya want?”

“What I want,” Packard said, “is for you to keep the hell away from me and let me do my job. That's what I want. Otherwise, I'll let the son of a bitch croak.”

*   *   *

Doc and Jody lay in bed, cuddling and listening to the radio, when the President addressed the nation at 9:00
A.M
. No one in New York saw him on TV. The President started with an excessively long explanation of the millennium bug and date-sensitive computers, and then notified his audience that some of our global neighbors had already experienced problems.

“We are much better prepared for the crisis than any other nation,” said the President in his most reassuring tone. “We've spent trillions of dollars. The smartest people in America have been working on this problem, and we're confident in their ability. Some things will go wrong, that's certain, but we'll get things working again as soon as humanly possible.”

He politely asked everyone to go home and remain calm. Cooperate with your neighbors. Don't loot, he said, because that's not neighborly. He called on the governors of the fifty states and Puerto Rico to shoulder the responsibility of using the National Guard to maintain order.

“Your local authorities know your situation better than we do here in Washington,” the President said. “Trust your public officials.”

“Why do we have a president, then?” Jody asked.

Doc considered his answer for a moment and then replied, “Nobody remembers.”

*   *   *

By 9:30 traffic in and out of Manhattan had reached critical mass. Nothing moved across the bridges or through the tunnels. After being stuck in traffic for hours, hundreds of people ran out of gas and abandoned their cars, ultimately immobilizing every traffic lane and isolating the island. Gridlock seized midtown and the bridge and tunnel approaches, and elsewhere on the island vehicles crept along, drivers making liberal use of their horns while passing bottles of champagne back and forth between cars.

True to the Broadway tradition that the show must go on, the festivities around Times Square continued as planned. Bands played, choirs sang, the 24 monster video screens displayed extravagant party scenes from around the city. Revelers in the street were treated to galas at the World Trade Center, the Plaza, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Diamonds glittered in the bright lights. Senators and judges in tuxedos smiled for the cameras, projecting an illusion of power and security.

The planned night regatta of tall ships commenced on schedule under the first round of fireworks along the Hudson River. The fleet of sailing vessels all had modern navigational equipment that depended on the GPS satellites that were no longer transmitting, but this posed no problem for experienced sailors. However, one of the ships near the front of the line, the Mexican training sloop
Emiliano Zapata,
was under the command of a young lieutenant who owed his billet to political connections rather than maritime skill, and he promptly rammed the Greek ship
Marathon
just off the 23rd Street sports complex. Under exploding rockets and pyrotechnic magic, the ships behind the two colliding craft maneuvered frantically to avoid a waterborne accordion crash, and presently the stately procession of nautical heritage was in complete disarray. The river turned white with churning foam from propellers thrust into reverse, and small boats escorting the ships were suddenly tossed into a maelstrom of right-of-way violations and abrupt maneuvers. In the midst of the chaos on the river, the Coast Guard discovered their GPS-driven radar system that controlled ship traffic in the harbor was malfunctioning. The radars were giving false positions when checked against simple hand-held radars. Ghosts and reflections were being displayed as solid objects. When the radar operators began reporting their difficulties to the captains and the pilots of the 37 ships underway between the Atlantic Ocean and the piers in New York, they learned to their horror that thirty vessels had lost their radars as well. The average ship of modern construction contained over 300 embedded chips and at least two dozen date-sensitive chip controllers, and almost every operation on board from propulsion to emission monitoring was automated and computerized. With most ships' clocks set to GMT, midnight in London marked the century rollover for the ships' computers, and ten ships immediately lost propulsion power. Their engines stopped. Four of the ten suffered failures in all their computer-controlled systems and were adrift without radar, communications, or steering.

The fireworks never stopped. The bursting balls and star clusters had no balky silicon transistors to impede their moment of glory. As a result, people in tall buildings could watch the Brownian movement of ships as the confusion in the harbor developed in slow motion. A huge container ship ran aground on Liberty Island, another rammed a pier at the foot of Broad Street just under the Brooklyn Bridge, and an automobile ship full of new Mercedes-Benzes smashed into the western support of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The bridge held. The bow of the ship started taking on water. The steel containers had been expertly sealed by skilled craftsmen in the old country and kept the cars dry.

*   *   *

Spellbound, Copeland and Spillman watched Doc's videotape, and when it ended Copeland rewound it and started it again. From the opening shots of Con Edison's Manhattan power plants, he realized he was being presented with the greatest business opportunity of his life. Doc had recorded the work of the Midnight Club, and then edited the footage down to a forty-five-minute presentation of the plan to save New York. The Midnight Club had refined the principles Doc had developed while writing the Copeland 2000 software packages for the banks and adapted them for electric utilities. After midnight, when the Midnight Club knew which parts worked and which didn't, they'd be able to debug the programs and in very short order create a viable, eminently saleable product. The software was incredibly valuable.

