Sunstroke: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  The phone box had a slot for two-kopeck pieces, but I guessed that you didn’t need money for a call inside the hotel—almost as though the phone was telling me how to use it.

  Billy bawled out a number, and I dialled.

  “Hullo? Can you hear me, Billy?” I asked softly.

  “Sure thing.”

  And I saluted the phone. This was a real fantasy moment. I could almost believe that I was phoning home to the States. Only, of course, there were no phones left there. Or cities, for that matter. But still!

  “General Greg Berry reporting! We’ve reached Khabarovsk. We’re on the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway! Group Red will set up an air shuttle service to Magadan tomorrow. Group White will take a train down to Vladivostok and if there aren’t any Chicoms there either—and so help me, I know so deep down in me there won’t be any, it’s as though God has told me Himself!—then Group White’ll sail the biggest warship they can handle out of the navy yards up to the Bering Sea. And Group Blue will get the locos rolling across the Siberian railroad. We’re in business!”

  We horsed around on the phone for a while like a couple of kids. But of course, every word of it was true. As Mary watched, the first grin in ages appeared on her face.

  It was a damn shame about last year’s war; but at least now we knew that we’d won it—and forever.

  As the culmination of the US Government’s search for nondestructive nuclear weapons, which wouldn’t wipe out the treasures of the world, we’d just deployed the Super-Radiation Bomb—which was as much an advance upon the Neutron Bomb of the eighties as the Neutron Bomb was upon the unwieldy Hydrogen Bomb.

  The S.R.B. produced hardly any blast or heat damage; if air-burst correctly, none at all. But its short-term radiation yield was incredible—and without any residual radioactivity. One single S.R.B. detonated over Moscow would kill every living thing in the city and environs—apart from cockroaches and such—and it would leave all the factories and apartment blocks, all the offices and shops, all the museums and churches in perfect condition.

  The Kremlin, of course, denounced this at once as the ‘Super-Capitalist Bomb’ because it respected property but not persons. And they unveiled their own secretly developed super-weapon, which they called the ‘Socialist Bomb’. We called it the S.O.B.

  The Devil himself must have had a hand in the design of this Socialist Bomb. Its effects were far crueller.

  How exactly it did it, I don’t know for sure, and we never had time fully to suss out the theory, but basically it generated a subatomic vibration field, perhaps at the quark level, that affected any inanimate matter which had in any way been manufactured, worked or tailored by man, leaving a particular ‘signature’ written in it. The S.O.B. had no effect at all on living tissue, or landscape, or minerals in the ground, or even foodstuffs—though it put paid to the containers. But it bust the continuum, for any ‘made’ or ‘shaped’ article within its field. It rapidly transformed the particles in any target object into ‘virtual’ particles so that they slipped out of existence, perhaps re-emerging somewhere else in our universe, or in some parallel universe. Within minutes, a thing grew soft, then foggy, then vanished away.

  In other words, drop an S.O.B. on New York City and very soon you would have no New York City at all, only an empty space with millions of people wandering around stark naked. Yes, we would be naked to our enemies, forced to accept occupation and emergency aid.

  Those of us, that is, who didn’t get killed when things grew foggy. The Soviets had said that we would have about four minutes to get clear, but how could that help the crew and passengers on an airliner? They would rain down from the stratosphere. Or the office staff on the fiftieth floor of a skyscraper? They would find themselves with no floors beneath their bare feet. Or sailors, pitched into the ocean as their ship dissolved? Or the driver of a speeding train?

  These could amount to millions of people.

  And there the cruelty was only just beginning. How many more would die in the following weeks, of cold or hunger—as food rotted away—or from lack of medical attention, or a hundred other things?

  And they had the gall to call it a ‘humane’ bomb! When it would destroy all the civilisation we knew. All the paintings in the great collections, all the highways and gas stations, all the space launch vehicles. Every laboratory, every hospital, every surfboard and oil refinery and shopping mall, every can of Budweiser and every TV set. The Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate, Disneyland, the lot.

