Denver Is Missing
Page 29
That was true….
“And then there’s my attitude! Good God, Mitch! You broke me loose from a nightmarish trauma, but that didn’t open me up for all men! You can be so dumb!” She glared at me in exasperation, her expression softened, maybe because I recoiled slightly, and she went on. “So we drank. I was about to turn in, and saw he was staring with real horror at the backrest behind me. Yeah, you’ve guessed, a spider! Maybe one of you brought it on board from the island. I didn’t like it much; short, black hairy legs it had— but when I tried to catch it, it scuttled away under the cushions.”
“So?”
“So this. Bill was sweating, and muttered something about sleeping on deck. That brought out the doctor in me. Whatever happened, it was vital that he get a good night’s rest, and he wouldn’t get that on deck. I made him take the bunk; I slept in the saloon, and,” she added reflectively, “I wasn’t so mighty keen, either.”
“That pipe…” I murmured, more to myself than her.
“Pipe—what pipe?” She looked puzzled. I told her the story, watching her face very carefully.
As I finished, the frown cleared and she smiled. “Really, Mitch. How can you be so stupid!”
“Hell, I’m not so sure—”
She flared up. “Well I am! To put it at its lowest, do you imagine I’d be laid by a guy smoking a pipe!” The smile broadened; the picture was too absurd. For the first time we laughed together.
And the laughter froze in our throats.
“Attention all personnel! Report to your anti-gas stations! Close all external doors and windows, assume AG Condition Two!”
“Oh no! What’s your station, Mitch?”
“I wouldn’t know—what’s Condition Two?”
“The fifteen-minute warning. We’d better get you to NRC HQ. It doesn’t matter about me; I’m not due on duty yet. Come on.” All around us doctors, nurses, and technicians were quietly finishing their drinks and leaving. They were taking it a lot more calmly than I felt. I mentioned this to Bette as we left.
“Could be an exercise, or a false alarm. We’re better organized now. Denver never knew what hit it; Fresno is a different proposition.”
I calmed down outside, for the air smelled fresh, none of that telltale coppery taste. There was a strong westerly wind.
The streets gave proof to Bette’s words. Marshals were shepherding people into shelters—buildings bearing a red triangle—and I saw my first “dome city.” On a vacant lot a plastic hemisphere, some eighty feet in diameter, was being inflated. A small compressor chugged away, the clear plastic flapping and crackling in the strong breeze.
“What’s that for? I thought proofing buildings was the answer.”
“No. That’s for animals.” SARAH had caused a fantastic upset of the ecological balance. Birds, for example, were rarer than five dollar gold pieces. With their frighteningly fast reproduction cycles, rats and mice had recovered all too soon; domesticated animals had a new value, horses for transport, dogs for guards, cats to fight vermin.
We passed a group of soldiers setting up a machine gun on a street corner, and the sight reminded me of the outlaws in the hills. If this was the return of SARAH, they would be gassed like gophers in their holes…. There flashed across my protesting mind a memory I had tried to forget, the glimpse I had, before we drove off, the girl, spread-eagled across the wing of the convertible by two men while the third mounted her like a dog on a bitch. But the shock was not in seeing what I already knew they were doing; for me the real horror lay in the fleeting emotion the sight aroused in me. I was no better than the soldiers….
Inside the double doors, which acted as an air-lock, NRC HQ mirrored the hospital activity. Emergency teams clattered around the marble floor of the foyer, checking equipment. Another facet of the human animal: ready to go out and risk his life for others. And that could be the soldiers, too….
“Let’s go upstairs,” said Bette. “People are psychologically conditioned to stay near the ground. Maybe we’ll get a little privacy up there.”
We walked up ten floors—and that was enough. We found an empty office, dusty and unused since SARAH. Papers still littered the big executive desk; a couple of potted plants trailed dead tendrils along the gritty grime of a filing cabinet top. The dirty window gave a fine view of the city.
It was a strange sight. Away to the north was a fragment of New Bay; blue, inviting, and terrible. Below us, the city of the dead. No cars moved; the sidewalks were empty. Above the desolate blue sky; no aircraft, no birds.
“Spooky,” observed Bette. “No, that’s not the word. Eerie? Whatever, if Denver had been half as ready—” She did not finish the sentence.
I sat down at the desk, glad of a rest after the stairs. “I guess we can’t smoke?”
She shook her head and sat down on the desk facing me, swinging her long legs. It was evening; details of the room were getting dim. Although I could not see clearly, I well knew the expression on her face. I didn’t want to come to the point.
“How come you—you are here?” I nearly said “found me,” but stopped in time.
She knew all right. “Simple. You said you were heading for California, and the Samoa base officer told me about NRC. I knew my place was back here, helping to rebuild.”
She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “We came back to San Diego—”
“Hold it,” I said. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Karen and I.” She sidetracked. “For two women, we got on pretty well, except toward the end. Sandra stopped us from fighting; a pity in a way, all this stupid business would have been straightened out. Pago Pago would have been marvelous—” She stopped abruptly; there were some things she didn’t want to say.
“What’s Karen doing?”
“She’s in your outfit; a secretary in L.A. HQ.”
“How come she left Bill?” I was making conversation— as if I couldn’t guess the answer to that one.
“In Pago Pago you were too wrapped up in yourself to see, but Karen was goddam mad at Bill—had been, ever since the atoll. The first night in, a lieutenant made a heavy play for her, and she welcomed it. Remember that evening? You found Bill and me on the porch. I told you—and him —she had turned in. I was covering.”
“She was holding hands with this guy?”
“Yep. I covered more for Bill’s sake than hers. Karen is a sexy number—as if you didn’t know!”
“You don’t think I ever laid her, do you?”
“No need to sound so scared, Mitch!” She reached forward and touched my knee reassuringly. “I’m sure you didn’t. Anyway, to finish this saga—
“Your letter really blew the lid off! Bill was so sore! Karen, like the born masochist she is, spilled the whole thing, including the news of her lieutenant. At once Bill was devastatingly polite, but you could practically see the frost around his eyes! She was, he said, a free agent and could do as she wished. He added with lethal politeness that that went for him too, and that what had been was now over.”
“Poor old Karen! She really collected!”
“Don’t feel too sorry for her. The gallant lieutenant is crazy about her! Writes every mail. For my money, they’re dangerously near getting married.”
“And Bill?”
“Secretly, I think he’s rather glad it’s finished. He was very anxious to set off for England as soon as Mayfly was ready.” She laughed. “I don’t think he liked the idea of having a woman aboard while he was battling around Cape Horn!”
“Except you.”
“Yes.” She did not try to evade it. “True—but do please try to get it into your head that / wouldn’t want to go!” She fumbled in her bag and produced a crumpled envelope. Her tone was very neutral. “Bill sent you this.”
I took it and went over to the window for extra light. The letter was dated two days after my departure from Samoa.
/Dear Mitch,
It would be a waste of time to indulge in recrimination. We were all c
aught up in a difficult situation, and by and large I think we behaved pretty well.
It is most unlikely our paths will cross again. I’m off soon for England, but I wanted you to know I was glad to have you aboard, and very glad indeed when we reached the atolls.
Regarding Bette, you have my word that what Karen imagined was imagination. I would have taken Bette off you like a shot, but she was not interested. Finally,
I hope you know me well enough to appreciate that if I had stood a chance, I would not have kept my aims secret.
I’m off soon, alone. It is sad about Karen, but that is the way things go. Mayfly is once more in fine shape— we did a good job with that patch—and Bette, ever on the ball, got the shore people to fumigate the boat. She assures me no spider could possibly survive, bless her.
One final word, which is not meant to be impertinent. Don’t fool around, you’ll never find anyone half as good as Bette.
All the best, Bill
I read the letter twice, then folded it carefully. “Yes,” I said.
“Yes, what?”
I was saved further explanation by the wild howl of a siren on the roof. The mournful wailing was taken up by others across the city.
“That’s the ‘alarm canceled’ signal.”
