Alas, Babylon

by Pat Frank

  Bill looked from one to the other and saw they were interested. "We are jointly making you a present of this whole apartment. Dan is going to move in with me."

  Lib said, "That's perfectly wonderful, Father!"

  Bill said, hesitantly; "Only, if Dan's asleep I don't think we ought to disturb him, do you?"

  "No, not tonight," Lib said. She kissed her father, and she kissed her husband, and she went across the hall to her old room. Randy fell across the couch and slept. Presently Graf jumped up beside him and snug­gled under his arm.

  At noon Monday the man with the bat was hung from a girder supporting the bandstand roof in Marines Park. All the regular traders and a number of strangers were in the park. Randy ordered that the corpse not be cut down until sunset. He wanted the strangers to be impressed and spread the word beyond Fort Repose.

  While he had not planned it, on this day he accepted the first enlistments in what carne to be known as Bragg's Troop, although in orders he called it the Fort Repose Provisional Company. Seven men volunteered that day, including Fletcher Kennedy, who had been an Air Force fighter pilot, and Link Haslip, a West Point cadet who had been home on Christmas leave on The Day. He created them provisional lieutenants of infan­try. The other five were even younger boys who had finished six months of Reserve training after high school or had been in the National Guard.

  After the execution, Randy posted the notices he had typed earlier and brought to the park in his uniform pocket. The first read:

  On 17 April the following highwaymen were killed on the covered bridge: Mickey Cahane, of Las Vegas and Boca Raton, a gambler and racketeer; Arch Fleggert, Mi­ami, occupation unknown; Leroy Settle, Fort Repose.

  On 18 April Thomas "Casey" Killinger, also of Las Ve­gas, and the fourth member of the band which murdered Mr. and Mrs. James Hickey and robbed and assaulted Dr. Daniel Gunn, was hung on this spot.

  The second notice was shorter:

  On 17 April Technical Sergeant Malachai Henry (USAF, reserve) died of a wound received on the covered bridge while defending Fort Repose.

  [12]

  Early in May a tube in the Admiral's radio flared and died, cutting off the voice of the world outside. While these communications had always been sketchy, and the information meager and confusing, the fact that they were gone entirely was a blow to everyone. The Ad­miral's short-wave receiver had been their only reliable source of news. It was also a fount of hope. Each night that reception was good some of them had gathered in the Admiral's den and listened while he conned the waive lengths, hoping for news of peace, victory, succor, re­construction. While they never heard such news, they could always wait for the next night with hope.

  After consulting with the Admiral and the Henrys, Randy posted a notice on his official bulletin board in Marines Park. He asked a replacement for the tube and offered handsome payment - a pig and two chickens or a five-year file of old magazines. A proper tube never came in. Before The Day the Admiral had been forced to order replacement tubes directly from the factory in New Jersey, so he had not been optimistic.

  Even had they been able to acquire a new tube, the radio could not have operated long, for the automobile batteries were depleted and it was in May that gasoline vanished entirely.

  In June Preacher Henry's corn crop ripened, the sweet yams swelled in the ground, and the first stalks of Two-Tone's sugar cane fell to the machete. June was the month of plenty, the month in which they ate corn pone , and hoe cake with molasses. In June they all fleshed out.

  It was in June, also, that they ran their first batch of mash through the still built by Bill McGovern and Two-Tone. It was an event. After pine knots blazed for three hours under a fifty-gallon drum, liquid began to drip from the spout terminating an intricate arrangement of copper tubing, coils, and condensers. Two-Tone caught these first drops in a cup and handed it to Randy. Randy sniffed the colorless stuff. It smelled horrible. When it had cooled a bit he tasted it. His eyes watered and his stomach begged him not to swallow. He managed to get a little down. It was horrid. "It's wonderful!" he gasped, and quickly passed the cup on.

  After all the men had taken a swallow, and properly praised Two-Tone's inventive initiative and Bill's me­chanical acumen, Randy said, "Of course it's still a little raw. With aging, it'll be smoother."

