Richard Wilson - Mother to the World

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 68.52KB 24 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

MOTHER TO THE WORLD

Richard Wilson

His name was Martin Rolfe. She called him Mr. Ralph.

She was Cecelia Beamer, called Siss.

He was a vigorous, intelligent, lean and wiry forty-two, a

shade under six feet tall. His hair, black, was thinning but

still covered all of his head; and all his teeth were his own.

His health was excellent. He'd never had a cavity Or an opera-

tion and he fervently hoped he never would.

She was a slender, strong young woman of twenty-eight,

five feet four. Her eyes, nose and mouth were regular and

well-spaced but the combination fell short of beauty. She

wore her hair, which was dark blonde, not quite brown,

straight back and long in two pigtails which she braided

daily, after a ritualistic hundred brushings. Her figure was

better than average for her age and therefore good, but she

did nothing to emphasize it. Her disposition was cheerful

when she was with someone; when alone her tendency was

to work hard at the job at hand, giving it her serious atten-

tion. Whatever she was doing was the most important thing

in the world to her just then and she had a compulsion to do

it absolutely right. She was indefatigable but she liked, almost

demanded, to be praised for what she did well.

Her amusements were simple ones. She liked to talk to

people but most people quickly became bored with what she

had to say she was inclined to be repetitive. Fortunately for

her, she also liked to talk to animals, birds included.

She was a retarded person with the mentality of an eight-

year-old.

Eight can be a delightful age. Rolfe remembered his son at

eight bright, inquiring, beginning to emerge from childhood

but not so fast as to lose any of his innocent charm; a refresh-

ing, uninhibited conversationalist with an original viewpoint

on life. The boy had been a challenge to him and a constant

delight. He held on to that memory, drawing sustenance from

it, for her.

Young Rolfe was dead now, along with his mother and

three billion other people.

Rolfe and Siss were the only ones left in all the world.

It was M.R. that had done it, he told her. Massive Retalia-

tion; from the Other Side.

When American bombs rained down from long-range jets

and rocket carriers, nobody'd known the Chinese had what

they had. Nobody'd suspected it of that relatively backward

country which the United States had believed it was soften-

ing up, in a brushfire war, for enforced diplomacy.

Rolfe hadn't been aware of any speculation that Peking's

scientists were concentrating their research not on weapons

but on biochemistry. Germ warfare, sure. There'd been prop-

aganda from both sides about that, but nothing had been

hinted about a biological agent, as it must have been, that

could break down human cells and release the water.

"M.R.," he told her. "Better than nerve gas or the neutron

bomb." Like those, it left the buildings and equipment intact.

Unlike them, it didn't leave any messy corpses only the

bones, which crumbled and blew away. Except the bone dust

trapped inside the pathetic mounds of clothing that lay every-

where in the city.

"Are they coming over now that they beat us?"

"I'm sure they intended to. But there can't be any of them

left. They outsmarted themselves, I guess. The wind must

have blown it right back at them. I don't really know what

happened, Siss. All I know is that everybody's gone now,

except you and me."

"But the animals"

Rolfe had found it best in trying to explain something to

Siss to keep it simple, especially when he didn't understand

it himself. Just as he had learned long ago that if he didn't

know how to pronounce a word he should say it loud and

confidently.

So all he told Siss was that the bad people had got hold

of 'a terrible weapon called M.R. she'd heard of that and

used it on the good people and that nearly everybody had

died. Not the animals, though, and damned if he knew why.

"Animals don't sin," Siss told him.

"That's as good an explanation as any I can think of," he

said. She was silent for a while. Then she said: "Your name

initials are M.R., aren't they?"

He'd never considered it before, but she was right. Martin

Roife Massive Retaliation. I hope she doesn't blame every-

thing on me, he thought. But then she spoke again. "M.R.

That's short for Mister. What I call you. Your name that I

have for you. Mister Ralph."

"Tell me again how we were saved, Mr. Ralph."

She used the expression in an almost evangelical sense,

making him uncomfortable. Rolfe was a practical man, a

realist and freethinker.

"You know as well as I do, Siss," he said. "It's because

Professor Cantwell was doing government research and

because he was having a party. You certainly remember;

Cantwell was your boss."

"I know that. But you tell it so good and I like to hear it."

"All right. Bill Cantwell was an old friend of mine from

the army and when I came to New York I gave him a call at

the University. It was the first time I'd talked to him in years;

I had no idea he'd married again and had set up housekeeping

in Manhattan."

