The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid (2 page)

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Authors: Scott B. Williams

BOOK: The Pulse: A Novel of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid
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“This is pretty weird,” Larry said. “The GPS says it’s still searching for satellites. It usually locks on in less than thirty seconds even when it’s first powered up. Still nothing on the XM either.” Larry opened the companionway hatch and turned up the volume on the VHF marine communications radio. It had been on all along, but they had kept the volume down once they were far from land and away from most boat traffic. When he turned it back up, nothing could be heard but static on Channel 16. Larry hit the scan button and found only static throughout the band.
“Nothing on the VHF either, huh?” Artie asked.
“No,
nada
. All the electronics are still working, just not picking up a signal. If it
had
been lightning, it would have fried everything. Of course, lightning striking the boat would mean we were in a big storm and that would have been obvious. Heat lightning couldn’t do this.”
“I’m telling you, it wasn’t heat lighting that I saw. I’ve seen heat lighting before; not at sea, but I’ve seen it. This was like the Northern Lights or something. It was really kind of spectacular. Really beautiful, if I hadn’t been so shocked when it happened. I wish you could have seen it.”
“Maybe it
was
something like the Northern Lights. Maybe some kind of atmospheric disturbance that’s temporarily interrupted radio signals. Strange that it would affect satellite signals too. It must have been really strong,” Larry said.
“It was strong, all right, and it
was
in the north. I can’t imagine that you’d see the real Northern Lights way down here though. You can’t even see them from most parts of the United States except in unusual conditions.”
“Maybe you could if it was some kind of unusual phenomenon,” Larry said. “I’ve read somewhere that solar storms can sometimes send a disruptive pulse through our atmosphere. I hope it’s just temporary, like the interruption of radio and TV signals you sometimes get during a strong electrical storm.”
“How are we going to navigate without the GPS if it doesn’t come back on?”
Larry laughed. “We’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way—with the compass,” he said as he pointed to the big Danforth steering compass mounted on top of the wheel pedestal. “Or the stars.” He nodded to Polaris, still hanging low over the horizon in the general direction they were sailing. “At least we can get the coordinates of the last position the GPS fixed on before the signal went out. Keep her on course; I’ll go down and get the paper chart and my logbook. We’d better plot a DR course and start keeping track of things right away.”
“DR course?”
“Dead reckoning. It’s another big part of the old way of navigation. Basically involves knowing your approximate ‘speed made good’—that is, the actual speed over ground, taking into account adverse or favorable currents—and the distance to your destination, then calculating how long it will take to get there assuming the same speed is maintained. Of course there are other factors, like sideways set from currents and such, but on a short passage like this it’s relatively easy to get accurate enough.”
“You call this a short passage?” Artie asked, at the same time noticing that for the first time on the trip he didn’t feel seasick anymore. Maybe it was the excitement of all that had happened that had taken his mind off it. “What do you call a long passage?”
“Sure it’s short: 350 miles?Three days and three nights, tops. Like I told you before, a long passage is a whole ocean. Like the run I did from Cape Town to Barbados last fall.”
“You can have that! This is long enough for me. Seeing those lights almost made it worth it, though. I wish you could have seen them yourself. Dammit, come to think of it, I wish I had thought to get a photo! I had my phone in my pocket. Casey would have loved to see that. I just didn’t think about it, it happened so fast.”
“Maybe she saw it from there,” Larry said.
That thought had not occurred to Artie, but of course, if it were some big event like a solar flare, it probably would have been visible all over North America as well. After all, it was in that direction. “Well, I wish she could have seen it, because it was so unusual, but the dad part of me hopes she didn’t, because it happened at about two a.m., her time, and I hope she was in her room sound asleep.”
“But you know she was just as likely to be out partying,” Larry said.
“Nah, I know she does a little, but not on a weeknight. You know she’s pretty serious about school.”
“Not like I was, huh, Doc?”
“I guess you went to a different kind of school. I still don’t see how you learned so much about boats, considering we grew up in Oklahoma. It’s like you were born with it or something.”
“I feel like I should’ve been. Guess I’m a lot like Buffett, just a pirate lookin’ at forty; born about two hundred years too late. But seriously, you know I’ve been out here sailing all these years while you’ve been doin’ the doctor thing. You learn a little out here, bit by bit. If you don’t, you won’t last long, because Mother Ocean doesn’t care who you are.”
Artie envied his carefree younger brother in a way, but he couldn’t imagine living Larry’s life. Initially, he had thought Larry would tire of it too and settle down into a regular job, but now, after spending just a few days with him in his element, Artie doubted it. Larry had a knack for always landing on his feet no matter how bad things got, and now, in his late thirties, he was apparently doing fine, with his skills as a delivery skipper keeping him in demand and taking him to some of the most exotic places in the world.
Artie preferred the security of a regular routine and a steady paycheck, and besides, he had Casey to think about, not just himself. In the beginning, a lot of it was about the money. After graduating from medical school and completing his specialty in ophthalmology, he was on the fast track to making the big bucks in private practice during the early years of his marriage to Dianne. But when Casey was just twelve, their family was torn asunder in one evening by someone else’s impatience on a rainy interstate highway. Artie lost his wife and Casey lost her mother, and suddenly making a lot of money didn’t matter near as much. He traded the long days of one surgery after another for a low-stress staff position at a V.A. hospital, where he could keep reasonable hours, have the weekends off, and spend as much time as possible filling the roles of both father and mother to his only daughter. Despite the challenges, he thought he had done pretty well as a single parent, and now that Casey was away at college, he felt the time had passed much too quickly and he often wished for the days when she was still living at home.
