Starburst

22

THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (WASHINGTON, D.C.) opened the storm window of his study and leaned out to yell at his Chief Science Advisor. "Harry, get the lead out! We're waiting for you!" Harry looked up and waved, then continued doggedly plowing through the dripping jungle that was the North Lawn. Between the overgrown weeds and the rain and the mud it was slow going, but the President had little sympathy. He slammed down the window and said, "Damn the man, he just goes out of his way to aggravate me. How long I supposed to wait for him so I can decide if we have to move the capital or not?" The Vice President looked up from her knitting. "Jimbo, honey, why do you fuss yourself like that? Why don't we just move and get it over with?"

"Oh, woman! We can't do that. It would look so bad." The President threw himself into a chair despondently. He was a big man, and the old chair creaked warningly. "I was really looking forward to the Tenth Anniversary Parade," he complained. "Ten years, that's really something to brag about! And I don't want to hold it the hell out in the sticks, I want it right down Constitution Avenue just like the old days, with the people cheering and the reporters and the cameras all over and everything. Then let that son of a bitch in Omaha say I'm not the real President."

His wife said placidly, "Don't fuss yourself about him, honey. There's worse nearer."

"He wouldn't even send a delegation!"

"We got enough to feed right now, you know that. Jimbo? You know what I've been thinking, though? The parade might look a little skimpy on Constitution Avenue anyway. It would be real nice on a kind of littler street."

"Oh, what do you know? If Washington's under water, what makes you think Bethesda would be any better?"

His Secretary of State put down his solitaire cards and looked interested for the first time. "Doesn't have to be in Bethesda, Jimbo. I got some real nice land up near Dulles we could move to. It's high there."

"Why, sure. Lots of nice high land over to Virginia," the Vice President confirmed. "Remember when we went out on that picnic after your Second Inaugural? That was at Fairfax Station. There was hills there all around. Just beautiful."

The President slammed his fist on the coffee table and yelled, "I'm not the President of Fairfax Station, Virginia, I'm the President of the U. S. of A.! What's the capital of the U. S. of A.? It's Washington! Always has been. Always will be. And that's where the President stays! My God, don't you see how those jokers in Houston and Omaha and Salt Lake and all would laugh if they heard I had to move out of my own capital? 'Sides, there's all those delegations that's here already, the Amish and the New York and the Wheeling folks." He broke off and scowled suspiciously at his Vice President, who was also his wife. "Now, what are you looking that way for?"

She said placidly, "I didn't hear you mention that little fox from Puget."

" 'Specially her! I mean them. Look how far away they come!"

"Not so far they haven't been eating us out of house and home two weeks, over there to Blair House. I notice you spend a lot of time negotiating with her."

"You think you know a lot, but you don't know nearly as much as you think," the President said cuttingly, but he was pleased with the interruption when his Chief Science Advisor came in the door, shaking himself, dripping mud as he got out of his oilskin slicker. "Well, Harry?" the President demanded. "What did they say?"

The Vice President moved the good pillows to one side so Harry could sit down on the couch. "It's terrible out there," he complained. "Anybody got a dry cigarette?" The President threw him a sack of makings, and Harry dried his fingers on his shirt front before he started to roll one. "Well," he said, licking the paper, "I went to every boat captain I could find. They all said the same. Ships they talked to, places they'd been. All the same. Tides are higher than they've ever been, all up and down the coast. They don't think they're rising much anymore, but they're way high already."

He looked around for a match. The President's wife handed him a gold cigarette lighter with the Great Seal of the United States on it, which, after some effort, he managed to ignite. "It don't look really good to me, Jim. Right now it's low tide, and that's all right, but it's coming in. Even if the tides don't come up higher, there's going to be storms. Not just rains like this, I mean, but you got to figure on a tropical depression coming up from the Bahamas now and then, these next few months."

"We're not in the tropics," the Secretary of State said suspiciously.

