The man came up on the left side of the car, rapped on the window; Breen ran the glass down. Then he stared stupidly at the gun in the man's left hand. "Out of the car," the stranger said sharply. "I've got to have it." He reached inside with his right hand, groped for the door lever.
Meade reached across Breen, stuck her little lady's gun in the man's face, pulled the trigger. Breen could feel the flash on his own face, never noticed the report. The man looked puzzled, with a neat, not-yet-bloody hole in his upper lip — then slowly sagged away from the car.
"Drive on!" Meade said in a high voice.
Breen caught his breath. "Good girl —"
"Drive on! Get rolling!"
They followed the state road through Los Padres National Forest, stopping once to fill the tank from their cans. They turned off onto a dirt road. Meade kept trying the radio, got San Francisco once but it was too jammed with static to read. Then she got Salt Lake City, faint but clear: "— since there are no reports of anything passing our radar screen the Kansas City bomb must be assumed to have been planted rather than delivered. This is a tentative theory but —" They passed into a deep cut and lost the rest.
When the squawk box again came to life it was a new voice: "Conelrad," said a crisp voice, "coming to you over the combined networks. The rumor that Los Angeles has been hit by an atom bomb is totally unfounded. It is true that the western metropolis has suffered a severe earthquake shock but that is all. Government officials and the Red Cross are on the spot to care for the victims, but — and I repeat — there has been no atomic bombing. So relax and stay in your homes. Such wild rumors can damage the United States quite as much as enemy's bombs. Stay off the highways and listen for —" Breen snapped it off.
"Somebody," he said bitterly, "has again decided that 'Mama knows best.' They won't tell us any bad news."
"Potiphar," Meade said sharply, "that was an atom bomb ... wasn't it?"
"It was. And now we don't know whether it was just Los Angeles — and Kansas City — or all the big cities in the country. All we know is that they are lying to us."
"Maybe I can get another station?"
"The hell with it." He concentrated on driving. The road was very bad.
As it began to get light she said, "Potty — do you know where we're going? Are we just keeping out of cities?"
"I think I do. If I'm not lost." He stared around them.
"Nope, it's all right. See that hill up forward with the triple gendarmes on its profile?"
"Gendarmes?"
"Big rock pillars. That's a sure landmark. I'm looking for a private road now. It leads to a hunting lodge belonging to two of my friends — an old ranch house actually, but as a ranch it didn't pay."
"Oh. They won't mind us using it?"
He shrugged. "If they show up, we'll ask them. If they show up. They lived in Los Angeles, Meade."
"Oh. Yes, I guess so."
The private road had once been a poor grade of wagon trail; now it was almost impassable. But they finally topped a hogback from which they could see almost to the Pacific, then dropped down into a sheltered bowl where the cabin was. "All out, girl. End of the line."
Meade sighed. "It looks heavenly."
"Think you can rustle breakfast while I unload? There's probably wood in the shed. Or can you manage a wood range?"
"Just try me."
Two hours later Breen was standing on the hogback, smoking a cigarette, and staring off down to the west. He wondered if that was a mushroom cloud up San Francisco way? Probably his imagination, he decided, in view of the distance. Certainly there was nothing to be seen to the south.
Meade came out of the cabin. "Potty!"
"Up here."
She joined him, took his hand, and smiled, then snitched his cigarette and took a deep drag. She expelled it and said, "I know it's sinful of me, but I feel more peaceful than I have in months and months."
"I know."
"Did you see the canned goods in that pantry? We could pull through a hard winter here."
"We might have to."
"I suppose. I wish we had a cow."
"What would you do with a cow?"
"I used to milk four cows before I caught the school bus, every morning. I can butcher a hog, too."
"I'll try to find one."
"You do and I'll manage to smoke it." She yawned. "I'm suddenly terribly sleepy."
"So am I. And small wonder."
"Let's go to bed."
"Uh, yes. Meade?"
"Yes, Potty?"
"We may be here quite a while. You know that, don't you?"
"Yes, Potty."
"In fact it might be smart to stay put until those curves all start turning up again. They will, you know."
"Yes. I had figured that out."
He hesitated, then went on, "Meade ... will you marry me?"
"Yes." She moved up to him.
After a time he pushed her gently away and said, "My dear, my very dear, uh — we could drive down and find a minister in some little town?"
