Alas, Babylon Read online

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What would you say if I told you I have very good information—about as good as you can get—that before long a war is coming?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”

  The answer surprised Randy. His swivel chair banged upright. “What makes you say that?”

  Malachai smiled, pleased with Randy’s reaction. “Well, sir, I keep up with things. I read all I can. I read all the news magazines and all the out-of-state papers I can get hold of and some service journals and lots of other stuff.”

  “You do? You don’t subscribe to them all, do you?”

  Malachai tried to control his grin. “Some I get from you, Mister Randy. You finish a magazine and throw it away and Missouri finds it and brings it home in her tote bag. And every day she collects the Cleveland papers and the business magazines from Mrs. McGovern’s. Mondays I work for Admiral Hazzard. He saves The New York Times and the Washington papers for me and the Naval Institute Proceedings and technical magazines. And I listen to all the commentators.”

  “How do you find the time?” Randy had never realized that Malachai read anything except the San Marco Sun (“It Shines for Timucuan County”).

  “Well, sir, there’s not much for a single, non-drinkin’ man to do around Fort Repose, week nights. So I read and I listen. I know things ain’t good, and the way I figure is that if people keep piling up bombs and rockets, higher and higher and higher, someday somebody’s going to set one off. Then blooey!”

  “More than one,” Randy said, “and soon—maybe very soon. That’s what my brother believes and that’s why he’s sending Mrs. Bragg and the children down here. You’d better get set for it, Malachai. That’s what I’m doing.”

  Malachai’s smile was gone entirely. “Mister Randy, I’ve thought about it a lot, but there’s not a doggone thing we can do about it. We just have to sit here and wait for it. There’s not much we can lay up—” he patted his breast pocket. “This twenty-five dollars, with what Missouri brings home this evening, is it. Fast as we make it, it goes. Of course, we don’t need much and we’ve got one thing hardly anybody else has got.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Water. Running water. Artestian water that can’t be contaminated. You all only use it in the sprinkling system because it smells funny some say like rotten eggs. But that sulphur water ain’t bad. You gets to like it.”

  Until that moment, Randy hadn’t thought of water at all. His grandfather, in a year of freakish drought, at great cost had drilled nearly a thousand feet to find the artesian layer and irrigate the grove. And his grandfather had allowed the Henrys to tap the main pipe, so the Henrys had a perpetual flow of free water, although it was hard with dissolved minerals and Randy hated to taste it out of the sprinkler heads in grove and garden, even on a hot summer day.

  “I’m afraid I’d never get used to it,” he said. He counted out two hundred dollars in twenties and thrust the money across the desk. “This is for an emergency. Buy what you need.”

  The new notes felt slippery in Malachai’s fingers. “I don’t know when I can pay this back.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not asking you to pay it back.”

  Malachai folded the bills. “Thank you, sir.”

  “See you next week, Malachai.”

  Malachai left and Randy mixed a drink. You turned a tap and lo, water came forth, sweet, soft water without odor, pumped from some sub-surface pool by a silent, faithful servant, a small electric motor. Every family on River Road, except the Henrys, obtained its water in the same way, each with its own pump and well. More important than anything he had listed was water, free of dangerous bacilli, unpolluted by poisons human, chemical, or radioactive. Pure water was essential to his civilization, accepted like pure air. In the big cities, where even a near miss would rupture reservoirs, demolish aqueducts, and smash mains, it would be hell without water. Big cities would become traps deadly as deserts or jungles. Randy began to consider how little he really knew of the fundamentals of survival. Helen, he guessed, would know a good deal more. It was a required subject in the education of Air Force wives. He decided to talk to Bubba Offenhaus, who ran Civil Defense in Fort Repose. Bubba must have pamphlets, or something that he could study.

  Downstairs Graf began to bark, an insistent, belligerent alarm announcing a strange car in the driveway. Randy went to the head of the stairs, shouted, “Shut up, Graf!” and waited to see who would knock.

  Nobody knocked but the door opened and Randy saw Elizabeth McGovern in the front hall, bending over Graf, her face curtained by shoulder-length blond hair. She stroked Graf’s hackles until his tail wigwagged a friendly signal. Then she looked up and called, “You decent, Randy?”

