“People?” said Teach.
Pope squinted at the big man. “A library requires more manpower than you would suspect.”
“What do they want?” asked Eric. He wondered if the men who had carried out the execution the day before were in the camp now. A soldier dressed in green, pushing a wheelbarrow, appeared between the tents and headed for the library. He dumped his load between the machine guns and the ditch. Eric strained to see what the small pile was. A second soldier followed the first with a similar wheelbarrow, and after him the line continued.
“Books,” the woman whispered. “Oh, Pope. Do you think they’ve found the Chemistry library, or the Bio lab’s?”
“So much for the ghosts,” said Eric.
“The traps would not discourage them forever,” said Pope grimly. “It doesn’t matter if they did.” Despite his words, he still sagged into his chair, as if someone had severed one of his strings. More books joined the pile, a barrow load every few seconds.
The message booming over the loudspeaker clicked off. Through the open window came the thud of books piling onto books and the metallic squeal of the barrow wheels as the low stack grew and spread out.
Teach said, “Why the library? What’s he want?”
More books hit the ground. Eric looked back. The old woman gripped Pope’s shoulder; he had closed his eyes. Behind them, rows of books spanned the distance from light to dark. Shadowy glass display cases stood beside dusty tables, and Eric imagined students working quietly, heads down, pens scratching notes.
“Many things, I suppose. Federal knows knowledge is power. He fears our existence here. The books frighten him. The building itself too maybe. The campus. We foiled him in Commerce City by luck. I did not even know of him,” wheezed Pope. “I had sent an expedition to warn them about the water, and all but the stubborn moved north and into the mountains three days before Federal arrived. He conscripted the remaining young men, killed most of the others and tortured the oldest to find out where the rest had gone. An eleven-year-old girl saw it all from hiding and warned us of his approach. We had time to prepare.” He coughed dryly into the flat of his hand and wiped it with a handkerchief the old woman gave him. “Federal thinks he is the new Genghis Khan, riding with his warriors over the wastes of the world. He thinks we will oppose him, so he decided to eliminate us first. He thinks that our power comes from the books. Just the Old Science between him and a crown. The man who would be king of nothing.” Pope coughed again, then said to the woman, “Contact the staff. Events are moving faster than I planned.” She nodded and disappeared between the rows.
“Why nothing?” Eric paid attention to the men piling books. At first he thought that they were innumerable, the uniformed men coming like an infinite line of men and wheelbarrows, but he’d seen the same soldiers several times now, and he realized there must be only fifty or so of them.
“We have preparations to make. But come, I will show you why Federal is a fool.” Pope turned his chair and wheeled himself to the elevator. When he reached the doors, he looked back at Eric as if to say something, then frowned. “Where is your young companion?” Teach had gone. Puzzled, Eric said, “My grandson and two of his friends may have followed us here. Perhaps Teach went to look for them.”
Pope grimaced. “That complicates matters, but nothing can be done about it.” Another floor up, Pope led Eric into what looked like a fully equipped radio lab. Silver and black consoles packed a counter top that ran around the large room. Eric found the soft, electric lighting bouncing off the dust-free surfaces nostalgic, reminding him of his dentist’s office, everything clean and fingerprintless.
“Federal’s ambitions may be larger than the world. Do you know anything about SETI?” asked Pope as he flipped several switches. A low, subsonic hum that Eric felt in his teeth filled the room. Pope continued. “It was the Search of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. C.U. took part, as did numerous other universities, building huge radio dishes aimed at the stars specifically with the idea of picking up other civilization’s signals.” Two large speakers mounted next to the ceiling on shelves hissed into life when Pope rotated a dial on a console packed with needle gauges. Lightly, the smell of ozone and warming electrical components filled the room. “We never found any. Why not?” He twisted another dial, and the speakers crackled as Pope rotated through the radio bands. “The SETI project theorists struggled with several possibilities: one, we weren’t searching the right bands. Maybe extraterrestrial communicated with gravity waves or ESP. Two, our equipment wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up their signals, or three, we were alone.”
