In the family there were farmers, a few lawyers, two doctors, insurance brokers and bankers and millers, hardware merchandisers, other shopkeepers. David's father owned a large department store that catered to the upper-middleclass clientele of the valley. The valley was rich. David always supposed that the family, except for a few ne'er-do-wells, was rather wealthy. Of all his relatives his favorite was his father's brother Walt. Dr. Walt, they all called him. He played with the children and taught them grown-up things, like where to hit if you really meant it, where not to hit in a friendly scrap. He seemed to know when to stop treating them as children long before anyone else in the family did. Dr. Walt was the reason David had decided very early to become a scientist.
David was seventeen when he went to Harvard. His birthday was in September and he didn't go home for it. When he did return at Thanksgiving and the clan had gathered, Grandfather Sumner poured the ritual before-dinner martinis and handed one to him. And Uncle Warner said to him, "What do you think we should do about Bobbie?"
He had arrived at that mysterious crossing that is never delineated clearly enough to be seen in advance. He sipped his martini, not liking it particularly, and knew that childhood had ended, and he felt a profound sadness and loneliness.
The Christmas that David was twenty-three seemed out of focus. The scenario was the same, the attic full of children, the food smells, the powdering of snow, none of that had changed, but he was seeing it from a new position and it was not the wonderland it had been, and he knew with regret that the enchantment had vanished and could never be recaptured. When his parents went home he stayed on at the Wiston farm for a day or two, waiting for Celia. She had missed the Christmas Day celebration, getting ready for her coming trip to Brazil, but she would be there, her mother had assured Grandmother Wiston, and David was waiting for her, not happily, not with an expectation of reward, but with a fury that grew and caused him to stalk the old house like a boy being punished for another's sin.
When she came home and he saw her standing with her mother and her grandmother, his anger melted. It was like seeing Celia in a time distortion, as she was and would be or had been. Her pale hair would not change much, but her bones would become more prominent, and the almost-emptiness of her face would have written on it a message of concern, of love, of giving, of being decisively herself, of a strength unsuspected in her frail body. Grandmother Wiston was a beautiful old lady, he thought in wonder, amazed that he never had seen her beauty before. Celia's mother was more beautiful than the girl. And he saw the resemblance to his own mother in the trio. Wordlessly, defeated, he turned and went to the rear of the house and put on one of his grandfather's heavy jackets because he didn't want to see her at all now, and his own outdoor clothing was in the front hall closet too near where she was still standing.
He walked a long time in the frosty afternoon, seeing very little, and shaking himself from time to time when he realized that the cold was entering his shoes or making his ears numb. And he found that he was climbing the slope of the antique forest where his grandfather had taken him once, a long time ago. He climbed and became warmer, and at dusk he was under the branches of the tiers of trees that had been there since the beginning of time. They or others that were just like them. Forever waiting for the day when they would reclaim the land and cover the continent once more. Here were the relicts his grandfather had brought him to see. Here was a silverbell grown to the stature of a large tree, while down the slopes, in the lower reaches, it remained always a shrub. Here the white basswood grew alongside the hemlock and the bitternut hickory, and the beeches and sweet buckeyes locked arms.
"David!" He stopped and listened, certain he had imagined it, but the call came again. "David, are you up here?"
He turned then and saw Celia among the massive tree trunks. Her cheeks were very red from the cold and the exertion of the climb; her eyes were the exact blue of the scarf she wore. She stopped six feet from him and started to speak again, but didn't. Instead she drew off a glove and touched the smooth trunk of a beech. "Grandfather Wiston brought me up here, too, when I was twelve. It was very important to him that we understand this place."
David nodded.
"Why did you leave like that? They all think we're going to fight again."
"We might," he said.
She smiled. "I don't think so."
"We should start down. It'll be dark in a few minutes." But he didn't move.
"David, try to make Mother see, will you? You understand that I have to go, that I have to do something, don't you? She thinks you're so clever. She'd listen to you."
He laughed. "They think I'm clever like a puppy dog." Celia shook her head. "You're the one they'd listen to. They treat me like a child and always will."
David shook his head, smiling. "Why are you going, Celia? What are you trying to prove?"
"Damn it, David! If you don't understand, who will?" She took a deep breath. "People are starving in South America. Not just a few Indians, but millions of people. And practically no one has done any real research in tropical farming methods. It's all lateritic soil, and no one down there understands it. Well, we trained in tropical farming and we're going to start classes down there, in the field. It's what I trained for. This project will get me a doctorate."
The Wistons were farmers, had always been farmers. "Custodians of the soil," Grandfather Wiston had said once, "not its owners, just custodians." Celia reached down and moved aside some matted leaves and muck on the ground, and straightened with her hand full of black dirt. "The famines are spreading. They need so much. And I have so much to give! Can't you understand that?" she cried. She closed her hand hard, compacting the soil into a ball that crumbled again when she opened her fist. She let the soil fall from her hand and carefully pushed the protective covering of leaves back over the bared spot.
