Orbit 15 - [Anthology] Read online

  David nodded.

  “Why did you leave like that? They all think we’re going to fight again.”

  “We might,” he said.

  She smiled. “I don’t think so.”

  “We should start down. It’ll be dark in a few minutes.” But he didn’t move.

  “David, try to make Mother see, will you? You understand that I have to go, that I have to do something, don’t you? She thinks you’re so clever. She’d listen to you.”

  He laughed. “They think I’m clever like a puppy dog.”

  Celia shook her head. “You’re the one they’d listen to. They treat me like a child and always will.”

  David shook his head, smiling. “Why are you going, Celia? What are you trying to prove?”

  “Damn it, David! If you don’t understand, who will?” She took a deep breath. “People are starving in South America. Not just a few Indians, but millions of people. And practically no one has done any real research in tropical farming methods. It’s all lateritic soil, and no one down there understands it. Well, we trained in tropical farming and we’re going to start classes down there, in the field. It’s what I trained for. This project will get me a doctorate.”

  The Wistons were farmers, had always been farmers. “Custodians of the soil,” Grandfather Wiston had said once, “not its owners, just custodians.” Celia reached down and moved aside some matted leaves and muck on the ground, and straightened with her hand full of black dirt. “The famines are spreading. They need so much. And I have so much to give! Can’t you understand that?” she cried. She closed her hand hard, compacting the soil into a ball that crumbled again when she opened her fist. She let the soil fall from her hand and carefully pushed the protective covering of leaves back over the bared spot.

  “You followed me to tell me good-bye, didn’t you?” David said suddenly, and his voice was harsh. “It’s really good-bye this time, isn’t it?” He watched her and slowly she nodded. “There’s someone in your group?”

  “I’m not sure, David. Maybe.” She bowed her head and started to pull her glove on again. “I thought I was sure. But when I saw you in the hall, saw the look on your face when I came in ... I realized that I just don’t know.”

  “Celia, you listen to me! There aren’t any hereditary defects that would surface! Damn it, you know that! If there were, we simply wouldn’t have children, but there’s no reason. You know that, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  “Come with me, Celia. We don’t have to get married right away, let them get used to the idea first. They will. They always do. We have a resilient family, you and me. Celia, I love you.”

  She turned her head and he saw that she was weeping; she wiped her cheeks with her glove, then with her bare hand, leaving dirt streaks. David pulled her to him, held her and kissed her tears, her cheeks, her lips.

  She finally drew away and started back down the slope, with David following. “I can’t decide anything right now. It isn’t fair. I should have stayed at the house. I shouldn’t have followed you up here. David, I’m committed to going in two days. I can’t just say I’ve changed my mind. It’s important to me. To the people down there. I can’t just decide not to go.”

  He caught her arm and held her, kept her from moving ahead again. “Just tell me you love me. Say it, just once.”

  “I love you,” she said very slowly.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Three years. I signed a contract.”

  He stared at her. “Change it! Make it one year. I’ll be out of grad school then. You can teach here. Let their bright young students come to you.”

  “We have to get back, or they’ll send a search party for us,” she said. “I’ll try to change it,” she whispered then. “If I can.” Two days later she left.

  David spent New Year’s Eve at the Sumner farm with his parents and a horde of aunts and uncles and cousins. On New Year’s Day, Grandfather Sumner made an announcement. “We’re building a hospital up at Bear Creek, this side of the mill.”

  David blinked. That was a mile from the farm, miles from anything else. “A hospital?” He looked at his uncle Walt, who nodded.

  Clarence was studying his eggnog with a sour expression, and David’s father, the third brother, was watching the smoke curl from his pipe.

  “Why up here?” David asked finally.

  “It’s going to be a research hospital,” Walt said. “Genetic diseases, hereditary defects, that sort of thing. Two hundred beds.”

  David shook his head in disbelief. “You have any idea how much something like that would cost? Who’s financing it?”

  His grandfather laughed nastily. “Senator Burke has graciously arranged to get federal funds,” he said. His voice became more caustic. “And I cajoled a few members of the family to put a little in the kitty.” David glanced at Clarence, who looked pained. “I’m giving the land,” Grandfather Sumner went on. “So here and there we got support.”

  “But why would Burke go for it? You’ve never voted for him in a single campaign in his life.”

  “Told him we’d dig out a lot of stuff we’ve been sitting on, support his opposition. If he was a baboon, we’d support him, and there’s a lot of family these days, David. A heap of family.”

  “Well, hats off,” David said, still not fully believing it. “You giving up your practice to go into research?” he asked Walt. His uncle nodded. David drained his cup of eggnog.

  “David,” Walt said, “we want to hire you.”

  He looked up quickly. “Why? I’m not into medical research.”

  “I know what your specialty is,” Walt said quietly. “We want you for a consultant, and later on to head a department of research.”

  “But I haven’t even finished my thesis yet,” David said, and he felt as if he had stumbled into a pot party.