"It doesn't mean that," said the Science Advisor, who had once given the weather reports over the local Top Forty FM radio station, back when there were FM stations and charts to be in the Top Forty of. "It means storms. Maybe hurricanes, coming up the coast from the Bahamas. Maybe the ice has stopped melting, who knows about that? But even if the water doesn't come up any higher, it sure isn't going to go down any lower, and any little piss-ant storm could have us swimming."

The President drummed his fingers on the coffee table, which was glass-topped, covering photographs of F.D.R., Ronnie Reagan, Harry Truman, and about six other ex-Presidents surrounding his own image. It often soothed him, but not this time. Suddenly he shouted: "I don't want to move my capital!"

No one answered. His temper outbursts were famous. The Vice President became absorbed in counting stitches, the Secretary of State picked up his cards and began to shuffle, the Science Advisor got up to retrieve his slicker and hang it carefully on the back of a door.

The President said, "You got to figure it this way. If we move out, then all those local yokels that claimed to be a President are going to look just that much better on their own turf, and the eventual reunification of our nation is going to be just that much more delayed." He moved his lips for a moment, and then burst out, "I don't ask nothing for myself! I never have. I only want to play the part I have to play in what's good for all of us, and that means keeping up my position as the real President, according to the U.S. Constitution as amended. And that means I got to stay right here in the real White House, no matter what."

His wife said hesitantly, "Honey, how about this? The other Presidents had like a Summer White House, and Camp David, and like that. Nobody fussed about it. Why couldn't you do the same as they did? We could pick out one of those old farm houses by Fairfax and fix it up real pretty."

The President looked at her with surprise. "Now, that's good thinking," he declared. "Only we can't move permanently, and we have to keep this place garrisoned so nobody will take it away from us, and we have to make sure of title."

"Oh, there's good titles to those places I have," the Secretary of State assured him hastily.

"I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to Harry. We have to come back here once in a while to show we own it, so is there going to be any problem there?"

The Science Advisor said thoughtfully, "We could rent some boats, I guess, if we couldn't get the horses in."

"No 'guess'! No 'if'!" the President yelled, looking at his Chief Science Advisor with irritation. "That's a national priority. We have to do it that way to keep those bastards in the rest of the country paying attention to the real President."

"Well, Jimbo, honey," said the Vice President after a moment, emboldened by recent praise, "you have to admit they don't pay a lot of attention to us right now. When was the last time they paid their taxes?"

The President looked foxily at her over his glasses. "Talking about that," he said, "I might have a little surprise for them anyway. What you might call a secret weapon."

"I hope it does better than we did in the last war," said his wife, "because if you remember, when we started to put down that uprising in Frederick, Maryland, we got the pee kicked out of us."

The President stood up, indicating the Cabinet meeting was over.

"Never mind," he said sunnily. "You go on out again, Harry, and see if you can find any good maps in the Library of Congress where they got the fires put out. Find us a nice high place within, um, twenty miles if you can—if it happens to belong to somebody we know, we'll get an appropriation for it. Otherwise we'll get the Army to condemn us a Summer White House, like Mae says, and maybe I can sleep in a bed that isn't moldy for a change."

Alerted by his tone, his wife looked suddenly worried. "Jimbo, what are you going to do?"

He chuckled. "I'm just going to check out my secret weapon."

He shooed them out of his study and, when they were gone, went to the little kitchen and got himself a bottle of Fresca from the six­pack in the open refrigerator. It was warm, of course. The Marine guard company was still trying to get the gas generators in operation, but they were having very little success. The President didn't mind. They were his personal Praetorians. If they lacked a little as appliance repairmen, they had proved their worth when the chips were down. The President was always aware that during the Troubles after the bolt from Alpha Centauri he had been no more than any other Congressman—appointed to fill a vacancy, at that— and his rapid rise to whip, majority leader, Speaker of the House and heir apparent, finally to the presidency itself, was due not only to his political skills and merits, but also to the fact that he was the only remotely legitimate heir to the presidency who also happened to be the brother-in-law of the commander of Washington's Marine garrison.

