The Genocides

ELEVEN A Natural Death

Anderson’s hair was coming out in handfuls. Maybe it would have at his age in any case, but he blamed it on his diet. The meager supplies rescued from the fire had been rationed out in dribs and drabs, and the little corn that remained now was for Maryann and for seed when they returned to the surface.

He scratched at his flaky scalp and cursed the Plant, but it was a half-hearted curse—as though he were peeved with an employer, instead of at war with an enemy. His hatred had become tainted with gratitude; his strength was quitting him.

More and more he pondered the question of who was to succeed him. It was a weighty question: Anderson was perhaps the last leader in the world—a king almost, undoubtedly a patriarch.

Though generally he believed in primogeniture, he wondered if a difference of only three months might not be construed charitably in favor of the younger son. He refused to think of Neil as a bastard, and he had therefore been obliged to treat the boys as twins—impartially.

There was something to be said for each of them—and not enough for either. Neil was a steady worker, not given to complaimngs, and strong; he had the instincts of a leader of men, if not all the abilities. However, he was stupid: Anderson could not help but see it. He was also… well, disturbed. Just how he was disturbed or why, Anderson did not know, though he suspected that Greta was in some way responsible. Considering this problem, he tended to be vague, to eye it obliquely or as through smoked glass, as we are told to observe an eclipse. He did not want to learn the truth if he could help it.

Buddy, on the other hand, though he possessed many of the qualities lacking in his half-brother, was not to be relied upon. He had proven it when, in the face of his father’s sternest disapproval, he had gone to live in Minneapolis; he had proven it conclusively on Thanksgiving Day. When Anderson had found his son in, as he supposed, the very commission of the act, it had become quite clear that Buddy would not succeed to his own high place. Anderson, in passing from early manhood to middle age, had developed an unreasoning horror of adultery. That he had once been adulterate himself and that one of his children was the fruit of such an union did not occur to him now. He would, in fact, have denied it outright—and, he would have believed his denial.

For a long time it had seemed that no one could possibly take his place. Therefore, he would have to carry on alone. Each time his sons had shown new weaknesses, Anderson had felt a corresponding growth in strength and purpose. Secretly, he had thrived on their failings.

Then Jeremiah Orville had entered the scene. In August, Anderson had been moved by reasons which were obscure and (it now seemed) God-given to spare the man. Today he trembled at his sight—as Saul must have trembled when he first realized that young David would supplant him and his son Jonathan. Anderson tried desperately both to deny this and to accommodate himself to his apparent heir. (He constantly feared that he would, like that earlier king, war against the Lord’s appointed and damn himself in the act. Belief in predestination has decidedly some disadvantages.) As by degrees, he bent his will to this unpleasant task (for, though he admired Orville, he did not like him); his strength and purpose quitted him by equal degrees. Orville, without even knowing it, was killing him.

It was night. That is to say, they had once again journeyed to exhaustion. As Anderson was the arbiter of what constituted exhaustion, it was evident to everyone that the old man was being worn down: as after the vernal equinox, each day was shorter than the day that had gone before.

The old man scratched at his flaky scalp, and cursed something, he couldn’t remember exactly what, and fell asleep without thinking to take a count of heads. Orville, Buddy and Neil each took the count for him. Orville and Buddy both arrived at twenty-four. Neil, somehow, had come up with twenty-six.

“But that’s not possible,” Buddy pointed out.

Neil was adamant: he had counted twenty-six. “Whadaya think—I can’t count, for Christ’s sake?”

Since Greta’s departure, a month or so had gone by. No one was keeping track of the time any longer. Some maintained it was February; others held for March. From the expeditions to the surface they knew only that it was still winter. They needed to know no more than that.

Not everyone went along. Indeed, besides Anderson, his two sons and Orville, there were only three other men. A permanent base of operations was again being maintained for those, like Maryann and Alice, who could not spend the day crawling through the roots. The number of those who deemed themselves incapable had grown daily until there were just as many lotus-eaters as before. Anderson pretended to ignore the situation, fearing to provoke a worse one.

Anderson led the men up by the usual route, which was marked by ropes that Maryann had braided. It was no longer possible for them to find their way about by the Ariadne’s thread of broken capillaries, for in their explorations they had broken so many that they had created a labyrinth of their own.

