Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“Selnick says we should offer to buy his equipment. The school will jump at the chance to unload it right now. Cheap.” David laughed. “Cheap. A quarter of a million, possibly.”

“Make the offer,” Grandfather Sumner said.

David stood up shakily and went off to bed.

People still went to work. The factories were still producing, not as much, and none of the nonessentials, but they were converting to coal as fast as possible. David thought about the darkened cities, and the fleets of trucks rusting, and the corn and wheat rotting in the fields. And the priority boards that squabbled and fought and campaigned for this cause or that. It was a long time before his twitching muscles relaxed enough for him to lie quietly, and a longer time before he could relax his mind enough to sleep.

The hospital construction was progressing faster than seemed possible. There were two shifts at work; again a case of damn-the-cost. Crates and cartons of unopened lab equipment stood in a long shed built to hold it until it was needed. David went to work in a makeshift laboratory trying to replicate Ferrer’s and Semple’s tests. And in early July, Harry Vlasic arrived at the farm. He was short, fat, near-sighted, and short-tempered. David regarded him with the same awe and respect that an undergraduate physics student would have felt toward Einstein.

“All right,” Vlasic said. “The corn crop has failed, as predicted. Monoculture! Bah! They’ll save sixty percent of the wheat, no more. This winter, hah, just wait until winter! Now where is the cave?”

They took him to the cave entrance a hundred yards from the hospital. Inside the cave they used lanterns. The cave was over a mile long in the main section and there were several branches. Deep in one of them flowed a river that was black and silent. Spring water, good water. Vlasic nodded again and again. When they finished the cave tour he was still nodding. “It’s good,” he said. “It’ll work. The laboratories go in there, underground passage from the hospital, safe from contamination. Good.”

They worked sixteen hours a day that summer and into the fall. In October the first wave of flu swept the country, worse than the outbreak of 1917 and 1918. In November a new illness swept the country, and here and there it was whispered that it was plague, but the government Bureau of Information said it was flu. Grandfather Sumner died in November. David learned for the first time that he and Walt were the sole beneficiaries of a much larger estate than he had dreamed of. And the estate was in cash. Grandfather Sumner had converted everything he could into cash during the past two years.

In December the family began to arrive, leaving the towns and villages and cities scattered throughout the valley to take up residence in the hospital and staff buildings. Rationing, black markets, inflation, and looting had turned the cities into battlegrounds. And the government had frozen the assets of every business—nothing could be bought or sold without approval. The family brought their stocks with them. Jeremy Streit brought his hardware merchandise in four truckloads. Eddie Beauchamp brought his dental equipment. David’s father brought all that he could from his department store. With the failure of radio and television communication, there was no way for the government to cope with the rising panic. Martial law was declared on December 28, six months too late.

There was no child left under eight years of age when the spring rains came, and the original three hundred nineteen people who had come to the upper valley had dwindled to two hundred one. In the cities the toll had been much higher.

David studied the fetal pig he was about to dissect. It was wrinkled and desiccated, its bones too soft, its lymph glands lumpy, hard. Why? Why did the fourth generation decline? Harry Vlasic came to watch briefly, then walked away, his head bowed in thought. Not even he could come up with any answers, David thought, almost with satisfaction.

That night David, Walt, and Vlasic met and went over it all again. They had enough livestock to feed the two hundred people for a long time, through cloning and breeding of the fertile animals. They could clone up to four hundred animals at a time. Chickens, swine, cattle. If the livestock all became sterile, as seemed likely, then the food supply was limited.

Watching the two older men, David knew they were purposely skirting the other question. If the people also became sterile, how long would they need a continuing supply of food? He said, “We should isolate some of the sterile mice, clone them, and test for the reemergence of fertility with each new generation of clones.”

Vlasic frowned and shook his head. “If we had a dozen undergraduate students, perhaps,” he said.

“We have to know,” David said, feeling hot suddenly. “You’re both acting like this is just a five-year emergency plan to tide us over a few bad years. What if it isn’t that at all? Whatever is causing the sterility is affecting all the animals. We have to know.”

Walt glanced at David and said, “We don’t have the time or the facilities to do any research like that.”

“That’s a lie,” David said. “We can generate all the electricity we can use, more than enough power. We have equipment we haven’t even unloaded yet . . .”

“Because there’s no one who can use it yet,” Walt said patiently.

“I can. I’ll do it in my free time.”

“What free time?”

“I’ll find it.”

In June, David had his preliminary answers. “The A-four strain,” he said, “has twenty-five percent fertility.” Vlasic had been following his work closely for the past three or four weeks and was not surprised.

Walt stared at him in disbelief. “Are you sure?” he whispered after a moment.

“The fourth generation of cloned sterile mice showed the same degeneracy that all clones show by then,” David said. “But they also had a twenty-five percent fertility factor. The offspring have shorter lives, but more fertile individuals. This trend continues to the sixth generation, where fertility is up to ninety-four percent, and life expectancy starts to climb up again, and then it’s on its way to normalcy.” He had it all on the charts that Walt now studied. A, A 1, A 2, A 3, A 4, and then the offspring by sexual reproduction, a, a 1, a 2. . . There were no clone strains after A 4; none had survived to maturity.

David leaned back and closed his eyes. He thought about bed and a blanket up around his neck and black, black sleep. “Higher organisms must reproduce sexually or die out, and the ability to do so is there. Something remembers and heals itself,” he said dreamily.

“You’ll be a great man when you publish,” Vlasic said softly, his hand on David’s shoulder. He then moved to sit next to Walt, to point out some of the details that Walt might miss. “A marvelous piece of work,” he said, his eyes glowing as he looked over the pages. “Marvelous.” Then he glanced back at David. “Of course, you are aware of the other implications of your work.”

David opened his eyes and met Vlasic’s gaze. He nodded. Walt, puzzled, looked from one to the other of them. David got up and stretched. “I have to sleep,” he said.

But it was a long time before he slept. He had a single room at the hospital, more fortunate than most. The hospital had more than two hundred beds, but few single rooms. The implications, he mused. He had been aware of them from the start, although he had not admitted it even to himself then, and was not ready to discuss it now. Three of the women were pregnant finally, after a year and a half. Margaret was near term, the baby well and kicking at the moment. Five more weeks, he thought. Five more weeks, and perhaps he never would have to discuss the implications of his work.