Triumph

by Philip Wylie

  "Farr states some artesian wells in Connecticut have been found by drilling to a depth of as much as seven thousand feet! His own drilling struck, at 3670 feet, fresh water with pressure, or 'head,' enough, to rise to within 670 feet of drilling-site. It is cold, pure, hard water. When drawn into holding tanks it is first measured for radioactive contamination. (To date, there has been no trace of increase in the carefully-established

  'background' level of this source--a very low level for deep-rock water--.007

  microcuries.) Radiation contamination of any measurable degree in that water source should not be expected, Farr says, until next spring, as Farr (fantastic man!) had geologists determine the origin of his well water and check their theories with tracers!

  The water was shown to come from a wide area of the Berkshires. Tracers showed that autumnal rain falling there did not appear in the deep water table penetrated by Farr's drilling till the ensuing April or May.

  "Hence our air and water seem virtually inexhaustible.

  "We can see why other short-term survivors in deep, otherwise safe shelters (who had spark-gap radio or other forms of communications gear) have already perished: they perished owing to slight interchanges of their air with the briefly, immensely radio-contaminated air over the United States.

  "As to sewage. This is carried through ordinary piping to a central vent where the water accompanying it, from sinks, flush toilets, etc., takes it down on a slanting course, through a three-foot-wide shaft, to a point almost nine hundred feet beneath this elevation. There (as was the case at many levels) more natural caverns were found.

  Through one, an underground river made its way. Initially, Farr planned to use it as his sewer-disposal outlet.

  "Subsequently it occurred to him that, granting all-out war, the soils hereabouts might be too 'hot' for successful farming, for some years and to a depth of many inches: a depth making the task of clearing away the layer of radiation-contaminated soil virtually impossible on any scale practical for agriculture.

  "He therefore diverted the subterranean stream and recut certain of the deep caverns for sewage-holding. In them the wastes are treated automatically, by bacteria and chemicals, and stored, by natural flow and by layering through valving of the water source. This uncontaminated and very fertile material will then be available, through a stand-by but heavily-plugged access tunnel, as fertilizer, if needed--just as the treated end-product of many big-city sewage-disposal plants is now sterilized, bagged, and sold, at a profit, by such municipalities." (On rereading that day's entry Ben struck out the word "is," and replaced it with "used to be."

  "The technically most difficult problem Farr faced," he wrote on, "was air supply and exhaust disposal for his powerful diesel motors, on which we depend for all our electrical power. Farr says he first considered installing a pair of nuclear reactors. But he decided their operation, even though they required no air, as do internal combustion machines, was too 'tricky' for whomever might manage to make it down here in the event of nuclear onslaught. He also feared some nearby enemy bomb hit might crack any feasible reactor shielding and so make his great subterranean 'city' uninhabitable. Hence he settled for diesels of the greatest obtainable efficiency. Their fuel is in 'tanks' like those that hold our supplies of water: enlarged caves and, also, gigantic chambers cut into the naked rock, all lined to prevent seepage. The air system now in use will adequately supply the diesels for months, as well as the people here.

  "The diesel exhausts with their load of toxic substances are drawn off and expelled under great pressure, into a vent that was cut to the base of this hill, or, as they call it, mountain. There, after passing numerous baffles, it is extruded into the open atmosphere. However, in the early days of our stay here exhaust gasses were stored (under ever-increasing pressure) in certain caverns. Only when the exterior radiation reached a preselected level were the openings of the vent--immense steel blocking-doors--

  automatically moved away. If they'd been fused, or if the vent had been rubble-blocked, it could have been opened by detonating preset charges! Positive pressure now expels all exhaust fumes at the foot of the cliff in a valley now half-filled with the rock Farr removed and dumped below us.

  "Of course, if the exterior radioactivity should remain high for so long that the reoxygenation and recirculation of our present, reconditioned air should begin to threaten to use up our oxygen stores (owing to high air consumption of the diesels), our gaseous-diffusion system could be set going at a rate that would furnish safe air for the diesels only, while the people here continued to breathe, for a long additional time, the preassault, reworked and wholly safe air we now use. What ingenuity and what determination Farr has shown!"

