It began when he was a graduate student at Cornell. He was an organic chemist, doing research on plastics and polymers. (He explained that these are very long molecules used in making nylon, dacron and the stretchy kind of plastic wrap.) The head of the department in which he studied was a Professor Kylmer, a very famous man who had once won a Nobel prize.
Professor Kylmer had a research grant from the government, and worked part of the time at a special laboratory they had built for him, not at Cornell but in the mountains about twenty miles away. The whole thing was secret, but it had something to do with plastic and polymers, which were also the Professor’s speciality.
Mr Loomis knew the Professor fairly well (being his pupil), though he was not a very friendly man, but always completely wrapped up in his work. One day, however, he invited Mr Loomis into his private office in the Cornell chemistry building. He was obviously excited about something. He asked Mr Loomis, as soon as the door was shut, if he would like to come and work with him in the secret laboratory. He said that he had just made an important discovery, and needed to increase his staff to develop it. Mr Loomis, after thinking it over, accepted the offer—since, as the Professor explained, it was the same kind of research he was doing anyway, and this way he would get paid for doing it.
The discovery was a method of magnetizing plastic. Mr Loomis called it “polarizing”, but that means making it magnetic. Since the plastic was made of polymers, they called it “polapoly”.
That did not sound like too exciting a discovery to me, but when he explained what it was for, I could see that it was—or would seem so to the government. The point was that magnetism can stop, or at least turn aside, radiation. Mr Loomis reminded me (I had learned it at school) that it is the earth’s magnetic field that keeps us all from being killed by cosmic rays. So a magnetic plastic could be used to make a radiation-proof suit.
That was what the government—the Army, of course—wanted. So that troops could live on (fight on!) in places that had been atom bombed. The government would issue suits to civilians, too, eventually, but the Army wanted the first ones.
This happened about three years before the war. The laboratory to which Mr Loomis reported the next day was eighty feet underground, a place as big as a house, hollowed out of a mountainside of solid rock. He worked there almost every day for the next three years, and often slept there, too—there were living quarters, so that when they got busy on some crucial test they did not need to drive back to Ithaca. They had stores of food and even a kitchen.
He soon learned that the project was more complicated than just making a plastic suit. There wasn’t much point in giving a soldier a safe-suit if he could not breathe the air around him, or drink the water. (Food rations, even cases of food, they could wrap in the plastic.) But Professor Kylmer had already started working on a variation of the plastic—a thin, slightly porous membrane that you could filter the water through. It worked this way: the worse the water was, the less you got, but what did come through was pure; the filter would not pass the radioactive part. Then they designed a similar membrane for air. That was harder, because the clean air coming out the other side had to be trapped and compressed into a tank. But they worked it out, all in a compact unit that a man could carry and operate with a hand pump.
These were (I now realized) the things Mr Loomis had brought with him—the greenish suit he was wearing when I first saw him, the air-tank on his back; the water filter, and a supply of purified water, had been in the wagon. The tent, of course, was the same stuff as the suit, and so was the wagon-cover.
They had designed all these in the laboratory, and finished a single pilot model of each, just before the war began. They had sent their report to Washington, and a team was coming from the Pentagon to test them. Then they would start production, not in the laboratory but in plastics factories all over the country.
But the men from the Pentagon never got there. It was all too late. The war broke out and was over before a single safe-suit was ever issued to a single soldier, much less a civilian.
On the night the bombing began, Mr Loomis was working late in the laboratory. He heard the news on the radio, and he decided to stay there, at least for the time being, to see how things went. He had a good supply of food—mostly army rations of freeze-dried things (which would keep indefinitely), for they had been testing the plastic for food packaging. Professor Kylmer was not there; he had gone back to Ithaca, and Mr Loomis never saw him again.
In the laboratory Mr Loomis also had the world’s only radiation-proof suit, and he had the air filter and the water filter.
Like me, he heard the radio stations go off one by one. Still he thought there might be other survivors in underground places like his—the Air Force, for instance, was supposed to have several shelters, all equipped so that the men in them could last for months. The difference was that if they were alive, they could not go out, and he could.
He stayed in the laboratory for three months, hoping the radiation level in the air outside would go down, but it did not. Then he began a series of expeditions. At first they were short ones. The suit had been carefully tested in the laboratory, and it was safe against all predictable radiation levels. But it had never actually been used “in the field”; so he was cautious, and it was lucky he was. His first impulse, for instance, was to get into his car and drive to Ithaca, the nearest big town. Before he did so, he checked the radioactivity inside the car, using a Geiger counter from the laboratory. He discovered it was ten times as high as in the open air: apparently the metal body, reflecting it inward from six directions, concentrated the rays more than anyone had anticipated. Anyway, the level was too near the theoretical limit of what the suit could handle, and he decided not to risk it.
Since then he had tested hundreds of cars, and they were all the same—as he said, too hot to be safe. Even motorcycles were dangerous. Bicycles were better, but too difficult to ride in the bulky plastic suit. So he ended up walking and hauling his supplies in the wagon, which he had made himself out of bicycle parts and a big, light plywood carton covered with polapoly.
