The Final Day (After, #3)(51)
They pulled up to the front of the house, Ernie opening a garage door and beckoning for them to pull in and get out of the lightly falling snow.
As they climbed out of the jeep, John looked around with envy. Ernie had a full workshop in the basement garage, and not just the workshop of a casual handyman. There was arc-welding equipment, tool-and-die-making equipment, and a hoist for pulling an engine block out of a vehicle, and lining one wall were boxes of unopened rations.
Ernie noticed John looking around and smiled. “Were you a Boy Scout?” he asked.
“Yes, made Eagle.”
“Well, Boy Scout, remember, ‘Be prepared.’ My family and I took it seriously. If everyone had, we wouldn’t be in this damn mess now.”
Ernie led the way upstairs to a spacious two-story-high living room, a cheery fire roaring in the fireplace, radiating warmth. Ernie’s wife, Linda, was in the kitchen in the vast open room, looking up, smiling, and coming around the counter—carrying two cups of coffee, no less.
John sighed. “Why is it everyone seems to have a stockpile of coffee stashed away except me?”
“Again, Boy Scouts: ‘Be prepared.’”
John tried not to bristle. Ernie could be so darn annoying at times rubbing in these types of things, but on the other hand, whether the final incident with Fredericks had been a setup by Ernie or not, he had dropped the guy, and now he just might be on the verge of unlocking some deadly serious questions as a follow-up performance.
The rest of Ernie’s extended family came out from the far side of the house to meet them—his sons, grandchildren, and daughter and her reclusive author husband, the daughter offering to help John and Maury shuck off their parkas, scarves, and gloves.
Ernie produced a bottle of fine brandy from under the kitchen sink and offered to put something extra into their coffee, and though tempted, John declined. This was not a social visit; the business was dead serious, and he wanted a clear mind to evaluate why Ernie had so urgently requested his visiting the “Franklin Enclave,” as everyone now called it, a visit that few had been permitted to experience.
“Let’s head upstairs,” Linda announced without further ado and social small talk with the rest of the family. Linda had rarely attended community meetings, and John thought her to be somewhat standoffish, until Makala, after meeting her, told John she suspected Linda had Asperger’s. Unlike most, John knew what it meant, and for him it carried no negative stereotypes. An “Aspie,” John knew, might not be up to par on most social skills, especially the ability to wander a crowd, meet and greet, and engage in small talk hour after hour. They tended to be mono-focused at times to the point of absolute obsession. It might be something society might think inane—the history of pinball machines and how to repair them or nineteenth-century railroads and the hauling capability of every engine ever made back then. In fact, if he could find people with that knowledge, he would have embraced them and put them to work to actually make such a machine to use on the abandoned Norfolk and Southern rails.
For Linda, it was software design, and in a long-ago world she had been one of the first programmers for the guidance systems for Saturn V rockets. She was a lone woman in a sea of techno-geek males of the early 1960s, writing guidance software for computers that had yet to even be made, so intense was the space race back then to get it done within President Kennedy’s timeline. He had learned that Linda’s task was to write the software for the third stage of the Saturn V rocket, several years before it was even built and flown, for what was called TLI—trans-lunar injection. It was software that at a very precise moment would fire off the third-stage rocket to propel the Apollo spacecraft out of earth orbit and send it soaring toward the moon at nearly twenty-five thousand miles per hour.
The challenge: she was aiming at an imaginary place in space where the moon would be three days later in its orbit around the earth so that the Apollo spacecraft would skim past the edge of the moon at a precise angle just sixty miles above the lunar surface. It was compared to aiming a pistol shot at a piece of paper set edgewise at fifty yards. Miss by even a fraction and the command module would crash into the lunar surface; too far out and lunar gravity would not sufficiently grab the spacecraft and it would just go winging off into deep space with no hope of return.
She did all of that before she was twenty-three.
Reaching the second-floor landing, John paused for a moment to soak in the view of Mount Mitchell, hidden briefly by a snow shower and then standing out again, cloaked in deep snow. The heat from the fireplace radiated up from the living room below, and John took off his sweater and enjoyed the warm, comfortable feel.
“Good morning, sir.”
Several of John’s old students were sitting at a long table where half a dozen computer screens were set up, several of them old Apple II screens, the others a mix from a first-generation Macintosh with its terrible blue nine-inch cube screen and two PCs, one in full, vivid color. As always, John felt a touch of embarrassment with his inability to remember names, though he recognized the young faces who at one time had sat in his one hundred–and two hundred–level history classes but could usually be found across the hall from his classroom in the room set up as a lab for the college’s cybersecurity program.
Linda motioned to a couple of chairs set up behind the three and then pulled up a chair herself in front of the color monitor. “Ernie just finished another calibration this morning on a geosynch sat comm device we think is of interest.”