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PART TWO: Learning To Fly - December 2161
Food and wine they had aplenty
And they slept beneath the stars
The people were contented
And the Gods watched from afar
But the winter fell upon them
And it caught them unprepared
Bringing wolves and cold starvation
And the hearts of men despaired…
– Rush
Sheltered inside from the cold of the snow
Follow me now to the vault down below
Drinking the wine as we laugh at the time
Which is passing incredibly slow
(What are these chains that are binding my arms?)
Part of you dies each passing day
(Say it’s a game and I’ll come to no harm)
You’ll feel your life slipping away
– The Alan Parsons Project
Run rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun,
And when at last the work is done
Don’t sit down it’s time to dig another one
For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race toward an early grave
– Pink Floyd
4~Four~4
The State Of The Nation
“…And while the subject may be unpleasant to consider, the immediate and long-range effects of a nuclear disaster on a global scale would almost certainly create extraordinary hardships – both for our country and the individual. Millions would be left homeless by such an attack. Police and fire departments, hospitals and most emergency services would be disrupted for an indeterminate length of time. Industry, transportation and communication would shut down – the nation would be prey to strange fears. These are somber subjects, which presuppose a catastrophe that can be made very unlikely by wise and positive policies. Still, realistic preparation for what could occur is of much greater use than ignorance, and if effective cau-tions had been taken in advance, this would assure our great nation the opportunity to rebuild in the aftermath of…”
The forbidding voice of the Vault-Tec narrator began to fade, turned down and then out, as Justin Marshall moaned softly in his sleep and rolled onto his side. He had kicked the blankets down to the foot of the bed at some point during the night, and now he lay naked, his body lightly sheened in perspiration, covered by a top sheet from the waist down. His knees drew up into a half-fetal position, and now his eyes began to move, darting behind their lightly closed lids, his breathing deepening, becoming slow and rhythmic, as his mind settled into a threefold place within thought, perception, and imagination – a flexible plane where fantasy and reality merge in the subconscious…
“…And how many of the old pieces would you suppose remain?” Mr. Watson put forth the question.
The study at 221 B Baker St. fell silent as Sherlock Holmes marked his place in a large book of Shakespearean works. He closed the leather bound volume with a rustling snap, then, placing it on his lap, considered his counterpart’s inquiry at some length.
“Elementary, my dear Watson”, the famed fictional sleuth said at last. “I haven’t a clue, as a glaringly pertinent fact will undoubtedly support. You see, old boy, it’s a matter of having been cloistered. Much like Tibetan monk, I would say.”
Mr. Watson’s eyebrows went up a notch. “Oh? How so?”
“All quite simple really”, Holmes expounded, “when one gives pause to mediate the case of young Mr. Marshall, our soon-to-be Great Traveler. Stated concisely, there has been a severe…constriction…shall we say, of every modern-day ‘information pipeline’ during the last thirty thousand or so days following the unsightly conclusion of civilization’s last great conflict. The ‘Great War’, in other words. Nasty business. Not a trifling condition by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Quite true, Holmes,” Watson agreed. “Quite true. Do go on, please.”
“Yes, well, difficult as this is to believe, the lad’s great-grandparents were the last persons on the Marshall family tree to garner a topside glimpse of Mother Earth before their Vault was sealed. Put simply, no one has seen the outside world since. Wasn’t such a bad lot, really, not for the first seventy-five years or so, at any rate.” Holmes tamped his pipe and then drew on it until a light smoke wreath circled his head. Satisfied, he dropped the tamper into his pocket, then continued. “However, I am sorry to say that their codified shelter was intended to lodge only a thousand souls, Watson, a figure which has been exceeded by a sizable margin. Which of course, lends itself to their present day dilemma. A fascinating case, as I am sure you will agree, as I am equally sure of your having noted the openly admirable manner which the denizens of Vault 13 have conducted themselves throughout a vexing ordeal, indeed. And while the circumstances are unfotunate, I must add that although this assemblage has become overly large, they had maintained a remarkable propensity for operating as a close-knit group. More of a family than not, although this untimely bit of nastiness with the failure of their water purification chip would seem to threaten…”
A hard jerk under the sheet and then Justin startled awake, staring, his heart skittering in his chest until a rustle of covers and the good feel of body warmth pushed the crazy, sepia-toned dream into the backwash of his semi-conscious mind.
“Hi, dreamer.” The voice was soft, feminine, and thick with sleep.
Justin sat up and raked a hand through his hair, while his pulse finally began to slow to something that resembled normal. “Morning, Cin,” he said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you. AM the hard way.” He peered owlishly to his right, and could just make out a sandy fluff of hair laying against a foam pillow: the rest of Miz Nelson was only a cascading dune under the blankets.
“That’s okay,” Cindy said. “I was already half awake.” Another rustle of covers, and then her head was on his lap. Gently, he laid a hand on her shoulder. The darkness seemed to give her a wispy, almost ethereal quality, as if she weren’t there. Like the world? Justin asked himself again, his thoughts running heavily toward this, while his hand ran lightly down her shoulder and across her ribs…now onto the fallaway slope of her slim waist, tracing her delicate outline…
And stopping at the rise of her hip, as the pieces jelled. He was in bed: no dead narrator’s voice preserved inside a collection of spinning disks and rolling holotapes, no crackling firelight or phantom aromas of pipe tobacco. It was Sunday morning, early. How early?
He was unsure: there were no clocks in his bedroom for him to stand vigil over. Nothing to remind him of broken technology or of time running down and out. There was only him and Miz Nelson, part-time pain in the ass, full-time girlfriend to him. And just Cindy to most of the masses here in Vault 13.
Got it, he thought, rubbing the stubborn sleep haze from his eyes. Or enough of it for now. There was a bit more, but that was later – it would come soon enough.
He pushed the sheet off, drawing his legs up as he did, then he swung them over the side of the bed and sat quietly on the edge, feeling his bare skin marble into gooseflesh, as purified air from the APUs caressed his arms and back. Air Processing Units were reliable; they were the ideal companion for anyone who lived in a sealed environment. They never broke down: they just went on pumping out the chill, and it was a little too cool to be sitting here bucky ass naked in the early hours. He rubbed his arms briskly and thought about making quick return trip under the sheets, then he felt his stomach twitch, and thought better of it. All of his muscles were starting to jump and tingle – nervously so, like someone had skewered him with a low current wire. The dull ache somewhere behind his eyes felt suspiciously like the makings of a headache, and he had the butterflies on top of it. It wasn’t bad…yet, but now the idea of actually leaving the Vault was starting to swing some serious weight. He thought that a fair-sized butterfly net and a handful of stickpins wouldn’t go to waste, as he slid off the mattress and began pawing the floor for his shorts.
“Are you getting ready to go?” Cindy asked. Her breasts giggled enticingly under her nightgown as she sat up, and turned on a reading lamp on the headboard.
“You trying to get rid of me, mon cheri?” Justin asked teasingly. “Got some plans after I’m gone, eh?”
“Will you be serious?”
“Not likely, Killjoy,” Justin said, and smiled winsomely. “I’ll be out of here soon enough, then you and your suitors will have this cozy little place all to yourselves.” He waved a finger at her. “But, I’m taking my time until then. Is that serious enough for you?”
“As close as you’ll get to it,” Cindy said, and then slipped under the covers. Killjoy, she thought. Justin teased her with that whenever she got depressed or down. And she supposed she was, now especially. They had been together for the last six years, and his good-natured taunting had always made it easier to push the clouds, the fear, away. Now, especially. “I’ll be out to make breakfast in a little bit.”
“And I’ll be in the other room,” Justin said, unearthing a pair of cotton briefs from the tangled “his and hers” mound of clothes by the bed. They were a little stiff – he spared a guilty glance at the heaps of clothes on the floor and by the dresser, and then climbed into what was arguably his cleanest, dirty pair of skivvies. The laundry was piling up nicely and a shower was definitely in order, but both would keep. The butterflies were out of their cocoons, and they weren’t leaving. Not a problem, Justin thought. A cool (and quick) promenade down the corridors of Level 2 would be just the ticket to clear out the jitters and sweep out the cobwebs.
Socks and underwear weren’t exactly standard touring attire – that was more along the lines of the one-piece, yellow-on-blue jumpsuits they all donned during the daytime rites (the ones with the big yellow “13” splashed in foot-high numbers on the back). It was your basic dapper garb for all stationary Vault Dwellers nationwide, but what were they going do if he paraded down an empty corridor without his? Kick him out? He was already leaving.
What a farewell that would make. He could just see himself in the hall…Justin Marshall, AM Rambler, precariously perched, paralleling a wisker’s width of expansion joint. One foot down, balance…step…then tug at the seat of his BVDs –
And keep those flaps in.
Justin smiled at the thought, and then dismissed the notion entirely, as his foot brushed against a coarse lump of nylar by the nightstand. A back pack. His pack, if possession really was nine-tenths the law. Issued to him yesterday along with a piddling amount of supplies. He jerked it up by one of the straps and thought: Not so close, you miserable load. Keep your distance…I barely know you. He dragged his newfound bundle of joy into the living room, and it followed obediently, tumbling and rattling and bouncing off the worn pile carpeting like a stone-filled can, as he passed the kitchenette and then zeroed in on the chair in the corner of the modest room.
He dropped the cinnamon-brown shoulder weight between his feet and then settled into the comfortably sprung, high-backed recliner. He and his nylar nemesis would be good buddies for a while, he supposed. After all, what walking tour of California, Nevada and all points between would be complete without a loyal pack? “Did you walk or come by foot?” Like there was a choice? Herm Stanton, the coding guru in Ops, had asked him that during lunch yesterday. “Hang a thumb out, Justin…maybe you can hitch a ride,” Herm had joked, while old geographic and political maps (and a new travel route) were being downloaded into an aging PipBoy 2000.
The unreal sense had held him then, a slow motion, dreamlike quality. Mental hypnosis, Novocaine for the brain. He and Herm had laughed like hell about it, but the laughter had carried a strained, forced edge.
Because of the war, Justin thought. The Great War. The Damned War.
He knew about the war: they all knew about the war. Eighty-five years in a thyroidal bomb shelter was testament to that. It was old hat but the library was there for the skeptical – a floor below his feet, and fairly brimming with holodisks and tapes – over a thousand of each. Available 24/7/365. Conveniently located, to serve you. Any year, every year. Drop in any time, just plop down and grab a seat. Number 27 if you please. Yes there…right on the isle, he said to himself. His favorite chair in his favorite viewing booth, the best seat in the house for their ongoing show, just three static-filled steps from the north com terminal. Back by catastrophic demand! Now entering our Eighty-Sixth Record-breaking year! Come one come all! See the world that was! Take a gander! It’s all there at the library, or inside a PDT for your remote viewing pleasure, right there, in the Personal Data Terminal for home, sweet, home – The Marshall residence; number fifty-two out of Vault 13’s identical hundred. All the comforts of home in the cubby in the corner – just no forwarding to the same mailing address for the last four generations.
And whadda ya mean ya can’t find it? Justin thought. Whadda ya, blind?! Down on the corner, cabbie! Where it’s always been! The Marshall residence, ya dumb hack! And step on it!
Right.
There was a fare, but the Checkers and hacks were all quits. The wheels had been stilled – no transportation at present other than two sock-clad feet. Ride that thumb, son…no chariots to wheel around in today.
Son, it came to him. Lordy, lordy. If the folks back home could see me now. The chair creaked softly, as he shifted in it. It seemed that a lot was coming to him of late, not that there weren’t plenty of reasons for it. He began to take in the living room, his eyes seeming to drift on their own across the quarters where he had spent about a third of his life; left, toward the entry – exit? – door, standing like an escape hatch, then right, at a high oak case by the sofa, the names on rows of dust jackets printed boldly, standing erect on the spines of books like sentries on watch. Crup and Keller; Leeland, Ellison and Cartright, Albright and Entené. They were the visionaries of another age who had dared to invent a future free of conflict, their dreams and ideals preserved in movable type for a soon to be traveler who had come to share many of those same beliefs.
The outside had always taken his curiosity, and he used to drive his parents bugshit with questions. Parents were supposed to know everything – that’s why they’re called “parents”. It had taken an awful lot, but his finally got fed up with his daily badgering, and then shuffled him off to library. That was really where it started, him reading about the past, and all the time wondering what was left of the present. His parents had never pushed any of it on him. They let him make up his own mind and research whatever he wanted. They let him decide for himself, and as he looked as the PDT console, or more at the photograph sitting on top of it, he thought that he had decided, all right. He’d picked up the whole thing, and ended up running with it.
