It looked like it was hard for Bethany, too. She was sitting in the armchair Travis had tossed the menu onto earlier. She was staring at nothing in particular. Her eyes kept narrowing as she considered new angles of the situation.
Travis went to the south end of the room and stared out the windows. Not quite a mile and a half in that direction stood the Washington Monument. For height it dwarfed everything else in the city. It was over five hundred fifty feet tall. Its white marble was nearly blinding in the summer sunlight.
Travis turned and walked to the projected opening, which was aimed more or less to the south. He ducked and leaned through it and stared at the Washington Monument there, rising from the canopy of pines and brightly colored hardwoods, its marble dull and gray beneath the overcast autumn sky.
Nearer by, the rusted girder skeletons of high-rises reared from the trees in various states of decay. Strangler vines had enveloped all but the tallest of them. Travis looked down at what remained of the Ritz-Carlton beneath him. Much of the southwest corner had collapsed, but otherwise the framework still held. Here and there a few sections of concrete flooring remained in place, though mostly there were just stubs of rebar where the concrete had long ago cracked and fallen away.
Through gaps in the trees Travis could see the ground ten stories below. He could see the remnant of Vermont Avenue, fractured by years of plant root invasion and ice expansion. He recalled the sound of the wolves clattering over it in the darkness.
“There’s a city in Russia called Pripyat,” Bethany said. “It’s right next to the Chernobyl power station.”
Travis drew back in from the opening and turned to her.
“The city had a population of about fifty thousand,” she said. “It was evacuated within a couple days of the accident, and it’s been empty ever since. Biologists are fascinated with it. It’s kind of a thumbnail view of what the world would look like if we all just disappeared one day. In Pripyat there were saplings taking root in the middle of city streets within just a couple years. We can assume the same thing would happen here. Which means the age of the trees on the other side gives us an estimate of the time frame we’re dealing with. It gives us a minimum, anyway.”
Travis nodded. “There’s a white pine out there that’s got sixty-seven rings of branches, and it’s about as tall as anything in sight. Branch rings equal years, more or less.”
“So call it seventy years,” Bethany said. “On the other side of the opening, it’s seventy years after the end of the world. Whenever that is.”
“The rest of it slots in easily enough,” Travis said.
He was pacing at the windows again.
Bethany was still sitting in the chair. Still looking numb.
Travis continued. “Paige and the others turned on the cylinders inside Border Town. Who knows what they saw on the other side, down there. Maybe that far in the future, the place is just deserted. Whatever the case, they took the cylinders up into the desert the next morning, and spent a lot more time there. They took radio and satellite equipment through the projected opening, and set it all up in the future. They wanted to find out if there was anyone alive in that time. If there was anyone out there, on the air.”
Bethany turned to him. Her eyes looked haunted.
“I wonder if they heard anyone,” she said.
Travis thought about it. “One way or another, they learned something. Something specific enough that they thought the president could help them understand it.”
“The first piece of the puzzle,” Bethany said.
Travis nodded. “It could have been anything. Some old military transmission broadcasting on a loop somewhere, even decades after everyone was gone. Or something else entirely. Who knows, right? But whatever it was, if they couldn’t make sense of it themselves, who better to go to than the president? He could put them in touch with almost anyone who might have expertise.”
Bethany considered it. Nodded slowly.
Travis stopped pacing. He returned to the opening and leaned into it. He stared at the wreck of the city beyond.