Mr. Adam

by Pat Frank

  “It’s just that I’m a little hung over,” I lied.

  “Is it that hospital business you talked about last week?”

  I didn’t reply, but I knew that she knew. “I don’t know why,” Marge said, “but I’ve been worrying about it.”

  “Nothing is certain, yet,” I said. When I left the house I kissed her with what I thought was reassurance. But I had never before seen Marge’s face so strained, and her eyes so dull, and lacking of life. On the way uptown it seemed that I stood apart and alone from all the others on the streets and in the subway. The bustle of New York going to work on a weekday morning seemed altogether futile and without meaning.

  J.C. had a little stack of teletype messages on his desk, and I knew the verdict before I read them, simply by the set of his shoulders, and by his silence.

  The answers were all the same. So far as anyone could determine, no more children would be born after the last week in June. In Paris and London, very secret official investigations had already been started.

  “We’ve got answers,” said J.C., “from everywhere except Moscow,” but even as he spoke an office boy brought in another incoming teletype. It was from the Moscow Bureau. It read:

  URGENT PRESS ASSOCIATED NEW YORK PROPOGEY SOVIET GOVERNMENT PERTURBEDEST MY INQUIRIES STOP MY EXPULSION THREATENED PROATTEMPTING PENETRATE STATE SECRETS STOP HOWEVER YOUR HUNCH CORRECT GILMORE

  “That’s enough for me,” said J.C.

  “It seems to me,” I said, “that the whole world knows about this thing, and is trying to keep it a secret.”

  “I don’t blame the whole world,” said J.C. “The whole world is like a man who knows he has cancer, but won’t admit it, even to himself. However, it has to break some time, and as long as it has to break, the AP might as well break it.”

  “We’ll have to put the Washington Bureau on it, for official statements, and the American Medical Association. But—why?”

  “That’s it—why?”

  “There must be a scientific reason.”

  J.C. put the worn serge of his elbows on his desk and massaged his head behind his ears. “All night,” he said, “I kept thinking of something General Farrell said after he witnessed the first atomic bomb explosion in New Mexico. He said, if I remember the words correctly, that the explosion ‘warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.’”

  I recalled a kindred phrase, after Hiroshima was atomized, about civilization now having the power to commit suicide at will. I thought about it, and I thought of the Mississippi disaster, and the thing began to come clear to me, and I yelled: “When was it that Mississippi blew up? Wasn’t it in September?”

  J.C. straightened. “That’s it, of course!” he said. “The Mississippi explosion was September the twenty-first. Nine months to the day! Nine months to the very day!”

  CHAPTER 2

  You will remember that on September 21 the great new nuclear fission plants at Bohrville, Mississippi—a city erected in the center of the state and named after one of the famous atomic physicists—disintegrated in an explosion that made Nagasaki and Hiroshima mere cap pistols by comparison.

  Not only did Bohrville disintegrate but most of Mississippi went along with it. The blinding glare of the Bohrville disaster was seen as far north as Chicago, and across the Gulf of Mexico. St. Louis felt it as an earthshock, while the heat was dangerous in New Orleans.

  What caused the explosion no man knew, for naturally there were no survivors. But it was known in Washington that the Bohrville plants were producing U-235, Plutonium, and even rarer and more violently radioactive substances in quantities that had been impossible in the plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington.

  The effects of the explosion upon the world were profound, and not all of them could be classed as evil. For one thing the United States stopped making atomic bombs, and the other nations showed no desire to begin where we left off. Molotov issued a statement blaming the explosion on the greedy capitalistic system, and assured the Russians that there were no nuclear fission plants within the borders of the Soviet Union. In the Argentine, certain pro-Fascist scientists suddenly ceased their private experiments, and began to take up botany and ichthyology.

  The United Nations had no trouble pledging its members to outlaw the atom as a weapon of war, but of course small wars kept going on, around the world.

