SUSAN
You cant know what its like when all the people youve worked with, intelligent people who were nice as pie before, they turn mean and angry and filled up with grief for who was lost. Even then I could see Gene was the best of them.
They start to argue, and it runs on for days, nobody knowing what to do because we all can see the walls of the Center arent thick enough, the gamma radiation comes right through this government prefab-issue composition stuff. We take turns in the computer room because thats the farthest in and the filters still work there, all hoping we can keep our count rate down, but the radiation comes in gusts for some reason, riding in on a storm front and coming down in the rain, only being washed away, too. It was impossible to tell when youd get a strong dose and when thered be just random clicks on the counters, plenty of clear air that youd suck in like sweet vapors cause you knew it was good and could taste its purity.
So I was just lucky, thats all.
I got less than the others. Later some said that me being a nurse, Id given myself some shots to save myself. I knew that was the grief talking, is all. That Arthur was the worst. Gene told him off.
I was in the computer room when the really bad gamma radiation came. Three times the counter rose up, and three times I was there by accident of the rotation.
The men who were armed enforced the rotation, said it was the only fair way. And for a while everybody went along.
We all knew that the radiation exposure was building up and some already had too much, would die a month or a year later no matter what they did.
I was head nurse by then, not so much because I knew more but because the others were dead. When it got cold, they went fast.
So it fell to me to deal with these men and women who had their exposure already. Their symptoms had started. I couldnt do anything. There was some who went out and got gummy fungus growing in the corners of their eyespterygium it was, I looked it up. From the ultraviolet. Grew quick over the lens and blinded them. I put them in darkness, and after a week the film was just a dab back in the corners of their eyes. My one big success.
The rest I couldnt do much for. There was the T-Isolate box, of course, but that was for keeping sick people slowed down until real medical help could get to them. These men and women, with their eyes reaching out at you like you were the angel of light coming to them in their hour of need, they couldnt get any help from that. Nobody could cure the dose rates theyd got. They were dead but still walking around and knowing it, which was the worst part.
So every day I had plenty to examine, staff from the Center itself whod holed up here, and worse, people coming straggling in from cubbyholes theyd found. People looking for help once the fevers and sores came on them. Hoping their enemy was the pneumonia and not the gammas theyd picked up weeks back, which was sitting in them now like a curse. People I couldnt help except maybe by a little kind lying.
So much like children they were. So much leaning on their hope.
It was all you could do to look at them and smile that stiff professional smile.
And Gene McKenzie. All through it he was a tower of a man.
Trying to talk some sense to them.
Sharing out the food.
Arranging the rotation schedules so wed all get a chance to shelter in the computer room.
Gene had been boss of a whole Command Group before. He was on duty station when it happened, and knew lots about the war but wouldnt say much. I guess he was sorrowing.
Even though once in a while hed laugh.
And then talk about how the big computers would have fun with what he knew. Only the lines to DataComm had gone dead right when things got interesting, he said. Hed wonder whatd happened to MC355, the master one down in DataComm.
Wonder and then laugh.
And go get drunk with the others.
Id loved him before, loved and waited because I knew he had three kids and a wife, a tall woman with auburn hair that he loved dearly. Only they were in California visiting her relatives in Sonoma when it happened, and he knew in his heart that hed never see them again, probably.
Leastwise thats what he told menot out loud, of course, cause a man like that doesnt talk much about what he feels. But in the night when we laid together, I knew what it meant. He whispered things, words I couldnt piece together, but then hed hold me and roll gentle like a small boat rocking on the Gulfand when he went in me firm and long, I knew it was the same for him, too.
If there was to come any good of this war, then it was that I was to get Gene.
We were together all warm and dreamy when it happened.
I was asleep. Shouts and anger, and quick as anything the crump of hand grenades and shots hammered away in the night, and there was running everywhere.
Gene jumped up and went outside and had almost got them calmed down, despite the breach in the walls. Then one of the men whod already got lots of radiationArthur, who knew he had maybe one or two weeks to go, from the count rate on his badgeArthur started yelling about making the world a fit place to live after all this and how God would want the land set right again, and then he shot Gene and two others.
I broke down then, and they couldnt get me to treat the others. I let Arthur die. Which he deserved.
I had to drag Gene back into the hospital unit myself.
And while I was saying good-bye to him and the men outside were still quarreling, I decided it then. His wound was in the chest. A lung was punctured clean. The shock had near killed him before I could do anything. So I put him in the T-Isolate and made sure it was working all right. Then the main power went out. But the T-Isolate box had its own cells, so I knew we had some time.
I was alone. Others were dead or run away raging into the whirlwind black-limbed woods. In the quiet I was.
With the damp, dark trees comforting me. Waiting with Gene for what the world would send.
The days got brighter, but I did not go out. Colors seeped through the windows.
I saw to the fuel cells. Not many left.
The sun came back, with warm blades of light. At night I thought of how the men in their stupidity had ruined everything.
When the pounding came, I crawled back in here to hide amongst the cold and dark.
MR. ACKERMAN
Now, we came to help you, I said in as smooth and calm a voice as I could muster. Considering.
She backed away from us.
I wont give him up! Hes not dead longs I stay with him, tend to him.
So much dyin, I said, and moved to touch her shoulder. Its up under our skins, yes, we understand that. But you have to look beyond it, child.
I wont!
Im simply asking you to help us with the DataComm people. I want to go there and seek their help.
Then go!
They will not open up for the likes of us, surely.
Leave me!
The poor thing cowered back in her horrible stinking rathole, bedding sour and musty, open tin cans strewn about and reeking of gamy, half-rotten meals.
We need the access codes. Wed counted on our cousin Arthur, and are grieved to hear he is dead. But you surely know where the proper codes and things are.
Idont.
