‘So, you’re from Kansas,’ he said, ‘are you looking for a place around here?’
‘No,’ Georgia said, ‘we still have a long way to go. We are headed for a small village, a little ways out of Chester. Our family has a small farm down there.’
The hours slipped by as they talked about their trip down and the trials they had endured. Tom listened quietly all the while, occasionally nodding or asking a question. He seemed particularly interested in Georgia’s description of what had happened in those seconds when the power went out.
‘So did you notice anything different that day?’ He asked, sitting forward, giving them his full attention.
Georgia shook her head.
‘It was pretty much a normal day,’ Lola said, ‘except for one thing.’
‘What was that?’ Tom asked.
Lola frowned slightly. ‘Well I don’t really know how to put it. It was like the color of the sunshine was a little off, almost as if there had been a sort of greenish tinge to the air, but perhaps I only imagined it.’
‘No, you didn’t imagine it!’ Tom exclaimed, lightly resting his hand on Lola’s knee. ‘That was exactly how it was. That and the fact that it was unusually warm.’
‘Well yes,’ Georgia agreed, ‘it was unusually warm.’ But he didn’t hear her.
‘Fancy that,’ Lola sighed, looking deeply into Tom’s eyes. ‘You saw it too.’ They stared at each other for a moment, almost as if they had forgotten anyone else was there.
Suddenly Ruby spoke up. ‘So tell me Mr…,’
‘Tom, just call me Tom.’
‘Yes, well I don’t think we are well enough acquainted for that,’ she sniffed.
Tom looked taken aback then said, ‘Tom Mallant, at your service.’
‘So, Mr Mallant, will we be having the pleasure of meeting your wife?’
‘My wife?’ Tom looked startled. ‘But I’m not married.’
‘Not married? But you said that Bryce was your grandson.’
‘Ruby!’ Lola exclaimed.
‘Don’t you Ruby me, I am talking.’
Georgia had a sudden urge to giggle at the absurdity of it all. She knew exactly what was on her mind. Ruby had seen the attraction between the two of them, just as she had, and now she was putting herself in the role of chaperone. Ah how times have changed.
Lola slumped back in her chair, rolling her eyes behind Ruby’s back, as Tom explained that, yes he had been married, many years ago, but he and his wife had divorced amicably and things were much better that way.
‘So what is your profession then?’ Ruby asked, an imperious tone to her voice.
‘I am a scientist.’
Georgia’s ears pricked up. A scientist? Perhaps he knew what had happened. He had seemed peculiarly interested in what they had been saying.
‘And does that pay well?’
‘No, not really, especially not these days.’ He gave a half smile as he said this, and Lola burst out laughing. ‘Well, it wouldn’t would it,’ she said.
Ruby apparently did not see the humor in this. ‘That simply won’t do,’ she said, then added to Lola, ‘come along, I think we should leave.’
Lola stood up, winking at Tom, ‘won’t be long,’ then slipping her arm through Ruby’s stepped out into the garden.
‘Sorry about that,’ Georgia said, as silence fell once more, then feeling as though she should explain more added, ‘she tends to be a little forgetful at times and comes out with the oddest things. A couple of days ago she was convinced we had robbed a bank and were on the run.’
He chuckled. ‘Your mum?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said, ‘not really.’
‘She’s my friend Lexie’s, Gran, Rebecca said suddenly, ‘but Lexie and her mum are gone now, so she is staying with us.’
Tom nodded slowly, a vague comprehension dawning, as Georgia grasped Rebecca’s hand, squeezing gently.
‘So you think she has Alzheimer’s?’ he asked.
‘Hard to tell, she had been living under pretty traumatic circumstances when we came upon her, so we are not sure if it’s her way of coping with that, or if she really is going senile. One day she is completely fine and makes complete sense, the next, she is in another world, and hasn’t a clue what’s going on around her.’
‘Too bad,’ Tom said, ‘it’s really good of you all to have taken her in.’
