by Roger Elwood
“You can take your time in writing a detailed report,” said Robinson, “but in general, how are things over there?” Drummond shrugged. “The war’s over. Burned out. Europe has gone back to savagery. They were caught between America and Asia, and the bombs came both ways. Not many survivors, and they’re starving animals. Russia, from what I saw, has managed something like you’ve done here, though they’re worse off than we. Naturally, I couldn’t find out much there. I didn’t get to India or China, but in Russia I heard rumors— No, the world’s gone too far into disintegration to carry on war.”
“Then we can come out in the open,” said Robinson softly. “We can really start rebuilding. I don’t think there’ll ever be another war, Drummond. I think the memory of this one will be carved too deeply on the race for us ever to forget.”
“Can you shrug it off that easily?”
“No, no, of course not. Our culture hasn’t lost its continuity, but it’s had a terrific setback. We’ll never wholly get over it. But—were on our way up again.”
The general rose, glancing at his watch. “Six o’clock. Come on, Drummond, let’s get home.”
“Home?”
“Yes, you’ll stay with me. Man, you look like the original zombie. You’ll need a month or more of sleeping between clean sheets, of home cooking and home atmosphere. My wife will be glad to have you; we see almost no new faces. And as long as we’ll work together, I’d like to keep you handy. The shortage of competent men is terrific.”
They went down the street, an aide following. Drummond was again conscious of the weariness aching in every bone and fiber of him. A home—after two years of ghost towns, of shattered chimneys above blood-dappled snow, of flimsy lean-tos housing starvation and death.
“Your plane will be mighty useful, too,” said Robinson. ‘Those atomic-powered craft are scarcer than hens’ teeth used to be.” He chuckled hollowly, as at a rather grim joke. “Got you through close to two years of flying without needing fuel. Any other trouble?”
“Some, but there were enough spare parts.” No need to tell of those frantic hours and days of slaving, of desperate improvisation with hunger and plague stalking him who stayed overlong. He’d had his troubles getting food, too, despite the plentiful supplies he’d started out with. He’d fought for scraps in the winters, beaten off howling maniacs who would have killed him for a bird he’d shot or a dead horse he’d scavenged. He hated that plundering, and would not have cared personally if they’d managed to destroy him. But he had a mission, and the mission was all he’d had left as a focal point for his life, so he’d clung to it with fanatic intensity.
And now the job was over, and he realized he couldn’t rest. He didn’t dare. Rest would give him time to remember. Maybe he could find surcease in the gigantic work of reconstruction. Maybe.
“Here we are,” said Robinson.
Drummond blinked in new amazement. There was a car, camouflaged under brush, with a military chauffeur—a carl And in pretty fair shape, too.
“We’ve got a few oil wells going again, and a small patched-up refinery,” explained the general. “It furnishes enough gas and oil for what traffic we have.”
They got in the rear seat. The aide sat in front, a rifle ready. The car started down a mountain road.
‘Where to?” asked Drummond a little dazedly.
Robinson smiled. “Personally,” he said, “I’m almost the only lucky man on Earth. We had a summer cottage on Lake Taylor, a few miles from here. My wife was there when the war came, and stayed, and nobody came along till I brought the head offices here with me. Now I’ve got a home all to myself.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re lucky,” said Drummond. He looked out the window, not seeing the sun-spattered woods. Presently he asked, his voice a little harsh: “How is the country really doing now?”
“For a while it was rough. Damn rough. When the cities went, our transportation, communication, and distribution systems broke down. In fact, our whole economy disintegrated, though not all at once. Then there was the dust and the plagues. People fled, and there was open fighting when overcrowded safe places refused to take in any more refugees. Police went with the cities, and the army couldn’t do much patrolling. We were busy fighting the enemy troops that’d flown over the Pole to invade. We still haven’t gotten them all. Bands are roaming the country, hungry and desperate outlaws, and there are plenty of Americans who turned to banditry when everything else failed. That’s why we have this guard, though so far none have come this way.
‘The insect and blight weapons just about wiped out our crops, and that winter everybody starved. We checked the pests with modem methods, though it was touch and go for a while, and next year got some food. Of course, with no distribution as yet, we failed to save a lot of people. And farming is still a tough proposition. We won’t really have the bugs licked for a long time. If we had a research center as well equipped as those which produced the things— But we’re gaining. We’re gaining.”
“Distribution—” Drummond rubbed his chin. “How about railroads? Horse-drawn vehicles?”
“We have some railroads going, but the enemy was as careful to dust most of ours as we were to dust theirs. As for horses, they were nearly all eaten that first winter. I know personally of only a dozen. They’re on my place; I’m trying to breed enough to be of use, but”—Robinson smiled wryly— “by the time we’ve raised that many, the factories should have been going quite a spell.”
“And so now—?”
“We’re over the worst. Except for outlaws, we have the population fairly well controlled. The civilized people are fairly well fed, with some kind of housing. We have machine shops, small factories, and the like going, enough to keep our transportation and other mechanism ‘level.’ Presently we’ll be able to expand these, begin actually increasing what we have. In another five years or so, I guess, we’ll be integrated enough to drop martial law and hold a general election. A big job ahead, but a good one.”
