At seven the hospital cafeteria was crowded when Walt stood up to make his announcement. First he had Avery Handley run down his log of diminishing shortwave contacts, with the accompanying grim stories of plague, famine, disease, spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and sterility. It was the same story worldwide. They listened apathetically; they could not care any longer what was happening to any part of the world that was not their small part. Avery finished and sat down once more.
Walt looked small, David thought in surprise. He had always thought of him as a fairly large man, but he wasn’t. He was only five feet nine, and now he was very thin and hard-looking, like a gamecock, trimmed of all excess with only the essentials needed to carry on the fight remaining. Walt studied the assembled people and deliberately said, “There’s not a person in this room hungry tonight. We don’t have any more plague here. The rain is washing away the radioactivity, and we have food stores that will carry us for years even if we can’t plant crops in the spring. We have men capable of doing just about anything we might ever want done.” He paused and looked at them again, from left to right, back again, taking his time. He had their absolute attention. “What we don’t have,” he said, his voice hard and flat now, “is a woman who can conceive a child, or a man who could impregnate her if she was able to bear.”
There was a ripple of movement, like a collective sigh, but no one spoke. Walt said, “You know how we are getting our meat. You know the cattle are good, the chickens are good. Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, we will have our own babies developed the same way.”
There was a moment of utter silence, of stillness, then they broke. Clarence leaped to his feet shouting at Walt. Vernon fought to get to the front of the room, but there were too many people between him and Walt. One of the women pulled on Walt’s arm, almost dragging him over, screaming in his face. Walt yanked free and climbed onto a table. “Stop this! I’m going to answer any questions, but I can’t hear any one of you this way.”
For the next three hours they questioned, argued, prayed, formed alliances, reformed them as arguments broke out in the smaller groups. At ten Walt took his place on the table again and called out. “We will recess this discussion until tomorrow night at seven. Coffee will be served now, and I understand we have cakes and sandwiches.” He jumped from the table and left before any of them could catch up with him, and he and David hurried to the cave entrance, locking the massive door behind them.
“Clarence was ugly,” Walt muttered. “Bastard.”
David’s father, Walt, and Clarence were brothers, David reminded himself, but he couldn’t help regarding Clarence as an outsider, a stranger with a fat belly and a lot of money who expected instant obedience from the world.
“They might organize,” Walt said after a moment. “They might form a committee to protest this act of the devil. We’ll have to be ready for them.”
David nodded. They had counted on delaying this meeting until they had live babies, human babies that laughed and gurgled and took milk from the bottle hungrily. Instead they would have a room full of not-quite-finished preemies, certainly not human-looking, with no more human appeal than a calf born too soon.
They worked all night preparing the nursery. Sarah had enlisted Margaret, Hilda, Lucy, and half a dozen other women, who were all gowned and masked professionally. One of them dropped a basin and three others screamed in unison. David cursed, but under his breath. They would be all right when they had the babies, he told himself.
The bloodless births started at five forty-five, and at twelve thirty they had twenty-five infants. Four died in the first hour, another died three hours later, and the rest of them thrived. The only baby left in the tanks was the fetus that would be Celia, nine weeks younger than the others.
The first visitor Walt permitted in the nursery was Clarence, and after that there was no further talk of destroying the inhuman monstrosities.
There was a celebration party, and names were suggested and a drawing was held to select eleven female names and ten male. In the record book the babies were labeled R-l strain; Repopulation 1. But in David’s mind, as in Walt’s, the babies were W-l, D-l, and soon, C-l . . .
For the next months there was no shortage of nurses, male or female, no shortage of help doing any of the chores that so few had done before. Everyone wanted to become a doctor or a biologist, Walt grumbled. He was sleeping more now, and the fatigue lines on his face were smoothing out. Often he would nudge David and tow him along, away from the nursery, propel him toward his own room in the hospital, and see to it that he remained there for a night’s sleep. One night as they walked side by side back to their rooms, Walt said, “Now you understand what I meant when I said this was all that mattered, don’t you?”
David understood. Every time he looked down at the tiny, pink new Celia he understood more fully.
Chapter 7
It had been a mistake, David thought, watching the boys from the window in Walt’s office. Living memories, that’s what they represented. There was Clarence, already looking too pudgy — he’d be fat in another three or four years. And a young Walt, frowning in concentration over a problem that he wouldn’t put on paper until he had a solution to add. Robert, too pretty almost, but determinedly manly, always trying harder than the others to endure, to jump higher, run faster, hit harder. And D-4, himself . . . He turned away and pondered the future of the boys, all of an age; uncles, fathers, grandfathers, all the same age. He was starting a headache again.
“They’re inhuman, aren’t they?” he said bitterly to Walt. “They come and go and we know nothing about them. What do they think? Why do they hang so close to each other?”
“Remember that old cliché, generation gap? It’s here, I reckon.” Walt was looking very old. He was tired, and seldom tried to hide it any longer. He looked up at David and said quietly, “Maybe they’re afraid of us.”
David nodded. He had thought of that. “I know why Hilda did it,” he said. “I didn’t at the time, but now I know.” Hilda had strangled the small girl who looked more like her every day.
“Me too.” Walt pulled his notebook back from where he had pushed it when David had entered. “It’s a bit spooky to walk into a crowd that’s all you, in various stages of growth. They do cling to their own kind.” He started to write then, and David left him.
Spooky, he thought, and veered from the laboratory, where he had been heading originally. Let the damn embryos do their thing without him. He knew he didn’t want to enter because D-l or D-2 would be there working. The D-4 strain would be the one, though, to prove or disprove the experiment. If Four didn’t make it, then chances were that Five wouldn’t either, and then what? A mistake. Whoops, wrong, sir. Sorry about that.
He climbed the ridge behind the hospital, over the cave, and sat down on an outcrop of limestone that felt cool and smooth. The boys were clearing another field. They worked well together, with little conversation but much laughter that seemed to arise spontaneously. A line of girls came into view, from nearer the river; they were carrying baskets of berries. Blackberries and gunpowder, he thought suddenly, and he remembered the ancient celebrations of the Fourth of July, with blackberry stains and fireworks, and sulfur for the chiggers. And birds. Thrushes, meadowlarks, warblers, purple martins.
Three Celias came into view, swinging easily with the weight of the baskets, a stair-step succession of Celias. He shouldn’t do that, he reminded himself harshly. They weren’t Celias, none of them had that name. They were Mary and Ann and something else. He couldn’t remember for a moment the third one’s name, and he knew it didn’t matter. They were each and every one Celia. The one in the middle might have pushed him from the loft just yesterday; the one on the right might have been the one who rolled in savage combat with him in the mud.