by Reif Larsen
“Tata!” he yelled.
The open door let some light into the hut’s darkened interior. The place looked like a disaster zone. Several large shelves had collapsed, spilling heaps of equipment onto the floor. Nearly every surface was covered with electrical components—buckets of antennae, spare parts, wires dangling from the ceiling, all manner of radios in various states of decay. Radar peered into the darkness. Nothing appeared to be on fire, but the smell of cordite was incredibly strong. One wall was completely black and scorched.
In the middle of the room, Radar spotted a giant machine. A long series of interlocking metal cylinders ending in a large cone. It looked like a futuristic ray gun. Radar took a step forward. What the hell was this thing? He noticed that the end opposite the cone appeared heavily damaged. The metal was twisted and gnarled. This must have been what he smelled. It looked as if there had been some kind of explosion.
Radar carefully approached, fearful of another blast. He put a hand on the smooth barrel of the machine. There were three main parts to it: the end that had burst open, the middle series of cylinders, which were covered in a sea of wires, and then the cone, which was made of a very fine mesh.
Could it be? Radar closed his eyes. Counted to three. Opened them again. The machine was still there.
All at once, he realized he had seen this machine before. It was in a science magazine that had been floating around their house for years.
But no. It was preposterous. He could not believe it. This was from a science fiction movie. It couldn’t be real.
Fig. 3.7. Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Oscillating Cathode Electromagnetic Pulse Generator
From Radasky, W. (2005), “Non-Nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse Generators,” Journal of Electrical Engineering 27: 24–31
And yet all the proof was here: the exploded flux compression generator that would precipitate the massive blast of electrons, the barrel-like vircator to shape this blast into a brief, powerful pulse of microwave energy, and the conical antenna to diffuse and direct the pulse. He would never have thought it was possible to build a machine like this without massive governmental support, yet here it was. Not only had his father built it (Where had he gotten the parts?), but it had actually worked. The pulse must have been magnified by the giant 119-foot antenna above the shack and been broadcast across a huge area.
Holy, holy crap.
His father, Kermin Radmanovic, had caused the blackout.
5
And yet his father was nowhere to be found.
“Tata?” he called again.
Nothing.
What the hell had his father been doing? Why had he built this thing? The whole idea of an explosively pumped flux compression generator was that it would explode. Didn’t he realize this? Didn’t he realize the potential devastation? Did he want to cause such devastation?
“Tata!” he coughed.
Maybe his father had been blown into a corner and was now knocked unconscious—or worse. He ventured deeper into the room but saw no evidence of Kermin, only more piles and piles of electrical junk. There was an overturned barrel full of various antennae that looked like an arsenal of medieval sabers; a collapsed rack of plush leather earphones; boxes of shattered vacuum tubes; rolls and rolls of wires of all different gauges; a collection of old World War II cryptography machines; and, across one low shelf, a solemn procession of microphones from every era since the dawn of broadcasting, now covered in shrapnel from the blast.
It was then that he looked up. He made a little gasp and tripped, falling backwards against the wall. Bats. The ceiling was filled with bats. There were hundreds of them. The bats were getting ready to sweep down and attack him. He instinctively covered his face.
But there was no attack. In fact, they did not move at all, so, after catching his breath again, Radar stood up and took a closer look. They weren’t bats at all—they were birds. Hundreds of tiny birds. Thousands of tiny birds. All dead. Hanging upside down from strings attached to their feet. He now saw that a number of the birds had been blown around the room during the explosion—he could see them on the floor, littered across the shelves.
Yet there was something wrong with the birds. Not just in their deadness—their bodies were not right. Then Radar realized what it was: the birds had no heads. Every single one of them was headless. This couldn’t have been caused by the explosion alone. He picked up one of the creatures and touched its feathered wing. The joints were soft and supple; the wing bent perfectly against his hands, swinging up and down as if under the influence of an invisible breeze. He had always figured taxidermied birds would be stiff and immovable, but this one was like a little bird robot. He looked into its neck and saw the glint of metal and wire.
What had been going on in here? Electromagnetic pulse generators and flocks of headless robot birds?
“Tata!” he called. “Kermin!”
He shivered. Despite the heat, he suddenly felt chilled and overtaken by the distinct sensation that he was performing some kind of trespass. He dropped the bird and slowly backed out of the shack, slamming the door behind him. In the yard, he stood, breathing, trying to reconcile what was in there with what was out here.
Mr. Neimann had mentioned that he heard a loud bang right before the lights went out. He had also said they had found the source of the blackout. What if the authorities were already on their way? Their entire block would instantly be swarming with FBI agents, CIA, military—everyone. His father would be labeled a whack-job terrorist. He could already see the New York Post headline:
BIRD-CRAZY BALKAN MAN DETONATES E-BOMB, CRIPPLES NEW JERSEY
And where was Kermin? Had he panicked when the explosion went off? Maybe he was hiding somewhere. Yes. Of course.
Radar ran into the house, shouting his father’s name.
“It’s okay, Tata. I saw the machine. I know what happened,” he said. “It’s okay—you can come out now.”
