Kate Wilhelm - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

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Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
by Kate Wilhelm
PART ONE
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Chapter 1
What David always hated most about the Sumner family dinners was the way everyone talked
about him as if he were not there.
“Has he been eating enough meat lately? He looks peaked.”
“You spoil him, Carrie. If he won’t eat his dinner, don’t let him go out and play. You were
like that, you know.”
“When I was his age, I was husky enough to cut down a tree with a hatchet. He couldn’t cut
his way out of a fog.”
David would imagine himself invisible, floating unseen over their heads as they discussed
him. Someone would ask if he had a girl friend yet, and they would tsk-tsk whether the answer was
yes or no. From his vantage point he would aim a ray gun at Uncle Clarence, whom he especially
disliked, because he was fat, bald, and very rich. Uncle Clarence dipped his biscuits in his
gravy, or in syrup, or more often in a mixture of sorghum and butter that he stirred together on
his plate until it looked like baby shit.
“Is he still planning to be a biologist? He should go to med school and join Walt in his
practice.”
He would point his ray gun at Uncle Clarence and cut a neat plug out of his stomach and
carefully ease it out, and Uncle Clarence would ooze from the opening and flow all over them.
“David.” He started with alarm, then relaxed again. “David, why don’t you go out and see
what the other kids are up to?” His father’s quiet voice, saying actually, That’s enough of that.
And they would turn their collective mind to one of the other offspring.
As David grew older, he learned the complex relationships that he merely accepted as a
child. Uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, third cousins. And the honorary members—the
brothers and sisters and parents of those who had married into the family. There were the Sumners
and Wistons and O’Gradys and Heinemans and the Meyers and Capeks and Rizzos, all part of the same
river that flowed through the fertile valley.
He remembered the holidays especially. The old Sumner house was rambling with many bedrooms
upstairs and an attic that was wall-to-wall mattresses, pallets for the children, with an enormous
fan in the west window. Someone was forever checking to make certain that they hadn’t all
suffocated in the attic. The older children were supposed to keep an eye on the younger ones, but
what they did in fact was to frighten them night after night with ghost stories. Eventually the
noise level would rise until adult intervention was demanded. Uncle Ron would clump up the stairs
heavily and there would be a scurrying, with suppressed giggles and muffled screams, until
everyone found a bed again, so that by the time he turned on the hall light that illuminated the
attic dimly, all the children would seem to be sleeping. He would pause briefly in the doorway,
then close the door, turn off the light, and tramp back down the stairs, apparently deaf to the
renewed merriment behind him.
Whenever Aunt Claudia came up, it was like an apparition. One minute pillows would be
flying, someone would be crying, someone else trying to read by flashlight, several of the boys
playing cards by another flashlight, some of the girls huddled together whispering what had to be
delicious secrets, judging by the way they blushed and looked desperate if an adult came upon them
suddenly, and then the door would snap open, the light would fall on the disorder, and she would
be standing there. Aunt Claudia was very tall and thin, her nose was too big, and she was tanned
to a permanent old-leather color. She would stand there, immobile and terrible, and the children
would creep back into bed without a sound. She would not move until everyone was back where he or
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she belonged, then she would close the door soundlessly. The silence would drag on and on. The
ones nearest to the door would hold their breath, trying to hear breathing on the other side.
Eventually someone would become brave enough to open the door a crack, and if she were truly gone,
the party would resume.
The smells of holidays were fixed in David’s memory. All the usual smells: fruit cakes and
turkeys, the vinegar that went in the egg dyes, the greenery and the thick, creamy smoke of
bayberry candles. But what he remembered most vividly was the smell of gunpowder that they all
carried at the Fourth of July gathering. The smell that permeated their hair and clothes lasted on
their hands for days and days. Their hands would be stained purple-black by berry picking, and the
color and smell were one of the indelible images of his childhood. Mixed in with it was the smell
of the sulfur that was dusted on them liberally to confound the chiggers.
If it hadn’t been for Celia, his childhood would have been perfect. Celia was his cousin,
his mother’s sister’s daughter. She was one year younger than David, and by far the prettiest of
all his cousins. When they were very young they promised to marry one day, and when they grew
older and it was made abundantly clear that no cousins might ever marry in that family, they
became implacable enemies. He didn’t know how they had been told. He was certain that no one ever
put it in words, but they knew. When they could not avoid each other after that, they fought. She
pushed him out of the hayloft and broke his arm when he was fifteen, and when he was sixteen they
wrestled from the back door of the Winston farmhouse to the fence, fifty or sixty yards away. They
tore the clothes off each other, and he was bleeding from her fingernails down his back, she from
scraping her shoulder on a rock. Then somehow in their rolling and squirming frenzy, his cheek
came down on her uncovered chest, and he stopped fighting. He suddenly became a melting, sobbing,
incoherent idiot and she hit him on the head with a rock and ended the fight.
