Anderson, Poul - Tomorrow's Children 01

by Tomorrow's Children (v1. 1)

  Drummond sighed heavily and sat down. In a way, this clinched it. He’d known for a long time, and finding mutation here, as far as any place from atomic destruction, was about the last evidence he needed.

  He had to get on friendly terms, or he wouldn't find out much about things like population, food production, and whatever else there was to know. Forcing a smile to stiff lips, he took a flask from his jacket. “Prewar rye,” he said. “Who wants a nip?”

  “Do we!” The answer barked out in a dozen voices and words. The flask circulated, men pawing and cursing and grabbing to get at it. Their homebrew must be pretty bad, thought Drummond wryly.

  The chief shouted an order, and one of his women got busy at the primitive stove. “Rustle you a mess o’ chow,” he said heartily. “An’ my name’s Sam Buckman.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Sam.” Drummond squeezed the hairy paw hard. He had to show he wasn’t a weakling, a conniving city slicker.

  “What’s it like, outside?” asked someone presently. “We ain’t heard for so long—”

  “You haven’t missed much,” said Drummond between bites. The food was pretty good. Briefly, he sketched conditions. “You’re better off than most,” he finished.

  “Yeah. Mebbe so.” Sam Buckman scratched his tangled beard. “What I’d give f’r a razor blade—! It ain’t easy, though. The first year we weren’t no better off 'n anyone else. Me, I’m a farmer, I kept some ears o’ corn an’ a little wheat an’ barley in my pockets all that winter, even though I was starving. A bunch o’ hungry refugees plundered my place, but I got away an’ drifted up here. Next year I took an empty farm here an’ started over.”

  Drummond doubted that it had been abandoned, but said nothing. Sheer survival outweighed a lot of considerations.

  “Others came an’ settled here,” said the leader reminiscently. “We farm together. We have to; one man couldn’t live by hisself, not with the bugs an’ blight, an’ the crops sproutin’ into all new kinds, an’ the outlaws aroun’. Not many up here, though we did beat off some enemy troops last winter.” He glowed with pride at that, but Drummond wasn’t particularly impressed. A handful of freezing starveling conscripts, lost and bewildered in a foreign enemy’s land, with no hope of ever getting home, weren’t formidable.

  “Things getting better, though,” said Buckman. “We’re heading up.” He scowled blackly, and a palpable chill crept into the room. “If ’twern’t for the births—”

  “Yes—the births! The new babies. Even the stock an’ plants.” It was an old man speaking, his eyes glazed with near madness. “It’s the mark o’ the beast. Satan is loose in the world—”

  “Shut up!” Huge and bristling with wrath, Buckman launched himself out of his seat and grabbed the oldster by his scrawny throat. “Shut up ’r I’ll bash y’r lying head in. Ain’t no son o’ mine being marked by the devil.”

  “Or mine—”

  “Or mine—” The rumble of voices ran about the cabin, sullen and afraid.

  “It’s God’s jedgment, I tell you!” The woman was shrilling again. “The end o’ the world is near. Prepare f’r the second coming—”

  “An’ you shut up too, Mag Schmidt,” snarled Buckman. He stood bent over, gnarled arms swinging loose, hands flexing, little eyes darting red and wild about the room. “Shut y’r trap an’ keep it shut. I’m still boss here, an’ if you don’t like it you can get out. I still don’t think that funny-looking brat o’ y’rs fell in the lake by accident.”

  The woman shrank back, lips tight. The room filled with a crackling silence. One of the babies began to cry. It had two heads.

  Slowly and heavily, Buckman turned to Drummond, who sat immobile against the wall. “You see?” he asked dully. “You see how it is? Maybe it is the curse o’ God. Maybe the world is ending. I dunno. I just know there’s few enough babies, an’ most o’ them deformed. Will it go on? Will all our kids be monsters? Should we . . . kill these an’ hope we get some human babies? What is it? What to do?”

  Drummond rose. He felt a weight as of centuries on his shoulders, the weariness, blank and absolute, of having seen that smoldering panic and heard that desperate appeal too often, too often.

