The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (50 page)

SUSAN

I went up to the little steel door they showed me once and I take a little signet thing and press it into the slot.

Then the codes. They change them every month, but this one’s still good, ’cause the door pops open.

Two feet thick it is. And so much under there you could spend a week finding your way.

Bud unloads the T-Isolate, and we push it through the mud and down the ramp.

BUD

Susan’s better now, but I watch her careful.

We go down into this pale white light everywhere. All neat and trim.

Pushing that big Isolate thing, it takes a lot out of you. ’Specially when you don’t know where to.

But the signs light up when we pass by. Somebody’s expecting.

To the hospital is where.

There are places to hook up this Isolate thing, and Susan does it. She is O.K. when she has something to do.

MC
355

The men have returned.

Asked for shelter.

And now, plugged in, MC355 reads the sluggish, silky, grieving mind.

GENE

At last…someone has found the tap-in…. I can feel the images flitlike shiny blue fish through the warm slush I float in…. Someone…asking…so I take the hard metallic ball of facts and I break it open so the someone can see…. So slowly I do it…things hard to remember…steely-bright…. I saw it all in one instant…. I was the only one on duty then with Top Secret, Weapons Grade Clearance, so it all came to me…attacks on both U.S. and USSR…some third party…only plausible scenario…a maniac…and all the counter-force and MAD and strategies options…a big joke…irrelevant…compared to the risk of accident or third parties…that was the first point, and we all realized it when the thing was only an hour old, but then it was too…

TURKEY

It’s creepy in here, everybody gone. I’d hoped somebody’s hid out and would be waiting, but when Bud wheels the casket thing through these halls, there’s nothing—your own voice coming back thin and empty, reflected from rooms beyond rooms beyond rooms, all waiting under here. Wobbling along on the crutches, Johnny fetched me, I get lost in this electronic city clean and hard. We are like something that washed up on the beach here. God, it must’ve cost more than all Fairhope itself, and who knew it was here? Not me.

GENE

A plot it was, just a goddamn plot with nothing but pure blind rage and greed behind it…and the hell of it is, we’re never going to know who did it precisely…’cause in the backwash whole governments will fall, people stab each other in the back…no way to tell who paid the fishing boat captains offshore to let the cruise missiles aboard…bet those captains were surprised when the damn things launched from the deck…bet they were told it was some kind of stunt…and then the boats all evaporated into steam when the fighters got them…no hope of getting a story out of
that
…all so comic when you think how easy it was…and the same for the Russians, I’m sure…dumbfounded confusion…and nowhere to turn…nobody to hit back at…so they hit us…been primed for it so long that’s the only way they could think…and even then there was hope…because the defenses worked…people got to the shelters…the satellite rockets knocked out hordes of Soviet warheads…we surely lessened the damage, with the defenses and shelters, too…but we hadn’t allowed for the essential final fact that all the science and strategy pointed to…

BUD

Computer asked us to put up new antennas.

A week’s work, easy, I said.

It took two.

It fell to me, most of it. Be weeks before Turkey can walk. But we got it done.

First signal comes in, it’s like we’re Columbus. Susan finds some wine and we have it all ’round.

We get US1. The first to call them from the whole South.

’Cause there isn’t much South left.

GENE

But the history books will have to write themselves on this one…. I don’t know who it was and now don’t care…because one other point all we strategic planners and analysts missed was that nuclear winter didn’t mean the end of anything…anything at all…just that you’d be careful to not use nukes anymore…. Used to say that love would find away…but one thing I know…war will find a way, too…and this time the Soviets loaded lots of their warheads with biowar stuff, canisters fixed to blow high above cities…stuff your satellite defenses could at best riddle with shot but not destroy utterly, as they could the high explosive in nuke warheads…. All so simple…if you know there’s a nuke winter limit on the megatonnage you can deliver…you use the nukes on C31 targets and silos…and then biowar the rest of your way…. A joke, really…I even laughed over it a few times myself…we’d placed so much hope in ol’ nuke winter holding the line…rational as all hell…the scenarios all so clean…easy to calculate…we built our careers on them…. But this other way…so simple…and no end to it…and all I hope’s…hope’s…the bastard started this…some Third World general…caught some of the damned stuff, too….