  Who started the War? The Soviets, without a doubt. They must have thought they could sneak up on us.

  In less than an hour, the USA and the USSR exchanged their entire arsenals of Radiation Bombs and S.O.Bs.

  And the Soviets were all dead.

  But we were left naked, without a single possession, except what we could make with our hands subsequently from the countryside.

  And nobody came to help us. God, how they must have hated us, for years! The rest of the world shunned us. They treated us as a nation of murderers, when so many of us were dying too. No foreign ships arrived on our bare shores. No airplanes landed on our fields. The Mexicans spurned us to the south, I hear. The Canadians fenced off their border and built a wide electrified corridor running all the way up through British Columbia into Alaska, like a double Berlin Wall. They told us to get lost.

  But God has got to have been on our side. Something, some divine force, clearly put it into all of our heads, just what we had to do, and how.

  You take a nation without a penny piece to its name. You take that, and you take a vast country that’s been completely cleaned out of people, full of empty cities and factories, airports and harbours.

  You put the two things together—and what do you get?

  You get a whole population marching in the only direction possible—to recover the goods they need to carry on.

  You get a shivering, starving nation, dressed in dog-skins and such, hauling logs north to build rafts and dug-outs to cross the Bering Strait and bring back some real ships from the other side—while the first pioneers press on ever further south, by boat or light plane or four-wheel drive, to get to somewhere half way decent, and firm up and supply the route for all those who would follow.

  You get the greatest human migration ever.

  And like with animal migrations, there’s an instinctive, almost guided aspect to it—as if our destination has been broadcasting to us. As well as broadcasting to everyone else, to leave it be! So, like superstitious peasants, it seems the Chinese have kept out of the USSR. Vladivostok is even closer to China than Khabarovsk is, but for sure we would find Vladivostok empty too. I admit that I couldn’t be one hundred per cent positive of this till we arrived in Khabarovsk. But now—as I said earlier in the hotel—I felt as sure as if God had whispered in my heart. This land was reserved for us, the victors, from last year on, from one shining ocean, the Pacific, to the shining Baltic Sea.

  Later, since it was a golden evening and we’d all done as much as we reasonably could, I decreed four hours R & R for the gang.

  Billy and Hank and I removed a bottle of Stolnichaya vodka from the hotel kitchen and wandered out to hit the town. Mary declared she was exhausted and could do with an early night; but I think she just said so to give us boys a chance to get roaring drunk.

  So off we capered, up Lenin Avenue to Lenin Square, admiring the silliest things: toy pedal cars on a lane around the weedy flower beds, abandoned ice cream carts, rows of bright red fruit-drink machines with the syrupy goo all dried up in them, and of course a statue of that man with his worker’s cloth cap, leaning forward into the future and looking aggressive … Hank climbed up the statue and sat piggy-back on his metal shoulders, urging him on.

  We took in another public park, behind the Dynamo Football Stadium, but the mosquitoes drove us out of there, so we went window-shopping instead—which may seem a little weird for three grown men, especially as the goods in the shop windows were few and poor stuff
. But my God, actual shop windows—with things in them!

  One of the shops was a grocer’s. A gastronom. We were getting pretty good at picking out names of streets and buildings in the crazy Russian script.

  “I’ve never tasted caviare,” said Billy. He hiccuped.

  “So let’s find some cans of caviare,” said I.

  In we went. A mummy, which we took to be a shop girl’s, lay pointing a bare finger bone up at approximately the right shelf. Other mummies, in suits and raggy coats and uniforms, lay piled up against the liquor counter, and behind it, so we avoided that area. Hank scooped up half a dozen little cans, which was all there were.

  “Thank you, Miss.” Billy giggled nervously, so I handed him the vodka bottle to kill it.

  We took the cans off to a restaurant, where there weren’t many corpses, and switched on the lighting—which worked, as the phone had worked, though the result was disconcertingly bright. Russians must have liked to chat to each other with searchlights shining in their faces. We sat tipsily contemplating the cans and a hand-scrawled menu, written in pencil.

