Don Pendleton - Civil War II (15 page)

"Don't talk that way, Floyd Benton. The President has been very kind to us. He needs your support, and you shall continue to give it to him. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you, Mrs. Fool. And the Governor, Mrs. Fool, is for damn sure going to get drunk."

"Don't you day-yuh!"

"Oh but that's one thing I
do
dare, my sweet, my executive sweet. Go to hell, Mrs. Governor Fool. The Governor of Arkansas is getting drunk." He stepped to the desk and pushed the intercom signaler and said, "Leroy—bring me a whiskey sour. No—make it a bottle and the mixings." He turned to glare at his wife. "And furthermore, my dear, I am getting out of politics. Just as quickly as I can."

It was the truth she had long dreaded to hear. "You
think
too much, Floyd, that's your trouble, you worry about things that don't concern you. Maybe you
should
have something to drink. I'll even join you, dee-yuh. And listen to me. Nobody ever said it was fun being a governor. But it's a
coffin'.
You hear me? A
callin'.
A man, a
man
cannot turn his back to that. You drink some whiskey and come to bed. Mama will make it feel better." She smiled coyly. "You want Mama to make it feel better?"

"Jesus Christ," he muttered.

The house boy rapped gently on the door and came in without awaiting an invitation. He carried a tray, covered with a napkin. The Governor dropped into the chair at his desk. "Put it here, Leroy," he said.

Leroy smiled and set the tray down. He was a small wiry man with delicate features, wavy black hair, and a slightly negroid nose and mouth. He whisked the napkin away, rotated the bottle to show the Governor the label, and set it on the desk. Still in the tray were bottles of mix and some sliced lemons. Alongside the lemon slices lay a long paring knife.

"What'd you bring the knife for, Leroy?" the Governor asked absently. He reached across the tray and snared a bottle of mix.

"To cut you with, Governor," Leroy replied pleasantly. He stepped closer and his hand moved toward the desk.

The Governor chuckled and picked up the bottle of mix. The chuckle turned to a bubbling sound, and the Governor slid forward in his chair, surprised eyes seeking Leroy's face, his throat slit neatly from ear to ear, blood flowing quickly onto the immaculate shirtfront, soaking into the silk lapels of the jacket. Surprise and dejection and depression and disgust and self-loathing and life itself departed from the eyes, then the Governor's head slumped forward onto the desk, spilling the wMskey.

The Governor's wife made a startled sound and raised herself to a half-sit on the bed. "Le-roy, did you spill the wto-key?" she cried.

"No ma'am," Leroy replied. He stepped quickly to the bed, gave her an instant to see the knife, and then showed her what he'd done.

He left the knife lying beside her on the blood-soaked bed, then he went to the window and looked out. The first fingers of dawn were pushing into the Little Rock sky.

Leroy sighed, smiled, and then quietly went back to his station.

CHAPTER 9

George Reamer had never considered himself a dedicated civil servant. Actually George had great contempt for civil servants. "Government workers are the flattest people on earth," George Reamer always said. And if he happened to be in a jocular mood, he would usually add, "That's why the blacks moved in on the field—they were
born
flat."

George actually had no solidified dislike for blacks, though. He would tell you so, if you should ask him. He thought they could be made better through technology, specifically through genetic engineering. "All of us, all life forms, are just so much electricity solidified," George would tell you. "In humans there are good circuits and bad circuits. It isn't the black's fault that he's composed of mostiy bad circuits."

Reamer's greater interests in life lay, however, in electronic technology, not in human genetics. Another thing which George always said was, "I'm sure glad the human race has technology. We sure have nothing else worthwhile."

