The Genocides (14 page)

Buddy, on the other hand, though he possessed many of the qualities lacking in his half-brother, was not to be relied upon. He had proven it when, in the face of his father’s sternest disapproval, he had gone to live in Minneapolis; he had proven it conclusively on Thanksgiving Day. When Anderson had found his son in, as he supposed, the very commission of the act, it had become quite clear that Buddy would not succeed to his own high place. Anderson, in passing from early manhood to middle age, had developed an unreasoning horror of adultery. That he had once been adulterate himself and that one of his children was the fruit of such an union did not occur to him now. He would, in fact, have denied it outright—and, he would have believed his denial.

For a long time it had seemed that no one could possibly take his place. Therefore, he would have to carry on alone. Each time his sons had shown new weaknesses, Anderson had felt a corresponding growth in strength and purpose. Secretly, he had thrived on their failings.

Then Jeremiah Orville had entered the scene. In August, Anderson had been moved by reasons which were obscure and (it now seemed) God-given to spare the man. Today he trembled at his sight—as Saul must have trembled when he first realized that young David would supplant him and his son Jonathan. Anderson tried desperately both to deny this and to accommodate himself to his apparent heir. (He constantly feared that he would, like that earlier king, war against the Lord’s annointed and damn himself in the act. Belief in predestination has decidedly some disadvantages.) As by degrees, he bent his will to this unpleasant task (for, though he admired Orville, he did not like him); his strength and purpose quitted him by equal degrees. Orville, without even knowing it, was killing him.

It was night. That is to say, they had once again journeyed to exhaustion. As Anderson was the arbiter of what constituted exhaustion, it was evident to everyone that the old man was being worn down: as after the vernal equinox, each day was shorter than the day that had gone before.

The old man scratched at his flaky scalp, and cursed something, he couldn’t remember exactly what, and fell asleep without thinking to take a count of heads. Orville, Buddy and Neil each took the count for him. Orville and Buddy both arrived at twenty-four. Neil, somehow, had come up with twenty-six.

“But that’s not possible,” Buddy pointed out.

Neil was adamant: he had counted twenty-six. “Whadaya think—I can’t
count
, for Christ’s sake?”

Since Greta’s departure, a month or so had gone by. No one was keeping track of the time any longer. Some maintained it was February; others held for March. From the expeditions to the surface they knew only that it was still winter. They needed to know no more than that.

Not everyone went along. Indeed, besides Anderson, his two sons and Orville, there were only three other men. A permanent base of operations was again being maintained for those, like Maryann and Alice, who could not spend the day crawling through the roots. The number of those who deemed themselves incapable had grown daily until there were just as many lotus-eaters as before. Anderson pretended to ignore the situation, fearing to provoke a worse one.

Anderson led the men up by the usual route, which was marked by ropes that Maryann had braided. It was no longer possible for them to find their way about by the Ariadne’s thread of broken capillaries, for in their explorations they had broken so many that they had created a labyrinth of their own.

It was near the surface, at about the sixty-degree level, that they came across the rats. At first it was like the humming of a beehive, though higher pitched. The men’s first thought was that the incendiaries had at last come down into the roots after them. When they had ventured into the tuber from which the noise was coming, the humming rose to a raspy whine, as though a coloratura’s aria were being broadcast at peak volume over a bad public-address system. The solid-seeming darkness beyond the lamp’s reach wavered and dissolved to a lighter shade as thousands of rats tumbled over each other to get into the fruit. The walls of the passage were honeycombed with the rats’ tunnelings.

“Rats!” Neil exclaimed. “Didn’t I say it was rats that gnawed their way through that root up above? Didn’t I, huh? Well, here they are. There must be a million of them.”

“If there aren’t now, there will be before very long,” Orville agreed. “I wonder if they’re all in this one tuber?”

“What possible difference can it make?” Anderson asked impatiently. “They’ve left us well enough alone, and I for one feel no need to keep them company. They seem content to eat this damn candied apple, and I’m content to let them eat it. They can eat the whole of it, of all of them, for all I care.” Sensing that he had gone too far, he said, in a more subdued tone: “There’s nothing we can do against an army of rats, in any case. I have only one cartridge left in the revolver. I don’t know what I’m saving it for, but I know it isn’t for a rat.”

