The Postman

by David Brin

  Across its bottom was a row of tiny buttons, and in the center a flat, gray screen gave off a pearly sheen.

  Pink spiders emerged from flying saucers and stepped imperiously down the screen, to a crunching, marching beat. Arriving at the bottom without opposition, they bleated in triumph, then their ranks reformed and the assault began all over again.

  Gordon’s throat was dry.

  “Where …” he breathed.

  The children stood up. One of the boys swallowed. “Sir?”

  Gordon pointed. “Where in the name of all that’s holy did you get that?” He shook his head. “More important … where did you get the batteries!”

  One of the children began to cry. “Please, sir, we didn’t know it was wrong. Timmy Smith told us it’s just a game the oldtime children used to have! We find ’em all over, only they don’t work no more.…”

  “Who,” Gordon insisted, “is Timmy Smith?”

  “A boy. His pa has come down from Creswell with a wagon to trade the last couple years. Timmy swapped this one for twenty old ones we found that wouldn’t work no more.”

  Gordon recalled the map he had been studying in his room earlier in the evening. Creswell was just a little north of here, not far off the route he had planned to take to Eugene.

  Can it be? Hope was too hot and sudden to be a pleasure, or even recognized.

  “Did Timmy Smith say where he got the toy?” He tried not to spook the children, but some of his urgency must have spilled over, frightening them.

  A girl wailed. “He said he got it from Cyclops!”

  Then, in a panicked flurry, the children were gone, disappeared down little alleys in the dusty storage room. Gordon was left suddenly alone, standing quite still, watching tiny invaders descend in the glow of the little gray screen.

  “Crunch-crunch-crunch,” they marched.

  The game blooped victoriously. Then began to play all over again.

  3

  EUGENE

  The pony’s breath puffed visibly as it plodded on through the dank drizzle, led by a man in a rain-slick poncho. Its only burdens were a saddle and two thick bags, plastic-covered against the damp.

  The gray Interstate glistened wetly. Deep puddles lay like small lakes in the concrete. Dirt had blown over the four-lane highway during the postwar drought years, and grass had later begun to grow as the old northwest rains returned. Much of the highway was now a ribbon of meadow, a flat notch in the forested hills overlooking a churning river.

  Gordon raised his slicker tentlike to consult his map. Ahead, to his right, a large fen had formed where the south and east forks of the Willamette came together before cutting west between Eugene and Springfield. According to the old map there was a modern industrial park below. Now only a few old roofs stuck out above the mire. The neat lanes, parking lots, and lawns were a realm for water fowl, who seemed not at all discomfitted by the wet.

  Back in Creswell they had told Gordon the Interstate would be impassable a little north of here. He would have to cut through Eugene itself, find an open bridge across the river, and then somehow get back onto the highway to Coburg.

  The Creswellers had been a little vague on details. Few travelers had made the trip since the war.

  That’s all right. Eugene has been one of my goals for months. We’ll take a look at what’s become of her.

  Briefly, though. Now the city was only a milestone along his path toward a deeper mystery, waiting farther to the north.

  The elements had not yet defeated the Interstate. It might be grassy and puddled, but the only fallen bridges he had passed still bore obvious signs of violence. When man built well, it seemed, only time or man himself could bring his things down. And they did build well, Gordon thought. Maybe future generations of Americans, ambling through the forests eating each other, would think these works the creations of gods.

  He shook his head. The rain, it’s got me in a fey mood.

  Soon he came upon a large sign, half buried in a puddle. Gordon kicked away debris and knelt to examine the rusting plate—like a tracker reading a cold trail in a forest path.

  “Thirtieth Avenue,” he read aloud.

  A broad road cut into the hills to the west, away from the Interstate. According to the map, downtown Eugene was just over the forested rise that way.

  He got up and patted his pack animal. “Come on, Dobbin. Swish your tail and signal for a right turn. It’s off the freeway and down surface streets from here.” The horse puffed stoically as Gordon gave the reins a gentle tug and led it down the off-ramp, then under the overpass and on up the slope to the west.

