"c41" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burt Andrew - Noontide Night)
NOONTIDE NIGHT - Chapter 4.1
Chapter 4.1
4:15 A.M., Saturday, January 1, 2000
Manukau, New Zealand
Reports trickled to the patients, doctors and staff huddled
around battery powered radios on various floors. Tokyo was dark.
Drunken revelers morphed into looters. A suddenly-blinded
freighter rammed an oil supertanker in Hong Kong harbor. Oil
gushed, unchecked. Singapore had no water. Fires raged.
Democracy protesters gathered in the dark in Tiananmen Square
in Beijing, spurred by troubles with Hong Kong. The Chinese
government's tanks, unfortunately, worked fine.
Half an hour after Manukau had gone dark, at 7:30 a.m.
Eastern Standard Time, the New York Stock Exchange had opened.
It was mildly lower as the first reports of New Zealand's Y2K
troubles arrived. Trading was light, as usual for a Friday,
December 31st, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off a
mere, untroublesome fifty points. Everything is known in the
stock market. An hour and a half later, when Sydney, Australia,
and its huge broadcasted party flickered out, the Dow Jones
sagged another hundred. The White House issued a brief
statement saying not to worry, that the United States was entirely
ready. Investors became slightly, but not horrendously worried.
That happened sixty minutes later, at ten o'clock EST, when Tokyo
vanished from civilization. The first level of the NYSE and
NASDAQ trading "circuit breakers" kicked in as the markets
plunged 10%. The circuit breakers required the market close for an
hour. Shortly after eleven o'clock, with fresh pandemonium in
Beijing, Jakarta and Manila, the markets reopened. They instantly
fell another 10%, and were closed by the second circuit breaker at
20%. Sensing Y2K bugs were a bigger issue than previously
perceived, and being on the eve of a holiday, the markets closed
for the day.
By noon, with half a day left in 1999 and hours ticking like
seconds, New York's Mayor Giuliani ordered the police into the
streets to ensure order. Spooked New Yorkers ensured they had
their hands full. Supermarket shelves were picked bone-clean in
pushing, crushing waves. Highways jammed to a honking,
cursing, brawling standstill.
Light snow fell on a White House snowed under with reports
of pandemonium and demands for action. President Clinton
prepped for an emergency televised address, his upbeat "new era"
speech for the evening shoved aside and forgotten.
Chaos swept the globe, a sniper calmly potshotting cities like
tin cans, once an hour, plink... plink... plink.
"Stay in there, little guy," Morgan said as he tucked Jeremy's
pink, chicken-bone thin arm back into the folds of cotton blankets
that surrounded them both, skin on skin. Damn, he wished they
could find one of those chemical heating pads. He shifted his
position in the visitor's chair; he pondered that it had been chosen
for its hardness and ill-fit to the human shape to discourage long
visits. He'd been doing "incubator duty" since three a.m. The boy,
unable to regulate his own temperature and losing heat quickly,
struggled for life. He desperately needed the warmth of an
incubator. Mom, dad, and a random off-duty nurse or two whose
hands could be spared had to suffice, holding him wrapped and
close.
"Doing okay?" Desiree asked in a groggy whisper, to avoid
waking the three other women recuperating in the room. "Want
me to take him? I'm having a hard time sleeping."
"No, no, I'm fine. Try to sleep while you can. The sun'll be up
soon." In fact, his new-father's arms were cramped like hell, but
that was all part of the adventure. He gently rocked his bundle.
Matty came into the ward. She'd somehow managed to get
mostly clean. She bent close to examine Jeremy's sour face and
whispered to Morgan. "Mind if I help warm the sprog? I heard
about your deal. Nothing I can do downstairs right now and I'm
off duty 'til this evening anyway. I'd like to feel helpful."
Morgan looked at Desiree. She'd fallen asleep.
"Sure. Here." He gently handed over his precious package
then wrapped his adult-sized blanket around Matty and the baby.
"Sir Howard's made it in. He's still sorting the thingo. Even
if he do get it drained, I haven't a clue how he'll get it started.
Electric start, you know? S'posed to start it while the battery
power's still up. But that's drier than a bone on Ayer's Rock..."
Morgan listened, but with his responsibilities momentarily
relieved, and nearly twenty-four event-packed hours since he'd
slept, he began to doze.
He dreamed of a bright sunny day, distant crowds cheering
him, the reassuring hum of mom's refrigerator stocked with food,
of people bustling purposefully on and off a subway, the fresh
smell of baby, of his son growing up, playing catch, asking for help
with math homework.
When he awoke, he wasn't sure he was awake. The lights
were on. Morgan blinked. He must be dreaming. No, it must be
sunlight. He rubbed sleepers out of his eyes. No, the overhead
lights were on. And someone had wheeled in a portable incubator,
and placed Jeremy's tiny frame in it. Desiree was snoring.
The lights flickered out. Humming noises stopped. "Oh
bugger again!" a woman's voice said. A baby began crying.
