The kitchens were the camp's clearing house for rumors and tidbits of information. They were one of the few places where inmates from different sections intermixed and, under cover of the steam and the clatter, were able to exchange furtive, muttered sentences. The first story to come out of the kitchens was attributed to a group on the women's side who had a clandestine radio. Supposedly, there were reports coming out of Canada that there was about to be major shakeup in the Faithful administration. Another, from G block, claimed that black deacon cars had been going in and out of the camp all through the night. There were also the usual doomsayers, who muttered that there were mass executions coming as the authorities intended to drastically reduce the size of the camp population.
In the middle of breakfast, there was an announcement over the PA. All religious services were canceled. That was unprecedented. Even the TV was shut down. The inmates spent the rest of the afternoon locked up in their barracks rooms quietly speculating what might happen next. At six, the TV came on again. The inmates were expected to watch the presidential special. They sat in silence through the opening filler, through the choir and the celebrities' pleas for peace and harmony. There were a few wry smiles among the inmates as soap opera star Charity Masterpiece exhorted the viewing audience to work together in Jesus. Then, to everyone's slack-jawed amazement, just before Faithful was due to begin his address, the transmission started to come unglued. There was a fleeting shot of running soldiers, then an interruption sign came on, only to be replaced ten minutes later by an equally confusing shot from the set of the Faithful special, showing performers and people who looked like deacons milling aimlessly about. Obviously something had completely disrupted the show. There was a kind of guarded excitement in the barracks – something was really radically wrong in the outside world. The TV signal went off again, in a flash of snow and horizontal lines.
The next TV picture was the most bizarre of all. Three enormous sky walkers were moving up a river. The Manhattan skyline identified the river as the Hudson.
1334680 Montague let out a low whistle. "The Beasts of Revelations. " Montague had been a Rastafarian in the real world.
1346809 Pitlik looked at him in surprise. "They're just big holograms."
"Armageddon time. Jah know." His eyes had taken on a glaze and the whites had turned yellow. "Armageddon time. Jah know."
"He's flipped."
Montague kept repeating his words over and over like a mantra. "Armageddon time. Jah know."
Later they would come for him with a straitjacket.
The first pictures of the monsters came from circling helicopters, but in a few minutes there was one from ground level, somewhere on the lower Manhattan waterfront. The camera crew was being jostled and buffeted by a crowd of struggling people; the roar of mass hysteria poured from the speakers. Near the mike, someone was babbling about the end of the world. Hands were clutching at the lens. The world had gone insane. From within the brutal order of the camp, it was a vision of the impossible. More than one inmate of D block wondered if 1334680 Montague was right. The cameraman must have staggered forward. After a series of lurches, the vantage point was directly over the river. People were actually jumping into the water.
"Armageddon time."
The picture died completely. There was no power. The bosses had pulled the plug. There was a deathly silence, broken only by 1334680 Montague droning on. "Armageddon time. Jah know."
The PA cut in. "All prisoners will remain in their barracks blocks until further notice. Food will be brought."
In an hour, food was brought and Montague was taken away. The food was slopped out by two kapos from A block. It was an unpleasant soup. A scrap of paper was attached to the bottom of one of the pails. There was a message on it: "Faithful has been arrested! There's going to be a new government!"
It might have been a cruel joke, but if it was true, what would a new government mean? One that opened the camps, or one that would set up gas ovens? The note was passed from one man to the next in aching silence. They scarcely dared to hope. Freedom? Maybe even revenge? It was almost inconceivable.
Carlisle
"You know what this is? This is like that Orson Welles Martian freakout back in the radio days."
"Except that it's to the hundredth power."
"I don't understand this. It's mass mania."
"Do they really believe it's the Apocalypse?"
"It's like these figures of Mansard's have hit some nerve and flipped everyone out."
Carlisle looked coldly at the man who had spoken. "If you're already half out of your mind on propaganda, poverty, and A-waves, flipping all the way might not look like so bad a deal."
That brought him some sharp looks. He glanced back at Dreisler. "This is the revolution, isn't it? We've got free speech now, right?"
Dreisler was sitting behind everyone, apparently watching their reactions; he seemed almost languid. The only sign that he might also be feeling the strain was the way he chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes, holding them between thumb and forefinger, FDR style.
"As long as you're breathing, Harry, your mouth will keep flapping."
Carlisle's mouth did indeed keep flapping. The day's events were building a reckless go-for-broke anger inside him. "You don't seem very surprised by all this. Were you expecting it? Maybe like the Proverb shooting?"
Dreisler's eyes flashed cold. "Watch it, Harry."
Carlisle ignored the warning. "Seriously, what do you think is going on out there?"
Dreisler's expression was impossible to read. "I think Johansen's right. Mansard has hit a nerve. He may even have lanced a large boil on the national psyche. Maybe it's the emotional end of the Faithful era. America wants one last, massive psychodelusion."
Carlisle slumped down in an empty operator's chair. "People are getting hurt out there."
Dreisler dragged on his cigarette. "People always get hurt. Omelets and eggs, remember?"
Carlisle thought of the dead cop on the stairs to the roof.
In the Astor Place com center they were watching the chaos growing outside. As soon as Faithful had been secured in the basement lockup under heavy guard, Dreisler, with the swagger of a magician, had produced a living, breathing Japanese cowboy called Hama who had jacked into the acres of corrupted software and laced in a temporary vaccine program. That, at least, had provided a narrow logic path through the virus-filled, psychedelic, random jungles that had once been the CCC base software. Dreisler had immediately used it to consolidate his position and start infiltrating his men into places that might be potential contra strongholds.
"As with revolution," he said, "the best time to fight counterrevolution is before it gets started."
It was not too long, though, before he was hampered in his efforts by the growing madness in the outside world and the reports of it that began to choke every communication channel.
Later it would be called the Armageddon Crazy, and it would go into the textbooks as one of the most extreme cases of riptide mass hysteria in a supposedly developed country. The appearance of Mansard's skywalkers had convinced vast numbers of people that Judgment Day was really at hand, and those vast numbers of people began to act accordingly. They went nuts. Initially it was confined to the crowds lining the Manhattan and Jersey sides of the river. People hurled themselves into the river in ever growing numbers. There were points during the night, even after the skywalkers were long gone, when the margins of the Hudson looked like a lemming fest, with bobbing heads and the thrashings of non-swimmers who had decided that they did not want to die after all. Unfortunately, the mania did not stay confined to the river for long. It rapidly spread across the city. By midnight, it was estimated that over two million people were raging through New York City, weeping, wailing, talking in tongues, and doing their best to damage themselves. At first the police had attempted to employ normal crowd-control measures, but after a while they were forced to admit defeat and simply step aside. The Armageddon Crazy was too highly charged to be kept in check. Also peace officers were not necessarily immune. The entire crew of a Pharaoh flipped out together and ran their armored carrier off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Many of those affected took it into their heads to go to graveyards and search for resurrected relatives. The hysteria was compounded by hundreds of people stumbling around among the headstones.