Orbit 15 - [Anthology] Read online

  “All right,” Vlasic said. “The corn crop has failed, as predicted. Monoculture! Bah! They’ll save sixty percent of the wheat, no more. This winter, hah, just wait until winter! Now where is the cave?”

  They took him to the cave entrance a hundred yards from the hospital. Inside the cave they used lanterns. The cave was over a mile long in the main section and there were several branches. Deep in one of them flowed a river that was black and silent. Spring water, good water. Vlasic nodded again and again. When they finished the cave tour he was still nodding. “It’s good,” he said. “It’ll work. The laboratories go in there, underground passage from the hospital, safe from contamination. Good.”

  They worked sixteen hours a day that summer and into the fall. In October the first wave of flu swept the country, worse than the outbreak of 1917 and 1918. In November a new illness swept the country, and here and there it was whispered that it was plague, but the government Bureau of Information said it was flu. Grandfather Sumner died in November. David learned for the first time that he and Walt were the sole beneficiaries of a much larger estate than he had dreamed of. And the estate was in cash. Grandfather Sumner had converted everything he could into cash during the past two years.

  In December the family began to arrive, leaving the towns and villages and cities scattered throughout the valley to take up residence in the hospital and staff buildings. Rationing, black markets, inflation, and looting had turned the cities into battlegrounds. And the government had frozen the assets of every business—nothing could be bought or sold without approval. The family brought their stocks with them. Jeremy Streit brought his hardware merchandise in four truckloads. Eddie Beauchamp brought his dental equipment. David’s father brought all that he could from his department store. With the failure of radio and television communication, there was no way for the government to cope with the rising panic. Martial law was declared on December 28, six months too late.

  There was no child left under eight years of age when the spring rains came, and the original three hundred nineteen people who had come to the upper valley had dwindled to two hundred one. In the cities the toll had been much higher.

  ~ * ~

  David studied the fetal pig he was about to dissect. It was wrinkled and desiccated, its bones too soft, its lymph glands lumpy, hard. Why? Why did the fourth generation decline? Harry Vlasic came to watch briefly, then walked away, his head bowed in thought. Not even he could come up with any answers, David thought, almost with satisfaction.

  That night David, Walt, and Vlasic met and went over it all again. They had enough livestock to feed the two hundred people for a long time, through cloning and breeding of the fertile animals. They could clone up to four hundred animals at a time. Chickens, swine, cattle. If the livestock all became sterile, as seemed likely, then the food supply was limited.

  Watching the two older men, David knew they were purposely skirting the other question. If the people also became sterile, how long would they need a continuing supply of food? He said, “We should isolate some of the sterile mice, clone them, and test for the reemergence of fertility with each new generation of clones.”

  Vlasic frowned and shook his head. “If we had a dozen undergraduate students, perhaps,” he said.

  “We have to know,” David said, feeling hot suddenly. “You’re both acting like this is just a five-year emergency plan to tide us over a few bad years. What if it isn’t that at all? Whatever is causing the sterility is affecting all the animals. We have to know.”

  Walt glanced at David and said, “We don’t have the time or the facilities to do any research like that.”

  “That’s a lie,” David said. “We can generate all the electricity we can use, more than enough power. We have equipment we haven’t even unloaded yet . . .”

  “Because there’s no one who can use it yet,” Walt said patiently.

  “I can. I’ll do it in my free time.”

  “What free time?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  In June, David had his preliminary answers. “The A-four strain,” he said, “has twenty-five percent fertility.” Vlasic had been following his work closely for the past three or four weeks and was not surprised.

  Walt stared at him in disbelief. “Are you sure?” he whispered after a moment.

  “The fourth generation of cloned sterile mice showed the same degeneracy that all clones show by then,” David said. “But they also had a twenty-five percent fertility factor. The offspring have shorter lives, but more fertile individuals. This trend continues to the sixth generation, where fertility is up to ninety-four percent, and life expectancy starts to climb up again, and then it’s on its way to normalcy.” He had it all on the charts that Walt now studied. A, A1, A2, A3, A4, and then the offspring by sexual reproduction, a, a1, a2 . . . There were no clone strains after A4; none had survived to maturity.

  David leaned back and closed his eyes. He thought about bed and a blanket up around his neck and black, black sleep. “Higher organisms must reproduce sexually or die out, and the ability to do so is there. Something remembers and heals itself,” he said dreamily.

  “You’ll be a great man when you publish,” Vlasic said softly, his hand on David’s shoulder. He then moved to sit next to Walt, to point out some of the details that Walt might miss. “A marvelous piece of work,” he said, his eyes glowing as he looked over the pages. “Marvelous.” Then he glanced back at David. “Of course, you are aware of the other implications of your work.”

  David opened his eyes and met Vlasic’s gaze. He nodded. Walt, puzzled, looked from one to the other of them. David got up and stretched. “I have to sleep,” he said.

