The Final Day Page 3

  Using a brand-new, expensive 2400-baud modem, he had actually managed typing in lengthy string codes via a system called the Internet to try to access data from a British library without success, but it was still a fascinating adventure at the time. Printing it out had taken half a day on their tractor-feed dot-matrix printer. He could still recall the speed and buzzing sound of it as it glided across the page, a momentary pause as the tractor feed advanced the paper up one line, and then the printer head running backward across the page.

  “Mind if I join you three?”

  John looked back to the darkened staircase and forced a smile of welcome. It was Ernie Franklin, the man who saved his life during the final confrontation with Dale Fredericks. He was grateful, of course, but at times Ernie could be more than a little domineering.

  “I sent word to Ernie about my find,” Paul whispered.

  “Why?” Forrest asked.

  “He worked for IBM back in the days of Apollo and the shuttle—figured the old guy might know a thing or two.”

  Ernie stepped up to the workbench, gazed at the screen for a moment, and snorted. “It would have to be one of those damn Apples. Damn toys.”

  “I did write my master’s thesis on one,” John retorted.

  “And then they screwed everyone over when Jobs dropped the operating system and went running off with those dinky nine-inch-screen Macs. We laughed our asses off over all you Apple fanatics stuck with the IIe system.”

  “Wait a minute,” Paul interjected. “I asked you over here to explain something, Ernie. We can argue about which system was better later.”

  John nodded, looking back at the image on the screen of the Pac-Man character, the tinny theme playing over and over.

  “Could you turn that damn music off?” Ernie asked. “My daughter was addicted to that damn game, and it drove me crazy.”

  Paul looked at the machine, not sure what to do, and Ernie just stepped forward and flipped the switch, turning it off. All three gasped as the screen went dark, as if he had pulled a curtain back down over a returning to the past from before the war.

  “If it turned on before, it will again,” Ernie replied calmly, “but before we do that.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small flashlight and clicked it on.

  If anyone in their entire community was prepared for life after the Day, it was Ernie Franklin and his family. After more than three years, they were still living off long-term rations stockpiled years earlier. His all-terrain Polaris was still running, and John had learned not to ask just how much gas he still had stored and treated against degrading. The old guy was always proud to show off his solar-powered flashlights like the one he had flicked on now, and without bothering to ask permission of Paul, he popped the lid off the top of the old—one could even say antique—computer.

  This basement was Paul’s domain. John waited for a response from Paul, the young man who had designed and brought back to life the electrical system of the community, but Hawkins said nothing, obviously deferring.

  Ernie peered inside the guts of the old Apple like a dentist poking around in the mouth of a victim in the chair, grunting with disapproval.

  “Inexcusable,” Ernie whispered. “You educators never knew how to take care of a computer. Look at all this dust, and what the hell is this?”

  He pointed down at the motherboard, and the three leaned forward to look over his shoulder.

  “Looks like dog or cat hair! This is a mess. For now, leave it off; I’ll take it back home and blow it out.”

  “What?” John asked.

  “I’m taking it back with me. I still have some canned air.”

  “Canned air?” Forrest asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Pressurized air in a can for cleaning computers.”

  “Just blow on the damn thing,” John whispered.

  Ernie did not even bother to reply to what he thought was such obvious stupidity. “Let’s wrap it up; I’ll take it with me.”

  “No way,” John stated quietly and forcefully. “It stays here for now.”

  Ernie braced himself back up, ready for a good argument, something he always took delight in.

  “Look, Ernie, it stays here. This thing is pure gold. Transporting through a storm back to your place, that’s crazy. Just go get that canned air, whatever else you need, and come back here.”

  “That will take at least a gallon of gas,” Ernie replied with a cagey smile. “Will the town provide it?”

  John sighed. They were scraping the bottom of their gas supply, his dream of somehow going over to steam power for transportation and the running of precious farm machinery still at a cold start for now. But this was too important to argue about at the moment; the curiosity about this discovery and all that it implied was overwhelming.

  “Give me the bill tomorrow; I’ll make good on it.”

  “Sure.” And without further comment, the lid off the computer, he reached to the side and flicked it back on, and again the three standing around him gasped as the screen flickered to life.

  “I thought you said it needed to be blown or something,” Forrest said, and there was a bit of a grin as he spoke, for Ernie was infamous at times for going into off-colored repartee. Paul cleared his throat and nodded back to the stairway where his wife, having tucked the twins in for their nap, was standing and watching the goings-on.

  Ernie nodded, backing off, and continued to peer into the machine. “It’s okay for the moment,” he finally replied, continuing to examine the motherboard and other boards slotted in for the video and sound, chuckling with delight.

  “Damn, I gotta admit, in its day, it really was something, even though it was a toy compared to what we were developing with IBM. A 64K machine for under three thousand bucks—and that was in 1980s money, no less. You know, I helped design the operating systems for the space shuttle. Five computers not much bigger than this thing ran that entire spacecraft. That’s when we had to squeeze out every byte of usage in the software. No gigs and terabytes around back then, even with the big Cray machines the military had. We were still storing data on ten-inch magnetic reel-to-reels when I first started.”

