Overload

  “I have an announcement,” Mrs. Van Buren said. Her voice was emotional and a paper in her hand was shaking. The room fell silent.

  “We have just learned there have been four deaths, not two. All of the dead are company employees who were working at their jobs at the time of the explosion. Their next of kin are being informed now and we’ll have a list of names for you, with brief biographies, in a few minutes. I’m also authorized to say that, while there is no proof at this moment, sabotage is suspected.”

  Amid the fusillade of questions which followed, Nim eased his way out.

  Step by step, directed by Energy Control, the disrupted distribution system was returning to a state of order.

  At the communications console the chief dispatcher, juggling two telephones and manipulating a battery of buttons, was issuing fast, low-key instructions to switchmen, in an attempt to restore interconnections with other utilities; these had separated automatically when Big Lil tripped. When the Pacific Intertie was re-established, the dispatcher leaned back in his gray metal swivel chair and released an audible sigh, then began pushing buttons to start restoring load. He glanced sideways briefly as Nim returned. “We’re halfway home, Mr. Goldman.”

  It meant, Nim realized, that nearly half the total area affected by sudden blackout had full electric power restored and the process was continuing. A computer could, and did, shut down the system faster by far than any human agency. But it took direct switching by technicians, supervised from Energy Control, to put the system back together.

  Cities and towns had priority and, district by district, were coming electrically alive once more. Suburbs, particularly those with concentrations of industrial plants, were next. Country villages would follow. Outlying rural areas, at the bottom of the power totem pole, would be last of all.

  A few exceptions were made. Hospitals, water and sewage treatment plants and phone company installations rated special preference because of their essential nature. It was true that such institutions usually had standby generators of their own, but these carried only a partial load and outside power was essential for normal functioning. There were also, here and there, pockets of special consideration for individuals.

  The chief dispatcher had transferred his attention to an unusual wiring circuitry map which he was discussing on one of his telephones. The map had a series of colored circles dotted over it.

  Waiting for a pause in the phoning, Nim asked, “What’s that?”

  The dispatcher looked surprised. “You don’t know that one?”

  Nim shook his head. Even a vice president of planning could not assimilate, or even see, the thousands of minutely detailed charts in an operation as large as GSP & L’s.

  “Life-sustaining equipment in private homes.” The dispatcher beckoned one of his assistants and moved out of his seat as the other replaced him. “I need a break.” He ran a hand through his white hair in a gesture of tiredness, then absently popped another Gelusil tablet into his mouth.

  Freed from pressures for the moment, the dispatcher positioned the circuitry map between himself and Nim. “Those red circles are iron lungs—respiratory equipment, they mostly call it nowadays. Green is kidney dialysis machines. This orange circle is an oxygen generating unit for an infant. We’ve got maps like this for every division and we keep them up to date. Hospitals, who know where the home equipment is located, help us.”

  “You’ve just filled a gap in my education,” Nim acknowledged. He continued to study the map, which fascinated him.

  “Most people relying on life-sustaining equipment have the kind that switches over to batteries in emergency,” the dispatcher continued. “Just the same, when outside power fails it’s traumatic for them. So what we do, if there’s a local outage, is check quickly. Then, if there’s any doubt or problem, we rush in a portable generator.”

  “But we don’t have that many portables—surely not enough for a widespread outage like today’s.”

  “No, and there aren’t many crews available either. But today we were lucky. Divisions have been checking. No users of life-sustaining equipment at home were in trouble.” The dispatcher indicated the map. “Now, in all these spots we have power back on.”

  The knowledge that a human element so small in numbers was being watched and cared about amid vaster concerns was moving and reassuring. Nim studied the map, his eyes roving. He found a street intersection he knew well. Lakewood and Balboa. One of the red circles marked the site of an apartment house he had driven by many times. A name beside it read “Sloan”—presumably the iron lung user. Who was Sloan? Nim wondered. What was he like?

  His musing was interrupted. “Mr. Goldman, the chairman wants to speak to you. He’s calling from La Mission.” Nim accepted a telephone which a control room assistant offered.

