The Day After Judgement (3 page)

Here was a side of a reinforced concrete building, windowless, cracked and buckled slightly inward where a shock wave had
struck it. Once it had been painted grey or some dark
colour, but all the paint had blistered and scaled and blown away in a second, except where a man had been standing nearby,
there the paint remained, a shadow with no one to cast it.

That vaporized man had been one of the lucky. Here stood another who had been in a cooler circle; evidently he had looked
up at a fireball, for his eyes were only holes; he stood in a half crouch, holding his arms out from his sides like a penguin,
and instead of skin, his naked body was covered with a charred fell which was cracked in places, oozing blood and pus. Here
a filthy, tattered mob clambered along a road almost completely covered with rubble, howling with horror – though there was
no sound with this scene – led by a hairless woman pushing a flaming baby carriage. Here a man who seemed to have had his
back flayed by flying glass worked patiently with a bent snow shovel at the edge of an immense mound of broken brick; by the
shape of its margins, it might once have been a large house…

There was more.

Šatvje uttered a long, complex, growling sentence of hatred. It was entirely in Czech, but its content was nevertheless not
beyond, all conjecture. Buelg shrugged again and turned away from the TV screen.

‘Pretty fearful,’ he said. ‘But on the whole, not nearly as much destruction as we might have expected. It’s certainly gone
no
higher
than Rung thirty-four. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to fit any of the escalation frames at all well. Maybe it makes
some sort of military or strategic sense, but if it does, I’m at a loss to know what it is. General?’

‘Senseless,’ McKnight said. ‘Outsight senseless. Nobody’s been hurt in any
decisive
way. And yet the action seems to be over.’

That was my impression.’ Buelg agreed. ‘There seems to be some missing factor. We’re going to have to ask the computer to
scan for an anomaly. Luckily it’s likely to be a big one – but since I can’t tell the machine what
kind
of anomaly to look for, it’s going to cost us some time.’

‘How much time?’ McKnight said, running a finger around the inside of his collar. ‘If the Chinks start upon us again – ’

‘It may be as much as an hour, after I formulate the question and Chief Hay programmes it, which will take, oh, say two hours
at a minimum. But I don’t think we need to worry about the Chinese; according to our data, that opening Taiwan bomb was the
biggest one they used, so it was probably the biggest one they had. As for anyone else, well, you just finished saying yourself
that somehow everything’s now stopped short. We badly need to find out why.’

‘All right. Get on it, then.’

The two hours for programming, however, stretched to four; and then the computer ran for ninety minutes without producing
anything at all, Chief Hay had thoughtfully forbidden the machine to reply D
ATA
I
NSUFFICENT
since new data were coming in at an increasing rate as communications with the outside improved; as a result, the computer
was recycling the problem once every three or four seconds.

McKnight used the time to issue orders that repairs to the keep be made, stores assessed, order restored, and then settled
down to a telecommunications search – again via the computer, but requiring only about 2 per cent of its capacity – for any
superiors who might have survived him. Buelg suspected that he really wanted to find some; he had the capacity to be a general
officer, but would find it most uncomfortable to be a president, even over so abruptly simplified a population and economy
– and foreign policy, for that matter – as the TV screen had shown now existed outside. Ordering junior officers to order
noncommissioned officers to order rankers to replace broken fluorescent bulbs was the type of thing he didn’t mind doing on
his own, but for ordering them to arm missiles and aim them, or put a state under martial law, he much preferred to be acting
upon higher authority.

As for Buelg’s own preference, he rather hoped that McKnight wouldn’t be able to find any such person. The United States under
a McKnight regime wouldn’t be run very imaginatively or even flexibly, but on the other hand it would be unlikely to be a
tyranny. Besides, McKnight was very dependent upon his civilian experts, and hence would be easy to manage. Of course, that
meant that something would have to be done about Šatvje –

Then the computer rang its bell and began to print out its analysis. Buelg read it with intense concentration, and after the
first fold, utter incredulity. When it was all out of the printer, he tore it off, tossed it on to the desk and beckoned to
Chief Hay.

‘Run the question again.’

