“The Castle movement didn’t start till some of the fringier rich people freaked out that Obama was president, so yeah, it’s less than twenty years. Though really the house I grew up in, before Dad built the big one above the Harbor, was a Castle in all but name. Some rich guys have always built fortified big houses in isolated spots; Dad’s is only noticeable because he decided to build it so close to a big city.”
The weather held, and they enjoyed the last of the sandwiches and apples before they saw the coast, savoring the warmth of the sun and the crispness of the air. The late-fall-afternoon sun was still painting the coast in rich golds and deep blues as they turned north; it was not quite sunset on the river when Mensche said, “So, I guess this is where I say, ‘Castle, ho!’?”
“Not advisable to call me a ho, but otherwise, yeah.”
The man who met them at the pier looked like he was trying to dress as something between the Crocodile Hunter and the Veteran Surfer: khaki safari shirt, baggy knee-length shorts with too many pockets, old-style leather boots. He wore an immense hogleg of a revolver on one hip and a huge belt knife on the other. The effect was somewhat spoiled by his camo strap cap held together with a piece of shoelace where the plastic strap had been, and by a straggly brown-and-gray ponytail that would have been more in keeping with an old-school software developer or a trustafarian venture capitalist.
“Right when I thought you’d be,” Quattro said, smiling. “How was the trip, Bambi?”
“Not too different from the usual except for having to dust off a tiny bit of my celestial navigation skills. This is Special Agent Larry Mensche; and this is Quattro Larsen. And this is our prisoner, Ysabel Roth.”
“Kind of a harsh introduction, isn’t it? Young lady, can we parole you while you’re on the grounds here? Will you give your word and keep it that you won’t run away?”
Ysabel gasped, “Promise me that the world will stop bucking and rolling, and I’ll do whatever you say.”
As they walked up the pathway to the big house, Bambi noted dugouts, trenches, and walls to cover troops moving out from the house; two garden sheds that would make good blockhouses; and a wide-walled patio with a loopholed wall that would allow small artillery to cover the mouth of the Russian River. “You’re a lot less public about your Castle than Dad is about his.”
“Remember the silly commercials when we were kids? He’s a PC, I’m a Mac. His fortress looks like a fortress and it’s all built around its fortress-ness. My fortress just works.”
Larry stopped dead and whistled. “Is that your airfield?”
“Yeah. Cool, hey?”
“I loved classic planes when I was a kid. Pre-jets, I mean. So, yeah, I built models of several of those. But aren’t they falling apart just like everything else?”
“Parts of them are, and avgas is going to be a problem. But the really old birds are less electrical and less plastic than present-day airplanes, and their engines were built for unreliable cruddy fuel. I’ve had that DC-3’s engines up and running on biodiesel, even long before Daybreak, because I thought regular fuel sources might be cut off. And the only thing electrical in that engine is the ignition, and I think I’ll be able to replace the plastic and rubber with wood, glass, and metal. Back before there was vulcanized rubber, when they needed airtightness, they used different kinds of shellacs and oils on silk and linen, and there was the stuff called goldbeater’s fabric that was basically treated gut. And as of last night, when Arcadia made it back here safely, I’ve got a couple materials scientists from Cal Poly, who are very glad to have their families safely out of the chaos, working on what we can make tires out of. I really want it for the planes, but I’m not opposed to the idea that being the re-creator of the pneumatic tire might make me richer than God.”
“I can see the viewpoint,” Larry said. “I don’t suppose, while we’re here—”
Quattro grinned. “Hey, my inner teenage geek always needs other guys’s inner teenage geeks to hang out with. First chance, you and me are doing the extensive hangar tour—starting with that DC-3, and I’ve got about almost all of a Lockheed Electra 10, most of the guts in boxes. That one’s kind of iffy for getting to fly again. I’ll probably never have the shops and tech to refit my P-51 from the Dominican Air Force for post-Daybreak, and I’m not sure how much I can knock together from one fairly complete DC-6, three spare engines, and one DC-6 airframe. The real thing I’ve got my hopes pinned on is that I have—brace yourself… ta-da! Most of three Stearman Kaydets, one of them that I actually had flying before Daybreak.”
“I think our inner ten-year-olds are going to be best buddies,” Mensche said, “especially if yours likes to hear mine say, ‘Wow.’”
THE NEXT DAY. CAMBRIDGE.MASSACHUSETTS. SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT EST. SUNDAY. NOVEMBER 3.
Building a radio station out of things you could find in the kitchen or the hardware store, plus scrap parts from everywhere, was the sort of interesting problem that MIT students enjoyed; it was a way to take their minds off the mess that surrounded them. Digging through the old paper library was fun in a nostalgic way, the trip out to off-campus storage with ROTC armed guards was a romantic adventure, and when finally they had a voltage controlled oscillator, built around five tubes that had been hand-built into test tubes and pickle jars, up and running, it felt like a major victory.
The crystal receivers for AM radio had been pulling in stories from KP-1 and Blue and Gold for a couple of days, so they had plenty of material for rebroadcast, and a couple of student reporters from the Tufts newspaper had managed to put together a local news report as well. FM radios that hadn’t been turned on or plugged in typically had not attracted many nanoswarm, and as word went from neighbor to neighbor, people dug out batteries and long-unused radios, wiped them with Drano and hydrogen peroxide, and heard the first news in several days.
So a surprising number of people were tuned in at two A.M. on Sunday, listening to the rereading of the day’s news, when the west wind began to rise. The hand-built anemometer at the improvised weather station on top of MacGregor jammed when nanoswarm from its bicycle-generator sensor penetrated the main bearing; two engineering students who climbed up to the roof to wipe and lubricate the anemometer looked southwest and saw the flames in Brookline.
The student announcer at WMBR broadcast the news immediately; within an hour, citizen volunteers were clearing fire lanes along Fisher Avenue and Lee Street, dragging wrecked cars out of the space, wetting down storefronts with water from the reservoirs, dousing the sparks that crossed the line, and helping fleeing residents find shelter.
Dawn came and the volunteers worked on in greater and greater numbers; at midmorning it began to snow, and the fire retreated.
By noon, the fire lanes were secure. Most people drifted away, but many lingered because of a rumor that they might all be paid, in food, or perhaps in a bus ride to a better location, or in an allocation of an abandoned house that had a woodstove—with something, at least, for their hours spent saving the city, sweating and hungry in the icy dark. Someone said that since the radio station at MIT had spread the word, probably the people who would pay them were there, and although most people didn’t want to walk that far, a few hundred made the trip, all the way across Harvard Bridge, marching in the thick snow, gaining determination to demand payment as they went.
The fighting may have started with nervous or overzealous ROTC guards, or perhaps the crowd, by the time it got there at around four in the afternoon, was simply too far gone into its desire to smash something. But by the time the so-called Battle of MIT was done, a dozen buildings were wrecked, much of the library had been carried off for fuel or burned in bonfires, and the radio station was off the air for good. When the National Guard arrived in the early hours of Monday morning, the campus was deserted, and there wasn’t much to do except catalog the damage.