Worlds Apart

1

At first Deucalion was a star, and then a bright star, moving slowly through the heavens. Soon it was definitely a shape, not a point, growing daily, and the observation dome in the hub of New New was often crowded.

It came to rest about twenty kilometers away. From that distance it looked like a small elongated potato, but with craters. The factories had been waiting in place for months, tiny bright toys attached to outsized solar collectors.

Now it was John Ogelby’s turn for overwork. He spent two months out at the factories, helping to supervise the interfacing of machine with rock. There was no way a spacesuit could fit his twisted body, so he worked from inside a modified emergency bubble, floating here and there, and using other people for hands. He loved zerogee work—the mobility and freedom from pain. But he did miss Marianne, and they spent many hours chatting, sometimes about inconsequential things, often about the suddenly complicated futures in store for them.

It seemed as if everything had happened at once. Scientists working with Insila had isolated the plague virus and synthesized a cure. After much argument, a very close referendum approved the manufacture of large quantities of the antibiotic, which would be sent to Earth by robot drones.

The starship question was finally resolved by a series of carefully worded referenda. The available work force (only a third of the population was really needed to run New New) would be split into two roughly equal groups. The stay-at-homes would work on refurbishing Devon’s World and Tsiolkovski, which together would eventually provide enough room for another 150,000 people.

The rest of them would be Working on the starship, which would bear the name Newhome. Salvage teams were at work on the remains of Mazeltov and B’is’ma’masha’la, mining them for useful parts. The army of engineers no longer needed for Deucalion dove into the “Janus Project” with enthusiasm.

Daniel wanted to go, and so did John. O’Hara was not sure. The idea did excite her, as an abstraction, but the actual details of it boiled down to sitting in a spaceship playing gin rummy and waiting to die of old age. She would also probably have to raise a child. Her experience with her baby sister, now five, seemed to indicate that she had no great talent in that direction.

If she stayed in New New she would doubtless continue to advance. Having attained Grade 15 in only five years of service made her something of a prodigy, and although she was realistic about the influence of her continuing friendship with Sandra Berrigan, she didn’t doubt that she would have advanced on her own. She had access to her own psych profile and the analysis of it made by the Executive Evaluation Board.

The people who had set up New New’s charter, more than a century before, had done their best to ensure that the World’s administrative structure stay free of the taint of politics. Nobody got “on the track”—advancing beyond Grade 12—without minute investigation of his or her past and exhaustive psychological testing. They looked for a balance of altruism with practicality; leadership ability without emotional dependence on having power over others; patience and deliberation. Nobody could insert himself into the power structure by dint of personal charisma, bribery, or influence. So New New’s history was rather dull, its leaders a succession of careful, phlegmatic people who usually retired with a great sense of relief. The Executive Evaluation Board was anonymous, but it was no secret that it consisted of a staff of professional psychologists overseen by past Coordinators and retired Justices. They had looked at Marianne and given their tentative blessing; now that she had reached Grade 15 she was subject to annual review, because power corrupts in subtle ways. A negative evaluation could mean anything from a temporary freeze in grade to demotion back to Grade 12, with no chance of appeal.

One reason this system had worked in the old days was the safety valve of emigration. There had been forty other Worlds then, with many different political setups, and a mutual pact required any World to accept an emigrant from any other World, so long as they had room. (They might put him in sewage maintenance and make sure he stayed there, but they did have to accept him.) Without that safety valve, and with guaranteed freedom of speech, New New was getting to be a rather noisy place. People who liked the old days were anxious to get a few new Worlds open for business. Many of them were also in favor of the Janus project, figuring that it would absorb a lot of the rowdier element.

Daniel and John, perhaps independently, both presented O’Hara with a “big fish in a small pond” argument. The social structure of Janus would parallel New New’s, with Engineering and Policy Coordinators at the top of two separate tracks, but with less than a tenth of New New’s population to draw from. So she would be much more likely to make it to the top.

She didn’t doubt this was true, but was not sure that it was an attractive proposition. The motivation that drove her ambition was to her complicated and obscure. The Board’s analysis was that it stemmed from a need to be admired, rooted in the rejection she had received from her Scanlan playmates and the lack of appreciation her mother and stepfather had shown for her academic achievement. To O’Hara that explanation sounded facile and incomplete. It ignored the abstract pleasure she took in problem-solving, which she thought was the main driving force behind her desire to advance: the higher you got, the more important and complex the problems were, and the more satisfaction in their solution. That also made her hesitate to accept her husbands’ argument. Janus would be a World, but it was primarily a spaceship. The Engineering Coordinator would be the captain; the highest she could aspire to would be chief stewardess.

And there was Earth, too. Once the plague was under control, there would be a need for administrators who had experience with Earth—though how relevant her experience would be in dealing with the strange world Jeff described, she couldn’t say.

Every month she went down to the Bellcom studios and listened to him, hoping that he would have found a new power source, so they could have a two-way conversation. (Intact fuel cells were rare because the most common variety contained a small silver bar inside; for a while after the war those bars were used as currency.) But his signal grew progressively weaker, and during the past two full moons there had been no transmission at all. The technicians said it was likely that was because the power he could generate had fallen below their antenna’s thresh-old of sensitivity. She hoped they were right.

In the course of seven communications Jeff had given them a vivid picture of the brutal world that was Charlie’s Country. Heavily armed bands of children and teenagers, “families,” either settled on farms or roamed from city to ruined city, looting. They sometimes traded with one another and sometimes fought desperate battles for each other’s supplies. Girls were impregnated soon after menarche, and would keep on having babies until they died, usually around eighteen or nineteen. Many of the babies were born dead or were grotesque mutations. Most of the families destroyed the mutations, but some kept them around as pets.

They had two holy books, the Christian bible and a booklet called Charlie’s Will. Jeff thought that Charlie’s Will must originally have been a heavy-handed satire against religion; now it was taken literally. A version printed about a year after the war contained an explanation for the plague—it was God’s reaction to the sin of contraception. Living a sensible twenty years or less, people had to make a lot of babies. It explained the war itself as punishment for mankind’s assault of the heavens. Thus the Worlds were responsible for all misery, both in historical “fact” and by theological fiat. Jeff had stopped trying to convince people otherwise; heresy could be very dangerous.