He kept checking the GPS and trying the XM receiver as Larry steered the boat by hand. “Still nothing,” he said. “How long do you think this interference could last?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it, Doc. I hope not much longer, but who knows? I’ve been on boats that were hit by lightning. Sometimes it takes out everything electrical on board, and other times it might just be the radio or nothing at all. Seems like every strike is different. People try all kinds of tricks for preventing strikes—dissipaters on the masthead, grounding everything on board to the keel—but I have my doubts about how effective any of it is, since lighting behaves in such strange ways and is so unpredictable.”
“But this
wasn’t
lightning,” Artie reminded him again, as if he suspected his brother doubted what he saw.
“I know that, Artie. Definitely not lightning. I would have heard the strike if it had been that close. I’m just talking about how power surges affect electronics or do not affect them, depending on unknown variables. And this was obviously a power surge. And if it took out our satellite radio and GPS signals, it had to be powerful. I’ll bet they have no signal on the islands, probably not even on the mainland.”
“Well, if that’s the case, at least it doesn’t matter to most of those people. Most people ashore aren’t listening to the radio anyway, at this hour, and GPS isn’t necessary on land.”
“You’d think it was, from what I saw last time I was in Florida,” Larry said. “It looked as if every car on the Interstate had one glowing on the dash just to find the next exit—pretty pathetic if you ask me. Do they not even teach kids to read maps anymore these days?”
“Maybe not, but Casey can find her way around. She didn’t want the confusion of something else to distract her when she was learning to drive, and she still doesn’t want one. I just hope this weird interference didn’t interrupt her cell phone service, or her Internet access. Now
that
would be a disaster of epic proportions in her world!”
Larry laughed. “Yeah, you should have seen their faces that first night she and Jessica were anchored with me at one of the out islands last summer and they found out they couldn’t text their friends back home! It was like I had just told them the boat was sinking or something. I think it was the worst thing either of them could have imagined happening!”
“Yeah, but Casey talked about that trip for weeks, Larry. Man, you just don’t know how much good it did her.”
Casey’s raving about what a great time she and her roommate had had spending a week of summer vacation sailing with Larry was in fact the main reason Artie was here now. She had gone on and on about the clear water of the Virgin Islands and how much fun sailing was, but Artie now knew that Casey and Jessica’s trip had been much different than this delivery passage he was on now. Larry had taken them on leisurely day sails among closely spaced islands where they had stopped to eat seafood and sip tropical drinks at beachfront cafés, anchoring every night in protected waters where the boat hardly rocked. It was a universe away from the hellish two days and nights Artie had already spent at sea, when the boat was like a mad carnival ride that never stopped moving, and there was nothing to look at but endless waves as far as he could see. He didn’t think Casey or Jessica would have liked such a voyage either, but then again, you never knew. Larry seemed more content out here than anywhere Artie had ever been with him. When they had started the passage, his brother was nervous and stressed as he went through checklists and inspected the boat one last time. The stress stayed with him as they motored out of the anchorage and finally got the sails hoisted and set, but with each mile they put out to sea, Larry’s smile got bigger until he seemed as if he didn’t have a care in the world and the land astern slipped beneath the horizon. This was his world out here, and the place he felt at home. For Artie, the passage was just an ordeal he had no choice but to endure once he was committed to it.
But now he was free of the awful seasickness for the first time since they’d left the anchorage. He didn’t know why it had suddenly gone away, but Larry had said he’d seen people instantly cured of seasickness before when there was some sudden crisis such as a storm that demanded action and somehow snapped the body out of the throes of nausea. Artie figured it was the shock of seeing the incredible lights as well as the “boat crisis” that had occurred when the autopilot went haywire. Now that he didn’t feel like he had to throw up all the time, he was hungry, and he reached inside the companionway for a bag of pretzels and pulled a soda out of the built-in ice box under one of the seats.
Larry stayed at the helm as the sky gradually lightened in the east, and soon a new day was breaking, the early light casting a slate-gray sheen on the rolling waves the schooner slashed through on her course to the north. When the sun climbed above the horizon and began to burn away the chill and dampness of the night, Artie felt better than he had on the entire voyage, and offered to spell his brother at the helm so Larry could go below and brew a pot of coffee in the galley.
When Larry returned with two cups in hand, the sun was already hot, the start of another tropical day that would soon have them both crowded into the scant shade of the small Bimini top that covered the cockpit.
“Still nothing,” Larry said as he pushed buttons on the GPS unit that was still displaying a flashing SEARCHING FOR SATELLITES message. Larry sat back in the cockpit and made another entry in his logbook, checking the compass as he did so.
“Do you know where we are?”
“Close enough. We’ll reach St. Thomas in time to enter the anchorage about this time tomorrow morning. We should get a visual by the glow from all the lights there early tonight. At night you can see the more populated islands from a long way out at sea.”
“What if this power surge, or whatever it was, caused their electricity to go out?” Artie asked.
Larry chuckled at the thought. “Not likely. That would take one hell of a powerful event—though it doesn’t take much for the lights to go out anyway on those islands. But this wouldn’t have anything to do with that, I wouldn’t think. My best guess is that it was just some kind of space interference or solar flare-up or something that messed up the satellites. Although I’m surprised it would affect local VHF radio reception, unless it somehow disrupted the big transmitter stations on the islands. We don’t know if we can talk to other vessels or not, since we haven’t seen any. But there’s usually some boat-to-boat chatter going on even this far out, and I should be able to get the NOAA weather radio channel in St. Thomas, so that’s kinda weird.”
“I just wish I could call Casey and ask her what’s going on up there in the Big Easy. I guess she’s getting dressed for class by now,” Artie said as he looked at his watch.

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