  “Nim,” Eric Humphrey said, “you knew Walter Talbot pretty well personally, didn’t you?” Despite the crisis, the chairman’s voice was urbane as usual. Immediately after first reports of the explosion, he had summoned his limousine and left, along with Ray Paulsen, for La Mission.

  “Yes,” Nim said, “Walter and I were good friends.” He was conscious of a catch in his voice, with tears not far away. Almost since Nun’s recruitment to Golden State Power & Light eleven years ago, he and the chief engineer had shared a mutual liking and habitually confided in each other. It seemed inconceivable there would be no more confidences ever again.

  “And Walter’s wife? How well do you know her?”

  “Ardythe. Very well.” Nim sensed the chairman hesitate, and asked, “How is it out there?”

  “Grim. I never saw bodies of men burned by superheated steam before. I hope I never do again. There’s virtually no skin left, just a mass of blisters with everything underneath exposed. Faces are unrecognizable.” For a moment Eric Humphrey’s composure seemed to waver, then he recovered it. “That’s why I’d like you to go to Mrs. Talbot as soon as possible. I understand she’s taken the news badly, which is not surprising. As a friend you may be able to help. I’d also like you to dissuade her, if you can, from viewing her husband’s body.”

  “Oh Christ, Eric,” Nim said. “Why me?”

  “For the obvious reason. Someone has to do this, and you knew them both, apparently better than any of us. I’m also asking a friend of Danieli’s to go to his wife for the same purpose.”

  Nim wanted to retort: Why don’t you go—to the wives of all four men killed? You’re our commander-in-chief, paid a princely salary which ought to compensate for an unhappy, messy duty once in a while. Besides, doesn’t dying in the service of the company merit a personal call from the man at the top? But he didn’t say it, knowing that J. Eric Humphrey, while a hard-working administrator, purposely kept a low profile whenever he could, and this was clearly one more occasion, with Nim and some other unfortunates acting as his surrogates.

  “All right,” Nim conceded, “I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you. And please convey to Mrs. Talbot my deep personal sympathy.”

  Nim brooded unhappily as he returned the telephone. What he had been instructed to do was not the kind of thing he was good at handling. He had known he would see Ardythe Talbot eventually and would have to grope emotionally for words as best he could. What he hadn’t expected was to have to go to her so soon.

  On the way out of Energy Control, Nim encountered Teresa Van Buren. She looked wrung out. Presumably her latest session with the reporters had contributed to that, and Teresa, too, had been a friend of Walter Talbot’s. “Not a good day for any of us,” she said.

  “No,” Nim agreed. He told her where he was going and about the instructions from Eric Humphrey.

  The p.r. vice president grimaced. “I don’t envy you. That’s tough duty. By the way, I hear you had a run-in with Nancy Molineaux.”

  He said feelingly, “That bitch!”

  “Sure, she’s a bitch, Nim. She’s also one spunky newspaperwoman, a whole lot better than most of the incompetent clowns we see on this be
at.”

  “I’m surprised you’d say that. She’d made up her mind to be critical—hostile—before she even knew what the story was about.”

  Van Buren shrugged. “This pachyderm we work for can survive a few slings and arrows. Besides, hostility may be Nancy’s way of making you, and others, say more than you intend. You’ve got a few things to learn about women, Nim—other than calisthenics in bed, and from rumors I hear, you’re getting plenty of that.” She regarded him shrewdly. “You’re a hunter of women, aren’t you?” Then her motherly eyes softened. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that right now. Go, do the best you can for Walter’s wife.”

  4

  His substantial frame jammed into his Fiat X19 two-seater, Nim Goldman wove through downtown streets, heading northeast toward San Roque, the suburb where Walter and Ardythe Talbot lived. He knew the way well, having driven it many times.

  By now it was early evening, an hour or so after the homebound rush hour, though traffic was still heavy. The heat of the day had diminished a little, but not much.