Up to that point the battle had been in almost total silence, broken only by gasps for
breath and whispered language that would have shocked their parents. But when she hit him and he
went limp, not unconscious, but dazed, uncaring, inert, she screamed, abandoning herself to terror
and anguish. The family tumbled from the house as if they had been shaken out, and their first
impression must have been that he had raped her. His father hustled him to the barn, presumably
for a thrashing. But in the barn his father, belt in hand, looked at him with an expression that
was furious, and strangely sympathetic. He didn’t touch David, and only after he had turned and
left did David realize that tears were still running down his face.
In the family there were farmers, a few lawyers, two doctors, insurance brokers and bankers
and millers, hardware merchandisers, other shopkeepers. David’s father owned a large department
store that catered to the upper-middle-class clientele of the valley. The valley was rich, the
farms in it large and lush. David always supposed that the family, except for a few ne’er-do-
wells, was rather wealthy. Of all his relatives his favorite was his father’s brother Walt. Dr.
Walt, they all called him, never uncle. He played with the children and taught them grown-up
things, like where to hit if you really meant it, where not to hit in a friendly scrap. He seemed
to know when to stop treating them as children long before anyone else in the family did. Dr. Walt
was the reason David had decided very early to become a scientist.
David was seventeen when he went to Harvard. His birthday was in September and he didn’t go
home for it. When he did return at Thanksgiving, and the clan had gathered, Grandfather Sumner
poured the ritual before-dinner martinis and handed one to him. And Uncle Warner said to him,
“What do you think we should do about Bobbie?”
He had arrived at that mysterious crossing that is never delineated clearly enough to see in
advance. He sipped his martini, not liking it particularly, and knew that childhood had ended, and
he felt a profound sadness and loneliness.
The Christmas that David was twenty-three seemed out of focus. The scenario was the same,
the attic full of children, the food smells, the powdering of snow, none of that had changed, but
he was seeing it from a new position and it was not the wonderland it had been. When his parents
went home he stayed on at the Wiston farm for a day or two, waiting for Celia’s arrival. She had
missed the Christmas Day celebration, getting ready for her coming trip to Brazil, but she would
be there, her mother had assured Grandmother Wiston, and David was waiting for her, not happily,
not with any expectation of reward, but with a fury that grew and caused him to stalk the old
house like a boy being punished for another’s sin.
When she came home and he saw her standing with her mother and grandmother, his anger
melted. It was like seeing Celia in a time distortion, as she was and would be, or had been. Her
pale hair would not change much, but her bones would become more prominent and the almost
emptiness of her face would have written on it a message of concern, of love, of giving, of being
decisively herself, of a strength unsuspected in her frail body. Grandmother Wiston was a
beautiful old lady, he thought in wonder, amazed that he never had seen her beauty before. Celia’s
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mother was more beautiful than the girl. And he saw the resemblance to his own mother in the trio.
Wordlessly, defeated, he turned and went to the rear of the house and put on one of his
grandfather’s heavy jackets because he didn’t want to see her at all now and his own outdoor
clothing was in the front hall closet too near where she was standing.
He walked a long time in the frosty afternoon, seeing very little, and shaking himself from
time to time when he realized that the cold was entering his shoes or making his ears numb. He
should turn back, he thought often, but he walked on. And he found that he was climbing the slope
to the antique forest that his grandfather had taken him to once, a long time ago. He climbed and
became warmer, and at dusk he was under the branches of the tiers of trees that had been there
since the beginning of time. They or others that were identical to them. Waiting. Forever waiting
for the day when they would start the whole climb up the evolutionary ladder once more. Here were
the relicts his grandfather had brought him to see. Here was a silverbell, grown to the stature of
a large tree, where down the slopes, in the lower reaches, it remained always a shrub. Here the
white basswood grew alongside the hemlock and the bitternut hickory, and the beeches and sweet
buckeyes locked arms.
“David.” He stopped and listened, certain he had imagined it, but the call came again.
“David, are you up here?”
He turned then and saw Celia among the massive tree trunks. Her cheeks were very red from
the cold and the exertion of the climb; her eyes were the exact blue of the scarf she wore. She
stopped six feet from him and opened her mouth to speak again, but didn’t. Instead she drew off a
glove and touched the smooth trunk of a beech tree. “Grandfather Wiston brought me up here, too,
when I was twelve. It was very important to him that we understand this place.”
David nodded.
She looked at him then. “Why did you leave like that? They all think we’re going to fight
again.”
“We might,” he said.
She smiled. “I don’t think so. Never again.”
“We should start down. It’ll be dark in a few minutes.” But he didn’t move.
“David, try to make Mother see, will you? You understand that I have to go, that I have to
do something, don’t you? She thinks you’re so clever. She’d listen to you.”
He laughed. “They think I’m clever like a puppy dog.”
Celia shook her head. “You’re the one they’d listen to. They treat me like a child and
always will.”
David shook his head, smiling, but he sobered again very quickly and said, “Why are you
going, Celia? What are you trying to prove?”
