Part 5 (1/2)

Paul looked uncertain. ”I don't know,” he said.

Whitlaw stood there for a moment, waiting. He looked at Paul, he glanced around the room at the rest of us, then looked back to Paul. ”Is that an observation, Paul, or is there a question in there somewhere?”

”Uh, yeah. There's a question in there, but I don't know what it is. It's just-I don't get it.”

”I see that. And thanks for being honest about it-that's good. So let me work with that for a second. Let's start with the facts about the Teamwork Army. These are men who are building things. People who build things tend to be very defensive about the things they build. It's called territoriality. It turns out they make very good soldiers. Yes, the possibility is there. The Teamwork Army could be converted to a regular military force in ... oh, let me see, now-what did that report say?” He made a show of returning to his clipboard and calling up a specific page of notes. ”Ah-twelve to sixteen weeks.”

He paused. He let it sink in. He looked around the cla.s.sroom, meeting the gaze of everyone who dared to look at him. I think we were horror-struck; I know I was. It wasn't the answer I wanted to hear. After a long, uncomfortable silence, Whitlaw said quietly, ”So what?” He stepped out into the middle of the room again. ”The question is not why is that possibility there-because there is always that possibility of military adventurism-the question is what, if anything, do we do about it?”

n.o.body answered.

Whitlaw grinned at us. ”That's what this course is about. That responsibility. Eventually it's going to be yours. So your a.s.signment is to look at how you'd like to handle it. What would you do with the army? It's your tool. How do you want to use it? We'll talk about that tomorrow. Thank you, that'll be it for today.” He returned to the podium, picked up his clipboard and left the room.

Huh-? We sat and looked at each other. Was that it? Patricia looked unhappy. ”I don't like it,” she said. ”And I still don't know what to do about my draft board.”

Somebody poked her. ”Don't worry about it,” he said. ”You'll think of something. You've got time.”

But he was wrong.

She didn't have time-and neither did any of the rest of us. She was dead within six months. And so were most of the rest of my cla.s.smates.

EIGHT.

WHEN THE plagues first appeared, the medical community a.s.sumed they were of natural origin, simple mutations of already familiar diseases. Hence the names: Black Peritonitis, African Measles, Botuloid Virus, Comatosis and Enzyme Reaction 42-that last one was particularly vicious. They were so virulent and they spread so fast that it wasn't until afterward that all of them were identified.

I remember Dad frowning as he read the newspaper each night. ”Idiots,” he muttered. ”I'm only surprised it didn't happen sooner. Of course you're going to get plague if you put that many people into a place like Calcutta.”

Within a couple of weeks, the frown gave way to puzzlement. ”Rome?” he said. ”I thought the Italians were more careful than that.”

When it hit New York, Dad said, ” 'Nita, I think we should move up to the cabin for a few weeks. Jim, you'll come with us, of course.”

”But, I've got school-”

”You can afford to miss it. I think I'll call your sister too.” At first, the doctors thought they were dealing with only one disease-but one with a dozen contradictory symptoms. They thought that it took different forms, like bubonic and pneumonic plague. Then they thought that it was so unstable it kept mutating. Everyone had a theory: the super-jumbos were the vectors; we should ground all air travel at once and isolate the disease. Or the bacterio-ecology had finally developed a widespread tolerance for our antibiotics; we shouldn't have used them so freely in the past. Or it was all those experiments with fourth-dimensional physics; they were changing the atmosphere and causing weird new mutations. Things like giant centipedes and purple caterpillars.

The first wave swept across the country in a week. A lot of it was carried by the refugees themselves as they fled the East Coast, but just as much was spread by seemingly impossible leapfrog jumps. Airplanes? Or something else? There was no direct air service at all to Klamath, California, yet that city died before Sacramento.

I remember one broadcast; this scientist-I don't remember his name-was claiming that it was biological warfare. He said there were two kinds of agents: the Y-agents for which there were vaccines and ant.i.toxins, and the X-agents for which there were no defenses at all. Apparently, he said, some of these X-agents must have been released, either accidentally or perhaps by terrorists. There was no other way to explain this sudden outbreak of worldwide uncontrollable death.

That idea caught on real fast. It made sense. Within days the country was in an uproar. Screaming for revenge. If you couldn't kill the germ, at least you could strike back at the enemy responsible for releasing it.

Except-who was that? There was no way of knowing. Besides -and this was the horrible thought-what if the bugs were ours? There were just as many people willing to believe that too.

After that, things fell apart real fast. We heard some of it on the short wave radio. It wasn't pretty.

We were fairly well isolated where we were, even more so after somebody went down to the junction one night and set the bridge on fire. It was an old wooden one and it burned for hours, until it finally collapsed into the stream below. Most of us who lived on the hill knew about the shallow place two miles upstream. If necessary you could drive a vehicle across there, but Dad had figured that the burned-out bridge would stop most refugees from trying to come up the mountain. He was almost right. One of our neighbors down the hill radioed us once to warn of a caravan of three land-rovers heading our way, but not to worry. A while later we heard some shooting, then nothing. We never heard anything more about it.

After that, however, Dad kept a loaded rifle near the door, and he taught all of us how to use it-even the kids. He was very specific in his instructions. If we did shoot someone, we were to burn the bodies, all their belongings, their cars, their animals and everything they had touched. No exceptions.

