Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (18 page)

“You joining the hunt?” Sid asks.

“No. You?”

“No. They won’t find the kids. Too many places to hide. Someone’ll have a heart attack out there in the cold.” Sid looks out the window toward the park. “Will you come over to the hospital with me in a little while?”

“Something wrong, Sid?” The old man can’t keep the anxiety out of his voice.

Sid shakes his head. “I want to put my notebooks, diaries and stuff, in the vault. Seems like a good time.”

The old man is silent for a moment, then he says, “We can use Boy’s wagon. Do you have much to take over?”

“Couple of boxes. We’d need the wagon.”

That afternoon they walk through the park, two old men in dark cloaks, pulling a stout wagon over the frozen ground. Their breath forms white clouds in front of their faces.

“They didn’t get a glimpse of the kids,” Sid says. “Didn’t think they would.”

“Are they going out again?”

“Sure. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.”

They smile briefly at each other and walk, taking turns pulling the wagon. It is hard to pull over the uneven ground.

“I keep wondering,” Sid says presently, “if this wasn’t part of the plan. Give us all time to die off and then bring out the new people and let them take over.”

“They can’t take over,” the old man says bitterly. “If that was the plan, it’s as much a failure as the first one was.” And he tells Sid about the boys’ testicles.

“That will change their minds for them,” Sid says thoughtfully. “The others who are holding back now. Harry only got five others to go with him and Jake, you know. The rest will go out too if they know this. Why not? Them or us. And we’re all doomed anyway.”

“I know.” They are almost through the park now.

“You think you could get Boy near that girl?”

The old man makes a rude noise. “He’d sooner couple with a snake. I don’t think he could, anyway. Psychologically. Even if I could explain and make him understand, which I probably couldn’t.” He considers it another moment, then shakes his head. He could never make Boy understand.

They take the wagon up the ramp and inside the hospital, and with much struggling they get it down the stairs to the subbasements. The vault is a freezer unit. There is a second section where the temperature was even colder once, and this part made tears come to the old man’s eyes when he first found it. He closed the door of the sperm bank that day, long ago, and hasn’t opened it since. The vault hasn’t been chilled at all for sixty years. It is simply a good place to store valuables. They cleared the shelves of blood plasma, medicines, unidentified vials, and now in their place are boxes of jewelry, books, photographs.

“You in a hurry?” Sid asks. “Might make just one more entry. What you just told me sure has changed everything.”

The old man shrugs and lights another lamp. Already Sid is writing with concentration, and the old man goes out into the corridor. No one has ever visited this section of the hospital often. Machinery is stored here, spare parts for the surgical units, tanks for oxygen, collapsible wheelchairs. The old man has never paid much attention to the machinery. They have had little use for motors to raise and lower hospital beds. Now he strolls through the storage room. Near the back of the room, he stops and stares. A generator. Boxed, a metal-clad box, in fact. Meant to be stored for an indefinite time. Taped to the box is a booklet of instructions. The air in the subbasements is very dry, the booklet is legible.

Sid is still writing, doesn’t notice when the old man glances in at him. The old man follows the diagram in the front of the booklet, through a door marked A-1, to the end of the room with miscellaneous pipes and tanks, to the far end where there is a small stainless steel door four feet above the floor. Behind the door there is a gauge registering full, a valve, a set of instructions riveted to a curved shiny surface. Twenty thousand gallons of fuel oil in a stainless steel tank! The pipes and the holding tanks are all designed so that the oil will flow by gravity when the valves are opened. They provided a Diesel-powered generator to be connected to the freezer unit, he realizes, with enough oil in storage to run it for years. No one ever started the generator; no one ever opened the valves. His feet drag when he leaves the room and joins Sid once more in the vault.

Sid is no longer writing. He is leafing through his diaries, first one, then another, not pausing long anywhere.

“What happened, Sid? How did it start?”

Sid shrugs. “I was reading some of the earliest books,” he says. “Didn’t realize at the time how contradictory the statements were. First they said China hit Russia with missiles. Then they said that type A flu virus was pandemic. Then biological warfare. God knows.”

