"My counter said it was," Zen answered.
"Possibly your counter was in error. Now if you will come into this room, colonel." West moved through an archway in the stone wall and into another room, holding the heavy draperies aside so Zen and Nedra could enter. An opaque screen was set into the wall. Several chairs, including one large seat with control buttons built into the arms, were in this room. West closed the curtain over the arch through which they had entered and motioned Zen to a chair. The craggy man slid into the chair with the buttons on the arms. Nedra sat beside Zen. Relaxed and at ease in the chair, she seemed to have forgotten that such creatures as colonels of intelligence existed. West pushed a button. Light flicked across the screen, danced an erratic pattern there, and vanished. An image began to form. Firming, it increased in detail, and became a city.
Or what had once been a city.
The place was blackened now, the buildings lying in ruins. Towers had toppled, windows had broken, the ravages of fire were visible. Here and there tall buildings had crumbled into streets that crossed and criss-crossed each other at crazy angles. The rubble from the broken buildings still lay where it had fallen.
"Washington, by thunder!" Zen said. "This was their prime target. We stopped their bombers cold but they eventually got through with a guided missile. The city is still hot. You can see it right there on the screen. Not a sign of life!" He became excited as he re-lived those first mad moments when the Asian Federation had struck out of nowhere. In this moment what little freedom that had remained in America had been given up in the face of the seemingly more important necessity of remaining alive.
"Yes," West said. "Now what do you see?"
The ruined Washington faded from the scene. As it faded, the broken dome of the capitol building—its top had been blown off in the blast—was revealed looking like a mysterious crater on the moon open to the sea of space.
Another city came on the screen, a mass of broken buildings where two rivers met.
"I think that's Pittsburgh," Zen said. "They were eager to hit us there, to cut down on our industrial production potential. They got Gary, Indiana, and South Chicago, for the same reason. In spite of everything we could do to stop it, they eventually got through to our major production centers. If we hadn't foreseen the possibility of this happening, and had not spread our industry across the country, breaking it up into small parts, they would have crippled us so badly before the war even started that we would not have lasted long. However, even with our production spread, when they hit the sources of our raw materials, they hurt us—bad. Our stock piles gave out after a couple of years. Since then we've been scavenging for metal wherever we can find it."
"Yes. I know," West said.