She looked at him steadily. "That wouldn't be very bright, would it? I mean, nobody knows we're here and that's the way we want it. And besides, your car might not make it back up that road."
"No, it wouldn't be very bright. But I want to do the right thing."
"It's all right. Potty. It's all right."
"Well, then ... kneel down here with me. We'll say them together."
"Yes, Potiphar." She knelt and he took her hand. He closed his eyes and prayed wordlessly.
When he opened them he said, "What's the matter?"
"Uh, the gravel hurts my knees."
"Well stand up, then."
"No. Look, Potty, why don't we just go in the house and say them there?"
"Hub? Hells bells, woman, we might forget to say them entirely. Now repeat after me: I, Potiphar, take thee, Meade —"
"Yes, Potiphar. I, Meade, take thee, Potiphar —"
Chapter Three
"OFFICIAL: STATIONS WITHIN RANGE RELAY TWICE. EXECUTIVE BULLETIN NUMBER NINE — ROAD LAWS PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED HAVE BEEN IGNORED IN MANY INSTANCES. PATROLS ARE ORDERED TO SHOOT WITHOUT WARNING AND PROVOST MARSHALS ABE DIRECTED TO USE DEATH PENALTY FOR UNAUTHORIZED POSSESSION OF GASOLINE. B.W. AND RADIATION QUARANTINE REGULATIONS PREVIOUSLY ISSUED WILL BE RIGIDLY ENFORCED. LONG LIVE THE UNITED STATES! HARLEY J. NEAL, LIEUTENANT GENERAL, ACTING CHIEF OF GOVERNMENT. ALL STATIONS RELAY TWICE."
"THIS IS THE FREE RADIO AMERICA RELAY NETWORK. PASS THIS ALONG, BOYS! GOVERNOR BRANDLEY WAS SWORN IN TODAY AS PRESIDENT BY ACTING CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS UNDER THE RULE-OF-SUCCESSION. THE PRESIDENT NAMED THOMAS DEWEY AS SECRETARY OF STATE AND PAUL DOUGLAS AS SECRETARY OF DEFENSE. HIS SECOND OFFICIAL ACT WAS TO STRIP THE RENEGADE NEAL OF RANK AND TO DIRECT HIS ARREST BY ANY CITIZEN OR OFFICIAL. MORE LATER. PASS THE WORD ALONG.
"HELLO, CQ, CQ, CQ. THIS IS W5KMR, FREEPORT, QRR, QRR! ANYBODY READ ME? ANYBODY? WE'RE DYING LIKE FLIES DOWN HERE. WHAT'S HAPPENED? STARTS WITH FEVER AND A BURNING THIRST BUT YOU CAN'T SWALLOW. WE NEED HELP. ANYBODY BEAD ME? HELLO, CQ 75, CQ 75 THIS IS W5 KILO METRO ROMEO CALLING QRR AND CQ 75. BY FOR SOMEBODY. ... ANYBODY!!!"
"THIS IS THE LORD'S TIME, SPONSORED BY SWAN'S ELIXIR, THE TONIC THAT MAKES WAITING FOR THE KINGDOM OF GOD WORTHWHILE. YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR A MESSAGE OF CHEER FROM JUDGE BROOMFIELD, ANOINTED VICAR OF THE KINGDOM ON EARTH. BUT FIRST A BULLETIN: SEND YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO 'MESSIAH,' CLINT, TEXAS. DON'T TRY TO MAIL THEM: SEND THEM BY A KINGDOM MESSENGER OR BY SOME PILGRIM JOURNEYING THIS WAY. AND NOW THE TABERNACLE CHOIR FOLLOWED BY THE VOICE OF THE VICAR ON EARTH —"
"— THE FIRST SYMPTOM IS LITTLE RED SPOTS IN THE ARMPITS. THEY ITCH. PUT 'EM TO BED AT ONCE AND KEEP 'EM COVERED UP WARM. THEN GO SCRUB YOURSELF AND WEAR A MASK: WE DON'T KNOW YET HOW YOU CATCH IT. PASS IT ALONG, ED."