  Nim shifted his body in the little car, straining to make himself comfortable, and was reminded he had put on weight lately and ought to take some off before he and the Fiat reached a point of impasse. He had no intention of changing the car. It represented his conviction that those who drove larger cars were blindly squandering precious oil while living in a fool’s paradise which would shortly end, with accompanying disasters. One of the disasters would be a crippling shortage of electric power.

  As Nim saw it, today’s brief power curtailment was merely a preview—an unpalatable hors d’oeuvre—of far graver, dislocating shortages, perhaps only a year or two distant. The trouble was, almost no one seemed to care. Even within GSP & L, where plenty of others were privy to the same facts and overview as Nim, there existed a complacency, translatable as: Don’t worry. Everything will come out all right. We shall manage. Meanwhile, don’t let’s rock the boat by creating public alarm.

  Within recent months only three people in the Golden State Power & Light hierarchy—Walter Talbot, Teresa Van Buren and Nun—had pleaded for a change of stance. What they sought was less timidity, more directness. They favored blunt, immediate warnings to the public, press and politicians that a calamitous electrical famine was ahead, that nothing could avert it totally, and only a crash program to build new generating plants, combined with massive, painful conservation measures, could lessen its effect. But conventional caution, the fear of offending those in authority in the state, had so far prevailed. No change had been sanctioned. Now, Walter, one of the crusading trio, was dead.

  A resurgence of his grief swept over Nim. Earlier, he had held back tears. Now, in the privacy of the moving car, he let them come; twin rivulets coursed down his face. With anguish he wished he could do something for Walter, even an intangible act like praying. He tried to recall the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer he had heard occasionally at services for the dead, said traditionally by the closest male relative and in the presence of ten Jewish men. Nim’s lips moved silently, stumbling over the ancient Aramaic words. Yisgadal veyiskadash sh’may rabbo be’olmo deevro chiroosey ve’yamlich malchoosey … He stopped, the remainder of the prayer eluding him, even while realizing that to pray at all was, for him, illogical.

  There had been moments in his life—this was one—when Nim sensed instincts deep within him yearning for religious faith, for identification, personally, with his heritage. But religion, or at least the practice of it, was a closed door. It was slammed shut before Nun’s birth by his father, Isaac Goldman, who came to America from Eastern Europe as a young, penniless immigrant and ardent socialist. The son of a rabbi, Isaac found socialism and Judaism incompatible. He thereupon rejected the religion of his forebears, leaving his own parents heartbroken. Even now, old Isaac, at eighty-two, still mocked the basic tenets of Jewish faith, describing them as “banal chitchat between God and Abraham, and the fatuous fairy tale of a chosen people.”

  Nim had grown up accepting his father’s choice. The festival of Passover and the High Holy Days—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur—passed unobserved by the Goldman family and now, as an outcropping of Isaac’s personal rebellion, a third generation—Nim’s own children Leah and Benjy—were removed from Jewish heritage and identity. No bar mitzvah for Benjy had been planned, an omission which occasionally troubled Nim and prompted the question: Despite decisions he had made about himself, did he have the right to separate his children from five thousand years of Jewish history? It was not too late, he knew, but so far Nim had not resolved the issue.

  As he thought of his family, Nim realized he had neglected to call Ruth to tell her he would not be home until late. He reached for the mobile phone to his right below the instrument panel—a convenience which GSP & L supplied and paid for. An operator answered and he gave her his home number. Moments later he heard a ringing tone, then a small voice. “Goldman residence. Benjy Goldman speaking.” Nim smiled. That was Benjy all right—even at ten, precise and systematized, in contrast to his sister Leah, four years older, perennially disorganized and who answered phones with a casual, “Hi!”

  “It’s Dad,” Nim said. “I’m on mobile.” He had taught the family to wait when they heard that because on a radiotelephone conversations couldn’t overlap. He added, “Is everything all right at home?”

  “Yes, Dad, it is now. But the electricity went off.” Benjy gave a little chuckle. “I guess you knew. And, Dad, I reset all the clocks.”

