The Alejandra Variations (5 page)

Reitinger finished by saying, "We had about three minutes flight time to intercept the incoming warhead, so Vandenberg sent up a decoy. The blast got the decoy and fizzled up part of Point Sal Beach."

Nick watched as Reitinger returned casually to the mangled copy of
Time
. It was as if the man were waiting in a dentist's office. An article in the sports section caught his pea-brained attention. He tapped it with a knobby finger. "That Weigl's the best damn thing to happen to the Colts. Too bad he had to go and deck the fine coach."

Nicholas snatched the magazine away from him. "Wait a minute. That's not the end of the story, is it?"

Reitinger looked up in surprise; then he smiled. "Well, when President Runciman sent that Cruise missile to nose around the Olenegorsk vicinity to see what it could come up with, he also called the Soviet premier. And after he read him the riot act, they decided between the two of them that it would be something of a trade-off. The Major General here says the score's about even. Maybe a couple Russian technicians at Olenegorsk, on their side, and some pleasure craft off Point Sal Beach on our side. And some low-level radiation flying around. Actually, we don't know the casualty count yet, because the Olenegorsk facility was mostly automated."

Nicholas breathed a little easier. He listened to the reassuring hum of the Tube as it wended its way underground. How many Tubes were shunting other "discretionary personnel" across the country? Were sirens going off in the world up above? Were fingers cocked and waiting over launch buttons? Were radio and television stations finally broadcasting those horrible words:
This is not a test. Repeat. This is not a test
…

What were the real-life scenarios of panic and fear?

"I wouldn't worry, Nickie," Reitinger said, smiling. "Sal says that it's all being treated as an 'incident' up above. Quote, unquote. Very low key. Although Staci says every plane we've got's being scrambled."

Nicholas thought about the wealth of data that had to be flying into the circuits of Mnemos Nine deep beneath the alpine hills of Longmont, Colorado.

"What else does Staci know?" he asked.

He trusted Staci. Staci Bolyard was an Intelligence in-system extrapolator for Mnemos. Under regular circumstances, a Strategic like Nicholas would be listening in on Mnemos—for this was a genuine wartime scenario. But these were not normal conditions.

He couldn't imagine what kind of dream scenario Staci was drifting in. It depended upon her mental state at the time she went in and the material Mnemos felt she could handle. If she worried too much about her children or her family, it would affect her every level of understanding and assimilation of the information the computer was laying out for her.

The system had other links, of course, and almost certainly Derek Mallory would be participating in Colorado. The last Nick had heard, Steven Childs, another Strategic, was at the University of Minnesota, doing some undercover recruiting for the Project. He wouldn't be too far from a Foresee link. Discretionary personnel were always where the government could reach them.

The Russians weren't too far away from developing a Project Foresee equivalent. They had made some peculiar computer advances of their own. What little information the CIA had been able to input into the Mnemos system indicated the Russian scientists had been able to link a small computer brain to a human body that had lost its mental functions—the patient's mind had clinically died but the body itself kept kicking. The brain had been overridden and plugged into the computer. The body couldn't get up and wander about, but the computer was learning slowly what it was like to be a human being, with much of the sensory input that a human being would experience.

"So, we're not at war yet," Nick said to Reitinger. "Officially."

"Officially, no. But when it's nuclear war you're talking about, is anything official?" he asked.

Nick shook his head. "Nothing but the mushroom clouds and the crying when it's over."

Reitinger seemed sure that developments topside weren't all that drastic; at least, that's what his words seemed to communicate to Nicholas. But Nicholas knew so little about how Nelson Reitinger's mind worked—if it worked at all.

Reitinger rose from the couch and gripped the overhang of the baggage compartment. Though there was little swaying of the Tube train, Nelson's reflexive actions made it appear as if they rode the Orient Express. All he needed was a trenchcoat and a porkpie hat.

"I'm on my way up to see Staci. You want to plug in and take a look at what's coming into the system? I don't think Staci would mind."