It was near the surface, at about the sixty-degree level, that they came across the rats. At first it was like the humming of a beehive, though higher pitched. The men’s first thought was that the incendiaries had at last come down into the roots after them. When they had ventured into the tuber from which the noise was coming, the humming rose to a raspy whine, as though a coloratura’s aria were being broadcast at peak volume over a bad public-address system. The solid-seeming darkness beyond the lamp’s reach wavered and dissolved to a lighter shade as thousands of rats tumbled over each other to get into the fruit. The walls of the passage were honeycombed with the rats’ tunnelings.

“Rats!” Neil exclaimed. “Didn’t I say it was rats that gnawed their way through that root up above? Didn’t I, huh? Well, here they are. There must be a million of them.”

“If there aren’t now, there will be before very long,” Orville agreed. “I wonder if they’re all in this one tuber?”

“What possible difference can it make?” Anderson asked impatiently. “They’ve left us well enough alone, and I for one feel no need to keep them company. They seem content to eat this damn candied apple, and I’m content to let them eat it. They can eat the whole of it, of all of them, for all I care.” Sensing that he had gone too far, he said, in a more subdued tone: “There’s nothing we can do against an army of rats, in any case. I have only one cartridge left in the revolver. I don’t know what I’m saving it for, but I know it isn’t for a rat.”

“I was thinking of the future, Mr. Anderson. With all this food available and no natural enemies to keep them down, these rats will multiply out of all bounds. They may not threaten our food supply now, but what about six months from now? a year from now?”

“Before the summer has begun, Jeremiah, we won’t be living down here. The rats are welcome to it then.”

“We’ll still be depending on it for food though. It’s the only food left—unless you want to breed the, rats. Personally, I’ve never liked the taste. And there’s next winter to think about. With the little seed that’s left for planting—even if it’s still good—we can’t possibly get through the winter. I don’t like to live like this any more than the next man, but it’s a way to survive. The only way, for the time being.”

“Ah, that’s a lot of hooey!” Neil said, in support of his father.

Anderson looked weary, and the lantern, which he had been holding up to examine the perforations of the wall of the passage, sank to his side. “You’re right, Jeremiah. As usual.” His lips curled in an angry smile, and he swung his bare foot (shoes were too precious to be wasted down here) at one of the ratholes from which two bright eyes had been staring up intently, examining the examiners. “Bastards!” he shouted. “Sons of bitches!” There was a squeal, and a fat, furry ball of ratfiesh sailed on a high arc out of range of the lamplight. The whining, which had grown somewhat quieter, rose in volume, answering Anderson’s challenge.

Orville put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. His whole body was shaking with helpless rage. “Sir…” Orville protested. “Please.”

“The bastard bit me,” Anderson grumbled.

“We can’t afford to scatter them now. Our best hope—”

“Half took off my toe,” he said, stooping to feel the injury. “The bastard.”

“—is to contain them here. To block up all the passages out of this tuber. Otherwise…” Orville shrugged. The alternative was clear.

“Then how do we get out?” Neil objected smugly.

“Oh, shut up, Neil,” Anderson said wearily. “With what?” he asked Orville. “We haven’t got anything a hungry rat couldn’t chew his way through in five minutes.”

“We have an axe though. We can weaken the walls of the roots so that they collapse in on themselves. The pressure at this depth is tremendous. That wood must be hard as iron, but if we can chip and scrape enough of it away at the right points, the earth itself will block the passages. Rats can’t chew their way through basalt. There’s a danger that the cave-in will get out of hand, but I think I can see that it won’t. A mining engineer usually has to prevent cave-ins, but that’s good training for someone who has to produce them.”

“I’ll let you try. Buddy, go back and get the axe—and anything else with a cutting edge. And send those other lotuseaters up here. Neil and the rest of you, spread out to each of the entrances of this potato and do what you can to keep the rats inside. They don’t seem very anxious to leave yet, but they may when the walls start tumbling down. Jeremiah, you come with me and show me what you mean to do. I don’t understand why the whole thing isn’t going to come down on our heads when we—God damn!”

“What is it?”

“My toe! Damned rat really took a hunk out of it. Well, we’ll show these bastards!”

The extermination of the rats, succeeded—if anything, too well. Orville attacked the first root at just the point where it belied outward to become the hard, spherical shell of the fruit. He worked hours, shaving off thin slices of wood, watching for any sign of stress that would give him an opportunity to escape, scraping away a little more, watching. When it came down, there was no warning. Suddenly Orville stood in the midst of thunder. He was lifted off his feet by the shock wave and hurled back into the passage.

The entire tuber had collapsed in upon itself.