He threw a switch and spoke into a microphone. “Staff members,” he said, “take your positions. We are at…” He glanced at his watch. “…five minutes and holding. Wait for my signal please.” Then he continued, as if he hadn’t interrupted himself. “Millions of star systems with planets are within radio distance of Earth.” Pope hunched forward. The dial he reached for was an uncomfortable reach for a man in a wheel chair. “Millions of chances for intelligent life to develop, and it might have. But time is vast, and maybe intelligent life isn’t stable. Perhaps it’s an evolutionary dead end. Intelligence just flickers in time and we have missed it all around us in our own eighty-year radio flicker.” He rotated the dial from one extreme to the other, and only light static came from the speakers.
Assembled on the shelf next to the radio array sat an obviously home-made panel. Over a hundred toggle switches pointed down, each neatly labeled with a number. On the wall, along with other charts, diagrams and pictures, hung a map of the campus with corresponding numbers marking buildings and the gaps between them. Pope flipped a switch to one side of the panel, and small lights glowed red above all but two of the switches. He tapped them both with his fingernail. One lit, but the other stayed dark. He spoke into the microphone again. “Davis or Courtney, check connections on fifty-seven.” A speaker crackled on the radio panel, and a sexless, nervous sounding voice said, “Fifty-seven. Yes, sir.”
“What’s all this?” asked Eric. He bent down and looked past Pope’s knees and under the shelf. A massive bundle of wires from the panel plunged through a sloppy hole in the sheet rock.
“Old science for Federal,” said Pope. “As I said, we had warning he was coming. But I’ve always known about him. My real preparations started the summer I realized I wasn’t going to die in the plague, sixty years ago.”
Pope turned off the panel lights and sighed deeply, and in the sigh Eric heard a profound sadness. “It is difficult to accept, but all the evidence, all rational thought argues that humanity is the sole intelligence in the universe. There is no one out there.”
Pope went back to the radio array and rotated the dial again. Other than a steady beeping that Pope identified as a satellite signal, he found nothing. He said, “But I’m not scanning the stars anymore. My equipment is now tuned to receive Earth’s signals, and I have picked up no other stations for years. I am searching the right bands. My equipment is sensitive enough. Like the SETI project years ago, I am left with only theories to explain this. One, nobody else is signaling, or two, we are alone. Undamaged radio equipment must exist everywhere, in every corner of the Earth. The ability to power it, and the knowledge to use it must still survive if the percentage of surviving population is similar elsewhere as it was here. I now ask the same questions that deviled SETI. Why are the radio waves empty? Why has no one visited us?” Pope’s milky eyes blazed at Eric; his knuckles whitened on the wheel chair arms. The same voice broke in on the radio again. “Loose wire at fifty-seven. Should be good now, Sir.” Eric thought of the small parties of explorers who had left Littleton over the years, one trying for Colorado Springs, one for Kansas City, one for Salt Lake City, that had never come back.
“I have concluded that rational thought must argue all of the rest of human kind is dead. The planet is empty of intelligence except for this narrow strip in the Rocky Mountains,” said Pope.
“That doesn’t
make sense. Why would we be the only ones left? Diseases don’t strike geographically.” Eric searched for an argument. Surely Pope must be wrong, he thought. Surely more than a few hundred people survived. But he thought again of Littleton’s isolation. Why hadn’t they been contacted? Where had all the young explorers gone? He said, “It didn’t miss Colorado. So many died here too!” Eric remembered sitting on his porch in Littleton the last few years. As the sun dropped below the peaks and cast their long shadows across the plains, he’d imagined little communities like his own, dotted across the country. Only space and the need to attend to the daily needs of survival kept them isolated. But the sense of those other people, the sure faith in their existence, had inspired him as he rocked in his chair watching the eastern horizon darken. A wall of pink-lined clouds had caught the last of the sun; an evening breeze ruffled the edge of the blanket he’d draped on his lap. He had been resting from a long day. We’ll fill the highways again, he’d thought. We’ll expand ourselves and be great again. Humanity has been set back, but this is only temporary. Knowledge will heal and bind us. He was ashamed to remember he’d then thought that the plague might have been a good thing. He’d thought that before, too. We were close to killing ourselves at times. Overpopulation, territorial jealousies, friction over historical occupation of the land had caused war and suffering. As the last of the sun edged the mountains pink, he’d thought, no one’s shooting at each other in the Golan Heights. They aren’t lobbing Molotov cocktails in Dublin anymore.
