Final Reckonings (44 page)

But he wouldn't snag one even if he saw it, because a shot might set the whole passel off. It was best we keep on a-singing and a-walking, and so we did until it was raising a powerful dark.

Then we got through and oozed out the other side, onto a little dried-over crick bed. We didn't figger the herd'd move in the night, and come morning we could start the drive back. So we bedded down.

But first we made us a fire and broke out supplies.

Iron Head stuck a pipe in his craw and curled up in his bag, closing his eyes and looking like a hoss gone under for sure — it was always his way, come night at a camp.

Me and Doc just set there for a spell.

"I can't shake it," I said. "All them critters, more than this child could count."

"Nature is fecund," Doc said.

"Wouldn't know about that," I told him. "But there's a powerful lot of breeding. Beaver, deer, elk, fish. And the flies and skeeters and chiggers too. Even up there." I pointed at the sky. "Look at that big white herd, forever roaming and twinkling down. Doc, do you reckon stars mate too?"

"I wouldn't know," Doc mumbled. "And I don't want to find out."

"One thing's mighty dark to this child," I said. "And I been meaning to ask. Seeing that we're animals, too, in a way — how is it that we never breed strong?"

"There's fifty-five of us on the Platte," Doc said. "And forty downriver, and another forty beyond. It's that way all over, Jake. Thousands of us, really."

"But that's just a smidgen compared to the others," I said. "You'd figger maybe there'd be millions."

Doc sort of sighed. "There were once."

"You mean like in the book stories? About the cities and all?" I let out a bark. "Don't tell me you put stock in that talk too."

"It's true, Jake. Where do you think the books came from? And don't Jed and the others take the team back to the ruins to get us guns and ammunition from the arsenals? You heard him tell about it with his own lips."

"I just can't swaller," I said. "I always figgered he aimed to stuff us with his talk. Thousands of stone
tipis
in one place, wagons that used to run without a team — it don't hold with nature."

"That's why everything turned out this way," Doc told me. "Men didn't hold with nature. Jake, I've read it in the books. And my father told me what
his
father told him — he was alive and saw it when
he
was a boy. Once there were cities and towns and villages everywhere."

"What happened?" I asked. "What became of the people, and why?"

Iron Head opened his eyes for a spell. "People go under," he grunted. "Heap bad medicine called nuclear fission."

"That's right," Doc said. "They got to fighting, and they had weapons. Atomic bombs, nerve gas. The cities were razed, the survivors scattered. And most of them didn't last long. They couldn't live in the open. They couldn't cope with the wilderness. They died of disease and plague. They froze in the winter, and they starved — "

"I don't rightly make out the meaning of the words," I told him. "But I'll allow you're talking straight about the fighting and maybe rough ways of killing. Only that part about the starving, now — how could they starve, with all this game here for the taking?"

Doc smiled. "You'd find it all in the books if you'd only be willing to learn," he said. "Iron Head knows the story, don't you?"

The Injun opened his eyes again. "No story," he said. "Only biological inevitability to restore the balance of nature."

Sometimes that Injun talk, or book talk, whichever it is, gets me down. But Doc set up a hoot and a holler.

"Probably right at that," he said. "Here's the way it was, Jake. Originally all this land was much the way you see it now. Then men came and settled. They killed the beaver. They fished the streams. They hunted buffalo and game until many animals were almost extinct. That means there were hardly any left.

"When the last wars were fought, there were only a few deer, a few buffalo, a few bear left roaming out here in the wilderness. There wasn't a wild creature east of the Big River at all. And the gas and the bombs and the plague killed off most of the domestic animals in the East — cows and sheep and pigs and horses. We've got a few horses here, but we're lucky, and you know we're trying to breed more because we need them. Some day we might try plowing."

"Plowing for squaw men," Iron Head muttered. "Agricultural perversion."

"Don't worry," Doc said. "It wouldn't be for a long time yet — and then only if we have to." He turned to me again. "But I was telling you about what happened. There was no game, and people died. Only a few of us managed to survive, out here in the open. A few hunters, trappers, Indians."

