Anderson, Poul - Tomorrow's Children 01 Read online

  TOMORROW’S CHILDREN

  BY POUL ANDERSON & F. N. WALDROP

  You don’t have to kill every man on Earth to end the human race. And atomic warfare is the way to kill hope without killing men. When all the children are different—

  Illustrated by Cartier.

  On the world’s loom

  Weave the Norns doom,

  Nor may they guide it nor change.

  —Wagner, Siegfried

  Ten miles up, it hardly showed. Earth was a cloudy green and brown blur, the vast vault of the stratosphere reaching changelessly out to spatial infinities, and beyond the pulsing engine there was silence and serenity no man could ever touch. Looking down, Hugh Drummond could see the Mississippi gleaming like a drawn sword, and its slow curve matched the contours shown on his map. The hills, the sea, the sun and wind and rain, they didn’t change. Not in less than a million slow-striding years, and human efforts flickered too briefly in the unending night for that.

  Farther down, though, and especially where cities had been— The lone man in the solitary stratojet swore softly, bitterly, and his knuckles whitened on the controls. He was a big man, his gaunt rangy form sprawling awkwardly in the tiny pressure cabin, and he wasn’t quite forty. But his dark hair was streaked with gray, in the shabby flying suit his shoulders stooped, and his long homely face was drawn into haggard lines. His eyes were black-rimmed and sunken with weariness, dark and dreadful in their intensity. He’d seen too much, survived too much, until he began to look like most other people of the world. Heir of the ages, he thought dully.

  Mechanically, he went through the motions of following his course. Natural landmarks were still there, and he had powerful binoculars to help him. But he didn’t use them much. They showed too many broad shallow craters, their vitreous smoothness throwing back sunlight in the flat blank glitter of a snake’s eye, the ground about them a churned and blasted desolation. And there were the worse regions of — deadness. Twisted dead trees, blowing sand, tumbled skeletons, perhaps at night a baleful blue glow of fluorescence. The bombs had been nightmares, riding in on wings of fire and horror to shake the planet with the death blows of cities. But the radioactive dust was worse than any nightmare.

  He passed over villages, even small towns. Some of them were deserted, the blowing colloidal dust, or plague, or economic breakdown making them untenable. Others still seemed to be living a feeble half-life. Especially in the Midwest, there was a pathetic struggle to return to an agricultural system, but the insects and blights—

  Drummond shrugged. After nearly two years of this, over the scarred and maimed planet, he should be used to it. The United States had been lucky. Europe, now—

  Der Untergang des Abendlaudes, he thought grayly. Spongier foresaw the collapse of a topheavy civilisation. He didn’t foresee atomic bombs, radioactive-dust bombs, bacteria bombs, blight bombs — the bombs, the senseless inanimate bombs flying like monster insects over the shivering world. So he didn’t guess the extent of the collapse.

  Deliberately he pushed the thoughts out of his conscious mind. He didn’t want to dwell on them. He’d lived with them two years, and that was two eternities too long. And anyway, he was nearly home now.

  The capital of the United States was below him, and he sent the stratojet slanting down in a long thunderous dive toward the mountains. Not much of a capital, the little town huddled in a valley of the Cascades, but the waters of the Potomac had filled the grave of Washington. Strictly speaking, there was no capital. The officers of the government were scattered over the country, keeping in precarious touch by plane and radio, but Taylor, Oregon, came as close to being the nerve center as any other place.

  He gave the signal again on his transmitter, knowing with a faint spine-crawling sensation of the rocket batteries trained on him from the green of those mountains. When one plane could carry the end of a city, all planes were under suspicion. Not that anyone outside was supposed to know that that innocuous little town was important. But you never could tell. The war wasn’t officially over. It might never be. with sheer personal survival overriding the urgency of treaties.

  A light-beam transmitter gave him a cautious: “O.K. Can you land in the street?”

  It was a narrow, dusty track between two wooden rows of houses, but Drummond was a good pilot and this was a good jet. “Yeah,” he said. His voice had grown unused to speech.

