“Good enough?” asked Art.
“Good enough.” They shook hands formally, though they had known each other for close to two decades. “The usual? With water?”
“Might as well. With water.”
He took the glass from Ed O’Donnell’s hand. It was not yet eleven in the morning, but as Ed explained, in his house they kept “Catoctin Mountain Time.” It was always the appropriate hour for a drink.
Art took the ritual sip, and nodded. “Very fine. Better than the last batch.”
The still was in a small shed behind the house, where it had sat for the near twenty years since Art bought his own house and became Ed’s second-nearest neighbor. Ed’s nearest neighbor sat on a metal-framed chair near the window, holding his own drink. He was a tall, well-muscled man, wearing shorts that revealed a long clean scar running from the front of his thigh to well below the right knee.
“Cheers, Art.” The glass was raised.
“Cheers, Joe.” He settled into a similar chair opposite.
“This goddam stuff is going to kill all of us.”
“Hey, something has to.” Ed chimed in across the bar that separated them from the kitchen. “I don’t see you refusing to drink it. Bambi burgers all right, Art?”
“Fine. Unless you have salmon?”
“Saint’s days and bonfire nights only.”
Art took his cue from the conversation. Clearly, no one wanted to talk about personal worries. Ed had grown kids and a brother in Idaho. Joe had two sisters and their children in Atlanta. There could have been no contact with any of them since March 14. Ed and Joe were making a deliberate assumption: no news was good news. Let’s hope they were right.
“So what the hell’s going on with you.” Joe Vanetti rubbed his scarred and swollen knee and turned to Art. “Figured things out yet?”
“I don’t know. But I was lying awake thinking about it last night. I got another idea.”
“A new one.”
“More like an old one. You know that blue sky flash seven days ago, when all the power went out?”
“I didn’t see it.”
“You know him,” Ed called from the kitchen. “Nine o’clock, and he’s asleep.”
“Well, it happened all right. I saw it, Joe. It seemed to be in the upper atmosphere, way above the clouds. At the time I wondered if it had anything to do with the supernova.”
“We asked you that,” Joe protested. “And you told us it couldn’t have. You told us that the supernova can’t ever be seen from here.”
“It can’t. But it might still have an effect. I remembered something from forty years back. You would still have been in the Air Force, Joe, you might recall it better than I do. Do you remember when everybody worried about a nuclear war between the United States and Russia?”
“The Soviet Union it was, back in those days. God, do I remember.” Joe, close to eighty, had entered the Air Force at eighteen. “We used to have these nuclear war drills. ’In the event of a nuclear attack, descend into the basement. Place your head between your legs, and kiss your ass good-bye.’ I was scared shitless, I just knew we were going to blow each other to hell. We were so on edge, we’d start a war by accident.”
“Then maybe you remember something called EMP.”
Joe scowled. “Something technical. And it came later. That’s all I remember.”
“He’s a mine of information,” Ed said from the kitchen. “Thank God we never had a war with him running it.”
“Do you remember EMP, Ed?”
“Hey, Art, be reasonable. I was a software developer.”
“Which means he don’t know shit about anything,” Joe said. “So what’s EMP, Art?”
“If you had a big nuclear war, all this radiation would hit the atmosphere, and it would cause a great pulse of electricity and magnetism — an electromagnetic pulse. And that would play havoc with electronic equipment down here on Earth.”
Ed was carrying in three loaded plates. “Here we go. Venisonburger medium with bun and no onion. Venisonburger rare with bun and onion. And venisonburger medium with onion and open top. You’re on your own for helping yourselves to drinks.” He set the plates on the table. “But there was no nuclear war.”
“Right. But there was a supernova.”
“Are you telling me that’s like a nuclear war?”
“Not really. But an EMP was supposed to make a big blue flicker in the sky, like the one we saw. If the supernova caused an EMP . . .”
Joe had taken a big bite, and he spoke with his mouth full. “I thought radio waves and things like that traveled at the same speed as light.”
“They do.”
“So how come we had the supernova a month and a half ago, but the electricity and television and everything else only went haywire last week? Wouldn’t the radiation get here at the same time as the light?”
“Ought to. I don’t know why it wouldn’t.”
“And if what you say is true, how come everybody else hasn’t figured this EMP thing out?”
“I feel sure a lot of people have. But how could they spread the word? You said it, radio’s gone and TV’s gone, and the web is down. There’s no way to tell anybody anything.”
It seemed like a good time to stop talking and start eating. Art bit into a piece of onion, one of those homegrown in Ed’s kitchen garden and hanging in strings on the kitchen wall. It was as hot as any he had ever tasted, and he took a drink to help it down. The combination of hot onion and moonshine took his breath away. His idea had seemed brilliant when it came to him late the previous evening. Now the others were pointing out that it raised more questions than it answered.
After a few minutes of silent chewing, Ed wandered through to the kitchen again to put a pan of water on the old stove. It occurred to Art that although Ed would never describe himself as a survivalist, most things in the house worked just fine without utilities piped in from outside. There were advantages to buying a place nearly eighty years old and not bothering to replace fixtures as long as they still worked halfway decent.
“Where’s Helen?” he asked.
“Down the hill, at Dr. Dennison’s place.” Ed brought a jar of brandied plums through and set it on the table. “She says once a year’s enough to sit and listen to three old farts going on at the world.”
“She said ’old farts’?”
“If you’d heard her, you’d know that’s what she meant.”
“She sick?”
“Just the usual. Arthritis. At least old Dennison’s honest, he told Helen that her arthritis is general wear and tear, and there’s not a lot he can do.”
“There’s not a lot any of ’em can do.” Joe cracked the top of the jar and spooned plums and brandy on the same plate that had held his venisonburger. “Goddam quacks. Remember what they told you three years ago, Art, that you had only a few months to live?”
“I’m not likely to forget it.”
“But you’re alive. How many of them are dead?”
“I wish I knew.” There was a long pause. Joe’s question had, almost by accident, forced them to consider the outside world. None of them looked at the others. Then Art said, “Give medicine credit, Joe. The telomod treatment saved my life.”
“Ah, they just feed you that scientific bullshit so they can increase the bill. You’d have got better anyway.”
There was no point in arguing with Joe. He was past the age where you could hope to change his mind. But he was wrong. Art knew, without a shred of doubt, that the treatment at the Institute for Probatory Therapies was the reason he was alive to eat lunch today. He had seen the scans. His body had been riddled with meta-static carcinomas before the telomods went to work.
“Doctors, they’re no different from other scientists.” Ed picked a plum out of the jar with his fingers, transferred it to his mouth, and spoke indistinctly around it. “Take the supernova. All the theories, and the government making statements about what was supposed to happen. The weather after the supernova didn’t match any of ’em.”