One Second After [25]
"So, is the whole country like this right now?" Kate asked. "Or is it just us?"
He shook his head.
"Look, I'm kinda tired, sat up most of the night keeping watch on the house, so let me try to explain this in order if that's OK." "Sure, John, take your time," Charlie intervened.
"Well, at the same time the potential energy release of EMP grew, and believe me, I don't understand the technical side of it at all, just that I know that it happens when a nuke goes off and we suspect there's ways of calibrating a small nuke to give off a high yield of energy. Our electronic equipment was getting more and more sensitive to it."
"No one saw an explosion," Charlie said, "and believe me, I've asked around, kind of suspecting the same thing."
"That's just it, it's in the report," and John motioned to the article on Kate's desk.
She looked at it, thumbed through it.
"Mind if we run off some copies? ..." And she fell silent, blushing slightly at what sounded like a dumb comment.
"We're all conditioned," John said with a reassuring smile. "I tried to make coffee in the machine this morning. It's OK, Kate."
She smiled sheepishly and nodded. "Go on, John."
"Well, to Charlie's question. EMP doesn't really hit unless you blow off the bomb above the atmosphere. Again the 'Compton effect,' and believe me, I've read about it, but don't have a real grasp on it myself; I need a tech head for that. Just that the burst above the atmosphere sets off an electro-disturbance, kind of like a magnetic storm, which cascades down into the lower atmosphere like a sheet of lightning and bango, it fries everything with electronics in it."
"Just one bomb?" Kate asked.
He nodded.
"Remember a TV back in the fifties, the early sixties, all those tubes, and hot as hell? That same thing now sits in the palm of my kid's hand when she's playing one of those damn games."
He wondered for a second if maybe all the pocket-size computer toys were gone.... If so, no regrets there at least.
"So the stuff gets more and more delicate, and more and more prone to even the slightest electrical surge."
"Someone could now fire off a nuke, calibrated to do a maximum load of EMP, and anything within line of sight from up in space gets fried, even from a thousand miles away. For that matter, anything hooked into our electrical web goes as well. Electrical lines are like giant antennas when it comes to EMP, and guide it straight into your house, through the sockets, and, wham, right into anything hooked up."
"Surge protectors, though?" Kate said. "I spent a hundred bucks on one for my new television."
He shook his head.
"Surge protectors don't work for this," Charlie interjected, and John looked over at him.
"We had one, exactly one, briefing on this about two years ago," Charlie said. "Hundreds on every other threat, just one on this, but I remember somebody asking that question. Seems like this EMP moves a lot faster than ordinary power surges like from lightning. Not faster in terms of speed, just that the impact hits and peaks faster, three or four times that of a lightning bolt hitting your electric line. So fast that the relay inside the surge protector doesn't have time to trigger off and boom, the whole system is fried. That's why it's so darn dangerous. It fries out all electronics before any of the built-in protections can react."
"You still haven't answered my question about your damn car," Tom snapped. "Why is yours working and I've got six squad cars out there that are dead?"
"The electronics," Charlie interrupted. "That's what got me thinking on it, too, but I didn't feel it was right to say anything about it." "Why not?" Tom asked.
"Panic. That's why. I saw an article on the Web about this a couple of months back, and it was a lot worse than what