by Philip Wylie
These, however, weren’t too difficult to field mechanically.
As his mind drifted, he took hands, cool, warm, strong, small, and heard his “party voice” make responses.
“Thanks, I feel fine.”
“Yes, it’s strange.”
“Glad to be ‘aboard,’ commissioner!”
And so on.
The initial business ended, finally.
Glenn found himself in a chair, at the table across from the Mayor with the others ringed around.
Soon, silence fell. The Mayor, plainly, was about to become his official self.
He didn’t rise but when the voices dropped away he bowed towards Glenn and said,
“Welcome, again, to USA, Incorporated.”
“To—what?”
The Mayor started slightly and then recovered his aplomb. He smiled, deliberately, Glenn felt: “The nation, Glenn—and I’m Bob, by the way—is now a single corporation.”
Glenn rubbed his nose with a knuckle and said nothing.
“All the changes—from your time to now—will be shown you, Glenn, beginning shortly. All the main ones. What happened to shift the nation from what you know to what you will now discover. A tragic yet fascinating period of history. Man almost became extinct. But of that, more later. My associates and I, unfortunately, are up against a busy schedule this afternoon. I believe you know you have been invited to dine this evening, with my wife and me?” He saw Glenn knew that. “Very well. For reasons of business, what I’d like to say now, and really ought to, will be postponed till the evening. Then, too, you’ll be readier for it. At this moment, however—” he glanced at his watch, “—the President wishes to make his greeting.”
Glenn stared.
“Yes. Of United States. President Mallet, George Mallet, formerly head of the Steel Corporation of USA. Great man. Ready, Harrison?”
“All set!”
“Just swing your chair around, Glenn,” the Mayor said. And with that, the lights in the long room dimmed.
The opposite wall was bare—not even a picture adorned it, not a stand or vase broke its blank surface. As Glenn swiveled around, that end wall was bathed in light—from behind. The effect gave him a prod he followed to the previous night and the drama on the bedroom wall at The Kettle. Only, this time, the “screen” was about thirty feet wide and ten feet high and as an image appeared, blurred for a second and then focussed, Glenn found himself grinning at his recollection and its form. “Last night” was forty-six years plus a day in the past! Apparently.
What came on the vast screen in perfect color was also recognized by Glenn. He said, aloud, “The Oval Room!”
The Mayor’s voice corrected him. “It’s an exact copy, Glenn, but underground.”
“Oh.”
Then the President walked in. President—what? Mallet. Remember it! George Mallet. Former head of the steel company, of all that had remained of steel companies in this destitute USA, Inc., Glenn prompted himself, wryly.
The President sat at the remembered desk and looked into the camera, or whatever it was: a man of fifty with a square face, gray eyes, a command look, expectably, but a rotound belly and thin wrists. White hair with a black streak, possibly natural but in any event, arresting; shrewd wrinkled around bold and slightly bleak irises, topped by a political smile, warm, somewhat paternal, rehearsed and well learned, Glenn observed.
“Welcome to USA, Incorporated, Mr. Howard! Glenn, may I say?” He swung about and said, “Nothing on my monitor!”
An off screen voice, agitated, said, “I thought Frank had told you. We cannot pick up LA today.”
“Oh?” The President looked back, at them, at the camera, at an invisible Glenn, at the world, for all Glenn knew. It was all happening a bit fast. A bit much, Glenn felt. So, he thought, Okay, President, George shoot!
The President did.
“First, with my welcome, on behalf of the nation, let me express my amazement—and gratitude—over the peculiar … miracle … that brings you to us. I had hoped we’d converse, now. That being electronically impossible, let me be brief. First, Glenn, your properties, in their present and I must say greatly augmented—relatively, at least—state, will be returned to you in toto. Second, the Board of Trustees wishes me to inform you that, in a hasty intercommunicative meeting, they have elected you, provisionally but unanimously, to the Board. Save for my own office, this is the highest status attainable by any American citizen. Third, and I wish we could exchange words over this, we trust that you will not object to your being made the subject of a sort of study, of some experiments, in the months ahead. These will not be arduous nor painful—the contrary, indeed.” His smile, now, was almost lascivious, Glenn thought. Experiments!
