Aftermath a-1 Page 4

  The little house sat at fifteen hundred feet on the edge of the Catoctin Mountain Park, woods above and steep fields below. He noticed that the red Maryland dirt of the fields was hidden by healthy green. Another anomaly. Like the flowers, the grass was a month and more ahead of schedule. The sky was as it had been for the past three days, with clouds coming in slowly from the south. If today followed the same pattern, afternoon would be overcast and evening would bring heavy rain.

  Most people would say the house was little more than a log cabin. There was the bedroom, its small bathroom fed by rainwater collected as runoff from the sloping slate roof; and there was the other room, on the west side, a combined kitchen/living room/library/storehouse, with a little porch where Art could sit and watch the sunset.

  He had come here on February 22, when most people still regarded the event of Day 1, February 9, as nothing more than an astronomical oddity, on a par with a bright comet. No, less than that. The Alpha Centauri supernova, like the star system that gave rise to it, was never seen in the Northern Hemisphere. An invisible event, trillions of miles away, might be something to excite the scientists. For everyone else it seemed to have no connection with the real world of jobs and day-today worries.

  Art was a consultant specializing in networks and feedback analysis. As one of the increasing number of people with no permanent job, he had more offers than he could use. He took work when he felt like it, and found plenty of time to listen to the news reports and range the science web. He was also free to go wherever his instincts told him.

  The astronomers had certainly been excited. There hadn’t been a naked-eye supernova in the Milky Way since the seventeenth century, and now here was one that in celestial terms was close enough to spit at. Not only that, according to current accepted theories of stellar stability, Alpha Centauri could not go supernova. That led to lengthy and intense debates among the astronomers. To Art, it all suggested that a better theory was definitely overdue. As one lady analyst said, defensively, astronomy was not a field in which you could create experiments to test your ideas. The universe was your laboratory. You had to wait for Nature to come up with a test case.

  For a few days, Art watched the images flowing down from the spaceborne observatories and listened to the discussions, hard to understand, of the energy that was being released. One figure, of all the discussions of billions and trillions and quadrillions, jumped out at him. The Alpha Centauri supernova was currently ninety percent as bright in Earth’s sky as the midday sun.

  Of course, said the commentators, that would last at most a month or two. Then the star would dwindle rapidly in brightness to its original level and probably less.

  President Steinmetz had chimed in, offering reassurances. The supernova would have major effects, he said, on climate; but those would be felt in the Southern Hemisphere. Art was a lifelong weather buff. At his home in Olney, less than twenty miles from the White House, he had listened. Then he downloaded scores of weather maps and satellite images, and tried to decide what a ninety percent increase in incident solar radiation, all in the Southern Hemisphere, would do to the Earth’s lands, oceans, and atmospheric circulation patterns. It was summer below the equator, a double summer.

  It didn’t take more than a couple of days for Art to realize that he had no idea what was likely to happen. Worse than that, the dozens of analyses made by the professionals all seemed to come up with wildly different answers. President Steinmetz was a smart man, but his principal job today was to soothe an alarmed public.

  On Day 14, February 22, the supernova was reported to be as bright as ever. Art packed into his solar electric van the hundred kilos of possessions that really mattered, locked up the house, and headed for the vacation house in the Catoctin Mountain Park.

  He had agonized over whom to tell, and what to tell. His sister, his neighbors, his colleagues at Syncom? “Get out while you can.” They would, very reasonably, ask, “Why?” He had no good answer. Suppose nothing much happened? Suppose all the heat from the supernova caused a few big thunderstorms, and nothing more? He’d have put a lot of people to a lot of pointless trouble — if they took any notice of him, that is. To some of his friends he was already the man who had cried wolf.

  Worry about what you do, boy. Then you’ll be way ahead of most people. His grandfather had told him that, over and over, half a century ago. Art could hear him still. Finally, twenty-seven days ago, he had headed for the mountain cabin. He would return to Olney as soon as he was sure that his worries were pointless.

