A Matter for Men

EIGHT

WHEN THE plagues first appeared, the medical community assumed they were of natural origin, simple mutations of already familiar diseases. Hence the names: Black Peritonitis, African Measles, Botuloid Virus, Comatosis and Enzyme Reaction 42-that last one was particularly vicious. They were so virulent and they spread so fast that it wasn't until afterward that all of them were identified.

I remember Dad frowning as he read the newspaper each night. "Idiots," he muttered. "I'm only surprised it didn't happen sooner. Of course you're going to get plague if you put that many people into a place like Calcutta."

Within a couple of weeks, the frown gave way to puzzlement. "Rome?" he said. "I thought the Italians were more careful than that."

When it hit New York, Dad said, " `Nita, I think we should move up to the cabin for a few weeks. Jim, you'll come with us, of course."

"But, I've got school-"

"You can afford to miss it. I think I'll call your sister too." At first, the doctors thought they were dealing with only one disease-but one with a dozen contradictory symptoms. They thought that it took different forms, like bubonic and pneumonic plague. Then they thought that it was so unstable it kept mutating. Everyone had a theory: the super-jumbos were the vectors; we should ground all air travel at once and isolate the disease. Or the bacterio-ecology had finally developed a widespread tolerance for our antibiotics; we shouldn't have used them so freely in the past. Or it was all those experiments with fourth-dimensional physics; they were changing the atmosphere and causing weird new mutations. Things like giant centipedes and purple caterpillars.

The first wave swept across the country in a week. A lot of it was carried by the refugees themselves as they fled the East Coast, but just as much was spread by seemingly impossible leapfrog jumps. Airplanes? Or something else? There was no direct air service at all to Klamath, California, yet that city died before Sacramento.

I remember one broadcast; this scientist-I don't remember his name-was claiming that it was biological warfare. He said there were two kinds of agents: the Y-agents for which there were vaccines and antitoxins, and the X-agents for which there were no defenses at all. Apparently, he said, some of these X-agents must have been released, either accidentally or perhaps by terrorists. There was no other way to explain this sudden outbreak of worldwide uncontrollable death.

That idea caught on real fast. It made sense. Within days the country was in an uproar. Screaming for revenge. If you couldn't kill the germ, at least you could strike back at the enemy responsible for releasing it.

Except-who was that? There was no way of knowing. Besides -and this was the horrible thought-what if the bugs were ours? There were just as many people willing to believe that too.

After that, things fell apart real fast. We heard some of it on the short wave radio. It wasn't pretty.

We were fairly well isolated where we were, even more so after somebody went down to the junction one night and set the bridge on fire. It was an old wooden one and it burned for hours, until it finally collapsed into the stream below. Most of us who lived on the hill knew about the shallow place two miles upstream. If necessary you could drive a vehicle across there, but Dad had figured that the burned-out bridge would stop most refugees from trying to come up the mountain. He was almost right. One of our neighbors down the hill radioed us once to warn of a caravan of three land-rovers heading our way, but not to worry. A while later we heard some shooting, then nothing. We never heard anything more about it.

After that, however, Dad kept a loaded rifle near the door, and he taught all of us how to use it-even the kids. He was very specific in his instructions. If we did shoot someone, we were to burn the bodies, all their belongings, their cars, their animals and everything they had touched. No exceptions.

We stayed on the mountain all summer. Dad phoned in his programs until the phones stopped working; then he just kept working without sending them in. I started to ask him once why he kept on, but Mother stopped me. Later, she said to me, "Jim, it doesn't matter if there's ever going to be anyone again who'll want to play one of his games-he's doing them for himself. He has to believe-we all do-that there will be a future."

That stopped me. I hadn't thought about the future-because I hadn't comprehended the awesome scale of the pestilence. I had stopped listening to the radio early on. I didn't want to know how bad it was. I didn't want to hear about the dead dying faster than the living could bury them-whole households going to bed healthy and all of them dying before they awoke. I didn't want to hear about the bodies in the streets, the panic, the looting, the burnings-there had been a firestorm in Los Angeles. Was anybody left alive?

We stayed on the mountain all winter too. It was rough, but we managed. We had a windmill, so we had electricity-not a lot, but enough. We had a solar roof and a Trombe wall, we wore sweaters and we stayed warm. We'd used the summer to build a greenhouse, so we had vegetables, and when Dad brought down the deer, I understood why he had spent so much time practicing with the crossbow. We survived.

I asked him, "Did you know that something like this would happen?"

He looked up at me across the body of the deer. "Something like what?"

"The plagues. The breakdown."

"Nope," he said, wiping his forehead. The insides of that animal were hot. He bent back to his task. "Why do you ask?"

"Um, the crossbow, the cabin-and everything. Why this particular mountain? I always thought you were a little bit ... well, wobbly for making such a thing about being self-sufficient. Now it seems like awfully good planning."

