Snap Call

A hundred feet above his head, snow began to fall into quiet drifts. There was silence broken by deer hooves and the soft hum of exhaust vents. At his level, he watched his screens in silence, looking at the phone once every hour.

The screens glowed the sickly phosphor of radar, interrupted with bright flashes of grayscale cathode ray, and above his head the luminescent paint on the clock hands burned slowly away. The smell of hot wires soaked the air. The only real light was a single red bulb that buzzed above the door, signifying the timelock was engaged. He was on duty for another day.

When the time came, as the generals ensured it would, he would speak the warning and the other men at their far distant switches would thank him and turn their keys. He had no key, only the phone. He was but a junior officer, deemed too meek to sit in a silo and banished to a distant room full of screens and numbers.

Seven hours later, something new entered the fog of radar echoes and set off grating proximity alarms. He jerked awake from his lull and stared at the numbers. Incoming, thousands of them, straight on this remote vector where only he watched. Skin puckered as he stared at the readout. Phosphor glowed like cancer beneath the screens. He would have to warn command to clear the streets, to open the silos for retaliation and send up the interceptors.

His hand went to the phone, then shook as if palsied, frozen on the phone. He had read the tracking readout.

The incoming targets were going thirteen times faster than anything predicted in the training manuals. He couldn't possibly provide warning enough to stop them. The cities were condemned. All he could do was call for retaliation before the silos went on the same pyre.

An alliance of hundreds on the opposite side had conspired to launch. They had sealed the death warrants of half a billion people. He held at least as many, alone. The man was the most powerful on the planet. Duty was clear. Retaliation was due. All he had to do now was...

Breath choked. His other hand pounded the concrete, breaking knuckles.

All he had to do now was evaluate the lives of his country and all its satellites against a hemisphere untouched by blast. Everyone he knew was going to die no matter what he did, everyone on the surface. Now he alone would determine how many of the alleged enemy would follow them to incineration.

He tried to work an absurd arithmetic in his throbbing head, tallying deaths on each side, each a 'yes' or 'no' to the course of action. Ten seconds into it, he clenched his hand on the phone with a dull huff.

He sat very still and thought in tight and fruitless circles, tallying deaths and innocents on either hemisphere, calculating the value of warning his superiors. Maybe they would do the job he feared. All he had to do was pick up the phone and tell them to launch before their silos melted, and turn continents to cinders.

Before he could rationalize and justify his way to an answer, thunder came in and rattled his teeth in their sockets. Every monitor screen fuzzed with static, and most went blank entirely. Detectors hissed a warning crackle of radioactivity battering at the hatches.

The plastic seemed to grow warmer as his hand fell away from the phone. He wondered if those people in their far-off land would be grateful if they knew what he'd inadvertently done. He also wondered how long the filters would last.