I found Sarah, sitting in what could only generously be called her quarters. She was crying softly and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to disturb her. She was leaning on the small desk with the flat panel for the computer fastened to the bulkhead and the screen blank. To one side was the web structure that served as a bed. It kept you from floating away once you climbed in. Mattress companies had talked of sleeping on air in their advertizing. We did it all the time. It wasn’t that great.
As I was about to turn, she looked up and saw me. For an instant she was embarrassed, but then just wiped the heal of her hand over her eyes to scrub away the tears.
“It’s just so hard.”
I knew, instinctively what she meant. The news from Earth wasn’t good, when we could learn anything at all. She pointed to the screen and then touched the mouse briefly bringing up the picture.
“I was using the spy satellites to look down on Tulsa,” she said. “You can get a real good look at the city.”
I nodded because I had done that same thing a dozen times. Everyone on the station had done it, looking for their houses, looking to see how their hometowns had withstood the impacts. Looking for signs that someone had survived. Looking for the sign that a family member, loved one, friend, had survived.
Of course, this wasn’t real time because the clouds were too thick now, so what she was looking at was Tulsa in its pristine, pre-impact state.
“I think I can see his car in the driveway. I think he’s standing outside. Maybe he just got out of the car. I think he’s waving up at me.”
I stepped closer so that I could see the screen better. The image she had wasn’t as clear as the one that I could pull up from Google Earth. There were a couple of low hanging clouds that obscured the city and one of them near her house. It was a thin thing so that it was like looking through a thin, loosely woven cloth.
“I wish we could see more now,” she said. “I need to see more.”
My opinion wasn’t quite as strong because, at the moment, there was still some hope. I didn’t know for sure and there were enough variables that Debbie could still be alive down there. She might be uncomfortable. She might be hungry, thirsty, or dirty, but she could still be alive. Manhattan was far enough inland that the tsunamis didn’t reach her and the shockwaves would have been well dissipated before they got to her, having had to fight through mountains and there was lots of land to suck their strength.
I wasn’t worried about the plate tectonics either. The major plate divisions were far from Kansas. The only worry was the New Madrid fault, but that was hundreds of miles away. If it shattered in all the shockwaves, I didn’t think it would affect Kansas all that much. The land was rock solid there.
“Have you tried anything?”
She touched the keyboard, and the mouse, but all we could see in real time was the brown smudge that was the Earth’s atmosphere. She said, “I’ve taken some readings and I think the temperatures have topped out. Some places, in Africa, the Middle East and near the major impacts reached about one fifty and stabilized there.”
“Hot,” I said, “but not fatal.”
“What is fatal?”
I shrugged. “I read, or heard, somewhere, that human life begins to fade at about one seventy-two. I’m thinking that is for a sustained period. I think if it gets much hotter than that, you’ll die of exposure pretty quick. At one fifty you need to get some relief or you’ll dehydrate pretty fast. It’s survivable, but you need to get out of it. Underground some way, even if it isn’t very deep.”
“So it got close.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but remember, that would be direct exposure. People inside, people in basements, in caves, those in hiding, probably could survive a spike to two hundred, if they were protected and it didn’t last too long. That’s the real key. How long did the high temperatures last?”
She sighed deeply and then wiped at her eyes again. “I wish I could get through. I send email but I don’t think the servers at his end are working, or maybe it’s just filling up his mail box and he never reads them. He probably doesn’t have electricity now either. Maybe no access to a computer.”
I wanted to say something comforting, but there really wasn’t anything to say. She could see the Earth as well as I and she knew that transmissions from the surface were sporadic at best. Of course, each time we picked one up, it was just more confirmation that some people had survived.
But those signals were found less frequently now. Radio required someone who knew how to work it, someone who could repair the damage, and it required a source of power. Batteries would last only so long and then you needed to generate power and I didn’t think any of the major generation capabilities had survived all the latest problems.
Finally she looked up at the brown of the screen and said, “I don’t know why I keep looking. Nothing is going to change in the near future.”