The Alejandra Variations (4 page)

And much, much more.

"It's real, isn't it, Sal," he said, free of the monitoring computer.

The Director's eyes were dark and profoundly troubled, but there was strength in them, and concern for him. Perhaps her strength came from the fact that her family was lodged in Longmont, close to Foresee in Colorado. Her two children would be safe, and her husband was where he could be notified. So, Nicholas could almost see in her eyes ninety-two million Americans vanishing in a radioactive haze. They both knew the facts about a full-scale nuclear war—the real facts that the governments involved didn't want to admit even to themselves. Melissa's kids might be safe—but so what? Both he and Melissa stood to lose equally, whatever the outcome. It was a frightful burden indeed.

"It's always been real, Nick. Right now, we're just taking precautions. You can bet the Russians are doing the same."

"Wonderful," Nick muttered sardonically.

Dr. Massingale got clothing for Nicholas from a closet near the bed. "There's nothing really to worry about, Nick," he said, tossing over a pair of pants. "You're in our care, and we're going to hustle you back to Colorado as soon as you're ready to get to the evac Tubes."

Nicholas stared at Melissa, the pants still in his hands. "It's that bad?"

"Like he said, it's just a precaution. I want everyone where I can reach them if things get rough."

When things get rough is more like it, Nicholas thought.

His paranoia about nuclear warfare dated back as far as he could remember. He dreamed about mushroom clouds, fiery contrails pushing SS-20s in from the Arctic, radioactive winds so harsh that they peeled the very skin from your bones. He could almost feel the fingers poised over the doomsday buttons; he could almost hear the growl of missiles deep in the cement throats of silos hidden beneath the snows of the Poluostrov Tajmyr plain in northern Russia.

He had inherited more than a certain chromosomal arrangement from his parents and his grandparents: he'd also inherited their Cold War apprehensions. And world history was beginning to suggest that the lid could not be kept on any longer. China finally had too many people. England was plagued with uncontrollable race riots and a paralyzed economy. Poland was a moonscape of idle factories and barren farmlands. Italy was run by terrorists who kept assassinating each other. And half the Christian world—in existential despair—was doing nothing, waiting for the Messiah to return. The other half was waiting to shoot Him if He did return. Dwindling resources, pockets of sheer starvation, and rampant paranoia created a disease for which there was no known cure.

Nicholas took a deep breath and stared squarely at his boss, "I think I get the hint, Sal. I'm in the army now."

Melissa Salazar stood tight-lipped for a moment, her hands resting in the pockets of her skirt. In the corridor outside, people ran past, lugging boxes, files, and briefcases. Nicholas saw an MP jog by, whistle in his mouth, hastening to direct traffic somewhere down the line.

He had just finished strapping on his boots when he was suddenly jolted by a tremendous thud that threw everyone to the floor. It was followed by a kind of hollow-throated thunder that made him weak. His cheek was pressed to the cold tile of the recovery room floor.

"Holy Mother of God," Melissa Salazar whispered, hair streaming across her face. She looked around her. In the corridor, several people were screaming. Others were shouting.

The lights flickered overhead, dimmed, then came back on.
EMP
, Nicholas thought. The base's optical fibers and protein circuits had taken over where copper and aluminum wiring had been fused by the pulse.

Melissa, regaining control, said, "Looks like we got visited by a small warhead."

Everyone got quickly to his feet. Dr. Massingale helped Nicholas up.

"We'd better head for the Tube tunnels. Do you feel you can walk, Nick?" he asked. "If not, we can get a wheelchair for you."

"Just show me the door, friend," Nicholas said, squirming into his shirt. Though he was still groggy, he managed it easily. "If I'm going to spend the rest of my natural life inside the Rocky Mountains, I'd like to get started."

He realized that such a life would not be a happy one. All the things he'd had any strong feeling for would be gone. He couldn't bear to think of his family. Maybe somehow they had a chance…

Melissa had gone out with Dr. Massingale to oversee the rest of Project Foresee's evacuation. Records would have to be destroyed, equipment smashed. The lights kept burning. Somewhere generators were still turning, men and women still functioned. But overhead a small mushroom cloud sprouted upward into the stratosphere, its radioactive ions breaking a hole in the ozone. If the war scenarios were correct, other monstrosities were growing with malevolent rapidity all across the earth's once-green surface.

