by Pat Frank
The world held its breath, prepared for the worst, and the worst happened.
For the remainder of the month, and indeed well into July, there were sporadic bursts of optimism as communities reported births, but all these, it developed, were the result of over-long periods of gestation.
False alarms were frequent, naturally, and we realized that they would continue for a generation or two. But for the most part, by autumn the world had composed itself to slow death, although the President had allotted unlimited funds, and all science had been enlisted, for the N.R.P., or National Re-fertilization Project. The Sunday supplements began to speculate as to who would inherit the earth—the insects, or the fishes.
On the first anniversary of the Mississippi explosion I awoke at noon. Marge was sitting, cross-legged, at the other end of Smith Field, and I smelled fresh coffee. “You see what I’ve done,” she said. “I’ve installed a percolator here at the corner. We weren’t using this corner at all.”
“You’re a genius,” I admitted.
“I’ve got another idea,” she said. “When the new television sets come out, we can put a screen down here at the bottom of the field, and on Saturday afternoons we can lie in bed and watch the football games.”
“Some day,” I warned, “people will find out about the way we live, and will put us on exhibition.”
The phone rang, and Marge picked up the extension. “It’s Maria Ostenheimer,” she said, puzzled, “for you.”
I took the telephone, and said, “Hello, Maria, what are you doing for a living nowadays?”
“That’s not very funny,” the lady obstetrician said. “I’ve got a good mind not to tell you what I called about.”
There was excitement in her voice. I said: “Go ahead, Maria, talk.”
“Stephen,” she said, “listen carefully. A baby is going to be born—may have been born already—in Tarrytown.”
“Now Maria,” I said, “just last week I flew down to a place called Big Stone Gap, Virginia, on one of those tips, and we landed in a cornfield and ground-looped, and it turned out to be a baby, all right, but a baby born to a circus elephant named Priscilla.”
“Stephen,” said Maria, enunciating her words slowly and carefully, “this is the real thing. You will remember I mentioned Dr. Blandy, who practises in Westchester. He was called on this case four months ago, back in May.”
“Why didn’t he mention it before?” I demanded.
“You dunce!” Maria said. “At first he thought it was going to be an abnormally small baby, and after the end of June he thought it might be an unusually long pregnancy. He didn’t want to say a word about it until he was absolutely sure.”
“And is he sure now?”
“There can be no doubt of it. The baby was conceived exactly nine months ago—three months after those damn uranium rays sterilized all the men. Blandy brought all the records of the case to my office this morning.”
“Why did he bring them to you?” I asked, looking for a loophole I was sure existed.
“I am,” said Maria, “on the executive board of the New York City investigating committee for the N.R.P. Besides, he knew there would be a great deal of publicity after the baby was born, and he wanted my advice. I said,” she continued sarcastically, “that I might persuade you to handle the press, since you had some experience along those lines, and were sometimes considered reliable.”
“Bless you! Maria. Bless you!” I exclaimed.
“What’s going on here?” Marge interrupted.
“Quiet!” I shouted.
“You’re not going to leave me out of this,” Marge said. She went to the closet and took out a blue dress. Then she began to pull underthings out of a drawer.
“Maria,” I said into the phone, “where is this child being born?”
There was a pause, and I knew she was searching for a memorandum. I considered all the things that J.C. would want me to do. “The address,” Maria said, “is The Gatehouse, Rosemere, Tarrytown.”
“That sounds like an estate,” I said.
“It sounds like the gatehouse on an estate,” Maria amended. “You’d better get going, Stephen, because it may happen any time this afternoon, according to Blandy. And remember, I’m depending on you to help him out.”
My pajamas were off before I was out of bed. “I never,” said Marge, startled, “saw you move so fast in all my life before.”
“Throw some shirts and socks and shorts and my shaving kit and handkerchiefs into a bag,” I yelled. “A baby is being born!”
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Tarrytown.”
