Solar Storm: Homeward Bound

by Vincent Keith

  They had enough cattle to keep the town fed for years. Ideally, they’d raise them faster than they butchered them. There was plenty of feed since most of the valley was either natural grazing land or grew hay. If they could find enough grains and greens to balance their diets they’d be in good shape. The biggest problem would be keeping the well pumps working.

  Jack erased the white board and put up a quick list of priorities: water, wood for heating and cooking, other fuels, food, vehicles, and medicine. He also made some notes about community sharing or going it alone.

  “Look,” said Jack. “At this point, we’re all in uncharted territory, I’ve made a list of a couple dozen things you’ll need to make decisions about. I’m going to make some suggestions that I guarantee won’t be popular at first, but think about them before you just toss them out.”

  He made a few more notes on the white board. When he moved out of the way, there was a lot of commotion. Jack suspected that most people were unhappy with the idea of sharing houses to save on wood. Eventually, they’d figure it out. Heating a house with a wood stove or fireplace uses the same amount of wood if there is one occupant or five. Older couples would have a hard time raising food and collecting enough firewood to keep warm through the winter. Perhaps they would decide to specialize and send the younger men out to do the heavy lifting while the older people worked in the greenhouses or on the ranches. Someone would have to watch the children and perhaps setup a school.

  “Hey!” Jack shouted, and waved his arms to get everyone’s attention. “They’re suggestions, I’m not telling you what to do, you need to figure that out yourselves. I have no stake in this, I won’t be here, and I’m no authority so if you don’t like the suggestions then figure something else out.”

  The grumbling died off a bit, but Jack knew it was far from over. They broke up to take care of a few tasks that everyone agreed were a priority. It was getting late enough that they decided to start again in the morning.

  “Travis? Do you have anyone on horseback that’s available to carry messages?” asked Jack

  “Hadn’t thought about it, you need to get a message to someone?”

  “No, but you will soon. I suspect you’ll end up consolidating into three or four areas. The town, the cattle ranch out West, the farms and ranches to the north. Perhaps Bieber, assuming there’s anyone left there. There are some ideas I think people will eventually adopt, but it may take a while. Filling up houses to save on wood for heating would be one you should consider sooner rather than later. It’s also the most unpopular for obvious reasons. I think after a month or two of everyone trying to figure out how to haul firewood, or even just cut their own…”

  Travis nodded. “I’ll go get that started. I’d appreciate it if you could help Dick out. It would help to know just how big this thing is. If we’re not getting help or supplies, that’ll make a difference.”

  “It will. I suspect we’ll be working on that as soon as we can,” Jack said, gesturing toward the table of Ham Radio operators.

  Travis nodded. “You’d best get with John about those supplies before you and Dick get in too deep. If this turns out to be big, I suspect everyone will be just a bit less willing to part with anything.” With that, Travis left to talk to a few ranchers who had horses.

  Jack headed over to speak with the shopkeeper. “John?”

  “Refill?”

  “Yes, thanks. Hey, I need to get some supplies for the girls, we’ve got a long walk ahead of us, and they’re not set up for it.”

  “You’re not staying?”

  “Nope, I have friends and home to get to. I volunteered to stay long enough to help Dick out. We’ll see if we can get any more information. But beyond that, we’re just more mouths to feed. Better if we keep moving.”

  “We haven’t got a lot, what all do you need?”

  Jack handed him the list he’d been working on since he rescued the Rachael from her would be rapists.

  “Some of this will be no problem, we just stocked up for winter so we can take care of the clothes. I don’t have any backpacks, maybe some small ones. Although…”

  “You have an idea?”

  “Yeah, why don’t you leave the ladies with me, and we’ll get this sorted out. I think I know where to get anything we don’t have in the store. There are lots of folks with camping gear they never use anymore.”

  “Okay, although I’m not sure how I should pay for it…”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. It’s probably best to wait until we know more—if we do. If it’s not a big deal, then I’ll take cash, card even an IOU. If it’s as bad as you said it might be, then money won’t be worth much, and credit even less.”