He stopped and laid down his knife. He wiped the blood off his gloves. "It is impossible to work in weather like this." His breath was frosty in the air. "And I can't get a grip through these gloves. No, I didn't know-and yes, it was good planning. But it wasn't my idea. It was your grandfather's. I wish you could have known him better. He used to tell me that a man should be prepared to move suddenly at least three times in his life. That is, if you're planning to live a long life. You know why, of course. Pick any period of history, any place. It's hard to find seventy years of unbroken peace and quiet. Somebody's tree is always too crowded." He sighed. "When the screeching starts, it's time to go someplace quieter." He picked up the knife and went back to his evisceration of the buck. "Our family has a history of narrow escapes-wait a minute. Hold that-ah, there! One of your great-grandfathers left Nazi Germany in 1935. He kept heading west until he got to Dublin-that's why your name is McCarthy today. He forgot to marry your great-grandmother in a church."

"Oh," I said.

"Your grandfather bought this land in 1986. When land was still cheap. He put a prefab on it. Came up here every summer after that and built a little more. Never saw the sense of it myself until-let's see, it was before you were born-it would have had to have been the summer of '97. Right, we thought that was going to be the year of the Apocalypse."

"I know," I said. "We studied it in school."

He shook his head. "It's not the same, Jim. It was a terrifying time. The world was paralyzed, waiting to see if they would drop any more bombs. We were all sure that this was it-the big one. The panics were pretty bad, but we came through it all right, up here. We spent the whole year on this mountain-didn't come down till Christmas. The world was lucky that time. Anyway, that's what convinced me."

We began pulling the buck around and onto the sled. I said, "How long do you think we'll have to stay up here this time?" "Dunno. Could be a while-maybe even a couple years. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death took its time about dying out. I don't expect these plagues to be any different."

I thought about that. "What do you think we'll find when we do go back?"

"Depends."

"On?"

"On how many people have... survived. And who." He looked at me speculatively. "I think you'd better start listening to the radio with me again."

"Yes, sir."

About a month after that, we caught a broadcast out of Denver, the provisional capital of the United States. Martial law was still in effect. The thirty-six surviving members of Congress had reconvened and postponed the presidential election for at least six months. And the second-generation vaccines were proving nearly sixty percent effective. Supplies were still limited though.

Dad and I looked at each other and we were both thinking the same thing. The worst is over.

Within a month, Denver was on the air twenty-four hours a day. Gradually, the government was putting its pieces back together. And a lot of information was finally coming to light.

The first of the plagues-they knew now there had been several -had appeared as isolated disturbances in the heart of Africa. Within a few weeks, it had spread to Asia and India and was beginning its westward sweep across the world. The second plague came so hard on its heels that it seemed like part of the same wave, but it had started somewhere in Brazil, I think, and swept north through Central America-so fast, in fact, that many cities succumbed before they even had a chance to identify it. By the time of the third plague, governments were toppling and almost every major city was in a state of martial law. Almost all travel worldwide was at a standstill. You could be shot for trying to get to a hospital. The fourth and fifth plagues hit us like tidal waves, decimating the survivors of the first three. There was a sixth plague too-but by then the population density was so low, it couldn't spread.

Some areas had been lucky and had remained completely unaffected, mostly isolated out-of-the-way places. A lot of ships just stayed at sea, particularly Navy vessels, once the admiralty recognized the need to preserve at least one military arm relatively intact. Then there were remote islands and mountaintop settlements, religious retreats, survival communities, our entire Nuclear Deterrent Brigade (wherever they were), the two lunar colonies, the L5 construction project (but they lost the ground base), the submarine communities of Atlantis and Nemo and quite a few places where someone had the foresight to go down and blow up the bridge.

But even after the vaccines were in mass production and the plagues had abated (somewhat), there were still problems. In fact, that was when the real problems began. In many parts of the world, there was no food, the distribution systems having broken down completely. And typhus and cholera attacked the weakened survivors. There was little hospital care available anywhere in the world; the hospitals had been the first institutions to go under. (Any doctor who had survived was automatically suspect of dereliction of duty.) Many large cities had become uninhabitable because of fires and mass breakdown of services. Moscow, for instance, was lost to a nuclear meltdown.

It was the end of the world-and it just kept on happening. So many people were dying of exposure, starvation, anomie, suicide, shock and a thousand other things that people didn't usually die of but which had suddenly become fatal, that it seemed we were caught up in a larger plague with no name at all-except its name was despair. The waves of it rolled around the world and kept on rolling and rolling and rolling....

