Tales of Downfall and Rebirth (20 page)

Armed with my hatchet and the cop's machete, I emerged from the steam tunnels like a gopher on north campus. I passed the old St. Michael's Hospital and went parallel to Columbia Road. I discovered the expansive community garden plots beyond were teeming with people. Maybe not everyone had left. Chunks of old concrete and stacked sandbags formed walls. Barbed wire was strung between pickets and a few plastic sheets and tents were set up behind. The houses along the nearby frontage road had been ransacked for building material. But I saw rows of sprouting crops on the protected acreage within.

I ducked into deserted neighborhoods to keep out of view. I came across signs of torn apart houses consolidated into sturdier ones in cul-de-sacs with barking dogs and
NO TRESPASSING
signs, or other dwellings simply abandoned and gutted. I moved quickly and quietly down alleys fenced off from yards and beneath the shade of leafy cottonwoods. Single family homes once filled with people who prided themselves on knowing who lived next door and the state of their lawns, were empty and overgrown. Now with the “Great Equalizer” of the handgun gone, people had banded together for protection whether needed or not.

I went through the downtown that had been underwater a year ago and passed the
Herald
newspaper building that had burned during the flood. Hell and high water. The mall and commercial developments on the south side had destroyed downtown long before the water. The looters had finished the job, giving the coup de grâce. Glass shards from storefronts scattered the streets amid abandoned vehicles. Delivery trucks were peeled open like sardine cans spewing torn plastic and discarded packing peanuts.

I crossed through the partly constructed flood wall near the DeMers Bridge and the proposed “river walk.” It had worked for San Antonio, so it must work here, according to civic leaders. I scrambled down the gentle bank, cautious of my braced knee and wary of the shadows under the bridge. I found a cottonwood and sat beneath it to rest.

In the shade near the river, I admitted that I wasn't likely to ever finish my dissertation at this point. Who cared about the impact of radon on health now? Lung cancer versus Alzheimer's? You would have to live long enough for it to matter anyway. Did radon even decay anymore?

I returned at dusk with the unopened packet of letters stuffed in my shirt.

*   *   *

J
UNE
19
B
ANKS OF THE
R
ED
R
IVER

The next two days I followed the same routine. I snuck out of Witmer, spied on the growing community gardens, and took a route through the backstreets to my place by the river. As I sat beneath my tree wondering how long it would be before I could abandon this fool's errand, but enjoying the solitude, I heard the splash of oars. Two canoes came plodding along the muddy waters from the south. They saw me on the bank and one canoe turned toward me with paddles dipping strongly into the river.

The strangers were dressed in leather and furs like French voyageurs or Lewis and Clark scouts. Probably members of a black powder reenactment club. Tomahawks were tucked into beaded belts, but they had aluminum Coleman canoes and hunting crossbows with razor tips on their gear. The canoe crunched into the dirt on the shore and the lead voyageur, a bearded man with a paunch under his fringed buckskins, stood cautiously and pulled off his sunglasses.

“I'm Tapio Hakula,” the bearded man said with a big smile. “We represent the Fargo community. We're contacting folks to join with us. Working together is better than being left on your own, wouldn't you agree? So who is left in charge up here?”

“Anything from Bismarck?” I asked, standing. I wiped damp dirt from my behind and kept my hands away from my weapons. “Minneapolis?”

Tapio looked to the south and then at the other canoe, which had turned to hold position in the slow river. “Those're overland, so that'll be a few days before we hear from the cyclists.”

“I'm from the university,” I said. “We need an important message delivered to someone at NDSU.”

“Who?”

“Anyone in physics, engineering, or chemistry, I suppose. We've got a theory about the Change and observations to support it.”

I held out the manila envelope stuffed with a dozen letters. “We need to spread the information.”

“You don't look like a professor,” he said.

“You don't look like a politician,” I said. “Why are you dressed like that?”

Tapio looked at his leather outfit and spread his arms in a welcoming manner. He laughed.

“It gets people talking before fighting.”

