“Hah—fat chance of that!” Erica nodded toward the departure screens. In spite of good weather, most flights were interminably delayed, several were canceled, and those flights that actually did make it out did so on dubious jets in desperate need of maintenance. Even now, the DC-10 pulling up right outside their window looked weak and world-weary.
“Look at that thing,” said Maddy. “It’s like the poster child for metal fatigue.”
It was amazing to think that Americans—so smug in their preeminence—had once scoffed at the shoddy state of air travel in Third-World nations and—most desolate of all—Eastern Europe. Maddy smiled ruefully. Now every airline was Aeroflot.
If it were only air travel, the ailment could have been cured, or at least treated—but it seemed every other world system was infected as well. Pundits waxed rhetorical day in and day out about a volatile global economy. Conservatives lamented the loss of traditional values. Liberals attacked greedy corporate interests. Zealots and zanies predicted the coming of, or the death of, God. There were a thousand other reasons why that thin veneer of civilization was suddenly being stripped to the grain. But the answer was clear to Maddy: If the power of one person’s thought could shatter the world’s greatest dam and turn back the massive flood that followed; if there were someone in this world who could do that—then where was the validity of science and reason? Who wouldn’t lose interest in their job and the petty ins— and—outs of their own life? And since civilization depended upon six billion docile and compliant cogs keeping the Grand Clockwork running smoothly, how could the system function with hundreds of thousands of mutinies and desertions, as workers suddenly left their jobs, abandoning their old lives? It didn’t take an economic sage to figure out that everything from airlines to food lines would soon come grinding to a halt.