“But that’s only—”
“If this thing is true, I’m going to stay.”
“You mean we are going to stay. This is just as important for me as it is for you. More!” I could see that Marge was already dressed, and was packing two bags, swiftly and efficiently, as if we were off for the weekend, and the train was going to leave in twenty minutes.
We caught a cab on Fifth Avenue, and the lights were with us all the way to Grand Central. The next train for Tarrytown was the Croton local. I bought a paper, and we fidgeted over a couple of milk shakes until it left.
It was an absurd train that crawled up the Hudson, pausing like a crosstown trolley at every intersection. I ticked off the stations—Glenwood, Greystone, Hastings-on-Hudson, Dobbs Ferry. Finally there came Irvington, and the next stop was Tarrytown.
There was a taxi at the station. “Do you know,” I asked the driver, “where Rosemere is? I think it’s an estate.”
The hackman removed the stub of a cigar from his mouth. “Sure,” he said, “been living here all my life. You want to go to Rosemere?”
“That’s right,” I said, throwing the bags into the back seat.
“Don’t you want to put them in the trunk compartment?” the driver asked.
“No!” I said. “No! They are perfectly okay.”
“You’re in an awfully big hurry, fellow,” the driver ventured.
I didn’t say anything. I kept wondering what sort of people lived in the gatehouse. Probably, I thought, servants. Probably a butler and an upstairs maid had had some sort of an affair.
“Stephen,” Marge said, “sit back and take it easy. You can’t make it go any faster.”
We crawled up the hill, and the cab stopped before stone gateposts with a chain stretched between them, and a gravel drive beyond. “You want to go to the big house?” the hackman asked. “I hear it’s closed up. The people go South this time every year.”
“No,” I said. “The gatehouse.”
He unhooked the chain, and the cab crept up the driveway for fifty yards. The gatehouse was a compact, squat, two-story cottage, solidly constructed of field stone, with a mangy oak arched over the faded red tiles of its roof. There was a forty-six Buick sedan parked in front, with the little green marker that identifies the physician attached to its license plate. I gave the hackman a dollar, he backed down the driveway, and I pushed the bell and then knocked loudly on the door.
The door swung open, and Marge and I entered, carrying our weekend bags. “You’re Smith,” said a stocky, red-faced, perspiring man, perhaps forty-five, perhaps fifty. He was coatless, and his sleeves were rolled to his elbows. He looked as if he had been working.
“I’m Smith,” I said, “and this is Mrs. Smith.”
“How d’you do,” he said, “I’m Blandy. Can’t shake hands. Just washed ’em. Ostenheimer told me about you. She didn’t say anything about Mrs. Smith.”
“I just horned in,” said Marge. “If I’m in the way—”
“Not at all. I’ve got a good nurse upstairs, but there are plenty of things you can do later. Anyway, your first job is to take care of him.” Blandy nodded towards a corner which I had dismissed as being inhabited completely by a grand piano. Then he puffed up the steps.
In the corner, half-hidden by the piano, and seated on a green hassock, utterly uncomfortable and miserable, with his lo
ng chin cupped in his hands, and his knees and elbows askew, was a man. I said, “Hello.”
“Hello,” he said, and got to his feet, unbelievably stretching out to some six feet plus four or five or even six inches. “I’m Adam.”
“You’re what?”
“Adam. Homer Adam.”
“You’re the—”
“Yes, I’m going to have a baby. I mean Mary Ellen is.” He kept putting his hands into his coat pockets and taking them out again. They were long, bony hands, and they were trembling. His shock of bright red hair appeared to be attempting to fly off his scalp in all directions.
“Now, look, fellow,” I said with what I believed to be cheerful confidence, “take it easy. My name is Steve Smith, from the AP. I’m here to help you. Don’t be so nervous. You’d think there’d never been a baby born before.”
“There hasn’t been, recently,” Adam said. “That’s just it.”
