THE GENOCIDES
  by Thomas M. Disch

COPYRIGHT 1965, by THOMAS M. DISCH

Published by arrangement with the author's agent



      _The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved_.
                        Jeremiah 8, 20



                     To Alan Iverson



BERKLEY MEDALLION EDITION, DECEMBER, 1965

BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by Berkley Publishing Corporation 15
East 26th Street, New York, N. Y. 10010

Printed in the United States of America




      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      ONE      The Prodigal

      TWO      Desertion

      THREE A Bundle of Joy

      FOUR     Good-bye, Western Civilization

      FIVE     Blood Relations

      SIX      Thanksgiving

      SEVEN Advent

      EIGHT The Way Down

      NINE     The Worm Shall Feed Sweetly

      TEN      Falling to Pieces

      ELEVEN         A Natural Death

      TWELVE         Ghosts and Monsters

      THIRTEEN     Cuckoo, Jug-jug, Pu-we, To-witta-wo!

      FOURTEEN    The Way Up

      FIFTEEN    Blood and Licorice
       SIXTEEN    Home Safe

       EPILOGUE    The Extinction of the Species




ONE:   The Prodigal

      As the lesser and then the greater stars disappeared in the advancing
light, the towering mass of the forest that walled in the cornfield retained
for a while the utter blackness of the night. A light breeze blew in from the
lake, rustling the leaves of the young corn, but the leaves of that dark
forest did not stir. Now the eastern forest wall glowed gray-green, and the
three men waiting in the field knew, though they could not yet see it, that
the sun was up.
      Anderson spat--the day's work had officially begun. He began to make his
way up the gentle incline toward the eastern forest wall. Four rows away on
either side of him, his sons followed--Neil, the younger and larger, on his
right hand, and Buddy on the left.
      Each man carried two empty wooden buckets. None wore either shoes or
shirts, for it was midsummer. Their denims were in tatters. Anderson and Buddy
had on wide-brimmed hats woven of crude raffia, like the coolie hats you used
to get at carnivals and state fairs. Neil had sunglasses but no hat. They were
old; the bridge had been broken and mended with glue and a strip of that same
fiber from which the hats had been made. His nose was calloused where the
glasses rested.
      Buddy was the last to reach the top of the hill. His father smiled while
he waited for him to catch up. Anderson's smile was never a good sign.
      "You're sore from yesterday?'
      "I'm fine. The stiffness comes out when I get working."
      Neil laughed. "Buddy's sore because he _has_ to work. Ain't that so,
Buddy?"
      It was a joke. But Anderson, whose style it was to be laconic, never
laughed at jokes, and Buddy rarely found very funny the jokes his half-brother
made.
      "Don't you get it?" Neil asked. "_Sore_. Buddy's _sore_ because he has
to work."
      "We all have to work," Anderson said, and that pretty well ended what
joke there had been.
      They began to work.
      Buddy withdrew a plug from his tree and inserted a metal tube where the
plug had been. Below the makeshift spigot he hung one of the buckets. Pulling
the plugs was hard work, for they had been in place a week and had stuck fast.
The sap, drying about the plug, acted as a glue. This work seemed always to
last just long enough for the soreness--of his fingers, his wrists, his arms,
his back--to reassert itself, but never to abate.
      Before the terrible work of carrying the buckets began, Buddy stopped
and stared at the sap trickling through the pipe and oozing, like lime-green
honey, into the bucket. It was coming out slowly today. By the end of the
summer this tree would be dying and ready to be cut down.
      Seen up close, it didn't seem much like a tree at all. Its skin was
smooth, like the stem of a flower. A proper tree this size would have split
through its skin under the pressure of its own growth, and its trunk would be
rough with bark. Farther back in the forest, you could find trees, big ones,
which had reached the limit of their growth and begun at last to form
something like bark. At least their trunks, though green, weren't moist to the
touch like this one. Those trees--or Plants, as Anderson called them--were six
hundred feet tall, and their biggest leaves were the size of billboards. Here
on the edge of the cornfield the growth was more recent--not more than two
years--and the highest stood only a hundred and fifty feet tall. Even so, here
as deeper in the forest, the sun came through the foliage at noonday as pale
as moonlight on a clouded night.
      "Get the lead out!" Anderson called. He was already out in the field
with his full buckets of sap, and the sap was brimming over Buddy's buckets
too, _Why is there never time to think?_ Buddy envied Neil's mulish capacity
just to _do_ things, to spin the wheel of his cage without wondering overmuch
how it worked.
      "Right away!" Neil yelled from a distance.
      "Right away!" Buddy echoed, thankful his half-brother too had been
caught up in his own thoughts, whatever they could be.
      Of the three men working in the field, Neil surely had the best body.
Except for a receding chin that gave a false impression of weakness, he was
strong and well proportioned. He was a good six inches taller than his father
or Buddy, both short men. His shoulders were broader, his chest thicker, and
his muscles, though not so well knit as Anderson's, were bigger. There was,
however, no economy in his movements. When he walked, he lumbered. When he
stood, he slouched. He endured the strain of the day's labor better than Buddy
simply because he had more material to endure with. In this he was brutish,
but worse than being brutish, Neil was dumb, and worse than being dumb, he was
mean.
      _He is mean_, Buddy thought, _and he is dangerous_. Buddy set off down
the row of corn, a full bucket of sap in either hand and his heart brimming
with ill-will. It gave him a sort of strength, and he needed all the strength
he could muster, from whatever source. His breakfast had been light, and
lunch, he knew, wouldn't be quite enough, and there'd be no dinner to speak
of.
      Even hunger, he had learned, provided its own kind of strength: the will
to wrest more food from the soil and more soil from the Plants.
      No matter how much care he took, the sap splattered his pants legs as he
walked, and the tattered fabric stuck to his calf. Later, when the day was
hotter, his whole body would be covered with sap. The sap would bake dry, and
when he moved, the stiffened cloth would tear out the crusted hairs of his
body, one by one. The worst of that was over now, thank heaven--the body has a
finite number of hairs--but there were still the flies that swarmed over his
flesh to feed on the sap. He hated the flies, which did not seem to be finite.
      When he had reached the foot of the decline and was in the middle of the
field, Buddy set one bucket down and began to feed the thirsty young plants
from the other. Each plant received about a pound of thick green nutrient--
and to good effect. It wasn't the Fourth yet, and already many plants were up
over his knees. Corn would have grown well in the rich lake-bottom soil in any
case, but with the additional nourishment they drew from the stolen sap, the
plants throve phenomenally--as though they were in central Iowa instead of
northern Minnesota. This unwitting parasitism of the corn served another
purpose besides, for as the corn throve, the Plants whose sap they had drunk
died, and each year the limit of the field could be pushed a bit farther.


      It had been Anderson's idea to pit the Plant against itself this way,
and every corn plant in the field was a testimony to his, judgment. Looking
down the long rows, the old man felt like a prophet in full view of his
prophecy. His regret now was that he hadn't thought of it sooner--before the
diaspora of his village, before the Plants had vanquished his and his
neighbors' farms.
      _If only_ . . .
      But that was history, water under the bridge, spilt milk, and as such it
belonged to a winter evening in the commonroom when there was time for idle
regrets. Now, and for the rest of that long day, there was work to do.
      Anderson looked about for his sons. They were straggling behind, still
emptying their second buckets over the roots of the corn.
      "Get the lead out!" he yelled. Then, turning back up the hill with his
two buckets empty, he smiled a thin, joyless smile, the smile of a prophet,
and spat out, through the gap between his front teeth, a thin stream of the
juice of the Plant that he had been chewing.
      He hated the Plants, and that hatred gave him strength.


      They worked, sweating in the sun, till noonday. Buddy's legs were
trembling from the strain and from hunger. But each trip down the rows of corn
was shorter, and when he returned to the Plant there was a moment (and each a
little longer than the last) before the buckets filled, when he could rest.
      Sometimes, though he did not like the vaguely aniselilce taste, he would
stick his finger into the bucket and lick off the bittersweet syrup. It did
not nourish, but it allayed for a while the worst of his hunger. He might have
chewed the pulp carved from the phloem of the trunk, as his father and Neil
did, but "chewing" reminded him of the life he had tried to escape ten years
before, when he had left the farm for the city. His escape had failed, as
surely as the cities themselves had failed. At last, just as in the parable,
he would have been content with the husks the swine ate, and he had returned
to Tassel and to his father's farm.
      True to form, the fatted calf had been killed, and if his return had
been a parable, it would have ended happily. But it was his life, and he was
still, in his heart, a prodigal, and there were times when he wished he had
died during the famine of the cities.
      But in a contest between the belly's hunger and the mind's variable
predilections, the belly is likelier to win. The prodigal's rebeffion had been
reduced to catchwords and petty crochets: an obstinate refusal to use the word
_ain't_, an abiding contempt for country music, a distaste for "chewing," and
a loathing for the hick, the hayseed, and the dumb cluck. In a word, for Neil.
      The heat and his body's weariness conspired to direct his thoughts to
less troubled channels, and as he stood gazing into the slowly filling
buckets, his mind surged with the remembered images of other times. Of
Babylon, that great city.
      He remembered how at night the streets would be swiftflowing rivers of
light and how the brilliant, antiseptic cars had streamed down those rivers.
From hour to hour the sound would not abate nor the lights dim. There had been
the drive-ins, and when there was less money, the White Castles. Girls in
shorts waited on your car. Sometimes the shorts were edged with little,
glittering fringes that bounced on tan thighs.
      In the summer, when the hicks had worked on the farms, there had been
flood-lit beaches, and his parched tongue curled now remembering how--in the
labyrinth of empty oil drums supporting the diving raft--he would have kissed
Irene. Or someone. The names didn't matter so much any more.
      He made another trip down the row, and while he fed the corn he
remembered the names that didn't matter now. Oh, the city had swarmed with
girls. You could stand on a street corner, and in an hour hundreds would walk
past. There had even been talk about a population problem then.
      Hundreds of thousands of people!
      He remembered the crowds in the winter in the heated auditorium on the
university campus. He would have come there in a white shirt. The collar would
be tight around his neck. In his imagination, he fingered the knot of a silk
tie. Would it be striped or plain? He thought of the stores full of suits and
jackets. Oh, the colors there had been! the music, and, afterward, the
applause!
      _But the worst of it_, he thought, resting by at the Plant again, _is
that there isn't anyone to talk to any more_. The total population of Tassel
was two hundred and forty-seven, and none of them, not one of them, could
understand Buddy Anderson. A world had been lost, and they weren't aware of
it. It had never been their world, but it had been, briefly, Buddy's, and it
had been beautiful.
       The buckets were full, and Buddy grabbed hold of the handles and made
his way back to the field. For the hundredth time that day, he stepped over
the cankerous knob of tissue that had formed on the stump of the Plant that
had irrigated these rows last year. This time his bare foot came down on a
patch of the slick wood where there was a puddle of slippery sap. Weighted
down by the buckets, he couldn't recover his balance. He fell backward, the
sap in the buckets spilling out over him. He lay in the dirt, and the sap
spread across his chest and down his arms, and the myriad flies settled to
feed.
       He didn't try to get up.
       "Well, don't just _lay_ there," Anderson said. "There's work to do." He
stretched out a hand, kinder than his words, to help Buddy up.
       When he thanked his father, there was a just-perceptible quaver in his
voice.
       "You all right?"
       "I guess so." He felt his coccyx, which had struck against a knob of the
stump, and winced.
       "Then go down to the stream and wash that crap off. We're about ready to
go and eat anyhow."
       Buddy nodded. Grabbing the buckets (it was amazing how automatic the
work had become, even for him), he set off down a forest path that led to the
stream (once, farther inland, it had been Gooseberry River) from which the
village drew its water. Seven years ago, this whole area--fields, forest and
village--had been under ten to fifteen feet of water. But the Plants had
siphoned off the water. They were still at it, and every day the North Shore
of Lake Superior moved a few inches farther south, though the rate of its
retreat seemed to be lessening, as all but the newest of the Plants reached
the limits of their growth.
       He stripped and lay down full length in the stream. The tepid water
moved languidly over his bare limbs, washing away sap and dirt and the dead
flies that had caught on him as on flypaper. He held his breath and lowered
his head slowly into the flowing water until he was totally submerged.
       With the water in his ears, he could hear slight sounds more distinctly:
his back scratching against the pebbles in the bed of the stream, and, more
distantly, another sound, a low rumbling that grew, too quickly, to a
pounding. He knew the sound, and knew he shouldn't be hearing it now, here.
       He lifted his head out of the water in time to see the cow running
full-tilt toward him--and in time for her to see him. Gracie jumped, and her
hind hooves came down within inches of his thigh. Then she ran on into the
forest.
       More followed. Buddy counted them as they splashed across the stream:
eight . . . eleven . . . twelve. Seven Herefords and five Guernseys. All of
them.
       The yearning bellow of a bull sounded in the air, and Studs came into
view--the village's great, brown Hereford, with his flaring white topknot. He
stared at Buddy with casual defiance, but there was more urgent business than
the settling of old scores. He hurried on after the cows.
       That Studs had gotten out of his pen was bad news, for the cows were all
of them half-gone with calves, and it would do them no good to be mounted by
an eager bull. The news would be even worse for Neil, who was responsible for
Studs. It could mean a whipping. This was not a thought to sadden Buddy
deeply, but still he was concerned for the cattle. He hurried into his
overalls, which were still sticky with sap.
       Before he'd gotten the straps over his shoulders, Jimmie Lee, the
younger of Buddy's two half-brothers, came running out of the forest on the
bull's trail. His face was flushed with the excitement of the chase, and even
as he announced the calamity--"Studs broke out!"--a smile touched his lips.
       All children--and Jimmie was no exception--feel a demonic sympathy with
those things that cause disorder in the grown-up world. The young thrive on
earthquakes, tornadoes and escaped bulls.
       It would not do, Buddy realized, to let their father see that smile. For
in Anderson the secret sympathy for the powers of destruction had been
metamorphosed by the agency of time into a stern, humorless opposition to
those same powers, a magnificent, raw willfulness as ruthless in its way as
the enemy it opposed. Nothing could more surely elicit that ruthlessness than
seeing this hectic flush in the cheeks of his youngest and (it was commonly
supposed) dearest.
       "I'll tell Father," Buddy said. "You go on after Studs. Where's everyone
else?"
       "Clay's getting together all the men he can find, and Lady and Blossom
and the women are going out to scare the cows away from the corn if they go
that way." Jimmie shouted the information over his shoulder as he trotted
along the broad trail blazed by the herd.
       He was a good boy, Jimmie Lee, and bright as a button. In the old world,
Buddy was sure, he would have become another prodigal. It was always the
bright one who rebelled. Now he'd be lucky to survive. They all would.


      The morning's work accomplished, Anderson looked across his field and
saw that it was good. At harvest the ears would not be large and juicy, as in
the old times. They had left the bags of hybridized seed moldering in the
abandoned storerooms of old Tassel. Hybrids gave the best yield, but they were
sterile. Agriculture could no longer afford such fripperies. The variety he
was using now was much closer hereditarily to the ancient Indian maize, the
Aztec zea mays. His whole strategy against the usurping Plants was based on
corn. Corn had become the life of his people: it was the bread they ate and
the meat as well. In the summer Studs and his twelve wives might get along on
the tender green roughage the children scraped from the sides of the Plants or
they might graze among the seedlings along the lake shore, but when winter
came corn sustained the cattle just as it sustained the villagers.
      Corn took care of itself almost as well as it took care of the others.
It did not need a plowman to turn over the soil, only a sharp stick to scratch
it and hands to drop in the four seeds and the lump of excrement that would be
their first food. Nothing gave the yield per acre that corn did; nothing but
rice gave as much nourishment per ounce. Land was at a premium now. The Plants
exerted a constant pressure on the cornfields. Every day, the smaller children
had to go out and hunt between the rows of corn for the lime-green shoots,
which could grow in a week's time to the size of saplings, and in a month
would be big as grown maples.
      _Damn them!_ he thought. _May God damn them!_ But this curse lost much
of its forcefulness from the conviction that God had sent them in the first
place. Let others talk about Outer Space as much as they liked: Anderson knew
that the same angry and jealous God who had once before visited a flood upon
an earth that was corrupt had created the Plants and sown them. He never
argued about it. When God could be so persuasive, why should Anderson raise
his voice? It had been seven years that spring since the first seedlings of
the Plant had been seen. They had come of a sudden in April of '72, a billion
spores, invisible to all but the most powerful microscopes, sown broadcast
over the entire planet by an equally invisible sower (and where was the
microscope or telescope or radar screen that will make God visible?), and
within days every inch of ground, farmland and desert, jungle and tundra, was
covered with a carpet of the richest green.
      Every year since, as there were fewer and fewer people, there were more
converts to Anderson's thesis. Like Noah, he was having the last laugh. But
that didn't stop him from hating, just as Noah must have hated the rains and
rising waters.
      Anderson hadn't always hated the Plants so much. In the first years,
when the Government had just toppled and the farms were in their heyday, he
had gone out in the moonlight and just watched them grow. It was like the
speeded-up movies of plant growth he'd seen in Ag School years ago. He had
thought then that he could hold his own against them, but he'd been wrong. The
infernal weeds had wrested his farm from his hands and the town from the hands
of his people.
      But, by God, he'd win it back. Every square inch. If he had to root out
every Plant with his two bare hands. He spat significantly.
      At such moments Anderson was as conscious of his own strength, of the
force of his resolve, as a young man is conscious of the compulsion of his
flesh or a woman is conscious of the child she bears. It was an animal
strength, and that, Anderson knew, was the only strength strong enough to
prevail against the Plants.
      His oldest son ran out of the forest shouting. When Buddy ran, Anderson
knew there was something wrong. "What'd he say?" he asked Neil. Though the old
man would not admit it, his hearing was beginning to go.
      "He says Studs got out into the cows. Sounds like a lotta hooey to me."
      "Pray God it is," Anderson replied, and his look fell on Neil like an
iron weight.
      Anderson ordered Neil back to the village to see that the men did not
forget to bring ropes and prods in their hurry to give pursuit. Then with
Buddy he set off on the clear trail the herd had made. They were about ten
minutes behind them, by Buddy's estimate.
      "Too long," Anderson said, and they began to run instead of trotting.
      It was easy, running among the Plants, for they grew far apart and their
cover was so thick that no underbrush could grow. Even fungi languished here,
for lack of food. The few aspens that still stood were rotten to the core and
only waiting for a strong wind to fell them. The firs and spruce had entirely
disappeared, digested by the very soil that had once fed them. Years before,
the plants had supported hordes of common parasites, and Anderson had hoped
mightily that the vines and creepers would destroy their hosts, but the Plants
had rallied and it was the parasites who had, for no apparent reason, died.
      The giant boles of the Plants rose out of sight, their spires hidden by
their own massive foliage; their smooth, living green was unblemished,
untouched, and like all living things, unwilling to countenance any life but
their own.
      There was in these forests a strange, unwholesome solitude, a solitude
more profound than adolescence, more unremitting than prison. It seemed, in a
way, despite its green, flourishing growth, dead. Perhaps it was because there
was no sound. The great leaves overhead were too heavy and too rigid in
structure to be stirred by anything but gale winds. Most of the birds had
died. The balance of nature had been so thoroughly upset that even animals one
would not think threatened had joined the ever-mounting ranks of the extinct.
The Plants were alone in these forests, and the feeling of their being set
apart, of their belonging to a different order of things was inescapable. It
ate at the strongest man's heart.
      "What's that smell?" Buddy asked.
      "I don't smell anything."
      "It smells like something burning."
      Anderson felt small stirrings of hope. "A fire? But they wouldn't burn
at this time of year. They're too green."
      "It's not the Plants. It's something else."
      It was the smell of roasting meat, but he wouldn't say so. It would be
too cruel, too unreasonable to lose one of the precious cows to a party of
.marauders.
      Their pace slowed from a run to a trot, from a trot to a cautious,
stalking glide. "I do smell it now," Anderson whispered. He withdrew from its
holster the Colt Python .357 Magnum that was the visible sign of his authority
among the citizens of Tassel. Since his elevation to his high office
(formally, he was the town's mayor, but in fact he was much more), he had
never been known to be without it. The potency of this weapon as a symbol (for
the village had a goodly stock of guns and ammunition yet) rested upon the
fact that it was only employed for the gravest of purposes: to kill men.
       The smell had become very strong; then at a turn in the path they found
the twelve carcasses. They had been incinerated to ash, but the outlines were
clear enough to indicate which bad been Studs. There was also a smaller patch
of ash near them on the path.
       "How--" Buddy began. But he really meant _what_, or even _who_,
something that his father was quicker to understand.
       "Jimmie!" the old man screamed, enraged, and he buried his hands in the
smaller pile of still-smoking ashes.
       Buddy turned his eyes away, for too great sorrow is like drunkenness: it
was not fitting that he should see his father then.
       _There's not even any meat left_, he thought, looking at the other
carcasses. _Nothing but ashes_.
       "My son!" the old man cried. "My son!" He held in his finger a piece of
metal that had once been the buckle of a belt. Its edges had been melted by
the heat, and the metal's retained heat was burning the old man's fingers. He
did not notice. Out of his throat came a noise, deeper than a groan, and his
hands dug into the ashes once more. He buried his face in them and wept.
       After a while, the men of the village arrived. One had brought a shovel
to use as a prod. They buried the boy's ashes there, for already the wind was
beginning to spread them over the ground. Anderson kept the buckle.
       While Anderson was speaking the words over his son's shallow grave, they
heard the _moo_ of the last cow, Gracie. So as soon as they'd said _amen_,
they went running after the surviving cow. Except Anderson, who walked home
alone.
       Gracie led them a merry old chase.



TWO:   Desertion


      They had to abandon Tassel, the old Tassel that they still thought of as
their proper home, the spring before last. The Plants had flung out their
seedlings (though exactly how this was done remained a mystery, for the Plants
exhibited not the slightest sign of flowers or fruiting bodies) over the
surrounding fields with a profligacy that had finally conquered every human
effort. They, the humans, had been extended too far: their town and the farms
about it had not been laid out with a siege in view.
      For the first three years, they had held their own well enough--or so it
had seemed--by spraying the seedlings with poisons that the Government had
developed. Each year, for as long as the Government and its laboratories
lasted, it was a new poison, for the Plant developed immunities almost as
quickly as the poisons were invented. But even then they had sprayed only the
fields. In marshes and along the wild lake shore, in forests and along the
roads, the seedlings shot up beyond the reach of any enemy but the axe--and
there were just too many Plants and too few axes to make that a conceivable
enterprise. Wherever the Plants grew, there was not light enough, nor water
enough, nor even soil enough for anything else. When the old trees and bushes
and grasses were crowded out and died, erosion stripped the land.
      Not the farmlands, of course--not yet. But in only three years the
Plants were crowding the fields and pastures, and then it was only a matter of
time. Of very little time, really: the Plants nibbled, they bit, and, during
the summer of their fifth year, they simply overran.
      All that was left was this shadowy ruin. Buddy took a certain elegiac
pleasure in coming here. There was even a practical side to it: scavenging in
the debris he was often able to find old tools and sheet metal, even
occasional books. The time for edibles was past, though. The rats and
marauders working their way up from Duluth had long ago cleaned out the little
that had been left behind after the move to New Tassel. So he gave up looking
and went to sit on the steps of the Congregationalist Church, which thanks to
his father's continued efforts was one of the last buildings in the town to
remain intact.
       There had been, he remembered, an oak, a tall archetypal oak, over to
the right of the Plant that had broken through the sidewalk at the edge of
what used to be the town park. During the fourth winter, they had used the oak
as firewood. And many elms, too. There had certainly been no lack of elms.
       He heard, distantly, Gracie's lugubrious plaint as she was pulled back
to town at the end of a rope. The chase had been too much for Buddy. His legs
had given out. He wondered if the Hereford was now extinct. Perhaps not, for
Gracie was pregnant, she was still young, and if she bore a bull calf, there
would be hope for her race, though it were but a glimmer. What more could one
ask than a glimmer?
       He wondered, too, how many enclaves had held out as long as Tassel. For
the last two years, captured marauders had been the village's only link with
the outside, but the marauders had been growing fewer. It was likely that the
cities had come to their end at last.
       He was thankful he had not been there to witness it, for even the little
corpse of Tassel could make him melancholic. He would not have thought he
could have cared so. Before the advent of the Plants, Tassel had been the
objectification of everything he despised: smallness, meanness, willful
ignorance and a moral code as contemporary as Leviticus. And now he mourned it
as though it had been Carthage fallen to the Romans and sown with salt, or
Babylon, that great city.
       It was not perhaps the corpse of the town that he mourned, but all the
other corpses of which it was compounded. Once a thousand and some people had
lived here, and all but a paltry two hundred and forty-seven of them were
dead. How invariably the worst had survived and the best had died.
       Pastern, the Congregationalist minister, and his wife Lorraine. They had
been good to Buddy during the years before he'd left for the University, when
life had been one long feud with his father who had wanted him to go to the Ag
School in Duluth. And Vivian Sokulsky, his fourth-grade teacher. The only
older woman in town with a sense of humor or a grain of intelligence. And all
the others too, always the best of them.
       Now, Jimmie Lee. Rationally you couldn't blame the Plants for Jimmie's
death. He had been murdered--though how or by whom, Buddy could not imagine.
Or why. Above all, why? Yet death and the Plants were such close kin that one
could not feel the breath of one without seeming to see the shadow of the
other.
       "Hello there, stranger." The voice had a strong musical timbre, like the
speaking voice of the contralto in an operetta, but to judge by Buddy's
reaction one would have thought it harsh.
       "Hello, Greta. Go away."
       The voice laughed, a full, husky laugh that would have reached the last
rows of any balcony, and Greta herself came forward, as full and husky in the
flesh as in her laughter, which now abruptly ceased. She stood herself before
Buddy as though she were presenting a grievance before the court. Exhibit A:
Greta Anderson, arms akimbo and shoulders thrown back, full hips jutting
forward, her bare feet planted in the dirt like roots. She deserved better
clothing than the cotton chemise she wore. In richer fabrics and brighter
colors and given better support, the type of beauty Greta represented could
excel any other; now she seemed just slightly overripe.
       "I hardly ever see you any more. You know we're practically next-door
neighbors--"
       "Except that we don't have doors."
       "--yet I don't see you from one week to the next. Sometimes I think you
try to avoid me."
       "Sometimes I do, but you can see for yourself it doesn't work. Now, why
don't you go fix your husband's dinner like a good wife? It's been a bad day
all around."
      "Neil's in a blue funk. I expect he'll be whipped tonight, and _I'm_ not
going to be around the house-or should I say the tent?--when he comes home
from that. When he went back to town, he fooled with the rope on Studs's pen
to try and make it look like it wasn't his fault--that Studs had jumped over
the bar. I can just see Studs clearing an eightfoot fence. But it didn't do
him any good. Clay and half a dozen others saw him doing it. He'll just get
whipped a little harder now."
      "That idiot!"
      Greta laughed. "You said it, not me."
      With a feigned casualness, she sat on the step below his. "You know,
Buddy, I come here a lot too. I get so lonely in the new town--it's not really
a town at all, it's more like summer camp with the tents and having to carry
water from the stream. Oh, it's so boring. You know what I mean. You know it
better than me. I always wanted to go live in Minneapolis myself, but first
there was Daddy, and then. . . . But I don't have to tell _you_."
      It had grown quite dark in the ruined village. A summer shower began to
fall on the leaves of the Plants, but only a few droplets penetrated their
cover. It was like sitting in spray blown in off the lake.
      After a considerable silence (during which she had leaned back to rest
her elbows on Buddy's step, letting the weight of her thick, sun-whitened hair
pull her head back, so that as she talked she gazed up into the faraway leaves
of the Plant), Greta let loose another well modulated laugh.
      Buddy couldn't help but admire her laugh. It was as though that laughter
was a specialty of hers--a note she could reach that other contraltos
couldn't.
      "Do you remember the time you put the vodka into the punch at Daddy's
youth meeting? And we all started doing the twist to those awful old records
of his? Oh, that was precious, that was such fun! Nobody but you and me knew
_how_ to twist. That was an awful thing to do. The vodka, I mean. Daddy never
knew what happened."
      "Jacqueline Brewster could twist well, as I recall."
      "Jacqueline Brewster is a pill."
      He laughed, and since it had become so much less customary for him, the
laughter was rough-edged and a little shrill. "Jacqueline Brewster's dead," he
said.
      "That's so. Well, I guess next to the two of us she was the best dancer
around." After another pause, she began again with a great show of vivacity.
"And the time we went to old man Jenkins' house, out on County Road B--do you
remember that?"
      "Greta, let's not talk about that."
      "But it was so _funny_, Buddy! It was the funniest thing in the world.
There we were, the two of us, going at it on that squeaky old sofa a mile a
minute. I thought it would fall to pieces, and him upstairs so dead to the
world he never knew a thing."
      Despite himself, Buddy snorted. "Well, he was _deaf_." He pronounced the
word in the country way, with a long _e_.
      "Oh, we'll never have times like that again." When she turned to look at
Buddy, her eyes gleamed with something more than reminiscence. "You _were_ the
wild one then. There wasn't anything that stopped you. You were the king of
the heap, and wasn't I the queen? Wasn't I, Buddy?" She grabbed one of his
hands and squeezed it. Once her fingernails would have cut his skin, but her
fingernails were gone and his skin was tougher. He pulled his hand away and
stood up.
      "Stop it, Greta. It won't get you anywhere."
      "I've got a right to _remember_. It _was_ that way, and you can't tell
me it wasn't. I know it's not that way any more. All I have to do is look
around to see that. Where's Jenkins' house now, eh? Have you ever tried to
find it? It's gone; it's simply disappeared. And the football field--where is
that? Every day a little more of everything is gone. I went into MacCord's the
other day, where they used to have the nicest dresses in town, such as they
were. There wasn't a thing. Not a button. It seemed like the end of the world,
but I don't know--maybe those things aren't so important. It's people that are
most important. But all the best people are gone, too."
      "Yes," Buddy said, "yes, they are."
      "Except a very few. When you were away, I saw it all happen. Some of
them, the Douglases and others, left for the cities, but that was only at the
very beginning of the panic. They came back, the same as you--those who could.
I wanted to go, but after Momma died, Daddy got sick and I had to nurse him.
He read the Bible all the time. And prayed. He made me get down on my knees
beside his bed and pray with him. But his voice wasn't so good then, so
usually I'd end up praying by myself. I thought it would have looked funny to
somebody else--as though it was Daddy I was praying to and not God. But there
wasn't anybody left by that time who could laugh. The laughter had just dried
up, like Split Rock River.
      "The radio station had stopped, except for the news twice a day, and who
wanted to hear the news? There were all those National Guard people trying to
make us do what the Government said. Delano Paulsen got killed the night they
got rid of the National Guard, and I didn't know about it for a week. Nobody
wanted to tell me, because after you left, Delano and I went steady. I guess
maybe you never knew that. As soon as Daddy got on his feet, he was going to
marry the two of us. Really--he really was.
      "The Plants seemed to be everywhere then. They broke up the roads and
water mains. The old lake shore was just a marsh, and the Plants were already
growing there. Everything was so terribly ugly. It's nice now, in comparison.
      "But the worst part was the boredom. Nobody had time to have fun. You
were gone and Delano was dead and Daddy--well, you can imagine. I shouldn't
admit this, but when he died, I was sort of glad.
      "Except that was when your father was elected mayor and really started
organizing everybody, telling them what to do and where to live, and I
thought: 'There won't be room for me.' I was thinking of Noah's ark, because
Daddy used to read that one over and over again. I thought: 'They'll take off
without me.' I was scared. I suppose everybody was scared. The city must have
been scary, too, with all those people dying. I heard about that. But I was
really _scared!_ How do you explain that?
      "And then your brother started coming to visit me. He was about
twenty-one then and not really bad-looking from a girl's point of view. Except
for his chin. But I thought: 'Greta, you've got a chance to marry Japheth.'"
      "Who?"
      "Japheth. He was one of Noah's sons. Poor Neil! I mean, he really didn't
stand a chance, did he?"
      "I think you've reminisced enough now."
      "I mean, he didn't know anything about girls. He wasn't like you. He was
twenty-one, just three months younger than you, and I don't think he even
thought about girls. He said later it was your father who recommended me! Can
you imagine that! Like he was breeding a bull!"
      Buddy started walking away from her.
      "What should I have done? You tell me. Should I have waited for you? Put
a candle burning in the window?"
      "You don't need a candle, when you're carrying a torch."
      Again the lyric laugh, but barbed with undissimulated shrillness. She
rose and walked toward him. Her breasts, which had been noticeably slack
before, were perceptibly less so.
      "Well, do you want to know why? You don't. You're afraid to hear the
truth. If I told you, you wouldn't let yourself believe it, but I'll tell you
anyway. Your brother is a two-hundred pound noodle of wet spaghetti. He is
completely and totally unable to _move_."
      "He's my _half_-brother," Buddy said, almost automatically.
      "And he's half of a husband for me." Greta was smiling strangely, and
somehow they had come to be standing face to face, inches apart. She had only
to stand on tiptoe for her lips to reach his. Her hands never even touched
him.
      "No," he said, pushing her away. "It's over. It's been over for years.
That was eight years ago. We were kids then. Teenagers."
      "Oh brother, have you lost your guts!"
      He slapped her hard enough to knock her to the ground, though in
fairness it must be said that she seemed to cooperate and even to relish the
blow.
      "That," she said, the old music quite gone for her voice, "is all the
best that Neil can do. And I must say that between the two of you he does that
better."
      Buddy laughed a solid, good-humored laugh and left her, feeling some of
the old stallion blood rising in him. Ah, he had forgotten what a magnificent
wit she could muster. Absolutely the only one left with a sense of humor, he
thought. And still the best-looking. Maybe they _would_ get together again.
      Eventually.
      Then he remembered that it was not a day to be in a good humor, and the
smile left his lips and the stallion quieted and went back to his stall.