“Damn it, David. If you don’t understand, who will?” She took a deep breath and said, “Look,
you do read the newspapers, don’t you? People are starving in South America. Most of South America
will be in a state of famine before the end of this decade if they aren’t helped almost
immediately. And no one has done any real research in tropical farming methods. Practically no
one. That’s all lateritic soil and no one down there understands it. They go in and burn off the
trees and underbrush, and in two or three years they have a sunbaked plain as hard as iron. Okay,
they send some of their bright young students here to learn about modern farming, but they go to
Iowa, or Kansas, or Minnesota, or some other dumb place like that, and they learn farming methods
suited to temperate climates, not tropical. Well, we trained in tropical farming and we’re going
to start classes down there, in the field. It’s what I trained for. This project will get me a
doctorate.”
The Wistons were farmers, had always been farmers. “Custodians of the soil,” Grandfather
Wiston had said once, “not its owners, just custodians.”
Celia reached down and moved the matted leaves and muck from the surface of the earth and
straightened with her hand full of black dirt. “The famines are spreading. They need so much. And
I have so much to give! Can’t you understand that?” she cried. She closed her hand hard,
compacting the soil into a ball that crumbled again when she opened her fist and touched the lump
with her forefinger. She let the soil fall from her hand and carefully pushed the protective
covering of leaves back over the bared spot.
“You followed me to tell me good-bye, didn’t you?” David said suddenly, and his voice was
harsh. “It’s really good-bye this time, isn’t it?” He watched her and slowly she nodded. “There’s
someone in your group?”
“I’m not sure, David. Maybe.” She bowed her head and started to pull her glove on again. “I
thought I was sure. But when I saw you in the hall, saw the look on your face when I came in . . .
I realized that I just don’t know.”
“Celia, you listen to me! There aren’t any hereditary defects that would surface! Damn it,
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you know that! If there were, we simply wouldn’t have children, but there’s no reason. You know
that, don’t you?”
She nodded. “I know.”
“For God’s sake! Come with me, Celia. We don’t have to get married right away, let them get
used to the idea first. They will. They always do. We have a resilient family, you and me. Celia,
I love you.”
She turned her head, and he saw that she was weeping. She wiped her cheeks with her glove,
then with her bare hand, leaving dirt streaks. David pulled her to him, held her and kissed her
tears, her cheeks, her lips. And he kept saying, “I love you, Celia.”
She finally drew away and started back down the slope, with David following. “I can’t decide
anything right now. It isn’t fair. I should have stayed at the house. I shouldn’t have followed
you up here. David, I’m committed to going in two days. I can’t just say I’ve changed my mind.
It’s important to me. To the people down there. I can’t just decide not to go. You went to Oxford
for a year. I have to do something too.”
He caught her arm and held her, kept her from moving ahead again. “Just tell me you love me.
Say it, just once, say it.”
“I love you,” she said very slowly.
“How long will you be gone?”
“Three years. I signed a contract.”
He stared at her in disbelief. “Change it! Make it one year. I’ll be out of grad school
then. You can teach here. Let their bright young students come to you.”
“We have to get back, or they’ll send a search party for us,” she said. “I’ll try to change
it,” she whispered then. “If I can.”
Two days later she left.
David spent New Year’s Eve at the Sumner farm with his parents and a horde of aunts and
uncles and cousins. On New Year’s Day, Grandfather Sumner made an announcement. “We’re building a
hospital up at Bear Creek, this side of the mill.”
David blinked. That was a mile from the farm, miles from anything else at all. “A hospital?”
He looked at his uncle Walt, who nodded.
Clarence was studying his eggnog with a sour expression, and David’s father, the third
brother, was watching the smoke curl from his pipe. They all knew, David realized. “Why up here?”
he asked finally.
“It’s going to be a research hospital,” Walt said. “Genetic diseases, hereditary defects,
that sort of thing. Two hundred beds.”
David shook his head in disbelief. “You have any idea how much something like that would
cost? Who’s financing it?”
His grandfather laughed nastily. “Senator Burke has graciously arranged to get federal
funds,” he said. His voice became more caustic. “And I cajoled a few members of the family to put
a little in the kitty.” David glanced at Clarence, who looked pained. “I’m giving the land,”
Grandfather Sumner went on. “So here and there we got support.”
“But why would Burke go for it? You’ve never voted for him in a single campaign in his
life.”
“Told him we’d dig out a lot of stuff we’ve been sitting on, support his opposition. If he
was a baboon, we’d support him, and there’s a lot of family these days, David. A heap of family.”
“Well, hats off,” David said, still not fully believing it. “You giving up your practice to
go into research?” he asked Walt. His uncle nodded. David drained his cup of eggnog.
“David,” Walt said quietly, “we want to hire you.”
He looked up quickly. “Why? I’m not into medical research.”
“I know what your specialty is,” Walt said, still very quietly. “We want you for a
consultant, and later on to head a department of research.”
“But I haven’t even finished my thesis yet,” David said, and he felt as if he had stumbled
into a pot party.