The insanity of daily life was compounded by reliance on oracles. For a week or two before a person died of the plague, his brain was infected and he raved, rambling nonsense. They thought it was disguised advice from God or His avatar, Charlie.

Jeff knew about Deucalion; he had watched it move across the sky and merge with the bright star that was New New. He said he hoped that was proof they had survived, since he was under the impression that the asteroid wasn’t due for another twenty years or so, and he assumed they had done something to speed it up. Other people had seen it too—some families used a simpleminded kind of astrology, watching the sky for omens—and their interpretations of it were interesting. God had finally destroyed the World, or Charlie’s spirit had moved into it, or aliens from outer space had taken it over and were going to invade Earth.

2

John was weaker than ever, coming back from two months of zerogee. When their schedules matched, O’Hara walked with him in the low-gravity sections, trying not to lope as he shuffled painfully along.

“So how’s the promotion working out?” Ogelby looked up at her sideways.

“Too early to tell.” She took two long steps, then caught herself and waited. “Actually, it’s a pain. I wish they’d let me stay in Resources Allocation. Everybody under me knows my job better than I do.”

“Take it from an old hand. It’s time to be very careful.” Ogelby was Grade 20, the highest.

“Oh, I know that. They’re testing me… my profile said ‘the subject’s main weakness is an unwillingness to delegate authority.’ So they put me in a position where I can’t do anything else.” She’d been shuffled up and sideways to become Director of Statistics in the Public Health Division. “I hadn’t even thought about statistics since I was sixteen. And that was just a basic, you know—‘if you have six black balls and four white balls—’”

“You’re a male basketball team. Mixed—”

“Spare me.” They stopped at a picture window that overlooked the curved expanse of parkland below them. “How soon do you think you’ll be ready for one gee?”

“God. I don’t even want to think about it.” He put his back to the view, looping both arms through the railing, to take some weight off his feet. “That’s what you’ve been studying, nights? Statistics?”

“Trying to get through a text. But I’m having to relearn calculus to do the proofs. It’s demoralizing, how fast you forget things.”

“If you need help…”

“No, thanks. I went through that with Dan. This stuff comes too naturally to you guys. When Dan tries to explain something I wind up knowing less than when I started.”

He nodded. “I’m no teacher, either.”

“Besides, I’m just doing it as a gesture. All this chisquare, standard deviation…all we really do is get numbers from Vital Statistics and put them down in various columns. How many workdays lost to colds last September? Shall we serve more chicken soup this September? I’m sure it would all be very fascinating to somebody else. I’ll stick with it for a year, until after the next Board review. If they give me a good evaluation I guess I can assume I’ve passed their little test. Then I can look around and ask for a transfer.”

“Want me to get you a transfer?”

“Into Engineering track?” She laughed. “No thanks.”

“It would be Policy track, assigned to Engineering. At your grade or a step higher.”

“No, it would look too fishy. With you a twenty and Dan an eighteen, and my being friends with Sandra, I don’t dare go near Engineering. The Board would see strings being pulled and freeze me forever.”

“It would be a computer selection. No personal recommendations at all.”

“With my husband programming the computer.”

“Not directly. Don’t you even want to know what the job is?”

“Go ahead.”

“We’re forming a start-up team for Operation Janus—”

“Still trying to get me aboard that goddamned star-ship.”

“Now listen. We do legitimately need a few people from the Policy side. Especially people with broad academic backgrounds. This is nothing less than setting up a whole new World from scratch. Social system, population distribution as to age, genetic background, professional specialty, and so forth. It would be a hell of a lot more interesting than chicken soup.”

She sighed and patted his hand, not looking at him. “It sure would. But I just can’t take the chance.”

“Why don’t you at least ask Berrigan’s opinion? She could tell you how the Board would feel. She does know half of them.”

“It’s the other half I’m worried about, the psychologist types. They can be pretty arbitrary. The senior administrators tend to make allowances, I guess out of empathy.”

“Psychologists don’t have empathy?”

She laughed. “Okay. I’m going swimming with Sandra tonight. I’ll see what she says.”

“It would be fun to work together.”

“All three of us?”

“Eventually, I hope.” He shook his head. “We have to get Dan out of that pressure cooker. The original reason for making him head of the Applied section no longer exists; all the problems with tar and resin decomposition have been resolved. God knows there are enough people hungry for the job.”

“More politics.”

“Maybe. I suppose the people over Dan are just as happy to have a section leader with no ambition to move higher. And he is good at it.”

She took him by the arm. “Let’s get you good at walking.”

Charlie’s Will

Jeff Hawkings pedaled cautiously toward the burned-out service station. In front of the station a boy sat behind a table, cases of beer stacked beside him. The boy’s scattergun tracked Jeff as he approached.

“You Healer?” the boy said.

“That’s right. Anybody in your family sick?”

“Nah. Just one with the death.”

“Charlie’s Will,” Jeff said, and sketched a small cross with his thumb on the center of his chest. “How much for the beer?”

“Let you have a case for a scattergun refill.” He pointed at the weapon that dangled on a web loop from Jeff’s shoulder.

“Just have the one cassette,” Jeff lied, “and it’s not full.”

“Have any silver?”

“Huhuh. I have some loose rounds, gunpowder,.22 and.45 caliber.”

“We got a.45. Let you have a beer for two rounds.”

Jeff fished through a leather bag on his belt. “Two beers for one round.” He tossed the heavy cartridge on the table.

“One for one.” The boy slid a beer across.

Jeff shrugged, pinched it open and took a cautious sip; the stuff hadn’t been manufactured with a five-year shelf life in mind. It tasted a little stale but not spoiled. He drank it down quickly, and then bought another, and slipped it into his saddlebag. “Know of anybody nearby needs healing?”

“Family ‘bout fifteen minutes down the road. Somebody always sick there. They keep their muties. On the left there’s a sign, says something something farm.”

“Thanks.” Jeff mounted the bicycle and started away.

“Hey!” He felt the familiar itch in the middle of his back, stopped, and looked back.

“They got a sentry ‘bout halfway down the road to the farm. You don’t want to go in there after dark.”

“Thanks, I’ll move it.” It was late afternoon, the sun reddening.

About two kilometers along, he came to a sand road beside a faded sign that read “Forest-in-Need Farm.” The bicycle slithered too much in the sugar sand, so he got off and pushed it along. He shouted “hello” a couple of times a minute. There was thick underbrush on both sides of the road, thick enough to hide a man. Tall Australian pines sighed in the slight breeze.

