She smiled and offered him a chair by the woodstove that they had installed, which was giving off a cheery warmth. “Just got the little ones down at the same time for once,” she announced, and without asking, she scooped a ladle of soup from a kettle on the fire, dipped it into a bowl, and offered it to John, who politely took it. Old Southern customs of greeting a guest with food still held, even now. The soup was watery thin; there was a hint of some kind of meat in it, wild onions, and he wasn’t really sure what else.
They chatted for a few minutes about the babies, who were thriving, John remembering to pull from his jacket the canned peaches, which she clutched with gratitude. Finished with the soup, he asked about “the guys,” and laughing, she pointed to the staircase to the basement.
“Those computers and all the other stuff have nearly turned me into a widow. Do me a favor and order Ernie to get the heck out of here at day’s end and for Paul to remember he has a wife.”
“Will do,” John replied with a smile, and he headed for the basement, which had been renamed “the Wizard’s Workshop.” A joke that few caught was that long ago it was the name for Tom Edison’s lab in Menlo Park, where he developed the incandescent lightbulb and helped trigger the electrical revolution of the nineteenth century that they were struggling to restore.
As John opened the basement door, he was surprised by the profligate use of electricity. The room was now brightly lit with fluorescent lights. He had always hated that type of illumination, but it used less juice than a standard incandescent bulb. A woodstove had been rigged into the basement, so it was no longer a damp, bone-chilling room, and, indeed a wonder, a dehumidifier was humming away. The stench of mold had at least abated somewhat as a result.
Six-foot stacks of magazines still cluttered most of the room, but a work area had been cleared in the far quarter, additional workbenches dragged over from classrooms and offices around the campus. Piled up around the benches were several dozen old computers—half a dozen more Apple IIes, early PCs, Commodore 64s, old Gateways, Dells, and half a dozen other models. Ernie, with Paul by his side, was hunched over a green computer board, and as John came up behind them, Ernie grunted out a curse and tossed the board to one side.
“Cooked, damn it. I would have liked to have had that one.”
“How’s it going?” John asked the two, obviously so intent on their work they had not heard him approach.
“Good and bad,” Ernie grumbled without bothering to look back at John as he picked up another board from a pile on the table and started to examine it.
“We’ve got half a dozen machines cobbled together,” Paul offered in a far cheerier voice.
He pointed to the restored computers off to one side, and John went over to examine them. Three were Apples, one of them an early Mac with its ridiculously small blue-screen monitor, beside them a couple of 1980s PCs and a Commodore 64. The 64 was turned on, the old television it was hooked to flickering, a popular fantasy adventure game of the ’80s running, little stick figures being chased by a stick-figure dragon.
While in college, John remembered, he had splurged on buying an Atari 2600 game machine, he and his friends consuming endless beers while driving two tanks around an obstacle field and shooting at each other. It had triggered the first fight with Mary, who became fed up that he was spending more time on “that damn game” than with her.
He hated to disturb the two at what was obviously an obsessive task, but he felt he had to. Paul had been absent from the factory ever since the discovery of a functional computer. It was at least keeping Ernie busy and out of his hair, but still, Ernie’s skills could perhaps be better devoted to working with the ham radio operators or helping as well with the production of generators and alternators to provide power to their ever-expanding State of Carolina.
Ernie and Paul were both hunched over a computer board, wearing magnifying glasses, absorbed with testing the board, quietly arguing whether it was fried or just one chip was bad.
“Mind if I interrupt?” John finally asked.
“In a minute,” Ernie replied without looking up, overriding Paul’s objections as he pried a chip off the board, fished a replacement out of a plastic tray, and snapped it in.
“There!” Ernie announced, pointing to a volt meter that surged to life once the chip was replaced. “It’s good to go. We can use it!”
John sighed. “I hate to do this, but can I ask what we can use that board for?”
The two looked up at him as if he was a peasant rudely interrupting a royal banquet.
“If we can just get some computers back online, it’s a huge step,” Ernie announced, still wearing his magnifying glasses, which gave him something of a crazed look when you were staring straight at him.
“For what purposes that we can use right now?” John asked, regretting that his query did sound somewhat blunt.
“All right, John, we’d better settle this priority right now,” Ernie replied sharply.
“I’m just asking where this can lead us, that’s all,” John said defensively. “You two are a couple of our most valuable resources. I just want to make sure we’re spending those resources wisely.”
“You suggesting I go out on woodcutting detail instead?” Ernie snapped.
“No, damn it.”
Paul stepped between the two and put his hands up in a soothing gesture. “John’s right, Ernie. We’re spending a lot of time on these old machines; there has to be a profit in it, and he has a right to know what we’re thinking about regarding all of this.”
“All right, then,” Ernie retorted. “God knows how many times when I was with IBM or contracted to NASA I’d be working on something and some damn project manager would come along, question its worth, and shelve it. IBM could have been years ahead of Apple and the whole PC revolution if people like me had been listened to.”
“Let me take this,” Paul said softly, sensing that Ernie was heating up.
“Fine,” Ernie snapped, “but if our supreme leader is here to tell us to shut this down, I’ll just hole up at home and keep at it myself. My family and I survived through the first year without the interference of others, and, John, you were damn glad to have us blocking the left flank on the day we fought the Posse.”
“Why don’t you three arguing fools come upstairs for some tea and talk it out up here?”
They looked back to where Becka stood at the base of the stairs, holding a teapot up as a peace offering.