Robert Adams - The Clan of the Cats

He nodded. “Yes, if you would be so kind. I’d really like to have us all in here when I tell the full story of this last trip and lay out what we are going to have to do to survive, to get as much as one more dollar of funding.”

They all sat down to wait for Drs. Singh and Baronian to come. Bedford stirred absently at his cooling coffee and kept a wary eye on the big man, who had begun to breathe more easily. Bedford sensed that unlike many bullies, there was beneath all the bluster and the histrionics a potential for real and dangerous violence.

( “If only I had known there and then just how right my intuition concerning Dr. Harel truly was,” he later was to record in his journal, “how different things might have been for us all. Who was it who said that ‘if only’ are the saddest words in the English language? They are.” )

Bundled against the chill of the concrete-walled underground room, Milo spent long days reading the notes of James Bedford by the light of the smaller of the gasoline lanterns. It was well that they had killed and helped to bring back the big bull elk, for the night following that fortuitous kill saw another blizzard blow up, this one lasting in fits and starts for the best part of a week, and Milo could only hope against hope that his lone rider had found a secure place to hole up with his mare until it blew itself out and he could once more proceed on his mission to bring the clans back here to these ruins.

As he continued to read through the boxes of folders, all meticulously arranged by date, he came to understand the long-dead James Bedford, came to sympathize, to empathize with the man, came to feel that he had truly known him. He regretted that Arabella Lindsay had not lived to this day, for she too could have read the journals and would have been truly delighted to do so, for they and what they contained would have answered so very many of her questions about the world of the dead past, partially quenched her endless curiosity about the people of that world of her forebears and how they had lived.

“Hmm,” he thought. “How old would Bella be today were she alive? About mid-sixties, I think, not a really great age for clansfolk. Yes, but not more than a barehandful of that first generation of the people from the MacEvedy Station are still alive, either—the change from settled farming and animal husbandry to a constantly moving existence of herding, hunting and gathering was just more than any but the very toughest-fibered of them could take and live on. Even so, they lived on longer as new-made nomads than they could, any of them, have expected to subsist at that doomed station, with or without being perpetually besieged by plains rovers, as they were when the clans and I chanced across them.

“But the children and grandchildren of those first-generation Lindsays and MacConochies and Dundases and Hamiltons and Rosses, MacKensies, Douglases and Keiths, born to the life, are become the tough, self-reliant and hardy clansfolk of today. And a large proportion of them possess at least a fair amount of telepathic ability, too, which makes a survival trait for such a life as we all lead, so in the course of succeeding generations it should become stronger and more prevalent among the Horseclansfolk.”

While musing, Milo had stuffed his greenstone pipe with some of the fine tobacco out of one of the sealed tins that had been a part of James Bedford’s survival store. That done to his critical satisfaction, he used one of the butane lighters Bedford had also included to light the mixture, drawing in several mouthfuls of the smooth, fragrant smoke before thinking on.

“In a way, it’s too bad that the late James Bedford’s mind didn’t run to fiction writing, for he owned a rare talent to put the reader directly into the places and situations he describes here in this journal of his; he could no doubt have made quite a name for himself as an author in that long-ago world. But if he had, of course, this place most likely would not have been here when we needed it and that huge wolfpack would probably have torn us all to gobbets and eaten us … and I don’t think that even my unusual constitution could’ve survived that sort of death.

“Even so, Bella would’ve been enthralled to read this journal, for it would’ve answered so many of her questions about the world as it was so long ago. She never ceased to be obviously thrilled to hear of how, before everything went to hell, thousands of folks every day were transported across the widths of whole continents or oceans in the space of less than a day, flying high above the clouds—six and seven miles straight up—sitting in complete comfort, watching moving pictures, listening to music, eating, drinking, sleeping, talking with others, reading books or magazines or newspapers, whatever they wished to do at the time.

“She knew well of ground vehicles, both tracked and wheeled ones, of course. Unlike most inhabited places, the MacEvedy Experimental Agricultural Station had managed by hook or by crook to keep some of its vehicles and sophisticated firearms, and even its electricity was in operation and use up until only a score of years before her birth. But she did not know of the networks of fine, wide, paved roads that once connected tens of thousands of towns and cities one with the other, and it excited her to hear of how vehicles not too much different from the stripped hulks scattered around the MacEvedy Station could, on those roads, cover in an hour or less distances that would now exhaust a good rider with a string of remounts to travel in a full day.

“And she never tired of having me open my mind, my memories, that she might see through my eyes the vast multitudes of people who inhabited that world, the differing races and nationalities. She especially loved to go into my memories of the cities—the larger ones in particular, New York, Tokyo, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Delhi, Cairo, London. And such a sojourn was always followed by hundreds of questions about anything and everything having to do with the people and their everyday lives, their artifacts, their habits, the huge buildings, where they raised their crops, what kinds of livestock they husbanded. One image which she never had ceased to ask him to recall was that of flying into the Los Angeles area one night, one Santa Ana—cleared night, with the tens of thousands of lights below the plane stretching from horizon to far horizon like a vast swarm of fireflies.

“She was just born a century or so too late,” Milo sighed to himself, puffing on his pipe and filling the low-ceilinged, icy room with layer on layer of blue-gray smoke. Poor little Bella, she hungered for any slightest scrap of new knowledge concerning the past, that dead world of her ancestors. And I really could impart her very little of the scenes she most craved, traveling as I did mostly from one war to another, generally in the more primitive parts of the world where my services were needed, going mostly by air, at that—and there’s damn-all to be seen from six or seven miles up, unfortunately—and one almost never encounters ladies of fashion in swamps, jungles, mountains, deserts, the bushlands or montane forests where I spent the bulk of my time after the U.S. Army decided I was too old and retired me.

“Hell, by their lights, I was too old. I enlisted in 1938—or was it 1937?—and I think my age was listed then as thirty. Yes, I looked older, looked just as I do now, in fact, but the army of that time, between World War One and World War Two, could not afford to be at all picky or to pry too deeply into an otherwise healthy, acceptable and qualified would-be recruit’s past, not in an era when the most they could pay privates was twenty dollars a month and found. But even so, by the early seventies, the Pentagon records indicated that I was pushing sixty-five, pushing it damned hard, too. And the damned whiz kids who had managed to fuck up a war we could’ve easily won in the beginning went into screaming tizzies at the mere thought of a sixty-four-year-old lieutenant colonel leading a combat unit in Vietnam.”