The Last Supper: And Other Stories (5 page)

“But you're convinced?”

“I'm afraid every scientist working in atomics is convinced, Mr. Baxter. Even the president is convinced, I hear.”

“I wonder what it does to his game?”

“Sir?”

“His golf game, Somerville. Old Harrison at Consolidated lives for golf. Plays almost every day, and plays a pretty good game too. He tells me he picked up eleven strokes since this H bomb business started.”

“It's quite provoking, sir.”

“Provoking puts it mildly. It's a god damned blunder that someone ought to pay for. Well, what's done is done. Is this bomb all they say it is, Somerville?”

“I'm afraid so,” Mr. Somerville admitted sadly. “If one were dropped properly in Connecticut, let us say, it's fallout would destroy every living thing in the entire state.”

“The devil with Connecticut. What would it do here in Ohio?”

“Well, Mr. Baxter, that depends. Suppose a little cobalt was added to one of them and it was dropped here in the lakeside vicinity. If there were prevailing north winds, it would have just about the same effect.”

“You mean one bomb would kill everyone in Ohio?”

“Yes, sir, and the cows and the ducks and the pigs, too. And the wheat and the corn,” Mr. Somerville added, unable to contain his bent for precision.

“I'll be damned.”

“It's a remarkable weapon,” Mr. Somerville said with a note of enthusiasm.

“I'll be damned. Do they know all this in Washington?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Baxter. They've published some very fine material on the subject—scholarly material.”

“Well, why in hell's name don't they do something about it?”

Mr. Somerville reflected that perhaps there was nothing they could do about it, but he did not voice that opinion, knowing full well that as a scientist it was not his place to meddle in politics.

“Of course, we could do the same to Moscow,” Mr. Baxter added as an afterthought.

“Yes, sir—indeed we could.”

Mr. Baxter knitted his brows and stared at Mr. Somerville. For almost a minute, he sat like that, staring silently at the scientist. Then he burst out, “Damn it all, you'd think those fools in Washington would drop everything else and set about building shelters. What about that, Somerville?”

“It's not quite as easy as it sounds, Mr. Baxter. An ordinary air raid shelter, such as they used in the last war, would be worthless. Even deep subways are quite useless.”

“I don't mean a direct hit, Somerville.”

“We can no longer even think in such terms as a direct hit,” Somerville said, inspired as he always was when it came to expounding a scientific point to Mr. Baxter, and even more delighted that Mr. Baxter was willing to listen. Usually, Mr. Baxter's reaction would be not to bother him with the damn details, but to go ahead and get the thing into production. But this time, it seemed, Mr. Baxter wanted details. “You see, a hit is direct enough within a ten mile radius, and atmospheric poisoning may extend to a hundred or two hundred mile radius, depending upon the constituent factors of the bomb. Theoretically, it is possible for a single cobalt bomb, with proper wind currents, to destroy every human being within the continental United States—theoretically, of course, but not very likely. Still in all, we can't think in terms of direct hits and avoiding them. That's probably what has Washington so baffled.”

“And how long does this atmospheric poisoning last?”

“We really don't know, never having faced such a situation before, but guesses vary anywhere from a few days to a few centuries.”

“A few centuries?” Mr. Baxter gasped.

“Oh, yes, sir—yes, indeed. Of course, surface life of any kind might not survive, but life would go on in the depths of the sea, and eventually the normal course of evolution would resume, and it's even conceivable that one day, billions of years from now, man would appear again.”

“That's damn comforting,” said Mr. Baxter.

“Of course,” Somerville added thoughtfully, “a self-contained shelter could be built. It would have to be quite deep, sealed off from the surface, and prepared to supply its occupants for at least five years. That presents a number of problems, but I suppose they could be tackled and licked. Yes, it's an interesting problem.”

“And what do you suppose such an outfit would cost, Somerville?” Mr. Baxter asked greedily.

