The Weather

It was cold enough that morning that the Pruitts’ car did not start on the first two and Gene’s mother said a word she did not say, and he walked, and it was eleven minutes instead of four and the inside of his nose hurt by the end of it.

There was ice on the flat part of the school roof where the gutter came around, in a sheet, which happened maybe twice a year.

Nobody thought anything about it. It was January.

Mrs. Kerr wheeled the cart in herself. She did it during the passing period so it would be in and plugged and warmed up, and she had the antenna wire already run because she had done it on the Monday too, and on the Monday it had been scrubbed and they had gone back to work.

By Tuesday there had been noise about it. By Tuesday there was a kid in the third row doing a countdown every time she went near the set.

She got the picture up and stood beside it with the remote in her hand.

“We’re going to watch this,” she said, “and then we’re going to do the rest of chapter nine.”

It was the teacher. That was the thing that made it a school event and not a news event. There were seven of them going up and one of them taught social studies in New Hampshire, and every teacher in the building had been talking about it since the fall the way you talk about somebody from your town being on television.

They waited about twenty minutes. There was ice on the tower in the picture and somebody said look at that and somebody else said that’s from the water, and Mrs. Kerr said quiet please twice without any heat in it.

Then it went.

Somebody in the back clapped, once, and stopped, because nobody else did.

It went up the way they went up, straight and slow-looking and then not slow, and the picture pulled back and it was a white line going up with the plume behind it, and the man’s voice was doing the numbers, and it got small.

Then the line stopped being a line.

The voice kept going for a moment because the voice was reading from a screen and the screen had not caught up. It said something about throttling up. It said something else.

Then it said:

Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.

The picture stayed on it. There were two hooks of smoke coming down and apart and there was a lot of white in the middle of the sky where the line had been, and nothing came out of it.

Nobody in the room said anything.

The voice said: We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded.

Mrs. Kerr did not turn it off.

She stood beside the cart with the remote in her hand and she did not raise it, and after a while she sat down on the front edge of the demonstration table facing the class, which put her back to the set, and she stayed there.

The kid in the third row who had been doing the countdowns put his head down on his arms and did not move again for the rest of the period.

Nobody left. The bell went at some point and nobody left. Somebody from the office came to the door, looked in, and went away again.

Roz was two rows over and one up. She had her pad out on the desk in front of her, flat, and both hands were on the desk on either side of it, and there was nothing on it.

She did not draw anything. Not that day and not that week.

They showed it again about four minutes later, and then again, and then again.

By the time the period would have ended, if the period had ended, they had seen it seven times. The station had it on a loop with a man talking over the top of it, and each time it came around somebody in the room made a small sound, the same somebody, and then stopped making it by the fifth one.

You could not not watch it. It came around and you watched it again.

Somebody said, later that afternoon, that there had been schools where the little kids had been watching, first and second graders, because of the teacher. That was the part that went around the building.

Gene walked home. It was still cold and the ice on the flat part of the roof was still there.

He went upstairs and the room was the room. The BASIC cartridge had been on the tray for two and a half years with the label up, and there was dust on it in a rectangle where the cartridge sat, and around it there was more.

He turned the television on and slid the box over.

The machine came up the way it always came up, four lines, one character at a time, unhurried.

    MICROCLAUDE V1
    8192 BYTES FREE

    SAY SOMETHING.

Gene knelt down on the carpet in front of the tray.

He put his hands on the keyboard and pressed the keys one at a time with the flat of his first finger, the way he had for four and a half years.

    SEVEN PEOPLE DIED TODAY

RETURN.

The block went solid.

    HOW MANY ARE LEFT ALIVE?

Gene knelt on the carpet in front of the tray with his hands on the sheet of plastic and did not move for a while.

It had no way to know. It had no radio and no wire and no clock and nothing in it that had happened after 1979, and it had two thousand and forty-eight of whatever it had, and every time he turned it on it started with nothing at all and asked him to say something.

It was not being cruel. It had a number and it wanted the other number.

He put his finger on the key.

    0

The block blinked after it, on and off, on and off, the way it did when there was nothing to do.

He did not press RETURN.

He reached around the right side of the machine and pushed the switch, and one white line went across the middle of the screen and closed, and there was snow.

He left the box on COMPUTER and went downstairs.