Z for Zachariah

Chapter Six

May 29th

His name is John R. Loomis; he is a chemist from Ithaca, New York, where Cornell University is, or used to be.

He was much better this morning—so much that I began to doubt whether he was really going to get sick again at all. But he said that is normal for radiation poisoning. And it turns out he is a real expert on the subject. In fact, that is, in a way, how he happens to be alive at all, and how he was able to make his way here.

I woke up early, feeling very cheerful, thinking that there was someone to talk to even if he was sick. I brought some more water, heated it over the fire and took a bath, something I haven’t been able to do for a while. (I do it by carrying the warm water into the tub in the bathroom. You can wash quite well with just two bucketfuls once you get used to it.) Then I put on my good slacks. After all, he is “company” in a way, and I thought I should dress up a bit. I felt a little embarrassed at first when I looked in the mirror; but it was just because I am so used to the men’s blue jeans.

Last night before I went to bed (in my own room again) I went out to the chicken yard, opened the gate, and scattered some chicken corn on the ground. So this morning, after I was dressed, I went out and looked. Sure enough, they had come back in, and there were three fresh eggs in the henhouse. I boiled them, toasted the last of the cornbread, made some coffee, and opened a tin of tomato juice. It made a respectable looking breakfast. I put it on a tray—also a jar of raspberry jam—and carried it out to the tent. The sun had just come over the ridge on the east, which meant it was about eight-thirty. Down the valley a couple of crows were calling. I felt happy and excited.

And to my surprise he was sitting up in the doorway of the tent.

“You’re better,” I said.

“For the moment,” he said. “At least I think I can eat something.”

I put the tray down in front of him and he stared at it.

“Amazing,” he said. He just whispered it.

“What?”

“This. Fresh eggs. Toast. Coffee. This valley. You, all by yourself. You are all by yourself?”

It was sort of a key question and he looked a little suspicious as he asked it, as if I, or someone, might be playing a trick on him. Still, there wasn’t any use pretending anything else.

“Yes.”

“And you managed to stay alive, and raise chickens and eggs and cows?”

“It hasn’t been so hard.”

“And the valley. How did it escape?”

“I don’t really understand that. Except that people always used to say the valley had its own weather.”

“A meteorological enclave. Some kind of an inversion. I suppose that’s a theoretical possibility. But the odds—"

I said: “You’d better eat. It will all get cold.”

If he was going to be too sick to eat later, he had better eat now, and build up his strength. As for the valley, I had wondered enough about it, especially in the first few months, when I was still expecting the deadness to creep in from outside. But it did not, and there was not much sense calling it a theoretical possibility when we were in it. At that point I did not know yet that he was a chemist, a scientist. And scientists won’t just accept things—they always have to try to figure them out.

He ate his breakfast. Then, still sitting up, he told me his name. And, of course, I told him mine.

“Ann Burden,” he said. “But weren’t there other people living in the valley?”

“My family,” I said. “And the people who owned the store, Mr and Mrs Klein.”

And I told him about how they drove away and never came back. Also about the Amish, and what my father had seen in Ogdentown.

“I suppose they kept going too long,” he said. “It’s hard not to, especially at first. I know. You keep hoping. And of course, so soon after the war there was still the nerve gas.”

“Nerve gas?”

“That’s what killed most of the people. In a way it’s better. They just went to sleep and never woke up.”

It had taken him ten weeks to get from Ithaca to the valley, and all that way, all that time, he had seen no living thing—no people, no animals, no birds, no trees, not even insects—only grey wasteland, empty highways and dead cities and towns. He had been ready to give up and turn back when he finally came over the ridge and saw, in the late evening, the haze of blue-green. At first he thought it was a lake, and, like all the other lakes he had come upon, dead. But the next morning by better light he saw that this green was different, a colour he had almost forgotten. As I had suspected, he still did not believe it, but came on to investigate anyway. Not until he came over Burden Hill did he know that he had finally found life. I had seen that for myself; that was when I first saw him.

He finished eating his breakfast; he ate it all and drank the coffee. But he was still weak, and started back into the tent to lie down on his sleeping bag.

“Why do you sleep in the tent?” I said. “If you are going to be sick again, the house would be better.”

He said: “The tent is radiation-proof.”

“But there is no radiation in the valley,” I said. “You have learned that.”

“I have,” he said. “But at first I didn’t trust it.”

“But you know now.”

“I do,” he said. “But now you have come back, and the house is yours.”

