Then things became, we might say, curious.
#
I missed my regular pilgrimage to the dam Monday morning. Old man Keefer was practically hemorrhaging in the kitchen. Gasping, he agreed to be healed.
That took most of the day. But how happy I was about that--not only to have healed Keefer, but to think that (if things took a normal course, which I saw I could not always count on) he would be a living example of what nan, properly used, could do.
For that reason I set off early on Tuesday along the Inter state. The sky was filled with dark clouds; it had rained all week, it had snowed all winter. The river next to the Interstate was already creeping onto the flood plain, a month early, they said.
Musing along, thinking in equal parts of Keefer, Mildred, and Don, I didn't really pay much attention to my surroundings until I was almost at the dam. I had hiked down the frost-heaved exit and taken the utility road simply as a matter of habit.
Then I noticed someone climbing the metal stairs next to the locks.
I was less than half a mile away. I stopped, curious. By the way he moved, I realized that it was Don.
I began to run.
It took me five minutes to reach the base of the dam and the overflow sluice into the locks hid the sound of my footsteps, which were as loud in my ears as my pounding heart.
He stopped climbing at the first lock and pulled something from within his coat. His arm reached out. He twisted his wrist.
I wasn't sure exactly, as I stared up at him, so astonished I couldn't move, what sort of nan he poured into that lock. It was a rather good bet that he didn't know himself. But whatever the effects, they could easily be blamed on me. I remembered my ransacked jars. No telling. Nan was in the final lock, and would be in the water supply system within twenty minutes.
I turned. I jumped into the fringing woods, and crashed through the saplings.
As I ran, those silly line drawings rushed across my vision, everyone rushing from Columbus because of the false rumor of the breaking dam and I thought Yes, Don, Yes! That's the answer! I'll get everyone out of town just like in the story. I'll tell them the dam has broken!
I was drenched with sweat when I reached the outskirts of Columbus, the farmhouse of Sally Cabriello, and I knew that she had a phone.
I shoved the door open and yelled, "The dam has broken!"
She turned pale. "No!" Her light brown hair was held back with a bandanna. She held her blond baby and another four-year- old boy rushed to her side and said "Mommy what's wrong?"
"Can I use your phone?" I asked.
She nodded, as she grabbed a pack and tossed bags of beans and grains into it. As I told John, the operator, and exhorted him to tell everyone Plan 2 was in effect, wherein they were all to go to the high ground enclaves which had been prepared, Sally bundled up her children, utterly calm, and led them outside. She set the boy in the wagon, put the baby in the bike seat. Then she paused, looking in through the window, staring at me think ing, I knew, what about her?
"Go!" I yelled, and motioned frantically. She looked doubt ful, then turned back toward her children and jumped on the bike without a second look.
Meanwhile, John said something really strange.
"Don told me you would try this," he said.
" What?"
John's voice was flat, without affect.
"He said you might try something like this. Pretend that the dam broke so that everyone would agree to be inoculated. He's pretty smart, you know."
"You don't understand," I said, wishing he was next to me so that I could tear his throat out. "Everyone has to get out of town. Now. There's no time--"
And then the phone was wrenched out of my hand.
Don covered it up and said, panting, "I saw you. You spied on me."
"You idiot," I said. "Tell John to get everyone out of town. You have no idea what you've done."
He just grinned and yanked the phone line out of the wall.
"You're going to tell me exactly what to do to fix everyone. Let's go."
Fine, I thought, as he shoved me ahead of him onto the road. I don't care who gets the credit. It's my chance to inoculate the whole damned town.
There were several things neither of us took into account.
One, Sally. She was just as good as a siren.
Two, the fact that when we got back to town, the clinic was mobbed.
And three, the dam really did burst.
It was old. The spring runoff, after all that snow, had been too much for it.
We heard it the first minute after coming into the clinic.
We saw we couldn't get in the front door so we came in the back way. It was packed. People were shouting at Mildred, demanding antidote nans to take with them to the Survival Bunker. People are funny, aren't they? Children were crying, many of them, adding to the general godawful cacophony. Mildred was pretending she didn't know where the nan was, unsure what I would want, I suppose.
"They're up on the top floor--come on!" hollered brave Don, as Mildred stared at him, then at me. I just nodded and she yelled "Wait now, be calm, just line up over here--"
Then we heard the dull explosion.
Everyone knew what it was. They thought the dam broke before, even though they heard nothing, which had probably made them feel safe, like maybe it's not broken, maybe it's just a small fissure and we have time to fool around.
Now they knew it for a fact.
Mildred was between them and the door.
"No!" yelled Don. "This way! The nan is this way!"
It took about three or four minutes for them to shove through the doorway. Some of them picked up chairs and the sound of glass shattering mingled with the general hue and cry, and the pounding footsteps of a hundred crazed people running down the front steps to join the mob in the street.
Then there were just the three of us.
The shards of glass left in the window frames were smeared with blood. Mildred was lying limp in the doorway.