  “Don’t kill them,” he said. “That’s the worst kind of murder, and anyway it’d do no good at all. It comes from the bombs, and you can't stop it. You’ll go right on having such children, so you might as well get used to it.”

  By atomic-powered stratojet it wasn’t far from Minnesota to Oregon, and Drummond landed in Taylor about noon the next day. This time there was no hurry to get his machine under cover, and up on the mountain was a raw scar of earth where a new airfield was slowly being built. Men were getting over their terror of the sky. They had another fear to face now, and it was one from which there was no hiding.

  Drummond walked slowly down the icy main street to the central office. It was numbingly cold, a still, relentless intensity of frost eating through clothes and flesh and bone. It wasn’t much better inside. Heating systems were still poor improvisations.

  “You’re back!” Robinson met him in the antechamber, suddenly galvanized with eagerness. He had grown thin and nervous, looking ten years older, but impatience blazed from him. “How is it? How is it?” Drummond held up a bulky notebook. “All here,” he said grimly. “All the facts we’ll need. Not formally correlated yet, but the picture is simple enough.”

  Robinson laid an arm on his shoulder and steered him into the office. He felt the general’s hand shaking, but he’d sat down and had a drink before business came up again.

  “You've done a good job,” said the leader warmly. “When the country’s organized again, I’ll see you get a medal for this. Your men in the other planes aren’t in yet.”

  “No, they’ll be gathering data for a long time. The job won’t be finished for years. I’ve only got a general outline here, but it’s enough. It’s enough.” Drummond’s eyes were haunted again.

  Robinson felt cold at meeting that too-steady gaze. He whispered shakily: “Is it—bad ?”

  “The worst. Physically, the country’s recovering. But biologically, we’ve reached a crossroads and taken the wrong fork.”

  “What do you mean? What do you mean?”

  Drummond let him have it then, straight and hard as a bayonet thrust. “The birth rate’s a little over half the prewar,” he said, “and about seventy-five per cent of all births are mutant, of which possibly two-thirds are viable and presumably fertile. Of course, that doesn’t include late-maturing characteristics, or those undetectable by naked-eye observation, or the mutated recessive genes that must be carried by a lot of otherwise normal zygotes. And it’s everywhere. There are no safe places.”

  “I see,” said Robinson after a long time. He nodded, like a man struck a stunning blow and not yet fully aware of it. "I see. The reason—”

  “Is obvious.”

  “Yes. People going through radioactive areas—”

  “Why, no. That would only account for a few. But—”

  “No matter. The fact’s there, and that’s enough. We have to decide what to do about it.”

  “And soon.” Drummond’s jaw set. “It’s wrecking our culture. We at least preserved our historical continuity, but even that’s going now. People are going crazy as birth after birth is monstrous. Fear of the unknown, striking at minds still stunned by the war and its immediate aftermath. Frustration of parenthood, perhaps the most basic instinct there is. It’s leading to infanticide, desertion, despair, a cancer at the root of society. We’ve got to act.”

  “How? How?” Robinson stared numbly at his hands.

  “I don’t know. You’re the leader. Maybe an educational campaign, though that hardly seems practicable. Maybe an acceleration of your program for reintegrating the country. Maybe— I don’t know.”

  Drummond stuffed tobacco into his pipe. He was near the end of what he had, but would rather take a few good smokes than a lot of niggling puffs. “Of course,” he said though
tfully, “it’s probabily not the end of things. We won’t know for a generation or more, but I rather imagine the mutants can grow into society. They’d better, for they’ll outnumber the humans. The thing is, if we just let matters drift there’s no telling where they’ll go. The situation is unprecedented. We may end up in a culture of specialized variations, which would be very bad from an evolutionary standpoint. There may be fighting between mutant types, or with humans. Interbreeding may produce worse freaks, particularly when accumulated recessives start showing up. Robinson, if we want any say at all in what’s going to happen in the next few centimes, we have to act quickly. Otherwise it'll snowball out of all control.”

  “Yes. Yes, we’ll have to act fast. And hard.” Robinson straightened in his chair. Decision firmed his countenance, but his eyes were staring. “We’re mobilized,” he said. “We have the men and the weapons and the organization. They won’t be able to resist.”

