Tsunami: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Page 10

  Many government agencies were nominally open, but their employees did not turn up to work. A few, mostly in agriculture and transport, paid their employees in agency scrip which could be exchanged for some resource the agency possessed. So a day of work might earn a gallon of gasoline, which one could then trade on the black market for a case of canned tuna — perhaps, if one felt like speculating, for a couple of cartons of cigarettes.

  The University of California was one of those agencies, sustaining its employees out of a dwindling stock of gasoline, tools, lumber and services. Kirstie had been promised some support until the end of her appointment in June, but did not expect it to last that long; she had, in any case, no students.

  With Pacific Institute of Oceanography gone, Don now spent part of his days working for Berkeley relief organizations, and had already left for half a day’s work on a salvage crew. It was an early March morning, unusually clear and sunny. Kirstie wished she could stay inside and enjoy it; instead she put sunblock on her face and hands, tied a big straw coolie hat to her head, and left the house. The next-door neighbour waved from her living-room window, and Kirstie waved back.

  That was something: the neighbours looked after one another now, protected one another. In the past month, the Kennards had gotten to know almost everyone for blocks around. First it had been simple self-defence: disarming the half-crazy teenager in the Tudor house who had been shooting at everyone. Then it had been a rapid growth of what Don called “housewives’ communism,” as people pooled their resources and lent one another a hand. Lately it had formalized into block committees and local councils — locals for short. They were made up of people in neighbourhoods who looked after each other and negotiated for help with other locals or the remaining government agencies.

  Kirstie walked quickly down the hill to Telegraph and then on to the campus. In the Physics Building, four or five families were tidying up the first-floor lounge where they had lived since the waves. They recognized her, and waved as she passed; she waved back, and ran up to Sam Steinberg’s office on the third floor.

  He was already there, hunched up in a shabby old wind-breaker with his feet on his desk. Einar, in a red-and-white striped soccer shirt, was scribbling on the chalkboard. It was cold in the office, and the only light came from the west-facing window.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” said Sam. He held up an opened envelope. Kirstie took it as she sat down and read the letter it held.

  “That’s absurd,” she said. “Why should they postpone your renewal appeal indefinitely?”

  “My sources tell me the university is about to close down. Indefinitely. Why fire me when we’ll all be on the street in a few days?”

  “Close down Berkeley?” Kirstie shook her head slowly. “Just lock up one of the best universities in the world and walk away? I don’t believe it. Who told you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s true, though. Thanks anyway for all the help you’ve been. I’m grateful for it.”

  “If they close down, what are we going to do?” Kirstie murmured. “We’re barely scraping along as it is.”

  “Go to work for the Berkeley local.”

  “Oh sure, but how much longer will they last? Don brings home some pretty grim rumours.”

  “All of them true.” Sam rubbed his hands together, trying to warm them. “But starving slowly beats starving fast.” He glanced at Einar’s chalkboard equations and seemed to lose interest in the university and the local. “Oho. Very pretty … very nice. Tidy rather than elegant — and equation six leads to — ”

  “A drop in energy output of about one per cent, for five thousand to fifty thousand years before reignition. But the flare activity should last only one or two hundred more years before it becomes normal again.”

  “What is this you’re talking about?” Kirstie asked.

  Einar smiled at her, his breath frosty in the cold room. “My solar model. What it shows is that the sun has gone out. Turned itself off.”

  “Ah. And what’s that shining outside then?”

  “The sun. It’s just starting to cool.”

  “It looks from Einar’s model as if nuclear fusion isn’t a constant process in the sun,” Sam explained. “It runs for a while and then switches itself off. When that happens the sun begins to cool off and shrink, pulled in by its own gravity. Eventually the shrinkage gets fusion going again. So the sun puffs up and down.”

  “And how long did you say we have until it puffs up again?” she asked Linar.

  “Five thousand to fifty thousand years. Then fusion for at least fifty thousand years, maybe much more. And so it goes.”

