William Forstchen - The Final Day

Forrest shrugged. “I used to get it for the articles,” he said a bit defensively, and John laughed. A pleasure since laughter was now so rare in his life. “Really, I loved Jean Shepherd—you know, the guy who wrote that Christmas movie about the kid with the BB gun. Here’s one of his stories.”

John looked over Forrest’s shoulder, a bit disbelieving, only to see it was indeed a story by “Shep,” whom he used to listen to on the radio when he was a kid and had once used the identical excuse when his mother had found his stash of the infamous magazines hidden behind his desk.

“Come on, you two, and leave that magazine there.” Paul stood, pointing the way farther back into the rabbit warren of the basement.

John followed him, going past a table stacked with educational tools discarded decades ago: old Dukane machines, which were thirty-five-millimeter projectors rigged to a record player, the slide changing every time there was a high-toned beep from the record—students were forever trying to imitate the sound of the beep to throw the projector off for some show for health class; overhead projectors, abandoned when PowerPoint came along; stacks of eight-track music cartridges; old classical 33 RPM records, which were useless, though older 78s were sought after thanks to those who had found hand-cranked record players in their attics and basements; mimeograph machines, which even he had tried to fiddle with after the Day, but the copying solution with its unique alcohol smell was nowhere to be found or reproduced. Just the sight of those old machines triggered a memory of the smell when a teacher handed out an assignment or bulletin, the blue ink smearing at times if still wet.

There were IBM Selectric typewriters, a dozen or more; John had looked those over as well after the Day, hoping that maybe the ribbons could be looted for his long-ago worn-out Underwood manual typewriter. There were several Singer sewing machines, from back in the days when the college was a female-only institution and students were most likely taught home economics. Of all things, a grandfather clock caught John’s eye, something that might be worth salvaging until he saw that the weights and pendulum were fake, an electrical cord draped up over the top of the machine. And back in a corner, of all things, a pinball machine, a classic Black Knight, which he remembered was still in use in the student lounge when he had first come to teach at the college.

Paul had stopped at a workbench in the far corner of this moldering gold mine of lost memories and lost technologies. He was smiling like a guide in a cave who was obviously proud of his domain as if he himself had created it.

He was pointing at a tan box, the corporate logo just above the keyboard—a more than thirty-year-old Apple IIe computer.

“You found an antique computer and…?” John asked, voice trailing off.

“Behold,” Paul said, still grinning, and with a flourish, he clicked the On button for the fourteen-inch monitor and then the computer.

The screen flashed to life, the room filled with light as the screen warmed up and came into focus, displaying the Apple logo in glorious RGB color.

John actually stepped back in amazement, almost feeling like some tribal primitive, a flash memory of the teddy bear characters in one of the Star Wars episodes, which he hated since militarily it was so absurd, going near crazy with wonder and then worshipful awe at the sight of C-3PO, floating around the tribal gathering thanks to Luke using the Force.

“My God, it works?” Forrest gasped.

“Hell yeah, it works!” Paul cried. “Watch this!”

He put an old five-and-a-half-inch floppy disk into one of the disk drives; it started to whirl and click, and all three stood silent as the seconds passed, and then a tinny familiar tune barely audible echoed from the monitor’s speaker and the logo for Pac-Man flashed on to the screen.

“Oh my God,” John whispered in awe, a deep, almost tearful nostalgia filling him. When Elizabeth was five and recovering from a long bout of the flu, his wife, Mary, had pulled their old Apple computer out of the attic, set it up by Elizabeth’s bed, and entertained her for a long rainy spring day with Mary’s favorite games the two of them had played while they were students at Duke.

He had written his master’s thesis on that computer, needing over twenty floppy disks to store his paper on proto-computers created for gunnery control prior to World War I. He was the envy of many students and even some of the professors who were still on electric typewriters or just beginning the transition to the first IBM Micros, as they were then called. Just running the final spelling check had taken several days, which at the time seemed like a miracle versus having to pay some English major to manually check your work one final time and then hand type it yet again.

Using a brand-new, expensive 2400-baud modem, he had actually managed typing in lengthy string codes via a system called the Internet to try to access data from a British library without success, but it was still a fascinating adventure at the time. Printing it out had taken half a day on their tractor-feed dot-matrix printer. He could still recall the speed and buzzing sound of it as it glided across the page, a momentary pause as the tractor feed advanced the paper up one line, and then the printer head running backward across the page.

“Mind if I join you three?”

John looked back to the darkened staircase and forced a smile of welcome. It was Ernie Franklin, the man who saved his life during the final confrontation with Dale Fredericks. He was grateful, of course, but at times Ernie could be more than a little domineering.

“I sent word to Ernie about my find,” Paul whispered.

“Why?” Forrest asked.

“He worked for IBM back in the days of Apollo and the shuttle—figured the old guy might know a thing or two.”

Ernie stepped up to the workbench, gazed at the screen for a moment, and snorted. “It would have to be one of those damn Apples. Damn toys.”

“I did write my master’s thesis on one,” John retorted.

“And then they screwed everyone over when Jobs dropped the operating system and went running off with those dinky nine-inch-screen Macs. We laughed our asses off over all you Apple fanatics stuck with the IIe system.”

“Wait a minute,” Paul interjected. “I asked you over here to explain something, Ernie. We can argue about which system was better later.”

John nodded, looking back at the image on the screen of the Pac-Man character, the tinny theme playing over and over.

“Could you turn that damn music off?” Ernie asked. “My daughter was addicted to that damn game, and it drove me crazy.”

Paul looked at the machine, not sure what to do, and Ernie just stepped forward and flipped the switch, turning it off. All three gasped as the screen went dark, as if he had pulled a curtain back down over a returning to the past from before the war.

“If it turned on before, it will again,” Ernie replied calmly, “but before we do that.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small flashlight and clicked it on.

If anyone in their entire community was prepared for life after the Day, it was Ernie Franklin and his family. After more than three years, they were still living off long-term rations stockpiled years earlier. His all-terrain Polaris was still running, and John had learned not to ask just how much gas he still had stored and treated against degrading. The old guy was always proud to show off his solar-powered flashlights like the one he had flicked on now, and without bothering to ask permission of Paul, he popped the lid off the top of the old—one could even say antique—computer.