  “Barter is going to become fashionable again in a hurry, though it’s inefficient. I’ve got some gold and silver, but honestly, it’s not likely to have much value for a while.”

  “That might be a risk I’m willing to take. How long before you know if the radios are working?”

  “A day or two at the most, I can’t afford to stay any longer than that. Every day we’re here it uses up food I can’t afford.”

  “Don’t worry about that. You guys come here for food. If I don’t get the freezer working soon, it’s all going to go bad anyway.”

  “Thanks, John. Hey how are you set for guns? Ammo?”

  “I carry some ammo for hunters, mostly shotgun. Maybe twenty different calibers of rifle ammo. But we don’t sell guns.”

  “I know, I meant how are you set?”

  “I’ve got a 12-gauge that hasn’t seen the light of day in probably ten years. I guess I should look at digging it out.”

  “Do that. I’ll give it a good checkup and cleaning. Time is one thing I can trade, given your generosity with the food. I wonder if I should start passing the word to anyone who’s got an old gun they want looked at.”

  “I’d check with Travis before you get too far down that road.”

  “Well, can’t hurt to clean and lube up yours. I’d better get with Dick. I’ll send Rachael and Lexi in, I think they decided to sit outside with the dogs.”

  “Okay. If you need me after closing, just come around the back of the store and you’ll see the house.”

  Jack headed off to catch Rachael up on events, then dug out the aluminum case and went back in to find Dick. Dick introduced him to Ralph, who must have been well into his eighties, but was still sharp. He moved at a quick pace despite his cane and a slight limp.

  “So Dick tells me you got a working radio?”

  “Maybe, we’ll find out in a minute. Any ideas for antennas? I have the wire to set up a twenty-meter end-fed, and parts to make an NVIS antenna useable from forty-meter up to one sixty. If we could get it high enough, we could use it as a dipole too.”

  The conversation dropped into what sounded like a foreign language as the men discussed radio equipment, antennas, and frequencies. After much back and forth they decided to congregate at Dick’s place near the middle of the valley. He had the largest towers and the best location.

  It took a while to find Travis and the one working truck in town. They stopped by Bill’s garage on the way out of town to fill up a five-gallon gas can.

  “Hey, Bill. Any luck with your truck?”

  “No. I gave up on it. Trying to get the old Ford working.”

  Travis nodded. “You might have more luck with it. This here is Jack Donovan, he’s got some notion of what might have happened. Jack this Bill Upton, our local mechanic. Why don’t you tell him what you told me earlier.”

  Bill set his wrench down on the fender and walked to the passenger window.

  “You a mechanic?”

  “No, but I’ve done a fair amount of my own wrenching. I suspect the older vehicles have blown ignition coils or fried spark plug wires. You might also check to see if the points are welded shut, or the starter solenoid is fried. Anything in the electrical that’s likely to fail if it got hit by a huge surge of current.”

  “Yeah,
that matches what I’ve been finding,” said Bill. “So I shouldn’t bother with nothing that has a computer then?”

  “Odds are very much against it. Look for older cars and trucks. You might scavenge enough parts from different vehicles to get a few more running. Getting tractors and trucks running I’d think would be the priority.”

  “Yep, that’s what Trav said, guess I should have considered the computers. Wasted most of the last couple days on my truck, but it’s too new. Damn…”

  “Under the circumstances, older is better. Oh, and I’d check for exploded batteries, you might want to hose those out if you think you might be salvaging anything.”

  “Yeah, I ran into two of those already, and from the comments made by folks at the store, I’d say there are a bunch. I guess my garage worked like one of those fair day cages you talked about, cause most of my tools still work.”

  “Faraday—named after the guy who invented it. But hey, that’s good news. It’ll make your job a lot easier.”

