by Philip Wylie
"To get beyond such often repeated scenes in the city's center," the evidently quiet voice went on, "scenes of stampede wilder and more deadly than any eruption of cattle herds, Schultz said that at several points he climbed out of second-floor windows, dropped on solid human masses and, in his own words, 'walked on shoulders and heads, being careful to try to pick dead stepping-stones where I could, as the live ones sometimes bit.' Fortunately for Schultz, he wore Western boots. These, however, plainly were badly torn by human teeth when he landed outside San José."
A series of not-dissimilar scenes followed.
Then the camera and its apparently nerveless (or unhuman) operator had reached the suburbs. A shot of a clock on a church spire established the local time: three-five, and afternoon.
Next came a private-shelter version of the awfulness just witnessed in the downtown area.
First, they beheld a horde of persons--women in slacks, men in sports shirts, children in light clothing, the boys often shirtless--a typical hot-summer-day suburban group, of some hundreds. The crowd had gathered on the extensive front and side lawns of a large, handsome, modernistic mansion that immediately suggested Uxmal to the beholders. This mass of persons was motionless, or nearly so; it looked forward, as if waiting intently for some unguessable event. Then the camera moved and showed a face-on view of the stagnant, slack-jawed, irresolute, but strangely grim people. A third angle revealed the cause of their hesitation:
It disclosed a smooth, high rise of lawn and planted shrubs that covered with greenery and some feet of earth what plainly was a back-yard shelter of considerable size.
Its access door was battened tight, and looked formidable. In front of that was a kind of earthwork and, peeping over its grassy verge, the muzzle of a machine gun. Now and again the face of a man, tense, middle-aged, and sweating popped up for a brief look at the crowd that coveted the safe, or presumedly safer, refuge of whomever this man was ready to defend, behind him in the shelter. At intervals a younger man, resembling the elder, also bobbed up for a look and to call out what evidently were warnings to the crowd.
The camera, as before, now examined individuals along the front edge of that ominous multitude. They were, by dress and general look, ordinary, middle-class suburbanites and, in some cases and by the same tokens, quite well-to-do people. People no doubt like the owners of the mansion and its commodious-looking, earth-and-grass-shielded, semi-buried shelter. But there was nothing ordinary either in their silence and watchfulness or in the emotions on their faces. Some women fell to their knees and folded their hands to entreat, pointing afterward at children beside them. Schultz had no sound-recording equipment but this tableau was self-describing.
Rightly or wrongly, these gathered neighbors and neighborhood people felt the builder and owner of the shelter--who now stood ready to defend it--could, or should, give admittance to a larger number of persons than those now behind its steel portal. As rightly, or as wrongly, the two defenders were adamant.
"Schultz," came the announcer's words by way of Connie, "says he was told by a number of people who weren't actually part of the crowd gathered on the lawn, that the owner was not liked, a 'mean type,' and that only his wife, two daughters, and three servants were behind that door . . . in a shelter large enough, the bystanders insisted, 'to hold a hundred people, standing, anyhow.' Whatever the fact, as you will see, the crowd decided, like others, to take matter into its own hands."
The ensuing shots showed a slow advance, perhaps owing, mainly, to pressure from behind but, somewhat, to hateful and visible belligerence. It moved perhaps twenty feet before the camera switched to the redoubt. From it, with no further warning, the machine gun commenced to fire. In a dizzy blur the camera swung back and showed men and women and two or three small children as bullets hit them and sent them pitching backward, dancing in pain, bleeding, with battled looks on their faces, or collapsing in weakening-jointed death.
The mob retreated some ways. As it did, men went back and snatched up prone or writhing infants and youngsters.
Then, however, gunfire came from the crowd, as some few of the householders drew pistols and tried to hit the two defenders. After a time, since the machine gun remained silent and the youth did not appear above the green-grass parapet, the mob once more edged forward.
