The light seemed to fade some, and then it disappeared behind some tall pines, and Rick found that his eyes had gotten moist. He wiped at them and said, “What do you think it was?”
“I dunno. I sometimes see lights move at night, and Momma tells me that it’s the Devil’s work, and I shouldn’t look at ’em. Is that true?”
He rubbed at his chin, thought for a moment about just letting the boy be, letting him grow up with his illusions and whatever misbegotten faith his mother had put in his head, letting him think about farming and hunting and fishing, to concentrate on what was real, what was necessary, which was getting enough food to eat and a warm place and—
No! the voice inside him shouted. No, that’s not fair, to condemn this boy and the others to a life of peasantry, just because of some wrong things that had been done, years before the child was even born. He shook his head and said, “Well, I can see why some people would think it’s the Devil’s work, but the truth is, Tom, that was a building up there. A building made by men and women and put up in the sky, more than a hundred miles up.”
Tom sounded skeptical. “Then how come it doesn’t fall down?”
Great, the voice said. Shall we give him a lecture about Newton? What do you suggest?
He thought for a moment and said, “It’s complex, and I don’t want to bore you, Tom. But trust me, it’s up there. In fact, it’s still up there and will be for a while. Even though nobody’s living in it right now.”
Tom looked up and said, “Where is it now?”
“Oh, I imagine it’s over Canada by now. You see, it goes around the whole globe in what’s called an orbit. Only takes about ninety minutes or so.”
Tom seemed to think about that and said shyly, “My dad. He once said you were something. A spaceman. That you went to the stars. Is that true?”
“True enough. We never made it to the stars, though we sure thought about it a lot.”
“He said you flew up in the air. Like a bird. And the places you went, high enough, you had to carry your own air with you. Is that true, too?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Jeez. You know, my momma, well…”
“Your momma, she doesn’t quite like me, does she?”
“Unh-hunh. She says you’re not good. You’re unholy. And some other stuff.”
Rick thought about telling the boy the truth about his mother, decided it could wait until the child got older. God willing, the boy would learn soon enough about his mother.
Aloud Rick said, “I’m going back to my house. Would you like to get something?”
“Another cold treat?” came the hopeful voice.
“No, not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Tonight, well, tonight I want to give you something that’ll last longer than any treat.”
A few minutes later they were up in his office, Tom talking all the while about the fishing he had done so far this summer, the sleep-outs in the back pasture, and about his cousin Lloyd, who lived in the next town over, Hancock, and who died of something called polio. Rick shivered at the matter-of-fact way Tom had mentioned his cousin’s death. A generation ago, a death like that never would have happened. Hell, a generation ago, if somebody of Tom’s age had died, the poor kid would have been shoved into counseling sessions and group therapies, trying to get closure about the damn thing. And now? Just part of growing up.
In his office Tom oohed and aaahed over the photos on his wall, and Rick explained as best he could what they were about. “Well, that’s the dot of light we just saw. It’s actually called a space station. Over there, that’s what you used to fly up to the space station. It’s called a space shuttle. Or a rocket, if you prefer. This… this is a picture of me, up in the space station.”
“Really?” Tom asked. “You were really there?”
He found he had to sit down, so he did, his damn hips aching something fierce. “Yes, I was really up there. One of the last people up there, to tell you the truth, Tom. Just before, well… just before everything changed.”
Tom stood before a beautiful photo of a full moon, the craters and mountains and flat seas looking as sharp as if they were made yesterday. He said, “Momma said that it was God who punished the world back then, because men were evil, because they ignored God. Is that true, Mister Monroe? What really happened back then?”
His fists suddenly clenched, as if powered by memory. Where to begin, young man, he thought. Where to begin. Let’s talk about a time when computers were in everything, from your car to your toaster to your department store cash register. Everything linked up and interconnected. And when the systems got more and more complex, the childish ones, the vandals, the destructive hackers, they had to prove that they had the knowledge and skills and wherewithal to take down a system. Oh, the defenses grew stronger and stronger, as did the viruses, and the evil ones redoubled their efforts, like the true Vandals coming into Rome, burning and destroying something that somebody else created. The defenses grew more in-depth, the attacks more determined, until one bright soul—if such a creature could be determined to have a soul—came up with ultimate computer virus. No, not one that wormed its way into software through backdoors or anything fancy like that. No sir. This virus was one that attacked the hardware, the platforms, that spread God knows how—theories ranged from human touch to actual impulses over fiber optics—and destroyed the chips. That’s all. Just ate the chips and left burned-out crumbs behind, so that in days, almost every thing in the world that used a computer was silent, dark, and dead.
Oh, he was a smart one—for the worst of the hackers were always male—whoever he was, and Rick often wished that the designer of the ultimate virus (called the Final Virus, for a very good reason) had been on an aircraft or an operating room table when it had struck. For when the computers sputtered out and died, the chaos that was unleashed upon the world… cars, buses, trains, trucks. Dead, not moving. Hundreds of thousands of people, stranded far from home. Aircraft falling out of the skies. Ships at sea, slowly drifting, unable to maneuver. Stock markets, banks, corporations, everything and anything that stored the wealth of a nation in electronic impulses, silent. All the interconnections that fed and clothed and fueled and protected and sheltered most of the world’s billions had snapped apart, like brittle rubber bands. Within days the cities had become uninhabitable, as millions streamed into the countryside. Governments wavered and collapsed. Communications were sparse, for networks and radio stations and the cable stations were off the air as well. Rumors and fear spread like a plague itself, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—called out from retirement at last—swept through almost the entire world.
There were a few places that remained untouched: Antarctica and a few remote islands.
But for the rest of the world… sometimes the only light on the nightside of the planet were the funeral pyres, where the bodies were being burned.
He grew nauseous, remembering what had happened to him and how it took him months to walk back here, to his childhood home, and he repressed the memory of eating something a farmer had offered him—it hadn’t looked exactly like dog, but God, he had been so hungry—and he looked over to young Tom. How could he even begin to tell such a story to such an innocent lad?
He wouldn’t. He composed himself and said, “No, God didn’t punish us back then. We did. It was a wonderful world, Tom, a wonderful place. It wasn’t perfect and many people did ignore God, did ignore many good things… but we did things. We fed people and cured them and some of us, well, some of us planned to go to the stars.”
He went up to the wall, took down the picture of the International Space Station, the Big Boy himself, and pointed it out to Tom. “Men and women built that on the ground, Tom, and brought it up into space. They did it for good, to learn things, to start a way for us to go back to the Moon and to Mars. To explore. There was no evil there. None.”
Tom looked at the picture and said, “And that’s the dot of light we saw? Far up in the sky?”
“Yes.”
“And what’s going to happen to it?”
He looked at the framed photo, noticed his hands shaking some. He put the photo back up on the wall. “One of these days, it’s going to get lower and lower. It just happens.
Things up in orbit can’t stay up there forever. Unless somebody can go up there and do something… it’ll come crashing down.”
He sat down in the chair, winced again at the shooting pains in his hips. There was a time when he could have had new hips, new knees, or—if need be—new kidneys, but it was going to take a long time for those days to