  The ashy cold of Drummond’s emotions stirred, but it was with a horrible wrenching of fear. “What are you getting at?” he snapped.

  “Racial death. All mutants and their parents to be sterilized, whenever and wherever detected.”

  “You’re crazy!” Drummond sprang from his chair, grabbed Robinson’s shoulders across the desk, and shook him. “You . . . why, it’s impossible! You’ll bring revolt, civil war, final collapse!”

  “Not if we go about it right.” There were little beads of sweat studding the general’s forehead. “I don’t like it any better than you, but it’s got to be done or the human race is finished. Normal births a minority—” He surged to his feet, gasping. “I’ve thought a long time about this. Your facts only confirmed my suspicions. This tears it. Can't you see ? Evolution has to proceed slowly. Life wasn't meant for such a storm of change. Unless we can save the true human stock, it’ll be absorbed and differentiation will continue till humanity is a collection of freaks, probably intersterile. Or . . . there must be a lot of lethal recessives. In a large population, they can accumulate unnoticed till nearly everybody has them, and then start emerging all at once. That’d wipe us out. It’s happened before, in rats and other species. If we eliminate mutant stock now, we can still save the race. It won’t be cruel. We have sterilization techniques which are quick and painless, not upsetting the endocrine balance. But it’s got to be done.” His voice rose to a raw scream, broke. “It’s got to be done!” ’

  Drummond slapped him, hard. He drew a shuddering breath, sat down, and began to cry, and somehow that was the most horrible sight of all.

  “You’re crazy,” said the aviator. “You’ve gone nuts with brooding alone on this the last six months, without knowing or being able to act. You’ve lost all perspective.

  “We can’t use violence. In the first place, it would break our tottering, cracked culture irreparably, into a maddog finish fight. We’d not even win it. We’re outnumbered, and we couldn’t hold down a continent, eventually a planet. And remember what we said once, about abandoning the old savage way of settling things, that never brings a real settlement at all? We’d throw away a lesson our noses were rubbed in not three years ago. We’d return to the beast—to ultimate extinction.

  “And anyway,” he went on very quietly, “it wouldn’t do a bit of good. Mutants would still be born. The poison is everywhere. Normal parents will give birth to mutants, somewhere along the line. We just have to accept that fact, and live with it. The new human-race will have to.”

  “I’m sorry.” Robinson raised bis face from his hands. It was a ghastly visage, gone white and old, but there was calm on it. “I—blew my top. You’re right. I’ve been thinking of this, worrying and wondering, living and breathing it, lying .awake nights, and when I finally sleep I dream of it. I . . . yes, I see your point. And you’re right.”

  “It’s O.K. You’ve been under a terrific strain. Three years with never a rest, and the responsibility for a nation, and now this— Sure, everybody’s entitled to be a little crazy. We'll work out a solution, somehow.”

  “Yes, of course.” Robinson poured out two stiff drinks and gulped his. He paced restlessly, and his tremendous ability came back in waves of strength and confidence. “Let me see— Eugenics, of course. If we work hard, we’ll have the nation tightly organized inside of ten years. Then . . . well, I don’t suppose we can keep the mutants from interbreeding, but certainly we can pass laws to protect humans and encourage their propagation. Since radical mutations would probably be intersterile anyway, and most mutants handicapped one way or another, a few generations should see humans completely dominant again.”

  Drummond scowled. He was worried. It wasn’t like Robinson to be unreasonable. Somehow, the man had acquired a mental blind spot where this most ultimate of human problems was concerned. He said slowly, “That won’t work either. First, it’d be hard to impose and enforce. Second, we’d be repeating the old Herrenvolk notion. Mutants are inferior, mutants must be kept in their place—to enforce that, especially on a majority, you’d need a full-fledged totalitarian state. Third, that wouldn’t work either, for the rest of the world, with almost no exceptions, is under no such control and we’ll be in no position to take over that control for a long time— generations. Before then, mutants will dominate everywhere over there, and if they resent the way we treat their kind here, we’d better run for cover.”