Watchers at the other entrances reported no escaped rats, but there had been a fatality: one man, having missed his lunch (Anderson insisted that they eat only three times a day, and then sparingly), stepped into the tuber for a handful of fruit pulp at exactly the wrong moment. He, the fruit pulp and some few thousand rats were now being converted, at a modest, geological pace, into petroleum. A basalt wall of perfect, Euclidean flatness blocked each of the entrances to the tuber; it had come down quickly and neatly as a guillotine.

Anderson, who had not been present to witness the event (shortly after Orville had begun his work, he had had yet another fainting fit; they came more and more frequently of late), was incredulous when it was reported to him. Orville’s ex post facto explanation did not convince him. “What’s Buckminster What’s-his-name got to do with anything? I ask a simple question, and you carry on about geographic domes.”

“It’s only a supposition. The walls of the tuber have to withstand incredible pressures. Buckminster Fuller was an architect—an engineer, if you prefer—who built things so they’d do just that. He designed skeletons, you might say. Designed them so that if the least part was weakened, the whole body would give way. Like when you remove the keystone of an arch—except that they were all keystones.”

“This is a fine time to learn about Buckminster Fuller—when a man’s been killed.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I appreciate that it was my responsibility. I should have given more thought to the matter before rushing ahead.”

“It can’t be helped now. Go find Alice and bring her here. I’m coming down with a fever—and that ratbite hurts more every minute.”

His responsibility indeed! Anderson thought, when Orville had left him. Well, it would be his responsibility soon enough. He had better call an assembly while he still had his wits about him and announce it for a fact.

But that would be tantamount to his own abdication. No, he would bide his time.

Meanwhile, he had had a new idea—a way of legitimatizing Orville as his heir: Orville would become Anderson’s son—his eldest son—by way of marriage.

But he balked at this step too. Blossom still seemed so young to him—hardly more than a child. Only a few months ago he had seen her with the other children playing jacks on the floor of the commonroom. Marriage? He would talk to Alice Nemerov about it. A woman always knew best about these things. Anderson and Alice were the two oldest survivors. That fact, and the death of Anderson’s wife, had forced them willy-nilly into each other’s confidence.

While he waited for her, he massaged his little toe. Where it had been bitten it was now numb; the pain was coming from the rest of the foot.

That night when the headcount was taken (Anderson being even less in a condition to do so), Orville and Buddy both came up with a figure of twenty-three. Neil, this time, counted twenty-four.

“He’s slow,” Buddy joked. “Give him time. He’ll catch up with us yet.”

Alice Nemerov, R.N., knew Anderson was going to die. Not just because she was a nurse and could recognize gangrene from its unremarkable inception. She had seen him begin to die long before he was bitten by the rat, even before the fainting fits had become a daily occurrence. When an old person is getting ready to die, you can see it all over him, written in neon. But because she was a nurse, and because she had come despite herself to like the old man, she tried to do something to keep him alive.

For this reason she had persuaded him to delay speaking to Orville and Blossom about his intentions for them. She led him on from day to day with a carrot of hope. At least it looked like hope.

At first, when the hope had been real, she had tried to suck off the infection, as in snakebite. The only effect was that she had grown nauseous and couldn’t eat for two days. Now, half his foot was a dusky, dead blue. Decomposition would set in very quickly, if it had not already begun.

“Why don’t you keep sucking off the infection?” Neil asked. He wanted to watch again.

“It wouldn’t do any good now. He’s dying.”

“You could try. That’s the least you could do.” Neil bent down and examined his father’s sleeping face. “Is he breathing better now?”

“Sometimes his breath comes very hard. Sometimes he scarcely seems to breathe at all. Neither symptom is out of the ordinary.”

“His feet are cold,” Neil said critically.

“What do you expect?” Alice snapped at him, past all patience. “Your father is dying. Don’t you understand that? Only an amputation could save him at this point, and in his condition he couldn’t survive amputation. He’s worn out, an old man. He wants to die.”

“That’s not my fault, is it?” Neil shouted. Anderson woke for a moment at the noise, and Neil went away. His father had changed so much in the last few days that Neil felt awkward with him. It was like being with a stranger.

“The baby—is it a boy or a girl?” His voice was barely audible.

“We don’t know yet, Mr. Anderson. It may take another hour. But no more than that. Everything is ready. She made the ligatures herself, from scraps of rope. Buddy went up to the surface for a bucket of snow—he says it was a real March blizzard up there—and we’ve been able to sterilize the knife and wash out a couple of pieces of cotton. It won’t be a hospital delivery, but I’m sure it will be all right.”