“You’ll do another year of donkey work for Selnick and eventually you’ll write the thesis, a
bit here, a dab there. You could write it in a month, couldn’t you, if you had time?” David nodded
reluctantly. “I know,” Walt said, smiling faintly. “You think you’re being asked to give up a
lifetime career for a pipe dream.” There was no trace of a smile when he added, “But, David, we
believe that lifetime won’t be more than two to four years at the very most.”
Chapter 2
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David looked from his uncle to his father, to the other uncles and cousins in the room, and
finally to his grandfather. He shook his head helplessly. “That’s crazy. What are you talking
about?”
Grandfather Sumner let out his breath explosively. He was a large man with a massive chest
and great bulging biceps. His hands were big enough to carry a basketball in each. But it was his
head that was his most striking feature. It was the head of a giant, and although he had farmed
for many years, and later overseen the others who did it for him, he had found time to read more
extensively than anyone else that David knew. There was no book, except the contemporary best
sellers, that anyone could mention that he wasn’t aware of, or hadn’t read. And he remembered what
he read. His library was better than most public libraries.
Now he leaned forward and said, “You listen to me, David. You listen hard. I’m telling you
what the goddamn government doesn’t dare admit yet. We’re on the first downslope of a slide that
is going to plummet this economy, and that of every other nation on earth, to a depth that they
never dreamed of.
“I know the signs, David. The pollution’s catching up to us faster than anyone knows.
There’s more radiation in the atmosphere than there’s been since Hiroshima— French tests, China’s
tests. Leaks. God knows where all of it’s coming from. We reached zero population growth a couple
of years ago, but, David, we were trying, and other nations are getting there too, and they aren’t
trying. There’s famine in one-fourth of the world right now. Not ten years from now, not six
months from now. The famines are here and they’ve been here for three, four years already, and
they’re getting worse. There’re more diseases than there’s ever been since the good Lord sent the
plagues to visit the Egyptians. And they’re plagues that we don’t know anything about.
“There’s more drought and more flooding than there’s ever been. England’s changing into a
desert, the bogs and moors are drying up. Entire species of fish are gone, just damn gone, and in
only a year or two. The anchovies are gone. The codfish industry is gone. The cod they are
catching are diseased, unfit to use. There’s no fishing off the west coast of the Americas.
“Every damn protein crop on earth has some sort of blight that gets worse and worse. Corn
blight. Wheat rust. Soybean blight. We’re restricting our exports of food now, and next year we’ll
stop them altogether. We’re having shortages no one ever dreamed of. Tin, copper, aluminum, paper.
Chlorine, by God! And what do you think will happen in the world when we suddenly can’t even
purify our drinking water?”
His face was darkening as he spoke, and he was getting angrier and angrier, directing his
unanswerable questions to David, who stared at him with nothing at all to say.
“And they don’t know what to do about any of it,” his grandfather went on. “No more than the
dinosaurs knew how to stop their own extinction. We’ve changed the photochemical reactions of our
own atmosphere, and we can’t adapt to the new radiations fast enough to survive! There have been
hints here and there that this is a major concern, but who listens? The damn fools will lay each
and every catastrophe at the foot of a local condition and turn their backs on the fact that this
is global, until it’s too late to do anything.”
“But if it’s what you think, what could they do?” David asked, looking to Dr. Walt for
support and finding none.
“Turn off the factories, ground the airplanes, stop the mining, junk the cars. But they
won’t, and even if they did, it would still be a catastrophe. It’s going to break wide open.
Within the next couple of years, David, it’s going to break.” He drank his eggnog then and put the
crystal cup down hard. David jumped at the noise.
“There’s going to be the biggest bust since man began scratching marks on rocks, that’s
what! And we’re getting ready for it! I’m getting ready for it! We’ve got the land and we’ve got
the men to farm it, and we’ll get our hospital and we’ll do research in ways to keep our animals
and our people alive, and when the world goes into a tailspin we’ll be alive and when it starves
we’ll be eating.”
Suddenly he stopped and studied David with his eyes narrowed. “I said you’d leave here
convinced that we’ve all gone mad. But you’ll be back, David, my boy. You’ll be back before the
dogwoods bloom, because you’ll see the signs.”
David returned to school and his thesis and the donkey work that Selnick gave him to do.
Celia didn’t write, and he had no address for her. In response to his questions his mother
admitted that no one had heard from her. In February in retaliation for the food embargo, Japan
passed trade restrictions that made further United States trade with her impossible. Japan and
China signed a mutual aid treaty. In March, Japan seized the Philippines, with their fields of
rice, and China resumed its long-dormant trusteeship over the Indochina peninsula, with the rice
paddies of Cambodia and Vietnam.
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Cholera struck in Rome, Los Angeles, Galveston, and Savannah. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan,
and other Arab-bloc nations issued an ultimatum: the United States must guarantee a yearly ration
of wheat to the Arab bloc and discontinue all aid to the state of Israel or there would be no oil
for the United States or Europe. They refused to believe the United States could not meet their
demands. International travel restrictions were imposed immediately, and the government, by
presidential decree, formed a new department with cabinet status: the Bureau of Information.