The car halted to let a cow lumber over the road, a calf trotting at her heels. She was gaunt and shaggy, and skittered nervously from the vehicle into the brush.
“Wild,” explained Robinson. “Most of the real wild life was killed off for food in the last two years, but a lot of farm animals escaped when their owners died or fled, and have run free ever since. They—” He noticed Drummond’s fixed gaze. The pilot was looking at the calf. Its legs were half the normal length.
“Mutant,” said the general. “You find a lot of such animals. Radiation from bombed or dusted areas. There are even a lot of human abnormal births.” He scowled, worry clouding his eyes. “In fact, that’s just about our worst problem. It—”
The car came out of the woods onto the shore of a small lake. It was a peaceful scene, the quiet waters like molten gold in the slanting sunlight, trees ringing the circumference and all about them the mountains. Under one huge pine stood a cottage, a woman on the porch.
It was like one summer with Barbara—Drummond cursed under his breath and followed Robinson toward the little building. It wasn’t, it wasn’t, it could never be. Not ever again. There were soldiers guarding this place from chance marauders, and— There was an odd-looking flower at his foot. A daisy, but huge and red and irregularly formed.
A squirrel chittered from a tree. Drummond saw that its face was so blunt as to be almost human.
Then he was on the porch, and Robinson was introducing him to “my wife Elaine.” She was a nice-looking young woman with eyes that were sympathetic on Drummond’s exhausted face. The aviator tried not ,to notice that she was pregnant.
He was led inside, and reveled in a hot bath. Afterward there was supper, but he was numb with sleep by then, and hardly noticed it when Robinson put him to bed.
§
Reaction set in, and for a week or so Drummond went about in a haze, not much good to himself or anyone else. But it was surprising what plenty of food and sleep could do, and one evening Robinson came home to find h
im scribbling on sheets of paper.
“Arranging my notes and so on,” he explained. “I’ll write out the complete report in a month, I guess.”
“Good. But no hurry.” Robinson settled tiredly into an armchair. ‘The rest of the world will keep. I’d rather you’d just work at this off and on, and join my staff for your main job.”
“O.K. Only what’ll I do?”
“Everything. Specialization is gone; too few surviving specialists and equipment. I think your chief task will be to head the census bureau.”
“Eh?”
Robinson grinned lopsidedly. “You’ll he the census bureau, except for what few assistants I can spare you.” He leaned forward, said earnestly: “And it’s one of the most important jobs there is. You’ll do for this country what you did for central Eurasia, only in much greater detail. Drummond, we have to know.”
He took a map from a desk drawer and spread it out. “Look, here’s the United States. I’ve marked regions known to be uninhabitable in red.” His fingers traced out the ugly splotches. “Too many of ‘em, and doubtless there are others we haven’t found yet. Now, the blue X’s are army posts.” They were sparsely scattered over the land, near the centers of population groupings. “Not enough of those. It’s all we can do to control the more or less well-off, orderly people. Bandits, enemy troops, homeless refugees—they’re still running wild, skulking in the backwoods and barrens, and raiding whenever they can. And they spread the plague. We won’t really have it licked till everybody’s settled down, and that’d be hard to enforce. Drummond, we don’t even have enough soldiers to start a feudal system for protection. The plague spread like a prairie fire in those concentrations of men.
“We have to know. We have to know how many people survived—half the population, a third, a quarter, whatever it is. We have to know where they are, and how they’re fixed for supplies, so we can start up an equitable distribution system. We have to find all the small-town shops and labs and libraries still standing, and rescue their priceless contents before looters or the weather beat us to it. We have to locate doctors and engineers and other professional men, and put them to work rebuilding. We have to find the outlaws and round them up. We— I could go on forever. Once we have all that information, we can set up a master plan for redistributing population, agriculture, industry, and the rest most efficiently, for getting the country back under civil authority and police, for opening regular transportation and communication channels—for getting the nation back on its feet.”
“I see,” nodded Drummond. “Hitherto, just surviving and hanging on to what was left has taken precedence. Now you’re in a position to start expanding, if you know where and how much to expand.”
“Exactly.” Robinson rolled a cigarette, grimacing. “Not much tobacco left. What I have is perfectly foul. Lord, that war was crazy!”
“All wars are,” said Drummond dispassionately, “but technology advanced to the point of giving us a knife to cut our throats with. Before that, we were just beating our heads against the wall. Robinson, we can’t go back to the old ways. We’ve got to start on a new track—a track of sanity.”
“Yes. And that brings up—” The other man looked toward the kitchen door. They could hear the cheerful rattle of dishes there, and smell mouth-watering cooking odors. He lowered his voice. “I might as well tell you this now, but don’t let Elaine know. She … she shouldn’t be worried. Drummond, did you see our horses?”
“The other day, yes. The colts—”
“Uh-huh. There’ve been five colts born of eleven mares in the last year. Two of them were so deformed they died in a week, another in a few months. One of the two left has cloven hoofs and almost no teeth. The last one looks normal—so far. One out of eleven, Drummond.”