The snapshot was taken when he was fifteen, but since then a lot had changed. His mother used to split her time between here and working support in the EML. She made all of it perfect, no matter what it was. It was an exaggeration, but it had seemed like it then. The model family in the Vault of the future. Dat was da Marshall clan, then. His father was the senior director of Ops at the time. The top man in Central Core, Justin thought. And after the senior Marshall retired, his son was going to drop in and take over. That spot was his – straight out. Locked up tight, no doubt. He remembered thinking that it was preordained.
But nothing was, and now, Justin picked up the photo and held it, listening to a quiet that seemed much too loud. Vault life was the only life there was, but it had turned sour for him. With only so many jobs to go around, he had gone about making sure that that slot in Ops would be his when the time came. Core Theory and Linear Extrapolation were a couple of the prereq classes, and he was just finishing up his third week in them, when his mother died from a cerebral hemorrhage. And then two days after her memorial service, his father had been back on the job, revising the monthly status logs, when he collapsed and died from massive heart attack.
Justin set the photo back on the console; only face down this time. Since then he had been on his own; he was used to making his own decisions, and still, he wondered what his parents would say about what he had chosen to do. What they would think; how they would feel? Then the door caught his eye, and he stopped wondering. They were gone – and thinking about that was pointless. He had no ties, so why not go? He was his own man now, and his decisions were just that – his. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. The call had been his to make, and right or wrong, he’d rung up a big one.
The notion of leaving had occurred to him even before his parents died, but with the Vault closed, here they all were, with no crisis at hand at that point. He had gotten his degree two years before the onset of the chip failure, and a spot as a junior consultant in Ops. Running performance evaluations on the primary core and subsystems was enough to keep him occupied, but being on the outside never left his mind. There were no small degrees of uncertainty over what may or may not be out there, but with the vast library archives at hand, he had formed a loose, general concept of it, and with the litererature that had been left to him, he had begun to nuture a belief in new and resurgent societies, rising from the ashes of a destroyed one. And it was this belief that first nudged and then pushed him, as the war became his pet project, almost an obsession for the last two years. Even with no all-clear signal to support it, there had to be some great goings on out there – there had to be. Vaults weren’t the only protection when the war arrived. There were fixed public shelters and expedient private ones – tens of thousands of them, in fact, that were built to withstand a nuclear catastrophe, perhaps even one as great as the “Great” War.
The idea of people recreating society after the holocaust was all he had to go on. There was little inside the Vault to support that creed but he wasn’t about to let go of it, and if the mail wasn’t coming to him, then he was going to it. A little pre-trip planning was all it took, which he had done. Between Herm Stanton and Tom Naus covering his butt during afternoon trips to the library and all the late night sessions with the tried and true PDT, he had been spending twelve and fourteen hours a day on it for months, readying himself and trying to figure out what might still be out there. He and Cindy had argued about all the time he had allocated to it, but they were two different people, with two entirely differing views. Besides, someone else had to have a look, and his mind was made up. It was his turn.
Now there was nothing more to research. He’d waded through the war; been through all of it, some if it twice. There were still more questions for him than answers but time was against them, and had been. Vault 13 needed a water chip, and he needed a place above ground, where the living were rebuilding and creating. And, he supposed, if you believed in one, you had to believe in the other. Those beliefs had been put to the test, as he dug deeper into the topside circus that landed them here in the first place. There were doubts and uncertainties, but it was out there. He knew it was: it had to be. To think otherwise would be to concede the extinction of the human race, and that was simply inconceivable. Humanity was resilient; they had survived other adversities and surely, they would have come through this. But he wasn’t naïve or stupid; just marginally convinced, and if he was wrong, then one person walking into what was, was better…safer…than all of them going out at once. They had already learned that much, and for his own part, this was an improvement over standing in a hole that seemed to get deeper every year.
He propped his feet on the console and tipped the chair back a notch, watching his own taunt face stare back at him. Note the tightly pursed lips and furrowed brow, he thought. A young/old mug, fellas. A face of the times, a face for the ages…reflected by a blank screen.
That seemed to fit.
Catch the mirror’s eye and stare at yourself, then behold the spectacle. See yourself born and then learn to walk on your own. Make dem rounds, boy, but take your time. You’re not going anywhere, so there’s no hurry. Shuffle across your choice of five well-marred levels of steel grating and floors, then watch yourself grow old, living and dying without ever seeing the sun. First breath to last gasp – it was one in the same for this West Coast affiliate of the Emergency K-Band Network.
And there was no way he would believe in the silence. Uh-uh. No sir. No way he could believe all of it was gone. Transmitters didn’t always work. Signals got crossed. Sure, there wouldn’t be very many people, and the survivors wouldn’t have had time to look for a Vault. They would have been too busy, and…
What if a tiny shard of what had been, still remained? Would people have returned to the cities? Would they rebuild and restore? Would there be warehouses and skyscrapers? Museums and universities and libraries? Offices and restaurants and take-out stands? Old retired gentlemen sitting on park benches, basking in the sun while mothers watched their children play by the fountain? Would there be cars and trucks and busses running up and down the streets? CycloTubes for businessmen and crosstown commuters? Would there be mass transit instead of mass hysteria?
Of course there would. The survivors would have learned. They would know better. They would be –
Oh bullshit.
It wasn’t so much the thought that bothered him as what it revealed about himself. Wish all he wanted, but idealism in the twenty-second century was dead. The war had killed it and dreaming couldn’t change it. The evidence to date had been irrefutable, and one day at a time, one breath at a time until death do us part was all there had been.
It was all there was, and it was maddening: a person could go nuts. Hitch it in and let it out…or hold it, hoping against hope while you filter the frequencies, scanning, day after day, listening to your heart thud in the void, the only break, the only discernable sound in a wash of static over the airwaves.
Corrections Are Being Made. Please Stand By.
Were they?
The question had never left him – it had gotten stronger with time, if anything. He’d had the time. Lots of it during the last seven years. He knew how to study, and he’d had boned up on lots of history (for all the good it had done), and it seemed to him that they all had become the pupils of Death. Grisly, but he thought there was a grain of truth to it. Where you lived didn’t matter. Black or White, Pass or Fail. The Reaper was the ultimate instructor of enduring permanence. Above ground or buried in a Vault made not a tad of difference – Death was a traveling instructor with instant lessons that were learned whether you wanted to or not. It was inflexible and unyielding and didn’t play favorites. Above ground or below, learn it and remember it, because Death never graded on a curve, only on its infinite plane – where what remained for him, where the set of wheels he had dreamed of, the wheels of Progress, might still be turning, rolling free of the monikers that clanged like a death knell in his memory.
Trinity had been the first, cradled in Alamagordo…or Pandora’s Box. Either way, it was the birthblood gush of the Atomic Age, and the breeding ground for the dark spawn that followed. The parents were virile, and their offspring were many. Little Boy arrived, and then boarded Enola Gay, the deliverer for Hiroshima, the first to be laid on the altar. Then came Fat Man, borne on the wings of Bock’s Car, guardian of the new and improved for Nagasaki, the second lamb led to slaughter.
And Oppenheimer had presided over it with horror in his eyes and a knowing dread in his soul. Thousands of others were involved with the Manhattan Project, but he had been the sire, the bull stud, the so-called father of the bomb. And, he had known better than any of them – he told them flat out when it was done that wars couldn’t be stopped, no matter how many nukes they made or how big they were.
But the pupils snatched the lessons and ran toward oblivion. They called it good, then J. Robert Oppenheimer called it quits. He resigned after that, walked away.
They should have taken the hint.
What had been created by war to end a war had ended with the war to end all wars. It was simple – just kill everything – no more fighting. There was a demented sort of symmetry to it. Two scarlet plumes ended a World War, but the billowing sorcerers that spared a million lives then conjured a Cold War as their price that ten and a half billion paid for later.
Just put it on my tab, Justin thought, his fingers drumming an arm of the chair. Let the music play. And the beat went on. And on. Operation Crossroads. Then Ranger…Sandstone…Greenhouse…Buster-Jangler. They were the house mothers, each bearing their own litters of fire-breathing kiddies. Able…Baker…Zebra…Easy. They’d christened all of the prodigies They never ran out of names or new designs. George…Sugar…Uncle…and Mike.
Ivy Mike – a new pedigree, and the harbinger of the Age of Fusion.
Out with the old, in with the new. They blew up an entire island in the South Pacific with that one. And then Bravo had come along and stripped the Bikini Islands with a 15 megaton ‘accident’ (and oh, hadn’t the fallout played hell with the natives afterward). Long-term effects? At least. It had taken almost two decades to settle the mile-deep stack of lawsuits and straighten that mess out.
But by then it had been “My bomb’s bigger than your bomb”, the worldwide yelp of frightened leaders who couldn’t see past their own paranoia.
He settled deeper into the chair, his mind drifting away, trying to make at least some sense of a lost era that often seemed senseless. There were few constants, although energy certainly had been one, a perpetual demand that led back to overuse of fossil fuels. It had been an oil-driven world, without question, and when the pinch began, it seemed that capitalism quickly became the decisive, overriding factor. Old-world economies and dollars were tied closely to the availability of petroleum – every nation was visible and wanting to head the line when the tankers unloaded, yet the responsibility and accountability for resource management were spread so thin across the last two centuries that fingering a single turning point was nigh on to impossible. Most of what shook loose from the great scheme of things then were little pieces, but a few of the larger hunks were visible, all of them falling into the mire like a topppled stack of dominoes, each contributing to the global destruction that ultimately came. Norway and Mexico rode the fence for a decade before finally signing on with OPEC in 2004, a move that had sent fuel costs skyrocketing. OPEC had the world by the balls then, and they knew it. With those countries in the fold, they had locked up about ninety percent of all known oil reserves and were wringing it for all it was worth, when the USA intervened in 2026, and tried to break the cartel with the SPR.
That folly had been short-lived. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve had an eyedropper full in it compared to the big boys. Trying to pour a smidgen of oil into the market in order to force prices down was more of a desperate, knee-jerk ploy than anything, and looked like the proverbial monkey on the elephant’s back. The U.S. ruffled a lot of international feathers with a very dicey gimmick that fell flat – OPEC was fumed about it and oil prices didn’t budge, but some short-term good had eventually come from it. Just not enough.
The world revolved around jobs and jobs revolved around industry, and that had elevated a lot thinking about alternative fuels. With industrial demands placing a constant, heavy drain on dwindling oil resources, compact and renewable alternative-fuel technologies such as the MicroFusion and Small Energy Cells were eventually applied. The self-contained power cells were used in everything from appliances to automobiles; they were a portable and reliable energy source, but were simply not enough to offset the world’s ingrained demand for petroleum. Joblessness had crept steadily upward while industry struggled with high-priced and inconsistent oil stocks, until the simmering hotbed in the Middle East finally exploded over a territorial dispute that pretty much sealed the deal.
Baghdad declared itself an independent sovereignty during what turned out to be the last conference of OPECs oil ministers, and then sent everything into a headlong tailspin when they emptied their missle silos on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in a show of solidarity. The UN took a dim view of the conflict, and retaliation had been swift. Iraq wound up as a gutted parking lot, but the shattered derricks in the Persian Gulf fared as badly or worse, blazing like a decaying sunspot under a foot-deep oil slick while half the world’s remaining oil reserves vanished in less than seventy-two hours.
The aftermath had been a precursor, another sort of chain reaction that happened nearly as quickly. Unemployment spiraled out of sight, and then jobs became scarce, while global economic stability teetered on the brink of collapse. No jobs meant no food on the table, and that had led to the first outbreak of food riots in Great Britain and France as the EEA went into effect. Then nuclear reactors flourished as a stopgap measure, while once-restricted information circulated freely under the guidelines of the EEA – which had led to chronic abuses of the system, when nations with little or no nuclear capabilities began assembling dual-role reactors for researching modern arsenal configurations.
Then it was like the 1950s all over again after word of those activities leaked, much too late to stop the flow of information, or stem the tide. A second arms race began in earnest, and within ten years, NATO estimates placed worldwide strategic arsenals at between 980,000 and 1,050,000 actively deployed warheads. Eroded by rampant poverty, anarchy and mutual mistrust, the esprit de corps forged by the founding principles of the EEA disappeared, while regimes new and old continued assembling nuclear weapons as a hedge against an uncertain future.