  From the top of the hill a gently falling mist seemed somehow to soften the ruined town’s disfigurement. Rains had long since washed away the fire stains. Slow beards of climbing greenery, sprouting from cracks in the pavement, covered many of the buildings, hiding their wounds.

  Folk in Creswell had warned him what to expect. Still, it was never easy coming into a dead city. Gordon descended to the ghostly streets, strewn with broken glass. The rain-wet pavement sparkled with another era’s shattered panes.

  In the lower parts of town, alders grew in the streets, in dirt laid down when a river of mud slammed into the city from the broken Fall Creek and Lookout Point dams. The collapse of those reservoirs had wiped out Route 58 west of Oakridge, forcing Gordon to make his long detour south and west through Curtin, Cottage Grove, and Creswell before finally swinging north again.

  The devastation was pretty bad. And yet, Gordon thought, they held on, here. From all accounts, they almost made it.

  Back in Creswell, between all the meetings and celebrations—the election of the new postmaster and excited plans to extend the new mail delivery network east and west—the citizens had regaled Gordon with stories of the valiant struggle of Eugene. They told how the city had struggled to hold out for four long years after war and epidemic had isolated it from the outer world. In a strange alliance of the university community and red-neck country farmers, somehow the city-state had overcome all threats … until at last the bandit gangs finished her off by blasting the upland reservoirs all at once, cutting off both power and unpolluted water.

  The tale was already legendary, almost like the fall of Troy. And yet the storytellers hadn’t sounded forlorn in telling it. It was more as if they now looked upon the disaster as a temporary setback, to be overcome within their own lifetimes.

  For Creswell had been in a tizzy of optimism even before Gordon’s arrival. His tale of a “Restored United States” was the town’s second dose of good news in less than three months.

  Last winter another visitor had arrived—this one from the north, a grinning man in a white-and-black robe—who passed out startling gifts for the children and then departed, speaking the magical name Cyclops.

  Cyclops, the stranger had said.

  Cyclops would make things right again. Cyclops would bring comfort and progress back into the world, redeeming everybody from drudgery and lingering hopelessness, the legacy of the Doomwar.

  All the people had to do was collect their old machinery, particularly electronics. Cyclops would take their donations of useless, ruined equipment, plus perhaps a little surplus food to maintain its volunteer servants. In return, Cyclops would give the Creswellans things that worked.

  The toys were only tokens of what was to come. Someday there would be real miracles.

  Gordon had been unable to get anything coherent from the people of Creswell. They were too deliriously happy to be completely logical. Half of them assumed his “Restored United States” was behind Cyclops, and half thought it was the other way around. It hardly occurred to anybody that the two wonders could be unconnected—two spreading legends encountering one another in the wilderness.

  Gordon didn’t dare disabuse them, or ask too many questions. He had left as quickly as he could—loaded down with more letters than ever—determined to follow the tale to its source.

  It was about noon as he turned north o
n University Street. The gentle rain was no bother. He could explore Eugene for a while and still make it by nightfall to Coburg, where a settlement of gleaners supposedly lived. Somewhere north of there lay the territory from which the followers of Cyclops were spreading word of their strange redemption.

  As he walked quietly past the gutted buildings, Gordon wondered if he should even try to pull his “postman” hoax in the north. He remembered the little spiders and saucers, flashing in the darkness, and found it hard not to hope.

  Perhaps he could give up the scam and find something real to believe in at last. Perhaps someone, at last, was leading a fight against the dark age.

  It was too sweet a glimmer to let go of, but too delicate to hold tightly.

  The shattered storefronts of the deserted town gave way at last to Eighteenth Avenue and the University of Oregon campus, the broad athletic field now overgrown with aspen and alder saplings, some more than twenty feet high. There, near the old gymnasium, Gordon slowed down, then stopped abruptly and held the pony still.

  The animal snorted and pawed the ground as Gordon listened, and then was sure.

  Somewhere, perhaps not too far away, somebody was screaming.

  The faint crying crescendoed then fell away. It was a woman’s voice, soaked with pain and deadly fear. Gordon pushed back the cover of his holster and drew his revolver. Had it come from the north? The east?

  He pushed into a semijungle between the university buildings, hurriedly seeking a place to go to ground. He had had an easy time of it since leaving Oakridge months ago, too easy. Obviously he had acquired bad habits. It was a miracle no one had heard him, traipsing down these deserted streets as if he owned them.

  He led the pony through a gaping door in the side of a slate-sided gymnasium, and tethered the animal behind a fold-down stand of bleachers. Gordon dropped a pile of oats near the animal, but left the saddle in place and cinched.

  Now what? Do we wait it out? Or do we check it out?

  Gordon unwrapped his bow and quiver and set the string. In the rain they were probably more reliable, and certainly quieter than his carbine or revolver.

  He stuffed one of the bulging mail sacks into a ventilation shaft, well out of sight. As he was searching for a place to hide the other, he suddenly realized what he was doing.

  He grinned ironically at his momentary foolishness and left the second bag lying on the floor as he set off to find the trouble.

  The sounds came from a brick building just ahead, one whose long bank of glass windows still gleamed. Apparently looters hadn’t even thought the place worth bothering with.

  Now Gordon could hear faint, muttered voices, the soft nickering of horses, and the creaking of tack.

  Seeing no watchers at the roofs or windows, he dashed across the overgrown lawn and up a broad flight of concrete steps, flattening against a doorway around the corner of the building. He breathed open-mouthed for silence.

  The door bore an ancient, rusted padlock and an engraved plastic sign.

  THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL CENTER

  Dedicated May 1989

  Cafeteria Hours

  11–2:30

  5–8 P.M.

  The voices came from just within … though too muffled to make out anything distinct. An outside stairway led up to several floors overhead. He stepped back and saw that a door lay ajar three flights up.

  Gordon knew he was being a fool once again. Now that he had the trouble located, he really should go collect his pony and get the hell out of there, as quickly as possible.

  The voices within grew angry. Through the crack in the door he heard a blow being struck. A woman’s cry of pain was followed by coarse male laughter.

  Sighing softly at the flaw in his character that kept him there—instead of running away as anyone with any brains would do—Gordon started climbing the concrete stair, careful not to make a sound.

  Rot and mold covered an area just within the half-open doorway. But beyond that the fourth floor of the student center looked untouched. Miraculously, none of the glass panes in the great skylight had been smashed, though the copper frame wore a patina of verdigris. Under the atrium’s pale glow a carpeted ramp spiraled downward, connecting each floor.

  As Gordon cautiously approached the open center of the building, it felt momentarily as if he had stepped backward in time. Looters had left the student organization offices—with their passionate tornadoes of paper—completely untouched. Bulletin boards were still plastered with age-dimmed announcements of sporting events, variety shows, political rallies.

  Only at the far end were there a few notices in bright red, having to do with the emergency—the final crisis that had struck almost without warning, bringing it all to an end. Otherwise, the clutter was homey, radical, enthusiastic …

  Young …

  Gordon hurried past and skirted down the spiraling ramp toward the voices below.

  A second floor balcony extended out over the main lobby. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way.

  On the north side of the building, to the right, part of the two-story glass facing had been shattered to make room for a pair of large wagons. Steam rose from six horses tethered over by the west wall, behind a row of dark pinball machines.

  Outside, amid the broken glass shards, the sulking rain created spreading pink pools around four sprawled bodies, recently cut down by automatic weapons fire. Only one of the victims had even managed to draw a sidearm during the ambush. His pistol lay in a puddle, inches from a motionless hand.

  The voices came from his left, where the balcony made a turn. Gordon crawled cautiously forward and looked out over the other part of the L-shaped room.

  Several ceiling-high mirrors remained along the west wall, giving Gordon a wide view of the floor below. A blaze of smashed furniture crackled in a large fireplace between the reflecting panes.

  He hugged the moldy carpet and lifted his head just enough to see four heavily-armed men arguing by the fire. A fifth lounged on a couch over to the left, his automatic rifle aimed idly at a pair of prisoners—a boy of about nine years and a young woman.

  Red weals on her face matched the pattern of a man’s hand. Her brown hair was matted and she held the boy close, watching her captors warily. Neither prisoner seemed to have any energy left for tears.

  The bearded men were all garbed in one-piece prewar army surplus outfits in green, brown, and gray-speckled camouflage. Each wore one or more gold earrings in his left ear lobe.

  Survivalists. Gordon felt a wave of revulsion.

  Once upon a time, before the War, the word had had several meanings, ranging from common sense, community-conscious preparedness all the way to antisocial paranoid gun nuts. By one way of looking at things, perhaps Gordon himself could be called a “survivalist.” But it was the latter connotation that had stuck, after the ruin the worst sort had caused.

  Everywhere he had gone in his travels, folk shared this reaction. More than the Enemy, whose bombs and germs had wrought such destruction during the One-Week War, the people in nearly every wrecked county and hamlet blamed these macho outlaws for the terrible troubles that led to the final Fall.

  And worst of all had been the followers of Nathan Holn, may he rot in Hell.

  But there weren’t supposed to be any survivalists anymore in the valley of the Willamette! In Cottage Grove, Gordon had been told that the last big bunch had been driven south of Roseburg years ago, into the wilderness of the Rogue River country!

  What were these devils doing here, then? He moved a little closer and listened.

  “I dunno, Strike Leader. I don’t think we oughta go any deeper on this recon. We’ve already had enough surprises with this ‘Cyclops’ thing the bird here let slip about, before she clammed up. I say we oughta head back to the boats at Site Bravo and report what we found.”

  The speaker was a short, bald man with a wiry frame. He warmed his hands over the fire, his back to Gordon. A SAW assault gun equipped
with a flash suppressor was slung muzzle-down over his back.

  The big man he addressed as “Strike Leader” wore a scar from one ear to his chin, only partly hidden by a gray-flecked black beard. He grinned, displaying several gaps in his teeth.

  “You don’t really believe that bull the broad was spewing, do you? All that crap about a big computer that talks? What a crock! She’s just feedin’ it to us to give us a stall!”

  “Oh yeah? Well how do you explain all that?”

  The little man gestured back to the wagons. In the mirror, Gordon could see a corner of the nearest. It was loaded down with odds and ends, no doubt collected here on the University campus. The haul seemed to consist mostly of electronic equipment.

  Not farm tools, not clothes or jewelry—but electronics.

  It was the first time Gordon had ever seen a gleaner’s wagon filled with salvage like this. The implication caused Gordon’s pulse to pound in his ears. In his excitement, he barely ducked down in time as the little man turned to pick up something from a nearby table.

  “And what about this?” the small survivalist asked. In his hand was a toy—a small video game like the one Gordon had seen in Cottage Grove.

  Lights flashed and the little box gave out a high, cheerful melody. The Strike Leader stared at it for a long moment. Finally he shrugged. “Don’t mean shit.”

  One of the other raiders spoke. “I agree wit’ lil’ Jim.…”

  “That’s Blue Five,” the big man growled. “Maintain discipline!”

  “Right,” the third man nodded, apparently unperturbed by the rebuke. “I agree with Blue Five, then. I think we oughta report this to Colonel Bezoar an’ the General. It could affect the invasion. What if the farmers do got high tech up north of here? We could wind up doin’ an end run right into some heavy-duty lasers or something … especially if they got some old Air Force or Navy stuff working again!”

  “All the more reason to continue this recon,” the leader growled. “We’ve got to find out more about this Cyclops thing.”

  “But you saw how hard we had to work to get the woman to tell us even what we learned! And we can’t leave her here while we go deeper on recon. If we turned back we could put her on one of the boats and …”