The President was, in fact, quite satisfied with the way the world was going. If he envied Presidents of the past (missiles, fleets of nuclear bombers, billions of dollars to play with), he certainly saw nothing in the present, when he looked at the world around him, that surpassed his own stature in the world he lived in. Oh, there were places where improvements could be made—the Science Advisor was a loser, and his brother-in-law had been better as a Marine major than he was as a Secretary of Defense. But he had plans for making improvements.

He finished his soda, opened his study door a crack, and peered out.

No one was nearby. He slipped out and down the back stairs.

In what had once been the public parts of the White House, you could see the extent of the damage more clearly. After the riots and the trashings and the burnings and the coups, the will to repair and replace had gradually dwindled away. The President didn't mind. He didn't even notice the charred walls and the fallen plaster. He was listening to the sound of a distant gasoline pump chugging away, and smiling to himself as he approached the underground level where his secret weapon was locked up.

The secret weapon, sniffling and sneezing although the weather was hot, was trying to complete that total defense of every act of life that he called his memoirs. His name was Dieter von Knefhausen.

Knefhausen was less satisfied with the world than the President of the United States (Washington, D.C.). When the power nets collapsed with the loss of all the nuclear plants, and transportation broke down for lack of power, and communications stopped mattering in any way because there was no effective means for anyone's will to be enforced past the visible horizon—then the world as Knefhausen knew it had come to an end.

This new one was far less pleasing. Knefhausen could have wished for many changes. Better health, for one thing. He was well aware that his essential hypertension, his bronchitis, his arthritis, and his gout were fighting the last stages of a total war to decide which one would have the honor of destroying their mutual battleground, which was himself. That was not unexpected. He was eighty years old, after all. But there were ills against which one had a right to complain. He did not much mind his lack of freedom, but he did mind the senseless destruction of so many of his papers.

The original typescript of his autobiography was long lost. But he had wheedled his superiors at Johns Hopkins, who had granted him a precarious haven for nearly two years, into making a search for what could be found of them. A few tattered and fragmentary Xerox copies had turned up, some sent from institutions far away. He had begun to restore the gaps as best he could when the raiders of this present President—the pretender, that is, who called himself by the name "President of the United States"—had found him and carried him here. And left half the papers behind, of course, and no amount of pleading seemed to make them willing to bring them to him.

Still—the essential story was there, of how he had planned Project Alpha-Aleph, with all the details meticulously itemized as to how he had lied, forged, and falsified to bring it about. Earliest training lasted longest, and Knefhausen was a thorough record-keeper.

He spared himself nothing. He admitted his complicity in the "accidental death" of Dot Letski's first husband in a car smash, thus leaving her free to marry the man he had chosen to go with the crew to Alpha Centauri. He explained de Bono's experiments, and related how he had decided to carry them out in the large. He confessed he had known the secret would not last out the duration of the trip, thus betraying the trust of the President who had made it happen. He put it all in, all he could remember, and boasted of his success.

For it was clear to him that success was already a fact. What could be surer evidence of it than what had happened ten years ago? The "incident of next week" was as dramatic and complete a proof as anyone could wish. If its details were still undecipherable, largely because of the demolition of most of the world's technology it had brought about, its main features were obvious. The shower of heavy particles, whatever particles they were, had drenched the Earth, and every radionuclide had leaked its energy out as heat.

Also there were the messages received and understood; also there were the still more significant messages for which there had unfortunately been no translation; and, take them all together, there was no doubt. The astronauts had done precisely as predicted. Well, almost precisely. They had developed knowledge so far in advance of anything on Earth that, from four light-years out, they could impose their will on the human race. They had done so. In one cloudburst of particles, the entire military-industrial complex of the planet perished.

