Triumph

by Philip Wylie

  "Day by day, monitoring every foot of the way for radiation levels, they then worked down the tower to the ground and gradually across the sloping summit of the big hill--or little mountain--toward the area where, by then, the last snows were melting and things like 'skunk cabbage' (whatever that is!) were shooting up green sprouts. Since that time (March) they have moved the tower off the elevator and carried their explorations to something like five hundred yards (in some directions). But it is always dangerous and the routine they go through to decontaminate themselves before they rejoin us takes hours!

  "What they've learned is far from encouraging!

  "Where bare rock has been exposed to the rains, snow-melts, and winds, the level of radioactivity is not bad. A person could stand in such spots for some time and not get sick. But if you come to a crack in the rock that contains a little dirt, or charred humus, or what-not, look out! Hot isotopes will have collected in such spongy spots. The jumble that once was Candlewood Manor Apartments is still, radiationwise, 'hot' as a nuclear blast furnace. Down the slopes of the now skull-bare summit of Sachem's Watch, these pockets of radiation become increasingly numerous. And once you reach a place where vegetation has started up--though its a very greatly reduced number of species!--a place, say, that used to be covered with a tall, second-growth pine-and-hardwood forest and is now just ashes-- another alarming thing occurs.

  "The burnt earth, of course, has soaked up and concentrated a lot of hot material--

  cobalt, much strontium and a little cesium, plutonium, and a score of other scarcer, but

  'hot' elements. So, walking on plain dirt and ash is dangerous and must be undertaken only with inch-by-inch radiation measurement! The men (we watch them on TV) creep along with the extended gadgets like soldiers in the Second War nervously hunting for land mines, buried somewhere ahead of them.

  "But the really horrible thing is this:

  "Assorted forms of life that cannot be predicted will pick up and concentrate various radioactive elements. We also, therefore, have a 'hot laboratory,' built on the rock, outdoors, and I think I'll be allowed to work there soon-though everybody is afraid to let us women be near much radiation. That doesn't make sense, if the men are near it! Either way, radiation can do damage to our reproductive organs, and so may harm the genes of any children we may bear--and theirs--for a hundred generations!

  "However. Some kinds of trees, bushes, weeds, wild flowers, insects and lower organisms concentrate various radioactive elements (in the slightly radioactive areas around them everywhere) to as much as one hundred thousand times its intensity in their environment! Even, one million times.

  "Ben says that biologists had known that fact since the early 1950s! He says, even then, at Oak Ridge, in an only slightly radioactive pond (one you could swim in, every day, without harm of any measurable amount) certain algae--the green slime in ponds--

  were found long ago to concentrate radioactive elements to that degree: a hundred thousand times the radiation intensity of the water! So, though you could swim there all your life, if you had grabbed and carried home even a handful of that species of algae, you'd perhaps die!

  "Outdoors it's that way everywhere! Some microorganisms and plants seem even to 'prefer' the hot to the stable form of elements they use to feed on. And others apparently 'pick up,' and thereby, of course, concentrate, radioactive isotopes of elements they never used in their natural state. No one knows why. But the result is simply appalling.

  "For if you want to move through places where there's bare earth, and, far more so, green stuff (which seemed, even last summer, to be growing rankly everyplace, though always in fewer species than before the bombs fell), you have to measure every inch ahead, and every plant and leaf and bug and blade of grass, and the scum in every ditch, before you dare step toward it!

  "Long Island Sound lies some forty miles away. The men at first thought that once outside they might hitch one of the tractors Vance Farr has down here to some sort of shielded, high-wheeled cart, and so, by easy (if rough) going, transport, first a boat, then us, to Long Island Sound. Such a boat could be built and provisioned, one that would carry us all, by sail and engines, to South America. Everything needed for that is on hand.

  "But the plan is now regarded as hopeless.

