The Long Loud Silence

by Wilson Tucker

  The airwaves remained dead.

  In a town near the river he had his first piece of luck. Some country printer had issued a newspaper, a small and hastily assembled two-page journal turned out on a flat-bed press. The newspaper had cost him a half dollar and an unending series of questions shot at him by the printer — questions which revealed the sources of the news stories in the sheet. With the radio silent, the mails unmoving and the wire services long dead, the printer had obtained his news from travelers such as they.

  It wasn't much, and much of it wasn't news.

  Chicago was treated in some detail because its nearness made it important and because a local family had attempted to reach it, seeking relatives. Every city of respectable size in that area had been bombed, bombed by some mysterious enemy — speculations all pointed at one enemy but no one knew for a certainty. The survivors of those cities were pillaging farms and towns and many of them had been shot. There were not many survivors — Chicago and Peoria had died under atomic bombs, but the other cities had been hit by something else, something unknown, like a gas that killed as it spread. Sometimes the survivors of those cities had wandered into the country to die later; they apparently carried the death with them, living a few days longer only because they were physically able to withstand the original treatment.

  When he could, Gary put a question to the printer.

  The old man stared at him. “The army? Yeah, the army's out there.” He pointed westward. “My son saw ’em.”

  “Where?”

  “T'other side of the river.”

  “Thanks — I've got to get going.”

  The old fellow shook his head. “Can't get across.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Blowed up the bridge.” He related the cold facts.

  “I'll get across!”

  He put the car in gear.

  * * *

  The bridge was a high steel structure arcing across the sky above Savannah, stretching from sheer rock cliffs on the Illinois side over to the Iowa shore. Its middle gaped and dangled openly above the river waters where an explosion had torn it apart. Gary stopped the car a quarter of a mile away because he could not force a path through the knot of automobiles clogging the highway, automobiles belonging to the group of seventy-five or a hundred people clustered at the nearer end, looking out across the river. He got out of the car and squinted his eyes against the sun, peering as they were, presently to discern a small group of soldiers milling around the Iowa terminal of the bridge.

  Irma moved across the seat, slid out and stood beside him, clinging to his arm. She stared at the Iowa shore.

  “Russell…?”

  “Yes.” It was an answer but she didn't recognize it as such. She moved around to where she could watch his face.

  “Russell… are you leaving me? Now?”

  “Yes.” He pointed at the far soldiers. “I belong over there.”

  “Russell, you can't leave me.”

  “Watch me,” he stated flatly.

  “But Russell, what will I do!” She was frightened.

  Gary brought his eyes away from the opposite shore. “Irma, I don't care what you do. There's the car, take it. Can you shoot a gun? There's ammunition and food to last you awhile, there's that damned bag of glass you stole. Take it and go somewhere, anywhere, I don't care.” He raised his glance once more to the Iowa shore, squinting. “I'm going over to the other side and get back in the army. I've been out of it four or five days too long.”

  “I don't know what to do!” she wailed.

  “Find yourself another man to sleep with,” he told her then, and shook off her restraining hand. “You'll get along.” Deliberately he walked away from her, walked toward the knot of people standing at the bridge.

  She let him go for about fifty feet. “Russell.”

  He turned his head toward her. “Yes?”

  “Good-bye, darling.”

  “So long, nineteen. Take care of yourself.”

  He approached the crowd at the bridge, worked his way through it to advance part way up the structure and stand with his hand shading his eyes, peering at Iowa land. The exploded hole in the center was too wide to cross and he realized he would have to locate a boat of some kind. In the distance he saw someone observing him through field glasses, and waved at him. The wave was not returned. Gary shrugged, turned his back on Iowa to retreat to the highway.

  He approached a browned, unshaven character who looked as if he might be a riverman, a man who leaned indolently on an automobile fender and chewed tobacco. “Any boats around here?” Gary asked him.

  “Not now,” the man answered him.

  “I've got to get across and get back to the army.”

  “You a soldier?” the riverman shot at him.

  “Yes.”

  The oldster spat. “Not a chance.”

  “Not a chance of what? Where can I find a boat?”

  The other raised a lean finger to point downstream. “There goes the last one.” Gary's squinting eyes followed the finger but could see nothing on the river. The man spat again, raked him with an amused yet bitter glance. “You can't get across. That feller didn't.”

  “I don't see anyone. What fellow?”

  “He's in that boat driftin' downstream. Tried to get across.”

  “What happened to him? Mother of Moses, make sense, will you?”

  “They shot him,” the riverman said.

  Gary whirled to scan the river again but could not see any vessel on its surface. “Who shot him? What for?”

  “The soldiers over there shot him. He tried to get across, I told you.”

  Gary stepped backward a pace. “Are you crazy?”

  “I reckon somebody is.” The man straightened up and slowly searched through his pockets, to bring out a folded and creased sheet of pink paper. He handed it to Gary. “Nobody gets across, mister. We're contaminated.”