He said, “Why might they all die everywhere else?”
Pope cut the power to the radio. “The plague began it, but my guess is we did the rest ourselves. Various, persistent toxins, I believe, both nuclear and chemical. At least in the Rocky Mountain region, the water table has gotten worse. The farther from the Continental Divide, the worse it is. The community in Commerce City, for example, drank from a water supply that had become increasingly poison. Too much upstream: rotting, underground gasoline tanks, stored pesticides and chemical solvents that were leaking from their barrels. I don’t know what all caused it. Maybe just buildings and cars and roads melting back into the land.”
With one push on his wheels, he crossed the room, opened a cabinet and took down what looked like a walkie-talkie, but where Eric expected to see speakers, there were instead several switches. Pope shrugged wryly. “It’s a poetic image, don’t you think? All our cities and factories, houses and stores, dissolving in the rain like sugar cubes, and all their toxins stored within and beneath them letting go, one corroded storage container after another. In Commerce City, the people were getting sick. Babies miscarried or were born deformed. I sent them into the mountains.”
“That’s what’s happening in Littleton too. Is it our water?” Eric thought of the South Platte that ran by the edge of town. Most water came from there, but the stream had been crystal clear for years, its water sweet and cool. “Should we move up into the mountains too?”
“Mountains may be the last to go, but they’ll go if the pollution continues.” Pope linked his fingers across his chest and closed his eyes, squeezing a tear in their corners. “It’s getting worse, I told you. We started measuring here thirty years ago when we began losing contact with other survivors. The water table’s going bad, and the lower in elevation you go, the higher the toxin level is. I can’t tell from here—there is no way to know without sending an expedition—but the seas may be sick. Nothing is more downstream than the sea.”
Ripple’s words about upstream and downstream came back to Eric. She’d said of the Gone Timers,
“They took upstream and disposed downstream like upstream was forever and no one lived below.” In the background, an amplified voice started shouting again, but the words were indistinct in the windowless room. Raising a hand, Pope pointed to a chart hung on a wall. “Somehow we poisoned the water, and if the sea dies, we will die too. Most of our breathing air comes from ocean-based photosynthesis, but I’ve been graphing other changes in the air.”
A timeline marked the bottom of the chart, and a line starting at five years after the plague climbed like stair steps to today. In the last five years, the steps came closer together.
“What’s being measured here?” asked Eric. His thinking centered on Pope’s last words. Surely he is wrong, thought Eric. The water table may be polluted, but it has to vary! A local problem in some places maybe, but not a global one—not one that could take in the sea. In the books somewhere there must be a solution!
Outside, the voice shouted incessantly. Pope twitched a finger toward the main library area.
“Push me, would you? My arms aren’t what they once were, and we need to keep an eye on him.” Grabbing the handles, Eric maneuvered the chair through the door and toward another muslin-covered window. When they reached it, Pope plugged an AC adapter from the walkie-talkie into a wall socket. On the quad below, the pile of books had grown to several feet thick.
“Remember the nuclear accident at Chernobyl?” Pope waited for Eric to nod. “The graph shows the rise in air-borne radiation. The plague killed too quickly. Not all nuclear power plants around the world must have been shut down safely. What I think we are seeing here in each one of these jumps…” He drew in the air the stair steps on the graph. “… is a power plant losing containment. They are burning and pumping radiation into the atmosphere.”
An image of a slowly rising tide of poisons came to Eric. Each year his community could move higher, but in the end there would be no place to retreat to, and the air could kill them before they reached the top.
