Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

"Speaking as a mother now, I want that vaccine to exist."

"I'll light a fire under them," said Torrent. "I want the vaccine to exist, too. I'm too young to die."

"If history has taught us anything, it's that diseases are smarter than we are."

"Not smarter," said Torrent. "They just don't give up."

MINGO'S BRIDGE

It's not about ending our dependence on "foreign" oil. It's about having some oil left in the world to do the things that only oil can do.

We can turn anything into electricity—sunlight, tides, rivers, coal, shale, corn, wind

, garbage, the heat of the Earth. We will never run out of electricity. So every vehicle that can run on electricity, must.

Because there will never be a battery-powered airplane, so far as we can foresee. Nor will we have electric rockets any time soon. Even after all the oil that we've burned in the past century, we still have enough oil left to keep all our planes in the air and put new satellites in the sky for thousands and thousands of years.

When President Eisenhower started the interstate freeway system, it was one of the great works of civilization. Now it's time to put our money into something else, to bet our future on something else.

I'm asking Congress to abolish, by the year 2015, the transport across state lines of vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine, except hybrids, which will have until 2020.

We are funding the development of lighter, longer-lasting, and faster-charging batteries.

We are providing tax incentives for service stations to provide quick-charge outlets in addition to, and eventually instead of, gas pumps.

Above all, we are embarking on a new national electric railway system. Passenger and freight service will once again reach into every city of more than twenty-five thousand people, and electric streetcars will be built for urban transport in all those cities.

On a corporate level, we are separating the trains from the track. Just as airlines share the air routes, so also the train companies will share the new double and quadruple tracks, express and local, urban and intercity. They will compete to offer you better and better service. Comfortable seating, plenty of luggage room, continuous cellphone and broadband internet service. Onboard food and shops from popular franchises.

The federal government will do for trains what it has done for airlines—we will maintain a Rail Traffic Administration that, using computers and highly trained operatives, will control the safe flow of rail traffic throughout America, without collisions or delays.

These trains will go where you need them to go, they will operate on schedules that suit your needs, and within a few years you will wonder why you ever wasted time driving yourself, hour after hour, across the country or around town, then searching for a parking place.

I will not be president when the whole system is complete—neither was Eisenhower when the interstate highway system finally reached every important destination. But within the next six months, you will be reading and watching videos about Railway One, the presidential train, the rolling White House, which I will use instead of an airplane for all my travel within the lower forty-eight states.

I will still fly to Alaska and Hawaii.

Cole lived in a boardinghouse behind the Library of Congress. It wasn't a particularly secure location, but he made up for the easy-pick lock on his room by never bringing anything home that contained any secrets. Even his telephone was discardable, and instead of saving numbers in the phone, he kept the ones he needed in his head.

He also didn't own a car. He kept a narrow-tired street bicycle and used it to get around D.C.—it helped keep him fit. Even though he hadn't run as many operations as the rest of Reuben's old jeesh in the years since they fought their way into Aldo Verus's subterranean stronghold in the mountains of Washington, he had worked hard to stay fit. At thirty-one, he wasn't going to give his superiors any excuse to shift him away from combat assignments.

Most days, the bike was as fast as any car—it was mostly downhill from where he lived to the White House and the Pentagon, and he could scoot through blocked-up traffic. Going home was when he got the exercise, uphill all the way. But he took pride in never leaving top gear all the way home.

Cessy Malich asked him once, when he rode the Metro out to see her and the kids, why he didn't buy a house. "You make enough money, I know you do," she said.

"Spying on me?" he asked.

"I've spent my whole life living on officers' pay, and I know what a colonel makes."

"I don't need a house," he told her.

"If you have a house, though, you're more likely to be attractive to women."

"I have buns of steel, Mrs. Malich. I don't need a house."

What he couldn't tell her was: He knew what a home was, because he had been so often in hers. It was a fatherless house, just like the one Cole had grown up in. He had been nine when his father died of cancer, only a year younger than Mark Malich was when Reuben was assassinated. Reuben's kids knew he had loved them and was proud of them, so in a way he was still in their lives, but that wasn't enough. Cole wasn't going to marry and then leave his children fatherless. Only when he knew combat was over forever would he start thinking about a home with wife and children. And if he was fifty and couldn't find a good woman who wasn't a widow or divorcee and well past childbearing, that would still be better than having children of his own and leaving them fatherless.

If he had children, it would make him timid.