  “Don’t look so surprised, Kirstie,” said Sam. “It’s not exactly a bolt out of the blue. We’ve suspected something like this for years, ever since they tried catching solar neutrinos and there weren’t any. Einar figures the sun’s been turned off for several thousand years, and the effect has finally started working its way to the surface.”

  “Are you saying that it might get really cold for a long, long time?”

  “Yes,” said Einar. “Do you know the old Norse mythology? At the end of the world, the World Serpent under the sea comes up again and makes huge waves. Fenrir the wolf runs free, killing people. Then come three years without a summer, the Fimbulwinter, and then the ice giants come to fight the Aesir at Ragnarok. The giants win.”

  *

  The three of them walked down to the civic centre, staying out of the sunshine and happily talking shop. Kirstie told them about the new climatic regime that seemed to have settled over the northern hemisphere.

  “I’ve done some rough calculations on the amount of snowfall this past winter. It’s rough because I don’t have anything like complete data, especially for this last month, but it doesn’t look as if the snow could begin to melt over the summer. Next winter we’ll see more snow on top of it, and still less melting the following summer. Between what Don’s told me about that Antarctic surge, Einar’s solar model and my snowfall calculations, I’d say we were well into a new ice age.”

  Einar grunted. “Maybe Iceland will be a good place to be, then. We are used to it. And we have plenty of volcanic energy.”

  “Any kind of energy would help just about now,” Sam grunted. “I am getting damn tired of freezing indoors and walking outdoors.”

  Two portable generators, guarded by policemen with shotguns, hammered away behind City Hall. Inside, the offices looked almost normal: typewriters clattered and fluorescent lights glowed. But the people looked tired and dirty. Most of the men wore new beards; most of the women had cut their hair short to make it easier to care for. The place smelled like a locker room.

  The receptionist was a big, burly man with a nightstick on his desk. He nodded as they approached him.

  “Hi, Sam. Einar. Got a meeting?”

  “Nope,” said Sam. “We’re looking for full-time jobs.”

  “Full-time! What a compliment to our working conditions and wages and fringe benefits. Go see Bernie. I hear he’s looking for people.” He pointed with the nightstick to the far corner of the crowded office behind him.

  Bernie turned out to be the young medical student who had been working in the school on Francisco Street after the waves. He looked thinner and older; his desk was piled high with paper.

  “Sure, I remember you,” he said to Kirstie. “And you guys. I’ve seen you around since then. And now you need a full-time job, okay. Got any medical training?”

  “No. I’m a climatologist. Not very useful, I’m afraid.”

  “Any experience with guns?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay, so we can’t use you as a medical aide or as a guard. Believe me, we need both. How about scrounging?”

  Kirstie felt awkward and ignorant. “I’m sorry?”

  “Scrounging. There’s a lot of stuff still lying around, okay? You go into stores, warehouses, abandoned houses, wherever, and bring back anything that might be useful. If we don’t get it, the
black market guys will. They’re starting to give us some real problems, almost as bad as the feds.”

  “That sounds a bit like what my husband’s been doing, down in the wreckage zone, only they call it salvaging.”

  “That’s different. In the zone, the stuff has been completely abandoned and usually has to be dug out of the mud and crud. Scroungers stay out of the zone. You usually have a team of three, four, five people, and a pushcart, okay, only really it’s a modified U-Haul trailer. We got a bunch of ‘em.

  “And what does it pay?”

  “The team splits twenty-five per cent of the haul, okay? If it’s not practical to take home, like a gross of plastic plates and a barometer, we pay in beans and rice, maybe a little flour, but we bargain hard.”

  “Well.” She looked at Sam and Einar. “Would you lads like to become fellow scroungers?”

  “Sounds all right,” said Sam. Einar nodded.

  “Good,” said Bernie. “Now I can tell you that you have to be really careful. The feds say it’s looting and sometimes they shoot scroungers. Some of the black market guys don’t like it either.” He scrawled something on the back of an old memorandum. “Show this to the people in the basement, and they’ll issue you each a gun. You can start work this afternoon.”

