Whitlaw stopped and took a breath. I found myself wondering again about his limp, where he had gotten it. He covered it well. I hadn't noticed it until someone else pointed it out to me. He looked at the girl whose comment had sparked this discussion as if to say, "Do you get it?"
She made a mistake. A little one, but it was enough. She sniffed.
Whitlaw's expression froze. I'd never seen him looking so angry. He said quietly, "You know something? If you were a whore, you'd probably starve to death."
Nobody laughed. Nobody dared to.
Whitlaw leaned in close to her, his face only inches away from hers. In a stage whisper, he said, "You've been ripped off. You've been allowed to turn yourself into an egocentric, selfish, spoiled brat-a self-centered, empty-headed, painted little cock-tease. You think the sanctity of your genitals is important? You're already a whore and you don't even know it!"
"You can't talk to me that way-" She started to rise-but Whitlaw didn't back away. He leaned in even closer. There was no room for her to rise, and she fell back in her seat. "Listen, I've seen you. You shake your tits and simper and expect the football team to fight for the privilege of sitting next to you in the cafeteria. You pout at Daddy and he hands you his credit cards. Someday you'll make a deal to screw twice a week and some poor sucker will give you a house and a car and a gold ring to wear. If that isn't whoring, I don't know what is. The only difference between you and a licensed courtesan is that he or she gives honest service."
"Hold on there-!" One of the fellows in the back of the room stood up suddenly. He was red in the face. He looked ready to punch Whitlaw. I didn't know whether to be scared for him or Whitlaw.
"Sit down, son!"
"No! You can't badger her like that!"
"How would you like me to badger her? Sit down!" Whitlaw turned to the rest of us, not bothering to look and see if the fellow had followed instructions or not. "How many of you think I'm out of line here?"
Most of the class raised their hands. Some didn't. Not me. I didn't know what to think.
"So get this! I don't care what you think! I've got a job to do! And if that means hitting some of you broadside with a shovel, I'll do it-because it seems to be the only way to get your attention! Listen, dammit! I am not a babysitter! Maybe in some of your other classes they can pour the stuff over you like syrup and hope some of it will stick; but in this class, we do it my waybecause my way produces results! This class comes under the authority of the Universal Service Act-and it's about growing up!" He poked the girl harshly. "You can go home and complain to your daddy if you want-I know who you are-and he can go and complain to the draft board. Mean old Mr. Whitlaw is picking on Daddy's little girl! They'll just laugh in his face. They hear three or four of those a week. And they love them-it proves I'm doing my job." He leaned in close to her again. "When things get uncomfortable, do you always run to Daddy? Are you going to spend the rest of your life looking for daddies to defend you against the mean old Mr. Whitlaws of the world? Listen, here's the bad news-you're going to be a grownup soon! You don't get to do that anymore!" He reached out and took her chin in his hand and pointed her face back toward him. "Look at me, Patricia-don't hide from it! There are tigers outside-and you are fat and plump and tender. My job is to toughen you up, so you have a chance against them. If I let you get away with this bullshit that you run on everybody else, I'd be ripping you off of the opportunity to learn that you don't need it. That you're bigger than all of that `sweet little Daddy's girl' garbage. So leave it at the door from now on. You got that?"
She started to cry. Whitlaw pulled a tissue from his pocket and dropped it on the desk in front of her. "That racket won't work in here either." She glared at him, then took it and wiped at her eyes quickly. For the rest of the session she was very quiet and very thoughtful.
Whitlaw straightened and said to the rest of us, "That applies to the rest of you too. Listen, this is about service. Most of you are operating in the context that the obligation is some kind of chore, something to be avoided. Do you know you're cheating yourself? The opportunity here is for you to use the resources of the United States government to make a profound difference for yourselves and the people you share this planet with. And we'll be talking about specifics later in the course. You just need to get one thing-this isn't about you serving others as much as it's about you serving yourselves." He stumped to the back of the room and faced the entire class. We had to turn in our seats to see him. His face was flushed, his eyes were piercing.