  Seven days ago, on March 14, the problem of going home had become orders of magnitude more complicated.

  Art went across to the gas stove, lit a burner, and set a kettle on top. While the water was heating he turned on the radio. Most people didn’t seem to understand what survival was all about. It wasn’t that you abandoned modern amenities, like health monitors and web wandering and silver bullets. It was that you made sure they ran independent of external supplies, like the little radio with its built-in fifty-year battery of doped fullerenes; or else you made sure that you could do without them if you had to. When the electricity failed, you went to gas and oil for light and heat. When those ran out, you turned to wood and tallow candles.

  They would never run out, at least in Art’s lifetime. The whole of Catoctin Mountain Park was his for the taking. He couldn’t use one-hundredth of the fallen trees and broken limbs within a mile of the house, brought down by the screaming winds of the previous three weeks. There was wildlife aplenty.

  But some things, even if you could do without them, you would sure miss. Art dumped boiling water on freeze-dried coffee, sniffed the aroma with pleasure, and added a spoonful of creamer. You could buy milk easily enough, if you were willing to walk half a mile down to the farm. But how long would that last?

  His supply of coffee and creamer would be enough, at a guess, for three or four months. Long before that, he had reasons more urgent than food to be back in Washington.

  Over on the table, the ancient and bulky radio was scanning its entire frequency range, seeking a signal above background strength. He had dragged it out of storage six days ago, and found to his surprise that it still functioned once he had cannibalized the now-useless new radio for its fullerene batteries. They built things to last when that old radio was made. On the other hand, it lacked sensitivity and an automatic signal tracker. Once or twice while he sipped his coffee a faint and scratchy voice surfaced out of a mass of static, then to his annoyance it quickly lost itself.

  Even so, here was the first suggestion that services might be creeping back.

  Art knew the precise moment when they went away. Just after eleven o’clock on the evening of March 14, the wind was rising and he was speculating on the chances of another severe storm. He was gazing out of his bedroom window at the cloud patterns when the sky lit with a shimmering blue discharge like an intense aurora. Within seconds, the bedside light went out and the hum of the refrigerator stopped.

  By the light of a gas lantern, Art confirmed his suspicion. Electrical power was gone. The refrigerator was nothing better than another storage cupboard.

  The next morning he discovered that he had to deal with something worse than a simple power outage. His DNA sequencer was dead. His car would not start. The telcom produced no dial tone. His computer, even on battery power, was lifeless, as were his personal secretary and calculator. Since then he had been reduced to making notes of schedules and dates and anything else he wanted to organize, and doing his rough calculations with pencil and paper. God help anybody under forty, who with rare exceptions knew nothing of the hand methods.

  Art waited. It took another day or two to realize that all aircraft had disappeared from the skies, and that traffic on the road beyond the fields was nonexistent.

  He didn’t have an explanation for any of this. Extreme weather around the globe could be expected to damage many high-tech systems, but you would expect them to degrade gradually and gracefully, j
ust as they were designed to do when individual components or subsystems failed. Instead, everything had happened all at once, in that single flicker of violet-blue. It was damnably annoying. Just when you most needed a broadband communications system to tell you what was going on, that failed along with everything else.

  And if he, way out here, was uneasy without electricity and cars and airplanes, what the hell must be going on in the cities of the world, where lives depended on police, buses and trains, hospitals and schools? What about food supplies, and running water? Unlike Art, city folk could not go hunting in the woods above his house, where deer and wildlife were always plentiful.

  He pushed away his bread and honey, losing interest in breakfast. His own advantage might only be temporary. Deer were plentiful, but would they remain that way? Others, less lucky than him, could head north at any time and disturb his snug little haven in the park. They might be armed, and dangerous. And if people were hungry now, that was surely going to get worse as the year wore on. Winter had ended abruptly halfway through February. With mid-March like boisterous late May, who knew what July and August might bring? Meanwhile, he was not willing to venture far afield to satisfy his curiosity. The woodchuck that came out of the hole first after the danger seemed over was not the one most likely to survive. Until planes were flying again and cars passed regularly along the road beyond the fields, curiosity as to what had happened would wait.