“Hold it right there,” a deep voice said from behind him. “Put up your hands.” Jeff did, leaning the bicycle against his hip.

He heard someone crashing through the brush and then a soft tread on sand. “You’re that old goof, the doctor.”

“Healer.”

“Whatever. You can put down your hands.” The man’s appearance was startling; he was full-grown and old enough to have a bush of blond beard. He was holding a modern Uzi flechette gun, the first one Jeff had seen in years. Jeff noted that the safety was off, so he moved very slowly. Two hundred darts per second. In training they’d called them meatgrinders.

“You come at the right time. We have some sick people.” He twisted his ring and spoke into it. “That Healer goof’s comin’ up. He’s okay.”

“You have electricity?”

“Little bit. Big house around the second bend, somebody’ll let you through the gate.”

The forest ended abruptly in another hundred meters. Large pasture had gone thoroughly to weed. Around two bends there was a tall barbed-wire fence which claimed to be electrified; behind it were acres of lush vegetable garden and pens with chickens and pigs. A modern two-story house with solar collectors on the roof. Sandbag bunkers, fighting positions, were spaced around the house. A girl of thirteen or fourteen was standing silently, holding the gate open. She was naked, cradling a baby that chewed at her small breast.

She closed the gate behind him and locked it. “My baby’s sick. Maybe you can help it?”

The infant had a large growth on its neck. She held it out to him, and he saw that the growth was actually a half-formed second head. No eyes or nose but a perfect petal mouth. The baby was hermaphroditic, small male genitals riding too high over a female slit.

“It throws up all the time,” she said. “Sometimes it shits blood. Usually.”

“You can’t tell with muties. It might be missing something inside. Let’s take it up to the house and I’ll look at it.”

The house was built of concrete blocks, windows equipped with roll-down steel shutters. The door was a slab of foamsteel, ten centimeters thick. “Somebody built this to last,” Jeff said.

“It was Tad’s parents. Tad you met down on the road.” It was cool inside, air conditioned. The girl wrapped the baby up in a blanket and put on a robe. “They knew there was going to be a war.”

“How old is Tad?”

“He’s twenty, he’ll get the death pretty soon. Marsha’s gonna take over then, she’s his sister. The rest of us just came, mostly the first year or two.”

The living room was elegant and spare and clean. Neo-Japanese, with mats and low tables. She set the baby on a table and Jeff squatted cross-legged by it. He sterilized a probe and took its temperature. He looked at the readout and shook his head.

“Does it cry a lot?”

“The regular head does, sometimes. The other head does nothing, don’t even suck.”

“I don’t think it’s going to live very long.” He felt its forehead, hot and dry. “That much fever would kill a grownup. Its brains are cooking.”

“It hasn’t cried since day before yesterday, doesn’t move much either. Can you do anything?”

“I can try. Be surprised if it’s alive tomorrow.”

“Charlie’s will,” she muttered. Jeff crossed himself and got the hypo gun out of his saddlebag. He swabbed the nozzle of it and a place on the mutant’s arm. After a moment’s hesitation, he screwed a bottle of plain saline solution into the gun. No use in wasting antibiotics.

She wiped a tear across her cheek. “My first baby.”

“Well, you have lots more in you. Might pick a different father…do you know who the father was?”

She shook her head. “One of the guys.”

“Are there any other muties?”

“Four others. Five if you count Jommy, but he’s just got extra fingers. Then there was some born dead. One was born kind of insideout, but he lived long enough to be christianed.”

“How many normal ones?”

“Eight, counting Jommy.”

“And how many women, I mean old enough to be mothers?”

“I’m the fourth. Then Sharon, she’s sixteen, she bleeds but don’t catch. She gets it two or three times a day but she don’t catch.”

“Does she bleed regularly?”

“Nah. She never can tell.”

“Then I might be able to help her, next time I come by.” He took out his pad and made a note. There were crates of birth control pills back at Plant City, but he didn’t bother to carry any. Maybe they could straighten out her cycle and make her more fertile. “Any other sick people?”

“Two upstairs, really sick. I’ll show you.” She picked up the baby and was all the way across the room before Jeff could make his joints stand up. “You hurt?”

“Just don’t move so well. Part of being old.”

She nodded soberly. “Charlie must hate you.”

He followed her up a broad staircase and into a bedroom. “I’m the only one comes in here,” she said. “Tad don’t want it to spread, whatever it is.”

In separate beds, two boys: emaciated, pale, beaded with sweat. One was asleep; the other was moaning and twitching. The sleeping one had crops of tiny pink spots on his chest.

“Let me see your tongue,” Jeff said to the one who was awake. When he didn’t respond, Jeff clamped his chin and forced his mouth open. The tongue was brown and dry.

“They been to Tampa recently?”

“Yeah, about a month ago, Tad sent ‘em down to get some hose. How come you know that?”

“There’s an epidemic down there. You know what an epidemic is?”

She shook her head. “That little thing in your belly?”

“No, it’s a disease that spreads all around, gets out of control. In Tampa they’ve got an epidemic of typhoid fever. These guys picked it up there.”

“Are they gonna die?”

“Probably not. I’ve got medicine for it. What do you do with their shit?”

“What?”

“You carry out the shit, don’t you? Where does it go?”

“Oh, we got a compost machine out back.”

“Does it burn it?”

“No, it’s, uh, ultra something. Tad knows.”

“Good.” He rummaged through his saddlebags and found the chloramphenicol and cortisone. “How have you been feeling? Have you been sick?”

She looked at the floor. “Huhuh. Just tired all the time. Maybe I got the runs.”

“Nosebleed?”

“Little bit.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it. Probably that’s what’s wrong with the baby, too.” He studied the chloramphenicol label and set the hypo gun for three-quarters of an adult dosage. “That’s how the disease spreads. In Tampa they just shit anywhere. Flies get on the shit and then on the food.”

“They’re real animals down there,” she said.

“Sure are.” He gave shots to both of the boys. “That’s how you got it, being in too close contact.”

“I’m real careful,” she said in a hurt voice.

