Read The Diary of Professor Gilbert Rasher Page 16

progress. I chipped in and helped for an hour but was eager to get the radio working.

  Normally, there would have been a foot of snow on the ground already. I showed them what worm egg capsules looked like. I thought we might start a worm farm in the greenhouse. The greenhouse was still intact and had some weeds growing in it and to my surprise one soybean plant. The soil was thick with lots of saphrophylic fungi. That's worm food. We planted the worm egg capsules and noticed that there already were a few worms in the soil. Only one automatic waterer was working in the corner that had the healthy soybean plant.

  2.27.2130:

  This last week has been very busy. I fixed all the automatic waterers in the greenhouse. The Lee family cleaned up the greenhouse and loved being in there. The warm sunlight had hardly any UV component owing to the coating that Max developed. I gave the Lee family a tablet computer with loads of information on raising worm, soybeans and a host of other things if we could find the seeds. Seeds were even rarer than bullets.

  I interfaced the digital radio with the upstairs computers so the computers could scan and record any radio traffic. To my surprise, there was more radio traffic than I suspected, mostly coastal or near rivers and lakes where there were fish. I remembered seeing them use river-wide quarter-inch nets towed behind heady duty fishing boats on the Ohio River. I couldn't imagine there being more than a handful of fish left after that exercise in stupidity.

  The digital radio open a door to both fact, rumor and more often a mixture of the two. The military was building underground greenhouses next to nuclear reactors. It wasn't clear to me what they were going to do when either replacement parts for the reactors or replacement light sources were no longer available. I decided I needed to broadcast the recipe for Max Goodson's greenhouse gunk and located a radio amateur shortwave transmitter and went on the roof of the Electrical Engineering Building and had it repeat the recipe voice message continuously on the 20 meters band. I got a reply from La Jolla that got me very excited.

  La Jolla: “Please advise, where do you get Soda Ash that isn't hydrated?”

  I sent back a message: “Swimming pool supply. Is Tristan there?”

  La Jolla: “Hi Professor Rasher, I recognize your voice. This is Tristan and Isolde. We are okay but the world around us has gone to hell. We are a colony of 70 survivors from Scripts and a few other places. We have been attacked several times and food and supplies were the target. So far, only one casualty on our side resulting from the attacks. The number of people and weapons on their side are growing.”

  “What are your people eating?”

  La Jolla: “We have four sailboats we use for fishing. We had six and have lost two in storms. The catches have been minuscule so we have little we can dry in salt for reserve. We have an underground greenhouse but need more lamps. If we had freedom of movement, there is so much we could do. We could forage for materials but now there are just too many bandits.”

  “I hope you can get the materials for an external greenhouse including the materials to make the coating. It works!”

  La Jolla: “We'll try.”

  No other location answered my message. I repeated the message on the 10, 40 and 80 meters shortwave bands without success. Many messages I heard were calls for help from people under attack. I could do nothing but feel helpless. In one case, the call for help was near a military base still transmitting messages on occasion. I was going to contact them on their military frequency until I realized they were the attacker. I was a cold reminder of my police experience where the protector becomes that from which you need protection.

  I decided to listen for news and contact La Jolla only when I had an idea that I thought might help them. I broke that off too when it was clear those surrounding them were also eavesdropping on our conversations. If I had something urgent to tell them, I would encrypt it using a book code with the Android Repair Manual as the book.

  1.20.2131:

  It been almost a year that the Lee family has been here and they have had many close calls with death. I had located one 9mm bullet and when two bandits armed with knives took their worms and demanded to get into the greenhouse one grabbed Gilbert Lee's son and put a knife to his throat. Gilbert Lee walked up to the man with the can of worms in his right hand and the man lowered the knife to grab the can. Gilbert took his left hand and pulled the gun out of his coat and shot the man in the head. The man died instantly. Gilbert then shouted at the other man to take his partner and get out, all the while waving his gun. The other man grabbed his partner by the back of the coat and dragged him away. Gilbert then carefully picked up the worms and put them back into the can. Then he started to shake violently. His wife and son brought him back to the house.

  In the winter, storms damaged the greenhouse and we had to repair it quickly under blizzard conditions. We lost most of the crop. Additionally, there was 15 feet of snow on the ground and you can't dig for worms and you have to shovel snow off the greenhouse in the middle of the night in subzero temperatures with winds gusting at 50 miles per hour. Frequently, the greenhouse heater went out and we had to repair it before the plants froze.

  Now we had a new challenge. A twister is coming down the alley toward the greenhouse. If it hits the greenhouse, there’ll be no food and there’s no time to go in there and remove the plants that aren't ready. It's been a very tough winter so far and the Lees are already half-starved, this will finish them. While we watched from the upstairs windows, the tornado did its work and pieces of the greenhouse could be seen rising into the air then falling hundreds of feet away. We were all crying. I have never felt so helpless, so impotent as we huddled together.

  After 20 minutes in a huddle, a dim light went on in my head. I went on the roof of the building to see whether I could see houses with severely damaged roofs. I saw many with no roof at all. I flew down to the first floor and grabbed a shovel, a crowbar and a can with the shotgun slung over my shoulder and said, “I'll be back!”

  At the first house with the roof caved in, I determined it was due to the last snowstorm because the internal house was not severely water damaged. I went to the next house. It had no roof, was badly water damaged and the floor was rotting. I attacked the floorboards with the crowbar and soon the living-room floor was two-thirds ripped up. The ground was moist but not mud. I started shoveling the ground and met a bonanza of worms. I brought back over one hundred worms to the overjoyed Lees. I also brought back some termites and told them how to fry them. Gilbert Lee tried one first and said, “It’s crunchy and taste kind of nutty.”

  Brock Lee: “Do you mean like crazy?”

  Gilbert Lee: “No! Nutty like Madeira Wine, essence of nut. Try one.”

  Brock Lee: “You only live once. Hey, either I'm really hungry or nuts, here goes.” A puzzled expression crossed his face then he smiled, “Where can we get more?”

  “About one block from here there are plenty. Eat enough and recoup your strength, there's much work to do.”

  5.4.2140:

  For the last 9 years, our little family has enjoyed a near quiet life. We've rebuilt the greenhouse twice after severe storm damage, have several good sources of worms, mushrooms and termites and have leisure time to fish in the Ohio river and ride bikes in the early morning and evening. We have yet to catch a single fish but we have had nibbles.

  We spent some time conversing with La Jolla and a few other spots on the globe. The communication is unreliable probably due to the disruption of the ionosphere. For long-distance communication, radio waves must bounce off the ionosphere. If there are large holes in the ionosphere, then there is nothing to bounce off of. The WR104 gamma ray burst complicated atmosphere dynamics from the ground all the way up through the ionosphere. The disruptions may be due to solar storms as well. No telling what the gamma ray burst did to the Sun. It was once thought that such a burst could produce vast solar storms that would last centuries and if we were in the way on one of these huge mass ejections, Earth would get fried. I do see fairly b
right northern lights from Pittsburgh making me wonder what is going on with the Sun. I obtained a small telescope and projected the image on the wall. The sunspots were numerous but not without precedent. I then put it out of my mind. After all, there is nothing anyone could do if the Sun did send large mass ejections our way. Regardless of what the Sun was doing, the weather was getting colder rather than hotter. Without satellite data, there was no way to know whether the Sun is doing anything unusual.

  Some people at Vandenberg says that a renegade military group hijacked a Chinese spaceship and headed for Tillian 5. I find it difficult to believe on several counts. The Chinese were only rumored to be building a spaceship capable of such a journey. Second, they would have had to launch before the gamma ray burst hit because China was facing the burst when it happened. Finally, our military would have had to gain access to this ship somehow. Besides these considerations, we had already sent a spaceship to Tillian 5.

  Shortwave radio is full of rumors and very little real information. All I can gather is, there are small clusters of people along the coasts and major waterways. The Earth’s population has been decimated. In large cities, there has been no food for almost 12 years. The only things