  One day she would barge in like this and he would be indecent. She bewildered him. She was brash, unpredictable, and sometimes uncomfortably outspoken. “Come on up, Lib,” he said. Like the Henrys, she was a special problem.

  All through the summer and early fall Randy had watched the McGoverns’ house and dock go up, while landscapers spotted palms in orderly rows, laid down turf, and planted flower pots and shrubbery. On a sultry October afternoon, trolling for bass in the channel, he had seen a pair of faultlessly curved and tapered legs incongruously stretched toward the sky from the McGovern dock. Since she was lying on the canvas-covered planking, heels propped up on a post, the legs were all that could be seen from water level. He turned the prow toward shore to discover whose body was attached to these remarkable and unfamiliar legs. When his boat was almost under the dock he’d spoken, “Hello, legs.”

  “You may call me Lib,” she’d said. “You’re Randy Bragg, aren’t you? I’ve sort of been expecting you’d call.”

  When they’d become something more than friends, although less than lovers, he’d accused her of luring him with her lovely legs. Lib had laughed and said, “I didn’t know, then, that you were a leg man but I’m glad you are. Most American males have a fixation about the mammary gland. A symptom of momism, I think. Legs are for men’s pleasure, breasts for babies’. Oh, that’s really sour grapes. I only said it because I know my legs are my only real asset. I’m flat and I’m not pretty.” Technically, she was accurate. She was no classic beauty when you considered each feature individually. She was only beautiful in complete design, in the way she moved and was put together.

  She came up the stairs and curled a bare arm around his neck and kissed him, a brief kiss, a greeting. “I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all day,” she said. “I’ve been thinking and I’ve reached an important conclusion. Where’ve you been?”

  “My brother stopped at McCoy, flying back to Omaha. I had to meet him.” He led her into the living room. “Drink?”

  “Ginger ale, if you have it.” She sat on a stool at the bar, one knee raised and clasped between her hands. She wore a sleeveless, turquoise linen blouse, doeskin shorts, and moccasins.

  He tumbled ice into a glass and poured ginger ale and said, “What’s this important conclusion?”

  “You’ll get mad. It’s about you.”

  “Okay, I’ll get mad.”

  “I think you ought to go to New York or Chicago or San Francisco or any city with character and vitality. You should go to work. This place is no good for you, Randy. The air is like soup and the people are like noodles. You’re vegetating. I don’t want a vegetable. I want a man.”

  He was instantly angry, and then he told himself that for a number of reasons, including the fact that her diagnosis was probably the truth, it was silly to be angry. He said, “If I went away and left you here, wouldn’t you turn into a noodle?”

  “I’ve thought it all out. As soon as you get a job, I’ll follow you. If you want, we can live together for a while. If it’s good, we can get married.”

  He examined her face. Her mouth, usually agile and humorous, was drawn into a taut, colorless line. Her eyes, which reflected her moods as the river reflected the sky, were gray and opaque. Under the
soft tan painted by winter’s sun her skin was pale. She was serious. She meant it.

  “Too late,” he said.

  “What do you mean, ‘too late’?”

  Yesterday, there might have been sense and logic to her estimate, and he might have accepted this challenge, invitation, and proposal. But since morning, they had lived in diverging worlds. It was necessary that he lead her down into his world, yet not too abruptly, lest sight and apprehension of the future imperil her capacity to think clearly and act intelligently. “My sister-in-law and her two children are coming to stay with me,” he began. “They get in tonight—in the morning, really. Three thirty.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Meet them, turn the house over to them, and then pick yourself a city—a nice, big, live city. They can have this place all to themselves and while they’re here you won’t have to worry about the house. How long are they staying?”

  “I don’t know,” Randy said. Maybe forever, he almost added, but didn’t.

  “It won’t matter, really, will it? When they leave you can rent the house. If they leave soon you ought to get a good price for it for the rest of the season. What’s your sister-in-law like?”

  “I haven’t told you the reason they’re coming.” He reached out and covered her hands. Her fingers, long, round, strong, matched her throat. Her nails were tinted copper, and carefully groomed. He tried to frame the right words. “My brother believes—”

  Graf, lying near Randy’s stool, rolled to his feet, hair bristling like a razorback pig, tail and ears at attention, and then raced into the hallway and down the stairs, barking wildly.

