Aftermath a-1 Read online

  Janet Kloos was holding the ship’s angle exactly as Tom had set it. She said, “I’ve never done an un-powered descent. How much speed do you need to avoid a stall?”

  Tom’s respect for the Vice President increased. Her thoughts were running on the same lines as his own.

  “About four hundred. These suborbitals weren’t designed to glide.”

  You could land a ship like this at four hundred. Tom had done it, himself, in training — during daylight, with assistance from the automatic pilot, and with a long, clear runway awaiting his arrival.

  It was night, there was no automatic pilot, and the land below was dark and unknown.

  Tom thought, We’re going to crash, and I have the Vice President on board. And then, in a flash of grim humor, Vice President? Hell, we’re going to crash with me on board.

  The ship was racing down through the atmosphere in its long arc of descent. Tom, with no information except the feel of the controls, guessed that they were already around twenty thousand meters. The buffeting from wind currents was no more than usual, and the faint glow of frictional heating and ionization looked familiar and normal. As the descent continued, that glow faded. It would have been easy to imagine that everything was under control.

  Janet Kloos was not fooled. She had released the dual controls. Now she was leaning forward and to the right, staring down at the ground. “Where are you going to put us down?”

  The question of the moment. A four-hundred-mile-an-hour landing speed sounded like nothing compared with suborbital speeds ten times that, but a normal touchdown was at less than one-fifty.

  “Do you see anything down there?” Tom’s question didn’t sound like an answer to hers, but it was.

  “I’m beginning to. The aurora helps. Now that my eyes are used to the darkness, I’m beginning to see outlines.”

  And so was Tom. In every test that he had ever taken, his sight had been judged exceptional. Especially in low lighting. Owl eyes, one tester had said. But owls didn’t land at four hundred knots.

  The terrain below was gradually appearing as faint contrasts between dark gray and total black. Since their trajectory had not changed, they should be descending toward the suborbital field fifty miles west of Washington. If he could direct them in to that, they had at least a chance.

  He glanced at the backup altimeter. That ought to be working; it used air pressure rather than computed absolute position. But it was too dark to see. His guess was that they had descended to around five thousand meters. They had maybe four minutes more flying time.

  Below he saw rugged terrain, ranges of wooded hills.

  The Shenandoahs? If so, they were getting close. He could hear the sound of rushing air on the streamlined body. That was unusual; during a normal powered descent it was masked by the noise of the engines. Should he say something to the passengers? If so, what? And how could he do it, with no cabin address system?

  They were descending fast. Tom saw a broad river valley, and for a moment he had hopes. Then the hills were back, rushing closer beneath them. Their slopes seemed covered with soft, gray feathers. It was easy to imagine that you could land on that downy surface, and it would serve to brake your movement. Tom knew better. At four hundred miles an hour, those soft, pliable branches would chop the ship into small pieces.

  He gripped the control stick more tightly. Janet Kloos reached over and placed her hand on his. “We’re not going to make it, are we?” she said quietly.

  “I don’t think so.” Tom tried to match her calm. “Not unless something opens up in the next few seconds. It’s all trees down there.”

  The banality, the normalcy, of their comments struck him. Last words ought to be epic and memorable, even if there was no way to record them. Were the flight recorders working? Probably not, since everything else had failed.

  Her hand was still on his. The sound of air on the ship’s body had risen to a scream. The topmost branches of the forest streaked by a few meters below. In the final moment before the world ended, Tom had enough self-control and curiosity to think a final question: What killed us?

  Third Strike. March 17, 2026; Bathurst Island, Canadian Arctic.

  The oil rig could be worked by hand, but the cold was extreme and after the first day no one suggested it.

  Early on the morning of the third day, Cliff Bar-ringer called a meeting of the four-man crew.

  “We’ve all been talking for the past couple of days in bits and pieces. I want to get organized and make some decisions. Nothing’s working right, but I have no idea why. The good news is that we’re in no danger, and we won’t starve.”

  “Or freeze,” Judd Clemens said. He was the oldest of the group, with thirty years of Arctic experience behind him. “Dahlquist says we’re sitting on the world’s biggest oil and gas field.”

  “We are.” Dahlquist was the odd man out, a lightly built and nervous geologist half a head shorter than the others. “All the groups who have leases in the basin agree. The seismic data and chemistry indicate more light crude in the Sverdrup Basin than the Saudis ever had. But we shouldn’t be burning it — good quality hydrocarbons are too precious for that.”

  “So we take a little drop, give us some light and keep our asses from freezing to the ground.” Barringer jerked his thumb toward the homemade lamps and the two oil stoves. “You want to turn those off, you do it over my dead body. Look, I don’t want to talk morality. I want to review the situation and make some decisions. The communications equipment is down, we’ve not heard a word from outside, and the rest of the group are two days overdue. What do we know, and what do we do?”

  “We’re still getting paid, aren’t we?” Big Eddie Hansen was frowning. “I mean, we’re here. It’s not our fault if the equipment’s no good and the others don’t come.”

