“I would argue against that,” Wattenbarger responded.
“Oh?” Warren queried.
“Yes, because a bacterial spore is about as tough an hombre as there is among any known life-forms. I’m willing to bet that many of them will survive the storms, even if they last thousands of years.”
“Hmm… interesting idea…”
“Look, professors, let’s move on. I don’t wanna be caught out on this mountain in the dark with a billion mummies on the loose,” Charles said with a shiver.
“Mummies don’t actually move, last time I checked,” Wattenbarger laughed.
“I see you don’t get out to the movies much,” Charles said sincerely.
The trio moved up to the ridge-line, collecting more rabbits and squirrels as they climbed. By the time they reached the top of the ridge, they each had their belts full of animals and Wattenbarger was dragging the dispatched corpse of a Coyote. At last they reached the ridge and turned east to face the plains below.
They could see the pallid certain color of death everywhere. What should have been a scene of green forest and plain was instead colored by the lifeless green-tinged-grey tint. At the limit of their view, the Arkansas River cut the eastern skyline. It was still colored its typical reddish brown, a ribbon of familiarity set against the bleakness of the dying earth.
“It’s just so unbelievable,” Warren said, his eyes viewing the expansive and unending blanket covering the earth that was once alive and had been alive for countless eons. And now it was lost, forever gone, the cycle of life now suddenly ended across the entire planet. Warren also knew that although he could see only to his horizon, that this death spread everywhere across the whole of the earth.
“It just doesn’t seem real. Somehow it just seems fake or something,” Wattenbarger said, just above a whisper. “It’s like my mind wants to believe it’s an early fall and that after a season, the life will return.”
“Well, it may,” Charles said. “After the storms, the trees could come back, right?”
Warren looked to Wattenbarger, exchanged an understanding glance, and then turned to Charles. “No, Lance, these trees and the plants and the grasses and the bushes – even their seed - they’re all dead; they can’t come back now. It’s not like winter, they’ve all been killed – even down to their roots. I know it’s hard to understand, but the life inside of them has been exterminated by the sun. It’s not like winter at all.”
“In just three days? Just like that?”
Warren nodded slowly. “Yeah, just like that.”
They made their way back to their cave in the gathering darkness, deeply affected by the ghastly scene of the utter, complete devastation of what was once a diverse and highly developed natural ecosystem. And they knew that the scene was not limited to the local mountain, or the view to the horizon, or the state or even the continent, but that this scene represented the whole of the earth. In but three days, all that had taken countless ages to develop was suddenly and irrevocably gone.
As they rounded the rocks to the entrance of Miller’s Cave, for the first time, Warren felt a sense of relief at the mere sight of their sanctuary. It represented true safety from the planet of death all around them.
Warren and Wattenbarger held a training session for Charles on the process for dressing small animals. After a magnificent dinner of their harvest, they demonstrated the secondary process of tanning the skins so that they could be used for the lining of winter clothing and gloves.
As time to retire approached, Warren approached Wattenbarger quietly as Charles enjoyed a movie on his personal player with Marbles sleeping noisily across his lap.
“I’m gonna need your assistance tonight,” Warren asked quietly.
“Okay, what?”
“I’ve applied the final layer to the test disk,” Warren explained. “We need to go out to the tower and set it up, tonight. According to the Seven model, the radiation flux should be strong enough at noon tomorrow to trigger the effect. Tomorrow we should finally know something.”
Wattenbarger’s eyes darted about the unseen space just before his eyes. “Okay. Understood. The epoxy method we employed should hold up; it should be properly cured. The boundary layer effect – you know, the secondary effects of the photon and higher energy layer effects - they should be soundly mediated by the density of the epoxy layering and the…”
“Chill, dude,” Warren said, gently laying his hand on Wattenbarger’s shoulder. “No need to rehash this now. I think we’ve gone over and over this more times than I care to count. It will or it won’t. In any case, there’s always plan B.”
Wattenbarger’s eyes did not focus. “Yeah,” he responded in a whisper. “There’s always Plan B. And if we go to plan B they’ll probably kill us. This grand idea of yours, it’d better be as good as we think it is...”
Warren ’s own eyes seemed to focus on that unseen space in front of his companion’s eyes. “Yep… But look at it this way, both alternatives are equally lethal. We die either way.”
“The issue’s never been one of dying, my friend,” Wattenbarger responded, his eyes still unfocused. “It’s just the little matter of when.”
35
At noon on the fourth day after the storms had begun, Seven sat with Meghan on his lap staring out the wide windows of Pacifica’s Command Center. They sat alone together, Seven’s arms gently wrapped around Meghan, his chin rested on her small shoulder as they looked outside together into the deep ocean. The other consoles of the Command Center were sparsely manned, as was the procedure in the standard cruise mode. Meghan had just turned seven years old a week earlier, and had become a frequent fixture in Seven’s life as he was often seen carrying her around wherever he went.
“It’s changing,” she said in her tiny voice, pointing her finger at the window.
