Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

He was not much worried. Carol was superwoman. Her competence at everything she touched made Art feel inferior during their once-a-year visits. Carol would manage to land on her feet. She always did.

The group’s numbers were much more guesswork. He had written down seven that he was sure of, and half a dozen more where he was within a digit or two of the full eighteen (though a miss was as good as a mile when it came to percom numbers). He had given up on the rest. If he could get through to just one, they would start to network.

By the sixth dead end he was starting to sweat. Some of it might be a delayed effect of Ed’s lethal white lightning, best followed by a walk to let your brain clear and your kidneys recover from the insult. But mostly it was the conviction of problems on the way. That feeling had started the second he realized that his DNA analysis box was out of action.

He kept trying. Joe, who had finished feeding and cursing the dogs, came into the room and watched him in silence.

“Bad news?” he said at last.

“No damn news at all. I think we only have a local piece of the network up. That explains why you could reach Anne-Marie’s old handset, and I can reach fuck all.”

He was stabbing at the soft screen as he spoke, convinced that he was wasting his time. It was a shock when, after another eternity of clicks and snaps and whistles, a voice said, “ID, please.”

It was the standard reply of a screener, verifying the caller’s acceptability before the machine would take a message. But if Art’s ideas were right, everything using microchips had failed when that blue flash filled the sky — and smart screeners were on the list.

“Dana?” he said. “This is Art Ferrand. It’s you, isn’t it, not the screener?”

There was a moment of background crackle and hiss. Then, “Art. God, I’m glad to hear from you. The line came back, but I haven’t been able to reach anyone with it. The screener doesn’t work, nor does the API controller.”

“I think the national grid is down. We’re patching in to each other through old equipment — you can practically hear electrical relays opening and closing. Where are you?”

He did not recall where she lived. Their contacts had been electronic, plus the quarterly meetings at the Institute for Probatory Therapies.

“Not where I usually am. Arlington was looking bad, mobs and looting and fires. I got scared.”

Art knew that without being told. The old Dana Berlitz was sassy and sexy and full of life. The woman on the line was all nerves.

“I left two days ago,” she went on. “I’m out with my sister Sarah in Warrenton. Where are you?”

“Up north, beyond Frederick. I ran for it early, over a month ago. You drove?”

“Drove?” Her voice was steadying. “You really are out of it. The cars stopped working a week back. There was this funny sort of blue flash, up in the sky—”

“I know. We had it here, too. I think it was everywhere. All the equipment with microchips in it is useless now. Trouble is, that’s just about everything in the world. How did you get to Warrenton?”

“The hard way. On my bike, fifty-seven miles door-to-door with that lousy saddle I always swore I was going to replace, not a car on the roads and it rained all the way. I won’t try to tell you what my ass felt like when I got here.” She laughed — a good sign. “Sarah took one look at it and slapped on a big skin patch. You ever had one?”

“Never needed one.”

“I don’t recommend it. The first few hours while it was bonding, it wriggled whenever I sat down on it. Cheap thrill.” She laughed again, but in her next words the worried tone was back. “Art, do you have your sequencer with you?”

“Of course. I don’t go anywhere without it.”

“Is it working?”

“Dead as Lincoln. The sequencers are full of microcircuits.”

“What are we going to do?”

“That’s why I’ve been so keen to get in touch with you and the rest of the group. How are you feeling?”

“So far, fine — except for the sore backside. My last genome scan was normal, but I’m worried about how long it will last. I was supposed to be reevaluated when we met again in six weeks.”

“Me, too.” Art didn’t know as much about the details of Dana’s disease as he did about the condition of some of the others in the program. It was cancer, of course, and she had been hit young. She had been in the program longer than Art, but she was still only forty-three; in Art’s eyes that made her practically a child. He knew that she had a grown-up son, which meant she’d married — or got pregnant — very young. But she never spoke of him, or of any male in her life, which was amazing in someone so attractive and friendly.

In your dreams, Art Ferrand.

“Look, Dana,” he went on. “We have to find out what’s going on with the program. Probably everything is fine, and the doctors are in the same position as we are, just not able to reach people. But I won’t risk that. You may think I’m overreacting—”

“Overreacting? That’s what my first doctor told me, when I went to him with a lump in my neck. That asshole cost me a whole month. You’re not overreacting,

Art. I’m on a knife edge, and I’m sure you are. Unless we have a way of checking the condition of our telomeres and making the right adjustments, we could be dead in a year of new cancer or premature old age. My question is, what do we do?”

“We keep trying to contact others of the group, today. But unless we find out from one of them, directly, what the situation is at the Institute, I’m heading there tomorrow. I won’t be happy until I see Dr. Lasker and Dr. Chow and Dr. Taunton in person, and know that they can keep the program going even if the usual equipment is dead. I’ll call you and let you know what I find — assuming the line still works.”

“Forget it. Art, I was worried before you called. I know you’ll do your best to get to the Institute, and I’m sure you’ll try to let me know what you find. But I’ve worked so hard to stay alive, I’m not willing to sit and hear things secondhand. Where do we meet?”

“I don’t know. The usual place, the Treasure Inn, where we stay for our group sessions? If it’s open.”

“When?”

“You’ll probably need three days. Any of the others we reach, we tell ’em the same thing, the Treasure Inn three days from now. But what about your sore rear end? There’s no cars, and you can’t ride all that way.”

“Let me worry about that. How are you going to travel? You’ve got farther than me to go, and you have that bad knee.”

“I’ll get there. Try and reach some of the others. I’ll see you in three days.”

“Cross your fingers. Good luck, Art.”

“Good luck, Dana.” Art closed the connection, and found Joe staring at him calmly. He had been listening to Art’s end of the conversation with obvious interest.

“Well,” he said, “that was a new one. Who is she?”

“Dana Berlitz. Part of my treatment group.”

“And I’ll bet I know which part of you she’s treating.” Joe Vanetti did not smile. He was a big man, tall and broad and slow-moving. It was hard for Art to imagine him as he had been in his thirties. According to Ed O’Donnell, in Joe’s Air Force days he had been a heartbreaker who cut a broad swath through the Washington female population.

“But what are these telly things of yours that need fixing?” Joe went on.

“Telomeres are the end pieces of chromosomes. In ordinary people, they shorten as you get older. In cancer cells, they don’t. Dana and I had a treatment to shrink our cancer cell telomeres, but we don’t want our other telomeres shortened too much or we’ll get old real fast. It’s like a tricky balancing act, and we need to keep checking that nothing’s going haywire. Our interest in each other is purely professional.”