Although it reached nearer to the defense position--which looked like a golf-course bunker--the reaction there was sudden and formidable. The machine gun's jumpy bursts began, and went on. And the camera tilted up to catch a series of objects hurtling through the air, then tilted back to watch them explode: grenades. They left, with the machine gun, a gory havoc that set the unhurt attackers running in all directions: a wriggling, tottering, yowling scrabble of people, of women without clothes, of a child crawling as its knees pulled out its own intestines, of a mother hugging a headless baby to a shot-off breast. . . .
Then it was later, and without comment from the narrator in Costa Rica they saw a lovely girl running down an empty suburban street, with an occasional backward glance of sheer horror. Three plainly drunken white men rose in her path and grabbed her. They commenced to strip off her clothes as she screamed and fought. But before she was quite naked, a Negro of great size, with the name of a Moving and Storage firm on his clean, white coveralls, ran into the scene carrying a heavy wrench. He began a quick, grim skull-splitting.
He then helped the girl to her feet and she ran on, nearly nude, blonde, fawnlike.
But that was not the end.
The end was, perhaps, predictable.
The Negro, smiling a little, giving a kick of disgust at one of the downed assailants, suddenly sagged and a rose of scarlet opened on his coveralls. A slug had hit him from behind and expanded as it went through heart and rib cage, chest muscles, ebony skin, and his white garment. He fell.
A young man with a revolver in each hand tore into the scene, leaped the heap of dead drunks and the Negro savior, and stopped. He looked directly into the camera, his longish, curly hair falling back in place, his eyes narrowing as he raised a weapon. There was an instant in which his expression, incredibly ferocious and yet, more incredibly, smiling, looked off in the direction taken by the girl. Then, his smile gone, the weapon steadied and bucked, with the result that the camera shimmied from a hit. Then the handsome, quite-young pursuer regained his unholy look of glee and recommenced his chase. But he did not get far.
Quite suddenly, he grabbed his abdomen and his body could be seen, as it toppled, to flinch from well-aimed bullets.
"Our cameraman, Schultz," Connie translated.
The photographer and his equipment had not, evidently, been seriously injured.
For the lens swung up the street and showed that the running girl was not running any more. She lay, stripped, on a lawn near a flagged sidewalk and hardly had breath or strength left to fight the two men, then three, who had emerged from somewhere and caught her. Others were running up, grins on their faces . . . such grins as no one in the Sachem's Watch shelter had ever before seen.
At that point Farr shouted, "For the love of God, Ben! George! Cut it off!"
Ben did so.
Somebody switched on lights.
The stricken viewers looked, slowly, at each other.
They said nothing.
By-and-by, in ones and twos, they rose and left the Hall for their own rooms, still wordlessly.
Finally, only Farr, George Hyama, and Ben remained.
They looked at each other.
Nothing to say.
All questions answered.
They had overwhelming cause to believe, now, that they were practically alone, among the living, in all their once-fair, utterly-desolate nation.
They knew the answer, even to what "good citizens" would do if ever "the whistle blew."
And it was nothing to discuss at all.
Something to forget, as much as a man could.
Ben shrugged, realized his cheeks were wet with unnoticed tears, uttered one violent o
ath, and started away.
Farr said, "Right."
George Hyama, usually so buoyant, made the only complete comment that night, a single sentence: "I feel less bad, now, about the outrages my fellow Japanese committed in wars in years past."
He bowed then, ceremoniously; both men, without any sense of novelty or any self-consciousness, returned the bow.
Ben switched the lights off, leaving only a few dim night-bulbs to illumine what otherwise would be the total blackness of a hole, five hundred feet down, in a rock mountain.
CHAPTER 11
For the next several days, the deep-dwelling survivors went about their tasks of housekeeping, cooking, furniture-making, machine maintenance, and the complex rest in a withdrawn manner. Laughter, which had become superficial but frequent, and had occurred over trifles, was not heard. Even Faith and Kit lost the unexplained coolness they had shown earlier in each other's presence. Not the mere abstract knowledge that the world--their half of it, anyway--was dead, but the dramatic display of how horribly and on what a colossal scale it had perished, left them stunned.