  *

  “I can see why they think we need guns,” Kirstie said to Don that night. “Some people didn’t like us at all.” She turned over in bed, groaning; her muscles were sore, and the crude harness, in which she and the men had pulled the trailer, had rubbed her shoulders raw. “Not that we got anything worth fighting for.”

  Their total haul, for over four hours’ work, had been three bales of peat moss and a case of motor oil from the shed behind an abandoned house in north Berkeley. Scrounge pay had been a pound of rice for each of them.

  “You’re right.” Don lay beside her in the darkness. “More and more people picking over less and less. It can’t go on much longer.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she complained. “I know about the waves, and I know about the blizzards in the Middle West, and the economic collapse, but even so — this is supposed to be one of the richest countries in the world. Surely we ought to be able to do better than this.”

  “Energy,” said Don sleepily. “All the machines are there, but we have to pull trailers with our own muscle. We can’t build anything, we can’t run anything, we can’t grow anything. Not enough energy.”

  “If only those bloody oil tanks in Richmond hadn’t burned.”

  “Must be more stockpiles.” He was silent for a time, and she thought he had gone to sleep. Then he said: “We were down by Alameda today, by the naval air station. The feds had a big barge sitting just offshore. I think they must have been pumping oil out of storage there. There must be a lot of oil around, out of reach — ah.”

  “What is it?”

  “Remember that supertanker, the Sitka Carrier? It went down in Monterey Bay when the tsunamis hit. Half a million tonnes of gasoline and diesel fuel. If you could get down to it, you could rig up a valve and pump the stuff up to a tanker or barge on the surface. Half a million tonnes would last a long time.”

  He got out of bed and walked to the window. For a time he looked out, saying nothing. “It’d be a lot of work, but just maybe we could pull it off.”

  “Don — I don’t want to spoil your party, but even if you did salvage it, what would we do when the oil and gas ran out? Good God, close to three million people are still living around the Bay Area; they could go through that much in no time. Then we’re back to scrounging again.”

  “Not if Dennis Chang gets back in business.”

  “And who the hell is Dennis Chang?”

  “A guy I know. He’s trying to produce methane on a large scale down in Palo Alto. Hey, Kirstie, how’d you like to go for a cruise?”

  “You’ve gone bonkers.”

  “You’re not going back to scrounging tomorrow. We’re going down to City Hall to sell the local on a long-term investment.”

  “I don’t like your tone of voice. You sound like your grandfather. Now come back to bed; I’m getting cold by myself.”

  *

  When trucks moved at all these days, they moved in heavily armed convoys. Two nights later, eight trailer rigs moved out of Berkeley loaded with clothing, drugs, vitamins, tools and assorted trade goods, bound for the farm communities south and east of San Jose. Don rode in one of the trucks, listening to the driver and his guard exchanging horror stories about hijackers. It seemed slightly unreal to be travelling so fast; in less than half an hour the convoy reached Fremont. Don’s driver stopped; Don got his bicycle out of the rear of the truck. A few seconds later the convoy was gone in a rush of diesel fumes, and he was alone in the darkness.

  Visibility was good; the sky was partly cloudy and a full moon hung in the south, bright enough to cast shadows. The air held the now-familiar stink of the shoreline, a mixture of smoke and decay. Seeing water on the road ahead, Don braked and then stopped completely.

  The low-lying shore around the approaches to the Dumbarton Bridge was flooded. Water glinted in the gaps between ruined town houses; cars seemed to be floating. The area must have subsided dramatically since the seiches; that had happened in many infilled areas now reclaimed by the bay.

  Something about the flooded area bothered him. Dismounting, he walked his bike through water almost knee-deep. As the road rose onto the bridge, he came back onto dry pavement again; turning, he studied the flooded stretch, until he understood what he was seeing.

