That had meant SAC didn't mean SAC any more. In the early 1960s, Strategic Air Command had become Strategic Aerospace Command. It looked after the military applications of space while another organization called NASA had looked after civilian space exploration. NASA had been a politicized, bureaucratic disaster. They'd got to the moon alright but only after one of the big Saturn rockets had burned on the pad, killing its three-man crew. After that disaster, much of NASA's responsibilities had been transferred to SAC. The President then was a man called Johnson and the only reason why he had saved NASA was that it operated out of Texas.
Then, a few years later, NASA had got into the shuttle business, building a re-usable space cargo carrier. They'd built five and lost two, one on launch, one on re-entry. Another enquiry, by this time under a new President, an ex-Hollywood actor who, nonetheless, had a profound understanding of space and science. He'd asked the head of NASA one question. “NASA has five shuttles and lost two. On the same budget, SAC operates over a hundred orbital bombers and hasn't lost any. Why?” NASA was abolished and its responsibilities transferred to SAC. SAC officially then got changed to Space Administration Command but everybody still knew what it really meant.
Outside the Honor Guard changed and the lights were dimmed. The Museum was closing but it didn't matter. Dedmon could sit here all night if he wished. Sometimes he did. What sort of world had he and Texan Lady created? One where American power was absolute certainly. American policy was simple, there was no better friend and no worse enemy than the USA. One American ambassador had ended an international crisis by licking his finger and holding it up in the air. Asked what he was doing he replied '“Checking wind direction, we don't want fallout landing on our friends.” But outside that simple certainty, the world was split between the power blocks whose enmity was bitter. All they had to do to keep America off them was to play nice but that left plenty of ways they could fight their proxy wars. Terrorism was just a part of it. There was a sort of brinkmanship in the world; how close could a country come to playing nasty without incurring American wrath.
Nobody wanted to do that. Germany was still a terrible example Goering's attempts to surrender, sensible though they were, had been hard to enforce. Especially in the East. The German Armies hadn't wanted to go home and hadn't wanted to surrender. So they'd kept fighting. The German generals had become warlords, setting up their own feudal states in the occupied areas of Russia. Some of them had been little more than Gangs of bandits hiding in the woods and had been finished off accordingly. Others had assembled real mini-states with industrial production and a functioning society. Some had become well-organized and well-governed, others had reverted to a barbarism that insulted the description “Dark Ages”. Some had been peacefully re-absorbed into Russia, some had gone down fighting.
It had taken years to finish them all off, the last one had only been finally defeated in 1960. That had delayed Russia's recovery and even now, the country was still an economic basket case. Germany itself was a patchwork agrarian state, almost a park in the middle of Europe. A park where people frightened their children by telling them of the day a monster called SAC had flown over their country and burned it into ashes. Much of the country though, especially the Ruhr Valley, was still a wasteland.
In contrast, the UK had been a shining example of what could be done. The Germans there had mostly stayed, those who had family surviving in German had brought them over. They'd been absorbed quietly and without fuss. Most historians today concluded that Churchill would have been an indifferent wartime leader but had been an outstanding peacetime prime minister; Dedmon had read a novel once that tried to suggest what would have happened if the Halifax-Butler Coup had failed. The suggestion had been that the war ended two years earlier without using nuclear weapons. Well, anything was possible in fiction.
The years following The Big One had been bad for Europe. Epidemics had developed among the surviving German population, particularly food poisoning, dysentery, and typhoid. Displaced populations, including the millions of burned, were particularly affected; those with radiation sickness were particularly vulnerable, since it increased susceptibility to disease up to fivefold. That year and the next, crops withered throughout Europe since sunlight, temperatures, and rainfall were all below normal. In many areas concentrations of ozone, smog, and other pollutants in the lower atmosphere were still high enough to afflict plants; and in restricted areas plants suffered from fallout.
Even in 1948, temperatures in the northern hemisphere were 2 degrees F below normal on average, shortening growing seasons and prolonging agricultural disruptions. In Germany, farming was still at subsistence level. Even the long term devastation had proved worse than the Targeteers had predicted, fish from the North Sea and Baltic was still too radioactive to eat. Oddly, the great fear, genetic defects were much less prevalent than feared, found only in a few percent of the population born in the northern hemisphere after the war; even then most were not noticeable or handicapping. Malnutrition had caused far more profound physical deficiencies.
That hadn't been the ultimate though. Five years after the Big One, Dedmon had been one of the spectators to the first test of Super, the first fusion device. The event had been stunning - quite literally. The scientists told him that the single Super initiated in the test had developed more raw explosive power than all the devices SAC had dropped on Germany during The Big One. Later that day, Dedmon had met The Seer again. He was standing in the navigation compartment of the flagship, staring at a map of Chipan and smiling. “Problem solved,” he'd said.
Chipan, now there was a mystery. Nobody knew who had defeated who in the long war between China and Japan. Japan had claimed it had won, China that it had. Get a historian from either country alone, get him drunk and ask the question and both would admit that even they didn't know. The war hadn't even officially ended, it had just faded away as each nation absorbed the other. Chipan had the Japanese Emperor as head of state but the Government was Chinese Communist. Or something. Whatever it was, the combined state was as ruthlessly expansionist as Imperial Japan had ever been.
Sitting comfortably in his pilot's seat, Demon felt the familiar presence of Texan Lady comforting him. The world wasn't the way he wanted it or would have liked it but it was what they had and they had to live with it. What was it The Seer had always said “See things the way they are, not the way you would like them to be. You may not be as comfortable but you'll be less likely to get caught flat-footed.” Dedmon was taking that advice now. He ran his hands over the familiar controls and instruments.
“This is probably goodbye, Texan Lady. I don't think I'll be back, the Doctors don't give me much longer. But you're safe here, in honorable retirement, looked after by people who love you and surrounded by your children and grandchildren.” The silent, empty aircraft seemed to be waiting for more somehow. He ran his hands over the seats and quietly said “I love you, Texan Lady”
And the female voice that had puzzled them all for years replied “I love you too Bob.”