THREE: A Bundle of Joy


      There was something of the mouse about Maryann Anderson. _Mouse_ was the
color of her hair: a lusterless gray-brown. There was a mousy tendency, when
her mind was on other things, for her lips to part, revealing largish,
yellowed incisors. Worse, she had, at the age of twenty-three, a faint, downy
mustache. She was short, no more than five feet two, and thin: Buddy's thumb
and middle finger could completely encircle her upper arm.
      Even her good qualities were mousy: She was perky, industrious and
content with scraps. Though she would never be a beauty, she might once have
been thought cute. She was submissive. She did not intrude.
      Buddy didn't love her. There were times when her very passivity
infuriated him. He had been used, on the whole, to something more. Still, it
was as hard to find fault with Maryann as it was to find anything particularly
to admire. Buddy was comfortably sure that she would never be unfaithful, and
as long as his wants were looked after, he didn't really resent Maryann for
being his wife.
      Maryann, for her part, could not reciprocate this indifference. She was
slavishly devoted to her husband and hopelessly, girlishly in love with him.
Buddy had always been able to elicit a species of self-sacrificing devotion,
though he had usually called for a different sort of sacrifice, and his
altars, so to speak, were dark with the blood of his victims. But be had never
tried to exert this influence on Maryann, who had only interested him for one
brief moment and then not amorously but by her pitiableness.
      It had been during the fall of the fourth year after the Plants had
come, and Buddy had only just returned to Tassel. A party of marauders,
Maryann among them, had somehow worked their way up from Minneapolis. Instead
of raiding, they'd been foolish enough to come to the village and ask for
food. It was unheard of. The invariable rule was for marauders to be executed
(hunger could turn the lambs to wolves), but a small controversy arose in this
case, because of the seeming good-will of the prisoners. Buddy had been among
those in favor of releasing them, but his father-- and the majority of the
men--insisted on execution.
      "Then at least spare the women," Buddy had pleaded, being still rather
sentimental.
      "The only woman that goes free is the one you take to wife," Anderson
had proclaimed, extemporizing the law, as was his way. And quite unexpectedly
and out of pure cussedness Buddy had gone and chosen one of them, not even the
best-looking one, and made her his wife. The other twentythree marauders were
executed, and the bodies were properly disposed of.
      Maryann didn't speak unless spoken to, but in their three years together
Buddy had picked up enough bits and pieces of her background to convince
himself that her depths were no more interesting than her surfaces.
      Her father had been a bank clerk, scarcely more than a teller, and she
had worked for one month in a stenographic pool before the world had entirely
collapsed. Though she had gone to a parochial grade school and later to St.
Bridget's, where she took the commercial course, het Catholicism had never
been more than lukewarm at best, with hot flashes around the holidays. In
Tassel she was able to adopt Anderson's homemade and apocalyptic brand of
Congregationalism without a qualm.
      But Maryann's special distinction was not her conversion from papistry:
it was the new skill she had brought to Tassel. Once, almost by chance, she
had taken a night course in basket-weaving at the CYO. Something in Maryann,
something quite fundamental, had responded to the simplicities of that ancient
craft. She experimented with the thicker rushes and with swamp grasses, and
when the shortages began, Maryann went out on her own and began stripping the
smooth green boles of the Plants and shredding their great leaves into raffia.
Right to the end, to that day when the Government trucks failed to show up in
the city for the morning dole, she went on making her baskets and bonnets and
sandals and welcome mats. People thought it silly, and Maryann herself
considered it a weakness. That it was the one thing that the poor mouse had
ever done well or found more than passing satisfaction in escaped their
attention and hers.
      In Tassel, Maryann's light was no longer hidden, as it were, beneath a
bushel. Her basketry quite transformed the village's way of life. After the
fatal summer when the Plants invaded the fields, the villagers (the five
hundred who were left) had picked up as many pieces as they could carry and
took themselves to the shore of Lake Superior, a few miles away down
Gooseberry River. The lake had been receding at a prodigious rate, and in
several areas the water was two or three miles from the old, rock-strewn shore
line. Wherever the water retreated, the thirsty seedlings sprang up, sank
roots, and the process accelerated.
      That fall and through the winter, the survivors (their number, like the
lake, was always shrinking) worked at clearing as large an area as they could
hope realistically to maintain for their own fields the next year. Then they
began to sink their own roots. There was little timber but what they could
scavenge from the old town. The wood of the Plant was less substantial than
balsam, and most of the trees native to the area had already rotted. The
villagers had the clay but not the skill to make brick, and quarrying was out
of the question. So they spent the winter in a great grass hut, whose walls
and roof were woven under Maryann's supervision. It had been a cold, miserable
November, but a person could keep his fingers warm weaving. There was a week
in December when the panels of the commonroom were blown halfway back to the
old village. But by January they had learned to make a weave that was proof
against the worst blizzard, and by February the commonroom was downright cozy.
It even had a welcome mat at each of the doors.
      No one had ever regretted admitting the clever mouse to the village.
Except, occasionally, the mouse's husband.


      "Why isn't there any dinner?" he asked.
      "I was all day with Lady. She's awful upset about Jimmie Lee. Jimmie was
her favorite, you know. Your father didn't help much either. He talked all the
time about the Resurrection of the Body. He must know by now she doesn't
believe the same as he does."
      "A person has to eat just the same."
      "I'm fixing it, Buddy. As fast as I can. Buddy, there's something--"
      "Father's feeling better then?"
      "--I wanted to tell you. I never know how your father is feeling. He's
acting the same as ever. He never loses control. Neil's going to be whipped
tonight--I suppose you heard about that?"
      "Serves him right. If he'd fixed the gate shut, that whole thing
wouldn't have happened."
      "What whole thing, Buddy? How can a person be burnt to ashes like that
in the middle of the forest? How can that be?"
      "You've got me. It doesn't seem possible. And those cows and Studs,
besides. Seven tons of beef turned to ash in less than ten minutes."
      "Was it lightning?"
      "Not unless it was the lightning of the Good Lord. I suspect it's
marauders. They've invented some new kind of weapon."
      "But why would they want to kill cows? They'd want to steal cows--and
kill people."
      "Maryann, _I_ don't know what happened. Don't ask any more questions."
      "There was something I wanted to tell you."
      "Maryann!"
      Glumly, she went back to stirring the suppawn in the earthenware pot
that nestled in the hot embers; to the side, wrapped in cornhusks, were three
sunfish that Jimmie Lee had caught that morning at the lake shore.
      From now on, with neither milk nor butter to add to the corn meal,
they'd have to settle for mush, with an occasional egg whipped in it. One of
the nice things about being married to an Anderson had always been the extra
food. The meat especially. Maryann hadn't questioned too closely where it all
came from; she just took what Lady, Anderson's wife, offered her.
      _Well_, she thought, _there are still hogs and chickens and a lake full
of fish. The world hasn't come to an end_. Maybe the hunters could bring in
enough after the harvest to make up for the Herefords. A couple of years ago,
the hunting had been so good that there'd been talk of turning nomad and
following the game, like the Indians used to. Then the deer started falling
off. There was a winter of wolves and bears, and then it was just like old
times. Except for the rabbits. Rabbits could eat the bark off the Plants.
Rabbits were cute, the way they wiggled their noses. She smiled, thinking
about the rabbits. "Buddy," she said, "there's something I should talk to you
about."


      Maryann was talking about something, which was almost an event in
itself, but Buddy's mind, after a day like this, didn't seem to focus on
things very well. He was thinking of Greta again: the curve of her neck when
she'd thrown her head back out on the church steps. The slight protuberance of
her Adam's apple. And her lips. Somehow she still had lipstick. Had she worn
it just for him?
      "What'd you say?" he asked Maryann.
      "Nothing. Oh, just nothing."
      Buddy had always thought that Maryann would have made the ideal wife for
Neil. She had the same chin, the same lack of humor, the same stolid
industriousness. They both had front teeth like a rabbit's or a rat's. Neil,
who was abject before Greta, would not have found fault with Maryann's
passivity. With Maryann in bed, Buddy was always reminded of tenth-grade gym
class, when Mr. Olsen had had them do fifty pushups every day. But apparently
that aspect of things didn't mean so much to Neil.
      It had been a shock to come back and find Greta Pastern married to his
half-brother. Somehow he'd been counting on finding her waiting for him. She'd
been so large a part of the Tassel he'd left behind.
      It had been a touchy situation all around, those first weeks. Buddy and
Greta had been anything but secretive during Buddy's last year in Tassel.
Their carryings-on were discussed in every bar and over every back fence in
town. Greta, the pastor's only child, and Buddy, the eldest son of the
richest--and most righteous--farmer in the township, in all Lake County. So it
was common knowledge that Greta was a hand-me-down in the Anderson family, and
a common expectation that something bad would come of it.
      But the prodigal who had returned to Tassel was not the same as the
prodigal who had left. In the meantime he had starved a third of his weight
away, worked on the Government's pressed-labor crews, and butchered his way to
Tassel from Minneapolis, joining the human wolf packs or fighting them as the
occasion offered. By the time he got to Tassel, he was much more interested in
saving his own hide than in getting under Greta's skirts.
      So, besides being a humanitarian gesture, it had been prudent to marry
Maryann. Buddy as a husband seemed much less likely to breach the village
peace than Buddy as a bachelor, and he could pass Greta on the street without
causing a storm of speculation.
      "Buddy?"
      "Tell it to me later!"
      "The suppawn's ready. That's all."
      _Such a ninny_, he thought. But a passable cook. Better, leastways, than
Greta, and that was a consolation.
      He shoveled the steaming, yellow porridge into his mouth, nodding to
Maryann that he was satisfied. She watched him put down two bowls of the
suppawn and the three fish, then she ate what was left.
      _I'll tell him now, while he's in a good mood_, she thought. But before
she could get a word in, Buddy was up off the mat on the floor of the tent and
heading outside.
      "It must be about time for the whipping," he said.
      "I don't want to see it. It makes me sick."
      "Nothing says a woman has to go." And with half a smile to cheer her up,
he was out of the tent. Even if he had been squeamish (which he wasn't), he
would have had to be there, as did every male in the village over seven years
old. A good whipping could instill almost as much fear of the Lord in the
hearts of beholders as in the single heart about which the lash curled.
      In the square before the commonhouse, Neil was already strung up to the
whipping post. His back was bare. Buddy was one of the last to arrive.
      Anderson, with the whip in his hand, stood spraddle legged in readiness.
These was just a bit too much stiffness in his stance.. Buddy knew that it
must be costing the old man to carry on as though this were no more than an
ordinary fiasco, a matter of some twenty lashes.
      When Anderson had to whip Buddy or Neil, he meted out the pain
impartially--no more and no less than he would have doled out to anyone else
for the same offense. His touch was as precise as a metronome. But tonight,
after the third stroke, his knees collapsed and he fell to the ground.
      There was a gasp from the circle of spectators, then Anderson was on his
feet again. The color had run out of his face, and, giving the whip to Buddy,
his hand trembled.
      "You continue," he commanded.
      If the old man had handed him his Python--or a scepter--Buddy couldn't
have been any more taken aback.
      Maryann heard it all from inside the tent, while she licked the pot.
When there was a pause after the third stroke, she hoped that might be the
end. She understood of course that these things had to be done, but that
didn't mean she had to like it. It wasn't good manners to enjoy someone else
being hurt, even if you didn't like them.
      The whipping started again.
      She wished Buddy had left her more food. And now, with the Guernseys all
dead, there'd be no more milk!
      She tried to think of what she would say when he got home. She decided
on "Darling, we are going to have a bundle of joy."
      It was such a nice expression. She had heard it first in a movie a long
time ago. Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds had been the stars.
      For _his_ sake, she hoped it was a boy, and she fell asleep wondering
what his name should be. Patrick, for his grandfather? Or Lawrence? She had
always loved that name, for some reason. Joseph was a good name too.
      Buddy? She wondered if there was a Saint Buddy. She had never heard of
one. Perhaps he was a Congregationalist saint.



FOUR: Good-bye, Western Civilization


            _______________

      On 22 August 1979, as per instructions of 4 July 1979, preparations were
begun for the incineration of the artifact shown in the maps as
"Duluth-Superior." Meteorological conditions were ideal: for 17 da-vs there
had been no rain, scarcely a dampness in the mornings. "Duluth-Superior" was
quartered, and each of these Quarters was divided into three Sections, as
shown in the accompanying photographs, taken from elevation 133 kms. Action
began at 20.34 hours, 23 August 1979.
      This artifact was constructed upon numerous low mounds of natural
formation, topographically akin to the artifact "San Francisco." Here,
however, the major construction element was wood, which burns quickly. Firing
began in the lowest areas of each Section, and the natural updraft of air
accomplished almost as much as the firing devices.
      With the exceptions of Sections II-3 and Ill-1 near the old lakeshore
(here for some reason, the elements of the artifact were larger and
constructed of stone and brick instead of wood), complete incineration was
achieved in 3.64 hours. When the work in each Quarter had been accomplished to
satisfaction, the equipment of that Quarter was transferred to Sections 11-3
and III-1, and these Sections were incinerated by 01.12 hours, 24 August 1979.
      There were Iwo mechanical failures in Section IV-3. Appraisal of damages
has been sent to the Office of Supplies, and a carbon of that appraisal is
enclosed herewith.
      Mammals dwelling in the periphery of Quarters I, II, and IV escaped into
the adjacent fields due to the insufficiency of equipment and the openness of
the terrain. Current estimates are from 200 to 340 of the large mammals,
constructors of the artifacts, and from 15,000 to 24,000 of the small mammals,
within established limits of probable error.
      All wood-burrowing insects were eradicated.
      Operations have been begun to trace the escaped mammals and other
mammals living beyond the limits of "Duluth-Superior," but equipment is
limited. (Consult Requisition Form 80Q-B: 15 August 1979; 15 May 1979; 15
February 1979.)
      Following incineration, ash was leveled into the concavities of the
artifact, and seeding operations were begun 27 August 1979.
      Based on the results of samples taken from 12 May 1979 to 4 July 1979,
this unit then removed to follow a route along the southern shore of "Lake
Superior." (Consult map of "Wisconsin State.") Sampling had indicated that
this area was most densely populated with indigenous mammals.
      The obsolete Spheroid Model 37-Mg will be employed for this operation,
due to the shortages of Models 39-Mg and 45-Mh. Despite their bulkiness, these
models are adequate for the extermination of such mammalian life as they are
likely to encounter. Indeed, their therm otropic mechanisms are more highly
developed than those of the later models. However, in exceptional
circumstances the operation of Model 37-Mg cannot, without undue delay, be
assumed by the Central Intelligence Bank of this Unit.
      The further process of incineration is expected to proceed less rapidly
now that this, the last of the chief artifacts, has been leveled and sown. The
remaining artifacts are small and widely spaced. Though our sample has shown
that most of these are no longer inhabited, we will, pursuant to instructions
of 4 July 1979, effect their entire incineration.
      Estimated completion of project: 2 February 1980.
            _______________


      "What do you make of it, my dear?" he asked.
      "It's very beautiful," she said. "And did you do it just for me?"
      "Sweetheart, as far as I'm concerned, you're the only girl in the
world."
      Jackie smiled, her bittersweet smile, the one she reserved for hopeless
disasters. She closed her eyes, not to shut out the scene, but because they
were very tired, and shook the ash from her short, curling black hair.
      Jeremiah Orville closed her in his arms. It wasn't chilly, but it seemed
the right thing to do just then--a traditional gesture, like taking off one's
hat at a funeral. Calmly, he watched the city burn.
      Jackie was rubbing her bobbed nose in the scratchy wool of his sweater.
"I never really liked that city anyhow," she said.
      "It kept us alive."
      "Of course, Jerry. I didn't mean to be ungrateful. I just meant--"
      "I understand. That's just my well known sentimentality getting out of
hand again."
      Despite the heat and his enclosing arms, she shivered. "We'll die now.
We'll die for sure."
      "Chin up, Miss Whythe! Tally-ho! Remember the Titanic!"
      She laughed. "I feel like Carmen, in the opera, when she turns up the
Queen of Spades." She hummed the Fate theme, and when the last note proved too
low, she mumbled: "In an amateur production."
      "It's no wonder one feels depressed, with the world burning up about
one," he said in his best David-Niven manner. Then, in an authentic Midwestern
accent: "Hey, look! There goes the Alworth Building!"
      She turned around quickly, and her dark eyes danced in the light of the
pyre. The Alworth Building was the tallest in Duluth. It burned magnificently.
The whole downtown area was in flames now. To the left of the Alworth
Building, the First American National Bank, after a late start, flared up even
more splendidly due to its greater bulk.
      "Ooowh," Jackie shouted. "Wheee!"
      They had lived these last years in the safe-deposit vault in the
basement of the First American National Bank. Their precious store of
scavenged cans and jars was still locked in the safe deposit boxes, and the
canary was probably in his cage in the corner. It had been a very cozy home,
though there were few visitors and they had had to kill most of those. Such
luck couldn't last forever.
      Jackie was crying real tears.
      "Sad?" he asked.
      "Oh, not sad . . . just a little déracinée. And annoyed with myself,
because I don't understand it." She snuffled loudly, and the tears were all
gone. "It's so horribly like what they used to call an Act of God. As though
God were the source of everything unreasonable. I like to know the reason for
things." Then, after a pause: "Perhaps it was the termites?"
      "The termites!" He looked at her unbelievingly, and her cheek began to
show its tell-tale dimple. She was pulling his leg. They broke out laughing
together.
      In the distance, the Alworth Building collapsed. Beyond, in the dry
harbor, a ship lay on its side and squirted flames out of its portholes.
      Here and there, scuttling about the rubble, the incendiary mechanisms
could be glimpsed attending their business. At this remove they seemed really
quite innocuous. They reminded Jackie of nothing so much as of Volkswagens of
the early Fifties, when all Volkswagens seemed to be gray. They were diligent,
tidy, and quick.
      "We should be getting on our way," he said. "They'll be mopping up the
suburbs soon."
      "Well, good-bye, Western Civilization," Jackie said, waving at the
bright inferno, unafraid. For how can one be afraid of Volkswagens?


      They coasted- their bicycles along the Skyline Parkway from which they
had viewed the burning city. When the Parkway went up hill, they had to walk
the bicycles, because the chain on Orville's was broken.
      The Parkway, unniended for years, was full of potholes and cluttered
with debris. Coming down from Amity Park, they were in the dark, for the hill
cut off the light of the fire. They went slowly with their handbrakes on.
      At the bottom of the hill, a clear womanly voice addressed them out of
the darkness: _Stop!_ They jumped off the bicycles and spread themselves flat
on the ground. They had practiced this many times. Orville pulled out his
pistol.
      The woman stepped into view, her arms over her head, hands empty. She
was quite old--that is to say, sixty or more--and defiantly innocent in
manner. She came much too close.
      "She's a decoy," Jackie whispered.
      That much was obvious, but where the others were Orville could not tell.
Trees, houses, hedges, stalled cars stood all about. Each would have been an
adequate cover. It was dark. The air was smoky. He had lost, for the while,
his night vision by watching the fire. Determining to make a show of equal
innocence, he reholstered his gun and stood up.
      He offered his hand to the woman to shake. She smiled, but did not
approach that near.
      "I wouldn't go over that next rise, my dears. There's some kind of
machine on the other side. Some sort of flamethrower, I think. If you like,
I'll show you a better way to go."
      "What does it look like, this machine?"
      "None of us have seen it. We've just seen the people who got crisped
when they got to the top of the bill. Shocking."
      It was not impossible nor even unlikely; it was equally possible and
likely that he was being led into a trap. "One moment," he told the woman. He
signaled to Jackie to stay where she was and walked up the gentle slope of the
hill. He scanned the debris that the years had heaped there and selected a
strip of lathing that must have dropped from a load of firewood. Halfway up
the hill he stopped behind one of the Plants that had broken through the
asphalt. He hurled the stick of lathing over the crest of the bill.
      Before it reached the top of its arc it flared into flame, and before it
fell out of sight, the flame was dead. The wood had been utterly consumed.
      "You're right," he said, returning to the woman. "And we thank you."
      Jackie rose to her feet. "We don't have any food," she announced, less
to the old woman than to those she supposed were surrounding them. The habit
of distrust was too strong to break in an instant.
      "Don't worry, my dears, you've passed your first test, such as it is. As
far as we're concerned, you've shown your mettle. If you only knew how many
people walk right on up. . . ." She sighed. "My name's Alice Nemerov, R.N.
Call me Alice." Then, almost as an afterthought: "The letters mean I'm a
nurse, you know. If you get sick, I can tell you the name of what you've got.
Even help a little, sometimes."
      "My name's Jeremiah Orville, MS. Call me Orville. My letters mean I'm a
mining engineer. If you have any mines, I'll be happy to look at them."
      "And you, my dear?"
      "Jackie Janice Whythe. No letters. I'm an actress, for the love of God!
I have thin hands, so I used to do a lot of soap commercials. But I can shoot,
and I don't have any scruples that I know of."
      "Splendid! Now come along and meet the other wolves. There are enough of
us to make a tidy pack. Johnny! Ned! Christie! All of you!" Shards of shadows
disengaged themselves from the static darkness and came forward.
      Jackie hugged Orville about the waist delightedly. She pulled at his
ear, and he bent down for her to whisper in it. "We're going to survive after
all! Isn't that wonderful?"
      It was more than they had expected.
      All his life he had hoped, had Jeremiah Orville, for better things. He
had hoped when he started college to become a research scientist. Instead he
had drifted into a comfortable job with more security (it had seemed) than San
Quentin. He had hoped to leave his job and Duluth as soon as he had saved
$10,000, but before the fabled sum, or even half of it, was put together, he
was married and the owner of a nice suburban home ($3,000 down, ten years to
pay the balance). He had hoped for a happy marriage, but by then (he married
late, at age 30) he had learned not to hope too hard. By 1972, when the Plants
came, he was at the point of transferring all these choice hopes to the
slender shoulders of his four-year-old son. But little Nolan proved unable to
support even the burden of his own existence during the first famine that hit
the cities, and Therese lasted only a month or two longer. He heard of her
death by chance the following year: shortly before she had died he had
deserted her.
      Like everyone else, Orville pretended to hate the invasion (in the
cities it was never considered anything but that), but secretly he relished
it, he gloried in it, he wanted nothing else. Before the invasion, Orville had
been standing on the threshold of a gray, paunchy middle age, and suddenly a
new life--life itself!--had been thrust upon him. He (and anyone else who
survived) learned to be as unscrupulous as the heroes in the pulp adventure
magazines he'd read as a boy--sometimes, as unscrupulous as the viliains.
      The world might die about him. No matter: he was alive again.
      There had been the intoxication, while it lasted, of power. Not the
cool, gloved power of wealth that had ruled before, but a newer (or an older)
kind of power that came from having the strength to perpetuate extreme
inequity. Put more bluntly, he had worked for the Government. First, as a
foreman over pressed-labor gangs; later (within only a few months, for the
pace of events was speeding up), as the director of the city's entire labor
operation. At times he wondered what difference there was between himself and,
say, an Eichmann, but he didn't let his speculations interfere with his work.
      In fact it was this, the strength of his imagination, that let him see
the untenability of the Government's position and make suitable preparations
for its collapse. The farmers could not be driven much further. They had the
habit of independence and resented the parasitism of the cities. They would
revolt and keep their little food to themselves. Without rations, the slaves
in the city (for, of course, that's what they were--slaves) would either
revolt or die. In any case, they would die. So (after suitable bureaucratic
fictions and a few bribes had had the building condemned), Orville had
provisioned his fortress in the basement of the First American National Bank
and retired from his life of public service.
      There had even been a romance, and it had progressed (unlike his
marriage) exactly as a romance should progress: a strongly contested
courtship, extravagant declarations, fevers, jealousies, triumphs--oh
unceasing triumphs, and always the aphrodisiac of mortal danger that suffused
the alleys and looted stores of the dying city.
      Three years he had been with Jackie Whythe, and it seemed no more than a
holiday weekend.
      If it were true for him, would it not be true for the other survivors as
well? Did they not all feel this clandestine gladness in their hearts, like
adulterers together secretly in a strange town? It must be so, he thought. It
must be so.


      Past the Brighton Beach Tourist Camp, the Plants grew denser and the
urban sprawl thinned. The fortuitously met little group had come to the
wilderness, where they might be safe. As they moved northeast on Route 61, the
dim light of the burning city faded behind them, and the dimmer light of the
stars was blotted out by foliage. They advanced into perfect darkness.
      They moved rapidly, however, for though the Plants had broken through
the road wherever they wished, they had not obliterated it. It was not as
though the hurrying band had to fight its way through one of the old scrub
woods that had once grown around here: no branches tore at one's face; no
brambles snagged one's feet. There were not e.ven mosquitoes, for the Plants
had drained all the marshes roundabout. The only obstructions were occasional
potholes, and sometimes, where the Plants had broken the asphalt sufficiently
to give headway to erosion, a gulley.
      Orville and the others followed the highway until morning glowed grayly
through the eastern mass of forest, then turned toward the light, toward the
lake, which had once been visible to the cars driving along this road. It
seemed dangerous to follow Route 61 any farther, as though it were an
extension of the city and subject to the city's fate. Then, too, they were
thirsty. If luck was with them, they might even get fish from the lake.
      The route had been forced on them by circumstances. It would have been
wiser, with the winter in view, to move south, but that would have meant
circling the burning city, a chance in no way worth taking. There was no water
to the west, and to the east there was too much. Lake Superior, though
diminished, was still an effective barrier. Perhaps one of the lakeshore
villages would have maintained serviceable boats, in which case they might
turn pirate, as that fleet of tugboats had done three years before when Duluth
Harbor ran dry. But the best probable direction was to continue northeast
along the shore of the lake, looting the farms and villages. Worry about
winter when winter came.
      Lake Superior teemed with sunfish. Cooked over a driftwood fire, they
were good even without salt. Afterward the group discussed, with some attempt
at optimism, their plight and prospects. There was not much to decide: the
situation dictated its own terms. The gathering was in fact less a discussion
than a contest among the sixteen men to see who would assume leadership. Their
band had been formed at hazard. Except for the couples, they did not know each
other. (There had been little social life those last years; the only community
that had survived in the cities had been the pack, and if any of these men had
been in a pack before, he wasn't talking about it now.) None of the contenders
for leadership seemed willing to discuss the details of his own survival. Such
reticence was natural and becoming: at least they had not become so brutalized
as to exult in their depravity and brag of their guilt. They had done what
they had to, but they were not necessarily proud of it.
      Alice Nemerov rescued them from this awkwardness by narrating her own
story, which was singularly free of unpleasantnesses, considering. From the
very first days of the famine she had stayed at the main hospital, living in
the isolation ward. The hospital personnel had traded on its skills and
medical supplies and gotten through even the worst times--except, apparently,
for that last worst time of all. The survivors were mostly nurses and interns;
the doctors had retired to their country houses when, after the failure of the
Government, anarchy and famine had governed the city. In the last years, Alice
Nemerov had gone about the city, armored in innocence and the certain
knowledge that her skills would be a passport among even the meanest
survivors, secure also in the knowledge that she had passed quite beyond the
point where she need worry about rape. Thus, she had come to know many of her
fellow refugees, and she effected their introductions with aplomb and tact.
She told too of other survivors and the curious expedients by which they bad
saved themselves from starvation.
      "Rats?" Jackie asked, trying not to seem overdelicate in her disgust.
      "Oh yes, my dear, lots of us tried that. I'll admit it was highly
unpleasant." Several of her listeners shook their heads in agreement.
      "And there were cannibals, too, but they were poor guilty souls, not at
all what you'd think a cannibal would be like. They were always pathetically
eager to talk, for all of them lived quite alone. Fortunately, I never came
across one when be was hungry, or my feeling might be different."
      As the sun mounted to noonday, weariness and sheer contiguity made the
others drop their guards and speak of their own pasts. Orville realized for
the first time that he was not quite the monster of iniquity that he had
sometimes thought himself. Even when he revealed that he had been a foreman on
the Government labor crews, his hearers did not seem outraged or hostile,
though several of them had been impressed for labor in their time. The
invasion had turned everyone into relativists: as tolerant of each others'
ways, and means, as if they were delegates at a convention of cultural
anthropologists.
      It was hot, and they needed sleep. The breaking down of the barriers of
solitude had tired their spirits almost as much as the march had tired their
bodies.
      The band did post sentinels, but one of them must have slept. The
opportunity for resistance was already past before it was realized.
      The farmers--their bones as ill-clothed with flesh as that flesh with
tattered denim--outnumbered them three to one, and the farmers had been able,
while the wolves slept (lambs, might not one better say?) to confiscate most
of the weapons and prevent the use of the rest.
      With one exception: Christie, whom Orville had thought he might grow to
like, had managed to shoot one farmer, an old man, in the head. Christie was
garroted.
      Everything happened very quickly, but not too quickly for Jackie to give
Orville a last kiss. When she was pulled away from him, roughly, by a younger
farmer who seemed better fleshed-out than the majority, she was smiling the
special, bittersweet smile which was reserved for just such occasions as this.



FIVE:   Blood Relations


      Lady tucked Blossom into bed that night just as though she were still
her little girl. She was only thirteen after all. Outside the men were still
going at it. It was a terrible thing. If only she could shut her ears to it.
      "I wish they didn't have to do that, Mother," Blossom whispered.
      "It's necessary, darling--a necessary evil. Those people wouldn't have
hesitated to kill us. Are you warm under that thin blanket?"
      "But why don't we just bury them?"
      "Your father knows best, Blossom. I'm sure it distresses him to have to
do this. I remember that your brother Buddy--" Lady always referred to her
stepson as Blossom's and Neil's brother, but she could never forget that this
was a half-truth at best and she stumbled over the word. "--that he once felt
the same as you."
      "_He_ wasn't there tonight. I asked Maryann. She said he'd gone out to
the west field."
      "To guard against the other marauders who may come." The steady rasping
noise outside penetrated the light weave of the summer walls and hung in the
air. Lady brushed back a strand of gray hair and composed her features to
something like sternness. "I have work to do now, darling."
      "Would you leave the light?"
      Blossom knew better than to bum oil to no purpose-- even this oil, which
had been extracted from the Plant. She was only seeing how far she could go.
"Yes," Lady conceded (for it was not just any night), "but keep it very low."
      Before she lowered the curtain that partitioned Blossom's bed from the
rest of the commonroom, she asked if Blossom had said her prayers.
      "Oh, _Mother!_"
      Lady lowered the curtain without either condoning or reproaching her
daughter's ambiguous protest. Her husband, certainly, would have seen it as an
impiety--and punishable.
      Lady could not help being pleased that Blossom was not _so_
impressionable (and if the girl had a fault, it was that) to be led too
fervently or too fearfully to adopt her father's fierce, unreasoning
Calvinism. If one had to behave like an infidel, Lady believed, it was sheer
hypocrisy to pass oneself off as a Christian. Indeed, she very much doubted
whether the god to whom her husband prayed existed. If be did, why pray to
him? He had made His choice some eons ago. He was like the old Aztec gods who
had demanded blood sacrifice on their stone altars. A jealous, vengeful god; a
god for primitives; a bloody god. What was the scripture Anderson had chosen
last Sunday? One of the minor prophets. Lady shuffled through the pages of her
husband's great Bible. There it was, in Nahum: "God is jealous, and the Lord
revengeth; the Lord revengeth, and is furious; the Lord will take vengeance on
his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies." Ah, that was God all
over!


