Wolf and Iron

CHAPTER 1

A man, failed and unfit, moved west and north. Jeebee had made it safely this far on the electric bike—a variation on the mountain bicycle with an electrically driven motor—moving at night through northern Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota. Partway across South Dakota, however, the heavy skies that had been with him since yesterday moved lower; and a late April rain began to come down, cold and bitter on the north wind.

His outer clothing, of a breathable, but waterproof fabric, kept the wet from reaching most of him. But even with the long brim of his baseball cap and riding gloves, the rain laid an icy mask on his face and icy chains around his exposed wrists.

He stopped at the first abandoned building he could find—a recently burned and partly fallen-in farmhouse. There was a way among the charred and fallen timbers, however, into a part of it where he could shelter from the rain.

He moved in, accordingly, after covering the motored mountain bike with a plastic tarpaulin from his backpack. He ate some of the cold canned stew he had found in another ruined habitation only a day or so earlier; then lay for hours, waiting for the rain to end.

Eventually, he slumbered. But his dreams were bad, about the running and hiding in a world bankrupt and collapsed. He woke groggily and shifted; and sleep came again, at once. This time he dreamed the old nightmare that he had carried with him out of Michigan and westward. He dreamed that he was back working in the study group; and that the computer screen in front of him was full of the symbols of his equations.

Suddenly a darkness, just a pinpoint at first, appeared near the middle of the screen to obliterate some of the symbols. The blackness grew, spreading and wiping out all his work. It was, he had long since realized, his awareness of the inevitability of the coming Collapse, even though he juggled symbols to prove that it need not come. Now, the inevitability of it invaded his dreams, in retrospect coming to interrupt and destroy all that he had tried to do—he and the others in the study group at Stoketon, Michigan.

His dream shifted. The darkness came out from his screen and became a black shape that pursued him. He found himself in one situation after another, backed into a corner, with no place to go and the darkness approaching; growing enormously to blot out everything as it came closer and closer, to blot him out also.

He woke, sweating. In the lightlessness of his sleeping place, he felt like a naked animal; like a shelled creature stripped of all its normal protection. After a long time, he fell asleep again. This time he slept steadily, the sleep of exhaustion. He did not wake until early afternoon of the next day.

Outside, he found the day scene hardly brighter than the night had been. The thick cloud cover had broken finally, here and there, to let down occasional beams of sunlight. He was so unreasonably cheered by seeing the sun that, since the surrounding territory seemed to be as clear of people as he had found it to be the last week, he took a chance and moved on for a change in daylight.

Slightly after midafternoon, however, the clouds closed down once more; and the rain began again.

Jeebee pulled the visor of his cap down against the falling moisture. Although this plains country, with its sparse patches of timber and only an occasional devastated farmstead, seemed deserted enough, nothing could be certain. His outer clothing, made for camping, continued to keep him dry underneath. Also, today’s rain was not as cold on his face and hands, so he was not uncomfortable.

But as the afternoon wore on, the darkness of the clouds increased, the temperature dropped and the rain turned to sleet. It whipped against the naked skin of his face as the wind strengthened from the north.

Like an animal, he thought again of shelter and began to cast around for it. So that, when a little later he came to another pile of lumber that had once been a ranch house, before being dynamited or bulldozed into a scrap heap, he gave up travel for the day and began searching for a gap in the rubble.

He found one at last, a hole that seemed to lead far enough in under the loose material to indicate a fairly waterproof area inside. Laying the bike on its side under an overhang of shattered timbers that would shield it from the rain, he crawled in. He pushed his backpack before him as he went, bracing himself for the possibility of having stumbled on the den of some wild dog—or worse.

But no human or beast appeared to dispute his entrance; and the opening went back farther than he had guessed. He was pleased to hear the patter of the rain only distantly through what was above him, while feeling everything completely dry and dusty around him. He kept on crawling, as far in as he could; until suddenly his right hand, reaching out before him, slid over an edge into emptiness.

He stopped to check, found some space above his head, and risked lighting a stub of candle from the bike pack. Its light shone ahead of him, down into an almost untouched basement garage; with no car in it but walls of cinder blocks and a solid roof of collapsed house overhead.

He memorized this scene below as best he could and put the candle out to save as much of it as possible. He let himself down into the thick, dust-smelling darkness until he felt level floor under his boot soles. Qnce down, he relit the candle for a moment, and looked around.

