Even so, here was the first suggestion that services might be creeping back.
Art knew the precise moment when they went away. Just after eleven o’clock on the evening of March 14, the wind was rising and he was speculating on the chances of another severe storm. He was gazing out of his bedroom window at the cloud patterns when the sky lit with a shimmering blue discharge like an intense aurora. Within seconds, the bedside light went out and the hum of the refrigerator stopped.
By the light of a gas lantern, Art confirmed his suspicion. Electrical power was gone. The refrigerator was nothing better than another storage cupboard.
The next morning he discovered that he had to deal with something worse than a simple power outage. His DNA sequencer was dead. His car would not start. The telcom produced no dial tone. His computer, even on battery power, was lifeless, as were his personal secretary and calculator. Since then he had been reduced to making notes of schedules and dates and anything else he wanted to organize, and doing his rough calculations with pencil and paper. God help anybody under forty, who with rare exceptions knew nothing of the hand methods.
Art waited. It took another day or two to realize that all aircraft had disappeared from the skies, and that traffic on the road beyond the fields was nonexistent.
He didn’t have an explanation for any of this. Extreme weather around the globe could be expected to damage many high-tech systems, but you would expect them to degrade gradually and gracefully, just as they were designed to do when individual components or subsystems failed. Instead, everything had happened all at once, in that single flicker of violet-blue. It was damnably annoying. Just when you most needed a broadband communications system to tell you what was going on, that failed along with everything else.
And if he, way out here, was uneasy without electricity and cars and airplanes, what the hell must be going on in the cities of the world, where lives depended on police, buses and trains, hospitals and schools? What about food supplies, and running water? Unlike Art, city folk could not go hunting in the woods above his house, where deer and wildlife were always plentiful.
He pushed away his bread and honey, losing interest in breakfast. His own advantage might only be temporary. Deer were plentiful, but would they remain that way? Others, less lucky than him, could head north at any time and disturb his snug little haven in the park. They might be armed, and dangerous. And if people were hungry now, that was surely going to get worse as the year wore on. Winter had ended abruptly halfway through February. With mid-March like boisterous late May, who knew what July and August might bring? Meanwhile, he was not willing to venture far afield to satisfy his curiosity. The woodchuck that came out of the hole first after the danger seemed over was not the one most likely to survive. Until planes were flying again and cars passed regularly along the road beyond the fields, curiosity as to what had happened would wait.
But he was willing to venture near afield. In fact, it was close to a requirement. If he missed his exercise, even for a single day, that right knee stiffened. Indoor stretching and flexing would do at a pinch, but nothing was as good as a gentle walk for a mile or so along the dirt track that followed the line of the woods, followed by a return over the humps and tussocks of the fields.
The telomod was working, no doubt about it. Two years ago it was all he could do to hobble from car to house. The question was, had the treatment gone as far as it could go?
And then, the second question, one that he was almost unwilling to ask: Where, how, and when (if ever) would he receive the next treatment?
Art left his cup, plate, and knife on the table. They were pretty clean and he would use them again later in the day. He did make a concession to his old standards and washed his hands and face, easier now that his beard was fully grown. Baths were a once-a-week luxury. He had plenty of wood for fuel, but even with wild torrents of rain filling the cistern every day or two he had to be careful with fresh water. A person might carry water for bathing from the stream that ran downhill about a quarter of a mile west of the house. But that person, Art had decided after one trip with a bucket, would need to be a hell of a lot more fastidious about personal hygiene than he was. And he for one was not about to stand outside buck naked in the cold rain to take a shower, no matter how dirty he got.
He turned off the radio, which was still interrupting a continuous crackle of static with the occasional tantalizing hint of human speech. As a matter of course, he checked the electrical power, telcom, and computer. Nothing. The little DNA sequencer received his special attention. If he had the power to restore just one device or service to working order, he would gladly continue without electric power and communications and everything else. Just give him back the ability to analyze, simply and quickly, the structure of the chromosomes of his own body.
Outside, the van still formed an inert mass of plastic, metal, and composites. Even the battery, which ought by now to have been amply recharged even with the weak solar flux of mid-March, was dead. Art wasted no time on it and began to walk southeast, toward a mid-morning sun now sporadically hidden by broken cloud.
Already, the temperature was at the upper limit of comfort. In a single day he could see a change in the plants. The buds of the rhododendrons flanking the dirt path were almost fully open, and farther off toward the woods on the left he saw a new mass of faint pink. It was wild rose, blooming far before its season. Instead of pleasure, the rush toward summer created in him a powerful uneasiness, a sense of events removed from their natural course. What came next? Was Alpha Centauri finally fading in the southern skies? The astronomers had so far done miserably on predictions, maybe they would be wrong again.
When he reached the dirt road he found it puddled and sticky from the rain of the previous evening. Today he went in the opposite direction from usual. He moved off left, to the higher ground at the fringe of the woods, and picked his way through tree roots and low brush. So far as he was concerned it didn’t matter how much clay he had on his boots, but he knew he would be exposed to a different philosophy when he reached his destination.
After three-quarters of a mile the track took a sharp turn right and down, toward the state road that ran across the lower edge of the hill. Art did not follow it. Instead he kept going east along a less traveled and even muddier trail, just wide enough for one car or van. His goal was already visible, where the track forked and a pair of small houses stood less than fifty yards from each other.
He turned toward the one on the left, and the dogs from the right-hand house ran out to greet him before he was halfway there. They made one identifying sniff and wagged their tails frantically.
“Not today,” Art said. “Got nothing for you. Down, fellas.”
The dogs had drawn their own conclusion from the smell of his pockets. They followed him until he was twenty yards from his destination, then wandered away toward their home.
“Thank God for that,” said a voice from the doorway. “I’ve had to shoo his damn dogs out of here twice — and he doesn’t do a thing to help. He sits there and laughs. Come on in. Wipe your shoes.”
The speaker was a bit shorter than Art, who did not consider himself a tall man. He had thin white hair, gnarled arthritic hands, and a smiling leprechaun’s face. He watched closely as Art wiped his boots on the rough matting just inside the door.