Mr. Somerville would have preferred a month to work it out, with estimates from various builders and exact costs on every item, but he knew that Mr. Baxter wanted his questions answered immediately, even if not too accurately. So Mr. Somerville leaned back, closed his eyes, and figured at top speed, while Mr. Baxter preserved an unusual and interested silence. Finally, Mr. Somerville said, “I think it could be done for three million—that's not an accurate figure, of course, but it shouldn't cost a great deal more.”

Mr. Baxter's lunch in Cleveland that day was with Harvey Ramson, who was sixty-eight, who had made a cool fifty million out of an aircraft industry he had developed since the war on government orders, who knew everyone in Washington, and who had just returned from a special job in Washington. He called the president and every member of the president's cabinet by their first names, and they called him Harvey. Mr. Baxter stood in a certain awe of Harvey Ramson and his opinions, and therefor managed in the course of the luncheon to ask him whether he thought there would be war with Russia.

“Got to be, sooner or later,” Mr. Ramson said. “Got to be a showdown. The whole free world and the American way of life's at stake.”

But didn't the H bomb make a difference, Mr. Baxter wanted to know?

“Don't believe they got it, and if they got it, don't believe they know how to get it off the ground. No technology in Russia, no know-how. A land of peasants.”

But if they did have it, Mr. Baxter insisted?

“Got to wallop them before they get it off the ground. Massive retaliation—that's the word for it.”

But somehow, “massive retaliation” was less than satisfying to Mr. Baxter, and once again, he slept poorly. This time, however, instead of nightmares, he had a dream which he afterward thought of as something of a vision. Not that he ever mentioned this thought to any of his friends, but there it was. He dreamed that he stood on a high peak, with his wife beside him, his two sons and their wives and children, his daughter; and the world lay dead and silent beneath him. Then a voice said, “Go and make it fruitful.” A fine voice, and it was a lovely dream. Henry J. Baxter woke up feeling refreshed and at peace for the first time since he had heard about the cursed bomb.

“Clarise,” he told his wife at breakfast, “I'm going to build an air-raid shelter, self-contained,”

“I think that's very thoughtful of you, Henry,” his wife nodded. She had no idea that the shelter would, according to Mr. Somerville, cost about three million dollars.

For the next twenty weeks, Mr. Baxter was absorbed in the building of the shelter. He built it on the grounds of his lake-front estate, which covered three hundred acres, and gave him all the privacy he required. Mr. Somerville, himself designed it, and they employed the three brightest young engineers in the plant to expedite its construction.

But about the bright young engineers, Mr. Baxter often felt as he did about the various managers of his plant. They were all right, but it wasn't their plant; and while these bright young engineers were all right, it wasn't their shelter they were building. Mr. Baxter stopped going to the country club and spent long hours compiling lists of things a large family would need for several years in a shelter. He was amazed at the endless number of things required to continue the Baxter family in the style to which it was accustomed—and he was also amazed at his wife's attitude.

“If you think I'm going to spend five years down in that hole and do my own housework, Henry,” she said firmly, “you've got another thought coming.”

“It's not a hole,” Mr. Baxter said coldly. “It's every bit as good as the one Ike has under the White House, but you can't go adding rooms to it.”

“Yes I can,” countered Mrs. Baxter. “Either you install servants' quarters, or leave me out.”

“For a quarter of a million dollars?”

“What?” Mrs. Baxter looked at her husband as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Henry, just what is this shelter costing us?”

“About three million dollars without the servants' quarters.”

“I think you've gone out of your mind,” she whispered—which came as a surprise, for it was the first time he had ever known Clarise to be concerned about money.

“You won't think so when those H bombs begin to drop.”

