by Philip Wylie
In the Hall, dozing, Vance answered.
"He's coming back!" Ben said rapidly. "Get two men in the heaviest suits we have, and bring them up! Prepare to flush off the elevator after we take him to decontamination. It's going to be nasty!"
Farr said, "Right," three times. Now he snapped, "And you stay where you are!"
Ben said, "Check!" making it sound sincere.
Then he went lithely down the ladder and started out over the sloping ledges, and on into the tangled greenery, until at last he came up to Kit.
The man's eyes were glazed. Tremors racked him. He recognized Ben, however, and grinned sheepishly. "Apologize, my friend," he said.
"Sure!" Ben wrapped a supporting arm around Kit. Waited, while Kit vomited.
Half-carried the heavy man back toward the bare, less-radioactive rock where, presently, others emerged to help.
All that day, behind a lead-brick screen in his room, Kit lay unconscious, his fever rising. Paroxysms occasionally seized his muscles. His feet, then his lower legs, hands, and arms, slowly turned black. Purple blotches appeared on his torso as blood vessels burst there.
The women, in heavy shielding suits, took turns sitting outside the lead-block wall, against the chance Kit might become conscious enough to ask for a drink of water, or speak a name, or need some other attention.
That never happened.
Limp, barely breathing, shriveled-seeming, and black, he died before the outdoors darkened again.
Ben became sick three hours after his rash, if gallant, effort.
He, too, was feverish, weak, nauseated, and marked with the splotchy hemorrhages beneath his skin.
It had been possible, however, to wash from Ben such radioactive material as had entered the few rips in his shielding clothes. No protective wall was therefore needed, and no special costumes for the women, who, round the clock, then tried the best they could to care for the often-delirious man.
After some days his symptoms grew less severe. One morning, a week later, he opened his large, blue eyes and they met the anxious and immediate attention of other eyes--Faith's.
Ben smiled weakly. Was kissed.
"You wonderful, crazy person!" Faith said. It seemed insufficient. Even silly.
"You--!"
Ben held up a hand, weakly. "Moron," he finished for her. "What's the diagnosis?"
"We've done everything we could manage. Typed everybody's blood. Given you six transfusions! You'll be okay."
Ben stared with feeble amazement. "How come?"
Faith laughed happily. "Dad played doctor. Did it from books. And also, as we only just learned, from watching. Half the nights Mother thought he spent with Angelica-
-maybe more--Dad was down at the Fenwich hospital learning all he could."
Ben frowned, "Didn't tell me--!"
"Nobody's been sick! Till now!"
"Oh?" He drifted off. Opened his eyes again. "Allowed--allowed--any water?"
She held the glass, put the sipper between his cracked lips, raised his body. He drank thirstily. . . .
In two weeks, insisting he was "good as new," Ben was able to resume his work, though on short shifts, as he still tired easily. He had a few, less-dramatic relapses. But such studies as they could make of his blood and general condition indicated no permanent damage had been done to him by his considerable dose of radiation.
When June came, he was entirely well.
With the first day of June, however, the long sense of doom that had overshadowed the adults noticeably increased. In less than two months they could
"celebrate" the second anniversary of their immolation. Because the labyrinths had been prepared by Vance Farr for two years and fifteen people, and they were now thirteen, and because that preparation had been lavish, they could and would continue to exist for an uncertain number of months after the second year below ground.
But their hopeful reliance upon rescue had become pessimism. Nobody had ever replied to their continuing signals.
At night now, quite often, when all the rest had retired with no more than sad, silent nods, Vance and Ben would sit till late, turning over in their minds, chiefly, the reason for the refusal of the world unharmed, or relatively unharmed, even to send them messages.
On one such mid-June evening, reviewing the possibilities, Ben's summary gave him a new idea. He said, that night:
"There's a reason we're ignored. Hatred. I'd imagine the remaining world despises every human being whose nation participated in this thing. It may also be that in the surviving nations, the Communists known to be there at the war's start have taken over."