      When the curtain was down, Blossom crawled out of bed and obediently
said her prayers. Gradually the rote formulas gave way to her own
requests--first, for impersonal benefactions (that the harvest be good, that
the next marauders be luckier and escape), then for more delicate favors (that
her hair might grow faster so that she could set it in curls again, that her
breasts would fill out just a little more, though they were already quite full
for her age--for which she gave thanks). At last, snuggling back in bed, these
formal requests gave way to mere wishful thinking, and she longed for the
things which were no longer or which were yet to be.
      When she fell asleep, the machinery outside was still grinding on.
      A noise woke her, something woke her. There was still a little light
from the lamp. "What is it?" she asked sleepily.
      Her brother Neil was standing at the foot of her bed. His face was
strangely vacant. His mouth was open: his chin hung slack. He seemed to see
her, but she could not interpret the expression in his eyes.
      "What is it?" she asked again, more sharply.
      He did not reply. He did not move. He was wearing the pants he bad worn
all that day and there was blood on them.
      "Go away, Neil. What did you want to wake me up for?"
      His lips moved, as though in sleep, and his right hand made several
gestures, emphasizing the unspoken words of his dream. Blossom pulled her thin
cover up to her chin and sat up in bed. She screamed, having only meant to
tell him to go away a little louder, so he would hear her.
      Lady slept lightly, and Blossom did not have to scream more than once.
"Are you having nightmares, my--Neil! What are you doing here? Neil?"
      "He won't say anything, Mother. He just stands there and he won't answer
me."
      Lady grabbed her oldest son--now that Jimmie was dead, her _only_
son--by the shoulder and shook him roughly. The right hand made more emphatic
gestures, but the eyes seemed to stare less raptly now. "Huh?" he mumbled.
      "Neil, you go to Greta now, do you hear? Greta is waiting for you."
      "Huh?"
      "You've been sleepwalking--or something. Now get along." She had already
pulled him away from the bed and let the curtain drop, veiling Blossom. She
was a few more minutes seeing Neil out the door, then she returned to the
trembling Blossom.
      "What did he want? Why did ho--"
      "He's been upset by the things that happened tonight, darling. Everyone
is nervous. Your father went out walking and he isn't back yet. It's only
nerves."
      "But why did he--"
      "Who knows why we do the things we do in our dreams? Now, you'd better
get to sleep again. Have your own dreams. And tomorrow--"
      "But I don't understand."
      "Let's hope Neil doesn't either, love. And tomorrow, not a word of this
to your father, do you understand? Your father's been upset lately, and it's
best that we keep it a secret. Just the two of us. Do you promise?"
      Blossom nodded. Lady tucked her into bed. Then she went back to her own
bed and waited for her husband to return. She waited till dawn, and all the
while, outside, the sausage machine kept up its dreary rasping song.


      Waking was pain. Consciousness was consciousness of pain. Movement was
painful. It was painful to breathe.
      Eddying in and out of the pain were figures of women-- an old woman, a
girl, a beautiful woman, and a very old woman. The beautiful woman was Jackie,
and since Jackie was dead he knew he was hallucinating. The very old woman was
the nurse, Alice Nemerov, R.N. When she came it was more painful, so he knew
she must be real. She moved his arms and, worse, his leg. _Stop that_, he
thought. Sometimes he would scream. He hated her because she was alive, or
because she was causing his pain. He was alive too, it seemed. Otherwise,
would he feel this pain? Or was it the pain that kept him alive? Oh, stop it.
Sometimes he could sleep. That was best.
      Ah, Jackie! Jackie! Jackie!


      Soon it was more painful to think than anything else, even than having
his leg moved. He was no more able to stop or diminish this pain than those
that had preceded it. He lay there, while the three women came and went--the
old woman, the girl and the very old woman--thinking.
      The girl talked to him.
      "Hello," she said, "how are you feeling today? Can you eat this? You
can't eat anything if you won't open your mouth. Won't you open your mouth?
Just a little? Like that--that's fine. Your name's Orville, isn't it? My
name's Blossom. Alice told us all about you. You're a mining engineer. It must
be very interesting. I've been in a cave, but I've never seen a mine. Unless
you call the iron pits mines. They're just holes, though. Open a little wider,
that's better. In fact, that's why Daddy--" She stopped. "I shouldn't talk so
much though. When you're better, we can have long talks."
      "That's why what?" he asked. It was more painful to talk than to eat.
      "That's why Daddy said to . . . said not to . . . I mean, both you and
Miss Nemerov are alive, but we had to . . ."
      "Kill."
      "Yes, we had to, all the rest."
      "The women too?"
      "But you see, we had to. Daddy explains it better than I do, but if we
didn't do that, then the others would come back, a lot of them together, and
they're very hungry, and we don't have enough food, even for ourselves. The
winter is so cold. You can understand that, can't you?"
      He didn't say anything more for some days.


      It was as though, all that time, he had lived only for Jackie, and with
her gone he no longer had any need to live. He was drained of desire for
anything but sleep. When she had been alive, he had not known that she had
meant so much to him, that anything could. He had never plumbed the measure of
his love. He should have died with her; he had tried to. Only the pain of
memory could ease the pain of regret, and nothing could ease the pain of
memory.
      He wanted to die. He told this to Alice Nemerov, R.N.
      "Watch your tongue," she counseled, "or they'll oblige you. They don't
trust the two of us. We shouldn't even talk together, or they'll think we're
plotting. And you'd better try and get well again. Eat more. They don't like
you laying around not working. You understand what saved your life, don't you?
I did. You're a damn fool to let them break your leg for you. Why wouldn't you
talk? They only wanted to know your occupation?"
      "Jackie, was she--"
      "It wasn't any different for her than for the rest. You saw the
machines. But you've got to get your mind off her. You--you're lucky to be
alive. Period."
      "The girl who feeds me--who is she?"
      "Anderson's daughter. He's the one in charge here. The wiry old man with
the constipated look. Watch out for him. And his son, the big one, Neil. He's
worse."
      "I remember him from that night. I remember his eyes."
      "But most of the people here aren't any different from you and me.
Except they're organized. They're not bad people. They only do what they have
to. Lady, for instance, Blossom's mother, is a fine woman. I have to go now.
Eat more."


      "Can't you eat more than that?" Blossom scolded. "You have to get your
strength back."
      He picked up the spoon again.
      "That's better." She smiled. There was a deep dimple in her freckled
cheek when she smiled. Otherwise, it was a commonplace smile.
      "What is this place? Does just your family live here?"
      "It's the commonroom. We only have it for the summer, because Daddy's
the mayor. Later when it's cold, the whole town moves in. It's awfully big,
bigger than you can see from here, but even so it gets crowded. There's two
hundred and forty-six of us. Forty-eight, with you and Alice. Tomorrow do you
think you can try walking? Buddy, he's my brother, my other brother, made a
crutch for you. You'll like Buddy. When you're healthy again, you'll feel
better-- I mean, you'll be happier. We aren't as bad as you think. We're
Congregationalists. What are you?"
      "I'm not."
      "Then you won't have any trouble about joining. But we don't have a real
minister, not since Reverend Pastern died. He was my sister-in-law's
father--Greta. You've seen her. She's the beauty among us. Daddy was always
important in the church, so when the Reverend died, he just naturally took
over. He can preach a good sermon, you'd be surprised. He's actually a very
religious man."
      "Your father? I'd like to hear one of those sermons."
      "I know what you're thinking, Mr. Orville. You think because of what
happened to the others that Daddy's bad. But he's not cruel deliberately. He
only does what he has to. It was--a necessary evil--what he did. Can't you eat
more? Try. I'll tell you a story about Daddy, and then you'll see that you
haven't been fair to him. One day last summer, at the end of June, the bull
got out and started after the cows. Jimmie Lee--that was his youngest--went
out after them. Jimmie Lee was sort of Daddy's Benjamin. He put great stock by
Jimmie Lee, though he tried not to show it to us others. When Daddy found
Jimmie Lee and the cows, they were all burnt up, just like they say happened
in Duluth. There wasn't even a body to carry home, just ashes. Daddy went
almost out of his mind with grief. He rubbed the ashes into his face and
cried. Then he tried to behave like nothing happened. But later that night he
just broke down again, crying and sobbing, and he went off by himself to the
grave, where he'd found him, and he just sat there for two whole days. He has
very deep feelings, but most of the time he doesn't let them show."
      "And Neil? Is he the same way?'
      "What do you mean? Neil's my brother."
      "He was the one who put the questions to me that night. And to other
people that I knew. Is he another one like your father?"
      "I wouldn't know about that night. I wasn't there. You've got to rest
now. Think about what I told you. And Mr. Orville--try and forget about that
night."
       There was growing in him a desire and will to survive, but unlike any
desire he had known till then, this was a cancerous growth, and the strength
it lent his body was the strength of hatred. Passionately, he desired not life
but revenge: for Jackie's death, for his own torture, for that whole horrible
night.
       He had never before felt much sympathy for avengers. The basic premises
of blood vengeance had always struck him as rather improbable, like the plot
of _Il Trovatore_, so that at first he was surprised to find himself dwelling
so exclusively on one theme: Anderson's death, Anderson's agony, Anderson's
humiliation.
       Initially his imagination was content simply to devise deaths for the
old man; then, as his strength grew, these deaths were elaborated with
tortures, which finally displaced death entirely. Tortures could be
protracted, while death was an end.
       But Orville, having himself tasted the bitterest gall, knew that there
was a limit beyond which pain cannot be heightened. He desired Anderson to
endure the sufferings of Job. He wanted to grind ashes into the man's gray
hair, to crush his spirit, to ruin him. Only then would he allow Anderson to
know that it had been he, Jeremiah Orville, who had been the agent of his
humbling.
       So that when Blossom told him the story of how the old man had carried
on over Jimmie Lee, he realized what he had to do. Why, it had been staring
him in the face!


       They had walked all the way to the cornfield together, Blossom and
Orville. The leg had mended, but he would probably always have the limp. Now,
at least, he could limp on his own--without any other crutch than Blossom.
       "And that's the corn that's going to feed us all this winter?" he asked.
       "It's more than we really need. A lot of it was meant for the cows."
       "I suppose you'd be out there harvesting with the rest of them if it
weren't for me." It was the custom, during harvest, for the old women and the
younger girls to take over the village duties while the stronger women went
out into the fields with the men.
       "No, I'm not old enough."
       "Oh, come now. You're fifteen, if you're a day."
       Blossom giggled. "You're just saying that. I'm thirteen. I won't be
fourteen till January 31."
       "You could have fooled me. You're very well developed for thirteen."
       She blushed. "How old are you?" she asked.
       "Thirty-five." It was a lie, but he knew he could get away with it.
Seven years ago, when he had been thirty-five, he bad looked older than he did
now.
       "I'm young enough to be your daughter, Mr. Orville."
       "On the other hand, Miss Anderson, you're _almost_ old enough to be my
wife."
       She blushed more violently this time and would have left him except that
he needed her for support. This was the farthest he'd walked on his own. They
stopped for him to rest.
       Except for the harvesting, it was hard to recognize this as September.
The Plants did not change color with the seasons: they just folded their
leaves like umbrellas to let the snow pass to the ground. Nor was there any
hint of autumn spiciness in the air. The cold of the mornings was a
characterless cold.
       "It's beautiful out here in the country," Orville said.
       "Oh yes. I think so too."
       "Have you lived here all your life?"
       "Yes, here or in the old town." She darted a sideways look at him.
"You're feeling better now, aren't you?"
       "Yes, it's great to be alive."
      "I'm glad. I'm glad you're well again." Impulsively she caught hold of
his hand. He answered with a squeeze. She giggled with delight.
      They began to run.


      This, then, seemed to be the final stage of his years-long reversion to
the primitive. Orville could not imagine a more unseemly action than the one
he intended, and its baseness only heightened the bloody passion that
continued to grow in him. His revenge now demanded more than Anderson, more
than the man's entire family. It demanded the whole community. And time to
savor their annihilation. He must wring every drop of agony from them, from
each of them; he must take them, gradually, to the limit of their capacity for
suffering and only then push them over the edge.


      Blossom turned in her sleep and her hands clutched at the pillow of corn
husks. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, and beads of sweat
broke out on her brow and in the dainty hollow between her breasts. There was
a weighi on her chest, as though someone were pressing her into the earth with
his heavy boots. He was going to kiss her. When his mouth opened, she could
see the screw turning within. Shreds of ground meat tumbled forth. The screw
made a dreary rasping sound.



SIX:   Thanksgiving


      Gray clouds were massing overhead. The ground was dry, bare, gray; no
grass, no trees, only the Plants, folded for the winter like parasols, grew
here. The dull, autumnal light would thicken at times, and a breeze would pass
through the park, picking up the dust. Sitting at the concrete picnic tables
on the cold benches, a person could see his own breath. Bare hands grew numb
and stiff in the cold. All through the park, people exercised their freezing
toes inside their shoes and wished that Anderson would finish saying grace.
      Across from the park stood what remained of the Congregationalist
Church. Anderson had not let his own people cannibalize the wood from the
church, but last winter marauders had stripped off the doors for firewood and
broken the windows for fun. The winds had filled the church with snow and
dust, and in the spring the oak floor had been covered with a lush green
carpet of young Plants. Fortunately it had been discovered in time (for the
which they were to be thankful), but even so the floor would probably soon
collapse of its own weight.
      Buddy, wearing his single surviving suit, shivered as the prayer dragged
out its slow length. Anderson, standing at the head of the table, was also
wearing a suit for the occasion, but Neil, sitting on his father's left hand
and facing Buddy, had never owned a suit. He was bundled in woolen shirts and
a denim jacket, enviably snug.
      It was the custom of the townspeople, like expatriates who return home
on brief visits to establish their legal residence, to celebrate all festive
occasions except Christmas here in the old town park. Like so many of the
unpleasant and disheartening things they had to do, it was necessary for their
morale.
      Anderson, having at length established the principle that God Almighty
was responsible for their manifold blessings, began to enumerate them. The
most salient of these blessings was never directly referred to--that, after
seven and a half years, they were all still alive (all of them that were),
while so many others, the great majority, were dead. Anderson, however, dwelt
on more peripheral blessings, local to that year: the abundance of the
harvest, Gracie's continued health in her tenth month with calf (not referring
to associated losses), the two recent litters of pigs, and such game as the
hunters had come home with. Unfortunately, this had been little (one deer and
several rabbits), and a surly, scolding note crept into the prayer. Anderson
soon rallied and came to a graceful close, thanking his Creator of the wealth
of his great Creation and his Savior for the promise of Salvation.
      Orville was the first to respond. His _amen_ was reverent and at the
same time manly. Neil mumbled something with the rest of them and reached for
the jug of whiskey (they called it whiskey), which was still three-quarters
full.
      Lady and Blossom, who sat together at the end of the table nearest the
brick barbecue, began serving the soup. It was faintly reminiscent of rabbit
and poorly seasoned with weeds from the lake.
      "Dig in!" she said cheerily. "There's plenty more coming."
      What else could you say on Thanksgiving?
      Since it was an important holiday, the whole family, on both sides, was
together. Besides the seven Andersons, there was Mae, Lady's younger sister,
and her husband Joel Stromberg, formerly of Stromberg's Lakeside Resort
Cabins, and the two little Strombergs, Denny, age ten, and Dora, eight. There
were, moreover, the Andersons' special guests (still on probation), Alice
Nemerov, R.N., and Jeremiah Orville.
      Lady could not help but regret the presence of the Strombergs, for she
was certain that Denny and Dora would only remind her husband more forcibly of
him who was absent from the table. Then, too, the years had not dealt kindly
With her dear sister. Mae had been admired as a beauty in her youth (though
probably not to the degree Lady had been), but at forty-five she was a frump
and a troublemaker. Admittedly, she still had her flame-red hair, but that
only pointed up the decay of what else remained. The only virtue that remained
to her was that she was a solicitous mother. Too much so, Lady thought.
      Lady had always hated the brassy reverence of the holidays. Now, when
there was not even the ritual gluttony of a turkey dinner to alleviate the
gloom that underlay the holiday cheer, one's only hope was to be out of it as
quickly as possible. She was grateful, at least, to be occupied with the
serving. If she were carefully inefficient, she might get out of eating
altogether.
      "Neil," Greta whispered. "You're drinking too much. You'd better stop."
      "Huh?" Neil replied, peering up at his wife (he had the habit, when he
ate, of bending down over his food, especially if it was soup).
      "You're _drinking_ too much."
      "I wasn't drinking at all, for gosh sakes!" he said, for the whole table
to hear. "I was eating my soup!"
      Greta cast up her eyes to heaven, a martyr to truth. Buddy smiled at the
transparency of her purpose, and she caught his smile. There was a flicker of
eyelashes, no more.
      "'N any case, it ain't any business of yours _how_ much I drink or don't
drink. I'll drink just as much as I want." To demonstrate this, he poured
himself some more of the liquor distilled from the pulpy leaves of the Plant.
      It didn't taste like Jim Beam, but Orville had testified to its purity
from his own experience of it in Duluth. It was the first use, as food, that
Anderson had been able to find for the Plants, and since he was by no means a
teetotaler himself, he'd given the project his blessing. Anderson wanted to
frown at the way Neil was swilling it down, but he said nothing, not wanting
it to look as though he were taking Greta's side. Anderson was a firm believer
in male supremacy.
      "Anyone want more soup?" Blossom asked.
      "I do," said Maryann, who was sitting between her husband and Orville.
She ate all she could get now, for the baby's sake. For her little Buddy.
      "And I do," said Orville, with that special smile of his.
      "I do, too," said Denny and Dora, whose parents had told them to eat all
they could at the dinner, which Anderson was providing.
      "Anybody else?"
      Everybody else had returned to the whiskey, which tasted unpleasantly
like licorice.


      Joel Stromberg was describing the progress of his disease to Alice
Nemerov, R.N. "And it doesn't really hurt--that's the funny thing. It's just
that whenever I want to use my hands they start to shaking. And now my head's
the same way. Something's got to be done."
      "But I'm afraid, Mr. Stromberg, that nothing can be. There used to be
some drugs, but even they didn't work very well. Six months, and the symptoms
would reappear. Fortunately, as you say, it doesn't hurt."
      "You're a nurse, aren't you?"
      He was going to be one of _those!_ Very carefully, she began to explain
everything she knew about Parkinson's disease, and a few things she didn't. If
only she could involve someone else in the conversation! The only other soul
within speaking distance was the greedy Stromberg boy, who was snitching
drinks from the glass of that foul liquor (one taste bad been enough for
Alice) sitting before Lady's empty plate. If only Lady or Blossom would stop
serving food and sit down for a minute, she could escape from the intolerable
hypochondriac. "Tell me," she said, "when did it all start?"


      The fish were all eaten, and Blossom began gathering the bones. The
moment everyone had been waiting for--the dreadful moment of the main
course--could be put off no longer. While Blossom brought round the bowl of
steaming polenta into which were stirred a few shreds of chicken and garden
vegetables, Lady herself distributed the sausages. A hush fell over the table.
      Each of them had a single sausage. Each sausage was about nine inches
long and three-quarter inch in diameter. They had been crisped over the fire
and came to the table still sizzling.
      _There is some pork in them_, Alice reassured herself. _I probably won't
be able to tell the difference_.
      Everyone's attention turned to the head of the table. Anderson lifted
his knife and fork. Then, fully aware of the solemnity of the moment, he
sliced off a piece of hot sausage, put it in his mouth, and began to chew.
After what seemed a full minute, he swallowed it.
      _There, but for the grace of God_ . . . . Alice thought.
      Blossom had turned quite pale, and under the table Alice reached for her
hand to lend her strength, though Alice didn't feel an excess of it just then.
      "What's everyone waiting for?" Anderson demanded. "There's food on the
table."
      Alice's attention drifted toward Orville, who was sitting there with
knife and fork in hand, and that strange smile of his. He caught Alice's
look--and winked at her. Of all things! Or was it at _her?_
      Orville cut off a piece of the sausage and chewed it consideringly. He
smiled beamishly, like a man in a toothpaste ad. "Mrs. Anderson," he
announced, "you are a _marvelous_ cook. How do you do it? I haven't had a
Thanksgiving dinner like this since God knows when."
      Alice felt Blossom's fingers relax and pull out of hers. _She's feeling
better, now that the worst is over_, Alice thought.
      But she was wrong. There was a heavy noise, as when a bag of meal is
dropped to the ground, and Mae Stromberg screamed. Blossom had fainted.


      He, Buddy, would not have allowed it, much less have originated and
insisted upon it, but then very probably he, Buddy, would not have been able
to bring the village through those seven hellish years. Primitive, pagan,
unprecedented as it was, there was a rationale for it.
      It. They were all afraid to call it by its right name. Even Buddy, in
the inviolable privacy of his own counsel, shied away from the word for it.
      Necessity might have been some justification. There was ample precedent
(the Donner party, the wreck of the _Medusa_), and Buddy would have had to go
no further than this for an excuse-if they had been starving.
      Beyond necessity, explanations grew elaborate and rather metaphysical.
Thus, metaphysically, in this meal the community was united by a complex bond,
the chief of whose elements was complicity in murder, but this complicity was
achieved by a ritual as solemn and mysterious as the kiss by which Judas
betrayed Christ; it was a sacrament. Mere horror was subsumed into tragedy,
and the town's Thanksgiving dinner was the crime and the atonement, so to
speak, in one blow.
      Thus the theory, but Buddy, in his heart, felt nothing but the horror of
it, mere horror, and nothing in his stomach but nausea.
      He washed down another steadfast mouthful with the licorice-flavored
alcohol.


      Neil, when he had polished off his second sausage, began to tell a dirty
joke. They had all, except for Orville and Alice, heard him tell the same joke
last Thanksgiving. Orville was the only one to laugh, which made it worse
rather than better.
      "Where the hell is the deer?" Neil shouted, as though this followed
naturally from the punch line.
      "What are you talking about?" his father asked. Anderson, when he drank
(and today he was almost keeping up to Neil), brooded. In his youth he had had
a reputation as a mean fighter after his eighth or ninth beer.
      "The _deer_, for Christ's sake! The deer I shot the other day! Aren't we
going to have some venison? What the hell kind of Thanksgiving is this?"
      "Now, Neil," Greta chided, "you _know_ that has to be salted down for
the winter. There'll be little enough meat as it is."
      "Well, where are the other deer? Three years ago those woods were
swarming with deer."
      "I've been wondering about that myself," Orville said, and again he was
David Niven or perhaps, a little more somberly, James Mason. "Survival is a
matter of ecology. That's how I'd explain it. Ecology is the way the different
plants and animals live together. That is to say--who eats whom; The deer--and
just about everything else, I'm afraid--are becoming extinct."
      There was a silent but perceptible gasp from several persons at the
table who had thought as much but never dared say so in Anderson's presence.
      "God will provide," Anderson interposed darkly.
      "Yes, that must be our hope, for Nature alone will not. Just consider
what's happened to the soil. This used to be forest soil, podzol. Look at
it--" He scooped up a handful of the gray dust on the ground. "Dust. In a
couple years, with no grass or brush to hold it down, every inch of topsoil
will be in the lake. Soil is a living thing. It's full of insects, worms--I
don't know what all."
      "Moles," Neil put in.
      "Ah, _moles!_" said Orville, as though that cinched it. "And all those
things live on the decaying plants and leaves in the soil--or on each other,
the way we do. You've probably noticed that the Plants don't shed their
leaves. So, except where we plant crops, the soil is dying. No, it's dead
already. And when the soil is dead, plants-our plants--will not be able to
live in it again. Not the way they used to."
      Anderson snorted his contempt for so preposterous a notion.
      "But deer don't live underground," Neil objected.
      "True--they are herbivores. Herbivores need to eat grass. For a while, I
suppose, they must have lived on the young Plants springing up near the
lakeshore, or else, like rabbits, they can eat the bark from the older Plants.
But either that was an inadequate diet nutritionally, or there wasn't enough
to go around, or--"
      "Or what?" Anderson demanded.
      "Or the wild life is being eliminated the way your cows were last
summer, the way Duluth was in August."
      "You can't prove it," Neil shouted. "I've seen those piles of ashes in
the woods. They don't prove a thing. Not a thing!" He took a long swallow from
the jug and stood up, waving his right hand to show that it couldn't be
proved. He did not estimate the position or inertia of the concrete table very
well, so that, coming up against it, he was knocked back to his seat and then
drawn by gravity to the ground. He rolled in the gray dirt, groaning. He had
hurt himself. He was very drunk. Greta, clucking disapproval, got up from the
table to help.
      "Leave him lay!" Anderson told her.
      "Excuse _me!_" she declaimed, exciting grandly. "Excuse me for living."
      "What ashes was he talking about?" Orville asked Anderson.
      "I haven't the faintest idea," the old man said. He took a swallow from
the jug and washed it around in his mouth. Then he let it trickle down his
throat, trying to forget the flavor by concentrating on the sting.


       Little Denny Stromberg leaned across the table and asked Alice Nemerov
if she was going to eat any more of her sausage. She'd taken only a single
bite.
       "I think not," Alice replied.
       "Can I eat it then?" he asked. His blue-green eyes glowed from the
liquor he had been sneaking all through the meal. Otherwise, Alice was sure,
his were not the sort of eyes to glow. "Please, huh?"
       "Don't mind Denny, Miz Nemerov. He doesn't mean to be _rude_. Do you,
sweet?"
       "Eat it," Alice said, scraping the cold sausage off onto the boy's
plate.
       _Eat it and be damned!_ she thought.


      Mae had just observed that they had been thirteen at the table. ". . .
so if you believe the old superstitions, one of us will die before the year's
out," she concluded with a gay little laugh, in which only her husband joined.
"Well, I do believe it's getting awfully cold here," she added, raising her
eyebrows to show that her words bore more than a single meaning. "Though what
can you expect at the end of November?"
      Nobody seemed to expect anything.
      "Mr. Orville, tell me, are you native to Minnesota? I ask because of
your accent. It sounds sort of English, if you know what I mean. Are you an
American?"
      "Mae--really!" Lady scolded.
      "He does talk funny, you know. Denny noticed it too."
      "Really?" Orville stared at Mae Stromberg intently, as though to count
each frizzled red hair, and with the strangest smile. "That's odd. I was
raised all my life in Minneapolis. I suppose it's just the difference between
the city and the country."
      "And you're a city person at heart, just like our Buddy. I'll bet you
wish you were back there right now, eh? I know your kind." She winked lewdly
to indicate just what kind that was.
      "Mae, for heaven's sake--"
      But Denny succeeded where Lady could not in bringing Mrs. Stromberg to a
stop. He vomited all over the table. The heavings splashed onto the four women
around him--Lady, Blossom, Alice, and his mother--and there was a great
Commotion as the women tried to escape the danger that was threatening anew on
Denny's face. Orville couldn't help himself--he laughed. He was joined,
fortunately, by Buddy and little Dora, whose mouth was filled with sausage.
Even Anderson made a noise that might charitably have been interpreted as
laughter.
      Buddy excused himself, and Orville rose only a moment later, with more
compliments for the cook and a scarcely perceptible gesture in Blossom's
direction, which, however, Blossom perceived. Stromberg took his son off into
the woods, but not far enough to prevent the rest of them from hearing the
whipping.
      Neil was asleep on the ground.
      Maryann, Dora, and Anderson were left alone at the table. Maryann had
been crying off and on all day. Now, since she too had had something to drink,
she started to talk: "Oh, I can remember the time . . ."
      "Excuse me," said Anderson, leaving the table, and taking the jug with
him.
      ". . . in the old days," Maryann went on. "And everything was so
beautiful then--the turkey and the pumpkin pie-- and everybody so happy . . ."


       Greta, after quitting the table, had gone roundaboutly to the church.
Before vanishing into the dark vestibule, she and Buddy, who had watched her
all the while, had exchanged a glance and Buddy had nodded yes. When the
dinner broke up, he followed her there.
       "Hello there, stranger!" Apparently she had settled on this gambit
permanently.
       "Hello, Greta. You were in high form today."
       In the vestibule they were out of the line of sight from the picnic
grounds. The floor was reassuringly solid. Greta took the nape of Buddy's neck
firmly in her two cold hands and pulled his lips to hers. Their teeth gnashed
together, and their tongues renewed an old acquaintance.
       When he began to pull her closer, she drew back, laughing softly. Having
gained what she wanted, she could afford to tease. Yes, that was the old
Greta.
       "Wasn't Neil drunk?" she whispered. "Wasn't he just stinko?"
       The expression in her eyes was not exactly as he remembered it, and he
could not tell, of the body beneath her winter clothes, whether it had changed
likewise. It occurred to him to wonder how much he had changed, but the desire
mounting within him overrode such irrelevancies. Now it was he who kissed her.
Slowly, in an embrace, they began to sink to the floor.
       "Oh no," she whispered, "don't."
       They were on their knees thus, when Anderson entered. He did not say
anything for a long time, nor did they rise. A strange, sly look came over
Greta's face, and Buddy thought that it had been this, nothing but this, which
Greta had hoped for. She had chosen the church for that very reason.
       Anderson made a gesture for them to get up, and he allowed Greta to
leave, after only spitting in her face.
       Was this compassion, that he did not demand the punishment that the
law--his own law--exacted of adulterers: that they be stoned? Or was it only
parental weakness? Buddy could read nothing in the old man's grimace.
       "I came here to pray," he said to his son when they were alone. Then,
instead of finishing his sentence, he swung his booted foot hard at him, but
too slowly--perhaps it was the liquor--for Buddy twisted aside in time and
received the kick safely in his hip.
       "Okay, boy, we'll take care of this later," Anderson promised, his voice
slurring the words. Then he went into the church to pray.
       It seemed that Buddy was no longer to enjoy the position he had
inherited last June of being foremost in his father's favor. As he left the
church, the first snowflakes of the new season drifted down from the gray sky.
Buddy watched them melting on the palm of his hand.



