We saw Olympus Mons in Christmas week of 2530. Then the Krazneys and Bologneses vacationed happily together more than a dozen times until early ’36 without much impact on this story. Except that by then I’d stopped thinking of Sherry as a sister.
Our families were lucky, very lucky, to be on vacation in Palau, some islands south of Japan and east of the Philippines in Earth’s Pacific Ocean, when the Great Gamma Blip of 2536 hit: A live HX came close to Earth for the first time in recorded history! “Close” was 9½ light years away near Sirius, but when an HX “blips”—in or out—space-time gets rattled and there’s a huge gamma ray burst.
HX may have blipped that near Earth or nearer many times in its history without affecting its life. The Earth’s atmosphere is thick enough to absorb the gamma rays and transform them into harmless light and heat before they get to the surface. Oh, and because Earth has both an ionizable atmosphere and a magnetic field around it, the gamma ray burst also produces a huge electromagnetic pulse, but since when does a plant or animal care about an EMP?
The plants and animals don’t care, and neither did humans for most of our existence, but almost every electrical and electronic device does. Centuries ago, during the Soviet-American Cold War, the EMP effect was discovered, but it was mostly ignored. Since that time a small fraction of civilian goods have been made with some shielding, but when nobody except the military sees a threat, nobody except the military is willing to pay extra for protection.
When the Blip happened this time civilized Earth was completely shut down, and for a time no one had any idea what had happened. Anything that could diagnose we’d just been zapped with a huge gamma ray–induced EMP was fried by it. Anyone that could figure it out couldn’t easily talk to anyone else because all the modern communications systems were gone, too. But word of “the Great EMP” did get around as ham operators got their low-tech, home-built rigs fixed and the communications net started to rebuild. They recognized the effects of an EMP when they saw them. It took longer for the astronomers’ observations and conclusions to circulate and rename it the Great Gamma Blip.
At the time of the event, Yanci and I were doing some scuba diving on a coral reef. What we noticed first was that our gear stopped working. That was spooky, but we both got up to the surface OK. Then the outboard motor wouldn’t start. It was weird. It was also weird that we couldn’t phone for a rescue. We were really pissed that we had to row all the way back to the harbor at Koror.
When we got back to shore—hot, angry, and thirsty—we found out that our problems were small potatoes. All the island’s phones, radios, and other electronics and electricity, which included every vehicle with a computer component and just about every other engine-powered device, had stopped working, and it was the same way on the bridge-connected islands and on all of the other neighboring ones.
It was a mystery, and it didn’t solve that day, or the next day, or for most of a year. But Palau’s food supply and people were stable enough that we survived. There were a lot of changes and surprises in what we did as we waited, but we made the changes and survived.
Yanci and I learned to fish six different ways while we were waiting. Before we left we were right up there with our Palau High classmates—many of whom had been as inexperienced as we were—as top fish providers for the islands, and we got a lot of respect for that. We were feeding a lot of people, which felt kind of strange at first, but we got used to it.
Especially at first, we also had to get used to eating a lot less, which wasn’t so fun, so that we actually looked forward to coconuts, seafood, poi, and rabbit food day after day. We all lost weight, and Mrs. Krazney got sick a lot, but we got by.
Yanci and I did win some two-man canoe races. Canoeing had become a common way to get around, and we helped build canoes, too.
The rest of our families also contributed to the islands’ economy in less athletic ways. In that period everyone on the island put in whatever time and effort was needed, as best they could. We all had to learn how to do new things and how to jury-rig stuff and how to make do. We couldn’t pay our room rent with credit chips, but we stayed where we were and the owners accepted our parents’ promises to pay at the monthly rate when this mess got straightened out.
Sherry got really good at cleaning and filleting fish, became one of the local monkeys who brought down coconuts, and was even better when intelligence was needed, as in electrical repair. Not only that, she became an impressive poi-dancer. She earned some respect too.
Our fathers and mothers helped with the farming and clamming, which had suddenly become much more important, and took their turns in the shops and doing maintenance. But where all four of them really shone was in the planning meetings, which also became more important than before.
There were people who wanted to elect Dad mayor of Koror City in 2538 and actually formed a campaign committee, even though he wasn’t a citizen. Of course in the early days of the Recovery in Palau, that kind of technicality didn’t seem important to anyone. I don’t know if Dad saw the prospect as a come-down from being a European Regional MP; he never said. But he never pushed for exceptional treatment while we were there. This didn’t strike me as strange until much, much later. What I saw was a man who was helping out as best he could, just like everyone else was. And who had as much time for his son as I could want, which he’d never had since I could remember.
I also learned that I had deep feelings for Sherry and she shared them. Wearing next to nothing together day after day, and being quietly but sincerely praised as local food providers, made me very conscious of my maturing body … and hers. Once our hormones got pumping, our minds and hearts followed.
“In a couple of years, we could get married,” Sherry said to me one evening while we were sitting on the beach. “If we’re still on these lovely tropical islands, we could start raising kids to call them home.”
After I got my breath back, I realized that I liked the idea of raising kids with her, and I put my arm around her.
“Unfortunately,” she went on as she cuddled closer, “we both know how different our fathers are, Joe. Politically, I mean.”
“Sure,” I said. “They like doing things together, and that includes arguing with each other. The crisis has brought us all closer together for now.
“But,” I added, feeling very mature at 17, “no one knows what the future will bring.” I kissed her, and that was as close as we got on that occasion … well, pretty much, anyway.
