by Roger Elwood
A lot of things had been up to him in the last six months. He’d had to work out a means of search, and organize his few, overworked assistants into an efficient staff, and go out on the long hunt.
They hadn’t covered the country. That was impossible. Their few planes had gone to areas chosen more or less at random, trying to get a cross section of conditions. They’d penetrated wildernesses of hill and plain and forest, establishing contact with scattered, still demoralized out-dwellers. On the whole, it was more laborious than anything else. Most were pathetically glad to see any symbol of law and order and the paradisical-seeming “old days.” Now and then there was danger and trouble, when they encountered wary or sullen or outright hostile groups suspicious of a government they associated with disaster, and once there had even been a pitched battle with roving outlaws. But the work had gone ahead, and now the preliminaries were about over.
Preliminaries— It was a bigger job to find out exactly how matters stood than the entire country was capable of undertaking right now. But Drummond had enough facts for reliable extrapolation. He and his staff had collected most of the essential data and begun correlating it. By questioning, by observation, by seeking and finding, by any means that came to hand they’d filled their notebooks. And in the sketchy outlines of a Chinese drawing, and with the same stark realism, the truth was there.
Just this one more place, and 111 go home, thought Drummond for the—thousandth?—time. His brain was getting into a rut, treading the same terrible circle and finding no way out. Robinson wont like what 1 tell him, but there it is. And darkly, slowly: Barbara, maybe it was best you and the kids went as you did. Quickly, cleanly, not even knowing it. This isn’t much of a world. It’ll never be our world again.
He saw the place he sought, a huddle of buildings near the frozen shores of the Lake of the Woods, and his jet murmured toward the white ground. The stories he’d heard of this town weren’t overly encouraging, but he supposed he’d get out all right. The others had his data anyway, so it didn’t matter.
By the time he’d landed in the clearing just outside the village, using the jet’s skis, most of the inhabitants were there waiting. In the gathering dusk they were a ragged and wildlooking bunch, clumsily dressed in whatever scraps of cloth and leather they had. The bearded, hard-eyed men were armed with clubs and knives and a few guns. As Drummond got out, he was careful to keep his hands away from his own automatics.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m friendly.”
“Y’ better be,” growled the big leader.
“First,” lied Drummond smoothly, “I want to tell you I have another man with a plane who knows where I am. If I’m not back in a certain time, he’ll come with bombs. But we don’t intend any harm or interference. This is just a sort of social call. I’m Hugh Drummond of the United States Army.”
They digested that slowly. Clearly, they weren’t friendly to the government, but they stood in too much awe of aircraft and armament to be openly hostile. The leader spat. “How long you staying?”
“Just overnight, if you’ll put me up. I’ll pay for it.” He held up a small pouch. ‘Tobacco.”
Their eyes gleamed, and the leader said, “You’ll stay with me. Come on.”
Drummond gave him the bribe and went with the group. He didn’t like to spend such priceless luxuries thus freely, but the job was more important. And the boss seemed thawed a little by the fragrant brown flakes. He was sniffing them greedily.
“Been smoking bark an’ grass,” he confided. ‘Terrible.”
‘Worse than that,” agreed Drummond. He turned up his jacket collar and shivered. The wind starting to blow was bitterly cold.
“Just what y’ here for?” demanded someone else.
‘Well, just to see how things stand. We’ve got the government started again, and are patching things up. But we have to know where folks are, what they need, and so on.”
“Don’t want nothing t’ do with the gov’ment,” muttered a woman. “They brung all this on us.”
“Oh, come now. We didn’t ask to be attacked.” Mentally, Drummond crossed his fingers. He neither knew nor cared who was to blame. Both sides, letting mutual fear and friction mount to hysteria— In fact, he wasn’t sure the United States hadn’t sent out the first rockets, on orders of some panicky or aggressive officials. Nobody was alive who admitted knowing.
“It’s the jedgment o’ God, for the sins o’ our leaders,” persisted the woman. ‘The plague, the fire-death, all that, ain’t it foretold in the Bible? Ain’t we living in the last days o’ the world?”
