Ill Wind

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Harris said. “You should have seen how he whipped up the crowd singing ‘Satisfaction.’ They all wanted to go out and just rip people’s arms and legs off. Then when he was playing ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ some kid pulled out a gun and waved it at the stage—”

  “It wasn’t ‘Sympathy for the Devil!’” Doog interrupted. “That’s an urban legend. It was ‘Under My Thumb.’”

  “That’s not how I remember it,” Harris said, glaring at his friend.

  “What happened to the guy with the gun?” Iris said. “Was he the one who got killed?”

  “Yeah,” Harris answered. “Guy pulled out his gun, and before you know it the Hell’s Angels stabbed him and stomped him to death. Great security, huh?”

  Doog shook his head. “Man, the Altamont concert was probably the darkest hour of the ‘60s. So much for all the love and peace and harmony crap the hippies kept talking about. Gave us all a bad image.”

  Iris stood up from the bleachers and brushed off her backside. She felt her knees crack. “Well, then let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again at the second great Altamont concert.”

  Harley returned from the refreshment stand. Dirt streaked his clothes, and some splinters stuck in his nappy hair. “Found some,” he said excitedly. “Two cans of Budweiser and an Orange Crush. I get one of the beers.”

  “No you don’t,” said Harris, “hand them over.”

  “I found them!”

  “You’re still too young.”

  Grudgingly, Harley handed the warm cans over.

  They had sent out notices with their runners to the people in Tracy and the other towns in the Central Valley, as well as to the enclave around Livermore. They would broadcast it across the Atlantis network to anyone listening in on the short-wave radio. Word would spread, summoning the audience and the musicians for the Last Great Rock ‘n Roll concert.

  They sat in silence sipping their warm beer and passing the two cans back and forth. By Labor Day the unnatural quiet would at last be replaced by human sounds, music rising to the sky.

  Chapter 62

  The woman at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory narrowed her eyes at them. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Todd and Casey Jones looked at each other and both shrugged. Todd removed his cowboy hat. “No, Ma’am, we’re serious. We’ve come to take those solar power satellites and haul them off to New Mexico.”

  The woman gestured them inside the concrete research building, still looking at them with a mixture of amazement and disbelief. “Come and get washed up, you two. I think you’re suffering from heat stroke.”

  She was a tough Asian woman, about 50, with wide hips and heavy arms. She looked like the type who’d move heavy equipment by herself just because she didn’t have the patience to wait for help. She pinned her gray-white hair back with elaborate pins. Her name, she said, was Henrietta Soo.

  The dim facility looked like a 1960s version of a “high tech” building, an eight-story-tall cube with dark windows and light cement. The aluminum mini blinds had been taken down to allow the maximum amount of light to pour through the windows. Inside, the petroplague had dissolved most of the carpets and linoleum, leaving only concrete and plywood base boards.

  Henrietta Soo took Todd and Casey past empty offices and a conference room where a half a dozen people stood brainstorming, scribbling things on a pad of paper propped on an easel.

  In a kitchen area, Henrietta twisted on a faucet. Water trickled out with low pressure, but it was enough for them to drink and wash. Droplets sprayed from side to side in the gasketless faucet nozzle. She disappeared, leaving them to take turns at the sink, splashing their faces and pulling brown paper towels to wipe themselves off.

  “Boy, this feels good!” Todd said as water dripped from the stubble on his chin. Casey Jones doused his bald head, kneading his dark skin with his fingertips.

  After the train wreck, they had hiked for two days northwest of Pasadena. They passed through the sprawling, confused metropolis of Burbank and Glendale, asking directions from people on the street. They must have painted an absurd picture: both of them streaked with grime, the back of Casey’s shirt stiffened with drying blood, asking for somebody to point the way to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  In Pasadena, the Rose Bowl sat empty, but a flea market had sprung up by itself, though the vendors sold a new selection of post-plague items. The lush and well-manicured country club golf course was ragged and overgrown.