"No," Nicholas said, recalling the advice of both Melissa and Dr. Massingale. "I want to talk to Sal before I do anything." He still felt too lethargic—drugged—to partake of the perils of the system.

"Right," Reitinger said. "I getcha. Staci's just looking around anyway, assessing data as it comes in from the Pentagon and Omaha."

Nicholas knew that "looking around" might be the equivalent of wandering the dream streets of Moscow or Peking, or perhaps listening in to an English-language broadcast on a street corner somewhere in Helsinki. Scenarios were always unpredictable and initially baffling. One never knew where one would find oneself when exposed to the system, but Staci Bolyard was a very flexible woman and quite competent. Approximately Nicholas's own age, she had three children back at Santa Barbara and a husband in the Air Force. Staci had been working in the Intelligence branch for Foresee since a couple of years before Nick had joined. She knew her way around the system very well.

Nicholas wondered if her present thoughts were entirely focused on Mnemos Nine's scenarios, or if there was some fragment of her mind lingering on the safety of her family. He could sympathize with her dilemma. If a nuclear war broke out, it would be very difficult to concentrate on anything but the welfare of your loved ones—even if you did happen to work for one of the agencies designed to help combat such an exigency as a full-scale attack.

Nelson stood at the open compartment door. "You want me to signal Melissa to come on down? She told us all what a roller-coaster ride you had with Mnemos. I don't think you and that computer get along, Nickie."

"At least I get results," he said in defense. He meant it as a barb, considering what meager work Environmentals actually did, but Reitinger missed the point entirely. He only smiled.

Nicholas stopped him as he was about to vanish into the corridor of the Tube.

"By the way," he began. "Who was it who figured out the source of the attack? Sal said that Derek was working in system. Did he do it?"

"It was us," Nelson said, his tiny eyes smiling with a fraction more pride than intelligence. "Or me, I should say, in all modesty."

"You?"

"Nickie!" he said. "Don't look so disappointed!"

"I'm just surprised," Nick quickly muttered.

"Hey, don't you remember a few weeks back when Mnemos dropped me into that offshore scenario at Namor City—where they found that gusher?"

Nick nodded. Reitinger in a scenario sounding out the consequences of a possible oil-spill made sense to him. That's what Environmentals were for.

Reitinger continued. "Well, when Sal moved us all to Vandenberg, she had me go under, since I had experience with that region of the Pacific. It was only natural to run the sequence with Derek and those trawlers with me in to provide the right balance of data. All the information suggested that something might happen with that flotilla of Russians and that one trigger-happy Chinese tub. I knew the area well, and Mnemos just added things up." He shrugged. "Derek was there for a while. I guess he gets some credit." He smiled and walked away.

Nicholas marveled at the man's flippancy. He related to computer-induced scenarios like a kid might play a game in a supermarket arcade. A missile here, a missile there.
Boom!

Perhaps it was because Reitinger, like Nick, was a loner. He had no family to speak of back in Santa Barbara—and even fewer friends. All he really had were the trees and the little furry animals of his profession. And Mnemos Nine.

And Reitinger knew that he would be part of any government plan of survival. No matter what happened in any of the scenarios—real or imagined—he and Nick would always have Tubes to whisk them away to safety.

But what about the rest of the world?

Even in the time it would take to get to Foresee in the Rockies, war could break out. The missiles might be launched, the bombers airborne.

He thought about Rhoanna Martin, who was now living somewhere south of Tucson. What was life like for her down there? Were the new Diomedes missiles being readied in their desert silos? Were Stealth III bombers silently lifting from Davis Monthan Air Force Base? Were the radar installations perched high in the Catalina Mountains going wild with incoming blips? Thankfully, he was tranquilized enough not to ponder those thoughts much further.

Abruptly Reitinger rushed back down the corridor and burst into Nick's nook.

"Just got the word," he said in a very agitated manner.

Nicholas's heart skipped a beat as he anticipated the absolute worst. "What is it?"

"Back East. The Colts just demolished the Bears! Can you believe it? Forty-two to fifteen! You owe me twenty bucks."