“Maybe.” Drummond was glad to stop before a long low cabin. Religious argument was touchy at best, and with a lot of people nowadays it was dynamite.
§
They entered the rudely furnished but fairly comfortable structure. A good many crowded in with them. For all their suspicion, they were curious, and an outsider in an aircraft was a blue-moon event these days.
Drummond’s eyes flickered unobtrusively about the room, noticing details. Three women—that meant a return to concubinage. Only to be expected in a day of few men and strong-arm rule. Ornaments and utensils, tools and weapons of good quality—yes, that confirmed the stories. This wasn’t exactly a bandit town, but it had waylaid travelers and raided other places when times were hard, and built up a sort of dominance of the surrounding country. That, too, was common.
There was a dog on the floor nursing a litter. Only three pups, and one of those was bald, one lacked ears, and one had more toes than it should. Among the wide-eyed children present, there were several two years old or less, and with almost no obvious exceptions, they were also different.
Drummond sighed heavily and sat down. In a way, this clinched it. He’d known for a long time, and finding mutation here, as far as any place from atomic destruction, was about the last evidence he needed.
He had to get on friendly terms, or he wouldn’t find out much about things like population, food production, and whatever else there was to know. Forcing a smile to stiff lips, he took a flask from his jacket. “Prewar rye,” he said. “Who wants a nip?”
“Do we!” The answer harked out in a dozen voices and words. The flask circulated, men pawing and cursing and grabbing to get at it. Their homebrew must be pretty bad, thought Drummond wryly.
The chief shouted an order, and one of his women got busy at the primitive stove. “Rustle you a mess o’ chow,” he said heartily. “An’ my name’s Sam Buckman.”
“Pleased to meet you, Sam.” Drummond squeezed the hairy paw hard. He had to show he wasn’t a weakling, a conniving city slicker.
“What’s it like, outside?” asked someone presently. “We ain’t heard for so long—”
“You haven’t missed much,” said Drummond between bites. The food was pretty good. Briefly, he sketched conditions. “You’re better off than most,” he finished.
“Yeah. Mebbe so.” Sam Buckman scratched his tangled beard. “What I’d give f’r a razor blade—! It ain’t easy, though. The first year we weren’t no better off ’n anyone else. Me, I’m a farmer, I kept some ears o’ corn an’ a little wheat an’ barley in my pockets all that winter, even though I was starving. A bunch o’ hungry refugees plundered my place, but I got away an’ drifted up here. Next year I took an empty farm here an’ started over.”
Drummond doubted that it had been abandoned, but said nothing. Sheer survival outweighed a lot of considerations.
“Others came an’ settled here,” said the leader reminiscently. “We farm together. We have to; one man couldn’t live by hisself, not with the bugs an’ blight, an’ the crops sproutin’ into all new kinds, an’ the outlaws aroun’. Not many up here, though we did beat off some enemy troops last winter.” He glowed with pride at that, but Drummond wasn’t particularly impressed. A handful of freezing starveling conscripts, lost and bewildered in a foreign enemy’s land, with no hope of ever getting home, weren’t formidable.
>
“Things getting better, though,” said Buckman. *We’re heading up.” He scowled blackly, and a palpable chill crept into the room. “If ’twern’t for the births—”
“Yes—the births. The new babies. Even the stock an’ plants.” It was an old man speaking, his eyes glazed with near madness. “It’s the mark o’ the beast. Satan is loose in the world—”
“Shut up!” Huge and bristling with wrath, Buckman launched himself out of his seat and grabbed the oldster by his scrawny throat. “Shut up ’r I’ll bash y’r lying head in. Ain’t no son o’ mine being marked by the devil.”
“Or mine—” “Or mine—” The rumble of voices ran about the cabin, sullen and afraid.
“It’s God’s jedgment, I tell you!” The woman was shrilling again. “The end o’ the world is near. Prepare f’r the second coming—”
“An’ you shut up too, Mag Schmidt,” snarled Buckman. He stood bent over, gnarled arms swinging loose, hands flexing, little eyes darting red and wild about the room. “Shut y’r trap an’ keep it shut. I’m still boss here, an’ if you don’t like it you can get out. I still don’t think that gunny-looking brat o’ y’rs fell in the lake by accident.”
