Читать книгу We Who Survived - Sterling Noel - Страница 19

THE WIND and the snow increased steadily for the next two hours, and by 4:15 A.M. it was blowing a full gale and the snow was so thick visibility was down to a few feet. The temperature had sunk to four above zero but Marge and I, snug in our first-floor master bedroom which had been turned over to us for our wedding night by the Harrows, lay in each other’s arms and talked the night through without a care on our minds.

It was the most delightful night I had ever spent, and the joy of it and the nights immediately to follow was so pervading that it took both of us several days before we could be aware of the bleak, forbidding world of storm and violence around us. I would say that it was not until the following Tuesday morning that Marge and I became conscious of the depressed spirits of the Harrow group and took the first good look about us since Saturday night at the external world, which was slowly being wrapped in death.

On Tuesday morning the snow measured 11 feet officially and had drifted well over the second story windows on three sides of the farmhouse. Two Cory heat converters had been kept working at the front of the house, so the snow was clear there in a wide path that extended to the two barns and the jetshield. Both Marge and I joined the workers at the West Barn. We helped them to move the lomax alloy beams to the East Barn and the house, where the interior reinforcements already had begun under the direction of Bill Wernecke.

We were welcomed to this group by Jack Osborne, Rance Goodrich and Steve Engles. Rance and Jack were untangling the beams from the pile that reached to the barn roof and Steve was one of the carriers. (Lomax alloy, as all of you must remember, was about a third the weight of magnesium, with a tensile strength far above that of old-fashioned steel.) Rance and Jack made the usual remarks about bride and bridegroom, but there was very little humor in them. Steve, who had been looking on silently, apologized for both.

“I think this storm has gotten on our nerves considerably and it is almost impossible to be light,” he said. “I know that I wanted to say something, too, but I was afraid it wouldn’t come off.”

Marge said, “Let’s just forget it. Sure, we’ve been doing what most of the world does all the time. We’ve been making love. Give me one of those beams and I’ll see if I can fight my way back to the house.”

Steve handed her an eight-foot beam and she tucked it under her arm and started out. I said, “I’m glad you decided to stay with us, Steve. We can use your knowledge of reactors.”

He picked up several fifteen-foot beams and started for the door. “Thanks,” he said. “But I haven’t changed any of my views. I think Kansas is a lousy idea.”

Jack Osborne climbed down from the pile and lit a cigarette. “We’re going to have trouble with that monkey,” he said. “He’ll never take orders from Gabe when the going gets rough.”

“I’ll handle him when it’s necessary,” I said. “Meanwhile we can use his brain, Jack. Don’t forget he’s the only reactor expert we’ve got. If we start stumbling over personalities this early, we’ll all murder each other before we can get out of here.”

He puffed on his cigarette in silence for a moment. Then he smiled at me and whacked me on the back. “You’ve got some sense, Colonel,” he said. “I’ll remember that when I start getting moody again.”

We worked continuously Tuesday at our various critical jobs and there was very little time for meals or conversation and none for recreation. The howling wind and the almost solid sheets of snow were frightening phenomena and so we battled with every ounce of our energy to build for ourselves a haven that would be safe.

The reinforcement work for house and barn shaped up very quickly and by Friday, September 27th, the work on the barn was completed and half of the house had been shored up. Bill Wernecke showed us with his drawings and stress figures that our abode would support thousands of tons of weight when the work was completed, and I know that we all felt new confidence.

By September 27th the official reports from the broadcasts placed the depth of snow at fifteen feet four inches and the wind velocity at 80 miles per hour. The temperature varied between 17 and 18 degrees below zero at 2:00 A.M. and four or five below at 2:00 P.M.

Florence Donner was appointed official broadcast monitor by Gabe and a complete set of receivers was installed in a small den off the library which became the communications room. On the previous Tuesday she had begun typing up brief summations of the daily reports, and these were placed on a notice board in the dining room.

It was on this Friday that all air service was officially abandoned. No Rings had been able to fly since shortly after the resumption of the storm on Saturday morning and there had been a terrible loss of life during those first few hours of high winds when the thousands of Rings in the air at the time were blown to Earth. However, missiles could still operate with relative safety and efficiency, since they are only little affected by wind. The difficulty there was that passenger missiles had been abandoned years before with the development of the Spencer principle and the perfection of the Gar-ring, which operated at one-fifth the cost of the missile and at very nearly the same speed. (The Bates Rings actually were faster than missiles but were considered unsafe at speeds over 1,800 miles per hour.) Now in 2203 there were no passenger missiles in service and the few still operable in the Air Force could carry one or two persons. The great air age of the Twenty-second and Twenty-third Centuries had come to an abrupt end.

York Area One had been completely wiped out as an area of human habitation. Only parts of Long Island Complex remained habitable. Half of Boston Complex had been destroyed. Most of the smaller Centers, Cities and Towns along the Atlantic Coast from Portland Complex to Charleston Complex had ceased to exist. Delaware Complex had lost half of its habitations and Baltimore Complex was under ten feet of water and ice. Most of Jersey Complex and Jersey Center had, miraculously, escaped destruction, and most of York Area Two was intact.

The estimates of the dead on the Atlantic Coast alone ran anywhere from eight to twelve million persons.

Inland from the Atlantic, north of Portland Complex and South of Charleston Complex, a somewhat different situation existed. In all of the far North and at Halifax Complex and Montreal Complex, as examples, most of the habitations were intact. The storms were more violent in the North in some respects—the snowfall was eight to ten feet deeper at Montreal Complex—but the tidal waves had done little damage except to dock areas. The buildings in that region were generally sturdy enough to withstand the high winds. South of Charleston Complex the tidal waves were less severe and the principal damage resulted from the winds, for most of the structures in that area were flimsy and not designed to withstand violent weather. In both North and South most of the loss of life resulted from smothering under the snow.

The situation inland was similar. In the Northern Areas and Complexes damage was relatively light. In the South damage was greater. The two great Complexes along the Western Gulf of Mexico were both wiped out completely. There were no more then 500 survivors reported from this area, which had supported some 5,000,000 persons.

The reports from the Pacific Coast were much worse than Gabe Harrow had predicted. The tidal waves had reached unbelievable heights and all of the Complexes, Centers and Cities on the seacoast from Lower California to British Columbia had been obliterated. The loss of life on the West Coast was by far the greatest of any area in the world, with the possible exception of the British Isles (more than 50 per cent inundated) and the North Sea coast from the Channel to Scandinavia. So many millions of persons were lost in the Pacific areas that it is impossible for the imagination to encompass the figures. The destruction was total, for all practical purposes.

This was the over-all situation, briefly, on September 27th, 2203.