Sarah now spent a lot of her time in what we thought of as the radio room, following what I thought of as my lead. She scanned the broadcast bands as I had done for days but they were all silent now. No matter how we attempted to boost the signal or narrow the search, nothing came across and in the days after our contact with the Chinese. A few stations or signals would pop up occasionally then, but they were all gone now.
I admit that it worried me when I thought my way through all that. No, I didn’t expect there to be regular broadcasts, but if I was on earth and I was looking for someone else who had survived, I’d want the best equipment available and to me that was a commercial radio station. They would have the satellites, antennas and the power to reach out over the largest area and we would be able to hear them when they broadcast.
As I thought about it I realized that power might be a problem, and I suppose a case could be made that all those high radio towers had been knocked down in the high winds of the shock wave caused by the impact, or wrecked as the debris fell back to earth, but I still figured that the best chance to hear anything came from the broadcast facilities.
And, I thought that I would want to find other survivors if only to learn that I wasn’t alone. More important than that would be a chance to trade. Maybe I had found a stash of tools necessary to rebuilt. I could trade some of those for things I might want or need.
What if I found a warehouse full of seeds? I might not be a farmer and might not know the best way to either preserve those seeds for when I would need them or I might not know the best way to plant them for maximum results when the clouds cleared. I might not even know what would grow best where I was. I might be able to trade seeds for that information.
But we were getting nothing. Sarah sat there, hour after hour slowly scanning the dial like a trucker on a two-lane highway in Utah at two in the morning. She still said that she believed Tom was dead, but now, with the Chinese gone, she was searching for some sign of other human survival. Any sign of human survival. I think that had become as important to her as finding Tom had once been.
This whole thing struck me as odd. Suddenly, now that the Chinese had left their station everyone here was acting strange. David was suddenly on his rationing kick, Sheila wanted to maintain the NASA work schedule as if it mattered and now Sarah had taken to searching the broadcast bands and the various television channels, looking for humans. Only Jason and I seemed to have come out of this trauma unaffected.
I dropped into the chair next to her and asked, “Do you look at the shortwave?”
She turned to stare at me like I was crazy. “Of course. And I look at the television and the UHF and everything else that I can scan. I don’t know who down there has what equipment so I have to look and listen to everything.”
Her tone was slightly nasty and a little surprising, considering everything. I felt like smacking her about it. But I also knew that we were now under a great deal of pressure. Once we had worried only about the trip back to Earth. About re-entry, heat shields, shuttle damage, and radiation. We had to worry about a hundred things then. Now we were worried about ten thousand different things and there was nowhere we could go for answers. We had to think of everything ourselves without anyone suggesting anything to us.
I think we all knew that re-entry was more of a dream than a reality but with the Chinese in orbit with us, there was the possibility that we would get back to home with them. They had the means to do it, they were prepared to do it and they could have taken us with them. Or rather, they probably could have taken a couple of us with them if they had really wanted to do it.
With that slim chance now officially gone we were all on edge. Now we had to worry about finding some kind of a ride home and while no one really talked about it yet, we were all very much aware of it.
Instead of snapping back, I said, “Sorry. I thought you’d cover it all. I just wanted to be sure.”
“Nothing but static. No real hint of a carrier wave even.” She turned to look at me and said, quietly, “You might say the Earth has gone dark.”
“Maybe it’s all the crap in the air. Maybe it’s that everyone is listening right now. Takes a lot of power to broadcast but not so much to listen. They’re all wondering if there is anyone else out there and might be afraid to let the world know where they are.”
“Maybe it’s everyone down there is dead, killed by the heat, the shockwave, bands of people looking to take something away from the few that have anything left or maybe they’ve all just starved because they couldn’t find enough food,” she said. “I just don’t know.”
I took a deep breath and said, “There have been great catastrophes in the past and the human race has come through them.”
“Not like this,” said Sarah. “Never anything like this in our history.”
I thought about Noah’s flood, which, if the Bible was right, killed everyone on the Earth but a handful of people. There was the Black Death which killed hundreds of thousands or millions in Europe and Asia but wasn’t the slate wiper that this catastrophe seemed to be. Maybe thirty percent of the population gone but no real hint that it hit the New World. We’d introduce those problems after Columbus.
This was a mass extinction like those when so many species died out along with the dinosaurs. It was something that had changed the face of the Earth and was changing the biological diversity of the planet. It was changing the environment and those species adapted to a limited range of environmental change were going to disappear.
“Human’s have the resources to survive,” I said. “We’re smarter than those that have gone before us. We have altered the planet to suit us.”
“Yeah,” said Sarah, no longer quiet and no longer caring who heard us. “Like what?”
“There are stockpiles of food and for those clever enough to find them, they could survive for years. Warehouses stocked with grain and cheese. Other warehouses that the grocery stores would use to restock. Military stockpiles of those meals they give to soldiers. There is a food supply and a water supply for those clever enough.”
She laughed, but it wasn’t with any humor. It was with derision. “Right. People are going to be able to live for years on those, if they can find them and hold on to them. They’re down there fighting for life, if there are enough people left to fight one another. And if someone has access to those warehouses, they’ll protect them from anyone else who comes along. They’ll be killing each other for the food resources or the clean water and anything else that will help them live on.”
“Someone always survives,” I said without much conviction. “We have the intelligence to survive. We have done it in the past.”
And I didn’t mention the barter system that I had been thinking about. Those holding the warehouses could always use other things. The smart would be aware of that. Money would be no good. Gold wouldn’t have much value, but someone with lots of weapons could certainly trade some of those with those who had lots of food. At least for a while.
Sarah turned to look at me. The static on the radio was a testament to the failure of our civilization. “Intelligence can’t repair the damage to the planet. That’s going to take centuries to fix, if not longer.”
“So we’ve taken a heavy blow,” I said. “But we have the knowledge. We’ve stored that knowledge. We’re not as vulnerable as those who have gone before us.”
“What good is it going to do up here? And even if we could get it down there, who’s going to be able to use all that accumulated knowledge. Even if another technological society develops, they’re not going to be able to access the data we have on storage. On Earth I had documents I had written in old word processing programs I couldn’t access and I put them there and I understood the electronic memory and everything about them. I knew what it was and I still couldn’t get at it. I’m not even thinking of video tape or floppy disks or CDs or DVDs or anything else.”
I realized that I didn’t want to argue about this with her anymore. There was no winning this argument. Sarah was in a bad mood, or maybe I should say depressed mood and she was going to see everything as ruined and unsalvageable. There would be no survival for any one. Not for the Chinese who had just gone home and not for us because we had no way to go home and certainly not for the people who had been there when the asteroid hit. The slate, to her, had been wiped clean.
And I didn’t want to argue about this because the others would hear us and that would force them to think about our problem. We didn’t have to worry about the heat, or the constant darkness, or the inhospitable weather elements on Earth. We didn’t have to worry about roving bands of savages who would kill to take our food or weapons or anything else that we had and they wanted and thought they could use. We had our own problems here and anyone with half a brain would know what they were. I didn’t need to underscore it by arguing with Sarah in a loud voice that would echo throughout the station and draw more attention to our trouble.
I stood up and said, “You’ll find a signal. There will be people alive down there.” And rather than wait for a response, I walked away from the radio room.