Triumph (24 page)

-civilian or military--would have about used up their facilities for holding out in shelters or caves that maybe did spare a few mountain people this long, or people in mines, or in certain military 'hard' bases that I've heard about. Three weeks was the civil-defense idea of a time limit for safe coming-out. The military, I believe, figured on about sixty days for its 'hardest' installations."

"Wasn't it
enough,"
Farr said hollowly, "to soak us with sodium?"

"Evidently not." Ben's head shook in a sort of angered stupefaction. "Plainly, they wanted to make
sure,
when enough time had passed, that the United States would get one more
general lathering of hot isotopes.
And it, I think, will be something that will
stay
hot for a long stretch. Not like the first, sodium shots from the seas, with their half-life of a mere fifteen hours."

"Like
how
long and
how
hot?" Vance asked, almost in a whisper.

Ben shrugged. "If it's cobalt, cesium, or strontium, the half-life could be fifteen to twenty-five years. Oh, hell, Vance! I can't say! Could be sodium again, and soon gone.

Could
be, if my interpretation's in error. We'll simply have to wait and watch the radiation count."

Stoically, perhaps even with considerable hope, they waited out the initial hours that followed the delayed devastation caused by what certain Soviet war-planners had long termed Phase Four.

The count did not rise to the fantastic levels measured in the hours and first days after the sodium bath of the nation. But it reached some five thousand roentgens, plus or minus a thousand, depending upon the location of the counter radioing measurements from the bleak landscape above and around them.

As days passed, that new level fell very slowly. Ben concluded, tentatively, that the nation, this third time, had been "salted" with radioactive isotopes of cobalt. In that case, much of it would remain too "hot" even to step on, for a long, long while. Years . . .

in most areas.

A few moments of exposure to any surface dusted with radioactive material of that intensity would result in certain death, even for a person plucked into some safe area afterward. Continued exposure at that level, as Ben and those who had begun reading up on the medical literature of radiation-poisoning and death knew, would cause sickness and sure dying, in less than an hour.

This third assault had still another effect on the occupants of Farr's shelter.

Fiendishly planned, mechanical, executed by Reds who were now dead or, at best, alive as a remnant not unlike their own, it added a new kind of anger to their depression: an infuriated feeling that a large and so-called scientific part of mankind--a Russian part--

had thought of humanity as if the species was a kind of bug. It was enraging because it was so
belittling.

Ben kept to himself, in consequence, certain of the likely aftereffects of this toxic and massive new showering of the United States by a blasted Soviet Union. It was bad enough that his shelter companions knew the long-range physical effects to be expected.

Such added biological and, especially, ecological effects as were bound to be caused by the new bombing, sure to be multiplied enormously by it, were not thoroughly understood and had, in prewar days, been largely ignored by engineers and military men.

Many biologists and radiobiologists had long tried to break through the curtain of disregard maintained by those physicists, soldiers, and politicians too, when they contemplated nuclear war; but the dire concepts of the biologists concerning the unlivability of continents after nuclear assault (owing to the strange effects of radioisotopes in and on living things) had seemed too unearthly, improbable, incomprehensible, insufficiently proven, and unresolvable for most experts in war and for their principal scientific advisers.

Even without the grewsome expectations Ben now envisioned (since he was one of the few physicists who had listened to the biologists), the mere fact that the United States had once again been lethally "crop-dusted" with hot material of a much longer half-life than that of sodium oxide, reduced people in the shelter to an unprecedentedly high level of frustration and so, in certain cases, to a new fury.

There had been quarrels in the past, of course.

But in the immediate aftermath of this thing, there were more quarrels. Tempers burned hot and broke out with slight cause. It was a situation bound to lead to explosion. .

. .

One evening, at bridge, Pete the Meek scowled suddenly over some misplay he attributed to George Hyama, his partner. George, usually in control of a temper that was, however, mercurial, saw the scowl and said instantly and sneeringly, "If you didn't like that finesse, say so!"

"It was stupid," Pete responded, paling but continuing. "You ought to have known from the bidding that the king of clubs was in the other hand."