"The world?" Vance objected. "Even Australia? South Africa, where the 'white-supremacy' and 'far-right' folly prevailed? Every Latin Nation?" Vance shrugged. "Hard to agree, and I'm sure, from all the radio messages we've intercepted, the Commies outside the U.S.S.R. had no notion of what was coming. Still, with the inevitable chaos following the razing of a hemisphere, it's possible. The Reds everywhere were always well organized, secretly armed, ready to step in when public uproar gave their all-set and willing minority a chance. Remember Castro, and Cuba? Or were you too busy studying-
-?"
"I remember. And other countries, since. There's just one objection to that theory.
All else fits--the silence in places like Australia, where a lot of game guys live. But which was socialist, anyway, and had a lot of Red citizens. A point. Even the refusal of white, far-right Capetown and the Union of South Africa to recognize us. There, I suspect, from the mixed-up months of yells for help, something pretty serious happened. Though Capetown comes in loud, clear, and sensible nowadays. But suppose--?"
He ceased his repetitive words.
Farr said, gently, "Suppose what, Ben?"
"Remember last fall--November 11, it was--when the Soviet survivors apparently committed united suicide?"
"Naturally." Vance's voice was dry.
"Suppose, since all that went up in nuclear blast, and in several areas, widely separated--Urals, Caucasus, Baikal, Arctic Sea, Okhotsk--suppose it wasn't suicide?
Suppose the U.S.S.R. big shots had decided on this thesis: that in any all-out war with the United States, the Soviet homeland, Siberia included, would be wiped out. Suppose they then decided there was only a single way to make Marxism become the world religion--or tyranny. You name it! Actually, there was only one way!" Ben stopped, gazed pensively at the brightly-painted and handsomely-decorated interior of the immense Hall.
"And that way would be?"
"This kind of place," Ben replied. "Only on a tremendous scale. And with thousands of people--specialists of all essential sorts--hidden ahead of the first strike in places like this, Vance, but hundreds or thousands of times larger. With nuclear-weapons stocks. And with the intent of remaining, like ourselves, till exodus was possible. Then even a few hundred nuclear-armed Reds, let alone thousands, could easily dominate the remainder of the world."
"How? Oh! I get you! Nuclear blackmail of the remaining nations, not one having an atomic weapon, or the means of making 'em, short of spending three-four years, maybe more, on the task. All right! Go on with that 'supposing.' Though it's hard to believe even the Russian Politbureau would sacrifice the entire population of the U.S.S.R.
to gain the residual half of mankind. Still, a man like Grovsky--!"
"Exactly! A truly 'believing' Soviet group, a group actually all-out Marxist-Leninist, does take the theoretical viewpoint that the world has to become all-Red, in order to complete the Red dream of earthly heaven. Nothing that advanced communism, anywhere, was deemed 'wrong' or 'evil.' Anything that hindered the spread of Marxist tyranny was 'sin.' Ethics and morals, in short, turned upside down. Perverted, totally! A people believing that could do anything! Hitler killed his millions. Stalin, his tens of millions. Grovsky might easily decide to destroy a billion and more people, including all but a few thousand or tens of thousands of his own, to gain the real and basic Red goal: world dominion! After all
, the Soviets thought in terms of generations, even centuries.
While we--" Ben shrugged. "And, after a few generations, you could safely repopulate the Temperate Zone.
Vance said bitterly, "Whereas we thought in terms of next year's balance sheets."
"More or less. Even as physicists we thought only as far ahead as the end of the twentieth century. Establishing a permanent colony on Mars before A.D. 2000. Nothing further, in science. American science."
"But how could the Red scientists even have gotten ready for such a thing without our knowing-intelligence agents, spy satellites, all that?"
"Not easy." Ben pondered. "But making great supershelters under mountains--
Urals, Caucasus, near Lake Baikal--could pass as 'mining.' And if the immense amount of gear they'd need was hauled into such giant strongholds at night and the heat dispersion of the hauling vehicles was kept low, or maybe if they used inside winches to pull gear into their initial diggings, our infrared satellites wouldn't have recorded that as anything special. The oceanside places are harder to account for." He paused and then said, startled, "Hey! Suppose they were under water!"