“Doesn’t take much. Turn around and lift up your robe.” She twitched at the cold alcohol. Jeff scrubbed her buttock a little longer than was necessary. Except for her feet, she was very clean, which had more of an effect on him than her boyish figure. Five years of filthy children, his sex life limited to mental pictures of Marianne and a handful of surgical lubricant. He swallowed saliva and told himself this girl was young enough to be his daughter. But he had to use both hands to keep the hypo gun steady.

“The baby now.” He set it on minimum dosage, scrubbed, and shot.

She pointed at his obvious erection and giggled. “You want me to fix that?”

He paused. “What would Tad say?”

“I wouldn’t tell him nothing.”

Jeff knew a little about child psychology and a lot about gunshot wounds. “Let’s wait. I’ll talk it over with Tad first.”

“He won’t let you. No one outside the family. Besides, if I got a baby it might get old like you.”

“There are ways not to catch.”

“Sure, front-to-back and front-to-top. Tad says Charlie says they’re sinful.” She laughed. “I did them both when I was pregnant, though, even with Tad. It was fun.”

Jeff closed his eyes and slowly let out the breath he’d been holding. Anal intercourse with a typhoid carrier. That wasn’t covered in the text he’d read. Well, he could always take a booster shot.

“Let’s go downstairs.” There were voices.

Tad was sitting at a table, giving dinner instructions to a couple of children. He motioned Jeff over and told one of the children to bring in a bottle of wine. “Could you do anything for them?”

Jeff sat down and told him about the typhoid epidemic. “I have enough vaccine to immunize everyone in the family. The girl with the two-headed baby, I think she already has it. The boy, too. I gave them all shots and they should get another in the morning. Then I’ll leave some pills.”

A girl brought in a bottle of pale wine and two glasses, actual stemware. Tad pulled the cork and poured. It tasted like harsh port with a musty aftertaste, like rotten oranges, but was drinkable.

“What can we give you in exchange? We have lots of food.”

“No, I’ve got all I can carry from the last family. What I really need is a charged fuel cell. You must have some.”

He frowned. “We don’t have any to spare. Seven on line and two backups.”

“I’d bring it back in a week or so.”

“I don’t know. Anybody knew you had it, they’d kill you for the silver.” He stared into the wine, swirling it. “What do you want with one, anyhow?”

“There’s a powerful radio back at the hospital where I keep my medicine. I want to see if I can raise anybody.”

Tad pulled on his beard. “Maybe… you leave the scattergun here, though. You have another weapon?”

Jeff nodded. “Pistol. But nobody ever bothers me.”

“That’s what I hear. How come you didn’t die, do you know?”

“Charlie’s will.”

Tad shook his head slightly and lowered his voice. “You don’t really believe in that.” He looked at the holo pictures over the fireplace: a beatific Manson, a bloody Christ, and three smaller pictures, two women and a man who resembled Manson in hair and beard. “My father and mothers were Family when I was growing up. I thought it was the craps and still do. The timing of the war was just coincidence. Charlie Manson was just a crazy goof. I don’t know about Jesus.”

“Does the rest of your family feel the same?”

“No. Or if they do, they keep it to themselves.” When Jeff didn’t say anything, he went on. “I’ve heard of a few other old people, and I even saw one once, Big Mickey over in Disney World. He was big like you, but crazy. All of the old ones are supposed to be big and crazy. How come you’re different? Tell me and I’ll let you use the fuel cell.”

“I can tell you what I think, but it won’t save you from the death.”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s an accident of birth. I’m a kind of mutie, like the other old people. It’s called acromegaly; something goes wrong with your glands and you keep growing after normal people stop. It usually affects your mind, but it started late in my case, and I had medicine.”

“So how does that keep you from the death?”

“All I know is that it does. I’ve traveled around a lot since the war, and never met or heard of anybody over twenty-some who didn’t have acromegaly.”

“Okay.” He looked thoughtful, took a sip of wine. “Now is there some way I can catch the acromegaly from you? Like a blood transfusion?”

“No, you have to be born with it. There’s a hormone involved, growth hormone, that might work, but I’ve never found any in hospitals and I wouldn’t know how to make it. I’m not a scientist; I’m not even a doctor. With the radio, maybe I can find something out.”

Tad looked at the door to the kitchen. “Go away, Mark. This is grownup talk.” A young boy was in the doorway, standing on his hands. His hands were like flesh spatulas, no fingers. Instead of legs he had a single limb rising into the air, ending in a flipper. He had a harelip and eyes that were too small and too close together in his egg-shaped head. He mewed something, turned around and padded out.

“Never know how much he understands,” Tad said. “Have you ever seen one like him?”

“Not quite. Most muties do have more than one thing wrong with them, but he’s a regular catalog: harelip, srenomelus, microphthalmia, acrocephalosyndactyly. God knows what else inside. It’s a wonder he survived.”

“Eats like a pig. If you’re not a doctor, how come you know all those names?”

“Found a book on monsters, not that it does any good. The few things that can be fixed, they take surgery. I can stitch up a wound, but that’s about it.”

“Do you think we ought to let them live? Most families don’t, I guess.”

“Hmm.” Jeff drank off his wine and refilled both glasses. “I wouldn’t say this to most people—and you’re not hearing it, right?” Tad nodded. “We should let the muties grow up and mate. Sooner or later a gene might come along that carries immunity to the death, maybe like acromegaly but without the bad side effects.”

“What do you think the death is? Other than Charlie’s blessing.”

“It’s either some kind of biological warfare agent or a common disease that underwent mutation. It might die out or it might last forever. I don’t even know how wide-spread it is, which is another reason for getting the radio working.”

“They’ve got it in Georgia, we know that. Met a guy from Atlanta.”

Jeff nodded. “It’s probably all over. At least all over the East Coast. You’d expect that Florida would have quite a few immigrants, after a winter or two.”

“Maybe they stick to the Atlantic side.”

“It’s pretty well bombed up. I started there, but came inland, looking for farms.”

For a while they sat and traded information about the various places they’d been. Then a little girl, apparently normal, came in and shyly said that dinner was ready.

They ate at two trench tables, one for the adults and one for the children. The food was delicious, chicken stewed with fresh vegetables, but the dinner companions at the other table were not too appetizing. Two had to be fed: one because of phocomelus, seallike flippers instead of arms; one who was microcephalic and totally passive. One who ate quite normally was a girl with beautiful golden curls and a single median eye. The girl with the two-headed baby took a bowl out to Marsha, Tad’s sister, who was guarding the road.