  The leaflet contained about two hundred words, a terse notice written in army doubletalk with some attempt to water it down for public consumption. It stated briefly that that part of the United States lying east of the Mississippi River was under strict quarantine, due to atomic and bacteriological bombing by the enemy, and therefore all traffic across the river was forbidden. It was hoped the quarantine could be lifted in a short while. The leaflet was signed by a Sixth Army commander; Gary knew the Sixth was headquartered on the west coast.

  “Where'd you get this?” he demanded.

  The other pointed a thumb across the river. “Those fellers flew over in a plane and dropped them yesterday.” He turned bitter eyes at Iowa. “Blowed up the bridge, too.”

  “The plane?”

  “Nope — them soldiers over there. They ain't letting nothing cross over — that feller that took my boat, he was a soldier too. Shot him.”

  Gary read the leaflet again and stood there for long minutes watching the other end of the bridge, watching the soldiers clustered there. Presently his eyes picked out others patrolling the shore to the north and south of the bridge.

  “Are they watching the whole damned river?”

  The riverman nodded. “Seems so. We're contaminated, mister.” He reached for the leaflet, folded it and returned it to his pocket, patted the pocket for security. Again his eyes sought the river, his lost boat floating away.

  Gary turned his back on the bridge to face the crowd, to thread a path through their silent ranks. He found their faces dull, mirroring nothing but helplessness and unviolent anger at what the anonymous men across the river had done to them. The people gathered there waited, simply waited, hoping the army would do something about them. Their attitudes suggested they would wait until the bridge and the highway crumbled and fell away from beneath them, waiting for someone to help them. Gary cast one sullen glance backward at a lone sentry prowling the opposite shore, and picked his way through parked automobiles to where he had left the Studebaker.

  Irma and the car were gone.

  He swore at
her briefly, angry because she had waited so short a time, because she had taken with her the arms and ammunition he now needed. Picking his way through the automobiles he had felt a momentary foolishness at coming back to her again, a slight embarrassment as he pictured the sudden reunion, but these easily turned to anger when he discovered her absence. His first thought was to walk into town and hunt about for her or to find another car, but an idea stopped him. Glancing briefly at the people clustered on the bridge, he slid behind the wheel of the first car having a key in the ignition lock, turned it about and followed the road paralleling the river. There was no outcry behind him.

  4

  Contamination and quarantine.

  At the end of a week the phrase sounded like a curse, a vile term hurled at an enemy in the heat of anger. Pink leaflets were scattered by the tens of thousands in every town lying within a certain radius of the Mississippi, were thick like discolored snow along the river highways and the blocked bridges.

  Rock Island, Illinois, untouched by a single bomb and suffering from nothing more than fright, was sealed off from its sister city of Davenport across the river by army order. Contamination and quarantine. Rock Island looked across the one whole bridge spanning the river and stared into the loaded muzzle of an armed tank squatting in the roadway. Rock Island's fifty-five thousand population was fast becoming a special police problem because transportation had stopped and food was no longer moving in. Davenport, under martial law and supplied and controlled by the army, was almost its normal self. A tank waited on the bridge, facing east. Rock Island and the eastern third of the nation must wait out the quarantine.

  At the end of a week some few radio stations were straggling back onto the air on both sides of the rivet, the surest sign that the military considered the danger of invasion to be over, to be averted or perhaps never attempted by the enemy. The types of bombing had made the possibility of an invasion a remote one for the contamination could strike friend and foe alike. In an isolated instance or two, in widely scattered interior towns, a voice on the air revealed that some life still existed there, some sort of electrical power had been harnessed despite the bombing. The lone voices haltingly took the air in search of news, aid, encouragement. Gary listened stonily to their broadcast appeals for help, their frantic quest for information about the rest of the country. He turned his eyes across the river and wondered if they were listening to the voices.

  At the end of a week he had grown weary of listening to impassioned pleas and desperate arguments, to proposals and rejections between two cities facing each other across the dividing river.

  And by the end of a week he had explored the state from the Wisconsin border south to the Kentucky fields across another river, to find the quarantine prevailed everywhere. He was trapped in Illinois unless he got away from the river, unless he drove eastward along the muddy Ohio searching for an undamaged bridge. The army engineers had methodically blown up all those structures which had escaped enemy destruction, all except a single span every few hundred miles along the river of demarcation; these remained intact but heavily guarded, intact for some purpose of their own. And everywhere they sowed pink leaflets, coldly explaining the necessity as they saw it, faintly hoping the quarantine might be lifted… someday.

  Every day for a week Gary stopped someone, anyone, who might have a grain of information, who might know or guess at the nature of the catastrophe, with out success. The guesses were wild and unreasonable and he rejected them, knowing from experience the cities had not undergone the fantastic poison gases said to be released by the falling bombs; realizing by the application of common sense that the places he had lived in and passed through had not been doused by atomic radiation, mists, dusts. People and dogs still lived there, some people and dogs were still slowly dying there and his observations of the near-dead did not fit into any lesson he had learned. There had never been a mention of bodies turning blue, or purple as death came. Not from atomic radiation.