George's chair fell over as he stood. Valerie and Faith, playing opposite the two men, normally would have intervened then. But the prevailing mood was abnormal.

Besides, Valerie was consuming a fifth or sixth highball and not herself.

Pete thereupon strode around the table and Valerie said, thickly but with a certain taunt,
"Fight?"
Faith spoke bitterly to nobody in particular: "Oh, for God's sake!" Her disgust and her mother's fuddled, approving cry launched Pete at George.

For half a minute the tall man and the wiry Japanese stood toe to toe, slugging each other. Valerie shouted hoarsely when either landed a hard blow. Faith ran from the room and found Ben. He raced back ahead of her, in time to see both combatants stagger apart and stand, panting, bleeding from cut faces, but gathering rage to go on. Ben lunged between them, face fixed. "Quit it, you idiots!" His voice was so high and so stressful that it astonished everybody. That tone had never been used by Ben before. Pete and George glared at each other. Ben shoved both apart with his long arms, sent both sprawling. They rose, after that, Pete daubing his cuts with a handkerchief and George wiping skinned knuckles on a just-pressed, clean jacket.

Nobody had heard Kit enter the Hall with Angelica in his wake. But they heard Kit's words, addressed to Faith: "So a fight started and you went for help from our Navy-trained, judo-Jew! Why not for me,
darling?
After all, I boxed in college!"

Faith said, "Oh, simmer down, Kit! I didn't know where to find you."

Kit was staring at the now embarrassed Ben. "I wonder," he said, nastily, "if you really are a better man than I? I've got fifty pounds on you, about. And I never did believe your dirty fighting tricks could stand up to a real man, even handicapped by only knowing how to fight
fair."

The others looked from Kit to Ben.

In that next moment Ben nearly succumbed to the general stress and the sense of helpless anger. He almost invited Kit to "put 'em up," with an offer to stick to the Marquis of Queensberry rules. Ben felt he would like to find out for himself whether or not he could outbox Kit Barlow. But though his lips began to frame a challenge, his voice never sent the defiant words through them. Instead, he said, "Don't be childish. So things are worse outside. Is that a good reason to worsen things here? If we ever get away, it'll be by sticking together. Not"--he turned from the flushed Kit to the now humiliated George and Pete--"by acting like kids."

Valerie Farr poured half a tumbler of whisky into the remaining half of her highball. Her too-wet, too-bright eyes fixed on Ben. "You ruined," she said unevenly, "a peach of a fist fight!" She lifted the glass to take what they knew would probably be the evening's final self-dosing of alcohol that would send her weaving and swaying to her room and alcoholic unconsciousness.

But she did not drink. Instead, her eyes focused, imperfectly and by accident, on Angelica, who had simply stood watching the violences. Watching miserably. And Valerie Farr saw the misery. Very slowly, she sat down the whisky-laden highball. To nobody, she muttered, "I
encouraged
that fight!" The words were spoken in a sort of shamed wonder.

Faith said, "Forget it, Mother."

But Valerie was still eying Angelica. She said, "Come here."

The black-haired girl half closed her sapphire eyes and stood where she was, paling a little. "Come here!" Mrs. Farr's tone was clearer and contained command.

So Angelica drew near, with reluctance, even fear.

Faith watched the highball, fearing her mother would use it, and her sudden-released but endlessly pent-up emotions, to hurl on the lovely ex-mistress of Vance Farr.

Valerie did no such thing. When Angelica was almost within touching distance, Valerie said, quietly, "I want to apologize, dear, since all our emotions are being stripped naked tonight, for treating you as I have, ever since you came here."

Angelica's eyes widened. "But you've been perfectly wonderful to me. When you consider that before the war, I--"

"The hell I have! I've gone on getting half cockeyed, night after night, almost as I did all the years when Vance cheated me and pretended a sickly innocence. We've been in this stone trap over two months now, child, and I've kept on drinking. Without cause.

But
you.
You never even gave my husband the eye. It's you who've been the--" Valerie said a word she had usually employed with scorn but now meant in its ancient sense--

"
lady."

This scene was watched in silence.

And it was swift-ended.

