But it never came. Was there really a God out there, she wondered. Perhaps there was nothing out there, nothing but the sunlight and the angelbees, and the Wall, the skeletons, the deadland. Nothing her soul could connect with.
The radio in her workshop was her best chance of connecting something, connecting to the Underground. That afternoon she would have to check the connections with her voltmeter; the last time she had closed the circuit, a resistor had burned and split in half, leaving a sooty trail. Between that and the Town Meeting threatening to send her a Committee of Concern, she would never get it done. What they ought to do was—
Send a Committee to the Pylon. A Witness, rather, a “Witness to Crimes Against Humanity,” as Grandfather Chase had done, years ago at the missile plant outside Philadelphia. In those days, Quakers had really meant something.
There came a rustling of clothes and feet as the children slid themselves off the benches to file out with the teachers. Daniel was waiting at the door till his Specials were all through; Grace caught his arm to lean on because she had a slight twist in her leg.
Now the programmed service would begin, led by Carl or Debbie Dreher, or another Lutheran. Isabel shifted herself on the bench and hoped the sermon would be brief. She generally found the Bible stories lacking in taste, let alone morality. That woman Jael, for instance, who hammered a tent peg through Sisera’s head and got nothing but praise for it. The New Testament was little better. Why had the city of Jerusalem put up with that trial, especially the false witnesses? There ought to have been a Committee of Concern somewhere. There ought to be one now, for the angelbees. She would tell them, she decided, as soon as Worship was done.
Instead of the Drehers, today, Matthew Crofts rose to lead the service. Matthew was a former chemist at Union Carbide who taught the science classes in high school. Isabel liked Teacher Matthew, even if he was a Lutheran.
Matthew ran a hand through his speckled gray hair. His receding chin gave him a diffident appearance. His build had a slight stoop, and he tended to roll his eyes upward as he spoke.
“Today is a special day,” Matthew began, “for a new soul has been born into our community. Yet while we rejoice in this gift, our joy is overshadowed by the inexplicable events in the heavens.” So Matthew would speak to what the angelbees were doing. Isabel took a deep breath.
“It would be easy for us to feel bitterness, to question God’s wisdom in permitting this suffering, in bringing about such a curse upon the day of this birth.” Matthew paused to open his Bible. “In one way or another, the birthdays of men have been cursed since the time of Abel and Cain. The suffering Job actually spoke a curse upon the day of his birth:
“May that day turn to darkness; may God above not look for it;
nor light of dawn shine on it.
May blackness sully it, and murk and gloom,
cloud smother that day, swift darkness eclipse the sun.
Blind darkness swallow up that night;
count it not among the days of the year.
“Doesn’t this verse hold special meaning for us?” Matthew asked. “Doomsday should have been a birthday to over two hundred thousand souls. Imagine it—a population greater than that of the whole Earth today, all born on a single day. Yet that birthday for thousands became the Death Year for billions.”
Isabel shivered inwardly. What would that Death Year have felt like? She herself had not yet been born, nor conceived, thank heavens. She recalled the solar eclipse, just over a year ago, when darkness had swallowed the sun, and the stars came out. But for a whole year—a blind darkness, without stars…
The elders never spoke of the Death Year, not in detail. Matthew had lost his family outside. But then, even within the Wall, four fifths of the town had died off during Isabel’s childhood. As her father said, the loss was slowing now.
“How shall we explain the events in the sky today?” Matthew asked. “More to the point, how shall we explain the events of Doomsday and the Death Year? Why did God allow these events, leaving us trapped as we are here today?
“To answer these questions, let us return to the mythic birthplace of all questions, the first Garden. There God’s people first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, knowing how to question, what is good and evil? This knowing of good and evil came at a price: mortality, eternal subjection to the laws of nature, the limits of the physical universe.
“But we forget that there was a second tree in the Garden: the Tree of Life, which meant Godlike mastery of the physical universe, the power of eternal life—or eternal death. God never gave us the chance to approach that Tree, the Tree of Life or Death. Instead He barred the way with a flaming sword.
