Aftermath

2

The dogs came to meet them midway between the two houses, wagging their tails wildly and rearing up on Joe with their muddy paws while he cursed and tried to push them away.

“Down, Rush,” he said to a large white mutt. “I’ve got nothing for you out here, you silly bugger. Down, I said, until we get home.”

It was the best diversion that Art could have hoped for. While Joe was feeding the dogs in the back of the tidy and well-organized house — whatever Anne-Marie was coming over for it wasn’t to do cleaning — Art went straight to the telcom set. It wasn’t merely old, it was antique. An actual telephone. There was no store-forward, no video plugs, no conferencing, no min-rate path finder, and pathetic internal storage. A bit more primitive, and you’d be back in the era of analog signals and rotary dials. But when Art picked up the handset he heard a treasured pulse tone, though again it was overlaid on a background hiss like interstellar space.

Another side effect of Supernova Alpha?

A dial pulse was a good start, but no more than that. Art held his breath and hit buttons.

He had spent a lot of time in the past week, trying to remember and write down the thirty-odd numbers that he needed. In the past he had relied on his personal secretary to store them, despite his preaching to others — “We’ve become too dependent on interconnected technologies. One day the information system will be hit and come down like a house of cards. We’ll have a devil of a time putting it back together.”

Do as I say, not as I do.

His half sister’s number was firmly in his head. He called that first, though she was not the reason for his awful feeling of urgency. The attempted connection to her California number produced a series of strange clicks that ended in the odd, open silence of a lost line.

He was not much worried. Carol was superwoman. Her competence at everything she touched made Art feel inferior during their once-a-year visits. Carol would manage to land on her feet. She always did.

The group’s numbers were much more guesswork. He had written down seven that he was sure of, and half a dozen more where he was within a digit or two of the full eighteen (though a miss was as good as a mile when it came to percom numbers). He had given up on the rest. If he could get through to just one, they would start to network.

By the sixth dead end he was starting to sweat. Some of it might be a delayed effect of Ed’s lethal white lightning, best followed by a walk to let your brain clear and your kidneys recover from the insult. But mostly it was the conviction of problems on the way. That feeling had started the second he realized that his DNA analysis box was out of action.

He kept trying. Joe, who had finished feeding and cursing the dogs, came into the room and watched him in silence.

“Bad news?” he said at last.

“No damn news at all. I think we only have a local piece of the network up. That explains why you could reach Anne-Marie’s old handset, and I can reach fuck all.”

He was stabbing at the soft screen as he spoke, convinced that he was wasting his time. It was a shock when, after another eternity of clicks and snaps and whistles, a voice said, “ID, please.”

It was the standard reply of a screener, verifying the caller’s acceptability before the machine would take a message. But if Art’s ideas were right, everything using microchips had failed when that blue flash filled the sky — and smart screeners were on the list.

“Dana?” he said. “This is Art Ferrand. It’s you, isn’t it, not the screener?”

There was a moment of background crackle and hiss. Then, “Art. God, I’m glad to hear from you. The line came back, but I haven’t been able to reach anyone with it. The screener doesn’t work, nor does the API controller.”

“I think the national grid is down. We’re patching in to each other through old equipment — you can practically hear electrical relays opening and closing. Where are you?”

He did not recall where she lived. Their contacts had been electronic, plus the quarterly meetings at the Institute for Probatory Therapies.

“Not where I usually am. Arlington was looking bad, mobs and looting and fires. I got scared.”

Art knew that without being told. The old Dana Berlitz was sassy and sexy and full of life. The woman on the line was all nerves.

“I left two days ago,” she went on. “I’m out with my sister Sarah in Warrenton. Where are you?”

“Up north, beyond Frederick. I ran for it early, over a month ago. You drove?”

“Drove?” Her voice was steadying. “You really are out of it. The cars stopped working a week back. There was this funny sort of blue flash, up in the sky—”

“I know. We had it here, too. I think it was everywhere. All the equipment with microchips in it is useless now. Trouble is, that’s just about everything in the world. How did you get to Warrenton?”

“The hard way. On my bike, fifty-seven miles door-to-door with that lousy saddle I always swore I was going to replace, not a car on the roads and it rained all the way. I won’t try to tell you what my ass felt like when I got here.” She laughed — a good sign. “Sarah took one look at it and slapped on a big skin patch. You ever had one?”

“Never needed one.”

“I don’t recommend it. The first few hours while it was bonding, it wriggled whenever I sat down on it. Cheap thrill.” She laughed again, but in her next words the worried tone was back. “Art, do you have your sequencer with you?”

“Of course. I don’t go anywhere without it.”

“Is it working?”

“Dead as Lincoln. The sequencers are full of microcircuits.”

“What are we going to do?”

“That’s why I’ve been so keen to get in touch with you and the rest of the group. How are you feeling?”

“So far, fine — except for the sore backside. My last genome scan was normal, but I’m worried about how long it will last. I was supposed to be reevaluated when we met again in six weeks.”