"Listen," he said. "You know about the Millennium Treaties -the final act of the Apocalypse. I know what you've been taught so far. In order to guarantee world peace, the United States gave up its right to have an international military force. We lost a war -and this time, we had to take the responsibility for it, Never again would an American president have the tools of reckless adventurism at such casual disposal-it's too dangerous a risk. The Apocalypse proved that.
"So what we have instead is the Teamwork Army-and what that means to you is that your service obligation is no longer a commitment to war, but a commitment to peace. It's an opportunity to work not just here, but anywhere in the world, if you so choose, attacking the causes of war, not the symptoms."
Abruptly, Whitlaw stopped there. He shoved both his hands into his jacket pockets and returned to the front of the room. He stood there with his back to us, peering at his notes on the podium. He stood like that long enough for the classroom to become uncomfortable. Some of us traded nervous glances. Without looking up from his clipboard, Whitlaw said quietly, "Paul, you have a question?"
It was Paul Jastrow, in the back of the room. How had Whitlaw known that? "Yeah," said Paul, standing up. "I've been reading here"-he held up one of the texts-"our situation is like that of Germany at the end of World War One, right?"
Whitlaw turned around. "In what way?"
"Well, we're being punished for starting a war. So we're not allowed to have the kind of military that could be used for starting another war, right?"
Whitlaw nodded. "One thing-in our case, it isn't a punishment. It's a commitment."
"Yeah," said Paul. "I hear you-but the terms of it are the same, no matter what you call it. We don't have a real armynot one that carries guns." He looked angry.
"Only the domestic service, of course," Whitlaw noted. "But essentially, you're right. So what's the question?"
"I'm getting to it. It's this `Teamwork Army'-" He said it with disdain. "It sounds an awful lot like what the Germans had after World War One. They had all these work camps and youth groups and they drilled with shovels instead of rifles and they did public works and all that kind of thing. And all that was really just a fake, because when the time came, these guys put down their shovels and picked up rifles and turned into a real army again. And we know how that turned out."
"Yeah," said Whitlaw. "So?"
"So-what about our so-called Teamwork Army? I mean, couldn't they be turned back into a military force?"
Whitlaw smiled. For some reason, it made him look dangerous. "Yep," he said, looking straight at Paul.
"Well-?" asked Paul. "Well what?"
"Was that intentional?"
"I don't know." Whitlaw's tone was casual. Perhaps he really didn't know.
"Well, doesn't that mean the Teamwork Army's a fake?"
"Is it?" Whitlaw asked. "You tell me."
Paul looked uncertain. "I don't know," he said.
Whitlaw stood there for a moment, waiting. He looked at Paul, he glanced around the room at the rest of us, then looked back to Paul. "Is that an observation, Paul, or is there a question in there somewhere?"
"Uh, yeah. There's a question in there, but I don't know what it is. It's just-I don't get it."
"I see that. And thanks for being honest about it-that's good. So let me work with that for a second. Let's start with the facts about the Teamwork Army. These are men who are building things. People who build things tend to be very defensive about the thing
s they build. It's called territoriality. It turns out they make very good soldiers. Yes, the possibility is there. The Teamwork Army could be converted to a regular military force in ... oh, let me see, now-what did that report say?" He made a show of returning to his clipboard and calling up a specific page of notes. "Ah-twelve to sixteen weeks."
He paused. He let it sink in. He looked around the classroom, meeting the gaze of everyone who dared to look at him. I think we were horror-struck; I know I was. It wasn't the answer I wanted to hear. After a long, uncomfortable silence, Whitlaw said quietly, "So what?" He stepped out into the middle of the room again. "The question is not why is that possibility there-because there is always that possibility of military adventurism-the question is what, if anything, do we do about it?"
Nobody answered.
