That terrible night, the bright blast spiked to a pale plume many miles high. Night collected into a pillar of day. But while we who were near enough to watch could not think why we were living through it, the read-outs on the quake-activated monitors were showing even more astonishingly that the firestorm kept exactly within that nation’s airspace. Air-samples taken during the following weeks uniformly said the same for fallout. Stranger still, within the perimeter of the crater no fallout either. The holocaust was clean.
We keep returning to the wonder of it. A seventy-mile-high blast that incredibly did not overflow their frontiers. Did they ever really want us with them? They had outdone themselves.
The blast had risen like a computer-generated mesa faithful at all points of the atlas outline any schoolchild might scan. Indeed, because of certain phenomena we mobilized schoolchildren to give us their thinking. The World Council set a zone around the new vacancy where only authorized persons might go. So we had what once was known in those days as a no-man’s-land, an incised micro-map of frontier embracing depth but within it now no mountains or river beds, no vales or unexpected cols. During those first weeks thousands came to look as they could. They saw of our former neighbor a crater outlined with infinite care and fractal fate. Adjacent nations that endured this tourism must needs control it.
The smoker’s smoke seeks any old lung, our roving Mach’monster machines spread bedlam on the still waters of untold semi-circular canals. Had a medium-size post-industrial state with a device that sealed off all other states from its explosive force achieved a technology downright self-containing? Yet self-reflective, it occurs to me. If so, why self-destroying? Was this holocaust a mistake? A folly of overreaching? If so, why the lack of contamination. Or would some new, unheard-of fallout follow in time? If not a mistake, was our vanished neighbor’s act suicide in some tradition ancient and modern of pride and refusal? A nation swallowing to the last-mega-drop the adventure of its own will, so swallower and responsibility went up as one.
We know a nation is one nation. But a nation, we have been told, of individuals and their powers. For population — a statistical, strange, perhaps incomprehensible term — is an intelligent resource poignant with human nuance and friction. Here, Us and Them. They had always said that in the light of their sovereignty they would never disarm. Had they at last been moved by us, the growing majority of unilateral disarmers? Yet never really wanted us with them. And when their power to outdo themselves found its last logic of undoing, they alone lived it. Was that annihilation, then, their way of respecting our convictions? A gift, and to us, if we’d take it, and at first we would. Yet if a gift, of what? Surely not the mere gross reduction in global numbers.
And the space. Whose was this new void? It repelled with some garden-variety inverse magnetism most winds and other air-currents, common particles of globally freewheeling dust and flesh. It repelled early test personnel who tried to install devices with which to descend the cliffs — and repelled at some frequencies light as well — beamed or in curious new forms of our naked sight. And if a gift from that now absent nation, who would we thank? Upwards of two thousand of their nationals traveling or residing outside the country at the moment of the event? Safely outside, we assumed — as with discretion in my laboratory circle we began to interview them, fission thinkers, architects, political scientists, artists, consultants, tourists, parents, many in near-amnesiac shock, some curiously alive unable still to think out loud about their home. One psycho-biologist who had been asked before he left not to make this trip somehow could not speak of research he had been engaged in or of what he might have lost; yet, chastened, he pointed out how many unimaginative ways our thus far unchastened species had found to gradually kill itself. He recommended patience, a strangely elusive man — what was it? — and seemed to have in him a palpable thing he could not locate. Yet he had no wish to return to his homeland. Was it legally still there to be his? Could you return to such a place? The floor of the crater three miles down? We kept returning to the event, a technological twist, a coup. A nation swallowing to the last drop, or becoming, some task of its will. We had dared think the event could not happen. Yet if in thinking such holocaust unthinkable we had in fact thought it, still it didn’t then happen to us, the unilateral disarmers. Was this a holocaust to end all such, the last disarmament?
What had held the blast within these frontiers?
The upward gust of the event had drawn after it itself. With it went the breakthrough thinking, the unprecedented originality it had sprung from, we concluded. Yet do not some thoughts need to forget the work they sprang from? Like childbirth, like hatred toward a friend, even the materials from which a formula is framed. The relief we felt that the one-man arms race was over gave way to a new drive toward understanding. This neighbor nation, reaching one end of its time line like an unusual music, had ventured so far that, in fascination, one might forget one’s good fortune that one had not oneself been incinerated.
Some of us needed to know how it had been done, hear that music, for in fact the literal vector of honest inquiry that confronts premises may have heard in the metaphor of our widespread thought that there was indeed an unusual music to be heard. Yet the relief we felt that the one-man arms race, as we used to call it, was over gave way to a suspicion that we had better know how the thing had been done.
Vanished yet still among us, that nation had been monitored; so in the event we had a wealth of data. They revealed an eerie scene that night. Micro-forces unique in our experience had barraged transparent interfaces along the risen ghost frontiers, yet both barrier and forces seemed there only at instants of collision, so the forces themselves appeared to at once create the transparencies they were rebuffed by. As best we could make out, the forces “shimmered.” They were shimmers, and appeared at first at all points of boundary. We guessed they kept some secret of what had been done and how.
When I heard people say the force gave off an aura of purpose, I said to myself, as usual, No: the forces captured or were captured by their own field of purpose. The forces were called Shimmer Emission Demonstration or, the alternative D word, Doubt. In either case SHED. Not only because acronymed from Shimmer Emission Demonstration (or Doubt), but because they shed, it seemed limitlessly, though, like the old Einsteinian light, weighably, an aim. Thus, it seemed to come to us as, in another sense, simultaneously it was lost or went somewhere. Theory agreed that each of the SHEDs felt unique, but split on whether SHEDs were clusters or individuals; also, whether they were only a “shimmer-function” of this miles-high-risen, roughly (or perhaps exactly) cylindrical envelope of presumed electro-magnetism, or had for some reason in their millions-fold net of points chosen to stop there. Shimmer Theory had its satisfactions, its elegance, but with the advent of the What and the How approaches, it began to be argued that the barrier did not exist except as an illusion propagated by the very forces it seemed to enclose.
How would we rethink this breakthrough? I felt my words change. Not at first so much in isotope, spike, chain reaction, as, on our globe with its own spherical endlessness now not shadowed by terminal ignition, how nonetheless the unthinkable came to mind afresh.