  Besides, nobody really missed Mississippi. The explosion eliminated Bilbo and Rankin, and anyway Mississippi was the most backward of states. People felt that if any one of the forty-eight states had to be sacrificed, it was just as well that it happened to Mississippi.

  After the explosion I was assigned to interview the atomic physicists who lived in the New York area as to the probable cause, and the results. I remembered, now, that all the physicists had assured me that the explosion was only dangerous within a radius of a few hundred miles. But always I had had a disquieting feeling that there was something else they wished to say, but were afraid to say. It was as if there were something they were afraid to put into words, even to themselves.

  Whenever I had asked about possible sterilization from Gamma rays, they’d clam up. Or they had pointed out, in words carefully picked and studied (for they knew they were talking for publication) that radioactive substances emitted Gamma rays “for only a comparatively short time.” Then they’d lapse into the jargon of the physicist, and lead me into a dark scientific jungle where my pedestrian, layman’s learning cast only a dim light.

  Now I went to Professor Felix Pell, up at Columbia University. I went to Pell because, of all the surviving atomic physicists, he had talked least about the Mississippi disaster, although I had felt at the time that he could have told most.

  Pell is a little man with narrow shoulders and uncertain legs, and you feel his body was constructed simply as a temporary support for his massive head. On his feet he is a caricature of a college professor, but in his own office, his shrunken body hidden behind an immense desk, he is imposing as a Supreme Court Justice posing for his first post-appointment picture.

  Pell received me in his office. “I suppose,” he suggested, “that you’re still troubled about that business in Mississippi.”

  “Well, not exactly,” I said. “I’m not troubled about Mississippi. Now I’m troubled about the world.”

  Professor Pell allowed himself to smile, but I had a feeling—reporters are always getting feelings or they wouldn’t be reporters—that he was not completely at ease.

  “It appears,” I said, reaching into my pocket for a cigarette in my attempt to be completely casual, “that the Mississippi explosion sterilized the human race.”

  I will say this for Professor Pell. He was emotionally shockproof. “A most peculiar statement,” he said. “I haven’t heard anything about the human race being sterilized.”

  “That is because,” I said, “you are not, at this stage in humanity’s development, able to read tomorrow’s newspapers.”

  “You are serious?”

  “I certainly am. I am sterile, and you are sterile.”

  The professor’s head twisted on the thin, wrinkled stem of his neck, and he peered up at me for a period of seconds. Then he dropped his eyes and said: “And what has this alleged sterilization got to do with the Mississippi catastrophe?”

  “Since Mississippi blew up, no babies have been conceived anywhere on earth, so far as we can find out.”

  “That is hardly scientific proof.”

  I suddenly discovered that I hated Professor Pell. Up to this moment I had regarded him with a great deal of respect, and even awe, for was he not one of the superior beings who had, in the President’s words, tapped the source from which the sun draws its power? But of a sudden I hated him, and I knew that I would not be alone in my hate. I put my hands on his desk, and leaned over it until my face was close to his face. “Professor Pell,” I said, “it may not be scientific p
roof, but it is pretty damn good circumstantial evidence.” I fixed my eyes on his turkey-thin neck. “It is good enough evidence to hang a man,” I continued. “It is good enough evidence to hang any man who even looked sideways at an atom.”

  I could see that I had shaken Pell loose from his equanimity. In this moment he was an old man, afraid for his life. “Please sit down,” he said, “and tell me what you want of me, but I would rather not have my name connected with this.”

  “You didn’t mind having your name at the top of the list when they were passing out credit for developing the bomb.”

  He nodded. “That is true,” he said slowly. “That is perfectly true, and with the credit must go the blame. We have always known that this risk existed, and certainly at every stage in our research and production we took the most careful precautions to safeguard our personnel. But the risk was always there.”