SEVEN:   Advent
      Gracie the cow lived right there in the commonroom with everybody else.
The chickens, likewise, had a corner to themselves, but the pigs were housed
in a sty of their own, outside.
      For four days, beginning that Thanksgiving, the snow had drifted down,
slowly, ponderously, like snow settling on the miniature town inside a glass
paperweight. Then for one week of bright wintry weather the children went
sledding down the old lakeshore. After that the snow came down in earnest,
driven by gale winds that made Anderson fear for the walls, bolstered though
they were by the high drifts. Three or four times a day the men went outside
to wind back the "awning" that formed the roof of the commonroom. As the half
of the roof heavy with snow was cleared off and rolled up, the other half
emerged from its weathertight cocoon to replace it. Aside from this chore and
the care of the pigs, the men were idle during a blizzard. The rest of the
work--cooking, weaving, looking after the children and the sick--was for
women. Later, when the weather cleared, they could hunt again or, with more
hope of success, fish through the ice of the lake. There were also plenty of
Plants to chop down.
      It was hard to get through these idle days. Drink wasn't allowed in the
commonroom (there were enough fights as it was), and poker soon lost its
appeal when the money in the pot was no more valuable than the money the
children played with at their unending games of Monopoly. There were few books
to read, except Anderson's calf-bound Bible (the same that once had graced the
lectern of the Episcopal Church), for indoor space was at a premium. Even if
there had been books, it was doubtful that anyone would have read them.
Orville might have--he seemed a bookish sort. Buddy would have. And Lady had
always read a lot too.
      The conversation, such as it was, never rose above the level of griping.
For the most part, the men imitated Anderson, who sat immobile on the edge of
his bed, chewing the pulp of the Plant. It is questionable, however, whether
they spent this time, like Anderson, in thought directed to useful ends. When
spring came, all the ideas, the projects, the innovations came from Anderson
and no one else.
      Now, it appeared, there was someone else capable of thought. He, by
contrast, preferred to think aloud. To the old man, sitting there listening to
Jeremiah Orville, the ideas that were put forth seemed positively irreligious
at times. The way he talked about the Plants, for instance--as though they
were only a superior laboratory specimen. As though he admired their conquest.
Yet he said many things, in almost the same breath, that made good sense. Even
when the weather was the subject of conversation (and more often than not it
was), Orville had something to say about that.
      "I still maintain," Clay Kestner had said (this was on the first day of
the bad blizzard, but Clay had been maintaining the same thing for several
years), "that it's not the weather getting colder but us getting out in the
cold more. It's psychosomatical. There ain't no _reason_ for the weather to
get colder."
      "Damn it, Clay," Joel Stromberg replied, shaking his head reprovingly
(though it might have been just palsy), "if this winter ain't colder than the
winters in the sixties and fifties I'll eat my hat. It used to be that we'd
worry whether we was going to have a white Christmas. And I say it's the way
the lake has gone down causes it."
      "Poppycock!" Clay insisted, not without justice.
      Usually no one would have paid any more attention to Clay and Joel than
to the wind whining about the spiky Plants outside, but this time Orville
intruded: "You know-- there _may_ be a reason why it's getting colder. Carbon
dioxide."
      "What's that got to do with the price of eggs?" Clay quipped.
      "Carbon dioxide is what the Plants--any plants--take in to combine with
water when they're making their own food. It's also what we--that is,
animals--exhale. Since the Plants have come, I suspect that the old balance
between the carbon dioxide they take in and the amount we give off has started
favoring the Plants. So there's less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now,
carbon dioxide is a great absorber of heat. It stores heat from the sun and
keeps the air warm. So with less carbon dioxide, there'll be a lot more cold
and snow. That's just a theory, of course."
      "That's a hell of a theory!"
      "I'll agree with you there, Clay, since it's not mine. It's one of the
reasons geologists give for the ice ages."
      Anderson didn't believe strongly in geology, since so much of it went
against the Bible, but if what Orville said about carbon dioxide was true,
then the worsening of the winters (and they were worse, no one really doubted
it) might well have that for a cause. But true or not, there was something he
didn't like in Orville's tone, something more than just the know-it-all
attitude of the college grad, which Anderson was used to from Buddy. It was as
if these little lectures on the wonders of science (and there had been more
than a few) had but a single purpose: to lead them to despair.
      But he _did_ know more science than anyone else, and Anderson grudgingly
respected him for it. If nothing else, he'd stopped Clay and Joel from arguing
about the weather, and for that small blessing Anderson could not help but
give thanks.


      It was not as bad yet as it would become in February and March, but it
was very bad: the close quarters, the silly quarrels, the noise, the stench,
the abrasion of flesh on flesh and nerve on nerve. It was very bad. It was
well nigh intolerable.
      Two hundred and fifty people lived in 2,400 square feet, and much of
that space was given over to storage. Last winter when there had been almost
double the number in the same room, when every day witnessed a new death,
every month a new epidemic of the deadly common cold, it had been measurably
worse. The more susceptible types-those who couldn't bear up--had run amok,
singing and laughing, into the deceiving warmth of the January thaws; these
were gone this year. This year the walls were firmly anchored and tightly
woven from the start; this year the rationing was not so desperately tight
(though there _would_ be less meat). Yet for all these improvements, it was
still an intolerable way to live and everyone knew it.
      The thing that Buddy could not stand, the very worst thing, was the
presence of so much flesh. All day it rubbed against him, it displayed itself,
it stank in his nostrils. And any of the hundred women in the room, even
Blossom, would by the simplest gesture, by the tamest word, trigger his lust.
Yet for all the good it did him, he might as well have been watching the
bloodless phantasms of a movie. There was simply no place, day or night, in
the cramped commonroom for sex. His erotic life was limited to such occasions
as he could impose upon Maryann to come with him to visit the freezing
outhouse by the pig sty. Maryann, in her seventh month and prone at any time
to sniffles, seldom accommodated him.
      It did not help that, as long as there was daylight in the room, Buddy
could look up from whatever he was doing (or more likely--whatever he wasn't
doing) and see, probably no more than twenty feet away, Greta.
      More and more, he found himself seeking the refuge of Jeremiah Orville's
company. Orville was the sort of person, familiar to Buddy from the
university, whom he had always liked much more than they had liked him. Though
he never once told a joke in Buddy's hearing, when the man talked-and he
talked incessantly--Buddy couldn't keep from laughing. It was like the
conversations in books and movies or the way people talked on the old Jack
Paar show, people who could take the most commonplace thing and, in the
telling, make it funny. Orville never tried to clown; his humor was in the way
he looked at things--with a certain, sly irreverence (not so much that someone
like Anderson could object), an oblique mockery. You never knew where you
stood with him, so that most folks--the authentic grassroots hicks like
Neil--were reluctant to get into conversations with him, though they listened
gladly. Buddy found himself imitating Orville, using _his_ words, pronouncing
them _his_ way (_gen_-uine instead of genu-_wine_), adopting _his_ ideas.
      It was a constant source of wonder how much the man _knew_. Buddy, who
considered his own education barely sufficient to judge the scope of another
person's, considered Orville encyclopedic.
      Buddy fell so thoroughly under the older man's influence that it would
not be unjust to say he was infatuated. There were times (for instance, such
times as Orville would talk too long with Blossom) when Buddy felt something
like jealousy.
      He would have been surprised to learn that Blossom felt much the same
way when Orville spent undue time with him. It was quite evidently a case of
infatuation, of conventional puppy-love.
      Even Neil had a good word to say for the newcomer, for one day Orville
had taken him aside and taught him a whole new store of dirty jokes.


      The hunters hunted alone; the fishermen fished together. Neil, a hunter,
was grateful for the chance to be alone, but the lack of game that December
aggravated him almost as much as the shove and clamor of the commonroom. But,
the day the blizzard stopped, he found deer tracks cutting right through the
still-uncrusted snow of the west cornfield. He followed them four miles,
stumbling over his own snowshoes in his eagerness. The tracks terminated in a
concavity of ash and ice. No tracks led away from or approached the area. Neil
swore loudly. Then he screamed for a while, not really aware that he was
screaming. It let off the pressure.
      _No use hunting now_, he thought, when he began to think again. He
decided he would rest for the rest of the day. Rest . . . rest! Ha! He'd have
to remember that. With the other hunters and fishermen still out of the
commonroom, maybe he'd get a little privacy.
      That's what he did--he went home and drank a pot of cruddy
licorice-flavored tea (that's what they called it, tea) and he got to feeling
drowsy and hardly knew what he was looking at or what he was thinking (he was
looking at Blossom and thinking of her) when all of a sudden Gracie started
making an uproar like he'd never heard before. Except he had heard it before:
Gracie was calving.
      The cow was making grunting noises like a pig. She rolled over on her
side and squirmed around in the dirt. This was Gracie's first calf, and she
wasn't any too big. Trouble was only to be expected. Neil knotted some rope
into a noose and got it over her neck but she was thrashing around so that he
couldn't get it over her legs so he let that go. Alice, the nurse, was helping
him, but he wished his father was there anyhow. Old Gracie was bellowing like
a bull now.
      Any cow that goes more than an hour is a sure loss, and even half an
hour is bad. Gracie was in pain like that and bellowing for half an hour. She
kept squirming backward to try and escape the shooting pains. Neil hauled on
the rope to keep her from doing that.
      "I can see his head. His head's coming out now," Alice said. She was
down on her knees in back of Gracie, trying to spread her wider open.
      "If that's all you can see, how do you know it's a her?"
      The calf's sex was crucial, and everyone in the commonroom had gathered
around to watch the calving. After each bellow of pain, the children shouted
their encouragement to Gracie. Then her squirming got worse, while her
bellowing quieted. "That's it, that's it!" Alice was calling out, and Neil
hauled all the harder against the rope.
      "It's a boy!" Alice exclaimed. "Thank God, it _is_ a boy!"
      Neil laughed at the old woman. "It's a _bull_ is what you mean. You city
slickers are all alike." He felt good because he hadn't made any mistakes and
everything was hunkydory. So he went over to the barrel and got the top off
and dipped himself a drink to celebrate. He asked Alice if she wanted one, but
she just looked at him funny-like and said no.
      He sat down in the room's single easy chair (Anderson's) and watched the
little bull-calf sucking at Gracie's full udder. Gracie hadn't got up. She
must have been exhausted by the birthing. Why, if Neil hadn't been around, she
probably wouldn't of lived through it probably. The licorice flavor wasn't so
bad once you got used to it. All the women were quiet now, and the children
too.
      Neil looked at the bull-calf and thought how someday it'd be a big horny
bull mounting Gracie--his own mother! _Animals_, he thought foggily, _are just
like animals_. But that wasn't exactly it.
      He had some more to drink.
      When Anderson got home he looked like he'd had a bad day (was the
afternoon gone already?), but Neil got up from the warm chair and called out
happily: "Hey, Dad, it's a bull!"
      Anderson came up, and he looked the way Neil remembered him looking
Thanksgiving night, all dark and with that ugly smile (but he hadn't said a
word, then or later, about Neil drinking too much at dinner), and he hit Neil
in the face, he just knocked him right down on the floor.
      "You goddam stupid asshole!" Anderson yelled. "You dumb turd! Don't you
know that Gracie's dead? You strangled her to death, you son of a bitch!"
      Then he kicked Neil. Then he went over and cut Gracie's neck where the
rope was still tight around it. Most of the cold blood went into the basin
Lady was holding, but some of it spilled out in the dirt. The calf was pulling
at the dead cow's udder, but there wasn't any more milk. Anderson cut the
calf's throat too.
      It wasn't _his_ fault, was it? It was Alice's fault. He hated Alice. He
hated his father too. He hated all those bastards who thought they were so
goddam smart. He hated all of them. He hated all of them.
      And he cupped his pain in his two hands and tried not to scream from the
pain in his hands and the pain in his head, the pain of hating, but maybe he
did scream, who knows?


      Shortly before dark the snow began to come down again, a perfectly
perpendicular descent through the windless air. The only light in the
commonroom came from the single hurricane lamp burning in the kitchen alcove
where Lady was scouring the well scoured pots. No one spoke. Who dared say how
fine the usual mush of cornmeal and rabbit tasted flavored with the blood of
cow and calf. It was quiet enough to hear the chickens fussing and clucking in
their roosts in the far corner.
      When Anderson went outside to direct the butchering and salting down of
the carcasses, neither Neil nor Buddy was invited to participate. Buddy sat by
the kitchen door on the dirty welcome mat and pretended to read a freshman
biology text in the semidarkness. He had read it through many times before and
knew some passages by heart. Neil was sitting by the other door, trying to
screw up the courage to go outside and join the butchers.
      Of all the townspeople, Buddy was probably the only one who took
pleasure in Gracie's death. In the weeks since Thanksgiving, Neil had been
winning his way back into his father's favor. Now since Neil himself had so
effectively reversed that trend, Buddy reasoned that it would be only a matter
of time before he would again enjoy the privileges of his primogeniture. The
extinction of the species (were Herefords a species?) was not too high a price
to pay.
      There was one other who rejoiced at this turn of events, but he was not,
either in his own estimation or in theirs, one of the townspeople. Jeremiah
Orville had hoped that Gracie or her calf or both might die, for the
preservation of the cattle had been one of Anderson's proudest achievements, a
token that civilization-as-we-had-known-it was not quite passé and a sign, for
those who would see it, that Anderson was truly of the Elect. That the agency
that would realize Orville's hopes should be the incompetence of the man's own
son afforded Orville an almost esthetic pleasure: as though some tidy,
righteous deity were assisting his revenge, scrupulous that the laws of poetic
justice be observed. Orville was happy tonight, and he worked at the
butchering with a quiet fury. From time to time, when he could not be seen, he
swallowed a gobbet of raw beef--for he was as hungry as any man there. But he
would starve willingly, if only he might see Anderson starve before him.
      A peculiar noise, a windy sound but not the wind, caught his attention.
It seemed familiar, but he couldn't place it. It was a sound that belonged to
the city. Joel Stromberg, who was looking after the pigs, shouted: "Ah,
hey!--there---- whadaya--" Abruptly, Joel was metamorphosed into a pillar of
fire.
      Orville saw this no more distinctly than he had heard the sound
preceding it, but without taking thought he hurled himself over a nearby
snowbank. He rolled in the powdery snow till he was out of sight of
everything--the carcasses, the other men, the pigsty. Everything but the
flames rising from the burning sty. "Mr. Anderson!" he yelled. Terrified lest
he lose his intended victim to the fires of the incendiaries, he crawled back
to rescue the old man.
      Three spherical bodies, each about five feet in diameter, floated just
above the snow at the periphery of the flames. The men (with the exception of
Anderson, who was crouched behind the flank of the dead cow, aiming his pistol
at the nearest sphere) stood watching the blaze, as though bewitched. Spumes
of steamy breath drifted from their open mouths.
      "Don't waste bullets on armor plate, Mr. Anderson. Come on--they'll fire
the commonroom next. We've got to get the people out of there."
      "Yes," Anderson agreed, but he did not move. Orville had to pull him
away. In that moment of stuporous incapacity, Orville thought he saw in
Anderson the seed of what Neil had become.
      Orville entered the commonroom first. Since the walls were buttressed
with great drifts of snow, none of them was yet aware of the blaze outside.
They were, as they had been all evening, leaden with unhappiness. Several had
already gotten into bed.
      "Everybody--start getting your clothes on," Orville commanded in a voice
as calm as authoritative. "Leave this room as quickly as possible by the
kitchen door and run into the woods. Take anything with you that's at hand,
but don't waste time looking for things. Don't wait for someone else to catch
up. Quickly, now."
      As many as had heard Orville looked dumbfounded. It was not for him to
be giving orders.
      "Quickly," Anderson directed, "and no questions."
      They were accustomed to obeying Anderson unquestioningly, but there was
still much confusion. Anderson, accompanied by Orville, went directly to the
area by the kitchen where his own family was quartered. They were all bundling
into their heavy clothes, but Anderson bundled them faster.
      Outside there were screams, brief as the whistle of a slaughtered
rabbit, as the incendiary devices were turned on their spectators. A man ran
into the room, flaming, and fell to the floor, dead. The panic began.
Anderson, already near the door, commanded respect even in the midst of
hysteria and managed to get his family out among the first. Passing through
the kitchen, Lady grabbed an empty cooking pot. Blossom was burdened with a
basket of laundry, which, proving too heavy, she emptied into the snow.
Orville, in his anxiety to see them out of the commonroom safely, took nothing
at all. There were no more than fifty people running through the snow when the
far corner of the commonroom caught fire. The first flames shot up thirty feet
from the roof, then began to climb as they ate into the bags of corn stacked
against the wails.
      It is hard to run through unpacked snow, just as it is hard to run in
knee-deep water: as soon as you acquire momentum, you are apt to tumble
forward. Lady and Greta had left the house wearing only straw slippers, and
others streamed out the door now in their nightshirts or wrapped in blankets.
      The Andersons had almost reached the forest edge when Lady threw aside
her cooking pot and exclaimed: _The Bible! the Bible is back there!_
      No one heard her. She ran toward the burning building. By the time
Anderson was aware of his wife's absence, there was no longer any way to stop
her. His own scream would not be heard among so many others. The family
stopped to watch. "Keep running," Orville shouted at them, but they paid no
heed. Most of those who had escaped the house had reached the wood by now.
      The flames illuminated the neighborhood of the building for a hundred
feet, making the snow shine with an unsteady orange glow upon which the swift,
uncertain shadows of the smoke rippled, like the fires of visible darkness.
      Lady entered by the kitchen door and did not re-emerge. The roof caved
in; the walls fell outward, neatly as dominos. The three spherical bodies
could be seen in silhouette to rise higher from the ground. In close formation
they began to glide toward the wood, their hum disguised by the crackling of
the flames. Within the triangle they defined, the snow melted and bubbled and
rose steaming into the air.
      "Why would she do a thing like that?" Anderson asked of his daughter,
but seeing that she was delicately poised on the brink of hysteria, he took
her in one hand and the length of rope he had taken up from a wheelbarrow
outside the house in the other and hurried after the others. Orville and Neil
were practically carrying barefoot Greta, who was screaming obscenities in her
rich contralto.


      Orville was frantic, and yet close behind the frenzy was a sense of
exultation and headlong delight that made him want to cheer, as though the
conflagration behind them were as innocent and festal as a homecoming game
bonfire.
      When he shouted _Hurry on; hurry on!_ it was hard to tell whether he was
calling to Anderson and Blossom or to the three incendiaries not far behind
them.



EIGHT:   The Way Down


      _Maybe we'll die_, Maryann thought, when they had at last stopped
running and she could think. But that was impossible. It was so cold! She
wished to heaven she could understand what Anderson was talking about. He'd
just said: "We'll have to take inventory." They were all standing around in
the snow. It was so cold, and when she'd fallen down she'd gotten snow inside
her coat, under her collar. The snow was still coming down in the dark. She'd
catch a cold and then what would she do? Where would she live? And her baby--
what about him?
      "Maryann?" Anderson asked. "_She's_ here, isn't she?"
      "Maryann!" Buddy barked impatiently.
      "I'm here," she said, snuffling the wet that trickled from her nose.
      "Well--what did you bring with you?"
      Each of her numb hands (she'd forgotten mittens too) was holding
something, but she didn't know what. She held up her hands so she could see
what was in them. "Lamps," she said. "The lamps from the kitchen, but one of
them is broken. The chimney's smashed." It was only then that she remembered
falling on it and cutting her knee.
      "Who's got matches?" Orville asked.
      Clay Kestner had matches. He lit the good lamp. By its light Anderson
took a headcount: "Thirty-one." There was a long silence while each survivor
examined the thirty other faces and tallied his own losses. There were
eighteen men, eleven women and two children.
      Mae Stromberg began to cry. She'd lost a husband and a daughter, though
her son was with her. In the panic Denny had not been able to find the shoe
for his left foot, and Mae had pulled him the three miles from the
conflagration on one of the children's sleds. Anderson, having concluded the
inventory, told Mae to be quiet.
      "Maybe there'll be more food back there," Buddy was saying to his
father. "Maybe it won't be burnt up so bad we can't still eat it."
      "I doubt it," Orville said. "Those damn flamethrowers are pretty
thorough."
      "How long will what we've got last if we ration it?" Buddy asked.
      "Till Christmas," Anderson replied curtly.
      "If _we_ last till Christmas," Orville said. "Those machines are
probably scouting the woods now, picking off anyone who got out of the fire.
There's also a matter of where we'll spend the night. Nobody thought to bring
along tents."
      "We'll go back to the old town," Anderson said. "We can stay in the
church and tear off the siding for firewood. Does anyone know where we are
now? Every goddam Plant in this forest looks like every other goddam Plant."
      "I've got a compass," Neil volunteered. "I'll get us there. You just
follow me." Off in the distance, there was a scream, a very brief scream. "I
think it's that way," Neil said, moving toward the scream.
      They formed a broad phalanx with Neil at the head and moved on through
the snowy might. Orville pulled Greta along on the sled, and Buddy carried
Denny Stromberg on his back.
      "Can I hold your hand?" Maryann asked him. "Mine are just numb."
      Buddy let her put her hand in his, and they walked along together for a
half hour in perfect silence. Then he said, "I'm glad you're safe."
      "Oh!" It was all she could say. Her nose was dripping like a leaky
faucet, and she began to cry too. The tears froze on her cold cheeks. Oh, she
was so happy!


      They almost walked through the village without realizing it. An inch of
snow had blanketed the cold, leveled ashes.
      Denny Stromberg was the first to speak. "Where will we go now, Buddy?
Where will we sleep?" Buddy didn't answer. Thirty people waited in silence for
Anderson, who was kicking the ashes with the toe of his boot, to lead them
through this Red Sea.
      "We must kneel and pray," he said. "Here, in this church, we must kneel
and ask forgiveness for our sins." Anderson knelt in the snow and ashes.
"Almighty and merciful God . . ."
      A figure came out of the woods, running, stumbling, breathless--a woman
in bedclothes with a blanket wrapped shawl-like about her. Falling to her
knees in the middle of the group, she could not draw breath to speak. Anderson
ceased praying. In the direction from which she had come, the forest glowed
faintly, as though, at a distance, a candle were burning in a farmhouse
window.
      "It's Mrs. Wilks," Alice Nemerov announced, and at the same moment
Orville said, "We'd better pray somewhere else. That looks like a new fire
over there."
      "There _is_ nowhere else," Anderson said.
      "There must be," Orville insisted. Under the pressure of hours of
crisis, he had lost track of his original motive--to save the Andersons for
his personal revenge, for slower agonies. His desire was more
primary--self-preservation. "If there are no houses left, there must still be
someplace to hide: a burrow, a cave, a culvert . . ." Something he bad said
touched the chord of memory. A burrow? A cave?
      "A cave! Blossom, a long time ago, when I was sick, you told me you'd
been in a cave. You'd never seen a mine, but you'd been in a cave. Was that
near here?"
      "It's by the lake shore--the old lake shore. Near Stromberg's Resort.
It's not far, but I haven't been in it since I was a little girl. I don't know
if it's still there."
       "How big a cave is it?"
       "Very big. At least, I thought so then."
       "Could you take us there?"
       "I don't know. It's hard enough in the summertime to find your way
around through the Plants. All the old landmarks are gone, and with the snow
besides . . ."
       "Take us there, girl! Now!" Anderson rasped. He was himself again, more
or less.
       They left the half-naked woman behind them lying in the snow. Not
through cruelty: it was simply forgetfulness. When they had gone, the woman
looked up and said, "Please." But the people whom she had thought to address
were not there. Perhaps they had never been there. She got to her feet and
dropped her blanket.
       It was very cold. She heard the humming sound again and ran blindly back
into the woods, heading in the opposite direction from that which Blossom had
taken.
       The three incendiary spheres glided to the spot where the woman had
lain, quickly converted the blanket there to ash, and moved on after Mrs.
Wilks, following the spoor of blood.


      Much of the old lake shore was still recognizable under the mantle of
snow: the conformation of the rocks, the stairways going down to the
water--they even found a post that had once been part of the resort's pier.
From the pier Blossom estimated it would be a hundred yards to the cave
entrance. She went along the rockface that rose ten feet above the old beach
and played the lamplight into likely crevasses. Wherever she directed him,
Buddy cleared the snow with a shovel, which, along with an axe, he had rescued
from the commonroom. The other searchers scraped off the snow (which had
drifted more than a yard deep among the boulders) with their hands, niittened
or bare, as luck would have it.
      The work went slowly, for Blossom remembered the entrance to the cave as
being halfway up the rockface, so that one had to clamber over snowy rocks to
be able to dig. Despite the hazard this involved, they did not have time to be
careful. Behind the clouds, from which the snow sifted steadily down, there
was no moon; the digging went on in near-total darkness. At regular intervals
one of them would call a sudden halt to the work and they would stand there
straining to hear the telltale bum of their pursuers that someone had thought
he'd heard.
      Blossom, under the unaccustomed weight of responsibility, became
erratic, running from rock to rock. "Here!" she would say, and then, running:
"Or here?" She was a good two hundred yards from the old pier, and Buddy began
to doubt that there _was_ a cave.
      If there were not, then surely they had come to an end.
      The prospect of death disturbed him most in that he could not grasp the
_purpose_ of these burnings. If this were an invasion (and even his father
could not doubt that now; the Good Lord did not need to build machines to
wreak his vengeance), what did the invaders want? Were the Plants themselves
the invaders? No, no--they were only Plants. One bad to suppose that the real
invaders--the ones inside the incendiary globes (or whoever had built them and
put them to work)--wanted the Earth for no other reason than to grow their
damn Plants. Was Earth, then, their farm? If so, why had there been no
harvest?
      It wounded his pride to think that his race, his species, his world was
being defeated with such apparent ease. What was worse, what he could not
endure was the suspicion that it all meant nothing, that the process of their
annihilation was something quite mechanical: that mankind's destroyers were
not, in other words, fighting a war but merely spraying the garden.
      The opening to the cave was discovered inadvertently-- Denny Stromberg
fell through it. Without that happy chance, they might well have gone the
whole night without finding it, for everyone in their party had passed it by.
      The cave went farther back than the lamplight would reach from the
entrance, but before the full depth was explored, everyone was inside. All the
adults except Anderson, Buddy, and Maryann (all three under five feet six) had
to bend over double or even crawl to keep from hitting their beads against the
crumbling ceiling. Anderson declared that the moment for silent prayer was at
hand, for which Orville was grateful. Huddled next to each other for warmth,
their backs against the sloping wall of the cave, they tried to recover their
sense of identity, of purpose, of touch-- whatever senses they had lost in the
hours-long stampede through the snow. The lamp was left burning, since
Anderson judged that matches were more precious than oil.
      After five minutes given over to prayers, Anderson, Buddy, Neil and
Orville (though not of the family hierarchy, he _had_ been the one to think of
the cave--and of more things besides than Anderson cared to reckon) explored
the back of the cave. It was big but not so big as they'd hoped, extending
some twenty feet to the rear, narrowing continually. At its far end, there was
a small el filled with bones.
      "Wolves!" Neil declared.
      Closer inspection confirmed this with some definiteness, for the
skeletons of the wolves themselves were discovered, stripped as clean as the
others, topmost on the pile.
      "Rats," Neil decided. "Just rats."
      To reach the far depth of the cave they had had to squeeze past the
gigantic root of a Plant that had broken through the cave wall. Returning from
the pile of bones the men examined this, the only other exceptional feature of
the cave, with some care. The Plant's root at this level was very little
distinguishable from its trunk. To judge from the curvature of the portion
exposed in the cave, it was, like the bole of the Plant, some fourteen or
fifteen feet in diameter. Near the floor of the cave, the smooth surface of
the root was abraded, just as the smooth green trunks were often chewed by
hungry rabbits. Here, however, there appeared to be more than a nibble taken
out.
      Orville stooped to examine it. "Rabbits didn't do this. It's gone right
to the heart of the wood." He reached his hand into the dark hole. The
outermost layer of wood extended no more than a foot, beyond which his fingers
encountered what seemed a tangle of vines--and beyond this (his whole shoulder
pressing against the hole), nothing; emptiness; air. "This thing is hollow!"
      "Nonsense," Anderson said. He got down beside Orville and thrust his own
arm into the hole. "It can't be," he said, feeling that it could be and was.
      "Rabbits certainly didn't make _that_ hole," Orville insisted.
      "Rats," Neil repeated, more than ever confirmed in his judgment. But, as
usual, no one paid him any attention.
      "It _grows_ that way. Like the stem of a dandelion--it's hollow."
      "It's dead. Termites must have gotten to it."
      "The only dead Plants I've seen, Mr. Anderson, are the ones we've
killed. If you don't object, I'd like to see what's down there."
      "I don't see what good that could do. You have an unhealthy curiosity
about these Plants, young man. I sometimes have the impression that you're
more on their side than on ours."
      "The good it could do," Orville said, half-truthfully (for he dared not
yet express his real hope), "is that it may provide a back door to the
cave--an escape hatch to the surface in the event that we're followed here."
      "He's right about that, you know," Buddy volunteered.
      "I don't need your help to make up my mind. _Either_ of you," Anderson
added when he saw that Neil had begun to smile at this. "You are right again,
Jeremiah . . ."
      "Just call me Orville, sir. Everyone else does."
      Anderson smiled acidly. "Yes. Well. Shall we start to work now? As I
recall, one of the men managed to bring a hatchet. Oh, it was you, Buddy?
Bring it here. Meanwhile, you--" (designating Orville) "--will see that
everyone moves to the back of the cave, where they'll be warmer. And safer
perhaps. Also, find some way to block up the entrance, so the snow will cover
it over again. Use your coat if necessary."
      When the opening to the root had been sufficiently enlarged, Anderson
thrust the lamp in and squeezed his bony torso through. The cavity narrowed
rapidly overhead, becoming no more than a tangle of vines; there was little
possibility of an exit--at least not without much hard work. But _below_ was
an abyss that stretched quite beyond the weak shaft of light from the lamp.
The lamp's effectiveness was further diminished by what seemed to be a network
of gauze or cobweb that filled the hollow of the root. The light passing
through this airy stuff was diffused and softened so that beyond a depth of
fifteen feet one could discern only a formless, pinkish glow.
      Anderson swiped at these strands of gauze, and they broke unresistingly.
His calloused hand could not even feel them giving Way.
      Anderson squirmed back out of the narrow hole and into the cave proper.
"Well, it won't be any use to escape by. It's solid up above. It goes _down_,
though--farther than I can see. Look for yourself if you want."
      Orville wormed into the hole. He stayed there so long, Anderson became
annoyed. When he reappeared he was almost grinning. "That's where we'll go,
Mr. Anderson. Why, it's perfect!"
      "You're crazy," Anderson said matter-of-factly. "We're bad enough off
where we are."
      "But the point is--" (And this had been his original, unexpressed hope.)
"--that it will be warm down there. Once you get fifty feet below the surface,
it's always a comfortable fifty degrees Fahrenheit. There's no winter and no
summer that deep in the ground. If you prefer it warmer than that just go down
deeper. It warms up one degree for every sixty feet."
      "Ah, what are you talking about?" Neil jeered. "That sounds like a lot
of hooey." He didn't like the way Orville--a stranger--was telling them what
to do all the time. He had no _right!_
      "It's one thing I should know about, being a mining engineer. Isn't that
why I'm alive, after all?" He let that sink in, then continued calmly: "One of
the biggest problems in working deep mines is keeping them at a bearable
temperature. The least we can do is see how far down it does go. It must be
fifty feet at least--that would be only a tenth of its height."
      "There's no soil fifty feet down," Anderson objected. "Nothing but rock.
Nothing grows in rock."
      "Tell that to the Plant. I don't know if it does go that deep, but again
I say we should explore. We've a length of rope, and even if we didn't, those
vines would support any of us. I tested them." He paused before he returned to
the clinching argument: "If nothing else, it's a place to hide if those things
find their way to us."
      His last argument turned out as valid as it had been effective. Buddy
had only just gone down by the rope to the first branching off of the
secondary roots from the vertical primary root (Buddy had been chosen because
he was the lightest of the men), when there was a grating sound at the
entrance of the cave, as when children try to fill a glass bottle with sand.
One of the spheres, having tracked them to the cave, was now trying to
bulldoze its way through the narrow entrance.
      "Shoot!" Neil yelled at his father. "Shoot it!" He started to grab ftr
the Python in his father's side holster.
      "I don't intend to waste good ammunition on armor plate. Now, get your
hands off me and let's start pushing people down that hole."
      Orville did not have to prompt any further. There was nothing left for
them to do. Not a thing. They were the puppets of necessity now. He stood back
from the melee and listened as the sphere tried to shove its way into the cave
by main force. In some ways, he thought, those spheres were no smarter than a
chicken trying to scratch its way through a wire fence that it could walk
around. Why not just shoot? Perhaps the three spheres had to be grouped about
their target before they could go zap. They were, almost surely, automatons.
They directed their own destinies no more than did the animals they were
programmed to track down. Orville had no sympathy for the dumb machines and
none for their prey. He rather fancied himself at that moment as the
puppeteer, until the real puppeteer, necessity, twitched a finger, and Orville
went running after his fellow men.


