John Barnes - Directive 51

The woman assessed Heather with an expression that held no expectations; just a simple Who are you and how do you fit into my life? The short man said, “Well, Leslie and I—uh, I’m James—uh, we walked all the way from Pueblo to get here, they don’t have a train running yet, and we thought since it’s one of the biggest government dealies in Colorado, you know, the president might have at least mentioned us, or invited us to write to him, or something, so we’d know what he wanted and needed from us.”

“I—uh, I work for him,” Heather said, “and the Federal government is… well, even now it’s huge, and of course he was only the head of a small department till recently, so he’s not necessarily up on everything…” She was afraid that she might be talking to a couple of petty bureaucrats administering a program that was gone forever, worried about their pensions and perks; she didn’t want to fend off inquiries from the Federal Poultry Inspection Corps or the Regional Authorized Paper Rearrangement Facility, and she especially didn’t want to make any promises to them. “How far was it from Pueblo?” she asked, lamely, and feeling how lame that was.

Leslie, the tall, rangy woman, said, “It’s about 135 miles. It wasn’t really bad because we could break the trip at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, where they let us stay a night, and the town of Castle Rock is in okay shape now, so we could get some food and shelter there. So we only actually had to camp every other day.”

Heather was wracking her brains; what’s in Pueblo? Anything? Or are these two postal clerks with delusions of grandeur?

She could tell they were about to turn away. She imagined them walking back, defeated, for the long week or so it might take, and perhaps getting stuck in a blizzard; she couldn’t stand it. “I can’t remember what Federal facility is in Pueblo,” she finally admitted. “I used to be in law enforcement so I know it’s not a prison or an agency regional office.”

James surprised her by clapping his hands together and laughing. “Leslie, what did I say to everyone about it not being like the old days?”

She rolled her eyes and looked like she’d eaten something sour. “Great, now he’s been right about something and I’ll have to hear about it the whole walk back. Well, we’re the people you used to hear about on television, as in ‘Pueblo, Colorado, 81009.’ The Government Printing Office and the Federal Consumer Information Center. For the past couple decades we mostly maintained a homepage that gave access to around two hundred thousand Federal web sites, so that if people wanted HUD’s information about removing lead paint or the Department of Agriculture’s procedure for collecting soybean subsidies, they could find it online. But we’re still the Government Printing Office and we have a few billion pamphlets, books, maps, everything that the Feds put together that consumers might want, including a lot of stuff on paper that goes back a few decades, everything from home gardening and canning to building your own pottery kiln to safe field sanitation, and especially with the Library of Congress gone, and the damage they say that the big libraries in the East have been taking, with us having all this practical stuff, we just thought—”

“Especially,” the short, heavy man put in, “because we do still have a lot of the old printing machinery, I don’t know which parts can be put back in service but some of the people who used to run it retired to Pueblo—”

Heather felt like she might just stare for an hour, but oh my dear god don’t let them get away! “You mean, we’ve got a whole library of all those practical skills—”

James’s head was pumping up and down violently. “And lots of impractical too. ‘Greek Word Roots Used in Scientific Vocabulary.’ ‘Chemistry Sets for School Instruction from Materials Purchased in Drug, Hardware, and Feed Stores.’ ‘Fundamentals of Amateur Astronomy.’ Stuff going back ninety years to the 1930s and before.” For the guy in the cynic role, he wasn’t doing much of a job. “I mean, we don’t know what will be useful, but it’s all there in the warehouses, and Pueblo’s kind of lucky; Fort Carson held down the Springs and blocked the main road from Denver, so we didn’t have much of a refugee problem or a civil disorder problem, and we still have plenty of food and clean water, and we do have those presses, so, really, if the president is serious about getting civilization restarted, and if he meant that line about ‘relearning all the old arts of peace’—”

“Oh, he meant it,” Heather said. She stuck out her hand. “My name is Heather O’Grainne. I can walk you straight to President Weisbrod. Might even be able to get you a meal or two, and some supplies for your trip home. And there’s a couple people—Dr. Arnold Yang, maybe General McIntyre—that I want you to meet too. In fact, I think maybe we should have you talk to Arnie, then to the president. Can you come along now? And where were you staying?”

“We’re in the bedroll crowd at the Oxford,” Leslie admitted, looking a little embarrassed. “The GPO didn’t exactly have a budget for us to do this, so—”

“Then you’re staying in the same hotel with the president anyway,” Heather said, enjoying the irony. “And I’ve just shared a major national security secret with you. Hope you don’t mind climbing stairs.”

But on the top floor, Arnie and McIntyre were “the two most unavailable people you could have asked for,” Allie explained to Heather.

“Do you know what it’s about?”

Allie glanced at Leslie and James, and Heather said, “They’re Federal employees I just found, and they’re the guardians of something we really want to keep.”

“How about we feed them while I tell you the classified stuff?”

“Deal,” Heather said, and steered the GPO employees down the hall. To the Oxford cooks, she said, “These are Federal employees, part of the party till I tell you different, and feed them, okay? They’ve come here over a hard road.”

In a room alone with Allie, she asked, “All right, what is it?”

“Radiogram from Cam. There’s been another EMP, this time over the South China Sea. Nailed the Canton/Macau/Hong Kong area, Manila, most of Taiwan, and the Western Pacific Fleet. They’re going to have to scuttle one carrier and two subs—all the reactor control stuff fried and the reactors failsafed into shutdown—and they’re towing all of them, hoping to get them into a deep trench like they did the Reagan . And just like before, no identified launch site.”

“So what’s the huddle about?”

“Cam’s radiogram was making the point that we’re getting hit with targeted attacks, don’t we see there’s a war on? That area was the best-equipped remaining base for rebuilding civilization in Asia, plus they also destroyed the protection and resources that area was borrowing from us; they could hardly have hit the human race harder. I don’t know if Cam knows yet about those stupid things Graham said in Pale Bluff, but he’s acting as if he did—practically inviting Graham to just hand over the presidency. Makes me furious!”

“Well, it definitely looks like a targeted attack.”

“It looks like an attack targeted by a robot, not by a living, thinking being. Arnie’s already pointed out that so far the pattern is that the EMP weapon hits the brightest radio source. He wants to do some serious study before anyone goes into a decision blind.”

“I thought you usually didn’t like it when Arnie wanted to study everything to death.”

“If one of Arnie’s studies can keep Graham Weisbrod from kicking away everything he ought to claim, then as far as I’m concerned, Arnie can study everything and everybody till doomsday. His idea for a test is really simple: He just wants everyone worldwide to go dead on the radio as much as possible, or at least keep signals to very low energy, and he wants to do some kind of experiment, I don’t get what, to see if whatever it is knows what it’s shooting at, or just shoots at the brightest radio signal.