One Second After

“Well, to Charlie’s question. EMP doesn’t really hit unless you blow off the bomb above the atmosphere. Again the ‘Compton effect,’ and believe me, I’ve read about it, but don’t have a real grasp on it myself; I need a tech head for that. Just that the burst above the atmosphere sets off an electro-disturbance, kind of like a magnetic storm, which cascades down into the lower atmosphere like a sheet of lightning and bango, it fries everything with electronics in it.”

“Just one bomb?” Kate asked.

He nodded.

“Remember a TV back in the fifties, the early sixties, all those tubes, and hot as hell? That same thing now sits in the palm of my kid’s hand when she’s playing one of those damn games.”

He wondered for a second if maybe all the pocket-size computer toys were gone…. If so, no regrets there at least.

“So the stuff gets more and more delicate, and more and more prone to even the slightest electrical surge.”

“Someone could now fire off a nuke, calibrated to do a maximum load of EMP, and anything within line of sight from up in space gets fried, even from a thousand miles away. For that matter, anything hooked into our electrical web goes as well. Electrical lines are like giant antennas when it comes to EMP, and guide it straight into your house, through the sockets, and, wham, right into anything hooked up.”

“Surge protectors, though?” Kate said. “I spent a hundred bucks on one for my new television.”

He shook his head.

“Surge protectors don’t work for this,” Charlie interjected, and John looked over at him.

“We had one, exactly one, briefing on this about two years ago,” Charlie said. “Hundreds on every other threat, just one on this, but I remember somebody asking that question. Seems like this EMP moves a lot faster than ordinary power surges like from lightning. Not faster in terms of speed, just that the impact hits and peaks faster, three or four times that of a lightning bolt hitting your electric line. So fast that the relay inside the surge protector doesn’t have time to trigger off and boom, the whole system is fried. That’s why it’s so darn dangerous. It fries out all electronics before any of the built-in protections can react.”

“You still haven’t answered my question about your damn car,” Tom snapped. “Why is yours working and I’ve got six squad cars out there that are dead?”

“The electronics,” Charlie interrupted. “That’s what got me thinking on it, too, but I didn’t feel it was right to say anything about it.”

“Why not?” Tom asked.

“Panic. That’s why. I saw an article on the Web about this a couple of months back, and it was a lot worse than what we were talking about just two years ago. Some people who don’t like us have apparently been spending a lot of time and money to get a bigger bang for the buck.”

“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.”