  “You’ll do another year of donkey work for Selnick and eventually you’ll write the thesis, a bit here, a dab there. You could write it in a month, couldn’t you, if you had time?” David nodded reluctantly. “I know,” Walt said, smiling faintly. “You think you’re being asked to give up a lifetime career for a pipe dream.”

  Grandfather Sumner let out his breath explosively. He was a large man with a massive chest and great bulging biceps. His hands were big enough to grip a basketball in each. But it was his head that you remembered. It was the head of a giant, and although he had farmed for many years, and later overseen the others who did it for him, he had found time to read more extensively than anyone else David knew. And he remembered what he read. His library was better than most public libraries. Now he leaned forward and said, “You listen to me, David. You listen hard. I’m telling you what the goddam government doesn’t dare admit yet. We’re on the first downslope of a slide that is going to plummet the world to a depth that they never dreamed of. I know the signs, David. Pollution’s catching up to us faster than anyone knows. There’s more radiation in the atmosphere than there’s been since Hiroshima—French tests, Chinese tests. Leaks. God knows where all it’s coming from. We reached zero population growth a couple of years ago, but, David, we were trying, and other nations are getting there too, and they aren’t trying. There’s famine in a quarter of the world right now. The famines are here, and they’re getting worse. There are more diseases than there’s ever been since the good Lord sent the plagues to Egypt. And they’re plagues that we don’t know anything about. There’s more drought and more flooding than there’s ever been. England’s changing into a desert, the bogs and moors are drying up. Entire species of fish are gone, just damn gone, and in only a year or two. The anchovies are gone. The codfish industry is gone. The cods they are catching are diseased, unfit to use. There’s no fishing off the west coast of the Americas, North or South. Every damn protein crop on earth has some sort of blight that gets worse and worse. We’re restricting our exports of food now, and next year we’ll stop them for good. We’re having shortages no one ever dreamed o
f. Tin, copper, aluminum, paper. Chlorine, by God! And what do you think will happen in the world when we suddenly can’t even purify our drinking water?”

  His face was darkening as he spoke, and he was getting angrier and angrier, directing his unanswerable questions to David, who stared at him with nothing at all to say.

  “And they don’t know what to do about any of it,” his grandfather went on. “No more than the dinosaurs knew how to stop their own extinction. We’ve changed the photochemical reactions of our own atmosphere, and we can’t adapt to the new radiations fast enough to survive! There’ve been hints here and there that this is a major concern, but who listens? The damn fools will lay each and every catastrophe at the foot of a local condition and turn their backs on the fact that this is global, until it’s too late to do anything.”

  “But, if it’s what you think, what could they do?” David asked, looking to Dr. Walt for support and finding none.

  “Turn off the factories, ground the airplanes, stop the mining, junk the cars. But they won’t, and even if they did, it would still be a catastrophe. It’s going to break wide open. Within the next couple of years, David, it’s going to break. There’s going to be the biggest bust since man began scratching marks on rocks, that’s what! And we’re getting ready for it! I’m getting ready for it! We’ve got the land and we’ve got the men to farm it, and we’ll get our hospital and we’ll do research on ways to keep our animals and our people alive, and when the world goes into a tail-spin we’ll be alive and when it starves we’ll be eating.”

  Suddenly he stopped and studied David with his eyes narrowed. “I said you’d leave here convinced that we’ve all gone mad. But you’ll be back, David, my boy. You’ll be back before the dogwoods bloom, because you’ll see the signs.”

  David returned to school and his thesis and the donkey work Selnick gave him to do. Celia didn’t write, and he had no address for her. In response to his questions his mother admitted that no one had heard from her. In February, in retaliation for the food embargo, Japan imposed trade restrictions that made further United States trade with her impossible. Japan and China signed a mutual aid treaty. In March, Japan seized the Philippines and their fields of rice, and China resumed its long-dormant trusteeship over the Indochina peninsula, with the rice paddies of Cambodia and Vietnam.

  Cholera struck in Rome, Los Angeles, Galveston, and Savannah. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and other Arab-bloc nations issued an ultimatum: the United States must guarantee a yearly ration of wheat to the Arab states and discontinue all aid to Israel, or there would be no oil for the United States or Europe. They refused to believe the United States could not meet their demands. Worldwide travel restrictions were imposed immediately, and the United States government, by presidential decree, formed a new department with Cabinet status: the Bureau of Information.

  The redbuds were hazy blurs of pink against the clear, May-softened sky when David returned home. He stopped by his house only long enough to change his clothes and get rid of his boxes of college mementos before he drove out to the Sumner farm, where Walt was staying while he oversaw the construction of his hospital.

  Walt had an office downstairs. It was a clutter of books, notebooks, blueprints, correspondence. He greeted David as if he hadn’t been away at all. “Look,” he said, “this research of Semple and Ferrer, what do you know about it? The first generation of cloned mice showed no deviation, no variation in viability or potency, nor did the second or third, but with the fourth the viability decreased sharply. And there was a steady, and irreversible, slide to extinction. Why?”