The woman shrank back, lips tight. The room filled with a crackling silence. One of the babies began to cry. It had two heads.
Slowly and heavily, Buckman turned to Drummond, who sat immobile against the wall. “You see?” he asked dully. “You see how it is? Maybe it is the curse o’ God. Maybe the world is ending. I dunno. I just know there’s few enough babies, an’ most o’ them deformed. Will it go on? Will all our kids be monsters? Should we … kill these an’ hope we get some human babies? What is it? What to do?”
Drummond rose. He felt a weight as of centuries on his shoulders, the weariness, blank and absolute, of having seen that smoldering panic and heard that desperate appeal too often, too often.
“Don’t kill them,” he said. ‘That’s the worst kind of murder, and anyway it’d do no good at all. It comes from the bombs, and you can’t stop it. You’ll go right on having such children, so you might as well get used to it.”
By atomic-powered stratojet it wasn’t far from Minnesota to Oregon, and Drummond landed in Taylor about noon the next day. This time there was no hurry to get his machine under cover, and up on the mountain was a raw scar of earth where a new airfield was slowly being built. Men were getting over their terror of the sky. They had another fear to face now, and it was one from which there was no hiding.
Drummond walked slowly down the icy main street to the central office. It was numbingly cold, a still, relentless intensity of frost eating through clothes and flesh and bone. It wasn’t much better inside. Heating systems were still poor improvisations.
“You’re back!” Robinson met him in the antechamber, suddenly galvanized with eagerness. He had grown thin and nervous, looking ten years older, but impatience blazed from him. “How is it? How is it?”
Drummond held up a bulky notebook. “All here,” he said grimly. “All the facts we’ll need. Not formally correlated yet, but the picture is simple enough.”
Robinson laid an arm on his shoulder and steered him into the office. He felt the general’s hand shaking, but he’d sat down and had a drink before business came up again.
“You’ve done a good job,” said the leader warmly. “When the country’s organized again, I’ll see you get a medal for this. Your men in the other planes aren’t in yet”
“No, they’ll be gathering data for a long time. The job won’t be finished for years. I’ve only got a general outline here, but it’s enough. It’s enough.” Drummond’s eyes were haunted again.
Robinson felt cold at meeting that too-steady gaze. He whispered shakily: “Is it—bad?”
“The worst. Physically, the country’s recovering. But biologically, we’ve reached a crossroads and taken the wrong fork.” “What do you mean? What do you mean?”
Drummond let him have it then, straight and hard as a bayonet thrust. “The birth rate’s a little over half the prewar,” he said, “and about seventy-five per cent of all births are mutant, of which possibly two-thirds are viable and presumably fertile. Of course, that doesn’t include late-maturing characteristics, or those undetectable by naked-eye observation, or the mutated recessive genes that must be carried by a lot of otherwise normal zygotes. And it’s everywhere. There are no safe places.”
“I see,” said Robinson after a long time. He nodded, like a man struck a stunning blow and not yet fully aware of it. “I see. The reason—”
“Is obvious.”
“Yes. People going through radioactive areas—”
“Why, no. That would only account for a few. But—” “No matter. The fact’s there, and that’s enough. We have to decide what to do about it.”
“And soon.” Drummond’s jaw set. “It’s wrecking our culture. We at least preserved our historical continuity, but even that’s going now. People are going crazy as birth after birth is monstrous. Fear of the unknown, striking at minds still stunned by the war and its immediate aftermath. Frustration of parenthood, perhaps the most basic instinct there is. It’s leading to infanticide, desertion, despair, a cancer at the root of society. We’ve got to act.”
“How? How?” Robinson stared numbly at his hands.
“I don’t know. You’re the leader. Maybe an educational campaign, though that hardly seems practicable. Maybe an acceleration of your program for reintegrating the country. Maybe— I don’t know.”