"— NO NEW LANDINGS REPORTED ANYWHERE ON THIS CONTINENT. THE PARATROOPERS WHO ESCAPED THE ORIGINAL SLAUGHTER ARE THOUGHT TO BE HIDING OUT IN THE POCONOS. SHOOT — BUT BE CAREFUL; IT MIGHT BE AUNT TESSIE. OFF AND
CLEAR, UNTIL NOON TOMORROW —"
-
The curves were turning up again. There was no longer doubt in Breen's mind about that. It might not even be necessary to stay up here in the Sierra Madres through the winter — though he rather thought they would. He had picked their spot to keep them west of the fallout; it would be silly to be mowed down by the tail of a dying epidemic, or be shot by a nervous vigilante, when a few months' wait would take care of everything.
Besides, lie had chopped all that firewood. He looked at his calloused hands — he had done all that work and, by George, he was going to enjoy the benefits!
He was headed out to the hogback to wait for sunset and do an hour's reading; he glanced at his car as he passed it, thinking that he would like to try the radio. He suppressed the yen; two thirds of his reserve gasoline was gone already just from keeping the battery charged for the radio — and here it was only December. He really ought to cut it down to twice a week. But it meant a lot to catch the noon bulletin of Free America and then twiddle the dial a few minutes to see what else he could pick up.
But for the past three days Free America had not been on the air — solar static maybe, or perhaps just a power failure. But that rumor that President Brandley had been assassinated — while it hadn't come from the Free radio ... and it hadn't been denied by them, either, which was a good sign. Still, it worried him.
And that other story that lost Atlantis had pushed up during the quake period and that the Azores were now a little continent — almost certainly a hang-over of the "silly season" but it would be nice to hear a follow-up.
Rather sheepishly he let his feet carry him to the car. It wasn't fair to listen when Meade wasn't around. He warmed it up, slowly spun the dial, once around and back. Not a peep at full gain, nothing but a terrible amount of static. Served him right.
He climbed the hogback, sat down on the bench he had dragged up there — their "memorial bench," sacred to the memory of the time Meade had hurt her knees on the gravel — sat down and sighed. His lean belly was stuffed with venison and corn fritters; he lacked only tobacco to make him completely happy. The evening cloud colors were spectacularly beautiful and the weather was extremely balmy for December; both, he thought, caused by volcanic dust, with perhaps an assist from atom bombs.
Surprising how fast things went to pieces when they started to skid! And surprising how quickly they were going back together, judging by the signs. A curve reaches trough and then starts right back up. World War III was the shortest big war on record — forty cities gone, counting Moscow and the other slave cities as well as the American ones — and then whoosh! neither side fit to fight. Of course, the fact that both sides had thrown their ICBMs over the pole through the most freakish arctic weather since Peary invented the place had a lot to do with it, he supposed. It was amazing that any of the Russian paratroop transports had gotten through at all.
He sighed and pulled the November 1951 copy of the Western Astronomer out of his pocket. Where was he? Oh, yes, Some Notes on the Stability of G-Type Stars with Especial Reference to Sol, by A. G. M. Dynkowski, Lenin Institute, translated by Heinrich Ley, F. R. A. S. Good boy, Ski — sound mathematician. Very clever application of harmonic series and tightly reasoned. He started to thumb for his place when he noticed a footnote that he had missed. Dynkowski's own name carried down to it: "This monograph was denounced by Pravda as romantic reactionariism shortly after it was published. Professor Dynkowski has been unreported since and must be presumed to be liquidated,"
The poor geek! Well, he probably would have been atomized by now anyway, along with the goons who did him in. He wondered if they really had gotten all the Russki paratroopers? Well, he had killed his quota; if he hadn't gotten that doe within a quarter mile of the cabin and headed right back, Meade would have had a bad time. He had shot them in the back, the swine! and buried them beyond the woodpile — and then it had seemed a shame to skin and eat an innocent deer while those lice got decent burial. Aside from mathematics, just two things worth doing — kill a man and love a woman. He had done both; he was rich.
He settled down to some solid pleasure. Dynkowski was a treat. Of course, it was old stuff that a G-type star, such as the sun, was potentially unstable; a G-O star could explode, slide right off the Russell diagram, and end up as a white dwarf. But no one before Dynkowski had defined the exact conditions for such a catastrophe, nor had anyone else devised mathematical means of diagnosing the instability and describing its progress.
He looked up to rest his eyes from the fine print and saw that the sun was obscured by a thin low cloud — one of those unusual conditions where the filtering effect is just right to permit a man to view the sun clearly with the naked eye. Probably volcanic dust in the air, he decided, acting almost like smoked glass.