  “You assume a lot. How do you know those hundreds or thousands of diverse types will work together? They’re less like each other than like humans, even. They could be played off against each other.”

  “Maybe. But that would be going back onto the old road of treachery and violence, the road to Hell. Conversely, if every not-quite-human is called a’mutant’, like a separate class, he’ll think he is, and act accordingly against the lumped-together ‘humans’. No, the only way to sanity —to survival — is to abandon class prejudice and race hate altogether, and work as individuals. We’re all . . . well, Earthlings, and subclassification is deadly. We all have to live together, and might as well make the best of it.”

  “Yeah . . . yeah, that’s right too.”

  “Anyway, I repeat that all such attempts would be useless. All Earth is infected with mutation. It will be for a long time. The purest human stock will still produce mutants.”

  “Y-yes, that’s true. Our best bet seems to be to find all such stock and withdraw it into the few safe areas left. It’ll mean a small human population, but a human one.”

  “I tell you, that’s impossible,” clipped Drummond. “There is no safe place. Not one.”

  Robinson stopped pacing and looked at him as at a physical antagonist. “That so?” he almost growled. “Why?”

  Drummond told him, adding incredulously, “Surely you knew that. Your physicists must have measured the amount of it. Your doctors, your engineers, that geneticist I dug up for you. You obviously got a lot of this biological information you’ve been slinging at me from him. They must all have told you the same thing.”

  Robinson shook his head stubbornly. “It can’t be. It’s not reasonable. The concentration wouldn’t be great enough.”

  “Why, you poor fool, you need only look around you. The plants, the animals— Haven’t there been any births in Taylor?”

  “No. This is still a man’s town, though women are trickling in and several babies are on the way—” Robinson’s face was suddenly twisted with desperation. “Elaine’s is due any time now. She’s in the hospital here. Don’t you see, our other kid died of the plague. This one’s all we have. We want him to grow up in a world free of want and fear, a world of peace and sanity where he can play and laugh and become a man, not a beast starving in a cave. You and I are on our way out. We’re the old generation, the one that wrecked the world. It’s up to us to build it again, and then retire from it to let our children have it. The future’s theirs. We’ve got to make it ready for them.”

  Sudden insight held Drummond motionless for long seconds. Understanding came, and pity, and an odd gentleness
that changed his sunken bony face. “Yes,” he murmured, “yes, I see. That’s why you’re working with all that’s in you to build a normal, healthy world. That’s why you nearly went crazy when this threat appeared. That... that’s why you can’t, just can’t comprehend—”

  He took the other man’s arm and guided him toward the door. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go see how your wife’s making out. Maybe we can get her some flowers on the way.”

  The silent cold bit at them as they went clown the street. Snow crackled underfoot. It was already grimy with town smoke and dust, but overhead the sky was incredibly clean and blue. Breath smoked whitely from their mouths and nostrils. The sound of men at work rebuilding drifted faintly between the bulking mountains.

  “We couldn’t emigrate to another planet, could we?” asked Robinson, and answered himself: “No, we lack the organization and resources to settle them right now. We’ll have to make out on Earth. A few safe spots—there must be others besides this one—to house the true humans till the mutation period is over. Yes, we can do it.”

  “There are no safe places,” insisted Drummond. “Even if there were, the mutants would still outnumber us. Does your geneticist have any idea how this’ll come out, biologically speaking ?”

  “He doesn’t know. His specialty is still largely unknown. He can make an intelligent guess, and that’s all.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, our problem is to learn to live with the mutants, to accept anyone as—Earthling—no matter how he looks, to quit thinking anything was ever settled by violence or connivance, to build a culture of individual sanity. Funny,” mused Drummond, “how the impractical virtues, tolerance and sympathy and generosity, have become the fundamental necessities of simple survival. I guess it was always true, but it took the death of half the world and the end of a biological era to make us see that simple little fact. The job’s terrific.. We’ve got half a million years of brutality and greed, superstition and prejudice, to lick in a few generations. If we fail, mankind is done. But we’ve got to try.”