With a reach and swing Valerie Farr retrieved her drink and sent it, ice, glass, and all, spinning and spilling, over the floor lamps and the pretty, hand-made furniture to smash against the beige paint they'd applied to the once-grim walls. She then closed the little distance between herself and the lovely Irish-Italian girl, threw her arms around Angelica, and kissed her. "You're an angel, and I'm tired of being a bum. You
and
Vance deserve something better!"

Head high, she left the Hall. Faith whispered, "Lord!" and ran to Angelica, who had started to weep. George Hyama said to Ben, "Sorry I mixed it up." He turned to Pete, hand out. "Apologies!"

Pete said, humbly, "It was my fault," and took the hand.

Faith made the statement that ended the matter. "If this fracas has caused Mother to see what she's been doing to herself--to all of us--it'd be worth staging every day!" She smiled tentatively at Pete and George. Then Ben. Then Kit.

It would be weeks before they were certain--Farr, especially. But, in time, they were to know that Valerie Farr had meant it.

She never took another drink.

The ensuing days were marked by a phenomenon they had already experienced, the scrambling of TV and radio signals. For a time they were out of touch with the voice of surviving humanity. Gradually, however, the messages began to come in clearly.

They learned that the Costa Ricans and others to the north of them now had suffered. "The hideous and evil monstrosity perpetrated by automatic action in a dead U.S.S.R.," as San José put it, "caused new millions to take all precautions against poison-clouds that, thousands of miles in length and about twelve hundred miles wide ( at first) are now repeatedly circling the globe, with ever-diminishing radioactivity, but with ever-widening menace."

When a frozen turkey was served, with trimmings, in the Sachem's Watch caverns, for Thanksgiving, the survivors had less to be thankful for than they had expected, some weeks earlier. If it had not been for the enthusiasm with which Dorothy and Dick attacked the meal and enjoyed the festivities, that day would have been drearier than any. As it was, every adult felt privately grateful for the presence of two youngsters, to whom the facts of life, or of death, inherent in radioactivity meant little. Youngsters for whom, moreover, every grownup felt he or she must keep up an appearance of calm, however fearful and depressed in fact.

It was Dick, in the middle of consuming a drumstick, his chin anointed with gravy, who suddenly heightened the festive pleasure shared only by his sister and himself. Hopefully he asked, "Isn't it now only a month . . . to
Christmas?"

Valerie broke a dead silence. "Why, of
course!
What a perfectly
wonderful
thing to realize, Dick! And I bet Vance has even got a
Christmas tree!"
She sounded ecstatic, and looked hopefully, even merrily, though it took a strong will, at her husband. He beamed back, with a matching effort to assume the right expression. "
Naturally!"

Valerie chortled. "Didn't I
tell
you!"

In truth, she had guessed her husband would figure a way to make an artificial Christmas tree. She did not know--and he did not disclose for some time--that the storage chambers contained an immense tree of aluminum--a Christmas-tree substitute for dangerously-flammable evergreens that had become popular in the early 1960s. . . .

As time passed, all the adults busied themselves with secret endeavors-the making of small gifts, the writing of verses, the painting of funny pictures that would be exchanged as gifts once the tree was brought out and decorated. Both youngsters had volunteered the information that they had not believed in Santa Claus "since we were babies." But both, and Dorothy especially, seemed very reassured to be told by Valerie again, and in a most confiding manner, that, "There
may
be no Santa Claus, children. But if by any chance there
is,
I know this: not even atomic bombs can bother the North Pole, where he would have been living, and he can come down an air-raid-shelter tunnel easy as a chimney!"

A week before Christmas, since the suspense had grown unbearable for the youngsters (and since Vance realized many of the adults were showing signs of dangerous depression beneath tight-controlled exteriors), the great aluminum tree was set up. It turned out to be the kind the children's parents had provided. Abundant ornaments were produced in their boxes; a tall stepladder was placed beside the tree; electric bulbs in long strings were unpacked; and everybody, at one time or another, then had a hand in helping the two young people to decorate what Ben one afternoon mournfully reflected was surely the only such tree in the United States.