Read The Day After Judgement Online

Authors: James Blish

Tags: #Science-Fiction

The Day After Judgement (2 page)

BOOK: The Day After Judgement
6.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

‘I thought you could come only at night,’ he said at last.

‘Oh, those old rules are gone for ever,’ she said, and as if to prove it, stepped across the threshold without even one invitation,
let alone three. ‘And you are leaving. We must celebrate the mystery once more before you go, and you must make me a last
present of your seed. It is not very potent; my other client is thus far disappointed. Come, touch me, go into me. I know
it is your need.’

‘In this mess? You must have lost your mind.’

‘Nay, impossible; intellect is all I am, no matter how I appear to you. Yet I am capable of monstrous favours, as you know
well, and will to know again.’

She took the suitcase, which was still unfastened, off the bed and set it flat on the floor. Though it was almost too heavy
for Jack when fully loaded, handling it did not appear to cost her the slightest effort. Then, lifting one arm and with it
the bare and spiky breast, she unwound the sari in a single, continuous sweeping motion, and lay down naked across the gritty
bed, light glinting from dewdrops caught about her inflamed mound, a vision of pure lubricity.

Jack ran a finger around the inside of his collar, though it was open. It was impossible not to want her, and at the same
time he wanted desperately to escape – and besides, Baines was waiting, and Jack had better sense than to pursue his hobby
on
company time.

‘I should have thought you’d be off raising hell with your colleagues,‘ he said, his voice hoarse.

The girl frowned suddenly, reminding him of that fearful moment after their first night when she had thought that he had been
mocking her. Her fingernails, like independent creatures, clawed slowly at her flat abdomen.

‘Dost think to copulate with fallen seraphim?’ she said. ‘I am not of any of the Orders which make war; I do only what would
be hateful even to the damned.’ Then, equally suddenly, the frown dissolved in a little shower of laughter. ‘And ah, besides,
I raise not Hell, but the Devil, for already I have Hell in me – dost know that story of Boccaccio?’

Jack knew it; there was no story of that kind he did not know; and his Devil was most certainly raised. While he still hesitated,
there was a distant growling sound, almost inaudible but somehow also infinitely heavy. The girl turned her head towards the
window, also listening; then she looked back at him, spread her thighs and held out her arms.

‘I think,’ she said. ‘that you had better hurry.’

With a groan of despair, he fell to his knees and buried his face in her muff. Her smooth legs closed about his ears; but
no matter how hard he pulled at her cool, pliant rump, the sound of the returning sea rose louder and louder around them both.

So Above

Haeresis est maxima opera maleficarum non credere.

HEINRICH INSTITOR AND JAKOB SPRENGER:
Malleus Maleficarum

1

The enemy, whoever he was, had obviously been long prepared to make a major attempt to reduce the Strategic Air Command’s
master missile-launching control site under Denver. In the first twenty minutes of the war, he had dumped a whole stick of
multiple hydrogen warheads on it. The city, of course, had been utterly vaporized, and a vast expanse of the plateau on which
it had stood was now nothing but gullied, vitrified and radioactive granite; but the site had been well hardened and was more
than a mile beneath the original surface. Everybody in it had been knocked down and temporarily deafened, there were bruises
and scrapes and one concussion, some lights had gone out and a lot of dust had been raised despite the air conditioning; in
short, the damage would have been reported as ‘minimal’ had there been anybody to report it to.

Who the enemy was occasioned some debate. General D. Willis McKnight, a Yellow Peril fan since his boyhood reading of
The American Weekly
in Chicago, favoured the Chinese. Of his two chief scientists, one, the Prague-born Dr Džejms Šatvje, the godfather of the
selenium bomb, had been seeing Russians under his bed for almost as long.

‘Nu, why argue?’ said Johann Buelg. As a RAND Corporation alumnus, he found nothing unthinkable, but he did not
like to waste time speculating about facts. ‘We can always ask the computer – we must have enough input already for that.
Not that it matters much, since we’ve already plastered the Russians
and
the Chinese pretty thoroughly.’

‘We already know the Chinese started it,’ General McKnight said, wiping dust off his spectacles with his handkerchief. He
was a small, narrow-chested Air Force Academy graduate from the class just after the cheating had been stopped, already nearly
bald at forty-eight; naked, his face looked remarkably like that of a prawn. ‘They dropped a thirty-megatonner on Formosa,
disguised as a test.’