“We must pray.”

“You must pray, Mr. Anderson. You know I don’t hold with those things.”

Anderson smiled, and it was not, for a wonder, a really unpleasant expression. Dying seemed to mellow the old man; he had never been nicer than now. “You’re just like my wife, just like Lady. She must be in hell for her sins and her scoffing, but hell can’t be much worse than this. Somehow, though, I can’t imagine her there.”

“Judge not lest ye be judged, Mr. Anderson.”

“Yes, Lady would always hark on that one too. It was her favorite Scripture.”

Buddy interrupted them: “Time now, Alice.”

“Go on, go on, don’t dally here,” Anderson urged. Unnecessarily, for she was already gone, taking the lamp with her. The darkness began to cover him like a woolen blanket, like a comforter.

If it’s a boy, Anderson thought, I can die happy.

It was a boy.

Anderson was trying to say something. Neil could not make out quite what. He bent his ear closer to the old man’s dry lips. He couldn’t believe that his father was dying. His father! He didn’t like to think about it.

The old man mumbled something. “Try and talk louder,” Neil shouted into his good ear. Then to the others standing around: “Where’s the lamp? Where’s Alice? She should be here now. What are you all standing around like that for?”

“Alice is with the baby,” Blossom whispered. “She said she’d be only another minute.”

Then Anderson spoke again, loud enough for Neil but no one else to hear. “Buddy.” That was all he said, though he said it several times.

“What’d he say?” Blossom asked.

“He said he wants to talk to me alone. The rest of you, go away and leave us together, huh? Dad’s got things he wants to tell me alone.”

There were shufflings and sighs as the few people who were not yet sleeping (the waking period having ended many hours ago) walked off into other areas of the tuber to leave father and son together. Neil strained to hear the least sound that would have meant that one of them remained nearby. In this abysmal darkness, privacy was never a sure thing.

“Buddy ain’t here,” he said at last, assured that they were alone. “He’s with Maryann and the baby. So’s Alice. There’s some kind of problem about the way it breathes.” Neil’s throat was dry, and when he tried to make saliva and swallow it, it hurt. Alice, he thought angrily, shouldn’t be off somewhere else now. All people talked about, it seemed to Neil, was the baby, the baby. He was sick of the baby. Did anybody care about his baby?

Curiously, Greta’s lie had made its most lasting impression on Neil. He believed in it with the most literal, unquestioning faith, just as Maryann believed in Christ’s virgin birth. Neil had the ability to brush aside mere, inconvenient facts and considerations of logic like cobwebs. He had even decided that his baby’s name was to be Neil Junior. That would show old Buddy-boy!

“Then get Orville, will you?” Anderson whispered vexedly. “And bring the others back. I have something to say.”

“You can tell it to me, huh? Huh, Dad?”

“Get Orville, I said!” The old man began to cough.

“Okay, okay!” Neil walked some distance from the small hollow in the fruit where his father was lying, counted to a hundred (skipping, in his haste, everything between fiftynine and seventy), and returned. “Here he is, Dad, just like you said.”

Anderson did not think it extraordinary that Orville should not greet him. Everyone, these last days, was mute in his presence, the presence of death. “I should have said this before, Jeremiah,” he began, speaking rapidly, afraid that this sudden renewal of strength would desert him before he could finish. “I’ve waited too long. Though I know you’ve been expecting it. I could tell by your eyes. So there was no need to—” He broke off, coughing. “Here,” (he gestured feebly in the darkness) “take my revolver. There’s only one bullet left, but some of them see it as a sort of symbol. It’s just as well to let them. There were so many things I wanted to tell you, but there was no time.”

Neil had grown more and more agitated during his father’s valedictory, and at last he could not contain himself: “What are you talking about, Dad?”

Anderson chuckled. “He doesn’t understand yet. Do you want to tell him, or shall I?” There was a long silence. “Orville?” Anderson asked in a changed voice.

“Tell me what, Dad? What don’t I understand?”

“That Jeremiah Orville is taking over from now on. So bring him here!”

“Dad, you don’t mean that.” Neil began to chew fretfully on his lower lip. “He ain’t an Anderson. He ain’t even one of the village. Listen, Dad, I’ll tell you what—I’ll take over, huh? I’d do a better job than him. Just give me a chance. That’s all I ask, just one chance.”