  David sat down hard and stared at Walt. “How did you get that?”

  “Vlasic,” Walt said. “We went to med school together. We’ve corresponded all these years. I asked him.”

  “You know his work?”

  “Yes. His rhesus monkeys show the same decline during the fourth generation, and on to extinction.”

  “It isn’t just like that,” David said. “He had to discontinue his work last year—no funds. So we don’t know the life expectancies of the later strains. But the decline starts in the third clone generation, a decline of potency. He was breeding each clone generation sexually, testing the offspring for normalcy. The third clone generation had only twenty-five percent potency. The sexually reproduced offspring started with that same percentage, and, in fact, potency dropped until the fifth generation of sexually reproduced offspring, and then it started to climb back up and presumably would have reached normalcy again.”

  Walt was watching him closely, nodding now and then. David went on. “That was the clone-three strain. With the clone-four strain there was a drastic change. Some abnormalities were present, and life expectancy was down seventeen percent. The abnormals were all sterile. Potency was generally down to forty-eight percent. It was downhill all the way with each sexually reproduced generation. By the fifth generation no offspring survived longer than an hour or two. So much for clone-four strain. Cloning the fours was worse. Clone-five strain had gross abnormalities, and they were all sterile. Life expectancy figures were not completed. There was no clone-six strain. None survived.”

  “A dead end,” Walt said. He indicated a stack of magazines and extracts. “I had hoped that they were out of date, that there were newer methods, or perhaps an error had been found in their figures. It’s the third generation that is the turning point, then?”

  David shrugged. “My information could be out of date. I know Vlasic stopped last year, but Semple and Ferrer are still at it, or were last month. They may have something I don’t know about. You’re thinking of livestock?”

  “Of course. You know the rumors? They’re just not breeding well, no figures available, but hell, we have our own livestock. They’re down by half.”

  “Can you get materials for the hospital?” David asked.

  “For now. We’re rushing it like there’s no tomorrow, naturally. And we’re not worrying about money right now. We’ll have things that we won’t know what to do with, but I thought it would be better to order everything I can think of than to find out next year that what we really need isn’t available.”

  David went to the window and looked out at the farm. The green was well established by now, spring would give way to summer without a pause and the corn would be shiny, silky green in the fields. Just like always. “Let me have a look at your lab equipment orders, and the stuff that’s been delivered already,” he said. “Then let’s see if we can wrangle me travel clearance, out to the coast. I’ll talk to Semple; I’ve met him a few times. If anyone’s doing anything, it’s that team.”

  “What is Selnick working on?”

  “Nothing. He lost his grant, his students were sent packing.” David grinned at his uncle suddenly. “Look, up on the hill, you can see a dogwood ready to burst open, some of the blooms are already showing.”

  David was bone-tired, every muscle seemed to ache at once, and his head was throbbing. For nine days he had been on the go, to the coast, to Harvard, to Washington, and now he wanted nothing more than to sleep, even if the world ground to a stop while he was unaware. He had taken a train from Washington to Richmond, and there, unable to rent a car, or buy gasoline if a car had been available, he had stolen a bicycle and pedaled the rest of the way. He had never realized his legs could ache so much.

  “You’re sure that bunch in Washington won’t be able to get a hearing?” Grandfather Sumner asked.

  “No one wants to hear the Jeremiahs,” David said. Selnick had been one of the group, and he had talked to David briefly. His committee was trying to force the government to admit the seriousness of the coming catastrophe and take strict measures to alleviate it. The government chose instead to paint glowing pictures of the coming upturn that would be apparent by fall. During the next six months, Selnick had warned, those with sense and money would buy everything they could to see them through, because after that period of grace there would be nothing to buy.

  “Selnick say
s we should offer to buy his equipment. The school will jump at the chance to unload it right now. Cheap.” David laughed. “Cheap. A quarter of a million, possibly.”

  “Make the offer,” Grandfather Sumner said.

  David stood up shakily and went off to bed.

  People still went to work. The factories were still producing, not as much, and none of the nonessentials, but they were converting to coal as fast as possible. David thought about the darkened cities, and the fleets of trucks rusting, and the corn and wheat rotting in the fields. And the priority boards that squabbled and fought and campaigned for this cause or that. It was a long time before his twitching muscles relaxed enough for him to lie quietly, and a longer time before he could relax his mind enough to sleep.

  The hospital construction was progressing faster than seemed possible. There were two shifts at work; again a case of damn-the-cost. Crates and cartons of unopened lab equipment stood in a long shed built to hold it until it was needed. David went to work in a makeshift laboratory trying to replicate Ferrer’s and Semple’s tests. And in early July, Harry Vlasic arrived at the farm. He was short, fat, near-sighted, and short-tempered. David regarded him with the same awe and respect that an undergraduate physics student would have felt toward Einstein.