‘It depends on what you mean by “start,”’ Buelg said. ‘That was already on Rung twenty-one; Level Four – local nuclear war.
But still only Chinese against Chinese’

‘But we were committed to them, right?’ Šatvje said. ‘President Agnew told the UN, “I am a Formosan.”’

‘It doesn’t matter worth a damn,’ Buelg said, with some irritation. It was his opinion, which he did not keep particularly
private, that Šatvje, whatever his eminence as a physicist, in all other matters had a
goyische kopf.
He had encountered better heads on egg creams in his father’s candy store. ‘The thing‘s escalated almost exponentially in
the past eighteen hours or so. The question is, how far has it gone? If we’re lucky, it’s only up to Level Six, central war
– maybe no farther than Rung thirty-four, constrained disarming attack.’

‘Do you call atomizing Denver “restrained”?’ the General demanded.

‘Maybe. They could have done for Denver with one warhead, but instead they saturated it. That means they were shooting for
us, not for the city proper. Our counterstrike couldn’t be preventive, so it was one rung lower, which I hope to God they
noticed.’

‘They took Washington out,’ Šatvje said, clasping his fat hands piously. He had been lean once, but becoming first a consultant
on the Cabinet level, next a spokesman for massive retaliation, and finally a publicity saint had appended a beer belly to
his brain-puffed forehead, so that he now looked like a caricature of a nineteenth-century German philologist. Buelg himself
was stocky and tended to run to lard, but a terrible
susceptibility to kidney stones had kept him on a reasonable diet.

‘The Washington strike almost surely wasn’t directed against civilians,’ Buelg said. ‘Naturally the leadership of the enemy
is a prime military target. But, General, all this happened so quickly that I doubt that anybody in government had a chance
to reach prepared shelters. You may now be effectively the president of whatever is left of the United States, which means
that you could make new policies.’

‘True,’ McKnight said. ‘True, true.’

‘In which case we’ve got to know the facts the minute our lines to outside are restored. Among other things, if the escalation’s
gone all the way to spasm, in which case the planet will be uninhabitable. There’ll be nobody and nothing left alive but people
in hardened sites, like us, and the only policy we’ll need for that will be a count of the canned beans.’

‘I think that needlessly pessimistic,’ Šatvje said, at last heaving himself up out of the chair into which he had struggled
after getting up off the floor. It was not a very comfortable chair, but the computer room – where they had all been when
the strike had come – had not been designed for comfort. He put his thumbs under the lapels of his insignia-less adviser’s
uniform and frowned down upon them. ‘The Earth is a large planet, of its class; if we cannot reoccupy it, our descendants
will be able to do so.’

‘After five thousand years?’

‘You are assuming that carbon bombs were used. Dirty bombs of that kind are obsolescent. That is why I so strongly advocated
the sulphur-decay chain; the selenium isotopes are chemically all strongly poisonous, but they have very short half lives.
A selenium bomb is essentially a
humane
bomb.’

Šatvje was physically unable to pace, but he was beginning to stump back and forth. He was again playing back one of his popular
magazine articles. Buelg began to twiddle his thumbs, as ostentatiously as possible.

‘It has sometimes occurred to me,’ Šatvje said, ‘that our discovery of how to release the nuclear energies was providential.
Consider: Natural selection stopped for Man when he achieved control over his environment, and furthermore
began to save the lives of all his weaklings, and preserve their bad genes. Once natural selection has been halted, then the
only remaining pressure upon the race to evolve is mutation. Artificial radio-activity, and indeed even fallout itself, maybe
God’s way of resuming the process of evolution for Man … perhaps towards some ultimate organism we cannot foresee, perhaps
even towards some unitary mind which we will share with God, as Teilhardt de Chardin envisioned –’

At this point, the General noticed the twiddling of Buelg’s thumbs.

‘Facts are what we need.’ he said. ‘I agree with you there, Buelg. But a good many of our lines to outside
were
cut, and there may have been some damage to the computer circuitry, too.’ He jerked his head towards the technicians who
were scurrying around and up and down the face of R
ANDOMAC.
‘I’ve got them working on it. Naturally.’

‘I see that, but we’ll need some sort of rational schedule of questions. Is the escalation still going on, presuming we haven’t
reached the insensate stage already? If it’s over, or at least suspended somehow, is the enemy sane enough not to start it
again? And then, what’s the extent of the exterior damage? For that, we’ll need a visual readout – I assume there are still
some satellites up, but we’ll want a closer look, if any local television survived.

