“Something extreme, and sometime soon,” Keene replied. “Any ideas?”
“Not really,” Cavan confessed. “One thought I had was that they could be fixing to grab themselves a ready-equipped bolt-hole somewhere deep and safe, but it didn’t add up. Voler would have no trouble getting onto the official lists anyway.”
“Maybe they’ve glimpsed what’s coming and prefer to control their own private guns,” Keene suggested.
“Will it really be as bad as that, Landen?”
“Afraid so. Worse than anything you’ll hear tonight. If you get a chance to get on a list for one of those deep shelters yourself, go for it.”
Cavan nodded slowly and somberly. “And what about yourself?”
“I’m not sure where I go after the job’s done here, Leo. Maybe back to Texas to help Marvin with whatever can be done there.”
“The Kronians lift off tomorrow morning. You should have gone with them. They would have found you a place, I’m sure.”
“Gallian offered me one. There were things to be done that I couldn’t leave.”
Cavan shook his head. “You are aware that you’re crazy, I hope, Landen?”
Keene snorted. “First Alicia, now me? It must be you, Leo. You just attract crazies. That’s what it is.”
* * *
Something exploded in the upper atmosphere above Mali, showering debris over the western Sahara and heard from Upper Volta to customs posts on the southern Algerian border. Another breakup occurred over the Sinkiang province in Central Asia, where a hysterical surveyor on a road-building project described in a phoned interview cabins and trucks at a construction camp being set ablaze, and fleeing workers cut down in a rain of red-hot fragments. In Western Australia and parts of Indonesia, red, ferruginous dust was coming down out of the sky and turning rivers and lakes the color of blood. Herd animals from Africa’s veldts to the Canadian tundra were seen moving in huge, restless, undirected surges, and swarms of birds everywhere, numbering millions, fluttered agitatedly in the trees long into the night.
* * *
Not just America but practically the entire world was watching or listening when President Hayer at last went on the air from the White House to acknowledge officially what most people by now were sensing. Grave-faced leaders of Congress flanked him on either side, along with defense chiefs and scientific advisors. Celia Hayer stood a little back and to one side with their two young children, a son and a daughter.
He did not deny any of the rumors and predictions that were circulating; neither did he go out of his way to dwell on any of them unduly in a way that would make anxieties even worse. His line was in essence a more professional and resounding version of what Keene had said to the scientists at JPL that morning. In fact, as he listened, Keene got the feeling that his own effort had perhaps been unconsciously inspired by what he had known instinctively, after meeting him, the President was going to say.
Hayer called upon everyone, individuals and organizations of every kind, to forget all the things that weren’t important anymore, and perhaps never had been: paychecks and promotions, prices and profits, prestige and pretenses. All that mattered now was helping each other get through. And he was insistent on making the point that some, maybe a lot more than the world was being told from some quarters, would get through—and, again as Keene in his own words had anticipated—that anyone listening might be among them. It appeared that humanity had faced a comparable crisis in its earlier history and pulled through. And that had been without modern technical resources and knowledge. Surely their descendants could do at least as well. They owed that much to the descendants who would follow. He concluded by quoting a paraphrasing of Winston Churchill’s words from 1940, in Britain’s darkest days of World War II:
“Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible. . . . Let us, then, brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that those descendants and their descendants a thousand years from now will say of us, `This was their finest hour.’ “