Marge, who had been prowling the room, examining the hunting prints, the fireplace, the bookcases, and the curtains, giggled. “I like him,” she said to nobody in particular. “He’s nice.”
From the upstairs came a sharp, feminine cry, suddenly bitten off in the middle. Adam began to shake. He collapsed on the sofa, and I was startled by the small number of cubic feet he occupied, sitting down, contrasted with his height, standing up.
“Look, Homer,” I said, sitting down beside him, “I’m going to have to ask you a lot of questions, so I might as well start now.”
Marge produced highballs, and an hour later she appeared with sandwiches. Just after dark the sounds from upstairs became more businesslike, and then Dr. Blandy shouted: “Hey, down there. It’s all over. It’s a girl—a fine girl! No trouble at all!”
“How much,” I yelled back, “does she weigh?”
“What an inane question!” Marge said.
“I know, but you always ask it first.”
Dr. Blandy shouted: “She’s average and normal. When they’re average and normal I always say they weigh seven pounds.”
I walked to the phone on the hall table and called Circle 6-4111, and asked for Pogey. “J.C.,” I said, “here is a flash.” I enunciated each word clearly: “Flash—a girl baby was born to Mr. and Mrs. Homer Adam in Tarrytown, New York, at”—I glanced at my watch—“six fifty-one today!”
“You sane and sober, Steve?” J.C. inquired.
“Certainly.”
“Did you say Adam?”
“Honest to Christ, J.C., it is Adam A-D-A-M.”
“You will,” J.C. ordered quietly, “give me a bulletin to follow flash within five minutes. You will then dictate a complete story, and don’t hesitate to call in with new leads and inserts. Why this is the biggest story—”
“Since the Creation,” I suggested.
“No,” he said quietly, “just the biggest since Mississippi.”
CHAPTER 3
The history of Homer Adam, until the day he became the world’s lone post-Mississippi father, would not have earned him more than a three-paragraph obituary in his home-town newspaper, even if he had died an unusual and violent death.
He was born in Hyannis, Nebraska, a small but prosperous cattle town. His great-grandfather had crossed the plains in a covered wagon (something of which the editorial writers made much when the repopulation schemes were being considered). His grandfather was a cattleman, and his father was a wholesale grocer.
As a boy he was rather shy, and spent more time collecting stamps and Indian artifacts than he did playing football or riding and hunting. “You see,” he confided in me, “I was much too tall for my age. The older, but smaller boys used to beat me up. I think it gave me an inferiority complex.”
He wanted to be an archeologist, but his parents didn’t think it was practical. He compromised on geology, and they sent him to the Colorado School of Mines, where his record was good enough to get him a job with the Guggenheims immediately after graduation. When war came, the Draft Board doctors, examining his gangling form, at first classified him as 4-F, but he probably would have attained 1-A eventually had not the government found a use for his special qualifications and dispatched him to Australia.
Living in a little mining town planted in the desert near Alice Springs made him homesick, and he became a prodigious letter writer. He wrote all his letters to Mary Ellen Kopp, a secretary in the Guggenheims’ New York office. When he returned from Australia they were married, after a suitable engagement period.
These were the main facts, as he gave them to me while we sat in the living room of the gatehouse, waiting for his baby to arrive. However, they were not the principal things I wanted to know, but the birth of the Adam daughter interrupted my questioning.
It was not until much later—after Mr. Adam had seen his baby, and Marge had gone back to our West Tenth Street apartment (because there would be no room for her in the gatehouse that night) and I had peeped in on the mother and baby—that I found an opportunity to ask Homer the really pertinent questions.
We were sitting in the living room, and I had shoved another highball into Homer’s hand, and had complimented him on both his wife and his child. Mary Ellen was a buxom, lusty young woman who, Dr. Blandy assured me, had gone through childbirth with considerable fortitude. “It was simple,” he said, “as popping a peanut out of the shell.” And the baby, as newborn babies go, could be classified as cute.