His first long trip was to the west, to where he knew there had been an underground Air Force command post. Using a map, he calculated the distance he had to cover each day, how long it would take, and how much freeze-dried food he would need. He knew he would not find anything edible along the way; there might be usable food at the underground post itself, but he could not count on that.
He found the Air base all right, barricaded, walled, fenced, with “Keep Out” signs starting a mile away. It was a shambles. Apparently men stationed in the barracks outside had tried to fight their way into the safe-room; local civilians had joined them, and in the battle grenades had been used. There were bodies everywhere, and no sign of life. He tried the lift but it did not work. Taking a torch, he climbed instead down a steep, ladder-like stairway next to the lift. After the first ten steps it was totally dark.
The command room itself, ninety steps further down, was relatively undamaged: a large oval room with maps on the walls, desks, telephones, and a bank of computers. Three dead men in uniform sat slumped over their desks; each had a loaded rifle next to him. Yet they had not been shot. They had died, Mr Loomis guessed, of asphyxiation; they would have depended for air on a bottled oxygen-mix, and someone, somewhere in the underground maze, had wrecked the circulation pumps.
He thought that did not really matter so much. Because all of the underground fallout shelters, this one and others around the world, had built-in time limits, enough air and water to last three months, six months, a year, on the assumption that after that it would be safe to go outside again. And that had not happened.
Mr Loomis had been telling all this as he lay in David’s bed, having finished eating his lunch. I could see that he was anxious to tell it, but that he was getting tired. When he finished what I have written here he reached to get a drink of water from the glass I had put on his lunch tray, but the glass was em
pty. I took the tray away to the kitchen, and the glass with it. I refilled it, and while I was taking it back I remembered one more thing I was really curious about.
I gave him the water and asked: “Who was Edward?” Because that was the name he had called me when he first saw me in the tent, when he was delirious.
For a second after I asked the question I thought the sickness had come back on him, because his eyes got a wild look again, as if he were seeing a nightmare. The hand holding the glass of water opened, and the glass slipped and fell to the floor. At the noise it made he shook his head and his eyes unclouded. Still he stared.
“How do you know about Edward?”
“When I first saw you,” I said, “in the tent, you called me Edward. Is something wrong? Are you sick?”
He relaxed. “It was a shock,” he said. “Edward was a man who worked in the laboratory with Dr Kylmer and me. But I didn’t think I had mentioned his name.”
I got him another glass of water and cleaned up the floor where the first one had fallen.
Chapter Seven
June 3rd
Four days have passed.
On the first day, Mr Loomis’s condition remained about the same. I gave him the fever thermometer, and we began keeping track of his temperature. It was about 99.5 degrees in the morning, went up to 101 in the middle of the day, and fell back to 99.5 in the evening. He said that meant he was still in the “interim” period.
I thought he should take some aspirin, but he said it would not do any real good, and that we should save it—the half dozen bottles in the store being perhaps the only usable aspirin left in the world. He said it seriously, but I had a feeling he was half joking.
I had a lot to do. With him in the valley—in the house—I decided I should cook better meals than I did when I was by myself. For one thing, as I said, if he was going to be sick he ought to build up his strength. Anyway, I like to cook, but when I was alone I frequently just did not bother—it seemed silly, just for one.
So I made several trips to the store for supplies. It was a tinned stuff, of course, or dried. There would not be anything fresh except milk and eggs until I could get the garden going again. Since it was already June, that was the most urgent thing; I wished now I had not dug it all up—I could be having fresh greens right now. Also the lettuce would have been ready. It was probably too late to start either of those again, but I decided to try anyway, and hope it stayed cool. I could at least get some to seed for next year. But I really longed for a salad, and fresh greens.
I got the spade and the hoe and went to work. Faro came up and sniffed the first few shovelfuls of earth I turned over. Then he dug a small hole of his own and lay on top of it. It was warm in the sun. He is already looking much better than he did at first.
It was easy spading, since the earth had already been turned up once; also the manure was still in it, so I did not have to haul that again. I had plenty of seeds; I had taken them up to the cave with me when I moved. But after I had dug the whole patch—in fact I had it partly planted—I realized that it was not really big enough. Because, of course, with two we would need twice as much of everything, and I wanted some left over for preserving. The tinned stuff in the store is not going to last forever. So I decided to double the size of the garden.
There was plenty of room, but for the new part I had to dig through turf, which was much harder digging. Still I was making pretty good progress when I noticed Faro standing up and wagging his tail. I looked up and there, leaning against the gate post watching me, was Mr Loomis. I had left him after lunch, still lying on David’s bed. It was now late afternoon, almost time to stop and get dinner. I was somewhat ashamed to have him see me, because working so hard I was dirty, hot and sweaty. I had intended to wash before I went into his room.
But more, I was concerned. What was he doing out here, out of bed? I walked over, still carrying the spade. I asked him: “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing wrong,” he said. “I felt bored. It’s a warm afternoon, so I came out.”
