Chains of the Sea

by Robert Silverberg

  “I’m not deducing,” I said testily. “I’m hoping.”

  “It’s grotesque.”

  “And then there’ll be riots, but the officials will be helpless, and more and more people will start hemorrhaging. We’ll have a world of hemophiliacs! And before anybody can do anything about it, it’ll be too late. We won’t have to wait until all the food vanishes.” I was very excited, but worried, too, because my hypothesis was built on rather thin evidence.

  “Your hypothesis is pretty shaky,” said Dr. Johnson, echoing my thoughts in that winsome manner of his.

  I decided to perform a serious experiment. I felt it prudent to know the truth before I returned to Cleveland, so that I might be ready for the worst. That night, after Dr. Johnson and I had retired to our sleeping bags, I pretended to fall asleep quickly. Dr. Johnson had no difficulty dropping off, after the long, exciting day on the water. I crept from my zippered bag and moved soundlessly to his side. I made a careful incision on the inside of his arm with my scaling knife, about one half inch long and deep enough to start a copious flow of blood; I also could not avoid rousing him from his slumber.

  “What are you doing?” he asked sleepily.

  “Binding you with stout cords,” I said, which is what I was doing at that point. I suppose I ought to have done that first; that’s what experiments are for, to learn these things. I made a mental note.

  He complained that the incision gave him some discomfort. I opened the first-aid kit and allowed him two aspirins, no water. Then I sat down to wait for results; the blood ran freely, never slowing down during a period of fifteen minutes. I tried to stanch the rivulet with a gauze pad, but that had no effect. By morning Dr. Johnson’s heart had pumped enough of the viscid fluid to foul his sleeping bag beyond possible hope of cleansing. I said good-bye to my friend and went outside to wait for the boat to take me back to Cleveland.

  It was very cold. The oil companies had stopped delivering fuel, and the day before the Morans’ apartment building had burned its last. Paul and Linda lay in bed, bundled as warmly as they could manage, but still shivering and exhausted from a poor night’s sleep.

  “I ought to go out today,” said Paul. “I could get us a stove that burned wood and stuff. And we’ll need more food soon.”

  “Don’t go, Paul. I’m sure the baby’s due today. I just know it. You won’t be able to find a doctor, and I don’t want to be alone when it comes.”

  Paul threw back the pile of clothing and blankets angrily. “Oh, I don’t know anymore,” he said, getting up and pacing the floor. “I can’t see that I’ll be any use whether I’m here or gone.”

  “I need you, Paul,” she said. “We need each other. We just don’t have anybody else in the world anymore.”

  He looked at her, lying helpless beneath the ineffectual layers of material. Her face had become lined with worry; her hair, once her greatest pride in whatever shrill tint it wore, was matted and dull. The mythical glow of motherhood had somehow passed her by, but Paul didn’t mind that. He saw her now in a way he had never imagined possible. The heavy weight of life in the newly hard times had crushed all the false, selfish values she had cherished. Without the neurotic need to create problems, she had become a saner, truer person. He hoped fervently that the same thing had happened to himself.

  “You were right,” he said flatly. “You were always right. We should have gotten out of the city when we had the chance. Now it’s too late; we’re stuck here.”

  “Only until the baby comes,” she said. “Then we can leave. I know things will be better. There’s no reason at all why we have to stay up north. If it’s going to be this bad, we may as well go down where it’s not so cold. We can even go to Mexico, maybe. And then we won’t have trouble about food—we can just pick it off the trees.” She smiled at him, and he felt very lonely.

  “So what happens when the baby comes? That scares me out of my mind.”

  “You’ve been reading that book I gave you, haven’t you? So don’t worry. Mine isn’t the first baby that’s ever been born; just do what it says. Other husbands have delivered. Policemen do it all the time.”

  “What if something goes wrong?”

  Linda forced another smile. “What’s to go wrong?” she asked. Paul could think of several things without trying very hard, but he said nothing.