The place was a treasure trove. Plainly no one had set foot here since the moment in which the house had been destroyed, and nothing had been looted from this part of the building’s original contents.

That night he slept warm and dry with even the luxury of a half-filled kerosene lantern he found there, to light him for a while. The next day he enlarged the entrance, and pulled the bike in out of sight. When he left the place, once more in daylight, two days later, through a separate, carefully tunneled hole much larger than the one by which he had entered, he was rich.

He left still more riches behind him. There was more than he and the bike could carry; but it was not just a lack of charity to his fellow human beings that made him carefully cover and disguise both openings to the place he had found. It was the hard-learned lesson to cover his trail so that no one would suspect someone else had been here and try to track him for what he carried. Otherwise, he would not have cared about the goods he left behind. For his path led still westward to Montana, to his brother Martin’s Twin Peaks Ranch—still eight hundred miles distant.

His riches, however, could not help going to his head a little. For one thing, he was taking a calculated risk, riding off in daylight, once more, on the bike. It was true that its motor was almost soundless. But it was an experimental, state-of-the-art device from the days when only those who knew him well had called him Jeebee.

To all others in those days—incredibly, only months before—he had been Jeeris Belamy Walthar. Even then the bike had been an experimental prototype of a vehicle under research, its battery rechargeable daily by sunlight falling on a blanket of miniature solar cells. A blanket which could be unfolded to create thirty-six square feet of energy-gathering surface, exposed to sunlight. Together, blanket and bike were priceless nowadays. It was also true that on it, in open country like this, he could probably outrun anyone else, including riders on horseback. But it was also an open invitation to attack and robbery in these catastrophic days; as a fat wallet had once been, flourished in a den of thieves.

Besides the bike, however, Jeebee had selected well. The compass that hung from a cord around his neck was sturdy and versatile; and his backpack contained, in addition to the precious solar-cell blanket, a Swiss army knife, some rope, twelve square feet of heat-reflecting plastic tarp, a medical kit, shaving kit, and a little food. Also a pair of binoculars—opera glasses—plus a thick, pencillike device containing a ceramic filter able to take out most bacteria down to two microns, some candles, a waterproof container of matches, an extra sweater, and extra underwear.

Now, as well, from the garage he had just left, he was wearing some other man’s old but still solidly seamed leather jacket. His belt was tight with screwdrivers, pruning knives, and other simple hand tools.

Canned food from looted houses and small game had fed Jeebee on his trip so far. But he had been running short of bullets—never having been much of a shot. Now, a small supply of additional ammunition for the take-apart .22 rifle he had been carrying was in the other pack on the bike’s rear-fender carrier. As well, in the cellar garage he had picked up a few canned goods, some of which might still be edible.

You could never tell until you opened a can and smelled its contents.

A final find, wrapped now around his waist above his belt, was a good twenty feet of heavy, solid-linked metal chain, taken from the cellar garage.

He had learned enough by this time not to follow any roads that might lead him to inhabited houses, or even small towns. So he cut off between the hills, on the same compass course westward that he had been holding to for the past two weeks, ever since he had run for his life to get away from Stoketon.

Even to think of Stoketon now set a cold sickness crawling about in the pit of his stomach. It had taken a miracle to save him. His buck fever had held true; and, at the last, when Buel Mannerly had risen up out of the weeds with the shotgun pointed at his head, he had been unable to shoot, though Buel was only seconds away from shooting him. Only the dumb luck of someone else from the village firing at Jeebee just then and scaring Buel into diving to the ground had cleared his way to tree cover and escape.

It was not only lack of guts on his part that had kept him from firing, Jeebee reminded himself now, strongly, steering the bike along a hillside in the sunlight and the light breeze. He, more than anyone else, should be able to remember that like everyone else, he was the product of his own part of the quantitative sociodynamics pattern; and it was that, more than anything else, which had stopped him from shooting Buel.

Once, in a civilized and technology-rich world, reactions like his had signaled a survival type. Now, they indicated the opposite. He glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror, on the rod projecting from the left handlebar of the bike. The image of his lower face looked back at him, brutal with untrimmed beard and crafty with wrinkles dried into skin tanned by the sun and wind. But above these signs, as he tilted his head to look, the visor of his cap had shaded the skin and his forehead was still pale, the eyes still blue and innocent. The upper half of his features gave him away. He had no instinctive courage, only what was left of a sense of duty, a duty to a fledgling science, which had barely managed to be born before the world had fallen apart.

