Edward Llewellyn - Prelude to Chaos

During the first few years the people of Sutton Settlement had lived on what they had caught and sold what they didn’t eat as cattle feed and fertilizer. By 2010 Fundy waters were declared clear and its products approved for export to foreigners. In 2015 its fish and lobsters were found fit for consumption by Americans and the Settlement gained a ready market for all it could catch. Fresh fish was at a premium; in the judgment of epicures, free-ranging lobsters from the cold waters of Maine tasted far better than the tanked product. Sutton Settlement was one of the few sources. The Settlement had brought prosperity and population back to Standish, though nobody-except Believers dared live any closer than thirty kilometers to the coast. The lethal reputation of the Fundy shoreline persisted as a legend more powerful that the facts about Impermease.

I settled down well enough into this seafaring society and earned my keep as the resident electronics tech. The Settlement had been suffering from the usual complaint of organizations which purchase sophisticated equipment without ensuring there shall be adequate service backup. I had all the work I could handle overhauling the gear in the boats, the com system in the Cove, and the radio station, which kept the Settlement in touch with other Settlements all over the world.

It was officially a ham radio station, but the transmitter was a good deal simpler than most twenty-first-century ham stations. For one thing it was strictly code in an age when few hams bothered to learn the International Morse Code and even commercial operators couldn’t handle code at any speed. The kids who manned the Sutton station passed traffic at over thirty words a minute, and could have matched keys with the expert radio operators of a century before.

The station intrigued me more than the sophisticated microcircuitry in the boats, and I came to enjoy sitting in the radio shack watching some youngster copying signals so faint that I could hardly hear them through the interference and static.

When I asked Kitty, one of the more talkative operators, why they made life difficult for themselves in this way, she explained, “Here in North America we can get almost any kind of electronic gadget we want—at present. But a lot of the Settlements are away to hell and gone. They may have to keep going for years with the gear they’ve got now. They may be powering their transmitters from somebody peddling a bicycle-generator. That means we’ve got to get used to CW only—morse code. And we’ve got to learn to read signals through heavy QRM and QRN—interference and noise.” She broke off our conversation to swivel around in her chair and fine-tune her receiver. These kids seemed to be able to carry on a discussion with one ear and monitor a channel with the other. “Some Aussie calling. At this time of day the Aussies come rolling in on fourteen megahertz. Could be a genuine ham.” She checked the call sign against a list. “No—it’s one of ours.” She pressed the phones against her ears, then rattled out an acknowledgment on her key. She listened a moment, touched her key again, and made an entry in the log. “Near Wiluna, Western Australia. Out in a damned great desert, Routine report that all’s as well as can be expected.”

“You can sure handle traffic fast!”

“Two half-decent code operators can pass traffic with zero error at twice the speed of two oldsters bellowing over mikes and misunderstanding each other. You should listen to some of our boats trying to report where they’ve found fish!”

“I have!”

“If it wasn’t for the scramblers so would the whole of the Eastern seaboard. If the Council want to keep us out of the public ear they’d better lock up the radiophones on half the boats in the fleet” She paused. “I’ll bet the Coast Guard have decoders.”

“Not any that’ll sort out our mix,” I said. “Not since I lined ’em up. But how come you don’t attract attention? I mean, this whole net you’ve set up between Settlements?”

“We use minimum power and stay in the ham bands. Fourteen megahertz at twenty watts lets us contact Almost anywhere in the world at some time of the day or night. And we always follow ham procedures—although we usually work too fast for any normal ham to copy unless they go to the trouble of taping. And we always answer any ham who calls us in code. There were hardly any before last year. Now a lot more are starting to switch to CW from radiophone. They’re starting to learn code again. I guess that means more and more of them are being isolated, running out of power and spares. In some parts of the world—the things I hear! It’s pathetic!” She listened a moment. “There’re those bastards at Sherando calling. That’s a Settlement somewhere in Virginia.

Blasting away at full power as usual. Guess I’ll have to answer.” And she turned to her task, the headphones around her neck, the morse echoing loud and hard through the room. I went slowly back to my workshop, sentimental enough to enjoy hearing about the revival of an old communication skill, depressed by the reasons for its revival.

Judith and I seemed to be the only people in the Settlement who were depressed, or even much interested, in what was happening in the outside world. All through the winter news bulletins on radio and TV became increasingly cheerful as the news itself worsened. The population decline was accelerating, there were few convincing examples of women under twenty becoming pregnant. News from some parts of the world, especially those where a girl of fourteen was considered to be of marriageable age, was catastrophic. Whole populations were beginning to see disaster ahead and, lacking the Affluence’s faith in Science, were turning to older faiths, resurrecting fertility rites which tended to be barbarous and bloody.

Believers, while deploring what was going on, tended to show an element of self-satisfaction as they heard of these disasters. One of the least attractive aspects of a “chosen people” is their indifference to what happens to the nonchosen. There was some excuse for those Settlements which were already suffering from persecution, for persecution seldom develops unselfishness or improves the character of those persecuted. So far the Believers in Sutton Cove, thanks to their isolation and their economic importance to the merchants of Standish, had only had black looks and curses hurled at them. But, after all, they too were Americans and should have been as anguished as I when, in the spring, the news broadcasts started to play the flip side of the American dream.

Yet even Judith, a fine scientist, who might have been adding her brains and skill to the struggle to discover some solution to the Impermease disaster, was more worried about the health of the few hundred children in the Settlement than the sterility of millions of American girls.

I mentioned this to her once. She sighed and said, “I’ve told you already, Gavin. All their research is hopeless. The eggs in those girls were sterilized years ago. I won’t waste my time trying to bring the dead back to life. What I can do is to help the living to grow up healthy and strong, fit to build a better world.”

“So America means nothing to you anymore?”

She turned to stare at me. “Oh yes it does! The new America. The America which will rise from the cesspool of the Affluence. That is what we are working for here!”

That was what she was working for. Since my moment of enlightenment when she had saved me from getting killed trying to kill Futrell I had been working chiefly for my own survival—and hers. If any marriage can be called satisfactory, ours was satisfactory. Because of our shared love, or our shared guilt, or because we were both working so hard we had neither the inclination nor the energy to criticize each other. Marriage was less of an entrapment than I had feared. In fact that first winter in Sutton Cove was among the happiest times of my life.