But what Mrs. Baxter thought when her husband cancelled their European trip and even intimated that until the bombs began to fall, there would be no more trips for them, does not bear printing. For two weeks, she did not speak to him, but it is questionable whether he realized that, so deeply was he involved with the shelter. He sat up a whole night with the grocery list. He read five brochures on vitamin pills before he ordered the twenty thousand that he felt would be necessary, and he regretted a hundred times that he had not trained one of his sons to be a physician. He pored over seed catalogues in order to select the germs that would once again make the earth fruitful. He called in experts on livestock and experts on horticulture, and he read the pages of his favorite magazine,
U. S. News and World Report
, more carefully than ever before seeking for inside information as to the imminence of war; for now, as the shelter neared completion, he felt that he was involved in a desperate race with time, and it made him sick at heart to think that they might start throwing the H bombs before he was ready.

Strangely enough, his hatred of communism, which had at one time been outstanding, even for an Ohio millionaire, began to cool. The Russians had provided what was now the prime motive in his life, and at times he felt rather warmly toward them. He was becoming more and more religious, and he began to believe that in his dream, he had met God face to face. Even that long sought after dinner at the White House, which Harvey Ramson had promised to arrange, paled into insignificance against this.

Meanwhile, his beautiful meadows on the bluff overlooking the lake had been turned into a construction site. Great steam shovels bit deeper and deeper into the ground. Wooden forms rose in the gaping hole, and an endless stream of concrete poured down to provide security for the, Baxter family. Tractors lumbered back and forth and steel girders swung on booms. The temporary slack in construction in Northern Ohio was taken up with Mr. Baxter's vision, and hundreds of men brought paychecks home each week and turned them into food for their children and clothes and rent; but of all this Mr. Baxter was superbly unaware. And when finally the form of the massive underground house which could survive even a direct hit of a hydrogen bomb took shape, Mr. Baxter's mood could be compared to one of actual ecstasy. Everyone at the plant, his friends, his associates, his wife—everyone noticed the change in him, the manner in which he held his head, so straight and confident, the way his eyes shone, the way his voice had become, so soft, so knowing.

One September evening, when the shelter was almost complete, as Mr. Baxter stood near the elevator that led down to it, admiring the concrete result of his vision, a quick autumn thunderstorm blew out of the lake. Mr. Baxter ran for shelter, but the rain overtook him before he reached his house. On the garden path to his den, deluged by sheets of water, his foot slipped, and he fell and struck his head a resounding whack on the flagstones. He lay there in the rain for more than an hour, and it was only when he failed to appear for dinner that his wife sent the servants out to look for him. When they found Mr. Baxter, he was quite dead and already cold.

All of his children and grandchildren came in for the funeral, and for the reading of the will. He had told them nothing about the shelter, for he had intended to inform them only after it was complete, and now Clarise thought it better not to mention it at all. She looked very youthful and beautiful in black, and while she bowed to all the conventions of sorrow, everyone remarked on how well she looked. The will allocated the lake, place and some five million dollars in securities to Mrs. Baxter, the other interests being divided among the sons and the daughter, and Clarise, who had never been a greedy woman, was quite content with her share.

Clarise waited three months before she left for Europe, and in that time, she did her best to sell the lakeside place; but the air was full of talk about negotiations and banning the H bomb and no one wanted to invest three million dollars in a self-contained shelter. In the south of France, Mrs. Baxter met an Austrian count, whom she married in what her children thought was an indecently short time—and it was remarkable how much attention the count, who had never been a business man, gave to her securities. When he discovered that her lakeside property had been reassessed to a value of four million dollars, he persuaded her to let it go in default for the taxes—and the county simply boarded it up and let the acres of lawn go to weed. The hermatically sealed elevator began to rust, and the twenty thousand vitamin pills lay silently, waiting vainly for someone to gobble them.

Sometimes, Mrs. Baxter had wistful thoughts of her first husband, Henry; but whenever she found herself giving way to feelings of guilt, she imagined five years in the self-contained shelter, and that stiffened her spine. As for her second husband, the, Austrian count, with five million dollars to spend, he never gave a second thought to the H bomb.

Only Mr. Somerville was really regretful. He had been sure that science combined with American know-how could lick a direct hit by an H bomb, and sometimes he felt very sad because Henry J. Baxter never really had a chance to test his theories.