“Probably not,” said Benton.
“And maybe someday there’ll be a medicine that’ll do some good.”
“I am hopeful.”
Watching Jackson leave, he wondered why he had told him what he had. Why the brutal honesty? Why the giving of some hope? “There is work being done on it,” he had said; but that had been a lie. Or had it? There was one person working on it and that one person, he grimly told himself, had better buckle down to business.
That evening he drafted a careful letter, setting forth in precise detail what he suspected. Then, as he found the time, working in the evening after office hours were over, he typed the letters and mailed them out. Then he sat back and waited.
The first reply came, in two weeks’ time, from JAMA. His letter, it said, could not be considered for publication since it lacked research evidence. JAMA was kind enough, but final. It did not even suggest he institute further research. But that was only fair, he admitted to himself, since there had been no research to start with.
The second reply, from the National Institutes of Health, was barely civil in its officialese.
The third, from the Association for Biochemical Research, was curt.
On a Saturday afternoon, when the last patient had left, he sat at his desk with the three letters spread out before him. It had been unrealistic, he admitted, to think that any one of the three would have paid attention to his letter. After all, who was he? An unknown family physician in a town that was equally unknown, advancing a theory unsupported by any kind of research, relying only on observation and deduction. The reactions to what he had written could have been expected. Yet there was no question in his mind that he should have written the letters. If no more than a gesture, it was something that had needed to be done.
So now what did he do? Work through the medical association, starting with the county, going to the state? He knew that it was useless. Smith, he was certain, might give him support; but the others would laugh him off the floor. And even if this were not so, it would take years before there was any action.
A chemical company, perhaps. There would be millions of dollars’ worth of business for a DDT capsule once what he now knew became general knowledge. But a chemical company, knowing the hassle of getting approval from the Food and Drug Administration, might shy away from it. Before a chemical company would even touch it, there would have to be years of laboratory work to provide supporting evidence to place before the FDA. On an idea so “far-out,” he knew, no drug or chemical firm would put up the money that was necessary.
So he was licked. He had been licked before he even started. If Abbott had not died, there might have been an even chance. Abbott, writing about the syndrome, would have found a publisher, for he would have produced the kind of book publishers dream about—sensational, controversial, attention-grabbing. Published, the book would have created enough furor that someone would have worked on the theory, if for no other reason than to prove Abbott wrong.
But there was no use thinking about it. Abbott would not write the book. No one would write it. So this was the end of it, he thought. All the years he had left, he would carry the knowledge that he had found a truth the world would not accept.
The world! he thought. To hell with the world! The world was not his concern. His concern was for the people of this community, for Lem and Ted, for Burt and Herb, and for all the others. Maybe he couldn’t help the world, but there might be a way, by God, he could help his people!
7
Lem Jackson lived on Coonskin Ridge, and Benton had to stop a couple of times to ask his way. But he finally found the farm, with its tilted acres and the little, falling-down house crouched against the wind that whipped across the ridges.
When he knocked, Jackson let him in.
“Come and sit by the fire. It’s a nippy day and a fire feels good. Mary, how about pouring Doc a cup of coffee. What brings you out here, Doc?”
“A small matter of business,” Benton said. “I thought maybe you’d be willing to do a job for me.”
“If I can,” Jackson answered. “If I’m up to it. I told you, remember, I’m not good for much.”
“You have a truck outside. This would be a hauling job.”
“I can manage a hauling job.”
Mrs. Jackson brought the cup of coffee. She was a small, wispy woman with hair straggling down across her face, wearing a bedraggled dress. From a far corner of the room, faces of children, quiet as mice, stared intently out.
“Thank you, Mrs. Jackson,” said Benton. “This will go good after the long drive out.”
“I have a bottle of brandy with some left in it,” said Jackson, “if you would like a splash in that there coffee.”
“That would be splendid, if there’s enough for both of us. I never drink good liquor by myself.”
“There’s plenty,” said Jackson. “I always keep a little in the house.”
Mrs. Jackson said, “Lem told me you would let him know if medicine ever came along that would do him good. I hope that’s why you’re here.”
“Well, I’m not absolutely sure,” Benton said, “but that’s what I have in mind.”
Jackson came back with the brandy and a cup of coffee for himself. He poured generous splashes and set the bottle on the floor.
“Now about this hauling job …” he said.
“When you were in to see me, you said you worked at a plant down in West Virginia, making DDT.”
“That’s right,” said Jackson. “They fired me off the job, but the plant was closed not long after.”
“It’s abandoned now?”
“I suppose so. It was just a little plant. It only made DDT. No reason to keep it open.”
“Would you be willing to drive down there and try to get into the plant?” Benton asked.
“Shouldn’t be no trouble. They might have fenced it in, but there shouldn’t be no guards. There’s nothing there to guard. Probably just sitting empty there. I could get through a fence. Doc, what are you getting at?”
“I need some DDT.”
Jackson shook his head. “There mightn’t be any left. They might’ve destroyed any they had left.”