“Why don’t they use it for alarms as well? It’s a Godawful noise.”
She saw I was changing the subject. “I wouldn’t know.” Slowly she got off the table.
I was at a loss for something to say, and turned again to the window, waiting for her to say something. All I heard was the door shutting quietly.
Half-heartedly I called, “Hey, Bette!” It was no good; she had her pride. It was up to me. I looked again out of the window. No glitter of lights to greet the onset of the dark, no streams of headlights to ribbon the highways, only the occasional car, the infrequent streetlight. For a long time I stared, unseeing, my mind oscillating between Fresno and Bette.
Of course I believed her, and I believed Bill. But it would have been nice to have had Karen’s view.
/Bette had been right; it was a false alarm. As a Grade Two Corpsman, I had right of entry into the operations room. The latest plot of the advancing SARAH cloud showed it north of Hawaii. It was estimated to be nine hundred miles long and four hundred wide, and there were smaller patches around this central body. The false alarm had been for what had looked like one of these. These concentrations were regarded as lethal, marked in glaring red on the map. Around it were larger yellow areas; these had a “discomfort” rating…. Behind these sinister blotches, trailed storms. Thunder, hail, and torrential rain would dog SARAH to the end.
It was comforting to see the degree of readiness, and to note that the warning system extended to fieldworkers. Until we all had radios, the Army was responsible for us. Of course, there were fewer problems; millions had died in the first cataclysm, and there were fewer cities to worry over: Seattle, Boise, Chicago, Denver, and a dozen others, hundreds of towns….
By the time I wandered into the NRC canteen, all that was at the back of my mind. Callous, tough, but that is the way it was; the mind can stand only so much. NRC coffee was no better than the hospital variety, thin and watery, but at least it was no longer rationed. I sat alone, thinking of Bette. I played with the idea of calling Karen, which was possible, if illegal, over the NRC network, but decided against it. The canteen, full of strange faces, intensified my feeling of loneliness, and I left. It was too early to get sacked up, and I plodded aimlessly around town, and of course, ended up in front of the hospital.
Bette was busy, but I got a message to her; I would wait in the commissary.
Half an hour passed. I turned over in my mind what I had to say, part of my brain doodling. What difference had SARAH made to this mess hall? Paper was scarce; the napkin dispensers were empty, so the clutter on the tables was less, but there was more spilled soup and coffee. On the other hand, no one left food half-eaten.
Bette arrived, white-coated, stethoscope hung around her neck. She got a cup of coffee and sat down opposite me. Without a word, she made it plain that the ball was in my court, and I was right back, fumbling. “I’m sorry, I was kinda slow.’- I forced a grin. “You got out so fast!” She went on stirring her coffee, no help at all.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you—”
She spoke quietly. “Did you call Karen?”
“No,” I said thankfully. “Thought about it, but didn’t.”
“Why not, Mitch?”
“Does it matter?”
“To me it does.”
“Well, I figured that either I trusted you, or I didn’t.”
She stopped playing with her cup and spoon. “Look at me, Mitch—please. Now—d’you really mean that?”
“Why, sure I mean it!”
“And you honestly believe there was nothing between Bill and me?”
“Yes.”
She smiled and relaxed slightly, unbuttoning her coat. She handed me another battered envelope—from Karen.
Dear Mitch,
I’m not much good at writing! This is just to tell you how ashamed and sorry I am. I was mad and jealous and wrong about Bette. He would have had her, but I’m SURE she didn’t! I was mad! SORRY, SORRY, Mitch—forgive me!
Bette will tell you about Marvin! A great guy!! If you get to L.A. look me up and bring Bette! In haste!
Love,
Karen
I crumpled the letter, uncomfortable under Bette’s gaze. “It may be habit-forming, but how about a breath of air?” I couldn’t talk in that place. Walking up the dark stairway, I got it out.
“Bette—can you forgive me?”
She took my arm. Together we walked out into the gloriously fresh air, scented with flowers, free of fumes. SARAH would be back, but we’d lick it….
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19