Sharon McShurley, newly elected mayor, was sitting at her desk in the Town Hall wondering for the millionth time that day what she was going to do when the telephone rang. She picked it up. “Hello, the Mayor speaking.”
“Mrs. McShurley?” The voice was male and unfamiliar.
“Yes? May I ask who this is?”
“This is Nathan Feltman, Secretary of Commerce for Indiana.”
“Ah, Mr. Feltman. How can I help you?”
“Mrs. McShurley, I was contacted not five hours ago by Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. You know of The Message?”
“Of course.”
“And of the developments in Iraq?”
“Of course. It's been all over the news.” Truth was, she'd been doing little more than watch the news since The Message. There had seemed so little she could do even to regain control over her small town.
“Secretary Gutierrez has informed me that the United States is immediately shifting to a war economy. I don't know how things will work on the military side, but on the economic side, we're going to be ramping up production as fast as possible. I've already spoken with the mayors of Indianapolis, Gary-Hammond, Fort Wayne, Evansville, and Anderson. Do you have a list of production overcapacity and unused assets in Muncie?”
“Yes, we do.” Unemployment was just the single most pressing problem in the city, and had been for thirty years.
“We need to compare our list with yours, and then we'll send the updated version to the US Department of Commerce. They'll be asking corporations to buy them up and get working on military equipment. Given Indiana's central location, rail accessibility, and manufacturing history, we'll be up near the top.”
Feltmann gave McShurley the fax number for the Indiana Department of Commerce, and within twenty minutes, the substantial list of old factories, closed-up warehouses, abandoned rail yards, and defunct properties was on its way to Indianapolis. A half hour and two double-checks later, it was again winging its way through cyberspace to Washington, D.C., where an undersecretary of commerce opened it and copy-pasted its contents into a secure website, open only to the procurement officers of the vast national and international corporations which supplied the US military with its equipment.
The next day, McShurley was in her office when the phone rang again. “Hello?”
“Mayor Sharon McShurley?” Another unfamiliar voice.
“Speaking.”
“This is John Walker, with Borg Warner Automotive. In light of the recent developments, we've decided not to close down the plant in Muncie. Instead, we're retooling it to provide transmissions for tanks.”
“Well, that's certainly happy news. Thank you.”
The man hung up, McShurley got back to her paperwork, and within a half hour the phone rang again. “Hello?”
“Mayor Sharon McShurley of Muncie?”
“Speaking.”
“I'm James Torida of General Dynamics Land Systems. We have acquired an older factory in Muncie to build M1A2 parts, and we would like the cooperation of the local government in finding employees and in renovating and retooling the plant as quickly as possible.”
“We'd love to help in any way we can.”
They discussed the details of the deal for fifteen minutes, then hung up. McShurley heaved a sigh – two in one day! Wow!
The phone rang again fifteen minutes later. It was General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, wanting again cooperation, tax breaks, etc., to get another old plant up and running, this time to manufacture AIM-120C missile casings. McShurley was more than willing to cooperate.
Before business hours ended, three more corporations had called. One wanted to acquire land to build a fourth railroad track south through the city; apparently, it was working on a line south from Chicago to Cincinnati and the Ohio River to supply raw materials from the mines in Minnesota and Ontario down to barges on the Ohio. The second had bought two abandoned warehouses on the south side of Muncie and wanted to open up the old trackyard to the warehouses to help supply the rejuvenated factories. The third was applying for a construction permit for the properties northwest of town that had so recently been slated for urban sprawl.
804 South Tillotson Ave., Muncie, Indiana, USA
Jim Schenkel had been a tool machinist for forty years before being laid off from his long-time job in 2003. He'd elected to retire instead of pursuing another job, and for the past five years he'd followed the same schedule: up at six, drink his coffee, read the morning paper over toast, an egg, and a glass of orange juice, tend his gardens until lunch, eat a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, monitor his investments and piddle around in his workshop until dinner, eat a bowl of soup, then watch the news until 10.
It was 1:30 AM when the phone rang. Groggily, he rolled over, and picked up the receiver on the sixth ring. “Hello?”
“Jim? Jack Roberts here.” Jack Roberts was his old supervisor at the ABB factory, before they'd all been fired and the place shut down.
“Jack? Why the hell are you calling me at -“ he squinted at the clock – “1:30 in the morning?”
“Jim, you're re-hired. We need you in tomorrow morning at 6:30.”
“What the hell's going on, Jack?”
“The factory's been started back up for the war effort. We need all the equipment repaired and retooled; the management wants the lines rolling in a week.”
“… the hell? I'm retired, goddamnit.”
“Like I said, we need you back. To be blunt, Jim, you don't have a choice. We'll send men out to get you if you can't make it on your own.”
“I don't give -“ he stared at the receiver, listening to the audible dial tone.
The next morning, at 6:30, he pulled into the parking lot of the ABB factory on the south side of town, and stared. It was packed with cars, and people were streaming toward the factory. The factory itself was brightly lit; the loading docks were packed with semis, and parts were already starting to form small piles waiting to be taken inside. He parked his car and joined the flow of humanity heading back to work.
That morning, The Star Press headlines read, “Look out, Baldricks! Here comes Muncie!” That day, the Mayor's office received eight more phone calls from corporations, and the first semis and trains started to roll into the city as construction equipment started to move away from the university – which had agreed to put its new dorm on hold for the time being to aid in the war effort – and toward the old, broken-down factories. Overnight, the city had been transformed.
And it wasn't alone. All across the eastern Midwest, the rust belt was being de-oxidized. Surveyors were entering old factories, cleaning companies entering and sweeping up dust, weeds being cleared and broken windows replaced. Lights that hadn't shone for decades were being turned on and replaced; cars were parking in lots that were more grass than gravel and hadn't been touched by tires for thirty years. More and more trains were rolling out of yards and thundering down the immense but ailing network of tracks connecting American cities to each other, and tractor-trailer semis were moving down the highways in huge fleets, carrying piping and wires and tools and other implements of the new war economy.
If Satan could have looked up from Hell and seen this, if he had wanted to learn about his enemies, if he had been capable of comprehending the vast network of the US economy and felt the rage at betrayal coursing through the collective veins of that nation, he might have felt that he was seeing the first traces of life in the resurrection of a giant long dead. But in the next dimension, sitting on his throne, lording over his sulfurous domain, and trying to figure out how fifteen of the senior generals in Abigor's army had spontaneously exploded, these thoughts never even occurred to him. Ignorance is bliss, until the first bombs start dropping.
Moscow, Russia
And these changes were hardly unique to the US. In Russia, Vladimir Putin had immediately accelerated the redevelopment of the military; old factories closed during the economic woes of the 1990s were being reopened, old mines and oil wells were being rechecked for viability. The storage depots and military installations were being searched for equipment, tanks, armored carriers, artillery that had been sitting in storage for a decade or more was being refurbished. New tracks were being laid, and the first of tens of thousands of new T-90S tanks were rolling off the final assembly lines even as he walked toward this meeting, flanked by security forces.