Jem

God Me

The coffee was at just the right temperature, and he drank it like medicine, swallow by swallow, until it was down. Then he threw off the robe, sat cross-legged on the bed in the half-lotus position, let his body go calm, and began to say his mantra.

Godfrey Me

The bed moved again.

It was not an earthquake. There were no earthquakes in West Virginia, he thought, bringing himself up out of reverie, getting ready to open his eyes. It was sharper than an earthquake would have been, more quick and trivial than the slow battering of a crustal slip. It was not particularly strong, and if he had still been asleep it might not even have awakened him. But it was something. And then the lights flickered.

Two hundred meters down in the side of a West Virginia mountain, the lights were not meant to flicker. A239Pu megawatt generating plant, vented through a kilometer of piping to emerge on the other side of the hill, was immune to most external events. Lightning bolts did not strike transformers underground. Winds could not tear loose a line, since there were no lines in the open air. And then, tardily, the flickering colors on the base of the telephone all went out. A single red light flared, and the buzzer sounded. He picked up the phone and said, “Me

“Three missiles came in, sir — near misses. There’s no structural damage. Point of origin backtracks probably to near Sinkiang province. The city of Wheeling is out.”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he said. He was still coming up from his meditation, and so he did not look at his own situation panel, but he also did not stop to shower or shave. He rubbed deodorant on his armpits — French whore’s bath, but good enough — ran a brush over his hair, pulled on his coveralls and shoes, and walked briskly down the placid, beige-carpeted corridor to his command room. The situation map was alight from end to end. “Here’s your coffee,” said General Weinenstat. That was all she said. She knew his ways. He took the cup without looking at her, because his eyes were on the board. It displayed a Mercator projection of the earth in outline. Within it, bright red stars were targets taken out. Bright blue stars were also targets taken out, but on the wrong side: that was Washington and Leningrad and Buenos Aires and Hanoi and Chicago and San Francisco. Broken red profiles in the ocean areas of the map were enemy missile-launching vessels destroyed. There were more than a hundred of them. But there were also nearly sixty broken blue ones. Pulsating targets, red and blue, were major concentrations not yet destroyed. There were relatively few of them. The number decreased as he watched. Kansas City, Tientsin, Cairo, and the whole urban complex around Frankfurt ceased to exist.

The second cup of coffee was not medicine but comfort. He took a sip of it and then asked, “What’s their remaining second-strike capability?”

“Marginal, Godfrey. Maybe one hundred missiles operational within the next twenty-four hours, but we’re cutting that down all the time. We have almost eighty. And only two of our hardened installations are scratched.”

“Local damage?”

“Well — there are a lot of casualties. Otherwise, not bad. Surface contamination is within acceptable limits — inside shielded vehicles, anyway.” She signaled an orderly for a coffee refill and added, “Too early to tell about long-lived isotope capture, but most of the Corn Belt looks okay. So’s Mexico and the Pacific Northwest. We did lose the Imperial Valley.”

“So we’re not bad for now.”

“I would say so, yes, God.”

“For the next twenty-four hours. Then they can start to redeploy.” She nodded. It was a known fact that every major country had squirreled away missiles and components. They were not at ten-minute command like the ones in the silos or on the subs. They could not be launched by pushing a button. But they could not be taken out at long range, either, since you didn’t know where they were hidden. He added, “And we can’t look for them, because the satellite busters have half-blinded us.”

“We’ve all-blinded them, Godfrey. They don’t have an eye in orbit.”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” he said testily. “We’ve won the exchange. The damn fools. Well, let’s get to work.”

Me

Meanwhile, one of the damn fools had finished the pro gramming and was trying to round up enough of a crew for the launch. It wasn’t easy. The neutron bomb had done just what ERW weapons were supposed to do — penetrated the carelessly scant meters of water and the steel tube of his submarine and knocked out most of the crew. The Libyan vice admiral himself had taken nearly five thousand rads. He knew he had only hours to live, but with any luck his target would have less than that.

Three hours’ sleep was not enough. Me