At this hour, Ken Redmond’s office was a quiet place to get a little privacy. Although Engineering was a department that ran 24/7, most of the routine work was done during normal daytime hours. That meant the evening staff was fairly small and he wasn’t apt to be interrupted.
Right now he was looking over the latest data from the SOLARIS solar observatory satellite system. The solar astronomers were still in disagreement right now on what exactly the data represented, but all of them concurred that space weather would be unsettled and quite possibly dangerous for the next several days.
It was bringing back memories he hadn’t thought about in years, of being in first grade and riding home on the bus, listening to some of the older kids talking about the strange heavy feel to the air, how they were certain a bad storm was brewing. He’d gone home and turned on the TV to watch his usual after-school shows, and hadn’t thought anything about it until the power went out.
Only later had he discovered that over a hundred tornadoes had swept through the Midwest. His own home town of French Lick had been lucky, but there had been a period that day when the entire state of Indiana was under a tornado warning because the weather forecasters simply couldn’t keep up with all the incoming reports. In the weeks and months that followed, he’d read a lot of accounts of what came to be called the Super Outbreak.
It had been another time, frightening mostly because it was the first time he became truly aware of what a big and potentially dangerous world he lived in. Only a few months the Watergate scandal had been the first political event to impinge upon his awareness.
And wasn’t that about the same time as everyone was so concerned about the Swine Flu, or was that a few years later?
It was odd, how time and memory could play tricks with the mind. Sometimes all of that seemed like another lifetime ago, and at other times he could remember a day, an event as if it had happened just yesterday. The bus making its way down that long, lonely country road, up and down the limestone hills of Southern Indiana, the windows opened to let in a bit of breeze to relieve the hot, muggy atmosphere electric with tension.
But then he’d been just a little kid whose biggest worry was being one of the smallest kids in his class, and how he kept getting picked on by the bigger kids. Now he had the responsibilities of being a father, a grandfather, and of holding one of the senior leadership positions of this settlement.
And right now there’s not a lot we can do about our situation except keep our heads down and hang on.
Which was why he hadn’t wanted to talk more than he had to about the situation with Brenda while they were in the gym. The current situation was precarious enough without people worrying about further solar storms, possibly requiring intermittent shutdowns of surface activity over the next week or more.
At least he knew he could discuss the matter with her in private and be confident she wouldn’t go spreading a confused version of it all over the settlement. She would never have stayed a DJ with Shepardsport Pirate Radio if she couldn’t be relied upon to handle such information responsibly.