“DDT would be nice to have,” said Benton, “but I’d settle for some dirt that had DDT mixed in it. Would there be that kind of dirt?”
“Sure there’d be! I know a dozen places where I could find that kind of dirt. Is it dirt you want? I could bring back a truckload. Even have a pal who would help—owes me a favor. Would a truckload be enough?”
“Plenty,” Benton said. “I take it you will do it. There might be some danger.”
“I don’t think so,” Jackson replied. “It’s sort of isolated. No one nearby. If I picked the right time of day, there’d be no one to see me. But what do you want the dirt for, Doc? The damn stuff’s poisonous.”
“It also might be the drug I was telling you about. The drug that we don’t have.”
“You’re spoofing me.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Jackson.
“You’ll do it, then?”
“I’ll start at sunup.”
8
Late Monday afternoon, Nurse Amy stuck her head in the office door. “Lem Jackson’s here to see you,” she said. “He has a truck heaped full of dirt parked out in front.”
“Fine. Please show him in.”
Jackson was grinning when he came in. “I got the dirt,” he said, “and better than that, I found three bags of DDT, tucked away in an old shed where someone had forgot them. Where do you want that dirt, Doc?”
“We’ll put the bags of DDT down in the basement,” said Benton. “Dump the dirt over in the northwest corner of my parking lot. And I wonder if you’d be willing to do something else for me?”
“Anything at all,” said Jackson.
“You just name it, Doc.”
“Tomorrow I’d like you to come back and build a tight board fence around the dirt so no one can get at it. Then down in the basement I want a box built, a sort of sandbox, like the sandboxes kids play in.”
Jackson scratched his head. “You sure do want the damnedest things. Maybe someday you’ll tell me what it’s all about.”
“I’ll tell you now,” said Benton. “Old Doc’s Dirt Box—that’s the whole idea. After you get that box built, we’ll fill it with some of the dirt you hauled and we’ll seed it with a little extra DDT. Then I want you to sit down alongside that box and play in the dirt, just like a kid would play in sand. Make a dirt castle, build dirt roads, dig dirt wells—things like that, you know. You need DDT. Don’t ask me to explain. Just do like I tell you.”
Jackson grinned lopsidedly. “I’d feel like a goddamn fool,” he said.
“Look,” said Benton, “if I knew how much was safe, I’d put that DDT in capsules and you could swallow them. But I don’t, and if I guessed wrong I could kill you off. But I do know that people like Helen Anderson, who works in a garden where there’s still some DDT, are healthy as a hog—while Helen’s husband, Herb, who won’t dirty his hands in the garden, feels just the same way you do. All beat out, good for nothing, tired.”
“Well,” Jackson said reluctantly, “if I could do what you say by myself. If there was no one to see me …”
“I promise you no one will see you. I won’t tell a soul.”
Watching Jackson’s retreating back, Benton stood for a time trying to figure out how he would convince Herb and Ted and Burt and all the others of them.
It might be a chore, he knew; but he would get it done. He would have them all down there in the basement, playing at that dirt box like a bunch of kids. After all, he was good old Doc and his people trusted him.
A Heritage of Stars
1
One of the curious customs to arise out of the Collapse was the practice of pyramiding robotic brain cases, in the same manner that certain ancient Asiatic barbarians raised pyramids of human heads that later turned to skulls, to commemorate a battle. While the braincase custom is not universal, there is enough evidence from travelers’ tales to show that it is practiced by many sedentary tribes. Nomadic peoples, as well, may have collections of brain cases, but these are not pyramided except on ceremonial occasions. Ordinarily they are stored in sacred chests which, when the band is on the march, are given positions of honor, carried in wagons at the head of the column.
Generally, it has been believed that this fascination with robotic brain cases may commemorate man’s triumph over the machines. But there is no undeniable evidence that this is so. It is possible that the symmetry of the cases may have an esthetic appeal quite apart from any other real or imagined significance. Or it may be that their preservation is an unconscious reaction to a symbolic permanence, for of all things created by technological man, they are the most durable, being constructed of a magic metal that defies both time and weather.
—From Wilson’s History of the End of Civilization
2
Thomas Cushing hoed potatoes all the afternoon, in the small patch on the bench above the river, between the river and the wall. The patch was doing well. If some unforeseen disease did not fasten on it, if it were not raided on some dark night by one of the tribes across the river, if no other evil fell upon it, come harvest time it would yield up many bushels. He had worked hard to produce that final harvest. He had crept on hands and knees between the rows, knocking potato beetles off the vines with a small stick he held in one hand and catching them as they fell in the bark container he held in the other hand. Catching them so they would not crawl from where they fell into the vines again, to feast upon the leaves. Crawling up and down the rows on his hands and knees, with his muscles screaming at the punishment, with a pitiless sun hammering at him so that he seemed to creep in a miasmatic fog composed of dead and heated air mixed finely with the dust that his crawling raised. At intervals, when the bark container was nearly full of the squirming, confused and deprived bugs, he’d go down to the riverbank, first marking the spot where he had ceased his labor, with the stick planted in the soil; then, squatting on the bank, he’d reach far out to empty the container into the flowing stream, shaking it vigorously to dislodge the last of the beetles, launching them upon a journey that few of them would survive, and carrying those few that would survive far from his potato patch.