  By now Todd and Casey were hungry and exhausted, but they had reached their destination. The bright flowers and arching willows made JPL look like a campus, 175 acres jammed up against the sheer green-brown mountains. Once they passed into the JPL complex, they tracked down the headquarters of the satellite division. The Jet Propulsion Lab normally held over five thousand workers, but now the site was quiet and lethargic.

  Henrietta Soo returned with a metal first-aid kit and opened it up, poking around to find cloth bandages. “Let me look at your back,” she said to Casey, and he dutifully removed his shirt. With a cotton swab, she dabbed and poked at the infected arrow wound. In her other hand she held a brown bottle. “I got a glass bottle of alcohol from one of the labs. All of our plastic tubes of first-aid cream are… no longer with us. I’ve got a few antibiotics, but we’re saving them.” She smiled apologetically, then said to Todd, “How about you?”

  Todd flexed his hands; he was lucky they hadn’t formed any large blisters from the burn. “I’m okay.”

  Casey Jones stared at the wall as she prodded crusted blood, cleaned the wound, and bandaged his shoulder. Finished, Henrietta clicked the first-aid kit shut and turned to face them.

  “Now then. I’ve got some of Dr. Lockwood’s smallsats sealed up and ready for launch, but there’s no way you’ll be able to take all of them. When he asked for help getting them shipped to his railgun launching system, I never thought anyone would take the challenge. The satellites have been sitting in one of our clean rooms for months—but what I want to know is just how you two propose to get them to White Sands?”

  She waited. Todd looked down at his dirty boots and shuffled his feet. Casey didn’t offer any ideas.

  Todd refused to meet Henrietta Soo’s eyes. “Um, I was hoping you might have a suggestion, Ma’am.”

  * * *

  Todd sat in front of JPL’s short-wave radio, looking befuddled. He stared at the microphone. “Is everything ready?”

  “Yes,” Henrietta said, leaning over his shoulder. “Go ahead.”

  Todd touched the microphone again. “You’re sure it’s at the right frequency and everything?”

  “Yes!” Henrietta said again, a bit more impatiently.

  “And I just hold down the microphone button?”

  Henrietta scowled. “You’re new at this aren’t you? We’re all connected to the Atlantis network. We’ve cleared our own node here and knocked off the Feds so we can get some decent radio time. FEMA is pissed off at us, but they’ll pick up the signal on this frequency and reroute it up to the Livermore receiving station. It’ll probably also be picked up by other substations and broadcast around the country.”

  Todd felt a knot in his throat at the thought of thousands of people listening in on his personal message, but before he could lose his nerve he gripped the microphone.

  “This is Todd Severyn calling for Moira Tibbett at the Sandia National Laboratory in Livermore, California.” He hoped Tibbett was there listening. From what he could tell, she never went home, she never left her map with its colored pushpins marking the growing number of stations on the emergency short-wave network.

  “Sandia, can you read me?” he repeated. “This is Todd Severyn transmitting from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.”

  Tibbett’s gruff voice came out of the shortwave speaker. “Todd, we read you! I take it you made it down to Los Angeles? Over.” A squeaky background hum accompanied her transmission.

  “I arrived just fine. Our locomotive was destroyed by
a gang down here, but Casey Jones and I are safe and unharmed.”

  “That’s good news Todd,” Tibbett replied. “Over.”

  “Could you…” Todd said, then paused. “Uh, could you make sure that message gets passed along to Iris Shikozu at the Altamont settlement?”

  “We’ll send it with the next courier that comes down. Over.”

  “And tell her…” The words clogged in Todd’s throat. He made a silent excuse to himself that he just had stage fright, but deep inside he knew that wasn’t really what stopped him. “Just tell her I’m OK. We’ll be taking the satellites and setting out for New Mexico. Wish us luck.”

  “Good luck, Todd,” Tibbett answered. “We’ll all be keeping our fingers crossed for you. Over.”

  “Over and out.” He signed off.

  Henrietta Soo stood behind him with arms crossed over her chest like a stern grandmother. “Sounds like you should have rehearsed your words a bit, Mr. Severyn.” She smiled. “Come on. Let me show you the smallsats. Maybe that’ll give you an idea how to transport them, if your friend doesn’t find anything today.”

