It was a knowledge that could read both the present and the future. Because of it, they who had worked with it knew how vital it was. It must not be lost. Otherwise future generations could suffer another cycle like this one, of disintegration and chaos.
It was a bitter thing that the others, like himself, were non-survivors under these conditions. The very civilized intellectual nature of their own individual patterns unfitted them for the primitive, violent world that had now recreated itself around them. It was a cruel irony that they were the weakest, not the strongest, vessels to preserve what they alone knew needed to be preserved.
But they could try. He could try. Perhaps he could come to some terms with this time of savagery. It was ironic, also, after all the fears of worldwide nuclear destruction, the “greenhouse effect” and the like, that the world had actually died with a whimper, after all.
No—he corrected himself—not with a whimper. A snarl.
It had begun with a universal economic breakdown, complicated by overpopulation. A time of noise and ideas, of waste and heat. A time of frustration, mounting to frenzy, with unemployment and inflation soaring, worldwide.
In the end had come a total breakdown of resource distribution systems; with all of the predictable consequences reinforcing each other in a maelstrom of positive feedback—like a thermostat gone berserk, feeding more fuel to the furnace as room temperature rises. Predictable—and predicted by all the mathematical models of the study group to which Jeebee had belonged.
Even this was something for bitter inner laughter in Jeebee. Sociodynamics was new, but it had its roots in the pitifully simple, and artificially static, optimality models by which behavioral ecologists of an earlier time had predicted the foraging behavior of animals.
But when it had been applied to human society and the problems of modeling dynamic processes, the conclusions were as inevitable as they were terrifying. Independently, but almost simultaneously, the predictions had appeared in the literature from around the world—from people like Piotr Arazavin, Noshiobi Hideki… and Jeeris Belamy Walthar, yours truly…
They had disagreed only on the degree of social entropy—chaos—required to trigger the leap to this new, savage expression of social organization. It was no one’s fault that the threshold turned out to be lower than any of them had suspected.
So cities became battlefields and stood now as silent, ravaged testaments to the dead left by riot and revolution. Isolated communities developed into small, primitive self-fortified territories. And the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were abroad once more—heraldic symbols of the new order.
So it had become a time of bloodletting, of a paring down and reshaping of the population—the pattern that QSD predicted would optimize the restoration of social order in those with the QSD patterns for survival under fang-and-claw conditions. A new medievalism was upon the globe. The iron years had come again; and those who were best fitted to the immediate task of survival were those to whom ethics, conscience, and anything else beyond the pure pragmatism of physical power, were excess baggage.
And so it would continue, the QSD models predicted, until a new, young order could emerge once more, binding the little village fortresses into alliances, the alliances into kingdoms, and the kingdoms into sovereign nations that could begin once more to treat with one another in systems. Fifty years, five hundred years, a thousand years—however long it would take.
And meanwhile, a small anachronism of the time now dead, a weak individual of the soft centuries struggled to cross the newly lawless country, carrying a precious child of the mind to where it might sleep in safety for as many centuries as necessary until reason and civilization should be born again—
Jeebee caught himself up at the brink of a bath in self-pity. Not that he was particularly ashamed of self-pity. Or, at least, he did not think he was particularly ashamed of it. But emotional navel-contemplating of any kind took his attention off his surroundings; and that could be dangerous. In fact, no sooner had he jerked himself out of his mood than his nostrils caught a faint but oily scent on the breeze.
In a moment he had killed the motor of the bike, was off it, and had dragged it with him into the cover of some nearby willow saplings. He lay there, silent and rigid, trying to identify what he had smelled.
The fact that he could not, did not make it any less alarming. Any unusual phenomena—noise, odor, or other—were potential warnings of the presence of other humans. And if there were other humans around, Jeebee wanted to look them over from a distance before he gave them a chance to see him.
In this case the scent was unknown, but, he could swear, not totally unfamiliar. Somewhere he had encountered it before. After lying some minutes hidden in the willows with ears and eyes straining for additional information, Jeebee cautiously got to his feet and, pushing the bike without starting the motor, began to try to track down the wind-borne odor to its source.
It was some little distance over two rises of land before the smell got noticeably stronger. But the moment came when, lying on his stomach with the bike ten feet back, he looked down a long slope at a milling mass of gray and black bodies. It was a large flock of Targhee sheep—the elusive memory of the smell of a sheep barn at a state fair twelve years before snapped back into his mind. With the flock below were three boys, riding bareback on small shaggy ponies. No dogs were in view.
The thought of dogs sent a twinge of alarm along his nerves. He was about to crawl back to his bike and start moving away when a ram burst suddenly from the flock with a sheep dog close behind it, a small brown-and-white collie breed that had been hidden by the milling dark backs and white faces about it. The sheep was headed directly up the slope where Jeebee lay hidden.
He lay holding his breath until the dog, nipping at the heels of the ram, turned it back into the mass of the flock. He breathed out in relief; but at that moment the dog, having seen the ram safely back among the other sheep, spun about and faced up in Jeebee’s direction, nose testing the wind.
The wind was from dog to Jeebee. There was no way the animal could smell him, he told himself; and yet the canine nose continued to test the air. After a second the dog began to bark, looking straight in the direction of where Jeebee lay hidden.
“What is it, Snappy?” cried one of the boys on horseback. He wheeled his mount around and cantered toward the dog, up the pitch of the slope.
Jeebee panicked. On hands and knees he scrambled backward, hearing a sudden high-pitched whoop from below as he became visible on the skyline, followed by the abrupt pounding of horses’ hooves in a gallop.
“Get him—get’im!” sang a voice. A rifle cracked.
Knowing he was now fully in view, Jeebee leaped frantically on the electric bike and kicked on the motor. Mercifully, it started immediately, and he shot off without looking backward, paying no attention to the direction of his going except that it was away from those behind him and along a route as free of bumps and obstacles as he could find.
The rifle cracked again. He heard several voices now, yelping with excitement and the pleasure of the chase. There was a whistling near his head as a bullet passed close. The electric bike was slow to build up speed; and its softly whining motor did not cover the sound of the yells behind him. But he was headed downslope and slowly the bounding, oscillating needle of the speedometer was picking up space above the zero-miles-per-hour pin.
The rifle sounded again, somewhat farther behind him; and this time he heard no whistle of a passing slug. The shots had been infrequent enough to indicate that only one of the boys was armed; and the rifle used was probably an old single-shot, needing to be reloaded after firing—not an easy thing to do on the back of a galloping horse with no saddle leather or stirrups to cling to. He risked a glance over his shoulder.