One afternoon-for the group still meticulously kept track of the outside time, although it would have been impossible, lacking clocks and chronometers, to tell one hour from another in the labyrinth--Vance Farr walked into the machine shop where Ben and George were hard at work, assisted by a very grease-blackened and very concentrated Lodi Li, operating an automatic drill press.
Seeing Vance, the three workers shut off power. For Vance obviously had something on his mind. He slumped tiredly against a workbench and looked from face to face, his usually expressive eyes now showing only worry, his square, mobile face set with new lines of stress, and his mop of red hair rumpled and streaked, Ben then noticed, with a few strands of white. "How's it coming?"
Ben shrugged. "We're still trying to figure out how to use one of the two aerials that came through in reasonable shape, for outside sending."
Farr nodded. "I had six antennas installed in 'hard' bases. It's a little sad to think we could only get two of 'em to rise above their silos after it was over."
"Two out of six is dandy," George said sturdily, "when you consider the forces and temperatures they survived. And besides, six out of twelve self-reading, automatic-signaling radiation monitors! That is a near miracle!"
Vance shook his head slightly. "I was the one who supposed he could foresee everything, and arrange to come through anything. Except, possibly, a direct hit." He turned to Ben. "I gather you offered to show anybody how to tune the TV in the Hall, on any of the relay stations using them?"
"I did. Why not? After all, not everything eventually to be broadcast from South America, Africa, Australia will necessarily be like that Costa Rican stuff."
"I know. But nobody accepted your offer?"
Ben's head shook. "Afraid they'll tune in some more pictures of what happened here. Or what's happening still, in Japan, in the northern Philippines. One night, alone, I did. Got some shots of firestorm refugees." He shuddered.
Vance stared. "You've heard anything new?"
"More of the same stuff. On the small TV in the communications room. They're all dead out there, pretty much. And the rest dying. They've had a dusting every time the weather took a circuit of the earth, and now everybody, pretty much, has had it. Japan--
Europe, too-what the Soviets didn't destroy in order to be sure nobody--England or France--had a nuclear weapon left. "
"Something," Vance then said, "has got to be done to stop this blue funk. Whole gang of us acting like pallbearers."
"We sort of are," Lotus Li said in her small, precise voice. "Pallbearers for half the earth. The last to weep--"
"Not quite!" Ben spoke sharply, perhaps unintentionally.
They stared at him, so he went ahead: "I haven't said anything, and I'm not sure I should now. But the seismographs have shown, for the last ten days, some individual missile hits, bomb bursts, here and there over the United States, and lots more in the U.S.S.R. Plus some very heavy strikes that I deduce to have been the hits of groups of missiles hitting the Reds--Russia and China."
Vance's eyes widened. He then scowled. His mouth made a flat line. He stared at the scientist as if angry. "How do you explain it, supposing it's not jus--oh--nuclear arms that blow up, when fire finally reaches them? That sort of thing?"
Ben answered quietly, "I picked up, on radio receivers, some of the starts of our own stuff. Account for it? Easy, isn't it? Here in the United States-and to some extent, over there-they must have had quite a few very hard missile bases that were under orders not to reply to any early strikes, and to wait for word later, in the event our retaliation, and the Reds' double assault, left any targets whatever.
"I'd suppose those bases held out, waiting for orders, until their margin of security ran out--then they just shot. Wasn't it always obvious--it was to me!--that if you ever started a war like this, any people surviving who could do it, by any means, would keep on shooting at the enemy? Even run H-bombs from England up the Baltic in motorboats and explode them by hand, to recremate or crop-dust Leningrad? Fly bombs over the enemy even in commercial planes, and nose-dive? Anything? The fury of any survivors, taken with the fact they know they are probably doomed by radiation anyhow, will lead men on both sides to pointless acts of vengeance. It's been that way in war before. So, I used to say, it would be if we got in this. Only more so. And no central government or command remains to order a halt to men in charge of isolated posts or civilians with a weapon and a soldier to show how to explode it plus a way to get it across the sea. I think that's what's happening."