Chapter Three

DISCRETIONARY PERSONNEL.

That was the euphemism handed down to them by the military brass stationed at Vandenberg. All discretionary personnel were to have priority in the evac procedure. In his slightly medicated state, Nicholas Tejada managed to grin at the silliness of the term. It sounded as if he and the others so listed were among a certain kind of moral elite, as if he spent most of his time being "discreet."

The Tube that whisked him and the other Vandenberg discretionary personnel out into Death Valley contained nearly eighty-five residents, mostly civilian, of the former California missile base. Nicholas knew that they were extremely important, for there were few military personnel in this first contingent. Only two generals were on board—a brigadier and a major general. The rest of the Vandenberg Air Force personnel were staying behind. Waiting.…

But there was something calming about the fact that the Air Force retained most of its active personnel at the base. Someone had to fight.

The compartment in which Nicholas languished hardly shook, hardly made a sound, as it passed safely beneath hundreds of feet of solid rock on its way through the Mojave Desert. Somewhere, Nicholas knew, there would be Tube links which would take the members of Foresee into Colorado. Other people would be rapidly funneled to various Air Force bases in Utah, Nevada, and southern Arizona.

There was only the slightest sensation of movement—a gliding, womblike feeling as the Tube raced at three-hundred-plus miles an hour through a near-vacuum. The smooth, relaxing motion of the Tube allowed him to forget briefly that in all likelihood there was nothing on the surface but ash and radioactive debris.

He wished he had been able to anticipate the attack on Vandenberg through Mnemos Nine. He couldn't bear the thought that if his mother and father had perished he had contributed to their deaths through inaction.

Why had they sent him to Bombay instead of having him prowl around the dream streets of someplace close to Vandenberg—Lompoc, perhaps, or Santa Barbara itself? They had to have known that the Russians were up to something. And he knew that region of California much better than the India conjured up by the microchips of Mnemos Nine's superbrain. Even in a hypothetical, computer-induced Santa Barbara, Nicholas knew that he would have spotted the harm those Russian trawlers could do.

On the other hand, two days ago he had gone comatose and the bombs had come down today. In a world of instant communications and instant destruction, computer scenarios, though precise, changed almost hourly.

The thing that perhaps bothered him the most about Bombay was the appearance of Rhoanna Martin. He had no idea where she had come from. Obviously, his memories of her were waiting to be culled, when such strong emotional responses were called for. Yet none were theoretically required in the Bombay/Ganesh Chaturthi sequence.

But she had appeared in Mnemos Nine scenarios many times before. Just three weeks previous, Nicholas had entered a scenario that was trying to anticipate a possible attack on the life of Pope Gregory XVII during his visit to Rio de Janeiro. The scenario had surprised him.

Rhoanna had walked out of the mass of revelers—the enthusiastic well-wishers who lined the streets—and waved at him. How full of life her smile was! A rapturous light glittered in her hair!

Then the bomb went off. It got the Pope and took out a third of Rio. It got Nicholas as well.

He shuddered, remembering all the gory details. It hurt to think back on it. The crumbling buildings of Rio—a city long wrapped like Laocoön in the crushing coils of spiritual and economic collapse—had burst into atomic flame like matchstick boxes. His body recalled the pain as needles of glass from the buildings ribboned through his flesh before each shred of torn skin shriveled away in a nanosecond. Fire stormed the poor streets of Rio de Janeiro.

In the real world the Pope lived and the bomb was found. Mnemos Nine had seen it coming from the sky, extrapolating that it might come from the upper reaches of a building rather than from an aircraft. All Nick knew was that it hurt. It hurt because Rhoanna had been there and the bomb had robbed them of their lives and love.

The door to Nicholas's private compartment eased open just then, and a short, stocky man entered, chewing on a carrot.

"Nelson," Nick said, putting aside the week-old copy of
Time
he had not been reading anyhow. "I didn't know you were on the Tube. Come on in." He got up and shook his colleague's hand.

Nelson Reitinger was another of the Mnemos system functionaries. He was an Environmental, not a Strategic. Nicholas was surprised to discover that the short man had been back at Vandenberg. Melissa Salazar hadn't said anything about his being here—but they had been hurrying to board the Tubes.

