From that point we fell into our routine again. We had the three month schedule that had been planned by NASA and we had everything we needed for that on the station. We arose each morning as it had been planned in Houston and we worked through the day, as if we were all on Earth and taking orders from an organization that still existed. We completed what we were supposed to do, readying the station for the next crew to take over, never thinking about that crew’s fate on Earth or that they would never come.
And each evening, as we wound down, we kept our radio watch. Sheila seemed to always be there and David sat at the controls, moving up and down the dial hoping to pick up some kind of radio signal from someone somewhere. He never found anything on television because those signals had ended about a week after the impact as the thick clouds covered everything. He assumed that the debris blocked the signal as effectively as if they were broadcast from a lead-lined box.
I had told them about the shortwave signals, but now, weeks later, they had faded as well. I searched the dial periodically but I got nothing but static. I didn’t know if those stations were down, had stopped broadcasting, or if the atmosphere, as it tried to clean itself had thrown up a new roadblock for us in space.
I sat at one of the computers searching through the material that we had downloaded from the satellites and the online repositories, looking for anything that told us about life on Earth. I searched through the blogs, websites, personal pages, My Space and Facebook and YouTube, trying to find something that would tell us about the conditions on Earth now that we could see nothing.
David turned to me one night as I finished one of the scans and asked, “Have you found anything?”
I was tempted to tell him that I had found quite a bit, from rock videos that were a hundred years old, to news reports of all the major events of the last one hundred years, to the personal and idiotic videos that teenagers had made of themselves doing many stupid things, but I knew what he meant.
“I have one thing that is a video made about twenty hours after the major impact,” I said. “I’m not sure how it was photographed.”
“Let’s see it.”
He didn’t ask me why I hadn’t mentioned it earlier and as he watched it, he understood.
The young man stood under a glowing red, boiling sky. It looked hot and he was sweating profusely. There was gray ash in the air, looking like a heavy snowstorm. He had on a surgeon’s mask but I wasn’t sure that it was doing him much good because he was coughing throughout his report. Of course, that could mean that he hadn’t put the thing on until it was too late for him. I had no way of knowing.
He panned the horizon and it was clear that there were fires burning everywhere. Behind him was the metal hulk of a car but it was nearly unrecognizable. The tires had burned away and the glass was all missing. The paint was a bubbled mess of brown and black and part of the roof was crushed. The fire and damage could have been the result of an accident and a fire rather than the impact of the asteroid.
The boy said, “It’s hot. Real hot. People are dead all over.”
As he said that, he panned down to two bodies and they were probably female but there was no telling for certain given their condition.
“I was in the basement of a building,” he said, pointing behind him. “The air conditioning gave out. There was no food. No water. People were crying.”
He stopped talking, looking as if he had run a marathon and hadn’t held up very well. He looked as if he was about to collapse.
“So hot. So very hot.”
It looked as if his hair was beginning to smolder and that was something that I just didn’t want to see again.
He started to say something and stopped. He lowered the camera and the picture faded. I knew that he had survived long enough in an environment that had electrical power because he uploaded the video onto the Internet where I found it.
There was a gasp behind me and I turned to see Sarah standing there, staring at the screen. She didn’t say anything about it but there were tears in her eyes.
David said, “It’s got to be terrible down there. If you’re outside, you’re going to die.”
“Where could you go?” asked Sarah quietly.
“Caves. Basements of buildings. Deep basements. Not those in homes. Missile silos. Many of them were turned into homes long ago. Kind of a big thing for a while. Being that deep in the ground would protect you from the heat and the ash and probably from the looters, if any are still roaming around outside.”
“So people survived,” said Sarah.
“Of course,” said David. “Billions probably survived the impacts.”
“Where was that?” she asked, and I understood the question. She wanted to know if the boy was near Tulsa, just as I had wanted to know if he was near Manhattan, Kansas. But, the boy had said nothing and I saw nothing in the picture that could have provided a clue as to the country. All I knew is that by his voice, his dress, and his speech he was an American but that covered a lot of territory down there.
And I knew what he wasn’t saying about the conditions. Those people would run out of food and water and then have nothing but a deep hole with no hope of rescue. They could hang on but if the environment didn’t cool sufficiently, they would be forced to the surface and they’d cook just like everyone else.
I also knew that some people had found food and water and survived the days right after the impact. What I no longer knew was if those people had survived the heat but I knew they were out there.
“We have to help,” said Sarah.
But neither David nor I said anything about that and she knew that there was nothing that we could do. Not orbiting Earth in a spaceship with no way for all of us to return to the surface. Our resources were limited and there was no certain way for us to return without help from below and I was certain that we weren’t going to get that sort of assistance.