"You followed me to tell me good-bye, didn't you?" David said suddenly, and his voice was harsh. "It's really good-bye this time, isn't it?" He watched her and slowly she nodded. "There's someone in your group?"
"I'm not sure, David. Maybe." She bowed her head and started to pull her glove on again. "I thought I was sure. But when I saw you in the hall, saw the look on your face when I came in . . . I realized that I just don't know."
"Celia, you listen to me! There aren't any hereditary defects that would surface! Damn it, you know that! If there were, we simply wouldn't have children, but there's no reason. You know that, don't you?"
She nodded. "I know."
"Come with me, Celia. We don't have to get married right away, let them get used to the idea first. They will. They always do. We have a resilient family, you and me. Celia, I love you."
She turned her head and he saw that she was weeping; she wiped her cheeks with her glove, then with her bare hand, leaving dirt streaks. David pulled her to him, held her and kissed her tears, her cheeks, her lips.
She finally drew away and started back down the slope, with David following. "I can't decide anything right now. It isn't fair. I should have stayed at the house. I shouldn't have followed you up here. David, I'm committed to going in two days. I can't just say I've changed my mind. It's important to me. To the people down there. I can't just decide not to go."
He caught her arm and held her, kept her from moving ahead again. "Just tell me you love me. Say it, just once." "I love you," she said very slowly.
"How long will you be gone?"
"Three years, I signed a contract."
He stared at her. "Change it! Make it one year. I'll be out of grad school then. You can teach here. Let their bright young students come to you."
"We have to get back, or they'll send a search party for us," she said. "I'll try to change it," she whispered then. "If I can." Two days later she left.
David spent New Year's Eve at the Sumner farm with his parents and a horde of aunts and uncles and cousins. On
New Year's Day, Grandfather Sumner made an announcement. "We're building a hospital up at Bea
r Creek, this side of the mill."
David blinked. That was a mile from the farm, miles from anything else. "A hospital?" He looked at his uncle Walt, who nodded.
Clarence was studying his eggnog with a sour expression, and David's father, the third brother, was watching the smoke curl from his pipe.
"Why up here?" David asked finally.
"It's going to be a research hospital," Walt said. "Genetic diseases, hereditary defects, that sort of thing. Two hundred beds."
David shook his head in disbelief. "You have any idea how much something like that would cost? Who's financing it?"
His grandfather laughed nastily. "Senator Burke has graciously arranged to get federal funds," he said. His voice
became more caustic. "And I cajoled a few members of the family to put a little in the kitty." David glanced at Clarence, who looked pained. "I'm giving the land," Grandfather Sumner went on. "So here and there we got support."
"But why would Burke go for it? You've never voted for him in a single campaign in his life."
"Told him we'd dig out a lot of stuff we've been sitting on, support his opposition. If he was a baboon, we'd support him, and there's a lot of family these days, David. A heap of family."
"Well, hats off," David said, still not fully believing it. "You giving up your practice to go into research?" he asked Walt. His uncle nodded. David drained his cup of eggnog.
"David," Walt said, "we want to hire you."
He looked up quickly. "Why? I'm not into medical research."
"I know what your specialty is," Walt said quietly. "We want you for a consultant, and later on to head a department of research."
"But I haven't even finished my thesis yet," David said, and he felt as if he had stumbled into a pot party.
"You'll do another year of donkey work for Selnick and eventually you'll write the thesis, a bit here, a dab there. You could write it in a month, couldn't you, if you had time?" David nodded reluctantly. "I know," Walt said, smiling faintly. "You think you're being asked to give up a lifetime career for a pipe dream."
Grandfather Sumner let out his breath explosively. He was a large man with a massive chest and great bulging biceps. His hands were big enough to grip a basketball in each. But it was his head that you remembered. It was the head of a giant, and although he had farmed for many years, and later overseen the others who did it for him, he had found time to read more extensively than anyone else David knew. And he remembered what he read. His library was better than most public libraries. Now he leaned forward and said, "You listen to me, David. You listen hard. I'm telling you what the goddamn government doesn't dare admit yet. We're on the first downslope of a slide that is going to plummet the world to a depth that they never dreamed of. I know the signs, David. Pollution's catching up to us faster than anyone knows. There's more radiation in the atmosphere than there's been since Hiroshima—French tests, Chinese tests. Leaks. God knows where it's all coming from. We reached zero population growth a couple of years ago, but, David, we were trying, and other nations are getting there too, and they aren't trying. There's famine in a quarter of the world right now. The famines are here, and they're getting worse. There are more diseases than there's ever been since the good Lord sent the plagues to Egypt. And they're plagues that we don't know anything about. There's more drought and more flooding than there's ever been. England's changing into a desert, the bogs and moors are drying up. Entire species of fish are gone, just damn gone, and in only a year or two. The anchovies are gone.
The codfish industry is gone. The cods they are catching are diseased, unfit to use. There's no fishing off the west coast of the Americas, North or South. Every damn protein crop on earth has some sort of blight that gets worse and worse. We're restricting our exports of food now, and next year we'll stop them for good. We're having shortages no one ever dreamed of. Tin, copper, aluminum, paper. Chlorine, by God! And what do you think will happen in the world when we suddenly can't even purify our drinking water?"