George liked machines. Machines he could understand. Especially electronic machines—and "the more sophisticated, the better," George liked to say.
People
were merely imperfect machines. George built
perfect
machines. His official title was CATCO, or Chief of Airflow Technical Center Operations. And George was more than a CATCO, George was CATCO at Kansas City, which meant that George Reamer was CATCO of the center of the universe. He was never hesitant to say so. He was proud of it. He had a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering, a master's degree in electronic logic, and a doctorate in electronic philosophy. The thesis he offered for his doctor's degree was titled "Electronic Parallels of Space-Time Continuua." It was to a challenge of Einstein's model of the cosmos, and few minds in the United States would admit to having the faintest idea of what the man was suggesting, though most scientific minds respected George Reamer. George did not like to discuss the thing himself. It seemed to embarrass him—perhaps in the same sense that it would embarrass God to discuss the secrets of creation with mere mortals who could never hope to grasp the heavenly language—and George would always switch the conversation to something more concrete, such as who he picked to win the next World Series or the future of aviation in America.

Once he confided to a friend that "God is unharnessed energy. Whatever portion we harness, dies. Therefore, mankind is daily killing and eating God." But nobody was ever able to tie that idea into his theory of electronic continuua.

At any rate, it seemed somehow fitting, to George's mind, that he be at the center of the universe and, in his mind, that is exactly where he was, electronically speaking and airflow-wise. The Kansas City Airflow Technical Center (KCATO) was actually the "brains" of the entire nation, aviation-wise. It was an electronic wonderland. KCATO occupied a low-slung building comprising more than two-thousand acre-feet. George had engineered the entire feat—or, at any rate, he had been the Project Leader during the entire period of design and development. Fittingly, he was offered the office of CATCO when the project was completed and placed into operation. And, also fittingly, George accepted the position. Even if it was a civil service job. Nobody else really knew just how to keep all the computers properly meshed, or how to keep all the robot stations properly balanced to insure that no two aircraft ever occupied the same precise cube of airspace at (he same precise time. In the era of supersonic air transport, which also happened to be the age of heli-cars, hovercars, zot-cars, air busses, air shuttles, and air taxies, this was no small task. George Reamer was the genius of Hie airflow age, and none would contest this.

One of George's most persistent nightmares always found
him
standing at the central computer, the
big brain,
feeding a program tape in backwards or upside down. Another one which cropped up now and then involved independent action by the machines he'd created, a dream in which they "took over" and began thinking for themselves. George had his nightmares. It was the price of genius.

There was one man at the Kansas City Central in whom George Reamer had absolute confidence. The man was a mere technician; his name was, incredibly, Archibald Gillingham. George called him "Gilly," and Archibald didn't seem to mind. Gilly, indeed, never seemed to mind anything George did or even suggested doing.

Gilly seemed eager to devote as much of his own life to the KCATO as did Reamer himself, and he had studied diligently under George for three years. He seemed to possess a natural knack for electronic philosophy; indeed, the tutor-student relationship between the two proved so stimulating to George that he had experienced a veritable explosion of consciousness, an expansion of awareness, to use his words, which was far greater and more meaningful than anything the student himself could have gained from the relationship. The explanation, of course, and one which George himself readily recognized, was that he had at last found someone who could understand him when he talked. The student became a sounding-board—George could "talk these things outside"—and, in so doing, he could solidify what may have otherwise amounted to no more than transitory impressions.

On the night of March 9th, 1999, George Reamer experienced a nightmare. It was shortly past midnight. The vision was so realistic, so fraught with the concrete, that he simply could not get back to sleep. He paced about the social of his suburban Kansas City cube for perhaps thirty minutes, drinking warm milk, then warm brandy, then mint-flavored whiskey. But he could not shake the feeling of impending doom. He saw airplanes, throughout the skies of North America, suddenly being diverted electronically into patterns of chaos—large astro-liners flying wingtip formation to shuttle-busses, zot-cars shooting straight upwards into the bellies of chopper-ferries, and thousand-passenger jet commuters diving vertically towards the earth.

And, in his agony, George Reamer began to form another theory of universal mind. He was becoming
psychic,
or
tuned-in,
to the logic circuits—or thought processes—of the airflow computers. He was developing
ESP
with his
machines! They were plotting somethingl

For another ten minutes the CATCO tried to shake off the nutty idea, and it was a nutty idea, he knew it was. Finally, however, George could stand it no longer. He had to get out to the KCATO and see for himself that the machines had not taken over.