Doc always talked like that — he never did learn how to say "Injun" rightly but stuck to book talk. Only I knew what he palavered anyhow.

"Gradually they came together, in little groups, for protection. The old crafts came into their own, the old speech ways and folkways that had somehow survived through two centuries of so-called civilization."

"You mean city life?" I asked.

"City death," Iron Head said. And Doc nodded again.

"We managed. We survived. And the remaining animals bred again, unrestricted and unmolested. They multiplied quickly, so that for the past generation it's been like old times once more. Plenty of game, and the timber's come back up north too. There's nothing left of the cities but ruins, and not even ruins where most of the villages and homesteads were. Life is simple again. Crude, perhaps, but — peaceful."

Sometimes I get the savvy of what Doc says, even if I can't understand the foferaw lingo. I knew what he meant now when I lay back and looked up at all the stars, blazing away.

Doc lay back too. It was quiet and easy, cept for a coyote howling off on the ridge.

"You never did say about the stars, Doc," I told him. "Reckon they mate? Reckon anybody's ever hit out to take a look?"

Doc frowned. "What made you say that?"

"Nothing. Only I was figgering maybe if they had some of them contraptions you showed me once in the books — what they call them, rackets?"

"Rockets," Doc said. "No, men didn't reach the stars. But there at the last they were ready to try for the moon. Some said that when war began they actually took off and — "

He closed lip, fast. Then he sat up.

I sat up too. Iron Head was already standing with his rifle cocked at the ready.

So it was no mistake. We'd all seen it and heard it at the same time.

It was like a big orange flash in the sky, over to the east. And like a big thunder. Only it wasn't lightning and it wasn't a storm. Something had hit, back there, near the river.

"Meteor!" Doc muttered.

"What's that?" I asked.

"I can't tell you now. Come on."

"Where you aiming to sashay to?"

"I want to see if I can find it." He was folding his pack. Iron Head stamped out the fire.

"All right," I said. "Reckon this child's not bent on rumping it far behind. But that thunder's getting nigher."

"Wait." Doc held up his hand. "He's correct."

"Correct, hell," I said. "I'm right! Just you clean the grubs out of your ears."

We could all hear it then, roaring closer and closer. And now Iron Head was squinting off aways, and he turned back and yelled, "Buffler! The noise — they're stampeding this way!"

No mistake, the herd was pounding prairie. I could see them plain now, black moving on black, in a crazy wave.

Nobody had to tell this hoss what to do, or the others, either. We spread out and got to our knees. Then we started pumping lead.

"Fire together!" Doc hollered. "Else they can't hear you!" So we fired together, or tried to. And the wave come on, faster and faster, and I could see horns tossing in the starlight, and I could hear the bawling and panting and the drumming, and it did something to me inside so that I sort of tightened up all over, because I knowed for a fact now that we were going under. Unless they heard and stopped.

They did, and not a mite too soon, either. The lead bulls reared up, and then they crashed back against the cows, and for a minute they was milling around, raising dust. Then it was like a wave dying off into ripples that stretched way back, far as eye could see. And then they quieted down again, ready to graze.

Doc stood up, rubbing his knees. "That was close," he said. 'Think we re safe to walk through?"

Iron Head nodded. "Come," he said. "We sing 'Onward Christian Soldiers.' "

So we walked back through the herd, and we sang "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "Roll Me Over in the Clover" and "No Business Like Show Business" and everything Doc could remember teaching us from the books at the rendezvous sings at springtime.

It was even worse in the dark, with the eyes and the horns sort of glittering and skittering all around us, but we went on. And on. And on.

Until we got back to the top of the ridge, where we'd come over in the afternoon, and looked down and saw it.

"God!" said Doc.

"The devil!" said Iron Head.

"What is it?" I asked.

But neither answered me, just stared. I stared too. This hoss has seen a heap of sights but never nothing like this. Never nothing like this big shiny shape setting there on the prairie, bigger'n all the lodges and tipis put together.