BUD

The germs got us. Cut big stretches through the U.S. We were just lucky. The germs played out in a couple of months, while we were holed up. Soviets said they’d used the bio stuff in amongst the nukes to show us what they could do, long term. Unless the war stopped right there. Which it did.

But enough nukes blew off here and in Russia to freeze up everybody for July and August, set off those storms.

Germs did the most damage, though—plagues.

It was a plague canister that hit the Slocum building. That did in Mobile.

The war was all over in a couple of hours. The satellite people, they saw it all.

Now they’re settling the peace.

MR. ACKERMAN

“We been sitting waiting on this corpse long enough,” I said, and got up.

We got food from the commissary here. Fine, I don’t say I’m anything but grateful for that. And we rested in the bunks, got recuperated. But enough’s enough. The computer tells us it wants to talk to the man Gene some more. Fine, I say.

Turkey stood up. “Not easy, the computer says, this talking to a man’s near dead. Slow work.”

Looking around, I tried to take control, assume leadership again. Jutted out my chin. “Time to get back.”

But their eyes are funny. Somehow I’d lost my real power over them. It’s not anymore like I’m the one who led them when the bombs started.

Which means, I suppose, that this thing isn’t going to be a new beginning for me. It’s going to be the same life. People aren’t going to pay me any more real respect than they ever did.

MC
355

So the simulations had proved right. But as ever, incomplete.

MC355 peered at the shambling, adamant band assembled in the hospital bay, and pondered how many of them might be elsewhere.

Perhaps many. Perhaps few.

It all depended on data MC355 did not have, could not easily find. The satellite worlds swinging above could get no accurate count in the U.S. or the USSR.

Still—looking at them, MC355 could not doubt that there were many. They were simply too brimming with life, too hard to kill. All the calculations in the world could not stop these creatures.

The humans shuffled out, leaving the T-Isolate with the woman who had never left its side. They were going.

MC355 called after them. They nodded, understanding, but did not stop.

MC355 let them go.

There was much to do.

New antennas, new sensors, new worlds.

TURKEY

Belly full and eye quick, we came out into the pines. Wind blowed through with a scent of the Gulf on it, fresh and salty with rich moistness.

The dark clouds are gone. I think maybe I’ll get Bud to drive south some more. I’d like to go swimming one more time in those breakers that come booming in, taller than I am, down near Fort Morgan. Man never knows when he’ll get to do it again.

Bud’s ready to travel. He’s taking a radio so’s we can talk to MC, find out about the help that’s coming. For now, we got to get back and look after our own.

Same as we’ll see to the boy. He’s ours now.

Susan says she’ll stay with Gene till he’s ready, till some surgeons turn up can work on him. That’ll be a long time, say I. But she can stay if she wants. Plenty food and such down there for her.

A lot of trouble we got, coming a mere hundred mile. Not much to show for it when we get back. A bumper crop of bad news, some would say. Not me. It’s better to know than to not, better to go on than to look back.

So we go out into dawn, and there are the same colored dots riding in the high, hard blue. Like camp fires.

The crickets are chirruping, and in the scrub there’s a rustle of things moving about their own business, a clean scent of things starting up. The rest of us, we mount the truck and it surges forward with a muddy growl, Ackerman slumped over, Angel in the cab beside Bud, the boy already asleep on some blankets; and the forlorn sound of us moving among the windswept trees is a long and echoing note of mutual and shared desolation, powerful and pitched forward into whatever must come now, a muted note persisting and undeniable in the soft, sweet air.

EPILOGUE
(twenty-three years later)

JOHNNY

An older woman in a formless, wrinkled dress and worn shoes sat at the side of the road. I was panting from the fast pace I was keeping along the white strip of sandy, rutted road. She sat, silent and unmoving. I nearly walked by before I saw her.