  “That’s the loudest dog I’ve ever met!” Lib said. “What’s eating him now?”

  “He’s got radar ears. Nothing can get close to the house without him knowing.” Randy went downstairs. It was Dan Gunn at the door. An angular, towering man, sad-faced and saturnine, wearing heavy-framed glasses, awkward in movement and sparing of speech, he stepped into the hallway, not bothering to glance at Graf. Dan said, “You got a woman upstairs, Randy? I know you have because her car is in the driveway.” He removed his pipe from his mouth and almost smiled. “I’d like to talk to her. About her mother. Her father, too.”

  “Go on up to the apartment, Dan,” Randy said. “I’ll just wander around in the yard.” He guessed that Dan had just come from a professional visit to the McGoverns. Lib’s mother had diabetes. He didn’t know what her father had, but if Dan was going to discuss family illnesses with Lib, he would politely vanish.

  “I don’t think Elizabeth will mind if you sit in on this,” Dan said. “Practically one of the family by now, aren’t you?”

  Going upstairs Randy decided that Dan, too, should know of Mark’s warning. If anybody ought to know, it was a doctor. And at the same time Randy realized he had not included drugs in his list, and the medicine cabinet held little except aspirin, nasal sprays, and mouthwash. With two children coming, he should’ve planned better than that. Anyway, Dan was the man to tell him what to get, and write the prescriptions.

  Randy mixed Dan a drink and said, “Our medic is here to see you, Lib, not me. When he’s finished talking, I’ve got something to say to both of you.”

  Dan looked at him oddly. “Sounds like you’re about to make a pronouncement.”

  “I am. But you go first.”

  “It’s nothing urgent or terribly important. I was just making the placebo circuit and dropped in to see Elizabeth’s mother.”

  “The what?” Lib asked. Randy had heard Dan use the phrase before.

  “Placebo, or psychosomatic circuit—the middle-aged retirees and geriatrics who have nothing to do but get lonely and worry about their health. The only person they can call who can’t avoid visiting them is their doctor. So they call me and I let them bend my ear with symptoms. I give them sugar pills or tranquilizers—one seems about as good as the other. I tell them they’re going to live. This makes them happy. I don’t know why.”

  At thirty-five, Dan was a souring idealist. After medical school in Boston he’d started practice in a Vermont town and in his free hours slaved at post-graduate studies in epidemiology. His target had been the teeming continents and the great plagues—malaria, typhus, cholera, typhoid, dysentery—and he was angling for a World Health Organization or Point Four appointment. Then he’d married. His wife—Randy did not know her name because Dan never uttered it—apparently had been extravagant, a nympho, a one-drink alcoholic, and a compulsive gambler. She’d recoiled at the thought of living in Equatorial Africa or a delta village in India, and pestered him to set up practice in New York or Los Angeles, where the big money was. When Dan refused, she took to spending weekends in New York, an easy pickup at her favorite bar in the Fifties. So he’d been a gentleman and let her go to Reno and get the divorce. When her luck ran out she returned East, filed suit for alimony, and the judge had given her everything she’d asked. Now she lived in Los Angeles and each week shovelled the alimony into bingo games or pari-mutuel machines, and Dan’s career was ended before it had begun. A World Health or Point Four salary would barely pay her alimony and leave nothing for him, and a doctor can’t skip, except into the medical shadowland of criminal practice. He had come to Florida because the state was growing and his practice and fees would be larger and he thought he’d eventually accumulate enough money to offer her a cash settlement and suture the financial hemorrhage.

  In Fort Repose, Dan shared the one-story Medical Arts Building with an older man, Dr. Bloomfield, and two dentists. He lived frugally in a two-room suite in the Riverside Inn, where he acted as house physician for the aging guests during the winter season. His gross income had doubled. While he delivered babies for Pistolville and Negro families for $25, he balanced this with ten dollar house calls on the placebo circuit. In a single two-hour sweep up River Road, handing out placebos and tranquilizers, he often netted $100. It did him no good. He discovered he was inexorably squeezed between alimony and taxes. Taxes rose with income and the escalator clause in his alimony order took effect. Once, he and Randy figured out that if his gross rose to more than $50,000 a year he would have to go into bankruptcy. Dan could imagine no combination of circumstances that would allow him to amass enough capital to buy off his former wife and set him free to fight the plagues. So he was a bitter man, but, Randy believed, a kind man, perhaps even a great one.