  The seiches had saturated many infills, liquefying them to the point where they could no longer support any weight. Buildings on such sites tilted, collapsed, even sank below the surface. But the town houses near the bridge stood upright, showing only the month-old damage of the seiches themselves. They had not collapsed, because they were not on infill; yet now they stood flooded to a depth of half a metre or more.

  The tides, Don knew, had been unusually high lately, and had sometimes reached the freeway along the Berkeley shoreline. He had assumed that was because the waves and seiches had eroded the shore, but now he was not so sure. After all, the Antarctic surge had dumped billions of tonnes of ice into the ocean almost instantaneously; that had triggered the tsunamis. By now, according to his brother’s theory, the ice would have spread far north, while more ice followed it. By July or so, in the dead of the southern winter, the ice would weld together into a floating shelf circling Antarctica. In the meantime, much of it was melting — melting enough to raise sea level by half a metre in a month.

  He shook his head in wonder. Half a metre of sea water, distributed all over the world’s oceans, represented an enormous quantity of melted ice. It also meant the loss of much of the Southern Ocean’s stored heat, gone into melting that ice. If all the ice in Antarctica melted, sea level might rise by sixty metres. That seemed highly unlikely, but a rise of ten or twelve metres did not.

  A ten-metre rise would drown every seaport in the world and turn many river mouths into brackish estuaries or silt-dogged swamps. The increased area of the oceans would have unpredictable effects on climate; the increased weight of the oceans would strain the earth’s surface.

  Don got back on his bike and pedalled across the empty bridge. He thought he ought to feel depressed and defeated by his own hypothesis; instead he felt excitement and the anticipation of a challenge.

  *

  Neogene was just another low sprawl of cinder block along a broad suburban road lined with high-tech industries. Don left his bike in the empty parking lot and tried the front door: locked. Walking around the building, he saw the glow of a light behind curtained windows and found a nearby door that opened unexpectedly. Taking a flashlight from his backpack, he walked in.

  Light fell through an open doorway into the dusty corridor. Don walked towards it and called out, “Hello, this place.” He stepped through the doorway.

  Dennis Chang, pale and unkempt, sat at a table at one end of a lon
g laboratory. A Coleman lantern threw white light over the papers strewn on the tabletop.

  “Hi, Dennis. It’s Don Kennard; we met on the Bay Bridge.”

  “I’ll be damned. Hello. Come on in.” Dennis got up, shook Don’s hand, and sat him down in a battered old armchair. Then he lit a Bunsen burner and put a flask of water on to boil.

  “You’ve got natural gas?”

  “Unnatural gas, brewed by my little monsters. They’re producing enough to keep part of the lab warm and to heat enough water for Mei Ming and me.”

  “You’re living here, then.”

  “Just the two of us. Our staff are scattered all over the place. So it’s a mom-and-pop operation, just like my folks’ grocery store. Mei Ming’s gone to bed, or I’d introduce you. Hell, you’ll stay the night and meet her in the morning. You even get a hot shower if you want one.”

  “My God, that sounds wonderful.”

  They talked easily for a time about how things had gone in the past month. Over his second cup of tea, Don asked: “What would you need to get back in business?”

  “Five or six technicians, people with experience in recombinant DNA. Some tradesmen — plumbers, sheet-metal workers, carpenters. Maybe three or four molecular biologists. A couple of clerical types. Why, you want to finance me?”

  “Could you be in mass production of methanogen by this autumn, if you had that many people?”

  “Mass production meaning how much?”

  “Enough to supply the basic energy needs of the Bay Area — call it three million people.”

  Dennis guffawed. “Wow, from mom and pop to A & P. Yes, by God, we could if we had some extra help at a couple of crucial points. We’ve got one big technical problem to solve — the gene for methane production doesn’t always take, so some cultures don’t produce for more than five or six generations. It’s nothing we can’t fix, but it’ll take awhile. This lab alone could produce ten thousand cubic metres a day. And you could export cultures to anywhere. Feed ‘em garbage, dead grass, wood chips, and they’ll turn it all into methane.”