Before the plagues had broken out, there had been almost six billion human beings on the Earth. By the end of it, nobody knew how many were left. The United States government didn't even try to take the next national census. If anybody in authority had any idea how many people had survived, they weren't saying. It was almost as if they were afraid to make it real. But we heard on the short wave one night that there had to be at least a hundred million dead in this country alone. Whole cities had simply ceased to exist.

We couldn't comprehend that, but there were all those reports on the radio and pictures on the TV. Large areas of the countryside were returning to wilderness. There were ruins everywhere. Burned-out houses were commonplace-frightened neighbors had tried to halt the spread of the disease by burning the homes of the dying, sometimes not even waiting until the dying were dead. Everywhere there were abandoned cars, broken windows, faded billboards, uncut lawns and more than a few mummified corpses. "If you come upon one," said the voice from Denver, "exhale quickly, don't inhale, hold your breath, don't touch anything and back away-practice it till it becomes a reflex. Then place yourself in quarantine-there may be a chance for you, maybe-and call a decontamination squad. If you're in a place where there are no decontamination units, set a fire. And pray you've been fast enough."

We stayed up in the mountains through spring. And listened to the radio.

Denver reported that it looked like the plagues were beginning to die out. There were less than a thousand outbreaks a week worldwide, but people were still dying. There were famines now -there were crops that hadn't been planted-and mass suicides too. If the plague without a name had been despair before, then now it was madness. People slipped into and out of it so easily it was recognized as a fact of life-a complaint so common that no one was untouched, so universal it became transparent. Like air, we couldn't see it anymore, but nonetheless we were enveloped in it every moment of existence.

The news reported only the most shocking or disturbing cases, the ones too big to ignore. We listened, wondered and sometimes cried. But there was just too much hurt to handle. Most of it we buried. And some of it we didn't-we just avoided it the best we could. Somehow we managed not to care too much. Somehow we managed to survive.

I was afraid that we would never be able to come down from the mountain-but we did, eventually. In April, Dad and I took the station wagon and ventured slowly down the hill and across the stream. If anyone was watching us, we didn't see them. We paused once to wave a white flag, but there was no answering "Halloooh."

It was as if we'd been traveling to another star for a hundred years and had only just returned. We felt like alien explorerswe felt as if we didn't belong here anymore. Everything was both familiar and different. The world looked deserted and empty. And it was uncannily quiet. But there were burned-out buildings everywhere-scorched monuments to the dead. Each one was testimony-a body had been found here.

We had to wend our way carefully around abandoned vehicles and fallen trees. I began to get uneasy. We saw nothing for miles until we came to a pack of dogs trotting down the highway. They started barking when they saw us. They chased the car for almost a kilometer. My unease gave way to fear.

Later we saw cattle wandering free; they looked thin and sickly. We saw a dazed young woman walking up the road. We tried to stop her, warn her about the dogs, but she just kept on walking past us as if we weren't there. After that we saw a naked boy hiding in the trees, but he turned and ran when we called to him. "Too soon?" I asked.

Dad shook his head. "Not soon enough. There's work to be done, Jim." And his face tightened in pain.

We stopped to fill our gas tank-there was an official-looking sign on the station, proclaiming that it had been nationalized for the duration of the emergency and whatever fuel and supplies still remained were freely available to all registered survivors.

"But aren't they afraid someone will steal it?"

"Why bother?" Dad said. "There's more than enough for everyone now."

I thought about that. The plagues had been fast. A thousand frightened people had scrambled aboard a super-jumbo in New York, and by the time the plane was over St. Louis, half of them were dead and the other half were dying. Only the flight crew, in their locked cabin, survived-but they were dead too, because there was no airport in the country that would let them land. And even if they could have landed, there was no way to get that flight crew out of the plane except through the passenger cabin. That happened three times. The one plane that did land was burned immediately as it rolled to a stop. The other two flight crews took the faster way out. After that all the airports were shut down.

Dad was saying, "It's all still here, Jim-almost everything. There wasn't time for a panic. That's how fast it happened." He shook his head sadly. "It's as if the human race has gone away and isn't coming back. There isn't any reason to steal anymore, no need to hoard-only to preserve. " He smiled sourly. "For the first time in the history of the human race, there's more than enough of everything for everybody. We've all been made suddenly wealthy." He sounded very sad.

Eventually, we came to a town. Two men with rifles met us at a roadblock. They were very polite about it, but we would not be allowed to pass until we had been cleared through decontamination. Their guns were very convincing.

It was an uncomfortable fifteen minutes. We stood by the car, our hands held away from our sides, until the decontamination team arrived. They pulled up in a white van with a large red cross on each side. We stripped naked and two helmeted figures in white safety-suits sprayed us with foam-our station wagon too, inside and out. I was glad it was a warm day. They took blood samples from each of us and disappeared back into their truck; they were gone for a long time. I began to shiver, even in the afternoon sun.