Georgia did not respond to this. Goodness had nothing to do with it. She looked at Rebecca, checking to see if she was okay, but Rebecca had turned her face away and was staring out over the water.
The silence in the room stretched out. Outside they could hear the children laughing, and Ant barking furiously at something she disapproved of. Ruby and Lola were on a stone bench half way down the walk.
She turned back to Tom. ‘So you’re a scientist?’ She asked the question even though he had just said so, less than ten minutes ago. But it was a way to lead in to her next question.
He nodded. ‘Yes, I am, or rather I was an astrophysicist.
Now it was Georgia that nodded. ‘So,’ she said, ‘does that mean you know what happened?’
He looked up at her then, studying her face intently for a moment and then he said, ‘yes, it does mean that, I know exactly what happened.’
Chapter Fifty
Georgia stared at him, her mouth trying to form words. So many thoughts collided with each other in her mind, that speech literally became impossible. She sensed that Rebecca had gone rigid next to her, and for a few seconds the whole world seemed to go silent. So intensely silent that, if that proverbial pin had dropped onto the jetty floor, the sound would have been thunderous.
She could feel the blood throbbing in her temples. Here, right now, she was finally going to learn who or what, had turned their lives upside down, and destroyed millions of others. The never ending question of what had caused Three-eighteen was about to be answered.
Georgia had no doubt that Tom was telling the truth, and that he really did hold such knowledge. She had a sense of the man and his quietly spoken intellect. There was none of the self-importance or brashness that she would expect from someone who was merely inflated by their own conjecture and speculations. This man actually knew what had happened.
‘So what…, what happened?' she finally managed to stammer, ‘was it an EMP?’
‘In a sense, yes, but not from a nuclear bomb blast detonated on high to trigger an electromagnetic pulse. This was a CME.’
‘A CME?’ Georgia repeated. What on earth was a CME? A cosmic mega…, explosion? A continental…,
Tom nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, exactly, a Coronal Mass Ejection.’
‘A what now?’ Lola asked from behind her, making Georgia jump. She had not heard her come back.
‘A Coronal Mass Ejection,’ he repeated.
‘No idea what that is,’ Lola said.
‘Nor do I,’ Georgia admitted.
He seemed just a tiny bit startled by this admission, and Georgia guessed the people he had probably previously mixed with, could have had entire conversations in three letter abbreviations and known exactly what was being discussed.
‘You probably are more familiar with the term Solar EMP, or Solar Flares.’
They nodded as Tom went on. ‘A CME is where a burst of plasma and accompanying magnetic field is ejected from the solar corona into the solar wind and…,’
Rebecca raised her hand. ‘Um, what is a solar wind?’
‘Oh, that’s quite simple. Basically, it’s a stream of charged particles released from the upper atmosphere of the sun. The plasma mostly consists of electrons, protons and alpha particles with thermal energy…,’
‘Wait,’ Georgia said interrupting Tom, impatient to fully understand what he was saying. ‘So what you are saying is that this was a natural occurrence, not a terrorist attack?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I am saying.’
‘So how come no one knew it was going to happen?’
Tom was si
lent for a moment, looking from face to face, and then out to where the children were playing. Then finally he said, ‘we did know.’ There was a calmness to his voice, and something else, something indefinable, a sadness perhaps.
‘We, who is we?’ Lola asked.
But Tom did not answer her. Instead he stood up, pulling a gold and blue enamel pocket watch from his jeans pockets. He flipped it open. ‘Look its getting late…,’
Confused, Georgia got to her feet as well. Were they being dismissed? Had they inadvertently offended him somehow? She knew the polite thing to do would be to thank him for his hospitality and continue on their way, but she did not want to do that, she wanted, needed to know more, needed to fully understand what had happened.
Somewhat desperately she asked, ‘perhaps we could come back tomorrow?’
‘Well if you prefer, but I was going to suggest that you all join us for dinner and bunk down in the main house tonight, that will give us plenty of time to talk, and I can answer all of your questions.’