      The descent into the root was swift and efficient. The size of the hole
insured that no more than one person passed through at a time, but fear
insured that that person got through as fast as he could. The unseen (the lamp
was below with Buddy) presence of the metal sphere grinding at the ceiling and
walls of the cave was a strong motivation to speed.
      Anderson made each person strip off his bulky outer clothing and push it
through the hole ahead of him. At last only Anderson, Orville, Clay Kestner,
Neil and Maryann were left. It was evident that for Clay and Neil (the largest
men of the village) and for Maryann, now in her eighth month, the hole would
have to be enlarged. Neil chopped at the pulpy wood with frantic haste and
much wasted effort. Maryann was eased first through the expanded opening. When
she reached her husband, who was astraddle the inverse v formed by the
divergence of the branch root from the greater taproot, her hands were raw
from having slipped down the rope too quickly. As soon as he laid hold of her,
all her strength seemed to leave her body. She could not go on. Neil was the
next to descend, then Clay Kestner. Together they carried Maryann on into the
secondary root.
      Anderson called out, "Watch out below!" and a steady rain of
objects--foodstuffs, baskets, pots, clothing, the sled, whatever the people
had brought with them from the fire--fell into the abyss, shattering the
delicate traceries. Buddy tried to count the seconds between the time they
were released and the moment they hit bottom, but after a certain point he
could not distinguish between the sounds of the objects ricocheting off the
walls of the root and their striking bottom, if any. Anderson descended the
rope after the last of the provisions had been dropped down the root.
      "How is Orville coming down?" Buddy asked. "Who'll hold the rope for
him?"
      "I didn't bother to ask. Where is everyone else?"
      "Down there . . ." Buddy gestured vaguely into the blackness of the
secondary root. The lamp was lighting the main shaft, where the descent was
more dangerous. The secondary root diverged at a forty-five degree angle from
its parent. The ceiling (for here there could be said to be floor and ceiling)
rose to a height of seven feet. The entire surface of the root was a tangle of
vines, so that the slope was easy to negotiate. The interior space had been
webbed with the same fragile lace, though those who had preceded Anderson into
the root had broken most of it away.
      Orville clambered down on the vines, the end of the rope knotted about
his waist in the manner of a mountain climber. An unnecessary precaution, as
it proved: the vines--or whatever they were--held firm. They were almost
rigid, in fact, from being so closely knit together.
      "Well," said Orville, in a voice grotesque with good cheer, "here's
everybody, safe and sound. Shall we go down to the basement, where the
groceries are?"
      At that moment he felt an almost godlike elation, for he had held
Anderson's life in his hands--literally, by a string--and it had been his to
decide whether the old man should die just then or suffer yet a little longer.
It had not been a difficult choice, but, ah, it had been his!



NINE:   The Worm Shall Feed Sweetly
       When they had ventured down the branch root a further twenty-five feet
(where, as Orville had promised, it was tolerably warm), they reached a sort
of crossroads. There were three new branches to choose from, each as
commodious as the one through which they had been traveling. Two descended,
like proper roots, though veering off perpendicularly to the right and left of
their parent; the other shot steeply upward.
       "That's strange," Buddy observed. "Roots don't grow up."
       "How do you know that's up?" Orville asked.
       "Well, look at it. It's _up_. Up is . . . up. It's the opposite of
down."
       "My point exactly. We're _looking_ up the root, which may be _growing_
down to us--from another Plant perhaps."
       "You mean this thing could be just one big Plant?" Anderson asked,
moving into the circle of lamplight, scowling. He resented each further
attribute of the Plant, even those that served his purpose. "All of them
linking up together down here this way?"
       "There's one sure way to find out, sir--follow it. If it takes us to
another primary root--"
       "We don't have time to be Boy Scouts. Not until we've found the supplies
we dropped down that hole. Will we get to them this way? Or will we have to
backtrack and climb down the main root on the rope?"
       "I couldn't say. This way is easier, faster and, for the moment, safer.
If the roots join up like this regularly, maybe we can find another way back
to the main root farther down. So I'd say--"
       "I'll say," Anderson said, repossessing, somewhat, his authority. Buddy
was sent ahead with the lamp and one end of the rope; the thirty others
followed after, Indian file. Anderson and Orville bringing up the rear had
only the sounds of the advance party to guide them: both the light and the
rope were played out this far back.
       But there was a plenitude of sound: the shuffle of feet over the vines,
men swearing, Denny Stromberg crying. Every so often Greta inquired of the
darkness: "Where are we?" or "Where the hell _are_ we?" But that was only one
noise among many. There were, already, a few premonitory sneezes, but they
went unnoticed. The thirty-one people moving through the root were still
rather shell-shocked. The rope they held to was at once their motive and their
will.
       Anderson kept stumbling on the vines. Orville put an arm around the old
man's waist to steady him. Anderson tore it loose angrily. "You think I'm some
kind of invalid?" he said. "Get the hell out of here!"
       But the next time he stumbled, he went headlong into the rough vines of
the floor, scratching his face. Rising, he had a dizzy spell and would have
fallen again without Orville's help. Despite himself, he felt a twinge of
gratitude for the arm that bore him up. In the darkness, he couldn't see that
Orville was smiling.
       Their path wound on down through the root, passing two more
intersections such as the one above. Both times Buddy turned left, so that
their descent described, approximately, a spiral. The hollow of the root gave
no sign of diminishing; if anything it had been growing larger for the last
few yards. There was no danger of becoming lost, for the shattering of the
root's lacy interior blazed an unmistakable trail through the labyrinth.
       A commotion at the head of the line brought them to a halt. Anderson and
Orville pushed their way to the front.
       Buddy handed the lamp to his father. "It's a dead end," he announced.
"We'll have to go back the way we came."
       The root's hollow was much enlarged at this point, and the cobwebby
stuff filling it more condensed. Instead of shattering glassily under the
force of Anderson's blow, it tore off in handfuls, like rotted fabric.
Anderson pressed one of these pieces between his hands. Like the pink candy
floss at carnivals or like the airiest kind of white bread, it wadded into a
little ball less than an inch round.
      "We'll push our way through," Anderson announced. He took a step back,
then threw his shoulder like a football tackle into the yielding floss. His
momentum gave out two and a half yards ahead. Then, because there was nothing
solid beneath his feet, he began, slowly, to sink out of sight. Inexorably,
under his weight, the candy floss gave way. Buddy stretched his hand forward,
and Anderson was able barely to catch hold, fingertips hooked in fingertips.
Anderson pulled Buddy into the mire with him. Buddy, falling in a horizontal
position, served somewhat as a parachute, and they sank more slowly and came
to a stop, safely, some ten feet below.
      As they fell, a powerful sweetness, like the odor of rotting fruit,
filled the air behind them.
      Orville was the first to realize their good fortune. He wadded a mass of
the floss to medium density and bit into it. The Plant's characteristic anise
flavor could be discerned, but there was besides a fullness and sweetness, a
satisfaction, that was quite new. His tongue recognized it before his mind did
and craved another taste. No, not just his tongue--his belly. Every
malnourished cell of his body craved more.
      "Throw us down the rope," Anderson shouted hoarsely. He was not hurt,
but he was shaken.
      Instead of playing out the rope, Orville, with a happy, carefree shout,
dove into the flossy mass. As he was swallowed into its darkness, he addressed
the old man below: "Your prayers have been answered, sir. You've led us across
the Red Sea, and now the Lord is feeding us manna. Taste the stuff--taste it!
We don't have to worry about those supplies. This is the reason for the
Plants. This is their fruit. This is manna from heaven."
      In the brief stampede over the edge, Mae Stromberg sprained her ankle.
Anderson knew better than to pit his authority against raw hunger. He
hesitated to eat the fruit himself, for it could be poisonous, but his body's
need strained against an overcautious will. If the rest of them were to be
poisoned, he might as well join them.
      It tasted good.
      _Yes_, he thought, _it must seem like manna to them_. And even as the
sugary floss condensed on his tongue into droplets of honey, he hated the
Plant for seeming so much their friend and their deliverer. For making its
poison so delicious.
      At his feet the lamp burned unnaturally bright. The floor, though hard
enough to hold him up, was not rock-solid. He took out his pocket knife,
brushed away the matted floss, and cut a slice of this more solid substance
from the fruit. jt was crisp, like an Idaho potato, and juicy. It had a
blander and less acid taste than the floss. He cut out another piece. He could
not stop eating.
      Around Anderson, out of range of the lamp, the citizens of Tassel (but
was there still a Tassel of which they could be said to be citizens?) snuffled
and ate like swine at a trough. Most of them did not bother to press the floss
into comfortable mouthfuls but pushed it blindly into their mouths, biting
their own fingers and gagging in their greedy haste. Strands of the pulp
adhered to their clothes and tangled in their hair. It stuck to the lashes of
their closed eyes.
      An upright figure advanced into the sphere of lamplight. It was Jeremiah
Orville. "I'm sorry," he said, "if I started all this. I shouldn't have spoken
out of turn. I should have waited for you to say what to do. I wasn't
thinking."
      "That's all right," Anderson assured him, his mouth full of half-chewed
fruit. "It would have happened the same no matter what you did. Or what I
did."
      Orville sat down beside the older man. "In the morning. . ." he began.
      "Morning? It must be morning now." In fact, they had no way to know. The
only working timepieces--an alarm clock and two wristwatches--had been kept in
a box in the cornmonroom for safety. No one escaping the fire had thought to
rescue the box.
      "Well, when everyone's fed full and they've got some sleep--that's what
I meant--then you can set them to work. We've lost a battle, but there's still
a war to fight."
      Orville's tone was politely optimistic, but Anderson found it
oppressive. To have come to sanctuary after a disaster did not erase the
memory of the disaster. Indeed, Anderson, now that he had stopped running from
it, was only just becoming aware of its magnitude. "What work?" he asked,
spitting out the rest of the fruit.
      "Whatever work you say, sir. Exploring. Clearing out a space down here
to live in. Going back to the main root for the supplies we dropped there.
Pretty soon, you might even send a scout back to see if anything can be
salvaged from the fire."
      Anderson made no reply. Sullenly he recognized that Orville was right.
Sullenly he admired his resourcefulness, just as, twenty years earlier, he
might have admired an opponent's fighting style in a brawl at Red Fox Tavern.
Though to Anderson's taste the style was a little too fancy, you had to give
the bastard credit for keeping on his feet.
      It was strange, but Anderson's whole body was tensed as though for a
fight, as though he _had_ been drinking.
      Orville was saying something. "_What'd_ you say?" Anderson asked in a
jeering tone. He hoped it was something that would give him an excuse to smash
his face in, the smart punk.
      "I said--I'm very sorry about your wife. I can't understand why she did
that. I know how you must be feeling."
      Anderson's fists unclenched, his jaw grew slack. He felt the pressure of
tears behind his eyes, the pressure that had been there all along, but he knew
that he could not afford to give in to it. He could not afford the least
weakness now.
      "Thank you," he said. Then he cut out another large wedge of the
solider, more succulent fruit, split it in two, and gave part to Jeremiah
Orville. "You've done well tonight," he said. "I will not forget it."
      Orville left him to whatever thoughts he had and went looking for
Blossom. Anderson, alone, thought of his wife with a stony, dumb grief. He
could not understand why she had, as he considered it, committed suicide.
      He would never know, no one would know, that she had turned back for his
sake. He had not yet taken thought of the Bible that had been left behind, and
later, when he would, he would regret it no more nor less than Gracie's death
or the hundred other irredeemable losses he had suffered. But Lady had
foreseen quite accurately that without that one artifact, in which she herself
had had no faith, without the sanction it lent his authority, the old man
would be bereft, and that his strength, so long preserved, would soon
collapse, like a roof when the timbers have rotted. But she had failed, and
her failure would never be understood.


      More than one appetite demanded satisfaction that night. A satiety of
food produced, in men and women alike, an insatiable hunger for that which the
strict code of the cornmonroom had so long denied them. Here, in warmth and
darkness, that code no longer obtained. In its stead, the perfect democracy of
the carnival proclaimed itself, and liberty reigned for one brief hour.
      Hands brushed, as though by accident, other hands--exactly whose it made
little difference. Death had not scrupled to sort out husband and wife, and
neither did they. Tongues cleaned away the sweet, sticky film from lips that
had done feasting, met other tongues, kissed.
      "They're drunk," Alice Nemerov stated unequivocally.
      She, Maryann and Blossom sat in a separate cove dug from the pulp of the
fruit, listening, trying not to listen. Though each couple tried to observe a
decorous silence, the cumulative effect was unmistakable, even to Blossom.
       "Drunk? How can that be?" Maryann asked. She did not want to talk, but
conversation was the only defense against the voluptuous sounds of the
darkness. Talking and listening to Alice talk, she did not have to hear the
sighing, the whispers--or wonder which was her husband's.
       "We're all drunk, my dears. Drunk on oxygen. Even with this stinking
fruit stinking things up, I know an oxygen tent when I smell it."
       "I don't smell anything," Maryann said. It was perfectly true: her cold
had reached the stage where she couldn't even smell the cloying odor of the
fruit.
       "I worked in a hospital, didn't I? So I should know. My dears, we're all
of us higher than kites."
       "High as the flag on the Fourth of July," Blossom put in. She didn't
really mind being drunk, if it was like this. Floating. She wanted to sing but
sensed that it wasn't the thing to do. Not now. But the song, once begun, kept
on inside her head: _I'm in love, i'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm
in love with a wonderful guy_.
       "Sssh!" Alice ssshed.
       "Excuse _me!_" Blossom said, with a wee giggle. Perhaps her song had not
after all been altogether inside her head. Then, because she knew it was the
correct thing to do when tipsy, she hiccoughed a single, graceful hiccough,
fingertips pressed delicately to her lips. Then, indelicately, she burped, for
there was gas on her stomach.
       "Are you all right, my dear?" Alice asked, laying a solicitous hand on
Maryann's full womb. "I mean, everything that's happened--"
       "Yes. There, you see! He just moved."
       The conversation lapsed, and through the breach the assault was renewed.
Now it was an angry, persistent sound, like the buzzing of a honeycomb.
Maryann shook her head, but the buzzing wouldn't stop. "Oh!" she gasped. "Oh!"
       "There, there," Alice soothed.
       "Who do you think is with him?' Maryann blurted.
       "Why, you're all upset for no reason at all," Blossom said. "He's
probably with Daddy and Orville this very minute."
       Blossom's obvious conviction almost swayed Maryann. It _was_ possible.
An hour ago (or less? or more?) Orville had sought out Blossom and explained
that he was taking her father (who was naturally very upset) to a more private
spot, away from the others. He had found a way into another root, a root that
burrowed yet deeper into the earth. Did Blossom want to go there with him? Or
perhaps she preferred to stay with the ladies?
       Alice had thought that Blossom would prefer to stay with the ladies for
the time being. She would join her father later, if he wished her to.
       Anderson's departure, and the departure with him of the lamp, had been
the cue for all that followed. A month's danmed energy spilled out and
covered, for a little while, the face of sorrow, blotted out the too-clear
knowledge of their defeat and of an ignominy the features of which were only
just becoming apparent.
       A hand reached out of the darkness and touched Blossom's thigh. It was
Orville's hand! it could be no other. She took the hand and pressed it to her
lips.
       It was not Orville's hand. She screamed. Instantly, Alice had caught the
intruder by the scruff of his neck. He yelped.
       "Neil!" she exclaimed. "For pity's sake! That's your sister you're
pawing, you idiot! Now, _get!_ Go look for Greta.. Or, on the other hand,
maybe you'd better not."
       "You shut up!" Neil bellowed. "You ain't my mother!"
       She finally shoved Neil away. Then she laid her head down in Blossom's
lap. "Drunk," she scolded sleepily. "Absolutely stoned." Then she began to
snore. In a few minutes, Blossom slept too--and dreamed--and woke with a
little cry.
       "What is it?" Maryann asked.
       "Nothing, a dream," Blossom said. "Haven't you gone to sleep yet?"
      "I can't." Though it was as quiet as death now, Maryann was still
listening. What she feared most was that Neil _would_ find his wife. And
Buddy. Together.


      Buddy woke. It was still dark. It would always be dark now, here. There
was a woman beside him, whom he touched, though not to wake her. Assured that
she was neither Greta nor Maryann, he gathered his clothes and sidled away.
Strands of the sticky pulp caught on his bare back and shoulders and melted
there, unpleasantly.
      He was still feeling drunk. Drunk and drained. Orville bad a word for
the feeling--what was it?
      Detumescent.
      The grainy liquid trickled down his bare skin, made him shiver. But it
wasn't that he was cold. Though he was cold, come to think of it.
      Crawling forward on hands and knees, he bumbled into another sleeping
couple. "Wha?" the woman said. She sounded like Greta. No matter. He crawled
elsewhere.
      He found a spot where the pulp had not been disturbed and shoved his
body into it backward. Once you got used to the sticky feeling, it was quite
comfortable: soft, warm, snuggly.
      He wanted light: sunlight, lamplight, even the red, unsteady light of
last night's burning. Something in the present situation horrified him in a
way he did not understand, could not define. It was more than the darkness. He
thought about it and as he dropped off to sleep again it came to him:
      Worms.
      They were worms, crawling through an apple.



TEN:   Falling to Pieces


       "Who's _your_ favorite movie star, Blossom?" Greta asked.
       "Audrey Hepburn. I only saw her in one movie--when I was nine years
old--but she was wonderful in that. Then there weren't any more movies. Daddy
never approved, I guess."
       "Daddy!" Greta snorted. She tore off a strand of fruit pulp from the
space overhead, lowered it lazily into her mouth, mashed it with her tongue
against the back of her teeth. Sitting in that pitch-black cavity in the
fruit, her listeners could not see her do this, but it was evident from her
blurred speech that she was eating again. "And you, Neil? Who's your
favorite?'
       "Charlton Heston. I used to go to anything with him in it."
       "Me too," said Clay Kestner. "Him--and how about Marilyn _Mon_-roe? Any
of you fellas old enough to remember old Marilyn _Mon_-roe?"
       "Marilyn Monroe was vastly overrated in my opinion," Greta mouthed.
       "What do you say about that, Buddy? Hey, Buddy! Is he still here?"
       "Yeah, I'm still here. I never saw Marilyn Monroe. She was before my
time."
       "Oh, you missed something, kid. You really missed something."
       "_I_ saw Marilyn Monroe," Neil put in. "She wasn't before my time."
       "And you still say Charlton Heston's your favorite?" Clay Kestner had a
booming, traveling-salesman's laugh, gutsy and graceless. In former years he
had been half-owner of a filling station.
       "Oh, I don't know," Neil said nervously.
       Greta laughed too, for Clay had begun to tickle her toes. "You're all
wet, all of you," she said, still giggling but trying to stop. "I still say
that Kim Novak is the greatest actress who ever lived." She had been saying it
and saying it for fifteen minutes, and it seemed now that she would say it
again.
      Buddy was mortally bored. He had thought it would be better to stay
behind with the younger set than to go along on another of his father's
tedious, purposeless explorations through the labyrinthine roots of the
Plants. Now that the supplies had been gathered in, now that they had learned
everything about the Plant that there was to learn, there was no point in
wandering about. And no point in sitting still. He had not realized till now,
till there was nothing to do, what a slave to work and Puritan busy-ness he
had become.
      He rose, and his hair (cut short now, like everyone else's) brushed
against the clinging fruit. The fruit pulp, when it dried and matted in one's
hair, was more aggravating than a mosquito bite that couldn't be itched.
      "Where are you going?" Greta asked, offended that her audience should
desert her in the middle of hen analysis of Kim Novak's peculiar charm.
      "I've got to throw up," Buddy said. "See you all later."
      It was a plausible enough excuse. The fruit, though it nourished them,
had minor side effects. They were all, a month later (such was the estimate on
which they had agreed), still suffering from diarrhea, gas pains and
bellyaches. Buddy almost might have wished he did have to vomit: it would have
been something to do.
      Worse than the stomach upsets had been the colds. Nearly everyone had
suffered from these too, and there had been no remedy but patience, sleep and
a will to recover. In most cases these remedies were sufficient, but three
cases of pneumonia had developed, Denny Stromberg among them. Alice Nemerov
did what she could do, but as she was the first to confess, she could do
nothing.
      Buddy climbed up the rope from the tuber into the root proper. Here he
had to walk crouched, for the hollow space in the root was only four and a
half feet in diameter. Bit by bit over the last month, the party had moved
down many hundreds of feet--to a depth, Orville had estimated, of at least
1,200 feet. Why, the Alworth Building wasn't that high. Not even the Foshay
Tower in Minneapolis! At this depth the temperature was a relaxed seventy
degrees.
      There was a rustling sound close ahead. "Who's that?" Buddy and Maryann
asked, almost in unison.
      "What are you doing here?" Buddy asked his wife in a surly tone.
      "Making more rope--but don't ask me why. It's just something to do. It
keeps me busy. I've shredded up some of the vines, and now I'm putting them
back together." She laughed weakly. "The vines were probably stronger than my
ropes."
      "Here, take my hands--show them how to do it."
      "You!" When Buddy's hands touched hers, she continued busily knitting so
that her fingers would not tremble. "Why would you want to do that?"
      "As you say--it's something to do."
      She began to guide his clumsy fingers but grew confused frying to keep
in mind that his right hand was in her left and vice versa. "Maybe if I sat
behind you . . ." she suggested. But as it turned out, she couldn't even close
her arms around his chest. Her belly was in the way.
      "How is he?" Buddy asked. "Will it be much longer?"
      "He's fine. It should be any day now."
      It worked out as she had hoped: Buddy sat behind her, his thighs
clenched about her spread legs, his hairy arms beneath hers, supporting them
like the armrests of a chair. "So teach me," he said.
      He was a slow learner, not used to this kind of work, but his slowness
only made him a more interesting pupil. They wore away an hour or more before
he was ready to start his own rope. When he had finished it, the fibers fell
apart like shreds of tobacco sliding out of a beginner's cigarette.
      From deep inside the tuber came the music of Greta's laugh, and then
Clay's bass-drum accompaniment. Buddy had no desire to rejoin them. He had no
desire to go anywhere except back to the surface, its fresh air, its radiance,
its changing seasons.
      Maryann apparently was having similar thoughts. "Do you suppose it's
Ground Hog's Day yet?"
      "Oh, I'd say another week. Even if we were up there where we could see
whether or not the sun was out, I doubt there'd be any groundhogs left to go
looking for their shadows."
      "Then Blossom's birthday could be today. We should remind her."
      "How old is she now? Thirteen?"
      "You'd better not let her hear that. She's fourteen and very emphatic
about it."
      Another sound came out of the fruit: a woman's anguished cry. Then a
silence, without echoes. Buddy left Maryann on the instant to find Out what
had caused it. He returned shortly. "It's Mae Stromberg. Her Denny's dead.
Alice Nemerov's taking care of her now."
      "Pneumonia?"
      "That, and he hasn't been able to hold any food."
      "Ah, the poor thing."


      The Plant was very efficient. In fact, as plants go, it couldn't be
beat. It had already proved that. The more you learned about it, the more you
had to admire it. If you were the sort to admire such things.
      Consider its roots, for instance. They were hollow. The roots of
comparable, Earth-evolved plants (a redwood is roughly comparable) are solid
and woody throughout. But what for? The bulk of such roots is functionless; in
effect, it is so much dead matter. A root's only job is to transport water and
minerals up to the leaves and, when they've been synthesized into food, to
carry them back down again. To accomplish this, a root must hold itself rigid
enough to withstand the constant pressure of the soil and rock around it. All
these things the Plant did excellently well--better, considering its
dimensions, than the most efficient of Earth's own plants.
      The greater open space within the root allowed the passage of more
water, more quickly and farther. The tracheids and vessels that conduct water
up through an ordinary root do not have a tenth of the capacity of the
expansible capillaries that were the cobwebs of the Plant. Similarly, the
vines lining the hollow roots could in a single day transport tons of liquid
glucose and other materials from the leaves down to the tubers of fruit and
the still-growing roots at the lowest levels. These were to the phloem of
ordinary plants as an intercontinental pipeline is to a garden hose. The
hollow space within the root served a further purpose: it supplied the
nethermost regions of the Plant with air. These roots, stretching so far below
the airy topsoil, did not have, as other roots would, an independent supply of
oxygen. It had to be brought to them. Thus, from the tips of its leaves to the
farthest rootcaps, the Plant _breathed_. It was this multifarious capacity for
rapid and large-scale transportation that had accounted for the Plant's
inordinate rate of growth.
      The Plant was economical; it wasted nothing. As its roots sank deeper
and thickened, the Plant digested even itself, forming thereby the hollow in
which the complex network of capillaries and vines then took shape. The wood
that was no longer needed to maintain a rigid exoskeleton was broken down into
useful food.
      But the fundamental economy of the Plant, its final excellence,
consisted in none of these partial features, but rather in the fact that all
Plants were one Plant. As certain insects have, by social organization,
achieved that which to their individual members would have been impossible, so
the separate Plants, by forming a single, indivisible whole, had heightened
their effective power exponentially. Materials that were not available to one
might be available to another in superfluity. Water, minerals, air, food--all
were shared in the spirit of true communism: from each according to his
ability, to each according to his need. The resources of an entire continent
were at its disposal; it did not want for much.
      The mechanism by which the socialization of the individual Plants took
place was very simple. As soon as the first branch roots budded from the
vertical primary root, they moved by a sort of mutual tropism toward the
kindred branch roots of other Plants. When they met, they merged. When they
had merged indissolubly, they diverged, seeking still another union at a
deeper level. The many became one.
      You had to admire the Plant. It was really a very beautiful thing, if
you looked at it objectively, as, say, Jeremiah Orville looked at it.
      Of course, it had had advantages other plants hadn't had. It had not had
to evolve all by itself. It was also very well cared for.
      Even so, there were pests. But that was being looked after. This was
after all, only its first season on Earth.


      By the time Anderson, Orville and the other men (those who'd bothered to
come) returned from that day's exploration deeper into the Plant, Mae
Stromberg had already disappeared. So had her son's corpse. In her last hours
with the dying boy, she had not said a word or wept a tear, and when he died
there had been only that single maddened outcry. The loss of her husband and
daughter she had borne much less calmly; she had felt, perhaps, that she could
afford to lose them--could afford, therefore, to grieve for them afterwards.
Grieving is a luxury. Now she was left only grief.
      There were twenty-nine people, not counting Mae Stromberg. Anderson
called for an assembly right away. Of the twenty-nine, only the two women
still down with pneumonia and Alice Nemerov were absent.
      "I am afraid," Anderson began, after a short prayer, "that we are
falling to pieces." There was some coughing and a shuffle of feet. He waited
for it to pass, then continued: "I can't blame anyone here for Mae's running
off like this. I can't very well blame Mae either. But those of us who have
been spared this last blow and guided here by Divine Providence, those of us,
that is to say . . ."
      He stopped, irretrievably tangled in his own words--something that had
been happening to him increasingly of late. He pressed a hand to his forehead
and drew a deep breath.
      "What I mean to say is this: We can't just lay around eating milk and
honey. There is work to be done. We must strengthen ourselves for the trials
ahead, and. . . . And, that is to say, we must not let ourselves go soft.
      "Today I have gone down lower into these infernal tunnels, and I found
out that the fruit down there is better. Smaller and firmer--there's less of
this sugar candy. I also found that there's less of this oxygen, which has
been . . . I mean to say that up here we're turning into a bunch of-- what was
that word?"
      "Lotus-eaters," Orville said.
      "A bunch of lotus-eaters. Exactly. Now this must _stop_--" He struck his
palm with his clenched fist in emphasis.
      Greta, who had had her hand up during the latter half of this speech, at
last spoke up without waiting for recognition. "May I ask a question?"
      "What is it, Greta?"
      "_What_ work? I just don't see what it is that we've been neglecting."
      "Well, we haven't been doing _any_ work, girl. That's plain to see."
      "That doesn't answer my question."
      Anderson was aghast at this effrontery--and from her. Two months ago he
could have had her stoned as an adultress--and now the harlot was vaunting her
pride and rebellion for everyone to see.
      He should have answered her challenge with a blow. He should have
quelled that pride by letting it be known, even now, just what she was: a
harlot--and with her husband's brother. That he did not return her attack was
a weakness, and everyone could see that too.
      After a long boding silence, he returned to his speech as though there
had been no interruption. "We've got to get the lead out! We can't _lay
around_ like this. We'll keep on the move from now on. Every day. We won't sit
around in one place. We'll _explore_."
      "There's nothing _to_ explore, Mr. Anderson. And _why_ should we move
every day? Why not clear out one space that's comfortable and live there?
There's enough food in just one of these big potatoes--"
      "Enough! That's enough, Greta! I've said all I'm going to. Tomorrow
we--"
      Greta stood up, but instead of moving forward into the lamplight, she
backed away. "It is not enoughi I've had enough of _you_. I'm sick and tired
of being ordered around like I was a slave. I've had _enough_ of it, I'm
through! Mae Stromberg did the right thing when shc--"
      "Sit down, Greta," the old man ordered, his sternness breaking into mere
stridency. "Sit down and shut up."
      "Not me. Not Greta. Not any more. I'm going. I have had it. From now on,
I do as I damn well please, and anyone that wants to come along is welcome."
      Anderson drew his pistol and pointed it at the shadowy figure outside of
the lamp's full light. "Neil, you tell your wife to sit down. If she don't
I'll shoot her. And I'll shoot to kill--by _God_ I will!"
      "Uh, sit down, Greta," Neil urged.
      "You won't shoot me--and do you want to know why you won't shoot me?
Because I'm pregnant. You wouldn't kill your own grandchild, now would you?
And there's no doubt he _is_ your grandchild."
      It was a lie, a complete fabrication, but it served its purpose.
      "My grandchild?' Anderson echoed, aghast. "My _grandchild!_" He turned
his Python on Buddy. His hand trembled--with rage or simply with infirmity,
one could not tell.
      "It wasn't me," Buddy blurted. "I swear it wasn't me."
      Greta had disappeared into the darkness, and three men were scrambling
to their feet, eager to follow her. Anderson shot four bullets into the back
of one of the men. Then, utterly spent, senseless, he collapsed over the
feebly burning lamp. It was extinguished.
      The man he had killed was Clay Kestner. The fourth bullet, passing
through Clay's chest, had entered the brain of a woman who had leapt up in
panic at Anderson's first shot.
      There were now twenty-four of them, not counting Greta and the two men
who had gone off with her.



ELEVEN:   A Natural Death


      Anderson's hair was coming out in handfuls. Maybe it would have at his
age in any case, but he blamed it on his diet. The meager supplies rescued
from the fire had been rationed out in dribs and drabs, and the little corn
that remained now was for Maryann and for seed when they returned to the
surface.
      He scratched at his flaky scalp and cursed the Plant, but it was a
half-hearted curse--as though he were peeved with an employer, instead of at
war with an enemy. His hatred had become tainted with gratitude; his strength
was quitting him.
      More and more he pondered the question of who was to succeed him. It was
a weighty question: Anderson was perhaps the last leader in the world--a king
almost, undoubtedly a patriarch.
      Though generally he believed in primogeniture, he wondered if a
difference of only three months might not be construed charitably in favor of
the younger son. He refused to think of Neil as a bastard, and he had
therefore been obliged to treat the boys as twins--impartially.
      There was something to be said for each of them--and not enough for
either. Neil was a steady worker, not given to complaimngs, and strong; he had
the instincts of a leader of men, if not all the abilities. However, he was
stupid: Anderson could not help but see it. He was also . . . well, disturbed.
Just how he was disturbed or why, Anderson did not know, though he suspected
that Greta was in some way responsible. Considering this problem, he tended to
be vague, to eye it obliquely or as through smoked glass, as we are told to
observe an eclipse. He did not want to learn the truth if he could help it.
      Buddy, on the other hand, though he possessed many of the qualities
lacking in his half-brother, was not to be relied upon. He had proven it when,
in the face of his father's sternest disapproval, he had gone to live in
Minneapolis; he had proven it conclusively on Thanksgiving Day. When Anderson
had found his son in, as he supposed, the very commission of the act, it had
become quite clear that Buddy would not succeed to his own high place.
Anderson, in passing from early manhood to middle age, had developed an
unreasoning horror of adultery. That he had once been adulterate himself and
that one of his children was the fruit of such an union did not occur to him
now. He would, in fact, have denied it outright--and, he would have believed
his denial.
      For a long time it had seemed that no one could possibly take his place.
Therefore, he would have to carry on alone. Each time his sons had shown new
weaknesses, Anderson had felt a corresponding growth in strength and purpose.
Secretly, he had thrived on their failings.
      Then Jeremiah Orville had entered the scene. In August, Anderson had
been moved by reasons which were obscure and (it now seemed) God-given to
spare the man. Today he trembled at his sight--as Saul must have trembled when
he first realized that young David would supplant him and his son Jonathan.
Anderson tried desperately both to deny this and to accommodate himself to his
apparent heir. (He constantly feared that he would, like that earlier king,
war against the Lord's annointed and damn himself in the act. Belief in
predestination has decidedly some disadvantages.) As by degrees, he bent his
will to this unpleasant task (for, though he admired Orville, he did not like
him); his strength and purpose quitted him by equal degrees. Orville, without
even knowing it, was killing him.
      It was night. That is to say, they had once again journeyed to
exhaustion. As Anderson was the arbiter of what constituted exhaustion, it was
evident to everyone that the old man was being worn down: as after the vernal
equinox, each day was shorter than the day that had gone before.
      The old man scratched at his flaky scalp, and cursed something, he
couldn't remember exactly what, and fell asleep without thinking to take a
count of heads. Orville, Buddy and Neil each took the count for him. Orville
and Buddy both arrived at twenty-four. Neil, somehow, had come up with
twenty-six.
      "But that's not possible," Buddy pointed out.
      Neil was adamant: he had counted twenty-six. "Whadaya think--I can't
_count_, for Christ's sake?"


