by Howard Fast
“Come now"—Meyers laughed—‘aren’t we playing the game too well? We have been a committee of sincere and interested citizens, and I don’t think we have shirked the problem. I move that we adjourn now and reconvene in September.”
The motion was seconded and carried.
Driving up to our summer place in Vermont, my wife, Jane, said rather sadly, “If the boy were alive, I wouldn’t sleep too well. Do you know, it’s three years since he died—and it seems like only yesterday.”
“We are beginning a vacation and rest,” I told her, “and I will not countenance this kind of mood.”
“It’s just that I sometimes feel we have stopped caring. Is it a part of growing old?”
“We still care,” I said sharply. But I knew exactly what she meant.
Our summer place is in a wonderful, isolated upland valley, like so many of the upland valleys in Vermont, full of sunny days and cool nights and a starry sky over the green folds of earth. It’s a place where time moves differently, and after we are there for a while, we, move with the time of the place.
We had occasional company, but not too often or too much, and mostly on the weekends. Town was six miles on a dirt road, and twenty miles away was a fair-sized artist colony with a summer symphony and theater and a great many people to talk to if we got lonely. But our visits there were few, two or three times a summer, and we were rarely lonely in the way people understand loneliness. Down the road about a mile lived our nearest neighbor, an old widower named Glenn Olson, who made honey in the summer and maple sugar in the winter. Both were delicious. His maples were old and strong and his bees worked among the wild flowers in the abandoned pastures.
I had been meaning to visit him for both honey and sugar, but put it off from day to day. On the third week the thing happened in the cities. But until then, nothing was very different, only the warm summer days and the birds and the insects humming lazily in the hot air. We could have forgotten the whole thing if only we had disbelieved; but somewhere in both of us was a nugget of belief. We had a postcard from Basehart, who was in the Virgin Islands, where he was cataloguing species and types of insects. The postcard ended with a rather sentimental good-by. Neither my wife nor I remarked on that because, as I said, we had a nugget of belief.
And of course, then, toward the beginning of the summer, the cities died.
There had been a great deal of speculation about the insects and what they might do if they were as some thought. Articles were written, books rushed into print, and even films were planned. There were nightmare things about super-insects, armies of ants, winged devils; but no one anticipated the simple directness of the fact. The insects simply moved against the cities to begin it. Apparently a single intelligence controlled all the movements of the insects, and the millions who perished made no great difference to the survival of the intelligence. They filled the aqueducts and stopped the flow of water. They short-circuited the wires and halted the flow of electricity. They ate the food in the cities and swarmed by the millions over the food coming in. They clogged the valves and intakes of motors and stalled them. They clogged the sewers and they spread disease and the cities died. The insects died by the billions, but this time it was not necessary to kill them. They imposed death on themselves, and the festering, malaria-ridden, plague-ridden cities died with them.
First we watched it happen on television, but the television went very soon. We have a relay tower, and it ceased to function on the third day after the attack on the cities began; after that the picture was so bad as to be meaningless, and a few days later it ceased. We listened to the radio then, until the radio stopped. Then there was the valley as it had always been, and the silence, and the insects hanging in the hot air and the sunlight and the nights.
My own feeling was to drive down to the town, and from day to day I felt that this had to be, but my wife would not have it. Her dread of leaving our place and going to the town was so great that it was not until our food began to run low that she agreed to my going—providing she went with me. Our own telephone had stopped functioning long ago, and it was only after days of not seeing a plane overhead that we realized no planes flew any longer.
Driving down toward town finally, we stopped at Glenn Olson’s place, to ask him whether he knew how it was in the village, and perhaps to buy some honey and sugar. We found him in his bedroom, dead—not long dead, perhaps only a day. He had been stung three times on the forearm while he slept. My wife had been a nurse once, and she explained the process whereby three consecutive bee stings would work to kill a man. The air outside was full of bees, humming, working, hanging in the air.
“I think we’ll go back to the house,” I said.
“We can’t leave him like that.”
“We can,” I said, thinking of how many millions of others were like that.
Olson had a well-stocked cupboard. I filled some bags with canned goods, flour, beans, honey in jars, and maple sugar, and I carried them out to my car, while Jane remained in the house. Then I pulled the blanket over Olson and took Jane by the arm.
“I don’t want to go out there,” she said.
“Well, we must, you know. We can’t stay here.”
“I’m afraid.”
“But we can’t stay here.”
Finally I convinced her to come to the car. Her arms were covered and she held a towel over her face, but the bees ignored us. In the car we raised the windows and drove back to our summer place—and then almost ran into our house.
Yet I got over the panic and resisted the temptation to cover myself with mosquito netting. I talked to Jane and finally convinced her that this was not a thing one could avoid or take measures against. It was like the wind, the rain, the sunrise and the sunset. It was happening and nothing we could do would alter it.
“Alan—will it be everyone?” she asked. “Will it be the whole world?”
“I don’t know.”
“What good would it do them to make it the whole world?”