All through dinner, Tad quizzed the “grownups”—the oldest might have been seventeen—about animal husbandry and plant propagation. His parents had accumulated a large library of books on farming and other aspects of survival, but as he’d told Jeff, most of the grownups didn’t read too well, and didn’t much want to learn.

After dinner Jeff vaccinated them, and then found out why they were so clean. On the porch beyond the kitchen, they had a shower room and a family-sized tub. They scrubbed down with soap that smelled slightly of bacon, then rinsed, and the adults slipped into the deliciously hot water while the children played.

“We fill the tank on the roof every morning,” Tad said, pointing to a pump contraption like a bicycle without wheels. “It takes a half-hour of pedaling but it’s worth it. This time of year we wait till noon, or it gets so hot you can hardly stand it.”

Marsha came in and Jeff watched with languid appreciation as she showered. Not beautiful, but she was adult, a rare sight. Solid with muscle, no baby fat, stretch marks from several pregnancies.

She stepped in next to Jeff and put her arm around him, and began talking to Tad. After a while they got out of the bath, letting the children have their turn. Jeff and Marsha dried each other off. Without a spoken word, they gathered up their clothes and weapons and led each other upstairs.

The first time, predictably, was over before it started, but Jeff had good powers of recuperation, and five years of catching up to do. Eventually they did talk.

“I bet you’re like Tad,” she said, playing with his beard. “You don’t believe.”

“I grew up in Taoism,” Jeff said cautiously, “American Taoism. A much more gentle way of looking at things.”

“Oh, Charlie’s way is gentle.” She stretched her body against his side and lay an arm partway across his broad chest. “Men have a hard time understanding, I think. Women are closer to life, so they aren’t so afraid of death.”

“That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“’Course not. You’re a man.”

“Charlie was a man.”

“So was Jesus. But they were strange men.”

Jeff smiled in the dark. “At least we can agree on—” He was on the floor and rolling toward his weapons before his brain quite registered what he had heard: through the open window, the unmistakable raow sound of an Uzi meatgrinder, scream, manic submachinegun chatter, the Uzi twice more, a fusillade of rifle and pistol fire, and then silence. Then a solitary pop, one shot from a small-caliber pistol.

From the other side of the room, greased-metal sounds of Marsha putting a cassette in her rifle and cocking it. “Guess they got Larry. Charlie’s will.”

Jeff automatically reached up to cross himself and then checked it. Calf holster in place, he stepped into his pants. He shrugged into the shoulder holster but didn’t bother with a shirt. He found his boots and knife and scattergun and followed her down the stairs. A gong was ringing.

They were the first ones behind the sandbags. He scanned the road and the overgrown pasture, pretty well lit by the moon. Three days till full; in three days he might be talking to Marianne. That was worth fighting for. “You ought to keep the weeds clear’around the perimeter,” he said. “You could have a hundred people crawl up and you wouldn’t see one of them until they started climbing the fence.”

“Then we just watch them fry.” Her voice was calm and happy. His own voice was tight and hoarse. His heart pounded adrenaline, his knees trembled. Palms wet and sphincters twitching. He sat down and put on his boots. If he had to run, how could he get by an electric fence? Steel shutters rattled down over the windows.

“Ever fight before?” she asked.

“Couple of times. And I used to be a cop in New York City.”

“You sound nervous.”

“Out of practice. Does this happen often?”

“Every month or so. But it’s usually dark, shouldn’t be no problem.”

He set both pistols on top of the sandbags and tried to get into a comfortable position, sighting down the scattergun. “You really aren’t afraid to die.”

“No… I’d rather wait for the death, but if Charlie wants me early, that’s His will.”

Tad got into place behind the bunker next to them. He had a heavy rifle with a fat starlight scope. He switched on the scope and looked around. “Nothing yet,” he said conversationally. “Everybody in place?” Somebody to the far left said “one,” and the count went all around the house, ending with eight. “Healer, don’t use that scattergun on the one with our Uzi, or anyone with an automatic weapon. We can’t afford to damage them.” The scattergun fired bursts of tiny metal splinters, propelled by compressednitrogen blasts. It was a good close-range weapon but it did make an awful mess of anything it hit.

“We’ll go for Plan Two. Jommy, go turn off the fence and don’t turn it on until you hear me or Mom shout. Everybody else get down behind the bunkers and don’t fire till I tell you.” To Jeff he explained, “I’ll pick off one or two with the starlight scope, and then we’ll just let them waste ammunition for a while.” He peered through the scope, aiming the rifle in a slow arc from east to west and back again. “If they come at all. They might just take the Uzi and go.”

“Don’t even think that,” Marsha said. She sat relaxed against the sandbags, her skin still glistening from sex.

“It would be a good prize.”

“They’ll try,” she said confidently. “There’s plenty of them.”

“Sounded like,” Tad said. “Damn, I wish Larry hadn’t opened up on them.”

“Plan One always works,” Marsha said. “The road sentry lets ‘em go by and warns us. Then he follows ‘em up and hides in a bunker over to the west there, at the tree line. When the shooting starts we’ve got ‘em in a crossfire.”

“Most of ‘em get it from the Uzi,” Tad said. “Damn that Larry.”

There was a sound like a rock hitting the ground, not far away, and then a bright flash and simultaneous blast. Bright particles spewed all around them. Tad had ducked behind the sandbags; now he popped back up and squeezed off five or six rounds, muffled taps behind a silencer.

“Got one.” He crouched down again, and they waited. No return fire; no sound at all.

“Healer,” Tad said, “give them a couple of bursts. See if we can get them started.” Jeff cautiously peeked around the sandbags. He heard a faint command, and suddenly thirty or forty people rose up out of the weeds and began moving toward them, silently and quickly. He fired two quick blasts in their general direction and rolled back. “Here they come,” he said. Still no return fire.

“They’ve got ladders,” Marsha said, peering over the top. “This is gonna be target practice.”

“Hold your fire until they have the ladders in place,” Tad said.

The Uzi howled at them in a long burst, raking all of the bunkers in front of the house. The sandbags above Jeff and Marsha tore open, spraying dirt. Tad said “Aw, shit,” rather calmly, and fell down, holding his face.