Justin sat up, and looked intently at the smooth, blank screen. And black, he thought. Where, or how, it began, no one could really say. But where it all ended was a place best left unexplored. The decline and fall of humanity had been a complex and fascinating weave of events. He thought it was interesting (and darkly compelling) but studying the tapes was like watching reruns of a holomovie. You sit there, watching scenes roll by, wishing it would change and already knowing how it’s going to turn out.
You’ve seen it all before…the end remains the same.
He shook his head in disgust. The Great War. What had been so great about it? How could anyone pay homage to two hours of wholesale lunacy that negated what could have been, what should have been for all of them? It was his own private argument – one he had waged boundless times. The war was over and done and he was straight with it (more or less), but the hurt crept up behind him when he wasn’t watching and bit him now and then, like a uncaged animal with a mouthful of jagged teeth, its muzzle foaming and snapping until he swatted it away. He could push the images of those final weeks and months away, but the bitterness they left behind was much harder to get around. There was always a deep and recurring sense of loss he felt every time he thought of what might have been – of how close the world had been to a renaisance, to rescuing itself from itself.
The indications had been there before the bottom fell out. Cooler heads had prevailed for a time, and at one point it seemed that rationale would reign over genocide. There had even been a period of reductions in nuclear arsenals after the turn of the millienna. So close, and not. The awareness groups had worked toward disarmament – the treaties were in place but were never ratified, and when the drain on oil resources finally went critical, panic had run amock after the Red, White, and Blue cornered the last of the oil market.
Poseidon 1 had been a deep sea gold mine. The U.S.’s monetary clout had swelled as other oil reserves shriveled, while U.S. citizens enjoyed a standard of living unseen since the Reagan Era. Foreign policy was rigid, and the dollars poured in while the oil flowed one way. The appeals for assistance went unheard, then panic turned into anger after the world’s third largest uranium supply was locked up when the U.S. annexed Canada.
The citizens of the 53rd state got barrels of crude and a break on their taxes, but the Land of Opportunity had been a Land of Opportunists at the last, hoarding its oil stocks to split the global sanctions, while the rest of the world ran dry. Other nations were staggering without petroleum to maintain the essentials, as the U.S. thrived under its banners of domestic “priorities” and “concerns”. Millions had starved in what had become an all-embracing crisis – government cabinets rose and fell almost daily, while anti-nuke groups with alphabet soup names like CDI or NRDC, CNS and Greenpeace were drowned out by the EEA.
And ultimately, by four more imposing letters – ICBM.
The EEA had been a bad joke with a horrendous punchline – all it had done was turn a handful of petty dictators into mini-superpowers overnight. Bigger was better – or so they had said – and the tracking dishes and the mounting stockpiles had proved the point. Every argument had since been settled. The playing field had been leveled – literally – and eighty-five years, a million launch codes, and a trillion megatons after the fact, it occurred to Justin that T.S. Elliott had it pegged all along: “The center does not hold.”
Nor had it, a fact that loomed large for them all in the here-and-now. And, when the center finally blew out – or up, not to cut it too finely – one hundred and fifty-seven Vaults spread across the United States had been the motherland’s idea of “effective cautions”, a fallback – the failsafe, ready and waiting to harbor the few who had been left with the unenviable task of picking up the pieces.
That was the problem, as he saw it; his problem, more accurately. There was a mountainlike summit of the past to peruse, and within it lay the systematic progression of the human condition. But then the buttons had been pushed, en masse – it all had ground to a halt, voiding everyone’s ticket in the bargain. Cancel the reservations. Sorry if there’s no one to hand out the refunds. Learning curves had been stacked in a holding pattern while the big bang shut it all down in a gaudy roar that ended in a wimper. Past had become present while the state of the nation hovered over unseen gaps which had eroded into vast, uncharted chasms. They could discuss and debate, stuffing a myriad of holes with speculation, pattering and theorizing until Gabriel sounded the Judgment Trump, but it was all so much mind fodder – they didn’t have a clue, as Holmes was wont to say. Four generations after the fall, all any of them knew was that they didn’t know jack. Today the Great Outdoors remained the big “Q”, the consummate question mark, ad infinitum, while fourteen hundred souls in here had lived and died for four score and five years below two hundred feet of stone, waiting, safe and sound for the all-clear that had never arrived, surviving on “what if’s” and “maybe’s” until Father Time had intervened and destroyed what the war couldn’t touch.
Justin looked at the clock on the console:
05 DEC 2161 – 0623:19
Six twenty-three AM. And nineteen seconds. T-Minus Fifty-Eight. His countdown was underway, and had been for all of them, for the last twenty-four months. It was all quite simple, really. Only the ages knew what had been going on over their heads – only the clock was infinite and it didn’t care a tick or a lick, and he could just see Pa Time in the face of the display – the old bastard was checking his watch and laughing at him.
That seemed to fit, as well.
A menagerie of delicate and irreplaceable mini-microchips and pure gold EUV interlinks had faithfully sustained this technology-fed time capsule for longer than anyone had a right to expect. Most of it ran by itself, but circuits were like people: they falter and fail. The Vault lived because of technology and they lived because of the Vault. Because of an unrepairable piece of tech the size of his thumbnail that had finally surrendered to those same ages and said enough was enough.
There was an ell off the main corridor on Three, a little room east of the armory, not far from the Command Center, where a G/A computer sat, dark and unpowered. The Norvel chip inside it had monitored and controlled the purity levels of the water in Vault 13 since a fateful late October Saturday in 2077. Day One, Justin said to himself. A long time ago. Tick-tock, said the tell-tale clock. Millions of gallons of clean water before his happy ass had shown up.
But the chip was history – kaput, toast, pronounced dead at the scene by Ken Montelle, the Overseer of the Vault. And the net result of that required not a tad of guesswork, sports fans – everyone knew that without clean water, they were basically screwed.
Ken and the crew in Ops were the Vault leadership (with Ken running point), and they’d strained a collective frontal lobe trying figure out an alternative. There had been open forums, conferences, and countless meetings with ad hoc committees and in the end, the choice had been simple – Vault 13 was tapping out rapidly, and had to have another chip. There was no other way around it, and it was that pressing urgency that had finally forced Ken to ask for a volunteer to enter the great unknown and search for a replacement.
And it sucked, Justin thought bitterly. It just sucked – which they had learned in time after Josh Adams set out a little more than a year ago, moving south with a shotgun and no guarantees; only the certainty that, even as what had been was winding down, the old world had built well.
The policy makers of old had seen the end coming, and had taken steps to “preserve the interests of the nation”, as former – and the last – U.S. President Alexander Morris had been quoted. Principal among those concerns had been stocking the Vaults – which had been determined in a near-carnival atmosphere during a weeklong, nationwide lottery that GNN had devoted ‘round the clock coverage to – between its updates on the impending U.S. counterinvasion of China.
There had been contests and giveaways but no free passes, while random digits plucked off a spinning, digitized wheel decided who lived and who didn’t. That course had been enforced to the letter when détante finally failed and gave way to a greater truth, when four hundred million U.S. citizens suddenly understood that the worst, nightmarish collapse possible was imminent, and that there was no escaping it.
But the government had anticipated the charge, and the military had been there in droves, divisions and battalions, regiments and platoons. A million strong had marched in, all of them armed with advanced high-tech energy weapons and defensive body armor, as they merged with law enforcement wards across the nation to defend the Vaults from the terror-stricken masses they had been designed to protect.
GNN had covered that as well, Justin now recalled, and it was chilling to realize how methodical it had been, how the orders everywhere had been the same – it was simplicity itself. If somebody’s number wasn’t on the master manifest, that was tough, but they still had a couple of choices: 1) leave the area immediately, or 2) be carted off in a body bag. There had been no exceptions to it – and very little loitering – after 90,000 protestors nationwide were shot while less than one-half of one percent of America assembled deep beneath the earth to begin its uncertain wait.
Every broadcast had ended shortly after, and today it was that lingering uncertainty that troubled Justin most. The accepted consensus in Vault 13 was that governments, armies, and most of the citizenry had vanished during the first wave of the war, as Josh and Ed had since.
But into what?
Justin had only the sketchiest of ideas – but he was willing to bet that the horde of advanced weaponry bred by the old tech-driven societies hadn’t disappeared, even if most of the planet had. Anyone with half a brain would have to believe that tons of that stuff was still scattered around out there…and that maybe, just maybe, it was being used. If that were true, then they were outmanned and outgunned. It only made sense.
He would loved to have asked Josh or Ed…if he or anyone could find them. Josh had been gone for six months, his wife, Mary and their four children still waiting for him to return when Ed Jamison bypassed the exit code and left on his own (and hadn’t there been some lively discussions about that?) As a staff member in Ops, Jamison was one of Ken’s trusted elite…yet he had walked out without a word to anyone.
Justin thought it was…interesting. He leaned forward and glanced at the pack, wondering if Ed had felt that linear computations and subroutines only went so far. Whatever his reasons had been, both he and Josh were missing, and the Vault was still without a chip.
Third time lucky, anyone?
Justin picked the pack up and shook it, listening to it rattle and clunk, thinking he hadn’t tried it on yet. Maybe later. When he had to. He thought that excess weight wouldn’t be much of a problem. Not with four Stimpaks and a pair of phosphorus flares inside…in case he found himself dying in the dark.
Now, there was a comforting thought, one that could have been made just a bit better by a big gun and some protective gear, neither of which were anywhere to be seen. That was a nasty trend in Vault 13. There was supposed to be a spare water chip laying around, plus enough weapons and defensive gear to outfit ten men. He’d heard that there was a jolly fellow named St. Nick that roamed the holiday skies, but he’d never seen him either. Suffice to say that the extra chip, the weapons, and Santa had never materialized. But there are of couple of non-standard goodies in there, Justin said to himself, with an appreciative nod at two water flasks (with the number “13” emblazoned across the face of each), courtesy of D.C. Thank you much, Dave, Justin thought. And, there was a stack of white terrycloth towels lining the bottom of the pack – always the ideal stand-in for a nonexistent first aid kit, liberated in a trade of sorts with Sharon Parks, the head of agricultural development in the hydro-farms.
He had stopped at the farms yesterday to pick up his food provisions – prepackaged dried concentrates. Just add water, yum! He had picked up the towels after he agreed to plant several of the hybrid wheat seeds that Sharon had developed. She was convinced that people in the Vault would be forced to relocate outside before much longer (an opinion shared), and she wanted at least some forehand knowledge of how well her hyperactive strain would fare in soil that might still contain hazardous amounts of radiation.
He had been half-straddled on one of the lab tables, arms folded across his chest, wonderfully captivated by the notion of his eyelids falling off, when Sharon came back from sterile storage and laid eight transparent plastic bags on a lab table. The 1/10th gram contents of each bag was secured by an airtight heatseal, molded below their blue zipper tops. He was thinking of how safe and protected they looked, when Sharon had thanked him and handed him the towels. “I may not show it,” she said, “but believe me, the thought of relocating frightens me just as much as anyone. But it will happen, regardless of opinion or personal fears, and I want us to be as prepared as we can, when that day arrives…”
When that day arrives, Justin thought now.
The russet-colored grain was in one of the side compartments of the pack, awaiting its debut in the new world. And he had a knife in there, of all things. He pulled it out and ran his thumb across the blade…it was sharp. Who knew? Maybe he could carve his way to Vault 15. Uh-huh. Just a leisurely run through the park with a gun – a brand-spanking new 10mm, Colt 6520 autoloading pistol.
He picked it up and dry-fired it, listening as the sterile click of the firing pin echoed flatly off the walls. Serious business to be sure, complete with a trio of clips and three boxes of hollow points –
For the bad guys.
Were there any? He tossed the pistol into the pack, wondering over and again, the screen staring at him like a blind oracle, his tapped-out crystal ball. Answers were elusive – and there was no comfort in thinking of two others who hadn’t made it back. That alone made the danger seem much too real, and certain or not, he’d be a fool to think otherwise. The war giveth, the war taketh away –
But how much?!
The question darted and danced inside his head like a capering shadowwraith, ever-present, every goddamn day, an unseen stalker, circling out of mind’s reach, haunting his nights throughout the dry seasons of safekeeping with too much time, a rising, atonal clamor that refused to be silenced, mocking the pace of the desperate, now that there wasn’t enough time.
On his time.
He leaned toward the screen and stared into its familiar blackness, his face taunt, a divided mask, evenly split between fact and unfounded hope, his lips moving silently…willing the black matrix to answer. Has the cost been counted? his mind pressed. Is the price paid? What’s the final tally? Do the wheels roll? Are they turning, somewhere? Is there Life? Or only Death? What does the ledger say?