‘So, you said that you knew ahead of time that this was going to happen?’ Georgia said, bringing the conversation back to what was uppermost in her thoughts. They were in Tom’s kitchen, Lola sitting on one of the white marble topped benches swinging her legs, while Georgia peeled potatoes. New potatoes, soil still clinging to them, that Bryce had been sent to dig up earlier.
Tom added a little more wood to the blazing interior of the wood burning cook stove, then stood up, nodding. ‘Yes we did.’ The cooker like everything else in the oversized kitchen was a contemporary take on a pre-electric appliance. Its sleek lines and wide clear glass front impressing the hell out of Georgia.
‘Who’s we?’ Lola asked.
‘That I can’t tell you, it was and no doubt still is a very classified government department , it’s enough for you to know that I worked with a group of high ranking scientists recruited from all over the world, with the sole exigent directive of finding a way to predict CMEs, specifically the most powerful ones, the X-class. These can produce as much energy as a billion hydrogen bombs, and if directed towards earth they can,’ he paused, shrugging his shoulders, ‘well you know firsthand what they can do.’ As he spoke he put the plug in the sink and reached for the faucet.
Georgia stared in admiration as he began pumping water directly into the sink using a faucet that operated like a hand pump. ‘Nifty,’ she said.
He glanced over at her. ‘Rinse those off in here when you are done, I’ll get the salad started.’
Georgia selected another potato from the bucket and began carefully removing the eyes. ‘So I take it you were successful.’
Tom who had disappeared into a side room, came back with a large bowl full of tomatoes, radishes, spring onions and a crisp looking butter lettuce. ‘Sorry, what was that?’ he asked. Georgia repeated the question.
‘Yes, five years ago, we had discovered a way of using SDO/HMI Vector Magnetic data product and Random Forest Algorithm to…,’
Lola gave a little cough, flicking her hair back over her shoulders as Tom looked over at her. ‘Um, perhaps in English?’
‘Oh right, okay so basically we found a way to predict them, at first we had two or three days warning, but then, two years ago, one of my colleagues, who had been working on the feedback mechanism between filament ejection and reconnection discovered…,’
‘Again, English please,’ Lola exclaimed.
Tom laughed. ‘And here I thought I was speaking English!’
They exchange a look that spoke volumes, and had absolutely nothing to do with solar flares, and then Tom continued, ‘she discovered a pattern, a cyclical pattern, and although she was still in the very early stages of testing her hypothesis, she was convinced from her findings that we were going to experience numerous X-28s and possibly even larger flares commencing in July of this year.’
‘Wait,’ Georgia said, ‘that was two years ago right? So what happened?’
‘Yes, we were fairly certain two years ago, and as to what happened I don’t exactly know.’ As he spoke he drew a large chopping block from under the sink and began deftly slicing the tomatoes. ‘At first there was a lot of congratulatory communications from those in charge, and talk of a laboratory at a top secret location that was near completion and would house the world’s largest telescope.’
Georgia listened intently as she dumped the peeled potatoes into the sink and began rinsing them.
‘At first?’ she prompted when Tom hesitated. ‘What changed?’
‘Talks changed everything. Members of our team were flown out to present our findings to various Heads of State, including Heads of the International Monetary Fund. They were gravely concerned about the fiscal consequences, estimating the world wide costs of such an event to be somewhere in the 20 Trillion dollar range. Shortly after that, NASA released plans to design and build a Solar Shield to protect power grids from the sun storms and the question on all our lips was when the public would be informed of the potential catastrophic…,’
The door suddenly flew open startling Georgia, and Rebecca raced in wild eyed and out of breath, the dogs at her heels. ‘Ruby has disappeared.’
‘What do you mean she has disappeared?’
‘She was reading her book, and I went over to talk to Jamie, and I swear I was only gone two or three minutes, and when I turned back she was gone.’
Georgia dropped the potato she was rinsing into the sink, hurrying over to the door as she wiped her hands on her jeans. ‘How long has she been gone?’
‘Not long, maybe ten minutes, we have all been looking for her.’