Jeff dashed over to him and saw that a flechette had ripped open the man’s cheek. A ragged flap of torn flesh dangled over his beard, exposing back teeth shiny with blood in the moonlight.

“Here.” Jeff held the flap in place and guided Tad’s left hand up to it. “Hold it tight until this is over. Then I’ll stitch it up.” He wasn’t really sure he could.

“Okay,” Tad said through clenched teeth. “Switch weapons. Can’t shoot the rifle one-handed.”

Jeff handed him the scattergun and hefted the unfamiliar rifle. “That’s got eight, maybe ten bursts left. Any more ammo for this thing?”

“In the stock. Tell Marsha to get the fence on.” Marsha heard, and yelled to Jommy. Jeff sighted through the scope, looking for the one with the Uzi, and saw the first casualty of the fence: a girl who was evidently holding on to it when Jommy threw the switch. She stood up rigidly, back arching, sparks, curiously, shooting from her elbows, and then she fell limp.

Through the starlight scope the world was mono-chromatic and bright. It had some sort of radar gadget, the cross hairs automatically moving downward for more distant targets. A number in the corner told him he had twenty-three shots left. With a sense of detachment, he lay the cross hairs on the first figure he saw, and pulled the trigger. The target spun around but stayed upright, staggering. The rifle had no recoil at all. He turned the eyepiece to increase the magnification, aimed carefully for the center of the chest, and fired again. This time the figure pitched forward and was still.

Jeff started walking dreamily back to Marsha’s bunker, then came to his senses and ran crouching. She admonished him to be careful and for Charlie’s sake find the bastard with the Uzi.

He heard the Uzi then and pointed toward the sound. The man, or boy, who had it was standing in the road, firing at the lock on the gate. Jeff shot him three times. He staggered forward and fell on the gate; there was a bright blue flash and it swung open.

“The gate!” Marsha shouted. “Kill the bastards!” With a steady rattle of gunfire mounting around him, Jeff again fell into an oddly calm state. Marianne had complained about that once, when they were trying to make it to the Cape and stumbled into an ambush, that nothing seemed to get to him; he had said no, not while it was happening. He kept the cross hairs fixed on the Uzi, lying in the dust, only firing when somebody stopped to pick it up, ignoring all the other targets as they streamed by. After six or seven he missed. A girl dove for the weapon, rolled, and began firing from a prone position. Jeff shifted his point of aim and then something smashed into the side of his head and he was falling, bright sparks flying around. He felt himself hit the ground and lay there for a few seconds, watching the sparks die.

He woke up to the sound of children laughing. The sky was pale blue, just about dawn. He tried to sit up and black spots danced in the sky. He choked back vomit and lay still for a minute, and then rolled over so he could see.

The children were playing in the garden. The cyclopean girl with the pretty golden curls was dressed in a party frock, holding a bloody hatchet. Giggling, she stood over the writhing body of a girl she had just decapitated. Other children were engaged in similar tasks.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on his monumental headache. How bad a concussion, he wondered. Carefully probing, he found a large bandage on the side of his head. It bent his ear over rather painfully.

“Are you all right?” Marsha’s voice.

He got up on one elbow and looked at her through the cloud of black spots. He couldn’t think of anything clever to say. “You got dressed.”

“It’s been over a long time. You only missed a few minutes, really. The kids are cleaning up now.”

He closed his eyes again. “Saves ammunition, I guess.”

“Yeah, and it gets them used to it. Can I do something?”

“Oh…bring down my saddlebags, I guess. Many wounded?”

“Just a few. All we lost was Larry and Deborah. Here.” He heard her set the bags down next to him. “I’ve been usin’ your stuff, just the bandages. Is that okay?”

“Sure.” But he’d have to take off the bandages and make things sterile, and then redress them. There might not be enough.

He sorted slowly through the bag and, on a hunch, gave himself a shot of amphetamine. It made the pain worse, but the spots went away and he could sit up. He fingered the morphine ampoules longingly but decided to settle for aspirin. “Bring me some water. And have all the wounded come over, most serious ones first. Get some water boiling.”

He looked at himself in a hand mirror. The left side of his beard was solid with caked blood. He gingerly removed the bandage, glad she had used the plastic kind that didn’t stick, and saw how lucky he’d been. The wound was long but not deep; he had been grazed by a bullet or flechette. It would have to be stitched up but the skull obviously wasn’t fractured.

Two of the grownups brought Jommy over and laid him down. He was pale as death and crying quietly. His right hand was a bundle of bright red bandage. Jeff unwrapped it carefully.

“Please don’t, Healer. Just let ‘em kill me. Don’t chop it off.” The thumb was blown off completely and the fingers were shattered, bone splinters sticking out of the gore. Without speaking he gave him a shot of general anesthetic. When the boy’s eyes closed he said to. the grownups, “Someone build a fire. Bring me a hacksaw.”

3

O’Hara continued to go down to the Bellcom studio at midnight every full moon, but for several months there had been no broadcast from Jeff. They said he probably was still sending, but the signal had gotten so weak they couldn’t pick it up: something about signal-to-noise ratio and discrimination. She kept going in the hope that he would find a new fuel cell or a way to recharge the one he had.

Jeff defined “midnight” as the time when the moon was highest, which would be at eleven-forty this month, New New York time. O’Hara came in at eleven and sat down in front of the familiar blank screen, listening to static. She opened up her briefcase and took out a small printer, which she balanced on her knees. She started outlining a report on the correlations between accident frequency and age for people involved in various construction tasks.

After about a half hour, the static abruptly stopped. She looked up, thinking that the monitor had been turned off, and Jeff’s voice boomed: “MARIANNE—I HAVE A FUEL cell.” Somebody adjusted the volume. “Can you hear me? Are you up there?”

The printer slid to the floor with a crash. “Yes… yes, I—” A technician rushed in with a throat mike and she fastened it to her neck. “I can hear you, Jeff. Can you hear me?”

There was a long silence. “Yes, I do. You’re all right, then—New New came out all right?”

Words appeared on a prompter: SOMEBODY’S COMING FROM THE PLAGUE PROJECT. TELL HIM TO SHUT DOWN FOR TEN MINUTES AND CALL BACK.

“Yes, everything’s…well, not back to normal exactly—Jeff, listen. We found a cure for the plague. An antibiotic. They want us to shut down for ten minutes, I guess to save your power; somebody’s coming to tell you about it.”