  Paul stood by the window, praying that everything would turn out all right. Outside, the street seemed very hostile. The garbage had been accumulating for over a week, and as it spilled and blew across the sidewalks it gave the city a fearful, abandoned look. He thought that it was odd how closely the street’s appearance matched his own inner landscape.

  “How are your teeth today?” asked Linda.

  Paul turned around and laughed. “You’re about to have a kid right there by yourself, and you’re worried about my teeth.”

  “If you’re not in good shape, you won’t be able to pull your weight,” she said with a mock-serious expression.

  “They’re still bleeding a lot,” said Paul. “They won’t stop. I would have thought they’d stop bleeding a long time ago.”

  “You’re not getting enough vitamins or something.”

  “I’m just tired of living off canned food. I’d love some good meat right now, but nobody around here’s got any.”

  “I’ve been bleeding, too,” said Linda in a small voice. “It started last night.”

  “I know. I guess it’s natural.”

  “I never heard of anything like that. I just want it to stop. The mattress is soaked.”

  “Now you’re the one who’s worrying too much,” said Paul.

  “You know what I’d like?”

  Paul sat by her on the edge of the bed. “No. What?”

  Linda smiled. “I think it would be great if one morning we woke up and all the cockroaches in the world were dead. It could happen, couldn’t it?”

  “Sure,” said Paul grimly. “But you know what everybody forgets in the middle of all his little problems? Maybe one morning the cockroaches will wake up and all the people will be dead. It could happen just as easy. I mean, if different animals and plants are going one after another, that probably means human beings will have a natural turn, too. From now on when we go to sleep at night, we’ll never be sure if we’ll wake up in the morning.”

  “I thought about that once, but I didn’t want to mention it. Anyway, you never know if you’ll wake up. You have to face that.”

  “There’s a big difference,” said Paul. “The idea of your own death is somewhere off in the hazy future. If you’re our age, dying in your sleep won’t be a serious probability for fifty years. But the extinction of everybody is different. I can’t accept it calmly, but it’s there, and I can’t fight against it. We’ll never know. It could happen tomorrow.”

  “No, tomorrow is a day for new babies,” said Linda. “I don’t want to talk about death anymore. We’re going to have a baby soon. It’s going to have to grow up in this falling-down world, but it’ll learn the new tricks fast. Our baby won’t have any trouble. Then, when we get old, he can take care of us; that’s funny to think about. You have to look at it that way, too, Paul. It’s not such an awful, hopeless situation. We’ve already made a lot of adjustments.” She squeezed his hand, and he kissed her lightly. “We just have to make a few more, that’s all,” she whispered weakly, a first tear beginning to trail down her dry cheek.

  “That’s all,” whispered Paul, watching the dark-red stain around her grow slowly larger.

  Chains of the Sea by GARDNER R. DOZOIS

  Gardner Dozois sold his first story in 1966, when he was seventeen; but then he entered the Army, serving in Europe as a military journalist, and four years went by before he appeared in print again as a science-fiction writer. Since then his stories have been published in many magazines and anthologies, he has edited an anthology himself (A Day in the Life, 1972), and he has begun work on a novel. Several of his short stor
ies have been nominees for the Nebula award, and his long novelette “A Special Kind of Morning” was a runner-up for both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1972. Mr. Dozois makes his home in Philadelphia.

  One day the aliens landed, just as everyone always said they would. They fell out of a guileless blue sky and into the middle of a clear, cold November day, four of them, four alien ships drifting down like the snow that had been threatening to fall all week. America was just shouldering its way into daylight as they made planetfall, so they landed there: one in the Delaware Valley about fifteen miles north of Philadelphia, one in Ohio, one in a desolate region of Colorado, and one—for whatever reason—in a cane field outside of Caracas, Venezuela. To those who actually saw them come down, the ships seemed to fall rather than to descend under any intelligent control: a black nailhead suddenly tacked to the sky, coming all at once from nowhere, with no transition, like a Fortean rock squeezed from a high-appearing point, hanging way up there and winking intolerably bright in the sunlight; and then gravity takes hold of it, visibly, and it begins to fall, far away and dream-slow at first, swelling larger, growing huge, unbelievably big, a mountain hurled at the earth, falling with terrifying speed, rolling in the air, tumbling end over end, overhead, coming down—and then it is sitting peacefully on the ground; it has not crashed, and although it didn’t slow and it didn’t stop, there it is, and not even a snowflake could have settled onto the frozen mud more lightly.