      Since Greta's departure, a month or so had gone by. No one was keeping
track of the time any longer. Some maintained it was February; others held for
March. From the expeditions to the surface they knew only that it was still
winter. They needed to know no more than that.
      Not everyone went along. Indeed, besides Anderson, his two sons and
Orville, there were only three other men. A permanent base of operations was
again being maintained for those, like Maryann and Alice, who could not spend
the day crawling through the roots. The number of those who deemed themselves
incapable had grown daily until there were just as many lotus-eaters as
before. Anderson pretended to ignore the situation, fearing to provoke a worse
one.
      Anderson led the men up by the usual route, which was marked by ropes
that Maryann had braided. It was no longer possible for them to find their way
about by the Ariadne's thread of broken capillaries, for in their explorations
they had broken so many that they had created a labyrinth of their own.
      It was near the surface, at about the sixty-degree level, that they came
across the rats. At first it was like the humming of a beehive, though higher
pitched. The men's first thought was that the incendiaries had at last come
down into the roots after them. When they had ventured into the tuber from
which the noise was coming, the humming rose to a raspy whine, as though a
coloratura's aria were being broadcast at peak volume over a bad
public-address system. The solid-seeming darkness beyond the lamp's reach
wavered and dissolved to a lighter shade as thousands of rats tumbled over
each other to get into the fruit. The walls of the passage were honeycombed
with the rats' tunnelings.
      "Rats!" Neil exclaimed. "Didn't I say it was rats that gnawed their way
through that root up above? Didn't I, huh? Well, here they are. There must be
a million of them."
      "If there aren't now, there will be before very long," Orville agreed.
"I wonder if they're all in this one tuber?"
      "What possible difference can it make?" Anderson asked impatiently.
"They've left us well enough alone, and I for one feel no need to keep them
company. They seem content to eat this damn candied apple, and I'm content to
let them eat it. They can eat the whole of it, of all of them, for all I
care." Sensing that he had gone too far, he said, in a more subdued tone:
"There's nothing we can do against an army of rats, in any case. I have only
one cartridge left in the revolver. I don't know what I'm saving it for, but I
know it isn't for a rat."
      "I was thinking of the future, Mr. Anderson. With all this food
available and no natural enemies to keep them down, these rats will multiply
out of all bounds. They may not threaten our food supply now, but what about
six months from now? a year from now?"
      "Before the summer has begun, Jeremiah, we won't be living down here.
The rats are welcome to it then."
      "We'll still be depending on it for food though. It's the only food
left--unless you want to breed the, rats. Personally, I've never liked the
taste. And there's next winter to think about. With the little seed that's
left for planting-- even if it's still good--we can't possibly get through the
winter. I don't like to live like this any more than the next man, but it's a
way to survive. The only way, for the time being."
      "Ah, that's a lot of hooey!" Neil said, in support of his father.
      Anderson looked weary, and the lantern, which he had been holding up to
examine the perforations of the wall of the passage, sank to his side. "You're
right, Jeremiah. As usual." His lips curled in an angry smile, and he swung
his bare foot (shoes were too precious to be wasted down here) at one of the
ratholes from which two bright eyes had been staring up intently, examining
the examiners. "Bastards!" he shouted. "Sons of bitches!" There was a squeal,
and a fat, furry ball of ratfiesh sailed on a high arc out of range of the
lamplight. The whining, which had grown somewhat quieter, rose in volume,
answering Anderson's challenge.
      Orville put a hand on the old man's shoulder. His whole body was shaking
with helpless rage. "Sir.. ." Orville protested. "Please."
      "The bastard bit me," Anderson grumbled.
      "We can't afford to scatter them now. Our best hopc--"
      "Half took off my toe," he said, stooping to feel the injury. "The
bastard."
      "--is to contain them here. To block up all the passages out of this
tuber. Otherwise . . ." Orville shrugged. The alternative was clear.
      "Then how do _we_ get out?" Neil objected smugly.
      "Oh, shut up, Neil," Anderson said wearily. "With what?" he asked
Orville. "We haven't got anything a hungry rat couldn't chew his way through
in five minutes."
      "We have an axe though. We can weaken the walls of the roots so that
they collapse in on themselves. The pressure at this depth is tremendous. That
wood must be hard as iron, but if we can chip and scrape enough of it away at
the right points, the earth itself will block the passages. Rats can't chew
their way through basalt. There's a danger that the cave-in will get out of
hand, but I think I can see that it won't. A mining engineer usually has to
prevent cave-ins, but that's good training for someone who has to produce
them."
       "I'll let you try. Buddy, go back and get the axe--and anything else
with a cutting edge. And send those other lotuseaters up here. Neil and the
rest of you, spread out to each of the entrances of this potato and do what
you can to keep the rats inside. They don't seem very anxious to leave yet,
but they may when the walls start tumbling down. Jeremiah, you come with me
and show me what you mean to do. I don't understand why the whole thing isn't
going to come down on our heads when we--God damn!"
       "What is it?"
       "My toe! Damned rat really took a hunk out of it. Well, we'll show these
bastards!"


      The extermination of the rats, succeeded--if anything, too well. Orville
attacked the first root at just the point where it belied outward to become
the hard, spherical shell of the fruit. He worked hours, shaving off thin
slices of wood, watching for any sign of stress that would give him an
opportunity to escape, scraping away a little more, watching. When it came
down, there was no warning. Suddenly Orville stood in the midst of thunder. He
was lifted off his feet by the shock wave and hurled back into the passage.
      The entire tuber had collapsed in upon itself.
      Watchers at the other entrances reported no escaped rats, but there had
been a fatality: one man, having missed his lunch (Anderson insisted that they
eat only three times a day, and then sparingly), stepped into the tuber for a
handful of fruit pulp at exactly the wrong moment. He, the fruit pulp and some
few thousand rats were now being converted, at a modest, geological pace, into
petroleum. A basalt wall of perfect, Euclidean flatness blocked each of the
entrances to the tuber; it had come down quickly and neatly as a guillotine.
      Anderson, who had not been present to witness the event (shortly after
Orville had begun his work, he had had yet another fainting fit; they came
more and more frequently of late), was incredulous when it was reported to
him. Orville's _ex post facto_ explanation did not convince him. "What's
Buckminster What's-his-name got to do with anything? I ask a simple question,
and you carry on about geographic domes."
      "It's only a supposition. The walls of the tuber have to withstand
incredible pressures. Buckminster Fuller was an architect--an engineer, if you
prefer--who built things so they'd do just that. He designed skeletons, you
might say. Designed them so that if the least part was weakened, the whole
body would give way. Like when you remove the keystone of an arch--except that
they were all keystones."
      "This is a fine time to learn about Buckminster Fuller-- when a man's
been killed."
      "I'm sorry, sir. I appreciate that it was my responsibility. I should
have given more thought to the matter before rushing ahead."
      "It can't be helped now. Go find Alice and bring her here. I'm coming
down with a fever--and that ratbite hurts more every minute."
      _His responsibility indeed!_ Anderson thought, when Orville had left
him. Well, it would be his responsibility soon enough. He had better call an
assembly while he still had his wits about him and announce it for a fact.
      But that would be tantamount to his own abdication. No, he would bide
his time.
      Meanwhile, he had had a new idea--a way of legitimatizing Orville as his
heir: Orville would become Anderson's son--his eldest son--by way of marriage.
      But he balked at this step too. Blossom still seemed so young to
him--hardly more than a child. Only a few months ago he had seen her with the
other children playing jacks on the floor of the commonroom. Marriage? He
would talk to Alice Nemerov about it. A woman always knew best about these
things. Anderson and Alice were the two oldest survivors. That fact, and the
death of Anderson's wife, had forced them willy-nilly into each other's
confidence.
      While he waited for her, he massaged his little toe. Where it had been
bitten it was now numb; the pain was coming from the rest of the foot.


      That night when the headcount was taken (Anderson being even less in a
condition to do so), Orville and Buddy both came up with a figure of
twenty-three. Neil, this time, counted twenty-four.
      "He's slow," Buddy joked. "Give him time. He'll catch up with us yet."


      Alice Nemerov, R.N., knew Anderson was going to die. Not just because
she was a nurse and could recognize gangrene from its unremarkable inception.
She had seen him begin to die long before he was bitten by the rat, even
before the fainting fits had become a daily occurrence. When an old person is
getting ready to die, you can see it all over him, written in neon. But
because she _was_ a nurse, and because she had come despite herself to like
the old man, she tried to do something to keep him alive.
      For this reason she had persuaded him to delay speaking to Orville and
Blossom about his intentions for them. She led him on from day to day with a
carrot of hope. At least it looked like hope.
      At first, when the hope had been real, she had tried to suck off the
infection, as in snakebite. The only effect was that she had grown nauseous
and couldn't eat for two days. Now, half his foot was a dusky, dead blue.
Decomposition would set in very quickly, if it had not already begun.
      "Why don't you keep sucking off the infection?" Neil asked. He wanted to
watch again.
      "It wouldn't do any good now. He's dying."
      "You could _try_. That's the least you could do." Neil bent down and
examined his father's sleeping face. "Is he breathing better now?"
      "Sometimes his breath comes very hard. Sometimes he scarcely seems to
breathe at all. Neither symptom is out of the ordinary."
      "His feet are cold," Neil said critically.
      "What do you expect?" Alice snapped at him, past all patience. "Your
father is dying. Don't you understand that? Only an amputation could save him
at this point, and in his condition he couldn't survive amputation. He's worn
out, an old man. He _wants_ to die."
      "That's not my fault, is it?' Neil shouted. Anderson woke for a moment
at the noise, and Neil went away. His father had changed so much in the last
few days that Neil felt awkward with him. It was like being with a stranger.
      "The baby--is it a boy or a girl?" His voice was barely audible.
      "We dbn't know yet, Mr. Anderson. It may take another hour. But no more
than that. Everything is ready. She made the ligatures herself, from scraps of
rope. Buddy went up to the surface for a bucket of snow--he says it was a real
March blizzard up there--and we've been able to sterilize the knife and wash
out a couple of pieces of cotton. It won't be a hospital delivery, but I'm
sure it will be all right."
      "We must pray."
      "_You_ must pray, Mr. Anderson. You know I don't hold with those
things."
      Anderson smiled, and it was not, for a wonder, a really unpleasant
expression. Dying seemed to mellow the old man; he had never been nicer than
now. "You're just like my wife, just like Lady. She must be in hell for her
sins and her scoffing, but hell can't be much worse than this. Somehow,
though, I can't imagine her there."
      "Judge not lest ye be judged, Mr. Anderson."
      "Yes, Lady would always hark on that one too. It was her favorite
Scripture."
      Buddy interrupted them: "Time now, Alice."
      "Go on, go on, don't dally here," Anderson urged. Unnecessarily, for she
was already gone, taking the lamp with her. The darkness began to cover him
like a woolen blanket, like a comforter.
      _If it's a boy_, Anderson thought, _I can die happy_.
      It was a boy.


       Anderson was trying to say something. Neil could not make out quite
what. He bent his ear closer to the old man's dry lips. He couldn't believe
that his father was dying. His father! He didn't like to think about it.
       The old man mumbled something. "Try and talk louder," Neil shouted into
his good ear. Then to the others standing around: "Where's the lamp? Where's
Alice? She should be here now. What are you all standing around like that
for?'
       "Alice is with the baby," Blossom whispered. "She said she'd be only
another minute."
       Then Anderson spoke again, loud enough for Neil but no one else to hear.
"Buddy." That was all he said, though he said it several times.
       "What'd he say?" Blossom asked.
       "He said he wants to talk to me alone. The rest of you, go away and
leave us together, huh? Dad's got things he wants to tell me alone."
       There were shufflings and sighs as the few people who were not yet
sleeping (the waking period having ended many hours ago) walked off into other
areas of the tuber to leave father and son together. Neil strained to hear the
least sound that would have meant that one of them remained nearby. In this
abysmal darkness, privacy was never a sure thing.
       "Buddy ain't here," he said at last, assured that they were alone. "He's
with Maryann and the baby. So's Alice. There's some kind of problem about the
way it breathes." Neil's throat was dry, and when he tried to make saliva and
swallow it, it hurt. _Alice_, he thought angrily, _shouldn't be off somewhere
else now_. All people talked about, it seemed to Neil, was the baby, the baby.
He was sick of the baby. Did anybody care about _his_ baby?
       Curiously, Greta's lie had made its most lasting impression on Neil. He
believed in it with the most literal, unquestioning faith, just as Maryann
believed in Christ's virgin birth. Neil had the ability to brush aside mere,
inconvenient facts and considerations of logic like cobwebs. He had even
decided that _his_ baby's name was to be Neil Junior. That would show old
Buddy-boy!
       "Then get Orville, will you?" Anderson whispered vexedly. "And bring the
others back. I have something to say."
       "You can tell it to me, huh? Huh, Dad?"
       "Get Orville, I said!" The old man began to cough.
       "Okay, okay!" Neil walked some distance from the small hollow in the
fruit where his father was lying, counted to a hundred (skipping, in his
haste, everything between fiftynine and seventy), and returned. "Here he is,
Dad, just like you said."
       Anderson did not think it extraordinary that Orville should not greet
him. Everyone, these last days, was mute in his presence, the presence of
death. "I should have said this before, Jeremiah," he began, speaking rapidly,
afraid that this sudden renewal of strength would desert him before he could
finish. "I've waited too long. Though I know you've been expecting it. I could
tell by your eyes. So there was no need to--" He broke off, coughing. "Here,"
(he gestured feebly in the darkness) "take my revolver. There's only one
bullet left, but some of them see it as a sort of symbol. It's just as well to
let them. There were so many things I wanted to tell you, but there was no
time."
      Neil had grown more and more agitated during his father's valedictory,
and at last he could not contain himself: "What are you talking about, Dad?"
      Anderson chuckled. "He doesn't understand yet. Do _you_ want to tell
him, or shall I?" There was a long silence. "Orville?" Anderson asked in a
changed voice.
      "Tell me what, Dad? What don't I understand?"
      "That Jeremiah Orville is taking over from now on. So bring him here!"
      "Dad, you don't mean that." Neil began to chew fretfully on his lower
lip. "He ain't an Anderson. He ain't even one of the village. Listen, Dad,
I'll tell you what--I'll take over, huh? I'd do a better job than him. Just
give me a chance. That's all I ask, just one chance."
      Anderson didn't reply. Neil began all over again, in a softer, more
persuasive tone. "Dad, you gotta understand--Orville ain't one of us."
      "He will be soon enough, you little bastard. Now bring him here."
      "What do you mean by that?"
      "I mean I'm marrying him to your sister. Now cut out the crap and bring
him here. And your sister too. Bring every. body here."
      "Dad, you can't mean that, Dad!"
      Anderson wouldn't say another word. Neil showed him all the reasons it
was impossible for Orville to marry Blossom. Why, Blossom was only twelve
years old! She was his sister--Neil's sister! Didn't he understand that? And
who was this Orville character anyhow? He wasn't anybody. They should have
killed him long ago, along with the other marauders. Hadn't Neil said so at
the time? Neil would kill him now, if Anderson only said the word. How about
it?
      No matter what arguments Neil offered, the old man just lay there. Wa3
he dead? Neil wondered. No, he was still breathing. Neil was in misery.
      His keen ears picked up the sounds of others returning. "Leave us
alone!" he shouted at them. They went away again, unable to hear Anderson's
orders to the contrary.
      "We've got to talk this thing over, you and me, Dad," Neil pleaded.
Anderson wouldn't say a word, not a word.
      With tears in his eyes, Neil did what he had to do. He pinched together
the old man's nostrils and held his other hand down tightly over the old man's
mouth. He wiggled around a little at first, but he was too weak to put up much
of a struggle. When the old man was very, very quiet, Neil took his hands away
and felt if he was still breathing.
      He wasn't.
      Then Neil took the holster and pistol off the old man am! strapped it
about his own thicker body. It was a sort of symbol.
      Shortly afterward Alice came, with the lamp, and felt the dead man's
wrist. "When did he die?' she asked.
      "Just a minute ago," Neil said. It was bard to understand him, he was
crying so. "And he asked me--he told me I should take his place. And he gave
me his pistol."
      Alice looked at Neil suspiciously. Then she bent over the face of the
corpse and studied it attentively under the lamp. There were bruises on the
sides of his nose, and his lip was cut and bleeding. Neil was bending over
behind her. He couldn't understand where the blood had come from.
      "You murdered him." Neil couldn't believe his ears: she had called him
_a murderer!_
      He hit Alice over the top of the head with the butt of the pistol. Then
he wiped away the blood trickling down his father's chin and spread fruit pulp
over the cut lip.
      More people came. He explained to them that his father was dead, that
he, Neil Anderson, was to take over his father's place. He also explained that
Alice Nemerov had let his father die when she could have saved him. All her
talk about looking after the baby was so much hogwash. It was just as bad as
if she'd killed him outright. She would have to be executed, as an example.
But not right away. For now they'd just tie her up. And gag her. Neil attended
to the gag himself.
       They obeyed him. They were accustomed to obeying Anderson, and they had
been expecting Neil to take over from him for a long time--for years. Of
course, they didn't believe Alice was in any way guilty, but then neither had
they believed a lot of things Anderson had told them, and they'd always obeyed
him anyhow. Maybe if Buddy had been there, he would have put up more of a
fuss. But he was with Maryann and his newborn son, who was still weakly. They
didn't dare bring the baby near his grandfather for fear of infection.
       Besides, Neil was waving the Python around rather freely. They all knew
there was a bullet left, and no one wanted to be the first to start an
argument.
       When Alice was securely bound, Neil asked where Orville was. Nobody, as
it turned out, had seen or heard from him for several minutes.
       "Find him and bring him here. Right now. Blossom! Where's Blossom? I saw
her here a minute ago." BUt Blossom too was nowhere to be found.
       "She's gotten lost!" Neil exclaimed, in a flash of understanding. "She's
lost in the roots. We'll get up a search party. But first, find Orville.
No--first help me with this." Neil grabbed up Alice by the shoulders. Somebody
else took her feet. She didn't weigh more than a feedbag, and the pearest
taproot where there was a sheer vertical drop wasn't two minutes away. They
dropped her down the shaft. They couldn't see how far she fell, because Neil
had forgotten to Sting the lamp. No doubt, she fell a long, long way.
       Now his father was revenged. Now he would look for Orville. There was
only one bullet left in his father's Colt Python .357 Magnum. It was for
Orville.
       But _first_ he must find Blossom. She must have run off somewhere when
she heard her father was dead. Neil could understand that. The news had upset
him too, upset him something terrible.
       First, they'd look for Blossom. Then they'd look for Orville. He hoped,
how he hoped, that he wouldn't find them together. That would be too awful for
words.



TWELVE:   Ghosts and Monsters


      _You'd better hide_, she thought, and that was how she gol lost.
      Once, when Blossom was seven, her parents had gone to Duluth for the
weekend, taking the baby, Jimmie Lee with them, leaving her alone in the big
two-story house on the outskirts of Tassel. It was their eighteenth wedding
anniversary. Buddy and Neil, both big boys then, had gone away--one to a
dance, the other to a baseball game. For a while she had watched television,
then she played with her dolls. The house became very dark, but it was her
father's rule never to turn on more than one lamp at a time. Other. wise, you
wasted current.
      She didn't mind being a _little_ scared. There was even something nice
about it. So she turned off _all_ the lights and pretended the Monster was
trying to find her in the dark. Hardly daring to breathe and on the tips of
her toes, she found safe hiding places for all her children: Lulu, because she
was black anyway, in the coal bin in the basement; Ladybird, behind the cats'
box; Nelly, the oldest, in the wastebasket by Daddy's desk. It got scarier and
scarier. The Monster looked everywhere in the living room for her except the
one place she was--behind the platform rocker. When he left the living room,
Blossom crept up the stairs, keeping close to the wall so they wouldn't creak.
But one _did_ creak, and the Monster heard it and came gallumphing up the
stairs behind her. With an excited shout she ran into the first room and shut
the door behind her. It was Neil's bedroom, and the big horned moosehead
glowered down at her from his place over the chest of drawers. She had always
been afraid of that moose, but she was even more afraid of the Monster, who
was out there in the hall, listening at every door to hear if she was inside.
      She crept on hands and knees to Neil's closet door, which was ajar. She
hid among the smelly old boots and dirty blue jeans. The door to the bedroom
creaked open. It was so dark she couldn't see her hand in front of her face,
but she could _hear_ the Monster snuffling all over. He came to the door of
the closet and stopped. He _smelled_ she was inside. Blossom's heart almost
stopped beating, and she prayed to God and to Jesus that the Monster would go
away.
      The Monster made a loud terrible noise and threw open the door, and for
the very first time Blossom saw what the Monster looked like. She screamed and
screamed and screamed.
      Neil got home first that night, and he couldn't understand what Blossom
was doing in his closet with his dirty blue jeans pulled down over her head,
whimpering like she'd been whipped with the strap, and trembling like a robin
caught in an April snowstorm. But when he picked her up, her little body
became all rigid, and nothing would content her but that she sleep that night
in Neil's bed. The next morning she'd come down with a fever, and her parents
had to cut their trip short and come home and take care of her. No one ever
understood what had happened, for Blossom didn't dare tell them about the
Monster, whom _they_ couldn't see. Eventually the incident was forgotten. As
Blossom grew older, the content of her nightmares underwent a gradual change:
the old monsters were no more terrifying now than the moosehead over the chest
of drawers.
      Darkness, however, is the very stuff of terror, and Blossom, running and
creeping through the roots, descending depth after depth, felt the old fear
repossess her. Suddenly all the lights in the house had been turned off. The
darkness filled itself with monsters, like water pouring into a tub, and she
ran down stairs and down hallways looking for a closet to hide in.
      All through these last, long days of her father's dying, and even
before, Blossom had been too much alone. She had felt that there was something
he wanted to say to her but that he wouldn't let himself say it. This
restraint humiliated her. She had thought that he did not want her to see him
dying, and she had forced herself to stay away. Alice and Maryann, with whom
she would customarily have passed her time, had no concern now but the baby.
Blossom wanted to help them, but she was too young. She was at that age when
one is uncomfortable in the presence of either birth or death. She haunted the
fringes of these great events and pitied herself for being excluded from them.
She imagined herself dying: how sad they would all be, how sorry they had
neglected her!
      Even Orville had no time for Blossom. He was either off by himself or at
Anderson's side. Only Neil seemed more upset at the old man's death. Whenever
Orville's path had crossed Blossom's he looked at her with such deadly
intensity that the girl turned away, blushing and even slightly scared. No
longer did she feel she understood him, and this, in a way, made her love him
more--and more hopelessly.
      But none of these things would have caused her to take flight, except
into fantasies. It was only after she had seen the expression on Neil's face,
the almost somnambulistic cast to his features, when she had heard him speak
her name in that particular tone of voice--it was then that Blossom, like a
doe catching scent of a hunter, panicked and began to run: away, into the
deeper, sheltering dark.
      She ran blindly, and so it was inevitable that she would go over one of
the dropoffs into a primary root. It could happen, in the dark, even if you
were careful. The void swallowed her whole.
      Her bent knees first entered the pulp of the fruit, then her body
pitched forward into the soft, yielding floss. She sank deep, deep into it.
She landed unhurt, only a few inches away from the broken but still breathing
body of Alice Nemerov, R.N.
      He had delayed, had Jeremiah Orville, altogether too long. He had meant
to revenge, and he had instead assisted. Day by day he had observed Anderson's
death, his agony, his humiliation, and he knew that he, Jeremiah Orville, had
had nothing to do with them. It was the Plant and mere happenstance that had
brought Anderson low.
      Orville had stood by, Hamletlike, and said _amen_ to Anderson's
prayers--had deceived only himself by his subtleties. He had been so greedy
that all Anderson's sufferings proceed from himself alone and none from the
Plant that he had led the old man and his tribe to a land of milk and honey.
And now his enemy lay dying by the merest accident, by an infected bite on a
vestigial toe.
      Orville brooded, alone, in that deep darkness, and an image, a phantasm,
took shape in the vacant air. Each day, the apparition took on greater
definition, but he knew even from the first white shimmering that it was
Jackie Whythe. But _this_ was a Jackie who had never been: younger, lither,
sweeter, the very essence of female grace and delicacy.
      She made him, by all her familiar wiles, declare his love for her. He
swore he loved her, but she was not satisfied, she would not believe him. She
made him say it again and again.
      She reminded him of the nights they had been together, of the treasures
of her young body. .. and the horror of her death. Then she would ask again:
_Do you love me?_
      _I do, I do_, he insisted. _I do love you. Can you doubt it?_ He was in
an agony of desire to possess her once again. He craved a final kiss, the
slightest touch, a breath merely, but he was refused.
      _I am dead_, she reminded him, _and you have not revenged me_.
      "Who will you have?" he asked aloud, grabbing up the axe, which he had
been whetting on the palm of his hand all this while. "Give me the name, and
with this same axe . . ."
      _Blossom_, the phantasm whispered eagerly, not without a hint of
jealousy. _You've abandoned me for that child. You court an infant_.
      _No! it was only that I might betray her. It was all for the sake of
you_.
      _Then betray her now. Betray her, and I will return to you. Then, only
then, will I kiss you. Then, when you touch me, your hand will feel flesh_.
With those words she disappeared.
      In the same instant he knew she had not been real, that this was, quite
possibly, the inception of madness. But he did not care. Though she was not
real, she was right.
      Immediately he went in search of his victim. He found her standing on
the edge of a group gathered about her father's corpse. Alice Nemerov was
lying bound near the corpse, and Neil Anderson was there too, raving. Orville
paid no heed to any of this. Then Blossom, as though sensing his purpose, ran
madly into the dark tunnels of the Plant. He followed her. This time he would
do what must be done--do it neatly, expeditiously, and with an axe.
      Pressing the hard, crisp pulp from the rind of the fruit between her
palms, Blossom was able to squeeze out a few oily drops of water. But it was
so warm at this depth-- eighty degrees or more-that she could hardly hope to
revive Alice with it. She began again to massage the old woman's thin hands,
her cheeks, the sagging flesh of her arms. Mechanically she repeated the same
few words of comfort: "Alice dear, please. . . . _Try_ to wake up, try. . . .
Alice, it's _Blossom_. . . . Alice? . . . . It's all right now. . . . Oh,
_please!_" At last the old woman seemed to be conscious, for she groaned.
      "Are you all right? Alice?"
      Alice made a noise verging on speech, which was terminated by a hissing
intake of breath. When she did speak, when she could speak, her voice was
unnaturally loud and strangely resolute. "My hip. I think . . . yes, it's
broken."
      "Oh no! Oh, Alice! Does it . . . does it hurt?"
      "Like hell, my dear."
      "Why did he do it? Why did Neil--" Blossom paused; she dared not say
what it was that Neil had done. Now that Alice was conscious, her own fear and
agitation settled over her again. It was as though she had revived Alice only
that she might be able to tell her, Blossom, that the Monster wasn't real,
just something she'd imagined.
      "Why did he throw me down here? Because, my dear, the bastard murdered
your father, and because I knew it and was fool enough to say so. And then, I
fancy, he never _has_ liked me very much."
      Blossom said she would not believe it, that it was absurd. She made
Alice tell her how she knew, called for the evidences, refuted them. She made
her, suffering as she was, repeat each detail of the story, and still she
would not believe it. Her brother had faults, but he was not a murderer.
      "He murdered _me_, didn't he?" It was a difficult question to answer.
      "But _why_ would he do such a thing? Why kill a man who's almost dead?
It makes no sense. There was no reason."
      "It was on your account, my dear."
      Blossom could almost feel the Monster breathing down her neck. "What do
you mean?" She grabbed Alice's hand almost angrily. "Why on _my_ account?"
      "Because he must have found out that your father was intending for you
and Jeremiah Orville to be married."
      "Daddy intended--I don't understand?"
      "He wanted Jeremiah to be the new leader, to take his place. He didn't
_want_ it, but he saw that it would have to be that way. But he put off
telling anyone about it. That was my doing. I told him to wait. I thought it
would keep him going. I never thought . . ."
      Alice talked on, but Blossom had stopped listening. She understood now
what her father had wanted to tell her and why he had hesitated. Grief and
shame flooded over her: she had misjudged him; she had left him all those days
to suffer alone. And he had only wanted her happiness, the happiness she
wanted for herself! If only she could return to beg his forgiveness, to thank
him. It was as though Alice, by those few words, had turned on all the lights
in the house and restored her father to life.
      But Alice's next words dispelled this illusion. "You'd better watch out
for him," she said grimly. "You dare not trust him. _Especially_ you."
      "Oh no, no, you don't understand. I love him. And I think he loves me
too."
      "Not Orville. Of course he loves you. Any fool can see that. It's Neil
you'd better watch out for. He's crazy."
      Blossom did not protest this. She knew, better than Alice, though less
aware till now, how true this was.
      "And part of his craziness has to do with you."
      "When the others know what he's done, when I tell them . . ." Blossom
did not have to say more than this. When the others knew what Neil had done,
he would be killed.
      "That's why I told you. So they _would_ find out."
      "You'll tell them yourself. We've got to get back. _Now_. Here--put your
arm around my shoulder." Alice protested, but Blossom would not listen. The
old woman was light. Blossom could carry her, if need be.
      An agonized cry parted the old woman's lips, and she tore her arm away
from Blossom. "No! no, the pain . . . I can't."
      "Then I'll get help."
      "What help? Whose help? A doctor? An ambulance? I couldn't help your
father recover from a rat bite, and this is--" The sound that intruded upon
her speech was more eloquent than any words she might have intended.
      For a long while, Blossom bit her lip to keep silent. When she felt
Alice was ready to listen, she said, "Then I'll just sit here with you."
      "And watch me die? It will take a while. No more than two days, though,
and most of the time I'll be making these awful noises. No--that would be no
comfort to me. But there is something you can do. If you're strong enough."
      "Whatever it is, I'll do it."
      "You must promise." Blossom's hand tightened over hers in assurance.
"You must do for me what Neil did for your father."
      "_Murder_ you? No! Alice, you can't ask me to--"
      "My dear, I've done it in my time for those who have asked. Some of them
had less reason than I. A hypodermic of air, and the pain is--" She did not,
this time, cry out. "--gone. Blossom, I _beg_ you."
      "Someone may come. We'll make a stretcher."
      "Yes, someone may come. Neil may come. Can you imagine what he would do
if he finds me still alive?"
      "No, he wouldn't--" But immediately she knew he would.
      "You _must_, my dear. I'll hold you to your promise. But kiss me first.
No, not like that--on the lips."
      Blossom's trembling lips pressed against Alice's that were rigid with
the effort to hold back the pain. "I love you," she whispered. "I love you
like my very own mother."
      Then she did what Neil had done. Alice's body twisted away in
instinctive, unthinking protest, and Blossom let loose her grip.
      "No!" Alice gasped. "Don't torture me--do it!"
      Blossom did not let loose this time until the old woman was dead.
      The darkness grew darker, and Blossom thought she could hear someone
climbing down the vines of the root overhead. There was a loud terrible noise
as his body came down into the fruit pulp. Blossom knew what the Monster would
look like: he would look like Neil. She screamed and screamed and screamed.
      The Monster had an axe.