Vance had stared, astonished. "I'm no engineer--"
"The hell you aren't!"
"--but how could that be done, successfully?"
Ben had then risen. He paced the chamber, meditated, and finally said, "Caissons!
In units. Sunk deep. Linked up. The work all done at night, and they have months of night up where they were! A submarine city--two, apparently--so far under the sea that land blasts, even nearby, wouldn't damage 'em!"
"Tremendous enterprise!"
"Sure! And haven't the 'tremendous enterprises' of the Soviets always happened?
And always stupefied our free-world experts who, nearly always anyhow, said the Reds couldn't do it?" Ben's pacing had stopped and his eyes widened. "In that case, Vance, what we thought of as accidentally-fired, random H-blasts, picked up in the arctic, and north of Japan, and in the Mediterranean, and at this end of the Black Sea, may not have been accidental! "
"Don't get it!"
"Look! There used to be rumors, among physicists like myself, though we weren't then working on weapons, that the U. S. Government had some sort of supersecret
'ultimate-weapon' program. I'd always thought of it as one of those 'doomsday machines,'
like those sodium-jacketed H-bomb mines we knew could be made as far back as the late 1950s. That Pentagon plan had a super-supersecret name I heard a few times. 'Operation Last Stand.' No! 'Operation Last Ditch!' If it wasn't some 'doomsday machine' that we didn't touch off, it could have been a program for special units--of the U. S. Navy, say. In which case, the hits outside the U.S.S.R. were counterfire on a long-delayed American attack that destroyed all the bases in the U.S.S.R. we've here hypothecated. But suppose one base even, was not found and destroyed. Suppose, from that presumed base in the U.S.S.R. the world has been forced, under threat of H-bomb attack, to become Red. And forbidden to contact us. You know, Vance, that idea seems plausible, however hideous it would seem as a war plan to genuinely civilized people! And we can check it!"
"Check it? How?"
"By studying the seismographic and other records we kept in that period. Come on!"
Neither man slept that night. And their scrutiny of their abundant and varied information at long last told them the truth: there had been aimed, rocket assaults--many, in fact, on each area they'd previously heard conferring by coded radio. And from those same bases, before they were annihilated, counterrockets had risen, and apparently gone home on their targets--evidently American nuclear submarines, or possibly aircraft carriers. That became plain when they made a minute study of the timing of the many, enormous explosions and the location of each, in relation to time. But if any Soviets had survived that horror, they had maintained radio silence since. . . .
On another night Vance and Ben had been discussing possible, last-minute methods of somehow getting safely away from the deep caverns and from Sachem's Watch above.
Ben had listed the ideas, in pencil, along with the relevant objections: 1. Build a helicopter. Range too short. Aerodynamic knowledge insufficient.
2. Build a plane in a lead-shielded hangar above. Probably could not build good enough plane in time left. Also: how to take off?
3. Clear low-radiation path to sea. Build boat, transfer it to Long Island Sound.
Load personnel. Head for Costa Rica or other safe and relatively near place. Impossible to clear that much land of very hot debris and vegetation.
4. Radar recently installed aloft shows large lake formed, evidently when the H-bombing of Hartford threw massive wreckage into the Connecticut River. Lake might be reached, in shielded cart towed by shielded tractors. Lake might also be less radioactive than land. How to survive in lake? Build boat? Live on fish, if any there and safe to eat?
Probably the best remaining chance, if all efforts to get outside help fail. We will start working on equipment for that in another month, if appeals are still unanswered.
It was at that point on that particular evening of moody converse between Vance and Ben, when George appeared. Both men said then, in unison and with smiles,
"Where's Lodi?"
"Asleep. I couldn't, Sleep, I mean. Been looking at TV on the small-screen set in the communications room. Rio de Janeiro's about to broadcast that stuff you saw, Ben, long ago, from Montreal. Vance, you told me you'd like to see it."
"Not 'like,' George. But I did feel compelled to. But why now?"
