Orbit 3 [Anthology]

248 Pages·2016·1.04 MB·English

by  Knight Damon

Orbit 3

By Damon Knight Proofed By MadMaxAU
CONTENTS

Richard Wilson MOTHER TO THE WORLD
Richard McKenna BRAMBLE BUSH
Joanna Russ THE BARBARIAN
Gene Wolfe THE CHANGELING
Doris Pitkin Buck WHY THEY MOBBED THE WHITE HOUSE
Kate Wilhelm THE PLANNERS
Philip Jose Farmer DON’T WASH THE CARATS
James Sallis LETTER TO A YOUNG POET
John Jakes HERE IS THY STING
Science fiction writers sometimes seem to be engaged in a witty
but very leisurely debate, in which decades may pass between
one comment and the next. Thus Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley’sThe Last Man (1826) was followed in turn by M. P.
Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1929), Alfred Bester’s “Adam and No
Eve” (1941), Fredric Brown’s “Knock” (1948), and my own “Not
With a Bang” (1950), among others.

Each of these writers probably felt he had said the last
word; I know I did. But again and again, when a theme like this
appears to be exhausted, along comes another writer who picks
it up and turns it by some magic into a fresh, new thing.

Richard Wilson’s “Mother to the World” is not just a new
variation on the Last Man theme; he has given it one new twist,
which I will not mention, since he reveals it himself in the first
three hundred words, but it’s a rather unimportant technicality
anyhow. What is important is not the variation but what Wilson
has made of it—this deeply honest, memorable and moving
story.

Mother To The World
by Richard Wilson

His name was Martin Rolfe. She called him Mr. Ralph.

She was Cecelia Beamer, called Siss.

He was a vigorous, intelligent, lean and wiry forty-two, a
shade under six feet tall. His hair, black, was thinning but still
covered all of his head; and all his teeth were his own. His
health was excellent. He’d never had a cavity or an operation
and he fervently hoped he never would.
She was a slender, strong young woman of twenty-eight,
five feet four. Her eyes, nose and mouth were regular and well-
spaced but the combination fell short of beauty. She wore her
hair, which was dark blonde, not quite brown, straight back and
long in two pigtails which she braided daily, after a ritualistic
hundred brushings. Her figure was better than average for her
age and therefore good, but she did nothing to emphasize it.
Her disposition was cheerful when she was with someone; when
alone her tendency was to work hard at the job at hand, giving
it her serious attention. Whatever she was doing was the most
important thing in the world to her just then and she had a
compulsion to do it absolutely right. She was indefatigable but
she liked, almost demanded, to be praised for what she did well.

Her amusements were simple ones. She liked to talk to
people but most people quickly became bored with what she
had to say—she was inclined to be repetitive. Fortunately for
her, she also liked to talk to animals, birds included.

She was a retarded person with the mentality of an eight-
year-old.

Eight can be a delightful age. Rolfe remembered his son at
eight—bright, inquiring, beginning to emerge from childhood
but not so fast as to lose any of his innocent charm; a
refreshing, uninhibited conversationalist with an original
viewpoint on life. The boy had been a challenge to him and a
constant delight. He held on to that memory, drawing
sustenance from it, for her.

Young Rolfe was dead now, along with his mother and three
billion other people.

Rolfe and Siss were the only ones left in all the world.
It was M.R. that had done it, he told her. Massive Retaliation;
from the Other Side.

When American bombs rained down from long-range jets
and rocket carriers, nobody’d known the Chinese had what they
had. Nobody’d suspected it of that relatively backward country
which the United States had believed it was softening up, in a
brushfire war, for enforced diplomacy.

Rolfe hadn’t been aware of any speculation that Peking’s
scientists were concentrating their research not on weapons but
on biochemistry. Germ warfare, sure. There’d been propaganda
from both sides about that, but nothing had been hinted about a
biological agent, as it must have been, that could break down
human cells and release the water.

“M.R.,” he told her. “Better than nerve gas or the neutron
bomb.” Like those, it left the buildings and equipment intact.
Unlike them, it didn’t leave any messy corpses—only the bones,
which crumbled and blew away.

Except the bone dust trapped inside the pathetic mounds
of clothing that lay everywhere in the city.

“Are they coming over now that they beat us?”

“I’m sure they intended to. But there can’t be any of them
left. They outsmarted themselves, I guess. The wind must have
blown it right back at them. I don’t really know what happened,
Siss. All I know is that everybody’s gone now, except you and
me.”

“But the animals—”

Rolfe had found it best in trying to explain something to
Siss to keep it simple, especially when he didn’t understand it
himself. Just as he had learned long ago that if he didn’t know
how to pronounce a word he should say it loud and confidently.

So all he told Siss was that the bad people had got hold of
a terrible weapon called M.R.—she’d heard of that— and used it
on the good people and that nearly everybody had died. Not the
animals, though, and damned if he knew why.

“Animals don’t sin,” Siss told him.

“That’s as good an explanation as any I can think of,” he
said. She was silent for a while. Then she said: “Your name—
initials—are M.R., aren’t they?”