“Do you know what this means?” Copeland asked Spillman.

“No,” Spillman said. “I dunno. A nifty way to keep the lights on?”

“Christ almighty, Jonathon, it means that while this son of a bitch was fucking with my head all day, he was maneuvering me here to watch this tape. These freaks are going to make me more money than Chase ever did.”

“Will that help us get out of this house?” Spillman asked.

“Who cares? What are you going to do if you get out? Go back to Shirley?”

*   *   *

Back down on Nassau Street, “The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” was blasting through the speakers. At 10:30 Doc was lying on a couch in the lounge, hands tucked behind his head, the football game on with the sound off. He was imagining the world as seen from space, the glorious blue of the sea, the white clouds, the polar caps. People were invisible, too small to be of significance. They hadn't been around long enough to make a significant mark and weren't nearly as important as they thought. Humans couldn't destroy the planet if they tried; they could only destroy themselves and perhaps a few other species, which they did every day, anyway.

Feeling serene, Doc tried to find a balance in the tumultuous events of the day. In the end the millennium bug would be remembered as a large hiccough in humanity's long, grappling struggle with the issue of the collective mind. People invented things: the wheel, the compass, the steam engine, the telephone, the controlled chain reaction, the computer. Other people found ways to use them that the inventors never dreamed of. It happened. Anything a human being could do, another human could understand and duplicate. Technology was wonderful and inevitable, but the organization of technological resources was never as advanced as the gadgets themselves. In time, microtechnology would open the heavens, plunder the depths of the earth, discover the chemical secrets of life, and find new sources of renewable energy, but not yet. High-tech was new. Computing was still in its infancy and having teething problems. By its very nature new technology broke new ground and was always experimental, which meant sometimes it broke. Sometimes the experiments didn't work out, but people learned. In this case the lesson would be hard won, but they usually were. The world that emerged from this event would be leaner, stronger, and more efficient, if not more just, equitable and fair.

The world would be different in the morning. His universe certainly was going to be different with Jody in it. He had a hard time remembering his last romance, or even the last time he got laid. No doubt it took the edge off and made him feel better. Lying next to him she'd felt like liquid silk, and when he licked the sweat between her breasts, she'd thrown back her head and laughed with pure joy.

For Jody, at the very moment when her world was imploding, when everything that could possibly go wrong did go wrong, she'd found salvation. She'd found Doc. The world was falling apart and he was spouting poetry, having a grand old time.

“Why me, Doc?” she asked. “You kept this secret for so long.”

“You can handle it,” he said. “Besides, you're cute. Do you like old boats?”

When they'd emerged disheveled and a little embarrassed from the bedroom, Ronnie had presented Jody with a Midnight Club T-shirt while the rest of the club whistled and applauded.

“You're one of us now,” Ronnie said. “You proved Doc is a human being.”

“You weren't sure?”

“Nope.”

“Hey, Doc,” Judd said. “Rudy had a heart attack.”

“No shit?”

“They took him by boat to Bellevue, and he's there now. His guys are yapping about it on their radios. Want to listen?”

“Pass. I'm gonna watch the Millennium Bowl.”

Jody picked up the video camera and resumed taping events in the room. Judd looked at the lens and began explaining the current satellite situation.

“As near as we can tell,” he said to the camera, “world-wide we have twelve ground control command centers flying 87 satellites out of 864. Three more ground stations have partial control of another 40 birds. The AT&T installation at Basking Ridge about twenty miles from here in New Jersey is fully operational. This is very good news. We have a total of 127 birds, including 53 communication sats with operational transponders, providing some communications. We're not dead in the water here. It just looks that way.”

Jody moved on to Carolyn who was watching her telephone screens and drinking a mint julep.

“When I was a little girl there was one phone company, Ma Bell, and a single monolithic structure meant everyone was always on the same page. With a zillion telephone companies, connections often fail even in the best of times. Bell Atlantic and AT&T are functioning properly and with each other, but their voice and data lines are suffering from more traffic than the systems can handle. Since every other telephone company is equally overloaded and the connections among them are malfunctioning, the surviving systems have to take drastic measures to ensure their integrity and survival. There isn't a damned thing any telephone company can do about overloads except cut off exchanges, and Bell Atlantic is doing that.”