Tell me, he thought, his nose mashed into the screen. Whisper your secret to me, mighty steel valkyrjas, choosers of the slain, hijackers of tomorrows, terminators of billions. What is out there? How much did you leave us? Chump change? Something? Anything?…
Nothing?
Can I get a Amen? Can I get some help here? Can I get a water ch –
“Do you want eggs or – ”
Justin jerked forward and then fell out of his seat in a pinwheeling splash of arms, elbows and feet. He sat down hard. His teeth clicked together hard – tasty grind of enamel! – cutting off his silent curse in mid-breath. He rubbed the side of his face, and could hear Cindy giggling softly, behind him.
He sighed, and made himself to count to ten as he got up. “Thanks, funny girl,” he said, climbing over the side of the chair. “I ought to paddle your behind for that.”
“Want to? Think a big, strong man like you can handle a little thing like me?” Cindy giggled, and smiled bravely. She was twenty-one; Justin’s junior by a year, and suddenly, six years could have been six minutes. It didn’t seem as if they’d had any time at all before he was asking her to stay here while he was gone. She could have stayed with her parents, but she had told him she would…and then silently promised herself that she would do so with good grace, and with no tears. She knew he would like that, and she could do that much, because she knew that anything this domain held was secondary to what he really wanted, to what he craved most.
Yourself included, Cinthia Marie, she thought with perhaps a hint of sadness, as he put his arms around her and held her. Justin was passionate but he wasn’t much on affection. He had never been harsh or unkind to her, or anyone she knew of. He was a gladhanding envoy with a good word and a crooked, surefire smile during the social functions they attended. He was articulate, outgoing and charming on the surface, and perhaps that had been the attraction all along. Cindy looked up and thought that it could be. And still, for all of his goodness, there was something hard and inflexible inside him, an unreachable place, where he only was permitted to tread. Justin would talk about anything at length – except himself. What he felt and how he felt were his alone. His heart belonged to him, and inside, there was only Justin, looking out.
Cindy was remembering this, while Justin held her, and neither of them said anything for what felt like a long time. So warm, he thought, his chin resting on her head, her hands lightly massaging the small of his back. She nuzzled the hair on his chest, and murmured something soft and unintelligible. Her breath tickled but she was so warm, he didn’t mind. But then she was pressing against him, her stealthy fingers easing under the waistband of his shorts, her tongue wetly tantilizing his right nipple. Justin turned and looked at the clock – was this trend or habit? – and groaned when he saw the time:
05 DEC 2161 – 0640:33
He reached around and grabbed her wrists. She looked up then, and he saw that her blue eyes were shiny and overbright.
“Can’t, Cin,” he said gently. “One of us has a date. I think it’s me.” He glanced at the plastic Christmas tree on the casual table that they set up and decorated only last week. Putting the little thing together hadn’t taken long, and they had spent the balance of the evening on the sofa, swapping holiday stories passed from generation to generation until they had fallen asleep next to each other.
It seemed like a generation ago. Now the tiny tree looked lonely just sitting there, blue and green lights winking and blinking. Alone, by itself…like he would be.
“I’m making eggs and rolls,” she said quietly. “Does that strike your appetite?”
“That sounds great,” Justin said. “I’m going to hit the spray first, okay?”
Cindy offered him a limp salute on her way to the kitchenette. Justin watched her disappear around the corner, and wondered if he would miss her, as he trotted off to the bathroom.
Cindy walked to the fridge, and opened the stainless steel door. Justin’s flask wasn’t in there, she saw, bending to reach her own. She removed it, and unscrewed the top. She poured herself a glass of water, then she set the flask on the counter, and entered their orders into the food replicator. She could hear the shower running when she picked up her glass, and drank in small, birdlike sips. The water was cold, as usual. But it had a flat, chlorinated taste, as usual. Processed, she thought, tilting the glass and looking at the flat-tasting, processed water, her mind forming a clear mental image of him, trapped inside a transparent cylinder, while a single, cool drop trickled slowly down the side.
He was tall and well-built, a shade over six feet. And probably doomed, she thought, and then abruptly shoved the thought away. And on the heels of that: Throw a drowning man an anchor, why don’t ya?
She could almost hear him saying it.
The Keeper of the Flame, she thought. Events had been decided long ago: that was her stance, and that had been their lot in life. They all occupied the same confined space with no promises about tomorrow. The failure of the chip had shown them all that. No one ever said it would be easy but they were alive, and there were billions who hadn’t been nearly as fortunate. But Justin had never accepted, and now he operated on a different plane. An illusory plane, it occurred to her, one he had run on for years. He had filled himself with nostalgia and make-believe in the library, and now he was brimming with wanderlust, a journeyer in a cage – a locked up explorer with no lands to traverse. A pie-in-the-sky dreamer, trapped in stasis: that was Justin in a nutshell.
The replicator beeped its shrill little beep. Their synthetic eggs and bun rolls were fabricated, and now, Cindy pulled their plates out, and set them into the convection warmer. She set the timer, and supposed she wasn’t complaining, or not overly much. He had been good to her, and she to him; they enjoyed each other in the quiet of this “cozy little place”, as he called it. But it was the distance he had maintained that seemed so odd to her now. They had grown up together; they were consenting adults, and she had borne his weight many times, with pleasure – and had never even known how much he weighed until he came back from his physical last Saturday. A buck eighty-five, he had crowed in delight.
The extra bulk agreed with him. It filled him out nicely, but she knew why it was there. It was there for the same reason the med staff in EML had pronounced him hale and fit two days ago, for the same reason a light tan began to appear on his frame a week earlier, after he developed a sudden interest in the solar lamps in the tanning rooms by the gym.
Just a short stay after his workout, she thought, pulling the plates from the warmer. She closed the door with a sigh, and then the sigh became a shudder. Justin was going into what none of them knew about. How could he keep believing in decency, when two others had gone out before him and hadn’t come back? They didn’t know what was out there: he didn’t really know, but he was so drawn by the allure of a spiteful, two-faced mistress overhead that held the needs of them all. And for Cindy, it was this one truth that made all of her arguments seem meaningless, that made letting go necessary…but not easier. They needed a water chip and Justin needed the world, and if a Vault couldn’t hold him, how could she?
She knew she couldn’t, watching him pull a chair out and then seat himself, showered and dressed, hair dripping on the table. She set their plates down, and was reminded again that he was his own man when her eyes were drawn to a prehistoric pair of wraparound aviator sunglasses, sitting on the table. The shades had belonged to Justin’s grandfather, and had been tucked into the back of a dresser drawer since that grand old gentleman passed away. And since then there had been times when she had asked Justin to put them on and model them for her, but he flatly refused to, saying only that he would wear them when the time was right.
Now the glasses were out of their case. Released, she thought. Freed, as they sat there, folded, tilted toward her, the high-gloss silver lenses seeming to snatch the light from the fernels and then amplify it, heliographing the rays in a fanning spray of violet hues like two brightly polished mirrors. There were dozens of pairs of Vault-Tec goggles in stores . She thought they were probably all right as far as eye protection went, but they were bulky and clunky-looking: they looked outdated, not sleek and racy like Justin’s glasses.
Cindy picked at her plate, aware of her own silence as she watched him, the vivid tones and tints shimmering in her eyes…and then it came to her that his time; their time, all time, was right. They were running out of water, and people were running out of patience. They argued and fought, while Josh and Ed had disappeared without a trace: there was nothing to be encouraged about, but she was. And strangely, looking at those gleaming, antique lenses now, thinking of the eddies and canals of past events, and how they channel together, overlapping themselves in a fluid, waterlike way to create the flows of the present, she felt better.
About him, herself, their chances. All of it.
“Thanks for breakfast, Cin,” Justin said to her now, shaking pepper onto his food it until took on a speckled, black appearance. It was the only way he knew how to improve the pencil-shavings taste of processed soy.
“You’re welcome,” Cindy said gently. “Hey, scruff. You didn’t shave.”
“C’est la vie,” Justin said, running a hand up the prickly stubble on one of his cheeks. “Thought I’d the skip the razor sacrifice dis moanin, ma’am. Wanted to look ornery and mean for the new masses.” He shoved a half a slice of cold egg into his mouth, and chewed slowly, remembering that water rationing had been invoked sixteen months earlier. All of the once-long, languid strolls under the shower head had been reduced to timed, two-minute splashes and then get the hell out of the pool. He’d wanted to grab a decent shower before he left, and that made shaving optional – any water drawn into sinks was subtracted from the time.
“What do you think, Cin?”
“I think you look like a bum, but you’ll do in a pinch,” Cindy said, waving her fork at the shades. “Are you finally going to try those on for me, fly boy?”
“Sure, why not, Miz Chipper Mood,” Justin said, grinning. He picked the sunglasses up and then stood, head bowed as he looped the wire frames over his ears. Then he looked at her, blinking and smiling disarmingly, his eyes masked behind the polarized lenses. The room had gone about eight shades darker. He liked that. “Well? Do you like them?”
“Very much so,” Cindy said approvingly, placing a finger under her chin. “I only wish you would have tried them on sooner. Makes you look…daring…and I guess that fits.”
Justin had no answer for that, and Cindy found that she wasn’t hungry. She slipped her arm around him instead, then they made their way into the living room.
“Do you have any idea how long you’ll be gone?” she asked, as Justin shouldered the pack.
“I’m not sure,” he said, considering the trip – and the unknowns – while he adjusted an annoying pinch in the straps. “Three weeks, by the look of it. Four, possibly. It’s a hundred miles plus to Vault. 15. Most of it depends on the lay of the land.” And what lays in the land, he said to himself. “If I come back with a chip in my pocket, we’ll both know.” He shrugged. “If I don’t make it back, then it won’t matter, will it?”
“No,” she said after a moment. “Nothing will.”
“Pre-cisely,” he said instantly, giving her the thumbs up. “So try to be of good cheer in the meantime, Cin.” He peeked at her over the top of his glasses. “‘Tis the season, you know…Ho-Ho-Ho. Besides, I can worry enough for both of us. Think you can keep the home fires burning that long?”
“I can do that,” Cindy said, squeezing his arm, while he figeted with the straps. Then, sharply, she asked: “Are you afraid?” The question weighed heavily on her mind, and her heart. She had asked once before, but he wouldn’t talk about it…and now, the answer suddenly seemed very important to her.
“Plenty,” Justin started, then, before he could say more, standing on tip-toe, his face cradled in her soft hands, Cindy kissed him…long and too firm, a live, exquisitely loving thing that seemed somehow to reach inside him. Startled, he pulled back without really meaning to, but she moved with him, letting him know it was okay without words, and he felt a familiar sense of loss, as he held her for a time…perhaps a bit closer this time…hearing her shallow breathing, sensing her nearness…just feeling the glowing warmth of her. He thought he might miss that…her.
Then why don’t you say it? With time running down, is it really so difficult? Tick-tock?
He shoved it away, and saw that her eyes were dry as she drew back, and nuzzled close to his ear. “The best of all good fortune to you, Justin,” she whispered, and then kissed his cheek. “Please take good care of you. I lo…I’ll miss you.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, hating the goodbyes. “Me too.”
As close as he’ll get, Cindy thought, as he pecked her on her cheek. Then he turned quickly and walked to the door. He pushed the gray exit button on the control pad, then the bluish steel door whirred up and out of sight – the same as it had on thirty thousand other days he thought weren’t quite like this one. He saw the elevator, as he stepped off the carpet of home and onto the plate steel walk of the corridor, its tightly closed doors waiting to open, when he turned and faced her.
A grinning tech freak, she thought then, the product of a lifelong environment, framed by a prefab steel door. To her, it looked as if a cage had been opened, and she couldn’t help wondering if an untamed animal ever returned to the bars, once it had tasted freedom. Then she wondered if leaving ever freed their hearts.
“I do like the glasses,” she said again, but weakly. The tears were close now. “I really do.”
Justin blew her a kiss. “Thanks, dry eyes. You take care…gotta go now.”
And then he was gone, striding down the corridor before she could answer. Cindy could see him as she turned and walked to the sofa, and thought she could hear a different sound, as the door pulled down behind her. A cage being shut, it came to her, as she sat down and placed her hands in her lap. She was still looking at the door – a cage door? – when her fingers began to curl and uncurl, working slowly into the sheer black fabric of her nightgown. She began to wait. But she didn’t cry.
Not then.
