"Dean Ing - Systemic Shock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

Scanned by Highroller and proofed more or less by Highroller.

PART I: VICTIMS

Chapter 1

In early August of 1996 the Atlantic states baked like some vast piecrust under a paralyzing heat
wave. It moved scoutmaster Purvis Little, in Raleigh, to plan the Smoky Mountain pack trip that
would save a few lives. It also moved the President of the United States to his retreat in the
Shenandoah hills.

The weather relented on the evening of Friday, the ninth. Young Ted Quantrill hardly noticed, racing
home after his troop meeting in Raleigh, because he knew he'd have to politick for that pack trip.
The President noticed it still less; despite the air conditioning in his hoverchopper, a tiara of sweat
beaded his balding head. The bulletin that had drawn him back to Washington suggested
complications in the sharp new rise of foreign oil prices; a rise that in itself further impeded his race
for reelection against Utah's Senator Yale Collier. The President considered Yale Collier a
charismatic fool. Ted Quantrill's parents thought the same of scoutmaster Little. In any event, a
modest proportion of fools would survive the next week, while some of their critics would die.

Chapter 2

Through twenty years and three administrations, pundits in American government had watched
helplessly as the Socialist Party of China wooed lubricious favors from the Middle East. Every few
years some think-tank would announce that global addiction to oil was on the wane, thanks to this
or that alternative energy source. Just as regularly, the thinkers went into the tank. Fusion was still
an elusive technique. New fission plants had been banned in the UN General Assembly after the
pandemic of fear that peaked in 1994. Loss of coolant (Alabama, '87), outgassing (Wales, '91),
partial meltdown (Karachi, '93), and accidental scatter of confined radioactive waste (Honshu, '89;
Connecticut, Shantung, '94) had taken only a few hundred livesтАФfar fewer than, say, offshore oil
rigs had taken.

But the fission boojum had scared the bejeezus out of voters from Reykjavik to Christchurch, and
even autocrats reluctantly agreed to decommission some of their reactors. It was not that fission
plants no longer existed, but they were fewer while power requirements grew.

If the million-plus deaths from the Birmingham and Minsk bombs of '85 added to the clamor against
fission plants, that connection was hard to find. A million deliberate killings was human nature
acceptable to the public, while a few hundred accidental killings composed a goad toward reform.
Industrialized nations rushed to develop clean power sources. Meanwhile, they continued to burn
petroleum.

Direct solar conversion, wind-driven generators, and alternative chemical fuels plugged part of the
energy gap, while the price of energy made conservationists of most Americans. Still, fossil fuel
remained a favored energy source: storable, compact, simple. While developing one's own oil
resources, one was wise to import as much as practicable. So said the Chinese; so said we all. As
early as 1979 China's ruling party, the SPC, served notice of its intent to anyone who might be
paying attention. The SPC's official news agency, Xinhua, said:

Nearly 160 Moslem mosques of the autonomous Ningxia Hui region of Northwest China are being