Hay turned to the input keyboard. It took him ten minutes to retype the programme; the question had been in the normal order
of things too specialized to tape. Two and a half seconds after he had finished, the machine chimed and the long thin slabs
of metal began to rise against the paper. The printing out process never failed to remind Buelg of a player piano running
in reverse, converting notes into punches instead of the other way around, except, of course, that what one got here was not
punches but lines of type. But he saw almost at once that the analysis itself was going to be the same as before, word for
word.

At the same time he became aware that Šatvje was standing just behind him.

‘About time,’ the Czech said. ‘Let’s have a look.’

‘There’s nothing to see yet.’

‘What do you mean, there’s nothing to see? It’s printing isn’t it? And you’ve already got another copy out on the bench. The
General should have been notified immediately.’

He picked up the long, wide accordion fold of paper with its sprocket-punched edges and began to read it. There was nothing
Buelg could do to prevent him.

‘The machine’s printing nonsense, that’s what I mean, and I didn’t propose to distract the General with a lot of garbage. The
bombing must have jarred something loose.’

Hay turned from the keyboard. ‘I ran a test programme through promptly after the attack, Doctor Buelg. The computer was functioning
perfectly then.’

‘Well, clearly it isn’t now. Run your test programme again, find out where the trouble lies, and let us know how long it will
take to repair it. If we can’t trust the computer, we’re out of business for sure.’

Hay got to work. Šatvje put the readout down.

‘What’s nonsense about this?’ he said.

‘It’s utterly impossible, that’s all. There hasn’t been time. With any sort of engineering training, you’d know that yourself.
And it makes no military or political sense, either.

‘I think we should let the General be the judge of that.’

Picking up the bulky strip again, Šatvje carried it off towards the General’s office, a certain subtle triumph in his gait,
like the school trusty bearing the evidence of petty theft to the head master. Buelg followed, inwardly raging, and not only
at the waste motion. Šatvje would of course tell McKnight that Buelg had been holding back on reporting the analysis; all
Buelg could do now, until the machine was repaired, was to be sure to be there to explain why, and the posture was much too
purely defensive for his liking. It was a damn shame that he had ever taught Šatvje to read a printout, but once they had
been thrown together on this job, he had had no choice in the matter. McKnight had been as suspicious as a Sealyham of both
of them, anyhow, at the beginning. Šatvje, after all had come from a country which had long been Communist, and had had to
explain that his ancestry was French, his name only a Serbo-Croat transliteration back from the Cyrillic of Chatvieux;’ while
Security had unfortunately confused Buelg with Johann Gottfried Jülg, a forgotten nineteenth-century translator of
Ardshi Bordschi Khan,
the
Siddhi Kur,
the
Skaskas
and other Russian folk tales, so that Buelg, even more demeaningly, had had to admit that his name was actually a Yiddish
version of a German word for a leather bucket. Under McKnight’s eye, the two still possibly suspect civilians had to cooperate
or be downgraded into some unremunerative university post. Buelg supposed that Šatvje had enjoyed it as little as he had,
but he didn’t care an iota about what Šatvje did or didn’t enjoy, Damn the man.

As for the document itself, it was no masterpiece of analysis. The machine had simply at last recognized an anomaly in a late-coming
piece of new data. It was the interpretation that made Buelg suspect that the gadget had malfunctioned; unlike Šatvje, he
had had enough experience of computers at RAND to know that if they were not allowed enough warm-up time, or had been improperly
cleared of a previous programme, they could produce remarkably paranoid fantsies.

Translated from the Fortran, the document said that the United States had not only been hit by missiles, but also deeply invaded.
This conclusion had been drawn from a satellite sighting of something in Death Valley, not there yesterday, which was not
natural, and whose size, shape and energy output suggested an enormous fortress.

