“They prefer the government food? Is it better?”
She looked at him. “It is easy. It needs no preparation.” As they walked in the village he was struck again by the polish on everything, the unnatural cleanliness. The smith appeared at the forge doorway, smiled, and disappeared again. The tanner appeared, so did the baker. They came
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and went, appearing as a mechanical duty, like figures on a Dresden clock.
John Brunt felt very uneasy and depressed. People in the street watched with big, dull eyes, but he noticed that some eyes gleamed with a little feeling as they saw Margaret. She did not greet anyone, but ignored them all.
“You see,” Margaret said. “They’re just well-trained little animals, cleaned, fed and burned when they die. They don’t know anything, see anything, read anything. They’re just morons, dull with manufactured foods, brought to a habit of times like trained animals. When the VIPs say laugh, they laugh and get extra food. But it isn’t the food, it’s fear that makes them do what they’re told. Fear of being cut off, sent away from here into the rotten world that’s outside. That’s what we want to change, this decay of privilege.”
“But we’d almost got to a point where we had done away with it,” John Brunt said, anger rising in him. “It was getting on quite well in this country. . . . I can’t understand what’s happened. Children are rare, and it’s all insemination. What happened to the men? Was Packard right? Did radiation sterilize them? If so, where is the semen coming from?”
“Banks,” Margaret said. “Banks that are running down. And the pills make sure the men don’t become natural again. It’s destroyed them, the drug. Even these poor fools get free pills, as much as they want. It keeps a stable government.”
“I don’t want to see any more!” he said urgently. “This isn’t the place I knew. This is a caricature, a cartoon. It doesn’t mean anything. There’s been no work dope in that smithy. There’s no sawdust on the floor, no bits, no nails, no mess at all. It’s been brought up like a sideshow at a fair. Those sheep up on the hill there, look! They look like mops! Why weren’t they sheared at the beginning of summer? Poor devils, up there in this heat and the flies . . . What are these people supposed to be doing? What are they? Where are the children? Where are the dogs, the cats? Why isn’t there any dirt, a dustbin, a bonfire, a broken toy, a dirty window—?” He took her arm. “Let’s get out of this! It’s a travesty of everything I ever knew.”
The people stared with dull curiosity, even with traces of animosity, as the couple went on toward the inn behind the trees. She led him round into the stabling yard and through into the kitchen. There was a big, fat cook, watching some
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thing boil on a wood fire. She looked round with big, brown cowlike eyes.
He realized it was getting late. The sun was down beyond the hill. He wondered if anyone had got the cows out of the corn. He was tired. The village had disturbed him. He kept wanting to be back with things as he had known them, but when he thought of that, and the gulf between then and now, he realized that Packard was dead. He had lost Packard. There would only be this place for ever more, for he had died already. He could not die a second time. There was no escape any more.
But he kept seeing Packard in his memory and it was impossible to imagine that big, massive, jovial energy, that extraordinary compassion being dead without any mark having been left on mankind.
“Want something to eat, love?” the cook said, wiping her hands on her bulging white-aproned belly. “Have some soup, then.”
“Thanks, yes, I would,” he said.
Margaret went away. He was given soup and bread. The bread was stodgy and sour, the soup thin, only faintly flavored, like a ghost of something he remembered. It was another
travesty.
Margaret went into Petra’s office and closed the door.
“What is he?” Petra said.
“I don’t know,” Margaret said.
“It would be safer to get rid of him.”
“Safer, yes. But if he is a sympathizer, he could be very useful. Peter sent the signal through to London about him.”
Petra’s face hardened.
“Will they do anything?”
“Please God they won’t!”
Petra turned to the desk.
“We ought to burn all the papers in case,” she said.
“Don’t do it too soon!” Margaret protested. “They may not come.”
Petra stayed still a moment.
“Look, if they come it will be for him,” Margaret said.
John finished the meal, thanked the fat cook and went out into the growing dusk in the yard. The cook did not even look round from her pot when he went.
When he had gone, Peter came in and lounged against the
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table, arms folded, smiling at the cook’s back. She turned her head after a while.
“What do you think he is?” Peter asked quietly.
“He could be anything,” she said shortly. “He asked questions about food. Whether the hams up there are real, how long they’ve been there, who made the cheeses.”
Peter slapped a palmful of pills into his mouth.
“He did? Well, that’s interesting! Why should he be so interested in Special Food?”
“I don’t know.” She turned back to the pot. “He just asked questions and questions about it. Where it came from, who smoked the hams, who looked after the pigs. He knew a lot about it.”
“Very unusual knowledge, isn’t it?” said Peter. “Very unusual. Well, we know he isn’t from the government.”
Peter turned and went out. The fat cook swung round as if to call him in a sudden surge of terror. Instead her brown eyes stayed staring at something unseen beyond the door.
-2
Packard went into the laboratory, a glass of whisky in his hand, the same one he had carried into the television room, still untouched. Slowly he walked down the steel avenue to the shrine of John Brunt. He watched the instruments, their needles unmoving, and the idle, senseless flickering of the cathode ray tubes.
“If he is there, he must be in the future somewhere,” he said. “It must be that. Or could it be a parallel time?” He felt suddenly tired. He was a man who went to sleep when he felt he needed it and woke as soon as he was satisfied. He sat down in a steel and leather control chair by the desk and watched the faces of the meters. He put his glass down on the desk and closed his eyes.
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-3
John Brunt watched the evening grow deep. He was frightened to go back into the schoolroom, as if going there would mark a step that could never be retraced.
He trudged along the lane, watching the church tower grow flat against the darkening sky. It was like an old friend, something that still was real and part of the life he had known in that place.
As he went by he remembered Helen Murphy again. He had collected hymn books after service with her, and they hid in the organ room, giggling and tense as they waited to see the vicar lock them in. It was the biggest adventure they had ever had, being locked in the great vast church of darkness. But they had got frightened and climbed out of the ventilating window on to the lead roof. She had lost her hold and gone rolling down the slope and over the edge. He had run down to the edge and jumped down among the graves, frightened she might have been killed. But she was lying there shaking, a handkerchief stuffed into her mouth in case anybody heard her laughing. , . . He had got her up, still choking with laughter.
“You won’t ever marry anybody else, Helen? Promise?”
“Promise, promise!” she had said.
She was dead. Helen Murphy was dead and his heart ached for her.
He went through the churchyard to the school. The door was still open. Nobody had been there since he had run out with the women behind him.
He felt his heart pause at the memory of the fear they had brought. He should have turned a
nd faced them. It had been foolish, shameful to run away.
But what did you do, once you had turned and faced women?
He shrugged. Perhaps it would never happen again.
He went into the dusty dark of the school. He remembered seeing a candle, its saucer an inch deep in dust, with a matchbox half submerged in it like a raft on a gray sea.
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He fumbled round till he found it.
The old matches struck. He lit the candle and picked up the history book where he had dropped it. He flipped through to that terrifying chapter heading, death of the united
STATES OF AMERICA.
“It was afterward known as the Defense Error. There was to be an experimental shield of cobalt radiation, forming an umbrella over the country and a great part of Canada. For a reason which for long remained unexplained, the setting up of the radiation defense started a chain-reaction of devastating power. In the course of one night towns and cities were obliterated, forests burned and converted into dust bowls where heat was so great that the uprush drew all air away over areas of thousands of square miles. Open land was turned into desert, lakes drained and left yawning craters, their waters dispersed over a million square miles of sky. The great rivers burst free and ran wild, their stemming waters draining down through the fissures in the burst earth. Debris which had not been disintegrated by the intense waves of heat silted the beds, and where seaboard towns had almost escaped the fire disaster they were obliterated by mountainous avalanches of mud and wreckage. For years the stained waters of the oceans were seen to be contaminated and bespattered to distances of a thousand miles from the Atlantic and Pacific shores. It was a terrible disaster.”
John Brunt could not adjust his mind to believe it, but he remembered that this was what Packard had said might happen.
“The scale of the experiment,” Packard had told him, “is too vast for human calculation. There could be a million errors passing unnoticed through the endless chains of computers, one minor fault multiplying with every stage. I know a computer’s weaknesses. I would sooner trust a man. He has a conscience.”
John sat back and looked at the candle.
Was this the answer to the mystery of decay? Radiation? But if radiation had drifted from America, it would have aSected both sides of this electronic fence. And it had not.
The pause was a natural space allowing horror to be digested.
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He went on with the chapter.
“There were small pockets of survivors who had suffered great hardship. They became wandering bands, searching in the monstrous devastation for homes, or places to build them where the country was not scorched and blasted into rock and burning sand. In places it seems parts of buildings, shacks, old buses were still usable. Such was the feeling among these wandering people that any small sign in the possession of a stranger, such as a book of mathematics, astronomy, an old science magazine, a microscope or a test tube even, was enough for him to be hanged from the nearest charred skeleton of a tree. Travelers who penetrated the disaster area brought only a rough picture of the devastation; the scale was too great for a witness to comprehend. They could remember only the small scenes of people living like animals in burned wreckage and tom earth, starving, dying from the heat and radiation. Such travelers who returned to Europe died soon after with cancer of the blood. Very soon no more explorers were allowed to go, and the United States ceased to exist to the remaining civilized world.”
Now he heard the voice of Packard in his head.
“Sooner or later,” Packard said, “we must face the fact that there is the danger of a trigger effect taking place. Though we may contain the original fission the danger might well lie in unseen effects taking place outside the sphere of operations. I do not believe that any man can live and die without his having had considerable effect upon the life that surrounded him through his years. Nor do I believe that anything can take place on this earth without it has some effect outside itself. As the scale of the incident increases, so does the likelihood of external effect. We are using a chain of events in these operations, and I do not believe we can say with any certainty which will be the last link in that chain.”
He felt as if Packard had spoken those words to him. He could not remember ever hearing the Professor say them. The realism of the voice in his head was startling.
He went on reading the following chapter.
EFFECTS OF THE DEFENSE ERROR “The disruption of normal forces over such a vast area
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caused all expectations of probable drift of radiation to be entirely wrong. Instead of a drift eastward across the Atlantic, the mass of the radiation moved westward over the Pacific at a greater rate than ever predicted. The result of this radiation mass was upon China where the effects upon human life were immediate and terrible. The government in Peking mistakenly assumed that an attack had been made on them by the Soviet Union from the eastern side and reprisal raids in great strengths were made by heat engines carried by tanks and aircraft, against which there was no defense. Armor was melted, men disintegrated, buildings burst into instant fire and burned almost as quickly as in an explosion. This attack, unopposed as it had to be—for the heat dispersed missiles and attack weapons as it dispersed everything else— reached beyond Moscow before a parley was called for. No war had been or was to be declared. At the parley the mistake was realized, but by the time of the withdrawal of the heat engines the heart had been burned out of Russia, her factories in the East obliterated and her workers with them. The grain, the food stores, all had gone before an implacable and misdirected revenge. At the time of the withdrawal Russia faced absolute disaster, starvation, and ruin. China herself found it impossible to deal with the scale of death imposed upon it, and not until plague began was it thought to use the heat engines as large-scale cremators. -
“The actual cost of the Defense Error cannot be estimated and will never now be known.
“The side-effects of this disaster and its two main phases (the American obliteration and the Sino-Russian Incident) were to have slower but much wider effects outside the Northern land masses.
“After the mid-century, numbers of overseas colonies which had been successfully developed by Europeans over the previous hundred years were given Independence, often as a result of pressure put upon the parent states by America. This independence was the foundation of new countries in Africa, the West and East Indies and parts of the East itself. Where new countries were formed the powers of world statesmen were put into the hands of men with a limited tribal outlook. This was well recognized by the Americans on the one hand and the Eastern powers, China and Russia on the other. All these countries then played political chess with the newly formed nations by secret offers of money, produce,
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and arms of limited striking power. The new nations accepted all, spent lavishly and intrigued to wipe out the white residents in the countries, after which the way would be clear for intrigue against each other. While they could turn on the one hand to America, and then frighten her by turning to the Communists, reversing the process as expedient, the new nations were bound to live in near idleness and wealth. Their roads, railways, bridges, hospitals, schools, public buildings, and sewage systems had all been built for them by European enterprise. What the new posessors did not realize was the cost of maintaining these institutions. They found it heavy, and a rapid deterioration set in. Though it had been said that the ambitions of the Europeans had been to rule them, the moral deterioriation following World War II led the Americans to try to buy them, and the Communists to seduce them.
“When therefore the Defense Error obliterated the greater mass of the civilizations in the Northern Hemisphere the income enjoyed by the new nations ceased as abruptly as the civilizations which had provided it.
“The European nations temporarily unaffected by the Error, turned their backs on pleas for help that came pouring in from the new Independe
nt nations. The plea that without help disease must spread found no sympathy. The disasters which had spread global death left the Europeans fighting disease on their own frontiers, and with the destruction of a great part of the natural world resources and its produce, they had no help to spare.”
John Brunt stared at the candle burning uneasily in the gloom. This was the record of what had happened; but even at the time the trend toward these happenings had been clear in the talk of people like Packard—
He looked up into the moving shadows round the room. Again he had the odd sensation that he heard Packard talking in the shadows, saying things he had never said in the past.
He looked all round, but there was no one in the room.
He read on.
“The effect of global disaster was that the world was effectively reduced again to its size in the fifteenth century. All air travel was declared illegal as it was a certain means of flying in radiation and plague. Travel by sea was restricted to the British Isles, to the Continent and the Mediterranean as far East as Istanbul. The entire Northern shore of Africa
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became hostile. As in ancient times, power in the East and West Asia came into the hands of intinerant bands, the strongest of which ruled until put down by a more powerful successor. In the newly developed countries disease began to be accepted and life fell back into the primitive, with the ruins of European civilization standing like tombstones around them. For a long time, passage to Australia was maintained round the only non-hostile, or non-radio-active seas, round Cape Horn. The removal of American investment and political influence in South America however eventually produced such a state of squalor and political opportunity, that the countries became involved in a state of constant civil war, and the route round the Cape was abondoned.
“With the full effects of the Defense Error taken into account, it will be seen that the entire equilibrium of the ‘Modern World’ was lost.
“Many years later, in 1995, a man working on a refuse dump in London found a piece of paper which proved to be part of the calculations upon which the Blackout experiment had been based. He was a qualified mathematician, but the world had so changed that his skill was no longer required. He worked on the calculations for many years before he discovered that the progression contained a fault which gave it a possibility of deviation, so that it could give two results. This meant it could give a supposed true result or a mutation, but that it was impossible to calculate which would take effect. This meant that the progression should have been discarded and a start made from another base. He published his findings, but few were interested. His publication sold only 384 copies.”
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