He threw a robe on over his pajamas, tubed up to the roof, stepped into his zot-car and flew a beeline uncontrolled transit to the center. It was shortly after two o'clock, Kansas City time, when he ran into the central computer room, his robe flying out behind him, his hair streaming down across his forehead, for all the world an Einstein on the run.

Then he saw Gilly, standing nonchalantly at the brain console, a faint smile on his face.

"Thank the ohms," George muttered. Had Gilly experienced a similar dream? "Well, well," he called over, trying to sound casual, "the two old philosophers, prowling

around the universal center in dead of night. What brings you out here, Gilly?"

The other man flashed him a smile. "I had an idea, just couldn't shake it, thought I'd come out and see about it," he replied.

Sure, okay, so Gilly
did
have the same uneasy feeling. "I think it's continuum-ESP," George told him in a husky voice.

"No, I'm working on another idea," Gilly replied.

"What do you mean?" George asked, a shivery feeling gripping his spine. "What kind of idea?"

"Well . . . come over and take a look," Gilly suggested, the smile widening.

"Hey! Hey hey hey!" George cried, bending low over the console. "What the hell is
this?'

"I programmed the inductance relay back through the and/or logic to see if I could pick any transients. Look. It's working. See?"

George screamed,
"You crazy bastard do you know what you've done
?" Then the deeper implications crashed into his reeling mind in a blinding expansion of awareness.
"Oh God\"
he gasped. "You've given them an
in\ You're letting it THINKl"

George staggered to another console and snatched up a microphone, "
Attention all aircraft, emergency, airflow emergency
!" he gasped.
"Fly dead\ Fly deadl
Ohmigod migod, I'm not getting out, I'm not, what's the matter with this goddamn transmitter—
don't tell me they've got it tied up tool"
He rolled frantic eyes toward his student assistant. "Gilly! Goddammit come over here and help me!"

"It's too late, Whitey," Gilly told him, positively beaming as he strolled toward the console.

"What?
What? Whatta you mean?
Then George saw the small revolver in Gilly's hand, and he immediately began to form a dizzying theory regarding the natural perversity of
animate
objects. But George did not have time to bring in all the parameters and exponentials of the theory and Gilly would not have been inclined to "talk the

thing outside" with him anyway.

The revolver reported once, just once, and a tiny hole opened just between George's eyes, and it was the end of another nightmare. It was, perhaps, the price of genius.

Commentary on the National Air Disasters of 1999

Due to the overshadowing events in which they found their context, the air disasters of March 9-10, 1999 were never coherently cemented in the public consciousness. Indeed, a complete assessment of "what happened in the airspace" was not formalized for several years, and then only through a laborious gleaning and inspection of isolated and fragmented news reports originating in various parts of the nation. It is perhaps proper then, that an attempt be made here to determine and document once and for all, the march of events across the continental airspace during those, fateful few hours of national history.

The earliest documented disaster involves Oceana Flight 140, enroute from Sydney, Australia to an airdrome outside the old city of Chicago, Illinois. A stratocruiser, this TomFan-80 type aircraft, developed by the Australian government in the middle nineteen-nineties and operated under a charter granted by the Oceanic Alliance in 1997, was a rough equivalent of other atomic-powered craft of that day. Passenger capacity ranged between five hundred and six hundred and fifty, depending upon cargo manifested; it exhibited a cruising range of some 35,000 miles at 2500 knots, with an operating ceiling of 65,000 feet. Flight 140, departing Sydney at one o'clock on the afternoon of March 10 (East Meridian Time), made a hover-stop over the Samoan Republic, enplaning some 40 passengers, then back-tracked for a cargo hover at Guam, in the Mariannas Mandate, and then proceeded along a flight path to make a foodstuffs drop over the offshore islands of Taiwan, where survivors of the China plague-famine belt had been spotted some days earlier.