The Wandering Island Factory

by TR Nowry

  Chapter 15

  The solar oven worked perfectly, as long as someone was available to keep it oriented toward the sun. If the boat traveled in a straight line, the oven only needed adjusting every hour or so, but in practice, it needed tending every fifteen minutes. Fortunately, it heated a few hundred pounds of common bricks to 500 or more degrees in as little as four hours of quality sunlight. Those bricks retained enough heat in that highly insulated box to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for two days, so long as they didn't need to broil anything. Rice and beans only needed boiling, fish was best fried or lightly baked, then just kept warm by the bricks.

  After adjusting their recipes, the troublesome oven started to suit their needs just fine.

  Ava and her mother settled into shifts aiming the oven, while the older children and Jason took turns wrestling the sail and fishing. Radio reception during the day was nonexistent, but they had a large library of CDs and freshly charged batteries.

  Melatonin came in handy with keeping everyone on their shifts. Nathan, Ava, and Makayla largely keep off the pills and on days, while Gina and Jason chemically adjusted into nights. For the first time since he had met her, they were on the same shift.

  Jason worked the controls as the sail figure eighted across the night sky. "It should have taken just a week or two, Gina. It's only about two thousand miles; even at just ten knots, that's two weeks at the most. We're two months into this and, by GPS, we're only about halfway there. But by the knots on the little speedometer, we're averaging fifteen knots. To keep with the winds, we have to zigzag some, but that couldn't—"

  Gina punched him in the arm. "Could we have been fighting some sort of cross current flowing down from Alaska, running toward Mexico? I mean, that would explain why we keep drifting south."

  Jason shrugged. "I really don't know. Maybe the GPS thing is broken. I mean, it's for roads and such, got it secondhand for fifty dollars. This isn't exactly what it was built for. But, it seems to be working right.

  Fortunately, we packed all the canned and dried food from the cupboards. No resale value. And, we stocked up, just in case. Packed some kerosene because it had a kerosene stove. I figure another month or two, but I don't know. The compass is reading right. It agrees with the GPS, it's just our GPS speed doesn't seem to match our," he plucks the instrument in the console "speedometer thingy. Currents are the only thing that make sense of that. Like a giant ocean-sized riptide. This thing is shaped like a barge, so, it should be very prone to the whims of currents. It isn't aerodynamic at all. Or, uh, water dynamic, I guess. Kind of a big square slab instead of a sleek, arrowed hull. It could be worse. We could be paying rent on this thing."

  She laughed. It was junk, but they did own it. And as long as they could catch a shark or a decent-sized fish every now and again, they could last indefinitely out on the open sea. She kept the radio adjusted while he steered the ship.

  The late night talk show of choice came on. This time, they caught it from the beginning with the all-important first hour where they recapped the news. The icecap was melting at an expedited rate. Panama had, in the blink of an eye, submerged, and the Atlantic and Pacific were draining into each other. The raw current, they figured, would cut Panama as deep as the Grand Canyon in less than six years. All this crosscurrent was adding to their navigation problems. Tapping such a rushing current could cut their trip down to days, but they had to steer clear or risk getting their remains shot into the Gulf of Mexico after being bashed across whatever boulders were left of Panama.

  CO2 had been, belatedly, let off the hook by most of the world, now that carbon cap and trade had fulfilled its true purpose and destroyed most modern economies. The sun, and the sun alone, had pushed polar climates up by fifteen degrees through properties that were still poorly understood. It was difficult to hear the complete story with the AM station fading in and out, but it seemed like the latest theory had an increased flow of charged solar particles disrupting the Earth's magnetic shield around the poles. The net effect of which was to toast the poles while leaving the shielding over the middle latitudes unaffected, something nobody had predicted was even possible. Nobody knew the sun could destabilize the shielding over the poles so easily, nor keep it up indefinitely. The reverse effect, it seemed, could also cause an ice age within a decade, more or less at the sun's whim. Like an ozone hole on steroids.

  The ugly heavy metal shipping container had been a kind of blessing. The metal shielded them from more of the sun's wild bursts of radiation than anything short of a cave could do. The civilian wandering islands were almost mobile caves themselves, and had repositioned near the equators where they continued to function unaffected by worldly events.

  The newly commissioned, but still incomplete, twenty-five square mile Mobile Island was serving as a temporary airport hub in the Middle East, where all hell was breaking loose.

  Jason looked at Gina as they listened in silence while the host grimly paused for a commercial. "Riots seemed to be happening everywhere, and we only have a flare gun. Mexico didn't look so inviting anymore. Perhaps we should try further north, if there was anything left of California."

  Gina was equally grim, "Heading north is easier said than done. Finding the winds might not be possible. But from the news we just heard, it might be our only option."

