There was a murmuring of the conferees. Various discussants floated the theory that this was a recording of the president and not a live broadcast at all. But this was belied by the specificity of his next remarks.
“The way I see it, we have discussed two options so far, the first option being a general quarantine for the affected population in Rio Blanco. As I understand it, the problem here is that we can’t identify the affected population in order to quarantine them, which makes that proposal ineffective. Correct? The second option is the blockade, at least that’s how I’m interpreting it — the idea that we seal off the town of Rio Blanco. Then we either open the border to the south, or we just wait out the infection. Is that an adequate summary of that proposal, Major Beauforte?”
“Sir, we could easily air-drop food supplies into the town—”
“The blockade, option two. You know, gentlemen, I have spent a lot of time in the Southwest. It’s really one of the most attractive parts of the nation. I mean, before we go in there and do something drastic to the place, we should pause to remember what a beautiful part of the country it is. In fact, I was there last year or so, and I saw my first dust storm. Leona, have I told you about the dust storm?”
“Yes, sir, you—”
“Did I show you the—?”
“You did. It was—”
“Gentlemen, I had, with the Secret Service detail, elected to do some hiking in a remote mountain range, near the border of the state of New Mexico. Bear country, I should say, and while it would, it’s true, have been unfortunate if the leader of the free world were somehow mauled in a bear attack, it’s just black bears down that way, you know. I have never seen a bear in the wild. At any rate, I’d led the good men and women of the Secret Service up one of the peaks in this range, and we’d had quite a good time at the top, where there were still some tumbledown shacks that I suppose were meant for fire observation in a much earlier era. In fact, we’d passed a few blazes on our way out toward the state line, but they were not yet any danger to the local population. Anyhow, we summited the peak in question not long after lunch, and we had a relaxing time there. Those parts of the state are now so empty that there was no danger of running into constituents, and most of the trails had been closed by the security detail in any event. At some point, I was alerted to the fact that a dust storm was coming in our direction from the northeast. There was some thought of extracting us by helicopter, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Soon enough, in the distance, you could see the storm, like a sheer wall. The dust comes from as far away as Mongolia, I was told later, though I don’t know how this would be possible, unless it was blown over the Bering Strait. Still, it was maybe twenty or thirty miles out, on a day that was dry and clear as any day can be in the desert in autumn. We watched, kept an eye on the storm, as we all but jogged down the mountain, gentlemen, and if the security people were a little apprehensive, I was practically giddy with the simple fact that nature continues to behave in a way that is impossible to predict, and if I didn’t want to be blown off the mountain, I was, at the same time, not averse to feeling the threat of the thing, as it seemed to head with its own volition toward the range on which I stood, gobbling up acres as fast as any phenomenon of God’s creation. We had a representative from the forest service on the line; we were told that the storm was, in fact, covering twenty or thirty miles an hour, and our best bet was to find a cave somewhere on the side of the mountain, and if that was impossible, we should sit down somewhere recessed and wait.
“There was a cave some way down. And so, gentlemen, it was a race against time. Given the velocity at which that dust storm was now engulfing the lower peaks in the range, there was little chance that we were going to make it to the cave. And so we did not. We had perhaps another two miles of trail below us, and we were somewhere around the six-thousand-foot level when the big tan cloud of particulate folded over us, like a blanket of the uninhabited earth, blotting out the sun, blotting out the trail, blotting out the expanses and vistas before us, until there was nothing but the ten or twenty feet in our vicinity, all of it whirling and weaving in the great cloud of Mongolian steppe, and why was it that I felt nothing but a tremendous relief? Why was it that the dust storm seemed like the best that nature had to offer us that day, assuming that we were not going to see a black bear, as indeed we did not? There were a few raindrops concealed in that cloud, but mainly there was just the grit of it, in our mouths, in our eyes, and so on. It would have been a fine time to mount an assassination, true, if any revolutionary groups were following the course of natural history in the desert, and for this reason, the security detail eventually made use of flare guns, their sidearms, flashlights, whatever else was available in order to keep casual hikers or other members of the general population away, as we carefully picked our way through the curtains of dust toward the canyon below—”
“Mr. President—”
“I know, Leona, I know, gentlemen, you are wondering what the story has to do with the situation at hand.”
“That’s right, sir,” said someone intrepid from a spot that could have been hard for the cameras to pick up.
“What did I learn on that day? Is that what you’re asking? What I learned, from a strategic point of view, gentlemen, was about the value of natural phenomena when subduing a population in order to preserve law and order. If someone had been clever enough, that day, to harness the dust storm, they could have paralyzed the government of the United States. You might ask how I could do something so cavalier while upholding my oath of office, but I think, on the contrary, that the question is how to make the scourges of the desert submit to our will when we need them to perform for us.”
“Mr. President, are you suggesting some kind of wildfire?”
Gibraltar felt again the sharp pain in his midsection, and he worried that he might need to be escorted from the meeting on a gurney. He thought about his family, and about his second family — the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — and he knew what was to be said next, and he therefore knew that he not only needed to survive the meeting, he needed to start moving his people out of range.
“Well, that’s a useful question, gentlemen. Is incineration going to do the job in terms of eradication? Would that insure that we root out what we need to root out?”
The CDC, who was already looking a little ashen himself and liable, with the president more or less in the room, to say anything, remarked, “Sir, we don’t know for certain yet what the effect of higher temperatures is going to be. But even if the bacteria does experience higher motility in a temperate Earth climate, it can’t have adjusted to extremely high temperatures. It’s a pretty rare pathogen that can manage that, and only after many hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation. Along these lines, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that with M. thanatobacillus, we find the body temperature goes down significantly. As if the pathogen is hostile to warmth. People with the infection start to move toward room temperature. Like a, well, like a corpse.”
The president, on the screen above, had turned three quarters from the camera, so that all but his neck, the sinews of his neck, was shrouded in the gloom of his artificially lit office. A contemplative pose.