The car came out of the woods onto the shore of a small lake. It was a peaceful scene, the quiet waters like molten gold in the slanting sunlight, trees ringing the circumference and all about them the mountains. Under one huge pine stood a cottage, a woman on the porch.
It was like one summer with Barbara—Drummond cursed under his breath and followed Robinson toward the little building. It wasn’t, it wasn’t, it could never be. Not ever again. There were soldiers guarding this place from chance marauders, and—There was an odd-looking flower at his foot. A daisy, but huge and red and irregularly formed.
A squirrel chittered from a tree. Drummond saw that its face was so blunt as to be almost human.
Then he was on the porch, and Robinson was introducing him to «my wife Elaine.» She was a nice-looking young woman with eyes that were sympathetic on Drummond’s exhausted face. The aviator tried not to notice that she was pregnant.
He was led inside, and reveled in a hot bath. Afterward there was supper, but he was numb with sleep by then, and hardly noticed it when Robinson put him to bed.
Reaction set in, and for a week or so Drummond went about in a haze, not much good to himself or anyone else. But it was surprising what plenty of food and sleep could do, and one evening Robinson came home to find him scribbling on sheets of paper.
«Arranging my notes and so on,» he explained. «I’ll write out the complete report in a month, I guess.»
«Good. But no hurry.» Robinson settled tiredly into an armchair. «The rest of the world will keep. I’d rather you’d just work at this off and on, and join my staff for your main job.»
«O.K. Only what’ll I do?»
«Everything. Specialization is gone; too few surviving specialists and equipment. I think your chief task will be to head the census bureau.»
«Eh?»
Robinson grinned lopsidedly. «You’ll be the census bureau, except for what few assistants I can spare you.» He leaned forward, said earnestly: «And it’s one of the most important jobs there is. You’ll do for this country what you did for central Eurasia, only in much greater detail. Drummond, we have to know.»
He took a map from a desk drawer and spread it out. «Look, here’s the United States. I’ve marked regions known to be uninhabitable in red.» His fingers traced out the ugly splotches. «Too many of ’em, and doubtless there are others we haven’t found yet. Now, the blue X’s are army posts.» They were sparsely scattered over the land, near the centers of population groupings. «Not enough of those. It’s all we can do to control the more or less well-off, orderly people. Bandits, enemy troops, homeless refugees—they’re still running wild, skulking in the backwoods and barrens, and raiding whenever they can. And they spread the plague. We won’t really have it licked till everybody’s settled down, and that’d be hard to enforce. Drummond, we don’t even have enough soldiers to start a feudal system for protection. The plague spread like a prairie fire in those concentrations of men.
«We have to know. We have to know how many people survived—half the population, a third, a quarter, whatever it is. We have to know where they are, and how they’re fixed for supplies, so we can start up an equitable distribution system. We have to find all the small-town shops and labs and libraries still standing, and rescue their priceless contents before looters or the weather beat us to it. We have to locate doctors and engineers and other professional men, and put them to work rebuilding. We have to find the outlaws and round them up. We—I could go on forever. Once we have all that information, we can set up a master plan for redistributing population, agriculture, industry, and the rest most efficiently, for getting the country back under civil authority and police, for opening regular transportation and communication channels—for getting the nation back on its feet.»
«I see,» nodded Drummond. «Hitherto, just surviving and hanging on to what was left has taken precedence. Now you’re in a position to start expanding, if you know where and how much to expand.»
«Exactly.» Robinson rolled a cigarette, grimacing. «Not much tobacco left. What I have is perfectly foul. Lord, that war was crazy!»
«All wars are,» said Drummond dispassionately, «but technology advanced to the point of giving us a knife to cut our throats with. Before that, we were just beating our heads against the wall. Robinson, we can’t go back to the old ways. We’ve got to start on a new track—a track of sanity.»
«Yes. And that brings up—» The other man looked toward the kitchen door. They could hear the cheerful rattle of dishes there, and smell mouth-watering cooking odors. He lowered his voice. «I might as well tell you this now, but don’t let Elaine know. She… she shouldn’t be worried. Drummond, did you see our horses?»
«The other day, yes. The colts—»
«Uh-huh. There’ve been five colts born of eleven mares in the last year. Two of them were so deformed they died in a week, another in a few months. One of the two left has cloven hoofs and almost no teeth. The last one looked normal—so far. One out of eleven, Drummond.»
«Were those horses near a radioactive area?»
«They must have been. They were rounded up wherever found and brought here. The stallion was caught near the site of Portland, I know. But if he were the only one with mutated genes, it would hardly show in the first generation, would it? I understand nearly all mutations are Mendelian recessives. Even if there were one dominant, it would show in all the colts, but none of these looked alike.»
«Hm-m-m—I don’t know much about genetics, but I do know hard radiation, or rather the secondary charged particles it produces will cause mutation. Only mutants are rare, and tend to fall into certain patterns—»
«Were rare!» Suddenly Robinson was grim, something coldly frightened in his eyes. «Haven’t you noticed the animals and plants? They’re fewer than formerly, and… well, I’ve not kept count, but at least half those seen or killed have something wrong, internally or externally.»
Drummond drew heavily on his pipe. He needed something to hang onto, in a new storm of insanity. Very quietly, he said:
«In my college biology course, they told me the vast majority of mutations are unfavorable. More ways of not doing something than of doing it. Radiation might sterilize an animal, or might produce several degrees of genetic change. You could have a mutation so violently lethal the possessor never gets born, or soon dies. You could have all kinds of more or less handicapping factors, or just random changes not making much difference one way or the other. Or in a few cases you might get something actually favorable, but you couldn’t really say the possessor is a true member of the species. And favorable mutations themselves usually involve a price in the partial or total loss of some other function.»
«Right.» Robinson nodded heavily, «One of your jobs on the census will be to try and locate any and all who know genetics, and send them here. But your real task, which only you and I and a couple of others must know about, the job overriding all other considerations, will be to find the human mutants.»
Drummond’s throat was dry. «There’ve been a lot of them?» he whispered.
«Yes. But we don’t know how many or where. We only know about those people who live near an army post, or have some other fairly regular intercourse with us, and they’re only a few thousand all told. Among them, the birth rate has gone down to about half the prewar ratio. And over half the births they do have are abnormal.»
«Over half—»
«Yeah. Of course, the violently different ones soon die, or are put in an institution we’ve set up in the Alleghenies. But what can we do with viable forms, if their parents still love them? A kid with deformed or missing or abortive organs, twisted internal structure, a tail, or something even worse… well, it’ll have a tough time in life, but it can generally survive. And perpetuate itself—»