  But he was willing to venture near afield. In fact, it was close to a requirement. If he missed his exercise, even for a single day, that right knee stiffened. Indoor stretching and flexing would do at a pinch, but nothing was as good as a gentle walk for a mile or so along the dirt track that followed the line of the woods, followed by a return over the humps and tussocks of the fields.

  The telomod was working, no doubt about it. Two years ago it was all he could do to hobble from car to house. The question was, had the treatment gone as far as it could go?

  And then, the second question, one that he was almost unwilling to ask: Where, how, and when (if ever) would he receive the next treatment?

  Art left his cup, plate, and knife on the table. They were pretty clean and he would use them again later in the day. He did make a concession to his old standards and washed his hands and face, easier now that his beard was fully grown. Baths were a once-a-week luxury. He had plenty of wood for fuel, but even with wild torrents of rain filling the cistern every day or two he had to be careful with fresh water. A person might carry water for bathing from the stream that ran downhill about a quarter of a mile west of the house. But that person, Art had decided after one trip with a bucket, would need to be a hell of a lot more fastidious about personal hygiene than he was. And he for one was not about to stand outside buck naked in the cold rain to take a shower, no matter how dirty he got.

  He turned off the radio, which was still interrupting a continuous crackle of static with the occasional tantalizing hint of human speech. As a matter of course, he checked the electrical power, telcom, and computer. Nothing. The little DNA sequencer received his special attention. If he had the power to restore just one device or service to working order, he would gladly continue without electric power and communications and everything else. Just give him back the ability to analyze, simply and quickly, the structure of the chromosomes of his own body.

  Outside, the van still formed an inert mass of plastic, metal, and composites. Even the battery, which ought by now to have been amply recharged even with the weak solar flux of mid-March, was dead. Art wasted no time on it and began to walk southeast, toward a mid-morning sun now sporadically hidden by broken cloud.

  Already, the temperature was at the upper limit of comfort. In a single day he could see a change in the plants. The buds of the rhododendrons flanking the dirt path were almost fully open, and farther off toward the woods on the left he saw a new mass of faint pink. It was wild rose, blooming far before its season. Instead of pleasure, the rush toward summer created in him a powerful uneasiness, a sense of events removed from their natural course. What came next? Was Alpha Centauri finally fading in the southern skies? The astronomers had so far done miserably on predictions, maybe they would be wrong again.

  When he reached the dirt road he found it puddled and sticky from the rain of the previous evening. Today he went in the opposite direction from usual. He moved off left, to the higher ground at the fringe of the woods, and picked his way through tree roots and low brush. So far as he was concerned it didn’t matter how much clay he had on his boots, but he knew he would be exposed to a different philosophy when he reached his destination.

  After three-quarters of a mile the track took a sharp turn right and down, toward the state road that ran across the lower edge of the hill. Art did not follow it. Instead he kept going east along a less traveled and even muddier trail, just wide enough for one car or van. His goal was already visible, where the track forked and a pair of small houses stood less than fifty yards from each other.

  He turned toward the one on the left, and the dogs from the right-hand house ran out to greet him before he was halfway there. They made one identifying sniff and wagged their tails frantically.

  “Not today,” Art said. “Got nothing for you. Down, fellas.”

  The dogs had drawn their own conclusion from the smell of his pockets. They followed him until he was twenty yards from his destination, then wandered away toward their home.

  “Thank God for that,” said a voice from the doorway. “I’ve had to shoo his damn dogs out of here twice — and he doesn’t do a thing to help. He sits there and laughs. Come on in. Wipe your shoes.”