“Yes, my dear, it’s changing,” Seven agreed, his response just above a whisper, his eyes focused on the scene outside. Normally, the view they had was a rich azure, fading to deep cobalt below them and, at noon, normally brightening considerably from their position to the surface above. They were so deep that they could never make out the surface interface itself; however, the impression from Pacifica was that the water was nearly always crystal clear. But now, it was not so. As Meghan had accurately observed, ‘it was changing’.
The water around them was distinctly foggy. Seven had warned them that this would happen. The countless trillions of microscopic plants and animals that normally inhabited the surface layers of the ocean – many of them responsible for the quality of the world’s atmosphere - the oxygen producers and the carbon dioxide absorbers – were dead. Now their bodies were floating ever so slowly toward the bottom in finely dispersed layers that lent a kind of fog to the water all around them. The effect would pass, of course, as the upper layers were sterilized by the quantum storms, and then the water would become even clearer than it had ever been. Seven also reasoned that eventually, however, after the plants on the land masses all perished and the natural covering was gone, there would be a period of time when the quality of the ocean water would degrade once more due to the massive influx of soil that would run off into the oceans with each rain. There would no longer be any plants to hold back the erosion that would immediately scour every inch of the earth’s land masses and color the oceans.
Seven’s mind was filled with the drastic possibilities, and he developed a crude model of oceanic effects, which were many and dramatic. All the life forms at or below their position were protected from the storms and were immediately unaffected. The pelagic species - the deep water dwellers - would go on about their business as usual. However, a vast majority of all life on earth depended on the energy from the sun, in the form of photosynthetic organisms that ultimately made their way deeper into the oceans through various biological pathways. All these upper ocean primary pathways were now gone. The source of energy to the pelagics had vanished. Ultimately, they would all starve to death. The only life form
that would not even notice the sun’s madness would be the tube worms located on the abyssal thermal vents that utilized chemosynthesis alone. All other life forms were utterly doomed.
Pacifica’s Command Center
But, in the deep, this process would take time. Indeed, as Seven reasoned, the deeper the species, the longer the effect would take. He crudely calculated that, at and below the position of Pacifica, located on the richest and most robust ecosystem on earth, the species that would feed the residents of the colony anchored to the top of the Hancock seamount could possibly, reliably be harvested for three to five years before their source of food ultimately ran out. After that, they would be totally dependent on their own gardens, aquaculture and capacity to produce their food.
But at the end of the long, complex equation, it would be the energy they produced at Pacifica that would ultimately determine whether they would remain alive. It would be this energy that would fuel the lights that would produce their crops, condition their air, move their pumps, and repair and create new parts to replace the old. It was energy that would keep them all alive. At Pacifica and at Middlearth, the bottom line was now and would always be energy.
Seven’s eyes peered through the fog outside. For the past day now, an occasional dead fish appeared in the current that swept past Pacifica . Before the onset of the storms, no one had ever seen the sight of a dead animal in the water at their depth. There were so many sharks, predators and other carrion consumers in the water that nothing was left for scrap in the earth’s oceans. But now, there was far too much to be consumed by the animals at the lower levels and the fish above them were all dead or dying. Because of the mediating effects of ocean water at all levels, the life in the oceans would succumb at a much slower pace than the relatively unshielded life of the land.
Just at the range of Seven’s vision, he thought he made out a silhouette in the fog as he peered through the window before him. But as soon as he thought he had seen it, the indistinct shadow dissipated. His arms tightened around Meghan involuntarily as his eyes cut though the dimness, causing her tiny body to tense in his arms.
“Is everything okay, Aaron?” she asked softly, moving her right hand up to gently touch his face.
Seven relaxed his grip on Meghan, opened his legs and allowed her to slide her feet to the floor where she now stood before him. He moved his hands to her shoulders as he looked over her head, his eyes attempting to focus on the haze before him. Then he saw it again; this time it was no illusion.
“Link, over there!” Seven pointed as he shouted to the Watch Officer on duty. “Paint it now, hurry!”
Link Rogers leapt to his feet and stepped three paces to the sonar operations console and pressed several switches. Then a loud ping rang out as the image appeared on the overhead screen.
“Constant Bearing, Decreasing Range. CBDR collision in less than two minutes, sir,” Rogers responded. “Shall I sound general quarters?”
Seven gripped Meghan under his arm and carried her like a stuffed sack across the Command Center . Her nails dug into his arm but she remained quiet.
“No, wait” Seven responded, his eyes darting back and forth between the image and the black shadow moving slowly toward them in the fog. “Paint it again and display the images side by side,” Seven shouted.
Rogers immediately complied as another loud ping rang out.
Seven then relaxed as he saw the images appear together on the screen. “It’s a whale, Link, most likely dead,” Seven said confidently, releasing Meghan to stand on the floor beside him. “It’s floating in the current. That’s how it got by the sonar since we’ve adjusted the readings to filter out all the drifting - and supposedly harmless – contacts.”
They turned and watched as the object drifted ever closer to the windows before them. Soon the apparition developed a clear shape. It was obviously a large black and white whale, floating head down and lifeless in the current toward them. The object would definitely strike Pacifica , but Seven reasoned that its impact would not damage the structure.
