Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  Orbit 3

  By Damon Knight

  Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  CONTENTS

  Richard Wilson MOTHER TO THE WORLD

  Richard McKenna BRAMBLE BUSH

  Joanna Russ THE BARBARIAN

  Gene Wolfe THE CHANGELING

  Doris Pitkin Buck WHY THEY MOBBED THE WHITE HOUSE

  Kate Wilhelm THE PLANNERS

  Philip Jose Farmer DON’T WASH THE CARATS

  James Sallis LETTER TO A YOUNG POET

  John Jakes HERE IS THY STING

  * * * *

  Science fiction writers sometimes seem to be engaged in a witty but very leisurely debate, in which decades may pass between one comment and the next. Thus Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’sThe Last Man (1826) was followed in turn by M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1929), Alfred Bester’s “Adam and No Eve” (1941), Fredric Brown’s “Knock” (1948), and my own “Not With a Bang” (1950), among others.

  Each of these writers probably felt he had said the last word; I know I did. But again and again, when a theme like this appears to be exhausted, along comes another writer who picks it up and turns it by some magic into a fresh, new thing.

  Richard Wilson’s “Mother to the World” is not just a new variation on the Last Man theme; he has given it one new twist, which I will not mention, since he reveals it himself in the first three hundred words, but it’s a rather unimportant technicality anyhow. What is important is not the variation but what Wilson has made of it—this deeply honest, memorable and moving story.

  * * * *

  Mother To The World

  by Richard Wilson

  His name was Martin Rolfe. She called him Mr. Ralph.

  She was Cecelia Beamer, called Siss.

  He was a vigorous, intelligent, lean and wiry forty-two, a shade under six feet tall. His hair, black, was thinning but still covered all of his head; and all his teeth were his own. His health was excellent. He’d never had a cavity or an operation and he fervently hoped he never would.

  She was a slender, strong young woman of twenty-eight, five feet four. Her eyes, nose and mouth were regular and well-spaced but the combination fell short of beauty. She wore her hair, which was dark blonde, not quite brown, straight back and long in two pigtails which she braided daily, after a ritualistic hundred brushings. Her figure was better than average for her age and therefore good, but she did nothing to emphasize it. Her disposition was cheerful when she was with someone; when alone her tendency was to work hard at the job at hand, giving it her serious attention. Whatever she was doing was the most important thing in the world to her just then and she had a compulsion to do it absolutely right. She was indefatigable but she liked, almost demanded, to be praised for what she did well.

  Her amusements were simple ones. She liked to talk to people but most people quickly became bored with what she had to say—she was inclined to be repetitive. Fortunately for her, she also liked to talk to animals, birds included.

  She was a retarded person with the mentality of an eight-year-old.

  Eight can be a delightful age. Rolfe remembered his son at eight—bright, inquiring, beginning to emerge from childhood but not so fast as to lose any of his innocent charm; a refreshing, uninhibited conversationalist with an original viewpoint on life. The boy had been a challenge to him and a constant delight. He held on to that memory, drawing sustenance from it, for her.

  * * * *

  Young Rolfe was dead now, along with his mother and three billion other people.

  Rolfe and Siss were the only ones left in all the world.

  * * * *

  It was M.R. that had done it, he told her. Massive Retaliation; from the Other Side.

  When American bombs rained down from long-range jets and rocket carriers, nobody’d known the Chinese had what they had. Nobody’d suspected it of that relatively backward country which the United States had believed it was softening up, in a brushfire war, for enforced diplomacy.

  Rolfe hadn’t been aware of any speculation that Peking’s scientists were concentrating their research not on weapons but on biochemistry. Germ warfare, sure. There’d been propaganda from both sides about that, but nothing had been hinted about a biological agent, as it must have been, that could break down human cells and release the water.

  “M.R.,” he told her. “Better than nerve gas or the neutron bomb.” Like those, it left the buildings and equipment intact. Unlike them, it didn’t leave any messy corpses—only the bones, which crumbled and blew away.

  Except the bone dust trapped inside the pathetic mounds of clothing that lay everywhere in the city.

  “Are they coming over now that they beat us?”

  “I’m sure they intended to. But there can’t be any of them left. They outsmarted themselves, I guess. The wind must have blown it right back at them. I don’t really know what happened, Siss. All I know is that everybody’s gone now, except you and me.”

  “But the animals—”

  Rolfe had found it best in trying to explain something to Siss to keep it simple, especially when he didn’t understand it himself. Just as he had learned long ago that if he didn’t know how to pronounce a word he should say it loud and confidently.

  So all he told Siss was that the bad people had got hold of a terrible weapon called M.R.—she’d heard of that— and used it on the good people and that nearly everybody had died. Not the animals, though, and damned if he knew why.

  “Animals don’t sin,” Siss told him.