Finally the door opened and they came out again, still masked. Dad and I looked at each other worriedly. They came up to us, each one carrying a pressure injector. The shorter one grabbed my arm and held the nozzle against the skin. Something went sssst and my arm felt suddenly cold and wet. I flexed my fingers experimentally.

"Relax, you'll be all right," she said, pulling off her hood-they were women! And they were grinning.

"They're clean!" shouted the gray-haired one; she turned to Dad. "Congratulations." Dad handled it with remarkable aplomb. He bowed.

I was already reaching for my jeans. The guards laid their guns aside and ran up to shake our hands. "Welcome to Redfield. Is either one of you a teacher? Or a sewage engineer? Do you know anything about fusion systems? We're trying to get the northwest power-net up again. Can you handle a stereo cam?"

I rubbed my arm; it was starting to sting. "Hey-what's this mark?"

"Coded tattoo," said the one who had vaccinated me. She was very pretty. "Proves you're clean-and immune. Stay away from anyone who doesn't have one. You might pick up spores and not know it."

"But we've got family!"

"How many? I'll give you extra vac-pacs to take with you-and coveralls. And foam! Oh, damn! I don't have enough! You'll have to stop at the med-station. Listen to me-you can't come in direct contact with your own people again until they've been vaccinated too. Even though you're immune, you can still carry spores-you could be very dangerous to anyone who isn't inoculated. Do you understand?"

I nodded. Dad looked worried, but he nodded too. "Good."

We went first to the med-station, formerly a drugstore across the street from the two-story city hall. The teenager in charge gave us complete decontamination and vaccination kits, and very thorough instructions on how to use them. She gave us extra vac-pacs for our neighbors on the mountain too.

Then she sent us to the Reclamation Office to register. "First floor, city hall," she pointed. "It's not exactly mandatory," she said, "but it'll be better for you if you do."

I asked Dad about that as we crossed the street. He shook his head. "Later, Jim-right now, we play by the rules."

The "office" was a desk with a terminal on it. It asked you questions, you answered. When you were through, it spat out a registration card at you. Dad thought for a moment, then registered only himself and me. No mention of Mom or Maggie or the boys. "There'll be time enough later, if it's necessary," he said. "Let's see if we can pick up some supplies. I really miscalculated on the toilet paper."

That was the strangest shopping trip I'd ever been on. Money wasn't any good anymore. Neither was barter. There was a wizened little old man at the checkout counter of the mall, a few other people moving in and out of the shops. He was shaking his head in slow rhythmic beats, and he couldn't focus his eyes on anything for long. He told us that the mall was under the authority of the local Reclamation Office-Dad and I exchanged a look -and we were free to claim what we needed. "When you leave, stop by here and show me your card. I punch it in. That's all."

"But how do we pay for it?"

"If you're lucky, you won't have to." He giggled.

Dad pulled me away. "Come on, Jim. Get a cart. I think I understand."

"Well, I don't! It sounds like legalized looting!"

"Shh, keep your voice down. Now, think about it. What good is money if you can walk into any empty house or store and walk out with handfuls of it--0r whatever else you find? A year ago, there were enough goods in this country for three hundred and fifty million Americans-not to mention goods produced for export. Look around, Jim-how many people are left? Do you want to take a guess at the percentage that survived? I don't-I don't want to scare myself. But it's fairly obvious, isn't it, that in circumstances like this even barter is unnecessary. These people here have worked out an answer to the immediate problem of survival. The goods are here. The people need them. We can worry about the bookkeeping later. If there is a later. For many of them there may not be-at least not without this kind of help. It all makes sense-sort of."

"But if they're giving things away, then why the registration cards?"

"To give a semblance of control, maybe. To give us the feeling there's still some authority in the world. You notice how industrious some of these people seem? Maybe it's to keep themselves going-because if they stop for even a moment and realize-" He caught himself. "Come on, get that cart."

We picked up toilet paper, a couple of radiophones, some cartons of canned goods and freeze-dried foods, a new first-aid kit, some vitamins, some candy for the kids, a newspaper, rifle shells and so on. The only things we couldn't afford were the fresh meats and vegetables. Those had to be paid for-in United Nations Federal Kilo-Calorie notes, caseys for short.

"Aha-yes. The nickel drops."

"What?"

"What's the only thing in short supply today, Jim?"

"People."

"Trained skills. That's what they're trading here. Ability. Labor. That's the new money-standard. Or it will be." He looked almost happy. "Jim"-he grabbed my shoulders abruptly-"it's over. These people are organizing for survival, for a future. There's work to do and they're doing it. They have hope." His grip was tight. "We can come down from the mountain now. We're needed. All of us. Your mom's a nurse. Maggie can teach. ... " His eyes were suddenly wet. "We made it, Jimmy. We made it through to the other side!"

But he was wrong. We hadn't even seen the worst of it yet.