  To those photo reconnaissance jets fortunate enough to be flying a routine pattern at thirty thousand feet over the Eastern Seaboard when the aliens blinked into their airspace, to the automatic, radareyed, computer-reflexed facilities at USADCOM Spacetrack East, and to the United States Aerospace Defense Command HQ in Colorado Springs, although they didn’t have convenient recon planes up for a double check—the picture was different. The highspeed cameras showed the landing as a process: as if the alien spaceships existed simultaneously everywhere along their path of descent, stretched down from the stratosphere and gradually sifting entirely to the ground, like confetti streamers thrown from a window, like slinkys going down a flight of stairs. In the films, the alien ships appeared to recede from the viewpoint of the reconnaissance planes, vanishing into perspective, and that was all right, but the ships also appeared to dwindle away into infinity from the viewpoint of Spacetrack East on the ground, and that definitely was not all right. The most constructive comment ever made on this phenomenon was that it was odd. It was also odd that the spaceships had not been detected approaching Earth by observation stations on the Moon, or by the orbiting satellites, and nobody ever figured that out, either.

  From the first second of contact to touchdown, the invasion of Earth had taken less than ten minutes. At the end of that time, there were four big ships on the ground, shrouded in thick steam—not cooling off from the friction of their descent, as was first supposed; the steam was actually mist: everything had frozen solid in a fifty-foot circle around the ships, and the quick-ice was now melting as temperatures rose back above freezing—frantic messages were snarling up and down the continent-wide nervous system of USADCOM, and total atomic war was a hair’s breadth away. While the humans scurried in confusion, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) created by MIT/Bell Labs linked itself into the network of high-speed, twentieth-generation computers placed at its disposal by a Red Alert Priority, evaluated data thoughtfully for a minute and a half, and then proceeded to get in touch with its opposite number in the Soviet. It had its own, independently evolved methods of doing this, and achieved contact almost instantaneously, although the Pentagon had not yet been able to reach the Kremlin—that didn’t matter anyway; they were only human, and all the important talking was going on in another medium. AI “talked” to the Soviet system for another seven minutes, while eons of time clicked by on the electronic scale, and World War III was averted. Both Intelligences finally decided that they didn’t understand what was going on, a conclusion the human governments of Earth wouldn’t reach for hours, and would never admit at all.

  The only flourish of action took place in the three-minute lag between the alien touchdown and the time AI assumed command of the defense network, and involved a panicked general at USADCOM HQ and a malfunction in the—never actually used- fail-safe system that enabled him to lob a small tactical nuclear device at the Colorado landing site. The device detonated at point- blank range, right against the side of the alien ship, but the fireball didn’t appear. There didn’t seem to be an explosion at all. Instead, the hull of the ship turned a blinding, incredibly hot white at the point of detonation, faded to blue-white, to a hellish red, to sullen tones of violet that flickered away down the spectrum. The same pattern of precessing colors chased themselves around the circumference of the ship until they reached the impact point again, and then the hull returned to its former dull black. The ship was unharmed. There had been no sound, not even a whisper. The tactical device had been a clean bomb, but instruments showed that no energy or radiation had been released at all.

  After this, USADCOM became very thoughtful.