We stayed on the mountain all summer. Dad phoned in his programs until the phones stopped working; then he just kept working without sending them in. I started to ask him once why he kept on, but Mother stopped me. Later, she said to me, ”Jim, it doesn't matter if there's ever going to be anyone again who'll want to play one of his games-he's doing them for himself. He has to believe-we all do-that there will be a future.”

That stopped me. I hadn't thought about the future-because I hadn't comprehended the awesome scale of the pestilence. I had stopped listening to the radio early on. I didn't want to know how bad it was. I didn't want to hear about the dead dying faster than the living could bury them-whole households going to bed healthy and all of them dying before they awoke. I didn't want to hear about the bodies in the streets, the panic, the looting, the burnings-there had been a firestorm in Los Angeles. Was anybody left alive?

We stayed on the mountain all winter too. It was rough, but we managed. We had a windmill, so we had electricity-not a lot, but enough. We had a solar roof and a Trombe wall, we wore sweaters and we stayed warm. We'd used the summer to build a greenhouse, so we had vegetables, and when Dad brought down the deer, I understood why he had spent so much time practicing with the crossbow. We survived.

I asked him, ”Did you know that something like this would happen?”

He looked up at me across the body of the deer. ”Something like what?”

”The plagues. The breakdown.”

”Nope,” he said, wiping his forehead. The insides of that animal were hot. He bent back to his task. ”Why do you ask?”

”Um, the crossbow, the cabin-and everything. Why this particular mountain? I always thought you were a little bit ... well, wobbly for making such a thing about being self-sufficient. Now it seems like awfully good planning.”

He stopped and laid down his knife. He wiped the blood off his gloves. ”It is impossible to work in weather like this.” His breath was frosty in the air. ”And I can't get a grip through these gloves. No, I didn't know-and yes, it was good planning. But it wasn't my idea. It was your grandfather's. I wish you could have known him better. He used to tell me that a man should be prepared to move suddenly at least three times in his life. That is, if you're planning to live a long life. You know why, of course. Pick any period of history, any place. It's hard to find seventy years of unbroken peace and quiet. Somebody's tree is always too crowded.” He sighed. ”When the screeching starts, it's time to go someplace quieter.” He picked up the knife and went back to his evisceration of the buck. ”Our family has a history of narrow escapes-wait a minute. Hold that-ah, there! One of your great-grandfathers left n.a.z.i Germany in 1935. He kept heading west until he got to Dublin-that's why your name is McCarthy today. He forgot to marry your great-grandmother in a church.”

”Oh,” I said.

”Your grandfather bought this land in 1986. When land was still cheap. He put a prefab on it. Came up here every summer after that and built a little more. Never saw the sense of it myself until-let's see, it was before you were born-it would have had to have been the summer of '97. Right, we thought that was going to be the year of the Apocalypse.”

”I know,” I said. ”We studied it in school.”

He shook his head. ”It's not the same, Jim. It was a terrifying time. The world was paralyzed, waiting to see if they would drop any more bombs. We were all sure that this was it-the big one. The panics were pretty bad, but we came through it all right, up here. We spent the whole year on this mountain-didn't come down till Christmas. The world was lucky that time. Anyway, that's what convinced me.”

We began pulling the buck around and onto the sled. I said, ”How long do you think we'll have to stay up here this time?” ”Dunno. Could be a while-maybe even a couple years. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death took its time about dying out. I don't expect these plagues to be any different.”

I thought about that. ”What do you think we'll find when we do go back?”

”Depends.”

”On?”

”On how many people have... survived. And who.” He looked at me speculatively. ”I think you'd better start listening to the radio with me again.”

”Yes, sir.”

About a month after that, we caught a broadcast out of Denver, the provisional capital of the United States. Martial law was still in effect. The thirty-six surviving members of Congress had reconvened and postponed the presidential election for at least six months. And the second-generation vaccines were proving nearly sixty percent effective. Supplies were still limited though.

Dad and I looked at each other and we were both thinking the same thing. The worst is over.

Within a month, Denver was on the air twenty-four hours a day. Gradually, the government was putting its pieces back together. And a lot of information was finally coming to light.

The first of the plagues-they knew now there had been several -had appeared as isolated disturbances in the heart of Africa. Within a few weeks, it had spread to Asia and India and was beginning its westward sweep across the world. The second plague came so hard on its heels that it seemed like part of the same wave, but it had started somewhere in Brazil, I think, and swept north through Central America-so fast, in fact, that many cities succ.u.mbed before they even had a chance to identify it. By the time of the third plague, governments were toppling and almost every major city was in a state of martial law. Almost all travel worldwide was at a standstill. You could be shot for trying to get to a hospital. The fourth and fifth plagues. .h.i.t us like tidal waves, decimating the survivors of the first three. There was a sixth plague too-but by then the population density was so low, it couldn't spread.

Some areas had been lucky and had remained completely unaffected, mostly isolated out-of-the-way places. A lot of s.h.i.+ps just stayed at sea, particularly Navy vessels, once the admiralty recognized the need to preserve at least one military arm relatively intact. Then there were remote islands and mountaintop settlements, religious retreats, survival communities, our entire Nuclear Deterrent Brigade (wherever they were), the two lunar colonies, the L5 construction project (but they lost the ground base), the submarine communities of Atlantis and Nemo and quite a few places where someone had the foresight to go down and blow up the bridge.