George grinned ruefully. "Oh, those Latins love gory stuff. I suspect some even like to see what happened to us gringos and Yankees." He smiled again, at their nods of unconscious assent to his inclusion of himself with "gringos" and "Yankees," and went on. "The excuse for the broadcast is kind of ironic. Tonight's the anniversary of the Grovsky-Conner agreement to begin a final and effective disarmament discussion.
Remember it? President Conner even thought the Reds meant it? And then, about six weeks later, the world came apart!"
Ben reluctantly, Vance face pale, followed George to the unpainted, black-box-crammed chamber cut in rock. They took chairs and listened to the incomprehensible Portuguese prologue. After it they saw the films Ben had watched, long before. Films taken by news photographers around Montreal in the early hours of the war and up until dusk. These films had been flown, by a Canadian jet, out over the Atlantic, to avoid the spreading atmospheric radiation, and south, to Rio and safety. The flight had been authorized by Canadian officials when they learned the film existed and realized it might be preserved by no less drastic means.
Montreal, Ben explained during some early shots of distant, horizon-to-horizon smoke, had not been hit. Apparently, of two or three weapons aimed at that city, only one had escaped interception and that one had fallen so far south and east of its target that, since the winds in the area were from the northwest, Montreal had remained unscathed until, that night, light fallout reached the city from the initial bombardment of the United States and from nearby Ottawa. Actually, till three and a half days later when the residual sodium clouds had arrived from the Pacific Coast, Montreal had remained alive though panicky.
The film now relayed from space and transmitted by Rio de Janeiro at first merely showed the shocking and violent efforts of the inhabitants of that city of well over a million to take cover, anywhere, or to escape in any sort of vehicle.
The onlookers had witnessed somewhat similar scenes, long ago, in films relayed the same way by Costa Rica.
But order was soon established in undamaged Montreal. The firestorm at Ottawa was visible as a mighty smoke cloud, but the winds bore the fallout away from Montreal.
Quebec's disappearance, in solar temperatures and bloody agony, equally had no effect on her sister city. What followed that was appalling: an endless variety of scenes showing the arrival of refugees from the United States.
They came, at first, in a trickle--cars and trucks loaded with the b
lind, the burned, the savagely cut, the dead. They came from Manchester, Vermont, and from Lowell and Lynn and Worcester and Springfield and even Boston. From all of Massachusetts. And from Albany, and later from the Buffalo area in New York. The licenses of their vehicles made their origins partly clear; and words, spoken, groaned, or screamed, supplied the rest of the information.
These were citizens of the United States--men, women, children, teen-agers, babies--who somehow had escaped from one or another ruined perimeter of an H-burst--
rocket warhead or plane-dropped, giant bomb. As the first of the arriving trucks, buses and, mainly, private cars grew to a flood that choked all roads leading to Montreal from the south, Canadian police, soon reinforced by soldiers, halted the columns at a distance from the city.
Filling all lanes of all highways, amid the roads through woods and farms, in hilly country and fiat, the titanic, wailing exodus came everywhere to a stop.
In each vehicle was at least one man or woman--the driver--who had not been blinded by seeing a fireball close enough--and in many cases forty miles was "close enough"--to lose his sight. But each load of refugees was in varied conditions that, even when shown one by one, beggared description.
Many were naked and of the naked, many were burned scarlet or, in places, black, from head to foot, or on arms and head.
The ears of thousands were gone. Their eyes had "melted" and lay on their cheeks in phlegm-like gobbets. Their noses were not there, and they breathed through holes in crisp, black faces. Their hair was gone. It was impossible to tell of thousands (unless they walked) which was the front, which the back of their horrible heads.
A sound rose from the stopped and backed-up caravan. It was like a dirge played on demonic, stringed instruments bloated in scale with the endless columns, a sound the ears even of the TV watchers could hardly believe, yet, on recognizing, recorded forever: the sound of thousands of people screaming and groaning and begging, often simply to be shot, by soldiers who tried, sick, nauseated, almost unable to carry out their orders, to give some sort of help to this interminable cavalcade of anguish.