Food and wine they had aplenty
And they slept beneath the stars
The people were contented
And the Gods watched from afar
But the winter fell upon them
And it caught them unprepared
Bringing wolves and cold starvation
And the hearts of men despaired…
– Rush
Sheltered inside from the cold of the snow
Follow me now to the vault down below
Drinking the wine as we laugh at the time
Which is passing incredibly slow
(What are these chains that are binding my arms?)
Part of you dies each passing day
(Say it’s a game and I’ll come to no harm)
You’ll feel your life slipping away
– The Alan Parsons Project
Run rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun,
And when at last the work is done
Don’t sit down it’s time to dig another one
For long you live and high you fly
But only if you ride the tide
And balanced on the biggest wave
You race toward an early grave
– Pink Floyd
4~Four~4
The State Of The Nation
“…And while the subject may be unpleasant to consider, the immediate and long-range effects of a nuclear disaster on a global scale would almost certainly create extraordinary hardships – both for our country and the individual. Millions would be left homeless by such an attack. Police and fire departments, hospitals and most emergency services would be disrupted for an indeterminate length of time. Industry, transportation and communication would shut down – the nation would be prey to strange fears. These are somber subjects, which presuppose a catastrophe that can be made very unlikely by wise and positive policies. Still, realistic preparation for what could occur is of much greater use than ignorance, and if effective cau-tions had been taken in advance, this would assure our great nation the opportunity to rebuild in the aftermath of…”
The forbidding voice of the Vault-Tec narrator began to fade, turned down and then out, as Justin Marshall moaned softly in his sleep and rolled onto his side. He had kicked the blankets down to the foot of the bed at some point during the night, and now he lay naked, his body lightly sheened in perspiration, covered by a top sheet from the waist down. His knees drew up into a half-fetal position, and now his eyes began to move, darting behind their lightly closed lids, his breathing deepening, becoming slow and rhythmic, as his mind settled into a threefold place within thought, perception, and imagination – a flexible plane where fantasy and reality merge in the subconscious…
“…And how many of the old pieces would you suppose remain?” Mr. Watson put forth the question.
The study at 221 B Baker St. fell silent as Sherlock Holmes marked his place in a large book of Shakespearean works. He closed the leather bound volume with a rustling snap, then, placing it on his lap, considered his counterpart’s inquiry at some length.
“Elementary, my dear Watson”, the famed fictional sleuth said at last. “I haven’t a clue, as a glaringly pertinent fact will undoubtedly support. You see, old boy, it’s a matter of having been cloistered. Much like Tibetan monk, I would say.”
Mr. Watson’s eyebrows went up a notch. “Oh? How so?”
“All quite simple really”, Holmes expounded, “when one gives pause to mediate the case of young Mr. Marshall, our soon-to-be Great Traveler. Stated concisely, there has been a severe…constriction…shall we say, of every modern-day ‘information pipeline’ during the last thirty thousand or so days following the unsightly conclusion of civilization’s last great conflict. The ‘Great War’, in other words. Nasty business. Not a trifling condition by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Quite true, Holmes,” Watson agreed. “Quite true. Do go on, please.”
“Yes, well, difficult as this is to believe, the lad’s great-grandparents were the last persons on the Marshall family tree to garner a topside glimpse of Mother Earth before their Vault was sealed. Put simply, no one has seen the outside world since. Wasn’t such a bad lot, really, not for the first seventy-five years or so, at any rate.” Holmes tamped his pipe and then drew on it until a light smoke wreath circled his head. Satisfied, he dropped the tamper into his pocket, then continued. “However, I am sorry to say that their codified shelter was intended to lodge only a thousand souls, Watson, a figure which has been exceeded by a sizable margin. Which of course, lends itself to their present day dilemma. A fascinating case, as I am sure you will agree, as I am equally sure of your having noted the openly admirable manner which the denizens of Vault 13 have conducted themselves throughout a vexing ordeal, indeed. And while the circumstances are unfotunate, I must add that although this assemblage has become overly large, they had maintained a remarkable propensity for operating as a close-knit group. More of a family than not, although this untimely bit of nastiness with the failure of their water purification chip would seem to threaten…”
A hard jerk under the sheet and then Justin startled awake, staring, his heart skittering in his chest until a rustle of covers and the good feel of body warmth pushed the crazy, sepia-toned dream into the backwash of his semi-conscious mind.
“Hi, dreamer.” The voice was soft, feminine, and thick with sleep.
Justin sat up and raked a hand through his hair, while his pulse finally began to slow to something that resembled normal. “Morning, Cin,” he said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you. AM the hard way.” He peered owlishly to his right, and could just make out a sandy fluff of hair laying against a foam pillow: the rest of Miz Nelson was only a cascading dune under the blankets.
“That’s okay,” Cindy said. “I was already half awake.” Another rustle of covers, and then her head was on his lap. Gently, he laid a hand on her shoulder. The darkness seemed to give her a wispy, almost ethereal quality, as if she weren’t there. Like the world? Justin asked himself again, his thoughts running heavily toward this, while his hand ran lightly down her shoulder and across her ribs…now onto the fallaway slope of her slim waist, tracing her delicate outline…
And stopping at the rise of her hip, as the pieces jelled. He was in bed: no dead narrator’s voice preserved inside a collection of spinning disks and rolling holotapes, no crackling firelight or phantom aromas of pipe tobacco. It was Sunday morning, early. How early?
He was unsure: there were no clocks in his bedroom for him to stand vigil over. Nothing to remind him of broken technology or of time running down and out. There was only him and Miz Nelson, part-time pain in the ass, full-time girlfriend to him. And just Cindy to most of the masses here in Vault 13.
Got it, he thought, rubbing the stubborn sleep haze from his eyes. Or enough of it for now. There was a bit more, but that was later – it would come soon enough.
He pushed the sheet off, drawing his legs up as he did, then he swung them over the side of the bed and sat quietly on the edge, feeling his bare skin marble into gooseflesh, as purified air from the APUs caressed his arms and back. Air Processing Units were reliable; they were the ideal companion for anyone who lived in a sealed environment. They never broke down: they just went on pumping out the chill, and it was a little too cool to be sitting here bucky ass naked in the early hours. He rubbed his arms briskly and thought about making quick return trip under the sheets, then he felt his stomach twitch, and thought better of it. All of his muscles were starting to jump and tingle – nervously so, like someone had skewered him with a low current wire. The dull ache somewhere behind his eyes felt suspiciously like the makings of a headache, and he had the butterflies on top of it. It wasn’t bad…yet, but now the idea of actually leaving the Vault was starting to swing some serious weight. He thought that a fair-sized butterfly net and a handful of stickpins wouldn’t go to waste, as he slid off the mattress and began pawing the floor for his shorts.
“Are you getting ready to go?” Cindy asked. Her breasts giggled enticingly under her nightgown as she sat up, and turned on a reading lamp on the headboard.
“You trying to get rid of me, mon cheri?” Justin asked teasingly. “Got some plans after I’m gone, eh?”
“Will you be serious?”
“Not likely, Killjoy,” Justin said, and smiled winsomely. “I’ll be out of here soon enough, then you and your suitors will have this cozy little place all to yourselves.” He waved a finger at her. “But, I’m taking my time until then. Is that serious enough for you?”
“As close as you’ll get to it,” Cindy said, and then slipped under the covers. Killjoy, she thought. Justin teased her with that whenever she got depressed or down. And she supposed she was, now especially. They had been together for the last six years, and his good-natured taunting had always made it easier to push the clouds, the fear, away. Now, especially. “I’ll be out to make breakfast in a little bit.”
“And I’ll be in the other room,” Justin said, unearthing a pair of cotton briefs from the tangled “his and hers” mound of clothes by the bed. They were a little stiff – he spared a guilty glance at the heaps of clothes on the floor and by the dresser, and then climbed into what was arguably his cleanest, dirty pair of skivvies. The laundry was piling up nicely and a shower was definitely in order, but both would keep. The butterflies were out of their cocoons, and they weren’t leaving. Not a problem, Justin thought. A cool (and quick) promenade down the corridors of Level 2 would be just the ticket to clear out the jitters and sweep out the cobwebs.
Socks and underwear weren’t exactly standard touring attire – that was more along the lines of the one-piece, yellow-on-blue jumpsuits they all donned during the daytime rites (the ones with the big yellow “13” splashed in foot-high numbers on the back). It was your basic dapper garb for all stationary Vault Dwellers nationwide, but what were they going do if he paraded down an empty corridor without his? Kick him out? He was already leaving.
What a farewell that would make. He could just see himself in the hall…Justin Marshall, AM Rambler, precariously perched, paralleling a wisker’s width of expansion joint. One foot down, balance…step…then tug at the seat of his BVDs –
And keep those flaps in.
Justin smiled at the thought, and then dismissed the notion entirely, as his foot brushed against a coarse lump of nylar by the nightstand. A back pack. His pack, if possession really was nine-tenths the law. Issued to him yesterday along with a piddling amount of supplies. He jerked it up by one of the straps and thought: Not so close, you miserable load. Keep your distance…I barely know you. He dragged his newfound bundle of joy into the living room, and it followed obediently, tumbling and rattling and bouncing off the worn pile carpeting like a stone-filled can, as he passed the kitchenette and then zeroed in on the chair in the corner of the modest room.
He dropped the cinnamon-brown shoulder weight between his feet and then settled into the comfortably sprung, high-backed recliner. He and his nylar nemesis would be good buddies for a while, he supposed. After all, what walking tour of California, Nevada and all points between would be complete without a loyal pack? “Did you walk or come by foot?” Like there was a choice? Herm Stanton, the coding guru in Ops, had asked him that during lunch yesterday. “Hang a thumb out, Justin…maybe you can hitch a ride,” Herm had joked, while old geographic and political maps (and a new travel route) were being downloaded into an aging PipBoy 2000.
The unreal sense had held him then, a slow motion, dreamlike quality. Mental hypnosis, Novocaine for the brain. He and Herm had laughed like hell about it, but the laughter had carried a strained, forced edge.
Because of the war, Justin thought. The Great War. The Damned War.
He knew about the war: they all knew about the war. Eighty-five years in a thyroidal bomb shelter was testament to that. It was old hat but the library was there for the skeptical – a floor below his feet, and fairly brimming with holodisks and tapes – over a thousand of each. Available 24/7/365. Conveniently located, to serve you. Any year, every year. Drop in any time, just plop down and grab a seat. Number 27 if you please. Yes there…right on the isle, he said to himself. His favorite chair in his favorite viewing booth, the best seat in the house for their ongoing show, just three static-filled steps from the north com terminal. Back by catastrophic demand! Now entering our Eighty-Sixth Record-breaking year! Come one come all! See the world that was! Take a gander! It’s all there at the library, or inside a PDT for your remote viewing pleasure, right there, in the Personal Data Terminal for home, sweet, home – The Marshall residence; number fifty-two out of Vault 13’s identical hundred. All the comforts of home in the cubby in the corner – just no forwarding to the same mailing address for the last four generations.
And whadda ya mean ya can’t find it? Justin thought. Whadda ya, blind?! Down on the corner, cabbie! Where it’s always been! The Marshall residence, ya dumb hack! And step on it!
Right.
There was a fare, but the Checkers and hacks were all quits. The wheels had been stilled – no transportation at present other than two sock-clad feet. Ride that thumb, son…no chariots to wheel around in today.
Son, it came to him. Lordy, lordy. If the folks back home could see me now. The chair creaked softly, as he shifted in it. It seemed that a lot was coming to him of late, not that there weren’t plenty of reasons for it. He began to take in the living room, his eyes seeming to drift on their own across the quarters where he had spent about a third of his life; left, toward the entry – exit? – door, standing like an escape hatch, then right, at a high oak case by the sofa, the names on rows of dust jackets printed boldly, standing erect on the spines of books like sentries on watch. Crup and Keller; Leeland, Ellison and Cartright, Albright and Entené. They were the visionaries of another age who had dared to invent a future free of conflict, their dreams and ideals preserved in movable type for a soon to be traveler who had come to share many of those same beliefs.
The outside had always taken his curiosity, and he used to drive his parents bugshit with questions. Parents were supposed to know everything – that’s why they’re called “parents”. It had taken an awful lot, but his finally got fed up with his daily badgering, and then shuffled him off to library. That was really where it started, him reading about the past, and all the time wondering what was left of the present. His parents had never pushed any of it on him. They let him make up his own mind and research whatever he wanted. They let him decide for himself, and as he looked as the PDT console, or more at the photograph sitting on top of it, he thought that he had decided, all right. He’d picked up the whole thing, and ended up running with it.