  “Service sure is slow,” joked Hank. Producing a hook of a can opener from his Soviet uniform, he tossed this on the tablecloth for us. “I’m going to find something to wash these down.” So he headed for the kitchen.

  Billy picked up the menu, while I was working on the cans. His eyes blinked like an owl’s.

  “Borsch,” he pronounced in a puzzled voice, as though that menu scribbled by a drunken spider was telling him what it said. “Salat eez Krab … We’d better get good at this, eh, Greg? If we’re going to be living in Russia for the rest of our lives.”

  “You know, old buddy, you’re right.” I nodded. “We aren’t going to be able to alter all the signs and notices—”

  “And diagrams and lists and instructions—”

  “And et cetera. We aren’t going to be able to change them all over into English very quickly. If ever.”

  Hank returned, triumphantly cradling another bottle with a red skyscraper on the label. Very like a picture of some Nineteen-thirties building in New York … except that the skyscraper was probably some State office block in Moscow, and Moscow still existed.

  We caroused a while, till we heard horns hooting along the street. So we piled outside. A victory parade was heading our way. I spotted Dave Weinstock at the wheel of the leading vehicle, thumping on the horn, and glanced at my watch. Obviously Dave was heading back towards the Far East Hotel as per instructions, and he had had the bright idea of rounding up a few extra vehicles, as well as sounding a bugle recall on the horns. There were buses and trucks and a couple of private automobiles too, which mustn’t have cracked their radiators during the previous winter. Or maybe they had, but since they were only being driven a little way round town, this wouldn’t hurt them. There was quite a bit of fixing up to be done, if we were going to own Volgas and Zhigulis, the way we had owned Chevys and Mustangs until last summer. And all the horns were blowing.

  The parade was as noisy as a Fourth of July celebration.

  Hank grinned.

  “Loud enough to waken the dead, eh?”

  This made me frown. I was feeling just a little maudlin, now, on account of the drink—in what I felt sure was a very Russian way. But I perked up as soon as we joined the parade, scrambling up on the back of a truck.

  I took the bottle from Hank, and waved it grandly.

  “Here’s a toast, you guys! To prosperity, again!”

  “To railroads and liquor!” shouted Billy. “To TV sets and cigarettes. To chairs and sausages. To … to … to cornucopia—to the horn of plenty!”

  I didn’t know that my friend Billy knew words like cornucopia. It sounded like a Russian word, the way he said it.

  “To civilisation!”

  I caught hold of Billy by the lapels, and gripped him tight. The streetlights had come on automatically a while back, and Billy’s big hairy face gleamed with sweat.

  “We beat the Commies, Billy. The Commies took away all our property—but we took away their lives. We beat ’em!”

  Then we laughed and wept and hugged each other. I think Major Billy Donaldson even kissed me on both cheeks; but charitably I attributed this to the drink.

  Next morning, we all assembled outside the hotel. Our numbers had been swollen overnight by the arrival of two hundred souls on the second Ilyushin. (The Ilyushin we’d come in, and a Tupolev, had already flown back north to Magadan.) The pilot of the second Ilyushin, a Captain Tom Quinn, had come into town to see the place, and get some sleep. This rather annoyed me, since he should have stayed at the airport; but his sheer boyish exuberance won me over.

  “It’s like landing on Mars, this! Yessir, on the red planet itself! You know,” he confided, “I was a bit nervous, piloting that Commie crate. But it was just as if that ole plane flew herself. Cooool.” He was wearing some dead Soviet pilot’s uniform, with some Order of Soviet Aviation pinned to its breast.

  “That’s very nice, Captain. Now please get the hell back to the airport, would you?”

  Today was railroad day. The Trans-Siberian called us. So we all piled into trucks and buses and headed off up Karl Marx Street towards Khabarovsk train station.

  As we rode, somebody started up singing When the Saints Come Marching In, and everyone joined in; though as our convoy was crossing Lenin Square somehow the song changed itself into Maryland My Maryland. Then everyone seemed to forget the words, and just carried on humming the tune loudly in harmony.