"How do, Nick?" he smiled, crushing Nicholas's hand in a firm but jovial grip. "Sal gave me the go-ahead to stop by and see you for a while."

"That's great," Nicholas said. "No one's come by since we evacuated Vandenberg. Have you seen Dr. Massingale?"

"I hear he's waiting for the next Tube out." Reitinger always seemed casual, at ease with the world, no matter how big the crisis.

"What's the news? Have you heard anything?" Nicholas asked.

"There's not much to tell, yet," Reitinger said around a mouthful of carrot. He had short curly hair and hands the size of a normal man's head. Though he looked rather comic, Nick knew that he was also physically dangerous. At a party in Santa Barbara, he'd seen Reitinger bend a tire-iron into something resembling a Möbius strip. Nicholas could not understand how or what he contributed to Mnemos's Environmental scenarios. He considered Reitinger a borderline mental case—even though his Ph.D. in biochemistry and his background in forestry and animal husbandry were points in his favor.

Reitinger continued, "We found out that they inflicted some minor damage to the Coast Highway. The latest word also has it that we took out part of Olenegorsk. That's about it for World War III so far." He seemed unimpressed by the whole situation.

Nicholas couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. He had visions—because he was trained to have visions—of the entire southern California coastline bubbling in a nuclear inferno, perhaps presaging the end of mankind and of all life on earth.

"What's at Olenegorsk?" he queried, trying to stay calm. "I've never heard of it before."

Reitinger began picking his teeth with a stubby little finger. He reached over and swept up Nick's copy of
Time
, with its picture of Meher Baba on the cover. As he spoke he leafed through it.

"Basically, it's a huge radar facility, like the one we got that covers most of the upper peninsula of Michigan. It's protected by some low-range ABMs—most of which were caught sleeping."

"Damn it," Nick breathed. "They never tell me anything."

Reitinger laughed, commiserating with him. "Relax, Nickie. If something big had developed, everyone on the Tube would be shaking in their little booties. But all that's happening is that Sal's conferring with the Major General about our next plan of action."

Nick stared at Reitinger, who had thumbed his way to the sports section. He could hear the man's teeth clacking disgustingly.

"How many of us are there on the Tube?" Nicholas asked.

Nelson looked up at the ceiling, and counted off on his fingers. "Well, let's see. There's me and you. There's Melissa, of course. And Staci Bolyard. She's up front with Mnemos. The rest on board are Vandenberg personnel, heading either for Edwards Air Force Base or up to Nellis in Nevada."

"We've got a system link here on the Tube?"

"Sure. Staci's been plugged in ever since we left. We lost the Vandenberg link when the bomb went off up the coast. Electromagnetic pulse, and all that. But she's been in touch with Colorado and Omaha through the other in-system links."

To Reitinger it was like gossip—news to be imparted over a backyard fence. Nothing seemed to affect him. But he had never suffered the utter pain of being blown away in a Mnemos Nine scenario. Even so, Reitinger must have known—he was a superb Environmental—what a full nuclear exchange would do to the earth.

"I didn't know that we had an in-system link to Mnemos on the Tube. I wish Melissa had told me that."

"She doesn't want to upset you, sweetie. We all know what a terrible time you had," Reitinger said in an unusual burst of cuteness. He pulled another carrot from his pocket and offered it to Nicholas. "You want one? Helps you see at night."

Bonkers, Nicholas thought. Completely unconnected with anything normal…. If they had put him into Strategics, the entire Mnemos system would cave in.

Nick demurred, and the second carrot vanished back into Nelson's pocket. "So, what happened back at Vandenberg? Why didn't the rest of the world blow up?"

Reitinger surrounded himself with as much of a cloak of seriousness as he could temporarily muster. He crunched thoughtfully on his carrot, looking properly profound.

"It seems," he began, "that this Soviet trawler was cruising off our territorial waters, about three hundred miles out, when this Chinese destroyer jammed its radar, or some such nonsense—they haven't gotten the facts right yet. Anyway, whatever it was they jammed did more than its fair share of the work, because half the Soviet ship was on automatic, run mostly by a skeleton crew and computers. The ships fired at each other and one missile went wild. It headed for Vandenberg and exploded about ten miles offshore. We don't know if it was the Chinese or the Russian ship that did it. So, the Pentagon accidentally-on-purpose took out the Olenegorsk facility just to keep the Russians honest."