He looked again. Either he had spots before his eyes or that was one fancy big sun spot. He had heard of being able to see them with the naked eye, but it had never happened to him. He longed for a telescope.
He blinked. Yep, it was still there, upper right. A big spot — no wonder the car radio sounded like a Hitler speech. He turned back and continued on to the end of the article, being anxious to finish before the light failed. At first his mood was sheerest intellectual pleasure at the man's tight mathematical reasoning. A 3% imbalance in the solar constant — yes, that was standard stuff; the sun would nova with that much change. But Dynkowski went further; by means of a novel mathematical operator which he had dubbed "yokes" he bracketed the period in a star's history when this could happen and tied it down further with secondary, tertiary, and quaternary yokes, showing exactly the time of highest probability. Beautiful! Dynkowski even assigned dates to the extreme limit of his primary yoke, as a good statistician should.
But, as he went back and reviewed the equations, his mood changed from intellectual to personal. Dynkowski was not talking about just any G-O star; in the latter part he meant old Sol himself, Breen's personal sun, the big boy out there with the oversized freckle on his face.
That was one hell of a big freckle! It was a hole you could chuck Jupiter into and not make a splash. He could see it very clearly now.
Everybody talks about "when the stars grow old and the sun grows cold" — but it's an impersonal concept, like one's own death. Breen started thinking about it very personally. How long would it take, from the instant the imbalance was triggered until the expanding wave front engulfed earth? The mechanics couldn't be solved without a calculator even though they were implicit in the equations in front of him. Half an hour, for a horseback guess, from incitement until the earth went phutt!
It hit him with gentle melancholy. No more? Never again? Colorado on a cool morning ... the Boston Post road with autumn wood smoke tanging the air ... Bucks county bursting in the spring. The wet smells of the Fulton Fish Market — no, that was gone already. Coffee at the Morning Call. No more wild strawberries on a hillside in Jersey, hot and sweet as lips. Dawn in the South Pacific with the light airs cool velvet under your shirt and never a sound but the chuckling of the water against the sides of the old rust bucket — what was her name? That was a long time ago — the S. S. Mary Brewster.
No more moon if the earth was gone. Stars — but no one to look at them.
He looked back at the dates bracketing Dynkowski's probability yoke. "Thine Alabaster Cities gleam, undimmed by —"
He suddenly felt the need for Meade and stood up.
She was coming out to meet him. "Hello, Potty! Safe to come in now — I've finished the dishes."
"I should help."
"You do the man's work; I'll do the woman's work. That's fair." She shaded her eyes. "What a sunset! We ought to have volcanoes blowing their tops every year."
"Sit down and we'll watch it."
She sat beside him and he took her hand. "Notice the sun spot? You can see it with your naked eye."
She stared. "Is that a sun spot? It looks as if somebody had taken a bite out of it."
He sq
uinted his eyes at it again. Damned if it didn't look bigger!
Meade shivered. "I'm chilly. Put your arm around me."
He did so with his free arm, continuing to hold hands with the other. It was bigger — the thing was growing.
What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a spot of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style.
She snuggled to him. "Keep me warm."
"It will be warmer soon. I mean I'll keep you warm."
"Dear Potty."
She looked up. "Potty — something funny is happening to the sunset."
"No darling — to the sun."
"I'm frightened."
"I'm here, dear."
He glanced down at the journal, still open beside him. He did not need to add up the two figures and divide by two to reach the answer. Instead he clutched fiercely at her hand, knowing with an unexpected and overpowering burst of sorrow that this was The End
By His Bootstraps
Bob Wilson did not see the circle grow.
Nor, for that matter, did he see the stranger who stepped out of the circle and stood staring at the back of Wilson's neck — stared, and breathed heavily, as if laboring under strong and unusual emotion.
Wilson had no reason to suspect that anyone else was in his room; he had every reason to expect the contrary. He had locked himself in his room for the purpose of completing his thesis in one sustained drive. He had to — tomorrow was the last day for submission, yesterday the thesis had been no more than a title: "An Investigation Into Certain Mathematical Aspects of a Rigor of Metaphysics."
Fifty-two cigarettes, four pots of coffee and thirteen hours of continuous work had added seven thousand words to the title. As to the validity of his thesis he was far too groggy to give a damn. Get it done, was his only thought, get it done, turn it in, take three stiff drinks and sleep for a week.