Vance brooded on that, after saying, "Horrible! But I suppose human nature!"
Soon he added a fierce declaration: "By all that's holy! If I knew where to reach even one still--workable H-bomb, and if I could find a plane that would go the distance--so help me! I'd blast my way out of here, and go to that bomb--hot as the ground still is--and take it over to 'em!"
Ben's head bent in a sort of rueful agreement. Since Vance's eyes rested on him, still, hotly, and as if seeking blame, Ben said, "I'd be with you, because I could figure how to rig the fuse."
"Me, too," George said in an icy tone.
And pretty, soft-looking Lotus, giving a toss to her hair, now held with a silver hoop in a dark river that coursed down her back, said, so softly it was that much more shocking, "And I would also go, to see it hit them!"
For a moment the four people shared the blazing rage that, by inference, had been driving some fellow Americans and some Soviet people, soldiers or civilians, to acts of wanton wrath. Just seeing, in one another's eyes, and in drawn-back lips, the intensity of that mutual fury, seemed to act as an emotional catharsis.
It was as if they'd said, "All right, I admit I'm insane, with a wrath that is utterly pointless," and having said it, challengingly, having heard it echoed by all, they felt relieved in not being alone with an unendurable burden of tamped hate.
Vance finally grinned. "Good!" His eyes now shrewdly appraised the other three pairs of eyes. "I think, then, as a first step, we ought to conspire to get the whole gang admitting that not just shock, and not just anguish, not mere loss and grief, but fury, also, is eating us up. Because, after that, maybe we can start the thing I came to discuss."
Ben lighted a cigarette, Vance accepted a light for a cigar and hopped onto a draftsman's stool. George held a match for Lodi's cigarette and his fingers shook a little; but he laughed at her delicate first puff. Lodi had not smoked before the entombment of the group. She was learning-for something to do, she said.
Vance waited till they found places to sit or perch. "It is recreation, I was talking about."
Ben said, perplexedly, "But, don't we have plenty? George and Lodi and I are busy all the time we have to spare--here, or in communications. You, your wife, and her gang, are doing wonders with furniture-making. It was an inspiration to stock all that lumber, carpet, water-base paint--what-not--so we could get the joint looking
like palace halls and jewel boxes after landing down here! Valerie is a near-genius with colors, fabrics, everything of the sort!"
"Sure," Vance grinned again. "Val has taste, and imagination." He sighed with quiet regret. "And everything else that makes a woman a real damn wonder of a woman!
By day." He shrugged. "But you guys are talking about work. Hobbies, or very valuable enterprises, all that is still work. We've got to start playing. Having fun."
Ben nodded. "See what you mean. Games--besides just bridge. Maybe--"
"Maybe what?"
"Well, Angelica is a dancer and Connie wanted to be one, and they've given some exhibitions. What about a class?"
Vance chuckled. "Exactly! Moreover, I've got a real stack of junk we can start to break out. Though I think we should do it a caper at a time, to stretch the novelty as far as we're able. For instance. Did you notice the kind of synthetic floor tile I had put in the Hall?"
George spoke when the other two were silent. "It's Owensite. Practically indestructible. And smooth as glass, if you wax it. Perfect dance floor. Yet a tank couldn't scar it."
"Right!" Vance responded.
That talk explained why, after dinner--and after a strange sort of confessional in which everyone present was led, casually, to express the rage that went locked with their separate sorrows--the mood of the group was deflected and reshaped, deliberately, by the four who had conferred.
All the furniture in the main chamber was swept to its walls. The rugs were rolled up. A stereophonic recording began to boom from a loudspeaker--a waltz. And Vance, accompanied by Ben and George, produced the evening's awaited "surprise." When little Dorothy saw it, she gave her first whoop of delight in that long time. "Roller skates!" she shouted, and ran toward the men, followed by her equally-elated brother. People rushed away to change shoes, or tried on shoes bounteously dumped from boxes by Vance, till they found a pair that fitted.