“I was home on vacation,” the old man says. “We started to run. My father was afraid we’d all die of plague. The cities were emptied practically overnight. I remember that. Was it plague?”

Again Sid shrugs. “A combination, I guess.” He snaps the book shut, puts it back in the box with the others, and pushes the box against the wall. “Ready?”

There are many meetings now. No one is to live alone any longer. Each group must have a man with a gun, and they have to fortify their homes, put bars on the windows, locks on the doors. No one is to wander outside alone, or after dark. And the daily expeditions to find the children will continue. Sid doesn’t disclose the old man’s secret. To the old man he says, “I won’t help them find the kids and destroy them. Neither will I help the kids in any way.”

The old man is tormented now, unable to sleep, and all the while it seems that an obsession is growing within him. He knows that his people are threatened, that the children are the enemy, that their hunger will be more powerful than the stratagems adopted by the people. And still he is obsessed with the idea that he has to act for them, make them accept his help. This old man and the man who is his son in all but the flesh, they will save humanity. He is hardly aware when Sam Whitten dies. The ground is frozen now; they will bury him in the spring, and until then the cold will preserve the thin old body. The people have become despondent and more fearful. There are outbursts of talk, then a strained silence among them as they listen to hear if the shadows are alive. Dore and Sid have moved into Monica’s palace. She is tearing down the forest in order to create an early American tavern. The old man doesn’t visit her.

Only Boy still ventures out after dark, but his forays are less frequent and most of the time he is close to the old man. Every day they go to the hospital, where they clean out the vault. They assemble the generator according to instructions and turn on the valves and start one Diesel; slowly the vault is chilled below zero. Unquestioningly Boy does what the old man tells him to do. The old man often addresses him as “Son,” and Boy accepts this also.

Somehow, the old man thinks, he must learn about artificial insemination. He must collect sperm from Boy. He must impregnate the wild girl with it. And he must instruct her, or the eunuch boys, in the method so that when the other girls reach childbearing age, they also can be impregnated. And in the privacy of his rooms, the old man laughs. Boy watches him fearfully. Sid and Dore also watch him when they are there, and Dore’s face reveals his worry. They think he is going mad, the old man knows, and he doesn’t know how to demonstrate that he is not,

Now when Boy starts to leave him, the old man says, “Don’t go out. Don’t leave me alone.” And Boy obediently sits down again. The old man is afraid that Boy will go out and won’t come back again, that he will not be allowed to finish what he knows he must do. He feels ashamed, implicitly lying to Boy, but he does it repeatedly in order to keep Boy nearby. He knows that he has to collect the semen very soon, that time may be working against him now.

Every night he prepares tea for himself and Boy; sometimes they have the flat nut cakes, sometimes the freeze-dried food, which is not as nourishing as it once was. This night the old man drugs Boy heavily and while he sleeps the old man kneels over him, weeping silently, and masturbates him and collects the ejaculate in a sterile flask. He is too blinded by tears to be certain he has covered Boy properly when he leaves him. Later he returns and arranges the blankets, and kisses Boy on the forehead.

It is cold, but not cold enough to preserve the semen; he has to take it to the vault that night, divide it among several vials, seal them, label them, freeze them. It is almost dawn when he returns and drops to his bed exhausted. Time and age, he thinks, unable to sleep, aching and afraid of the way his heart is palpitating. Time and age.

Every night he makes his solitary journey to the hospital with another flask, and each day his face is greyer, he is more fatigued. Dore is insistent that the old man move to the palace, or at least let someone come and stay with him in his apartment. The old man refuses irritably, and Dore leaves him alone. But they are talking about him, he knows. It is hard to find time alone now. Someone always seems to be with him, observing him, afraid that if he breaks, they will be without any medical help at all. How very old they all are, he thinks one day, surprised that he has never realized it before. The survivors are all over seventy, all except Boy. It is time for them all to die.

That night when he returns from the hospital, Boy is gone.