In his mind, at times, he had talked to them. I wish you no harm, he’d told them; I do this not out of malice but to protect myself and others of my kind, removing you so you’ll not eat the food on which I and others count. Apologizing to them, explaining to them to take away their wrath as ancient, prehistoric hunters had apologized and explained ritually to the bears they had slaughtered for a feast.
In bed, before he went to sleep, he’d think on them again, seeing them once again, a striped golden scum caught in the swirl of water and carried rapidly away to a fate they could not understand, not knowing why or how they’d come to such a fate, powerless to prevent it, with no means of escaping it.
And having dumped them in the river, back to crawling between the rows once more to gather other bugs to consign to the selfsame fate.
Then, later in the summer, when days went by with no rain falling, with the sun striking down out of the cloudless blue bowl of the sky, carrying buckets of water from the river on a yoke slung across his shoulders to supply the thirsty plants the moisture that they lacked; day after day trudging from the river’s edge up the sharp slope to the bench, lugging water for his crop, then going back again to get two more pails of water, on an endless treadmill so the plants would grow and thrive and there would be potatoes stored against the winter. Existence, he had thought, survival so hard and dearly bought—a continual fight to assure survival. Not like those ancient days Wilson had written about so long ago, reaching back with fumbling fingers to try to create the past that had come to an end centuries before he had put quill to paper, forced to exercise a niggling economy of paper—writing on both sides of each sheet, leaving no margins on either side of the page, with no whiteness left at either top or bottom. And always that small and niggardly, that painfully small, script, so that he could cram in all the words seething in his brain. Agonizing over the concern that he mentioned time and time again—that the history he wrote was based more on myth and legend than on fact, a situation that could not be avoided since so little fact remained. Yet, convinced it was paramount that the history be written before what little fact remained completely disappeared, before the myth and legend had become more distorted than they already were. Agonizing, as well, over his measurement of myth and legend, sweating over his evaluation of them; asking himself, time and time again, “What should I put in? What should I leave out?” For he did not put in all of it; some he had left out. The myth about the Place of Going to the Stars he had left out.
But enough of Wilson, Cushing told himself; he must get back to his hoeing and his weeding. Weeds and bugs were enemies. The lack of rain, an enemy. The too hot sun, an enemy. It was not only he who thought so: there were others working patches of corn and potatoes that lay on other tiny benches, so much like his own, all up and down the river, close enough to the walls to gain some protection against the occasional raiders from across the river.
He had hoed all the afternoon and now, with the sun finally gone behind the river bluffs looming to the west, he crouched beside the river and stared across the water. Upstream, a mile or so, stood the stone piers of a ruined bridge, with some of the bridge’s superstructure still remaining, but nothing one could use to cross the river. Still farther upstream, two great towers rose up, former living structures that the old books called high rises. There had been, it appeared, two such types of structures—ordinary high rises and high rises for the elderly—and he wondered briefly why there should have been such age distinction. No such thing
was true today. There was no distinction between the young and old. They lived together and needed one another. The young provided strength and the old provided wisdom and they worked together for the benefit of all.
This he had seen when he first came to the university and had experienced himself when he had been taken in under the sponsorship of Monty and Nancy Montrose, the sponsorship in time becoming more than a formal sponsorship, for he had lived with them and had become, in effect, their son. The university and, most of all, Monty and Nancy, had given him equality and kindness. He had, in the last five years, become as truly a part of the university as if he had been born to it and had known what he came to recognize as a unique kind of happiness that, in his years of wandering, he had not known elsewhere. Now, hunkering on the river’s bank, he admitted to himself that it had become a nagging happiness, a happiness of guilt, chained here by the sense of affectionate loyalty to the aged couple who had taken him in and made him a part of them. He had gained much from his five years here: the ability to read and write; some acquaintance with the books that, rank on rank, lined the stacks of the library; a better understanding of what the world was all about, of what it once had been and what it was at the present moment. Given, too, within the security of the walls, the time to think, to work out what he wanted of himself. But though he’d worked at it, he still did not quite know what he wanted of or for himself.
He remembered, once again, that rainy day of early spring when he had sat at a desk in the library stacks. What he had been doing there he had now forgotten—perhaps simply sitting there while he read a book which presently he would replace upon the shelves. But he did recall with startling clarity how, in an idle moment, he had pulled out the desk drawer and there had found the small pile of notes written on flyleaves that had been torn from books, written in a small and crabbed hand, niggardly of space. He recalled that he had sat there, frozen in surprise, for there was no mistaking that cramped and economic writing. He had read the Wilson history time and time again, strangely fascinated by it, and there was no question in his mind, not the slightest question, that these were Wilson’s notes, left here in the desk drawer to await discovery a millennium after they’d been written.