"And had a working girl named Siss," she put in.

"The very same," he agreed. Siss never referred to herself

as a maid, which was what she had been. "And so when I

asked Bill if he could put me up, I thought it would be in his

old bachelor apartment. He said sure, just like that, and I

didn't find out till I got there, late in the evening, that he had

a new wife and was having a house party and had invited two

couples from out of town to stay over."

"I gave my room to Mr. and Mrs. Glena, from Columbus,"

Siss said.

"And the Torquemadas, of Seville, had the regular guest

room." Whoever they were; he didn't remember names the

way she did. "So that left two displaced persons, you and

me."

"Except for the Nassers."

The Nassers, as she pronounced it, were the two self-con-

tained rooms in the Cantwell basement. The NASAs, or the

Nasas, was what Cantwell called them because the National

Aeronautics and Space Administration had given him a con-

tract to study the behavior of human beings in a closed

system.

Actually the money had gone to Columbia University,

where Cantwell was a professor of mechanical and aerospace

engineering.

"A sealed-off environment," Rolfe said. "But because

Columbia didn't have the space just at that time, and because

the work was vital, NASA gave Cantwell permission to build

the rooms in his own home. They were -still are -in his

basement, and that's where you and I slept that fateful night

when the world ended."

"I still don't understand."

"We were completely sealed off in there," Rolfe said. "We

weren't breathing Earth air and we weren't connected in any

way to the rest of the world. We might as well have been out

in space or on the moon. So when it happened to everybody

else to Professor and Mrs. Cantwell, and to the Glenns and

the Torquemadas and to the Nassers in Egypt and the Joneses

in Jones Beach and all the people at Columbia, and in Wash-

ington and Moscow and Pretoria and London and Peoria and

Medicine Hat and La Jolla and all those places all over it

didn't happen to us. That's because Professor Cantwell was a

smart man and his closed systems worked."

"And we were saved."

"That's one way of looking at it."

"What's the other way?"

"We were doomed."

From his notebooks:

Siss asked why I'm so sure there's nobody but us left in

the whole world. A fair question. Of course I'm not abso-

lutely positively cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, swear-on-a

Bible convinced that there isn't a poor live slob hidden away

in some remote corner. Other people besides Bill must have

been working with closed systems; certainly any country with

a space program would be, and maybe some of their nassers

were inhabited, too. I hadn't heard that any astronauts or

cosmonauts were in orbit that day but if they were, and got

down safely, I guess they could be alive somewhere.

But I've listened to the rest of the world on some of the

finest radio equipment ever put together and there hasn't been

a peep out of it. I've listened and signaled and listened and

signaled and listened. Nothing. Nil. Short wave, long wave,

AM, FM, UHF, marine band, everywhere. Naught. Not a

thing. Lots of automatic signals from unmanned satellites, of

course, and the quasars are still being heard from, but nothing

human.

I've sent out messages on every piece of equipment con-

nected to Con Ed's EE net. RCA, American Cable & Radio,

the Bell System, Western Union, The Associated Press, UPI,

Reuters' world news network. The New York Times' multi-

farious teletypes, even the Hilton Hotels' international reser-

vations system. Nothing. By this time I'd become fairly expert

at communications and I'd found the Pentagon network at

AT&T. Silent. Ditto the hot line to the Kremlin. I read the

monitor teletype and saw the final message from Washington

to Moscow. Strictly routine. No hint that anything was amiss

anywhere. Just as it must have been at the Army message

center at Pearl Harbor on another Sunday morning a genera-

tion ago.

This is for posterity, these facts. My evidence is circum-

stantial. But to Siss I say: "There's nobody left but us. I

know. You'll have to take my word for it that the rest of

the world is as empty as New York."

Nobody here but us chickens, boss. Us poor flightless birds.

One middle-aged rooster and one sad little hen, somewhat

deficient in the upper story. What do you want us to do, boss?

What's the next step in the great cosmic scheme? Tell us:

where do we go from here?

But don't tell me; tell Siss. I don't expect an answer; she

does. She's the one who went into the first church she found

open that Sunday morning (some of them were locked, you

know) and said all the prayers she knew, and asked for

mercy for her relatives, and her friends, and her employers,

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Richard Wilson - Mother to the World.pdf

共24页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Richard Wilson - Mother to the World

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: