“Can we talk to him?” John asked hopefully.
Linda shook her head. “We don’t have any kind of uplink here, just listening.”
“Should we get our ham operator guys to try to establish contact with them?”
“Already doing that,” Ernie replied.
“Remember one of them talked with us several days after we snatched that Black Hawk,” Maury interjected. “Then nothing. We can only run the radio in the chopper for so long before we have to fire it up to recharge.”
John looked around at the equipment scattered on the table—boxes of additional equipment, computer boards, old empty mini-frame stacks, heavy-duty backup batteries that used to be standard external equipment for most home computers so that if the power blinked off the battery kept the system running. John spared a glance into the open door of a bedroom across the hall and saw where there were yet more boxes piled up, some of them stamped Montreat College.
A couple of more students whom he had vague recollection of once being in his classes were in that room, leaning over a ubiquitous green computer board, probing at it with a voltmeter.
John caught Ernie’s eye and motioned for him to follow, not sure where to go until Ernie gestured toward a back room, a spacious affair, and within were yet more boxes, stripped-down computers, television monitors, some flat screens, others old-style heavy fourteen-and sixteen-inch monitors. There was barely room for a desk and a couple of chairs, with Ernie gesturing for John to sit down in one, while from under the desk he pulled out a bottle of brandy, opened it, and without asking poured a couple of ounces into two rather dingy-looking glasses.
John did not argue the point this time and was glad for the warmth of the drink coursing through him seconds later. Ernie also pulled out a cigar and looked to John quizzically at least for this offer. John reluctantly refused, and Ernie shrugged, bit off the end of his smoke, produced an old-fashioned friction match, and lit it up, the blue smoke curling around John.
“Something bothering you?” Ernie asked.
John wasn’t sure how to start as he sipped his drink. “For starters, I finally relented and said it was okay to recruit a couple of kids for this scheme of yours. Then I find out you all but hijacked the equipment from the college library basement and hauled it all over here without a by-your-leave. I now see five or more kids working here. Where did you get them from?”
“Paul Hawkins recommended them.”
John nodded slowly. “And what jobs did you take them from?”
“Here and there,” Ernie said with a bit of a grin.
“I would have liked to have known.”
“John, you know you are sounding a bit like a bureaucrat with that. Were we supposed to ask permission?”
“Ernie, you know how many mouths we have to feed between now and when food starts to get produced come late spring. Every hand counts.”
“And we’ve got hundreds working on making generators, retrofitting vehicles to burn alternate fuel, even some on your obsession with steam-powered tractors or some sort of mini locomotive.”
“We try to find a job everyone can do, but unless under attack, our first priority is food and more food.”
“And those tech nerds out there, how much food or whatever can they make versus what they are doing now?”
John nodded, finishing his drink and putting his hand over his glass in refusal while Ernie poured several ounces more for himself.
“Dare I quote someone we both disdain?” Ernie pressed. “‘From each according to his ability.’ You know the rest.”
“I’m not saying that, Ernie.”
“Well, in defense of what I am doing here, I’m saying it. Those kids are bloody geniuses when hunched over those old screens and damn near useless when it comes to canning beans, trapping rabbits, or toting a gun through the woods without accidentally shooting themselves or someone else. I’m maximizing their effectiveness, and their effectiveness might actually mean figuring what in hell is really going on out in the rest of the world and how it might hit us. Hell, you’re the historian; you tell me what role kids like that played in previous wars.”
John took that in and finally nodded. “You telling me you got a Bletchley Park out there in the next room?”
“Could be. Maybe one of them is the next Turing who will figure out how to crack the German Enigma code by building a machine to mimic how it works. Maybe not that dramatic, but if you are here on some kind of inspection tour and are about to order them back to whatever they were doing, I’m kicking you out of my house. The Franklin Clan will close up the gates and survive on our own again.”
“And those kids stay here!”
John looked up to see Linda standing in the doorway, most likely having listened to the entire conversation.
“You feeding them as I requested?” John asked.
“That’s right,” Linda replied with a smile.
“You have that kind of surplus?”
“Be prepared, as my husband said.”
John looked down at the freshly opened bottle of brandy stashed beneath Ernie’s desk, the cigar resting in the ashtray, and wondered how, after two and a half years, this family still seemed to have enough to keep going without ever asking for additional help. But as he had resolved back in the first days when the responsibility fell upon him to try to organize his community to survive and defend itself, when it came to those who had prepared before the Day, his policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” had to stand. He was not a commissar out to redistribute what was left or, as most likely happened in far too many places, point a finger at the 1 percent who’d had the foresight to be ready and shout for the other 99 percent to kill and loot them, just so all could fill their stomachs for a few extra days and then go back to starving.
“We’ll feed and house them,” Linda announced, pressing in on John’s musings. “That poor skinny rail Samantha was half-starved to death; most of her peers pitied her but saw her as not good for much of anything other than consuming a ration a day. Here she is back where she belongs, and the others view her as some sort of guru and definitely a leader they turn to for advice. John, in the vicious triage of the world you have to deal with—and God save you, I know what a hell it must be—that girl most likely would have died before spring and except for a few close friends been mourned by few.”
Linda’s words were a slap of reproach, and they stung. He lowered his head. “Point made, Linda. She stays.”