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But how long would that last?
    His supply of coffee and creamer would be enough, at a guess, for three or four months. Long before that, he had reasons more urgent than food to be back in Washington.
    Over on the table, the ancient and bulky radio was scanning its entire frequency range, seeking a signal above background strength. He had dragged it out of storage six days ago, and found to his surprise that it still functioned once he had cannibalized the now-useless new radio for its fullerene batteries. They built things to last when that old radio was made. On the other hand, it lacked sensitivity and an automatic signal tracker. Once or twice while he sipped his coffee a faint and scratchy voice surfaced out of a mass of static, then to his annoyance it quickly lost itself.
    Even so, here was the first suggestion that services might be creeping back.
    Art knew the precise moment when they went away. Just after eleven o'clock on the evening of March 14, the wind was rising and he was speculating on the chances of another severe storm. He was gazing out of his bedroom window at the cloud patterns when the sky lit with a shimmering blue discharge like an intense aurora. Within seconds, the bedside light went out and the hum of the refrigerator stopped.
    By the light of a gas lantern, Art confirmed his suspicion. Electrical power was gone. The refrigerator was nothing better than another storage cupboard.
    The next morning he discovered that he had to deal with something worse than a simple power outage. His DNA sequencer was dead. His car would not start. The telcom produced no dial tone. His computer, even on battery power, was lifeless, as were his personal secretary and calculator. Since then he had been reduced to making notes of schedules and dates and anything else he wanted to organize, and doing his rough calculations with pencil and paper. God help anybody under forty, who with rare exceptions knew nothing of the hand methods.
    Art waited. It took another day or two to realize that all aircraft had disappeared from the skies, and that traffic on the road beyond the fields was nonexistent.
    He didn't have an explanation for any of this. Extreme weather around the globe could be expected to damage many high-tech systems, but you would expect them to degrade gradually and gracefully, just as they were designed to do when individual components or subsystems failed. Instead, everything had happened all at once, in that single flicker of violet-blue. It was damnably annoying. Just when you most needed a broadband communications system to tell you what was going on, that failed along with everything else.
    And if he, way out here, was uneasy without electricity and cars and airplanes, what the hell must be going on in the cities of the world, where lives depended on police, buses and trains, hospitals and schools? What about food supplies, and running water? Unlike Art, city folk could not go hunting in the woods above his house, where deer and wildlife were always plentiful.
    He pushed away his bread and honey, losing interest in breakfast. His own advantage might only be temporary. Deer were plentiful, but would they remain that way? Others, less lucky than him, could head north at any time and disturb his snug little haven in the park. They might be armed, and dangerous. And if people were hungry now, that was surely going to get worse as the year wore on. Winter had ended abruptly halfway through February. With mid-March like boisterous late May, who knew what July and August might bring? Meanwhile, he was not willing to venture far afield to satisfy his curiosity. The woodchuck that came out of the hole first after the danger seemed over was not the one most likely to survive. Until planes were flying again and cars passed regularly along the road beyond the fields, curiosity as to what had happened would wait.
    But he was willing to venture near afield. In fact, it was close to a requirement. If he missed his