  “That’s good, and yes, I knew. Let me talk to your mother.”

  “Leah wants …”

  Nim heard a scuffling, then the voice of his daughter. “Hi! We watched the TV news. You weren’t on.” Leah sounded accusing. The children had become used to seeing Nim on television as spokesman for GSP & L. Perhaps Nim’s absence from the screen today would lower Leah’s status among her friends.

  “Sorry about that, Leah. There were too many other things happening. May I talk to your mother?”

  Another pause. Then, “Nim?” Ruth’s soft voice.

  He pressed the push-to-talk bar. “That’s who it is. And getting to talk to you is like elbowing through a crowd.”

  While talking, he changed freeway lanes, maneuvering the Fiat with one hand. A sign announced the San Roque turnofi was a mile and a half ahead.

  “Because the children want to talk, too? Maybe it’s because they don’t see much of you at home.” Ruth never raised her voice, always sounding gentle, even when administering a rebuke. It was a justified rebuke, he admitted silently, wishing he hadn’t raised the subject.

  “Nim, we heard about Walter. And the others. It was on the news; it’s terrible. I’m truly sorry.”

  He knew that she meant it, and that Ruth was aware how close he and the chief had been.

  That kind of understanding was typical of Ruth, even though in other ways she and Nim seemed to have less and less rapport nowadays, compared with how it used to be. Not that there was any open hostility. There wasn’t. Ruth, with her quiet imperturbability, would never let it come to that, Nim reasoned. He could visualize her now—composed and competent, her soft gray eyes sympathetic. She had a Madonna quality, he had often thought; even without the good looks she possessed in abundance, character alone would have made her beautiful. He knew, too, she would be sharing this moment with Leah and Benjy, explaining, treating them as equals in that easy way she always had. Nim never ceased to respect Ruth, especially as a mother. It was simply that their marriage had become uninteresting, even dull; in his own mind he characterized it as “a bumpless road to nowhere.” There was something else—perhaps an outgrowth of their mutual malaise. Recently Ruth seemed to have developed interests of her own, interests she wouldn’t talk about. Several times Nim called home when normally she would have been there; instead, she appeared to have been out all day and later dodged explaining, which was unlike her. Had Ruth taken a lover? It was possible, he supposed. In any case, Nim wondered how long and how far the
y would drift before something definite, a confrontation, had to happen.

  “We’re all shaken up,” he acknowledged. “Eric has asked me to go to Ardythe and I’m on my way there now. I expect I’ll be late. Probably very late. Don’t wait up.”

  That was nothing new, of course. More evenings than not, Nim worked late. The result: Dinner at home was either delayed or he missed it entirely. It also meant he saw little of Leah and Benjy, who were often in bed, sometimes asleep, when Nim arrived. Sometimes Nim had guilt feelings about the meager amount of time he spent with the children and he knew it troubled Ruth, though it was a rare occasion when she said so. Sometimes he wished she complained more.

  But tonight’s absence was different. It needed no further explanations or excuses, even to himself.

  “Poor Ardythe,” Ruth said. “Just as Walter was getting near retirement. And that announcement just now makes it even worse.”

  “What announcement?”

  “Oh, I thought you’d know. It was on the news. The people who planted the bomb sent—a communiqué I think they called it—to a radio station. They were boasting about what they’d done. Can you imagine? What kind of people must they be?”

  “Which radio station?” As he spoke, Nim put down the phone with a swift movement, snapped the car radio to “on,” then scooped up the phone again in time to hear Ruth say, “I don’t know.”

  “Listen,” he told her, “it’s important I hear. So I’m going to hang up now and, if I can, I’ll call you from Ardythe’s.”

  Nim replaced the phone. The radio was already tuned to an all-news station and a glance at his watch showed a minute to the half hour when he knew there would be a news summary.

  The San Roque off-ramp was in sight and he swung the Fiat onto it. The Talbots’ home was just a mile or so away.

  On the radio, a trumpet blast punctuated by Morse code announced a news bulletin. The item Nim had been waiting for was at the top.