  He cut speed in a spiral descent until He was gliding with only the faintest whisper of wind across his ship. Touching wheels to the street, he slammed on the brake and bounced to a halt.

  Silence struck at him like a physical blow. The engine stilled, the sun beating down from a brassy blue sky on the drabness of rude “temporary” houses, the total-seeming desertion beneath the impassive mountains— Home! Hugh Drummond laughed, a short harsh bark with nothing of humor in it, and swung open the cockpit canopy.

  There were actually quite a few people, he saw, peering from doorways and side streets. They looked fairly well fed and dressed, many in uniform, they seemed to have purpose and hope. But this, of course, was the capital of the United States of America, the world’s most fortunate country.

  “Get out—quick!”

  The peremptory voice roused Drummond from the introspection into which those lonely months had driven him. He looked down at a gang of men in mechanics’ outfits, led by a harassed-looking man in captain’s uniform. “Oh—of course,” he said slowly. “You want to hide the plane. And, naturally, a regular landing field would give you away.”

  “Hurry, get out, you infernal idiot! Anyone, anyone might come over and see—”

  “They wouldn’t get unnoticed by an efficient detection system, and you still have that,” said Drummond, sliding his booted legs over the cockpit edge. “And anyway, there won’t be any more raids. The war’s over.”

  “Wish I could believe that, but who are you to say? Get a move on!”

  The grease monkeys hustled the plane down the street. With an odd feeling of loneliness, Drummond watched it go. After all, it had been his home for—how long ?

  The machine was stopped before a false house whose whole front was swung aside. A concrete ramp led downward, and Drummond could see a cavernous immensity below. Light within it gleamed off silvery rows of aircraft.

  “Pretty neat,” he admitted. “Not that it matters any more. Probably it never did. Most of the hell came over on robot rockets. Oh, well.” He fished his pipe from his jacket. Colonel’s insignia glittered briefly as the garment flipped back.

  “Oh . .. sorry, sir!” exclaimed the captain. “I didn’t know—”

  “ ’S O.K. I’ve gotten out of the habit of wearing a regular uniform. A lot of places I’ve been, an American wouldn’t be very popular.” Drummond stuffed tobacco into his briar, scowling. He hated to think how often he’d had to use the Colt at his hip, of even the machineguns in his plane, to save himself. He inhaled smoke gratefully. It seemed to drown out some of the bitter taste.

  “General Robinson said to bring you to him when you arrived, sir,” said the captain. “This way, please.”

  They went down the street, their boots scuffing up little acrid clouds of dust. Drummond looked sharply about him. He’d left very shortly after the two-month Ragnarok which had tapered off when the organization of both sides broke down too far to keep on making and sending the bombs, and maintaining order with famine and disease starting their ghastly ride over the homeland. At that time, the United States was a cityless, anarchic chaos, and he’d had only the briefest of radio exchanges since then, whenever he could get at a long-range set still in working order. They’d made remarkable progress mean
while. How much, he didn’t know, but the mere existence of something like a capital was sufficient proof.

  Robinson— His lined face twisted into a frown. He didn’t know the man. He’d been expecting to be received by the President, who had sent him and some others out. Unless the others had— No, he was the only one who had been in eastern Europe and western Asia. He was sure of that.

  Two sentries guarded the entrance to what was obviously a converted general store. But there were no more stores. There was nothing to put in them. Drummond entered the cool dimness of an antechamber. The clatter of a typewriter, the Wac operating it— He gaped and blinked. That was—impossible! Typewriters, secretaries — hadn’t they gone out with the whole world, two years ago? If the Dark Ages had returned to Earth, it didn’t seem—right—that there should still be typewriters. It didn’t fit, didn’t—

  He grew aware that the captain had opened the inner door for him.

  As he stepped in, he grew aware how tired he was. His arm weighed a ton as he saluted the man behind the desk.