Drummond stuffed tobacco into his pipe. He was near the end of what he had, but would rather take a few good smokes than a lot of niggling puffs. “Of course,” he said thoughtfully, “its probably not the end of things. We won’t know for a generation or more, but I rather imagine the mutants can grow into society. They’d better, for they’ll outnumber the humans. The thing is, if we just let matters drift there’s no telling where they’ll go. The situation is unprecedented. We may end up in a culture of specialized variations, which would be very bad from an evolutionary standpoint. There may be fighting between mutant types, or with humans. Interbreeding may produce worse freaks, particularly when accumulated recessives start showing up. Robinson, if we want any say at all in what’s going to happen in the next few centuries, we have to act quickly. Otherwise it’ll snowball out of all control.”
“Yes. Yes, we’ll have to act fast. And hard.” Robinson straightened in his chair. Decision firmed his countenance, but his eyes were staring. “We’re mobilized,” he said. “We have the men and the weapons and the organization. They won’t be able to resist.”
The ashy cold of Drummond’s emotions stirred, but it was with a horrible wrenching of fear. ‘“What are you getting at?” he snapped.
“Racial death. All mutants and their parents to be sterilized whenever and wherever detected.”
“You’re crazy!” Drummond sprang from his chair, grabbed Robinson’s shoulders across the desk, and shook him. “You … why, it’s impossible! You’ll bring revolt, civil war, final collapse!”
“Not if we go about it right.” There were little beads of sweat studding the general’s forehead. “I don’t like it any better than you, but it’s got to be done or the human race is finished. Normal births a minority—” He surged to his feet, gasping. “I’ve thought a long time about this. Your facts only confirmed my suspicions. This tears it. Can’t you see? Evolution has to proceed slowly. Life wasn’t meant for such a storm of change. Unless we can save the true human stock, it’ll be absorbed and differentiation will continue till humanity is a collection of freaks, probably intersterile. Or … there must be a lot of lethal recessives. In a large population, they can accumulate unnoticed till nearly everybody has them, and then start emerging all at once. That’d wipe us out. It’s happened before, in rats and other species. If we eliminate mutant stock now, we can still save the race. It won’t be cruel. We have sterilization techniques which are quick and painless, not upsetting the endocrine balanc
e. But its got to be done.” His voice rose to a raw scream, broke. “Its got to be done!”
Drummond slapped him, hard. He drew a shuddering breath, sat down, and began to cry, and somehow that was the most horrible sight of all. “You’re crazy,” said the aviator. “You’ve gone nuts and with brooding alone on this the last six months, without knowing or being able to act. You’ve lost all perspective.
“We can’t use violence. In the first place, it would break our tottering, cracked culture irreparably, into a mad-dog finish fight. We’d not even win it. We’re outnumbered, and we couldn’t hold down a continent, eventually a planet. And remember what we said once, about abandoning the old savage way of settling things, that never brings a real settlement at all? We’d throw away a lesson our noses were rubbed in not three years ago. We’d return to the beast—to ultimate extinction.
“And anyway,” he went on very quietly, “it wouldn’t do a bit of good. Mutants would still be born. The poison is everywhere. Normal parents will give birth to mutants, somewhere along the line. We just have to accept that fact, and live with it. The new human race will have to.”
“I’m sorry.” Robinson raised his face from his hands. It was a ghastly visage, gone white and old, but there was calm on it. “I—blew my top. You’re right. I’ve been thinking of this, worrying and wondering, living and breathing it, lying awake nights, and when I finally sleep I dream of it. I … yes, I see your point. And you’re right.”
“It’s O.K. You’ve been under a terrific strain. Three years with never a rest, and the responsibility for a nation, and now this— Sure, everybody’s entitled to be a little crazy. We’ll work out a solution, somehow.”
“Yes, of course.” Robinson poured out tw7o stiff drinks and gulped his. He paced restlessly, and his tremendous ability came back in waves of strength and confidence. “Let me see— Eugenics, of course. If we work hard, we’ll have the nation tightly organized inside of ten years. Then … well, I don’t suppose we can keep the mutants from interbreeding, but certainly we can pass laws to protect humans and encourage their propagation. Since radical mutations would probably be intersterile anyway, and most mutants handicapped one way or another, a few generations should see humans completely dominant again.”