  "We could build the boat and get it to the sea. But safe passage of a cart would require it to be too heavily shielded by lead, for moving. Moreover, it would have to be airtight for such a slow trip. Dust and pollen stirred up by the wind can come in sudden, very 'hot' gusts! A littler cart, making many trips, involves merely a longer exposure for whoever runs the tractors. Besides that, the men are now pretty sure such largely landlocked waters as Long Island Sound would be found full of 'hot' areas where various microorganisms (as on land) and many algae, jellyfish, and other biota--living sea things-

  -would occur in great, hot patches and be unsafe to cruise through!

  "This has made us, with our unanswered pleas, pretty blue.

  "For our food supplies, already rationed, will not last more than another six months at best. Soon after that, our systems for decontaminating air and water would become so loaded with radioactive debris they would not function, and then we'd have no water or air!

  "If it weren't for dear George Hyama, I'd about die! But he is the most wonderful man that ever was! Every time I feel his black, black eyes fixed on me--and they move so fast you can't see them shift and you will think he's watching someone else, when with no warning you find him gazing at you!--every time he looks at me the way he does, I feel warm all over, and less miserable about our likely, sad end, and also glad I'm a woman, Chinese or whatever sort!

  "I used, not so much to envy, but sort of wistfully wonder what it was like to be one of those graceful, tall, blonde women that nineteenth-century novelists used to call

  'willowy.' Angelica is too shaped and too dark-haired to qualify, but Faith does. And I know what it is like to be like Faith.

  "Not a bit different from being slant-eyed and Chinese! Or from being colored, like Connie!

  "Except that Faith has had a dismal time since 'way back, when her fiancé started

  'answering' Angelica's look. Not that I blame Kit too much, or Angelica any; I know myself how she felt, even if I only felt it about George. But Faith did not, plainly, feel toward Kit as Kit feels toward any pretty woman who reciprocates. Or maybe Faith was too proud to compete that way. Not 'maybe' I guess.

  "Faith would have about perished of humiliation, if Ben--that total genius!--had not had the inspiration of getting her interested in science. Since that day, though she's remained sad about the Kit-Angelica affaire, she has devoted herself to studying, with an ability you'd never dream existed in any rich man's onetime debutante, almost playgirl, daughter, even if she did graduate from college!

  "I've helped teach Faith and in doing it come to know her intimately. And she's a real femme suprême, as people said in the days before the war started. She's now learned all the math I know and all the physics George studies. Ben takes time, when he can, to run classes for the three of us, in relativity, in quantum math, and in his new concept that relates both, for which he received the Fermi Prize, and would surely have gotten a Nobel, too, if the world hadn't come to an end. Our world, anyhow.

  "Poor old Paulus Davey now has completely white hair and he is calmly getting prepared to 'meet his Maker.'

  "I said, though, that we are all depressed.

  "But the most restless one is Kit. I've tried to talk privately with him. So have others. And he finally said to me that 'what ate him' was the fact he wouldn't get out of here with Angelica!

  "I asked, 'What about Faith?'

  "He virtually shrugged that off. 'Faith, too, of course,' he said, sounding uninterested. 'Because if Angelica and I made it out, Faith would; and doubtless we'd get married. But I wish Faith would understand that I can't even face living without Angelica!'

  "What do you say to a man who says that?


  "It's only part of how Kit feels, I believe. He is getting what was called, in slang,

  'stir daffy.' It meant, 'crazed by confinement.' He roams around here like a caged tiger, day and night, unless Angelica is free. Then you don't see either one.

  "I'd say Vance Farr and Ben Bernman are the men--with Pete Williams; as well, naturally, as my George--who are steadiest these days. But even Vance is jerky and abrupt and preoccupied. Peter became a quiet, strong, determined, affectionate, grown-up man, entirely because of all Connie's effort and affection. But something went wrong with them. They cooled off. They are friendly, but not loving any more. And so Peter's slowly getting to be another nervous, restive, low-spirited person--maybe, like Kit. Or the way Alberto used to be. At times cross and mean, the way the kids have become lately, catching it from the general melancholy and Connie's new aloofness.

  "I have no idea--nobody has, I guess--whether or not that gold-brown, deep-voiced, orchid-handsome Heliconia and Pete were having an affaire that came to an end.