“If you are sick, and I am to take care of you, I can do it better in the house.”

He did not argue any longer, but got up, very shaky on his legs, and walked a few steps towards the house. He stopped. “I’m quite dizzy,” he said. “I’ll have to rest.”

“You can lean on me,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder, leaning quite heavily, and after a few minutes we went on. It took about ten minutes of this to get him to the house, up the porch steps, and into Joseph and David’s room, which fortunately is on the ground floor next to the living room. He lay on David’s bed and went to sleep. I got him a blanket.

He slept until about noon, and during that time I went down to the far field, past the pond, to get the two cows and the calf and put them back into the pasture. They had grown used to their new freedom, however, and did not want to go; they would not come when I called, so in the end I had to cut a stick and drive them in. Of course the calf kept running off in every direction but the right one, but I got the cows in and shut the gate. A few minutes later the calf was bawling to get in. I got the fresh cow (its mother) into the barn and milked her—she is still giving almost a gallon at each milking. Just the same, she is bound to go dry within a year, and then we will have a milkless, creamless, butterless period for a while, until the bull calf grows up. I’m not even sure how long that will take.

When I came back to the house Mr Loomis was just waking, but he stayed in bed. I made lunch, and then he told me some more of his story.

It began when he was a graduate student at Cornell. He was an organic chemist, doing research on plastics and polymers. (He explained that these are very long molecules used in making nylon, dacron and the stretchy kind of plastic wrap.) The head of the department in which he studied was a Professor Kylmer, a very famous man who had once won a Nobel prize.

Professor Kylmer had a research grant from the government, and worked part of the time at a special laboratory they had built for him, not at Cornell but in the mountains about twenty miles away. The whole thing was secret, but it had something to do with plastic and polymers, which were also the Professor’s speciality.

Mr Loomis knew the Professor fairly well (being his pupil), though he was not a very friendly man, but always completely wrapped up in his work. One day, however, he invited Mr Loomis into his private office in the Cornell chemistry building. He was obviously excited about something. He asked Mr Loomis, as soon as the door was shut, if he would like to come and work with him in the secret laboratory. He said that he had just made an important discovery, and needed to increase his staff to develop it. Mr Loomis, after thinking it over, accepted the offer—since, as the Professor explained, it was the same kind of research he was doing anyway, and this way he would get paid for doing it.

The discovery was a method of magnetizing plastic. Mr Loomis called it “polarizing”, but that means making it magnetic. Since the plastic was made of polymers, they called it “polapoly”.

That did not sound like too exciting a discovery to me, but when he explained what it was for, I could see that it was—or would seem so to the government. The point was that magnetism can stop, or at least turn aside, radiation. Mr Loomis reminded me (I had learned it at school) that it is the earth’s magnetic field that keeps us all from being killed by cosmic rays. So a magnetic plastic could be used to make a radiation-proof suit.

That was what the government—the Army, of course—wanted. So that troops could live on (fight on!) in places that had been atom bombed. The government would issue suits to civilians, too, eventually, but the Army wanted the first ones.

This happened about three years before the war. The laboratory to which Mr Loomis reported the next day was eighty feet underground, a place as big as a house, hollowed out of a mountainside of solid rock. He worked there almost every day for the next three years, and often slept there, too—there were living quarters, so that when they got busy on some crucial test they did not need to drive back to Ithaca. They had stores of food and even a kitchen.

He soon learned that the project was more complicated than just making a plastic suit. There wasn’t much point in giving a soldier a safe-suit if he could not breathe the air around him, or drink the water. (Food rations, even cases of food, they could wrap in the plastic.) But Professor Kylmer had already started working on a variation of the plastic—a thin, slightly porous membrane that you could filter the water through. It worked this way: the worse the water was, the less you got, but what did come through was pure; the filter would not pass the radioactive part. Then they designed a similar membrane for air. That was harder, because the clean air coming out the other side had to be trapped and compressed into a tank. But they worked it out, all in a compact unit that a man could carry and operate with a hand pump.

These were (I now realized) the things Mr Loomis had brought with him—the greenish suit he was wearing when I first saw him, the air-tank on his back; the water filter, and a supply of purified water, had been in the wagon. The tent, of course, was the same stuff as the suit, and so was the wagon-cover.

They had designed all these in the laboratory, and finished a single pilot model of each, just before the war began. They had sent their report to Washington, and a team was coming from the Pentagon to test them. Then they would start production, not in the laboratory but in plastics factories all over the country.