“Me, too.” Art didn’t know as much about the details of Dana’s disease as he did about the condition of some of the others in the program. It was cancer, of course, and she had been hit young. She had been in the program longer than Art, but she was still only forty-three; in Art’s eyes that made her practically a child. He knew that she had a grown-up son, which meant she’d married — or got pregnant — very young. But she never spoke of him, or of any male in her life, which was amazing in someone so attractive and friendly.

In your dreams, Art Ferrand.

“Look, Dana,” he went on. “We have to find out what’s going on with the program. Probably everything is fine, and the doctors are in the same position as we are, just not able to reach people. But I won’t risk that. You may think I’m overreacting—”

“Overreacting? That’s what my first doctor told me, when I went to him with a lump in my neck. That asshole cost me a whole month. You’re not overreacting,

Art. I’m on a knife edge, and I’m sure you are. Unless we have a way of checking the condition of our telomeres and making the right adjustments, we could be dead in a year of new cancer or premature old age. My question is, what do we do?”

“We keep trying to contact others of the group, today. But unless we find out from one of them, directly, what the situation is at the Institute, I’m heading there tomorrow. I won’t be happy until I see Dr. Lasker and Dr. Chow and Dr. Taunton in person, and know that they can keep the program going even if the usual equipment is dead. I’ll call you and let you know what I find — assuming the line still works.”

“Forget it. Art, I was worried before you called. I know you’ll do your best to get to the Institute, and I’m sure you’ll try to let me know what you find. But I’ve worked so hard to stay alive, I’m not willing to sit and hear things secondhand. Where do we meet?”

“I don’t know. The usual place, the Treasure Inn, where we stay for our group sessions? If it’s open.”

“When?”

“You’ll probably need three days. Any of the others we reach, we tell ’em the same thing, the Treasure Inn three days from now. But what about your sore rear end? There’s no cars, and you can’t ride all that way.”

“Let me worry about that. How are you going to travel? You’ve got farther than me to go, and you have that bad knee.”

“I’ll get there. Try and reach some of the others. I’ll see you in three days.”

“Cross your fingers. Good luck, Art.”

“Good luck, Dana.” Art closed the connection, and found Joe staring at him calmly. He had been listening to Art’s end of the conversation with obvious interest.

“Well,” he said, “that was a new one. Who is she?”

“Dana Berlitz. Part of my treatment group.”

“And I’ll bet I know which part of you she’s treating.” Joe Vanetti did not smile. He was a big man, tall and broad and slow-moving. It was hard for Art to imagine him as he had been in his thirties. According to Ed O’Donnell, in Joe’s Air Force days he had been a heartbreaker who cut a broad swath through the Washington female population.

“But what are these telly things of yours that need fixing?” Joe went on.

“Telomeres are the end pieces of chromosomes. In ordinary people, they shorten as you get older. In cancer cells, they don’t. Dana and I had a treatment to shrink our cancer cell telomeres, but we don’t want our other telomeres shortened too much or we’ll get old real fast. It’s like a tricky balancing act, and we need to keep checking that nothing’s going haywire. Our interest in each other is purely professional.”

“Sure it is. I’m not deaf, I heard how you spoke to her. You’re soft on her. Just remember to keep your pants up.”

“It’s nothing to do with sex. But I’m going back to Washington.”

“I know that. Ed and I were talking about it this morning, before you got here.”

“How could you? I only just made up my mind I had to go.”

“All the same, we knew it. We’ve seen it before.” And now Joe did smile, the slow, self-satisfied grin of a man who has seen his predictions come to pass. “You arrive up here, see, and you tell us the world has gone to hell. First it was the Lascelles virus, that airborne thing that would kill the lot of us.”

“It would have, if they hadn’t come up with the viral phage and released it.”

“Maybe. Point is, they did and nothing happened. I bet your neighbors in Olney gave you hell when you got back, sending them running for the hills the way you did. Then there was Scarlatti, going to vaporize Washington.”

“He tried.”

“Sure he tried. Lots of people try things. Point is, he failed. And now there’s this Supernova Alpha thing, and from what I hear that’s fading away, too.”

“This is different.”

“So what me and Ed figure,” Joe went on, as though Art had not spoken, “we figure this. Every couple of years the craziness down there in Washington gets too much for you, and you head up here for a jolt of sanity. You ought to stay, and when you get a few more years on you, you probably will. But you’re young, you still got this feather up your ass to save the world — not that most of it’s worth saving. So you’re going back, one more time. But tell me this. The cars don’t run, and the buses don’t run, and the trains don’t run. So how do you think you’ll go? Your knee’s near as bad as mine.”

The question of the hour. He couldn’t ride a bike such a distance, even if he had one. If he walked, Joe was right, his knee made it close to impossible and the journey would take weeks.

“Damned if I know. Got any ideas?”

“Nothing special.” Joe sat down, rubbed at his scar, and stared into space. “But here’s a thought, for what it’s worth. Did you know that Annie keeps three horses on her place?”