“But…a cure? Christ. All right.” The static rushed back.

While O’Hara waited, other cube screens lit up with various data about the plague. Two flatscreens showed a road map of Plant City and a satellite photograph, which enlarged itself and rotated, to match the orientation of the road map.

A young man—black, short, wiry, stifling a yawn—rushed into the studio and sat down next to O’Hara. He shook her hand. “Elijah Seven,” he said. “Am I awake yet?”

“Getting there,” O’Hara said. He had buttoned up his shirt wrong; she leaned over and fixed it. “You’re from the plague project?”“Yeah, I’m with the bunch distributing the vaccine. We have a special kind of—”

“I’m back now,” the speakers said. “You hear me?”

Seven put a throat mike in place. “Hawkings, this is Dr. Elijah Seven. We’ve synthesized a vaccine for the plague. I’m in charge of sending it down to Earth.

“We’ve sent down a couple of hundred thousand doses already; none to your area. Some went to Atlanta and Miami. You may run across them: they’re bright red individual ampoules in crates of the thousand. The crates have pictograph instructions, as well as written ones, telling how to administer the dose.”

“Haven’t seen anything like that.”

“Didn’t think you would, not yet Listen, we have a special shipment for you. The ampoules are damned inefficient. We made up a batch in regular hypo bottles. You have an American standard hypo gun?”

“I guess that’s what it is. It has the Pharmaceuticals’ Lobby symbol stamped on it.”

“Good. We want to drop a crate at your hospital, for you to store in that safe. But we don’t know where the hospital is. We have a map of Plant City but it doesn’t show St. Theresa’s.”

“It’s a brand-new building just south of the city limits, on Main Street extended. It’s shaped like an H, forty stories high, all blue glass and composites. Big golden cross in front.”

“Okay…” He watched the prompter. “The vaccine’s in low Earth orbit. We’ll bring it down to you soon as it gets light. Coming in from the west about seven-thirty.”

“All right. But look, are the bottles or the crate identified as plague vaccine? Most of the people around here wouldn’t take it if they knew it would prevent the death. They have pity on me for having lived so long.”

“Yes, we anticipated that. No markings, no labels. Tell them anything you want.”

“We’ve got a typhoid epidemic south of here. I can claim it’s for that.”

“Good. You’ll be getting several years’ supply; twenty or thirty thousand doses, depending on the proportion of small children. Though I think it would be smart to inoculate the older ones first.”

“What about me? Should I take it? Then I could start taking drugs again for the growth hormone anomaly—it’s probably all that’s keeping me alive, but sooner or later the pain is going to immobilize me.”

“What, you’re growing?”

“I don’t think so, not enough to notice. But it’s doing something to my joints, something like arthritis.”

Seven kneaded his forehead. “I’ll have to talk to an endocrinologist. Seem to remember that in children the growth hormone sends some sort of ‘message’ to the bone ends. Maybe that’s what you’re feeling.

“Don’t take it yet. We’ll get a consensus and leave word with O’Hma. Any other questions?”

“No. I’ll call back in one month. Let me talk with my exwife.”

They’d signed a one-year marriage contract, partly in the hope of getting Jeff space on the shuttle. “Hello, exhusband.”

“So. How’s the weather up there?”

Charlie’s Will

Jeff heard the robot drone before he saw it. It came out of the morning haze to the southwest, banked toward him, then coasted silently overhead, releasing its package. About twenty seconds later its engines kicked back in and it sped off to the east.

The bright red parachute floated straight down and just missed getting hung up on the golden cross in front of the hospital. That would have been interesting, trying to find a long ladder before some scavengers got to it.

It was a plain metal box with no markings. No obvious way to get it open, either. He walked around it, puzzled, and was just about to turn it over when there was a faint “pop” and the top sprang open. Inside, dozens of half-liter bottles were nestled in spun glass. He filled the wagon and pulled it inside to the safe.

After three wagonloads he put two bottles in his sad-dlebags and locked up the safe. He wrapped the fuel cell in dirty clothing and put it in the bottom of his canvas bag. When he went out to get his bike there were two boys standing there, looking at the parachute and the metal box. One had a shotgun and the other had a pistol stuck in his belt. He recognized them as the two hunters from the family he’d treated for syphilis.

“Hello, boys. How’s the girl doing?”

“What girl?” said the one with the shotgun. “The girl who had the fungus, remember?”

“Oh yeah. She’s okay. What’s all this shit, we heard the rocket and saw it drop this shit.”

“It’s medicine. They have typhoid down in Tampa. I’m trying to fix it so no one up here gets it. It’s pretty ugly.”

“So where’d the rocket come from? The Worlds?”

“No,” Jeff said slowly, “you retarded? We killed those bastards a long time ago. This is from Mobile, Alabama. That’s where they keep stuff like that.”

“Yeah, Willy,” said the one with the pistol. “You never seen them?”

“Maybe I seen ‘em and maybe not.” He stared at Jeff. “So you got a radio in there.”

“Not here. I have to go down to St. Petersburg. There’s a Public Health Service building down there.”

“They got fuel cells, then.”

“No, it’s a sort of bicycle contraption. It makes electricity; you have to pedal while you talk.” Jeff had actually seen such a device, in a fire station outside of Orlando, but it didn’t work. “Roll up your sleeves. I’ll give you the typhoid medicine.” So the first person Jeff gave the gift of life was a mean little punk who would have killed him for a bar of corroded silver.

The sentry on the sand road to Forest-in-Need Farm stayed hidden but said hello as Jeff passed him. They had put heads on stakes all along the road. In the week Jeff was away, the ants had polished them clean.

Tad was waiting for him at the gate. He shook hands solemnly and said, “Marsha’s got the death.”

It gave Jeff a curious hollow feeling, not quite grief. He had seen a lot of people with the death, but no one he had known. No one he had made love to, or fought beside. “Well, let me see her.”

She was on the porch, sitting next to the bath. Jeff braced himself, but she didn’t look as bad as the others he had seen, because she had been in good health and eaten well. They were usually emaciated and covered with sores. She looked normal except for her posture, slack and immobile.

“Marsha? Say hello to Healer.”

She looked up, her eyes slightly crossed, the pupils very small. Lips parted and wet. “Healer. Squealerdealer. Where’s the wagon, dragon?” Her head lolled forward. “Fraggendragon.” A string of drool dropped from her open mouth. She caught it on the second try and played with it.