And a desperate, instinctive need to survive.

It had been fury over that failed duty that pushed him originally in the first few days of his escape from Stoketon. Without that, his spirit would have failed at the thought of the hundreds of unprotected miles between him and the safety of the Twin Peaks Ranch; where he could shelter behind a brother more adapted to these times. But what he had learned and worked at had driven him—the importance of a knowledge that must be saved for the future.

All around the world now there would be forty, perhaps as many as sixty, men and women—applied mathematicians and behavioral scientists like himself—sufficiently expert in the complexities of quantitative sociodynamics to have come independently to the same conclusion as he had. For a second the elegant mathematical notations danced before his mind’s eye, spelling out the unarguable truth about the human race in this spring of dissolution and disaster.

Like him, the others would have come to the conclusion that the knowledge of QSD must be protected, taken someplace safe, and hidden against the time—fifty or a thousand years from now—when the majority of the race would begin to change back again toward civilized patterns. Only if all those understanding the mathematics of QSD tried their best would there be even a chance of one of them succeeding in saving this great new tool for the next upswing of mankind.

It was a knowledge that could read both the present and the future. Because of it, they who had worked with it knew how vital it was. It must not be lost. Otherwise future generations could suffer another cycle like this one, of disintegration and chaos.

It was a bitter thing that the others, like himself, were non-survivors under these conditions. The very civilized intellectual nature of their own individual patterns unfitted them for the primitive, violent world that had now recreated itself around them. It was a cruel irony that they were the weakest, not the strongest, vessels to preserve what they alone knew needed to be preserved.

But they could try. He could try. Perhaps he could come to some terms with this time of savagery. It was ironic, also, after all the fears of worldwide nuclear destruction, the “greenhouse effect” and the like, that the world had actually died with a whimper, after all.

No—he corrected himself—not with a whimper. A snarl.

It had begun with a universal economic breakdown, complicated by overpopulation. A time of noise and ideas, of waste and heat. A time of frustration, mounting to frenzy, with unemployment and inflation soaring, worldwide.

In the end had come a total breakdown of resource distribution systems; with all of the predictable consequences reinforcing each other in a maelstrom of positive feedback—like a thermostat gone berserk, feeding more fuel to the furnace as room temperature rises. Predictable—and predicted by all the mathematical models of the study group to which Jeebee had belonged.

Even this was something for bitter inner laughter in Jeebee. Sociodynamics was new, but it had its roots in the pitifully simple, and artificially static, optimality models by which behavioral ecologists of an earlier time had predicted the foraging behavior of animals.

But when it had been applied to human society and the problems of modeling dynamic processes, the conclusions were as inevitable as they were terrifying. Independently, but almost simultaneously, the predictions had appeared in the literature from around the world—from people like Piotr Arazavin, Noshiobi Hideki… and Jeeris Belamy Walthar, yours truly…

They had disagreed only on the degree of social entropy—chaos—required to trigger the leap to this new, savage expression of social organization. It was no one’s fault that the threshold turned out to be lower than any of them had suspected.

So cities became battlefields and stood now as silent, ravaged testaments to the dead left by riot and revolution. Isolated communities developed into small, primitive self-fortified territories. And the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were abroad once more—heraldic symbols of the new order.

So it had become a time of bloodletting, of a paring down and reshaping of the population—the pattern that QSD predicted would optimize the restoration of social order in those with the QSD patterns for survival under fang-and-claw conditions. A new medievalism was upon the globe. The iron years had come again; and those who were best fitted to the immediate task of survival were those to whom ethics, conscience, and anything else beyond the pure pragmatism of physical power, were excess baggage.

And so it would continue, the QSD models predicted, until a new, young order could emerge once more, binding the little village fortresses into alliances, the alliances into kingdoms, and the kingdoms into sovereign nations that could begin once more to treat with one another in systems. Fifty years, five hundred years, a thousand years—however long it would take.