  Casey Jones had gone out by himself that morning to see if he could find any solution to hauling the satellites. The wide-faced man had used the water trickle and a little bit of soap to shave his entire head so clean that it glistened even after he toweled it dry. Obsessed again, Casey set out to see what he could find in the chaos of Pasadena.

  Todd could not talk openly with his partner, though they had come hundreds of miles together and narrowly escaped death. The man who called himself Casey Jones had some sort of parasite of guilt inside him, chewing away.

  Casey had been all right when he was moving, bringing supplies down to Los Angeles, taking direct action to alleviate his conscience. The moment they stopped and ran up against a problem, though, he became restless as a lion in a cage. Todd guessed he would have done the same thing. In some ways, he and Casey were a lot alike.

  Henrietta Soo led Todd deeper into the laboratory complex, away from the offices and conference rooms. The partially dissolved linoleum on the floor left hard cheese-like remains in strange patterns on top of the plywood underfloor.

  At the end of the corridor an emergency exit sign marked a red-painted door. Banks of gun-metal gray lockers lined the left side of the hall, like a high-school corridor. On the other side, dark windows gazed in on a warehouse-sized clean room.

  “This is where we assembled the smallsats,” Soo said. “It’s a Class 1000 clean room. The air inside was filtered and refiltered so that it had a thousand times fewer particles than outside air. Even that couldn’t stop the spread of the petroplague, of course, but twenty of the solar smallsats were already finished, packaged and sealed, ready for launch. The original plan called for constructing nearly a hundred of them, but Lockwood’s project was on a shoestring budget and we had to go one step at a time. We probably have the components and spare parts to complete another twenty smallsats, though. In addition to these.”

  Through the glowing lights of luminous power sources inside the clean room, Todd could make out the hulks of the twenty packaged solar satellites like meter-long pods on the tables.

  “Have you spoken to Dr. Seth Mansfield?” Henrietta asked. “He got interested in this work after speaking with Spencer Lockwood over the wireless—Seth has a lot of admiration for that young man. Seth still comes in here, helps us brainstorm last-ditch solutions. Did he put you up to this?”

  Todd shook his head. “No, Ma’am. I just heard on the radio that the White Sands folks needed someone to transport these sats and that it could be a big payoff to the country’s recovery. I was tired of sitting on my butt.” He refrained from saying anything about his part in the Promethus spraying.

  Henrietta leaned closer to the glass, jabbing her stubby fingers at something Todd couldn’t see.

  “Each smallsat is about the size of a large scuba tank, weighing nearly a hundred kilograms. It uses solar electric propulsion for attitude control and has a supercomputer brain the size of a deck of cards. It’s got a microthin array of solar power panels accordioned into a layer a few centimeters thick, but once extended the panels cover several hundred square meters of collection area.”

  Todd put the edge of his hand against the glass and tried to peer inside, but he saw no further details. “Sounds delicate,” he said. “Are we going to ruin these things by carrying them a thousand miles cross country?”

  She shook her head. “Everything’s been hardened to withstand over ten thousand gees of acceleration during launch, standard stuff for this type of equipment. If Dr. Lockwood hadn’t specified using silcon sealants, the petroplague would have done them in.”

  As they walked back toward Henrietta’s office, he looked around; the other rooms were empty. “We saw a big meeting yesterday when we came in. Where is everybody? How many people still work at JPL?”

  Henrietta Soo shrugged. “Quite a few, actually, but most of our people have thrown themselves into practical problems, trying to develop technological band-aids for crucial city services. The big one is the Emergency Broadcast Network. It’s linking more and more as people build short-wave radios.”

  As she stepped into her dim office, Henrietta flicked the light switch out of habit. She frowned at herself when nothing happened. “It’s really not as bad out there as we thought at first. PVC seems to be unaffected, the hard plastic pipe that most of our underground conduits are made out of. Same with natural rubber, though synthetic rubber gets all spongy and doesn’t function well. Bakelite, that old amber-colored plastic you find in antique stores, resists the petroplague. It’s brittle, but it still holds up pretty well. Some nylon even managed to survive.”