‘And if you’re now the president, General, are you prepared to negotiate, if you’ve got any opposite numbers in the Soviet
Union or the People’s Republic?’

‘There ought to be whole sets of such courses of action already programmed into the computer,’ McKnight said, ‘according to
what the actual situation is. Is the machine going to be useless to us for anything but gaming, now that we really need it?
Or have you been misleading me again?’

‘Of course I haven’t been misleading you. I wouldn’t play games with my own life as stakes. And there are indeed such alternative
courses; I wrote most of them myself, though I didn’t do the actual programming. But no programme can encompass what a specific
leader might decide to do, War gaming actual past battles – for example, rerunning Waterloo without allowing for Napoleon’s
piles, or the heroism of the
British squares – has produced “predicted” outcomes completely at variance with history. Computers are rational; people aren’t.
Look at Agnew. That’s why I asked you my question – which, by the way, you haven’t yet answered.’

McKnight pulled himself up and put his glasses back on.

‘I’ he said, ‘am prepared to negotiate. With anybody. Even Chinks.’

2

Rome was no more, nor was Milan. Neither were London, Paris, Berlin, Bonn, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Riyadh, Stockholm and a score
of lesser cities. But these were of no immediate concern. As the satellites showed, their deaths had expectably laid out long,
cigar-shaped, overlapping paths of fallout to the east - the direction in which, thanks to the rotation of the Earth, the
weather inevitably moved – and though these unfortunately lay across once friendly terrain, they ended in enemy country. Similarly,
the heavy toll in the USSR had sown its seed across Siberia and China; that in China across Japan, Korea and Taiwan; and the
death of Tokyo was poisoning only a swath of the Pacific (although, later, some worry would have to be devoted to the fish).
Honolulu somehow had been spared, so that no burden of direct heavy nuclear fallout would reach the West Coast of the United
States.

This was fortunate, for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle amd Spokane had all been hit, as had Denver, St Louis,
Minneapolis, Chicago, New Orleans, Cleveland, Detroit and Dallas. Under the circumstances, it really hardly mattered that
Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Syracuse, Boston, Toronto, Baltimore and Washington had all also got it, for even without
bombs the Eastern third of the continental United States would have been uninhabitable in its entirety for at least fifteen
years to come. At the moment, in any event, it consisted of a single vast forest fire through which, from the satellites,
the slag pits of the bombed cities were invisible except as high spots in the radiation contours. The Northwest
was in much the same shape, although the West Coast in general had taken far fewer missiles. Indeed, the sky all over the
world was black with smoke, for the forests of Europe and northern Asia were burning too. Out of the pall, more death fell,
gently, invisibly, inexorably.

All this, of course, came from the computer analysis. Though there were television cameras in the satellites, even on a clear
day you could hardly have told from visual sightings, from that height-nor from photographs, for that matter-even whether
or not there was intelligent life on Earth. The view over Africa, South America, Australia and the American Southwest was
better, but of no strategic or logistic interest, and never had been.

Of the television cameras on the Earth’s surface, most of the surviving ones were in areas where nothing seemed to have happened
at all, although in towns the streets were deserted, and the very few people glimpsed briefly on the screen looked haunted.
The views from near the bombed areas were fragmentary, travelling, scarred by rasters, aflicker with electronic snow – a procession
of unconnected images, like scenes from an early surrealist film, where one could not tell whether the director was trying
to portray a story or only a state of mind.

Here stood a single telephone pole, completely charred; here was a whole row of them, snapped off the ground level but still
linked in death by their wires. Here was a desert of collapsed masonry, in the midst of which stood a reinforced-concrete
smokestack, undamaged except that its surface was etched by heat and by the sand blasting of debris carried by a high wind.
Here buildings all leaned sharply in a single direction, as if struck like the chimney by some hurricane of terrific proportions;
here was what had been a group of manufacturing buildings, denuded of roofing and siding, nothing but twisted frames. Here
a row of wrecked automobiles, neatly parked, burned in unison; here a gas holder, ruptured and collapsed, had burned out hours
ago.

BOOK: The Day After Judgement
6.77Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Running Irons by J. T. Edson
Angel Be Good by Kathy Carmichael
Capture Me by Anna Zaires, Dima Zales
The Mexico Run by Lionel White
Exception to the Rules by Stephanie Morris
Time for Love by Kaye, Emma
Gregory's Game by Jane A. Adams
The Breath of God by Jeffrey Small
Intoxicated by Jeana E. Mann