“Will you take the letters?” I asked.

“Fair enough. We won't be headed back for a while. We're going up to Pembina before turning around.”

He gripped the envelope as I let go.

“Your responsibility now.” I just hoped they wouldn't use all the copies to wipe their ass along the way.

*   *   *

A
UGUST
3
W
ITMER
F
ORTRESS

“Everything we worked for can't just go away. Science can't turn into something called magic for our grandchildren.”

Kirk's fingers were blue from the mimeograph ink.

“We'll never have grandchildren or even regular children at the rate we're going.”

I flipped through a
Penthouse
magazine and then tossed it onto the couch we had pulled up the stairs.

“I need some air.” Kirk didn't like having the windows open in the bandit lair, because the breeze would blow his papers all over the place. “Could you check the chickens?”

I climbed to the roof. I caught Kirk with a stethoscope checking the heartbeat and breathing rates of the chickens once, but only for estimating the pressure flow and how it matched his demon theory. Other than collecting eggs, he left it to me to play Igor to his scientist. I approached the fine metal mesh, meant for a high frequency Faraday cage, and the enclosed birds.

The flock stared with evil beady eyes to see if I had brought food. Oatmeal, to my surprise, was their favorite. They scattered when I had empty hands, except for one dark brown hen. The dark brown hen had peck marks on her neck and broken feathers. She still wasn't laying while the other chickens were. The rest of the brood would eventually kill her if I left her in there. I did feel hungry, and not for more eggs or aging potted meat product. Hatching a plan, I opened the coop and grabbed the pathetic hen. Kirk wouldn't approve, but I did it anyway.

*   *   *

A
UGUST
3
C
OMMUNITY
G
ARDENS

I began to doubt the wisdom of my gut as I drew near the guarded entrance to the community gardens. I had seen outsiders approach the gate when I spied on them before, so I assumed it wasn't by invitation only. There were two guards on either side of the makeshift entrance, just like you'd expect for a castle from the movies. When I saw the corpse with an arrow with green plastic fins protruding from its chest on a concrete slab, I nearly turned away with my cardboard box. A burlap sack covered the dead man's head and sprinkles of white powder had been thrown over the body. Lye or carpet deodorant?

A cardboard sign hung from the corpse's neck.
PETER RABBIT
.

“Hey, Gunderson, what are you doing here?” one of the guards called out to me.

The big black guy was named Pennington and had been a trainer in the sports department. He held a baseball bat and wore the green and white Fighting Sioux tracksuit.

“Hardly recognized you with the beard.”

I tore my attention away from the corpse. “I need a salad.”

“I hear ya,” Pennington said. He waved me through. “I could kill for a real, honest-to-god cheeseburger.”

“I heard some whacko let the beefalo out of the pens west of town.”

The other guard, a shorter, squatter white guy, leaned on a long pole tipped with a pruning hook. Must have been a hockey player judging from the missing teeth and mullet, but I couldn't recognize him without a jersey.

“To establish great herds on the prairie again.”

I stepped into their compound. A dozen people tended the fields beyond, once gridded into family plots, now a single large farm in the nearly abandoned city. A mountain ash shaded a small lean-to of plastic tarp, sandbags, and two-by-fours.

“If any buffalo get in my gardens, they'll get an arrow through their heart,” came an older woman's voice from the shelter.

Patsy Helmsrud, one of the administrative staff responsible for students with athletic scholarships, ducked out of the lean-to. I remembered her because she presented a bag of zucchinis to me when I'd first in-processed nine years ago this autumn.

She wore a Harley-Davidson leather motorcycle jacket, tight on her barrel frame, and carried a red compound bow with confident ease. Stickers for Forx Archery and Red River Bow League were plastered on the flat steel limbs holding the cams and four arrows with florescent green fletching hung from the mounted quiver. Patsy had a square, no-nonsense look about her, dark hair chopped short that would be butch on anyone younger and touched with gray. A judgmental middle-aged aunt or opinionated shirttail in-law.

