by William Tenn
“Hey!” he yelled, turning into the road. “Hey, look!”
Plunkett looked over his shoulder. Charlie Whiting was gesturing at him with his left hand, the forefinger pointing out and the thumb up straight.
“Look, Mr. Plunkett,” the old man called. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” He cackled hysterically and writhed over the steering wheel.
Rusty scuttled around the side of the house and after him, yipping frantically in ancient canine tradition.
Plunkett watched the receding car until it swept around the curve two miles away. He stared at the small dog returning proudly.
Poor Whiting. Poor everybody, for that matter, who had a normal distrust of crackpots.
How could you permit a greedy old codger like Whiting to buy your produce, just so you and your family wouldn't have to risk trips into town?
Well, it was a matter of having decided years ago that the world was too full of people who were convinced that they were faster on the draw than anyone else—and the other fellow was bluffing anyway. People who believed that two small boys could pile up snowballs across the street from each other and go home without having used them, people who discussed the merits of concrete fences as opposed to wire guardrails while their automobiles skidded over the cliff. People who were righteous. People who were apathetic.
It was the last group, Plunkett remembered, who had made him stop buttonholing his fellows at last. You got tired of standing around in a hair shirt and pointing ominously at the heavens. You got to the point where you wished the human race well, but you wanted to pull you and yours out of the way of its tantrums. Survival for the individual and his family, you thought—
Clang-ng-ng-ng-ng!
Plunkett pressed the stud on his stopwatch. Funny. There was no practice alarm scheduled for today. All the kids were out of the house, except Saul—and he wouldn't dare to leave his room, let alone tamper with the alarm. Unless, perhaps, Ann—
He walked inside the kitchen. Ann was running toward the door, carrying Dinah. Her face was oddly unfamiliar. “Saulie!” she screamed. “Saulie! Hurry up, Saulie!”
“I'm coming, momma,” the boy yelled as he clattered down the stairs. “I'm coming as fast as I can! I'll make it!”
Plunkett understood. He put a heavy hand on the wall, under the dinner-plate clock.
He watched his wife struggle down the steps into the cellar. Saul ran past him and out of the door, arms flailing. “I'll make it, poppa! I'll make it!”
Plunkett felt his stomach move. He swallowed with great care. “Don't hurry, son,” he whispered. “It's only judgment day.”
He straightened out and looked at his watch, noticing that his hand on the wall had left its moist outline behind. One minute, twelve seconds. Not bad. Not bad at all. He'd figured on three.
Clang-ng-ng-ng-ng!
He started to shake himself and began a shudder that he couldn't control. What was the matter? He knew what he had to do. He had to unpack the portable lathe that was still in the barn.
“Elliot!” his wife called.
He found himself sliding down the steps on feet that somehow wouldn't lift when he wanted them to. He stumbled through the open cellar door. Frightened faces dotted the room in an unrecognizable jumble.
“We all here?” he croaked.
“All here, poppa,” Saul said from his position near the aeration machinery. “Lester and Herbie are in the far room, by the other switch. Why is Josephine crying? Lester isn't crying. I'm not crying, either.”
Plunkett nodded vaguely at the slim, sobbing girl and put his hand on the lever protruding from the concrete wall. He glanced at his watch again. Two minutes, ten seconds. Not bad.
“Mr. Plunkett!” Lester Dawkins sped in from the corridor. “Mr. Plunkett! Herbie ran out of the other door to get Rusty. I told him—”
Two minutes, twenty seconds, Plunkett realized as he leaped to the top of the steps. Herbie was running across the vegetable garden, snapping his fingers behind him to lure Rusty on. When he saw his father, his mouth stiffened with shock. He broke stride for a moment, and the dog charged joyously between his legs. Herbie fell.
Plunkett stepped forward. Two minutes, forty seconds. Herbie jerked himself to his feet, put his head down—and ran.
Was that dim thump a distant explosion? There—another one! Like a giant belching. Who had started it? And did it matter—now?
Three minutes. Rusty scampered down the cellar steps, his head back, his tail flickering from side to side. Herbie panted up. Plunkett grabbed him by the collar and jumped.
And as he jumped he saw—far to the south—the umbrellas opening their agony upon the land. Rows upon swirling rows of them…
He tossed the boy ahead when he landed. Three minutes, five seconds. He threw the switch, and, without waiting for the door to close and seal, darted into the corridor. That took care of two doors; the other switch controlled the remaining entrances. He reached it. He pulled it. He looked at his watch. Three minutes, twenty seconds. “The bombs,” blubbered Josephine. “The bombs!”