“I’m sorry,” I explained, “that I have to ask all these questions at this time. I know—and it’s quite natural too—that you’re excited and upset. But it will save you a lot of trouble in the end, because you’ll only have to answer them one time. All the reporters in New York will descend on this place before long, and I don’t know who else besides, and if you give me all the answers I can handle them. This way, it won’t bother you or your wife.”
Homer shuddered, like a tall, thin, unkempt pine in a fitful breeze, and swallowed his drink. “Why did this have to happen to me?” he moaned.
“Don’t be a damn fool,” I said. “You’re a very lucky and remarkable man. Why, you’re the luckiest guy on earth.”
“But what I cannot figure out,” Homer said, “is how it happened. Please give me another drink. I think I ought to get tight, because you see I’m scared.”
I poured him another drink, more rye than soda. He took a swallow and choked on it, water filling his eyes. “Easy!” I cautioned. “Just tell me, where were you on the day Mississippi exploded?”
“In Colorado,” Homer replied. “The boss sent me to investigate the possibility of reopening some old silver and lead workings.”
“Exactly where in Colorado?”
“Well, near Leadville. I spent the whole day in the lowest level of Eldorado No. 2. You know that’s one of the deepest shafts in the world. Certainly the deepest lead workings. I was very much surprised when I went into Leadville that night—it was a Sunday—and they told me about the flash in the sky, and later I heard on the radio about the explosion.”
I didn’t have to know as much about physics as Professor Pell to guess the reason for Homer Adam’s miracle. “When the explosion came,” I said, “you were probably completely shielded from the world by lead?”
Mr. Adam considered this. “Yes,” he said finally, “I suppose I was. The lead and silver ore in the lowest level is as rich as you’ll find anywhere in the world. Hardly economical, though, because of—”
“Let’s forget about it, from the mining viewpoint,” I suggested. “Let’s consider it from the viewpoint of the rays from the explosion.”
“If lead protects you against radioactive rays,” said Homer, “I suppose I was better protected, more than a mile down there, than any other man in the world.”
“It certainly seems so,” I said, “considering the known facts. Was there,” I asked hopefully, wondering whether any other still potent males existed, “anybody else down there with you?”
“Oh, no,” Homer replied. “You see Eldorado No. 2 has been abandoned for
a generation or more. There are watchmen at the mine, but they only operate the elevators, and guard the machinery, and inspect the shafts for drainage. They rarely go into the lower levels.”
The next few days, I would just as soon forget. It was like the Dionne quintuplets all over again, except that in this case it was the father, not the mother, in the center ring. There were other considerable differences, and one of them was that every human being, without exception, had a vital interest in Mr. Adam. I describe it inadequately. For the human race, the welfare and future of Mr. Adam was literally a matter of life and death.
I was hounded, harassed, heckled, harried, quizzed, questioned, cross-examined, badgered, and browbeaten by the ladies and gentlemen of my own profession until I did not know which end was up, or care much.
The first thing I did was borrow a technique that had proved successful in war coverage. I instituted a photographic pool system. This simply meant that instead of dozens of photographers swarming over the gatehouse, one still photographer and one newsreel cameraman were chosen by lot. They made pictures for all companies, newspapers, and agencies.
I arranged press conferences for Homer Adam, Mary Ellen, Dr. Blandy, and Mrs. Brundidge, the tight-lipped trained nurse who took a Scottish general attitude of disapproval regarding all these proceedings. Mrs. Brundidge was even persuaded to exhibit the baby (named Eleanor, for the mother was a firm Democrat). At the same time I managed to furnish the AP with enough exclusive material to keep J.C. Pogey satisfied, and yet not so much that other newspapermen would raise a beef that would exclude me from my strategic post in the gatehouse. Altogether, as I was to learn, I made a pretty satisfactory public relations counsel.
The press conferences, as can be imagined, were largely biological, but how else can a story like this be handled?