“Then we'll eat good again, eh?” the hockey player said.

Patsy gauged me slowly. “I know you. You came through my Twamley office a few years ago. Football scholarship?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Did you drop from university?” Patsy tilted her head in disapproval, which tucked her chin into the folds of her neck.

“Messed up my knee. Got my engineering degree instead of playing. Now I'm in grad school. Well, I was.”

“Well, good for you. You seem to be keeping well.” She assessed me like I was a show animal at the state fair.

“Doing okay, I guess.”

“Now, what do you want from our growers' cooperative and do you have money?”

“Dollars?” I asked.

“Gold or silver,” Patsy said with a sneer. Pennington and the hockey player snickered.

“Better,” I said, and opened the cardboard box. The brown hen poked her head up and tried to flutter out. I snatched her legs and held her splayed upside down for Patsy.

“This should be good for a sack of fresh produce.”

Patsy's lips pursed in a sour expression. “She laying?”

A nearby garden worker, a bottle blond sorority type, had stood when she heard the hen's alarmed clucking. The blonde had a pleasantly round face with high cheekbones that had taken a nice tan over the summer. She wore shorts and a loose T-shirt that exposed straps from an athletic bra over her broad volleyball player shoulders. Her nails were crusted with dirt. When she made eye contact with me, I sucked in my gut out of habit, though I'd slimmed since the Change.

To Patsy, I said, “No, but I'd bet she'd taste better than scrawny red squirrels from the park.”

The blonde smiled and distracted me.

*   *   *

A
UGUST
25, 1998
W
ITMER
F
ORTRESS

The memory of the blonde's gray eyes troubled me, as if she had asked a question I wasn't prepared for. I could only guess what she had seen, a hermit trading a chicken for a rucksack of vegetables. All I knew was that I felt dissatisfied and angry. Back at our lair, I told Kirk, “We have archaic knowledge. What use are we now?”

“Archaic? It's been six months, Jason. Some rules may have changed, but we're capable of discovering the new rules.”

Kirk dropped effortlessly into lecture mode. “How often have you imagined going back in time with the knowledge that you have now? We're opening a new field, a new era. Discovering the workings of the universe after this change. It's the new edition of science. Version 2.0.”

“Why bother? We're running low on food.” I desperately groped for any excuse. “There's no reason for me to stay here.”

“I've been reading.” Kirk's challenging tone changed to something closer to mollification. He patted the stack of old theory journals on his desk. “Maxwell's demon may violate entropy locally, but if you expand the box to include this demon, eventually he will add disorder to the system. It can't go on indefinitely.”

“So this Change will go away?” I asked.

“Yes. Eventually.”

“We'll find a fix? We're after a solution?”

“Yes, of course.”

So I believed him and continued to help. He needed me.

*   *   *

S
EPTEMBER
13
W
ITMER
F
ORTRESS AND
S
IGMA
C
HI HOUSE

“We'll need to fill the balloon before the last of the helium leaks out.”

“So late in the day?”

I'd have to hoist the heavy metal cylinders to the roof from the lab in the basement. I had already changed into jeans and a clean T-shirt.

“Yes. Launch at dusk so the balloon catches the light from the setting sun over the horizon against a dark sky. That way I can track it.”

Kirk touched the binoculars dangling from his neck. Then, as if he remembered I was standing behind him, he asked, “What else do we have to do?”

“I thought we'd go to the harvest dance that Patsy Helmsrud is throwing.”

I'd been invited by Pennington the last time I visited, trading extra eggs for chicken feed and fresh veggies.

“Free food and music. Haven't heard music in a while.”

“You go. I have to protect our lab.”

“Kirk, this is getting old.”

“Old?” Kirk asked. “The easy stuff had already been done in physics. Didn't you ever notice? What was the last big scientific breakthrough?”

“High temperature superconductors,” I said glumly.

“That's nearly ten years ago, but no paradigm shift. Now the universe changed. We can be the first to use old techniques to discover the new paradigm.”