Morgan looked outside the curtain that had been drawn
around Desiree's bed area. Rays of morning sun reflected
blindingly off the floor. The voice appeared to be from one of the
other women in the maternity room. "What's up?" Morgan asked
groggily. He checked his watch: almost six a.m.
"Lights keep getting cut. Come up for five minutes, then,
whammo. How'm I supposed to breastfeed?"
Morgan smiled embarrassedly, then ducked back behind the
curtain. He wondered why she couldn't do that in the dark;
perhaps she was new at this. If it were him... he suddenly realized
what subject he was musing on and shook his head. This baby
business was going to take some getting used to. Still, why would
a woman need light to— Comprehension came unbidden. People
were so rattled they no longer knew what worked, or trusted what
obviously did. But, a breast, that was— Morgan swallowed. He
had to quit thinking about these things. He scrawled a note for
Desiree—"going to check on generator"—and left it propped up on
his chair where she'd see it when she woke.
In the basement, the generator once more chugged to life.
Morgan introduced himself to Sir Howard. Sir Howard was the
kind of man who put the 'stiff' in stiff upper lip. He clearly only
allowed grease on his well-manicured hands because he
thoroughly enjoyed it.
"She keeps getting clogged. I can purge the line manually," he
said, pushing the button, "but I can't stand here and push it every
two minutes. And you have to be precise. Do it too often and it
overheats the motor. Have a new pump on order, but I won't be
holding my breath for it. Fly them in from the States. Expect
they'll be too buggered up for a while. Los Angeles is having a bit
of a rioting problem, I hear."
"If you had a computer that flushed the line every two
minutes, would that keep it going? Can you expose the wires for
that switch?"
"Like Bob's your uncle. You've a spare computer?"
Morgan considered. What better use for his laptop than saving
his son? They had enough parts in the basement from which he
could rig a switch from the computer's serial port. "I'll be back.
You keep the power up, eh? My kid's in an incubator..."
Morgan returned quickly from the parking lot with his Toshiba
laptop and gear. With Sir Howard prying the covers off the
generator's housing (and pressing the flush button every two
minutes), Morgan hastily, tiredly tapped out a PERL program.
Loop forever doing... Well, how was he going to get something to
happen every two minutes? He knew there was a function to get
number of seconds since a certain date, but couldn't remember the
name. Damn. Okay. Reinvent it: Get current time... Multiply
hours by 60, add minutes... Wait! That won't work across a
midnight boundary. Morgan knew he had a date function that
gave the number of days since a certain date, using some obscure
formula he'd copied from a textbook in school. He'd always found
that handy, and a quick hunt turned it up. He pasted that in.
sub daynum {
($m, $d, $y) = @_;
$correction = -(($y-1900)/100);
if ($m <= 2) {
$correction++ if ($y%100 == 0);
$y—;
$m += 13;
}
else {
$m++;
}
return(int(1461*$y/4) + int(153*$m/5) +
$d + $correction);
}
Okay, need everything in the same unit, so multiply number
of days by 60 and by 24 to convert days to minutes, add number of
minutes since midnight. He paused to make sure that number
wouldn't overflow the memory allocated to an integer... He ran a
quick test—for today's date it gave a number slightly over a billion;
that would fit fine. (Number of seconds would not; he hoped Sir
Howard wouldn't suddenly tell him to make this work every
minute and a half.) His testing did reveal that PERL stored the
values as "real" numbers with fractions, so he'd have to round up
to make sure he didn't have any problems with 0.9999 not being
the same as 1.0. Done. Now, back to the main algorithm.
Compare ThisTime to LastTime... If difference is 2, trigger switch
and save as LastTime. Wait—back to the top—load LastTime from
disk file in case it loses power—wouldn't want to run more than
once in two minutes. Okay. Save time to file inside 'if'. He felt
there was a simpler way to write the whole thing, but that
simplicity eluded him. A shape in the fog. Well, this was short.
It would work. He'd fix it if it didn't.
"There! Let's give it a try."
They wired the makeshift appliance controller to the switch,
Morgan seeded the last-time-ran appropriately, ran the program,
and waited...
Two minutes later, the pump whooshed on schedule.
Again in two more minutes. And again.
Morgan put up his hand for a high five. Sir Howard stared,
said "Oh, yes," then clumsily high-fived him. "Well done."
Morgan bounded up the stairs (still not entirely trusting the
lifts). Besides, he had adrenaline to burn. He swaggered into the
maternity ward, taking faux bows and employing his best Elvis
voice, "Thank you, thank you very much."
"Thank God, Morgan. Thank God you did it. Now it's okay,
we have power." Desiree was crying. She held him tight.
"What's wrong?"
"The oxygen—it comes from a plug in the wall and it didn't
work without power and they had some manual tanks but they
were almost empty and there was nothing I could do, I felt so
helpless, and—and—"
"What?"
"We almost lost him, Morgan! We almost lost Jeremy! He quit
breathing! They put him on a ventilator. If the power goes out
again, he'll... he'll..." She muffled her racking sobs in his shirt,
unable to say the words.
back | next
home
|