| HAWKINGS: |
My actual name is Jeff Hawkings. With any luck, I should know one of you. Hi, Marianne. Long time no see. |
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Key West was an oasis after the war, with water, food, and power independent of the American mainland. The ubiquitous biological agent, what we called the “death,” was here as everywhere, until New New York sent us the antigen that wiped it out. I brought it down south; that’s why they call me Healer. |
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Not that simple, actually. There was unrest, a power struggle, a bizarre belief system that took over most of Dixie and still has its adherents. Guess I told you about them back in ’90, ’91, when 1 got through to Marianne from Plant City. The Mansonites; they’re still around, but on the wane. Fortunately. Murder and cannibalism are sacraments to them. We try to stay out of their way. |
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We need help. Trying to rebuild the world here; trying not to repeat too many mistakes. Reinventing the wheel several times a week, I’m sure. |
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As you know, the death killed almost all adults; the only grown-ups who survived were giants like me, people with acromegaly. Most of us are mentally retarded. I may be the only person on this planet with a bachelor’s degree. |
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Which is why we so desperately need you. Information. Training. We’re surrounded by technological wonders and nobody knows how they work, let alone how to fix them if they break. |
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We weren’t able to get anything from New New York. We picked up a lot of radio noise from them until they stopped dead. But we were still a couple of years away from being able to broadcast then. |
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That B.A. isn’t very useful: Political Science, with some graduate work in forensics and management. No real science. I can barely do algebra; calculus is just a word to me. My main function here is teaching, but I can’t teach anybody anything technical. |
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There are bright kids here and they can figure out a lot on their own—one of them got this transmitter going and pointed at you—but they need to talk to real engineers and scientists, even with a twoor three-year time lag. |
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There may be many other enclaves like this somewhere in the world, but so far we haven’t heard of them. We have made contact with two other radio transmitters: one in Brazil and one in Poland. So far we haven’t done much but exchange names and locations. We desperately need language texts, or at least dictionaries, in Polish and Portuguese. |
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Anyhow, you can see the fix we’re in. The only books we have are old-fashioned paper ones. Most of the information in them is inapplicable or just plain wrong. We desperately need to copy things from your up-to-date library. |
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I’m sure that somewhere on this planet we’ll find a large electronic library intact, like a physical backup to the Library of Congress—I know that the actual hadron matrix for something like that is about the size of a small floater, and there are dozens of copies around the country—but as things stand right now, even if we found one, we wouldn’t be able to tap it. |
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Let me close off on a personal note. We saw the starship leave back in ’97. That was fast work; I have some idea of how huge a project it was, and I suspect you were in a hurry because you were afraid of another war, afraid of Earth. |
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That seems ludicrous on the face of it, since we’re little more than a band of savages capering around the mysterious remnants of an advanced civilization. We lack both knowledge and context. Context is the personal part. |
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(He gestures at the radio telescope behind him.) The boys and girls who fixed up that dish lived around it for years without even knowing what it was. I had to tell them. Then they had to learn to read, and find books; eventually, books about electronics. |
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People with my disorder don’t live too long. What will happen after I’m dead? What obvious things are going to be overlooked forever, because there’s nobody alive who remembers real life, life before the war? |
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Assuming something terrible did happen, and New New York is dead—then you people are the only human link that Earth will have with its past. You’re going to have to supply the context, if Earth is going to be rebuilt. |
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Don’t be afraid of us. The madmen, the mad governments, who started the war are memories now, less than memories. This is a planet of innocent children. They need your help to survive. |
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Hope I’m not talking to empty space. We had to make various assumptions—that your target star was still Epsilon Eridani, that you would be listening to the 21-centimeter line, 1420 megahertz. That you still survive. |
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Marianne… uh, what can I say? I hope to hear from you in a couple of years. (Laughs) Hope you’re enjoying your trip. Life is not bad here, considering. |
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I must look awful strange. (Rubs his beard) You remember me as a young man—and in my mind you’re still my twenty-four-year-old bride, though twice that time has passed for you. Not quite twice for you, I guess, with relativity. |
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I never fathered any children, of course, though I’ve raised a few. Hope you have, too. |
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Love you still. |