He checked every room in the house. He checked the basement. He looked under the couches, in the attic crawl space, behind the shower curtain. His father was nowhere to be seen. He must’ve fled. Or maybe he was injured and had gone to the hospital?
He heard a car door slam out front. The police! The police had found them already.
Suddenly he was the one looking for a hiding place. The basement! Behind those boxes of his childhood Erector Set! Quick!
There was no time to lose, and yet curiosity drove him into the front parlor, where he hunched on Kermin’s favorite beige couch and parted the linen curtains. He just wanted to see the scrum of SWAT trucks, to see how many guns they had trained on the house. He wanted to see the police tape cordoning off the crowd of anxious, disbelieving neighbors. He wanted to see polite Mr. Neimann’s expression when he heard the news that Kermin, kind old Kermin, was a wanted terrorist.
But there were no guns. No SWAT trucks. There was only the Oldsmobile.
It was Charlene. She was speaking with Mr. Neimann on the sidewalk, gesturing at the car. Mr. Neimann, still holding the spatula, was nodding like a good neighbor.
Radar collapsed back into the couch. Suddenly the question now became: What should he tell her? The truth? That her husband had blown up New Jersey, kept a shackful of headless birds, and was now on the run from the authorities? What would this do to her?
As much as she might argue otherwise, his mother was a fragile woman. Radar had the feeling that she had spent much of her life running from a part of herself, a dark part that had never seen the light of day. While he was away at college, she had battled through multiple bouts of depression, and there were a couple of times when things had gotten really bad, when she had slipped all the way to the edge, when he was terrified that he would wake up to a call in the middle of the night and she would be gone. That call had never come, but the edge was still there. The edge was always there. The threat of her relapsing had
created a strong gravitational field around their little family and was part of the reason he had never left home.
He went to the kitchen and sat down at the table. The twin radios, now silent, still flanked the pig centerpiece. His father’s plate and its lunula of forgotten toast. Nearby, the humping-bunny mug, which housed the cold dregs of his mother’s chinchilla concoction. The props of a marriage at equilibrium.
This house. How funny, this house. How funny this house was just another house, and yet it contained all of this.
Outside, the light was beginning to soften. He wondered what time it was. A pang of hunger. He looked at the clock on the wall. Two forty-four. Like all clocks, it had stopped at the moment of the pulse. He guessed it must be at least eight o’clock.
He heard the front door open and close.
“Radar?” his mother called.
“I’m in here, Mom.”
“Radar?”
“In here.”
She was still wearing her lab coat, which was covered in great big streaks of muck, as if she had been thwacking her way through a dense forest. There was a small cut across her forehead.
“Are you okay?” he asked, standing.
“Oh, Radar!” she said, her eyes sparkling. “I was out there. You should’ve seen me. I was out there.”
“You look like you were out there.”
“It was absolutely wild.”
“The Olds worked, huh?”
“Oh, it was beautiful. What justice. I mean, to drive around all these fancy cars—these BMWs, these Mercedes. I just lay into my horn. I had no shame. I think I drove six people to the hospital. Everyone thought I was a doctor because of my coat. But it didn’t matter, I was just out there. Helping people. Doing my duty. I haven’t felt this good . . .” She shook her head. “But it’s the strangest thing. My sense of smell is gone.”
“Gone?”
“Well, not gone. You know me. But not like it was. I can’t feel a room anymore.” She sniffed.
“I’m sure it’s just stress,” he said. “How bad is it out there?”
“Well, for the most part, everyone’s helping each other out. But even in the last hour, it’s been getting worse. People were starting to act a little crazy. Like it was the end of the world. Who knew a simple power outage would cause such a panic?”
“It’s not just a simple power outage.”
“A policeman even tried to take my car. Can you believe it? But I told him, ‘No. No way—this is my baby.’ He even had the nerve to pull out his gun and tell me the roads were closed and that I had to give him the car, by law, but I didn’t fall for any of that crap.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, I drove away. What was he going to do, shoot me?”
“A policeman pulled a gun on you and you just drove away?”
“They can’t just do whatever they want.”
“Uh, they declared martial law. They actually can do whatever they want.”
“That’s my car. I was helping people. I wasn’t causing trouble,” she said. “I stuck by that car for thirty years; I should at least be able to keep it when the going gets a little rough.”
Radar smiled. “I never would’ve thought, Mom,” he said. “I didn’t know you still had it in you.”
“Just wait until I tell your father about all this. He probably didn’t think I had it in me, either. Where is the old man, by the way?”
Radar blinked.
“I bet he’s in a foul mood. Is his playpen in ruins?”
Radar felt his gears hiccup. Did she know?
“What do you mean?” he said.
“All those electronics he has out there! People were saying everything got fried. You’ve got to feel for the man.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah,” he said, relieved.
“How’s your station?”
“Same as everywhere. The pulse took out all the circuitry. We hadn’t protected it properly,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
“How were you supposed to know about something like this?” Charlene got up and started walking toward the backyard. “Well, I suppose I’ll have to talk him down myself.”
