Chapter Fifteen

No Condition B blackout could ever have hidden the catastrophe which blazed like a banner in the sky, not from the night side where the first report had come from, not even from the day side. Bahr watched impatientiy as the congressmen clumped in little nervous knots here and there, jamming the aisles and dooiways of the House chamber. The call had only been out for eighty minutes, but they were nearly all here, at least seventy percent, and the Chief Executive and the Joint Chiefs were expected any moment.

The session with the Joint Chiefs in New York . . . with Adams of DEPCO conspicuous by his absence . . . had been stormy; mostly they objected to calling a joint session of Congress, because Congress had no power to do anything about it anyway. But Bahr had insisted that only a return to the half-forgotten formalities and traditions could really drive home to all the people what had to be done. Congress still nominally represented the people, eVen though it had no real function any more, since the government was run by DEPEX and DEPCO and the other Vanner-Elling Bureaus and all the congressmen ever did was to formally OK funds. But now they must be made to feel useful, to feel that they were making a decision that all the machines and all Mark Vanner's mathematics could never make.

And the Joint Chiefs finally had given in because they had to, because they had all seen the Moon in the sky—Earth's fine old stable yellow moon against the blue sky, but not a Moon any longer, just a clump of shattered pieces hanging obediently in orbit like the fragments of a broken plate, slowly falling away from each other.

An observatory in Australia had seen the explosion, a sudden flash of incredible whiteness bursting out in the dark Australian sky, and then, dimly, through the curtain of debris, a mammoth slow-motion display of planetoidal destruction. Idiot destruction, destruction without point or reason, but destruction, with terrible implications.

If the aliens could do that to the Moon . . .

Everyone on Earth could see it. In the streets there was the wildfire spread of terror.

From the prop room behind the rostrum, Bahr saw the Chief Executive arrive, wearing a white, impeccably cut nylon jacket that had a modified military look about it, very splendid, very dashing. The president, G. Allen White, had taken the ladies by storm after he deserted the cast of "Heroes of the 801st" on TV to run for President. He still played the dashing hero, which the women all approved, except that now there was trouble, real trouble, and danger, real danger, and he had to struggle to keep the fear from showing on his face. What face to wear? The face of concern, that was it. You could see his actor's mind working. Serious concern, but confidence . . .

Bahr glanced at Libby. "Prettyboy," he said.

"He's cute," Libby said. "No spine, though."

Behind the Chief Executive, the Joint Chiefs, marching down the aisle like the Horsemen of die Apocalypse. The roll call was taken. There was a simple introduction from the Speaker of the House. "Julian Bahr, Director DIA, has requested this emergency session to speak to you." Then Bahr was on the rostrum.

Behind him, on a vast screen on the wall, images sprang to life. First a night wirephoto of the fragmented Moon, hanging like a cracked and baleful eye above them. A slow dissolve into a chrome-color montage of panic: long ragged evacuation columns, people jammed into the streets, frightened, desperately moving out of the city, rioting crowds at night, brandishing torches, bombed out buildings bursting into flame, shock troops moving in with machine guns and burps, a man in a white shirt running screaming and bloody-faced through a gauntlet of jeering men and women. All hand-picked scenes from the cruel bloody days of the crash, flashing on the screen, then dimming slowly as Bahr's voice rose in the microphone.

"We have seen these things before, in a time of terror, and we pledged ourselves then that these things would never happen again on the face of the Earth. Now, today, we are threatened with just such panic and horror as we see here. Whatever the nature of the alien creatures that have come into our skies, it is very clear what they are attempting to do. We are fighting a war of nerves. Every move the aliens have made has been calculated to spread panic and terror among us, to force us to destroy ourselves. We have not returned a single blow. In spite of every effort, my forces in DIA had no warning of this attack."

He paused to let that sink in. "I am going to say some things now which are triple-A classified. You are being given this information because you must make a decision for the safety of this country that no machines or equations can make. No other branch of the government can make these decisions because they are rightfully yours to make, as agents of our national power, the people."

There was a stir, a rising murmur of warmth, because Bahr had delivered the statement to every single one of them, and they felt proud.