David stood up, but hesitated. “Walt, I think it’s time you told me. What’s wrong with you?”
“Get out of here, damn it,” Walt said, but the timbre of his voice was gone, the force that should have propelled David from the room was not there. For a moment Walt looked helpless and vulnerable, but deliberately he closed his eyes, and this time his voice was a growl. “Get out. I’m tired. I need rest.”
David walked along the river for a long time. He hadn’t been in the lab for weeks, months perhaps. No one needed him in the lab any longer. He felt in the way there. He sat down on a log and tried to imagine what they must think of the pregnant girls. They would revere them. The bearers of life, so few among so many. Was Walt afraid a matriarchy of some sort would develop? It could. They had discussed that years ago, and then dismissed it as one of the things they could not control. A new religion might come about, but even if the elders knew it was happening, what could they do about it? What should they do about it? He threw twigs into the smooth water, which moved without a ripple, all of a piece on that calm, cold night, and he knew that he didn’t care.
Wearily he got up and started to walk again, very cold suddenly. The winters were getting colder, starting earlier, lasting longer, with more snows than he could remember from childhood. As soon as man stopped adding his megatons of filth to the atmosphere each day, he thought, the atmosphere had reverted to what it must have been long ago, moister weather summer and winter, more stars than he had ever seen before, and more, it seemed, each night than the night before: the sky a clear, endless blue by day, velvet blue-black at night with blazing stars that modern man had never seen.
The hospital wing where W-l and W-2 were working now was ablaze with lights, and David turned toward it. As he neared the hospital he began to hurry; there were too many lights, and he could see people moving behind the windows, too many people, elders.
Margaret met him in the lobby. She was weeping silently, oblivious of the tears that ran erratically down her cheeks. She wasn’t yet fifty, but she looked older than that; she looked like an elder, David thought with a pang. When had they started calling themselves that? Was it because they had to differentiate somehow, and none of them had permitted himself to call the others by what they were? Clones! he said to himself vehemently. Clones! Not quite human. Clones.
“What happened, Margaret?” She clutched his arm but couldn’t speak, and he looked over her head at Warren, who was pale and shaking. “What happened?”
“Accident down at the mill. Jeremy and Eddie are dead. A couple of the young people were hurt. Don’t know how bad. They’re in there.” He pointed toward the operating-room wing. “They left Clarence. Just walked away and left him. We brought him up, but I don’t know.” He shook his head. “They just left him there and brought up their own.”
David ran down the hall toward the emergency room. Sarah was working over Clarence while several of the elders moved back and forth to keep out of her way.
David breathed a sigh of relief. Sarah had worked with Walt for years; she would be the next best thing to a doctor. He flung his coat off and hurried to her. “What can I do?”
“It’s his back,” she said tightly. She was very pale, but her hands were steady as she swabbed a long gash on Clarence’s side and put a heavy pad over it. “This needs stitches. But I’m afraid it’s his back.”
“Broken?”
“I think so. Internal injuries.”
“Where the hell is W-one or W-two?”
“With their own. They have two injuries, I think.” She put his hand over the pad. “Hold it tight a minute.” She pressed the stethoscope against Clarence’s chest, peered into his eyes, and finally straightened and said, “I can’t do a thing for him.”
“Stitch him up. I’m going to get W-one.” David strode down the hall, not seeing any of the elders who moved out of his way. At the door to the operating room he was stopped by three of the young men. He saw an H-3 and said, “We have a man who’s probably dying. Where’s W-two?”
“Who?” H-3 asked, almost innocently.
David couldn’t think of the name immediately. He stared at the young face and felt his fist tighten. “You know damn well who I mean. We need a doctor, and you have one or two in there. I’m going to bring one of them out.”
He became aware of movement behind him and turned to see four more of them approaching, two girls, two boys. Interchangeable, he thought. It didn’t matter which ones did what. “Tell him I want him,” he said harshly. One of the newcomers was a C1-2, he realized, and still more harshly he said, “It’s Clarence. Sarah thinks his back is broken.”
C1-2 didn’t change his expression. They had moved very close. They encircled him, and behind him H-3 said, “As soon as they’re through in there, I’ll tell them, David.” And David knew there was nothing he could do, nothing at all.
Chapter 8
He stared at their smooth young faces; so familiar, living memories every one of them, like walking through his own past, seeing his aged and aging cousins rejuvenated, but rejuvenated with something missing. Familiar and alien, known and unknowable. Behind H-3 the swinging door opened and W-1 came out, still in surgical gown and mask, now down about his throat.
“I’ll come now,” he said, and the small group opened for him. He didn’t look again at David after dismissing him with one glance.
David followed him to the emergency room and watched his deft hands as he felt Clarence’s body, tested for reflexes, probed confidently along the spinal column. “I’ll operate,” he said, and that same confidence came through with the words. He motioned for S-l and W-2 to bring Clarence, and left once more.
At the arrival of W-l, Sarah had moved back out of the way, and now she slowly turned and stripped off the gloves that she had put on in preparing to stitch up Clarence’s wound. Warren watched the two young people cover Clarence and strap him securely, then wheel him out the door and down the hall. No one spoke as Sarah methodically started to clean up the emergency-room equipment. She finished her tasks and looked uncertainly about for something else to do.
“Will you take Margaret home and put her to bed?” David asked, and she looked at him gratefully and nodded. When she was gone David turned to Warren. “Someone has to see to the bodies, clean them up, prepare them for burial.”
“Sure, David,” Warren said in a heavy voice. “I’ll get Avery and Sam. We’ll take care of it. I’ll just go get them now and we’ll take care of it. I’ll . . . David, what have we done?” And his voice that had been too heavy, too dead, became almost shrill. “What are they?”
“What do you mean?”
“When the accident happened, I was down to the mill. Having a bite with Avery. He was just finishing up down there. Section of the floor caved in, you know that old part where we should have put in a new floor last year, or year before. It gave way somehow. And suddenly there they were, the kids. Out of nowhere. No one had time to go get them, to yell for them to come running. Nothing, but there they were. They got their own two out of there and up to the hospital like fire was on their tails, David. Out of nowhere.”
He looked at David with a fearful expression, and when David simply shrugged, he shook his head and left the emergency room, looking down the hall first, a quick, involuntary glance, as if to make sure that they would permit him to leave.
Several of the elders were still in the waiting room when David went there. Lucy and Vernon were sitting near the window, staring out at the black night. Since Clarence’s wife died, he and Lucy had lived together, not as man and wife, but for companionship, because as children they had been as close as brother and sister, and now each needed someone to cling to. Sometimes sister, sometimes mother, sometimes daughter, Lucy had fussed over him, sewed for him, fetched and carried for him, and now, if he died, what would she do? David went to her and took her cold hand. She was very thin, with dark hair that hadn’t started to gray, and deep blue eyes that used to twinkle with merriment, a long, long time ago.