The snapshot was taken when he was fifteen, but since then a lot had changed. His mother used to split her time between here and working support in the EML. She made all of it perfect, no matter what it was. It was an exaggeration, but it had seemed like it then. The model family in the Vault of the future. Dat was da Marshall clan, then. His father was the senior director of Ops at the time. The top man in Central Core, Justin thought. And after the senior Marshall retired, his son was going to drop in and take over. That spot was his – straight out. Locked up tight, no doubt. He remembered thinking that it was preordained.
But nothing was, and now, Justin picked up the photo and held it, listening to a quiet that seemed much too loud. Vault life was the only life there was, but it had turned sour for him. With only so many jobs to go around, he had gone about making sure that that slot in Ops would be his when the time came. Core Theory and Linear Extrapolation were a couple of the prereq classes, and he was just finishing up his third week in them, when his mother died from a cerebral hemorrhage. And then two days after her memorial service, his father had been back on the job, revising the monthly status logs, when he collapsed and died from massive heart attack.
Justin set the photo back on the console; only face down this time. Since then he had been on his own; he was used to making his own decisions, and still, he wondered what his parents would say about what he had chosen to do. What they would think; how they would feel? Then the door caught his eye, and he stopped wondering. They were gone – and thinking about that was pointless. He had no ties, so why not go? He was his own man now, and his decisions were just that – his. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. The call had been his to make, and right or wrong, he’d rung up a big one.
The notion of leaving had occurred to him even before his parents died, but with the Vault closed, here they all were, with no crisis at hand at that point. He had gotten his degree two years before the onset of the chip failure, and a spot as a junior consultant in Ops. Running performance evaluations on the primary core and subsystems was enough to keep him occupied, but being on the outside never left his mind. There were no small degrees of uncertainty over what may or may not be out there, but with the vast library archives at hand, he had formed a loose, general concept of it, and with the litererature that had been left to him, he had begun to nuture a belief in new and resurgent societies, rising from the ashes of a destroyed one. And it was this belief that first nudged and then pushed him, as the war became his pet project, almost an obsession for the last two years. Even with no all-clear signal to support it, there had to be some great goings on out there – there had to be. Vaults weren’t the only protection when the war arrived. There were fixed public shelters and expedient private ones – tens of thousands of them, in fact, that were built to withstand a nuclear catastrophe, perhaps even one as great as the “Great” War.
The idea of people recreating society after the holocaust was all he had to go on. There was little inside the Vault to support that creed but he wasn’t about to let go of it, and if the mail wasn’t coming to him, then he was going to it. A little pre-trip planning was all it took, which he had done. Between Herm Stanton and Tom Naus covering his butt during afternoon trips to the library and all the late night sessions with the tried and true PDT, he had been spending twelve and fourteen hours a day on it for months, readying himself and trying to figure out what might still be out there. He and Cindy had argued about all the time he had allocated to it, but they were two different people, with two entirely differing views. Besides, someone else had to have a look, and his mind was made up. It was his turn.
Now there was nothing more to research. He’d waded through the war; been through all of it, some if it twice. There were still more questions for him than answers but time was against them, and had been. Vault 13 needed a water chip, and he needed a place above ground, where the living were rebuilding and creating. And, he supposed, if you believed in one, you had to believe in the other. Those beliefs had been put to the test, as he dug deeper into the topside circus that landed them here in the first place. There were doubts and uncertainties, but it was out there. He knew it was: it had to be. To think otherwise would be to concede the extinction of the human race, and that was simply inconceivable. Humanity was resilient; they had survived other adversities and surely, they would have come through this. But he wasn’t naïve or stupid; just marginally convinced, and if he was wrong, then one person walking into what was, was better…safer…than all of them going out at once. They had already learned that much, and for his own part, this was an improvement over standing in a hole that seemed to get deeper every year.
He propped his feet on the console and tipped the chair back a notch, watching his own taunt face stare back at him. Note the tightly pursed lips and furrowed brow, he thought. A young/old mug, fellas. A face of the times, a face for the ages…reflected by a blank screen.
That seemed to fit.
Catch the mirror’s eye and stare at yourself, then behold the spectacle. See yourself born and then learn to walk on your own. Make dem rounds, boy, but take your time. You’re not going anywhere, so there’s no hurry. Shuffle across your choice of five well-marred levels of steel grating and floors, then watch yourself grow old, living and dying without ever seeing the sun. First breath to last gasp – it was one in the same for this West Coast affiliate of the Emergency K-Band Network.
And there was no way he would believe in the silence. Uh-uh. No sir. No way he could believe all of it was gone. Transmitters didn’t always work. Signals got crossed. Sure, there wouldn’t be very many people, and the survivors wouldn’t have had time to look for a Vault. They would have been too busy, and…
What if a tiny shard of what had been, still remained? Would people have returned to the cities? Would they rebuild and restore? Would there be warehouses and skyscrapers? Museums and universities and libraries? Offices and restaurants and take-out stands? Old retired gentlemen sitting on park benches, basking in the sun while mothers watched their children play by the fountain? Would there be cars and trucks and busses running up and down the streets? CycloTubes for businessmen and crosstown commuters? Would there be mass transit instead of mass hysteria?
Of course there would. The survivors would have learned. They would know better. They would be –
Oh bullshit.
It wasn’t so much the thought that bothered him as what it revealed about himself. Wish all he wanted, but idealism in the twenty-second century was dead. The war had killed it and dreaming couldn’t change it. The evidence to date had been irrefutable, and one day at a time, one breath at a time until death do us part was all there had been.
It was all there was, and it was maddening: a person could go nuts. Hitch it in and let it out…or hold it, hoping against hope while you filter the frequencies, scanning, day after day, listening to your heart thud in the void, the only break, the only discernable sound in a wash of static over the airwaves.
Corrections Are Being Made. Please Stand By.
Were they?
The question had never left him – it had gotten stronger with time, if anything. He’d had the time. Lots of it during the last seven years. He knew how to study, and he’d had boned up on lots of history (for all the good it had done), and it seemed to him that they all had become the pupils of Death. Grisly, but he thought there was a grain of truth to it. Where you lived didn’t matter. Black or White, Pass or Fail. The Reaper was the ultimate instructor of enduring permanence. Above ground or buried in a Vault made not a tad of difference – Death was a traveling instructor with instant lessons that were learned whether you wanted to or not. It was inflexible and unyielding and didn’t play favorites. Above ground or below, learn it and remember it, because Death never graded on a curve, only on its infinite plane – where what remained for him, where the set of wheels he had dreamed of, the wheels of Progress, might still be turning, rolling free of the monikers that clanged like a death knell in his memory.
Trinity had been the first, cradled in Alamagordo…or Pandora’s Box. Either way, it was the birthblood gush of the Atomic Age, and the breeding ground for the dark spawn that followed. The parents were virile, and their offspring were many. Little Boy arrived, and then boarded Enola Gay, the deliverer for Hiroshima, the first to be laid on the altar. Then came Fat Man, borne on the wings of Bock’s Car, guardian of the new and improved for Nagasaki, the second lamb led to slaughter.
And Oppenheimer had presided over it with horror in his eyes and a knowing dread in his soul. Thousands of others were involved with the Manhattan Project, but he had been the sire, the bull stud, the so-called father of the bomb. And, he had known better than any of them – he told them flat out when it was done that wars couldn’t be stopped, no matter how many nukes they made or how big they were.
But the pupils snatched the lessons and ran toward oblivion. They called it good, then J. Robert Oppenheimer called it quits. He resigned after that, walked away.
They should have taken the hint.
What had been created by war to end a war had ended with the war to end all wars. It was simple – just kill everything – no more fighting. There was a demented sort of symmetry to it. Two scarlet plumes ended a World War, but the billowing sorcerers that spared a million lives then conjured a Cold War as their price that ten and a half billion paid for later.
Just put it on my tab, Justin thought, his fingers drumming an arm of the chair. Let the music play. And the beat went on. And on. Operation Crossroads. Then Ranger…Sandstone…Greenhouse…Buster-Jangler. They were the house mothers, each bearing their own litters of fire-breathing kiddies. Able…Baker…Zebra…Easy. They’d christened all of the prodigies They never ran out of names or new designs. George…Sugar…Uncle…and Mike.
Ivy Mike – a new pedigree, and the harbinger of the Age of Fusion.
Out with the old, in with the new. They blew up an entire island in the South Pacific with that one. And then Bravo had come along and stripped the Bikini Islands with a 15 megaton ‘accident’ (and oh, hadn’t the fallout played hell with the natives afterward). Long-term effects? At least. It had taken almost two decades to settle the mile-deep stack of lawsuits and straighten that mess out.
But by then it had been “My bomb’s bigger than your bomb”, the worldwide yelp of frightened leaders who couldn’t see past their own paranoia.
He settled deeper into the chair, his mind drifting away, trying to make at least some sense of a lost era that often seemed senseless. There were few constants, although energy certainly had been one, a perpetual demand that led back to overuse of fossil fuels. It had been an oil-driven world, without question, and when the pinch began, it seemed that capitalism quickly became the decisive, overriding factor. Old-world economies and dollars were tied closely to the availability of petroleum – every nation was visible and wanting to head the line when the tankers unloaded, yet the responsibility and accountability for resource management were spread so thin across the last two centuries that fingering a single turning point was nigh on to impossible. Most of what shook loose from the great scheme of things then were little pieces, but a few of the larger hunks were visible, all of them falling into the mire like a topppled stack of dominoes, each contributing to the global destruction that ultimately came. Norway and Mexico rode the fence for a decade before finally signing on with OPEC in 2004, a move that had sent fuel costs skyrocketing. OPEC had the world by the balls then, and they knew it. With those countries in the fold, they had locked up about ninety percent of all known oil reserves and were wringing it for all it was worth, when the USA intervened in 2026, and tried to break the cartel with the SPR.
That folly had been short-lived. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve had an eyedropper full in it compared to the big boys. Trying to pour a smidgen of oil into the market in order to force prices down was more of a desperate, knee-jerk ploy than anything, and looked like the proverbial monkey on the elephant’s back. The U.S. ruffled a lot of international feathers with a very dicey gimmick that fell flat – OPEC was fumed about it and oil prices didn’t budge, but some short-term good had eventually come from it. Just not enough.
The world revolved around jobs and jobs revolved around industry, and that had elevated a lot thinking about alternative fuels. With industrial demands placing a constant, heavy drain on dwindling oil resources, compact and renewable alternative-fuel technologies such as the MicroFusion and Small Energy Cells were eventually applied. The self-contained power cells were used in everything from appliances to automobiles; they were a portable and reliable energy source, but were simply not enough to offset the world’s ingrained demand for petroleum. Joblessness had crept steadily upward while industry struggled with high-priced and inconsistent oil stocks, until the simmering hotbed in the Middle East finally exploded over a territorial dispute that pretty much sealed the deal.
Baghdad declared itself an independent sovereignty during what turned out to be the last conference of OPECs oil ministers, and then sent everything into a headlong tailspin when they emptied their missle silos on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in a show of solidarity. The UN took a dim view of the conflict, and retaliation had been swift. Iraq wound up as a gutted parking lot, but the shattered derricks in the Persian Gulf fared as badly or worse, blazing like a decaying sunspot under a foot-deep oil slick while half the world’s remaining oil reserves vanished in less than seventy-two hours.
The aftermath had been a precursor, another sort of chain reaction that happened nearly as quickly. Unemployment spiraled out of sight, and then jobs became scarce, while global economic stability teetered on the brink of collapse. No jobs meant no food on the table, and that had led to the first outbreak of food riots in Great Britain and France as the EEA went into effect. Then nuclear reactors flourished as a stopgap measure, while once-restricted information circulated freely under the guidelines of the EEA – which had led to chronic abuses of the system, when nations with little or no nuclear capabilities began assembling dual-role reactors for researching modern arsenal configurations.
Then it was like the 1950s all over again after word of those activities leaked, much too late to stop the flow of information, or stem the tide. A second arms race began in earnest, and within ten years, NATO estimates placed worldwide strategic arsenals at between 980,000 and 1,050,000 actively deployed warheads. Eroded by rampant poverty, anarchy and mutual mistrust, the esprit de corps forged by the founding principles of the EEA disappeared, while regimes new and old continued assembling nuclear weapons as a hedge against an uncertain future.