Whitlaw grinned at us. "That's what this course is about. That responsibility. Eventually it's going to be yours. So your assignment is to look at how you'd like to handle it. What would you do with the army? It's your tool. How do you want to use it? We'll talk about that tomorrow. Thank you, that'll be it for today." He returned to the podium, picked up his clipboard and left the room.
Huh-? We sat and looked at each other. Was that it? Patricia looked unhappy. "I don't like it," she said. "And I still don't know what to do about my draft board."
Somebody poked her. "Don't worry about it," he said. "You'll think of something. You've got time."
But he was wrong.
She didn't have time-and neither did any of the rest of us. She was dead within six months. And so were most of the rest of my classmates.
EIGHT
WHEN THE plagues first appeared, the medical community assumed they were of natural origin, simple mutations of already familiar diseases. Hence the names: Black Peritonitis, African Measles, Botuloid Virus, Comatosis and Enzyme Reaction 42-that last one was particularly vicious. They were so virulent and they spread so fast that it wasn't until afterward that all of them were identified.
I remember Dad frowning as he read the newspaper each night. "Idiots," he muttered. "I'm only surprised it didn't happen sooner. Of course you're going to get plague if you put that many people into a place like Calcutta."
Within a couple of weeks, the frown gave way to puzzlement. "Rome?" he said. "I thought the Italians were more careful than that."
When it hit New York, Dad said, " `Nita, I think we should move up to the cabin for a few weeks. Jim, you'll come with us, of course."
"But, I've got school-"
"You can afford to miss it. I think I'll call your sister too." At first, the doctors thought they were dealing with only one disease-but one with a dozen contradictory symptoms. They thought that it took different forms, like bubonic and pneumonic plague. Then they thought that it was so unstable it kept mutating. Everyone had a theory: the super-jumbos were the vectors; we should ground all air travel at once and isolate the disease. Or the bacterio-ecology had finally developed a widespread tolerance for our antibiotics; we shouldn't have used them so freely in the past. Or it was all those experiments with fourth-dimensional physics; they were changing the atmosphere and causing weird new mutations. Things like giant centipedes and purple caterpillars.
The first wave swept across the country in a week. A lot of it was carried by the refugees themselves as they fled the East Coast, but just as much was spread by seemingly impossible leapfrog jumps. Airplanes? Or something else? There was no direct air service at all to Klamath, California, yet that city died before Sacramento.
I remember one broadcast; this scientist-I don't remember his name-was claiming that it was biological warfare. He said there were two kinds of agents: the Y-agents for which there were vaccines and antitoxins, and the X-agents for which there were no defenses at all. Apparently, he said, some of these X-agents must have been released, either accidentally or perhaps by terrorists. There was no other way to explain this sudden outbreak of worldwide uncontrollable death.
That idea caught on real fast. It made sense. Within days the country was in an uproar. Screaming for revenge. If you couldn't kill the germ, at least you could strike back at the enemy responsible for releasing it.
Except-who was that? There was no way of knowing. Besides -and this was the horrible thought-what if the bugs were ours? There were just as many people willing to believe that too.
After that, things fell apart real fast. We heard some of it on the short wave radio. It wasn't pretty.
We were fairly well isolated where we were, even more so after somebody went down to the junction one night and set the bridge on fire. It was an old wooden one and it burned for hours, until it finally collapsed into the stream below. Most of us who lived on the hill knew about the shallow place two miles upstream. If necessary you could drive a vehicle across there, but Dad had figured that the burned-out bridge would stop most refugees from trying to come up the mountain. He was almost right. One of our neighbors down the hill radioed us once to warn of a caravan of three land-rovers heading our way, but not to worry. A while later we heard some shooting, then nothing. We never heard anything more about it.
After that, however, Dad kept a loaded rifle near the door, and he taught all of us how to use it-even the kids. He was very specific in his instructions. If we did shoot someone, we were to burn the bodies, all their belongings, their cars, their animals and everything they had touched. No exceptions.