For hours the old man sits at his window, staring blindly at the dark city. He is frozen, he cannot weep, cannot think, cannot feel. Soon after dawn he unwraps his shotgun and carefully inspects it, rubs the metal with an oil-soaked rag, and then examines his shells. He loads the gun and puts the rest of his shells into a pouch that he wears like a necklace, and then he goes to the eighth floor where the telescope is. Slowly, painstakingly, he scans what he can see of the city, not looking at the ruined streets and buildings but at the black line where city and sky meet, and finally he finds a place where the air shimmies, and, squinting, he believes he can see smoke. It is very far away, miles up the river, close to the downtown section. He dresses warmly and starts out, not thinking anything at all.

When he nears the downtown area, he knows where he will find them, and he turns toward the bridge that is still standing, with great gaping holes in the roadbed, and supporting posts that are eaten through in places with corrosion, but not enough to collapse the structure. With their fear of enclosed places, the children will huddle under the bridge, and anyone approaching will be visible a long way off. He doesn’t approach yet. He goes inside an office building and climbs up to the third floor where he can look out and see the children. They are here as he expected: four of them, the smaller ones, are huddled close to a small fire; the older ones are not in sight. As he watches, one of the little ones, who are indistinguishable in their blankets, nods again and again and finally lies down on the ground and draws up into a compact ball to sleep. There is no sign of Boy’s body.

The old man waits at the window. He dozes and starts into wakefulness many times, and his legs grow stiff with cold and fatigue. There is a ringing in his head, and when he is awake, he has a sense of euphoria now, of well-being and contentment. Suddenly he wakes thoroughly and knows that he will freeze to death if he doesn’t move. He should have eaten. He should have brought food with him. He tries to stand and reels into the wall and nearly falls down, catching himself clumsily. A fall could be fatal, he knows. A broken leg or hip, and he will die in this office building. He flexes his muscles slowly, and with each movement there is a burning pain that races through his body. Finally he is able to move; he stumbles to the door and down to the street again. He stays in the alleys until he is very close to the bridge. The other three children are back. He counts them. Seven. The old man is almost close enough now to reveal himself, to be able to fire into the group and be certain of killing or injuring most of them with the two shots in his gun. He takes another step, and suddenly he hears a whisper behind him.

“Lew! Damn it, wait a minute!” It is Jake Pulaski, with his rifle. Jake hurries to him. “Wait a minute until Harry has time to get to the other side of the bridge, to head them off.”

The old man stares at Jake in perplexity; he has forgotten what it was he meant to do. He sees the rifle in Jake’s hands and without thinking he swings his shotgun hard, catches Jake in the stomach and knocks him down. And he steps into the open and walks toward the children.

They jump up wildly. Their faces are pinched with cold.

“You get to the hospital and wait for me,” the old man says in his hardest voice. “Or you will be killed.”

They don’t move. Behind him the old man hears Jake advancing, and he hears the click of a safety being released.

“There are many men who are coming to kill you!” the old man thunders. “Run to the hospital and wait for me there!” He whirls around and sees Jake at the alley mouth now, the rifle rising, pointing past him at the group. The old man raises his shotgun and pulls both triggers together, and the shocking noise of his gun drowns out the sound of the rifle. At the noise the children scatter like leaves in a whirlwind.

For hours the old man stumbles in the ruins. He weeps and his tears freeze in his beard. Sometimes he can hear voices close by and he reaches for them, tries to find them, and even as he does so, he knows the voices are in his head. The voices of his mother and father. Monica’s voice. Sid’s voice. Sometimes he sees Boy ahead and he finds strength to walk on when he would rather sit down and sleep. And finally he comes back to the hospital when the day is finished and the shadows fill all open spaces.

Numbly he lights the stove and then he falls to the floor and sleeps. When he awakens the children are there. The old man sits up, suffering, and he finds his shotgun on his legs. He lifts it and the children cringe away from him.

“You are filth and scum,” he says savagely at them. “And I shall punish you. And your punishment will be life, life for your children, for their children.” And he laughs.

He drags himself to his feet, each new motion a new agony. He raises his shotgun and the children cover their faces in terror, and bow before him and his terrible wrath.