James Axler – Gaia’s Demise

The rays descended until reaching an area in the desert where strands of bare wire had been strung in yard-wide squares across miles of dead land. The cone washed over the wire, and now tiny waves of electricity flowed into a series of transformers that unleashed the harnessed power in a network of high-tension lines toward a crumbling city on the horizon.

The ruins seemed to stretch for miles, tilting skyscrapers threatening to topple over, fires burning in gutted houses, rats feasting on bloated corpses strewed along the streets. Blast craters dotted the ground, their fused-glass bottoms glowing with deadly rads. A layer of frost covered the city like a death shroud, and what few bridges remained were eaten by blisters of red rust, just barely hanging over polluted rivers full of dead fish and decomposing ship hulls.

As the cables reached the decimated metropolis, slowly lights flicked to life inside the buildings, and the picture began to change. Window cracks sealed, and roofs straightened into proper alignment. The frost melted away, and the weeds withered and died. The hordes of rats ran shrieking into the sewers as the graffiti flowed off the sides of the strong buildings, and grass began to grow in yards and trees began to blossom. The roads smoothed as the potholes were filled, painted lines racing into existence along the clean macadam. The bridges became level, the rust falling away like autumn leaves, exposing the shiny steel underneath. A car rolled around a corner, then another and another until traffic flowed through the bustling city streets as in the days before the nukestorm.

But the restoration didn’t stop there. A tumble-down shack rose again as a brick school, the field full of graves transformed into a ballpark and a playground. The junkyards and bomb craters became fields of golden wheat that reached into the distance. Factories disgorged machinery and clothing into softly humming electric trucks. Machines rolled out of warehouses and thrust electric prods into the rivers. Soon the water boiled and began to run clear again, all the way to the blue ocean. The prods were withdrawn, and fish jumped from the waters, rejoicing in their newborn life.

Outside the city, hordes of slavering muties touched the electrified fencing and withered into ash. Stalking the perimeter was a black dog with writhing tentacles sprouting from its shoulders, accompanied by a puma-like beast with a scorpion tail and insect mandibles. The beasts moved like well-oiled machines, but they, too, bumped the fence and vanished like flash paper in a candle’s flame.

First one, then a dozen people appeared on the sidewalks, smiling and not carrying blasters. Soon they become a hundred, a thousand. Far away, farmers rose from the wastelands, the electric fences repelling the muties, as tractors plowed the land, planting more crops. Then the skies gently rumbled, and a soft clear rain fell on the world. Children rushed outside to play in the falling water as forest turned green and the world began to gradually turn into a blue-white sphere from the view in space.

Then the television screen turned blue.

“And that is our weapon?” Major Sheffield asked, sitting back in the chair, reeling from the amazing deluge of bizarre sights and sounds.

“Yes and no,” Silas said, turning off the television and VCR.

“Unlimited electricity is merely one aspect of the Kite. The device is actually simplicity itself, as you saw. Solar cells in a high Earth orbit turn direct sunlight into electricity, which is gathered in transformers and broadcast to Earth as low-frequency microwaves.”

“Like the microwave oven you showed me?” the sec man asked in horror.

“Different frequency, but the same principle. However, these beams cannot harm a fly, and are easily harnessed by those squares of wiring, which can be placed above croplands or cattle-grazing fields. Doing no harm to the cattle or crops, I might add. And then you have electricity, free, clean power. Gigawatts upon gigawatts.”

Silas hobbled over to the television and got the tape out of the VCR. He slid the cassette into a box and stored it in a drawer along with his other videotapes. “A single Kite was designed to supply enough energy to run predark New York City and most of its suburbs. However, nowadays that’s enough for all of the North American continent.”