We stared, and that's how it happened — how he fixed it so's he snuck up behind us. And we not noticing until the light come.

It like to of blinded me, at first, and I could scarce make out to aim. Then the voice come, and I knowed it was a man.

"Don't shoot," he said. "We're friends."

Iron Head was drawing a bead, too; he's got Injun eyes.

"Put it down," said the man. "We're friends, don't you understand?" He sort of jerked his head away, and it come over me he was talking to other men behind him. "Maybe they don't understand English."

All at once I could see. The light was coming from a little stick he held in his hand. It wasn't a torch, and it wasn't any kind of oil lamp I ever heard tell of. But the light was bright as day, and he stood there with three others behind him, all alike as chips under a buffalo. Wearing floppy duds all of one piece, but with bare heads; the hair cut short the way tads wear it, and not a beard to be seen. That's the truth of it — four overgrown nippers is what they shined up to be.

This child's not one to run from tads, and neither is Iron Head. We dropped our guns.

"That's better," said the one with the light. "Maybe they do understand after all."

"Of course we understand," Doc told him. "It's just that you startled us."

'
We
startled
you
?" The man grinned. "That's a good one. But look, this is no way to meet. After all, it's a historic occasion. The very least it rates is a 'Doctor Livingstone, I presume,' or something similar."

"Then you say it," Doc told him. "My name happens to
be
Doctor Livingstone."

It was book talk, but I got the hang of it, enough to remember every word, even what I couldn't rightly reckon out. Because it was strange I set store by it.

Doc pointed to us. "This is Iron Head," he said. "And that's Jake."

"I'm Captain Buckton," the big tad told us. "And this is Lieutenant Thorne, Ensign Winters, Ensign Taylor." He nodded our way. "These Indians understand English?"

"Dry your gap," I spoke up. "I ain't no Injun. Iron Head here's a true Cree, but I allow as he can palaver better'n you hosses."

"No offense," Captain Buckton said. He took Doc by the arm. "It's wonderful to find you here. We didn't know what to expect — whether there'd be any life at all, for that matter. I presume you realize we've just landed. You can see the rocket down there."

Doc nodded. "We noticed it. But I could scarcely believe my eyes — there are still rumors preserved, of course, yet I never knew if anyone had succeeded in taking off."

"Tell you anything you want to know," Buckton said. "But come on, let's go down to the ship and make ourselves comfortable."

I looked at Doc and he nodded, so we trailed along. We let him and this Captain Buckton do all the jawing.

Now here's the meat, without hide or fat or guts or lights — according to the way Buckton skinned it. What Doc used to tell about was gospel true, about the war and all. Seems there had been men that were set on hitting the sky trail, and they'd built these rockets out in the desert. When things got bad, they decided it was time to get shut of Earth, and the whole kit and kaboodle took off for the moon.

Some made her; some went under. According to this Buckton — and Doc, he didn't make him out a liar—things on the moon ain't natural-like. He allowed as how your weight changes, and it's hard to breathe, and there's no critters up there. But the ships that landed brought means of making air which I don't rightly comprehend, and they dug lodges underground. From the talk I figger they made regular cities like the old ones down here, only all underneath, living like prairie dogs. For a while it was all leather and no fleece for them, until they got the hang of how to live that way. Then they got so's they could mine metals and make things and set up a way of making their air and raised a bellyful by some means — the word for it is "hydroponics," whatever that is. They knew how to get water, too. Doc asked a powerful lot of questions, but it's of no nevermind to me. Main thing is, they done it.

All this time they figgered Earth for a goner. But they were breeding up again and wanted to fan out, and for some seasons there was a heap of talk about coming back.

It weren't easy to ready a rocket for the trip, from all Buckton said, and they only hoped to make do with it once they got her.

Doc asked aplenty about that part, but I got lost in the brush right off—anyhow, they pieced it out and took off for Earth. Buckton and six others, there were, come to scout and see what had happened back here. They were a month on the way, and here they were.

"But where are we?" Buckton asked.

"Just west of the Platte," Doc told him. "Our group is located across the river, to the east of here."