  "It ought to be aged in the wood," Bill said. "Where will we get a keg?"

  "It'll be a cinch," Randy said. "Anybody who has a keg will trade it for a couple of quarts after it's aged." But for Dan Gunn, the corn whiskey was immedi­ately useful. While he would not dare use it for anes­thesia, he estimated its alcohol content as high. It would be an excellent bug repellent, liniment, and pre­operative skin antiseptic.

  One day in July, Alice Cooksey brought home four books on hypnotism; and presented them to Dan Gunn. "If you can learn hypnotism," she suggested, "you might use it as anesthesia."

  Dan knew a number of doctors, and dentists too, who commonly practiced hypnotism. It had always seemed to him an inefficient and time-consuming substitute for ether and morphine but now he grasped at the idea as if Alice had offered him a specific for cancer.

  Every night Helen read to him. She insisted on doing his reading, thus saving his eyes. They no longer had candles or kerosene but their lamps and lanterns burned furnace oil extracted from the underground tanks with a bilge pump. It was true that furnace oil smoked, and stank, and produced yellow and inefficient light. But it was light.

  Soon. Dan hypnotized Helen. He then hypnotized or attempted hypnosis on everyone in River Road

  . He couldn't hypnotize the Admiral at all. He succeeded in partially hypnotizing Randy, with poor results, includ­ing grogginess and a headache. Randy attempted to co­operate but he could not erase everything else from his mind.

  The children were excellent subjects. Dan hypnotized them again and again until he had only to speak a few sentences, in the jargon of the hypnotist, snap his fin­gers, and they would fall into malleable trance. Randy worried about this until Dan explained.

  "I've been training the children to be quick subjects, because in an emergency, they have their own built-in supply of ether."

  "And if you're not around?"

  "Helen is studying hypnotism too." He was thought­ful. "She's becoming quite expert. You know, Helen could have been a doctor. Helen isn't happy unless she's caring for someone. She takes care of me."

  A week later Ben Franklin developed a stomachache which forced him to draw up his right knee when he tried to lie down. The ache was always there and at in­tervals it became sharp pain enveloping him in waves. Dan decided Ben's pain was not from eating too many bananas. It was impossible to take a blood count but the boy had a slight fever and Dan knew he had to go into him.

  Dan operated on the billiard table in the gameroom, after putting Ben into deep trance. Dan used the steak knives, darning needles, hair curlers, and nylon line, all properly sterilized, and removed an appendix distended and near to bursting.

  In five days Ben was up and active. After that Randy, somewhat in awe, referred to Dan as "our witch doctor."

  In August they used the last of the corn, squeezed the last of the late oranges, the Valencias, and plucked the last overripe but deliciously sweet grapefruit from the trees. In August they ran out of salt, armadillos destroyed the yam crop, and the fish stopped biting. That terribly hot August was the month of disaster.

  The end of the corn and exhaustion of the citrus crop had been inevitable. Armadillos in the yams was bad luck, but bearable. But without fish and salt their survival was in doubt.

  Randy had carefully rationed salt since he was shocked, in July, to discover how few pounds were left.Salt was a vital commodity, not just white grains you shook on eggs. Dan used saline solutions for half dozen purposes. The children used salt to brush their teeth. Without salt, the slaughter of the Henry pigs would have been a terrible waste. They planned to tan one hide to cut badly needed moccasins, and without salt this was impossible.


  As soon as they were out of salt it seemed that almost everything required salt, most of all the human body. Day after day the porch thermometer stood at ninety-five or over and every day all of them had manual labor to do, and miles to walk. They sweated rivers. They sweated their salt away, and they grew weak, and they grew ill. And all of Fort Repose grew weak and ill for there was no salt anywhere.

  In July Randy had gone to Rita Hernandez and she had traded five pounds of salt to him for three large bass, a bushel of Valencias, and four buckshot shells. She had traded not so much for these things, Randy believed, but because he had helped her arrange decent burial, for Pete, and provided the pallbearers to carry him to Repose-in-Peace Park. Since July, he had been unable to trade for salt anywhere. In Marines Park a pound of salt would be worth five pounds of coffee, if anyone had coffee. You could not even buy salt with corn liquor, potent if only slightly aged.