But the men from the Pentagon never got there. It was all too late. The war broke out and was over before a single safe-suit was ever issued to a single soldier, much less a civilian.

On the night the bombing began, Mr Loomis was working late in the laboratory. He heard the news on the radio, and he decided to stay there, at least for the time being, to see how things went. He had a good supply of food—mostly army rations of freeze-dried things (which would keep indefinitely), for they had been testing the plastic for food packaging. Professor Kylmer was not there; he had gone back to Ithaca, and Mr Loomis never saw him again.

In the laboratory Mr Loomis also had the world’s only radiation-proof suit, and he had the air filter and the water filter.

Like me, he heard the radio stations go off one by one. Still he thought there might be other survivors in underground places like his—the Air Force, for instance, was supposed to have several shelters, all equipped so that the men in them could last for months. The difference was that if they were alive, they could not go out, and he could.

He stayed in the laboratory for three months, hoping the radiation level in the air outside would go down, but it did not. Then he began a series of expeditions. At first they were short ones. The suit had been carefully tested in the laboratory, and it was safe against all predictable radiation levels. But it had never actually been used “in the field”; so he was cautious, and it was lucky he was. His first impulse, for instance, was to get into his car and drive to Ithaca, the nearest big town. Before he did so, he checked the radioactivity inside the car, using a Geiger counter from the laboratory. He discovered it was ten times as high as in the open air: apparently the metal body, reflecting it inward from six directions, concentrated the rays more than anyone had anticipated. Anyway, the level was too near the theoretical limit of what the suit could handle, and he decided not to risk it.

Since then he had tested hundreds of cars, and they were all the same—as he said, too hot to be safe. Even motorcycles were dangerous. Bicycles were better, but too difficult to ride in the bulky plastic suit. So he ended up walking and hauling his supplies in the wagon, which he had made himself out of bicycle parts and a big, light plywood carton covered with polapoly.

His first long trip was to the west, to where he knew there had been an underground Air Force command post. Using a map, he calculated the distance he had to cover each day, how long it would take, and how much freeze-dried food he would need. He knew he would not find anything edible along the way; there might be usable food at the underground post itself, but he could not count on that.

He found the Air base all right, barricaded, walled, fenced, with “Keep Out” signs starting a mile away. It was a shambles. Apparently men stationed in the barracks outside had tried to fight their way into the safe-room; local civilians had joined them, and in the battle grenades had been used. There were bodies everywhere, and no sign of life. He tried the lift but it did not work. Taking a torch, he climbed instead down a steep, ladder-like stairway next to the lift. After the first ten steps it was totally dark.

The command room itself, ninety steps further down, was relatively undamaged: a large oval room with maps on the walls, desks, telephones, and a bank of computers. Three dead men in uniform sat slumped over their desks; each had a loaded rifle next to him. Yet they had not been shot. They had died, Mr Loomis guessed, of asphyxiation; they would have depended for air on a bottled oxygen-mix, and someone, somewhere in the underground maze, had wrecked the circulation pumps.

He thought that did not really matter so much. Because all of the underground fallout shelters, this one and others around the world, had built-in time limits, enough air and water to last three months, six months, a year, on the assumption that after that it would be safe to go outside again. And that had not happened.

Mr Loomis had been telling all this as he lay in David’s bed, having finished eating his lunch. I could see that he was anxious to tell it, but that he was getting tired. When he finished what I have written here he reached to get a drink of water from the glass I had put on his lunch tray, but the glass was empty. I took the tray away to the kitchen, and the glass with it. I refilled it, and while I was taking it back I remembered one more thing I was really curious about.

I gave him the water and asked: “Who was Edward?” Because that was the name he had called me when he first saw me in the tent, when he was delirious.

For a second after I asked the question I thought the sickness had come back on him, because his eyes got a wild look again, as if he were seeing a nightmare. The hand holding the glass of water opened, and the glass slipped and fell to the floor. At the noise it made he shook his head and his eyes unclouded. Still he stared.

“How do you know about Edward?”

“When I first saw you,” I said, “in the tent, you called me Edward. Is something wrong? Are you sick?”

He relaxed. “It was a shock,” he said. “Edward was a man who worked in the laboratory with Dr Kylmer and me. But I didn’t think I had mentioned his name.”

I got him another glass of water and cleaned up the floor where the first one had fallen.