  “That’s as good an explanation as any I can think of,” he said. She was silent for a while. Then she said: “Your name—initials—are M.R., aren’t they?”

  He’d never considered it before, but she was right. Martin Rolfe—Massive Retaliation. I hope she doesn’t blame everything on me, he thought. But then she spoke again. “M.R. That’s short for Mister. What I call you. Your name that I have for you. Mister Ralph.”

  * * * *

  “Tell me again how we were saved, Mr. Ralph.”

  She used the expression in an almost evangelical sense, making him uncomfortable. Rolfe was a practical man, a realist and freethinker.

  “You know as well as I do, Siss,” he said. “It’s because Professor Cantwell was doing government research and because he was having a party. You certainly remember; Cantwell was your boss.”

  “I know that. But you tell it so good and I like to hear it.”

  “All right. Bill Cantwell was an old friend of mine from the army and when I came to New York I gave him a call at the University. It was the first time I’d talked to him in years; I had no idea he’d married again and had set up housekeeping in Manhattan.”

  “And had a working girl named Siss,” she put in.

  “The very same,” he agreed. Siss never referred to herself as a maid, which was what she had been. “And so when I asked Bill if he could put me up, I thought it would be in his old bachelor apartment. He said sure, just like that, and I didn’t find out till I got there, late in the evening, that he had a new wife and was having a house-party and had invited two couples from out of town to stay over.”

  “I gave my room to Mr. and Mrs. Glenn, from Columbus,” Siss said.

  “And the Torquemadas, of Seville, had the regular guest room.” Whoever they were; he didn’t remember names the way she did. “So that left two displaced persons, you and me.”

  “Except for the Nassers.”

  The Nassers, as she pronounced it, were the two self-contained rooms in the Cantwell basement. The NASAs, or the Nasas, was what Cantwell called them because the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had given him a contract to study the behavior of human beings in a close
d system.

  Actually the money had gone to Columbia University, where Cantwell was a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

  “A sealed-off environment,” Rolfe said. “But because Columbia didn’t have the space just at that time, and because the work was vital, NASA gave Cantwell permission to build the rooms in his own home. They were— still are—in his basement, and that’s where you and I slept that fateful night when the world ended.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “We were completely sealed off in there,” Rolfe said. “We weren’t breathing Earth air and we weren’t connected in any way to the rest of the world. We might as well have been out in space or on the moon. So when it happened to everybody else—to Professor and Mrs. Cantwell, and to the Glenns and the Torquemadas and to the Nassers in Egypt and the Joneses in Jones Beach and all the people at Columbia, and in Washington and Moscow and Pretoria and London and Peoria and Medicine Hat and La Jolla and all those places all over—it didn’t happen to us. That’s because Professor Cantwell was a smart man and his closed systems worked.”

  “And we were saved.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “What’s the other way?”

  “We were doomed.”

  * * * *

  From his notebooks:

  Siss asked why I’m so sure there’s nobody but us left in the whole world. A fair question. Of course I’m not absolutely positively cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, swear-on-a-Bible convinced that there isn’t a poor live slob hidden away in some remote corner. Other people besides Bill must have been working with closed systems; certainly any country with a space program would be, and maybe some of their nassers were inhabited, too. I hadn’t heard that any astronauts or cosmonauts were in orbit that day but if they were, and got down safely, I guess they could be alive somewhere.

  But I’ve listened to the rest of the world on some of the finest radio equipment ever put together and there hasn’t been a peep out of it. I’ve listened and signaled and listened and signaled and listened. Nothing. Nil. Short wave, long wave, AM, FM, UHF, marine band, everywhere. Naught. Not a thing. Lots of automatic signals from unmanned satellites, of course, and the quasars are still being heard from, but nothing human.

  I’ve sent out messages on every piece of equipment connected to Con Ed’s EE net. RCA, American Cable & Radio, the Bell System, Western Union, The Associated Press, UPI, Reuters’ world news network, The New York Times’ multifarious teletypes, even the Hilton Hotels’ international reservations system. Nothing. By this time I’d become fairly expert at communications and I’d found the Pentagon network at AT&T. Silent. Ditto the hot line to the Kremlin. I read the monitor teletype and saw the final message from Washington to Moscow. Strictly routine. No hint that anything was amiss anywhere. Just as it must have been at the Army message center at Pearl Harbor on another Sunday morning a generation ago.

  This is for posterity, these facts. My evidence is circumstantial. But to Siss I say: “There’s nobody left but us. I know. You’ll have to take my word for it that the rest of the world is as empty as New York.”

  Nobody here but us chickens, boss. Us poor flightless birds. One middle-aged rooster and one sad little hen, somewhat deficient in the upper story. What do you want us to do, boss? What’s the next step in the great cosmic scheme? Tell us: where do we go from here?