  In August the traders in Marines Park dragged them­selves about like zombies, for want of salt. And for the first time in his life Randy felt a weird uneasiness and craving that became almost madness when he rubbed the perspiration from his face and then tasted salt on his fingers. Now he understood the craving of animals for salt, understood why a cougar and a deer would share the same salt lick in the enforced truce of salt starva­tion.

  But even more important than salt was fish, for the fish of the river was their staple, like seal to the Es­kimo. It had been so simple, until August. Their bamboo set poles, butts lodged in metal or wooden holders on the ends and sides of their docks, each night usually provided enough fish for the following day. In the morning someone would stroll down to the dock and haul up whatever had hooked itself in the hours of darkness. If the night's automatic catch was lean, or if extra fish were needed for trading, someone was granted leave from regular chores to fish in the morning, or at dusk when the feeding bass struck savagely. Their poles grew in clumps, they had line aplenty, hooks enough to last for years (fishing had been the pre-Day hobby of Bill McGovern and Sam Hazzard as well as Randy), and every kind of bait - worms, crickets, grasshoppers, tadpoles, minnows, shiners - for anyone capable of using a shovel, throw net, or simply his hands.

  Randy had more than a hundred plugs and spoons and perhaps half as many flies and bass bugs. He had bought, them knowing well that most lures are designed to catch fishermen rather than fish. Still, on occasion the bass would go wild for artificials and in the spring the specks and bream would snap up small flies and tiny spoons. So fish had never been a problem, until they stopped biting.

  When they stopped they stopped all at once and all together. Even with his circular shrimp net, wading - barefoot in the shallows, Lib beside him hopefully carrying a bucket, Randy could not net a shiner, bream, cat, or even mudfish. Randy considered himself a good fisherman and yet he admitted he didn't understand why fish bit or why they didn't. August had never been a good month for black bass, true, but this August was strange. Only during thunderstorms was there a ripple on the river. A molten sun rose, grew white hot, and sank red and molten, and the river was unearthly still and oily, agitated no more than Florence's aquarium. Even at crack of dawn or final light, no fish jumped or swirled. It was bad. And it was eerie and frightening.

  In the third week of August when they were all weak and half-sick Randy spoke his fears to Dan. It was eve­ning. Randy and Lib had just come from the hammock. For an hour they had crouched together under a great oak waiting for the little gray squirrels to feed. They had been utterly quiet and the squirrels had been noisy and Randy had blasted two of them out of the tree with his double twenty, a shameful use of irreplaceable am­munition for very little meat. Yet two squirrels was enough to give meat flavor to a stew that night. What they would have for breakfast, if anything, nobody knew. They found Dan in Randy's office, with Helen trimming his hair. Randy told them about the two squir­rels and then he said, "Dan, I've been thinking about the fish. I've never seen fishing this bad before. Could anything big and permanent have happened? Could ra­diation have wiped them out, or anything?"

  Dan scratched at his beard and Helen brushed his hand down and said, "Sit still."

  Dan said, "Fish. Let me think about fish. I doubt that anything happened to the fish. If the river had been poisoned by fallout right after The Day the dead fish would have come to the surface. The river would have been blanketed with fish. That didn't happen then and it hasn't happened since. No, I doubt that there has been a holocaust of fish."

  "It worries me," Randy said.

  "Salt worries me more. Salt doesn't grow or breed or spawn. You either have it or you don't."

  Helen swung the swivel chair. Dan was facing the teak chest. Suddenly he lifted himself out of the chair, flung himself on his knees, opened the chest and began to dig into it. "The diary!" he shouted. "Where's the diary?"

  "It's there. Why?"

  "There's salt in the diary! Remember when Helen was reading it to me after I was slugged by the highway­men? There was something about salt in it. Remember, Helen?"