How? How? Ah, thought Knefhausen, with envy and pride, there one posed the question! One could not know. All that was known was that every nuclear device and concentration—bomb or ore dump, hospital radiation source or power-plant core—had ceased to exist as a source of nuclear energy. The event was not rapid and catastrophic, like a bomb. It was slow and long-lasting. The uranium and the plutonium had simply melted in the long, continuous reaction that was still bubbling away in the •seething lava lakes where the silos had stood and the nuclear plants had generated electricity. Little radiation was released, but a good deal of heat.

Knefhausen had long since stopped regretting what could not be helped. Still he wished, wistfully, that he had had the opportunity to make proper measurements of the total heat flux. Not less than 10¹® watt-years, he was sure, just to estimate from the known effects on the Earth's atmosphere: the storms, the gradual raising of temperature all over, above all the rumors about the upward trend of sea level that bespoke the melting of the polar ice caps. There was no longer even a good weather network, but the fragmentary information he was able to piece together suggested a world increase of four, maybe as many as five or six degrees Celsius already, and the reactions still seething away in Czechoslovakia, the Congo, Colorado, and a hundred lesser infernos.

Rumors about the sea level?

Not rumors, he corrected himself. No. Facts. He lifted his head and stared at the snake of hard rubber hose that began under the duckboards at the far end of the room and ended outside the barred window, where the gasoline pump outside did its best to keep the water level inside his cell low enough to keep the water below the boards. Judging by the inflow, the grounds of the White House must be nearly awash.

A great triumph!

In the long run, it was only an annoyance that the triumph had been not quite complete. It was planned that the astronauts should develop such knowledge. It was not planned that they should use it against their benefactors, or fail to share it with them.

It was ungrateful to God to complain that the triumph was not perfect—but in his heart Knefhausen could not stop complaining. Wir siegen uns zum Tode. We have won so many victories!—and they have destroyed us.

The door opened. The President of the United States patted the shoulder of the thin, scared, hungry-looking kid in green Marine fatigues who guarded it, and walked in, closing it behind him.

"How's it going, Knefhausen?" the President began sunnily. "You ready to listen to a little reason yet?"

Knefhausen stood as straight as he could. "I will do whatever you wish, Mr. President, but as I have told you there are certain limits. Also I am not a young man and my health—"

"Screw your health and your limits, Knefhausen!" the President shouted. "Don't start up with me!"

"I am sorry if I have given offense, Mr. President," Knefhausen whispered.

"Don't be sorry! Sorry doesn't cut the mustard. What I got to judge by is results. See that pump, Knefhausen? You know what it takes to keep it going? It takes gasoline. Gas is rationed, Knefhausen! Takes a high national priority to get it! I don't know how long I'm going to be able to justify this continuous drain on our resources if you don't cooperate!"

Sadly but stubbornly, Knefhausen said, "Up to the limits imposed by the realities of the situation, Mr. President, I cooperate."

"Yeah. Sure." But the President did not push the matter. He was in an unusually good mood, Knefhausen observed with the prisoner's paranoid attention to detail. The President changed the subject. "Knefhausen, I'm going to make you an offer. Just say the word, and I'll fire that dumb son of a bitch Harry Stokes and make you my Chief Science Advisor. Now, how do you like that? Right up at the top of the heap again! An apartment of your own. Electric lights. Servants—you can pick 'em out yourself, and there's some nice-looking little girls in the pool. The best food money can buy. A chance to perform a real service for the U. S. of A., helping to reunify this great country to become once again the great power it should and must be."

"Mr. President, naturally, I wish to help in any way I can. But we have been over this subject before. I will do anything you like, but I don't know how to make the bombs work again. You saw what happened, Mr. President. They no longer exist."

"I didn't say anything about bombs, did I? Look, Kneffie, I'm a reasonable man. You say you can't make bombs; all right, but there are other things. How about this. You promise to use your best efforts in any way you can."

Knefhausen hesitated. "What other things, Mr. President?"

"Don't press, Knefhausen. Services to your country." The President locked his hands over his belly and smiled benignly. "You give me that promise and you're out of here today. Or would you rather I just turned off the pump?"

