Opticals, fitted with new lenses, scan the night sky. Twinkling dots scoot across the blackness, scurrying on their Newtonian rounds.
The Arcapel Colony.
Russphere.
US1.
All intact. So they at least have survived.
Unless they were riddled by buckshot-slinging antisatellite devices. But, nothe inflated storage sphere hinged beside the US1 is undeflated, unbreached.
So man still lives in space, at least.
MR. ACKERMAN
Crazy, I thought, to go out looking for this DataComm when everybodys dead. Just the merest step inside one of the houses proved that.
But they wouldnt listen to me. Those who would respectfully fall silent when I spoke now ride over my words as if I werent there.
All because of that stupid incident with the sick one. He must have taken longer to die. I couldnt have anticipated that. He just seemed hungry to me.
Its enough to gall a man.
ANGEL
The boy is calm now, just kind of tucked into himself. He knows whats happened to his mom and dad. Takes his mind off his hurt, anyway. He bows his head down, his long dirty-blond hair hiding his expression. He leans against Turkey and they talk. I can see them through the back cab window.
In amongst all weve seen, I suspect it doesnt come through to him full yet. It will take a while. Well all take a while.
We head out from Fairhope quick as we can. Not that anyplace else is different. The germs mustve spread twenty, thirty mile inland from here. Which is why we seen nobody before whod heard of it. Anybody close enough to know is gone.
Susans the only one it doesnt seem to bother. She keeps crooning to that box.
Through Silverhill and on to Robertsdale. Same everywhereno dogs bark, cattle bones drying in the fields.
We dont go into the houses.
Turn south toward Foley. They put this DataComm in the most inconspicuous place, I guess because secrets are hard to keep in cities. Anyway, its in a pine grove south of Foley land good for soybeans and potatoes.
SUSAN
I went up to the little steel door they showed me once and I take a little signet thing and press it into the slot.
Then the codes. They change them every month, but this ones still good, cause the door pops open.
Two feet thick it is. And so much under there you could spend a week finding your way.
Bud unloads the T-Isolate, and we push it through the mud and down the ramp.
BUD
Susans better now, but I watch her careful.
We go down into this pale white light everywhere. All neat and trim.
Pushing that big Isolate thing, it takes a lot out of you. Specially when you dont know where to.
But the signs light up when we pass by. Somebodys expecting.
To the hospital is where.
There are places to hook up this Isolate thing, and Susan does it. She is O.K. when she has something to do.
MC 355
The men have returned.
Asked for shelter.
And now, plugged in, MC355 reads the sluggish, silky, grieving mind.
GENE
At lastsomeone has found the tap-in. I can feel the images flitlike shiny blue fish through the warm slush I float in. Someoneaskingso I take the hard metallic ball of facts and I break it open so the someone can see. So slowly I do itthings hard to remembersteely-bright. I saw it all in one instant. I was the only one on duty then with Top Secret, Weapons Grade Clearance, so it all came to meattacks on both U.S. and USSRsome third partyonly plausible scenarioa maniacand all the counter-force and MAD and strategies optionsa big jokeirrelevantcompared to the risk of accident or third partiesthat was the first point, and we all realized it when the thing was only an hour old, but then it was too
TURKEY
Its creepy in here, everybody gone. Id hoped somebodys hid out and would be waiting, but when Bud wheels the casket thing through these halls, theres nothingyour own voice coming back thin and empty, reflected from rooms beyond rooms beyond rooms, all waiting under here. Wobbling along on the crutches, Johnny fetched me, I get lost in this electronic city clean and hard. We are like something that washed up on the beach here. God, it mustve cost more than all Fairhope itself, and who knew it was here? Not me.
GENE
A plot it was, just a goddamn plot with nothing but pure blind rage and greed behind itand the hell of it is, were never going to know who did it preciselycause in the backwash whole governments will fall, people stab each other in the backno way to tell who paid the fishing boat captains offshore to let the cruise missiles aboardbet those captains were surprised when the damn things launched from the deckbet they were told it was some kind of stuntand then the boats all evaporated into steam when the fighters got themno hope of getting a story out of thatall so comic when you think how easy it wasand the same for the Russians, Im suredumbfounded confusionand nowhere to turnnobody to hit back atso they hit usbeen primed for it so long thats the only way they could thinkand even then there was hopebecause the defenses workedpeople got to the sheltersthe satellite rockets knocked out hordes of Soviet warheadswe surely lessened the damage, with the defenses and shelters, toobut we hadnt allowed for the essential final fact that all the science and strategy pointed to
BUD
Computer asked us to put up new antennas.
A weeks work, easy, I said.
It took two.
It fell to me, most of it. Be weeks before Turkey can walk. But we got it done.
First signal comes in, its like were Columbus. Susan finds some wine and we have it all round.
We get US1. The first to call them from the whole South.
Cause there isnt much South left.
GENE
But the history books will have to write themselves on this one. I dont know who it was and now dont carebecause one other point all we strategic planners and analysts missed was that nuclear winter didnt mean the end of anythinganything at alljust that youd be careful to not use nukes anymore. Used to say that love would find awaybut one thing I knowwar will find a way, tooand this time the Soviets loaded lots of their warheads with biowar stuff, canisters fixed to blow high above citiesstuff your satellite defenses could at best riddle with shot but not destroy utterly, as they could the high explosive in nuke warheads. All so simpleif you know theres a nuke winter limit on the megatonnage you can deliveryou use the nukes on C31 targets and silosand then biowar the rest of your way. A joke, reallyI even laughed over it a few times myselfwed placed so much hope in ol nuke winter holding the linerational as all hellthe scenarios all so cleaneasy to calculatewe built our careers on them. But this other wayso simpleand no end to itand all I hopeshopesthe bastard started thissome Third World generalcaught some of the damned stuff, too.