  But it was a long time before he slept. He had a single room at the hospital, more fortunate than most. The hospital had more than two hundred beds, but few single rooms. The implications, he mused. He had been aware of them from the start, although he had not admitted it even to himself then, and was not ready to discuss it now. Three of the women were pregnant finally, after a year and a half. Margaret was near term, the baby well and kicking at the moment. Five more weeks, he thought. Five more weeks, and perhaps he never would have to discuss the implications of his work.

  But Margaret didn’t wait five weeks. In two weeks she gave birth to a stillborn child. Zelda had a miscarriage the following week, and in the next week May lost her child. That spring the rains kept them from planting anything more than a truck garden.

  Walt began testing the men for fertility. He reported to David and Vlasic that no man in the valley was fertile.

  “So,” Vlasic said softly, “we now see the significance of David’s work.”

  ~ * ~

  Winter came early in sheets of icy rain that went on day after day after day. The work in the laboratories increased, and David found himself blessing his grandfather for his purchase of Sel-nick’s equipment, which had come with detailed instructions for making artificial placentas as well as nearly completed work on computer programs for chemical amniotic fluids. When David had gone to talk to Selnick about the equipment, Selnick had insisted—madly, David had thought at the time—that he take everything or nothing. “You’ll see,” he had said wildly. “You’ll see.” The following week he hanged himself, and the equipment was on its way to the Virginia valley.

  They worked and slept in the lab, leaving only for meals. The winter rains gave way to spring rains, and a new softness was in the air.

  David was hardly aware of the spring until one day his mother found him in the cafeteria. He hadn’t seen her for weeks, and would have brushed past her with a quick hello if she hadn’t stopped him. She looked strange, childlike; he turned from her to stare out the window, waiting for her to release his arm.

  “Celia’s coming home,” she told him. “She’s well, she says.”

  David felt frozen; he continued to stare out the window, seeing nothing. “Where is she now?” He listened to the rustle of cheap paper and when it seemed that his mother
was not going to answer him, he wheeled about. “Where is she?”

  “Miami,” she said finally, after scanning the two pages. “It’s postmarked Miami, I think. It’s over two weeks old. Dated May twenty-eighth. She never got any of our mail.”

  David didn’t read the letter until his mother had left the cafeteria. I was in Colombia for a while, eight months, I think. And I got a touch of the bug that nobody wants to name. The writing was spindly and uncertain. He looked for Walt.

  “I have to go get her. She can’t walk in on that gang at the Wiston place.”

  “You know you can’t leave now.”

  “It isn’t a question of can or can’t. I have to.”

  Walt studied him for a moment, then shrugged. “How will you get there and back? No gas. You know we don’t dare use it for anything but the harvest.”

  “I know,” David said impatiently. “I’ll take Mike and the cart. I can stay on the back roads with Mike.” He knew that Walt was calculating, as he had done, the time involved, and he felt his face tightening, his hands clenching. Walt simply nodded. “I’ll leave as soon as it’s light in the morning.” Again Walt nodded. “Thanks,” David said suddenly. He meant: for not arguing with him, for not pointing out what both already knew; that there was no way of knowing how long he would have to wait for Celia, that she might never make it to the farm.

  Three miles from the Wiston farm David unhitched the cart and hid it in thick underbrush. He swept the tracks where he had left the dirt road, then led Mike into the woods. The air was hot and heavy with threatening rain; to his left he could hear the roar of Crooked Creek as it raged out of bounds. The ground was spongy and he walked carefully, not wanting to sink to his knees in unsuspected mud here in the lowlands. The Wiston farm always had been flood-prone; it enriched the soil, Grandfather Wiston had claimed, not willing to damn nature for its periodic rampages. “God didn’t mean for this piece of ground to have to bear year after year after year,” he said. “Comes a time when the earth needs a rest, same as you and me. We’ll let it be this year, give it some clover when the ground dries out.” David started to climb, still leading Mike, who whinnied softly at him now and again.

  “Just to the knob, boy,” David said quietly. “Then you can rest and eat meadow grass until she gets here.” The horse whinnied.

  Grandfather Wiston had taken him to the knob once, when David was twelve. He remembered the day, hot and still, like this day, he thought, and Grandfather Wiston had been straight and strong. At the knob his grandfather had paused and touched the massive bole of a white oak tree. “This tree saw the Indians in that valley, David, and the first settlers, and my great-grandfather when he came along. It’s our friend, David. It knows all the family secrets.”

  “Is it still your property up here, Grandfather?”

  “Up to and including this tree, son. Other side’s national forest land, but this tree, it’s on our land. Yours too, David. One day you’ll come up here and put your hand on this tree and you’ll know it’s your friend, just like it’s been my friend all my life. God help us all if anyone ever lays an ax to it.”