The Mayor, sitting beside Glenn, evidently sensed his stiffening and resentment. He patted Glenn’s shoulder amiably. “Nothing to fret you, fellow! Tell you later—the details.”
The President had paused to don spectacles so as to read from a paper. What he then read was a sort of order, quasi-military, to his subordinates in the residual USA—a proclamation, perhaps, Glenn revised “order”—formally installing Glenn Howard, provisionally, as a citizen, Board member and the future head of all communications in USA, Inc., save those of a military or other restricted nature. Finishing that document he looked straight at Glenn (and, evidently, at all USA watching this broadcast) to say further:
“You will be provided with Board-Level quarters as soon as these can be refurbished. For the moment, a mere commissioner level apartment is available. We apologize. We are particularly pleased to have you with us, Glenn—and call me George—because our present news-and-directional-orienting programs have nowhere near the effective reach and range your record shows you can achieve. Finally, we congratulate you on your singular overall rating. Remarkable! And priceless to us all! Every facility you wish will be furnished to brief you on both the history between your date and this, and our present lifeways, systems, the establishment, and our aims. We count on you, once you’re informed, for great things!”
The man looked off and saw, evidently, his time was up. He gave Glenn—or the camera—a sort of salute, bowed, and faded out.
The lights went up. There was vigorous applause. Glenn swiveled about and met shiny eyes, envious faces, a number of sycophantic looks, a few narrowed stares. He was as bewildered as before.
People began to shake hands and depart. The brown-eyed lady official said that since the Mayor had grabbed him for dinner, maybe she could have him for lunch, the next day. Or dinner. Even—a late snack?
He thanked her, promised nothing.
A man said, “When you start touring the city, don’t miss my show. Air and water regeneration plant.”
“And mine!” a second commissioner put in. “Power plants. H-reactors, you know.”
Glenn registered that. “I didn’t! Sounds like the solution we needed—back in my time.”
The second speaker—Glenn thought his name was Bolton Loaden—smiled and flashed spectacles as he nodded, also. “Came too late, except for the survivors.”
Glenn kept shaking hands, exchanging good-byes and promises to see this, that, go here, and there. But the words just spoken made a special mark. “How many—survived?” He threw the query at Bolton Loaden, which name later proved nearly right. Oddly, it stopped the polite farewell.
Bob had heard and finally said, “Worldwide, Glenn? Or USA?”
“Well, both?”
“Nobody really knows. Where there was enough preparation—underground facilities—all national policy was secretive. About the construction. And, then, how it served after the crunch. And nations are still quietly sitting on that. Not much intercommunication. No cause. All any country can do, now, is just maintain its living. And every one of the technological nations, of course, is a little afraid some other one has more people. Natural pride. No war likely, of course. Just—the expectable silence. Did USA start with a million survivors? Did the USSR manage anything
like that? And how many people have they, now?”
Glenn scowled, “Can’t even give—an order of magnitude?”
Bob Baker shook his dark-thicketed head slowly. “When you meet with the Board—and that’ll be in January unless there’s a special session—you may get figures. But if you imagine the world population peaked around five billion in the late eighties, and that even before the Last Day, hardly a fifth had survived, you can begin to get an idea.”
Glenn began to. He was silent and shaken. “It’s hard to make that sort of leap.”
“Precisely,” Bob smiles. “And so, since you have a couple of hours between now and changing for dinner, we thought, if you agreed, that a series of”—he nodded at the wall that had for a while become a screen—“displays from the past, major events of a disastrous sort—might be your best, initial experience. Leandra will be with you to explain what you need explained. The material is ready—and we’re under some pressure—”
“I think that would be very useful,” Glenn said.
