The Fury and the Terror by John Farris Read Free Book Online Page A

mean, pull the fuckin' fuse."
    "Dutch" van der Veek held up the fuse in question, smiling tautly. He resumed contact with L.A. Center.
    "L.A., this is Captain van der Veek. Can you confirm location of our new waypoints?"
    " Doing that now, Captain. What is your status? "
    "Unable to correct malfunctioning mode control at this time. Also we have been unable to reacquire the controls. We'll try to decouple R-NAV. Meantime, ah, you might want to effect coordination with Seattle Center to divert traffic around us until we rectify our situation."
    " Roger, TRANSPAC 1850. New waypoints indicate Innisfall, California, as your revised destination. Do you want to declare an emergency? "
    "Negative, L.A. Center," the captain said as the first officer reached into a locker for the map book. Darkfeather glanced at the altimeter. They had lost another two thousand feet.
    "Hey, Dutch?" Darkfeather said. "What the hell do you call an emergency? Get some expert advice on this glitch. The autopilot's just another computer. Computers don't have minds of their own." The words barely out of her mouth, and she knew. This one had acquired a mind. Kelane Cheng's.
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    E den Waring stood silently at the podium on the fifty-yard line. Her head was turned to the west. She watched, for several seconds, a rising airplane, single engine,that had taken off from the runway of the college airport and was turning north a mile from the stadium. She'd had her first flying lessons in that very same plane. She gave the Piper Lance all of her attention.
    Someone in the rows of folding chairs tittered. It brought Eden back to earth; she remembered where she was and what she was supposed to be doing there. She smiled edgily and addressed them.
    "Chancellor Luzaro, Dean Bettendorf, distinguished guests, faculty, friends, fellow students. Four years have gone by so quickly. And as I was thinking about what I wanted to say to you today—"
    Betts, who had let out a long-held breath while Eden was sky-gazing, tensed again when Eden's second hesitation became a stall. The nails of her right hand bit into the back of Riley's hand, and she breathed, "Come on , baby. Get through it."
    Eden touched her forehead as if she was distracted and dismayed by something that had occurred deep in her brain. Behind her, administrators and distinguished guests were looking at each other, concerned that they might have a major embarrassment brewing. But her head came up, and Eden smiled bravely.
    "I guess what I really want to say is, we do have something to look forward to, friends and f-fellow students, we can make things better for ourselves. For all humankind. What we must not do is just give up now and go, oh, well , that's the end, America is done for. Nice while it lasted. But they've got us. No way to fight back, the bomb in the baby carriage and so forth. No way to fight the terror that's trying to take us over, slowly squeeze us until we've surrendered our birthright. How many square miles around Portland had to be evacuated? Two hundred? Two thousand? I don't know. What does low yield mean, in practical terms? I don't know that either. I'm a chem major. If the prevailing winds had been from the north, would we be sitting here today? Lucky us. But we're still frightened. Aren't we? The images burn in our dreams. Portland, Portland, Portland. Oh, my God. The firestorm. Kids screaming in evacuation shelters, too charred to touch. You saw it, night after night. I saw it. Too much. We back away. We're Land of the Free,;we haven't been schooled since birth in Balkan-style horrors. Who does this to us? Who dares to believe we will accept it? Better not to think about the bastards. And hope they won't come to us again, with their surface-to-air missiles, backpack nukes, bubonic aerosols in the school air-conditioning ducts, da da, da da, da da whatever. But to pretend is to be afraid. To give in to fear is to lose all hope. I had a quote here somewhere. From Emerson. Can't seem