One Second After [26]
"So why didn't we just protect ourselves?" Kate asked. "Hell, what does it take to build a better surge protector?"
John sighed and shook his head. She was so damn right.
"Kate, it's some rather technical stuff, but it meant retrofitting a lot of stuff, hundreds of billions perhaps, to do all of it. And besides, a lot of people in high places, well, they just glazed over when the scientists started with the technical jargon, the reports would go into committees, and ..."
"And now we got this," Charlie said coldly. John nodded, frustrated.
"Global warming, sure, spend hundreds of billions on what might have been a threat, though a lot say it wasn't. This, though, it didn't have the hype, no big stars or politicians running around shouting about it.. . and it just never registered on anyone's screen except for a few."
"I don't get it with the cars, though," Tom interjected. "Computers, yes, but a car?"
"Any car made after roughly 1980 or so has some solid-state electronics in it," John said. "Remember carburetors, thing of the past with fuel injection and electronic ignition. That's why my mother-in-law's old Edsel is OK and Bartlett's VW out there. No computers in the engine, and vacuum tubes in the radio. The surge had nothing to fry off; therefore, it still runs. Now everything in a car is wired into some kind of computer. Better living through modern science."
John fished in his pocket for a cigarette, pulled it out, then hesitated. Kate was glaring at him, as was Tom. The town had a no-smoking ordinance for all its buildings.
John hesitated, but damn, he wanted one now.
"Look, guys, if you want me to talk, I get a cigarette."
"Mary would kick your ass if she knew you were still smoking," Kate said.
"Don't lay the guilt on me," John replied sharply. It was Mary's dying that had snagged him back into smoking after being clean for ten years. The army had started getting uptight on it, and amongst all the other aspects of grooming for the star, smoking was a checkmark against him with some of the bean counters and actuaries in the Pentagon who argued why invest the effort on a guy who might die early?
"Go on; light up." She hesitated. "And give me one of those damn things, too."
Now it was his turn to hesitate. He hated leading someone back into sin, but on this day ... what the hell.
He lit her cigarette. She leaned back in her chair, inhaled deeply, let it out, and sighed.
"God damn, I've been wanting that for six years now. Damn, is it good." A couple of seconds later she actually smiled, the first time she had done so since he walked in.
"Head rush," she muttered, then took another puff.
"Damn near everything has a computer in it now," John continued. "Cash registers, phones, toys, cars, trucks, but, most vulnerable of all, the complex web of our electrical distribution system. All of it was waiting to get hit."
Tom leaned against the wall and let a few choice words slip out.
"You think they'd of seen this coming. Done something about it."
"Who is 'they,' Tom?"
"Jesus, John, you know. The president, Homeland Security. Hell, I was getting e-mails damn near every day on terrorist alerts, training on what to do if they hijacked a truck loaded with nuclear waste, even a drill with the hospital last year if they unleashed some sort of plague. I got twenty bio and hazmat suits in a storage closet. Never even heard about this thing being talked about."
John sighed.
"Yeah, I know. It was off most people's screens. Seemed too sci-fi to some of them. But that doesn't matter now."
"I'm still worried about radiation, though," Kate said, "fallout." "Don't."
"You sound rather assured of yourself."
"You don't have a single radio working here, nothing at all?" John asked. Tom shook his head. "I do." "Where?"
"In the Edsel. It's an old tube radio. I checked it last night. Static from one end to the other. If this thing was local, if they had popped