      "Return soon," she begged.
      "I will, I promise." Buddy bent down to his wife, missing her lips in
the darkness (the lamp, by Neil's authority, was to remain with the corpse)
and kissing her nose instead. She giggled girlishly. Then, with an excess of
caution, he touched one finger to the tiny arm of his son. "I love you," be
said, not bothering to define whether he was addressing her or the infant or
perhaps both. He did not know himself. He only knew that despite the terrible
events of the last months, and especially of the past hour, his life seemed
meaningful in a way that it had not for years. The somberest considerations
could not diminish the fullness of his hopes nor dampen the glow of his
satisfaction.
      In even the worst disaster, in the largest defeats, the machinery of joy
keeps on grinding for a lucky few.
      Maryann seemed more aware than he that their charmed circle was of very
small circumference, for she murmured, "Such a terrible thing."
      "What?" Buddy asked. His attention was taken up with Buddy Junior's
teeny-tiny toe.
      "Alice. I can't understand why hc
      "He's crazy," Buddy said, moving reluctantly outside the circle. "Maybe
she called him a name. She has--she had a sharp tongue, you know. When he gets
back, I'll see that something's done. There's no teffing what rotten thing
he'll do next. Orville will help, and there are others, too, who've let a word
drop. But in the meantime he has a gun and we don't. And the important thing
now is to find Blossom."
      "Of course. That must come first. It's just that it's such a terrible
thing."
      "It's a terrible thing," he agreed. He could hear Neil calling to him
again. "I have to go now." He began to move away.
      "I wish the lamp were here, so I could see you one more time."
      "You sound like you don't think I'll return."
      "No! Don't say that--even as a joke. You will come back. I know you
will. But, Buddy--?"
      "Maryann?"
      "Say it one more time."
      "I love you."
      "And I love you." When she was quite sure he was gone, she added: "I've
_always_ loved you."


      The several members of the descending search party threaded their way
through the labyrinth of divergent roots on a single slim rope, braided by
Maryann from the fiber of the vines. When any member of the party separated
from the main body, he attached the end of his own reel of rope to the
communal rope that led back to the tuber where Anderson was lying in state
beside the vigilant lamp.
      Neil and Buddy descended the farthest along the communal rope. When it
gave out, they were at a new intersection of roots. Buddy knotted one end of
his rope to the end of the main line and went off to the left. Neil, having
done likewise, went to the right, but only for a short distance. Then he sat
down and thought, as hard as he could think.
      Neil did not trust Buddy. Never had. Now, with their father passed on,
wouldn't he have to trust him still less? He thought he was so smart, Buddy
did, with that brat of his. Like he was the only man in the world ever had a
son. Neil hated his guts for other reasons too-which his mind shied from. It
would not do for him to be too consciously aware that the presumable Neil
Junior, if he existed at all, existed most probably as a result of other seed
than his own. That was a thought that he had best not think at all.
      Neil was worried. He sensed in several of the men who'd gone out on the
search a resistance to his authority, and this resistance seemed strongest in
Buddy. A leader can't afford to let his leadership be challenged. Their father
had always harped on that. It didn't seem to make any difference to Buddy that
Anderson had _wanted_ Neil to take over for him. Buddy had always been a wild
one, a rebel, an atheist.
      _That's what he is!_ Neil thought, astonished at how perfectly the word
defined everything dangerous in his brother. _An atheist!_ Why hadn't he
realized that before?
      One way or another, atheists had to be stomped out. Because atheism was
like poison in the town reservoir; it was like. . . . But Neil couldn't
remember how the rest of it went. It had been a long time since his father had
given a good sermon against atheism and the Supreme Court.
      On the heels of this perception another new idea came to Neil. It was,
for him, a true inspiration, a revelation--almost as though his father's
spirit had come down from heaven and whispered it in his ear.
      _He would tie Buddy's line in a circle!_
      Then, when Buddy tried to get back, he'd just keep following the rope
around and around the circle. Once you grasped the basic concept, it was a
very simple idea.
      There was one hitch, however, when you thought about it carefully. One
part of the circle would be here at this intersection, and Buddy could feel
around, maybe, and discover the end of the main line where it was still
knotted to Neil's.
      _But he wouldn't if the circle didn't touch this intersection!_
      Chuckling to himself, Neil unknotted Buddy's rope and began following
Buddy, winding the rope up as he went along. When he figured he'd taken up
enough of it, he turned off along a minor branch of the root, unwinding the
rope as he crawled along. This small root connected to another equally small,
and this to yet another. The roots of the Plant were always circling around on
themselves, and if you just kept turning the same direction, you usually came
back to the point you started from. And sure enough, Neil soon was back in the
larger root, where he caught hold of Buddy's line, stretched taut, a foot off
the floor. Buddy was probably not far away.
      Neil's trick was working splendidly. Having nearly reached the end of
the length of rope, he knotted it to the other end and formed a perfect
circle.
      _Now_, Neil thought, with satisfaction, _let him try and find his way
back. Let him try and make trouble now! The lousy atheist!_
      Neil began to crawl back the way he had come, using Buddy's rope as a
guide, laughing all the way. Only then did he notice that there was some kind
of funny slime all over his hands and all over his clothing, too.



THIRTEEN:   Cuckoo, Jug-jug, Pu-we, To-witta-wo!


      There are people who cannot scream even when the occasion calls
emphatically for screaming. Any drill sergeant can tell you of men, good
soldiers every other way, who, when they must run forward to plant a bayonet
in the guts of a sawdust dummy, cannot let loose with any sort of battle
cry--or at best can manage some bloodless imitation, a half-hearted _Kill Kill
Kill!_ It is not that these men lack the primordial emotions of hatred and
bloodlust; they have just become too civilized, too bound in, to experience a
pure berserker rage. Perhaps a real battle will bring it out of them; perhaps
nothing will.
      There are emotions more primordial, more basic to survival, than hatred
and bloodlust; but it is the same with them too-they can be stilled, covered
over with civilized form and secondary modes of feeling. Only extreme
circumstances can release them.
      Jeremiah Orville was a very civilized man. The last seven years had
liberated him in many ways, but they had not effaced his civilization until
very lately, when events had taught him to desire the consummation of his
revenge above his own happiness and safety. It was a beginning.
      But as he stood beside Blossom, the axe in his hand unseen, himself
unseen, hearing these heartrending cries that fear wrenched from her throat,
now the more primordial emotion of love overcame him, shattered the civilized
Jeremiah, and, dropping the weapon, he fell to his knees and began kissing the
young body that was now the most important and beautiful thing in the world.
      "Blossom!" he cried with joy. "O Blossom! Blossom!" and continued
senselessly to repeat her name.
      "Jeremiah! You! My God, I thought it was _him!_"
      And he, in the same instance: "How could I have loved _her_, a ghost,
bodiless, when all this whilc-- Forgive me! Can you ever forgive me?"
      She could not understand him. "_Forgive_ you!" She laughed and cried,
and they said many things to each other then without thinking, without caring
to understand any more than the as-yet-unassimilable fact that they were in
love.
      Passion's highest flights tend to be, if not completely innocent, slow.
Orville and Blossom could not enjoy the happiness of gazing hours-long into
each other's eyes, but the darkness permitted as much as it denied. They
dallied; they delayed. They called each other by the simple, affectionate
names of schoolgirl romances (names that had never passed between Orville and
Jackie Whythe, who had been given, when Orville's hands moved over her, to
cruder expressions--a certain sign of sophistication), and these
_sweethearts_, these _darlings_ and _my very owns_, seemed to express
philosophies of love exact as arithmetic and subtle as music.
      Eventually, as they must, a few words of common sense disturbed the
perfect solitude of their love, like pebbles thrown in a still pond. "The
others must be looking for me," she said. "I have to tell them about
something."
      "Yes, I know-- I was listening up above as Alice spoke to you."
      "Then you know that Daddy wanted this. He was going to say so when--"
      "Yes, I know."
      "And Neil--"
      "I know that too. But you needn't worry about him now." He kissed the
soft, drooping lobe of her ear. "Let's not speak of it though. Later, we'll do
what we have to do."
       She pushed Orville away from her. "No, Jeremiah. Listen--let's go away
somewhere. Away from them and all their hating and jealousy. Somewhere where
they'll never find us. We can be like Adam and Eve and think of new names for
all the animals. There's the whole world--" She did not say any more, for she
realized that there _was_ the whole world. She stretched out a hand to draw
Orville back to her--and to push the world aside for a little longer--but
instead of Orville's living flesh her hand encountered Alice's fractured hip.
       A voice, not Orville's, called her name. "Not _yet_," she whispered. "It
can't end _now_."
       "It won't end," he promised, helping her to her feet. "We have our whole
life ahead of us. A lifetime lasts forever. At my age, I should know."
       She laughed. Then, for the whole world to hear, she shouted: "We're down
here. Go away, whoever you are. We'll find our way back by ourselves."
       But Buddy had already found them, entering the tuber by a side passage.
"Who's that with you?" he asked. "Orville, is it you? I should knock your
block off for pulling a stunt like this. Don't you know the old man is dead?
What a hell of a time to elope!"
       "No, Buddy, you don't understand. It's all right--Orville and I are in
love."
       "Yeah, I understand that all right. He and I'll have a talk about
that--in private. I only hope I got here before he could put your _love_ to
the test. For Christ's sake, Orville--this girl is only fourteen! She's young
enough to be your daughter. The way you're going at it, she's young enough to
be your _grand_daughter."
       "Buddy! It's not like that at all," Blossom protested. "It's what father
_wanted_ for us. He said to Alice and then--"
       Buddy, moving forward with their voices as a guide, stumbled over the
nurse's dead body. "What in hell!"
       "That's Alice. If you'd only _listen_--" Blossom broke into tears in
which frustration mingled with sorrow.
       "Sit down," Orville said, "and shut up for a minute. You've been jumping
to the wrong conclusions, and there are a lot of things you don't know.
No--don't argue, man, _listen!_"
       "The question, then, is not what should be done in Neil's case, but
who's to do it," Orville concluded. "I don't think I should have to bear that
responsibility, nor that you should either. Personally, I've never liked your
father's high-handed way of being judge, jury, and law all by himself. It's an
honor to have been nominated as his successor, but an honor I'd rather
decline. This is a matter for the community to act on."
       "Agreed. I know that if _I_ did . . . what has to be done, they'd say it
was for personal reasons. And it just wouldn't be true. I don't want anything
he's got. Not any more. In fact, the only thing I want right now is to go back
and see Maryann and my son again."
       "Then the thing to do is to set about finding the others. Blossom and I
can stay out of the way until the matter has been settled. Neil can be king
for a day, but he'll have to sleep sometime, and that will be time enough to
depose him."
       "Fine. We'll go now--but not back along my rope. It would be too easy to
run into Neil that way. If we climb up the vines of the root that you came
down, there'll be no danger of our crossing his path."
       "If Blossom's up to it, I'm agreeable."
       "Jeremiah, you strange old man, I can climb up those things twice as
fast as any thirty-five-year-old, two-hundred pound grandfather."
       Buddy heard what he supposed was a kiss and pursed his lips in
disapproval. Though he agreed in theory with all that Orville had said in his
own and Blossom's defense--that times had changed, that early marriage was now
positively to be preferred to the old way, that Orville (this had been
Blossom's argument) was certainly the most eligible of the survivors, and that
they had Anderson's posthumous blessing on their union--despite all these
cogent reasons, Buddy could not help feeling a certain distaste for the whole
thing. _She's still a child_, he told himself, and against this, to him,
incontrovertible fact all their reasonings seemed as specious as the proofs
that Achilles can never pass the tortoise in their endless footrace.
      But he swallowed his distaste, as a child swallows some loathed
vegetable in order to go outside and do something more important. "Let's shove
off," he said.
      To return to the primary root down which Blossom and Orville had dropped
it was necessary to detour back along the way Buddy had come and then angle up
along a branch root so narrow that even crawling through it was arduous.
      But this was only a foretaste of the difficulties they faced in climbing
the vertical root. The vines by which they hoped to ascend were covered over
with a thin film of slime; the hand could not grip them firmly enough to keep
from slipping. Only at the nodal points, where the vines fed into each other,
forming a sort of stirrup (like the system of roots, these vines were forever
joining and rejoining), could one purchase a secure hold, and there was not
always certain to be another such nodal intersection of vines within grasping
distance overhead. They had continually to backtrack and reascend along a
different network of vines. Even more frustrating was that their feet (though
bare, they were not prehensile) were constantly slipping out of these
makeshift stirrups. It was like trying to climb a greased rope ladder with
rungs missing.
      "What's to be gained killing ourselves?" Buddy asked rhetorically, after
having come within one slippery fingerhold of doing exactly this for himself.
"I don't know where this slop is coming from, but it doesn't seem to be
letting up. The higher we go, the more likely we are to break our necks if we
fall. Why not go back along my rope after all? It's not that likely we'll run
into Neil, and if we do, we don't have to let on that we know anything he
wouldn't want us to. I'd rather risk five, ten minutes with him than another
hundred yards up this greased chimney."
      This seemed a sensible course, and they returned to the tuber. The
descent was easy as sliding down a firepole.
      Following Buddy's line up a mild slope, they noticed that here too the
vines were slimed and slippery beneath their bare feet. Feeling down beneath
the layer of vines, Orville discovered that a little rivulet of the slime was
flowing down the slope.
      "What is it, do you suppose?" Buddy wondered.
      "I think the springtime has come at last," Orville replied.
      "And this is the sap--of course! I reëognize the feel of it now--and the
smell--oh, don't I know that smell!"
      "Springtime!" Blossom said. "We'll be able to return to the surface!"
      Happiness is contagious (and wasn't there every reason for a young man
newly in love to be happy in any case?), and Orville quoted part of a poem he
remembered:

            "Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant king;
            Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
            Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,
            Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-wo!"

      "What a lovely poem!" she said, catching hold of his hand and squeezing.
      "What a lot of nonsense!" Buddy said. "_Cuckoo, jugjug, pu-we,
to-witta-wo!_"
      The three of them laughed gaily. The sun seemed to be shining on them
already, and nothing was needed to make them laugh again but that one of them
repeat the silly old Elizabethan words.


      Some two thousand feet above their heads, the reviving land basked under
the bright influence of the sun, which had indeed passed the equinox. Even
before the last patches of snow had melted from the southern sides of
boulders, the leaves of the great Plants unfurled to receive the light and
began without further ado to set about their work as though October were only
yesterday.
      Except for the noise of the leaves snapping open (and that was over in a
day), it was a silent spring. There were no birds to sing.
      The leaves spoke hungrily to the stems, drained dry to last out the
freezing northern winter, and the stems spoke to the roots, where the
solute-bearing sap, which the leaves needed to make new food, began to boil up
through myriad capillaries. Where these capillaries had been broken by the
passage of man, the sap oozed forth and spread over the vines that lined the
hollows of the roots. As more and more sap poured through the arteries of the
awakening Plant, the thin sap formed little rivulets, which, merging with
other rivulets, became little streams, and these streams ran down to flood the
lowest depths of the roots. When they flowed into hollows in which the
capillaries were still intact, they were reabsorbed, but elsewhere the levels
of these streams rose higher and higher, flooding the roots, like sewers in a
sudden March thaw.
      Now the tubers of the fruit, which had been forming for years, took on a
fine, autumnal richness. The airy floss at their cores, receiving their final
supplies of food from the leaves above, thickened to the consistency of
whipped egg white.
      In both hemispheres, the Plant was coming to the end of a long season,
and now, at regular intervals over the green earth, there descended from the
spring skies gleaming spheres so immense that each one, landing, crushed
several of the Plants under its ponderous bulk. Viewed from the proper
distance, the landscape would have resembled a bed of clover overspread with
gray basketballs.
      These gray basketballs basked a few hours in the sun, then extruded,
from apertures at their bases, hundreds of exploratory cilia, each of which
moved toward a nearby Plant and with tidy, effective little drill bits, began
to bore down through the woody stem into the hollow of the root below. When a
satisfactory passage had been opened, the cilium was drawn back into the gray
basketbalL
      The harvest was being prepared.


      Neil had gone three times about the circle of rope he had fashioned to
trap Buddy, and he was beginning, dully, to sense that he had been caught in
his own snare (though how it had happened he did not yet understand). Then, as
he had feared, Buddy could be heard returning along the root. Blossom and
Orvifie were with him, all of them laughing! At him? He had to hide, but there
was nowhere to hide, and he didn't want to hide from Blossom anyhow. So he
said, "Uh, hi." They stopped laughing.
      "What are you doing _here?_" Buddy asked.
      "Well, you see, uh. . . . This rope here, it keeps . . . No, that's not
it, either." The more he talked, the more confused he became, and the more
impatient Buddy.
      "Oh, never mind then. Come along. I've found Blossom. And Orville too.
Let's round up the others now. It's spring. Haven't you noticed the
slime--Hey--what's this?" He had found the point where the end of his own rope
was knotted to its own middle. "This surely isn't the intersection where we
left each other. I'd remember if I'd gone down any root as small as this."
      Neil didn't know what to do. He wanted to hit his snoopy brother over
the head, that's what he wanted to do, and shoot Orville, just blast his
brains out. But he sensed that this had better be done away from Blossom, who
might not understand. Then too, when you're lost the most important thing is
to get home safe. When you're home safe, things won't seem so muddled as when
you're lost.
      A whispered conversation was going on among Buddy, Orville and Blossom.
Then Buddy said: "Neil, did you--"
      "No! I don't know how . . . it just must of _happened!_ It's not _my_
fault!"
      "Well, you dumb clod!" Buddy began to laugh. "Why, if you had to saw a
limb off a tree, I swear you'd sit on the wrong side to do it. You've tied my
line in a circle, haven't you?"
      "No, Buddy, honest to God! Like I said, I don't know how--"
      "And you didn't bring your own line along so you could get back. Oh,
Neil, how do you do it? How do you always find a way?"
      Orville and Blossom joined Buddy's laughter. "Oh, _Neil!_" Blossom cried
out. "Oh, _Neil!_"
      That made Neil feel good, to hear Blossom say his name like that, and he
began to laugh along with everybody else. The joke was on him!
      Surprisingly, it seemed that Buddy and Orville weren't going to make a
big stink. Maybe they knew what was good for them!
      "It seems we'll have to find our way back as best we can," Orville said
with a sigh, when they were all done laughing. "Neil, would you like to lead
the way?"
      "No," Neil said, somber again and touching the Python in his holster for
assurance. "No, I'll be the leader, but I'll bring up the rear."


      An hour later they had come up against a dead end, and they knew they
were thoroughly lost. It was no longer possible to shatter the capillaries
with a wave of one's arm. They were swollen with sap and resilient. It would
have been no more difficult to crawl through a honeycomb than through the
unopened hollows. They were compelled therefore to stay strictly within the
bounds of paths already blazed. Thanks to Anderson's explorations, there were
quite enough of these. Quite too many.
      Orville summed up their situation. "It's back to the subbasement, my
dears. We'll have to take another elevator to get to the ground floor."
      "Wha'd you say?" Neil asked.
      "I said--"
      "I heard what you said! And I don't want you to use that word again,
understand? You remember who's leader here, huh?"
      "What word, Neil?" Blossom asked.
      "_My dears!_" Neil screamed. Neil had always been able to scream when he
felt the occasion called for it. He was not overcivilized, and the primordial
was very close to the surface of his mind. It seemed to grow closer all the
time.



FOURTEEN:   The Way Up


      The quiet, which for months had been absolute, was broken by the
trickling of the sap. It was a sound like the sound of water in early spring,
flowing through the town gutters underneath unmelted banks of snow.
      While they rested they did not speak, for the most innocuous statements
could throw Neil into a state of hysterical excitement. Naturally, they knew
better than mention Anderson or Alice, but why, when Buddy began to worry out
loud about his wife and son, should Neil complain that he was "selfish," that
all he thought about was sex? When Orville spoke of their predicament and
speculated (with more good cheer than he felt) on their chances of reaching
the surface, Neil thought they were blaming him. Silence seemed altogether the
best policy, but Neil could not endure more than a few moments of silence
either. Then he would start to complain: "If only we'd brought down the lamp,
we wouldn't be having any trouble now." Or, remembering one of his father's
favorite themes: "Why do I have to do the thinking for everybody? Why is
that?"
       Or he would whistle. His favorite tunes were the _Beer-Barrel Polka_,
_Red River Valley_, _Donkey Serenade_ (which he accompanied percussively with
the popping of his cheeks), and the theme from _Exodus_. Once he had started
any of these, he could go on perpetuum mobile for the duration of the time
they rested. It wouldn't have been so bad if he'd been able to stay in the
same key for eight bars running.
       It was hardest for Buddy. Blossom and Orville had each other. In the
darkness they would hold each other's hands, while Neil ground out the tune
one more time around, like a diligent monkey; they could even kiss, quietly.


      Here there was neither north nor south, east nor west; there was only up
and down. There were no measurable units of distance, only rough estimates of
temperature and depth, and their only measure of elapsed time was the time it
took their bodies to drop, too exhausted to continue without another rest.
      They never knew whether they were at the periphery or near the heart of
labyrinth. They might ascend, through channels already opened, to within a few
hundred feet--or even ten--of the surface only to find themselves at a dead
end. It was necessary not simply to find a way up but to find the way up. It
was hard to make Neil understand why this was so. When Blossom had explained
it to him, he had seemed to agree, but later when Orville brought up the
subject again, the argument started all over.
      They were soaked through with their own sweat and with the sap, which in
the least steep roots reached levels of four and five inches. After hours of
climbing they were at a height where the heat was not so overwhelming (the
lower depths felt like a sauna), and the air seemed to be gas again. Orville
estimated the temperature as seventy-five, which placed them a probable
fifteen hundred feet from the surface. Ordinarily, over a known route, they
could have climbed that height in little more than three hours. Now it might
very well take days.
      Orville had hoped that the flow of sap would abate as they reached
higher levels; instead it was worsening. Where did it all come from? The
logistics of the Plant's water supply was something he had never stopped to
consider. Well, he couldn't stop now either.


      You couldn't just grab hold of a vine and haul yourself up the slope;
you had to make your hand into a sort of hook and slip it into a stirrup. You
couldn't just reach back and help the next person up after you; you had to
grapple the two hooks together. So it was always the hands that hurt worst and
were first to give out. You'd hang there and feel them letting loose, and
you'd hope that you wouldn't slide back with the sap too far. Once you let go,
it wasn't so bad--you'd slide along soft and easy if the slope wasn't too
steep, or else shoot down like a toboggan, until you came up against someone
or something with a bump, and then you had to get your hooks bent back into
shape and start clawing your way back up through the slime. But you knew your
body could go a long way yet, and you hoped that would be far enough.


      They might have been climbing twelve or twice twelve hours. They had
eaten and rested a few times, but they had not slept. They had not slept, in
fact, since before the night of Anderson's dying and Maryann's delivery. Now
it must be night again. Their minds were leaden with the necessity for sleep.
      "Absolute necessity," Orville repeated.
      Neil objected. This was just going to be a resting period. He feared
that if he went to sleep first, they would take away his gun. They weren't to
be trusted. But if he just sat here and let his body _relax_ . . . dog-tired,
that's what he. . . .
      He was the first to sleep after all, and they didn't take his gun. They
didn't care. They didn't want his gun: they only wanted to sleep.
      Neil's repertoire of dreams was no larger than his stock of songs. First
he dreamed his baseball dream. Then he was walking up the stairs of the old
house in town. Then he dreamed of Blossom. Then he dreamed his baseball dream
again, except this time it was different: when he opened the closet door, his
father was the first baseman. Blood spurted from the deep cleft of the first
baseman's mitt, which opened and closed, opened and closed, in the dead man's
hand. But otherwise the dreams were just the same as always.


      The next day, after an hour or so, the hurt went out of their hands, and
it was the stickiness that was hardest to endure. Their clothes clung to their
straining limbs or hung loose and heavy like skins that could not be sloughed
off. "We'd move faster," Orville said, "if we weren't weighted down with these
denim jackets."
      Somewhat later, since it appeared that the idea was not going to come to
Neil of itself, Buddy added, "If we knotted our jackets together, sleeve to
sleeve, and used them for rope, we could climb faster."
      "Yeah," Neil said, "but you're forgetting there's a lady with us."
      "Oh, don't bother about _me_," Blossom protested.
      "Just our jackets, Neil. It wouldn't be any different than going
swimming."
      "No!" The strident tone was creeping into his voice again. "It wouldn't
be _right!_" There was no use arguing with him once he had made up his mind.
He was their leader.
      The next time they stopped to rest and eat, the sap was raining down on
them in great globs, like the waterdrops that announce a summer- thunderstorm.
The central stream of sap flowing through the root was now well over their
ankles. As soon as they were not quite sopping wet, their clothes stuck to
them like suits of adhesive tape. They could move freely only when they were
drenched.
      "I can't stand it any longer," Blossom said, beginning to cry. "I can't
_stand_ it."
      "There now, Miss Anderson. Chin up! Tally-ho! Remember the Titanic!"
      "Stand what?" Neil asked.
      "These clothes," she said. And indeed that was a part of what she
couldn't stand.
      "Oh, I guess she's right," Neil said, as uncomfortable as the others.
"It can't hurt if we just take off our jackets. Hand them to me, and I'll knot
the sleeves together."
      "Good idea!" Orville said. They all handed their jackets to Neil.
      "Blossom!" he said. "I didn't mean _you_. It isn't right." She didn't
say anything. Neil sort of giggled. "Well, if that's the way you want it," he
said.
      The stuff gushed from the small opening above as from a burst water
main. Quite properly, it could not be called sap. It was more like water. For
a while they were happy because it cleaned them off. But it was cold, too
cold.
      The roots, as they ascended through them, had been growing smaller
instead of larger. To get through them now they had to crawl on hands and
knees, and even so they could scrape their heads on the ceiling if they
weren't careful. The water was up to their elbows.
      "I think," Orville said cautiously, "that we're coming up underneath
Lake Superior. This much water can't be coming from spring thaws." He waited
for Neil to protest. Then, still more cautiously: "I think we'll have to go
back the way we came. Let's hope we have better luck a second time."
      The reason Neil had not protested was that he had not heard. Orville's
voice had been drowned out by the roar of the water, which acres and acres of
thirsty Plants were siphoning from the lake bottom. Orville explained his
theory several times over when they had backed off to a quieter spot. Then
Blossom tried.
       "Neil, look, it's very simple--the only way away from the lake is
_down_. Because if we try to move along at _this_ level, we can as easily be
going east--farther on into the lake--as west--away from it. If we had the
lamp, we could use your compass, but we don't have the lamp. We might just go
along north or south and follow the shore. There's no telling how much area
beneath the lake Daddy explored last winter. We just have to go _down_. Do you
understand?"
       Orville took advantage of this occasion to have some private words with
Buddy: "What the hell--let's leave him here if he doesn't want to go with us.
It'll be his own fault if he drowns."
       "No," said Buddy, "that wouldn't be _right_. I want to do this by the
book."
       "Okay, I'll go," Neil told Blossom, "but I think it's a lot of hooey.
I'm only agreeing for your sake. Remember that."


      Down: the sap was in spate. It jostled their bodies together or tore
them apart as casually as floodwaters bearing off the trees of the riverbank.
Strong currents dashed them against the walls of the root wherever the curves
were too sharp or too steep. Days of climbing were retraced in minutes.
      Deeper down: the stream became less chill, grew thicker, like pudding
coming to a boil. But its pace did not slacken. It was like going down a ski
trail on a piece of cardboard. At least they need not worry about repeating
their mistake: it was no longer possible to move "upstream" toward the lake.
      At this depth there were now whole stretches where the hot sap filled
the entire hollow of the root. Hoarding a lungful of air, Orville (who was the
first to test any new passage) followed the current resistlessly and hoped.
There had always been some branch root feeding into the flooded root from
above, too small to ascend through perhaps but large enough to butt one's head
into for a breath of air. But the next time, of course, there might not be
such an opening. There might only be a dead end.
      That fear--that the current was leading them down a blind
alley--absorbed their whole attention. More and more often their bodies were
swept into entangling networks of the sap-swollen capifiaries that lined the
unexplored passages. Once Orville was caught in such a net where the root had
split abruptly in two. Buddy and Blossom, next behind, found him there, his
legs moving only as the current moved them. His head had struck against the
hard wedge separating the two branches of the root. He was unconscious,
perhaps drowned.
      They hauled at his pants leg, and his pants slid right off his narrow
hips. Then they each took a foot and pulled him out. A short distance away
they found an area where the root, sloping gently upward, was only half-filled
with sap. Buddy embraced Orville in a bear hug and began squeezing the water
out of his lungs rhythmically. Then Blossom tried mouth-to-mouth respiration,
which she'd learned in Red Cross swimming classes.
      "What are you doing?" Neil asked. Unfamiliar sounds made him nervous.
      "She's giving Orville artificial respiration," Buddy answered testily.
"He half-drowned back there."
      Neil reached out fingers to confirm this. The fingers came between
Orville's mouth and Blossom's, then clamped down tightly over Orville's.
"You're _kissing_ him!"
      "Neil!" Blossom screamed. She tried to tear away her brother's fingers,
but even desperation did not lend her sufficient strength. One can only be
desperate so long, and she'd passed that limit long ago. "You'll kill him!"
      Buddy struck a blow in the direction he supposed Neil to be, but it
glanced off Orville's shoulder. Neil began to drag Orville's body away.
      "He doesn't have pants on either," Neil fretted.
      "They came off when we were pulling him out. We told you that,
remember?"
      The sudden deprivation of oxygen, coming after their efforts at revival,
proved to be exactly the stimulus Orville required--he came to.
      When the body he was carrying began to stir, Neil let go abruptly,
spooked. He had thought Orville was dead, or very nearly.
      Buddy and Neil then had a long debate on the propriety of nudity (both
in the particular case of Orville and in general) under the present,
exceptional circumstances. The argument was mainly a pretext on Buddy's part
to give Orville a chance to regain his strength. "Do you want to get back to
the surface," Buddy asked, "or do you want to stay down here and be drowned?"
      "No!" Neil said, yet once more. "It isn't right. _No!_"
      "You've got to _choose_. Which is it?" Buddy was pleased to discover
that he could play on Neil's fears as easily as on a harmonica. "Because if
we're going to go up, we'll have to go up together, and we'll need some kind
of rope."
      "We _had_ a rope."
      "And you lost it, Neil."
      "I didn't. I did not. I--"
      "Well, you were the last one who had a hold on it, and now it's gone.
Now we need another rope. Of course, if you don't _care_ about getting back...
. Or if you think you'll do better on your own . . ."
      Eventually Neil agreed. "But Blossom ain't going to touch him,
understand? She's my sister, and I ain't going to have it. _Understand?_"
      "Neil, you don't have to worry about anything of that sort till we're
all home safe," Buddy temporized. "Nobody's going to--"
      "And they better not speak to each other either. Cause I say so, and
what I say goes. Blossom, you go on ahead of me, and Buddy behind. Orville
goes last."
      Neil, naked now except for belt and holster, knotted the legs of their
several trousers together, and they set off, each with a grip on the line. The
water was deep and so hot their skin seemed to be coming off their bones, like
a chicken that boils too long. The current was weakening, however, and they
moved more slowly.
      Soon they had found a root angling upward from which the trickle of
water was not much worse than when they'd first noticed it--how many days ago?
Wearily, almost mechanically, they began to climb again.
      Blossom remembered a song from nursery school days about a spider washed
down a water spout by the rain:

            Out came the sun and dried away the rain,
            And the inky-dinky spider be-gan to climb again.