  Randy had not looked into the log of Lieutenant Randolph Rowzee Peyton for years, but now it was coming back to him, and he did remember. Lieutenant Peyton's Marines had also lacked and needed salt, and somehow obtained it. He dropped on his knees beside Dan and quickly found the log. He skimmed through the pages. Lieutenant Peyton, as he recalled it had run out of salt in the second year. He found an entry, dated August 19, 1839:

  "The supply boat from Cow's Ford being much overdue, and my command lacking salt and suffering greatly from the heat, on 6 August I dispatched my loyal Creek guide, Billy Longnose, down the St. Johns (sometimes called River May) to discover the cause of delay. Today he returned with the information that our supply boat, beating its way upstream, had put into dock at Mandarin (a town named to honor the oriental nation from which it imported its orange trees). By ill luck, on that night the Seminoles raided Mandarin, putting to death a number of its inhabitants and burning the houses. The master of the supply boat, a ci­vilian, and his crew, consisting of a white man and two Slaves, escaped to the woods and later reached St. Augustine. However, the boat was pillaged and then burned.

  All other privations my men can endure except lack of water and lack of salt."

  The next entry was dated August 21. Randy read it aloud:

  "Billy Longnose today brought to the Fort a Seminole, a very dirty and shifty-eyed buck calling himself Kyukan, who offered to guide me to a place where there is sufficient salt to fill this Fort ten times over. So he says. In payment he demanded one gallon of rum. While it is unlawful to sell spirits to the Seminoles, nothing is said about giving them drink. Accordingly, I offered the buck a half-gallon jug, and he agreed."

  Randy turned the page and said, "Here it is. Twenty-three April":

  "This day I returned to Fort Repose in the second boat, bringing twelve large sacks of salt. It was true. I could have filled the Fort ten times over.

  "The place is near the headwaters of the Timucuan, some twenty-two nautical miles, I should judge, up that tributary. It is called by an Indian word meaning Blue Crab Pool. The pool itself is crystal clear, like the Silver Springs. I thought it surrounded by a white beach, but then discovered that what I thought sand was pure salt. It was quite unbelievable. In this pool there were blue crabs, such as are found only in the ocean, yet the pool is many miles inland, and two hundred miles from the mouth of the St. John, or May."

  Randy closed the log, grinned, and said, "I've heard of Blue Crab Run but I've never been there. My father used to go there when he was a boy, for crab feasts. He never mentioned salt. I guess salt didn't impress my fa­ther. It was always in the kitchen. He had plenty."

  The next morning the Fort Repose fleet set sail, five boats commanded by an admiral whose last sea com­mand had also been five ships - a super-carrier, two cruisers, and two destroyers.

  By August most of the boats in Fort Repose had been fitted with sails cut from awnings, draperies, or even nylon sheets for t
he lighter outboards, and with keels or sideboards, and hand-carved rudders. For the expedition up the Timucuan, Sam Hazzard chose boats of exceptional capacity and stability. Randy's light Fi­berglas boat wasn't suitable, so Randy went along as the Admiral's crew. With the south wind blowing hot and steady, they planned to reach Blue Crab Pool before night and be back in Fort Repose by noon the next day, for their speed would double on their return voyage downstream.

  Their five boats crewed thirteen men, all well armed. It would be the first night Randy had spent away from Lib since their marriage, and she seemed somewhat dis­tressed by this. But Randy had no fear for her safety, or for the safety of Fort Repose. His company now num­bered thirty men. It controlled the rivers and the roads. Knowing this, highwaymen shunned Fort Repose. The phrase "deterrent force" had been popular before The Day and effective so long as that force had been unmis­takably superior. Randy's company was certainly the most efficient force in Central Florida, and he intended to keep it so.

  Sitting at the tiller, gold-encrusted cap pushed back on his head, the wind singing through the stays, the Ad­miral seemed to have sloughed off a decade. "You know," he said, "when I was at the Academy they still insisted that we learn sail before steam. They used to stick us in catboats and make us whip back and forth on the Severn and learn knots and rigs and spars. I thought it was silly. I still do, but it is fun."