The redbuds were hazy blurs of pink against the clear, May-softened sky when David returned
home. He stopped by his house only long enough to change his clothes and get rid of his boxes of
college mementos before he drove out to the Sumner farm, where Walt was staying while he oversaw
the construction of his hospital.
Walt had an office downstairs. It was a clutter of books, notebooks, blueprints,
correspondence. He greeted David as if he hadn’t been away at all. “Look,” he said. “This research
of Semple and Frerrer, what do you know about it? The first generation of cloned mice showed no
deviation, no variation in viability or potency, nor did the second or third, but with the fourth
the viability decreased sharply. And there was a steady, and irreversible, slide to extinction.
Why?”
David sat down hard and stared at Walt. “How did you get that?”
“Vlasic,” Walt said. “We went to med school together. He went on in one direction, I in
another. We’ve corresponded all these years. I asked him.”
“You know his work?”
“Yes. His rhesus monkeys show the same decline during the fourth generation, and on to
extinction.”
“It isn’t just like that,” David said. “He had to discontinue his work last year—no funds.
So we don’t know the life expectancies of the later strains. But the decline starts in the third
clone generation, a decline of potency. He was breeding each clone generation sexually, testing
the offspring for normalcy. The third clone generation had only twenty-five percent potency. The
sexually reproduced offspring started with that same percentage, and, in fact, potency dropped
until the fifth generation of sexually reproduced offspring, and then it started to climb back up
and presumably would have reached normalcy again.”
Walt was watching him closely, nodding now and then. David went on. “That was the clone-
three strain. With the clone-four strain there was a drastic change. Some abnormalities were
present, and life expectancy was down seventeen percent. The abnormals were all sterile. Potency
was generally down to forty-eight percent. It was downhill all the way with each sexually
reproduced generation. By the fifth generation no offspring survived longer than an hour or two.
So much for clone-four strain. Cloning the fours was worse. Clone-five strain had gross
abnormalities, and they were all sterile. Life-expectancy figures were not completed. There was no
clone-six strain. None survived.”
“A dead end,” Walt said. He indicated a stack of magazines and extracts. “I had hoped that
they were out of date, that there were newer methods, perhaps, or an error had been found in their
figures. It’s the third generation that is the turning point then?”
David shrugged. “My information could be out of date. I know Vlasic stopped last year, but
Semple and Frerrer are still at it, or were last month. They may have something newer than I know.
You’re thinking of livestock?”
“Of course. You know the rumors? They’re just not breeding well. No figures are available,
but, hell, we have our own livestock. They’re down by half.”
“I heard something. Denied by the Bureau of Information, I believe.”
“It’s true,” Walt said soberly.
“They must be working on this line,” David said. “Someone must be working on it.”
“If they are, no one’s telling us about it,” Walt said. He laughed bitterly and stood up.
“Can you get materials for the hospital?” David asked.
“For now. We’re rushing it like there’s no tomorrow, naturally. And we’re not worrying about
money right now. We’ll have things that we won’t know what to do with, but I thought it would be
better to order everything I can think of than to find out next year that what we really need
isn’t available.”
David went to the window and looked at the farm; the green was well established by now,
spring would give way to summer without a pause and the corn would be shiny, silky green in the
fields. Just like always. “Let me have a look at your lab equipment orders, and the stuff that’s
been delivered already,” he said. “Then let’s see if we can wrangle me travel clearance out to the
coast. I’ll talk to Semple; I’ve met him a few times. If anyone’s doing anything, it’s that team.”
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“What is Selnick working on?”
“Nothing. He lost his grant, his students were sent packing.” David grinned at his uncle
suddenly. “Look, up on the hill, you can see a dogwood ready to burst open. Some of the blooms are
already showing.”
Chapter 3
David was bone tired, every muscle seemed to ache at once, and his head was throbbing. For
nine days he had been on the go, to the coast, to Harvard, to Washington, and now he wanted
nothing more than to sleep, even if the world ground to a stop while he was unaware. He had taken
a train from Washington to Richmond, and there, unable to rent a car, or buy gasoline if a car had
been available, he had stolen a bicycle and pedaled the rest of the way. He never realized his
legs could ache so much.
“You’re sure that bunch in Washington won’t be able to get a hearing?” Grandfather Sumner
asked.
“No one wants to hear the Jeremiahs,” David said. Selnick had been one of the group, and he
had talked to David briefly. The government had to admit the seriousness of the coming
catastrophe, had to take strict measures to avert it, or at least alleviate it, but instead, the
government chose to paint glowing pictures of the coming upturn that would be apparent by fall.
During the next six months those with sense and money would buy everything they could to see them
through, because after that period of grace there would be nothing to buy.
“Selnick says we should offer to buy his equipment. The school will jump at the chance to
unload it right now. Cheap.” David laughed. “Cheap. A quarter of a million possibly.”
“Make the offer,” Grandfather Sumner said brusquely. And Walt nodded thoughtfully.
David stood up shakily and shook his head. He waved at them and went off to his bed.
