Transmaniacon Read Free Page B

martyrs?
    Fuller asked, “What’s this Barrier I keep hearing about?”
    Ben glanced at Fuller. His eyes were in shadow, like two black holes sucking in light.
    Ben leaned back and sighed, looking out over the desert, the wilderness outside the city-states. The stars were sharp, the mountains loomed black. “The Barrier went up shortly after you went down,” he began. “Five years after they froze you, they started activating the Barrier projection installations. The good old US government, may it rest in peace, put it up… The Barrier was conceived as the perfect defense against nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare. It’s a screen of densely flowing ions held in place by a magnetic field generated by the rotation of the planet itself. It’s said that as long as the earth continues to turn the Barrier will stand. The Barrier is usually invisible, except around the edges near the ground. It will not permit certain toxic combinations of gases, certain forms of bacteria, or any solid object to penetrate it. Not even birds. It entirely encloses the continental zone once called the United States.”
    Fuller shook his head in stunned silence. Ben was pleased to see Fuller rattled. “The whole goddamn US? Inside this Barrier? Like a fucking terrarium in a bottle?” He snorted in disbelief.
    Ben shrugged. “That’s the way it is. If you don’t believe me, just take this insect up for about a half-mile, at which point I’m going to bail out. Because if you keep going you’ll get swatted by the Barrier. Wind passes through it, of course, and clouds of pure H 2 0. Light up to certain frequencies—but heavy laser won’t penetrate it. The Barrier was set up a half an hour before the third world war ignited. Russia, China, Israel, Britain, Germany, India, Japan, and Saudi Arabia fried one another. The only nuclear power that stayed out of it was Brazil, but as far as we know they died in the fallout. What remained of civilization outside the Barrier collapsed into barbarity or slowly died from radiation poisoning. We aren’t sure what it’s like out there now ... We can’t get there to find out. The Barrier cages us in…”
    Now Fuller was laughing. “Israel? Russia? Britain? Japan? Gone? Excellent /” Then he frowned and his affability faded. “What do you mean, we can’t get out? Wasn’t the Barrier taken down after the radiation dropped?”
    â€œIt took a long time for the radiation to fade to fairly safe levels. Meantime, there was an upheaval here. Revolution, civil war, ecological collapse . . . birds, insects, and certain other creatures in the eco-food chain couldn’t get inside the Barrier. And pollution couldn’t get out. The ecology went insane for a while. The air got foul and the temperament of the country got fouler. The country fragmented and a lot of things died. What remained formed into small clusters, the city-states, and a few nomadic tribes. The city-states became independent from one another, developed their own food and power sources.
    â€œThe men who knew the Barrier’s secrets died in Washington during the civil war--when some stoned-out Air Force lunatics decided to make the capital a crater. This is the clincher: No one knows where the controls for the Barrier are stored.”
    â€œNo clue?”
    â€œSome figure it’s in the Adirondacks...down in a bunker. But no one knows exactly where. No one even knows how the damn thing is maintained. You’d have thought it would have broken down by now. Sooner or later, whatever is holding it there will wear out and the outer world will bust in to what used to be the USA and then the city-states might have to stop being such whiny pussies and band together again...”
    â€œThey don’t cooperate or anything?” Fuller asked.
    â€œNot much. But only once have any two of them gone to a full-scale war. Chicago crushed