CHAPTER NINE
TAPES FROM HELL
They sat in two chairs, side by side.
Leandra had a remote-control gadget which she used to cut off the scenes, to repeat them, to select from an evidently great but special library scenes she’d already arranged, or, occassionally, something else to clear up Glenn’s perplexities or add to his comprehension.
The show convinced Glenn beyond any further doubt that his present was real and no dream, hallucination or other, unnamable phenomenon.
When it was useful, Leandra would cut out the sound so they could talk. It was often useful.
“We’ll start,” she said, “in 1977. That was the year of the first big disaster. This is Bombay.”
Bombay was, he thought, unchanged from his knowledge of it. He’d never been there but he had seen many photos, spent time in New Dehli, visited Calcutta and some other cities in India. He was now looking down a broad street at a mass of people running towards the camera. Behind them was nothing that seemed ominous, a rolling smog of a bluish hue, but one that any breeze might blow into any city, Glenn felt. Yet the hordes in their white dhotis, their saris, their turbans, were trying, it seemed, to escape the mist. As they came closer, their united yelling was deafening. Glenn bent toward the girl and she cut that din.
“The smog?” he asked. “They were running from that?”
She nodded. Now, silently, the great screen showed why.
The camera was now on some higher place, the top of a vehicle, or a balcony. And the seething horde could be seen into the distance. But as the cloud overwhelmed the most distant myriads, they fell.
That was all.
Glenn thought there must have been a hundred thousand people in view, in that few minutes. And the pursuing smog rolled forward, nearer, faster than the running people could go. In fact, they were their own impediment. The slow ones were knocked down and trampled, while the swift, strong and agile clawed through the nearer masses to try to get clear. The result was the usual one in a panic. Mere numbers and crowd compression, frenzied ruthlessness and utterly selfish effort, made the great mob slow down. Glenn saw, as the front of the multitude came nearer, a horrible thing. There were palms on both sides of the street, wide walks, and then buildings shops and stores and offices, most of them white and flat facaded.
The human pressure began to sway, then slant and finally topple the palm trees, which meant human bodies in hundreds were being shattered against the rough trunks. And then, here and there, he saw the white fronts of buildings turning red. Which, again, meant only one thing: crushed human beings on the sides of this route were being hauled against the walls until they burst and became paintbrushes, swept along by the masses, and recoloring the walls with their blood.
This hideous scene continued until, a little short of the camera, their agonized faces individually clear, the foremost—so, last—of the multitude were overtaken by the bluish mist and fell, jerking and kicking, gagging, trying to rise only to collapse with the attempt, till the last one was quiet and the great avenue was paved deep under its dead, the white-clad and red-blotched masses of its dead.
Leandra switched on the sound again.
None came from this area but a horror of screaming seemed to rise from every direction in the distance.
Then, suddenly, the camera must have tipped over for the picture swung in an arc—and went out. The screen was empty. The sound stopped, too.
“What was it?”
The girl gave that smile which states no smile is appropriate. She looked at a small book in which were notes, gave her gadget a number of clicked punches and then answered by a new tape.
First, Glenn saw a gentleman, tall, with an oddly bulging brow and what proved to be the most steady and compassionate eyes he could remember, as he talked into dozens of mikes and was captured by as many movie and TV cameras at what was clearly an airport, perhaps Kennedy. He was near to exhaustion and seemed strangely troubled even before he spoke. Questions were belted at him by the media-mob.
Finally he talked into mikes and cameras as was now shown Glenn. “I’ve been asked, perhaps ordered, officially, it appears, not to give out any public information until after I have been interviewed by certain Washington people.”
There were boos. Voices yelled things like, “Public domain!” Or, “The people must have facts!” Even, “Another bribed scientist, doctor?”
Whatever he heard, the man, who was perhaps seventy, decided to ignore the official “orders.”