And meanwhile, a small anachronism of the time now dead, a weak individual of the soft centuries struggled to cross the newly lawless country, carrying a precious child of the mind to where it might sleep in safety for as many centuries as necessary until reason and civilization should be born again—

Jeebee caught himself up at the brink of a bath in self-pity. Not that he was particularly ashamed of self-pity. Or, at least, he did not think he was particularly ashamed of it. But emotional navel-contemplating of any kind took his attention off his surroundings; and that could be dangerous. In fact, no sooner had he jerked himself out of his mood than his nostrils caught a faint but oily scent on the breeze.

In a moment he had killed the motor of the bike, was off it, and had dragged it with him into the cover of some nearby willow saplings. He lay there, silent and rigid, trying to identify what he had smelled.

The fact that he could not, did not make it any less alarming. Any unusual phenomena—noise, odor, or other—were potential warnings of the presence of other humans. And if there were other humans around, Jeebee wanted to look them over from a distance before he gave them a chance to see him.

In this case the scent was unknown, but, he could swear, not totally unfamiliar. Somewhere he had encountered it before. After lying some minutes hidden in the willows with ears and eyes straining for additional information, Jeebee cautiously got to his feet and, pushing the bike without starting the motor, began to try to track down the wind-borne odor to its source.

It was some little distance over two rises of land before the smell got noticeably stronger. But the moment came when, lying on his stomach with the bike ten feet back, he looked down a long slope at a milling mass of gray and black bodies. It was a large flock of Targhee sheep—the elusive memory of the smell of a sheep barn at a state fair twelve years before snapped back into his mind. With the flock below were three boys, riding bareback on small shaggy ponies. No dogs were in view.

The thought of dogs sent a twinge of alarm along his nerves. He was about to crawl back to his bike and start moving away when a ram burst suddenly from the flock with a sheep dog close behind it, a small brown-and-white collie breed that had been hidden by the milling dark backs and white faces about it. The sheep was headed directly up the slope where Jeebee lay hidden.

He lay holding his breath until the dog, nipping at the heels of the ram, turned it back into the mass of the flock. He breathed out in relief; but at that moment the dog, having seen the ram safely back among the other sheep, spun about and faced up in Jeebee’s direction, nose testing the wind.

The wind was from dog to Jeebee. There was no way the animal could smell him, he told himself; and yet the canine nose continued to test the air. After a second the dog began to bark, looking straight in the direction of where Jeebee lay hidden.

“What is it, Snappy?” cried one of the boys on horseback. He wheeled his mount around and cantered toward the dog, up the pitch of the slope.

Jeebee panicked. On hands and knees he scrambled backward, hearing a sudden high-pitched whoop from below as he became visible on the skyline, followed by the abrupt pounding of horses’ hooves in a gallop.

“Get him—get’im!” sang a voice. A rifle cracked.

Knowing he was now fully in view, Jeebee leaped frantically on the electric bike and kicked on the motor. Mercifully, it started immediately, and he shot off without looking backward, paying no attention to the direction of his going except that it was away from those behind him and along a route as free of bumps and obstacles as he could find.

The rifle cracked again. He heard several voices now, yelping with excitement and the pleasure of the chase. There was a whistling near his head as a bullet passed close. The electric bike was slow to build up speed; and its softly whining motor did not cover the sound of the yells behind him. But he was headed downslope and slowly the bounding, oscillating needle of the speedometer was picking up space above the zero-miles-per-hour pin.

The rifle sounded again, somewhat farther behind him; and this time he heard no whistle of a passing slug. The shots had been infrequent enough to indicate that only one of the boys was armed; and the rifle used was probably an old single-shot, needing to be reloaded after firing—not an easy thing to do on the back of a galloping horse with no saddle leather or stirrups to cling to. He risked a glance over his shoulder.

The three had already given up the chase. He saw them on the crest of a rise behind him, sitting their horses, watching. They had given up almost too easily, he thought—and then he remembered the sheep. They would not want to go too far from the flock for which they were responsible.

He continued on, throttling back only a little on his speed. Now that they had seen him, he was anxious to get as far out of their area as possible, before they should pass the word to more adult riders on better horses and armed with better weapons. But he did begin, instinctively, to pay a little more attention to the dangers of rocks and holes in his way.

