It was a good long walk to the banks of the Potomac, but if you stayed to the main streets you could manage it without getting your good shoes wet. Of course, you had to climb the side of the dike of sandbags to see across the Potomac, because the tides were now running six feet above what used to be the riverbank. But it was worth it.
The golden globe lay there, faintly luminous, in the shadow of what had once been the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal. Darien was not alone as she stared. The levee was filled with sightseers, members of the delegations who had come for the President's Tenth Anniversary gala as well as Washington natives. She joined them in studying the great globe. It was, after all, precisely what she had crossed the continent to see.
"Good morning to you, Miss McCullough," said someone beside her, and she turned to greet the head of the Amish delegation, a tall old man with a beard and broad-brimmed hat. There was a whole wagonload of the stately Amish there, and heaven knew how many back in the Amish embassy on K Street. After the disaster the Amish, along with the Mennonites, the Doukhobors, and a few other sects, came into their own. They hadn't needed much from modern technology even before the power plants slagged down; they needed even less later on. While Iowa corn farmers stared in dreary despair at the fields they could neither plant nor sow without power for the tractors and a whole spectrum of chemicals to feed the plants and kill the pests, the Amish brought out their teams and prospered. Darien spoke politely to the Amishman. She was on good terms with their government, as she was with nearly every government in North America and a few which were not; that was one of the reasons why Puget stayed as healthy as it did.
Darien McCullough had been a teenager when the world as she knew it came to an end. She was in high school in Ottawa, firmly intending to become either a nuclear physicist or perhaps a world-champion tennis player . . . unless she went into the family business. Which was politics. Like all good Canadians, she both despised and loved the wretched giant to the south. She had seen a lot of the United States from her father's embassy residence in Washington, D.C., as a small child. She was not anxious to see more. Quebec was more interesting. So was tennis. So were boys. When the kaons sluiced into every fissionable atom on the surface of the Earth, Darien's first thought was that it was a pretty good joke on the U.S.A. The mighty American muscle had simply melted away. All over the hemisphere U.S. bomber crews were parachuting to the ground, dozens of them over Canada, as their nuclear warheads dissolved their casings and the aircraft became uninhabitable. School closed early that day. At home, the telly showed CBC reporters following stunned generals around the Pentagon, asking questions that had no answers at all.
Then even CBC went off the air.
Forty percent of North American, not just Canadian, electric power came from nuclear reactors. As the cores softened and slumped, the turbines stopped turning. CANDUs were no luckier than the Westinghouses or the breeders. The power net failed. The grid died.
There was a bad week then, even in Ottawa. Nothing at all, compared to Detroit or L.A. But bad. When it became clear to her parents that it would be easier to stay alive in their home province than in Ottawa, they simply bought a train ticket and got on board. (A few weeks later it got harder.) The rail trip was normal enough— wheat fields do not riot—although there were delays and the restaurant car offered little choice. But Vancouver, when they got there, was wholly blacked out.
Saunders McCullough, Darien's father, was well equipped for the problem. He had been given the ambassadorship as a reward for political service, and the best of his service was with the national power authority, with an engineering degree from McGill before that. He was the one who put together the hydroelectric network that gave most of British Columbia and parts of the former states of Oregon and Washington a head start on returning to industrial civilization—or something fairly like it—after the disaster. Darien's mother was also an exceptional individual. Burned-out women'srights revolutionary turned housewife, she sparked to life again and led the secessionist movement that put Puget together as an independent nation. The McCulloughs were certainly the first family of Puget, and the daughter was the logical choice to pick up the torch when the old folks died. Puget didn't have a President. It had a Council, but if there was a first among equals among them it was Darien McCullough. And when they unscrambled the Hawaiian Kingdom's message from space, she was the logical one to bring it to Washington.
A remote beepbeepbeep interrupted her thoughts.
The Amishman glanced disapprovingly at her purse, where the sound came from, but approvingly enough at Darien herself as he removed himself a few paces for politeness' sake. She held the purse up to her mouth to respond, then to her ear. It whispered to her, in the voice of Jake Harris, the anchorman back at Blair House, "Darien? You better get back here, ay? Looks like they're going to have a parade and we're supposed to be in it."
She frowned at the thought of walking down Pennsylvania Avenue behind the President's prized cavalry. "They don't need me, Jake."
"Course not. But you know how His Nibs gets."
"He's.got plenty on his mind today. He won't even notice I'm not there." She peered past the Amish family to judge distances and then nodded to herself. "Look, I'll pick up the procession at the Arlington Bridge if I have to. So make my excuses till then, right? I have to sign off now."
There was a faint squawk of protest from the walkie-talkie in her bag, but she paid no attention. Like a proper sightseer, she concentrated on the great golden globe across the river.
The soggy ground beneath the sphere was cracked and dry. Tremendous heat had boiled the water out of the mud, between and over the old runways, for a distance of fifty yards around the spacecraft. Darien studied the caked mud thoughtfully. That meant waste heat, surely, but from what? Some immense energy had cushioned the fall of that globe, but there was no external sign of how it was applied. It had no wings, no visible rocket nozzles. Jake, who had watched the orbiting parent sphere the night before, thought that there had seemed to be some huge, wavy sort of aurora behind it—plasma? Darien could not guess, and shook her head regretfully. It was more important than ever, she thought, that she get to the people in the globe before anyone else did.
There were mottled irregularities on the globe that might have been windows, but if they gave a view at all it was only from the inside looking out. What did they look like, the people who undoubtedly were peering at her even now? Great golden gods and goddesses, as bronzed as their spaceship? Two-headed mutants? She felt a shudder run up her back, in spite of the muggy heat.
What the spacefarers were seeing was far less impressive. The pathetic rabble that was the President's picked corps of commandos was knotted around the ship, their oddly assorted weapons pointed at the ship, at the sky, at each other in random directions as they whispered to each other and strained to look inside the ship; and it was beginning to rain.
Darien sighed, rummaged in her purse, and took out a camera. It did not look any different than any other of those Japanese minis that still existed in quantity; cameras were not rare. But she attracted glances when she peered through its viewfinder at the ship because it was rare enough to see one used; film had not been in the stores for twenty years. For Darien's camera that didn't matter. It didn't use film. She clicked away, as a dozen generations of tourists had before her in that spot, and then she noticed what images she was storing on the magnetic tape.
A door in the golden globe was opening.