We rushed over and knelt beside her. She looked directly into my eyes. "Please save Don," she told me, as if she knew I might not. I couldn't help thinking, sure, if I have the time. I might be busy, though.
She said to Don, "Take mother's silver out of the buffet and put it in the attic. Don't forget. And the photographs in the hall closet too." The side of her head was swollen. Her nose looked broken. As she spoke Don felt her body quickly, expertly. He turned to me. He gasped a few times before he could speak.
"The cocoons," he said. "Can they heal a broken neck?"
I ran for a stabilizing collar. We strapped her onto a board. The elevator was not working. As we paused at each landing to catch our breath, we saw people hurrying by on bikes, on horses, on foot, heading out to the Bunker, which was five hundred feet above the city. I saw four teenage boys drag Mr. Tolliver, the owner of the ice cream shop, from his yellow car and shove him into the street, and then we trudged up another flight, sweating.
The cocoons were on the twelfth floor, the top.
Water was surging through the streets by the time we made it up there, and whatever Don had poured in the lock was beginning to have an effect. I had no idea what it was of course. He stared at you, Mildred, and began laughing hysterically. Then he began to cry. He was pulling at you, making little sobbing noises, trying to keep you away from the cocoon. I was looking around for something to bash his head with, I must be honest with you, when he collapsed onto the floor.
I lifted you into one of the cocoons without any of his help, what they say about emergencies making you strong is true. My hands were shaking but I soon had it breathing for you, and it told me you were stabilized. Any damage I had done in handling you would be repaired. I was weak with relief. The cocoon was self-powered, of course, the bacteria still lived, one of the reasons they were kept locked up on the top floor, because of their scariness. I looked over at Don. My energy had ebbed. I couldn't possibly lift him into a cocoon, could I? I looked back at you.
Stories are good for teaching things like kindness, espe cially if you believe you are living them. I started to sort of waltz past my shelf of pretty jars wondering if Kindness, too, had been smashed as I tried to ignore the sight of the First National Bank crumbling, quite slowly, to one side out the west window.
#
When I finally was finished I had managed to load Don and administer, I think, Kindness. You must remember that things were, to put it mildly, rather haywire. I included a radio code, despite Fibrillation (it seems to subside every few months) for I had no idea where I would go but in my hubris I thought that when you woke, regrown, and each incarnation of you thereafter, you might want to find me. Or if not, at least get some information from me about surviving.
I gave you, as you sank deeper and deeper into cocoon immer sion, every single immunization I could muster. Hell, it wasn't hard. I just scooped vials of immunization from the floor on my knees. Someone--now why did I think of Don? had smashed a row or two of them. The crystals had spilled to the floor in a rainbow of what looked like colored sand. He had pried open the large can of replication medium and dumped it where they could all mingle, so they were replicating like mad, I am sure.
One of the puppies--they were big enough to follow You to work, and to wait outside the hospital patiently--wandered in the door and after she got over her joy at seeing me, began lapping away at the nan on the floor. Hmm I thought, as I loaded it into the cocoon vents, must be tasty. In a dazed way I gathered up samples of what I thought I might need and sealed them tightly in my original small plastic vials, and wrapped those in plastic and--oh, what does it matter if it leaks, I finally thought, and tossed the sealed jars into my original bag and sealed that as well.
At any rate, by the time G.E. and I climbed out the second floor window and swam over to First Street, where we staggered ashore, me with my pathetic bag of nan, it really didn't matter. You were lucky, in a way.
A new plague was sweeping the country, as it were. Columbus would have had it at any rate. It was from Asia, I heard later, whenever the Fibrillation paused, as G.E. and I rushed west, then north, on the robot train, out here to the end of the line.
#
I know now that Kindness did not take on at least one of You, Don. When you walked up the hill, shaggy and bearded, all I had to do was hug you, and because you were unchanged your breath stopped. That's all. I have the directions within me, and cannot change them now. If you are Kind, which is a very precise nan instruction, you will certainly live when I hug you.
Well, that should keep the rest of you away, if there are any. Read it in the news.
I wonder what you have done with Mildred, unkind one. Why has she never come? She was kind already. I would have loved to see both of you come, together. Or if not, I would loved to see both of you have children. If you had become kind. Mildred talked about it a lot. She asked me if I had nan to fix what was wrong with her and I did, but she never got around to talking to you about it. I told her just do it; he'll never agree. He wanted children. But not, of course, as a gift of nan. Well, I think I fixed that, at least.
These are my thoughts. But I have plenty to do.
I weed my soybeans. I talk to Granddad
And, on one day a year, I visit the Pointed Fir Lodge.
I go down into the cool stone cellar, and seriously debate the choice of wine.
G.E. and I choose an unrotted rowboat. The oars cut into the shimmering water and I pull away from the wavery granite shelves of the shallows, pull hard, until we glide quickly. It takes a while to catch pike, but it's great fun. The most fun in the world. I always catch two. Sometimes I grill them; sometimes I poach them with herbs.
