OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  An additional factor urged them on. During the years of the Atomic Age they had been living--like people of every city--with keen, increasing queasiness. It is not conducive to urban content to know that any of a dozen foreign governments can, or potentially can, blot out you and yours in an eye-twinkling. Indeed, for many years, people had been trickling away from cities everywhere-either openly giving their reason or offering some excuse.

  Finally, from the very onslaught of B Day, there had poured forth a succession of orders setting up various official hierocracies for the emergency--deputy police, wardens, and so on, along with the rationing of gasoline, restrictions on subway use, abrogation of power supply, and other such matters. Americans are not a patient people and of all Americans, New Yorkers are the most impatient. Unlike Britains, Russians, and Europeans, they had never accepted the brash contempt of the public exhibited continually both by government and industry after World War II. Nor had they become reconciled to bureaucratic rule. They had resented the multiplication of authorized agents and official personnel. Hence, not being schooled to such vicissitudes at the time of B

  Day, they lost their tempers. They left town. By midnight, the tunnels, bridges, and ferries could no longer be held open for the evacuation of casualties. By three in the morning, every bridge and every tunnel and every boat was swarming with one-way, antlike movement as New Yorkers abandoned New York. All the next day the human tide welled into metropolitan environs.

  The contagion spread to other cities as words began to form above them and in some instances even before their skies developed a C or a J or a P or an A or the like.

  Terror begat terror. Various metropolises were soon without electricity, water, food, gasoline, and so on. Fires began to rage in them. In no time, Cleveland, Detroit, Birmingham, Boston, Los Angeles, and other centers were in a condition like that of cities over which a powerful enemy has gained absolute control of the air.

  There is, of course, no general record of the total effect of this exodus. Towns, villages, hamlets, and lone farms were unprepared to house or to feed the scores of millions who descended upon them--rich refugees in limousines piled high with canned foods and guns--slum masses in rags and on foot, with nothing but fear and hunger to drive them ahead. Here and there some man of feudal abilities organized bands of the fugitives and these forcibly evacuated whole communities, taking possession of them--

  only to be driven out by bands better armed and more ruthless. Theft and violence became the national way of life; and murder--murder that took the lives of millions--the means to obtain a meal or a woman or a bauble in some as yet unsmashed village store window. City people had become the sworn enemies of country people--and vice versa.

  The Hindus and Mussulmans of India on the days after its liberation were more kindly disposed to one another than these--and dealt more mercifully.

  So it went--fire, blood and turmoil, death, epidemic and ruin.

  Only Russia maintained, for "a little while, the mask of order. No obscenity in its skies was able to break the disciplined ranks of the proletariat. But this calm--this grimly enforced maintenance of social decorum--was ultimately shattered. On the 3rd of September, while the Kremlin exulted over the downfall of each and every empire and democracy, there appeared, almost experimentally, over the city of Kiev the phrase: ЛЕНИН ДИСИВД

  No mere exposure of lewd words could faze the Soviets; but the hideous violation of the proprieties represented by the simple statement that "Lenin deceived" sent consternation whistling from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The next day, the sky of Moscow reported that Stalin had lied methodically; and the day after that, the people of Ordzhonikidze were informed that the Kremlin feasted, the party guzzled, the people starved. Russia rose against its government and Politburo heads were carried from city to city on stakes. Exodus followed. From the hot wheatfields of the Ukraine to the cool timberlands of Siberia, the panoply of death began.

  Last to enjoy the fruits of organized society, perhaps, were the atomic scientists and their families at Los Alamos. These persons, impounded by a series of fences and protected by guards trained not only to mistrust rumor, but to bear silently all knowledge of however weird a nature, and to shoot without asking questions, were protected through the precedents and methodologies of what is called security. The town and its laboratories were stocked with food and water against possible air attack and resultant isolation by radiation. Hence the planetary debacle, while it became known to the scientists, did not greatly affect the local status quo. The guards were ordered to destroy such bands of wandering refugees as made their way across the deserts to the vicinity. This was done.

  Meantime, the scientists took measures to study and if possible to arrest the universal disintegration of humanity.

  It is the custom of journalists (and it is the habit in fiction) to depict scientists as impractical, dreamy men, absent-minded, innocent, and not competent to deal with simple situations--men forever in need, like infants, of overseers. Nothing could possibly be further from the truth. Indeed, it may fairly be said that, had the people of the world understood this fallacy about scientists, they might themselves have been more scientific-

  -which is to say aware--and so prevented their catastrophe. Actually, it was known--

  known statistically--even before World War II, that scientists as a group were possessed of an all-round superiority over their fellows. They were not merely precocious, but like the precocious everywhere, they had on the average larger physiques, more strength and endurance, quicker reflexes, greater athletic ability, and better looks than common Homo sapiens. However, although this fact had been published a thousand times and proved in a hundred ways, the people preferred to cling to the myth that scientists were inept in all but their métier-naïve, absent-minded, and rather foolish.

  That but affords another index of the general foolishness.