Georgia heart began to thud, where the hell could she have gone?
Lola slid easily off the counter top. ‘Any chance she took one of the canoes?’
Of all the stupid questions…, the very idea of Ruby trying to get into a canoe on her own. Georgia froze. ‘Oh God, what if she tried to get aboard one and fell into the water?’ As she pictured Ruby losing balance and plunging into the depths her stomach lurched and for a moment she thought she would be sick.
‘No, Deedee and Bryce would have seen her, they were fishing right there.’
Tom carefully lay down the paring knife he had been using and stepped forward. ‘She will be fine,’ he said, his voice casually calm.
Georgia felt her blood rise. ‘How do you know? She’s a muddle headed old lady and if she gets lost anything could happen to her.’ Her tone was a little harsher than she had intended, but really, who was he to decide that she would be fine!
He reached over and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I mean she can’t get lost. The entire property is securely enclosed, if we fan out, it will just be a matter of time and we will locate her.’
When Georgia did not immediately reply, he pulled open the door. ‘Come on, let’s go, I’ll tell you about it while we look.’ As they stepped out of the house he quickly organized the others, sending them off in different directions. ‘Whistle if you find her.’
As Tom and Georgia headed down a side path, Ant came scampering after them, yapping to be picked up and Georgia stooped to pick her up before she got under Tom’s feet. ‘I didn’t realize all this land was yours,’ she said, as Ant snuggled in the crook of her arm.
‘I bought it when it became clear that there was no way to avoid the catastrophe heading our way and those in power were determined not to release the relevant information. So I resigned. I did not want to be party to the cover up. I sold everything I owned and after a bit of research, purchased this entire stretch of land. I own six blocks, complete with the jetties, land and the houses, and I spent over a year preparing it, scouring the internet for materials and survival techniques. Hence the underground winter vegetable gardens, as well as the glass houses, wood stoves, the power free cooling…,’
‘Cooling? That explains the cool lemonade and those crisp vegetables. ‘You have a fridge?’
‘Not a fridge as such, but a system for keeping things chilled. I will show you lat
er if you like.’
Georgia nodded, she would like, peering between the trees, hoping for a glimpse of Ruby, as she tried to keep pace with Tom’s long strides.
‘The entire property is fenced with impenetrable steel, high walls hidden by ordinary looking fencing. From the river, really the only access onto the property, the place looks run down and well, as you saw from my kitchen, that is only for appearances.’ He turned towards a small cottage and headed up the steps.
‘We’ll check inside.’ As he opened the door, he patted it. ‘Solid steel plate in here, and the windows are armored glass. All the residences are built to resist attack, and of course, there are underground tunnels linking them all together. I had expected the others to join me, but they never came, but there is a chance they are still making their way down here. It depends on where they were transferred to.’
Georgia nodded a little distractedly. ‘Ruby? Ruby are you in here,’ as she called out her name she hurried down the corridor pushing open doors.
She headed back to the kitchen, checking the room once more. ‘She’s not here.’
‘Okay, next one.’
Georgia was beginning to feel desperate, Ruby had to be somewhere, and was only half listening as Tom told of the armories, the special seed stores, and freeze dry food supplies, enough for ten years at least. ‘That, with the fishing and the game easily available around here should make for a fairly comfortable life.’
She stopped dead in her tracks, catching hold of Tom’s arm, nearly jerking him off his feet. ‘Ten years? You think this will take ten years to rectify?’
‘At least ten years. We are not contending with a single EMC, so until the cycle has settled, any progress will be stopped dead in its tracks, unless they come up with some other technology.’
Just then, a shrill whistle came from the direction they had come in, they hurried back, as Rebecca’s voice came through the trees, ‘found her.’
Thank God.
‘Oh dear, there you are,’ Ruby said, as Georgia ran up to her. ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about, I can’t seem to find the front gate, so I was looking in this shed for a ladder to get over the wall. It is getting quite late and I don’t want to miss the train.’ She turned to Tom. ‘Do you happen to know where there is a ladder?’
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