“I don’t know.”
“I would not want to live if it were the whole world.”
“It’s not a question of what we want. It’s the way it is. We can only live with it the way it is.”
Yet when I went out to the car to bring in the supplies we had taken from Olson’s place, I had to call upon every shred of courage and strength I possessed.
It was a little better the next day, and by the third day I convinced Jane to leave the house with me and to walk a little. She covered herself at first, but after a while her fear began to dissipate, and then, bit by bit, it became something you live with—as I suppose anything can. The following week I sat down to write this account. I have been working on it for three days. Yesterday a bee lighted on the back of my hand, a large, fuzzy, working bumblebee. I held my hand firmly and looked at the bee, and the bee returned my stare.
Then the bee flew away, and I had a feeling that it was over and that what would happen had happened. But how we will pick it up and what we will put together, I don’t know. I talked about it with my wife last night.
“I hope Basehart is alive and well,” she said. “It would be nice to see him again.” Which was rather curious, since all she knew about Basehart was what I had told her. Then she began to cry. She was not a woman who cries a great deal, and soon she dried her eyes and took up some sewing that she had laid aside weeks before. I lit my pipe. It was the last of the day. We sat there in silence as darkness fell.
I lit our single kerosene lamp, and she said to me, “We will have to go down to the village sooner or later, won’t we?”
“Sooner or later,” I agreed.
A Biography of Howard Fast
Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast’s commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his live
ly cinematic style.
Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast’s mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London’s The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.
Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.
Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast’s appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin’s purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.
Fast’s career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast’s books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).
Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side’s Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. “They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage,” Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he “fell in love with the area” and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.
Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother “had no childhood.” As a result of their mother’s death in 1923 and their father’s absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. “My brother was like a rock,” he wrote, “and without him I surely would have perished.”
A copy of Fast’s military identification from World War II. During the war Fast worked as a war correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater, writing articles for publications such as PM, Esquire, and Coronet. He also contributed scripts to Voice of America, a radio program developed by Elmer Davis that the United States broadcast throughout occupied Europe.
Here Fast poses for a picture with a fellow inmate at Mill Point prison, where he was sent in 1950 for his refusal to disclose information about other members of the Communist Party. Mill Point was a progressive federal institution made up of a series of army bunkhouses. “Everyone worked at the prison,” said Fast during a 1998 interview, “and while I hate prison, I hate the whole concept of prison, I must say this was the most intelligent and humane prison, probably that existed in America.” Indeed, Fast felt that his three-month stint there served him well as a writer: “I think a writer should see a little bit of prison and a little bit of war. Neither of these things can be properly invented. So that was my prison.”
Fast with his wife Bette and their two children, Jonathan and Rachel, in 1952. The family has a long history of literary achievement. Bette’s father founded the Hudson County News Company. Jonathan Fast would go on to become a successful popular novelist, as would his daughter, Molly, whose mother, Erica Jong, is the author of the groundbreaking feminist novel Fear of Flying. (Photo courtesy of Lotte Jacobi.)
Fast at a bookstand during his campaign for Congress in 1952. He ran on the American Labor Party ticket for the twenty-third congressional district in the Bronx. Although Fast remained a committed leftist his entire life, he looked back on his foray into national politics with a bit of amusement. “I got a disease, which is called ‘candidateitis,’” he told Donald Swaim in a 1990 radio interview. “And this disease takes hold of your mind, and it convinces you that your winning an election is important, very often the most important thing on earth. And it grips you to a point that you’re ready to kill to win that election.” He concluded: “I was soundly defeated, but it was a fascinating experience.”
In 1953, the Soviet Union awarded Fast the International Peace Prize. This photo from the ceremony shows the performer, publisher, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson delivering a speech before presenting Fast (seated, second from left) with the prestigious award. Robeson and Fast came to know each other through their participation in leftist political causes during the 1940s and were friends for many years. Like Fast, Robeson was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era and invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions. This led to Robeson’s work being banned in the United States, a situation that Robeson, unlike Fast, never completely overcame. In a late interview Fast cited Robeson as one of the forgotten heroes of the twentieth century. “Paul,” he said, “was an extraordinary man.” Also shown (from left to right): Essie Robeson, Mrs. Mellisk, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rachel Fast, and Bette Fast. (Photo courtesy of Julius Lazarus and the author.)
Howard and Bette Fast in California in 1976. The couple relocated to the West Coast after Fast grew disgruntled over the poor reception of his novel The Hessian. While in California, Fast temporarily gave up writing novels to work as a screenwriter, but, like many novelists before him, found the business disheartening. “In L.A. you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you are cheating on your wife,” he told People after he had moved back East in the 1980s. Of course, Fast, an ardent
nature-lover, did enjoy California’s scenic beauty and eventually set many of his novels—including The Immigrant’s Daughter and the bestselling Masao Masuto detective series—in the state.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1969, 1970 by Howard Fast
cover design by Jason Gabbert
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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