  Tommy Nolan was already a half hour late to school, but he wasn’t hurrying. He dawdled along the secondary road that led up the hill behind the old sawmill, and watched smoke go up in thick black lines from the chimneys of the houses below, straight and unwavering in the bright, clear morning, like brushstrokes against the sky. The roofs were made of cold gray and red tiles that winked sunlight at him all the way to the docks, where clouds of sea gulls bobbed and wheeled, dipped and rose, their cries coming faint and shrill to him across the miles of chimneys and roofs and aerials and wind-tossed treetops. There was a crescent sliver of ocean visible beyond the dock, like a slitted blue eye peering up over the edge of the world. Tommy kicked a rock, kicked it again, and then found a tin can which he kicked instead, clattering it along ahead of him. The wind snatched at the fur on his parka, puff, momentarily making the cries of the sea gulls very loud and distinct, and then carrying them away again, back over the roofs to the sea. He kicked the tin can over the edge of a bluff, and listened to it somersault invisibly away through the undergrowth. He was whistling tunelessly, and he had taken his gloves off and stuffed them in his parka pocket, although his mother had told him specifically not to, it was so cold for November. Tommy wondered briefly what the can must feel like, tumbling down through the thick ferns and weeds, finding a safe place to lodge under the dark, secret roots of the trees. He kept walking, skuff-skuffing gravel very loudly. When he was halfway up the slope, the buzz saw started up at the mill on the other side of the bluff. It moaned and shrilled metallically, whining up through the stillness of the morning to a piercing shriek that hurt his teeth, then sinking low, low, to a buzzing, grumbling roar, like an angry giant muttering in the back of his throat. An animal, Tommy thought, although he knew it was a saw. Maybe it’s a dinosaur. He shivered deliciously. A dinosaur!

  Tommy was being a puddle jumper this morning. That was why he was so late. There had been a light rain the night before, scattering puddles along the road, and Tommy had carefully jumped over every one between here and the house. It took a long time to do it right, but Tommy was being very conscientious. He imagined himself as a machine, a vehicle—a puddle jumper. No matter that he had legs instead of wheels, and arms and a head, that was just the kind of ship he was, with he himself sitting somewhere inside and driving the contraption, looking out through the eyes, working the pedals and gears and switches that made the ship go. He would drive himself up to a puddle, maneuver very carefully until he was in exactly the right position, backing and cutting his wheels and nosing in again, and then put the ship into jumping gear, stomp down on the accelerator, and let go of the brake switch. And away he’d go, like a stone from a catapult, up, the puddle flashing underneath, then down, with gravel jarring hard against his feet as the earth slapped up to meet him. Usually he cleared the puddle. He’d only splashed down in water once this morning, and he’d jumped puddles almost two feet across. A
pause then to check his systems for amber damage lights. The board being all green, he’d put the ship in travel gear and drive along some more, slowly, scanning methodically for the next puddle. All this took considerable time, but it wasn’t a thing you could skimp on—you had to do it right.

  He thought occasionally, Mom will be mad again, but it lacked force and drifted away on the wind. Already breakfast this morning was something that had happened a million years ago—the old gas oven lighted for warmth and hissing comfortably to itself, the warm cereal swimming with lumps, the radio speaking coldly in the background about things he never bothered to listen to, the gray hard light pouring through the window onto the kitchen table.

  Mom had been puffy-eyed and coughing. She had been watching television late and had fallen asleep on the couch again, her cloth coat thrown over her for a blanket, looking very old when Tommy came out to wake her before breakfast and to shut off the humming test pattern on the TV. Tommy’s father had yelled at her again during breakfast, and Tommy had gone into the bathroom for a long time, washing his hands slowly and carefully until he heard his father leave for work. His mother pretended that she wasn’t crying as she made his cereal and fixed him “coffee,” thinned dramatically with half a cup of cold water and a ton of milk and sugar, “for the baby,” although that was exactly the way she drank it herself. She had already turned the television back on, the moment her husband’s footsteps died away, as if she couldn’t stand to have it silent. It murmured unnoticed in the living room, working its way through an early children’s show that even Tommy couldn’t bear to watch. His mother said she kept it on to check the time so that Tommy wouldn’t be late, but she never did that. Tommy always had to remind her when it was time to bundle him into his coat and leggings and rubber boots—when it was raining—for school. He could never get rubber boots on right by himself, although he tried very hard and seriously. He always got tangled up anyway.