  Finally he had caught a snatch of conversation on the air that led him to the answer. Rock Island was pleading for an open bridge, pleading its mounting distress, pointing out that pestilence and death had been spared the city. A brusque voice of authority in Davenport maintained a steadfast no, bluntly told the sealed city its fate was still to come. Travelers from the bombed cities were undoubtedly moving through Rock Island and those travelers were spreading the plague, sowing the deadly contamination as they moved.

  “What plague?” Gary shouted aloud at the radio, and heard Rock Island echo his question with a dull passivity which belied knowledge.

  The authoritative voice in Davenport answered in a tone of painful repetition, spoke of two distinct types which had been identified, added that only God knew how many others had been thrown at them. The voice repeated the names of the two, pneumonic plague and botulism, and passed on to the unswerving no. Gary listened for many minutes longer but there was no more mention of the diseases, no explanation of them. He switched off the radio and drove in a frenzy along the highway seeking someone who might have knowledge of the terms, stopping strangers at gun point if they would not stop otherwise, stopping armed men who patrolled their towns or farms, demanding answers of them.

  They had no answer. And at the end of a week he found out another way.

  He picked his way into Bloomington, avoiding the debris and wrecked cars filling the streets, detouring where the sight and smell of a body ahead threatened to turn his stomach, and cruised around and around the business district until he had located the public library. The heavy glass door had to be smashed in. He searched the long high rows of books with a growing impatience, finding nothing that might help him, and after an hour he climbed the stairs to the second floor to see what was stored there. The stairway opened onto an immense reading room heavy with a silence it had never known before, occupied now only by tables, racks of magazines and out-of-town newspapers. At his immediate right was an attendant's dusty desk and just behind the desk were the volumes he sought, an encyclopedia set. He shoved the desk aside and reached for them.

  Botulism at first had no meaning as applied to the dead world outside the library door. Botulism was poisoning caused by eating food in which a bacterium had developed. Pneumonic plague was see plague, pestilence, etc. He threw down the heavy volume and reached for another only to find he had misjudged the alphabetical spacing, plague was in the discarded book. Plague was slowly giving him an answer when his impatient eyes skipped over the paragraphs of history and dropped to the bottom of the column. The reference there was see also biological warfare.

  Gary abandoned the page he was reading and searched for another volume. That one, with occasional references to the first, provided the startling answer. He carried the tomes to a near-by table and spread them open.

  * * *

  Biological warfare began in a limited way during the war of 1914 when enemy agents were believed to have injected disease-producing germs into American cattle being shipped abroad. Biological warfare mushroomed into an expensive and heavily classified entity of its own in the war which began for America in December, 1941. During that war the United States poured more than fifty million dollars into new experiments for biological destruction, recruited some three thousand scientists to devise new ways to die. Both offensive and defensive weapons were produced, most important among the former being a poison, the toxin of botulism.

  The toxin was successfully isolated in a pure crystalline form and methods were developed for producing it on a large scale. A really large scale wasn't necessary inasmuch as the poison was so deadly one-seventh of a microgram was a fatal dose when taken internally; one ounce was capable of slaughtering a hundred and eighty million people. The military machine thought to introduce this toxin into an enemy's food or water supply by agents, or by spraying from the sky. Unstated, but implied, was the definite possibility of its being introduced by long-range missiles, whether guided or in free flight.

  Gary stopped reading
, looked up to see sunlight through the windows. He reached for a cigarette, paused to inspect it critically and then put it in his mouth. The following sentence caught his eye: “Among diseases suitable for biologic warfare are pneumonic plague…” He paused again, to reach for the other volume.

  Pneumonic plague was a different kind of a killer. The plague was a dark leftover from the Middle Ages when Bubonic swept a countryside and completely decimated a town. Pneumonic plague was so named because the lungs were the organs infected; the disease was freely transmitted by the spray from the mouths and lungs of other infected persons. The infection may spread — he turned the page — to other parts of the body, resulting in septicemic plague. There followed a graphic description of the symptoms of the two, and the statement that one is about ninety-five percent fatal whereas the other is almost invariably so. Time: death as early as the same day on which the symptoms first develop, or as late as two or three days afterward. The final paragraph pulled his attention. The victims assume a deep blue or purple color, typical of the last hours of all forms of plague, due to respiratory failure. The so-called “black death.”

  Gary puffed slowly on the cigarette, disliking the taste of it. His gaze wandered back to the brutal line of the other article.

  Among diseases suitable for biologic warfare are pneumonic plague, influenza, yellow fever, dengue, glanders… The United States, because of its particular geographic isolation, would be highly vulnerable to biologic attack. Infectious diseases would be spread by air or other means and then freely allowed to propagate themselves; for instance, pneumonic plague, one of the most contagious and highly dangerous diseases known, could readily be spread in this manner.