Fatal Mistake

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Earth's climate change leads to massive problems for people.
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Copyright 2009 by madengineer3

I want to thank grylion for his excellent help in editing this story.

*

This science based fiction is just fiction. It is, however, based upon good solid science, as opposed to the fluff popular scientific views. Some names are real, and their work is real, but are to be taken as stories based upon celebrities. No disrespect to any identified character is intended.

The "experts" had been wrong, as usual. Those of us in the colder climates of the world are familiar with waking up and finding six inches of "partly cloudy" in our driveways. Weather forecasting is still not an exact science.

I am only aware of the four of us left at this point. Forty years ago there used to be tens of thousands in our area. Now everyone was gone, all gone! Some migrated south, some were killed for their food and clothes, and some died of starvation or disease. When the real social upheavals came I resigned my job and moved my family to my hobby farm in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania.

My name is Ken. I am now left with my wife, Mary, and two daughters, Ruth and Gina. I am a physician and my wife has a Ph.D in Botany. Mary had worked extensively with North American plants becoming familiar with the flora that we would later use for medicinal purposes. With eight years experience as a military surgeon, I had spent the last ten years as the chief of surgery for our small hospital. I also hung up my shingle as a GP in our small town.

Our youngest, Gina, is nineteen and her older sister, Ruth, twenty-three. Ruth graduated from college as a mechanical engineer. (You can never tell what will interest a woman these days.) I think we may be able to hold out here for a few more years, but I'm not going to guarantee it.

***********************

The problem that eventually led to our possible extinction was caused by the "Law of Unintended Consequences". Back in the late 1960s to early 1970s America had been at war in Vietnam. Instead of letting the military do its job, congress and the administration had added all sorts of political limits on what our military could and could not do. Such as, don't shoot at the enemy unless they shoot at you first. Stupid, you bet. Reality, you bet.

Anyway, there had been anti-war mobs, fighting in the inner cities, domestic terror, etc. As we know now, from papers released from the KGB archives, the old Soviet Union had been funding the radical activities of the Weather Underground, the SDS, and other such terror groups. The government needed a way to turn the radicals in another direction.

When Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring" some brilliant politician had a "bright" idea. Instead of trying the leaders of the radical scum as traitors, which many of them were, our government's idea was to shift the attention from the Vietnam war to something safe.

That 'something safe' was the, as of yet, almost non-existent, environmental movement. Department of Defense "black budget" items were earmarked to promote environmental awareness. One of the first big bombshells that helped kick off the nascent movement was the book "The Population Bomb" by Paul Ehrlich, published in 1968.

These new, internal propaganda tactics worked well beyond the wildest dreams of those who had decided to used the environment as a diversionary tactic. Now, let me say here that the people who wrote the books and formed the core of the movement didn't know that they were being used. But, used they were. Politicians, who could see a little bit ahead, staked out their fiefdom. They called it the Environmental Protection agency.

By the end of the twentieth century the environmental movement had gone through the ideas that we would be soon entering a new ice age, to the idea that all of England being dead from pollution by the year 2000, to the idea of Global Warming. It was the Global Warming crew that finally did us in. Their patron saint, Al Gore, assured us that climate change was going to kill us all by melting the polar ice caps, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

All of the clamor surrounding Gore's global warming finally led politicians to do something devastating. The idea was to reverse the effects of the greenhouse gas problem by forbidding the use of combustion as a means of heat or power. Not only did they go overboard with this, under a president with no true scientific training, they decided that they needed to do one more thing to "save the planet".

They decided to try reflecting away just a small part of the sun's light. The amount of reduction in solar energy absorption was planned to be about one hundredth of one percent. The gullible politicians from all of the Western hemisphere, the technologically advanced countries, agreed to fire missiles up to about a hundred miles above the earth and fire explosives to disburse colloidal sized particles of aluminum. This was to reflect some of the sun's light away from our earth.

On paper it sounded good. Anyone who disagreed was considered reactionary, lacking in vision, and was summarily dismissed as "Anti-Green" or "Anti-Environment" effectively ostracizing them from society.

If we had, truly, been going into global warming, it might have been a huge success. Unfortunately, the Russian climatologists, who the mainstream Western scientific community ignored, were proved right. Our heating, measured in the late 1980s through mid 1990s had been due to a peak in an oscillation in the sun's output that had a period measured in centuries. The sun had gone through its maximum heating and was now truly entering the new ice age predicted by the Russians.

Unfortunately, it was only clear that a new ice age was upon us by the year 2035. By that time the Western Hemisphere had fully outlawed heating or generating electricity by means of combustion of any material. All oil and gas wells were sealed to prevent any leakage from hurting the delicate environment. The oil refineries had all been disassembled. The larger coal mines had all been collapsed by use of explosives and their entrances filled in and covered over. The giant mining machines had been scrapped.

All power plants had been abandoned, except for a few ancient nuclear plants that were needed for the many times that there was not enough wind or sun light to generate the meager electricity that was available. Since aircraft had been flagged as one of the major polluters, they had been abandoned in favor of high speed rail and high speed ships that used the new fuel cell technology.