  Pell touched a stapled sheaf of papers on the corner of his desk. I could read Top Secret on the first page. “Ever since the Mississippi explosion,” he continued, “we have speculated on the possible harmful effects of unloosing such an unprecedented quantity of radioactive substances—along with obscure rays of which we know little—upon the earth. This is my analysis, which I was about to forward to the National Research Council.”

  “And what was your conclusion?” I asked.

  “My conclusion,” he said hesitantly, “was that such an explosion would send very penetrating radiations, encompassing the whole spectrum, around the world with the speed of light. Not only Gamma rays, and Alpha and Beta rays and particles, but their obscure variations. It was also my conclusion that these rays would prove harmful, but to what extent it was impossible to predict.”

  “Now we know,” I said.

  “Yes, indeed,” Pell said, “now we know.” Then he added: “Tell me, were women affected as well as men?”

  “Of course the investigations aren’t complete,” I said. “A group of doctors has been making as many examinations as possible. But thus far they’ve found that all men are sterilized without exception, while few if any women were affected. The doctors say almost all women still ovulate, and the Fallopian tubes have not been damaged.”

  “The human body,” said Pell, “is a strange business. There are chemistries of the body more mysterious than any problem in physics. Now I asked that question for a good reason. Men have always been more susceptible to certain rays than women. But all known harmful rays have affected both men and women. So the ray which did the damage must be one with which we are not as yet familiar.”

  “I don’t see that it matters very much,” I said.

  “Well,” said Pell, “it is an interesting aspect of the phenomenon, although its importance henceforth can only be classed as theoretical.”

  “Henceforth,” I said, rising, “the importance of everything will only be theoretical.” He was puzzling that one out as I left.

  That night we began to move the story across our wires. The reactions, throughout the world, were immediate and fearful. I could trot out all the Hollywood adjectives, and run them into a sentence, two by two, like Noah’s animals entering the Ark, and they would not begin to describe what started happening that night, and kept on happening.

  J.C. Pogey, handling the story with no more flurry than if it were a national election, kept me at the rewrite desk until dawn. By that time, the story was not dissimilar to an election, for the whole world was split straight up the middle—those who believed it and those who didn’t.

  Strange little sidebar stories began to creep into the main trunk wires.

  In Boston, an eminent churchman, hauled from his bed by the local press, denounced the whole thing as a vicious hoax. In Baltimore an equally eminent churchman said he’d been expecting it all along, and added that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if the world didn’t blow up within forty-eight hours.

  In London, the King spoke over the BBC, and reassured the Empire that His Majesty’s government was, and had been, well aware of the situation, was conducting an investigation, and was taking the necessary steps.

  There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris.

  Moscow cut itself off from the world.

  The President urged the nation to be calm.

  Up in Morningside Heights, a group of serious young women stoned the apartment house inhabited by Professor Pell.

  Spontaneous rumors started simultaneously in Vienna, Budapest, Frankfurt am Main. Madrid and Berne said it was a plot on the part of Jewish scientists.

  But it is best, perhaps, to describe what went on in my own particular household.

  When I got home, just after the milkman but before the morning papers, Marge was curled up in one corner of Smith Field. I could tell, by the number of cigarette butts, that she had been up all night, undoubtedly listening to the news on the radio. The radio was still on, tuned to a Newark station, and giving out boogie-woogie.

  I undressed, tossing my trousers and shirt across the back of a chair. I was examining myself in the full length mirror, wondering how a man who kept such irregular hours, and ate so erratically, could develop a definite belly, when the boogie-woogie faded, and a girl announcer said in the peculiar clipped sing-song which is currently the fashion among swing shift announcers:

  “We are interrupting for another news flash. Washington—Surgeon General George Gail announced that he has called a congress of the nation’s leading physicians and scientists early next week. They will meet in the capital to plan national re-fertilization. Next you will hear that international wartime favorite, ‘Lili Marlene,’ and while I adjust the needle, let me remind you that this program comes to you through the courtesy of SILK E. RUB Furniture Polish, pronounced Silky Rub, the polish of Gracious Living.”