"I
what?
Hey, wait…"

Reitinger scurried down the corridor—off to spread the news—before Nicholas could stop him.

The goddamn football pool. He'd forgotten all about it. Along with everything else that was trivial.

He picked up the copy of
Time
and stared at the cover. The world was on the verge of a real nuclear conflict, and somewhere in Baltimore ordinary people were going home from an ordinary football game.

How he longed for an ordinary life. Maybe in the long run the whole thing was just a game anyway.

Chapter Four

RIDING UP IN quiet elevator from the Tube terminals in the eternally secure Rocky Mountains, Nicholas noticed that much of the anxiety he'd felt leaving California had dissipated. Staci Bolyard, a well-kept blonde hardly ever out of sorts, had maintained her composure, and Nicholas was able to absorb her confidence. She was slightly preoccupied as the elevator gently breezed them up to the fortress of the Project Foresee headquarters. She was making a disinterested attempt at filing down her fingernails, as Nicholas stood beside her and Melissa Salazar.

"I didn't think they could do it," Staci suddenly said, idly filing her fingernails. She blew away the fine dust at the tips of her nails.

Melissa, only a few feet away, looked evenly at her, her arms folded around a purse and leather briefing pouch. Nick glanced down at Staci, listening to the emery board sigh away at her fingers.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

She smiled at him, but it was a smile more of relief than triumph. One did not consider successful extrapolations an indication of personal worth. They were just extrapolations, after all.

"I guess you could call it sabre rattling between the Russians and us," Staci said. "The scenarios I'm familiar with say that the Soviets aren't in a position yet to risk everything they've got just to rid the world of capitalism."

He could almost hear the mother in her telling her children that there was nothing to fear in the thunder and lightning of a summer's storm.

Nicholas watched the luminous numbers overhead diminish as they approached the lower levels of Foresee. He had never been here before, and he was somewhat apprehensive.

He said, "I just can't help but think what that little radioactive cloud is doing over Santa Barbara."

Staci pinched back a curl of blond hair that had strayed across her cheek. "I think Nelson said the prevailing winds will take it into the San Rafael Mountains. If we get the rain we've been expecting, it might be washed away. The watersheds will take it back into the Pacific."

Melissa, quiet until now, had been watching her two extrapolators closely. "I wish that it could be so simple," she said in a very quiet voice.

"Well," Staci began, "both warheads—ours and theirs—were extremely low-yield. That tells us one thing right there."

They all knew what she was talking about. A low-yield warhead would not contribute that much fallout in the first place, regardless of the actual damage done. It
was
saber-rattling—or chest-pounding, as Nicholas saw it: just a couple of big gorillas in the mimosa trees, hooting at one another across the Holocene plain.

"Come children," Melissa Salazar said as the doors of the elevator wheezed open, presenting them with Foresee.

This was all new to Nicholas. His only experience with the system as a whole had been through the scattered lead-ins at the Foresee offices surface-side. All of his apprentice training had been conducted in San Diego, and for the last four years he'd been stationed in Santa Barbara. He'd always intended a trip to Foresee Headquarters, but there had never been any real need.

Now there was the need.

The mountain above them was impenetrable granite. Nicholas knew that on the far northern slope was a busy ski resort that was just now in the process of gearing up for the snows of Thanksgiving. With more than thirty-two Olympic-rated runs—and two enormous lodges that attracted skiers from around the world—it was very much the perfect cover for a clandestine government operation.

The elevator doors parted and presented them with a large open corridor where they could see dozens of people moving about, most dressed in military uniforms. A number of others, in mufti, were driving small electric-powered carts. Two efficient women were checking in various individuals at a desk studded with computer terminals and security monitors.

Melissa walked up to the desk and nodded. "The others will be here shortly. Staci Bolyard you know, and this," she indicated Nick, "is Nicholas Tejada."

A brassy blond lieutenant stood up and offered security badges to them both.

"Welcome to Foresee, Mr. Tejada. We've heard a lot about you." She smiled. The badge she gave him bore his picture and his original security number.