There was a new, gnawing uneasiness inside him. Dogs meant trouble for him, as one had just demonstrated. Other humans he could watch for and slip by unseen, but dogs had noses and ears to sense him in darkness or behind cover; and sheep-herders meant dogs—lots of them. He had expected cattle, but not sheep, out here. According to the road maps that were all he had to direct him, he should be no further west than a third of the way into South Dakota, by now.

A feeling of utter loneliness flooded through him. He was an outcast; and there was no one and no hope of anyone to stand by him. If he had even one companion to make this long hazardous journey with him, there might be a real chance of his reaching his brother’s place. As it was, what he feared most deeply was that in one of these moments of despair he would simply give up, would stop and turn, or wait to be shot down by armed riders like the ones just now following him. Or he would walk nakedly into some camp or town to be killed and robbed; just to get it all over with.

Now he fought the feeling of loneliness, the despair, forcing himself to think without emotion. What was the best thing for him to do under the circumstances? He would be safer apart from the electric bike; but without it he could not cover ground anywhere near so swiftly.

With luck, using the bike, he could be out of this sheep area in a day or so. With the solar blanket to charge its battery, he could cover ground at the low speed of eight miles an hour for some ten hours, before needing to recharge. Four hundred miles—it was like thinking of some incredible distance; but it was actually only fifty hours of such travel away. The bike would get him there, if he just trusted it. It was a case of simply pushing on through; and simply hoping to outrun trouble, as he just had, when he ran into more of it.

But he must go back to hiding out somewhere during the days and traveling nights only. This daytime travel was too dangerous. Starting right now—but even with a good moon he would have trouble spotting all the rocks and potholes in the path of the bike, off-road like this. And road travel increased his chances of being seen. But the yearning for even a rainy daytime like this one was too strong. No, he would make as much time as he could while the day lasted. When night came, he would decide then whether to ride on…

Thinking this, he topped the small rise he had been climbing and looked down at a river, a good two hundred yards across, flowing swiftly from north to south across his direct path west.

Jeebee stared at the river in dismay. Then, carefully, he rode down the slope before him until he halted the bike at the very edge of the swiftly flowing water.

It was a stream clearly swollen by the spring runoff. It was dangerously full of floating debris and swift of current. He got off the bike and squatted to dip a hand in its waters. They numbed his fingers with a temperature like that of freshly melted snow. He got to his feet and remounted the bike, shaking his head. Calm water, warm water, he could have risked swimming, pushing the bike and his other possessions ahead of him on a makeshift raft. But not a river like this.

He would have to go up- or down-stream until he could find some bridge on which to cross it. Which way? He looked downstream. In the past, it had always led to civilization—which in this case meant habitation and possible enemies. He turned the bike upstream and rode off.

Luckily, the land just beside the river here was still-uncovered floodplain, flat and open. He made good time, cutting across sections where the river looped back on itself and saving as much time as possible. Without warning he came around a bend and saw ahead the end of a bridge; straight and high above the gray, swift waters.

It was a railroad bridge.

His first reaction was pure reflex, out of a civilized time when it was dangerous to try to cross a railway bridge for fear of being caught halfway over by traffic on the rails. Then common sense took over, and his heart and hopes leaped up together. For his purpose a railway bridge and the way along further rails, beyond the bridge, was the best thing he could have encountered.

There would be no traffic on these rails nowadays. And for something like the bike, the right-of-way beside the track should be almost as good as a superhighway. He rode up the sloping bank of the river to the railway grading, stopped to lift the bike onto the ties between the rails just for the bridge crossing alone, and remounted. A brief bumpy ride took him safely across what, moments before, had been an uncrossable barrier.

On the far side of the river, as he had expected, there was plenty of room on the grade top beyond the ends of the ties, on either side, for him to ride the bike. He lifted the machine off the ties to the gravel and took up his journey along the track. He was among cottonwoods now, which blocked his view of the surrounding countryside. The embankment top was pitted at intervals where rain had washed some of the top surfacing down the slope and away, but for the most part it was like traveling a well-kept dirt road, and he made steady time with the throttle at a good ten to fifteen miles per hour.

He was now back into the open landscape he had been passing through earlier, although then the land had nourished few stands of trees. Now, on either side of the track, the land was obscured to the near horizon; until, in the far distance ahead, it curved out of sight entirely among some low hills. And nowhere in view were there any sheep, or in fact any sign of man or beast.

