But the rest of the world waited for Albertson Randell's announcement.
Five minutes before press time, Ken Collins and Colonel David Johannsen, along with several members of the Secret Service, loyal CIA, and a number of armed military personnel, strode down the hall briskly toward the control booth.
The soldiers dropped back in pairs behind them, taking up key positions in the White House corridors. Since Ken Collins was still the presidential press secretary, everyone let him pass.
He entered the control booth, quietly. The director turned around and smiled. "Well, hey, Ken! Good to see you back!"
Collins held the door open for the head of the Secret Service to climb through.
The director nodded a greeting to him. "Mr. Rushton, come on in." He had been working all morning long with most of the White House technical staff, but hadn't expected the head of the Secret Service himself to show up.
"How are things going, Bob?" Collins asked the director with his most congenial smile.
"Great. We've five minutes to show time. We missed you here. The last couple of days have been like a Chinese fire drill. No one knew what was up. Things are quieter now." He smiled at everyone from his swivel chair.
"Well," Ken began softly, "there's been a slight change in plans."
"Ok. What's the scoop?"
Ken said, "While the conference is going on, I want you to run the video and run this over the audio."
He held out a small sonic-wafer. "We want you to cut out the sound transmission of the press conference as soon as Randell goes on and play this instead."
The director looked at the sonic-wafer of
Tintagel
, confused. "I don't understand. This isn't in the …" and he began leafing back his program notes on his clipboard.
"Do it," Rushton ordered. Two Secret Service men pulled out their service revolvers and held them on the director.
"What's going on?"
Collins was careful. He had known Robert Dobbins as the director and coordinator for all White House media facilities for a number of years. As press secretary, he had worked with Dobbins closely. They were slightly more than acquaintances or business partners.
Collins looked out of the beveled windows of the control booth down into the press room to make sure no one on the outside saw what was going on on the inside.
"Now, take it easy, Bob," he said. "This is all on the up and up. Believe me. The President wants it. In fact, ordered it," he smiled. "Ordered it herself."
"Katie …?"
One of the assistant coordinators beside Bob Dobbins, wearing a set of earphones and a pin-mike, said, "Thirty seconds, please. Standby."
No one else moved. The assistant looked sheepishly over at the director. The Secret Service men held their guns low, out of sight.
Collins handed Dobbins the wafer. Rushton looked on.
"The President?" Dobbins asked, puzzled. "She's all right? It says here that…" He had the text of Randell's startling announcement before him. "But I don't understand."
"You don't have to," Rushton said. "It's all been taken care of. Just play it over the audio. And don't let those inside hear it either."
"Ten seconds. Cue camera one."
The director turned to the microphone. The assistant counted down the seconds. Bob Dobbins switched it on.
"Ladies and Gentemen—the President of the United States."
The Seal of the President filled the television screens on the console before than. Albertson Randell came out from behind the curtains at stage left and stood before the gathered news-people. He dwarfed the podium that had originally been constructed for the smaller Katie Babcock. He kept the podium for effect.
Dobbins then took the sonic-wafer from Ken's outstretched palm and slotted it into the board, throwing three switches as he did. He glanced back at Collins, questioningly, and Ken stared at him, nodding. The only people who heard what Albertson Randell had to say were the press audience.
Tintagel
began playing back through the earphones of the technicians at the control booth. It was on audio as well, so Ken and the Secret Service agents could hear it.
"Now—" Bob Dobbins squared off . "Mind telling me what this is all about?" He pointed to the sonic-wafer of
Tintagel
.
Collins ignored him for a moment, watching instead how the press corps was taking Randell's announcement. Everyone inside the press room began looking at one another, amazed and perplexed. Randell had just announced that he was assuming the presidency. Permanently.
"Yes," Ken said, hearing the opening chords of
Tintagel
flood the control booth. The emotional patterns of Francis Lanier were imprinted on the recording so strongly that everyone was beginning to become overwhelmed by the music. Baktropol couldn't prevent anything from happening now. The Leander Interphase ingraining would nullify any preventative except a downright cure.
Suddenly one of the Secret Service men vanished with a resounding
pop
! Bob Dobbins swung around. Rushton only stared, knowingly. Then he himself vanished. The last expression in his eyes was not one of recognition, but one of mesmerization. The music enthralled them all. The Interphase, ingrained at its most intense level, was working.
Collins said to the director, fighting the music for a few minutes more, "I want this on constant broadcast. Put it on automatic. Can you do it?"
Bob Dobbins' eyes glazed.
"Bob!"
He snapped out of it. "Yes, sure. But why?"
Dobbins' assistant controller suddenly vanished, his headset dropping to the chair cushion.
"We're moving," Ken said with a smile.
I don't understand …" but Dobbins shut down the console anyway, switching over to automatic replay. "We're on for as long as you like."
Good
, Collins thought.
It'll be up to NASA to hold on to the transmission after the wafer stops playing here
.
He knew that the satellites would broadcast the piece for as long as possible all around the world, wherever radios and televisions were picking up Albertson Randell's historic takeover of the United States.
The reporters began to panic. Soldiers—the new White House elite guard—ran into the room. Collins watched impassively. His skin was beginning to tingle. His spine shuddered with what seemed to be a thousand watts of electricity.
Bob Dobbins, staring wide-eyed, suddenly vanished.
Ken let go of himself, falling into the music. It would be several minutes before someone realized what was going on in the control booth. But that's all the time it would take. By then, millions would be gone.
Transferred
.
And he vanished on the spot. The control room stood empty as the sonic-wafer, locked into the repeat position, played on and on.