      She began to laugh, as she had laughed at the strange words of
Jeremiah's poem, but this time she couldn't stop laughing, despite how much
the laughter hurt.
      Of them all, Buddy was the most upset by this, for he could remember the
winter before, in the commonroom, and the people who had run out into the
thawing snow, laughing and singing, never to return. Blossom's laughter was
not unlike theirs.
      The root at this point opened onto a tuber of fruit, and they decided to
rest and eat. Orville tried to calm Blossom, but Neil told him to shut up. The
pulp, which was now semiliquid, dropped down on their heads and shoulders like
the droppings of huge, diarrhetic birds.
      Neil was torn between his desire to go away where the noise of his
sister's laughter wouldn't disturb him and an equally strong desire to stay
close at hand and protect her. He compromised, removing to a middle distance,
where he lay on his back, not intending to go to sleep, just to rest his body
...
      His head came down on the handle of the axe that Jeremiah had dropped
there. He let out a little cry, which nobody noticed. They were all of them so
tired. He sat for a long time, thinking very hard, his eyes crossing with the
effort, though you couldn't see anything in that uncompromising dark.
      The softened fruit pulp continued to fall from overhead and spatter on
their bodies and on the floor with little crepitant sounds, like the sounds of
children's kisses.



FIFTEEN:   Blood and Licorice


      His hand touched her dead body. Buddy thought at first it was his
father's corpse, but then he remembered how he had once already stumbled
across that same cold body, and delight displaced terror: there _was_ a way
back! This was the thread that led out of the labyrinth. He traced his steps
back to Orville and Blossom.
      "Is Neil asleep?" he asked.
      "He's stopped whistling," Orville said. "He's either asleep or dead."
      Buddy told them his news. ". . . and so, you see, that means we can go
back the way we tried to in the first place. Up the shaft. It was a mistake,
our turning back when we did."
      "Here we are, come full circle. The only difference now," Orville
observed, "is that we've got Neil with us. Perhaps we'd do best to ignore that
difference and leave him behind. We can go now."
      "I thought we'd agreed to let the others decide what to do with Neil."
      "We won't be doing away with him. We'll be leaving him in almost exactly
the same place we found him--caught in the trap he meant for you. Besides, we
can leave Alice's body in his way, and he can figure out for himself that the
way back is up the shaft he threw her down."
      "Not my half-brother. Not Neil. He'd only get scared if he found her
body. As for figuring his way back, you might as well expect him to discover
the Pythagorean theorem all by himself. Hell, I'll bet if you tried to explain
that to him, he wouldn't believe it."
      Blossom, who had been listening to all this rather dazedly, began to
shiver, as the tension which her body had sustained so long began to drain
away. It was like the time she'd gone swimming in the lake in April; her flesh
trembled, yet at the same time she felt strangely rigid. Then her body, naked
and taut, was suddenly pressed against Orville's, and she did not know if he
had come to her or she to him. "Oh darling, we'll go back! We _will_--after
all! Oh, my very own!"
      Neil's voice shrilled in the darkness: "I heard that!"
      Though she could hear Neil gallumphing forward, Blossom sustained the
kiss desperately. Her fingers tightened into Orville's arms, grappled in the
wiry muscles. Her body strained forward as his tried to pull away. Then a hand
closed around her mouth and another around her shoulder and pulled her roughly
away from Orville, but she didn't care. She was still giddy with the high,
maenad happiness of those who are reckless in their love.
      "I suppose you were giving him some more artificial respiration?" Neil
sneered. It was, perhaps, his first authentic joke.
      "I was kissing him," Blossom replied proudly. "We're in love."
      "I forbid you to kiss him!" Neil screamed. "I forbid you to be in love.
I forbid you!"
      "Neil, let go of me." But his hands only shifted to secure a better grip
and closed tighter.
      "You, _you_--Jeremiah Orville! I'm going to _git_ you. Yeah, I've been
on to you right along. You fooled a lot of people, but you never fooled me. I
knew what you was up to. I saw the way you looked at Blossom. Well, you ain't
going to get her. What you're going to get is a bullet in your head."
      "Neil, let go--you're hurting me."
      "Neil," Buddy said in a low, reasoning tone, the tone one adopts with
frightened animals, "that girl is your sister. You're talking like he stole
your girl. She's your _sister_."
      "She is not."
      "What in hell do you mean by that?"
      "I mean I don't care!"
      "You filth."
      "Orville, was that you? Why don't you come here, Orville? I ain't going
to let Blossom go. You're going to have to come and rescue her. Orville?"
      He jerked Blossom's arms behind her back and circled the slender wrists
with his left hand. When she struggled, he twisted her arms up painfully or
cuffed her with his free hand. When she seemed pacified, he unsnapped the
leather flap of the holster and took out his Python, as one removes jewelry
for a giftbox, lovingly. "Come here, Orville, and git what I got for you."
      "Be careful. He does have a gun," Buddy said. "He has father's."
      Buddy's voice came more from the right than Neil had expected. He
shifted his weight, but he wasn't really worried, because he had a gun and
they didn't.
      "I know," Orville said.
      A little to the left. The space inside this tuber was long and narrow,
too narrow for them to circle around to either side of him.
      "I got something for you too, Buddy, if you think you're going to move
in when your buddy's brains are blown out. I got me an axe." He chirruped an
ugly laugh. "Hey! that's a joke: Buddy . . . buddy, get it?"
      "Your jokes stink, Neil. If you want to improve your personality, you
shouldn't make jokes."
      "This is just between me and Orville, Buddy. You go away, or . . . or
I'll chop your head off, that's what I'll do."
      "Yeah? With what, with your big front teeth?"
      "Buddy," Orville cautioned, "he may have the axe. I brought it down here
with me." Fortunately no one thought to ask why.
      "Neil, let go now. Let go or--or I'll never speak to you again. If you
stop acting this way, we can all go right up and forget this happened."
      "No, you don't understand, Blossom. You're not safe yet." His body
leaned forward until his lips were touching her shoulders. They rested there a
moment, uncertain what to do. Then his tongue began to lick away the fruit
pulp with which her whole body was slimed. She managed not to scream:
      "When you're safe, I'll let you go, I promise. Then you can be my queen.
There'll be just the two of us and the whole world. We'll go to Florida, where
it never snows, the two of us." He spoke with unnatural eloquence, for he had
stopped thinking too closely about what he said, and the words left his lips
uncensored by the faulty mechanisms of consciousness. It was another triumph
for the primordial. "We'll lay on the beach, and you can sing songs while I
whistle. But not yet, little lady. Not until you're safe. Soon."
      Buddy and Orville seemed to have stopped moving forward. All was quiet
except for the piops of the ripe fruit. Neil's blood surged with the raw
delight that comes from inducing fear in another animal. _They're afraid of
me!_ he thought. _Afraid of my gun!_ The weight of the pistol in his hand, the
way his fingers curved around it, the way one of them pressed against the
trigger, afforded him pleasure more richly gratifying than his lips had known
touching his sister's body.


      They _were_ afraid of him. They could hear his hard breathing and
Blossom's theatrical whimpering (which she maintained, like a foghorn, just so
that they might hear it and gauge their distance), and they hung back. They
had too much contempt for Neil to be ready to risk their lives desperately
against his. Surely there was some way to trick him--to make _him_ take the
gamble.
      Perhaps, Buddy reasoned, if he became angry enough, he would do
something foolish--squander his single bullet on a noise in the dark or at
least loose his grip on Blossom, which must by now be wearying. "Neil," he
whispered, "everybody knows about you. Alice told everyone what you did."
      "Alice is dead," Neil scoffed.
      "_Her ghost_," Buddy hissed. "Her ghost is down here looking for you. On
account of what you did to her."
      "Ah, that's a lot of hooey. I don't believe in no ghosts."
      "And on account of what you did to Father. That was a terrible thing to
do, Neil. He must be awful angry with you. He must be looking for you, too.
And he won't need a lamp to find you with."
      "I didn't do _nothing!_"
      "Father knows better than that. Alice knows better, doesn't she? We all
do. That's how you got the pistol, Neil. You killed him to get it. Killed your
own father. How does it feel to do something like that? Tell us. What did he
say at the very last moment?"
      "Shut up! shut up! shut up!" When he heard Buddy begin to talk again, he
set up the same shrill chant, backing away meanwhile from the voice that
seemed to be drawing nearer to him.
      Then it was quiet again, and that was worse. Neil began to fill the
quiet with his own words: "I didn't kill him. Why would I want to do that? He
loved me more than he loved anybody else, cause I was the one that always
stuck by him. I never ran away, no matter how much I wanted to. We were pals,
Dad and me. When he died--"
      "When you _murdered_ him--"
      "That's right--when I murdered him, he said, 'Now you're the leader,
Neil.' And he gave me his gun. 'That bullet's for Orville,' he says. 'Yes,
Dad,' I said, 'I'll do anything you say.' We were always pals, Dad and me. I
_had_ to kill him, you can see that, can't you? Why, he would have married off
Blossom to Orville. He said so. '_Dad_,' says I, 'you gotta
understand--Orville ain't one of us!' Oh, I explained it very careful, but he
just lay there and wouldn't say a thing. He was dead. But nobody else cared.
Everybody hated him except me. We were pals, Dad and me. Pals."
      It was evident, to Orville, that Buddy's strategem was failing of its
desired effect. Neil was past the point where he could be shaken. He was over
the edge.
      While Neil spoke, Orville moved forward, crouched, his right hand
exploring the air before him, tentative as a mouse's whisker. If Neil had not
been holding Blossom, or if he had not had a gun, it would have been a simple
matter of running in low and tackling. Now it was necessary, for his own sake
but more especially for Blossom's, either to disarm him or to make sure that
his shot went wild.
      To judge by his voice, Neil could not be far off. He swung his hand
around in a slow arc, and it encountered not the gun, not Neil, but Blossom's
thigh. She did not betray her surprise by the slightest ifinch. Now it would
be easy to wrench the gun from Neil's hand. Orville's hand stretched up and to
the left: it should be right about _here_.
      The metal of the gun barrel touched Orville's forehead. The weapon made
such perfect contact that Orville could feel the hollow bore, concave within a
distinct circlet of cool metal.
      Neil pulled the trigger. There was a clicking sound. He pulled the
trigger again. Nothing.
      Days of immersion in the sap had effectually dampened the gunpowder.
      Neil did not understand, then or ever, _why_ the gun had failed him, but
after another hollow _click_, he was aware that it had. Orville's fist came up
for his solar plexus and glanced off his rib cage. As Neil toppled backward,
the hand holding the pistol struck down with full force where he supposed
Orville's head must be. The gunbutt struck against something hard. Orville
made a noise.
      Lucky--Neil was lucky. He struck down again and hit something soft. No
noise. Orville's body was limp at his feet. Blossom had gotten away, but he
didn't mind so much about that now.
      He pulled out the axe from his gun belt, where it had been hanging, the
head flat against his stomach, the handle crossing his left thigh.
      "You stay away, Buddy, you hear? I still got me an axe."
      Then he jumped on Orville's belly and his chest, but it was no good
without shoes on, so he sat down on his belly and began hitting him in the
face with his fists. Neil was beside himself. He laughed--oh, how he laughed!
      But even so he stopped at intervals to take a few swipes at the darkness
with the axe. "Whoop-pee!" he yelled. "Whooppeel"


       Someone was screaming. Blossom.
       The hard part was to keep Blossom from rushing right back into the thick
of it. She just wouldn't listen.
       "No!" Buddy said. "You'd get yourself killed. You don't know what to do.
Listen--stop screaming and listen!" He shook her. She quieted. "I can get
Orville away from him, so let _me_ do it. Meanwhile, you go up the shaft the
way we went before. Along the detour. Do you remember the way?"
       "Yes." Dully.
       "You'll do that?"
       "Yes. But you've got to get Jeremiah away from him."
       "Then I'll expect to see you up there. Go on now."
       Buddy picked up Alice's rigid and festering corpse, which had been
already in his hands when Orville had rushed in like a fool and spoiled
everything. He lugged it a few feet in the direction of Neil's voice, stopped,
grappled the old woman's body to his chest like a suit of armor. "Oooow," he
moaned.
       "Buddy," Neil shouted, standing, hoisting the axe, "you go away."
       But Buddy only went on making the same silly moans and groans that
children make playing ghost on a summer night or in a dark attic.
       "You can't scare me," Neil said. "I ain't scared of the dark."
       "It isn't me, I swear," Buddy said calmly. "It's Alice's ghost. She's
coming to get you. Can't you tell by the smell it isn't me?"
       "Ah, that's a lot of hooey," Neil retorted. The moaning started up
again. He was uncertain whether to return to Orville or go after Buddy. "Stop
it," he yelled, "I don't like that noise."
       He could smell it! It was the way his father had smelled when he was
dying!
       Buddy's aim was good. The corpse struck Neil full-force across his body.
A stiff hand grabbed at his eyes and wiped across his mouth, tearing his lip.
He toppled, waving the axe wildly. The corpse made an awful screaming sound.
Neil screamed too. Maybe it was just all one scream, Neil's and the corpse's
together. Someone was trying to pull the axe away! Neil pulled back. He rolled
over and over again and got to his feet. He still had the axe. He swung it.
       Instead of Orville, there was someone else underneath his feet. He felt
the rigid face, the long hair, the puffy arms. It was Alice. She wasn't tied,
and the gag was out of her mouth.
       Someone was screaming. Neil.
       He screamed all the while he hacked apart the dead woman's body. The
head came off with one stroke of the axe. He split the skull with another.
Again and again he buried the axehead into her torso, but that wouldn't seem
to come apart. Once the axe slipped and struck his ankle a glancing blow. He
fell over, and the dismembered body squished under him like rotten fruit. He
began to tear it to pieces with his hands. When there was no more possibility
that it would haunt him again, he stood up, breathing heavily, and called out,
not without a certain reverence: "Blossom?"
       _I'm right here_.
       Ah, he knew she would stay behind, he knew it! "And the others?" he
asked.
       _They've gone away. They told me to go away too, but I didn't. I stayed
behind_.
        "Why did you do that, Blossom?"
        _Because I love you_.
        "I love you too, Blossom. I always have. Since you were just a little
kid."
      _I know. We'll go away together_. Her voice singsonged, lulled him,
rocked his tired mind like a cradle. _Someplace far away where nobody can find
us. Florida. We'll live together, just the two of us, like Adam and Eve, and
think of new names for all the animals_. Her voice grew stronger, clearer, and
more beautiful. _We'll sail on a raft down the Mississippi. Just the two of
us. Night and day_.
      "Oh," said Neil, overcome with this vision. He began to walk toward the
beautiful strong voice. "Oh, go on." He was walking in a circle.
      _I'll be the queen and you'll be my king, and there won't be anybody
else in the world_.
      His hand touched her hand. His hand trembled.
      _Kiss me_, she said. _Isn't that what you've always wanted?_
      "Yes." His lips sought her lips. "Oh yes."
      But her head, and therefore her lips, was not where one would have
expected it to be. It was not attached to her neck. At last he found her head
a few feet away. The lips that be kissed tasted of blood and licorice.
      And for a few days, he satisfied the years' pent-up lusts on the head of
Alice Nemerov, R.N.



SIXTEEN:   Home Safe


       Sometimes distance is the best cure, and if you want to recuperate you
keep on going. Besides, if you stopped, you couldn't be sure of starting up
again. Not that they had that much choice--they _had_ to keep going up. So
they went up.
       It was easier this time. Perhaps it was just the contrast between a sure
thing (sure if they didn't slip, but that sort of danger hardly stimulated
their adrenals at this point) and the distinct if unacknowledged presence of
death that had burdened these last few days, so that their ascent was also a
resurrection.
       There was only one anxiety now, and it was Buddy's. Then even this was
dissipated, for after less than an hour of climbing they had reached the level
of their home base, and Maryann was waiting there. The lamp was burning so
they could see again, and the sight of each other, mired as they were,
bruised, bleeding, brought tears to their eyes and made them laugh like
children at a birthday party. The baby was all right, they were all right,
everything was all right.
       "Do you want to go up to the surface now? Or do you want to rest?"
       "Now," Buddy said.
       "Rest," said Orville. He had just discovered that his nose was broken.
It had always been such a good nose too-- straight and thin, a proud nose.
"Does it look awful?" he asked Blossom.
       She shook her head sadly and kissed his nose, but she wouldn't say
anything. She hadn't said a word since the thing that had happened down there.
Orville tried to return her kiss, but she averted her head.
       Buddy and Maryann went away so they could be by themselves. "He seems so
much bigger," Buddy remarked, dandling Buddy Junior. "How long have we been
gone?"
       "Three days and three nights. They were long days, because I couldn't
sleep. The others have already gone up to the surface. They wouldn't wait. But
I knew you'd be back. You promised me. Remember?"
       "Mmm," he said, and kissed her hand.
       "Greta's come back," Maryann said.
       "That makes no difference to me. Not any more."
       "It was on your account that she came back. She told me so. She says she
can't live without you."
       "Shes got her nerve--saying that to you."
       "She's . . . changed. You'll see. She's not back in the same tuber where
I was waiting, but in the one next above. Come, I'll bring you to her."
       "You sound like you _want_ me to take up with Greta again."
       "I only want what you want, Buddy. You say that Neil is dead. If you
want to make her your second wife, I won't stop you. . . if that's what you
want."
       "That's not what I want, dammit! And the next time I say I love you,
you'd better believe me. Okay?"
       "Okay," she said in her teensiest, church-mouse voice. There was even
the suggestion of small laughter, stifled. "But you'd better see her anyhow.
Because you'll have to think of some way of getting her back to the surface.
Mae Stromberg is back too, but she's already gone up with the rest of them.
She's sort of crazy now. She was still carrying her Denny around with
her--what's left of Denny. Bones mostly. This is the tuber. Greta's over at
the other end. I'll stay back here with the lamp. She prefers the dark."
       Buddy smelled a rat. Soon, advancing through the tuber, he smelled
something much worse. Driving through a town in southern Minnesota in
pea-canning season once, he had smelt something like this--an outhouse gone
sour. "Greta?" he said.
       "Buddy, is that you, Buddy?" It was surely her voice that replied, but
its timbre had altered subtly. There was no crispness to the d's, and the
initial B had a sputtering sound. "How are you, Buddy? Don't come any closer
than you are! I--" There was a gasping sound, and when Greta began to speak
again, she burbled, like a child who tries to talk with his mouth full of
milk. "--shill lub you. I wan oo be yours. Forgib me. We can begin all over
again--like Adamb an Ebe--jus us oo."
       "What's wrong with you?" he asked. "Are you sick?"
       "No. I--" A sound of violent gargling. "--I'm just a little hungry. I
get that way now and again. Maryann brings me my food here, but she won't ever
bring me enough. Buddy, _she's trying to starve me!_"
       "Maryann," Buddy called. "Bring the light here."
       "No, don't!" Greta shouted. "You've got to answer my question first,
Buddy. There's nothing standing between us now. Maryann told me that if you
wanted-- No--go away! The light hurts my eyes." There was a slopping, sucking
sound, as when one moves too suddenly in a full bathtub, and the air was
roiled, releasing new tides of fetor.
       Maryann handed her husband the dimly burning lamp, which he held over
the sty into which the huge bulk of Greta Anderson had sunk of its own great
weight. Her bloated body had lost any distinctively human features: it was an
uncomplicated mass of flaccid fat. The contours of her face were obscured by
folds of loose flesh like a watercolor portrait that has been left out of
doors in a rainstorm. Now this face began to move from side to side, setting
the, flesh into a jellylike commotion--a gesture of negation, as far as one
could judge.
       "She doesn't move any more," Maryann explained, "and she's too heavy to
lift. The others found her when they were looking for Blossom, and they pulled
her this far with ropes. I told them to leave her here, cause she needs some-.
one to look after her. I bring her all her food. It's a fulltime job."
       The commotion of flesh at their feet became more agitated, and there
seemed almost to be an expression on the face. Hatred, perhaps. Then an
aperture opened in the center of the face, a mouth, and Greta's voice said,
"Go away, you _disgush_ me!"
       Before they had left, the figure at their feet was already stuffing
handfuls of the syrupy fruit pulp into the cavity in the center of its face.
       While the men and Blossom rested, Maryann rigged a sort of harness and
even succeeded, over loud protests, in cinching it about Greta. Maryann
fetched another heaping portion of swill using the laundry basket that had
been rescued from the commonroom fire. If this wasn't done for Greta at hourly
intervals, she would begin to take up handfuls of the surrounding filth and
stuff her gullet full of it. She no longer seemed to be aware of the
difference, but Maryann was, and it was largely for her own sake that she kept
the basket replenished. After Greta had downed suflicient of the fruit pulp,
she was usually good, as now, for a few moments of conversation, and Maryann
had been grateful for this during the long, dark hours of waiting. As Greta
had often observed during these sober interludes: "The worst part is the
boredom. That's what got me into my _condition_."
      Now, however, she was pursuing a less weighty subject: "There was
another movie, I can't remember the name now, where she was poor and had this
funny accent, and Laurence Harvey was a medical student who fell in love with
her. Or else it was Rock Hudson. She had him right in the palm of her hand,
she did. He'd have done anything she said. I can't remember how that one
ended, but there was another one I liked better, with James Stewart--remember
him?-- where she lived in this beautiful mansion in San Francisco. Oh, you
should have seen the dresses she had. And such lovely hair! She must have been
the most beautiful woman in the world. And she fell down from a tower at the
end. I _think_ that's how it ended."
      "You must have seen just about every movie Kim Novak ever made," Maryann
said placidly while the baby nursed at her breast.
      "Well, if there was any I missed, I never heard about them. I wish you'd
loosen these ropes." But Maryann never replied to her complaints. "There was
one where she was a witch, but not, you know, old-fashioned. She had an
apartment right on Park Avenue or someplace like that. And the most beautiful
Siamese cat."
      "Yes, I think you've told me about that one already."
      "Well, why don't you ever contribute to the conversation? I must have
told you about every movie I've ever seen by now."
      "I never saw many movies."
      "Do you suppose she's still alive?"
      "Who--Kim Novak? No, I don't suppose so. We may be the very last ones.
That's what Orville says."
      "I'm hungry again."
      "You just ate. Can't you wait till Buddy is finished nursing?"
      "I'm _hungry_, I tell you! Do you think I _like_ this?"
      "Oh, all right." Maryann took up the basket by its one remaining handle
and went off to a more wholesome section of the tuber. Filled, the basket
weighed twenty pounds or more.
      When she could no longer hear Maryann nearby, Greta burst out into
tears. "Oh God, I _hate_ this! I hate _her!_ Oh, I'm so _hungry!_" Her tongue
ached to be covered with the beloved, licorice-flavored slop, as a three-pack
smoker's tongue craves nicotine on a morning when he has no cigarettes.
      She was not able to wait for Maryann's return. When she had driven away
the worst of her hunger. she stopped cramming the stuff in her mouth and
moaned aloud in the darkness. "Oh Ga, how I hay myself! _Myself_, thas who I
hay!"


      They had hauled Greta a long way, only stopping to rest when they had
reached the uppermost tuber in which they had spent the first night of their
subterranean winter. The relative coolness at this height was a welcome relief
from the steamy heat blow. Greta's silence was an even more welcome contrast.
All during the ascent she had complained that the harness was strangling her,
that she was caught in the vines and they were pulling her apart, that she was
hungry. As they passed through each successive tuber, Greta would stuff the
pulp into her mouth at a prodigious rate.
      Orville estimated that she weighed four hundred pounds. "Oh, more than
that," Buddy said. "You're being kind."
      They would never have been able to get her as far as they had, if the
sap coating the hollow of the roots had not been such an effective lubricant.
The problem now was how to hoist her up the last thirty, vertical feet of the
primary root. Buddy suggested a system of pulleys, but Orville feared that the
ropes at their disposal might not be able to support Greta's full weight. "And
even if they can how will we get her out through that hole? In December,
Maryann was barely able to squeeze in through it."
      "One of us will have to go back for the axe."
      "Now? Not _this_ one of us--not when we're this close to the sunlight. I
say let's leave her here where there's food ready at hand for her and go up
the rest of the way ourselves. Later is time enough to be Good Samaritans."
      "Buddy, what's that sound?" Maryann asked. It was not like Maryann to
interrupt.
      They listened, and even before they heard it, they feared what it might
be, what it was. A low grating sound--a whine--a rasp not so loud a noise as
the metal sphere had made trying to push its way into the cave, because, for
one thing, it was farther away, and for another, it did not seem to be having
the same difficulty purchasing entrance. The whine grew louder; then a vast
flushing sound ensued, as when a swimming pooi begins to drain.
      Whatever it was, it was now in the tuber with them.
      With a fury sudden as their terror, a wind sprang up and bowled them to
their knees. Tides of liquid fruit rose from the floor and walls and dropped
from the ceiling; the wind swept off the crest of each successive wave and
carried it toward the far end of the tuber, like the superfluous suds that
spill out of an automatic washer. All that could be seen in the lamplight were
white flashes of the blowing froth. Maryann clutched her child to her breast
convulsively, after a blast of wind had almost lifted him from her arms.
Assisted by Buddy, leaning into the wind, she made her way to the sanctuary of
a root that branched off from the tuber. There they were sheltered from the
worst effects of the gale, which seemed to howl still more fiercely now.
      It was left to Orville to attempt Greta's rescue, but it was a hopeless
task. Even under ordinary circumstances, it was difficult to pull her weight
across the slippery floor of the fruit; alone, against the wind, he could not
budge her. In fact, she seemed to be moving into the vortex with the pulp of
the fruit. After a third quixotic attempt, he surrendered willingly to
Blossom's mute entreaties and they joined Buddy and Maryann in the root.
      Greta's ponderous weight slid forward with the other matter of the
fruit. Miraculously, the lamp which had been entrusted to her during the rest
period was still burning. Indeed it burned brighter than before.
      Though her vision was beginning to flicker like badly spliced film, she
was certain in the last moments of consciousness that she could see the great,
palpitant maw of the thing, a brilliant rosy orange that could only be called
Pango Peach and, superimposed over it, a grille of scintillating Cinderella
Red. The grille seemed to grow at an alarming pace. Then she felt the whole
mass of her being swept up in the whirlwind, and for a brief, weightless
moment she was young again, and then she spattered over the grille like a
cellophane bag of water dropped from a great height.
      In the root they heard the popping sound distinctly. Maryann crossed
herself, and Buddy mumbled something.
      "What'd you say?" Orville shouted, for the tempest had reached its
height, and even here in the root they were clinging to the vines to keep from
being sucked back into the tuber.
      "I said there'll be worms in the cider tonight," Buddy shouted back.
      "_What?_"
      "_Worms!_"
      The rasping sound, which had ceased or been inaudible during the storm,
was renewed, and as abruptly as the wind had sprung up, it died. When the
rasping sounds had diminished to a reassuring level, the five of them returned
to the tuber. Even without the lantern, the change was evident: the floor was
several feet lower than it had been; voices echoed from the surfaces, which
were hard as rock; even the thick rind of the fruit had been scraped loose. In
the center of this larger space, at about the level of their heads, a large
tube or pipeline stretched from the upper root opening to the lower. The tube
was warm to the touch and was in constant movement--down.
      "That was some vacuum cleaner," Orville said. "It scoured this place as
clean as a whistle. There's not enough left here to feed a mouse."
      "The harvesters have come," Buddy said. "You didn't think they'd plant
all these potatoes and leave them to rot, did you?"
      "Well, we better go up to the surface and see what Farmer MacGregor
looks like."
      But they were strangely reluctant to leave the dry tuber. An elegaic
mood had settled over them. "Poor Greta," Blossom said.
      They all felt better when the simple memorial had been pronounced. Greta
was dead, and the whole old world seemed to have died in her person. They knew
that the world to which they would now ascend would not be the same as the one
they'd left behind.



EPILOGUE:   The Extinction of the Species


       Just as a worm passing through an apple may suppose that the apple, its
substance and quality, consists merely of those few elements which have passed
through his own meager body, while in fact his whole being is enveloped in the
fruit and his passage has scarcely diminished it, so Buddy and Maryann and
their child, Blossom and Orville, emerging from the earth after a long passage
through the labyrinthine windings of their own, purely human evils, were not
aware of the all-pervading presence of the larger evil that lies without,
which we call reality. There is evil everywhere, but we can only see what is
in front of our noses, only remember what has passed through our bellies.
       The gray basketballs, pumped full of the pulp of the fruit, had risen
from an earth that was no longer green. Then, like primitives clearing their
lands, the machines that served the alien farmers turned that earth into a
pyre. The towering stalks of the great Plants were consumed, and the sight had
all the grandeur of a civilization falling to ruins. The few humans who
remained retreated into the earth one more time. When they re-emerged, the
pall that hung over the scorched earth made them welcome the total eclipse of
night.
       Then a wind moved in from the lake, and the pall thinned to reveal the
heavy cumulus above. The rains came. The pure water cleared the skies and
washed the months' encrustations from their bodies and soaked into the black
earth.
       Out came the sun and dried the rain, and their bodies gloried in its
tenuous April warmth. Though the earth was black, the sky was blue, and at
night there were stars-- Deneb, Vega, Altair--brighter than anyone had
remembered. Vega, particularly, shone bright. In the false dawn, a sliver of
moon rose in the east. Later the sky would lighten, and once more the sun
would rise.
       It all seemed very beautiful to them, for they believed that the natural
order of things--that is to say, their order--was being restored.


      There were expeditions down into the roots to search out traces of fruit
that the harvesters had overlooked. Such traces were rare, but they existed;
by rationing out these scraps of rind sparingly, they might hope to survive
the summer at least. For the time being, there was also the water and weeds in
the lake, and as soon as it became warmer, they planned to make their way down
along the Mississippi, to the warm southlands. There was also the hope that
the ocean would still be fruitful.
      The lake was dead. All along the fire-blackened shore, shoals of
stinking fish were heaped memorially. But that the ocean might be in the same
condition--that was unthinkable.
      Their chief hope was that the Earth had survived. Somewhere there must
be seeds sprouting in the warm soil, survivors like themselves, from whose
flowering the earth might be made green again.
      But their cardinal hope without which all hopes else were vain, was that
the Plant had had its season, long though it had been, and that that season
was over. The armored spheres had left with the rape of a planet, the fires
had burnt over the stubble, and the land would now wake from the nightmare of
that second alien creation. That was their hope.
      Then everywhere the land was covered with a carpet of the richest green.
The rains that had washed the sky clean of the smoke of the burning had also
borne the billion spores of the second planting. Like all hybrids, the Plant
was sterile, and could not reproduce itself. A new crop had to be planted
every spring.
      In two days the Plants were already ankle-deep.


      The survivors spread out over the flat green uniformity of the plain
resembled the figures in a Renaissance print illustrating the properties of
perspective. The nearest three figures, in the middle distance, comprised a
sort of Holy Family, though moving closer, one could not help but note that
their features were touched by some other emotion than quiet happiness. The
woman sitting on the ground was, in fact, weeping bitterly, and the man on his
knees behind her, his hands planted on her shoulders as though to comfort her,
was barely able to restrain his own tears. Their attention was fixed upon the
thin child in her arms, who was futilely puffing at her dry breast.
      A little farther on was another figure--or should we say two?--without
any iconographic parallel, unless we allow this to be a Niobe sorrowing for
her children. However, Niobe is usually depicted alone or in the prospect of
all fourteen children; this woman was holding the skeleton of a single child
in her arms. The child had been about ten years of age when it died. The
woman's red hair was a shocking contrast to the green everywhere about her.
      Almost at the horizon one could make out the figures of a man and woman,
nude, hand in hand, smiling. Certainly these were Adam and Eve before the
Fall, though they appeared rather more thin than they are usually represented.
Also, they were rather ill-matched with respect to age: he was forty if he was
a day; she was barely into her teens. They were walking south, and
occasionally they would speak to each other.
      The woman, for instance, might turn her head to the man and say, "You
never told us who your favorite actor is." And the man would reply, "David
Niven, I always liked David Niven." Then how beautifully they would smile!
      But these figures were very, very small. The landscape dominated them
entirely. It was green and level and it seemed of infinite extent. Vast though
it was, Nature--or Art--had expended little imagination upon it. Even viewed
closely, it presented a most monotonous aspect. In any square foot of ground,
a hundred seedlings grew, each exactly like every other, none prepossessing.
      Nature is prodigal. Of a hundred seedlings only one or two would
survive; of a hundred species, only one or two.
      Not, however, man.


            _______________

      Behold even to the moon, and it shineth not; yea, the stars are not pure
in his sight.
      How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?

                              Job 25:5-6
_______________



            THE END