He’d never considered it before, but she was right. Martin
Rolfe—Massive Retaliation. I hope she doesn’t blame everything
on me, he thought. But then she spoke again. “M.R. That’s short
for Mister. What I call you. Your name that I have for you. Mister
Ralph.”

“Tell me again how we were saved, Mr. Ralph.”

She used the expression in an almost evangelical sense,
making him uncomfortable. Rolfe was a practical man, a realist
and freethinker.

“You know as well as I do, Siss,” he said. “It’s because
Professor Cantwell was doing government research and because
he was having a party. You certainly remember; Cantwell was
your boss.”

“I know that. But you tell it so good and I like to hear it.”

“All right. Bill Cantwell was an old friend of mine from the
army and when I came to New York I gave him a call at the
University. It was the first time I’d talked to him in years; I had
no idea he’d married again and had set up housekeeping in
Manhattan.”

“And had a working girl named Siss,” she put in.

“The very same,” he agreed. Siss never referred to herself
as a maid, which was what she had been. “And so when I asked
Bill if he could put me up, I thought it would be in his old
bachelor apartment. He said sure, just like that, and I didn’t find
out till I got there, late in the evening, that he had a new wife
and was having a house-party and had invited two couples from
out of town to stay over.”

“I gave my room to Mr. and Mrs. Glenn, from Columbus,”
Siss said.

“And the Torquemadas, of Seville, had the regular guest
room.” Whoever they were; he didn’t remember names the way
she did. “So that left two displaced persons, you and me.”

“Except for the Nassers.”

The Nassers, as she pronounced it, were the two self-
contained rooms in the Cantwell basement. The NASAs, or the
Nasas, was what Cantwell called them because the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration had given him a contract
to study the behavior of human beings in a closed system.

Actually the money had gone to Columbia University,
where Cantwell was a professor of mechanical and aerospace
engineering.

“A sealed-off environment,” Rolfe said. “But because
Columbia didn’t have the space just at that time, and because
the work was vital, NASA gave Cantwell permission to build the
rooms in his own home. They were— still are—in his basement,
and that’s where you and I slept that fateful night when the
world ended.”
“I still don’t understand.”

“We were completely sealed off in there,” Rolfe said. “We
weren’t breathing Earth air and we weren’t connected in any
way to the rest of the world. We might as well have been out in
space or on the moon. So when it happened to everybody else—
to Professor and Mrs. Cantwell, and to the Glenns and the
Torquemadas and to the Nassers in Egypt and the Joneses in
Jones Beach and all the people at Columbia, and in Washington
and Moscow and Pretoria and London and Peoria and Medicine
Hat and La Jolla and all those places all over—it didn’t happen to
us. That’s because Professor Cantwell was a smart man and his
closed systems worked.”

“And we were saved.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“What’s the other way?”

“We were doomed.”

From his notebooks:

Siss asked why I’m so sure there’s nobody but us left in the
whole world. A fair question. Of course I’m not absolutely
positively cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, swear-on-a-Bible
convinced that there isn’t a poor live slob hidden away in some
remote corner. Other people besides Bill must have been
working with closed systems; certainly any country with a space
program would be, and maybe some of their nassers were
inhabited, too. I hadn’t heard that any astronauts or
cosmonauts were in orbit that day but if they were, and got
down safely, I guess they could be alive somewhere.
But I’ve listened to the rest of the world on some of the
finest radio equipment ever put together and there hasn’t been
a peep out of it. I’ve listened and signaled and listened and
signaled and listened. Nothing. Nil. Short wave, long wave, AM,
FM, UHF, marine band, everywhere. Naught. Not a thing. Lots of
automatic signals from unmanned satellites, of course, and the
quasars are still being heard from, but nothing human.

I’ve sent out messages on every piece of equipment
connected to Con Ed’s EE net. RCA, American Cable & Radio,
the Bell System, Western Union, The Associated Press, UPI,
Reuters’ world news network, The New York Times’ multifarious
teletypes, even the Hilton Hotels’ international reservations
system. Nothing. By this time I’d become fairly expert at
communications and I’d found the Pentagon network at AT&T.
Silent. Ditto the hot line to the Kremlin. I read the monitor
teletype and saw the final message from Washington to
Moscow. Strictly routine. No hint that anything was amiss
anywhere. Just as it must have been at the Army message
center at Pearl Harbor on another Sunday morning a generation
ago.

This is for posterity, these facts. My evidence is
circumstantial. But to Siss I say: “There’s nobody left but us. I
know. You’ll have to take my word for it that the rest of the
world is as empty as New York.”

Nobody here but us chickens, boss. Us poor flightless birds.
One middle-aged rooster and one sad little hen, somewhat
deficient in the upper story. What do you want us to do, boss?
What’s the next step in the great cosmic scheme? Tell us: where
do we go from here?

But don’t tell me; tell Siss. I don’t expect an answer; she
does. She’s the one who went into the first church she found
open that Sunday morning (some of them were locked, you
know) and said all the prayers she knew, and asked for mercy