  Lib said, “You don’t consider our house a stop on the placebo circuit, do you?”

  “No,” Dan said, “and yes. Your mother does have diabetes.” He paused, to let her understand that was not all that was wrong. “She called me today. She was very much upset. She wondered whether she could change from insulin to the new oral drug. You’ve been giving her her insulin shot every morning, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” Lib said. “She can’t bear to stick herself and she won’t let my father do it. She says he’s too rough. Says Dad jabs her like he enjoys it.”

  This was something Randy hadn’t known before.

  Dan said, “She wants me to get her oranise because she says you’re talking about leaving her.”

  Lib said, “Yes, I do intend to leave. I’m going to leave when Randy leaves.”

  Randy started to speak, but checked himself. He could wait a moment.

  Dan wiped his glasses. His face dropped unhappily. “I don’t know about experimenting,” he said. “Your mother is balanced at seventy units of insulin a day. A pretty solid shot. I don’t want to take her off insulin. She’ll have to learn to use the hypodermic herself. Now, let’s move on to your father.”

  “My father! Nothing’s wrong with Dad, is there?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. He’s turning into a zombie, Elizabeth. Doesn’t he have any hobbies? Can’t he start a new business? He’s only sixty-one and, except for a little hypertension, in good shape physically. But he is dying faster than he should. The better a man is at business, the worse in retirement. One day he’s running a big corporation and the next day he isn’t al
lowed to run anything, even his own home. He wishes himself dead, and he dies.”

  Lib had been listening intently. She said, “It’s even harder on Dad. You see, he didn’t retire by choice. He was fired. Oh, we all call it retirement, and he gets his pension, but the board eased him out—he lost a quiet little proxy fight—and now he doesn’t think he is of any use to anyone at all.”

  “I felt,” Dan said, “it was something like that.” He was silent a moment. “I’d like to help him. I think he’s worth saving.” Now Randy knew it was time to speak. “When you came in, Dan, I was about to tell Lib what Mark told me today, out at McCoy. He is afraid—he is sure—that we are on the verge of war. That’s why Helen and the children are being sent down here. Mark thinks the Russians are already staged for it.”

  Randy watched them. Comprehension seemed to come first to Elizabeth. She said, softly, “Oh, God!” Her fingers locked in her lap and grew white.

  Dan’s head shook, a negative tremor. He looked at the decanter and Randy’s half-empty glass on the bar. “You haven’t been drinking, have you, Randy?”

  “First today—since breakfast.”

  “I didn’t think you’d been drinking. I was just hoping.” Dan’s massive head, with the coarse, wiry, reddish hair at the temples, bent forward as if his neck could no longer support it. “I guess that makes everything hypothetical,” he said. “How soon?”

  “Mark doesn’t know and I can’t even guess. Today—tomorrow—next week—next month—you name it.”

  Lib looked at her watch. “News at six,” she said. A portable radio no larger than a highball glass stood at the end of the bar. She turned it on.

  Randy kept the portable tuned to WSMF (Wonderful San Marco, Florida) the biggest station in the county. The dance music faded and the voice of Happy Hedrix, the disk jockey, said:

  “Well, all of you frozen felines, I’ve got to take the needle out of the groove for five minutes so the cubes—a cube is a square anyway you look at him, hah, hah—can get hip with what cooks around the sphere. So let’s start in with the weather. It’s sixty-nine outside our studios right now and the forecast for Central Florida is fair and mild with light to moderate east winds tomorrow, and no frost danger through Tuesday. That’s good fishing weather, folks, and to prove it here’s a story from Tavares, over in Lake County, Jones Corkle, of Hyannis, Nebraska, today caught a thirteen pound, four-ounce bigmouth in Lake Dora to take the lead in Lake County’s Winter Bass Tournament. He used a black eel bait. A UP item from Washington says the Navy has ordered preventive action against unidentified jet planes which have been shadowing the Sixth Fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean. At Tropical Park today, Bald Eagle won the Coral Handicap by three lengths, paying eleven-sixty. Careless Lady was second and Rumpus third. Now, turning to news of Wall Street, stocks closed mixed, with missiles up and railroads off, in moderate trading. The Dow-Jones averages…”