Aftershocks

Slowly, Jonathan nodded. “Truth,” he said-in the Lizards’ language.

At last, the TV screen cut away from the podium with nobody behind it. But when it did, Jonathan wished it hadn’t, for what it showed were the ruins of Indianapolis. Chet Huntley’s voice provided commentary: “These are the outskirts of the city. We ca

A man walked into the camera’s line of sight. The right side of his face looked normal. The left, and his left arm, had been dreadfully burned. “Sir,” called a newsman behind the camera, “what happened, sir?”

“I was watering my lawn,” the man with half a normal face said. “Watering my lawn,” he repeated. “I was watering my lawn, and the whole god-damn world blew up.” He swayed like a tree in a high breeze, then slowly toppled.

“Flash must have got him,” Jonathan’s dad said. “If he’d been turned the other way, it would have been the other side of his face. Or if he’d been looking right at it…” His voice trailed away. Jonathan had no trouble figuring out what would have happened then. His stomach lurched. The camera pa

The telephone rang. He sprang up and ran to answer it, as much to escape the images on the TV screen as for any other reason. “Hello?”

“Jonathan?” It was Karen. “My God, Jonathan…” She sounded as ravaged, stu

“Yeah,” he said, for want of anything better. “This is what we were sitting on.”

“I know,” she answered. “I never imagined it would turn out like this.”

“I didn’t, either. I’m just glad they turned Dad loose and he got home okay.” Looking at some tiny private good in the midst of general disaster was a very human trait. Maybe that thought impelled what came next: “Karen, will you marry me, dammit?” She hadn’t said yes and she hadn’t said no.

It was the wrong time. It couldn’t have been a worse time. Maybe it couldn’t have been a better time, either, though, for she answered, “Yes, I think we should do that.” And then, before he could say anything else, she hung up.

Dazed, he walked back into the living room. He still didn’t get a chance to say anything, because his mother told him, “They’ve caught up with Vice President-President-Stassen.”

Sure enough, there was Harold Stassen, with the words THIEF LAKE, MINNESOTA superimposed on his image. He wore a fisherman’s vest that was all over pockets, a floppy hat, and an expression as sandbagged as everybody else’s. Jonathan thought it was cruel for a reporter to thrust a microphone in his face and bark, “In light of the present situation, Mr. President, what do you intend to do?”

Stassen gave what Jonathan thought was about the best answer he could: “I’m going to go back to Little Rock and find out exactly what happened. After that, with God’s help, I’ll try to take this country forward again. I have nothing else to say right now.”

In spite of that last sentence, the reporter asked, “Mr. President, were you aware that the United States launched the attack on the colonization fleet?”

“No,” Stassen said. “I was not aware of that, not until you told me a moment ago. Some officers will have some things to answer for. I expect to find out which ones.”

“You can start with Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay,” Jonathan’s father said, and then, thoughtfully rather than in anger, “I wonder if he’ll have the decency to kill himself. Too much to hope for, unless I’m wrong. And I wonder just how many know. Not a lot, or the secret wouldn’t have stayed secret this long.”

“Dad, Mom,” Jonathan said, “Karen just said she’d marry me.”

“That’s good, son,” his father said.

“Congratulations,” his mother added. But neither one of them heard him with more than half an ear. Almost all of their attention was on the TV screen, which cut away from the most unpresidential images of the new president to new scenes of the ruin that had without warning overtaken Indianapolis. Jonathan would have been angrier at them if his own eyes hadn’t been drawn as by a magnet to the television set.

“I was in orbital patrol when that satellite launched on the ships of the colonization fleet,” Glen Johnson said in the galley of the Lewis and Clark. “I figured it had to be the Nazis or the Reds. I never imagined the United States would do such a thing.”

“Now that you know better,” Dr. Miriam Rosen said, “what do you think of what President Warren did?”

“Falling on his sword, you mean?” Johnson said. “The country would have strung him up if he hadn’t.”

But the doctor shook her head, which made her dark, curly hair flip back and forth in a way that would have been impossible under gravity. “No, that’s not what I meant. What do you think of his sacrificing a city instead of everything we’ve done in space?”

Before Johnson could answer, Mickey Fly

Johnson ate another mouthful of beans and diced peppers. The peppers provided essential vitamins. They were also hot enough to make his eyes cross. In a way, that was a welcome change from the blandness of most of what he ate aboard the spaceship. In another, more immediate, way, though, it made him drink from his plastic bottle of water before he could speak. When he did, he said, “Wi

Fly

“That’s a fu

“It’s different when the shoe is on your own foot,” Dr. Rosen observed.

“Ain’t it the truth!” Johnson’s agreement was wholehearted if ungrammatical.

“If I had to guess-” Fly

Johnson cut him off: “If I know you, Mickey, that means you’ve analyzed it seventeen ways from Sunday.”

“Not this time,” the second pilot said with dignity. “Not enough data. As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, if I had to guess, I’d say Warren took the Race by surprise when he gave them Indianapolis instead of everything out here and everything in Earth orbit.”

“Congratulations,” Miriam Rosen said. “Second-guessing a dead man from a couple of hundred million miles away isn’t just a world record. If it’s not a solar system record, it’s got to be in the ru

Fly

“That means explain, right?” Johnson asked-more harassing fire.

But Fly

“But in the long term, it would ruin the United States,” Johnson said. “It would put us at the Lizards’ mercy.”

“Exactly.” Fly

“All that makes a good deal of sense,” Dr. Rosen said. “What do you think, Glen?”

“The last time you asked me that, Mickey got up on his soapbox,” Johnson replied, at which Fly

“He’d have been impeached and convicted as soon as the story broke,” Dr. Rosen said. “I wonder if we would have handed him over to the Lizards after that. Maybe it’s just as well we don’t have to find out.”

“Probably,” Fly

Johnson couldn’t quarrel with that, either. He said, “When we did give him to the Lizards, he’d have been covered with tar and feathers. He almost screwed up everything he’d been building-everything we’ve been building-for years and years.”

“And yet…” Fly

“To be or not to be, that is the question,” Dr. Rosen said.

“I wasn’t joking, Miriam,” Mickey Fly

“Neither was I,” she answered.

Slowly, Johnson said, “By doing what he did, Warren made sure the Lewis and Clark and now the Columbus would stay out here. He made sure we wouldn’t lose whatever space stations we build in Earth orbit and the weapons we’ve already got there. The Race still has to take us seriously. That’s not the smallest thing in the world. Twenty years from now, fifty years from now, it’s liable to be the biggest thing in the world. Five hundred years from now, it’s liable to say who’s writing the history books.” He raised his water bottle in salute. “Here’s to Earl Warren-I think.”

Fly