“Why, then, have we mortals schemed ever since to get at that second Tree, to master life and death? Despite that flaming sword, we have calculated like Caiaphas that one man should die for the life of a people, ten for the life of a hundred, ten million for the life of a hundred million. We burned heretics at the stake; we exterminated the natives of our American shores. The advent of modern science only heightened our calculation: millions burned in one war, billions in the next.”
Matthew paused as if for breath. “So as we mourn our imprisonment, and shake our heads at the evil disturbance of our skies, let us recall the road taken. If we ever should regain our mastery of Earth, let us return to the Tree of Knowledge and learn to master the evil within.”
Isabel blinked at this sermon, perplexed. It was the angelbees who had destroyed Earth, as surely as if they had sent the missiles themselves. Why had Teacher Matthew turned the blame around? Any Quaker knew that killing humans was wrong, but as for angelbees—that was different.
What an odd turn Teacher Matthew had taken, like the neck of the Klein bottle he described in school. Absorbed in thought, she missed the closing hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
As the worship concluded, the room filled with shaking hands and people leaning across benches to greet their neighbors. Isabel clasped Peace Hope’s shoulder, not her gripper-hand.
It was time for announcements. Suddenly her heart was pounding. Someone would have to speak up about the burning of the sky. Surely someone would want to do something about it.
Liza Scattergood, as Town Clerk, stood first, her hair pinned neatly beneath her cap, and her black skirt flowing down her straight profile. “Ruth’s newborn boy welcomes visitors,” she announced.
“A boy!” Peace Hope whispered.
“Yes,” said Isabel. “She hasn’t named it yet; isn’t that odd?”
“Of course she won’t, silly; not till the bris.”
Isabel frowned, annoyed when Peace Hope used a word she did not know.
Marguerite announced the water crisis, and she confirmed that the ground water still contained too much strontium-ninety.
Peace Hope nudged her again. “Why is strontium still a problem, does thee know? What is its half-life?”
“Thirty years—that means it’s still here, Scatterbrain,” Isabel whispered, triumphant this time.
Children burst in upon the room with exuberant squeals and hands signing to the deaf Pestlethwaite twins. They seemed to be continuing one of Daniels’s “sunshine games,” the object of which was to call out, “This is a hug!” then squeeze your nearest companion as hard as you could. “This is a hug!” called Grace, and she threw her arms clumsily around Daniel. The twin girls signed the same with their hands, crossing their arms before their chests; then they embraced him.
Daniel managed to extricate himself with good humor, but he looked paler than usual. It was probably about time for another dose of his medicine, or even a blood transfusion.
“Are there no more announcements?” Liza asked.
Surely now someone would speak up about the sky? People were standing to leave.
Isabel leaned tensely on the bench in front of her. She rose to her feet, and she nearly blacked out as the blood rushed from her head. Her loss of sleep was catching up with her. “I think we
should do something.” Her voice sounded thin and strained. “About the sky. About what the angelbees are doing.”
People gasped as if taking a collective breath. The depth of their reaction took Isabel by surprise. “There must be something we could do,” she hurried on, louder over the voices. “We could send a Committee of Concern to the Pylon.”
From his seat up front, Carl Dreher stood and half turned toward her. “The Town Meeting will consider this, I’m sure.”
The next Town Meeting was a month off. It was even worse than she had feared. They were not going to face it; even this time they would give in to the Pylon without protest. She tightened her grip on the bench in front of her, inwardly burning.
“Isabel is right.” Her mother stood beside her, laying a hand on her shoulder. “We need to do something, about the angelbees and about the survival of this town. We were saying so, just last night, Liza.”
Liza nodded. “We must consider these things. I invite everyone to a discussion, at our house this afternoon.”
There was a rush of voices as people got up to leave, some remaining to talk in worried tones.
Marguerite whispered, “I do wish you’d warned me. You can’t know how frightening it is, to those of us who lived through…” She did not finish.