  His final entry that day read:

  "It begins to appear that, save for expectable human chaos, the subequatorial half of the planet is safe. The few broadcasts we have intercepted through the still-highly-ionized static, which have included monitor readings, show these to be, at Lima, Accra, in Colombia, and at Rio de Janeiro, of about the order they reached following the 1966

  tests of massive H-devices by the U.S.S.R.: i.e., from 1.5 roentgens down to a (commoner) reading of a few score microcuries.

  "Morale in this group remains high."

  That same evening, while Lodi wrote in her diary and while Ben brought up-to-date his report of the status of the outside world, various other now routine events occurred. A bridge game was being played by Valerie, Connie, Al--who played shrewdly--and Peter Williams--who, though a beginner, was an eager and quick learner.

  Some others kibitzed or read one of the thousands of books available in the shelter library chamber. George Hyama stubbornly struggled to find a means to damp out the ion-uproar over the continent and receive some picture and sound he could tune in on TV--either from a space relay or from any station still operating and in his range. Kit, toward the standard bedtime hour, saw Faith come into the Hall alone, carrying a book, and with a nod he succeeded, much to his surprise, in making her tum around and walk back quietly into the passage.

  He overtook her as she opened the library door. He followed her inside. No one else happened to be in the large, book-lined room. He waited for the door to shut, automatically. She replaced the book and turned to him, her face flushed a little, its expression resigned. Kit seized her vehemently, kissed her, and after that lifted and carried her to one of the lamp-lit divans. He set her down and turned to retrieve one of her slippers, which had dropped off as she had been unexpectedly lifted clear off the floor.

  He replaced the shoe, started to kiss her again, and halted, stiffly, at her first word: "Don't."

  "But, damn it, Faith, we're engaged! We've been in this hole for two weeks! And I haven't had even ten minutes alone with you." He could see the beginning of anger in her eyes, and retreated a little. "Okay! I understand! Up to a point, I do. But it isn't only your friends and your family's friends and your relatives who are gone. My mother and dad.

  Sis. Everbody else I care for, too! I mean to say, we're all even, in that way. So we're all in shock, call it, and we're all in mourning. The good old U.S.A. is gone, and the enemy, too, and everybody else who wasn't lucky enough to be somewhere below the old equator at the time. Still, life has to go on!"

  He stopped, realized he'd begun to flounder, and made a more careful effort, raking his crew-cut, pale hair and letting a faint smile show. A smile he was aware of, one which, he hoped, had a look of empathy about it and was--again, hopefully--a bit cryptic, too. A brave and somewhat unreadable smile; the look of a man tried, torn, compassionate, courageous, and yet one who had an undecipherable question in his good-tempered expression, too.

  Kit had been reared to think of himself in dramatic and romantic terms, being an only son of unwise and indulgent parents. The fact that his self-appraisals were such somewhat hid from him the deeper fact that they were unconscious, fundamentally very selfish, very self-centered, and, under any great stress, at best, immature.

&n
bsp; To Faith, in this moment, foreseen since their entombment, postponed with a rising anxiety, Kit's simper was asinine.

  "Don't make speeches," she said. "And don't bother to get out the old false faces of chivalry, or whatever you think they are."

  "I could be angry at that!" She nodded, her face almost without expression, her eyes averted, their arching brows knit slightly. "I know. And I don't really want to make you mad."

  "Fine. Then all you need to do is move over a bit. Better still, give your thus-far-noble fiancé an appointment for a little tête-à-tête in some secret comer of this catacomb-

  -preferably, your own boudoir--"

  Her head was shaking. She saw him grow pale.

  "Why not?" His words were two slaps.