  I doubt it; probably people would have learned, sooner or later. Yet of all of us who might have fallen in love and lost their inhibitions (near impossible to keep one's inhibitions after twenty-one months jammed together down here!), Connie and Pete are the one pair who, perhaps, could have enjoyed a concealed love affaire. For everybody's so fond of Connie, and so proud of the way she is still educating Pete (not to mention, so immensely glad the utterly-crazed Pete who arrived here became a pillar of the community) that when Connie and Pete study, work, or talk together, no one bothers to spy or listen or hunt them up or gossip or anything. We all love both too much to risk embarrassing them! But if it was an affaire, it's over!

  "George and I didn't really try very long to hide our love. We couldn't! It showed like a banner against a blue sky. What Pete and Connie feel, and may do, is another matter, though. Pete's naturally not communicative; a person who likes privacy. And Connie's the soul of discretion now, though she didn't used to be, as a younger woman.

  "Valerie leads the females, in calm, in continued interest in everyday activities, in caring for the kids--in character, to state it with one word. She's actually a titan of a woman inside, as well as superior in beauty and intelligence! By just observing her I learn thousands of things, big and little, I can and should and try to improve in me!

  "Someone ran past my door a moment ago, and then another, so there must be some excitement. I'll close for now. . . ."

  In negligée and slippers Lodi soon ran down her passage to the Hall, where others, similarly clad, were gathering. The group was tensely staring at the elevator shaft.

  Emptiness behind its opened door showed that someone had gone up into the night.

  "What's wrong?" Lodi asked.

  Pete, who was nearest her, answered. "We don't know. The elevator went up an hour ago. Ben and your George, I think, to make some night observations, or work in the hot lab. Then someone sent it back here--I was in the kitchen, thought nothing of it. But soon it ascended again, and then I began to wonder. I looked at the schedules. Nobody but Ben and George were listed for night duty. I got worried. Tried to get the elevator back but they'd locked it up there. So I tried phoning. No answer. Then I got Connie, and together we started knocking on doors--she took the women, me--I--the men. Now, it seems, Kit's missing."

  "Kit!" Two voices said it simultaneously, and with the sound of two differing sorts of alarm: Angelica's deep voice, Faith's level contralto.

  Valerie rushed to the wall phone and pressed a button to ring the one above the shaft, in the night. She pressed and pressed. But no one answered.

  No one could, at that instant. . . .

  What had happened was an act of madness.

  Ben and George, in lightweight shielding garb, were measuring radiation levels of a soft, southerly breeze, in moonlight, atop the steel tower, when they heard the elevator as it rumbled down. They exchanged baffled glances.

  "Maybe," George said, "something's wrong below. And someone's coming up to tell us."

  "They'd phone!" Ben answered.

  "Suppose a big short circuit, lot of smoke, hard to reach the elevator phone?" But even as he spoke, the elevator rose, far below.

  By then Ben had snatched up the outdoor instrument and was pressing its ring button. He tried repeatedly. At that time, however, Connie and Pete were hurrying through passageways, knocking on doors, counting heads. So the ringing was unheard in the Hall.

  A short while later the elevator drew near.

  When its fiat, vast floor was level with the rock surface, George and Ben saw in the moonlight, with horror, a lone male figure, in sports clothes. By build and size, Kit.

  Kit, without a shielding garment, and bareheaded. As the elevator clicked to a stop, he walked over and locked it in place. No one, now, could push the Hall button and bring it down.

  Ben yelled, "You idiot! Go back!"

  Kit's voice came smoothly, almost amiably, but strangely, "Lovely night!" They could hear him inhale. Chuckle.

  George was first to start down the ladder, muttering to Ben, "Off his rocker!" Ben swarmed down behind George.

  But when they reached the steel floor, Kit was not there. They leaped up on the rock. Raced around the lead-lined, concrete-block building constructed as a "shielded lab."

  Saw Kit again.

  He was moving, in loping strides, down the rocky ledges of Sachem's Watch.

  Ben bellowed, "You fool! Come back! In a hundred yards, dressed the way you are, you'll get a serious dose of radiation!"

  Kit heard, stopped, and turned. His mellow voice floated up across the nocturnal landscape, a stark scene softened by the moon's rays. It was loud enough to carry clearly.