Debbie Dreher came over, her steps dragging a bit; she was into the sixth month, when the baby grows fast. Her flower-print dress was faded nearly as gray as Peace Hope’s. “Of course we must do something, Isabel, but please, nothing rash. If the angelbees ever find your radio they’ll—”
It was too much to take anymore. She turned and strode up the aisle, avoiding the faces, and headed out the side door into the courtyard. The hot air enveloped her like a cloak, and a squirrel skipped away from her feet. The cicadas’ hum rose and intensified.
There was one place to get away, one place where the elders never came. That place was the Wall.
III
ISABEL CUT THROUGH the cemetery, the rows of headstones, five times as many as the current population. She passed the earliest ones already leaning, and the little lamb that marked Vera’s stillborn from the Death Year, then the later ones for Daniel’s parents and Peace Hope’s two brothers. Then she walked on through the stand of pines beyond. Dry needles crunched underfoot, and the shaded air was sweetly cool.
She came to the place where the strangeness began. The pines thinned out, and the few trunks that remained grew at a slight angle to the earth, all leaning back toward her in parallel, almost like the old headstones. Past the leaning pines, the forest gave out altogether, with just a few stunted bushes that straggled back as if crawling on the ground.
Now Isabel could feel the unmistakable pressure of the Wall, a larger version of the airwall enclosing the Pylon. It was as if an enormous hand were pushing her back, gently but steadily.
Isabel stopped and pulled a pair of mirrorshade glasses out of her overalls. The sun was coming in from the east, its ultraviolet rays unscreened by the Wall. Only directly above Gwynwood the Wall’s upper dome enclosed a patch of ozone to filter the sun.
She walked on, another ten paces or so, the air pressure rising until her face went numb. Then taking care not to fall backward, she gradually sat herself down and stared through her mirrorshades, through the Wall.
The ground beneath the Wall itself was bare, sun-baked clay, an otherworldly sterile zone. Beyond, well outside, lay the hulks of dead trees, miles upon miles of charred deadland. But just at the threshold of deadland lay the skeletons.
The bones were not all human, of course. Isabel could spot parts of deer, and dogs, and raccoons, even a barn owl here and there among the scorched dry bones. One skull of a large dog happened to face her directly, its eye sockets shadowed dark, tilted just a bit to one side as if begging its last meal. Human or animal, the scattered skeletons lined every stretch of the Wall that imprisoned Gwynwood town.
It was hard for Isabel to comprehend that the Wall had not always stood there, and that the pines and farmlands and crowded towns had once covered Pennsylvania. Those who had lived before spoke of it and taught what the world had been before Doomsday. What was harder to speak of was what had come after.
One morning, the skies already filling with soot from distant firestorms, those residents of Gwynwood who had not fled town awoke to discover the Wall. The Wall was a tangible barrier that solid matter could not pass through, not even dust or flour. The dome of the Wall, some twenty miles across, cut an unearthly hole through the black clouds. Within the circle of the Wall, there was light and warmth. Outside, there was dark and cold. Nuclear winter.
Living things trapped outside quickly noticed the place of light within. From miles around came animals, birds, and people to press into the Wall, in vain. Only light could pass through, and sound. The elders rarely talked about that.
Outside the temperature fell to well below zero—just how far below, no one could say, but the corpses stayed frozen through the next planting season. When they thawed at last, there were no animal scavengers, and no birds. There were plants, but they shriveled in the radioactive rain. There were some flying insects; but, surprisingly, these vanished and were gone before Isabel was born. Marguerite said that the nuclear blasts had mopped up so much ozone from the upper atmosphere that the ultraviolet had blinded all sighted creatures. Microbes, millipedes, and a few hardy weeds inherited the world outside.
The Wall became a sort of terrarium, its upper atmosphere condensing into a round pancake cloud that rained upon the crops. Within the Wall, people were safe from ultraviolet and from dirty rain, but the soil still leaked poison. One year, the seepage into Gwynwood’s farmland had killed a third of the town, and not a child that year was born alive. After that, they had listened when the Pylon warned Alice to destroy a crop of apples or potatoes.