“This is the second day. She woke up with it yesterday. How long?”

“A week, maybe two. There’s nothing I can do for her.”

“I know.”

Jeff shook his head. There had been a short note with the bottles. The death was some sort of virus that was kept in check by a number of factors, the most important apparently being the level of GH in the blood. When the virus began to thrive it reproduced very rapidly, its toxins concentrating in the brain and spinal column. The frontal lobes went first, which caused the “oracular” stage of the disease, but eventually the entire nervous system degenerated. The note said not to waste antibody on anyone who had developed symptoms, because, at best, they would live on as mindless cripples.

“Let’s go into the living room,” Jeff said. “I have some news.”

They sat down at the low table. “Can anybody over-hear us?”

“They’re all out.”

“Listen…you are not going to get the death. Neither is anybody else in the family. Marsha is the last one.” Tad just looked at him.

“With the radio, I got in contact with a civil defense computer in Washington.” Jeff didn’t know how Tad felt about the Worlds, and didn’t want to risk the truth. “It told me where I could find a supply of an antibody, a medicine to prevent the death.”

“Can you…” He looked toward the porch.

“No. It would only make her die more slowly.”

“How come, why hasn’t anybody ever heard about this?”

“They came up with it too late. All the old people were dead or dying, and there was no way to distribute it. No mass communication, to even tell people about it.”

“Wait, now,” Tad said. “You’re not going to tell people.”

“I might tell some people like you, nonbelievers, so they can plan ahead. Otherwise, I’ll say it’s for something else, typhoid.”

Tad leaned back on his elbows. “I see. If I live a couple more years, people will start to wonder.”

“Even your own family. If I were you I’d stash some supplies out in the woods, then fake the death. Wander off during the night; a lot of people do it. Go someplace and start over.”

“Hard to leave.”

“Your decision. I’ve got enough medicine for more than twenty thousand people, so over the next few years I should be able to get almost everyone in the area. Sooner or later people will have to accept the fact that the death was only a disease, and that people aren’t getting it any more. But it may be hard on the first people who live into the mid-twenties. Going against Charlie’s Will.”

He nodded slowly. “What I could do, I could wander off like you say, wait a few years, and come back. Say I went a little crazy but it cleared up.”

“That might work.” Jeff pulled over his saddlebags and took out the hypo. “Here, I’ll get you first Rest of the family at dinner.”

The two men spent the rest of the afternoon trying to fix the auxiliary pump outdoors, but it turned out that a plastic washer was broken, and they didn’t have anything to replace it. Jeff took the pieces and said he would try to find one.

He felt a little out of place, being the only person with clothes on, but he didn’t want to burn. He enjoyed watching the family work and play, strange contrast to the last bloody time he was with them. The two-headed baby had died, and its mother seemed relieved. Jommy was playing catch with the younger children; they threw the ball slowly so he could manage with one hand. The two boys with typhoid had recovered enough to do light chores.

“Who takes over after you leave?” Jeff said softly, while they were reassembling the broken pump.

“Guess it’ll be Mary Sue. She’s seventeen.”

“Not too bright, though.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that. Downright stupid, actually.” He leaned into the wrench with savage force, then tugged back on it. “Hell. We’ll just be takin’ it apart again…why not you?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you take over. The family’d accept you, and you know as much as anybody, and you can look up whatever you don’t know.”

“I’ve got to get the vaccine out. Have to keep moving.”

“I don’t see why. Half the people you give it to’d kill you just for the hell of it, if they weren’t afraid. You don’t owe them nothing.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got to take a long view of it. What’s going to happen to me when I’m really old? If things don’t change. I might have another fifty years left. Maybe a hundred, if we get things going the way they were before the war.”

“How old are you, anyhow.”

Jeff hesitated. “Thirty-five.”

“Wonder if you’re older than Big Mickey, down at Disney World.”

“He looks a little younger. But he can’t remember when he was born; I talked to him once.”

“You know, I went to see my great-great-grandfather once. He was 120.1 don’t know if I’d ever want to be that old. He could hardly get around.” He finished tightening the last bolt and stood up. “It really changes your whole way of looking at things. I could live another hundred years too.” He shook his head and whistled.

Jeff stayed at the farm overnight, working out tentative plans with Tad, and then for three weeks pedaled around Hillsborough County, giving “typhoid” inoculations, ending up back at Plant City. The sun was about an hour from setting as he locked bis bicycle and pulled the wagon down the sidewalk to the hospital entrance.

Someone had tried to batter in the unbreakable glass doors. They were almost opaque with overlapping white shatter-stars, and a shotgun or scattergun blast had punched a neat round hole in the middle of one.

Inside, a tile mosaic wall had been defaced with a smeared lopsided cross topped by a C. It smelled recent.

He rushed upstairs, knowing what he would find. The hunters had not believed his story about the pedal-powered radio in St. Petersburg. They had found the radio room and taken apart every piece of equipment, evidently with a crowbar. Wiring ripped out and cast aside. Circuit boards scattered over the floor, crushed.

Jeff righted a chair and sat for a long time, thinking. Until dark he sat, considering various things he might do to the boys, but most of them involved wasting ammunition and putting himself in some danger. He forced himself to think practically.

He ought to go back to Forest-in-Need. Put a wellarmed family between himself and this kind of madness.

Forget the plan he and Tad had made, forget the antibody; let them have their short furious lives and Charlie’s gift.

But to be completely realistic, he was probably safer moving on, protected by his Healer pose. If Tad’s family gets attacked every couple of months, and a couple of people die in every attack, how long could he expect to survive? Marianne could work out the probabilities for him.

That was a factor. If he stayed with the family he would never talk to Marianne again. If he went on the road with the medicine, he might find another working radio. There was a family down by Bealsville that had mules and had offered to trade for his bicycle. A mule could carry a lot of medicine.

And if he stayed here for another year or two, people might wonder why the grownups he treated never got the death. Logic was a rare commodity in Plant City nowadays, but it would only take one person making the connection.

It would be good to go farther south, with winter coming on. The days were fairly warm, but last year there’d been two nights of frost. Whatever was happening to his joints didn’t like cold. He would wake up almost immobilized with pain. It was warmer down in the Keys.