Worlds

42. What Happened Behind Their Backs (1)

O’Hara didn’t cause it. It happened because of a defiant credit transfer, and because of unusual industry on the part of the Third Revolution, and because of a multitude of minor factors, one of which was a difference of opinion as to who should ransom O’Hara. But initially it was the credit transfer.

In their first payment since New New demanded the rate increase, New York State defiantly paid at the old rate. At the same time they sent to New New York, both in orbit and at the Cape, a seven-page brief defending their right to do so. Coordinators Markus and Berrigan turned the brief over to the one person in New New who was an expert in American contract law. Then they announced that the solar power satellite needed maintenance, and they switched it off, at exactly five o’clock in the afternoon, Eastern time.

New York State had not been quite honest when they claimed that New New’s powersat supplied only ten percent of their electricity. The real figure fluctuated between forty and fifty percent. When the satellite was turned off, everything went out of kilter.

It was a bad time for a blackout. People who left work a little early were stuck in darkened subways; others, in frozen elevators or abruptly inert office buildings—some facing an hour-long descent down lightless fire stairs. A few dozen died of heart attacks.

There was an interstate power net that kept the Eastern Seaboard operating smoothly. New York tried to suck power out of it, but it was too great a demand, all at once. There were blackouts and brownouts and crippling power surges from Boston to Norfolk.

Under the best of conditions it would have been the next morning before everything got straightened out. But conditions could hardly have been worse.

In an office building in Washington, the man who had requested that O’Hara be kidnapped considered the chaos around him. He went to a very private telephone and called three people. Then he went upstairs and discreetly murdered his boss, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By midnight he was sitting in a well-appointed bunker under the hills of West Virginia.

Exactly at midnight, several hundred thousand acts of sabotage were carried out. They ranged in magnitude from the snipping of a cable in Des Moines to the detonation of nuclear weapons in Washington and Chicago.

The Third Revolution began at midnight and was effectively over by 12:01, though the fighting would go on until it was no longer relevant. It happened a month early. The original plans called for April 13th, Good Friday, but the confusion over the power loss was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Their slogan, “Power to the People,” was not original but it did have a certain ironic force: in the sense of being able to turn on a switch or plug something into the wall, most of the people would never have power, ever again.