But the Russians and the Chinese wouldn’t move, and didn’t. They were much too nervous themselves, not so much about the Wilderness Organism as about the fear that a totally panicked and paranoid America would seek someone logical to blame.
Fleets put to sea, and missile bases were raised to full war alert.
And still the string of mathematics made no more than ordinary procedural sense. Going back to the start of the work on DNA molecule matching, it still proceeded in a perfectly sound, normal, scientific manner. Nothing out of the ordinary.
She tried again and again and again as the United States went slowly mad from sheer frustration at the lack of an enemy to hit back.
NINE
He’d put out the word, of course, but he never expected anything to come of it. That’s what made the whole thing, the final agreement to help ferret out the perpetrators of the Wilderness Organism, so easy.
If these people were really the old-line radicals, the last person they’d trust on something like this would be Sam Cornish, the man who’d refused to take part in the airplane blowup, the man who’d run out on his “brothers and sisters” and hid out in a Vermont commune for years, plagued by terrible dreams.
It was a compromise his conscience could accept. Say “yes” and do what they wanted, knowing nothing would happen.
About four days after the FBI man had approached him, he received a message at the commune. It came to his cover name, by mailgram, and was very simple.
If you are seriously interested in alternate employment, we will be interviewing applicants from your region in Boston on April 4. It gave an address in that city not really so far away, a time, and was signed The Woodbine Laboratories, Ltd.
He just stood there staring at the thing for several minutes. He knew what it was, who it had to be from, what it had to be about.
Well, here it is, Sam, he said to himself not once but over and over again. He was sweating although it wasn’t a warm day, and shaking slightly.
He walked out in his beloved woods and stared at the mountains for the rest of the afternoon. He wanted to think it out, but he couldn’t seem to think at all. He felt drained, empty somehow, a dreamless sleepwalker.
He’d have to go, he knew. Deep down, he’d given his word—and the pictures of those stricken innocents in the towns would join those screamers in the airplane if he did not try. He knew it, knew also that the damned all-knowing smugly self-confident Federal Bureau of Investigation had known as well, known even before he would admit it to himself.
He was sick, upset, shaking, and felt more alone yet more of a pawn to others’ desires than ever in his whole life. He didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all.
But he would go, damn their eyes.
Curiously, that last night at the commune he didn’t dream at all.
Boston had changed radically since the Cambridge Disaster had swept the metropolitan area as the Black Plague had swept London centuries earlier, striking down more than eighty percent of the area’s population. It was no longer a huge port, business and commercial center—people were still reluctant to return, despite the vaccines—but it retained its old character, its odd mixture of old and new buildings, and some commerce was returning, for it was still the most convenient harbor for the New England region.
And many people, those who never thought of the Death any more, actually preferred it as it was—a rustic city center of about 50,000 people, uncrowded, uncluttered, many of the old neighborhoods burned to the ground during the panic now replaced with trees and grass, giving it almost a garden air in the April sunlight.
He had a little time, and briefly toured some of the historic structures from the nation’s founding that had survived everything thrown at them. It was almost as if he were trying to kindle inside himself some sort of feeling that would make the coming ordeal a matter of belief rather than blackmail.
He could sympathize with those early revolutionaries. Sam Adams, the fiery rabble-rouser who’d moved mobs to stone the British. His nasty yet principled cousin, John, who took time out from figuring how to overthrow the British to defend the soldiers accused of shooting citizens in the Boston Massacre—and won.
Somehow those two men meant something, he thought. Sam—he stirred the crowds to mob violence in that very Boston Massacre, yet Sam wasn’t there to get shot, nor had he ever had any clear idea of what the revolution was about. Sam, his cousin once remarked, just loved overthrowing governments.
Who were Sam Adams’ inheritors? Robespierre, the aristocratic lawyer who executed tens of thousands in the French Revolution including his own best friends, yet could not rule or control the revolution he wrought. Another man better suited to overthrowing than governing.
Karl Marx, the studious scholar and social scientist, who labored for a proletariat against the intelligentsia when he himself was one of the latter, and who left his wife and eleven children in the slums of London to talk of the coming revolution with international intelligentsia at the British Museum. Friedrich Engels, a millionaire who always lived like one and never even helped out his friend Marx with the rent. Lenin, the upper middle class student who’d never done a day’s real labor in his life. Mao the librarian, and Stalin the former monk.
What a collection. Was any great popular revolutionary a member of the masses, the proletariat for whom he claimed to labor? Could any of them swing an axe and build a stable in the Vermont forests?
And yet they all got to where they were through the blood of those masses. Sam Adams wasn’t at the Boston Massacre he precipitated, but the blood of honest working people was. Crispus Attucks fell, shot dead, a mulatto sailor between ships, the first of them.
Is this, really, what revolutionaries are like? Sam Cornish wondered. Didn’t Joseph Conrad write derisively that the revolutionaries who want to smash their way to universal happiness will simply add to the sum total of human misery?
But, he told himself, if all this is true, then everything else is a lie. Man’s dreams were but a ghastly Midas Touch, turning everything they reached to instant putrefaction.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Jefferson, the aristocratic slave owner wrote.
Why did the beautiful spring day seem so dark and ugly now? Why did the bright green grasses springing from early rains and warmer, longer days seem suddenly like evil things, grasping and clawing their way to the surface? Why did the charming old buildings now seem so shabby and sinister?
He walked across the ancient Boston Common, pausing in the center of it to see the great, black sculptural arches of the artist Sean Spacher, with the eerie gargoyle-like creatures at the base and the eternal flame framed by the ugly yet majestic curving beams.
He paused to read the plaque.
Erected by the People of the United States as a continuing memorial to man’s folly, as a remembrance for those lost who were so dear and as a commitment that they shall be the last to die in such a manner.
Almost a million people, dead of a simple bacteria created just across the Charles River by eager scientists when one tiny little bacterium escaped somehow to the outside world.
… A commitment that they shall be the last to die in such a manner.
California… North Dakota… Maine… Nebraska… Maryland…
Carried there not by a mistake, but by Sam Adams’ grandchildren, none of whom had ever worked, and none of whom that he could ever remember had a clear idea of what the revolution was all about.