Justin sat up, and looked intently at the smooth, blank screen. And black, he thought. Where, or how, it began, no one could really say. But where it all ended was a place best left unexplored. The decline and fall of humanity had been a complex and fascinating weave of events. He thought it was interesting (and darkly compelling) but studying the tapes was like watching reruns of a holomovie. You sit there, watching scenes roll by, wishing it would change and already knowing how it’s going to turn out.
You’ve seen it all before…the end remains the same.
He shook his head in disgust. The Great War. What had been so great about it? How could anyone pay homage to two hours of wholesale lunacy that negated what could have been, what should have been for all of them? It was his own private argument – one he had waged boundless times. The war was over and done and he was straight with it (more or less), but the hurt crept up behind him when he wasn’t watching and bit him now and then, like a uncaged animal with a mouthful of jagged teeth, its muzzle foaming and snapping until he swatted it away. He could push the images of those final weeks and months away, but the bitterness they left behind was much harder to get around. There was always a deep and recurring sense of loss he felt every time he thought of what might have been – of how close the world had been to a renaisance, to rescuing itself from itself.
The indications had been there before the bottom fell out. Cooler heads had prevailed for a time, and at one point it seemed that rationale would reign over genocide. There had even been a period of reductions in nuclear arsenals after the turn of the millienna. So close, and not. The awareness groups had worked toward disarmament – the treaties were in place but were never ratified, and when the drain on oil resources finally went critical, panic had run amock after the Red, White, and Blue cornered the last of the oil market.
Poseidon 1 had been a deep sea gold mine. The U.S.’s monetary clout had swelled as other oil reserves shriveled, while U.S. citizens enjoyed a standard of living unseen since the Reagan Era. Foreign policy was rigid, and the dollars poured in while the oil flowed one way. The appeals for assistance went unheard, then panic turned into anger after the world’s third largest uranium supply was locked up when the U.S. annexed Canada.
The citizens of the 53rd state got barrels of crude and a break on their taxes, but the Land of Opportunity had been a Land of Opportunists at the last, hoarding its oil stocks to split the global sanctions, while the rest of the world ran dry. Other nations were staggering without petroleum to maintain the essentials, as the U.S. thrived under its banners of domestic “priorities” and “concerns”. Millions had starved in what had become an all-embracing crisis – government cabinets rose and fell almost daily, while anti-nuke groups with alphabet soup names like CDI or NRDC, CNS and Greenpeace were drowned out by the EEA.
And ultimately, by four more imposing letters – ICBM.
The EEA had been a bad joke with a horrendous punchline – all it had done was turn a handful of petty dictators into mini-superpowers overnight. Bigger was better – or so they had said – and the tracking dishes and the mounting stockpiles had proved the point. Every argument had since been settled. The playing field had been leveled – literally – and eighty-five years, a million launch codes, and a trillion megatons after the fact, it occurred to Justin that T.S. Elliott had it pegged all along: “The center does not hold.”
Nor had it, a fact that loomed large for them all in the here-and-now. And, when the center finally blew out – or up, not to cut it too finely – one hundred and fifty-seven Vaults spread across the United States had been the motherland’s idea of “effective cautions”, a fallback – the failsafe, ready and waiting to harbor the few who had been left with the unenviable task of picking up the pieces.
That was the problem, as he saw it; his problem, more accurately. There was a mountainlike summit of the past to peruse, and within it lay the systematic progression of the human condition. But then the buttons had been pushed, en masse – it all had ground to a halt, voiding everyone’s ticket in the bargain. Cancel the reservations. Sorry if there’s no one to hand out the refunds. Learning curves had been stacked in a holding pattern while the big bang shut it all down in a gaudy roar that ended in a wimper. Past had become present while the state of the nation hovered over unseen gaps which had eroded into vast, uncharted chasms. They could discuss and debate, stuffing a myriad of holes with speculation, pattering and theorizing until Gabriel sounded the Judgment Trump, but it was all so much mind fodder – they didn’t have a clue, as Holmes was wont to say. Four generations after the fall, all any of them knew was that they didn’t know jack. Today the Great Outdoors remained the big “Q”, the consummate question mark, ad infinitum, while fourteen hundred souls in here had lived and died for four score and five years below two hundred feet of stone, waiting, safe and sound for the all-clear that had never arrived, surviving on “what if’s” and “maybe’s” until Father Time had intervened and destroyed what the war couldn’t touch.
Justin looked at the clock on the console:
05 DEC 2161 – 0623:19
Six twenty-three AM. And nineteen seconds. T-Minus Fifty-Eight. His countdown was underway, and had been for all of them, for the last twenty-four months. It was all quite simple, really. Only the ages knew what had been going on over their heads – only the clock was infinite and it didn’t care a tick or a lick, and he could just see Pa Time in the face of the display – the old bastard was checking his watch and laughing at him.
That seemed to fit, as well.
A menagerie of delicate and irreplaceable mini-microchips and pure gold EUV interlinks had faithfully sustained this technology-fed time capsule for longer than anyone had a right to expect. Most of it ran by itself, but circuits were like people: they falter and fail. The Vault lived because of technology and they lived because of the Vault. Because of an unrepairable piece of tech the size of his thumbnail that had finally surrendered to those same ages and said enough was enough.
There was an ell off the main corridor on Three, a little room east of the armory, not far from the Command Center, where a G/A computer sat, dark and unpowered. The Norvel chip inside it had monitored and controlled the purity levels of the water in Vault 13 since a fateful late October Saturday in 2077. Day One, Justin said to himself. A long time ago. Tick-tock, said the tell-tale clock. Millions of gallons of clean water before his happy ass had shown up.
But the chip was history – kaput, toast, pronounced dead at the scene by Ken Montelle, the Overseer of the Vault. And the net result of that required not a tad of guesswork, sports fans – everyone knew that without clean water, they were basically screwed.
Ken and the crew in Ops were the Vault leadership (with Ken running point), and they’d strained a collective frontal lobe trying figure out an alternative. There had been open forums, conferences, and countless meetings with ad hoc committees and in the end, the choice had been simple – Vault 13 was tapping out rapidly, and had to have another chip. There was no other way around it, and it was that pressing urgency that had finally forced Ken to ask for a volunteer to enter the great unknown and search for a replacement.
And it sucked, Justin thought bitterly. It just sucked – which they had learned in time after Josh Adams set out a little more than a year ago, moving south with a shotgun and no guarantees; only the certainty that, even as what had been was winding down, the old world had built well.
The policy makers of old had seen the end coming, and had taken steps to “preserve the interests of the nation”, as former – and the last – U.S. President Alexander Morris had been quoted. Principal among those concerns had been stocking the Vaults – which had been determined in a near-carnival atmosphere during a weeklong, nationwide lottery that GNN had devoted ‘round the clock coverage to – between its updates on the impending U.S. counterinvasion of China.
There had been contests and giveaways but no free passes, while random digits plucked off a spinning, digitized wheel decided who lived and who didn’t. That course had been enforced to the letter when détante finally failed and gave way to a greater truth, when four hundred million U.S. citizens suddenly understood that the worst, nightmarish collapse possible was imminent, and that there was no escaping it.
But the government had anticipated the charge, and the military had been there in droves, divisions and battalions, regiments and platoons. A million strong had marched in, all of them armed with advanced high-tech energy weapons and defensive body armor, as they merged with law enforcement wards across the nation to defend the Vaults from the terror-stricken masses they had been designed to protect.
GNN had covered that as well, Justin now recalled, and it was chilling to realize how methodical it had been, how the orders everywhere had been the same – it was simplicity itself. If somebody’s number wasn’t on the master manifest, that was tough, but they still had a couple of choices: 1) leave the area immediately, or 2) be carted off in a body bag. There had been no exceptions to it – and very little loitering – after 90,000 protestors nationwide were shot while less than one-half of one percent of America assembled deep beneath the earth to begin its uncertain wait.
Every broadcast had ended shortly after, and today it was that lingering uncertainty that troubled Justin most. The accepted consensus in Vault 13 was that governments, armies, and most of the citizenry had vanished during the first wave of the war, as Josh and Ed had since.
But into what?
Justin had only the sketchiest of ideas – but he was willing to bet that the horde of advanced weaponry bred by the old tech-driven societies hadn’t disappeared, even if most of the planet had. Anyone with half a brain would have to believe that tons of that stuff was still scattered around out there…and that maybe, just maybe, it was being used. If that were true, then they were outmanned and outgunned. It only made sense.
He would loved to have asked Josh or Ed…if he or anyone could find them. Josh had been gone for six months, his wife, Mary and their four children still waiting for him to return when Ed Jamison bypassed the exit code and left on his own (and hadn’t there been some lively discussions about that?) As a staff member in Ops, Jamison was one of Ken’s trusted elite…yet he had walked out without a word to anyone.
Justin thought it was…interesting. He leaned forward and glanced at the pack, wondering if Ed had felt that linear computations and subroutines only went so far. Whatever his reasons had been, both he and Josh were missing, and the Vault was still without a chip.
Third time lucky, anyone?
Justin picked the pack up and shook it, listening to it rattle and clunk, thinking he hadn’t tried it on yet. Maybe later. When he had to. He thought that excess weight wouldn’t be much of a problem. Not with four Stimpaks and a pair of phosphorus flares inside…in case he found himself dying in the dark.
Now, there was a comforting thought, one that could have been made just a bit better by a big gun and some protective gear, neither of which were anywhere to be seen. That was a nasty trend in Vault 13. There was supposed to be a spare water chip laying around, plus enough weapons and defensive gear to outfit ten men. He’d heard that there was a jolly fellow named St. Nick that roamed the holiday skies, but he’d never seen him either. Suffice to say that the extra chip, the weapons, and Santa had never materialized. But there are of couple of non-standard goodies in there, Justin said to himself, with an appreciative nod at two water flasks (with the number “13” emblazoned across the face of each), courtesy of D.C. Thank you much, Dave, Justin thought. And, there was a stack of white terrycloth towels lining the bottom of the pack – always the ideal stand-in for a nonexistent first aid kit, liberated in a trade of sorts with Sharon Parks, the head of agricultural development in the hydro-farms.
He had stopped at the farms yesterday to pick up his food provisions – prepackaged dried concentrates. Just add water, yum! He had picked up the towels after he agreed to plant several of the hybrid wheat seeds that Sharon had developed. She was convinced that people in the Vault would be forced to relocate outside before much longer (an opinion shared), and she wanted at least some forehand knowledge of how well her hyperactive strain would fare in soil that might still contain hazardous amounts of radiation.
He had been half-straddled on one of the lab tables, arms folded across his chest, wonderfully captivated by the notion of his eyelids falling off, when Sharon came back from sterile storage and laid eight transparent plastic bags on a lab table. The 1/10th gram contents of each bag was secured by an airtight heatseal, molded below their blue zipper tops. He was thinking of how safe and protected they looked, when Sharon had thanked him and handed him the towels. “I may not show it,” she said, “but believe me, the thought of relocating frightens me just as much as anyone. But it will happen, regardless of opinion or personal fears, and I want us to be as prepared as we can, when that day arrives…”
When that day arrives, Justin thought now.
The russet-colored grain was in one of the side compartments of the pack, awaiting its debut in the new world. And he had a knife in there, of all things. He pulled it out and ran his thumb across the blade…it was sharp. Who knew? Maybe he could carve his way to Vault 15. Uh-huh. Just a leisurely run through the park with a gun – a brand-spanking new 10mm, Colt 6520 autoloading pistol.
He picked it up and dry-fired it, listening as the sterile click of the firing pin echoed flatly off the walls. Serious business to be sure, complete with a trio of clips and three boxes of hollow points –
For the bad guys.
Were there any? He tossed the pistol into the pack, wondering over and again, the screen staring at him like a blind oracle, his tapped-out crystal ball. Answers were elusive – and there was no comfort in thinking of two others who hadn’t made it back. That alone made the danger seem much too real, and certain or not, he’d be a fool to think otherwise. The war giveth, the war taketh away –
But how much?!
The question darted and danced inside his head like a capering shadowwraith, ever-present, every goddamn day, an unseen stalker, circling out of mind’s reach, haunting his nights throughout the dry seasons of safekeeping with too much time, a rising, atonal clamor that refused to be silenced, mocking the pace of the desperate, now that there wasn’t enough time.
On his time.
He leaned toward the screen and stared into its familiar blackness, his face taunt, a divided mask, evenly split between fact and unfounded hope, his lips moving silently…willing the black matrix to answer. Has the cost been counted? his mind pressed. Is the price paid? What’s the final tally? Do the wheels roll? Are they turning, somewhere? Is there Life? Or only Death? What does the ledger say?