Unfortunately, the United States had been the source of modern electronics ever since the 8.9 Richter scale earthquakes had hit China, Taiwan and Japan. Those temblors had caused tidal waves that put the electronics industry in the Far East out of business. American politicians used this monopoly on electronics as a lever.

The European electronics manufacturers had been put out of business by the competition from the Far East. Our State Department used the heavy-handed foreign policy that refused to do business with any country that hadn't outlawed combustion for mechanized transportation and generation of electricity. As a result of this even Russia, China, and India had followed most of the idiocy of the "Green Parties" of the Western hemisphere. It was now the entire globe that suffered from the religious belief that politicians had placed in "global warming".

The first warning of the new ice age was heralded by the extension of the polar ice packs. At first, the "powers that be" indicated that the temporary cooling was simply the planet returning to its normal temperature. After ten years of steady cooling, they started to say that it was the result of a brief modification of the sun's output.

It was in 2052 that the disaster hit. There was a massive CME (coronal mass ejection) event from the sun. Nothing even near it had been seen since the beginning of the industrial revolution. All solar cells and electronics on satellites and on the ground were destroyed in the first few minutes. The electronic controls that allowed the power grid to work, died. Power distribution transformers shorted out due to ground current effects.

And then there was no electricity except from the few remaining simple wind turbines on individual's property. Oh, to be sure the massive wind turbines made by high tech industry were still there. They were, however, useless since the distribution network no longer existed. Some of the unforeseen damage was to calculators, computers, controls for electric cars, medical equipment, and navigational equipment.

At this time most people had not learned to do math, by hand. It had been thirty years since manual math was taught in school to anyone who was not on an academic track aimed towards technical subjects like physics, engineering, basic science, statistics or such.

By 2052 none of the old petroleum experts and chemists were still around. There were books, obviously. However, as any practicing engineer will tell you the books only get you into the general area of what you need to know. The little "tricks of the trade" aren't taught in the books. Only then did some independent thinking Western scientists dare to indicate the heretical fact. That fact was that the sun's output was now three percent lower than it had been in the 1980s. Now, three percent may not sound like a lot, but believe me, a sustained three percent drop in solar output is more than enough to start a catastrophic ice age.

It is now 2085 and there is no question that the new ice age is real. That is where we are now. Since the vast majority of the people, living in the United States, have been living in cities for the last fifty years, almost none of them know anything about taking care of themselves without power, grocery stores, and subways.

Fortunately our little family was living in what had been the coal mining areas of Pennsylvania's Endless Mountains. Our county had a population of twenty thousand people before the CME. There are now four of us. If there is to be hope for the future, our little group needs to grow so that there will be enough hands to do the work of growing food and gathering wood and coal for the much longer and harder winters. Fortunately only the large commercial coalmines were closed. There are hundreds of very little mines in our area. They were manually run and when the big commercial mines went on line these mines were abandoned.

One of those mines is on, and under, our property. We can manually chip coal from the seam when we need it. Our growing season is now from mid June to very early September. There aren't too many crops that we can depend on to grow in such a short time. As to the division of labor, we haven't seen another person for the last five years. There just doesn't seem to be anyone else alive within a day's walk from our home. Our house was built during the early 1900s. We had left the original convection coal stove and fire place intact, as historical items. Up until the CME we used a heat pump to keep the house warm.

There are many things we can no longer get that we used to take for granted. We can't buy toilet paper or razor blades. We can't buy cheese, meat, soap, bread, rice, or vegetables. But, we are alive, and free!

Freedom and Liberty are new to us. We thought that being citizens of the USA meant that we were free. Now we know what freedom is like. We will have to survive by using our own judgment and knowledge. We are not dependent upon government help of any sort. It is no longer illegal for us to use guns. I have been told that it used to be an American's right to keep and bear arms. That had changed somewhere around the year 2011.

It was outlawed when most of the states voted to hold a constitutional convention. Lots of things became illegal then. Owning a gun that wasn't a black powder muzzle loader that could only fire only a single shot, without reloading, was illegal. That has all changed. The result of the actions of the federal government of the United States was to be the death warrant for most of the people who lived anywhere except for the tropics. We are four of those who have survived, so far.

**************

One morning in late fall my wife called a family meeting.

"So, Mary, what's the meeting about?"

"Ken, a while back I had told the girls that after Gina was born I had my tubes tied. Ruth and Gina came to me with a suggestion earlier this week. They asked me not be mad at them but to consider their idea on its merits. I agreed to consider it, and have reluctantly decided that it makes sense. I'm going to ask Ruth to explain what they have in mind."

"Dad, I want you to think back to the early times in the Old Testament. Back then men could have multiple wives. I guess that was allowed because the population was so small that they needed to have a large population growth to provide the labor needed to survive and provide for defense. Am I right, so far?"

"Yes, but I'm a bit uneasy with the direction of the conversation at this point."

"Well, dad, let me ask you a couple of questions then. You are now in your mid forties. In twenty years you would be in your mid sixties. How will you manage to do the work you have been doing to allow us to live when you are that age?"

"I'm not sure that I will be able to, Ruth. But I don't see any way around it at this point."