  Gina fiddled with the dial as it faded, catching a sister station that seemed to be transmitting the same show, just ten seconds behind.

  ". . . Now, we shift to our NASA spokesman on the phone," the host said, "I guess, I'll just turn it over to you now, Pete, what have we learned?"

  "Thank you, George, it's an honor to be on your show again tonight. I just wish we had something better to discuss," Pete said. "As you know, we have a large array of satellites now focused on the sun. The changes in the solar jet stream have increased solar flares to record levels. In the last few months, we've learned more about the structure and science behind flares than all of science had learned in the four hundred years that came before it. X class eruptions are far more common than. . . "

  The signal faded while Gina tried to tune back to the previous frequency.

  ". . . That's right, George," Pete continued, "until the 1990's, we had thought that solar flares as big as the X class were rare. Now we know better. Thanks to observations from instruments like the Hubbell, we now know that it is rather uncommon for stars like our sun to have as stable and consistent an output as we've enjoyed in the past. Most stars, of the same class as ours, vary their output by as much as twenty percent from time to time. See, most stars are classified by how bright they appear and by their spectrum. However, when a star like ours starts to go through an intense flaring period, like ours appears to be, its spectrum, when seen from a distance, shifts. It's brightness shifts, and to observers from outside our solar system, it appears to be a different class of star.

  Since we've only been able to study the spectrums of other stars for the last century, we never observed a known star to shift like this. And when we did, we attributed the difference to human error, improved equipment, or closer orbits and such. We completely dismissed the idea of solar storms this big and this powerful as being common occurrences."

  "So, what can we expect now?" George calmly asked.

  "Well, the short answer is, we don't know. Nobody does. Everything is just guesswork. But our best guess is that these storms can last years, or more likely decades and centuries. We now believe that the Little Ice Age was triggered by the sun dimming, the reverse effect if you will, for a period of only five decades. But the repercussions from those five decades gave us four hundred years of an ice age. Supercomputers, satellites, and a lot of intellectual capital are guessing that it will take less than a decade to melt every pound of natural ice everywhere on the planet. From there, even if the sun returns to a period of calm, it will take hundreds, if not thousands of years to rebuild the polar ice caps, regardless of how you factor in the impact of CO2 and greenhouse gasses."

&
nbsp; "Has NASA recanted on the importance of greenhouse gasses, officially?" George pressed his guest.

  "Officially, no. But you have to understand, our budget, our entire budget comes from the politicians in government. We, officially, always support the political 'science', especially when it has total control over our budget. But all research that receives money from outside parties always finds a way to prove the 'science' those backers endorse—"

  "So," George said, "officially, NASA sees the flares, sees the effects on the magnetic shield around the poles, is measuring the melting happening before their very eyes, and still says CO2 caused it all."

  "Officially, yes. Look, back in the days of the Dark Age, the official scientific consensus was that stars . . ."

  Gina quickly dialed in the sister station.

  ". . . days of the Dark Age, the official scientific consensus was that stars couldn't change their brightness, ever. Well, a supernova occurred and one star, for a week, was bright enough to be seen during the day, and bright enough at night to read by. It was recorded by every society around the world, except one. Europe refused to believe their own eyes—"

  "It's remarkable that you would pick that example," George said what Jason and Gina were thinking.

  "Well, it isn't by accident. The scientists of that day got ALL their funding from the church, or from the king by way of suggestions by the church. And the church believed that stars stayed constant forever. Today's political church sees things the same way, and is paying the bills. Officially, the government never makes any mistakes and CO2 is thus the only legitimate cause, ignore your lying eyes is our policy."

  George sighed over the radio, his depression conveyed well across the long and awkward pause. "Well, uh. . . hmmm. . . coastal cities are being evacuated. FEMA is so overwhelmed that they are subcontracting all their distribution logistics to Wal-Mart. Lobbying for funding seems like semantics when we're talking total government collapse, but, I only have you for another twenty minutes, and arguing the politics seems like a waste of that. What are we looking at in the short term?"

  "Well, our jet stream here on Earth has shifted too. Mild weather is everyone's best guess. An elongated spring, a few weeks of summer, and a long fall, with almost no winter. In the past we had the year without a summer, I suspect we'll have several years without a winter. The good news is, that will probably mean extra growing seasons. At the very least, it means that Canada and Siberia will continue to provide the world with an abundance of food. . . "

  They lost the signal again, but this time they lost the sister station as well.

  Jason worked the figure eight as they sat in silence.

  Gina eventually stood and turned on her flashlight. "I'm going to check what's left in the hotbox of the oven. You hungry for anything?"

  "Yeah, I smelled some fresh bread, maybe a fish sandwich? Remind me to try to bring all of this up with the rest of your family at breakfast, ok. We should vote before turning north."