Tell me, he thought, his nose mashed into the screen. Whisper your secret to me, mighty steel valkyrjas, choosers of the slain, hijackers of tomorrows, terminators of billions. What is out there? How much did you leave us? Chump change? Something? Anything?…
Nothing?
Can I get a Amen? Can I get some help here? Can I get a water ch –
“Do you want eggs or – ”
Justin jerked forward and then fell out of his seat in a pinwheeling splash of arms, elbows and feet. He sat down hard. His teeth clicked together hard – tasty grind of enamel! – cutting off his silent curse in mid-breath. He rubbed the side of his face, and could hear Cindy giggling softly, behind him.
He sighed, and made himself to count to ten as he got up. “Thanks, funny girl,” he said, climbing over the side of the chair. “I ought to paddle your behind for that.”
“Want to? Think a big, strong man like you can handle a little thing like me?” Cindy giggled, and smiled bravely. She was twenty-one; Justin’s junior by a year, and suddenly, six years could have been six minutes. It didn’t seem as if they’d had any time at all before he was asking her to stay here while he was gone. She could have stayed with her parents, but she had told him she would…and then silently promised herself that she would do so with good grace, and with no tears. She knew he would like that, and she could do that much, because she knew that anything this domain held was secondary to what he really wanted, to what he craved most.
Yourself included, Cinthia Marie, she thought with perhaps a hint of sadness, as he put his arms around her and held her. Justin was passionate but he wasn’t much on affection. He had never been harsh or unkind to her, or anyone she knew of. He was a gladhanding envoy with a good word and a crooked, surefire smile during the social functions they attended. He was articulate, outgoing and charming on the surface, and perhaps that had been the attraction all along. Cindy looked up and thought that it could be. And still, for all of his goodness, there was something hard and inflexible inside him, an unreachable place, where he only was permitted to tread. Justin would talk about anything at length – except himself. What he felt and how he felt were his alone. His heart belonged to him, and inside, there was only Justin, looking out.
Cindy was remembering this, while Justin held her, and neither of them said anything for what felt like a long time. So warm, he thought, his chin resting on her head, her hands lightly massaging the small of his back. She nuzzled the hair on his chest, and murmured something soft and unintelligible. Her breath tickled but she was so warm, he didn’t mind. But then she was pressing against him, her stealthy fingers easing under the waistband of his shorts, her tongue wetly tantilizing his right nipple. Justin turned and looked at the clock – was this trend or habit? – and groaned when he saw the time:
05 DEC 2161 – 0640:33
He reached around and grabbed her wrists. She looked up then, and he saw that her blue eyes were shiny and overbright.
“Can’t, Cin,” he said gently. “One of us has a date. I think it’s me.” He glanced at the plastic Christmas tree on the casual table that they set up and decorated only last week. Putting the little thing together hadn’t taken long, and they had spent the balance of the evening on the sofa, swapping holiday stories passed from generation to generation until they had fallen asleep next to each other.
It seemed like a generation ago. Now the tiny tree looked lonely just sitting there, blue and green lights winking and blinking. Alone, by itself…like he would be.
“I’m making eggs and rolls,” she said quietly. “Does that strike your appetite?”
“That sounds great,” Justin said. “I’m going to hit the spray first, okay?”
Cindy offered him a limp salute on her way to the kitchenette. Justin watched her disappear around the corner, and wondered if he would miss her, as he trotted off to the bathroom.
Cindy walked to the fridge, and opened the stainless steel door. Justin’s flask wasn’t in there, she saw, bending to reach her own. She removed it, and unscrewed the top. She poured herself a glass of water, then she set the flask on the counter, and entered their orders into the food replicator. She could hear the shower running when she picked up her glass, and drank in small, birdlike sips. The water was cold, as usual. But it had a flat, chlorinated taste, as usual. Processed, she thought, tilting the glass and looking at the flat-tasting, processed water, her mind forming a clear mental image of him, trapped inside a transparent cylinder, while a single, cool drop trickled slowly down the side.
He was tall and well-built, a shade over six feet. And probably doomed, she thought, and then abruptly shoved the thought away. And on the heels of that: Throw a drowning man an anchor, why don’t ya?
She could almost hear him saying it.
The Keeper of the Flame, she thought. Events had been decided long ago: that was her stance, and that had been their lot in life. They all occupied the same confined space with no promises about tomorrow. The failure of the chip had shown them all that. No one ever said it would be easy but they were alive, and there were billions who hadn’t been nearly as fortunate. But Justin had never accepted, and now he operated on a different plane. An illusory plane, it occurred to her, one he had run on for years. He had filled himself with nostalgia and make-believe in the library, and now he was brimming with wanderlust, a journeyer in a cage – a locked up explorer with no lands to traverse. A pie-in-the-sky dreamer, trapped in stasis: that was Justin in a nutshell.
The replicator beeped its shrill little beep. Their synthetic eggs and bun rolls were fabricated, and now, Cindy pulled their plates out, and set them into the convection warmer. She set the timer, and supposed she wasn’t complaining, or not overly much. He had been good to her, and she to him; they enjoyed each other in the quiet of this “cozy little place”, as he called it. But it was the distance he had maintained that seemed so odd to her now. They had grown up together; they were consenting adults, and she had borne his weight many times, with pleasure – and had never even known how much he weighed until he came back from his physical last Saturday. A buck eighty-five, he had crowed in delight.
The extra bulk agreed with him. It filled him out nicely, but she knew why it was there. It was there for the same reason the med staff in EML had pronounced him hale and fit two days ago, for the same reason a light tan began to appear on his frame a week earlier, after he developed a sudden interest in the solar lamps in the tanning rooms by the gym.
Just a short stay after his workout, she thought, pulling the plates from the warmer. She closed the door with a sigh, and then the sigh became a shudder. Justin was going into what none of them knew about. How could he keep believing in decency, when two others had gone out before him and hadn’t come back? They didn’t know what was out there: he didn’t really know, but he was so drawn by the allure of a spiteful, two-faced mistress overhead that held the needs of them all. And for Cindy, it was this one truth that made all of her arguments seem meaningless, that made letting go necessary…but not easier. They needed a water chip and Justin needed the world, and if a Vault couldn’t hold him, how could she?
She knew she couldn’t, watching him pull a chair out and then seat himself, showered and dressed, hair dripping on the table. She set their plates down, and was reminded again that he was his own man when her eyes were drawn to a prehistoric pair of wraparound aviator sunglasses, sitting on the table. The shades had belonged to Justin’s grandfather, and had been tucked into the back of a dresser drawer since that grand old gentleman passed away. And since then there had been times when she had asked Justin to put them on and model them for her, but he flatly refused to, saying only that he would wear them when the time was right.
Now the glasses were out of their case. Released, she thought. Freed, as they sat there, folded, tilted toward her, the high-gloss silver lenses seeming to snatch the light from the fernels and then amplify it, heliographing the rays in a fanning spray of violet hues like two brightly polished mirrors. There were dozens of pairs of Vault-Tec goggles in stores . She thought they were probably all right as far as eye protection went, but they were bulky and clunky-looking: they looked outdated, not sleek and racy like Justin’s glasses.
Cindy picked at her plate, aware of her own silence as she watched him, the vivid tones and tints shimmering in her eyes…and then it came to her that his time; their time, all time, was right. They were running out of water, and people were running out of patience. They argued and fought, while Josh and Ed had disappeared without a trace: there was nothing to be encouraged about, but she was. And strangely, looking at those gleaming, antique lenses now, thinking of the eddies and canals of past events, and how they channel together, overlapping themselves in a fluid, waterlike way to create the flows of the present, she felt better.
About him, herself, their chances. All of it.
“Thanks for breakfast, Cin,” Justin said to her now, shaking pepper onto his food it until took on a speckled, black appearance. It was the only way he knew how to improve the pencil-shavings taste of processed soy.
“You’re welcome,” Cindy said gently. “Hey, scruff. You didn’t shave.”
“C’est la vie,” Justin said, running a hand up the prickly stubble on one of his cheeks. “Thought I’d the skip the razor sacrifice dis moanin, ma’am. Wanted to look ornery and mean for the new masses.” He shoved a half a slice of cold egg into his mouth, and chewed slowly, remembering that water rationing had been invoked sixteen months earlier. All of the once-long, languid strolls under the shower head had been reduced to timed, two-minute splashes and then get the hell out of the pool. He’d wanted to grab a decent shower before he left, and that made shaving optional – any water drawn into sinks was subtracted from the time.
“What do you think, Cin?”
“I think you look like a bum, but you’ll do in a pinch,” Cindy said, waving her fork at the shades. “Are you finally going to try those on for me, fly boy?”
“Sure, why not, Miz Chipper Mood,” Justin said, grinning. He picked the sunglasses up and then stood, head bowed as he looped the wire frames over his ears. Then he looked at her, blinking and smiling disarmingly, his eyes masked behind the polarized lenses. The room had gone about eight shades darker. He liked that. “Well? Do you like them?”
“Very much so,” Cindy said approvingly, placing a finger under her chin. “I only wish you would have tried them on sooner. Makes you look…daring…and I guess that fits.”
Justin had no answer for that, and Cindy found that she wasn’t hungry. She slipped her arm around him instead, then they made their way into the living room.
“Do you have any idea how long you’ll be gone?” she asked, as Justin shouldered the pack.
“I’m not sure,” he said, considering the trip – and the unknowns – while he adjusted an annoying pinch in the straps. “Three weeks, by the look of it. Four, possibly. It’s a hundred miles plus to Vault. 15. Most of it depends on the lay of the land.” And what lays in the land, he said to himself. “If I come back with a chip in my pocket, we’ll both know.” He shrugged. “If I don’t make it back, then it won’t matter, will it?”
“No,” she said after a moment. “Nothing will.”
“Pre-cisely,” he said instantly, giving her the thumbs up. “So try to be of good cheer in the meantime, Cin.” He peeked at her over the top of his glasses. “‘Tis the season, you know…Ho-Ho-Ho. Besides, I can worry enough for both of us. Think you can keep the home fires burning that long?”
“I can do that,” Cindy said, squeezing his arm, while he figeted with the straps. Then, sharply, she asked: “Are you afraid?” The question weighed heavily on her mind, and her heart. She had asked once before, but he wouldn’t talk about it…and now, the answer suddenly seemed very important to her.
“Plenty,” Justin started, then, before he could say more, standing on tip-toe, his face cradled in her soft hands, Cindy kissed him…long and too firm, a live, exquisitely loving thing that seemed somehow to reach inside him. Startled, he pulled back without really meaning to, but she moved with him, letting him know it was okay without words, and he felt a familiar sense of loss, as he held her for a time…perhaps a bit closer this time…hearing her shallow breathing, sensing her nearness…just feeling the glowing warmth of her. He thought he might miss that…her.
Then why don’t you say it? With time running down, is it really so difficult? Tick-tock?
He shoved it away, and saw that her eyes were dry as she drew back, and nuzzled close to his ear. “The best of all good fortune to you, Justin,” she whispered, and then kissed his cheek. “Please take good care of you. I lo…I’ll miss you.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, hating the goodbyes. “Me too.”
As close as he’ll get, Cindy thought, as he pecked her on her cheek. Then he turned quickly and walked to the door. He pushed the gray exit button on the control pad, then the bluish steel door whirred up and out of sight – the same as it had on thirty thousand other days he thought weren’t quite like this one. He saw the elevator, as he stepped off the carpet of home and onto the plate steel walk of the corridor, its tightly closed doors waiting to open, when he turned and faced her.
A grinning tech freak, she thought then, the product of a lifelong environment, framed by a prefab steel door. To her, it looked as if a cage had been opened, and she couldn’t help wondering if an untamed animal ever returned to the bars, once it had tasted freedom. Then she wondered if leaving ever freed their hearts.
“I do like the glasses,” she said again, but weakly. The tears were close now. “I really do.”
Justin blew her a kiss. “Thanks, dry eyes. You take care…gotta go now.”
And then he was gone, striding down the corridor before she could answer. Cindy could see him as she turned and walked to the sofa, and thought she could hear a different sound, as the door pulled down behind her. A cage being shut, it came to her, as she sat down and placed her hands in her lap. She was still looking at the door – a cage door? – when her fingers began to curl and uncurl, working slowly into the sheer black fabric of her nightgown. She began to wait. But she didn’t cry.
Not then.
