John had called an emergency meeting of the town council that same evening, unable to contain his excitement, and within the hour, the proposal by Paul had been passed with a full allocation of whatever resources were necessary—if and when they could be found—and even a boost in precious rations from the town reserve for those doing the heavy, dirty work for the project.
The proposaclass="underline" to retrofit the dam at Lake Susan down below the college and turn it into a hydroelectric generating system. The few old-timers still alive in Montreat—John’s mother-in-law, Jen, being one of them—could recall how there actually had been a hydroelectric power plant a couple of miles above Lake Susan that first provided electricity to Montreat until the big power companies had moved in and taken things over in the 1930s, abandoning the smaller mills and letting them fall into ruins. Jen, as a small girl, used to hike up to the abandoned site and prowl around the wreckage.
The day after the decision was made, Paul led an expedition up there to scavenge through the bits of wreckage in hopes of finding abandoned equipment. Some useable pipe, a few rusted gears, and some disintegrating switchboards were dug out, but not much else—other than a rattlesnake, which was quickly dispatched. No matter how hungry he was, John could not stomach the thought as several students quickly skinned the still-twitching snake and made a meal of it.
The list of necessary supplies put forth by Paul seemed insurmountable at first glance. So many of the items listed in the journals from the 1880s were readily at hand in that long-ago world. But to find them now? In the world of the 1880s, Tesla and Westinghouse could cook up their ideas about this revolutionary thing called AC current and then turn to an army of men with technical skills—wire makers, steel molders, and lathe operators on down to the sandhogs digging tunnels. The details of how they ventured to harness the power of Niagara Falls for the great megaproject of that time were outlined in the journals in the breathless detail that the Victorians loved to read about. They made it seem easy in comparison to turning tiny Lake Susan into a new source of energy.
It presented the classic paradox of attempting to recover a lost technology when the entire infrastructure had been shattered. Tesla, Westinghouse, and Edison created one of the most significant technological advances in history, the ability to create energy at one location and move it to another to perform myriad tasks as yet undreamed of in the 1880s. They created a system that would lead to radio, television, medical technologies that nearly doubled the average life span from that of the year 1900, and limitless energy at the flick of a switch—everything that the world of the twenty-first century assumed was part of ordinary life until the Day.
As they conceptualized those first ideas regarding the still barely understood thing called electricity, they could turn over their drawings to master tool and die makers, precision lathe operators, smelters running blast furnaces, wire makers, and even blueprint drawers. There was a nineteenth-century infrastructure already in place to make the great wonders of the nineteenth century, not just the generating of electricity but the means to get it out there and keep it running 24-7-365.
As a historian, when he was first looking at the plans that Paul and Becka drew up for the town’s approval, John felt overwhelming despair. Nearly everything they envisioned for their project had to be made from scratch, reshaped from the salvaged refuse of a collapsed national infrastructure, and it would all have to be manufactured locally. As he examined Tesla’s patent application for the essential converters—the precision-made tools that converted the electrical current blasting out of a generator turned by waterpower into 60-hertz alternating current—it seemed nearly impossible to replicate. So to for the transformers, another of Tesla’s near genie-like creations, that could step voltage up for transmission and then step it back down again for final distribution into homes and factories.
Paul shrugged off John’s concerns with a smile. “I helped with rigging up Internet to this campus and kept it running; this is no big deal in comparison.”
The challenge presented to Paul and Becka by their discovery was ultimately to start the rebuilding of a modern community from scratch.
The Day had taught all that electricity was the fundamental bedrock of their entire civilization, so ubiquitous that no one really fully grasped how crucial it was until it was gone. John’s former students, if successful, would begin the long journey back. If they said it was possible, he and the rest of the community could do nothing less than support them, and all had given the go-ahead even as it strained the community resources, taking dozens of workers out of food production—the bare essentials of survival—with the hope that the investment would indeed start the long journey back from the darkness. As John voted to approve their plan and requests for resources, he quoted the old Joni Mitchell song with the refrain “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”
So the plan had moved forward. Anderson Auditorium, a beautiful old structure that was actually a twelve-sided, three-story-high building—a popular architectural style for conference centers back in the 1920s—was cleared out and converted into a huge workshop. The interior of a day care center next to Flat Creek, which emptied out of Lake Susan, was gutted out to be converted into the town’s new power station. Out along the front of the dam, part of that structure was torn down, the lake was drained, and even during the coldest days of winter and early spring, piping was laid in and the dam face rebuilt.
Lake Susan was a relic of a time when people actually built dams and created lakes for strictly scenic reasons. No one until Paul and Becka came along looked upon the sparkling water falling over the dam’s spillway as representing quite a few megawatts of energy.
When Paul and Becka, now sporting official titles as electrical engineers, presented their wish list of necessary material, John had told them to move forward, but he did wonder if it was all turning into a pipe dream.
The generator would have to be woven by hand with a dozen miles of copper wire. Most of the freestanding, old-fashioned copper wires in the community had literally melted off the poles when hit by the EMP or had been looted afterward for other such uses as the barely functional telephone system. The turbine of welded steel had to be perfectly balanced; if not, within minutes, it would burn out its bearings and either seize up or fly apart. New transformers had to be made, miles of wire needed to be restrung to run the power from the dam clear down to Black Mountain, and all the other intricacies of actually building a power grid from scratch had to be accomplished.
Regarding the copper wire, Paul had uncovered yet another treasure trove that was under their noses: the old electrical substation at the base of the hill where John used to live. It had been heavily damaged by the EMP and further damaged in the battle with the Posse, which had been stopped in the area around the station. Paul began to tear the old transformers apart and pull out the copper wiring within them. Most of it was fused into a solid mass from the electrical overload of the EMP. The answer—and Paul, in his enthusiasm, made it sound simple—was just melt it down and draw new wire out of the molten mass.
It had taken weeks of experimenting, of remastering a common technology of the nineteenth century. One student was severely burned, but they had finally figured it out, and the interior of Anderson Auditorium was now a thunderous, smoke-filled workshop of wood-fired kilns, a foundry, wire works, and lathes powered by a somewhat gasping old VW engine provided by the town’s auto mechanic, Jim Bartlett. Teams were sent out to pull generators and alternators from abandoned cars for their wiring and batteries for the acid and lead inside.