Anderson didn’t reply. Neil began all over again, in a softer, more persuasive tone. “Dad, you gotta understand—Orville ain’t one of us.”

“He will be soon enough, you little bastard. Now bring him here.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean I’m marrying him to your sister. Now cut out the crap and bring him here. And your sister too. Bring every. body here.”

“Dad, you can’t mean that, Dad!”

Anderson wouldn’t say another word. Neil showed him all the reasons it was impossible for Orville to marry Blossom. Why, Blossom was only twelve years old! She was his sister—Neil’s sister! Didn’t he understand that? And who was this Orville character anyhow? He wasn’t anybody. They should have killed him long ago, along with the other marauders. Hadn’t Neil said so at the time? Neil would kill him now, if Anderson only said the word. How about it?

No matter what arguments Neil offered, the old man just lay there. Was he dead? Neil wondered. No, he was still breathing. Neil was in misery.

His keen ears picked up the sounds of others returning. “Leave us alone!” he shouted at them. They went away again, unable to hear Anderson’s orders to the contrary.

“We’ve got to talk this thing over, you and me, Dad,” Neil pleaded. Anderson wouldn’t say a word, not a word.

With tears in his eyes, Neil did what he had to do. He pinched together the old man’s nostrils and held his other hand down tightly over the old man’s mouth. He wiggled around a little at first, but he was too weak to put up much of a struggle. When the old man was very, very quiet, Neil took his hands away and felt if he was still breathing.

He wasn’t.

Then Neil took the holster and pistol off the old man arm, strapped it about his own thicker body. It was a sort of symbol.

Shortly afterward Alice came, with the lamp, and felt the dead man’s wrist. “When did he die?” she asked.

“Just a minute ago,” Neil said. It was bard to understand him, he was crying so. “And he asked me—he told me I should take his place. And he gave me his pistol.”

Alice looked at Neil suspiciously. Then she bent over the face of the corpse and studied it attentively under the lamp. There were bruises on the sides of his nose, and his lip was cut and bleeding. Neil was bending over behind her. He couldn’t understand where the blood had come from.

“You murdered him.” Neil couldn’t believe his ears: she had called him a murderer!

He hit Alice over the top of the head with the butt of the pistol. Then he wiped away the blood trickling down his father’s chin and spread fruit pulp over the cut lip.

More people came. He explained to them that his father was dead, that he, Neil Anderson, was to take over his father’s place. He also explained that Alice Nemerov had let his father die when she could have saved him. All her talk about looking after the baby was so much hogwash. It was just as bad as if she’d killed him outright. She would have to be executed, as an example. But not right away. For now they’d just tie her up. And gag her. Neil attended to the gag himself.

They obeyed him. They were accustomed to obeying Anderson, and they had been expecting Neil to take over from him for a long time—for years. Of course, they didn’t believe Alice was in any way guilty, but then neither had they believed a lot of things Anderson had told them, and they’d always obeyed him anyhow. Maybe if Buddy had been there, he would have put up more of a fuss. But he was with Maryann and his newborn son, who was still weakly. They didn’t dare bring the baby near his grandfather for fear of infection.

Besides, Neil was waving the Python around rather freely. They all knew there was a bullet left, and no one wanted to be the first to start an argument.

When Alice was securely bound, Neil asked where Orville was. Nobody, as it turned out, had seen or heard from him for several minutes.

“Find him and bring him here. Right now. Blossom! Where’s Blossom? I saw her here a minute ago.” But Blossom too was nowhere to be found.

“She’s gotten lost!” Neil exclaimed, in a flash of understanding. “She’s lost in the roots. We’ll get up a search party. But first, find Orville. No—first help me with this.” Neil grabbed up Alice by the shoulders. Somebody else took her feet. She didn’t weigh more than a feedbag, and the pearest taproot where there was a sheer vertical drop wasn’t two minutes away. They dropped her down the shaft. They couldn’t see how far she fell, because Neil had forgotten to sting the lamp. No doubt, she fell a long, long way.

Now his father was revenged. Now he would look for Orville. There was only one bullet left in his father’s Colt Python .357 Magnum. It was for Orville.

But first he must find Blossom. She must have run off somewhere when she heard her father was dead. Neil could understand that. The news had upset him too, upset him something terrible.

First, they’d look for Blossom. Then they’d look for Orville. He hoped, how he hoped, that he wouldn’t find them together. That would be too awful for words.