We stayed on the mountain all summer. Dad phoned in his programs until the phones stopped working; then he just kept working without sending them in. I started to ask him once why he kept on, but Mother stopped me. Later, she said to me, "Jim, it doesn't matter if there's ever going to be anyone again who'll want to play one of his games-he's doing them for himself. He has to believe-we all do-that there will be a future."
That stopped me. I hadn't thought about the future-because I hadn't comprehended the awesome scale of the pestilence. I had stopped listening to the radio early on. I didn't want to know how bad it was. I didn't want to hear about the dead dying faster than the living could bury them-whole households going to bed healthy and all of them dying before they awoke. I didn't want to hear about the bodies in the streets, the panic, the looting, the burnings-there had been a firestorm in Los Angeles. Was anybody left alive?
We stayed on the mountain all winter too. It was rough, but we managed. We had a windmill, so we had electricity-not a lot, but enough. We had a solar roof and a Trombe wall, we wore sweaters and we stayed warm. We'd used the summer to build a greenhouse, so we had vegetables, and when Dad brought down the deer, I understood why he had spent so much time practicing with the crossbow. We survived.
I asked him, "Did you know that something like this would happen?"
He looked up at me across the body of the deer. "Something like what?"
"The plagues. The breakdown."
"Nope," he said, wiping his forehead. The insides of that animal were hot. He bent back to his task. "Why do you ask?"
"Um, the crossbow, the cabin-and everything. Why this particular mountain? I always thought you were a little bit ... well, wobbly for making such a thing about being self-sufficient. Now it seems like awfully good planning."
He stopped and laid down his knife. He wiped the blood off his gloves. "It is impossible to work in weather like this." His breath was frosty in the air. "And I can't get a grip through these gloves. No, I didn't know-and yes, it was good planning. But it wasn't my idea. It was your grandfather's. I wish you could have known him better. He used to tell me that a man should be prepared to move suddenly at least three times in his life. That is, if you're planning to live a long life. You know why, of course. Pick any period of history, any place. It's hard to find seventy years of unbroken peace and quiet. Somebody's tree is always too crowded." He sighed. "When the screeching starts, it's time to go someplace quieter." He picked up the knife and went back to his evisceration of the buck. "Our family has a history of narrow escapes-wait a minute. Hold that-ah, there! One of you
r great-grandfathers left Nazi Germany in 1935. He kept heading west until he got to Dublin-that's why your name is McCarthy today. He forgot to marry your great-grandmother in a church."
"Oh," I said.
"Your grandfather bought this land in 1986. When land was still cheap. He put a prefab on it. Came up here every summer after that and built a little more. Never saw the sense of it myself until-let's see, it was before you were born-it would have had to have been the summer of '97. Right, we thought that was going to be the year of the Apocalypse."
"I know," I said. "We studied it in school."
He shook his head. "It's not the same, Jim. It was a terrifying time. The world was paralyzed, waiting to see if they would drop any more bombs. We were all sure that this was it-the big one. The panics were pretty bad, but we came through it all right, up here. We spent the whole year on this mountain-didn't come down till Christmas. The world was lucky that time. Anyway, that's what convinced me."
We began pulling the buck around and onto the sled. I said, "How long do you think we'll have to stay up here this time?" "Dunno. Could be a while-maybe even a couple years. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death took its time about dying out. I don't expect these plagues to be any different."
I thought about that. "What do you think we'll find when we do go back?"
"Depends."
"On?"
"On how many people have... survived. And who." He looked at me speculatively. "I think you'd better start listening to the radio with me again."
"Yes, sir."
About a month after that, we caught a broadcast out of Denver, the provisional capital of the United States. Martial law was still in effect. The thirty-six surviving members of Congress had reconvened and postponed the presidential election for at least six months. And the second-generation vaccines were proving nearly sixty percent effective. Supplies were still limited though.
Dad and I looked at each other and we were both thinking the same thing. The worst is over.
A Matter for Men watc-1 Page 5
