Damon Knight - Orbit 15

“How many people did we kill?” she asked, stepping out of her jeans. She turned her back to lay her clothes on the foot of her cot. Her buttocks were nearly as flat as an adolescent boy’s. When she faced him again, her ribs seemed to be straining against her skin. She looked at him for a moment, and then came to him and held his head tight against her chest as he sat on his cot and she stood naked before him. He could feel her tears as they fell onto his cheek.

There was a hard freeze in November, and with the valley flooded and the road and bridges gone, they knew they were safe from attack, at least until spring. The people had moved out of the cave again, and work in the lab went on at the same numbing pace. The fetuses were developing, growing, moving now with sudden motions of feet and elbows. David was working on substitutes for the chemicals that already were substituting for amniotic fluids. He worked each day until his vision blurred, or his hands refused to obey his directions, or Walt ordered him out of the lab. Celia was working longer hours now, still resting in the middle of the day for several hours, but she returned after that and stayed almost as late as David did.

David was aware of her, as he always was, even when preoccupied with his own work. He was aware that she stood up, that she didn’t move for a moment, and when she said, in a tremulous voice that betrayed disbelief, “David . . . David . . .” he was already starting to his feet. He caught her as she crumpled.

Her eyes were open, her look almost quizzical, asking what he could not answer, expecting no answer. A tremor passed through her and she closed her eyes, and although her lids fluttered, she did not open them again.

“David, are you going to pull yourself together? You just giving up?” Walt didn’t wait for a reply. He sat down on the only chair in the tiny room and leaned forward, cupping his chin, staring at the floor. “We’ve got to tell them. Sarah thinks there’ll be trouble. So do I.”

David stood at the window, looking at the bleak landscape, done in grays and blacks and mud colors. It was raining, but the rain had become clean. The river was a gray swirling monster that he could glimpse from up here, a dull reflection of the dull sky.

“They might try to storm the lab,” Walt went on. “God knows what they might decide to do.”

“I don’t care,” David said.

“You’re going to care! Because those babies are going to come busting out of those sacs, and those babies are the only hope we have, and you know it. Our genes, yours, mine, Celia’s, those genes are the only thing that stand between us and oblivion.” He was white, his lips were pale, his eyes sunken. There was a tic in his cheek that David never had seen before.

“Why now?” David asked. “Why change the plan and tell them now, so far ahead of time?”

“Because it isn’t that far ahead of time.” Walt rubbed his eyes hard. “Something’s going wrong, David. I don’t know what it is. Something’s not working. I think we’re going to have our hands full with prematures.”

David couldn’t stop the rapid calculations he made. “It’s twenty-six weeks,” he said. “We can’t handle that many premature babies.”

“I know that.” Walt put his head back and closed his eyes. “We don’t have much choice,” he said. “We lost one yesterday. Three today. We have to bring them out and treat them like preemies.”

Slowly David nodded. “Which ones?” he asked, but he knew. Walt told him the names, and again he nodded. He had known that they were not his, not Walt’s, not Celia’s. “What are you planning?” he asked then, and sat down on the side of his bed.

“I have to sleep,” Walt said. “Then a meeting, posted for seven. After that we prepare the nursery for a hell of a lot of preemies. As soon as we’re ready, we begin getting them out. That’ll be morning. We need nurses, half a dozen, more if we can get them. Sarah says Margaret would be good. I don’t know.”

David didn’t know either. Margaret’s four-year-old son had been one of the first to die of the plague, and she had lost a baby in stillbirth. He trusted Sarah’s judgment, however. “Think between them they can get enough others, tell them what to do, see that they do it properly?”

Walt mumbled something, and one hand fell off the chair arm. He jerked upright.

“Okay, Walt, you get in my bed,” David said, almost resentfully. “I’ll go down to the lab, get things rolling there. I’ll come up for you at six-thirty.” Walt didn’t protest, but fell onto the bed without bothering to take off his shoes. David pulled them off. Walt’s socks were mostly holes, but probably they kept his ankles warm. David left them on, pulled the blanket over him, and went to the lab.

At seven the hospital cafeteria was crowded when Walt stood up to make his announcement. “There’s not a person in this room hungry tonight. We don’t have any more plague here. The rain is washing away the radioactivity. We have food stores that will carry us for years even if we can’t plant crops in the spring. We have men capable of doing just about anything we might ever want done.” He paused and looked at them again, from left to right, back again, taking his time. He had their absolute attention. “What we don’t have,” he said, his voice hard and flat now, “is a woman who can conceive a child, or a man who could impregnate her if she was able to bear.”

There was a ripple of movement, like a collective sigh, but no one spoke. Walt said, “You know how we are getting our meat. You know the cattle are good, the chickens are good. Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, we will have our own babies developed the same way.”

There was a moment of utter silence, of stillness, then they broke. Clarence leaped to his feet shouting at Walt. Vernon fought to get to the front of the room, but there were too many people between him and Walt. One of the women pulled on Walt’s arm, almost dragging him over, screaming in his face. Walt yanked free and climbed onto a table. “Stop this! I’m going to answer any questions, but not this way.”

For the next three hours they questioned, argued, prayed, formed alliances, reformed them as arguments broke out in the smaller groups. At ten Walt took his place on the table again and called out, “We will recess this discussion until tomorrow night at seven. Coffee will be served now, and I understand we have cakes and sandwiches.” He jumped from the table and moved to the door too fast to let any of them catch up to him. He and David hurried to the cave entrance and went through, locking the massive door behind them.

“Clarence was ugly,” Walt muttered. “Bastard.”

David’s father, Walt, and Clarence were brothers, David reminded himself, but he couldn’t help regarding Clarence as an outsider, a stranger with a fat belly and a lot of money who expected instant obedience from the world.

“They might organize,” Walt said after a moment. “We’ll have to be ready for them.”

David nodded. They had counted on delaying this meeting until they had live babies, human babies that laughed and gurgled and took milk from the bottle. Instead they would have a roomful of not-quite-finished preemies, certainly not human-looking, with no more human appeal than a calf born too soon.

They worked all night preparing the nursery. Sarah had enlisted Margaret, Hilda, Lucy, and half a dozen other women. They were all gowned and masked professionally. One of them dropped a basin and three others screamed in unison. David cursed under his breath. They would be all right when they had the babies, he told himself.

The bloodless births started at five forty-five, and at twelve thirty they had twenty-five infants. Four died in the first hour, another died three hours later; the rest of them thrived. The only baby left in the tanks was the fetus that would be Celia, nine weeks younger than the others.