  Oh Mary, my Mary … ! Mary had done wonders with our breakfasts. And the hot coffee … I kissed my fingers.

  “… people’s flag is deepest red!” I heard a single voice sing out amidst the humming. I glared at the man, and he shut up.

  There were a lot of red flags hanging about. I presumed all that kind of paraphernalia would have to stay around for a while. And this set me to thinking about melting down all the statues of that man into something useful, such as coins, and about how good it would be to have change jingling in my pocket again, even though everything was free for the time being.

  “Hey Hank,” I called. “What do you suppose we’re going to do about money?”

  Hank pulled out a bundle of rouble notes from his pocket. He laughed.

  “Use these, eh?”

  “But what about dollars and cents, for Chrissake?”

  “Have you got any cents to make dies from? Have you got any Treasury plates to print dollars off?”

  “There’ll still be billions of dollars abroad.”

  “Electronic money, a lot of it. Anyway, it’ll be worth nothing now. The foreigners aren’t speaking to us, remember? And as for here”—he chuckled—“somebody seems to have hung up a real Iron Curtain, or else the whole place would be swarming.”

  “Maybe there’s been a United Nations resolution—to quarantine the USSR?” said Billy.

  “Just like everyone quarantined America!” snapped Hank, bitterly.

  “Maybe they’re all scared of some smart computer firing off more Socialist Bombs?”

  Hank leaned close to Billy.

  “Nobody can breathe the air here, but us. I know it.” He flourished the Russian money. “So I figure we’ll use this stuff, as soon as we get organised. We can call the roubles, bucks; and the kopecks, cents.”

  “Be easier to call them roubles and kopecks,” observed Billy. “That’s what’s printed on them. Don’t want to confuse the growing kids.”

  Billy was in sheer ecstasy as soon as we climbed aboard one of the green passenger cars of the Vostok, sitting on the southbound track in the cavernous train station. We’d been worried in case a lot of* trains were in transit at the time when the radiation bombs went off, and had run on mindlessly through the steppes and forests. But here was the Vostok, drawn up waiting for us.

  And opulent wasn’t the word. This was a veritable mobile palace of the tracks. Solid brass fittings everywhere. Mahogany woodwork. Thick Turkish carpets on the floors. Golden
curtains hanging at the windows. Red plush seats—even the swing-down ones along the corridors.

  “Holy Moses! It’s like some Cunard liner from the Nineteen-twenties! Group White’s going to ride into Vladivostok in style.”

  Billy fingered everything rapturously. Well, so did I too. Here was everything that we’d been dreaming about, in a crazed way, for months. All here, just waiting for us to use.

  “Of course,” I had to remind Billy gently, “the whole of the USSR isn’t all like this …”

  “Well hell, but even so! I mean, things, things, lovely things! It’s Las Vegas and Hollywood and—everything they took away from us!”

  Finally Billy tore himself away from the passenger accommodation, and we were able to go up front to get a report on the Czech diesel loco.

  Group White, with Billy in command, trundled out of Khabarovsk Station a couple of hours later, the CHS4 that pulled the cars hooting deliriously. But then we had manned the switch tower with—well, I was going to say with a skeleton crew. But it already had that, of course … Once out of Khabarovsk, Group White would have to stop and switch any points themselves.

  Getting the station running again was all suddenly so easy. Murphy’s Law seemed to have flown right out of the window. Machinery practically told us what we were supposed to do with it.

  That was all four heroic months ago.

  It’s been an unexpectedly long summer and unseasonably benign fall in the north of the world; and what we’ve accomplished matches the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway itself—or the construction of the great hydro-electric scheme at Bratsk.

  We’ve ferried fifty million-plus survivors down to Vladivostok in the superb Soviet navy ships. (And late stragglers were still turning up at Nome, Alaska, till quite recently. No doubt there’ll be another, smaller flood into Alaska next season.)