BUD
The germs got us. Cut big stretches through the U.S. We were just lucky. The germs played out in a couple of months, while we were holed up. Soviets said theyd used the bio stuff in amongst the nukes to show us what they could do, long term. Unless the war stopped right there. Which it did.
But enough nukes blew off here and in Russia to freeze up everybody for July and August, set off those storms.
Germs did the most damage, thoughplagues.
It was a plague canister that hit the Slocum building. That did in Mobile.
The war was all over in a couple of hours. The satellite people, they saw it all.
Now theyre settling the peace.
MR. ACKERMAN
We been sitting waiting on this corpse long enough, I said, and got up.
We got food from the commissary here. Fine, I dont say Im anything but grateful for that. And we rested in the bunks, got recuperated. But enoughs enough. The computer tells us it wants to talk to the man Gene some more. Fine, I say.
Turkey stood up. Not easy, the computer says, this talking to a mans near dead. Slow work.
Looking around, I tried to take control, assume leadership again. Jutted out my chin. Time to get back.
But their eyes are funny. Somehow Id lost my real power over them. Its not anymore like Im the one who led them when the bombs started.
Which means, I suppose, that this thing isnt going to be a new beginning for me. Its going to be the same life. People arent going to pay me any more real respect than they ever did.
MC 355
So the simulations had proved right. But as ever, incomplete.
MC355 peered at the shambling, adamant band assembled in the hospital bay, and pondered how many of them might be elsewhere.
Perhaps many. Perhaps few.
It all depended on data MC355 did not have, could not easily find. The satellite worlds swinging above could get no accurate count in the U.S. or the USSR.
Stilllooking at them, MC355 could not doubt that there were many. They were simply too brimming with life, too hard to kill. All the calculations in the world could not stop these creatures.
The humans shuffled out, leaving the T-Isolate with the woman who had never left its side. They were going.
MC355 called after them. They nodded, understanding, but did not stop.
MC355 let them go.
There was much to do.
New antennas, new sensors, new worlds.
TURKEY
Belly full and eye quick, we came out into the pines. Wind blowed through with a scent of the Gulf on it, fresh and salty with rich moistness.
The dark clouds are gone. I think maybe Ill get Bud to drive south some more. Id like to go swimming one more time in those breakers that come booming in, taller than I am, down near Fort Morgan. Man never knows when hell get to do it again.
Buds ready to travel. Hes taking a radio sos we can talk to MC, find out about the help thats coming. For now, we got to get back and look after our own.
Same as well see to the boy. Hes ours now.
Susan says shell stay with Gene till hes ready, till some surgeons turn up can work on him. Thatll be a long time, say I. But she can stay if she wants. Plenty food and such down there for her.
A lot of trouble we got, coming a mere hundred mile. Not much to show for it when we get back. A bumper crop of bad news, some would say. Not me. Its better to know than to not, better to go on than to look back.
So we go out into dawn, and there are the same colored dots riding in the high, hard blue. Like camp fires.
The crickets are chirruping, and in the scrub theres a rustle of things moving about their own business, a clean scent of things starting up. The rest of us, we mount the truck and it surges forward with a muddy growl, Ackerman slumped over, Angel in the cab beside Bud, the boy already asleep on some blankets; and the forlorn sound of us moving among the windswept trees is a long and echoing note of mutual and shared desolation, powerful and pitched forward into whatever must come now, a muted note persisting and undeniable in the soft, sweet air.
EPILOGUE(twenty-three years later)JOHNNY
An older woman in a formless, wrinkled dress and worn shoes sat at the side of the road. I was panting from the fast pace I was keeping along the white strip of sandy, rutted road. She sat, silent and unmoving. I nearly walked by before I saw her.
Youre resting? I asked.
Waiting. Her voice had a feel of rustling leaves. She sat on the brown cardboard suitcase with big copper latchesthe kind made right after the war. It was cracked along the side, and white cotton underwear stuck out.
For the bus?
For Buck.
The chopper recording, it said the bus will stop up around the bend.
I heard.
It wont come down this side road. Theres not time.
I was late myself, and I figured she had picked the wrong spot to wait.
Buck will be along.
Her voice was high and had the backcountry twang to it. My own voice still had some of the same sound, but I was keeping my vowels flat and right now, and her accent reminded me of how far I had come.
I squinted, looking down the long sandy curve of the road. A pickup truck growled out of a clay side road and onto the hardtop. People rode in the back along with trunks and a 3D. Taking everything they could. Big white eyes shot a glance at me, and then the driver hit the hydrogen and got out of there.
The Confederation wasnt giving us much time. Since the unification of the Soviet, USA and European/Sino space colonies into one political union, everybodyd come to think of them as the Confeds, periodone entity. I knew betterthere were tensions and differences abounding up therebut the shorthand was convenient.
Whos Buck?
My dog. She looked at me directly, as though any fool would know who Buck was.
Look, the bus
Youre one of those Bishop boys, arent you?
I looked off up the road again. That set of wordsbeing eternally a Bishop boywas like a grain of sand caught between my back teeth. My mothers friends had used that phrase when they came over for an evening of bridge, before I went away to the university. Not my real mother, of courseshe and Dad had died in the war, and I dimly remembered them.
Or anyone else from then. Almost everybody around here had been struck down by the Soviet bioweapons. It was the awful swath of those that cut through whole states, mostly across the Souththe horror of itthat had formed the basis of the peace that followed. Nuclear and bioarsenals were reduced to nearly zero now. Defenses in space were thick and reliable. The building of those had fueled the huge boom in Confed cities, made orbital commerce important, provided jobs and horizons for a whole generationincluding me. I was a ground-orbit liaison, spending four months every year at US3. But to the people down here, I was eternally that oldest Bishop boy.