The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,177

the others. We’ve got irregular charge on one and four. Twenty-eight this morning across the board, never over fifty-five by First Bell.”

Elton nodded. “So, brownouts within the next six months, total failure within thirty. More or less like your father figured.”

“He knew?”

“Your old man could read those batteries like a book, Michael. He could see this coming a long time ago.”

So there it was. His father had known, and probably his mother too. A familiar panic rose within him. He didn’t want to think about this, he didn’t.

“Michael?”

He took a deep breath to calm himself. One more secret for him to carry. But he would do what he always did, pushing the information down inside himself as far as it could go.

“So,” said Michael, “how exactly do you build a radio?”

Radio wasn’t the problem, Elton explained; it was the mountain that was the problem.

The original beacon had run off an antenna that stood at the peak of the mountain; an insulated cable, five kilometers long, had run the length of the power trunk to connect it to the transmitter in the Lighthouse. All taken down and destroyed by the One Law. Without the antenna, they were hopelessly blocked to the east, and any signal they might have picked up would be overwhelmed by electromagnetic interference from the battery stack.

That left two choices: go to the Household and ask for permission to run an antenna up the mountain; or say nothing and try to boost the signal somehow.

It was, in the end, no contest. Michael couldn’t ask for permission without explaining the reason, which meant telling the Household about the batteries; and to tell them about the batteries was simply out of the question, because then everyone would know, and once that happened, the rest wouldn’t matter. It wasn’t just the batteries that Michael was in charge of; it was the glue of hope that held the place together. You couldn’t just tell people they had no chance. The only thing to do was find somebody still alive out there—find them with a radio, which would mean they had power and therefore light—before he said another word to anyone. And if he found nothing, if the world really was empty, then what would happen would happen anyway; it was better if nobody knew.

He got to work that morning. In the shed, piled among the old CRTs and CPUs and plasmas and bins of cell phones and Blu-rays, was an old stereo receiver—just AM and FM bands, but he could open that up—and an oscilloscope. A copper wire up the chimney served as their antenna; Michael refitted the guts of the receiver into a plain CPU chassis, to camouflage it—the only person who might have noticed an extra CPU sitting on the counter would be Gabe, and from what Sara had told him, the poor guy wasn’t ever coming back—and jacked the receiver into the panel, using the audio port. The battery control system had a simple media program, and with a little work he was able to configure the equalizer to filter out the battery noise. They wouldn’t be able to broadcast; he had no transmitter and would have to figure out how to build one from the bottom up. But for the time being, with a little patience, he’d be able to scoop out any decent signal from the west.

They found nothing.

Oh, there was plenty to hear out there. A surprising range of activity, from ULF to microwaves. The odd cell phone tower powered by a working solar panel. Geothermals still pushing juice back into the grid. Even a couple of satellites, still in their orbits, dutifully transmitting their cosmic hellos and probably wondering where everybody on planet Earth had run off to.

A whole hidden world of electronic noise. And nobody, not one single person, home.

Day by day, Elton would sit at the radio, the headphones clamped to his ears, his sightless eyes turned upward in their sockets. Michael would isolate a signal, clear out the noise, and send it to the amplifier, where it would be filtered a second time and pushed through the phones. After a moment of intense concentration, Elton would nod, maybe take a moment to give his crumby beard a thoughtful rub, and then proclaim, in his gentle voice:

“Something faint, irregular. Maybe an old distress beacon.”

Or: “A ground signal. A mine, maybe.”

Or, with a tight shake of the head: “Nothing here. Let’s move on.”

So they sat through the days and nights, Michael at the CRT,