Free Aftermath by Charles Sheffield Page A

win. People who lost possessions or family would blame you no matter what you did. They'd say you had offered too little and too late. Nobody would remember the good work.
    General Mackay was ready and waiting, examining Saul's face. Sick or well, drunk or dry, she had the instincts and techniques of a great briefer and communicator. She spent as much time establishing what her audience knew and didn't know as on providing information.
    "What you saw was a C-5A," she said when she was sure that she again had Saul's attention. "It's half a century old, and it looks primitive. But it can be flown without computer support or smart sensors or pilot neural meshing. For the time being, that plane, or another like it, is likely to be Air Force One."
    What Grace didn't add, because Saul already knew it, was what happened when you tried to fly a modern plane without the help of its PIP—Pilot Interaction Package—and other goodies. Five top test pilots, each confident of being able to fly anything that could get off the ground, had died proving they were wrong. Others were still clamoring for their chance when General Mackay ended the effort. Test pilots were a breed unlike any other—but so were politicians and generals.
    "Do you have a cutoff date?" Saul asked.
    "About 1980. With any big aircraft later than that it's going to be marginal. We are still looking at the low-cost end of commercial planes, we may be able to use some of them. And it's not just stability and control. By the end of the last century the microchips were handling fuel injection and stall protection and everything else."
    Everything else. And everything meant every thing.
    Grace Mackay was head of a department whose guns and lasers could not fire—the chips in their targeting and range-finding and loading and release circuits had become in an instant brainless dots of fused gallium arsenide. The planes would not fly without the help of superhuman data reduction speeds and reaction times. The ships, bristling with dead weapons for both defense and offense, sat in port or floated out of control on the oceans of the world. The manned platforms in low Earth orbit, so far as anyone could tell without direct communications, had become chilly sarcophagi.
    They had been designed, all of these, with the luxury of triple redundancy. If one microchip, by some rare misfortune, were to fail, then two others remained to accept sensory data and provide control commands. As for the idea that all three might fail, at the same moment—that was unthinkable.
    Saul reminded himself that as Commander in Chief of the same organization, he had swallowed that official line of logic. How many Titanic s did it take before the lesson sank in permanently? Probably, it never did. Every generation had to learn for itself.
    Saul knew how tired he was. At fifty-six, he was sure he had less energy than his ninety-two-year-old mother. He pulled himself back with an effort to Mackay, silently waiting and watching.
    "I'm sorry, General. I rely on your judgment completely. What you feel is safe for me to fly, I fly."
    "Yes, sir. Give us several more days, if you please. I'm working with the civilian agencies to define a network of suitable landing fields and en route handoffs. Of course, for the time being everything will be on visual flight rules."
    "Fuel?"
    "Not a problem. More diesel oil and kerosene than we know what to do with."
    "Unless we have more break-in problems."
    Grace Mackay had finally heard something to put surprise on her drawn gray face. "Seriously? People are stealing aircraft fuel?"
    "It looks like it. You can't really blame them. Diesel fuel and heating oil are the same thing. The power grid is still down, and in the north-central states the emergency distribution system of heating oil isn't working as it's supposed to. No, that's the wrong way to put it. The distribution system isn't working at all. We're operating under martial law. Looters are in danger of being shot. But