“I was thinking of the future, Mr. Anderson. With all this food available and no natural enemies to keep them down, these rats will multiply out of all bounds. They may not threaten our food supply now, but what about six months from now? a year from now?”

“Before the summer has begun, Jeremiah, we won’t be living down here. The rats are welcome to it then.”

“We’ll still be depending on it for food though. It’s the only food left—unless you want to breed the rats. Personally, I’ve never liked the taste. And there’s next winter to think about. With the little seed that’s left for planting—even if it’s still good—we can’t possibly get through the winter. I don’t like to live like this any more than the next man, but it’s a way to survive. The only way, for the time being.”

“Ah, that’s a lot of hooey!” Neil said, in support of his father.

Anderson looked weary, and the lantern, which he had been holding up to examine the perforations of the wall of the passage, sank to his side. “You’re right, Jeremiah. As usual.” His lips curled in an angry smile, and he swung his bare foot (shoes were too precious to be wasted down here) at one of the ratholes from which two bright eyes had been staring up intently, examining the examiners. “Bastards!” he shouted. “Sons of bitches!” There was a squeal, and a fat, furry ball of ratflesh sailed on a high arc out of range of the lamplight. The whining, which had grown somewhat quieter, rose in volume, answering Anderson’s challenge.

Orville put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. His whole body was shaking with helpless rage. “Sir…” Orville protested. “Please.”

“The bastard bit me,” Anderson grumbled.

“We can’t afford to scatter them now. Our best hope—”

“Half took off my toe,” he said, stooping to feel the injury. “The bastard.”

“—is to contain them here. To block up all the passages out of this tuber. Otherwise…” Orville shrugged. The alternative was clear.

“Then how do
we
get out?” Neil objected smugly.

“Oh, shut up, Neil,” Anderson said wearily. “With what?” he asked Orville. “We haven’t got anything a hungry rat couldn’t chew his way through in five minutes.”

“We have an axe though. We can weaken the walls of the roots so that they collapse in on themselves. The pressure at this depth is tremendous. That wood must be hard as iron, but if we can chip and scrape enough of it away at the right points, the earth itself will block the passages. Rats can’t chew their way through basalt. There’s a danger that the cave-in will get out of hand, but I think I can see that it won’t. A mining engineer usually has to prevent cave-ins, but that’s good training for someone who has to produce them.”

“I’ll let you try. Buddy, go back and get the axe—and anything else with a cutting edge. And send those other lotus-eaters up here. Neil and the rest of you, spread out to each of the entrances of this potato and do what you can to keep the rats inside. They don’t seem very anxious to leave yet, but they may when the walls start tumbling down. Jeremiah, you come with me and show me what you mean to do. I don’t understand why the whole thing isn’t going to come down on our heads when we—God damn!”

“What is it?”

“My toe! Damned rat really took a hunk out of it. Well, we’ll show these bastards!”

The extermination of the rats, succeeded—if anything, too well. Orville attacked the first root at just the point where it belled outward to become the hard, spherical shell of the fruit. He worked hours, shaving off thin slices of wood, watching for any sign of stress that would give him an opportunity to escape, scraping away a little more, watching. When it came down, there was no warning. Suddenly Orville stood in the midst of thunder. He was lifted off his feet by the shock wave and hurled back into the passage.

The entire tuber had collapsed in upon itself.

Watchers at the other entrances reported no escaped rats, but there had been a fatality: one man, having missed his lunch (Anderson insisted that they eat only three times a day, and then sparingly), stepped into the tuber for a handful of fruit pulp at exactly the wrong moment. He, the fruit pulp and some few thousand rats were now being converted, at a modest, geological pace, into petroleum. A basalt wall of perfect, Euclidean flatness blocked each of the entrances to the tuber; it had come down quickly and neatly as a guillotine.