  New York's tragedy convinced the farsighted physicists, chemists, biologists, and others at Los Alamos that the nation and possibly the world would be swept with unprecedented panic. The steps anent local guards which have been already described were immediately taken. Under Xerxes Cohn, the scientists organized research parties; in fifteen planes, they took off to study the situation at first hand. Within forty-eight hours they had assembled a full report of events in a dozen urban areas and of the gory melee in progress everywhere in the countryside. (They had, naturally, all the information available on the Words from Calk's first account in the Chicago papers, through Cummings's initial survey, to the latest military data--as well as reports of many great savants made before their own flights from various cities of the earth.) These data were now screened, and evaluated. Charts were prepared. A discussion meeting was held in the hall for top-secret conferences. Various papers were read, including the following:

  Tead's Hypothesis that energy, in whatever form, has a sort of subnuclear consciousness and will power and that the watery masses which made up clouds, revolted by the wretched spectacle of humanity, had taken up word--spelling as a form of rebuke, i.e., as Nature talking to human nature.

  Schilch's Theory that there were no words and that the whole grisly phenomenon was the result of mass autohypnosis. This proposition (which might valuably have been given further investigation) was discarded by the scientists for empirical reasons: they, themselves, they felt, could not be hypnotized and certainly their instruments could not be.

  (It will be noted that there was no discussion of the possibility that the scientists could be so hypnotized as uniformly to misread their instruments.)

  Boden's Proposal that the human unconscious mind actually formed the Words by telekinesis. To defend this (another idea worthy of deeper scrutiny) he cited J. B. Rhine--

  and was laughed off the rostrum.

  Jetefti's remarkably erudite Demonstration--following studies of cosmic radiation around various Words--studies of ionization, of stratospheric air currents, of polarization, of the uninterruptibility
of streams of neutrons, gamma rays, alpha particles, electrons, photons, and other forms of radiation with which the Words had been surrounded, of the Heaviside Layer, etc., etc.--that no external (i.e., interplanetary) agency or intelligence had projected the Words on city skies.

  Poglief's Discussion of God which concluded, "Religious Fundamentalism has been the recourse of millions, as might be expected. These persons hold either that God has permitted the Devil thus to rebuke humanity, which may be a sound moral observation but which is not good physics; or else that the Words represent the imminence of the Day of Judgment and the approach of the Opening of the Gates of Paradise. This latter theory, gentlemen, is not, I feel, borne out by the specific nature of the abundant tokens."

  Hearty laughter greeted this conclusion. And again--the opportunity to consider the nature of God, a third valuable occasion, was missed.

  Ultimately, it was decided that

  (a) No direct harm whatever had come from the Words

  (b) Thus the disaster was of psychological occasion, up to the present time

  (c) Wherefore Los Alamos should immure itself as a fort against all threat from the ravening masses, until

  (1) they calmed down (unlikely for years)

  (2) they all perished (not probable)

  (3) a manageable remnant remained (most likely)

  (d) In which last case Los Alamos could be the nucleus of a new and spreading social culture, factual and scientific in nature, which would gradually recapture and restrain humanity with a view

  (z) to establish a true freedom

  (y) to abolish racialism

  (x) to end wars

  (w) to limit birth to numbers the planet's resources could maintain indefinitely

  (v) by the use of genetics and eugenics to raise constantly all levels of health and intelligence

  (u) and thus to bring about the halcyon world which had been within the very grasp of the stupid species when they had all but destroyed themselves.

  So propitious was this program that a banquet to celebrate its inauguration was called for that night. The entire community, dressed in its best, assembled in a mood of new hope to dine from trestle tables in an airplane hangar.

  It was during this festival, while postprandial brandies were being served, that Xerxes Cohn stepped outdoors to take a breath of the thin, poignant night air of New Mexico and, perhaps, to turn a covertly exultant face upon the raw landscape; after all, through persons like himself, man would triumph despite man's folly and its cost. He stepped into the gloom, then, and because he was an astrophysicist as well as a nuclear expert, he turned his eyes to the familiar constellations. His stocky body grew stiff.

  There, in the region of Ursa Minor, glowed a hitherto unknown star--a nova of approximately the third magnitude. At once he called into the laughter-filled area behind him, "Oh, Tead! Schilchl Boden! Come on out! We've got a sign, too--a nova."

  People--including those summoned--began to join the great man and murmur with a sort of primitive awe. As they looked, the light from yet another new star--reaching the planet earth after years of journeying at its absolute speed--burst before their gaze. The sign was doubled in the heavens--and, soon enough, trebled. It was Jetefti--the Italian-Czech--whose keen imagination caused him first to whisper, "I say, Xerx, it couldn't be--

  ?"

  Silence fell everywhere. More novae flashed into being. And there could no longer remain a doubt amongst even the most skeptical of this enlightened residue of the race. The stars had set forth an unimaginably vast initial of their own, an

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  13

  The phone split my sleep. I was unready for the sound, or any sound, ripping open my peaceful bivouac-bayoneting dreams and my poor respite.

  I grabbed in the dark. "Yeahhhh?"

  "Can I come up?"

  "For God's sakes, Paul, what time is it?"

  "She's gone!"

  "Okay, okay. Where--?"

  "Downstairs! "

  I found the light. Four-fifteen. Went to the door and propped it open with a chair.