  Faith stared at him as if he were not human, but some unpleasant living thing--a spider, perhaps, come upon unexpectedly and when she'd assumed all American spiders, like all known Americans, were gone: a harmless but ugly-looking stowaway. But, slowly, her eyes crinkled, she smiled, and she reached out to ruffle his bristly hair. "Kit, you dope!" She said it affectionately. The instant of surprise and repugnance was gone; she remembered him as she'd always known him, and always felt about him: familiar, rather superficial, very handsome, spoiled, amiable Christopher Barlow, her neighbor.

  "More like it," he said.

  Her eyes now did meet his and their gaze was warm, tender even. But it was an evanescent look and a sigh erased its last trace. "I think I know exactly how you feel, Kit.

  Or think you feel." She shrugged a little and smiled again, but owing to some inner need for smiling as a way to conceal unease. "Let's face it. I know what you want. Me, in short."

  "You--in short. And always and forever. And also, right now!"

  Faith nodded and that made the gleam of the floor lamp play on her hair. "I know.

  Well, look, Kit. You can skip any planned peroration about our being engaged. And you can also skip any hortative discussion of my past life and its abandoned ways. I know we are engaged and I have no intention of trying to change that. But, for a whole lot of reasons, I've lost the incentive to be my old, dissolute, gay, loving self. And I strongly suspect it'll be a long, long time before I even feel female, let alone amorous female--if I ever do, again. Oh, don't get mad at that! I will, sure, someday! But right now--under these circumstances--being engaged, in love, or even caring for love, that sort of love, seems--"

  "Not to me, it doesn't!"

  "I know." Her smile became almost supplicatory. "But it takes two, remember?"

  "If you'll--?" He touched her. She pulled away. His face turned red. "Look here, Faith. I--!"

  "Look here, nothing! You don't own me. Yet, anyhow. And plenty of people still think--thought--that mere engagement isn't a license to practice being married. I'm feeling, say, something like them."

  "Sure is out of character!"

  "Not really. Not when you consider the terrible things that happened to a billion people--" she pointed upward--"around the earth. Or when you consider what it must look like, in all the many places we knew. The silence. The smell, for that matter. Don't you ever realize things . . . like that? And doesn't realizing, sort of . . . deplete your libido?"

  "I don't dwell on it," he answered, reprovingly. "Or else it might start me into a funk. Like yours."

  She ignored it. Her voice went on, softly, "And then, the utter preposterousness, of us."

  "What's so damned preposterous about us?"

  "Fourteen people," she answered, but as if answering to herself and not to his interrupting and sarcastic query. "Just fourteen people--and they are probably all those left alive for miles and miles and hundreds of miles, except, maybe, Ben says, military people, who won't last so very much longer, likely. Us, though. We will go on. Alive.

  Day after day. Month after month!"

  "Maybe," Kit said quietly, "I ought to slap you. Shake you. You sound half nuts.

  That isn't preposterous. It's real. Nothing funny about it. I've been trying to say just that.

  We are here. Ergo, we have to carry on as before, till the pop-out moment arrives. And believe me, that can't be soon enough for our Christopher! I'm suffering in this hole, Faith! Always had a touch of the old claustrophobia. Down here, no matter how many miles of stone rooms and halls your Dad dug, it gets you! Know what I mean? You feel, day after day--and every night, especially--the old stone hill sitting on top of you, every cubic mile and every ton of it. Sometimes till you get perspiring, shaky, want to yell!"

  She heard but answered only as to half-assimilated words: "No use trying to work on my sympathies, Kit. I never heard you speak about claustrophobia before, and even if you work up one, now, it would be futile. Nobody would be especially sympathetic for anybody who developed a phobia about the very thing that saved his life. But I meant something else. If you want to see how crazy, how preposterous I feel it all is, then think how many steps could have been taken to prevent what happened! How many millions of Americans could have gotten together to take measures to avoid this. That didn't. How many Presidents had how many opportunities to save us all? Starting with--who was it?--

  Truman. When only our side had the bomb! And on and on, right to Conner, with the cold war the only sane chance either side had for settling anything. And the cold war always being neglected, evaded, compromised, not fought--by us--till things got this crazy! If . . . no! . . . since the people of the United States and their leaders had no better sense than to let things happen that ended with perhaps exactly fourteen survivors in the whole nation, then that's eminently preposterous! It's cuckoo! We ought to be hysterical with mirth at it. We ought to chortle night and day! All the Christianity, technology, education, freedom, democracy, wealth--and whammo! Gone. With fourteen remainders!