  He knew that was good news, but he could not get too excited about it. “Yeah, but if we don’t have the industry to keep making this stuff…” Todd let his voice trail off.

  “Ah, but that means we can find substitutions—given time—but it’s going to be hell to survive the transition.”

  * * *

  Later, when Henrietta convinced Todd that he should contact the group at White Sands, he grabbed the microphone with much less trepidation and waited for Spencer Lockwood to acknowledge his transmission. “Lockwood here,” said the man’s voice. “Who am I talking to?”

  “You’re talking to the guy who’s going to deliver your solar power satellites from JPL.”

  “What!” Spencer’s voice was suddenly high-pitched with childish excitement. “Hot damn!” Then he dropped off again. “I hope we’re still ready to receive them when you get here. We might be having a few minor problems with the military. Some big bully wants to take all our toys. We hope we can hold out.”

  “We’ll get there as soon as we can,” Todd said.

  “Good luck. We’ll be waiting,” Spencer said.

  After they exchanged a few more details, Todd signed off. He felt the sense of urgency bubble through him again. They had made it all the way to Pasadena, but practical matters had brought them to a screeching halt.

  Todd was still pacing the floor when Casey Jones returned from his day’s search. The grin on the burly man’s face made Todd stop in his tracks. “You find something?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” Casey answered. He held out a battered old book. “I got a map of all the main lines and spurs of railroad tracks in the southwestern United States. From here, we can hook onto the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line, which will take us east to Barstow, Flagstaff, and straight to Albuquerque. From there, another spur heads south, right into White Sands.”

  “Rail lines?” Todd said. “Where did you get that book?”

  “At the library.” Casey set the book down and dropped himself heavily into a folding metal chair. “It was a zoo down there! You should have seen the people. They were grabbing all sorts of books on do-it-yourself stuff. How to make your own clothes, build your own furniture, gardening books, that sort of thing. The library is kind of messed up, but I got the book I needed. Can you bel
ieve a lady even asked me if I had a library card?”

  “That’s a sign some parts of civilization are still working,” Todd said, then he scowled. “But what do you want with railway maps? Your train is wrecked!”

  “Ah, but I’ve come up with something else,” he said. “In an old railyard I found two handcars. They’re rusty, but nothing a little lard and sandpaper won’t fix; and we can link them together, ride the rails, pump ourselves across country. I figure we can get a wheelbarrow to haul the smallsats down to the rail line. From there, we’ll… just head off. Simple.” He grinned with deep satisfaction.

  Todd looked skeptical. “You realize there’s twenty satellites here? These things are heavy.”

  “So we only take half of them. After we prove we can do it, we can come back for the rest of them. Or somebody else can.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “I know.” Casey shrugged, but he kept smiling.

  * * *

  They left at dusk, hauling the ten packed smallsats in wheelbarrows as well as all the bottled water and food supplies they could carry, and three metallized survival blankets to shield them from the desert heat and night cold. Even with help from some of the other JPL workers, it still took five trips to get everything to the hidden handcars.

  Henrietta Soo surprised them both by insisting on coming along on the rigorous journey. “The smallsats are my babies,” she said. “How do I know I can trust you two? I have to watch them.” She stood firm.

  Todd argued with her, but Casey Jones just wanted to leave. Finally, as Henrietta trudged along hauling a loaded wheelbarrow of her own and keeping pace, Todd believed her when she said she could do her share of the work. It reminded him of Iris—she insisted on pulling her own weight.

  According to Casey’s railroad map, they had about a thousand miles of track to cover. He guessed they could make 10 to 15 miles per hour pumping the hand car, once they got it going. With three of them, they could take shifts and keep going maybe ten hours a day. By traveling at night, they hoped to avoid gangs like the one that had blown up Casey’s locomotive. If they started at dusk, and pumped straight through the night, they could be far from Los Angeles by dawn.