People still went to work. The factories were still producing, not as much, and none of the
nonessentials, but they were converting to coal as fast as possible. He thought about the darkened
cities, the fleets of trucks rusting, the corn and wheat rotting in the fields. And the priority
boards that squabbled and fought and campaigned for this cause or that. It was a long time before
his twitching muscles relaxed enough for him to lie quietly, and a longer time before he could
relax his mind enough to sleep.
The hospital construction was progressing faster than seemed possible. There were two shifts
at work; again a case of damn-the-cost. Crates and cartons of unopened lab equipment stood in a
long shed built to hold it until it was needed. David went to work in a makeshift laboratory
trying to replicate Frerrer’s and Semple’s tests. And in early July, Harry Vlasic arrived at the
farm. He was short, fat, near-sighted, and short-tempered. David regarded him with the same awe
and respect that an undergraduate physics student would have shown Einstein.
“All right,” Vlasic said. “The corn crop has failed, as predicted. Monoculture! Bah! They’ll
save sixty percent of the wheat, no more than that. This winter, hah, just wait until winter! Now
where is the cave?”
They took him to the cave entrance, which was just over a hundred yards from the hospital.
Inside the cave they used lanterns. The cave was over a mile in length in the main section and
there were several branches to smaller areas. Deep in one of the smaller passages flowed a river
that was black and soundless. Spring water, good water. Vlasic nodded again and again. When they
finished the cave tour he was still nodding. “It’s good,” he said. “It’ll work. The laboratories
go in there, underground passage from the hospital, safe from contamination. Good.”
They worked sixteen hours a day that summer and into the fall. In October the first wave of
flu swept the country, worse than the outbreak of 1917-1918. In November a new illness appeared,
and here and there it was whispered that it was plague, but the government Bureau of Information
said it was flu. Grandfather Sumner died in November. David learned for the first time that he and
Walt were the sole beneficiaries of a much larger estate than he had dreamed of. And the estate
was in cash. Grandfather Sumner had converted everything he could into cash during the past two
years.
In December the members of the family began to arrive, leaving the towns and villages and
cities scattered throughout the valley to take up residence in the hospital and staff buildings.
Rationing, black markets, inflation, and looting had turned the cities into battle mounds. And the
government was freezing all assets of every business—nothing could be bought or sold without
approval. The army was occupying the buildings, and government employees were overseeing the
strict rationing that had been imposed.
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The family brought their stocks with them. Jeremy Streit brought his hardware merchandise in
four truckloads. Eddie Beauchamp brought his dental equipment. David’s father brought all that he
could from his department store. The family had diversified, and there were representative
supplies from almost every conceivable area of business and professional endeavor.
With the failure of radio and television communication, there was no way for the government
to cope with the rising panic. Martial law was declared on December 28. Six months too late.
There was no child left under eight years of age when the spring rains came, and the
original 319 people who had come to the upper valley had dwindled to 201. In the cities the toll
had been much higher.
David studied the fetal pig he was getting ready to dissect. It was wrinkled and desiccated,
its bones too soft, its lymph glands lumpy, hard. Why? Why did the fourth generation decline?
Harry Vlasic came to watch briefly, then walked away, his head bowed in thought. Not even he could
come up with any answers, David thought, almost with satisfaction.
That night David, Walt, and Vlasic met and went over it all again. They had enough livestock
to feed the two hundred people for a long time, through cloning and sexual breeding of the third
generation. They could clone up to four hundred animals at a time. Chickens, swine, cattle. But if
the livestock all became sterile, as seemed indicated, then the food supply was limited.
Watching the two older men, David knew that they were purposely skirting the other question.
If the people also became sterile, how long would they need a continuing supply of food? He said,
“We should isolate a strain of sterile mice, clone them, and test for the reemergence of fertility
with each new generation of clones.”
Vlasic frowned and shook his head. “If we had a dozen undergraduate students, perhaps,” he
said drily.
“We have to know,” David said, feeling hot suddenly. “You’re both acting like this is just a
five-year emergency plan to tide us over a bad few years. What if it isn’t that at all? Whatever
is causing the sterility is present in all the animals. We have to know.”
Walt looked at David briefly and said, “We don’t have the time or the facilities to do any
research like that.”
“That’s a lie,” David said flatly. “We can generate all the electricity we can use, more
than enough power. We have equipment we haven’t even unloaded yet. . . .”
“Because there’s no one who can use it yet,” Walt said patiently.
“I can. I’ll do it in my free time.”
“What free time?”
“I’ll find it.” He stared at Walt until his uncle shrugged permission.
In June, David had his preliminary answers. “The A-four strain,” he said, “has twenty-five
percent potency.” Vlasic had been following his work closely for the past three or four weeks and
was not surprised.
Walt stared at him in disbelief. “Are you sure?” he whispered after a moment.