  With that, the radio crew headed down the road to Dick’s. Once they’d arrived, Jack understood why Dick had picked his spot. Being in the middle of a huge valley, he had low angles to get a signal over the mountains. In town, they were hard up against the hills. After a quick look around the radio shack Travis, Frank and Ralph got back in the truck and left to collect their own equipment.

  RALPH HAD three old vacuum-tube sets and was pretty sure if they could rig up batteries for power, he could get at least one of them working. Between them, they’d managed to piece together enough components to rebuild Dick’s antennas and run new cables. Frank was reconstructing a controller for rotating the directional antenna. Ralph was swapping tubes between radios. Dick and Jack were running a new cable up the 120-foot tower.

  “It’s too dark to see what I’m doing up there. We’ll have to finish up in the morning. How’d we do?”

  Dick looked around and then spoke up. “We got one of Ralph’s radios working. Your transceivers power up, and we’re pretty sure we can get Frank’s old Heathkit working. Best of all, his Kenwood is powering up now. He replaced the input rectifier and transformer, and it looks promising. We won’t know until we finish getting the antenna strung up.”

  “Did it test with a dummy load?”

  “Not yet, the only dummy we have is in Frank’s shipping container. Travis is due to give us a ride back into town soon, so that’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  “That’s pretty good, did anyone try out the little handhelds?”

  “Not yet. We need to get the batteries configured for a power supply and then charge up batteries.”

  “Crap, I’ve got a solar charger in the other case and a bunch of AA batteries.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Ralph. “I know we’re all eager to get this going, but let’s not screw it up before we get started.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Jack shrugged. It had been a long day, and he was starving. “I’m not even sure where I’m sleeping tonight.”

  “Well, let’s get you back to town, I suspect your wife will have it all figured out by now.”

  Jack corrected him without thinking about what that would mean. He spent the next fifteen minutes telling the tale of his journey. Just as the questions were getting close to Jack’s actual meeting with the girls, Travis showed up to take Jack, Ralph and Frank back to town.

  BILL SHOWED up at the General Store in the morning in an old ’64 Ford pickup with a load of batteries, cables, and a charger. Jack climbed into the back with Frank and Arnie and they headed out to Dick’s place.

  “This all works, but we still need to find a generator. Travis is out looking,” said Bill.

  “We got one,” said Frank.

  “You do? That’s great! The one at the fire station was working, but Trav was hoping to use that for the big walk-in freezer at the store. Hopefully that’s enough batteries.”

  “My little one works, and with the batteries, we’ll be set up fine.”

  Arnie and Frank went to work wiring up the batteries. Jack had climbed the hundred-foot tower again, this time, to replace the antenna rotator with the one Frank had found in the back of his shipping container. The same shipping container that had contained a working laptop and generator.

  Dick had dug an old dipole out of the garage. It was also connected to the tower with its own cable. Down near the bottom of the tower they’d rigged a boom and strung another dipole about fifteen feet off the ground.

  “You sure that’s gonna work? Seems awfully close to the ground to me.” asked Dick.

  “Yeah.” Jack nodded. “That’s a pretty standard configuration for an NVIS. Low is what you want. It forces the signal to go almost straight up then bounce at a steep angle. I know you’re used to low-angle skip to get distance, but we’ve got no line of sight, and by the time the radio waves clear those hills, your big antennas are going to be reaching out what, fifteen hundred miles?”

  “Yeah, about that. So this setup will let us talk to anyone close by?”

  “Close is relative, maybe as much as five hundred miles. Under these conditions, I’ve got no clue. I’ve seen it reach a thousand miles, and I’ve seen it not even get three hundred. You know now it goes. Depends on what’s happening up there.” Jack pointed at the sky. “And right now, who the heck knows?”

  “Well, I’ll leave that to you and Frank.”

  “Okay, we got your big Yagi directional antenna at the top. The twenty-meter vertical over by the house. The two trapped dipoles on the tower, and my NVIS on the boom. The Carolina Windom antenna on your sixty-foot tilt-over tower. That ought to be enough.”

  “Kinda surprised we managed to get that many working.”

  “That remains to be seen. If we didn’t screw up the four to one balun…”

  “Ralph and Frank really know their stuff. If they say it’ll work, I’m not worried.”

  “So that off center Windom works on everything from six-meter to eighty-meter?”

  “Yeah, it’s been a good antenna. I just hope that new line isolator Ralph rigged up works. I’ve never seen one built that way.”

  “I’ve never even used one—let’s go see how they’re doing inside.”

  Frank had a cheap Chinese built two-meter handheld radio that powered up.

  “I’ve got four of those, they’re nice little radios,” said Jack. “That one work?”

  “Not sure. Two of them power up, the ones I never opened. The two I had on chargers are dead.”

  Jack pulled the four handhelds out of the case and gave them to Frank. “Grab somebody, and try them all, I guess we’ll see.”

  It didn’t take more than a few seconds to see that his main radio was working. The little low power CW kit radio powered up as well. They tried the handhelds, and all four of Jack’s worked. The two Frank had left in the box were fine.

  “I suppose,” said Dick, “at some point, we’ll want to put a station up on the mountain. It’ll be hell getting the guys to work up there. It’s a hell of a hike.”

  “Hmm, unless there’s a road, you’d need to build a small cabin up there big enough for maybe five guys. Or train some of the youngsters, you might get a bit more interest now.”

  “Yeah, it’s sad how many things have become the domain of old men.”

  “Ain’t one of you old yet,” said Ralph.

  “We’re old,” said Dick, “we’re just not ancient.” He laughed and dodged a swipe from Ralph’s cane.

  “Better run youngster, I catch up to you I’m gonna whip your behind.”

  By 8:30 p.m. they’d started to collect news.

  “Well,” said Ralph as he set down his headphones, “that’s sixteen contacts. We’ve got California to South Carolina, Japan, Alaska, and Denmark. The news is the same. Everyone got walloped. That’s a great little rig you’ve got, Jack. I’d like more power but it’s working well enough.”

  “Good, I was a bit worried. With a full battery pack, it outputs ten watts. When the batteries get low, i
t drops the power output,” said Jack

  “Really? That tiny thing? That’s impressive. I was figuring it was one of those really low power rigs, less than a couple of watts,” said Ralph

  “You’ll get up to about fifteen watts if you hook it to a fourteen volt supply.”

  “Well, ain’t that something,” said Ralph.

  “I think we should keep trying for something south,” said Dick.

  “Yeah,” said Frank. “We need to work out shifts. I’m getting too old for contests, but damn if this doesn’t feel like one.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Jack “I’ve never done one.”

  “Well, Jack, we appreciate your help for sure,” said Dick. “It’s easier to work a radio when you know it functions.”

  “I hate to interrupt,” Travis said, poking his head through the door to Dick’s radio shack. “but what’s the word?”

  Dick shook his head. “Afraid Jack was right, this was huge. We know for sure all of North America, Europe, and at least part of—“

  “HEY, Quiet!” Ralph waved in a shushing motion.

  Everyone’s head swiveled to look at Ralph, who was holding a headset earpiece tight to his head. He started keying Morse code, faster than Jack could follow, but Dick and Frank got it.

  “Oh, holy God,” Frank whispered.

  It was another minute while Ralph worked the old fashioned telegraph key and scribbled notes. Finally, he tossed the headset down. “Goddamned idiots.”

  “Some of us can't follow code that fast, so fill us in,” said Jack.

  “Sorry, that was a contact in Southern Spain, this is second or third hand, but if it’s true… The Middle East blew a fuse. Israel got attacked by Syria and Iran, maybe some others. I guess Israel hit back hard. The Middle East is the new Hiroshima, and they’re not alone. So far they’ve gotten reports of nuclear strikes in Pakistan, India, South Korea, Russia, and China. No one is sure if the Americans launched anything or not.”

  “But we’ve only heard it from one source?”

  “True,” said Ralph, “but it would be a bad time to start a hoax like that. I guess it is possible.”