  “At ease, at ease,” Robinson’s voice was genial. Despite the five stars on his shoulders, he wore no tie or coat, and his round face was smiling. Still, he looked tough and competent underneath. To run things nowadays, he’d have to be.

  “Sit down, Colonel Drummond.” Robinson gestured to a chair near his and the aviator collapsed into it, shivering. His haunted eyes traversed the office. It was almost w’ell enough outfitted to be a prewar place.

  Prewar! A word like a sword, cutting across history with a brutality of murder, hazing everything in the past until it was a vague golden glow through drifting, red-shot black clouds. And—only two years. Only two years! Surely sanity was meaningless in a world of such nightmare inversions. Why, he could barely remember Barbara and the kids. Their faces were blotted out in a tide of other visage's — starved faces, dead faces, human faces become beast-formed with want and pain and eating throttled hate. His grief was lost in the agony of a w'orld, and in some ways he had become a machine himself.

  “You look plenty tired,” said Robinson.

  “Yeah . . . yes, sir—”

  “Skip the formality. I don’t go for it. We’ll be working pretty close to gether, can’t take time to be diplomatic.”

  “Uh-huh. I came over the North Pole, you know. Haven't slept since— Rough time. But, if I may ask, you—” Drummond hesitated.

  “I? I suppose I'm President. Ex officio, pro tem, or something. Here, you need a drink.” Robinson got bottle and glasses from a drawer. The liquor gurgled out in a pungent stream. “Prewar Scotch. Till it gives out I’m laying off this modern hooch. Gainbai.”

  The fiery, smoky brew jolted Drummond to wakefulness. Its glow was pleasant in his empty stomach. He heard Robinson’s voice with a surrealistic sharpness:

  “Yes, I’m at the head now. My predecessors made the mistake of sticking together, and of traveling a good deal in trying to pull the country back into shape. So I think the sickness got the President, and I know it got several others. Of course, there was no means of holding an election. The armed forces had almost the only organization left, so we had to run things. Berger was in charge, but he shot himself when he learned he’d breathed radiodust. Then the command fell to me. I’ve been lucky.”

  “I see.” It didn’t make much difference. A few dozen more deaths weren’t much, when over half the world was gone. “Do you expect to —continue lucky ?” A brutally blunt question, maybe, but words weren't bombs.

  “I do.” Robinson was firm about that. “We’ve learned by experience, learned a lot. We’ve scattered the army, broken it into small outposts at key points throughout the country. For quite a while, we stopped travel altogether except for absolute emergencies, and their with elaborate precautions. That smothered the epidemics. The microorganisms were bred to work in crowded areas, you know. They were almost immune to known medical techniques, but without hosts and carriers they died. I guess natural bacteria ate up most of them. We still take care in traveling, but we’re fairly safe now.”

  “Did any of the others come back? There were a lot like me, sent out to see what really had happened to the world.”

  “One did, from South America. Their situation is similar to ours, though they lacked our tight organization and have gone further toward anarchy. Nobody else returned but you.”

  It wasn’t surprising. In fact, it was a cause for astonishment that anyone had come back. Drummond had volunteered after the bomb erasing St. Louis had taken his family, not expecting to survive and not caring much whether he did. Maybe that was why he had.

  “You can take your time in writing a detailed report,” said Robinson, “but in general, how are things over there ?”

  Drummond shrugged. "The war’s over. Burned out. Europe has gone back to savagery. They were caught between America and Asia, and the bombs came both ways. Not many survivors, and they’re starving animals. Russia, from what I saw, has managed something like you’ve done here, though they’re worse off than we. Naturally, I couldn't find out much there. I didn’t get to India or China, but in Russia I heard rumors— No, the world’s gone too far into disintegration to carry on war.”

  “Then we can come out in the open,” said Robinson softly. “We can really start rebuilding. I don’t think there’ll ever be another war, Drummond. I think the memory of this one will be carved too deeply on the race for us ever to forget.”

  “Can you shrug it off that easily?”

  “No, no, of course not. Our culture hasn’t lost its continuity, but it’s had a terrific setback. We’ll'never wholly get over it. But—we’re on our way up again.”