  He sighed, and for a moment, John could sense the inner sadness of this man who had been viewed as a crazy Jeremiah by some when he would publicly warn about the fragility of the nation’s infrastructure. He had retired to these mountains with that exact thought in mind, that it was all about to come crashing down.

  “Ernie, the question is how and why?” John asked, interrupting his musings.

  “What?”

  “How and why is this computer working?”

  Ernie stepped back and looked around the semi-dark room, illuminated only by the single fluorescent light overhead and the softly glowing television screen.

  “Easy enough. I bet this machine was dumped down here fifteen, maybe twenty years ago when you guys finally decided to leave Apple behind and upgrade to a Pentium. Someone stuck it in a corner, and—the key thing—it was totally off-line. The EMP pulse and its impact has a lot of variables. Intensity, line of sight from the weapon burst, how much shielding this basement provided.”

  Ernie shined his flashlight around the room, chuckling sadly at the sight of all the piled-up magazines, books, and electrical tools that were once part of the business of teaching at a small college. He walked over to where several white and black boxes were stacked under the workbench.

  “Now these babies,” he announced with delight, “those are mine; I helped write some of the software. IBM 8088s, our competition for the Apples, which you educators loved to cling to. Bet the administration at least had those; they always were smarter than professors when it came to this stuff.”

  John bristled slightly at Ernie’s jab as he squatted down, wiping dust and mildew off the front of one of the boxes.

  “Yup, a tower box model. We gotta take a look at this next.”

  “Wait a minute,” John interjected,
“let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Ernie, how, why, and what do we do with it?” As he spoke, he nodded back to the Apple.

  “Like I said, it survived the EMP pop and then just sat here undamaged. Nothing unusual about that.”

  “How come we didn’t know before?” Forrest asked.

  “Well, because we just didn’t have the juice,” Paul replied. “Once we’ve got at least some electricity going, why, we just kind of…”

  The question was so damned obvious, John realized. Why didn’t any of them come running down to this basement the day after they got a few kilowatts of electricity running and start trying to hook things back up?

  “I never really thought about it,” Paul said woodenly. “Too busy with getting lighting, juice for the sterilizing autoclave and hot water in the hospital, high-intensity lighting for the surgery room, more juice for the chemistry lab, stuff like that. Any of the computers sitting in faculty offices and such were just dead hunks of toasted boards and wires and tossed into a basement or Dumpster after the Day, figuring they were all fried.”

  “Because they were all wired in and got zapped by the full overload,” Ernie stated.

  “Ernie, a question?” John asked.

  “Sure, what?”

  “You of all people, didn’t you think to stick a computer into your basement inside one of those faraday cages folks were later talking about?”

  Ernie looked off, now obviously embarrassed and caught off guard, his silence answer enough.

  John remembered how a few months before everything hit the fan, how Paul and others with the IT team for the school had finished remodeling the computer center because the school was creating a new major in cybersecurity. The old machines, in an age where a computer aged faster than Detroit-built cars of the 1980s, were just simply tossed into the Dumpster after the hard drives were downloaded for anything of value and then wiped clean.

  Truly a throwaway world that now seemed a thousand years away.

  The fluorescent light overhead began to hum and flicker.

  Ernie quickly reached behind the Apple and pulled the plug, the screen going dark.

  “This power supply isn’t clean at all,” he growled, glancing over at Paul.

  “What do you mean, not clean?” Forrest asked.

  “Just that.” Paul sighed. “Someone throws a switch on in the hospital, it sucks up a few kilowatts, the voltage to the rest of the grid fluctuates, and that can be death, especially for these older machines. It’s exactly the thing that can kill this computer while we’re gazing in wonder at it. I’ll bring some surge protectors along.”

  He hesitated.

  “All right,” Ernie sighed, “I got a couple of portable solid-state solar-charging battery systems at home. Gives clean, steady juice for electronics—I’ll bring that over as well to power these computers.”

  “You got one of those?” John asked sharply. “Nice to know now.”

  Ernie shrugged. “Be prepared, as the Boy Scouts used to say.”

  “But you didn’t have a computer stashed off, did you?”

  “You accusing me of something, John?” Ernie snapped back.

  John held up a hand in a calming gesture. “No, but still?”

  “Look, we all got caught with our pants down in different ways. My wife Linda kept complaining that I was trashing up the basement with cast-off computers, so, like everyone else, I tossed them out when I upgraded every year or two.”

  He sighed, and John could see that the memory troubled him. The old guy had most likely spent many a night kicking himself with that memory of all the computers he had once owned and then thrown out rather than storing away. Again, the throwaway society before the Day. At least some of the old-time ham radio operators had hung on to those precious devices and had them stashed away “just in case.” Some even took pride in the niche hobby of actually operating old ham radios with vacuum tubes rather than “newfangled transistors.”