Lanier, wrapped in his Arctic parka, stood beside an old cane chair on his front porch. The lights in the surrounding Bitterroot Valley were, one by one, winking on. As were those in Missoula.
They're arriving
, he thought.
They're coming home
.
Christy's voice came from the living room through the door. "Fran, it's the President. She's on the horn."
He slowly turned around and came in from outdoors.
On the videophone, Katie Babcock's face, haloed in the usual aura of cigarette smoke, came smiling through.
"So," she said. "How's it feel to be unemployed?"
He smiled thinly, relieved. No one suffered from Liu Shan's Syndrome anymore. And no one needed to fear music because of it.
"It feels fine, Katie."
She grinned. "We've got some more reports for you."
"Let's hear them."
She reached beside her, drawing up a few sheets of printout. She almost resembled a newscaster, and had been collecting reports all day long such as it was.
"Our projections show that we can retrieve just under one billion of the world's population." She beamed as she spoke. "It turns out that much of South America and the Orient, despite their own troubles, were tuned in. We don't think Africa caught the broadcast, but there might be isolated pockets that'll show up later. We're getting an excellent response from all the major Indian reservations, particularly the Navajo and Hopi. I guess all they do is watch television or listen to the radio anyway. And one other thing happened."
"What's that?"
"You have this thing for buffalo?"
"Not particularly. Why?"
"It seems as if South Dakota, Wyoming, and parts of Nebraska are covered with buffalo."
Lanier laughed. "Good. Let's give them back to the Indians."
Katie was pleased. "But," she began, "some parts of the country are completely uninhabited. Did you do it on purpose?"
Lanier squinted into the videophone. "No. Not at all. I tried to make it so that anyone who heard the music would return to their same region. Why? What's missing?"
She consulted another sheet of computer paper. "We're missing most of the southeast; Los Angeles and all of southern California are also gone. There's an enormous bay where L.A. used to be. We think that you must've feared the big quake due the area, and dreamed one in. In any case, that part of the country must have been completely cut off by the fighting by the time we got out of there and this morning when we set things up in Washington." She shook her head. "And it's too bad."
Lanier was saddened. He had a number of acquaintances who apparently wouldn't be coming here.
Katie went on: "Ken has given me some further projections. In about two days' time, the influx will decrease rapidly. There will be fewer and fewer people to man the transmissions, the radio stations, and the like. In about five days, all those who're going to come will be here." She sat back, tossing the papers before her. "And no more Albertson Randell."
The Iron Lady, he thought. The warlord. Chew 'em up and spit 'em out
.
But it was as he suspected. The only people who would remain were those who had no access to media, and those who had the cure. They would be trapped back there. With a significant portion of the earth's population now gone, the rest of civilization wouldn't be able to hold up. Even without the transfer, Lanier knew that civilization wouldn't have lasted more than a few years anyway.
"We have a whole new world to explore and rebuild," Katie Babcock said softly over the videophone. "If our economy can recover and reorganize in time, we'll be the first to start things right."
Lanier looked at her. "That was the agreement. This is our only chance not to screw things up." He thought of the clean rivers now running through Ohio, the clear sky over London, and the open-pit mines that had only forests and fields above them.
That's the way it should be
.
"And it seems," she concluded, "that you gave us another fusion facility in upstate New York. That makes three now." Lanier nodded, not really knowing the full scope of his changes.
"Well, Katie, keep me posted," he told her. "I'm taking a few years off for a vacation to see just what I've done."
"Take as many as you want," she said. "And … Fran?"
"Yes?"
"Stay in touch." Her image faded. Her smile was the last to go.
Christy and Charlie were poking at the chips in a fire they had started in the fireplace, and everything surrounded them with an air of coziness that neither had known for some time.
Christy stood up. "Oh, Fran. This is the best thing to happen."
Lanier tried to smile, but felt drawn inside.
She went on: "I only wish that …"
Lanier gently waved her off, smiling. "We have enough wishes for now. Most are working out."
Charlie and Christy looked at him. Charlie said, "Why not stay inside tonight? Relax."
Lanier lifted up the hood of his parka.
"No, Charlie. I'm fine. I just need to walk a few things off tonight. I'll be gone a while."
"Well, we'll be here when you get back," Christy said.
Lanier smiled at his friends. "That's the best news yet."
Chapter Sixteen
Coda
He stepped back out onto the porch.
The sunset on this, the first day of their world, had been glorious. And now the stars shimmered and twinkled as if the night sky had been raked with a billion bits of shattered glass. It was pure, intense, and brilliant. As he walked out onto the dirt road before his house, the stars were so bright that they cast shadows all around him. He almost wished that Charlie and Christy were out here to share it with him. But they had each other inside beside the fire.…
As he stood there on the country lane, far from the golden glow of the curtained living room window, he wondered about the balance.
Fudd-Smith's Law
. Good old Two Moons. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Even here it works. He looked up at the street sign that used to say LYNCH LANE and DALLAS ROAD, that now read in this new world, BABA AVENUE and WITSCHEL WAY. Even among the changes, the balance had to be struck. Even here, on this small corner of the world.
He stood in the darkness and starlight thinking of Ellie Estevan, thinking of her death, the sacrifice. It made all things equal.
But
, he wondered, was
it too much—or was it merely enough
?
He didn't know. There were no more questions. There were no more answers. And this was what he had to accept. And accept it he did.
Digging his hands deeper into the pockets of his parka, he walked on down the road under the tough old stars
.
The End