  "I simply don't believe it! The other day, when I was helping you -----s haul gear to the lab in my little lead suit, I saw a flock of birds out yonder"--his arm gestured in the blue dusk--"and they were alive and peppy!"

  "Damn it!" Ben bellowed. "Sure! Last spring, apparently, some migratory birds somehow realized their old flyway wasn't usable and stayed far south! This year a few species, in small numbers, are trying it again. Instinct! They've come up over the Atlantic, but they won't last a week here!"

  Kit replied, "Phooie! Know what I think? I think you and your scientist pals have a conspiracy! To keep us buried till we die! Jew, Chinese woman, Jap kid. You're taking a revenge on the white race. I'm fed up with those caves and Angelica and I yearn to go on a moonlight stroll! So I'm going, as a test! When I get back, and when the gang sees how you've betrayed all of us, you'll be slaughtered, Mr. Jew Doctor Benvenuto Cellini Bernman and young George Hyama! Then we white poeple will all come out, and your crazy plot will be futile!" He laughed and began to move away, yelling over his shoulder

  "Foiled! . . . Foiled! . . . Foiled!" and running like a deer.

  George lunged toward Kit. Ben grabbed George. "Keep your senses, fellow! Look at the speed he's making! Could you catch up? And suppose you did, a mile or two down the valley, your shielding clothes all ripped from falls and skids, leaking?"

  "We gotta try for him, Ben!"

  The scientist stared into the lucent murk where Kit's figure was merging with shadows below the pale-lit rocks. Ben stared, and held the struggling George tightly.

  "You heard what Kit said," he murmured. "That was not the real Kit talking, but a man gone mad. For cause, too! Guilt. Frustration. Passion spent, or misspent. Rotten manners. Claustrophobia. You name it! If there was one chance in a million of getting him, I'd be gone, with you. But could we even lick him? Together, maybe. But catch him?

  Racing away like that, into that shambles of blasted rock, thornbush, creepers? And suppose he's armed? No, George! I can recognize insanity when it's that violent! And I won't allow a good man, or even, myself, to get killed on a hopeless try."

  By then George, although tense, was calming down. "I know," he answered slowly. "You're right! But--!"

  "Sometimes," Ben panted, his voice sympathetic in spite of t
hat, "it takes more guts not to play Good Samaritan, when the effort's absolutely hopeless, than to make a damn-fool try! You learn that, learning to be Navy, I suppose."

  George then said, "Thanks!"

  "Okay." Ben loosed his hold on the young Japanese.

  George, still breathing hard, suggested, "Shouldn't we switch on the searchlight--

  pointed up?"

  "Won't hurt!" They climbed the tower and sent a piercing beam of light vertically upward in stabbing opposition to the moonglow. With that sudden, thrusting finger of light, from very far in the distance they heard sounds of mocking laughter.

  After calling repeatedly they at last descended, unlatched the elevator, went down to a decontamination chamber built above the middle set of psi doors, meticulously followed the wash-off drill, dressed, and took the elevator again to break the terrible news to the people below.

  It was received in silence by all save Angelica, who ran, sobbing hysterically, toward her room. Presently, Valerie followed her. Neither returned. Faith merely sat quietly in a chair, pale, without expression, making no comment. Somebody served coffee.

  Several fresh sets of lightweight shielding garments were brought out. A watch was posted on the tower--George first, then Vance, Pete next, and Ben for the daybreak period.

  Just after the sun had risen above the bleak, flattened landscape and the far-off, blue Sound, Ben saw, in the powerful telescope mounted for a different purpose on the tower, the figure of a human being coming slowly, from a place about two miles distant, near the rubble acreage that had been Fenwich.

  Kit was plainly exhausted. And doubtless, Ben surmised, pretty ill already. Once or twice Kit stumbled, almost fell.

  Meantime, through the 'scope, Ben surveyed a path toward the reeling man that he had already monitored for some distance. He considered the resistance of the garment he was wearing, added up theoretical roentgens, multiplied assumed minutes, and presently rang the phone.