  A time to bellow and roar with glee. A time to chum with laughter. A farce, Kit-- farce.

  See?"

  "All I see is, you're losing your grip."

  "My point, Kit. There never was any grip."

  He had been standing in front of her, watching with the narrow-eyed care of an expectant psychiatrist. But she had said what she had said without much emotion and with no concurrent or subsequent hysteria. Just said it, smiled a little, and stopped.

  Looked up at him, quite calmly, a little questioningly. Her mind, he decided, was going glassy. What she needed was a bit of shock. A touch of the old realism.

  He applied a calculated measure:

  "You leave your door unlocked tonight, and lock the one that connects with your mama, even though she'll be out cold, as per usual, dear. I'll come by about midnight.

  And we'll take up this engagement as it ought to be conducted."

  "Oh?" Faith said.

  "Yes 'Oh!' That, or I'll speak to your father about how do we get married in a joint like this. And get married."

  She held out her hand and opened it. The ring with the great diamond blazed on her palm. "Want it back?"

  "No." He said that instantly.

  She slipped the ring on again. Looked at it, at him.

  He said quietly, "It's this Bernman?"

  "No." She thought a moment. "It's everything."

  "He's a good Joe," Kit said, rather surprisingly. "Might even be interesting from a gal's standpoint. I mean as an experiment. Well. I'm broad-minded. You know that. But you'll also remember, I expect a certain quid pro quo, and you're not the only alluring female in this dungeon."

  "I know," she said in a gentle way, a sad-seeming way.

  "So okay, dear." He went.

  Faith sat in the large room alone, tears sliding down her cheeks. Once or twice she laughed, shortly; and once or twice she sobbed, slightly. Finally she rose and just before she went into the passageway, but after she'd repaired her careful, light makeup, she said, aloud:

  "It is preposterous, though! Everything here!"

  CHAPTER 10

  Ben Bernman emerged from the communications room and rather worriedly sought out Vance Farr, whom he found,
finally, in the chamber housing an elaborate machine shop, turning out on a lathe what Ben assumed were candlesticks. Farr at once explained:

  "Valerie's been beefing about the absence of footstools in the joint. She always likes her feet up, when she reads, and so on. Making legs for one. We'll make most of the furniture we'll need. Help pass time."

  "I didn't know," Ben smiled, "you were a master carpenter."

  "No master. But I always enjoyed it--lathe work, especially. Never had time to do much." He now perceived the tension in the other man. "Hey! Something wrong?"

  "It's just this, Vance. I thought you ought to help make a decision. As you know, for several evenings George and I have tuned in bits and pieces of TV programs, broadcast from below the equator and dispersed world-wide, on the international repeaters."

  "A plain wonder," Farr muttered, "they weren't blown out of their orbits! Or to smithereens! Like everything else."

  Ben smiled fleetingly. "They're still in orbit. Well. We now know that we can get a good picture and clear sound from various stations. And tonight, beginning at eight, there's going to be a program of film and photos and other material, showing the devastation in the United States."

  "Who's transmitting that?"

  "San José, Costa Rica."

  "That's above the equator!"

  "Sure. A few degrees. But they're all right. City's surrounded with mountains that shielded them from most of the fallout that reached that far south. Not very hot stuff.

  They also took precautions--and still are taking 'em. But, the thing is, do you feel we should tune in whatever they project, for everybody?"

  "Yeah."

  Ben said, "Okay. But it could be pretty hideous."

  "Bet it will be! Let's get a set hooked up--if you can do it--in the big Hall. Eight o'clock, our time? Right! Then I'll have the dinner shift feed us at seven sharp, and no alibis for delays. We maybe need to see some of the reasons for being glad we are here."