Robert Adams - Horses of the North

“The emergency brought us all together as equals—doctors, surgeons, nurses, osteopaths, chiropractors, dentists, medical technicians of all sorts, paramedicals, midwives, veterinarians, pharmacists, morticians, orderlies, even sitters and military veterans with antique medical-corps training. But those terribly contagious plagues quickly weeded out almost all of the volunteer staff despite the most stringent precautions, and the man or the woman working beside you in the morning might well be just another dying patient before the fall of that night. Poor Brigitte lasted through three weeks of work in that hellish charnel house, then she came down with a combination of the two worst, most incurably deadly varieties, and, seeing the inevitable, I stole enough of the proper drug to give her a quick, painless death, for she had been to me a very good and loving wife.

“Being what I am, of course, I neither sickened physically nor died. Although I grieved over the loss of my sweet Brigitte and missed her terribly for a while, I did recover in time and then saw for me and my talents a new and a pressing need. No leaders were left alive among the few pitiful survivors still rattling about in the almost empty city of Casper. Food stocks were perilously low, and no one seemed to know just what to do, how to go about the business of remaining alive. So I took over, took command, and won them all over to me with my abilities to so do.

“I organized the survivors, disciplined them, had certain of them do a thorough inventory of our remaining resources and supplies, then set up rationing of food and fuel for the remainder of that mild winter. With the spring thaw, those with any knowledge or experience of farming were set to preparing selected land for the harrowing, plowing and planting, while others were sent out into the surrounding countryside to bring back cattle, horses, sheep, swine, goats, domestic fowl, seeds, farming machinery and equipment and all of the thousand-and-one other necessities.

“Knowing that spoilers would make an appearance, soon or late, I collected firearms and ammunition, trained my people in the proper use of them and waited for the inevitable worst. When it came, each time it came, we drove them back with heavy losses and mounted counterattacks which extirpated their entire strengths, or as good as did so, then appropriated their arms and munitions and explosives to our own use to utilize against the next pack to descend upon us.

“After some years and for a number of reasons, I persuaded my folk to move south to Cheyenne, where we found a few more of the survivors already in residence, but sorely beset by spoilers and overjoyed to be reinforced by trained and well-armed fighters. I was chosen mayor—which should be read to mean ‘paramount leader’—and had served as such for a bit over four years when you rode in that day with your scouting expedition.

“Friend Milo, alte Kamerad, I had wanted so very much to tell you many of these things over the years we have been co-leaders of the folk. Had you proved less hostile in regard to my rational beliefs about breeding our folk along reasonable lines, I might have told you much of this that night by the camp-fire. Better yet, I might have awakened your clear, but now latent, telepathic powers and then have opened my memories to you, that you might more quickly have realized the truths, the validities of my beliefs, based as they are upon centuries of experience and of deep thought with which I occupied my mind through countless lonely nights of exile enforced by my differences from humans. “Now, with me departed, you will just have to awaken your mind yourself. I have left under this rather long letter copies of two books which will be of assistance in this endeavor. Also you will find in this locker formulae for the fullering and the hardening agents for felt, all derived of natural substances, all of these native to the prairie hereabouts; this must be my last gift to the folk once mine and now yours. I know that you will lead them well, probably as well as might I have led them, and possibly better.

“I must soon depart, old friend. This typewriter has surely all but drained the storage batteries and I can hear the morning shift of felters cursing even now at the necessity of mounting the bicycles and recharging them so early in the day, none of them knowing that I and my laboratory will no longer have need of that electricity.

“So, my work—such of it as you would allow—is done and I now make my exeunt, as it were. I am taking my Schnellig, of course, two spare mounts and two of the Bactrian camels to bear my yurt, gear, food and essentials, grain for the horses, et cetera; I believe that the folk and you owe me at least this much, friend Milo.

“I feel most certain that we two will meet again, one day, be it in a few hundred of years or in a millennium, but meet we will. As you will then, perforce, be an older, sadder, but much wiser man, perhaps we can then converse as true equals.

Your true friend,

“Post scriptum: Guard well my sheafs of notes from my series of experiments, for contained within them are many other formulae upon which I stumbled. Included are formulae for the easy tanning of leather and furred pelts, the best materials for softening animal sinew (for use in fabricating bows, for instance), several really effective bonding agents all derived of natural, if not common, ingredients, a number of salves of antiseptic and/or anesthetic properties, some truly fast dyes, a procedure for rendering common cowhide leather almost as tough and impervious as metal, some analgesics, laxatives and a first-rate expectorant. Consider these to be bonus gifts to you and our folk.

The two books and the notes—ream after ream of them, all as neatly typewritten as the lengthy letter—filled the locker almost to the rim. Even after Milo had read through the notes and removed those which were repetitive, had ended in useless failures or in substances for which he and the people would never have any use, there still were two thick binders of the parchment-bond pages remaining—Bookerman’s legacy.

All the while he sorted and sifted the notes, Milo pondered on the letter of the now-departed doctor. Could it all be true? Were there more like himself scattered widely about the world? Never before having found any references to people with like abilities, he had for many long years thought himself to be unique. Now he was not so sure.

Of course, there was always the chance that the letter was all an utter fabrication, cut out of whole cloth, containing no shred of truth, but … if it was, then just how had the man so shrewdly assessed Milo’s secret agelessness?

And Bookerman’s early experiences closely paralleled Milo’s own. He still recalled the exact details of the first time that he had been “killed” in combat, though many of the later of such occurrences were become a little fuzzy around the edges unless he consciously set himself to recollect them in detail. One’s first “deathwound” simply was not something easily or quickly forgotten.

It had been in France, D-Day + 41. While warily slinking along the shoulder of a narrow roadway with what forty days of hot, vicious, hard-driving combat had left of the platoon with which he and poor little Lieutenant Hunicutter had hit Omaha Beach, they had come within range of a German sniper. And the crack shot quickly proved to them all both his expert-rifleman status and the fact that he was no tyro at combat sniping, which has always been an exacting and often fatal occupation.

The automatic rifleman, Pettus, had slammed into the high grassy bank at their left before any of them had heard the first shot, a bloody hole just under the right rim of his helmet and the now-precious BAR pinned under the dead weight of his bulky body, tobacco juice from his ever-present plug dribbling from the corners of his slackened lips over his blue-stubbled chin.