I had forgotten about being bored. There was always so much to do. But of course I had not been sick in bed. I had given him some books to read, but they were historical novels that used to be my mother’s. I suppose he did not like them much. I had some more in my bedroom upstairs, but they were mostly either school books or children’s books. We generally depended on the public library in Ogdentown.
“I’ve been digging,” I said, which of course he had already seen. “This is going to be the garden.”
“Hard work for a girl,” he said, noticing, I suppose, how messy I looked.
“I’m used to it.” I started to tell him that most of it had already been dug before and was therefore easy, but then I decided not to. I did not want him to know how afraid I had been when I first saw him coming.
He looked puzzled. “But do you have to do it all by hand? Didn’t your father have a tractor?”
“It’s in the barn.”
“You can’t run it?”
“I can, but there’s no petrol.”
“But there are two petrol pumps at the store. There must be petrol there.”
That was true. The Amish, though they did not drive cars, used plenty of tractors, reapers, balers and other machines, and bought their petrol from Mr Klein.
“I suppose there is,” I said. “But the pumps won’t work without electricity.”
“And you’ve been doing all this with a shovel. Don’t you realize it would be simple to take the motors off the pumps and work them by hand? There may be four or five thousand gallons there.” He smiled but it made me feel stupid.
“I don’t know much about electric motors and pumps,” I said.
“But I do,” he said. “At least enough to do that.”
“When you’re well again,” I said.
Without having discussed it, we both had begun going on the assumption that he would recover. The other possibility kept occurring to me at first, but now it seemed to have become remote. At least it had faded from my mind, through no effort on my part.
I was really glad to hear what he said about the petrol and the tractor, and I hoped it would work. There was enough winter pasture for the three cows, but just barely. With the tractor running I could mow the grass after it went to seed, and bring in some hay. Also, I hoped eventually to increase the herd.
We walked back to the house just as the sun was setting. Because the walls of the valley are so high, the sun always sets early and rises late; there is a long twilight and we never have real sunsets the way they are where the land is level. Still this was one of the better ones. My father used to say, “In a valley the real sunset is in the east,” and that is how it was. As the sun disappeared over the west ridge, the last of the orange light moved up the hill on the east, with the darker shadow climbing up after it. At the end only the tops of the last high trees were lit, and they looked as if they were burning. Then they faded and went out, and it was dusk.
We stopped a minute to watch it and he rested his hand on my shoulder as he had on the gate post. I felt proud to be of help to him, but when we turned to walk the rest of the way he went without help. He was obviously much stronger and standing straighter. I realized that he was quite tall.
It turned colder that night, so after we had eaten dinner I built a fire in the living room fireplace and closed the windows. Since the living room adjoins his—Joseph and David’s—room, I opened the door so the fire would warm it, too. He did not go back into the bedroom immediately, however, but sat down in a chair near the fireplace.
The living room has two big upholstered chairs and a sofa, all placed so you can see the fire, which my father and mother liked to do in winter. (This last winter I slept on the sofa to be near the fire.) The chair Mr Loomis sat in was the one my father used to use. The electric lamps are still beside the chairs—I left them there for looks, even though they will not light. Against the wall on one side of the room stands the record-player, and
against the other our piano.
“Would you like me to get you a book?” I said, thinking he would be bored again. “I can put the lamp on the table by the chair.”
He said: “No, thank you. I only want to look at the fire a few minutes. Then I’ll get sleepy. The fire always does that.”
Still, for the first time it bothered me. There was absolutely nothing for him to do. When I am by myself—when I was by myself—I was always quite tired at the end of the day, and unless I had washing or sewing or something like to do, I usually went to sleep very soon after eating. Now I wished there was a radio station to tune in, or that the record-player would work. It was quite a good one, and we had a lot of records. But it would not play without electricity so I did something I would be embarrassed to do under ordinary circumstances. I said: “Would you like me to play the piano?” I added quickly: “I can’t play very well.”
To my surprise he seemed extremely pleased, almost excited. “Could you?” he said. “I haven’t heard music for more than a year.”
I felt sorry for him, because I not only can’t play too well, but I don’t have much music. I have the John Thompson “Second Year Lesson Book”, Thompson’s “Easy Pieces”, and a recital piece I once learned, “Fur Elise”. The Lesson Book is about half finger exercises.
I put the lamp near the piano and started on “Easy Pieces”. A lot of them are too babyish, but towards the end of the book there are some harder ones that are quite pretty. I played these, glancing at him now and then. He really seemed to like it, and I think because of that I played better than I usually do, and hardly made any mistakes. I mean he didn’t clap or say anything, but he sat forward in his chair and listened without moving at all. When I finished “Easy Pieces” I played “Fur Elise”, then a few things from the Lesson Book, and that was all I had, except hymns.
I can play hymns better than anything else, because I used to play them for our Sunday School singing. I opened the hymn book and played two of my favourites, “How Great Thou Art” and “In the Garden”. The melodies are good, but the arrangements are not really meant for the piano, but for choir. I played “In the Garden” very softly, and when I looked around again he had fallen asleep, still leaning forward in his chair. I was afraid he would fall, so I stopped, and when I did he woke up.
Z for Zachariah Page 5