The Rift (75 page)

The President tried to focus on this problem. It seemed to require more than his current level of concentration could quite absorb.

“Latvia is only a little more than fifty percent ethnic Latvian,” the National Security Advisor said. “The rest are mostly Russians or Belorussians. We presume that the Russian infiltrators will attempt to provoke conflict between the Latvians and the minorities, who will then ask for Russian protection ...”

“Latvia and the other Baltics are within the West’s sphere of influence,” the Secretary said. “They’re candidate NATO members, and the only reason they are not fully within our defense umbrella is that we have tried not to offend Russian sensibilities. The Baltics were part of the USSR, and the Russians would be very sensitive about these nations being made part of a Western military alliance.”

“The Baltics are militarily indefensible,” added the advisor. “Latvia’s nothing but a plain with rolling hills— Russian tanks could be in the capital in a matter of hours. I have to question whether NATO should commit itself to defending that which cannot be defended.”

“Enrolling the Baltics in NATO is the best way of protecting them,” the Secretary countered. “Let the Russians know that if they roll their tanks over that Latvian plain, there will be
consequences,
that they’ll have to take on all of Europe and the U.S. at the same time ...”

The President’s head whirled. The Secretary’s vehemence was making his head ache. He pressed his palms to his temples. “Gentlemen,” he said. “It’s a little late to debate the NATO issue now. The question is, what can we do in the current situation?”

“Sorry, Mr. President,” the Secretary said. “But this is a clear challenge to the West and to your leadership. They want to discover whether we still possess the will to defend our commitments in light of the tragedy that has befallen us.”

Will
seemed to the President a perfectly absurd thing to want to possess. What did will matter in a world that could wipe you out without thinking? That could open a crevasse in your path and leave you a burnt cinder on the runway?

Will was meaningless. An absurdity. It flew in the face of Nature. And for a
nation
to possess will—
that
notion was even more ridiculous.

Still, the holder of the office of the President was presumed to possess something called will. The President supposed that he was obliged to pretend that something like will existed.

And then an idea occurred to him.

“Do you suppose the Russian President knows what his people are up to?” he asked. He himself, after all, hadn’t known there were American soldiers in Georgia; perhaps the Russian President was similarly uninformed. Or indifferent.

The Secretary seemed interested in this idea. “It’s very possible,” he said. “The Executive over there has uncertain control over some of its departments, let alone things like paramilitaries. It wouldn’t be the first time some ambitious minister or general blindsided his own leadership.”

“Perhaps you should tell our ambassador to inform their President on the QT,” the President said. “Point out what a PR disaster the whole thing could be if it went wrong, like in Chechnya.” He turned to the Secretary. “It
was
Chechnya where they really screwed the pooch, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell them that this isn’t a public issue yet,” the President free-associated. “But that it
can
be. Tell him, hey, his people have
already
screwed up their little operation, everyone’s onto them, if he acts quickly, he can save face.”

“But if the Russian President is the person behind it ...”

“It won’t make any difference,” the National Security Advisor said quickly. “It’s a way of saving his face whether he’s a part of it or not. Just tell him the jig’s up. There’s no need to make a public issue of it.”

“Not unless we
need
to,” the Secretary said. Calculation gleamed in his eyes.

The President rose from behind the desk. “Let me know what the Russian President says,” he said. “I’m interested.”

I’m interested in knowing why he cares,
he thought.

The others, startled, rose from their seats. “I have a big day tomorrow,” the President said. “I’ll leave the details to you gentlemen.”

Maybe his idea was useful. Maybe it wasn’t. He would probably never know.

The world could open at his feet and swallow him up, and it wouldn’t make a difference to anything.

He left the room, made his way out through the West Office Wing into the White House proper, and went up carpeted steps to his own private apartments. He sat on his bed for a long while and tried to decide whether or not he really wanted to lie down.

He really couldn’t tell. So, after thinking about it for a while, he did nothing.