He picked up his microphone and said to Rogers , “Give me a community circuit.
“A dead whale that’s floating in the current will make contact with Pacifica in less than one minute,” Seven announced to the entire community. “It will strike on the northeastern upper side of the dome and you may feel the impact. There’s no reason for alarm. It should slide harmlessly by and be gone shortly.”
Meghan raised her arms for Seven to pick her up off the floor. He complied; both of their eyes pasted on the huge animal approaching them. Seven could ultimately see that the whale was, in fact, a massive Killer Whale, some 25 feet in length. As he made out its shape, he was watching the Orca’s dorsal fin appear out of the mist, some 60 feet in front of the windows. But the animal slowly rotated as it approached.
Seven was taken by the enormity of the mammal, its sheer size as it drew near was unnerving. The thought of whether he had made the right decision in not sounding General Quarters spun though his head as his eyes were fixed on the floating leviathan headed directly toward the windows in front of him. Meghan’s eyes turned slowly to the window as she clung to Seven. As she saw the black creature near, she whimpered and buried her head in his neck.
Approaching at a scant five meters, the huge ocean mammal drifted ever closer to Pacifica . Its bulk towered above Seven and he could see the Orca’s eye was open as it neared. It was an unsettling image, the great dead beast whose eye stared blankly at him in death, drifted toward an encounter that Seven suddenly realized he would never forget.
The massive creature struck the windows of the Command Center. As it did, the great animal rocked the entire structure, but very gently. Then it paused, held in place by the current and the resistance of its skin against the bulk of Pacifica.
Seven could see the great eye of the beast staring at them, lifeless as it hung arrested in the current. He walked slowly to the window and stood just inches from the colossal ocean mammal and stared at the wonderfully sleek and beautiful beast eye to eye. Meghan turned her head once more and was also captured by the scene. Seven raised his hand slowly and gently touched the window just at the level of the whale’s huge, black orb.
Then the enormous creature slowly blinked as it stared back at him in its final moments before death. The immense beast’s gaze almost seemed to signal its resignation to the greater hand of fate. It appeared to welcome this last sight of life, this final gesture of understanding just before the eternal darkness of the abyssal night.
Meghan screamed and buried her head in Seven’s shoulder.
The Orca’s large, black eye closed slowly, hauntingly, as it slid across the windows and away into the formless sea.
“Good-bye, my friend, good-bye,” Seven whispered as Meghan wept and the current carried it down into the darkness, away and out of their view.
But Seven had been changed by the encounter. He was engulfed by its sadness. He had held back his emotions for far too long, not knowing what to feel. The nearest star had gone mad, changed from the single object that gave everything and everyone life, to one that took every living breath from the earth. In the past days, it had not only killed nearly all living creatures on the planet, but it had also destroyed billions of his fellow humans. In his mind, a single whale held no distinction compared to so many fellow humans, but the eye-to-eye encounter did catalyze something in his heart and mind that he could not understand before – resolve. It was a resolve so deep, so powerful, so primal that it raised the very hairs on the back of his neck.
The sun would not win, it would not defeat them, ever! As long as he had breath, he would not allow it.
“Not good-bye. Not good-bye! Never!” he whispered. “Not good-bye…”
“Link, track the whale. Mount a party immediately to intercept it and bring back a twenty centimeter skin patch. Bring it to me personally.”
It was obvious by the look and smile on Rogers ’ face that he understood completely. Seve
n was going to snag a genetic sample and freeze it along with all the others. If the storms ever abated, and if they survived, perhaps some day these great creatures would again swim the oceans of the earth, drawn from the primal genetic seed of this magnificent animal.
Seven understood that if they had nothing else, they at least had hope and they at least had plans. He tightly clutched the weeping little Meghan to himself. Death pursued and it was close aboard, to be sure. But if death ever captured them, Aaron Seven was convinced it would have to capture them from behind as they schemed, planned, plotted and ran. Like little Meghan, he vowed he would personally carry the weak and the powerless and those bereft of hope. He would see to it that the genetic plans of every species of organism that died were preserved for a revival at an unknown time in the future. He would encourage the downcast and, somehow, he would energize and persuade all the rest. He would never, ever give up or give in. As far as he was concerned, they only had to stay one step ahead.
The sun was hopelessly vast and burned with a thermonuclear vengeance that could swallow up more than a million earths and all their inhabitants in the wink of a cosmic eye. But the sun lacked something he had: courage, intelligence and conviction. These were synergistic, powerful combinations that, although they could never hope to actually defeat the bright and deadly star, they could at least empower them to carve out their niches on the blistered earth and wait until its outburst was over, no matter how long it took.
36
By the end of the first week, the intensity of the quantum storms had reached their peak, just as the Seven Model had predicted. The earth had been sterilized as deep as ninety feet in some places, fifty feet below solid rock and 100 feet below the surface of the planet’s oceans. No life could exist in these regions at all, not even microscopic forms. By the seventh day, every trace of green from chlorophyll had been turned a rusty brown by the sunlight, radiation and organic death, blanketing the planet with a dark pallor.
Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven Page 29