“Is this what you see?” asked Eric, thinking of his own vision. “That humanity is finished?” He thought, if all this is true, then why try to save the library? What’s to be gained? The last barrow full of books hit the pile, and soldiers scurried around the pod, picking up guns, heading this way and that. As if answering the thought, and not the question, Pope said, “As long as we live, we live. I have work to do here, and I am not ready to quit it quite yet.” He cranked open the small ventilation window that rested at the bottom of the tall, narrow expanse of glass so they could hear the loudspeaker. “Besides, I still want to deal with Federal.”
“But why?” Eric wanted to collapse. As quickly as the euphoria of seeing the books had come, the weight of his age had returned. “Why not walk away and give him the library if he’s going to die anyway?” Through the open window, the voice boomed, “Surrender the library or we burn the books.” Beside the stack, two soldiers stood with torches. Two others flanked them, their M-16s held ready at waist level. The rest had taken positions in the ditches; some pointed their guns at the library doors, while others watched the roof and windows.
Pope said, “Fairly illogical request, don’t you think? I know his intent is to burn these books too. He knows I know that. What makes him think the threat to burn part of the books would make me give him the rest?”
Eric gasped. “Not burn them. He wouldn’t destroy them. Wouldn’t he want to get their power, if that’s what he believes they represent?”
Pope fingered the switches on his walkie-talkie. In this pose, with the gauzy muslin-filtered light falling on him, he looked almost like a statue, something hewn out of white marble. “I imagine the librarian at Alexandria must have thought the same thought in ancient Egypt as the hordes descended.” His voice grew sarcastic. “‘Surely they won’t damage the papyrus scrolls! Surely they won’t destroy all of mankind’s learning.’” Pope barked out a short laugh. “They estimate a half-million documents were lost at Alexandria.”
The soldiers extended their torches over the books.
“We will burn them,” shouted the voice. “We will burn them all.” The amplifier crackled. Wherever the unseen speaker was, he had not released the “send” button; his breathing washed behind the static.
Eric’s hand pressed against the wall. The pressure ached on his wrist as he leaned to get a better look down into the quad.
Twin plumes of torch sm
oke, thin and gray, trailed straight up.
Soldiers’ eyes, white and wide, swept over the building.
Federal’s breathing rasped in and out.
“Drop them,” his voice said metallically.
Torches fell.
The thuds of their impact sounded dully on Eric’s ears as he looked at the floor. It begins this way, he thought. Threats and fear hold the barbarians out for a while, but they always seem to conquer. How could I get so close, he thought. How could I get so close and not find an answer? All the lessons I tried to teach Troy. All the learning we’ve put away, all the proof of where man’s been, about to go away. If man lives, this is the beginning of the new dark age.
Heavy as spring time mud, despair weighted him. He took one shaky breath, closed his eyes, and held it.
“No!” shouted a voice from outside.
Eric brought his eyes up. From the wall of greasewood thirty yards from the pile of books, sprinted a small figure, arm upraised. The soldiers’ heads swiveled to spot it. Soldiers in the trenches whipped around and repointed their guns. Still running, half the distance covered, the arm snapped down and one of the soldiers by the fire dropped; his hat flew one direction and the rock flew another. Clawing the muslin out of the way, Eric slapped his hand against the glass. A smothering sense of deja vu swept through him. “Rabbit! Stop! Stop!”
Even from the window, Rabbit’s scar was visible, his face contorted with effort and rage. “Not the books!” he shouted, and another rock smacked one of the soldiers who had held a torch. Rabbit reached the pile of books, snagged a torch, and flung it away. One of the soldiers in the ditch fired a long burst, missing Rabbit but shredding the side of a tent. The loudspeaker erupted in a panic, “Don’t shoot, you idiot.”
Eric drummed the flat of his hand against the glass. “Run, Rabbit, Run!” Rabbit bent over the pile and grabbed the other torch. Flame had barely touched the books. As if breaking a paralysis, the second soldier with a gun, reversed it, stepped forward, and delivered a business-like blow to the back of Rabbit’s head, sending him sprawling into the books. The torch tumbled away across the bare dirt.
Summer of the Apocalypse Page 26