There is a lot of rice in the cellar, and bitter shoots of rocket in the spring.
On one evening the robot train rushes into town and stops precisely on the mark. Sometimes G.E. and I watch from the shadows of the old stone station; other times we finish our dinner in late and dignified fashion and just hear it come and go as the candle flickers--it depends on how long we stayed out fishing and that depends on the mood of the pike.
Never has anyone been on it.
It is coming again tomorrow, Mildred. Probably You are old now too, perhaps you woke long ago, and the Don you woke with was kind, and together you rebuilt your town and salvaged the minds of your townspeople and did not allow your ghostly doubles to grow. I did my best to override that old one-year programming on that horrible day but could not be sure that it would be success ful.
Sometimes I wish that I had been strong enough to return, and undo it all. And sometimes I am glad that I was not, think ing (as I so often do, here in the bright sun of my mountaintop) of the best possible outcome, which was not so unlikely after all. I was second in my class you know; if anyone could have corrected the programming on such short notice, it was me. And at the time I could not bear the alternative of just letting you die.
So if that worked. If that worked, and the kind Don has died, as he probably would have when he was 78, according to my genetic projections, much earlier than your projected 107 years, please come. Just pack a small bag, you won't need much.
Get off at the end of the line.
Head north.
The End
Solitaire, by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Stumblebum was not his real name, but Norman had taken early to playing lots of solitaire and not paying much attention to his surroundings or anything else except cards. Early means seven years old and understandably this warped his thinking. When other kids were playing Cowboys and Indians, a popular pursuit in 1956, SB was making sure his playing surface was clean and dry so as not to gum up the cards, and took care to avoid windy places which meant that he was usually inside with the windows shut.
As for his name, SB's father could be cruel at times or at least rather short-tempered, and it was he who took to yelling "You idiotic card-sharp stumblebum, I told you to bring me that jar of screws from down in the basement ten minutes ago now where is it? I'll show you to waste your time with those stupid cards" loud enough for the neighbors to hear, in the summer, anyway. The other kids, by rights SB's natural playmates, heard this epithet wafting out the windows often enough and it struck them as just right. The Stumble, or SB, as it finally boiled down to, did have a penchant for clumsiness, and once had committed the atrocity of yelling, panicked, for some kid's dad to get him down out of a tree. His real name was Norman and he told them for awhile, then gave up.
SB's mother was not your normal fifties Lassie type mom, and though she did wear an apron when she cooked it was usually spattered with last week's dinner. She was sharp-faced with stringy blonde hair she kept in a pony tail at the nape of her neck, smoked all the time, and complained that SB (even she took to calling him that) had tied her down--right to his face--so often that after awhile it ceased to bother him. He wasn't sure why it was supposed to bother him, actually, but he was pretty certain that it was meant to.
Their house was a big white house. It sat on a corner lot, and had peeling paint and a dirt-packed yard where the grass grew in raggedy patches which his dad complained bitterly about having to mow with the metal push mower that went clip clip clip on Saturday mornings. SB had friends, sort of, for awhile, two neighbor boys. They were brothers, one his age the other a year younger, both with limpid brown eyes and freckles. But then a doctor did something wrong--so SB's mom told him--and the big brother died suddenly and the family moved away real fast. Jim, the dead one, had been all right. At least he'd play war, or fish. Boring, but at least you had cards in your hand.
SB kind of liked his new name, event
ually, so that in school even the teachers called him that except Miss Gaymond, his second grade teacher. She called him Norman which always made everyone snicker until she made them write sentences on the board and then they stopped. As for the other things the kids did, SB did not mind baseball too much--not to play, of course, since he was taunted for his clumsy throws and never picked till last to be on a team. But he liked it when on Saturday afternoons his dad sat opening one can of Hamm's after another with an opener he kept next to him on the tv table, and watched the tiny men shift places like cards in a solitaire game on the small black and white Crosley which sat in a corner of the living room. SB absorbed the rules; he liked rules, and this was one of the main reasons he lacked interest in playing with the other kids--somebody was always changing the rules. He had no objection to sitting down and making up the rules to a game such as Indians could die twice but no more or that when you ran out of lovely sharp-sounding acrid-smelling caps which unreeled through your gun in a papery red tape you changed from a Cowboy to an Indian. But you just couldn't depend on the other kids to stick to those rules. The players on the gray diamond watching, waiting, while the crowd sat, then stood and roared, reminded him of cards. It could be anyone there on third but when they were there they took on special characteristics depending on how the other parts of the game were going. There was chance like when he shuffled the cards and his uncle had taught him some pretty fancy shuffles, a bridge where he bent the cards in an arc which forced them to cascade together and so on, but once that was over it was up to his wits to see every opening, and up to his judgment to decide whether or not to move a card or wait for a better one and up to the sharpness of his memory to recall the position of a formerly turned up card.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 197