For a rare moment he relaxed and let himself hope. Anywhere west of the Mississippi, across the prairie country, a railroad line could run for long distances between towns. With luck, he could be out of this sheep country already. Further west, Martin had written two years before, in the last of the rare letters Jeebee had gotten from his brother while there had still been mail service, the isolated ranchers of the cattle country had been less affected than most by the breakdown of the machinery of civilization. Law and order, after a fashion at least, was still in existence. But in order to reach there, Jeebee needed to trade off the loot he had picked up from the cellar for things he needed.

First would be a more effective rifle than the .22. The .22 was a good little gun, but it lacked punch. Its slug was too light to have the sort of impact that would stop a charging man or large beast. Wolf, bear, and even an occasional mountain lion, still existed in the Montana area toward which he was headed. To say nothing of wild range cattle, which could be dangerous enough.

Moreover, with a heavier gun he could bring down cattle—or even deer or mountain sheep, if he was lucky enough to stumble across them—to supplement whatever other food supplies he was carrying. Which brought him to his second greatest need, the proper type of food supplies. Canned goods were convenient, but heavy; and impractical to carry by backpack. What he really needed was some irradiated meat. Or, failing that, some powdered soups, plain flour, dried beans or such, and possibly bacon.

He had started with some supplies of that sort in his backpack, when he had finally made his escape alive from Stoketon. In fact, when he had packed to go, it had never actually occurred to him that the locals would not just let him leave, that they might really intend to kill him. In spite of his previous three months of near isolation in the community, he had still felt that after five years of living there, he was one of them.

But of course, he had never been one of them. What had led him to think he knew them was their casual politeness in the supermarket or the post office, plus the real friendship he had had with his housekeeper, Ardyce Prine. Mrs. Prine had lived there all her life, and, in her sixties, was in a position of belonging to the local authoritative generation.

But when the riots became too dangerous for him to risk traveling into Stoketon itself, to the building housing his study group—think tank, his Stoketon neighbors had called it—the local folks had begun to consider him an outsider they were better off without. There was, in fact, no real place for him in their lives. Particularly, as those lives began to shift toward an inward-looking economy, with local produce and meat being traded for locally made shoes and clothing. Jeebee produced nothing they needed.

While Ardyce had still been his housekeeper, they had tolerated him; but the day came when she did not appear; only a short stiff note, delivered by her grandson, saying that she could no longer work for him.

After that, he had felt the invisible enmity of his neighbors beginning to close about him. When he did try to leave and head west to Twin Peaks, he found them lying in wait for him with guns. At the time, he had not been able to understand why. But he understood now. If he had tried to leave naked, they might have let him go. But even the clothes he wore they now regarded as Stoketon property. Buel Mannerly, the druggist, had risen like a demon out of the darkness of the hillside, shotgun in hand, ready to bar his going; and only that lucky misshot from somewhere in the surrounding darkness had let Jeebee get away.

But then, once away, he had foolishly gone through his supplies like a spendthrift, not understanding then how hard it would be to replace them with anything edible at all, let alone more of their special and expensive kind.

He had learned differently the hard way, living off vegetables in abandoned gardens and what he could find in the ruins of isolated and looted houses. There was never much to be found in either kind of place. Now, three weeks later, at least part of him had become bearded, wise, and wary—ears listening, eyes moving, all the time; and a nose sensitive to any scent that might signal danger…

He fell to dreaming of the things he would want to trade for as soon as he found someplace where it was safe to do so.

In addition to a heavier rifle, he badly needed a spare pair of boots. The ones he wore would not last him all the way to Montana, if the bike broke down or he had to abandon or trade it off for any reason. Also—a revolver and ammunition for it would be invaluable. But of course to dream of a handgun like that was like dreaming of a slice of heaven. Weapons were the last thing anyone was likely to trade, these days.

He became so involved in his own thoughts that he found himself entering a curve between two low hills almost unexpectedly. The railroad track curved out of sight ahead between two heavy, grassy shoulders of open land and disappeared in the shadow of a clump of cottonwood trees that lay at the far end of the curve. The rain had stopped sometime before. He followed the tracks around, chugged into the shadow of the cottonwoods and out the other side—to find himself in a small valley, looking down at a railroad station, some sheep-loading pens, and a cluster of buildings, all less than half a mile away.