Joe Haldeman: Worlds

“It was like-the last time. His reflexes versus mine. I won again, but it doesn’t have the feeling of victory. And I never want to do it again.”

“You won’t have to. There aren’t any guns in New New York.”

“Wonderful.” He stretched. “We’re almost an hour from Denver. Long night ahead of us both; we ought to nap.”

I had one of those strange Klonexine dreams. A small glass dinosaur was in the floater with us, jumping around, clacking its jaws. Finally Jeff caught it, pulled back the canopy, and threw it out. I woke up when that happened.

“Denver,” Jeff said. It was beautiful at night, the golden lights in graceful geometry spreading out to the horizon.

While I was gazing, the lights went out, every one.

O’Hara didn’t cause it. It happened because of a defiant credit transfer, and because of unusual industry on the part of the Third Revolution, and because of a multitude of minor factors, one of which was a difference of opinion as to who should ransom O’Hara. But initially it was the credit transfer.

In their first payment since New New demanded the rate increase, New York State defiantly paid at the old rate. At the same time they sent to New New York, both in orbit and at the Cape, a seven-page brief defending their right to do so. Coordinators Markus and Berrigan turned the brief over to the one person in New New who was an expert in American contract law. Then they announced that the solar power satellite needed maintenance, and they switched it off, at exactly five o’clock in the afternoon, Eastern time.

New York State had not been quite honest when they claimed that New New’s powersat supplied only ten percent of their electricity. The real figure fluctuated between forty and fifty percent. When the satellite was turned off, everything went out of kilter.

It was a bad time for a blackout. People who left work a little early were stuck in darkened subways; others, in frozen elevators or abruptly inert office buildings—some facing an hour-long descent down lightless fire stairs. A few dozen died of heart attacks.

There was an interstate power net that kept the Eastern Seaboard operating smoothly. New York tried to suck power out of it, but it was too great a demand, all at once. There were blackouts and brownouts and crippling power surges from Boston to Norfolk.

Under the best of conditions it would have been the next morning before everything got straightened out. But conditions could hardly have been worse.

In an office building in Washington, the man who had requested that O’Hara be kidnapped considered the chaos around him. He went to a very private telephone and called three people. Then he went upstairs and discreetly murdered his boss, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By midnight he was sitting in a well-appointed bunker under the hills of West Virginia.

Exactly at midnight, several hundred thousand acts of sabotage were carried out. They ranged in magnitude from the snipping of a cable in Des Moines to the detonation of nuclear weapons in Washington and Chicago.

The Third Revolution began at midnight and was effectively over by 12:01, though the fighting would go on until it was no longer relevant. It happened a month early. The original plans called for April 13th, Good Friday, but the confusion over the power loss was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Their slogan, “Power to the People,” was not original but it did have a certain ironic force: in the sense of being able to turn on a switch or plug something into the wall, most of the people would never have power, ever again.

“What the hell is going on?” Jeff said quietly. On the dash of the floater a red light blinked several times and then glowed constantly: EMERGENCY POWER.

Jeff brought the floater down to treetop level, searched, and drifted down onto a baseball diamond. “It’s not just Denver,” he said. “The carrier wave this thing runs on is federally maintained.”

We tried all the civilian channels on the flatscreen and got nothing but a white square, until we found a Canadian station. It was from a French province, but a simultaneous translation in English slid along the bottom of the picture:

…OF A SCALE UNPARALLELED IN THE COUNTRY’S HISTORY AT LEAST TWO ATOM BOMBS HAVE EXPLODED, IN WASHINGTON AND CHICAGO THE SABOTAGE APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN DIRECTED MAINLY TOWARD POWER GENERATION AND TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS, AND COMMUNICATION THE GROUP RESPONSIBLE HAS-IDENTIFIED ITSELF AS LA TROISIEME REVOLUTION *CORRECTION* THE THIRD REVOLUTION AND CLAIMS TO HAVE OVER A MILLION MEMBERS UNDER ARMS THE REVOLUTION’S LEADER, WHO CALLS HIMSELF PROVISIONAL PRESIDENT, IS RICHARD CONKLIN—

“My God!” Jeff said.

—WHO IS ALSO THE ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION A STATEMENT FROM HIM IS FORTHCOMING.

IT IS NOT KNOWN HOW MANY OF THE COUNTRY’S LEADERS SURVIVED THE DESTRUCTION OF DOWNTOWN WASHINGTON THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE HAS DECLARED A COUNTRY-WIDE STATE OF MARTIAL LAW, ORDERING ALL MILITARY PERSONNEL TO REPORT TO THEIR UNITS, INCLUDING THB SEMI-CIVILIAN NATIONAL GUARD.

The message was repeated, and we were urged to stay tuned for further developments. Jeff turned it off.

“I don’t know how far we can get on emergency power. Probably not as far as the Cape. Have to try, though.”

“How long do you think the power will be off?”

“Depends on how thorough they were. Suppose they actually destroyed all of the country’s major generators? A couple of thousand people could do the trick, with moderate training.” He typed out directions for the autopilot and we drifted up off the grass with barely perceptible acceleration.

“We can’t make new generators without energy. We can’t do anything . Get food to cities…”

“I wonder if it’s the group Benny and I were involved with.”

“Probably. And with Conklin at the head of it, going to the Bureau is what got him killed. What I wonder is how much of the Bureau is involved? How much of the police and military?”

For hours we watched the screen, cruising slowly to conserve power. We got an outline of the catastrophe’s dimensions.

New York City was in chaos, a three-way firefight among police, looters, and revolutionaries. From most cities, there was no communication at all. Satellite photos showed that Pittsburgh and Los Angeles were in flames.

Canada, Mexico, and Nevada had all closed their borders. The revolution was condemned by most of Common Europe but cautiously endorsed by the Supreme Socialist Union.

There were more than ten thousand people caught in the interstate tube system. Rescue operations were under way, but most of them would suffocate. Thousands had died because their floaters’ failsafes didn’t work.

New New York denied having anything to do with it, but the timing of their turning off the powersat convinced at least one commentator that they were part of the revolution.

“That’s not possible, is it?” Jeff asked.

“I can’t see it. Nobody’s much interested in Earth politics except as it affects the price we get for steel and electricity. This 3R gang isn’t going to help the market any.

“Besides, the Worlds are all pacifistic. We’re too vulnerable to get involved in revolutions and wars.”

“You’re involved in this one, I’m afraid.” It would be two days before we found out how catastrophically true that was.

The U.S. military had game plans for everything, even revolution. They even had plans for what to do in case parts of the military were on the other side.