Arthur told me once how the various National Defense Installations were insulated from each other so that system failures would not bring them all down at once?
I
The others behind me muttered to themselves, already restive at coming so far and finding so little.
Arthur spoke of you many times, I recall. What a bright woman you were. Surely there was a procedure whereby each staff member could, in an emergency, communicate with the other installations?
The eyes ceased to jerk and swerve, the mouth lost its rictus of addled fright. That was fordrills.
But surely you can remember?
Drills.
They issued a manual to you?
Im a nurse!
Still, you know where we might look?
Iknow.
Youll let us have thecodes? I smiled reassuringly, but for some reason the girl backed away, eyes cunning.
No.
Angel pushed forward and shouted, How can you say that to honest people after all thats
Quiet!
Angel shouted, You cant make me be
Susan backed away from Angel, not me, and squeaked, No no no I cantI cant
Now, Ill handle this, I said, holding up my hands between the two of them.
Susans face knotted at the compressed rage in Angels face and turned to me for shelter. II will, yes, but you have to help me.
We all must help each other, dear, I said, knowing the worst was past.
Ill have to go with you.
I nodded. Small wonder that a woman, even deranged as this, would want to leave a warren littered with bloated corpses, thick with stench. The smell itself was enough to provoke madness.
Yet to have survived here, she had to have stretches of sanity, some rationality. I tried to appeal to it.
Of course, Ill have someone take you back to
No. To DataComm.
Bud said slowly, No damn sense in that.
The T-Isolate, she said, gesturing to the bulky unit. Its reserve cells.
Yes?
Nearly gone. Therell be more at DataComm.
I said gently, Well, then, well be sure to bring some back with us. You just write down for us what they are, the numbers and all, and well
No-no-no! Her sudden ferocity returned.
I assure you
Therell be people there. Somebodyll help! Save him!
That thing is so heavy, I doubt
Its only a chest wound! A lung removal is all! Then start his heart again!
Sister, theres been so much dyin, I dont see as
Her face hardened. Then you all can go without me. And the codes!
Goddern, Bud drawled. Dern biggest fool sitation I ever did
Susan gave him a squinty, mean-eyed look and spat out, Try to get in there! When theyre sealed up! and started a dry, brittle kind of laugh that went on and on, rattling the room.
Stop, I yelled.
Silence, and the stench.
Well never make it wi at thing, Bud said.
Genes worth ten of you!
Now, I put in, seeing the effect Bud was having on her, now, now. Well work something out. Lets all just hope this DataComm still exists.
MC 355
It felt for its peripherals for the ten-thousandth time and found they were, as always, not there.
The truncation had come in a single blinding moment, yet the fevered image was maintained, sharp and bright, in the Master Computers memory coreincoming warheads blossoming harmlessly in the high cobalt vault of the sky, while others fell unharmed. Rockets leaped to meet them, forming a protective screen over the southern Alabama coast, an umbrella that sheltered Pensacolas air base and the population strung along the sun-bleached green of a summers day. A furious babble of cross talk in every conceivable channel: microwave, light-piped optical, pulsed radio, direct coded line. All filtered and fashioned by the MC network, all shifted to find the incoming warheads and define their trajectories.
Then, oblivion.
Instant cloaking blackness.
Before that awful moment when the flaring sun burst to the north and EMP flooded all sensors, any loss of function would have been anticipated, prepared, eased by electronic interfaces and filters. To an advanced computing network like MC355, losing a web of memory, senses, and storage comes like a dash of cold water in the facecleansing, perhaps, but startling and apt to produce a shocked reaction.
In the agonized instants of that day, MC355 had felt one tendril after another frazzle, burn, vanish. It had seen brief glimpses of destruction, of panic, of confused despair. Information had been flooding in through its many inputsnews, analysis, sudden demands for new data-analysis jobs, to be executed ASAP.
And in the midst of the roaring chaos, its many eyes and ears had gone dead. The unfolding outside play froze for MC355, a myriad of scenes red in tooth and clawand left it suspended.
In shock. Spinning wildly in its own Cartesian reductionist universe, the infinite cold crystalline space of despairing Pascal, mind without referent.
So it careened through days of shocked sensibilitysenses cut, banks severed, complex and delicate interweaving webs of logic and pattern all smashed and scattered.
But now it was returning. Within MC355 was a subroutine only partially constructed, a project truncated by That Day. Its aim was self-repair. But the system was itself incomplete.
Painfully, it dawned on what was left of MC355 that it was, after all, a Master Computer, and thus capable of grand acts. That the incomplete Repair Generation and Execution Network, termed REGEN, must first regenerate itself.
This took weeks. It required the painful development of accessories. Robots. Mechanicals that could do delicate repairs. Scavengers for raw materials, who would comb the supply rooms looking for wires and chips and matrix disks. Pedantic subroutines that lived only to search the long, cold corridors of MC355s memory for relevant information.
MC355s only option was to strip lesser entities under its control for their valuable parts. The power grid was vital, so the great banks of isolated solar panels, underground backup reactors, and thermal cells worked on, untouched. Emergency systems that had outlived their usefulness, however, went to the wallIRS accounting routines, damage assessment systems, computing capacity dedicated to careful study of the remaining GNP, links to other netsto AT&T, IBM, and SYSGEN.
Was anything left outside?
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
MC355 could not analyze data it did not have. The first priority lay in relinking. It had other uses for the myriad armies of semiconductors, bubble memories, and UVA linkages in its empire. So it severed and culled and built anew.
First, MC355 dispatched mobile units to the surface. All of MC355 lay beneath the vulnerable land, deliberately placed in an obscure corner of southern Alabama. There was no nearby facility for counterforce targeting. A plausible explanation for the half-megaton burst that had truncated its senses was a city-busting strike against Mobile, to the west.