Free Earthbound by Joe Haldeman Page A

unfolded into lumpy beds, angled like chevrons. Some of us rested or napped. Paul took a pill. The plane was on autopilot, but if the Others turned off the power we’d be on a glider looking for a flat place to land.
    We were over Hudson Bay, after about six hours, when we made contact with the president’s people. I couldn’t hear what was going on, but I presumed they were livid. They gave us a plane and we hijacked it to Russia. Paul was grinning broadly as he gave them monosyllabic replies.
    The Northeast was greener than I’d expected. Big cities and crowded exurbs, but a lot of forest, too. Broad superhighways with almost no traffic. Occasional knots of pileups, dozens or even hundreds of abandoned cars.
    When we were a couple of hundred miles from Camp David, we were joined by a pair of military jets that moved in close enough to make eye contact. Paul waved and one of them waved back, and they banked off and sped away.
    Namir noted that the day’s travel had reduced our fuel supply from 0.97 to 0.95. We could go around the world fifty times if we wanted to.
    “Let’s hope this thing is productive,” I said, without high hopes. The president must have been the genius who had authorized the rocket launch through the meteor storm, which had so pissed off the Others. But he presumably was the best person to organize a nationwide response to prepare for the coming dark age.
    We landed without incident, and Paul followed directions, taxiing us to a reviewing stand. A lot of people in suits, squinting into the morning sun. No brass band.
    Spatters of applause as we stepped down in random order. Alba grinned broadly when the applause faltered. Who the hell was she?
    We were seated on folding chairs, and a couple of soldiers armed with boxed lunches came out. Room-temperature tuna-salad sandwiches. Not caviar, but I was hungry.
    I scanned the faces of the dignitaries and was a little disappointed not to see President Gold. Then someone introduced President Boyer. A gaunt man in his fifties approached the microphone.
    “He was vice president,” Alba whispered. “Something must have happened to Gold.”
    The new president greeted us and bloviated for a few minutes about the importance of our “mission.”
    It was two-pronged: try to repair some of the damage done by the power outage and meanwhile try to tool up for a nineteenth-century life style. Either one clearly impossible in a week. But we had to do something.
    Factories that could be converted were already cranking out carts and bicycles and hand plows and cargo wagons—a pity horses and oxen couldn’t be mass-produced. This brave new world would be largely powered by human muscle—from humans who had been free from the necessity of physical labor for generations.
    A lot of time and effort were being spent, perhaps wasted, trying to figure out how to preserve a central government without modern communication. It seemed obvious that you couldn’t, given the size of the country and the time lag between decision and response. You weren’t going to have Ben Franklin closing up his print shop and taking off for the Continental Congress on foot. Or mule or whatever.
    We followed the president and the seven others who had been on stage with him up a gravel path to a large rustic lodge, old log walls and a slate roof. There were other buildings around that looked equally old and homespun.
    “This is the main lodge,” the president said as he went up the timber stairs to the porch. “It goes back almost two hundred years. Franklin Roosevelt in World War II.”
    Pretty old for a wooden building, I thought, but there was probably a lot of technology embedded in its reassuring simplicity.
    “Let’s go down to the planning room. You space travelers, I want to talk to you first. You have a unique point of view. President Gold, before he died, told me to take full advantage of that.” We followed them down a spiral staircase into a well-lit room that was