  Such a lost world, John thought sadly, looking at the darkened screen of the computer, symbolic of all that they had allowed to slip out of their grasp. America in an instant plunged into darkness and wondering at this moment if the few small flickering lights of hope were going out now as well.

  He remembered Sir Edward Grey’s heartfelt cry when midnight struck on a warm August evening in London of 1914, and war with Germany had come to pass. “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

  In a way, how prophetic his words had been. That first war ending a hundred years of peace. The prophetic H. G. Wells predicting it truly was the beginning of the end, complete with atomic weapons. The steady, peaceful advance of the Edwardian era did indeed die in the trenches of Ypres, Verdun, and the Somme, with civilization taking a step backward to unleash poison gas, flamethrowers, bombs tumbling from the sky into undefended cities, and millions tearing at each other in the squalid mud of the trenches in primal rage with knives and bare fists. It led to a second war of death camps and brilliant flashes of light delivered on August mornings, thirty-one years after Edward Grey spoke and H. G. Wells uttered his prophecies, as entire cities were incinerated in a blinding flash.

  Then the long years of what was called a Cold War, civilized nations ready to unleash a thousand such flashes of light over their enemies, no one realizing at first that when they created those first such bombs, it was not the blast, the fire as hot as the heart of the sun, that could destroy; it was something subtle, a mere microsecond of a massive gamma ray burst ignited out in space, that as it raced to the earth’s surface at the speed of light would free off electrons in the upper atmosphere’s oxygen and nitrogen—and as it did so building up to an overwhelming static discharge that could cripple the greatest nation in the history of humanity and leave 90 percent of its citizens dead two years later.

  It was something he had long ago learned not to allow himself to dwell on too much, for surely it would drive him to impotent despair. Here he had been asking Ernie the how and why of this one computer surviving when the far greater question still was how and why his entire nation, his entire world, had allowed the unthinkable to happen. Who was responsible? Surely someone must have known it was coming. And with that coming, his youngest daughter became marked to die.

  “John, are you okay?”

  It was Becka, who was standing behind him, reaching up to touch him on the shoulder with a soothing gesture. He realized there were tears in his eyes, and he forced a smile.

  “Yeah, sure. The babies asleep?”

  “Like kittens.”

  It was hard with just those two words to hold back long-suppressed tears. Those were exactly the same words Mary used long ago to describe Jennifer when she was tucked in and asleep. When they had learned she had a highly aggressive type 1 diabetes, they could not help but hover watchfully over her. The memory of it was made even more poignant after Mary learned she had something aggressive as well, breast cancer that would finally take her, leaving him with two young girls to raise. Nights when he would look in at her asleep, the two girls asleep to either side of her, knowing their mother was ill, and with childlike instinct sensing that she would soon go away from them forever.

  And he would think of them as two kittens nestled in against their mother.

  He struggled for control, turned away from the others, and walked off to the other side of the basement, absently picking up one of the old Life magazines as if studying it, his friends having the instinctive sense that he wanted to be alone.

  The magazine was from right after World War II, falling open to an article “Our Boys Are Come Home”—pictures of the old Queen Mary being escorted into New York Harbor, fireboats around it up sending up a salute of red-, white-, and blue-colored water, the Statue of Liberty in the background. Joyful mothers, wives, and children embracing young men, young men with dark, haunted eyes, age far beyond their years etched into their faces, in tears as they returned embraces. On the following pages, an article ab
out the new homes to be built a thousand at a time in a place called Levittown.

  Gone, all of it gone. The young captain from the ANR he had taken prisoner back in the spring and who was now part of his inner core of advisors had briefly served with that force on the Jersey Shore, facing Manhattan, a deadly island now quarantined with reports that bubonic plague and cholera were still endemic with the few thousand survivors still living there, scurrying and scrounging in the vast, abandoned concrete canyons.

  No nuclear blast had leveled what was once said to be the pulsing heart of the Western world … just quietly turn off the switch, and in an instant, it was as uninhabitable as Antarctica or the searing Gobi Desert … its once fertile lands that had greeted Henry Hudson and Peter Stuyvesant long paved over—except for Central Park, where it was rumored that feral dogs, once tamed and loving golden retrievers and spaniels, had been wiped out, replaced by breeds of mongrels who again hunted in packs and would kill anything, including a man foolish enough to wander into that overgrown forest.

  He closed the magazine and set it aside. It was too much to bear, feeding this sudden surge of depression. He again could hear the other four talking among themselves, a bit of a friendly argument that did have an edge to it as to why no one had thought to check on old computers and other electronic devices earlier.

  He wiped the tears from his eyes and took a deep breath. “Galileo and the telescope,” he said.

  The others fell silent and looked back at him.

  “What?” Paul asked.

  He forced himself to smile—at least there was still a touch of the college professor in him—and as he looked at Paul and Becka, there was a flashback to when they were students in his History of Technology class, more often than not paying slight attention to him as they gazed lovingly at each other in the back of the classroom.

  “You remember our discussion about Galileo and the telescope?” he asked, taking a few steps back to join them.