It turned out that the angelbees had set up similar Walls scattered around the globe, seeming to sample the population in proportion to the number of survivors. Thus in Australia they set up a dozen of them totaling two hundred thousand people plus twice that number of sheep. The tip of South America came out well, too. North America had only three other known airwalls, one at Vista, a big town of two thousand on the West Coast, and two smaller ones in Canada. Asia had several, but Europe had none.
Wisps of something green poked up among the charcoal stumps beyond the skeletons. Outside the Walls, no human survivor had been seen, in all the years since the Death Year. No human could have survived the ultraviolet, let alone the radioactivity, dying of cancer before reproductive age. By now, though, the radiation would be down and the ozone would have recovered—if the angelbees had allowed it to do so.
Marguerite had tried to estimate the radiation levels that remained outside, and whether it was yet “safe.” For Isabel, though, radiation was just another fact of life, like typhoid. The pioneers who had built America the first time risked typhoid and more. The time had come for new pioneers.
But still there was the Wall.
Off to Isabel’s left, the Dreher kids, Miracle and his sisters, came out to play against the Wall. The game was to turn and run backward as far into the Wall as you could, then jump up and fly off for several yards. Faith and Charity squealed in chorus as they went airborne for a moment, then tumbled to the ground. Above their squeals rose a hollow wailing sound, the sound of the wind outside blowing in against the Wall, as if the voices of the dead rose to speak in some incomprehensible tongue.
Shunned by the elders, the threshold of the Wall had become a meeting place for the young. As Isabel expected, Sal and Deliverance Brown soon came strolling after her, with Daniel between them.
“Isabel!” called Sal. “Whatever possessed you? We can’t just go visit the Pylon.”
“Especially with Alice still sick.” Deliverance ran to the little ones. “Faith, the sun’s coming in; you’ll get cancer. Come back and sit in the shade with Teacher Daniel.”
Isabel kept her back to them, and stared into the Wall. Daniel’s r
eply was inaudible, but Sal added, “They know Alice is dying. I saw three angelbees floating over the Meetinghouse, waiting like—”
“Oh, hush, Sal,” said Deliverance.
Peace Hope came over and dropped her crutches, letting her leg prostheses splay out as she supported herself on her gripper-hands. Her gray homespun skirt spread out over the grass. “‘Where does thee come from, and where is thee going?’” she remarked, after Carroll’s Red Queen. Peace Hope, who loved chess, kept the Red Queen in her breast pocket for luck because, though limbless, the “Queen” ran the fastest.
Isabel got up and moved back to sit with her friend beneath a pine tree.
“Whatever possessed thee?” Peace Hope’s voice carried reproof and admiration.
“I was just witnessing to the Truth.”
“But why did thee leave so abruptly?”
Isabel sighed, and she looked away again through the Wall, at the dog’s skull that jutted at an angle from the pile. “I guess I’ve just had enough. Something happened last night.” She saw again the sky as it had seemed to crack and peel away, draining the lifeblood of Earth. “Something’s changed. I feel I don’t belong here anymore.” She thought of Daniel again. If only he could see her point of view. They had argued it for years; but now they were graduates without a future. It was time to act. “The point is, I’m ready to speak for myself. I’ll strike out on my own if I have to.”
“That’s just what they’re afraid of. They think thee has already joined the Underground. Carl Dreher was saying, thee is a danger to the town.”
“That’s just an excuse.” Angrily Isabel pulled a grass blade and peeled it in half, then in half again. “The real danger is here.” She tossed the bits of grass to the radioactive earth. “How many of us will make it to the next generation?”
“The deadland is only worse.”
“Around here it is. But Mother says there must be places less contaminated, maybe down in Mexico. We could live there—if the angelbees would pull out the Wall and quit bleeding off our ozone.”
The Wall Around Eden Page 3