‘Which is just plain idiotic,’ Buelg added, after the political backing and filling in McKnight’s office had been gone through
to nobody’s final advantage. ‘On any count you care to name. The air drops required to get the materials in there, or the
sea landings plus overland movements, couldn’t have gone undetected. Then, strategically it’s insane: the building of targets
like fortresses should have become obsolete with the invention of the cannon, and the airplane made them absurd. Locating
such a thing in Death Valley means that it dominates nothing but utterly worthless territory, at the price of insuperable
supply problems – right from the start it’s in a state of siege, by Nature alone. And as for running it up overnight – I ask
you, General, could
we
have done that, even in peacetime and in the most favourable imaginable location? I say we couldn’t, and that if we couldn’t,
no human agency could.’

McKnight picked up his phone and spoke briefly. Since it was a Hush-a-Phone, what he said was inaudible, but Buelg’s guess
about the call was promptly confirmed.

‘Chief Hay says the machine is in perfect order and has produced a third analysis just like this one,’ he reported. ‘The problem
now clearly is one of reconnaissance. (He pronounced the word correctly, which, amidst his flat Californian American, sounded
almost affected.) Is there such a thing in Death Valley, or isn’t there? For the satellite to be able to spot it at all, it
must be gigantic. From twenty-three thousand miles up, even a city the size of San Antonio is invisible unless you know exactly
what you’re looking for in advance.’

Here, Buelg was aware McKnight was speaking as an expert. Until he had been put in charge of SAC in Denver, almost all his
career had been spent in various aspects of Air Information; even as a teenager, he had been a Civil Air Patrol cadet involved
in search-and-rescue operations, which, between the mud slides and the brush fires, had been particularly
extensive in the Los Angeles area in those days.

‘I don’t doubt that the satellite has spotted
something,
’ Buelg said. ‘But what it probably “sees” is a hard-radiation locus – maybe thermally hot, too – rather than any optical
object, let alone a construct. My guess is that it’s nothing more than the impact site of a multiple warhead component that
lost guidance, or was misaimed to begin with.’

‘Highly likely.’ McKnight admitted. ‘But why guess? The obvious first step is to send a low-level attack bomber over the site
and get close-in photographs and spectra. A primitive installation such as you suggested earlier would be typically Chinese,
and if so they won’t have low-level radar. If on the other hand the plane gets shot down, that will tell us something about
the enemy, too.’

Buelg sighed inwardly. Trying to nudge McKnight out of his single channel was a frustrating operation. But maybe, in this
instance, it wasn’t really necessary; after all, the suggestion itself was sensible.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘One plane seems like a small investment. We’ve got damn all else left to lose now, anyhow.

3

No attack was made on the plane, but there was nevertheless one casualty. Neither the photographer nor the flight engineer,
both busy with their instruments, had actually seen much of the target, and the Captain, for the same reason, had seen little
more.

‘Hell of a lot of turbulence,’ he said at the debriefing, which took place a thousand miles away, while the men under Denver
watched intently. ‘And the target itself is one huge updraft, like New York used to be, only much worse.’

But the navigator, once his job had been done, had had nothing to do but look out, and he was in a state of shock. He was
a swarthy young enlisted man from Chicago who looked as though he might have been recruited straight from a Mafiosa family,
but he could say nothing now but a sentence which
refused to get beyond its first syllable: ‘Dis – Dis –’ Once he had recovered from his shock they would be able to question
him. But for the time being he was of no help.

The photographs, however, were very clear, except for the infra-red sensitive plates, which showed nothing intelligible to
the eye at all. The installation was perfectly circular and surrounded by a moat which, impossibly for Death Valley, appeared
to be filled with black but genuine water, from which a fog bank was constantly trying to rise, only to be dissipated in the
bone-dry air. The construction itself was a broad wall, almost a circular city, a good fifteen miles in diameter. It was broken
irregularly by towers and other structures, some of them looking remarkably like mosques. This shell glowed fiercely, like
red-hot iron, and a spectrograph showed that this was exactly what it was.

Inside, the ground was terraced, like a lunar crater. At ground level was a flat plain, dotted with tiny rectangular markings
in no discernible pattern; these, too, the spectrograph said, were red-hot iron. What seemed to be another moat, blood-red
and as broad as a river, encircled the next terrace at the foot of the cliff where it began, and this, even more impossibly,
was bordered by a dense circular forest. The forest was as broad as the river, but thinned eventually to a ring of what appeared
to be the original sand, equally broad.