The radio fell silent for several minutes. Spencer hoped the battery wouldn’t die before the FEMA people got back to him. He tapped his fingers on the metal bench, waiting, waiting. Romero looked at him and shrugged. Finally, the woman’s voice returned. “Hello, White Sands? Part of JPL was hit by the rioting. We should be able to get someone back to you shortly, if you’re still on the air. Can we get some information from you for our files?”
Spencer pushed the microphone over to Romero. “Go ahead and help them out,” he said.
As Romero grinned and started to answer their questions, Rita raised an eyebrow at Spencer. She cocked back her hat and let her braided hair fall down. “You’ve got more up your sleeve than just getting this microwave farm back on line.”
Spencer tried not to smile as he ducked outside to scan the desert restlessly. “If we can get this receiving station back up again, wouldn’t it be nice to increase the amount of power we beam down? Keep us on line for hours at a time. Just think of those twenty satellites sitting at JPL, all finished and waiting to be sent into orbit. If Nedermyer hadn’t deep-sixed the acquisition process, they’d be here already… or maybe even up there.”
Rita spat a wad of tobacco off to the side. She seemed to be aiming at a small lizard, but the glob struck a rock instead. The lizard scurried away.
“Now I know you’ve flipped a byte,” she said. “Say those satellites still work—they’ve been in a clean room and they’re vacuum sealed, so I can buy that—and just suppose we could somehow get them a thousand miles from LA to New Mexico. Then what do we do with them? We still need to get them into orbit. Are there some rocket launchers left here at White Sands that I don’t know about?”
She trailed off as Spencer looked toward the north, toward Oscura Peak. A long thin housing for the five-mile-long electromagnetic launcher ran up the side of the mountain.
She started laughing as it hit her. “I don’t believe it. You’re crazy! Absolutely nuts! It’s one thing to change parts in a simple AM radio and make it work. It’s a thousand times harder to change out every single seal and joint in our microwave farm. But to bring those satellites cross country and use a launcher that’s only worked once? They need to finish that thing before it can launch our satellites into a high enough orbit! And how the hell do you think we’re going to get those satellites out here—by wagon train?”
Spencer stopped humming to himself. He was disappointed she had guessed it so easily. “How did you know?”
Chapter 42
Clear blue but smudged with clouds, the Napa Valley sky hung over the tourist train station. But, son of a brick, the tourist trade had sure gone belly up.
Rex O’Keefe didn’t really miss the crowds, the automobiles, or the fat self-styled wine conoisseurs who hopped from one winery to the next, gulping the free samples and rolling the fancy names on their tongues. Rex liked the world better this way. Peaceful, uncomplicated, giving him a chance to kick back and relax. When the food ran out, he’d probably be all uptight again, but he tried not to think about that just yet.
Leaning back on the old wooden bench, Rex took a sip of red table wine—Gamay Beaujolais 1991, liberated from the Sandstone Crest winery, best served at room temperature (which was about all he could get these days, now that refrigeration was out of the question). He rolled the wine on his tongue, swallowed slowly to feel the warm bite, to taste the oak.
In front of him, bright in the morning sunshine, the refurbished old steam locomotive sat in front of him on the tracks. Steam Roller. He admired the train, wishing the day would go on forever. And because of the petroplague, it just might. Nothing much would change around here for a long time.
For the moment at least, Rex had everything he could want—plenty of wine, the run of the tourist train station, and no one to bother him now that the weekend crowds fought for survival in the big cities rather than taking a leisurely ride through wine country on an authentic turn-of-the-century steam train.
He had pulled all the dried food and snacks from the refreshment stand, adding to his own stockpile in the small home behind the station. He figured he’d stashed enough food to get by for half a year. The eating would get dull, imported water crackers and some cheese, canned vegetables to supplement whatever he could scrounge from his garden, bottled mineral water. But there was plenty of wine. He would survive.
At forty-five and without a family, Rex O’Keefe’s world extended little beyond the railroad tracks and the train station, even now after the petroplague had caused the old Steam Roller to gasp her last breath, unless he could find some other lubricants and gaskets.
He hadn’t cared much for the people when they came around anyway. What was the point being boot-licking and nice to strangers who would never come by again? The locals themselves never bothered to ride Rex’s train; they had their own tourist industry to watch over.
Rex was content to be alone with his memories. From the time he’d been old enough to own an electric Lionel until he got his first job at 14 stoking wood on the refurbished Steam Roller, Rex had lived for the day when he could work on the trains.
But now the damn locomotive just sat there, unable to move, stalled in place.
Rex stood on tired legs and sauntered out to the behemoth that sat frozen on the tracks. Painted a deep black, the Steam Roller burned wood in her furnace, heating water in the boiler to drive one of the last locomotives that had not transferred over to coal or diesel. He could smell the creosote from the railroad ties, the old deteriorating oils on the driving wheels, the caked soot from the furnace.
Even motionless, Steam Roller was a sight too pretty just to look at. Rex pulled a red bandanna out of his blue-and-white railroad overalls—the clichéd outfit the tourists expected him to wear—and began to polish the brass pistons.
He ran his hand along the metal siding, then boosted himself up to the engineer’s cab where he tried to work the controls. For a moment he imagined himself riding the tracks as the train chugged through the valleys, a throbbing rhythmic rattle as the wheels passed over crossings. The lush green vineyards extended on either side of the cab, pale vines stretched out along wires in flickering razor-straight rows that looked like optical illusions stretched out to the hills.
Blinking his eyes, Rex reached up to grab the steam release, when a low voice came from behind the cab, startling him. “Shame to let a beauty like this rust away.”
Rex whirled, opening and closing his mouth as if he expected the right words to fall automatically out. He took a second to focus on the stranger: a bearlike man, built short and stocky, with blotchy dark skin and not a hair on his head. The stranger’s scalp had been freshly shaved; even the eyebrows were gone.
Rex felt the sour taste of wine claw up his throat. He said hoarsely, “Yeah, she’s my train. What do you want?”
The bald man said nothing, only turned to look over the train, admiring it. Rex wanted to leave, to go back into the station, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t leave the locomotive unguarded. What if the strange man was a vandal or something? The bad taste in his mouth wouldn’t go away.
Rex hadn’t had much trouble in the week or so since the plague struck the wine country north of San Francisco. The train station was away from most of the town buildings, and he didn’t have anything marauders would want.