Anderson, who had not been present to witness the event (shortly after Orville had begun his work, he had had yet another fainting fit; they came more and more frequently of late), was incredulous when it was reported to him. Orville’s
ex post facto
explanation did not convince him. “What’s Buckminster What’s-his-name got to do with anything? I ask a simple question, and you carry on about geographic domes.”

“It’s only a supposition. The walls of the tuber have to withstand incredible pressures. Buckminster Fuller was an architect—an engineer, if you prefer—who built things so they’d do just that. He designed skeletons, you might say. Designed them so that if the least part was weakened, the whole body would give way. Like when you remove the keystone of an arch—except that they were all keystones.”

“This is a fine time to learn about Buckminster Fuller—when a man’s been killed.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I appreciate that it was my responsibility. I should have given more thought to the matter before rushing ahead.”

“It can’t be helped now. Go find Alice and bring her here. I’m coming down with a fever—and that ratbite hurts more every minute.”

His responsibility indeed!
Anderson thought, when Orville had left him. Well, it would be his responsibility soon enough. He had better call an assembly while he still had his wits about him and announce it for a fact.

But that would be tantamount to his own abdication. No, he would bide his time.

Meanwhile, he had had a new idea—a way of legitimatizing Orville as his heir: Orville would become Anderson’s son—his eldest son—by way of marriage.

But he balked at this step too. Blossom still seemed so young to him—hardly more than a child. Only a few months ago he had seen her with the other children playing jacks on the floor of the commonroom. Marriage? He would talk to Alice Nemerov about it. A woman always knew best about these things. Anderson and Alice were the two oldest survivors. That fact, and the death of Anderson’s wife, had forced them willy-nilly into each other’s confidence.

While he waited for her, he massaged his little toe. Where it had been bitten it was now numb; the pain was coming from the rest of the foot.

That night when the headcount was taken (Anderson being even less in a condition to do so), Orville and Buddy both came up with a figure of twenty-three. Neil, this time, counted twenty-four.

“He’s slow,” Buddy joked. “Give him time. He’ll catch up with us yet.”

Alice Nemerov, R.N., knew Anderson was going to die. Not just because she was a nurse and could recognize gangrene from its unremarkable inception. She had seen him begin to die long before he was bitten by the rat, even before the fainting fits had become a daily occurrence. When an old person is getting ready to die, you can see it all over him, written in neon. But because she
was
a nurse, and because she had come despite herself to like the old man, she tried to do something to keep him alive.

For this reason she had persuaded him to delay speaking to Orville and Blossom about his intentions for them. She led him on from day to day with a carrot of hope. At least it looked like hope.

At first, when the hope had been real, she had tried to suck off the infection, as in snakebite. The only effect was that she had grown nauseous and couldn’t eat for two days. Now, half his foot was a dusky, dead blue. Decomposition would set in very quickly, if it had not already begun.

“Why don’t you keep sucking off the infection?” Neil asked. He wanted to watch again.

“It wouldn’t do any good now. He’s dying.”

“You could
try
. That’s the least you could do.” Neil bent down and examined his father’s sleeping face. “Is he breathing better now?”

“Sometimes his breath comes very hard. Sometimes he scarcely seems to breathe at all. Neither symptom is out of the ordinary.”

“His feet are cold,” Neil said critically.

“What do you expect?” Alice snapped at him, past all patience. “Your father is dying. Don’t you understand that? Only an amputation could save him at this point, and in his condition he couldn’t survive amputation. He’s worn out, an old man. He
wants
to die.”

“That’s not my fault, is it?” Neil shouted. Anderson woke for a moment at the noise, and Neil went away. His father had changed so much in the last few days that Neil felt awkward with him. It was like being with a stranger.

“The baby—is it a boy or a girl?” His voice was barely audible.

“We don’t know yet, Mr. Anderson. It may take another hour. But no more than that. Everything is ready. She made the ligatures herself, from scraps of rope. Buddy went up to the surface for a bucket of snow—he says it was a real March blizzard up there—and we’ve been able to sterilize the knife and wash out a couple of pieces of cotton. It won’t be a hospital delivery, but I’m sure it will be all right.”