“Okay!” he shouted and his eyes were alive. “There is nothing secret—can’t be—about the disaster. As you know there have been oceanic blooms—massive multiplications of microscopic sea animals and plants—before. Like the red tides often observed off Florida in the Gulf killing millions of fish. Something similar occurred in the waters off eastern India, the Indian Ocean and the southern part of the Arabian Sea. In past weeks, thousands of square miles have been covered by a ‘bloom’ of a new strain of phytoplankton, a hybrid, or else a mutated form of a familiar organism. I must skip the technical details. No time!” His eyes had focussed on some distant activity before he said that.
“Millions of tons of these organisms, billions, appeared in the upper ten feet or so, of these seas. They continued to multiply till they literally smothered, or crowded themselves to death. Dead, they burst and each single cell then let out a tiny but fantastically toxic bit of gas. This was about as dense as air, with the same mass, and so it floated above the area.” His gaze wandered. He flinched a little and went on:
“The simple movement of a normal weather front brought the poisoned air ashore. It moved inland from Mysore to the Gulf of Bombay at lethal strength. For seventy to a hundred miles inland, it remained a killer. How many scores of millions it destroyed in one day remains uncertain, though it included practically everybody along that coastal distance and inland to seventy or more miles. Turbulent weather dissipated it then, and its later effects haven’t been severe. One thing: this phenomenon should be understood because it can happen again, in many forms, anyplace.” He looked down and said, “Yes.”
He was arrested!
Glenn turned to Leandra but saw her eyes fixed on the screen, where the light-effect had changed.
He looked. What he saw was a reproduction of one of his own newspapers, one of the biggest, The Midwest Sentinel. First, a banner headline:
FAMED BIOLOGIST MAKES ERRONEOUS REPORT
Dr. Robbel Biltman in Custody for Own Good White House Urges Public to Keep Calm as False Rumor Sweeps Nation.
There was much more of the same sort.
Among the rapid series of sound-and-color events that followed, Glenn found that Willen Deever, not Angelo Katz, whom he’d named for the spot, had taken over the “Howard Empire,” as it was now called.
And Glenn realized that his TV, radio, newspaper and other publishing properties had evidently taken the very opposite position from the one he had planned on that dr
ive toward Los Angeles that had, indeed, ended there—and nearly half a century too late!
He did not need to be told much more to know that the conspiracy of the twenty-five industrial czars at Boiling Wells had succeeded. Here, six years later, was ample proof. A single, brave scientist had told a set of truths, against orders of some official sort—but immediately, the world of industry, and the media, with the full approval of several federal spokesmen had launched a massive campaign to mislead and befuddle the American public.
While he mused bitterly on that, the lights went up.
He turned to the girl with a questioning look.
“You get the point, here—?”
“I sure do! The warning that one man, Biltman—I knew him, I believe, slightly—gave, on his return from India … so I thought: news that was scotched as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Right? An actually horrible, biological disaster! But ‘local.’ So what was the policy of the USA? Make the folks ignore the warning—the statement that such things could or might or would happen elsewhere, everywhere, anytime.”
She bent her head slightly in assent. Shrugged. Looked at him gravely. “That was the first big one. But there’d been plenty of little ones, which hadn’t been used as warnings. Even your media didn’t get the point, really, while you were the chief. Radiation deaths—”
“But accidental. And few. Only individuals—”
“—making clear what any massive radiation release could do.” She saw his perplexity. “Nobody seemed to be even sane, looking back from here! The whole country was being used as a throughway for all sorts of lethal material. Trucks loaded with atomically blazing hot materials—so hot they boiled and had to be carried in water-cooled, lead containers—were roaring through cities and towns all the time. In 1978, I think, one of them was wrecked and the radioactive cargo ran out into a river … let me see … the Muskingam, I think, in Ohio. I didn’t include any tapes on that It was ‘relatively’ a small thing. Ten thousand eventual deaths. Three or four times as many ill, maybe half permanently injured.”