*

Jason hadn’t had a good day. Most of it was spent cleaning out a feed store. The roof had fallen in, but a team of grownups had cleaned up some of the wreckage, and propped up the roof so that it was safe to go inside. The Samaritans were employed in hauling out fifty-pound feed sacks, twenty-pound sacks of dog food— Jason hoped he wouldn’t be eating it later— and sacks of useful seeds, which apparently people hoped to plant for food. Most of the Samaritans were older, bigger, and stronger than Jason, and the work was easier for them. Sweat dripped in his eyes and he panted for breath in the humid air. The roof creaked and groaned to aftershocks. By the time lunch break came, all he wanted to do was throw himself to the ground and try to sleep. Mr. Magnusson had to badger him into eating his peanut butter sandwiches.

During the lunch break, three of the other Samaritans asked him if he’d brought a nuclear reactor into camp with him. They pronounced it
nu-cu-lar.
He always told them yes.

After lunch Jason went back to hauling sacks, but shortly thereafter a call came on Magnusson’s radio, and everyone was loaded into the truck to go somewhere else and harvest fish. Whatever a fish harvest consisted of, Jason thought, it had to be better than hauling feed sacks.

The fish emergency was across the road from Frankland’s camp. When Jason stepped up the earth embankment onto the edge of the catfish pond, he looked at the pond in stunned surprise. There were
acres
of still water glinting silver in the sun, all divided into smaller ponds by earthen barriers. All of the water was
choked
with fish, tens of thousands of them.

And all the fish were dead, floating belly-up. They were so closely packed in places they formed shoals.

A number of adults, Jason saw, were gathered around a man who lay on the earthen bank by one of the ponds, next to a large, bright blue machine that looked like an oversized outboard motor. Jason was sufficiently exhausted that he didn’t realize right away that the man was dead.

“Right,” Magnusson said. “We’ve got to harvest all the fish, okay? So we can eat them, okay?” He grinned. “Big fish fry tonight!”

Jason’s head reeled. The fish were
dead.
He were supposed to eat poisoned fish for dinner?

He raised a hand. “Mr. Magnusson?” he said. “What killed these fish?”

Magnusson looked at him, grinned. “It wasn’t anything that’ll kill us, okay?”

“What was it?” Jason asked.

“Oxygen starvation,” Magnusson said. “They weren’t poisoned, they strangled to death. So we can eat them, okay?” He went on to explain that if the temperature and humidity were right, algae could grow in the catfish ponds. The algae used up all the oxygen, so the fish would die unless they could get oxygen.

Joe Johnson, who owned the ponds, had died attempting to save his fish. The blue object was, in effect, a large blue outboard motor, electrically powered, with a propeller on the end. It was called an aerator, and its propeller acted to thrash air into the water so that the catfish wouldn’t die. When algae began to grow in his catfish ponds, Mr. Johnson had tried to start his aerator, but had electrocuted himself by accident, and his catfish had died before anyone noticed.

Stupid way to get killed, Jason thought through his weariness. But then, he thought, what was the intelligent way to die? Get blown up by your star?

Jason looked from the dead man to the acres of dead fish. “We’re not going to harvest them by hand, are we?”

Magnusson grinned. “Not exactly, no. We’ve got other plans for
you
.”

In a few minutes a truck arrived, with a crane on its bed. A net was strung from the crane, and a team of men deployed the net along the far side of the pond. Then the crane hauled in the net, brimming with dead catfish, and dropped the fish into the back of one of the pickup trucks that had brought the work crews to the site.

“Right!” Magnusson called, and clapped his hands. “Everyone get on the slime line!”

Jason realized with a certain listless revulsion that he was not expected to rescue the dead fish from the ponds, he was going to have to clean them afterward.

“Ten tons of fish!” Magnusson shouted. “And we’re going to save every pound, glory hallelujah!”

*

“Omar,” Tree Simpson said. His voice crackled over the radio in Omar’s police cruiser. “Omar, I’ve got some information for you. About Morris.”

“Yes?”

“Well, you know, I thought I should maybe get the body X-rayed, to see if there were any bullets in it. But Dr. Patel’s little X-ray machine is out of commission, so what I did— I’m kinda proud of this, actually— was to borrow Joe Roberts’ metal detector. And when I passed it over the head, it started beeping. So I probed into the skull, and I came out with a deformed nine-millimeter round.”