  But don’t tell me; tell Siss. I don’t expect an answer; she does. She’s the one who went into the first church she found open that Sunday morning (some of them were locked, you know) and said all the prayers she knew, and asked for mercy for her relatives, and her friends, and her employers, and for me, and for all the dead people who had been alive only yesterday, and finally for herself; and then she asked why. She was in there for an hour and when she came out I don’t think she’d had an answer.

  Nobody here but us chickens, boss. What do you want us to do now, fricassee ourselves?

  * * * *

  Late on the morning of doomsday they had taken a walk down Broadway, starting from Cantwell’s house near the Columbia campus.

  There were a number of laughs to be had from cars in comical positions, if anybody was in a laughing mood. Some were standing obediently behind white lines at intersections, and obviously their drivers had been overtaken during a red light. With its driver gone, each such car had simply stood there, its engine dutifully using up all the gas in its tank and then coughing to a stop. Others had nosed gently into shop windows, or less gently into other cars or trucks. One truck, loaded with New Jersey eggs, had overturned and its cargo was dripping in a yellowy-white puddle. Rolfe, his nose twitching as if in anticipation of a warm day next week, made a mental note never to return to that particular spot.

  Several times he found a car which had been run up upon from behind by another. It was as if, knowing they would never again be manufactured, they were trying copulation.

  While Siss was in church Rolfe found a car that had not idled away all its gas and he made a dry run through the streets. He discovered that he could navigate pretty well around the stalled or wrecked cars, though occasionally he had to drive up on the sidewalk or make a three-block detour to get back to Broadway.

  Then he and Siss, subdued after church, went downtown.

  “Whose car is this, Mr. Ralph?” she asked him.

  “My car, Siss. Would you like one, too?”

  “I can’t drive.”

  “I’ll teach you. It may come in handy.”

  “I was the only one in church,” she said. It hadn’t got through to her yet, he thought; not completely.

  “Who were you expecting?” he asked kindly.

  “God, maybe.”

  She was gazing straight ahead, clutching her purse in her lap. She had the expression of a person who had been let down.

  At 72nd Street a beer truck had demolished the box office of the Trans-Lux movie house and foamy liquid was still trickling out of it, across the sidewalk and along the gutter and into a sewer. Rolfe stopped the car and got out. An aluminum barrel had been punctured. The beer leaking from it was cool. He leaned over and let it run into his mouth for a while.

  The Trans-Lux had been having a Fellini festival; the picture was 8½. On impulse he went inside and came back to the car with the reels of film in a black tin box. He remembered the way the movie had opened, with all the cars stalled in traffic. Like Broadway, except that the Italian cars had people in them. He put the box in the rear of the car and said: “We’ll go to the movies sometime.” Siss looked at him blankly.

  At Columbus Circle a Broadway bus had locked horns with a big van carrying furniture from North Carolina. At 50th Street a Mustang had nosed gently into the front of a steak house, as if someone had led it to a hitching post.

  He made an illegal left turn at 42nd Street, noting what was playing at the Rialto: two naughty, daring, sexy, nudie pix, including a re-run of “My Bare Lady.” He didn’t stop for that one.

  At the old Newsweek Building east of Broadway, an Impala had butted into the ground-floor liquor store. The plate glass lay smashed but the bottles in the window were intact. He made a mental note. Across the street, one flight up, was the Keppel Folding Boat Company, which had long intrigued him. Soon it might be useful to unfold one and sail off to a better place. He marked it in his mind.

  Bookstores, 42nd Street style. Dirty books and magazines. Girly books. Deviant, flagellant, homosexual, Lesbian, sadistic books. Pornographic classics restored to the common man—Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The Kama Sutra, quaint but lasciviously advertised. Books of nudes for the serious artist (no retoucher’s airbrush here, men!).

  Nudie pix in packets, wrapped in pliofilm, at a buck and a half the set. Large girls in successive states of undress. How big can a breast be before it disgusts? What is the optimum bosom size? A cup? D cup? It would depend on the number to be fed, wouldn’t it? And how hungry they were? Or was that criterion passé?

  He looked
over at Siss, who wasn’t looking at him or the bookstores or the dirty-movie houses but straight ahead. She had a nice figure. About a C.

  But it was never the body alone; it was the mind that went with it and the voice with which it spoke.

  “What are you thinking, Siss?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. It was probably true. “What are you thinking?”

  Riposte. How could he tell her?

  He improvised. They were passing Bryant Park. “Pigeons in the park,” he said. “I’m thinking of the pigeons. Hungrier than yesterday because nobody’s buying peanuts for them, bringing slices of bread from home; there’s no bread lady buying bagfuls for them at Horn & Hardart’s day-old bakery shop.”

  “It’s a sad time, isn’t it, Mr. Ralph?”