Gina jumped into the conversation. "We think we have come up with a reasonable solution, but we don't want you to get mad at us. Can you promise to hear what we have to suggest without interrupting us?"

"I'll try, but it may not be easy for me."

"O.K. dad, you know that we know of no other families within a radius of a days walk from here area, right?"

"Right."

"O.K. given that, where are Ruth and I going to get husbands?"

"I don't know."

Seeing comprehension dawning in my eyes, Gina rushed ahead with her explanation before I could offer any objections.

"Ruth and I want to effectively become your second and third wives. If we end up with sons, they will be in their early twenties when you are getting into your mid sixties. That way there will be hands enough to help us survive. We want you to think about this before giving us an answer. Will you think about it for a couple of days?"

My thoughts were whirling. It seemed like I had a jumble of various reactions, or tentative feelings, fighting with each other in my head. This was the most outrageous proposal I had ever heard!

"I'll think about it, but I don't like it. This runs against my upbringing and my understanding of the New Testament."

The meeting broke up and Mary came over to me and sat on my lap with her arms around me. She knew that I needed to have reassurance that she loved me.

"I want you to know that I could live with their solution if you can. I really don't want to share you, but since I cannot have any more children I'm not sure that we can survive without young workers available. After all, if you work yourself to death keeping us alive, we'll all end up dead of starvation or of the cold. Please think about this seriously."

I had a lot to think about. This situation was an example of being caught between a rock and a hard place. I didn't feel right about the idea of impregnating my daughters, but at the same time the reality of our situation was also a strong inducement to do what they suggested. I needed to pray about this one!

I knew that God is not just a "cosmic Santa" giving us whatever we desire. I knew also that I want to be in His Will. But, how could we find out what His Will really was? Then I remembered the story of Gideon, found in late in chapter six of Judges (In the Bible).

I called for a family meeting that evening.

"O.K. ladies, I understand the rationale for your suggestion. However, I find myself still highly reluctant to do what you suggest. I am married to your mother and don't want to break our wedding vows. I'm going to suggest that we use a 'fleece.'" (For those not familiar with a "fleece" it is a prayer request made to resolve a conflict. The prayer is that something highly unlikely will occur if the Lord will permit the activity and that if the fleece isn't provided, His answer to the prayer is no.)

"What do you have in mind, dad?"

"Let me ask you a question. When did the three of you have your last period?"

The answers varied from one to four weeks.

"How regular are they?"

It turned out that they were so regular you could almost construct a calendar from their timing.

"O.K. Here's what we will pray for. If I am to do what you want me to do, none of you will have a period during the next two weeks, but exactly two weeks from now all of you will start your periods on exactly the same day. Is that fair?"

They looked at each other and agreed that it was fair. We all agreed to pray for direction with an indication given through that highly unlikely event.

It was two weeks to the day that my wife informed me that she had just started her period. She proceeded to go ask our daughters about their status. All three had started their periods, exactly two weeks after we started praying. The die was cast.

That night we were all sitting at the dining room table enjoying some freshly made venison stew. (I have found that I am a relatively good hunter. We have a fair amount of salt around since my wife has always made her own cucumber pickles. We usually salted the meat, or made jerky. We are using our basement as a root cellar for saving potatoes, beets, and carrots. For drinking water we have built a model of the old chain and diaphragm pump of the late 1800s.

For baths we are on the side of a hill that goes down into a valley. We have a small creek that runs down the hillside all year long. I managed to make a hydraulic ram pump, also called a "water hammer pump" that keeps a large tank full of water. It isn't pressurized but it will flow from the faucets in the house. It is just about useless for showers. For baths we divert water from our water tank through a trough that we heat with a wood fire. It takes time to fill the tub, and we can't take showers, but we do have hot bathing water. Boy do I miss real hot water heaters as well as showers. We have insulated the tub to retain the heat so that it doesn't become cold while we are trying to fill it.

"O.k. ladies, now that we know that we are going to go down this road, I need to set a couple of ground rules. I am not planning on having sex with you on a regular basis. Our task is to have enough children so that we can improve our chances for survival. With that in mind, how do you want to proceed?"

"Ken, since it was the girl's idea, let them suggest what they want to do."

"Fair enough. You're the older one, Ruth, why don't you start."

"O.K. but this is going to be a bit embarrassing, if you know what I mean."

"Oh, I definitely know what you mean!"

"O.K. dad, here is what Gina and I thought would be a good opening. As you know, there haven't been any boys in this area in years. Gina and I have worked out some ways of relieving our sexual tensions, together. We want you and mom sitting up in your bed and Gina and I will 'relieve our tensions' on the foot of your bed. We figure that it will get us used to being seen by you, and it will probably put you in the mood, so to speak. We all need to become very well acquainted with all of our family's physical bodies. Is that acceptable to you?"

I turned to Mary and we just looked at each other for a few moments. By this time my face had to be bright red. Then I said: "What do you think, Mary?"

"I must admit that it sounds exciting. I've never pictured the girls getting together for this type of 'activity', but there is a first time for everything. In fact the idea of this is getting me turned on,"

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