“Agreed. That we should have to face up to what we’re doing, I mean. I don’t think I’m eager for this. But I think you’re right, we should.”
In the next hour and a half, Chris introduced them to forty or so Americans, post-Daybreak, and Heather thought he’d never been better, not on television, or radio, or even in print. He probably figures lives are depending on it. Must be good to work like lives are depending on you. Chris drove on—how many victims in the crossfire would be worth it to make a given statement? how many burned libraries? how many men with hideous crimes in their memories for the next fifty years?
“The dogs of war,” Graham said after a while. “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. That’s what Shakespeare was talking about, that once you let them loose, they get… excited, they bark each other into a frenzy, they want to do more and more… they’re only safe on a leash, never when turned loose. Not even when you must turn them loose, and of course, Cam, if there is a surviving Daybreak out there for us to fight, we will have to turn them loose. But whenever you do, the dogs of war will tear up whatever they can get—your enemy, sure, but everything else too…and to turn them loose on a friend, or a relative, or someone who is just trying to do the right thing by their own lights…”
They let the question hang while Chris pushed them again, making them think about how long it takes to put a railroad line together with hand tools, and how little time it takes to put a hole in it; then about what it must feel like to be on the road, walking away from the home where you had everything, where you’ll never return, and with no idea where you’re going to go. And they talked about the strange power of words—not just the little holes and gaps in the Constitution, but the slippery points in every principle and idea, in every story all people tell themselves—
The lights went out; everyone froze, and Heather walked to the window, leaned out, and said, “Power off everywhere, that I can see.” She shouted to a runner downstairs.
A few minutes later, they had a radio that had been stored in a Faraday cage, and Heather was trying to raise Arnie at the research facility at Mota Elliptica.
The response came almost at once; he too had pulled out a spare radio from a shielded cage. “We got ’em,” he said. “We definitely got ’em. We had a great big EMP here, and Cam’s radars worked, we have a trajectory from just before it went off.”
“And have you traced it back?”
“Well, that’s the weird part,” Arnie said. “Um.”
There’s no place so terrible that I won’t be relieved to know it is where the enemy is. “Where did the bomb come from, Arnie?”
“It entered at escape velocity almost straight down, boss. So we don’t exactly know where it came from—”
“Damn, can you narrow it down?”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying not to say. We sure can. On that trajectory the one thing we know for sure is it didn’t come from Earth.”
Cam leaned forward. “Could it have come from the moon?”
“That would be my first guess,” Arnie said. “But definitely not from Earth.”
After they signed off, Chris said, “Well, your two hours expired, a while ago, but…”
“But we’ve established that whether it’s an enemy or a leftover booby trap, it doesn’t want us to make peace, and we would like to,” Cameron Nguyen-Peters said. “Shall we, Graham?”
“We shall.” Graham Weisbrod seemed to sit straighter, and some of the age seemed to fall off him. “I don’t know what we’re facing either, but whoever or whatever it is, I’d make peace just to spite it.”
Chris glanced up from the notes he was making. “And is that the only reason?”
“No, not at all,” the two leaders said, in unison, and laughed like any two men sharing a coincidence.
TWO DAYS LATER. BEGINNING AT MIDNIGHT. WEDNESDAY. MAY 1 (KNOWN AS OPEN SIGNALS DAY EVER SINCE).
It was a world of crystal sets and home-built antennae, by now. Most people did not have radios, but nearly everyone had a friend who was an inveterate listener. The EMP on Radio Perth had put an end to high-power continuous broadcasting, but stations slipped on and off the air in short bursts, and radio stations on sailing ships were beginning to move out into the world’s oceans. Radio Free Pacific broadcast two or three hours of English or Japanese at irregular intervals. Mostly it broadcast stories from the Pueblo Post-Times , or a few coastal papers in North America; now and then it broadcast grim eyewitness reports from the Asian coast. Once it ran an hour in Russian about a town in Kamchatka that seemed to be doing well.
The hobby radio listeners were people who couldn’t sleep, or had to stay awake, or were blessed somehow with time off. None of them could be sure when one or another station would open up for an hour or two on some frequency or other, so there were listeners at all hours hoping to find some news that would make the bearer the center of attention. The rest of the people counted on the obsessive listeners to fill them in, knowing that if anything interesting came over the airwaves, Rosa down the road, or Ivan who lived over the bar, would be delighted to tell them all about it at the first opportunity.
There were many stations, of course, that broadcast endless strings of numbers, or phrases from books, or several that broadcast strange, incomprehensible gibberish from some scrambler system. Those tended to be on the air even more briefly.
As midnight began on May 1st, several of the garbled stations began to broadcast in plain English. They gave passwords and authentications, and then, addressing agents and military units by code names (it had been decided that it would be neither fair nor desirable to use real names), they gave order after order to stand down, back away, undo the sabotage, release the prisoners, pull back to base, move back from the precipice. Radio TNG in Athens directly ordered the Pacific fleet to move out of striking range of Olympia. Radio Olympia ordered the destruction of the bottled nanoweapons and of the nanomakers. Hostile troops within short distances of each other were ordered to make contact under flag of truce and arrange for mutual peaceful policing of their areas; known political prisoners were ordered released.
As morning worked its way around the world, people were awakened by their radio-hobbyist neighbors, and as they heard the news, huge crowds formed around nearly every station and listener.
The Pueblo Post-Times brought out its first extra, and Chris dropped by Heather’s office. “Not one confidential word divulged,” he said, setting down a stack of copies. “No need for it. The headline and the story are too good to clutter up with unnecessary intrigue, anyway.”
Heather looked down; a picture of Cam, from some official document somewhere, was juxtaposed with one of Weisbrod from the inauguration. Both were smiling, and by mirror-reversing Graham, Chris had made it appear they were smiling at each other. Above them the headline said only,
THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO. COLORADO. 11:00 A.M. MST. THURSDAY. MAY 2.
“I’ve wanted all my life to begin a speech with ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here,’” Heather said. “Let me explain who we are, and then who we really are, and let me tell Chris in front of all of you that in order to have a chance to hear this, he had to become one of us, and that means he is bound just as much by his oath as the rest.”