Читать книгу We Who Survived - Sterling Noel - Страница 12

FRIDAY I was awakened some time before 4:00 A.M. in one of the Fallon guest rooms by a roar of wind that was the voice of doom itself. The whole house shook despite its steel and masonry construction. I would guess that the wind reached velocities of 150 miles per hour in gusts, and it blew at least a steady 100 M.P.H.

I got dressed and went to the kitchen, where I found Ali and Sarah sitting, huddled in worried consultation. I reassured them as best I could and sat at their table and had coffee with them. I turned on the VM receiver and found the air filled with disaster.

The hurricane winds had swept the oceans over all of the low coastal lands along the Atlantic and the Western Gulf of Mexico and had inundated at least a score of cities. York Area 1 was under five feet of water and it was feared that at least 200,000 persons had lost their lives. Most of Boston Complex was flooded and the dead there were expected to reach at least 50,000. All of the low areas of Long Island were under water, with nearly 100,000 missing and believed lost. The Jersey Complex was likewise hard-hit, with another 100,000 missing, and half of Delaware Complex (the old city of Philadelphia) was wiped out, with at least 100,000 dead. The destruction went all the way down the coast to Florida, although in the far South the damage was less and the winds of lower velocity.

As the reports of the disaster mounted the feeling of panic grew. The voices on the VM reflected it so that very soon one felt himself to be in a madhouse. Ali and Sarah both were moaning and crying; then they jumped up from their seats and began to rush about aimlessly, screaming out their fear. I restrained my own impulse to join their demonstration and finally collected my wits sufficiently to turn off the VM. I calmed them somewhat after half an hour and convinced them, partially at least, that they were in no danger at Fallon.

At 5:30 A.M. I went into the library and called Mt. Hood. I got a sleepy, short-tempered Gabe Harrow on the scope. It was 2:30 A.M. out there, and he told me morosely that he’d been in bed little more than an hour.

I told him of the hurricane winds and the disasters on the Atlantic and Gulf coast—that there would probably be more than a million dead and that a major panic apparently had set in, judging from the VM.

“Don’t let it upset you,” he said, “The wind will last only a few hours, so it’ll be forgotten soon enough. I knew about the wind. It’s due out here in an hour or so, but its force should be greatly reduced by the mountains.”

“How about the flooding?” I asked him.

“It’s some sort of unique disturbance that started around Earth from East to West at noon yesterday. Our first reports came from Central Asia and we think it originated in the vicinity of the China coast. Now go back to bed, Vic, and let me get some sleep.”

He clicked off the connection and I went back up to the guest room. My mind was whirling like a turbine. I sat down at a desk and began to make drawings of various installations we would need if we were to exist under several hundred feet of snow.

My first thought was of ventilation, if our oxygen generators should conk out. Every home in 2203 still had its own oxygen generator, a hangover from the air contamination of the insane Fourth World War, when men had pretty nearly succeeded in exterminating each other and making the Earth uninhabitable with radioactivity.

However, the use of the generators had greatly declined in the past 25 years as the air cleared. I stopped my drawing long enough to go to the reactor room and check on the Harrow farm generator. I gave it a whirl to check on the output, then went back to my room satisfied.

The ventilator I designed was a metal tube that was to be pushed up through the snow. The length could be increased by the addition of sections of tubing, and two suction fans at the bottom would draw in the air. The main feature, actually an afterthought, was a group of instruments mounted at the upper opening for reporting the weather.

After those drawings were completed, I spent a lot of time speculating upon what manner of vehicle Rance Goodrich would design for carrying us over the snow. I began to make drawings of so-called snowmobiles, which were used back in the Dark Centuries to travel in the Arctic and Antarctic, before man had discovered the simplicities of fusion reactors and the easy way to fly. The vehicles I was drawing were, actually, variations of the ancient automobile, the chief differences being tremendous wheels of inflated rubber that would support the machine and its occupants on snow.

At 8:15 I got Bill Wernecke on the scope and put my ventilation project in his lap. The Werneckes had just finished breakfast, and I could hear Martha and the kids in the background with voices raised. I showed Bill the drawings over the scope and he praised my design and said that in his opinion it would work like a mallow.

“Save ’em,” he said. “We’ll see you later today. I talked to Gabe yesterday and he insists that we all come out to Fallon immediately.”

“Wind do any damage at Berle Park?” I asked.

“Not to us. We heard it, though. Woke us up at three A.M. It seems to be dying down now.”

“I talked to Gabe about it,” I said. “It’s some sort of freak disturbance.”

“Probably the sun will be out this afternoon,” he said. “Wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this was the end of the storm—a sort of last gasp.”

“A hundred to one says you won’t see the sun during your lifetime,” I said.

“I’ll take that. One louvre’s worth, and I’ll collect it tonight. Keep your chin up, Colonel Savage.”

He went off the scope and I went back to my designing. At ten o’clock the wind had subsided completely. I had been aware, over my concentration, that there had been a change—that something external was very different. Suddenly I realized it was the absence of wind-howl. I looked out the window (the snow had drifted up to the second-story sill) and it seemed that the snowfall had thinned out considerably. I went down to the living room and turned on the VM and the VK receivers.

Luke Hobson, Secretary for Internal Affairs, was on the VK, his fat, smiling face and his unctuous voice oozing optimism. “. . . that the storm is nearing its end,” he said. “You will see that our predictions have been right, that these prophecies of an Ice Age and a frozen world are just so much latakia. I can assure you that it will stop snowing within hours and—”

I cut off the VK and tuned up the VM. There was a plump lady with shiny, blonde hair mixing something in a bowl and talking about it in a low, sexy voice. Life went on as usual. I cut off the VM.

At 10:41 the Garbut I had ordered from the Henderson Office set down at the jetshield and Marge Couzins was in my arms and giving me one of those kisses I once thought I couldn’t live without—and apparently was ready so to think again. Marge is a tall girl, only seven inches shorter than I am, and ordinarily her heels make up for some of that difference. Today she was dressed in Fincham arctics with fur snowboots, so she was back down to her real height. She took my arm and we walked up the heated path to the house.

“You’re a hell of a weather prophet,” she said. “Everybody from Luke Hobson on down to the air steward says the storm is over—that there’ll be no more snow after today.”

“All right,” I said. “You win. The storm is over. Gabe is a crackpot. How about we get married?”

“You mean a silly ceremony with a priest? I should say not!”

“Well—what do we do then? I’ve never been through this before.”

“Neither have I. . . . But we get three witnesses. We turn on the DW-three—there is a DW-three here, isn’t there?—then you say, ‘Be my wife, Marjorie Couzins.’ I reply, ’I will be your wife, Victor Savage.’ Then we face the screen while our picture is taken and we give our addresses and Waverly Numbers. That’s all there is to it.”

“I like the old-fashioned way better,” I said. “We would go to a temple or the priest comes here. He would read out of the ancient prayer book, then we would promise to love, honor, and obey each other and I would put a gold ring on your finger. Then we would kiss and would be married. We would get an engraved certificate which we could frame over our bed—a sort of license to make love. That’s real romance!”

“Phooie,” said Marge. But she gave me another one of those kisses and I didn’t care much how we got married, so long as we did.