His face was darkening as he spoke, and he was getting angrier and angrier, directing his unanswerable questions to David, who stared at him with nothing at all to say.
"And they don't know what to do about any of it," his grandfather went on. "No more than the dinosaurs knew how to stop their own extinction. We've changed the photochemical reactions of our own atmosphere, and we can't adapt to the new radiations fast enough to survive! There've been hints here and there that this is a major concern, but who listens? The damn fools will lay each and every catastrophe at the foot of a local condition and turn their backs on the fact that this is global, until it's too late to do anything."
"But, if it's what you think, what could they do?" David asked, looking at Dr. Walt for support and finding none.
"Turn off the factories, ground the airplanes, stop the mining, junk the cars. But they won't, and even if they did, it would still be a catastrophe. It's going to break wide open. Within the next couple of years, David, it's going to break. There's going to be the biggest bust since man began scratching marks on rocks, that's what! And we're getting ready for it! I'm getting ready for it! We've got the land and we've got the men to farm it, and we'll get our hospital and we'll do research on ways to keep our animals and our people alive, and when the world goes into a tailspin we'll be alive and when it starves we'll be eating."
Suddenly he stopped and studied David with his eyes narrowed. "I said you'd leave here convinced that we've all gone mad. But you'll be back, David, my boy. You'll be back before the dogwoods bloom, because you'll see the signs."
David returned to school and his thesis and the donkey work Selnick gave him to do. Celia didn't write, and he had no address for her. In response to his questions his mother admitted that no one had heard from her. In February, in retaliation for the food embargo, Japan imposed trade restrictions that made further United States trade with her impossible. Japan and China signed a mutual aid treaty. In March, Japan seized the Philippines and their fields of rice, and China resumed its long-dormant trusteeship over the Indochina peninsula, with the rice paddies of Cambodia and Vietnam.
Cholera struck in Rome, Los Angeles, Galveston, and Savannah. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and other Arab-bloc nations issued an ultimatum: the United States must guarantee a yearly ration of wheat to the Arab states and discontinue all aid to Israel, or there would be no oil for the United States or Europe. They refused to believe the United States could not meet their demands. Worldwide travel restrictions were imposed immediately, and the United States government, by presidential decree, formed a new department with Cabinet status: the Bureau of Information.
The redbuds were hazy blurs of pink against the clear, May-softened sky when David returned home. He stopped by his house only long enough to change his clothes and get rid of his boxes of college mementos before he drove out to the Sumner farm, where Walt was staying while he oversaw the construction of his hospital.
Walt had an office downstairs. It was a clutter of books, notebooks, blueprints, correspondence. He greeted David as if he hadn't been away at all. "Look," he said, "this research of Semple and Ferrer, what do you know about it? The first generation of cloned mice showed no deviation, no variation in viability or potency, nor did the second or third, but with the fourth the viability decreased sharply. And there was a steady, and irreversible, slide to extinction. Why?"
David sat down hard and stared at Walt. "How did you get that?"
"Vlasic," Walt said. "We went to med school together. We've corresponded all these years. I asked him."
"You know his work?"
"Yes. His rhesus monkeys show the same decline during the fourth generation, and on to extinction."
"It isn't just like that," David said. "He had to discontinue his work last year—no funds. So we don't know the life expectancies of the later strains. But the decline starts in the third clone generation, a decline of potency. He was breeding each clone generation sexually, testing the offspring for normal
cy. The third clone generation had only twenty-four percent potency. The sexually reproduced offspring started with that same percentage, and, in fact, potency dropped until the fifth generation of sexually reproduced offspring, and then it started to climb back up and presumably would have reached normalcy again."
Walt was watching him closely, nodding now and then. David went on. "That was the clone-three strain. With the clone-four strain there was a drastic change. Some abnormalities were present, and life expectancy was down seventeen percent. The abnormals were all sterile. Potency was generally down to forty-eight percent. It was downhill all the way with each sexually reproduced generation. By the fifth generation no offspring survived longer than an hour or two. So much for clone-four strain. Cloning the fours was worse. Clone-five strain had gross abnormalities, and they were all sterile. Life expectancy figures were not completed. There was no clone-six strain. None survived."
"A dead end," Walt said. He indicated a stack of magazines and extracts. "I had hoped that they were out of date, that there were newer methods, or perhaps an error had been found in their figures. It's the third generation that is the turning point, then?"
David shrugged. "My information could be out of date. I know Vlasic stopped last year, but Semple and Ferrer are still at it, or were last month. They may have something I don't know about. You're thinking of livestock?"
"Of course. You know the rumors? They're just not breeding well, no figures available, but hell, we have our own livestock. They're down by half."
"Can you get materials for the hospital?" David asked.
"For now. We're rushing it like there's no tomorrow, naturally. And we're not worrying about money right now. We'll have things that we won't know what to do with, but I thought it would be better to order everything I can think of than to find out next year that what we really need isn't available."
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