  They had gone on that day, down the other side of the knob, then up again, farther and steeper this time until once more his grandfather had stopped and, his hand on David’s shoulder, paused for a few moments. “This is how this land looked a million years ago, David.” Time had shifted suddenly for the boy; a million years ago, or a hundred million, was all the same distant past, and he had imagined the tread of giant reptiles. He had imagined that he smelled the fetid breath of a tyrannosaur. It was cool and misty beneath the tall trees, and under them the saplings grew, their branches spread horizontally as if to catch any stray hit of sunlight that penetrated the high canopy, and where the sun did find a path through, it was golden and soft, the sun of another time. In even deeper shadows grew bushes and shrubs, and at the foot of it all were the mosses and lichens, liverworts and ferns. The arching, heaving roots of the trees were clothed in velvet emerald plants.

  David stumbled and caught himself against the giant oak tree that was, somehow, his friend. He pressed his cheek against the rough bark, and stayed there for a few minutes. Then he pushed himself away and looked up through the luxuriant branches; he could see no sky beyond them. When it rained, the tree would protect him from the full force of the storm, but he needed shelter from the fine drops that eventually would make their way through the leaves to fall quietly on the absorbent ground.

  He examined the farm through his binoculars. Behind the house there was a garden being tended by five people, impossible to tell immediately if they were male or female. Long-haired, jeans, barefoot, thin. It didn’t matter. He noted that the garden was not producing yet, that the plants were sparse and frail. He studied the east field, aware that it was changed, not certain how. Then he realized that it was planted to corn. Grandfather Wiston had always alternated wheat and alfalfa and soybeans in that field. The lower fields were flooded, and the north field was grown up in grasses and weeds. He studied the people he could see and swung the glasses slowly over the buildings. He spotted seventeen of them altogether. No child younger than eight or nine. No sign of Celia, nor of any recent use of the road; it was also overgrown with weeds. No doubt the people down there were just as happy to let the road hide under weeds.

  He built a leanto against the oak where he could lie down and observe the farm. He used fir branches to roof his shelter, and when the storm came half an hour later, he stayed dry. Rivulets ran among the garden rows below, and the farmyard turned silver and sparkly from this distance, although he knew that closer at hand it would simply be muddy water, inches deep. The ground was too saturated in the valley to absorb any more water. It would have to run off into Crooked Creek, which was inching higher and higher toward the north field and the vulnerable corn there.

  By the third day the water had started to invade the cornfield, and he pitied the people who stood and watched helplessly. The garden was still being tended, but it would be a meager harvest. By now he had counted twenty-two people; he thought that was all of them. During the storm that lashed the valley that afternoon, he heard Mike whinny. He crawled from the leanto and stood up. Mike, down the slope of the knob, wouldn’t mind the rain much, and he was protected from the wind. Still he whinnied again, and then again. Cautiously, holding his shotgun in one hand, shielding his eyes with the other, David edged around the tree. A figure stumbled up the knob haltingly, stopping with bowed head often, not looking up, probably blinded by the rain. Suddenly David threw the shotgun under the leanto and ran to meet her. “Celia!” he cried. “Celia!”

  She stopped and raised her head, and the rain ran over her cheeks, plastered her hair to her forehead. She dropped the shoulder bag that had weighed her down and ran toward him, and only when he caught her and held her tight and hard did he realize that he was weeping, as she was.

  Under the leanto he pulled her wet clothes off and rubbed her dry, then wrapped her in one of his shirts. Her lips were blue, her skin seemed almost translucent; it was an unearthly white.

  “I knew you’d be here,” she said. Her eyes were very large, deep blue, bluer than he remembered, or bluer in contrast to her pale skin. Always before she had been sunburned.

  “I knew you’d come here,” he said. “When did you eat?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t believe it was this bad here. I thought it was propaganda. Everyone thinks it’s propaganda.”

  He lighted the Sterno. She sat wrapped in his plaid shirt and watched him as he opened a can of stew.

  “Who are those people down there?”

  “Squatters. Grandmother and Grandfather Wiston died last year. That gang showed up. They gave Aunt Hilda and Uncle Eddie a choice, join them or get out. They didn’t give Wanda any chance at all. They kept her.”

  She stared down the valley and nodded slowly. “I didn’t know it was this bad. I didn’t believe it.” Without looking back at him she asked then, “And Mother,
Father?”

  “They’re dead, Celia. Flu, both of them. Last winter.”

  “I didn’t get any letters,” she said. “Almost two years. They made us leave Brazil, you know. But there wasn’t any transportation home. We went to Colombia. They promised to let us go home in three months. And then they came one night and said we had to get out immediately. There were riots, you know.”

  He nodded, although she was still staring down at the valley and couldn’t see. He wanted to tell her to weep for her parents, to cry out, so that he could take her in his arms and try to comfort her. But she continued to sit motionless and speak in a dead voice.

  “They were coming for us, for the Americans. They blame us for letting them starve. They really believe that everything is still all right here. I did too. No one believed any of the reports. And the mobs were coming for us. We left on a small boat, a skiff. Nineteen of us. They shot at us when we got too near Cuba.”