  In the background I could hear the opening bars of “Lili Marlene,” and then a deep-voiced female quartet cut in with:

  For all the news of sterilization

  Please keep tuned to this station.

  “Lili Marlene” swelled up, and I remembered the last time I had heard it, and the lyrics that went with it, while the Army trucks bound for the repple-depple in Naples rumbled by, and I began to sing the lyrics aloud:

  Please, Mr. Truman, let the boys go home.

  We have conquered Naples, and we have captured Rome.

  We have licked the master race,

  Now all we want is shipping space.

  Oh, please, may we go home!

  Let the boys at home see Rome!

  Marge stirred, and inched across Smith Field until she reached the corner farthest away from me. “Damn you!” she grumbled sleepily. “Damn you!”

  “I’m sorry, darling,” I said. “Had to work all night. Big story.”

  Marge propped herself on her elbows and rubbed her eyes. “I’ll say it was a big story,” she exclaimed. “Oh, yes, it was the very biggest story—you eunuch, you!”

  I didn’t say anything, because it was the first time I had heard it put that way, and I was somewhat shocked, but I began to understand that the situation was complicated beyond anything either I or J.C. had imagined.

  “You eunuch, you!” she repeated.

  “Is that nice?” I inquired.

  Marge sat up straight. She wore the red silk pajamas fashioned from the ammo chute I’d scrounged when the British paratroops jumped into Megara, Greece. You put a blonde into red pajamas, piped with white silken parachute cord, and ruffle her hair, and let indignant fire run out of her eyes, and you have something particularly lovable, if she is in the mood to be loved. She was not in that mood. She said: “You sleep on your own side of the field!”

  “But darling,” I protested, “is it my fault?”

  “Of course it’s your fault,” she said. “At least it is your fault that we didn’t start any children before it happened.”

  “Who was it,” I asked, “who said the world wasn’t a fit place to produce babies?”

  “That was in forty-three,” she
retorted. “It wasn’t, then.”

  “Is it my fault, entirely,” I enquired, “that Mississippi blew up? Simply because Mississippi blew up, are we going to go through the remainder of our lives like distant and not-too-friendly cousins?”

  “Stephen Decatur Smith,” Marge said, “I know it sounds silly to you but I think it is a dirty trick on the part of the whole male population. For the rest of your lives you will be rabbiting around, smirking, all equipped with built-in contraceptives.”

  It didn’t seem necessary to answer. I got into my own side of Smith Field. “Not being a woman, you could never completely understand,” Marge went on. “Men will continue to live their lives. But to every woman, it will be as if she were already dead.”

  Later, I found that Marge’s evaluation was accurate, and until the miracle of Mr. Adam, the feminine suicide rate rose considerably.

  But generally, life continued on an astoundingly normal plane. The world ticked on, like a clock that would never be wound again, but which would continue to tell time and sound off the hours until it finally ran down.

  Winter slipped into spring. There was the usual art fair in Washington Square. Young people in love held hands and planned plastic houses, including nurseries, in the blind confidence of love and youth. Radical plastic automobiles appeared, the United Nations reached agreement on the Hungarian-Slovak border, and a United States oil company succeeded in obtaining a ninety-nine-year lease on the new field in Iraq.

  The front pages of the newspapers, of course, were devoted to little except stories on World Sterilization, or, as abbreviated by the tabloid headline writers, W.S. But so long as babies continued to be born, the whole thing seemed incredible and fantastic, and indeed it was denounced every day, officially, by experts such as Congressmen, Anglican Bishops, the President of the Chamber of Commerce, Dorothy Thompson, and three- and four-star generals.

  But things began to get tense in June, and as the month slid by, apprehension increased. By this time, of course, the facts had been so well established, in every country and on every continent, including the interior of Africa and the Eskimos near the Pole, that there was no reason for hope—and yet hope persisted. On June 21 the Daily News ran a banner, “W.S. DAY TOMORROW!”