The panel was working up toward a high C. Treat flipped a switch, went to the vault door and wrestled it open.
"C'moan in, honey, we got company."
The girl was a half-foot shorter than her father. She was small but not so young.
"Derry, this here is uh — Brian? Brian. Young fella this is my little girl."
She stepped into the room, wiggling her arm free of her father's grip and squinting against the bright. "Hey."
Hey.
She was cute, maybe ninth-grade age, and wore a lot of makeup. Deep purple over her eyes, heavy on the liner.
"Choir practice get out late?"
"Yuh," she said and gave Brian an impy grin.
"Have a pretty good day in school?"
"Okay."
"Have any tests?"
"Nope."
"You have much homework?"
"Nope."
"You hungry?"
She peeked over to what was heating on the stove. "A little."
"Brian here is a drifter. He's headed for California."
"Oh."
"Well why don't you wash up for dinner, honey, and we'll get this show on the road."
"Sure."
"These kids," he said to Brian as she sauntered past him with a little smirk, "they don't talk. Deep thinkers, the lot of them, worriers and planners. You got to make allowances for it, hold up both ends of a conversation, pull teeth. And Derry," he shouted across the room, "how's about you clean that bedroom of yours a bit? Almost fell and broke my skull in there today, all them damn stuffed animals lyin around. You hear me?"
The deep thinker turned at her door and gave her father the finger.
Derry changed into gym shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt for dinner. There were wells in the table where the plates and glasses fit. Treat managed to dole out the chow mein and Minute Rice with a minimum of groping. He hooked his thumb over the lip of each glass as he poured the waterylooking milk and when the level reached it he stopped. He squeezed into his bolted seat, bowed his head and folded his hands for grace.
Brian copied the motion but averted his eyes from his plate. He couldn't handle it. Every grain of rice was a separate entity, he felt an urge to count them. Derry ignored her father and scooped Bosco into her milk.
"For the food on our table," he said, "and the roof over our head, we thank Thee, Lord."
Brian was very hungry but the food wouldn't stay quiet. The rice squeaked on his teeth like rubber boots over hardpacked snow, the water chestnuts were like splitting rails and the bamboo slivers were deafening. The food wouldn't stay quiet and wouldn't stay still and Derry's foot kept nudging his. Her legs weren't that long, it had to be intentional.
"They picked the Marines cause the Marines always had to go first, always got chewed up liberating the beachfront. Didn't tell us much, that's their way, let you rumor yourself so scared that the real thing isn't so bad when you finally come up against it. Hell, all we knew was what we'd heard the Haberdasher say on the radio, wasn't nobody knew the first thing about hydrogen bombs or what effect radiation would have on folks. Not even the scientists were so sure. Half the guys expected the islands to be run over with atomic Jap monsters, things with X-ray eyes that would glow in the dark. They gave us a hurry-up lesson in how to use the special equipment right there on the ship, kept warning us whatever you do, don't get contaminated. S'what they said, 'contaminated.' Same word the chaplains always used in their VD lectures.
"So the orders get passed down and they say Nagasaki, on Kyushu island, and-be prepared for anything. Surrender was official already but who expects some Nip has just been Hbombed to listen to the news?"
A hunk of chicken plopped off Treat's fork and he bit down on bare metal. Derry giggled. A bean sprout whimpered as it slid down Brian's throat. Derry's foot brushed his ankle. He could feel her toes grasping to hold his pants-leg.
"It wasn't anything out of the usual," said Treat, "not at first. A big river valley and a port that had been bombed. A lot of the damage to the buildings was from conventional attacks before. Wasn't much left at the bottom of the valley, but as you rose up the sides vegetation went from black to brown to yellow to green. The burns on people were in that pattern too, mostly on one side of the body, darker and deeper the further down into the valley you went. Of course, the worst weren't even there to be seen. Pretty much vaporized, maybe their shadow burnt into the side of a building. Remember this one woman, she had been nursing her baby when the blast came. About halfway up the valley wall she was. One of her breasts was tanned a deep dark brown, the other white from where her baby's head soaked up most of the radiation."
Brian gagged on his milk and got some up his nose. Derry handed him the Bosco. Treat worked on his plate in a counterclockwise direction, tapping it lightly with fork tip to be sure he missed nothing.
"It was the weeks after, when we were administrating the island and classifying the doomed that it got rough. People's hair fell out. Women's — that long, black, beautiful hair pulled out by the handful, you'd see little girls like Derry here, barely high-school age, all bald and scabby-headed. Kids' teeth crumbled like candy. Men grew breasts. People died of nosebleeds that wouldn't stop. People just starting to feel the poisoning would sit in the hospital waiting and see all the stages they were headed for sitting around them, meet relatives who they couldn't recognize but by voice. A lot of them blinded in the first flash got their sight back and wished they hadn't. Quite a few recovered and never let on, preferred to grope and bump and cry in the dark though there was nothing physically wrong with their eyes. Who knows, maybe they didn't see. And then the babies that were born — God. It was like Nature decided to review all the false starts and bad experiments she made on her way to evolving man. Things without arms, things without legs, two-headed things, legs or arms without anything else. One woman delivered up this big ball of teeth fused together, looked like a sea urchin. The ones who got vaporized, they were the lucky ones, them and the blind ones who didn't have to see it."
Treat almost tipped his glass putting it back into its tablewell. He had a clot of rice on his neck. "You want to get the dessert, Derry?"
"Mnph.
"I feh I wuh." Chicken juice dribbled down her chin and she had to snake it with her tongue.
"You go get it and try waiting till you're done chewing before you speak. There's things you can get away with in front of me that you can't do in front of company."
She stuck her little red tongue out in front of both of them and went to the refrigerator.
"It's a chore raising her myself," whispered Treat to Brian. "Trying to keep her safe, teach her the right way. The wife passed on in 'sixty-four, Derry was only two. That's her on the door down there, back when we lived in Houston. I gave Derry a picture to send and have it blown up, so's she'd remember what her mother looked like."
Derry returned with three plastic tubs of Whip and Chill pudding and some spoons and she blushed a little. Treat was pointing to the poster of the rock singer.
"I took that when we put the down payment on our first house. My first big NASA check signed right over to the realtors. But she was in seventh heaven."
Brian managed to say that she was a nice-looking woman.
"That was before the cancer got her. Thing called chronic granulocytic leukemia caught hold of her and wore her down for two hard years before she give up the ghost. Course it's a thin line between what was caused by the cancer and what was caused by the radiation therapy, but for the person in pain it don't matter which is the culprit. She was sick to her stomach every morning, upchucked two meals out of three, didn't have a spark of energy."
Derry vacantly spooned pudding into her mouth. Treat's voice had taken on a detached tone, like a senile parish priest reciting the financial report.