“The fourth generation of cloned sterile mice showed the same degeneracy that all clones
show by then,” David said wearily. “But they also had a twenty-five percent fertility factor. The
offspring have shorter lives, but more fertile members. This trend continues to the sixth
generation, where fertility is up to ninety-four percent and life expectancy starts to climb
again, and then it’s on its way to normalcy steadily.” He had it all on the charts that Walt now
studied. A, A1, A2, A3, A4, and their offspring by sexual reproduction, a, a1, a2 . . . There were
no clone strains after A4; none had survived to maturity.
David leaned back and closed his eyes and thought about bed and a blanket up around his neck
and black, black sleep. “Higher organisms must reproduce sexually or die out, and the ability to
do so is there. Something remembers and heals itself,” he said dreamily.
“You’ll be a great man when you publish,” Vlasic said, his hand on David’s shoulder. He then
moved to sit next to Walt, to point out some of the details that Walt might miss. “A marvelous
piece of work,” he said softly, his eyes glowing as he looked over the pages. “Marvelous.” Then he
glanced back at David. “Of course, you are aware of the other implications of your work.”
David opened his eyes and met Vlasic's gaze. He nodded. Puzzled, Walt looked from one to the
other of them. David got up and stretched. “I have to sleep,” he said.
But it was a long time before he slept. He had a single room at the hospital, more fortunate
than most, who were sleeping doubled up. The hospital had more than two hundred beds, but few
single rooms. The implications, he mused. He had been aware of them from the start, although he
had not admitted it even to himself then, and was not ready to discuss it now. They weren’t
certain yet. Three of the women were pregnant finally, after a year and a half of barrenness.
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Margaret was near term, the baby well and kicking at the moment. Five more weeks, he thought. Five
more weeks, and perhaps he never would have to discuss the implications of his work.
But Margaret didn’t wait five weeks. In two weeks she delivered a stillborn child. Zelda had
a miscarriage the following week, and in the next week May lost her child. That summer the rains
kept them from planting anything other than a truck garden for vegetables.
Walt began testing the men for fertility, and reported to David and Vlasic that no man in
the valley was fertile.
“So,” Vlasic said softly, “we now see the significance of David’s work.”
Chapter 4
Winter came early in sheets of icy rain that went on day after day after day. The work in
the laboratories increased, and David found himself blessing his grandfather for his purchase of
Selnick’s equipment, which had come with detailed instructions for making artificial placentas as
well as nearly completed work on computer programs for synthetic amniotic fluids. When David had
gone to talk to Selnick about the equipment, Selnick had insisted—madly, David had thought at the
time—that he take everything or nothing. “You’ll see,” he had said wildly. “You’ll see.” The
following week he had hanged himself, and the equipment was on its way to the Virginia valley.
They worked and slept in the lab, leaving only for meals. The winter rains gave way to
spring rains, and a new softness was in the air.
David was leaving the cafeteria, his mind on the work in the lab, when he felt a tug on his
arm. It was his mother. He hadn’t seen her for weeks, and would have brushed past her with a quick
hello if she hadn’t stopped him. She looked strange, childlike. He turned from her to stare out
the window, waiting for her to release his arm.
“Celia’s coming home,” she said softly. “She’s well, she says.”
David felt frozen; he continued to stare out the window seeing nothing. “Where is she now?”
He listened to the rustle of cheap paper and when it seemed that his mother was not going to
answer him, he wheeled about. “Where is she?”
“Miami,” she said finally, after scanning the two pages. “It’s postmarked Miami, I think.
It’s over two weeks old. Dated May 28. She never got any of our mail.” She pressed the letter into
David’s hand. Tears overflowed her eyes, and heedless of them she walked away.
David didn’t read the letter until his mother had left the cafeteria. I was in Colombia for
a while, eight months, I think. And I got a touch of the bug that nobody wants to name. The
writing was spindly and uncertain. She was not well then. He looked for Walt.
“I have to go get her. She can’t walk in on that gang at the Wiston place.”
“You know you can’t leave now.”
“It isn’t a question of can or can’t. I have to.”
Walt studied him for a moment, then shrugged. “How will you get there and back? No gas. You
know we don’t dare use any for anything but the harvest.”
“I know,” David said impatiently. “I’ll take Mike and the cart. I can stay on the back roads
with Mike.” He knew that Walt was calculating, as he had done, the time involved, and he felt his
face tightening, his hands clenching. Walt simply nodded. “I’ll leave as soon as it’s light in the
morning.” Again Walt nodded. “Thanks,” David said suddenly. He meant for not arguing with him, for
not pointing out what both already knew—that there was no way of knowing how long he would have to
wait for Celia, that she might never make it to the farm.
Three miles from the Wiston farm, David unhitched the cart and hid it in thick underbrush.
He swept over the tracks where he had left the dirt road, and then led Mike into the woods. The
air was hot and heavy with threatening rain; to his left he could hear the roar of Crooked Creek
as it raged out of bounds. The ground was spongy and he walked carefully, not wanting to sink to
his knees in the treacherous mud here in the lowlands. The Wiston farm always had been flood-
prone; it enriched the soil, Grandfather Wiston had claimed, not willing to damn nature for its
periodic rampages. “God didn’t mean for this piece of ground to have to bear year after year after
year,” he said. “Comes a time when the earth needs a rest, same as you and me. We’ll let it be
this year, give it some clover when the ground dries out.”