  The speaker was a bit shorter than Art, who did not consider himself a tall man. He had thin white hair, gnarled arthritic hands, and a smiling leprechaun’s face. He watched closely as Art wiped his boots on the rough matting just inside the door.

  “Good enough?” asked Art.

  “Good enough.” They shook hands formally, though they had known each other for close to two decades. “The usual? With water?”

  “Might as well. With water.”

  He took the glass from Ed O’Donnell’s hand. It was not yet eleven in the morning, but as Ed explained, in his house they kept “Catoctin Mountain Time.” It was always the appropriate hour for a drink.

  Art took the ritual sip, and nodded. “Very fine. Better than the last batch.”

  The still was in a small shed behind the house, where it had sat for the near twenty years since Art bought his own house and became Ed’s second-nearest neighbor. Ed’s nearest neighbor sat on a metal-framed chair near the window, holding his own drink. He was a tall, well-muscled man, wearing shorts that revealed a long clean scar running from the front of his thigh to well below the right knee.

  “Cheers, Art.” The glass was raised.

  “Cheers, Joe.” He settled into a similar chair opposite.

  “This goddam stuff is going to kill all of us.”

  “Hey, something has to.” Ed chimed in across the bar that separated them from the kitchen. “I don’t see you refusing to drink it. Bambi burgers all right, Art?”

  “Fine. Unless you have salmon?”

  “Saint’s days and bonfire nights only.”

  Art took his cue from the conversation. Clearly, no one wanted to talk about personal worries. Ed had grown kids and a brother in Idaho. Joe had two sisters and their children in Atlanta. There could have been no contact with any of them since March 14. Ed and Joe were making a deliberate assumption: no news was good news. Let’s hope they were right.

  “So what the hell’s going on with you.” Joe Vanetti rubbed his scarred and swollen knee and turned to Art. “Figured things out yet?”

  “I don’t know. But I was lying awake thinking about it last night. I got another idea.”

  “A new one.”

  “More like an old one. You know that blue sky flash seven days ago, when all the power went out?”

  “I didn’t see it.”

  �
�You know him,” Ed called from the kitchen. “Nine o’clock, and he’s asleep.”

  “Well, it happened all right. I saw it, Joe. It seemed to be in the upper atmosphere, way above the clouds. At the time I wondered if it had anything to do with the supernova.”

  “We asked you that,” Joe protested. “And you told us it couldn’t have. You told us that the supernova can’t ever be seen from here.”

  “It can’t. But it might still have an effect. I remembered something from forty years back. You would still have been in the Air Force, Joe, you might recall it better than I do. Do you remember when everybody worried about a nuclear war between the United States and Russia?”

  “The Soviet Union it was, back in those days. God, do I remember.” Joe, close to eighty, had entered the Air Force at eighteen. “We used to have these nuclear war drills. ’In the event of a nuclear attack, descend into the basement. Place your head between your legs, and kiss your ass good-bye.’ I was scared shitless, I just knew we were going to blow each other to hell. We were so on edge, we’d start a war by accident.”

  “Then maybe you remember something called EMP.”

  Joe scowled. “Something technical. And it came later. That’s all I remember.”

  “He’s a mine of information,” Ed said from the kitchen. “Thank God we never had a war with him running it.”

  “Do you remember EMP, Ed?”

  “Hey, Art, be reasonable. I was a software developer.”

  “Which means he don’t know shit about anything,” Joe said. “So what’s EMP, Art?”

  “If you had a big nuclear war, all this radiation would hit the atmosphere, and it would cause a great pulse of electricity and magnetism — an electromagnetic pulse. And that would play havoc with electronic equipment down here on Earth.”

  Ed was carrying in three loaded plates. “Here we go. Venisonburger medium with bun and no onion. Venisonburger rare with bun and onion. And venisonburger medium with onion and open top. You’re on your own for helping yourselves to drinks.” He set the plates on the table. “But there was no nuclear war.”