Ann was scrabbling Herbie to her in the main room, feeling his arms, caressing his hair, pulling him in for a wild hug and crying out yet again. “Herbie! Herbie! Herbie!”
“I know you're gonna lick me, pop. I—I just want you to know that I think you ought to.”
“I'm not going to lick you, son.”
“You're not? But gee, I deserve a licking. I deserve the worst—”
“You may,” Plunkett said, gasping at the wall of clicking Geigers. “You may deserve a beating,” he yelled, so loudly that they all whirled to face him, “but I won't punish you, not only for now, but forever! And as I with you,” he screamed, “so you with yours! Understand?”
“Yes,” they replied in a weeping, ragged chorus. “We understand!”
“Swear! Swear that you and your children and your children's children will never punish another human being—no matter what the provocation.”
“We swear!” they bawled at him. “We swear!”
Then they all sat down.
To wait.
Afterword
For a long time (until I wrote “The Custodian”), “Generation of Noah” was my favorite among my stories. But the science-fiction magazines didn't want it: too hortatory. The general fiction magazines all said something on the order of “too fantastic.” Six years after publication, it was rejected by a movie producer who was interested in filming some of my work (“far too prosaic for today's audiences”).
Fred Pohl, the agent who finally sold the piece, liked it almost as much as I did. But he begged me and begged me to change what he called “the Greek chorus ending.” And I kept telling him that the goddam Greek chorus ending was why I had written the story in the first place. He would walk away from me muttering, “That's no excuse at all.”
So from the white-bearded standpoint of eighty years of age, let me remind the reader:
In 1947 when I wrote “Generation of Noah,” the Federation of Atomic Scientists kept trying to tell everyone how much they apologized for having helped to develop our nuclear weaponry. And a lot of them got investigated as un-American for making such noises. (After all, the military kept saying, the atomic bomb was a weapon just like any other weapon. A bigger bang for the buck, some general shrugged.)
By 1957, six years after the story was published, we knew full well that the Soviet Union not only had nuclear weapons too, but might even have better means of delivering them than we. Everyone had heard of the atomic bomb drills in the schools where the children learned that at a given signal they were to jump off their benches and lie down under their desks with their hands locked behind their heads to protect vital parts. I knew people—I swear this!—who said that in the event of an atomic attack one should above all close the windows and pull down the window shades. That would reduce the amount of radiation reaching you.
And, of course, this was the tail-end of the period where every new home built had a bomb shelter in
the basement, a tiny room surrounded by well-plastered walls and maybe, if the contractor was an especially responsible type, by some walls of brick. You go now into homes built in this period and you find that those bomb shelters are being used as fruit cellars or wine vaults or, most likely, extra storage space.
Well, the bipolar Cold War has given way to the sunshine of monopolar power, and all that is behind us now.
Like hell.
John Campbell wrote a number of editorials in Astounding Science Fiction of the 1940s that were remarkably strong and good and gave him a free pass to be forgotten as the chief publicist of Dianetics and the Hieronymus Machine. I remember one where he talked of the atomic bomb as The Great Equalizer.
He pointed out that when the Colt six-gun reached the West, it had a tremendous effect on the relationships between small, weak men and the big, strong men who formerly had been able to bully them at will. Billy the Kid and others now had their equalizer. And from Los Alamos on, Campbell said, small countries that were unable to afford big navies and big artilleries and big air forces now could have weapons that would equalize the difference between them and the great powers of the Earth. All they had to do was find the right messenger with a suitcase to deliver them.
War is by no means gone from our planet, as a glance at almost any continent will unmistakably show. And if war ever comes our way again…
There is Lenin's dictum as enunciated in State and Revolution: “No ruling class in history ever laid down power of its own free will.” Which makes me think of Hitler, 1945, in that last bunker in the ruins of Berlin. An aide comes to him and says, “Mein Fuhrer, we have just now perfected a weapon that will vaporize the enemy, city by city, patch of countryside by patch of countryside. But—”
“But what?” yells red-eyed Hitler.
“If we use it, we just may set off a reaction that will destroy the entire planet. What should we do?”
And Hitler, hearing the Russian guns going off in one direction, and knowing that the Americans, British, and French are scant miles off in the other direction—what do you think Adolf Hitler would say to do?
No, until we as a species grow a couple of moral inches, or until we have daughter colonies on planets outside Earth, until then—
I will keep my Greek chorus ending.
Written 1947 / Published 1951
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