  The general rose, glancing at his watch. “Six o’clock. Come on, Drummond, let’s get home.”

  “Home?”

  “Yes, you’ll stay with me. Man, you look like the original zombie. You'll need a month or more of sleeping between clean sheets, of home cooking and home atmosphere. My wife will be glad to have you; we see almost no new faces. And as long as we’ll work together, I’d like to keep you handy. The shortage of competent men is terrific.”

  They went down the street, an aide following. Drummond was again conscious of the weariness aching in every bone and fiber of him. A home — after two years of ghost towns, of shattered chimneys above blood-dappled snow, of flimsy lean- tos housing starvation and death.

  “Your plane will be mighty useful, too,” said Robinson. “Those atomic-powered craft are scarcer than hens’ teeth used to be.” He chuckled hollowly, as at a rather grim joke. “Got you through close to two years of flying without needing fuel. Any other trouble?”

  “Some, but there were enough spare parts.” No need to tell of those frantic hours and days of slaving, of desperate improvisation with hunger and plague stalking him who stayed overlong. He’d had his troubles getting food, too, despite the plentiful supplies he’d started out with. He’d fought for scraps in the winters, beaten off howling maniacs who would have killed him for a bird he’d shot or a dead horse he’d scavenged. He hated that plundering, and would not have cared personally if they’d managed to destroy him. But he had a mission, and the mission was all he’d had left as a focal point for his life, so he’d clung to it with fanatic intensity.

  And now the job was over, and he realized he couldn’t rest. He didn’t dare. Rest would give him time to remember. Maybe he could find surcease in the gigantic work of reconstruction. Maybe.

  “Here we are,” said Robinson. Drummond blinked in new amazement. There was a car, camouflaged under brush, with a military chauffeur — a car! And in pretty fair shape, too.

  “We’ve got a few oil wells going again, and a small patched-up refinery,” explained the general. “It furnishes enough gas and oil for what traffic we have.”

  They got in the rear seat The aide sat in front, a rifle ready. The car started down a mountain road.

  “Where to?” asked Drummond a little dazedly.

  Robinson smiled. “Personally,�
� he said, "I’m almost the only lucky man on Earth. We had a summer cottage on Lake Taylor, a few miles from here. My wife was there when the war came, and stayed, and nobody came along till I brought the head offices here with me. Now I’ve got a home all to myself:”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you’re lucky,” said Drummond. He looked out the window, not seeing the sun-spattered woods. Presently he asked, his voice a little harsh: "How is the country really doing now ?”

  “For a while it was rough. Damn rough. When the cities went, our transportation, communication, and distribution systems broke down. In fact, our whole economy disintegrated, though not all at once. Then there was the dust and the plagues. People fled, and there was open fighting when overcrowded safe places refused to take in any more refugees. Police went with the cities, and the army couldn’t do much patrolling. We were busy fighting the enemy troops that’d flown over the Pole to invade. We still haven’t gotten them all. Bands are roaming the country, hungry and desperate outlaws, and there are plenty of Americans who turned to banditry when everything else failed. That’s why we have this guard, though so far none have come this way.

  “The insect and blight weapons just about wiped out our crops, and that winter everybody starved. We checked the pests with modern methods, though it was touch and go for a while, and next year got some food. Of course, with no distribution as yet, we failed to save a lot of people. And farming is still a tough proposition. We won’t really have the bugs licked for a long time. If we had a research center as well equipped as those which produced the things— But we’re gaining. We’re gaining.”

  “Distribution—” Drummond rubbed his chin. “How about railroads ? Horse-drawn vehicles ?”

  “We have some railroads going, but the enemy was as careful to dust most of ours as we were to dust theirs. As for horses, they were nearly all eaten that first winter. I know personally of only a dozen. They’re on my place; I’m trying to breed enough to be of use, but”— Robinson smiled wryly — “by the time we’ve raised that many, the factories should have been going quite a spell.”