Patiently: “There were a few at first, those many years ago; we managed to keep in touch with some survivors by radio before the power failure. Arthur located a small group in Virginia, a military group living underground in an Army command post; and later he contacted a family in Maine. Sometimes we would make brief contact with one or two individuals in the west, in the mountain states, but it was always poor news. Each of them survived for the same reasons: by a series of lucky circumstances, or by their skills and their wits, or because they were unusually well protected as we were. Their numbers were always small and it was always discouraging news.”
“But some survived. That’s important, Katrina. How long have you been alone on the station?”
“Since the rebellion, since the Major’s year.”
Chaney gestured. “That could be—” He peered at her, guessing at her age. “That could be thirty years ago.”
“Perhaps.”
“But what happened to the other people here?”
She said: “Almost all the military personnel were withdrawn at the beginning; they were posted to overseas duty. The few who remained did not survive the attack when the rebels overran the station. A very few civilian technicians stayed with us for a time, but then left to rejoin their families — or search for their families. The laboratory was already empty in Arthur’s year. We had been ordered underground for the duration.”
“The duration. How long was that?”
The sharp old eyes studied him. “I would think it is ending just now, Brian. Your description of the family outside the fence suggests it is ending now.”
Bitterly: “And nobody around but you and me to sign the peace treaty and pose for the cameras. Seabrooke?”
“Mr. Seabrooke was relieved of his post, dismissed, shortly after the three launches. I believe he returned to the Dakotas. The President had blamed him for the failure of the survey, and he was made the scapegoat.”
Chaney struck the table with a fist.
“I said that man was a dunce — just one more in a long line of idiots and dunces inhabiting the White House! Katrina, I don’t understand how this country has managed to survive with so many incompetent fools at the top.”
Softly-spoken reminder: “It hasn’t, Brian.”
He muttered under his breath and glared at the dust on the table. Aloud: “Excuse me.”
She nodded easily but said nothing.
A memory prodded him. “What happened to the JCS, to those men who tried to take Camp David?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, as if to close off the past. Her expression was bitter. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff were executed before a firing squad, a public spectacle. The President had declared a business moratorium on the day of the execution; government offices closed and the children were let out of school, all to witness the spectacle on the networks. He was determined to give the country a warning. It was ghastly, depressing, and I hated him for it.”
Chaney stared at her. “And I have to go back and tell him what he’s going to do. What a hell of a chore this survey is!” He hurled the drinking cup across the room, unable to stifle the angry impulse. “Katrina, I wish you had never found me on the beach. I wish I had walked away from you, or thrown you into the sea, or kidnapped you and ran away to Israel — anything.”
She smiled again, perhaps at the memory of the beach. “But that would have accomplished nothing, Brian. The Arab Federation overran Israel and drove the people into the sea. We wouldn’t have escaped anything.”
He uttered a single word and then had to apologize again, although the woman didn’t understand the epithet. “The Major certainly jumped into the beginning of hell.”
She corrected him. “The Major jumped into the end of it; the wars had been underway for nearly twenty years and the nation was on the brink of disaster. Major Moresby came forward only in time to witness the end for us, for the United States. After him, the government ceased to be. After twenty years we were wholly exhausted, used up, and could not defend ourselves against anyone.”
The old woman spoke with a dry weariness, a long fatigue, and he could listen to her voice and her spirit running down as she talked.
The wars began just after the Presidential election of 1980, just after the field trials into Joliet. Arthur Saltus had told her of the two Chinese railroad towns blown off the map, and suddenly one day in December the Chinese bombed Darwin, Australia, in long-delayed retaliation. The whole of northern Australia was made uninhabitable by radiation. The public was never told of the first strike against the railroad towns but only of the second: it was painted an act of brutal savagery against an innocent populace. Radioactivity spread across the Arafura Sea to the islands to the north, and drifted toward the Phillipines. Great Britain appealed to the United States for aid.
The re-elected President and his Congress declared war on the Chinese Peoples’ Republic in the week following his inauguration, after having waged an undeclared war since 1954. The Pentagon had privately assured him the matter could be terminated and the enemy subdued in three weeks. Some months later the President committed massive numbers of troops to the Asian Theater: now involving eleven nations from the Philippine Republic westward to Pakistan, and to the defense of Australia. He was then compelled to send troops to Korea, to counteract renewed hostilities there, but lost them all when the Chinese and the Mongolians overran the peninsula and ended foreign occupation.
She said tiredly: “The President was re-elected in 1980, and again for a third term in 1984. After Arthur brought back the terrible news from Joliet, the man seemed unable to control himself and unable to do anything right. The third-term prohibition was repealed at his urging, and some time during that third term the Constitution was suspended altogether ‘for the duration of the emergency.’ The emergency never ended. Brian, that man was the last elected President the country ever had. After him there was nothing.”
Chaney said bitterly: “The meek, the terrible meek. I hope he is still alive to see this!”
“He isn’t, he wasn’t. He was assassinated and his body thrown into the burning White House. They burned Washington to destroy a symbol of oppression.”
“Burned it! Wait until I tell him that.”
She made a little gesture to hush him or contradict him. “All that and more, much more. Those twenty years were a frightful ordeal; the last few years were numbing. Life appeared to stop, to give way to savagery. We missed the little things at first: passenger trains and airliners were forbidden to civilian traffic, mail deliveries were cut back to twice a week and then halted altogether, the news telecasts were restricted to only one a day and then as the war worsened, further restricted, to only local news not of a military nature. We were isolated from the world and nearly isolated from Washington.
“Our trucks were taken away for use elsewhere; food was not brought in, nor medicines, nor clothing, nor fuel, and we fell back on the supplies stored on station. The military personnel were transferred to other posts or to points overseas, leaving only a token crew to guard this installation.
“Brian, that guard was compelled to fire on nearby townspeople attempting to raid our stores: the rumor had been spread that enormous stockpiles of food were here, and they were desperately hungry.”
Katrina looked down at her hands and swallowed painfully. “The twenty years finally ended for us in a shocking civil war.”
Chaney said: “Ramjets.”
“They were called that, once they came into the open, once their statement of intent was publicized: Revolution And Morality. Sometimes we would see banners bearing the word RAM, but the name soon became something dirty — something akin to that other name they were called for centuries: it was a very bitter time and you would have suffered if you had remained on station.