“Were those horses near a radioactive area?”
“They must have been. They were rounded up wherever found and brought here. The stallion was caught near the site of Portland, I know. But if he were the only one with mutated genes, it would hardly show in the first generation, would it? I understand nearly all mutations are Mendelian recessives. Even if there were one dominant, it would show in all the colts, but none of these looked alike.”
“Hm-m-m—I don’t know much about genetics, but I do know hard radiation, or rather the secondary charged particles it produces, will cause mutation. Only mutants are rare, and tend to fall into certain patterns—”
uWere rare!” Suddenly Robinson was grim, something coldly frightened in his eyes. “Haven’t you noticed the animals and plants? They’re fewer than formerly, and … well, I’ve not kept count, but at least half those seen or killed have something wrong, internally or externally.”
§
Drummond drew heavily on his pipe. He needed something to hang onto, in a new storm of insanity. Very quietly, he said:
“In my college biology course, they told me the vast majority of mutations are unfavorable. More ways of not doing something than of doing it. Radiation might sterilize an animal, or might produce several degrees of genetic change. You could have a mutation so violently lethal the possessor never gets born, or soon dies. You could have all kinds of more or less handicapping factors, or just random changes not making much difference one way or the other. Or in a few cases you might get something actually favorable, but you couldn’t really say the possessor is a true member of the species. And favorable mutations themselves usually involve a price in the partial or total loss of some other function.
“Right.” Robinson nodded heavily. “One of your jobs on the census will be to try and locate any and all who know genetics, and send them here. But your real task, which only you and I and a couple of others must know about, the job overriding all other considerations, will be to find the human mutants.”
Drummond’s throat was dry. “There’ve been a lot of them?” he whispered.
“Yes. But we don’t know how many or where. We only know about those people who live near an army post, or have some other fairly regular intercourse with us, and they’re only a few thousand all told. Among them, the birth rate has gone down to about half the prewar ratio. And over half the births they do have are abnormal.”
*Over half—”
“Yeah. Of course, the violently different ones soon die, or are put in an institution we’ve set up in the Alleghenies. But what can we do with viable forms, if their parents still love them? A kid with deformed or missing or abortive organs, twisted internal structure, a tail, or something even worse . .. well, it’ll have a tough time in life, but it can generally survive. And perpetuate itself—”
“And a normal-looking one might have some unnoticeable quirk, or a characteristic that won’t show up for years. Or even a normal one might be carrying recessives, and pass them on— God!” The exclamation was half blasphemy, half prayer. “But how’d it happen? People weren’t all near atom-hit areas.” “Maybe not, though a lot of survivors escaped from the outskirts. But there was that first year, with everybody on the move. One could pass near enough to a blasted region to be affected, without knowing it. And that damnable radiodust, blowing on the wind. It’s got a long half-life. It’ll be active for decades. Then, as in any collapsing culture, promiscuity was common. Still is. Oh, it’d spread itself, all right.”
“I still don’t see why it spread itself so much. Even here—” “Well, I don’t know why it shows up here. I suppose a lot of the local flora and fauna came in from elsewhere. This place is safe. The nearest dusted region is three hundred miles off, with mountains between. There must be many such islands of comparatively normal conditions. We have to find them too. But elsewhere—”
“Soup’s on,” announced Elaine, and went from the kitchen to the dining room with a loaded tray.
The men rose. Grayly, Drummond looked at Robinson and said tonelessly: “O.K. I’ll get your information for you. We’ll map mutation areas and safe areas, well check on our population and resources, we’ll eventually get all the facts you want. But—w
hat are you going to do then?”
“I wish I knew,” said Robinson haggardly. “I wish I knew.”
§
Winter lay heavily on the north, a vast gray sky seeming frozen solid over the rolling white plains. The last three winters had come early and stayed long. Dust, colloidal dust of the bombs, suspended in the atmosphere and cutting down the solar constant by a deadly percent or two. There had even been a few earthquakes, set off in geologically unstable parts of the world by bombs planted right. Half of California had been ruined when a sabotage bomb started the San Andreas Fault on a major slip. And that kicked up still more dust.
Fimhulwinter, thought Drummond bleakly. The doom of the prophecy. But no, we’re surviving. Though maybe not as men—
Most people had gone south, and there overcrowding had made starvation and disease and internecine struggle the normal aspects of life. Those who’d stuck it out up here, and had luck with their pest-ridden crops, were better off.
Drummond’s jet slid above the cratered black ruin of the Twin Cities. There was still enough radioactivity to melt the snow, and the pit was like a skull’s empty eye socket. The man sighed, but he was becoming calloused to the sight of death. There was so much of it. Only the struggling agony of life mattered anymore.
He strained through the sinister twilight, swooping low over the unending fields. Burned-out hulks of farmhouses, bones of ghost towns, sere deadness of dusted land—but he’d heard travelers speak of a fairly powerful community up near the Canadian border, and it was up to him to find it.