“I took a nine millimeter into custody today,” Omar said. “From one of the rioters.” The gun would test negative, of course, because the pistol that killed Morris was sitting on Omar’s hip, but that didn’t signify. All that meant was that there was more than one armed bad man in the camp: more information with which to terrify the good people of the parish.

“It may be a while before we can send it to the state police to test it.”

“It’ll wait,” Omar said. “Thanks a bunch, Tree. This is real helpful.”

Now he would tell Mrs. Morris that someone from the camp had killed her husband. He would put out a murder warrant for a man already dead, send out a bulletin, and then he would send deputies to everyone who lived around the camp, warning them of armed, murderous refugees. Don’t talk to
anyone
from the camp, they would say, just call the police and we’ll deal with them.

And then Omar would do what was necessary. He didn’t want to think about it yet, because it would mean the end of everything he had worked for.

But he knew he would face it when the time came.

*

Jason was given a knife and instructions on the filleting of a catfish, a task more difficult than it sounded. The dorsal spine had to be avoided, and the tough skin, which had no scales, had to be peeled off rather than scraped. The easiest way to accomplish this was to nail the fish’s head to a plank, then peel the skin off with a pair of pliers. Jason repeatedly demonstrated his incompetence at this task, so Magnusson reassigned him to another group that gutted the fish before the stronger, more experienced boys peeled them.

Others were getting the big smoker ready to smoke fish on an industrial scale, other fish were being salted, drying racks were being readied, and the kitchens were frying and baking fish as fast as they could be delivered.

Dinner was fried fish served with a ball of rice. For once Jason ate as much as he wanted. He suspected this generosity wouldn’t survive the current emergency, and though the fish half-nauseated him, he made himself eat as much as he could. The work went on after dark, by floodlights strung up on the poles that held the PA speakers. Sister Sheryl’s Apocalypse, the weird artwork with its iridescent, hallucinatory rendition of biblical scenes, glowed in the light of the floods and provided an eerie backdrop to the toiling workers. The Reverend Frankland’s tones boomed from the speakers, either old recorded speeches about the upcoming Apocalypse or genial encouragement to everyone on the slime line.

An exhausted cheer rose from the camp as the last of the fish was cleaned about one in the morning. Jason’s clothes were covered with blood and fish guts. He smelled like offal and his head swam with exhaustion. He’d cut his hands with the filleting knife, and no bandage would stick to him in the slime, so he just bled onto the fish until the wounds closed. He washed in a galvanized horse trough and threw himself onto the first piece of level ground that wasn’t already occupied by a stunned figure.

If boys cried that night, Jason didn’t hear them.

*

The Earthquake.
—
A letter has been received in this city, from a gentleman of the first respectability in Tennessee, which states that the Earthquake, so generally felt on the 16th of Dec. was so violent in the vicinity of his residence, that several chimnies were thrown down, and that eighteen or twenty acres of land on Piney river had suddenly sunk so low, that the tops of the trees were on a level with the surrounding earth. Four other shocks were experienced on the 17th, and one or more continued to occur every day to the 30th aft., the date of the letter.

Raleigh, (N.C.) Jan. 24

“It’s been lovely,” Wilona said. “Hard work, but lovely. I almost fainted when I helped Dr. Patel set that broken leg, but afterward Mrs. Ashenden said I was very brave.” She smiled. “And all the patients are so understanding. So kind. Even the ones who are in pain. They know we’re doing our best.”

Omar listened to Wilona in silence while a headache beat through his temples. He had picked her up at the Clarendon camp and was driving her home for the night, after which he would drive back to his office and continue his planning session with Micah Knox.

“We’ve got about a dozen cases of diarrhea,” Wilona said. “There’s some kind of stomach bug going around. That’s the most disgusting thing we’ve had to deal with.” She gave a little laugh. “We had that with Davy when he was little, of course, but I’m out of practice.
Look out
!” she called.

Omar swerved to avoid the figure of old Cudgel, off tramping the road alone at night. Omar caught a glimpse of the hermit’s yellow eyes in his lined, black, bearded face beneath his big hat. Cudgel carried a stick over his shoulder with some kind of dead animal dangling from it.