There had been epic drought throughout the whole southern tier of America, from Arizona to Florida, and there had been horrible wildfires in the southwestern states. Triple-digit temperatures had gone all summer in south Texas. There had been horrible flooding on the Mississippi River due to the large snowmelt, from last winter’s unusually deep snows up north.
Now it was November and Gwen was actually sweating long before she reached her car, although it had been chilly this morning. She took off her jacket. At least the car had air-conditioning, and she was turning it on, even if it was technically almost winter. Idly, she wondered how people had lived in this heat before air-conditioning was invented. It couldn’t have been an easy life, especially since most Texans of the early twentieth century had worked on the land. Imagine, having to herd and brand cattle in this sort of heat, much less plow and plant!
Gwen got into her car and drove by the crime lab to see if Alice had found anything on that digital camera. In fact, she had. There were a lot of photos of people who were probably friends—Gwen could use face recognition software to identify them, hopefully—and there was one odd-looking man standing a little distance behind a couple who was smiling into the camera against the background of the apartment complex where the victim had lived. That was interesting and suspicious. She’d have to check that man out. He didn’t look as if he belonged in such a setting. It was a mid-range apartment complex, and the man was dingy and ill kempt and staring a little too intently. She drove back to her precinct.
Her mind was still on Marquez, on what she knew, and he didn’t. She hoped he wasn’t going to have too hard a time with his true history, when the truth came out.
Barbara glared at her son. “Can’t you just peel the tomato, sweetie, without taking out most of it except the core?”
He grimaced. “Sorry,” he said, wielding the paring knife with more care as he went to work on what looked like a bushel of tomatoes, a gift from an organic gardener with a hothouse, that his mother was canning in her kitchen at home. Canning jars simmered in a huge tub of water, getting ready to be filled with fragrant tomato slices and then processed in the big pressure cooker. He glared at it.
“I hate those things,” he muttered. “Even the safest ones are dangerous.”
“Baloney,” she said inelegantly. “Give me those.”
She took the bowl of tomatoes and dunked them into a pot of boiling water. She left them there for a couple of minutes and fished them out in a colander. She put them in the sink in front of Rick. “There. Now they’ll skin. I keep telling you this is a more efficient way than trying to cut the skins off. But you don’t listen, my dear.”
“I like skinning them,” he said with a dark-eyed smile in her direction. “It’s an outlet for my frustrations.”
“Oh?” She didn’t look at him, deliberately. “What sort of frustrations?”
“There’s this new woman at work,” he said grimly.
“Gwen.” She nodded.
He dropped the knife, picked it back up and stared at her.
“You talk about her all the time.”
“I do?” It was news to him. He didn’t realize that.
She nodded as she skinned tomatoes. “She trips over things that she doesn’t see, she messes up crime scenes, she spills coffee, she can’t find her cell phone …” She glanced at him. He was still standing there, with the knife poised over a tomato. “Get busy, there, those tomatoes won’t peel themselves.”
He groaned.
“Just think how nice they’ll taste in one of my beef stew recipes,” she coaxed. “Go on, peel.”
“Why can’t we just get one of those things that sucks the air out of bags and freeze them instead?”
“What if we have a major power outage that lasts for days and days?” she returned.
He thought for a minute. “I’ll go buy twenty bags of ice and several of those foam coolers.”
She laughed. “Yes, but we can’t tell how the power grid is going to cope if we have one of those massive CMEs like the Carrington Event in 1859.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“There was a massive coronal mass ejection in 1859 called the Carrington Event,” she explained. “When it hit earth, all the electrics on the planet went crazy. Telegraph lines burned up and telegraph units caught fire.” She glanced at him. “There wasn’t much electricity back in those days—it was in its infancy. But imagine if such a thing happened today, with our dependence on electricity. Everything is connected to the grid these days, banks, communications corporations, pharmacies, government, military and the list goes on and on. Even our water and power are controlled by computers. Just imagine if we had no way to access our computers.”
He whistled. “I was in the grocery store one day when the computers went offline. They couldn’t process credit cards. Most people had to leave. I had enough cash for bread and milk. Then another time the computers in the pharmacy went down, when you had to have those antibiotics for the sinus infection last winter. I had to come home and get the checkbook and go back. People without credit cards had real problems.”
“See?” She went back to her tomatoes.
“I suppose it would be a pretty bad thing. Is it going to happen, you think?”
“Someday, certainly. The sun has eleven year cycles, you know, with a solar minimum and a solar maximum. The next solar maximum, some scientists say, is in 2012. If we’re going to get hit, that would have my vote for the timeline.”
“Twenty-twelve,” he groaned, rolling his eyes. “We had this guy come in the office and tell us we needed to put out a flyer.”
“What about?”
“The fact that the world is ending in 2012 and we have to have tin-foil hats to protect us from electromagnetic pulses.”
“Ah. EMPs,” she said knowledgeably. “Actually, I think you’d have to be in a modified and greatly enlarged version of a Leiden jar to be fully protected. So would any computer equipment you wanted to save.” She glanced at him. “They’re developing weapons like that, you know,” she added. “All it would take is one nicely placed EMP and our military computers would go down like tenpins.”
He put down the knife. “Where do you learn all this stuff?” he asked, exasperated.
“On the internet.” She pulled an iPod out of her pocket and showed it to him. “I have Wi-Fi in the house, you know. I just connect to all the appropriate websites.” She checked her bookmarks. “I have one for space weather, three radars for terrestrial weather and about ten covert sites that tell you all the stuff the government won’t tell you …”
“My mother, the conspiracy theorist,” he moaned.
“You won’t hear this stuff on the national news,” she said smartly. “The mainstream media is controlled by three major corporations. They decide what you’ll get to hear. And mostly it’s what entertainer got drunk, what television show is getting the ratings and what politician is patting himself on the back or running for reelection. In my day—” she warmed to