One day about a year after our vacation was supposed to be over, a motorized yacht finally showed up on the horizon, cruising around offshore but making no immediate move to land. “They might be pirates,” our native friends cautioned us. But at that point, the Acksheugh family went stir-crazy.
Since right after the Great EMP, all four generations of Acksheughs, from the great-grandmother with her collection of tattoos to the youngest with his collection of squirt-cannons—less lethal in Palau than they would have been in Europe—had been chronic complainers and finally ended up living separately from the rest of us. I could never figure out why, but none of them would accept that the whole country of Palau was in trouble, let alone the whole Earth and much of the Solar System. The family acted like the hardship we were experiencing was some sort of trick, probably perpetrated by the filthy, stupid locals (who resented those and other adjectives the Acksheughs used), and all they had to do was get somewhere else and things would all be OK.
If they hadn’t been such arrogant fools, someone with a sailboat or who’d gotten a motorboat working might have taken the risk of delivering them to one of the larger countries for a reasonable fee, a trip that no Palauan had yet found quite enough motivation to do just for themselves. But no one trusted the Acksheughs would pay.
However, when they saw the gleaming yacht, they rushed down to the docks, where they waved and shouted that they would pay a lot to get “to civilization”. The yacht docked and the snooty “owner” dickered their offer up by more than three times, to the delight of the local observers. The price included all of Mr. Acksheugh’s clunky gold necklaces and nose-rings, and we saw those get handed over before the family could board. Then the pirates sailed away—to the South Philippines, I later heard, where it was another year before they got passage back to Connecticut. Apparently they insulted the Filipinos, too.
Two months later, a Philippine government ship arrived and delivered messages from Brussels that Dad had to heed. They had plenty of space to carry vacationers and a few interested natives back with them, and a mandate to do so without charge.
It was when we got to Manila that the magnitude of the damage done by the Big Blip, as everybody now called the event, really began to hit us.
Of course we knew abstractly that the settlement under the Greenland ice cap had been wiped out. Now we found out that, even a year later, it still was not rehabilitated.
The first night in our hotel, its Shared Media Center was playing a doc-virty about the Kasemsarn Expedition, a hundred or so brave people who’d tried to trek to the Greenland coast when life support for the settlement shut down. Our parents thought two and three times before they would let us see it. From the looks on their faces I was pretty sure they didn’t want to see it.
There was a lot of melodramatic narration, some mushy drama with voice-overs saying farewells, and pretentious landscape shots, all of which left me cold, pardon the pun, but the story of the trekkers’ slow attrition was sobering. What really got to you, though, was the evidence of those left behind, the threedies and vids and virties of residents in happier times, the farewell letters written to family and friends by frozen fingers before the end came, some fairly good sketches done by candlelight, one finger-painting done all in grays and pale blue on white, carefully titled “Freezing” by a parent’s hand. Yanci and I weren’t the only strong young men continually wiping our eyes, and none of us were pointing and grinning at each other around the images, either.
The virty had the highly unusual G-18 label—not to be experienced by people under 18 without parent or guardian present. For once the rating board got it right, sort of, but I think our folks took it a lot worse than we did. As we headed back to our rooms my mother and I had our arms around each other, with Dad’s hand on her shoulder. Right then, I was sorry none of my grandparents, aunts, or uncles had come to Palau with us, but had stayed scattered from Cape Verde to Triton. I felt like reaching for Sherry’s hand, as I watched the Krazneys also clinging together, but I knew that in front of her parents she wouldn’t want me to.
That’s when it hit me: If they’d been home for the Big Blip, they would have been cut off, and whether they’d trekked or huddled, they would have died with the hundred thousand other Greenlanders! Not to mention the billion or so that had died elsewhere all over Earth.
The Solar System colonies had also suffered. The killer for Mercury, the Moon, the Belt, and those of the Outer Colonies without atmosphere was the raw gamma radiation, so intense that normal shielding against solar storms wasn’t enough. People who survived were those who had enough rock—of a planet or a moon—between them and the gamma rays when it happened. Most of the rest lived a month or less before dying of radiation poisoning. Even most of those who made it to hospitals succumbed; hospitals were never designed to treat half a community or more all at once.
The occasional off-planet spaceship crew with unusually heavy shielding survived, but most lived something like thirty hours with their life support fried or thirty days until their bodies succumbed. We wouldn’t get news from Alpha Centauri for another three years, and from the other stars it would take even longer.
Titan Colony, Mars, and the Outer Colonies with thick atmospheres survived better than Earth. With atmospheric shields, they took comparatively little harm from the gamma rays, but with no magnetic field, there was no EMP. Within days Titan and Mars had ships running again, filled with supplies to help the rest of the System. Titan was closest to the other Outer Colonies and the Belt, so of course it sent most of its ships there. Mars aided Earth and the Moon. Travel time to Mercury from Titan and Mars is about the same and both sent help there.
The difference in where the aid went seemed small at the time, and it was, given the magnitude of the crisis, but it grew in significance as the Solar System recovered and started to pull apart on the HX issue again.
Just as quickly as people recovered from the crisis, that issue loomed large, because the last thing recorded by scientists in the orbiting observatories was the direction the radiation had come from. It took awhile for the big telescopes to be operational again, given that repairs were difficult, and that even most astronomers considered food, water, transport, and communication to be higher priorities. But as soon as possible they’d been pointed in that direction and spotted the new HX, less than 10 light-years from the Solar System.