Knefhausen's head-shake was not so much negation as despair. "You do not understand the difficulties! What can a scientist do for you today? If there were anything, do you think I would have spent these last years writing memoirs?"

"That's why I took you out of that, Knefhausen."

"Yes, you took me from Johns Hopkins University, where I was fulfilling some function until your band of looters came along."

"Watch your mouth," the President said in righteous indignation. "That was an IRS field team."

"Naturlich, Mr. President, tax collectors, not looters—a distinction not always easily made. Nevertheless! The preconditions for what you want no longer exist. Ten years ago, five maybe, yes, something perhaps could have been done. Now, no. When all the nuclear plants went out— When the factories that depended on them ran out of power— When the fertilizer plants couldn't fix nitrogen and the insecticide plants couldn't deliver— When the people began to die of hunger and the pestilences started—"

"Yes or no, Knefhausen," the President cut in.

The scientist paused, looking thoughtfully at his adversary. A gleam of the old shrewdness appeared in his eyes.

"Mr. President, you know something. Something has happened."

"Rightl You're smart. Now tell me, what is it I know?"

Knefhausen shook his head. After seven decades of life, and another decade of slowly dying, it was hard to allow himself to hope again. This terrible upstart, this lump— he was not without animal cunning, and he seemed very sure. "Please, Mr. President, tell me."

The President put a finger to his lips, and then an ear to the door. When he was convinced no one could be listening, he came closer to Knefhausen and said softly:

"We're not such hicks here as you think. I have contacts all over the continent. Would you like to know what one of them just brought me?"

Knefhausen did not answer, but his watery old eyes were imploring.

"A message," the President whispered.

"From the Constitution?" cried Knefhausen. "But, no, it is not possible! Farside is gone, Goldstone is destroyed, the communications satellites are running down—"

"It wasn't a radio message," said the President. "And it didn't come from Goldstone. It came from some people from the West Coast, and they got it from some other place. From some observatory in Hawaii, they said, although maybe they just said that to get the price up. They say there's some telescope out there that didn't get smashed, and I guess there's some old fogies that still look through it sometimes, and they got a message. In laser light. Plain Morse code. From what they said was Alpha Centauri. From your little friends, Knefhausen."

He took a folded slip of paper from his pocket and held it up.

Knefhausen was racked by a fit of coughing, but he managed to reach for it. "Give it to me!"

The President lifted it out of his reach. "Do we have a deal?"

"Yes, of course. YesI Anything you say, but give me the message!"

"Why, certainly," smiled the President, and passed over the much-creased sheet of paper.

It said:

PLEASE BE ADVISED. WE HAVE CREATED THE WORLD ALPHA-ALEPH. IT IS BEAUTIFUL AND GRAND. WE WILL SEND A FERRY TO BRING SUITABLE STOCK AND TO COMPLETE CERTAIN OTHER BUSINESS. OUR SPECIAL REGARDS TO DR. DIETER VON KNEFHAUSEN, WHOM WE WANT TO TALK TO VERY MUCH. EXPECT US IN 250 DAYS FROM THIS MESSAGE.

Knefhausen read it over twice, lifted his head to stare at the President, and read it again. Then he stared into space, the paper dangling from his fingers.

The President snatched it back, folded it, and put it in his pocket, as though the message itself was the key to power. "Do we have a deal?"

"Zwei hundert funfzig— Mr. President, when was this message received?"

"About seven months ago, near as I can tell. That's right. They'll be here very soon, and you can imagine what they'll have Guns, tools, everything—and all you have to do is persuade them to join us in restoring the U. S. of— Knefhausen!"

The President jumped forward, but he was too late. The scientist had fallen limply to the duckboards. The guard, when ordered, ran for the White House doctor, who limped as rapidly to the scene as his bad legs would let him, but he was too late too. Everything was too late for Knefhausen, whose old heart had failed him . . . just in time.