“You’re resting?” I asked.

“Waiting.” Her voice had a feel of rustling leaves. She sat on the brown cardboard suitcase with big copper latches—the kind made right after the war. It was cracked along the side, and white cotton underwear stuck out.

“For the bus?”

“For Buck.”

“The chopper recording, it said the bus will stop up around the bend.”

“I heard.”

“It won’t come down this side road. There’s not time.”

I was late myself, and I figured she had picked the wrong spot to wait.

“Buck will be along.”

Her voice was high and had the backcountry twang to it. My own voice still had some of the same sound, but I was keeping my vowels flat and right now, and her accent reminded me of how far I had come.

I squinted, looking down the long sandy curve of the road. A pickup truck growled out of a clay side road and onto the hardtop. People rode in the back along with trunks and a 3D. Taking everything they could. Big white eyes shot a glance at me, and then the driver hit the hydrogen and got out of there.

The Confederation wasn’t giving us much time. Since the unification of the Soviet, USA and European/Sino space colonies into one political union, everybody’d come to think of them as the Confeds, period—one entity. I knew better—there were tensions and differences abounding up there—but the shorthand was convenient.

“Who’s Buck?”

“My
dog
.” She looked at me directly, as though any fool would know who Buck was.

“Look, the bus—”

“You’re one of those Bishop boys, aren’t you?”

I looked off up the road again. That set of words—being eternally
a Bishop boy
—was like a grain of sand caught between my back teeth. My mother’s friends had used that phrase when they came over for an evening of bridge, before I went away to the university. Not my real mother, of course—she and Dad had died in the war, and I dimly remembered them.

Or anyone else from then. Almost everybody around here had been struck down by the Soviet bioweapons. It was the awful swath of those that cut through whole states, mostly across the South—the horror of it—that had formed the basis of the peace that followed. Nuclear and bioarsenals were reduced to nearly zero now. Defenses in space were thick and reliable. The building of those had fueled the huge boom in Confed cities, made orbital commerce important, provided jobs and horizons for a whole generation—including me. I was a ground-orbit liaison, spending four months every year at US3. But to the people down here, I was eternally that oldest Bishop boy.

Bishops. I was the only one left who’d actually lived here before the war. I’d been away on a visit when it came. Afterward, my Aunt and Uncle Bishop from Birmingham came down to take over the old family property—to save it from being homesteaded on, under the new Federal Reconstruction Acts. They’d taken me in, and I’d thought of them as Mom and Dad. We’d all had the Bishop name, after all. So I was a Bishop, one of the few natives who’d made it through the bombing and nuclear autumn and all. People’d point me out as almost a freak, a
real native
, wow.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said neutrally.

“Thought so.”

“You’re…?”

“Susan McKenzie.”

“Ah.”

We had done the ritual, so now we could talk. Yet some memory stirred….

“Something ’bout you…” She squinted in the glaring sunlight. She probably wasn’t all that old, in her late fifties, maybe. Anybody who’d caught some radiation looked aged a bit beyond their years. Or maybe it was just the unending weight of hardship and loss they’d carried.

“Seems like I knew you before the war,” she said. “I strictly believe I saw you.”

“I was up north then, a hundred miles from here. Didn’t come back until months later.”

“So’d I.”

“Some relatives brought me down, and we found out what’d happened to Fairhope.”

She squinted at me again, and then a startled look spread across her leathery face. “My Lord! Were they lookin’ for that big computer center, the DataComm it was?”

I frowned. “Well, maybe…I don’t remember too well….”

“Johnny. You’re Johnny!”

“Yes, ma’am, John Bishop.” I didn’t like the little-boy ending on my name, but people around here couldn’t forget it.

“I’m Susan! The one went with you! I had the codes for DataComm, remember?”

“Why…yes….” Slow clearing of ancient, foggy images. “You were hiding in that center…where we found you….”

“Yes! I had Gene in the T-Isolate.”

“Gene…” That awful time had been stamped so strongly in me that I’d blocked off many memories, muting the horror. Now it came flooding back.