Radar leaped up. “Don’t!”
“What?” She looked surprised.
“He went out.”
“He did? Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, he went out?”
“I mean, he just disappeared.”
She shook her head. “I’ll tell you what—that man. I love him, but that man will drive you nuts.”
Radar considered telling her everything. About the EMP. The birds. He opened his mouth but couldn’t bring himself to speak.
“Well, I for one am going to lie down,” she said. “When he comes back, tell him I’m upstairs and he’s responsible for dinner.”
“Dinner might be a problem. We might be facing a lot of problems.”
“I’m sure we will, but I’m going upstairs,” she said. “I’m going to take a Valium and put my feet up so that when the end of the world comes I’m at least feeling relaxed.”
• • •
RADAR DID NOT DRINK, but as day faded into night, as what was then faded into what will be, he pulled out a dusty bottle of his father’s šljivovica and poured a thumb or two into one of his old Star Wars glasses. As Mr. Neimann had said, now seemed like as good a time as any. And in some strange way, it felt as if he was lighting a homing beacon for his father, even though Kermin also rarely drank. The šljivovica was saved for only momentous occasions—births, deaths, graduations. Blackouts. He sipped the rakija, waiting for someone to walk through the front door. Kermin? The authorities? Surely any investigator with half a brain would be drawn to the house with the absurd, 119-foot antenna that towered above the entire neighborhood?
Yet the front door remained closed. Eventually, after two more thumbs of šljivovica, feeling the quiver of wire in his blood, he lit a dusty candle from their dining room table and headed out to the backyard again. Dusk had already descended on the neighborhood, leaving the houses oddly dark. A sound of sirens rushing a street or two over. He listened, but they did not stop in front of their house, instead Dopplering away to a distant disaster.
When Radar opened the door to the shack, he was again hit by that pungent odor of things burning and now burned. The bird bodies still hung above him; the light from the candle elongated their limbs into a latticework of ghoulish shadows.
He stepped over the detritus and made his way to his father’s cluttered desk. Tacked to the wall just above, two framed black-and-white photographs hung cockeyed. One showed a young Nikola Tesla, looking heavily eyebrowed and manic under the glare of a flashbulb of his own invention. The other was a grainy snapshot of Deda Dobroslav, posing triumphantly on some anonymous mountaintop in Bosnia during World War II with Vojvoda Dujic and a heavily bearded band of Chetniks in black sheepskin shubaras. He leaned in closer to the photograph. In the foreground, Dujic, their talismanic leader, was holding an absurdly long rifle in one hand. This picture must have been taken early on in the war, when hope still carried the day and weary warriors could pause in their day’s pursuit to taste the sun’s riches on the top of a mountain. Crouching beside the cluster of barbarian warriors, his grandfather was the only man without a beard, his face burned dark from the sun. Radar sensed an aura of innocence emanating from those eyes, no doubt enhanced by his giant radio backpack. The resident communications geek. Some things never changed. Though the photograph was blurry, Radar could just make out Dobroslav saying something into the mouthpiece of the radio. Was he actually communicating a message as the camera shutter clicked open? Or was he simply hamming it up for the photographer? Somehow, this picture had survived the war and then made it halfway across the world to America. The captured photons of that fall morning still held true, seventy years la
ter, suspended in silver gelatin, framed above the desk of a radio shack in New Jersey.
It was as he had written once. Rule #48: History persists.
He walked back over to the pulse generator. Touched its hull. He was suddenly taken by a chill, a feeling of emptiness. He looked down and saw something lying on the ground. A little figure. A man, made of sticks and coiled twine. He picked it up, turning it over in his hands. He thought he had seen such a figure before, though he could not remember when.
In one corner of the room, Radar caught sight of a large metal trunk. He touched its side, confused at first, before he realized what it was: a Faraday cage. Of course. His father must have known the potential consequences of his machine, even if he was perhaps not quite aware of how wide-ranging those consequences would be. But he would have at least wanted to protect his own equipment.
Radar looked around the shack. It sure seemed as if he had left a lot out in the open, to simply be fried by the pulse. Maybe he hadn’t really known what he was doing. Certainly he hadn’t considered the role the giant antenna would play in broadcasting the pulse. But all of this—this explosion, this pulse—did not seem like his father’s behavior: his father did not affect things. His father simply was—observing, listening, grumbling. He was a passenger, not the driver. Maybe he had seized the wheel for one brief and terrible moment?
Radar unlatched the trunk and opened its lid. A little gasp. It was indeed a trunk full of riches. There were flashlights and radios and small televisions (apparently he had not thrown all of these out). Earphones. A calculator wristwatch. A cell phone (so his father did have a cell phone!). A Taser. An old IBM laptop. A digital camera.
Just then, released from its cage, one of the transceivers began to beep. The noise sounded foreign to his ears, and Radar realized he had already mentally adjusted to a world devoid of such electronic sounds. He picked up the radio and found that it was connected to an old Vibroplex Morse key—what they called “a bug” in the business. The transceiver must have been in CW mode. The beeps he was hearing were in Morse code: