After a while, she asked, “How do I raise, say, three to the 2.5th power?”
“That’s what the log-log scales are for,” Colin said.
“The who?” Kelly said blankly. He might as well have been speaking Cherokee.
“The LL scales. Here, I’ll show you.” And he did. It made sense once you saw how to do it. Well, damn near everything made sense once you saw how to do it. Kelly began to understand how there’d been science in the ancient, primitive days before computers and even calculators.
She had more fun twiddling the slide rule than she would have punching buttons on the HP. She knew she would have to refine her results once she could get on the computer again, but she would have had to do that with results from the scientific calculator, too. Then Deborah woke up and started to cry. She’d made a mess in her diaper. For the next little while, geology took a back seat to motherhood.
Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles tuned their instruments near the altar of Guilford, Maine’s, Episcopalian church. Rob Ferguson sighed. Even inside the crowded church, his breath smoked. “One more acoustic set,” he said quietly. “There are times when I really miss cranking it up.” He did some impassioned air guitar. You really couldn’t impersonate an electric bass without, well, another electric bass.
“I miss all kinds of things from the old days,” Justin Nachman said. Lead guitar was easier to do without a power cord than bass was—not always easy, but easier. He was also responsible for most of the band’s vocals. Those didn’t change a whole lot even if he wasn’t miked.
But lack of electricity wasn’t all he was mourning. He patted his hair. It was long and curly. It wasn’t the aggressively permed Brillo fright wig—Dylan with his finger in the electric socket—he’d once worn to mark his status as a rock-’n’-roll not-quite-legend. Perms were ridiculous luxuries everywhere these days. In Maine north and west of the Interstate, which enjoyed very intermittent power a couple of months a year, perms were flat-out impossible.
Biff Thorvald, the rhythm guitarist, said, “Wish we had some dope, is what I wish.”
“Amen, Brother Ben!” That was Charlie Storer, whose drums missed amplification less than anybody else’s pet instrument. Just because Charlie said it first, though, that didn’t mean Rob didn’t agree with him. It didn’t mean Justin and Biff didn’t agree with him, either.
The only trouble was, Rob couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen weed in Guilford, much less smoked any. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember because he’d got too wasted to think straight. It had been a hell of a long time ago, if he’d ever seen any here at all.
Since the eruption, Cannabis sativa would not grow here. It wouldn’t grow here even in greenhouses, which stretched the growing season from essentially nonexistent all the way up to ridiculously short. The only things that would—sometimes—grow in local greenhouses were the kinds of food plants that had been eaten in the Far North since time out of mind: turnips, parsnips, a few extra-hardy varieties of Andean spuds, cabbage, rutabaga, and the ever-unpopular mangel-wurzel. Rob had never heard of the mangel-wurzel before the supervolcano blew. Now he’d eaten it stewed, boiled, baked, steamed, fried… . If he never ate it again—that would mean he’d moved away from Maine.
Two or three months a year, enough snow melted to make road traffic possible if not easy. During what passed for summer up in these parts, the rest of the USA dimly remembered Maine north and west of the Interstate still existed. Food and machinery and some fuel came in. People who’d got sicker than the local quacks could fix or who couldn’t stand living in these parts another second got the hell out.
The authorities reckoned that, next to food and machinery and fuel, dope was nonessential (to say nothing of illegal). Nobody seemed to see enough profit in this little tiny market to flout the authorities and bring some up here anyhow. Where were the Mexican drug cartels when you really needed them, dammit?
When the blizzards started rolling in again—say, about the end of August—even the Interstate turned impassable. The rest of the country forgot about its northeastern extremity again. It had plenty to worry about where more people lived. The handful of cold-loving maniacs who stayed in the new Arctic were left to their own devices.
Which was why Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were tuning up here in the church. They’d play after the town meeting. Before the eruption, Rob might have been caught dead in a church, but he wouldn’t have been caught alive in one. Justin, Charlie, and Biff had piety every bit as notorious.
Before the eruption, odds were they all would have made loud, unhappy noises about the separation of church and state if they even heard about a secular town meeting in a building dedicated not merely to religion but to one particular religion. Now… Now Rob couldn’t get his bowels in an uproar about it, even if he had no dope to keep him mellow. The church held more people than any other building in town. Okay, fine. The locals used it, and they worried not at all about the Supreme Court telling them they were committing a serious no-no.
Come to think of it, there were some serious advantages to being cut off from the rest of the world. You had the freedom to do what you wanted (within the limits imposed by frigid weather and nineteenth-century technology). Nobody called you at dinnertime to sell you on a candidate, to get you to take a survey, or to try to pry your credit-card number out of you. Since Rob’s cell phone had been as dead as a doornail the past couple of years, no one called him at all. Nobody texted him, either. He found that he missed being hooked into everything 24/7 a lot less than he missed getting stoned.
Mayor McCann rapped loudly for order. The secretary—a real secretary, a gray-haired woman who actually knew shorthand—poised pen over paper to take the minutes. People paid close attention when the mayor read the typed transcript of last week’s minutes. The church was packed. For people who couldn’t amuse themselves with one electronic gadget or another, town meetings and screwing were your basic choices for fun. And hey, you could screw any old time.
No one moved to change the minutes, so they were approved as read. The arguments would come later. And they did, over hunting and over cutting wood. Without shooting lots of moose and deer, Guilford—like any other small Maine town north and west of the Interstate—would have starved. Rob had an ugly scar on his leg where an overeager hunter had shot him instead of a moose.
And, like any other small Maine town north and west of the Interstate, Guilford would have frozen if people hadn’t chopped down acres and acres of the second-growth forest that had sprung up on great swaths of abandoned cropland. Rob didn’t like denuding the countryside. He liked freezing even less, though. He’d swung an axe. He’d pulled on a two-man saw that came out of somebody’s barn, too.
By now, though, not so many unshot moose were left. And there wasn’t a whole lot of forest close to Guilford or any other town, either. The argument about what to cut now and what to leave for later was louder and more heated than the air inside the church.
“If we all turn into blocks of ice now, we won’t have to worry about later, will we?” Dick Barber asked in loud, sardonic tones. Barber wasn’t always loud, but sardonic seemed his default setting. Before the eruption, he and his family had run the Trebor Mansion Inn, a towered hostelry dating from the 1830s. These days, Maine got no summer, which meant it also got no summer people. Barber and his clan still lived at the Inn. The bank might have taken it away from him, but the bank also seemed to have forgotten about lands where electricity no longer reached. There were certain advantages to falling off the edge of civilization.