David started to climb, still leading Mike, who whinnied softly at him now and again. “Just
to the knob, boy,” David said quietly. “Then you can rest and eat meadow grass until she gets
here.”
Grandfather Wiston had taken him to the knob once, when David was twelve. He remembered the
day, hot and still like this day, he thought, and Grandfather Wiston had been straight and strong.
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At the knob his grandfather had paused and touched the massive bole of a white oak tree. “This
tree saw the Indians in that valley, David, and the first settlers, and my great-grandfather when
he came along. It’s our friend, David. It knows all the family secrets.”
“Is it still your property up here, Grandfather?”
“Up to and including this tree, son. Other side’s national forest land, but this tree, it’s
on our land. Yours too, David. One day you’ll come up here and put your hand on this tree and
you’ll know it’s your friend, just like it’s been my friend all my life. God help us all if anyone
ever lays an ax to it.”
They had gone on that day, down the other side of the knob, then up again, farther and
steeper this time until once more his grandfather paused for a few moments, his hand on David’s
shoulder. “This is how this land looked a million years ago, David.” Time had shifted suddenly for
the boy; a million years, a hundred million, was all the same distant past, and he imagined the
tread of the giant reptiles. He imagined that he smelled the fetid breath of a tyrannosaur. It was
cool and misty under the tall trees, and below them the saplings grew, with their branches spread
horizontally, as if to catch any stray bit of sunlight that penetrated the high canopy. Where the
sun did find a path through, it was golden and soft, the sun of another time. In even deeper
shadows grew bushes and shrubs, and at the foot of it all were the mosses and lichens, liverworts
and ferns. The arching, heaving roots of the trees were clothed in velvet emerald plants.
David stumbled and, catching his balance, came to rest against the giant oak tree that was,
somehow, his friend. He pressed his cheek against the rough bark for a few moments, then he pushed
himself away and looked up through the luxuriant branches; he could see no sky through them. When
it rained, the tree would protect him from the full force of the storm, but he needed shelter from
the fine drops that would make their way through the leaves to fall quietly on the absorbent
ground.
Before he started to build a lean-to, he examined the farm through his binoculars. Behind
the house, there was a garden being tended by five people; impossible to tell if they were male or
female. Long-haired, jeans, barefoot, thin. It didn't matter. He noted that the garden was not
producing yet, that the plants were sparse and frail. He studied the east field, aware that it was
changed but not certain what was different. Then he realized that it was growing corn. Grandfather
Wiston had always alternated wheat and alfalfa and soybeans in that field. The lower fields were
flooded, and the north field was grown up in grasses and weeds. He swept the glasses slowly over
the buildings. He spotted seventeen people altogether. No child younger than eight or nine. No
sign of Celia, nor of any recent use of the road, which was also grown up with weeds. No doubt the
people down there were just as happy to let the road hide under weeds.
He built a lean-to against the oak, where he could lie down and observe the farm. He used
fir branches to roof the shelter, and when the storm came half an hour later he stayed dry.
Rivulets ran among the garden rows below, and the farmyard turned silver and sparkly from this
distance, although he knew that closer it would simply be muddy water inches deep. The ground was
too saturated in the valley to absorb any more water. It would have to run off into Crooked Creek,
which was inching higher and higher toward the north field and the vulnerable corn there.
By the third day the water had started to invade the cornfield, and he pitied the people who
stood and watched helplessly. The garden was still being tended, but it would be a meager harvest.
By now he had counted twenty-two people; he thought that was all of them. During the storm that
lashed the valley that afternoon, he heard Mike whinny and he crawled from the lean-to and stood
up. Mike, down the slope of the knob, wouldn’t mind the rain too much, and he was protected from
the wind. Still, he whinnied again, and then again. Cautiously, holding his shotgun in one hand,
shielding his eyes from the lashing rain with the other, David edged around the tree. A figure
stumbled up the knob haltingly, head bowed, stopping often, then moving on again, not looking up,
probably blinded by the rain. Suddenly David threw the shotgun under the lean-to and ran to meet
her. “Celia!” he cried. “Celia!”
She stopped and raised her head. The rain ran over her cheeks and plastered her hair to her
forehead. She dropped the shoulder bag that had weighed her down and ran toward him, and only when
he caught her and held her tight and hard did he realize that he was weeping, as she was.
Under the lean-to he pulled off her wet clothes and rubbed her dry, then wrapped her in one
of his shirts. Her lips were blue, her skin seemed almost translucent; it was unearthly white.
“I knew you’d be here,” she said. Her eyes were very large, deep blue, bluer than he
remembered, or bluer in contrast to her pale skin. Before, she had been always sunburned.
“I knew you’d come here,” he said. “When did you eat?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t believe it was this bad here. I thought it was propaganda.
Everyone thinks it’s propaganda.”
He nodded and lighted the Sterno. She sat wrapped in his plaid shirt and watched him as he
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