  “Suppose they don’t arrive until midsummer?” Cliff Barringer addressed his question to all of them, not just Big Eddie. “How long are we willing to sit on our duffs and wait? You may be more patient than me, but I want to know what’s going on. When I turned in at nine o’clock three nights ago, everything was working—”

  “Later than that,” Clemens interrupted. “Me and Eddie was outside watching the aurora. We come in at about half-ten when it clouded over, and everything seemed all right then.”

  “So it happened sometime during the night. But when we got up, half our stuff was useless. I want to know why.”

  “A lot more than half, I think. Radio and television communications. Computers.” Dahlquist began to tick items off on his fingers. “Snowmobile. Rig pump controller. Hut thermostat. Fuel cells. Clocks and watches. Fluorescent lights. Electric oven. CD player—”

  “Enough,” Barringer interrupted. “What is working?”

  “Everything mechanical. Oil stoves, and oil lamps, and the thermometer and can opener and hand pumps and the manual rig. Batteries still work. Everything simple. Nothing that uses electronics or elaborate controls.”

  “Electronics? The snowmobile has a simple two-stroke engine—”

  “—with an electronic fuel injection system.” It was Dahlquist’s turn to interrupt.

  “All right. Look, you said all this yesterday. The question is, what can we do about it?”

  “About the equipment? Nothing. We have no way of repairing electronic equipment. It’ll have to be heli-lifted south.”

  “Which assumes that the helicopter arrives, when all we know is that it’s way overdue. If we knew what was causing this—”

  “You know my suggestion. All this forms some strange sort of side effect of the supernova.”

  “That happened down in the Southern Hemisphere,” Clemens said, in the tones of a man with little interest in any event south of the Arctic Circle.

  “It did.” Dahlquist became defensive, as though this was now regarded as his supernova. “The star that blew up is at sixty degrees south.”

  “About as far away from us as you can get.” Clemens proved that he knew a little more about s
outhern events than he pretended. “It’s produced weird weather around most of the world, but nothing here. And it started over a month ago, and it’s nowhere near as bright now as it was. So how could it cause trouble now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, you two.” Barringer wondered why he could never hold a decent meeting. The talk always seemed to run off down side alleys. “I’d like to know what caused the trouble, too. But I’d like a hell of a lot more to decide what we’re going to do right here in this camp. And I don’t want a debate. I want to make some suggestions.”

  That produced at least a temporary silence. Barringer waved his arm around, indicating the walls of the prefabricated hut. “You could probably run right through the walls if you wanted to, but it won’t blow away and it’s thermally insulated. So option one is to sit in here and wait ’til we all go crazy with each other’s company. I don’t like that. So here’s my idea. We know that BSP has leases northwest of here, and Amarillo has leases to the southwest. They must have test crews, too.”

  “They do,” Dahlquist said. “I talked to them a week ago, about interpretation of the seismic.”

  “Do you know where their camps are?”

  “Pretty well. They’re both fifteen to twenty miles away from us. I can give you a heading.”

  He did not say “compass heading.” Bathurst Island sat almost on the North Magnetic Pole.

  “We can manage twenty miles,” Barringer said, “even without the snowmobile. It’s time we compared notes with the other groups. If we’re the only ones with troubles, great. They’ll help us. If we’re all in the same boat, then we’ll help each other. So I say we draw lots, to decide who—”

  “Me.” Judd Clemens had his hand already in the air. “I want to go. I know how to travel easily over snow, I’ve done it often enough.”

  “And me.” Big Eddie Hansen raised his hand.

  Barringer stared at him. “Do you know how to move on snow?”

  “Better than you do. And like you said, I’d go crazy sitting here waiting for nothing.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Clemens added. “Me and Eddie know the land and we work together good. All right?”

  “Just give me a minute.” Barringer had been thinking of two trips, one man to BSP and one to Amarillo. But what Judd Clemens said made a lot more sense. If BSP was affected, so almost certainly was Amarillo. And two men could help each other if one got into difficulties. “All right.”

  “When can we go?” Clemens asked.

  Barringer glanced out of the thick plastic window. It was still a few days short of the equinox, so at this latitude the sun never rose above the horizon. From about ten to two in the afternoon, a strange half-light reflected off the clouds. Today it was calm outside, with no breath of wind. “It looks good to me right now. What do you think?”

  “Perfect.” Clemens stood up. “Come on, Eddie. Let’s get suited up and our snowshoes on, and we’ll be off.”

  “Where’ll we go, Judd?”

  “Amarillo. They eat better than at BSP. With luck we’ll be there in time for dinner.”

  In five minutes they were pushing out through the multiple layers of thermal plastic that covered the flimsy door of the hut. In one more minute, Judd Clemens was back.

  “Here.” He handed the rifle that he was carrying to Dahlquist. “I thought I’d better test it to make sure this fired, before we lugged it all the way to Amarillo. You can add it to the list of things that doesn’t work. See you tomorrow, early afternoon.”

  He pushed his way out again, while Dahlquist sat down and examined the weapon.

  “Odd. I would have thought that this — oh, I think I see. It’s the laser range finder and the target follower, they are controlled by a little ballistic computer. When that’s out of use, there’s a safety feature that stops the gun from being fired.”

  “Could it be bypassed?”

  “I think so. With a bit of tinkering.” Dahlquist laid the rifle down. “I’ll take a look at it later. At the moment I have three weeks’ worth of well logs to look at — and no computer to help.”

  Barringer took the hint. He put on his own suit and went outside. The area around the camp was flat and featureless. Bathurst Island was a bare, eroded, and glaciated sheet of rock, with nothing but the small island of Ellef Ringnes between its jagged shoreline and the North Pole. A big change from Indonesia, or the tall offshore rigs east of the Falklands.

  The snow around the prefab hut was about a foot and a half deep. Its thin crust showed the marks of two pairs of snowshoes, heading off to the southwest. Judd Clemens and Big Eddie Hansen were already reduced to two blurry dots on the horizon. They had moved much faster across the snow than Barringer could ever have done.

  He turned to go back inside. Clemens, and Big Eddie, too, might be at home in this land, but they were not real oilmen. Oilmen roamed the world. They would never stay a life in one place.

  A full day passed with no sign of Judd Clemens and Eddie Hansen. Barringer was not worried. The weather held fine, and visibility was good.

  On the second day, about noon, he went outside again. He wanted to look for the others, and also Dahlquist was getting on his nerves. The geologist was prone to confusing a discussion of neutron well logs with conversation.

  The weather was changing, but not in any threatening way. The temperature was up, and a thin fog lay on the land. It was not enough to confound, and anyway Judd Clemens was a seasoned Arctic traveler with a good sense of direction. But where the devil were they? They must know that he was itching to know the situation at the Amarillo camp.

  About ten o’clock on the third morning, Dahlquist suited up to take the short walk over to the rig. “Be back in about an hour,” he said.

  Barringer nodded. Yesterday’s feeling of irritation with Dahlquist was still there.

  By one-thirty the geologist had not returned and there was still no sign of Clemens and Hansen. Barringer put on his own snowsuit, feeling more annoyance than alarm. He had fried ham steaks over the oil stove for him and Dahlquist, and eaten some himself. The rest was cold and spoiled, and he was damned if he would start over when the other man came back.

  The air outside was warmer and perfectly still. Yesterday’s fog had thickened. The dark oil rig, about fifty yards from the hut, stood misted and indistinct.

  Barringer walked in that direction, crunching through frozen snow and calling Dahlquist’s name. His voice was swallowed up by the still air. He came to the drill site and circled around it. On the far side, about five paces beyond the rig, he saw a ragged piece of windproof cloth. It was bloodstained. Two steps away he noticed a long smear of blood leading away from the rig. The surrounding surface of the snow was trampled and broken.

  Barringer did not follow the line of the long blood smear. He backed away toward the hut, nerves jangling. When he turned he saw what he ought to have noticed earlier: paw prints in the snow, ten inches across. They led toward, and wandered around, the hut.

  He ran for the door with its hanging sheets of thick plastic. As he opened it and went through, he turned. A white shadow was approaching through the fog, silently and at great speed. He scarcely had time to close the door and snap the bolt into position.

  The building shook. Barringer backed away across the hut and snuffed the oil lamp. In the darkness, he waited. Ten seconds later a tall form reared up against the window. He saw great curved claws on the window’s edge, and a long head reaching for the roof. At last the beast dropped to all fours. The nose quested, sampling the air for a few moments, then the animal turned and loped away across the snow. Barringer thought that he made out two more shapes, outlined eerily against the swirling mist.

  He had seen polar bears before, from a distance. Judd Clemens had pointed them out. He said, “You have to pity them. For twenty thousand years they ruled this land. Everything they saw was either their own species or it was prey. Then we came along and took over.”

  Took over with our helicopte
rs that could seek them out, our power sleds that could outrun them, and our guns that could kill from half a mile away. But without those aids, Nature’s balance tilted back the other way. No need now to pity the bears.

  In the dark hut, Barringer groped his way to where Dahlquist had sat. A full-sized polar bear weighed half a ton. It was ten feet from nose to hindquarters, and it could run faster than any human. The wicked claws would rip the walls of the hut like tissue paper.

  Had Dahlquist found time to do his “bit of tinkering,” enough to make the rifle work? Barringer was about to find out. Then, and only then, would he have an idea of his own possible future.

  1

  March 21, 2026.

  Art Ferrand woke just before dawn. The only bedroom of the house faced due east, and he lay at ease until he could watch the disk of the rising sun neatly divided by an east-west line of fence running down the middle of the yard.

  Day 41, and the vernal equinox. In a normal year, at this latitude and altitude, the crocuses would be about ready to flower.

  But this was not a normal year. Yesterday, the tulips and azaleas had been in bloom in the front yard.

  Art rolled over and climbed carefully out of bed. Gingerly, he put weight on his right leg. Some aches and pains were easing, but some would be with him forever. At sixty-two, lost cartilage did not replace itself even with the telomod treatment. His knee was probably as good as it would ever be, and that wasn’t so great.

  He leaned on the windowsill and peered south-southeast, down the slope of the hill. That way, line of sight but much too far off to be seen, lay Washington. What did the city look like now, on Day 41? It was hard to picture — and hard not to try.