  Turned on the shower and stepped into it--letting the multiple streams rattle against my sleepy skull and sweep away the salty acids on my body.

  The door slammed. Paul stuck his head around the curtain. "I can't find her!"

  "For God's sakes, it's not that hot! She won't melt! Go get yourself some whisky.

  Or would you rather have coffee?"

  "Christ. What do I care?" His brow was fissured. Sweat had soaked his unshaved face--which he had wiped with hands increasingly grimed by junketing about the city all night. He looked like a hung-over mechanic.

  "You need a bath, yourself," I said, stepping out. "You don't understand! I've got to find her! Before she does anything desperate."

  "Look, Paul. If she's going to pull one, on the spur--it's pulled. If it's not done now--she won't hurry about it." I daubed myself with a towel; perspiration came immediately where the water had just been. It was muggier than Miami before a hurricane. "Don't get the idea that because it's your first, it's her primary emotional crisis, either! Marcia's been through a lot!" I opened the hot-water tap, let it run, and filled a tumbler. I went into the living room, took a jar of powdered coffee from the desk pigeonhole where I kept it, dumped in a couple of spoonfuls, went back, and stirred with my toothbrush handle. Then I took a couple of lumps of sugar from a horde I'd been accumulating at the Astolat's expense, plunked them in, and stirred more. I drank about half of the hot coffee and lit a cigarette.

  Paul had followed every step of this gambit. I felt a little less like a roused-up mummy with the coffee inside me, so I said, "I'm sorry as all hell, cooky. Tell me about it."

  "You did it!" His eyes despised me for a moment. Then tears came. "I guess I should have known enough not to bring her around to see you."

  "What did I do?"

  "Made her self-conscious. Made her think it wasn't ever going to work out for us.

  She said that when you looked at her it made her feel like a tart."

  It had gone the other way around: when she'd looked at me, she'd felt--not like a tart, necessarily--but not like a faithful wife, either. And I was being blamed for that. I skipped the point. "You two kids retired in good order."

  "That's what I thought. We got about a block away before she blew up."

  "I'm sorry."

  He tossed himself into a chair. He slipped down his tie and stared at me. "What in hell did you do?"

  "Nothing."

  "It wasn't--a pleasant-lunch. If all those idiotic things hadn't got us laughing--then paralyzed--"

  "Go on. She blew up?"

  "Sure. She said about a thousand crazy things--things like never being able to go around with me where people knew--because she realized she'd always see them knowing

  --and thinking. I had to get back to the lab. We've got the pile set at--we've got stuff cooking. I managed to calm her down enough so she promised to go home and get dinner.

  But when I got there--" He held out a note:

  Paul, dear--For people like us, it should always be quick, clean, permanent, and no hard feelings. I love you--that's why. M.

  "Sounds like--going away. Nothing more drastic."

  "Drastic enough! And she can't get away with that! I won't let her! We'd have made it."

  "What did you do? Bloodhound around the city?"

  "Went to her old apartment, first. Then--to the people who'd been her friends.

  Routing them out. Bribing doormen to let me knock and wake them up. Finally--when I ran out of ideas--I went to Hattie Blaine's. Good God--what a hideous place!"

  I skipped that one, too. It was no time to argue that Hat's, while it had a few dim facets of one sort or another, was in my opinion (or had been, anyhow)--rather enchanting. A kindlier spot than many a hearth or any city street.

  "What did Hat say?"

  "Ye gods! She talked. She talked the grimmest bunch of obscene sophistries I ever heard in my
life! She tried to get me drunk! She even tried to get one of the girls to--

  entertain me!"

  "It never passed through your cold, reasoning, scientific cranium that perhaps she was trying to be decent to you?"

  "Decent!'

  "Did she know where Marcia was?"

  "If she did--she wasn't saying. She said she had no idea on earth. Hadn't heard from her for months. Or seen her--naturally. I begged her--beseeched her--to give me any useful address. Any name. Any scrap of a suggestion--"

  I picked up the phone. After ringing me, the Astolat switchboard operator had fallen back to sleep and I listened to the buzz for a long while before she plugged in--

  irritably. The number I gave wasn't in the book. But Hattie wouldn't be asleep--yet. Not unless she'd changed.

  Viola answered and Hattie came on in a moment. "Hello, Phil. What's cooking?

  You and Gwen quarrel?"

  Since waking, I hadn't thought about Gwen--or Yvonne. The question startled me.

  "Nope," I said. "Gwen, incidentally, has--has gone out for a bit with a friend of mine.

  Nice gal, Gwen. It's about my nephew, Paul."

  "Oh. Is he there?"

  "Yeah."

  "Phil, that lad's in very bad shape."

  "Yeah."

  ' I'm serious. I know men. He's apt to do--anything!"

  "Yeah. Maybe so. Look. You don't have any ideas about Marcia--that you'd give me, but not him?"

  "Too many!"

  "I don't understand."

  "I couldn't very well give Paul the names and addresses of all the boys who have liked her, could I? In the shape he's in--he'd rout out God Almighty, or run a one-man posse through hell."

  "Yeah."